Author: Catherine Russell

Walter Benjamin

Post author By Catherine Russell
Post date December 11, 2012

Walter Benjamin was a prolific writer, whose corpus spans a wide range of genres, from philosophy, to criticism, to autobiography. A small cottage industry has developed around Benjamin’s extensive writing, producing an ongoing stream of interpretations, applications, and contextualizations. A host of different “Benjamins” have arisen, depending on the great variety of analytical frameworks and disciplinary concerns. Benjamin’s difficult life in interwar Europe as a nomadic character on the fringes of so many cultural circles is very much part of his philosophy, and cannot be entirely separated from his critical theory. Benjamin worked on the edge of a political precipice, and adapted methodologies from a wide range of cultural currents, expressing himself eloquently in French and German, providing a significant challenge to his English translators. He challenges the film critic and media analyst to craft new avenues of interpretation in order to recognize the utopian within the ideological, and to illuminate the lost promises of technological modernity.

Students in this class are encouraged to think through Benjamin’s critical aesthetics in light of contemporary image culture and tropes of recycling, affect, technologies, and posthumanism. The fragmentation and circulation of images in digital media is anticipated by Benjamin along with its dangers and potentials for social justice. We will explore the ways that his work has been taken up by feminist theorists, media archaeology scholars, and other interdisciplinary scholars as a way of opening up a richly interdisciplinary approach to the aesthetics and politics of film and media. Students will be required to do class presentations and complete a final research paper.

Walter Benjamin syl 2017 FINAL

Tags Walter Benjamin

Books Publications

The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity

Post author By Catherine Russell
Post date December 11, 2014

Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

One of the most prolific and respected directors of Japanese cinema, Naruse Mikio (1905–69) made eighty-nine films between 1930 and 1967. Little, however, has been written about Naruse in English, and much of the writing about him in Japanese has not been translated into English. With The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, Catherine Russell brings deserved critical attention to this under-appreciated director. Besides illuminating Naruse’s contributions to Japanese and world cinema, Russell’s in-depth study of the director sheds new light on the Japanese film industry between the 1930s and the 1960s.

Tags Japanese cinema

Books Publications

Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas

Post author By Catherine Russell
Post date December 10, 2014

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

What seems like closure might be something more, as Catherine Russell illustrates in this book about death in narrative cinema since the 1950s. Analyzing the structural importance of death in narrative endings, as well as the thematics of loss and redemption, Russell identifies mortality as a valuable critical tool for understanding the cinema of the second half of the twentieth century. Her work includes close textual readings of films by Fritz-Lang, Wim Wenders, Oshima Nagisa, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Altman, among others.

Tags Narrative, New Wave

Books Publications

Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video

Post author By Catherine Russell
Post date December 11, 2014

Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Experimental film and ethnographic film have long been considered separate, autonomous practices on the margins of mainstream cinema. By exploring the interplay between the two forms, Catherine Russell throws new light on both the avant-garde and visual anthropology. Russell provides detailed analyses of more than thirty-five films and videos from the 1890s to the 1990s and discusses a wide range of film and videomakers, including Georges Méliès, Maya Deren, Peter Kubelka, Ray Birdwhistell, Jean Rouch, Su Friedrich, Bill Viola, Kidlat Tahimik, Margaret Mead, Tracey Moffatt, and Chantal Akerman. Arguing that video enables us to see film differently—not as a vanishing culture but as bodies inscripted in technology, Russell maps the slow fade from modernism to postmodern practices. Combining cultural critique with aesthetic analysis, she explores the dynamics of historical interruption, recovery, and reevaluation. As disciplinary boundaries dissolve, Russell contends, ethnography is a means of renewing the avant-gardism of “experimental” film, of mobilizing its play with language and form for historical ends. “Ethnography” likewise becomes an expansive term in which culture is represented from many different and fragmented perspectives.Original in both its choice of subject and its theoretical and methodological approaches, Experimental Ethnography will appeal to visual anthropologists, as well as film scholars interested in experimental and documentary practices.

Tags Ethnographic film, Ethnography, Experimental cinema

Academic Writing Publications

David Rimmer: Films & Tapes 1967-1993

Post author By Catherine Russell
Post date December 11, 2014

Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1993.

This is a catalogue that was produced by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1993 to accompany an exhibition of David Rimmer’s work in the same year. My essay was commisioned as a critical overview of Rimmer’s career up until 1993.

Books Publications

Classical Japanese Cinema

Post author By Catherine Russell
Post date December 10, 2014

The book approaches Japanese cinema as an industry closely modelled on Hollywood. The classical period refers to the years in which the studio system dominated all film production in Japan, from roughly 1930 to 1960. My approach to the most well known films of this period situates them within Japanese society and culture, the star system, the genre system and the film industry. While I am respectful and well-informed about the aesthetics and critical values of the canon, I am also critical of some of the ideological tendencies of this cinema, and my analyses tend to comment on class and gender dynamics. In this sense, this book is arguably a departure from the usual line of criticism on Japanese cinema. In my view Japanese Classical Cinema has had enormous influence on other Asian cinemas, especially in TV broadcast form, and it is important that the industrial production context be accounted for in discussions of the films.

Tags Japanese cinema

Academic Writing Publications

Peer-reviewed publications

Post author By Catherine Russell
Post date December 5, 2013

Edited Books and Journals

“Cinema as Timepiece: Perspectives on The Clock,” Dossier in Framework 54.2 (Fall 2013).
New Women of the Silent Screen: China, Japan, Hollywood. Special Issue Editor. Camera Obscura 60 Vol 30 no. 3 (2005).
“Dossier on Cinephilia and Womens’ Cinema in the 1920s,” edited by Catherine Russell and Rosanna Maule, Framework 46 no. 1 (Spring 2005).
Le cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du 20e siècle / The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century. Eds. André Gaudreault, Pierre Véronneau and Catherine Russell. Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2004.
Le cinéma muet au Québec et au Canada: nouveaux regards sur une pratique culturelle. Co-edited with Pierre Veronneau. Special Issue of Cinémas (Vol 6, no. 1): Fall 1995.