Editor’s Introduction

Robert Kolker

University of Maryland
rk27@umail.umd.edu

 

This issue of Postmodern Culture grew from a conviction that the critical and scholarly study of film could make more use of computer-based image technologies. In our discipline (as in any other humanities undertaking) quotation and illustration constitute proof and demonstration. In the past, we have been restricted in our ability to quote and illustrate because our source material was limited to (at worst) publicity stills from films and (at best) frame enlargements from the films themselves. In all cases, those illustrations were only stills. We wrote about the moving image and offered only the still image as proof.

 

The ability to digitize still and moving images has broadened the scope of our work and enabled us to enter an intimate relationship with the images that are the source of our study. We can choose the stills we want and need, and, most importantly, we can show the moving images themselves. This, coupled with networked publication and the hypertext capabilities of the Web, makes possible new kinds of thinking about film, new textualities in which the work of the critic and the work of the film assume different kinds of relationships, new flexibilities of thought, expression, and publication.

 

The work that appears in this issue represents an extraordinary range of thought and execution. It not only demonstrates how digital technology can be used to open critical perspectives, but how critical thinking about film is changing, with and without technology. In other words, all of the essays advance our thinking about film and culture, and many exist as unique digital events.

 

Gina Marchetti’s “Transnational Cinema, Hybrid Identities and the Films of Evans Chan” concerns a filmmaker whose work is a meditation on national identity, national boundaries, and their dissolution. Because Chan’s work is rarely seen in commercial venues, the inclusion of stills and moving-image clips not only opens Marchetti’s analysis and anchors it in the work itself, but makes that work visible to the reader perhaps for the first time.

 

In “Simultaneity and Overlap in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing,” Stephen Mamber doesn’t use stills from Kubrick’s early gangster film, but creates schematic diagrams and a 3-D fly-through to visualize its complex chronology. Time and space are merged, and The Killing’s mise-en-scène, once thought of as split between what was seen on the screen and heard in the voice-over narration, are understood and visualized as integral.

 

Dziga Vertov was a revolutionary Russian filmmaker who reflected upon the mechanical nature of his art in his cinema. He adumbrated cyborg theory by understanding that the movie camera was a mechanical, perceptual extension of the political and historical imagination. Joseph Schaub, in his “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye,” traces lines of development between Vertov, the Italian Futurists, and contemporary cyborg theory, and sees them in gendered contexts.

 

Jorge Otero-Pailos, in “Casablanca’s Régime: The Shifting Aesthetics of Political Technologies (1907-1943),” examines the city of Casablanca, and the film that most famously represents it to Western eyes. Otero-Pailos sees the city and its history from a political, post-colonial, and architectural perspective. The essay examines the political architecture of the city; the images that accompany the essay help plot the axes of its analysis.

 

Since the mechanics of perceptual fabrication in early cinema are a central concern of William Routt’s “The Madness of Cinema and of Thinking Images,” it is appropriate in a symbolically symmetrical way that the author employs the mechanics of digital fabrication to visualize his analysis about the image in early cinema. Routt uses digital technology to see the history of the spectacular image from a number of critical perspectives.

 

Adrian Miles turns an exploration of Singin’ in the Rain into a hypertext of interrelated moving-image clips, critical analyses, thematic and structural associations. This piece rethinks the linearity of critical writing on film and creates a work that can only exist in a digital environment.

 

So too does Peter Donaldson’s “Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and the End of Books.” Working from the base offered by Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, Donaldson speculates on the relationship of images and archives, text, countertext, and hypertext.

 

Speculation is very much the key to all the essays in this issue. The writers want to know about the history, textuality, and culture of the films they write about and how the writing and their analyses are changed through technologies that offer new ways of seeing and (in both senses of the word) reading. The technologies aren’t perfect. Pushing moving-image files across the Internet is still an event that requires much patience. If you read this issue through a 28.8 modem connection, it will take a while to get some of the images downloaded. Perhaps this belies the myth of the instantaneous that is so much a part of Internet culture. Things aren’t always immediately available to the eye, which is one of the things the authors are thinking about.

 

Many thanks to Stuart Moulthrop and Anne Sussman for the markup and production editing that made this complex issue of Postmodern Culture possible.