Reviewed by: Revisiting Star Studies ed. by Sabrina Qiong Yu and Guy Austin Louisa Stein and Martin Shingler (bio) Revisiting Star Studies edited by Sabrina Qiong Yu and Guy Austin. Edinburgh University Press. 2017. $100.00 hardcover; $100.00 e-book. 320 pages. Revisiting Star Studies makes a welcome and timely intervention into the field of star studies. Although star studies is a well-established branch of film studies, it is currently undergoing renewed interest.1 This is evidenced by the launch of the BFI Film Stars series in 2012, which I coedit with my University of Sunderland colleague Susan Smith, as well as a series of major conferences, such as Exploring British Stardom at Queen Mary’s, University of London, and Revisiting Star Studies at Newcastle University, both of which took place in 2013. Indeed, the latter gave rise to this new publication, enabling editors Sabrina Qiong Yu and Guy Austin, of Newcastle University, to compile a wide-ranging collection of essays on stars in classic and contemporary cinema. And a very coherent collection it is, with many overlapping themes despite the diversity of case studies being examined here. The fourteen essays selected for publication are organized into seven discrete parts on performance, voices, ethnicity, aging, audiences, the aberrant, and marginal stardom. Across these, [End Page 176] a number of themes recur, including masquerade, undesirability (e.g., ugliness), gender, sexuality, race, acting, fandom, social media, globalization, and transnationalism or “translocal stardom,” as Qiong Yu redefines it in her incisive introduction. This diverse range of topics ensures that media scholars, students and researchers of all kinds are well catered to, with studies of Hollywood, European, Chinese, and Indian film stars, but also studies of porn and animal performers.2 Such thematic diversity stems from an intention on the part of the editors not only to reflect and respond to current trends in star studies but also to push the envelope, further expanding the parameters of this vibrant subdisciplinary field. This fascinating collection of chapters confirms that, as I argued in Star Studies: A Critical Guide, this important branch of film studies has consistently revealed a capacity to “reinvent itself and embrace new areas of investigation and methodology.”3 The intention to push the boundaries of star studies is signaled early in the book, in Sabrina Qiong Yu’s thought-provoking introduction. Qiong Yu, who has previously published a masterful study of Chinese martial arts movie star Jet Li and his fandom, is well placed to set the agenda here and indicate the direction in which star studies might profitably advance.4 At the start of Revisiting Star Studies, Qiong Yu boldly states that the book’s goals are to test the boundaries, offer alternatives, and challenge the clichés of star studies, thus promising something different, innovative, and fresh. To achieve this aim, the editors have included studies that go beyond not only Hollywood (as others have done) but also the human and the desirable. One of the ways this ambition is realized is through the inclusion of essays that apply detailed performance analysis both to dramatic acting and to dancing, fighting, and sex, as well as to star performances on chat shows and live public appearances. Qiong Yu makes a strong and compelling case in her introduction when advocating for the cross-pollination of star studies with related fields, such as “crip studies” (i.e., radical and affirmative studies of disability, inspired in part by queer studies) and animal studies. The book as a whole is indeed a worthy testament to that ambition. Yet curiously, at the same time Qiong Yu expresses some unease when it comes to the cross-pollination of ideas and methods between star studies and celebrity studies, even revealing a degree of suspicion when it comes to the latter.5 This particular branch of [End Page 177] media and cultural studies, which has grown rapidly since the launch of the Celebrity Studies journal in 2010 and the inauguration of the biennial Celebrity Studies conference in 2012, has undoubtedly helped reignite interest and enthusiasm in stardom and stars among film scholars. However, the rise of celebrity studies might well be perceived as a threat by some...
Reviewed by: The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism ed. by Jonathan Kahana, and: Essays on the Essay Film eds. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan Tanya Goldman (bio) The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism edited by Jonathan Kahana, with a foreword by Charles Musser. Oxford University Press, 2016. $135.00 hardcover. $69.00 paper. Also available in e-book. 1046 pages. Essays on the Essay Film edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan. Columbia University Press, 2017. $105.00 hardcover. $35.00 paper. $34.99 e-book. 392 pages. Reflecting on the nature of book collecting, Walter Benjamin observed, "There is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order."1 These words are a fitting entry point to discuss two new anthologies, Jonathan Kahana's The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism and Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan's Essays on the Essay Film. Is there a more characteristic tension animating the epistemological impulse of scholars such as these than to attempt to tame the unruly construct of the documentary film in all its permutations? Both volumes adeptly balance this order and disorder by featuring written works that generate dialogues within, rather than impose strict boundaries on, their objects of inquiry—the capacious "documentary" for Kahana, and the more narrow (but no less thought-provoking) "essay film" for Alter and Corrigan. Such dialogues, whether within the individual volumes or exchanged across the [End Page 161] two, will undoubtedly inspire students, scholars, and filmmakers to pursue new modes of inquiry and cinematic practice. Jonathan Kahana's The Documentary Reader is an expansive collection of more than one hundred entries. The reader is structured around what Kahana refers to as documentary's "seven ages."2 Each section features historical and contemporary texts related to key trends that trace the evolution of documentary history and form. Thus, a part on cinema's early nonfiction iterations gives way to a second on documentary's varied interwar modernisms. Middle sections cover World War II propaganda and the sponsorship-heavy 1950s, the emergence of vérité and other observational modes, and documentary's "radical" turn during the late 1960s and 1970s. The two concluding sections address more recent moments, documentary's subjective and postmodern configurations, and the most current period, which Kahana labels "transnational and transmedial crossings" to address the field's porous boundaries and "uncertain horizons."3 Short essays introducing each section allow Kahana to mitigate his discomfort in imposing a necessary order onto what John Grierson himself famously called a "clumsy description."4 Echoing Grierson, Kahana calls the volume's structure a "convenient fiction."5 In prefacing each section, he situates key texts and trends within their broader context. Here fissures in historical periodization and theoretical orientation emerge. To name just one example, in introducing observational documentary, Kahana remarks that the seemingly anarchic ethos of Ricky Leacock's 1961 call for an "uncontrolled cinema" mirrors the more conservative Griersonian models he seeks to challenge, for both call to "take the apparatus out of the studio, and use it to tell the unique story of a location."6 Kahana also notes Lindsay Anderson's fondness for Humphrey Jennings's Spare Time (1939), a notably playful work that was able to transcend the limitations of conservative government oversight.7 By placing works within each section—and across sections—in dialogue with each other, such orienting essays make this anthology especially useful for students new to documentary who are eager to find their footing. Competing theories and formulations duke it out within and across sections. Consider again, for example, the contested terrain of observational cinema. Treatises on "direct" cinema, cinéma vérité, and Free Cinema, among others, are interspersed with scholarly critiques of "fly-on-the-wall" objectivity. Kahana writes that such "critiques challenge us to rewatch, reread, and reconsider, neither to praise nor bury but to better understand the mythology and persistent appeal of the vérité style."8 [End Page 162] Such contradictions, of course, are what make documentary both a slippery and an intellectually satisfying field of study. Its practitioners and theoreticians have never been monolithic. Why should we expect...
A Thousand Kindred Spirits B. Ruby Rich (bio) Dear Lisa and Victor, In truth, with this title I am stealing back a phrase from Monica Pearl (which she borrowed from me originally) that seems apt for the occasion of convening in a banquet room in Atlanta in 2016 with a thousand kindred spirits to celebrate Richard Dyer. I first encountered Richard on the page in the ferment of 1970s-era Chicago. The occasion was the publication of Jump Cut, no. 16, and the special section "Gays and Film" that included Richard's pioneering article "Homosexuality and Film Noir."1 It was 1977. Richard was a key figure for this opening salvo. JC editor Chuck Kleinhans back then wrote the grand introduction to the section, observing rightly that "for the most part, open gay criticism in the seventies has resided in the gay press and parts of the alternative press in North America. It hasn't been on the agenda in film studies or in the pages of film publications."2 He warned that the situation was changing, though, in no small part due to Richard, whose own "indispensable booklet," Gays and Film, then just out from the BFI, heralded "the emergence of a strong gay presence in contemporary film thought."3 Kleinhans then apologized on behalf of JC for the absence of lesbians in its section and promised a future remedy; sure enough, three years later, there was a "Lesbians and Film" issue, which I coedited.4 I'd been inspired by Richard, yes, but by then had also become fully enamored of girls. Richard inspired on many levels! His influence on both life and film should not be underestimated. Dyer's "Homosexuality and Film Noir" addressed the influence of film noir and the pernicious representations of lesbians and gays in the cinema. He observed: Given the dearth of alternative images, it is reasonable to suppose that these had an important influence on both public ideas about homosexuality and damagingly gay self-images. I know that as I grew up realizing I was gay, I used to identify with characters like Waldo in Laura [Otto Preminger, 1944] [End Page 155] or Jo in Walk on the Wild Side [Edward Dmytryk, 1962]; they concretized and reinforced for me the negative feelings about myself that I picked up elsewhere in the culture. I know from work within the gay movement how widespread these images still are.5 And knowing how widespread they were, he went on to write for Jump Cut again, this time in "Gays in Film," an essay that looked at everything from stereotypes to realism.6 If Richard offered courage to stand up against these ideas and images, through his great love of genres and movies he equally gave permission to hold on to beloved artifacts. Richard was always embracing his own "bad objects" and wouldn't be shamed into forsaking his passions for those films. In this way, he was different from the more puritanical Vito Russo, who railed against the films and who, I felt, didn't trust the audience to transform their dross into gold.7 Richard did, and does, and that explains why so many gathered last year to cheer him on. Richard approached film with love, with a generosity from the very beginning that has continued throughout his work. Ah, but back then. What were the early years like for "gay and lesbian" film? First of all, nothing unfolded in a fancy banquet room or mainstream conference like the SCMS of 2016. This is no recitation of histories of victimhood, but I must allow an involuntary memory: just how hard fought those early writings were. Don't take them for granted. Imagine instead what a grand, expansive spirit it took to set these ideas afloat in the world, for them to emerge on the page with such ebullience out of an era of repression that had left so many angry and, a decade later, so many dead. Richard has conducted his career with the grace of a film-worthy prince. It is his willingness to be forever open, putting his ideas out with great sangfroid but also with great love, that explains why those...
Reel Evil Negar Mottahedeh (bio) I still remember the unexpected fever that washed my skin in red as I watched him, the forty-third president of the United States, George W. Bush, apply a black-and-white overlay to the world in his 2002 State of the Union address. That speech followed a series of unthinkable terrorist attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001. My visceral response as I watched the State of the Union that night is captured by a descriptive French phrase, colère du lait (milk anger), a state of being that boils into sudden rage when heated. In that speech, President Bush spoke of three "axis" countries: North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. They were evil. They developed and tested dangerous weapons of mass destruction. They curtailed their citizens' freedoms—repressed, starved, and tortured them. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was, by far, the worst among them. This political rhetoric is by now familiar ground. The forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald Trump, applied it to President Bashir Assad in his first postelection act of military aggression against [End Page 146] Syria and again to Iran's president Hassan Rouhani's in a speech in Riyadh in May 2017.1 In the spring of 2003, still outraged by the reconstruction of the world in terms of good and evil, I designed the Reel Evil: Films from the Axis of Evil film series at Duke University with my colleague and collaborator miriam cooke, the eminent Middle East literary scholar, and Hank Okazaki, Screen/Society's film curator. By that spring, six countries in total had been identified as members of the "axis of evil" by the Bush administration. Reel Evil, our festival of films from North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Cuba, launched just days before the United States went to war in Iraq in March 2003. The war implemented the military doctrine of "shock and awe"—rapid dominance in order to shut down the adversary's society completely, incapacitating the ability to fight.2 The Reel Evil film series, which ran from February 26 to April 17, 2003, featured a variety of film genres from the axis of evil—comedies, vérité films, melodramas, war epics, and Godzilla films. The series was media activism in its own right. The sheer variety of featured genres emphasized the presence of well-developed societies in these vastly different "adversary" countries against the backdrop of a rhetoric of uniformity and backwardness in the media landscape. The festival's range established that there was an infrastructure supporting the making of feature-length films in the axis countries atop a culture and viewership that enjoyed a hearty laugh and a solid cry. Global media outlets went bonkers when they heard about Reel Evil. Hank, miriam, and I gave interviews about the festival for weeks on end that spring. The BBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, MTV, NPR—the news networks were all excited.3 The conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh denounced us. He wondered what the concession stands on Duke's campus would sell during the screening of the North Korean Godzilla movie Pulgasari (1985): fried frog legs and critter soda? Made in 1985, Pulgasari was Kim Jong Il's crowning achievement in filmmaking. To make it, he kidnapped a South Korean director, Shin Sang Ok, and his wife, the talented actor Choi Eun Hee.4 (The film is clunky, and it is so dreadful that it is awesome!) Teetering on this foundation of grave corruption and wrongdoing by the filmmaker himself, the film itself tells the people's story, the story of a giant metaleating monster who fights alongside the peasants to overthrow an evil monarchy. [End Page 147] The semester-long film series was intended to educate Duke students about cinema and film industries in the axis countries that had come into focus. This simple act, we thought, would undo the representations of otherness that daily colonized our media on the level of content. It would also upend formal film standards that had been normalized by dominant cinema in its circulation around the globe. Our films would show that cinema could speak in a multiplicity of formal...
To Dye[r] For Thomas Waugh (bio) Dear Richard, You have just sent me one of your legendary postcards, men in kilts at the urinal this time, prodding me unwittingly to finish converting my SCMS tribute (roast?) from last March, ineptly titled "To Dye[r] for: From Gay to Queer?," into a sober epistolary contribution to Cinema Journal. There were eleven of us, and we each had to stake out our small parcel of territory. I had no trouble choosing Gays and Film, since your pioneering seventy-three-page first book from 1977 (you call it a "pamphlet," but I call it the Bible) had such a paradigm-shifting effect on both the discipline and my career.1 That lavender volume, whose [End Page 151] ragged cover featuring a washed-out Garbo-in-drag still from Queen Christina (Reuben Mamoulian, 1933), survived almost forty years of attrition on my bookshelf and highlighted my PowerPoint at SCMS, for it had been the spark that led us to meet that same year in New York, thanks to my fan letter, and the rest is histoire. I guess the question of pamphlet or book is moot: this volume had the timeless impact of many much longer books as it went through a 1980 reprint (with the cover, still lavender, this time haunted not by a pale Garbo but by a larger-than-life Edwige Feuillère from the French boarding-school potboiler Olivia [Jacqueline Audry, 1951], which only you had seen), and then a 1984 revised US edition (which cruelly took the lesbians off the cover), each time with the filmography enlarged. You went on to produce extrapolations of your own 1977 chapter, your essay on stereotypes, in 1979 and 1983 and reprinted them both in your 1993 anthology, and they haven't aged a nanosecond.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Well-worn cover of Richard Dyer's Gays and Film (1977), collection of the author. Why did Gays and Film change my life and our discipline? For one thing this work was the first concretization of gay liberation politics in book form in our discipline. As I launched my teaching career in 1976, with more than one foot in the closet both to my teachers and to most of my cohorts at Columbia and Concordia, your book put an end not only to this glaring contradiction in my intellectual life but also to the contradiction in our discipline, the silent lavender elephant in the room. Your book was profoundly political, and this crystallized in four ways. The first is editing as politics. In the year of Anita Bryant and the repeal of a gay rights ordinance in Dade County and, across the pond, the tide of Thatcherism (remember the hate campaign directed against the National Film Theatre season of films on homosexuality that was the occasion for your BFI-published volume?), you knew that coalitional politics, the convergence of identities and points of view, were what was required. Your brilliance as editor, recruiting the very different Caroline Sheldon and Jack Babuscio as contributors, matched your strategic skill at matchmaking and alliances. The three essays and your introduction had in common not only their political urgency but also their transformation of gay cinephilia and fan culture into scholarship, yet scholarship that was community-focused and elegantly grassroots-accessible (as your work has never ceased to be). [End Page 152] Second is gender parity as politics (or the "lesbian" in "lesbian and gay"). The presence of Garbo on your cover, it is important to remember, was explicitly and intentionally political as well; no doubt your principled insistence on gender parity in this and subsequent work was carried over from your membership in the all-male Gay Left, the London activist and intellectual group whose biannual journal was both dogmatically feminist and very much in the vanguard of the emerging subfield of gay film criticism.3 At a time when so-called lesbian separatism and gay male sexism had splintered and torpedoed many same-sex intellectual initiatives, you were among the few men who dared to speak on lesbian film—with both humility and honesty—paving the way for the...
Just Another Fan of Yours Miriam J. Petty (bio) Dear Richard, It seems only fitting to be writing you a fan letter, that after years of reading your writing about stars, you are hailed in this moment as the star. (Does this make me Judy Garland to your Clark Gable?) I've been your fan since my first reading of your work. It's a privilege to craft an open intellectual love letter to a scholar I've deeply admired for much of my life in the academy. I hope I can do so with the same spirit of generosity, collegiality, curiosity, and integrity that are the hallmarks of your provocative and pioneering writing; it is a challenge I accept with equal parts relish, pride, fear, and trembling. But to tell the truth, it's always been the vulnerability and intellectual openness of your work that has pushed me, goaded me, and even reassured me that the less healthy trends of self-consciousness and self-censure that I'm prone to cultivating are not necessary (or even useful) in an academic life. So much of your work is carefully wrought, yet it also openly sows the seeds of its own transformation, sometimes by being direct about the work's shortcomings and other times by being plainspoken and generous enough to show the work behind the work—not only scholarly, but psychological, historical, and emotional as well. As an uninitiated graduate student reading texts like Stars, Heavenly Bodies, and especially White, I felt myself invited into a conversation that was ongoing, sometimes right before my eyes.1 This strain of intellectual humility seemed even more important because you are a white male scholar who was writing about race in ways that recognized it as a thing before white scholars recognizing race as a [End Page 169] thing was exactly a thing itself. As a graduate student, especially a black female graduate student in a context that sometimes felt hostile to my growth and my very presence, I remember being surprised, astonished, even, at how consistently you mobilized your privilege by recognizing, citing, and actually engaging with the work of thinkers, scholars, and nonacademics of color who had been discerning and discussing race as a thing for decades; the breadth and richness of the black discursive world you carved out for Paul Robeson in conversation with the likes of C. L. R. James, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Ollie Harrington, J. A. Rogers, and Arthur Huff Fauset is just one example.2 And that you so rarely, if ever, seemed to do that other, less creditable thing, of seeking thanks and blessings, or proudly Columbusing, as it were, into the territory where others had already carved a path. In a final master stroke of irony, especially in the context of the nationally self-deprecating hierarchy of the American imagination around intellectual work, you did all these things while being not only white and male but also British. Your accent bounced off the printed page, lending authority, gravitas, and irreproachability to your observations. In the early 2000s, when I was a PhD student in Emory University's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, I traveled to Princeton University for a conference organized around the film versions of Fannie Hurst's 1930s novel Imitation of Life, a set of texts with which I was becoming increasingly obsessed.3 The star-studded lineup for the conference even boasted—somewhat oddly—a keynote by actor and bona fide movie star Halle Berry. But nothing could compare to my excitement for the afternoon panel that featured you and Valerie Smith on a double bill. Neither of you disappointed. Smith presented an elegant and complex reading of racial passing narratives, marshaling the expansive black feminist analysis that she honed in her book Not Just Race, Not Just Gender.4 You offered an early version of your essay on Lena Horne, "Singing Prettily," a reading of the anxious industrial packaging and repackaging that characterized Horne's experiences in early twentieth-century Hollywood.5 My pilgrimage was portentous in ways I never imagined; it was the beginning of my engagement and reengagement with the film Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934...
Textual Intimacy Jackie Stacey (bio) Dear Richard, When I was thinking about your contribution to film studies for this roundtable, I was struck by the fact that no matter which of my courses I turned to, your writing features prominently on the syllabus: if it's a course on film noir, then it's your "Homosexuality in Film Noir"; if it's women and film, it's "Four Films of Lana Turner"; if it's romance, it'll be the Brief Encounter book; even on my new course on Tilda Swinton (whom you have not written about), I taught Pastiche in relation to Lynn Hershman's 2002 film Teknolust starring Swinton, and this coming semester, I am teaching White alongside a comparison of how Swinton and Bowie embody what you called "extreme whiteness."1 Thinking about Richard Dyer in the house of cinema, for me, means thinking about your writing in conjunction with teaching. And I have had the pleasure of teaching alongside you. When working with you on the annual Sexuality Summer School at Manchester, we ran a workshop called "Textual Intimacy." I have taken this as my title here to characterize just one aspect of your contribution to film studies. My suggestion is that your modes of intimacy with films as texts defy the distinction between what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously characterized as "paranoid and reparative readings": as has been well rehearsed, the paranoid mode achieves a mastery motivated by a hermeneutics of suspicion and revelation (uncovering ideology and exposing a text's hidden secrets); the reparative mode is motivated by affective connection, bringing the critic into a loving intimacy with the object of study.2 Despite Sedgwick herself refusing to frame the distinction as an opposition, many others have turned it into a polarity. I think that your approach to close reading, your textual intimacy, is a mode of analysis that combines the best of these two approaches, and demonstrates the importance of not holding them apart. As you have often said: "What we feel about films matters." Like Raymond [End Page 166] Williams, you are concerned with structures of feeling; as Williams put it: "Not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feelings as thought."3 Here are two brief examples of how beautifully your textually intimate method demonstrates the false dichotomy of paranoid and reparative reading. And I think they show how you have brought your formation as a PhD student (supervised by the late Stuart Hall) at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to film analysis in some subtle and yet vital ways: you find the context in the text and then pursue its implications beyond the text (showing how they are intimately intertwined); you travel across art forms, from cinema to art history, from literature to photography; you combine Marxism, feminism, and antiracism with a queer sensibility to produce a reading of culturally embedded formations and pleasures; and you're just terribly good at getting at that dimension of culture, which cannot quite be captured and pinned down but has a powerful grip upon our feelings. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The final touch of Laura's shoulder. Brief Encounter (Cineguild, 1945). My first example is taken from your BFI classic on the film Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) (or, as you always call it, Brief!). One wonderful example of your textual method is the discussion of the early scene when Alec (Trevor Howard) leaves Laura (Celia Johnson) at the railway station tearoom (Figure 1): There is a close-up of him gently squeezing Laura's shoulder before going. This is the most obtrusive camerawork so far in the film, using a close-up to convey a sense of the momentousness (for Laura) of his departure. It is not a point-of-view shot, which would explicitly place the gesture within Laura's perception; it is the film as impersonal narration slipping into identification with Laura's personal position. . . . Brief Encounter puts a woman at the centre of the story, puts her in charge of telling the story, validates her account and perception of it. Yet there is a price to pay for this position of narrative...
Own-Becoming Victor Fan (bio) Dear Friends and Colleagues in Cinema and Media Studies . . . and Richard, How to be a thoughtful, caring, and resourceful pedagogue? And how to use what we learn from our teaching in our research? These questions are often raised in job interviews and applications for promotion. On a day-to-day basis, however, they put to the test our roles as scholars and mentors, who are supposed to talk the talk and walk the walk, or in Confucian terms, teach by means of our speech (yanjiao) and our bodies (actions, or shenjiao). As film scholars and teachers, through our speech and action we engage our friends, peers, and students in the way we see the world and the cinematographic image. What I wish to convey in this letter may sound anecdotal, because I know Richard, having been his colleague at King's College London, and we interact on a personal level. However, what I learn from our personal interactions is what Tiantai Buddhism calls yuanrong: the process of integrating a set of interdependent philosophical ideas, practices, and modes of being into a well-rounded whole.1 What I have learned from Richard affects the ways I teach and how I approach the cinematographic image as a trace of reality.2 Richard was one of several brilliant scholars who sat on the hiring committee for my job interview at King's. Like many scholars in film and media studies, I first encountered Richard's stimulating, encouraging, and moving writings when I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s. By "moving," I mean intellectually persuasive, kind, and passionate. When I heard that Richard would be my interviewer, I was so excited that I told my friend Brian Bergstrom, "Well, if I do not manage to get the job, I will at least have had the honor and pleasure of speaking with Richard Dyer." In my job interview, Richard opened the conversation by asking me, "Why would you like to come to King's?" I thought about his question before responding. "I want to go home," I replied. "I want to go home." Ever since that interview, Richard has often recalled this memory of ours. We both found that the idea of going home, which I blurted [End Page 177] out probably as an expression of desperation or anxiety at the interview, resonates with something that lies deep inside our minds. What does it mean to go home? When I said "go home," I had in mind returning to the United Kingdom—a place to which my parents and I immigrated in the early 1990s––and to which I often maintained an interdependent relationship that lies between being Heimlich and Unheimlich, the canny and the uncanny. I was also thinking about the idea of coming home to film studies, of being at a place where we could all shamelessly and unapologetically share our profound love of the cinema for what it is and what it can be. Nonetheless, in the past four and a half years, Richard has taught me something more about what it means to go home. For most of us, being able to go home does not mean that from now on it will be smooth sailing. Being home often means that no matter what kinds of obstacles, difficulties, and turbulence we experience, we always are there for one another. I cannot tell you how many times, as I worked late into the evening, I would receive a phone call and hear Richard's voice or even hear a door knock and see his face. Richard would ask me how I was and if I would like to have a cup of tea with him some time. At those moments, I knew I was at home. When Richard heard about my surgery in 2015 and showed up at my doorstep, I knew I was at home. Richard not only showed me care and kindness in these repeated gestures; he showed me something more profound. In Chan (Zen) Buddhism, going home means that one has found the sabhāva (or in Chinese, zixing), usually translated as "thusness" or "own-becoming": a pure potentiality from which an assemblage...
Countermanifestos and Audibility Macarena GóMez-Barris (bio) By now "Decolonize_____!" is a familiar formulation. "Decolonize" is placed in front of a word to describe it as an object of oppression, and the phrase is then followed by an exclamation point. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang predicted, in the academic move to decolonize everything, specific claims by Indigenous peoples to territories fall out of the political demand. If we are serious about changing the structural relations of colonial power, which the call to decolonize media implies, we must first raise the problem of foundational violence and dispossession, remembering how settler Law protects the privatization of property as a foundational underpinning of the capitalist racial order. Let's not follow the "commonsense" next move, which would make a universal claim to common lands. As the radio programmer and Kanaka Moli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui reminds us, the concept of the commons dates back to a seventeenth-century English context. It was transferred into North America by British settlers in order to manage Indigenous lands during the founding of early towns. The commons, then, is "a historically and racialized concept as well as one implicated in colonial structures."1 In other words, in the Americas there is no common media, no common property—except as Indigenous communal territories and Indigenous technologies. To decolonize media, we should first reposition the normative claim on land as the original corporate ownership, mediated by and organized for settlers. We might call this group of ideas countermanifesto point number 1. Countermanifesto point number 2 invokes Nicholas Mirzoeff's term "countervisuality" as a way to look back on the mediations of colonial power.2 I use the term "the extractive view" as a way to see how terrains are mapped as digital colonies.3 Rather than the panopticon, which assumes a disciplinary society, the extractive view [End Page 124] names how corporate states use military and surveillance technologies. We might also insist on decentering ocular and Eurocentric representation through decolonial visions. The Mapuche filmmaker Francisco Huichaqueo works with the machi healer Sylvia Kallfüman to slow the speed of accelerated capitalism by visualizing temporal lag in the videos they make together. Embedded in the Bío-Bío River, the machi's body becomes a way to inhabit the sensorial world. We might turn the original demand to decolonize into a question, changing the language slightly to adjust for vibration and frequency: What do decolonial media look like? What do decolonial media feel and sound like? Countermanifesto point number 3: originally, the genre of the manifesto referred to a verbal declaration of intention, political motives, or viewpoints, be it by an individual, group, or the state. I use the term "countermanifesto" to invoke the antistate and anticolonial historical usages of the manifesto, rather than its mediation as a tool of power. We might think with the decolonial critique of Emma Pérez, who queers the documents of archival research that reproduce colonial and heteronormative ways of seeing and knowing.4 Pérez asks, How do we retrain colonial visions? Which modes work beyond, rather than on behalf of, the technologies of racial and extractive capitalism? For this, the manifesto may be a useful genre, although it, too, is steeped and entangled in a history of power. For masculine revolutionaries in the Americas, the countermanifesto has often been the privileged site of enunciation and a new site of dispossession, excluding Black, trans, queer, female, and Indigenous populations, to instead speak on behalf of the oppression of "the working man" or lo popular. In other words, the manifesto, depending on standpoint, could become another site of mediation on behalf of all, but it often functions to lift the positionality and knowledge locus of only the speaker. Although the human microphone used by the Occupy movement amplified this idea by echoing the voices of many, it still amplified the voice of a singular speaking subject. Put simply, the manifesto was the original leftist mansplaining technology. I would even go so far as to suggest that the manifesto, with a few exceptions, leaves out the complex trace of queer and decolonial feminist and submerged perspectives. In the vein of...
Theorist of Feeling Anu Koivunen (bio) Dear Richard, I wonder if you remember an evening walk in Stockholm in December 2010 when Jackie Stacey and I envisioned a book project for you: a collection of essays showcasing your pathbreaking work on feeling in cinema, packaged as your take on the ascending affective turn in cinema studies. During the walk from Filmhuset to Odenplan in crisp weather, Jackie and I enthusiastically proposed essays to be included—there were so many to choose from—and even invented what we thought was a brilliant title (which I have since forgotten). I remember it vividly, as I also remember your amused but unconvinced silence in the face of our—or at least my—eagerness. I so wanted to read such a book, especially an introductory chapter in which I [End Page 163] imagined you would flesh out the theory of feeling lurking between the lines in your work from the early 1970s until today. I still hope such a book might be in the making, and while waiting, I offer my notes for the road. While never fully coming out as a theorist of feeling, in my reading you are a classic author in the field. Your first book from 1973, Light Entertainment, the second volume in the BFI Television Monograph series, focused on pop shows and variety, programs "akin to show business, cabaret and musical comedy," prefiguring your later studies on the musical, stardom, performance, and songs in cinema.1 At the heyday of screen theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis in film studies, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies paved the way for the study of feeling and a concern with "popular forms."2 "Shows are entertaining," you argued, "because they assert against the unpleasantness of reality certain hopes and ideals for humanity, because they give pleasure by making their audiences feel what those ideals would be like were they realised."3 Light Entertainment reads as your first attempt to formulate an analysis of audiovisual entertainment as both a social and aesthetic experience, and to carve out a critical space that would allow for sociological and aesthetic concerns to coexist.4 Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Richard Hoggart appear in the footnotes, as do Henri Lefebvre and Susanne K. Langer. For affect studies today, your overall attunement to affective life, to sensory experience and media materiality as research questions, and your emphasis on the physicality of performer and viewer in this early piece is distinctive and pioneering. In your approach, the sociological, situated phenomenon of entertainment is examined aesthetically and as a form of vital potential. In Light Entertainment, you underlined "the fact of human energy in the vitality of the dance number, the pow of the singing, the snap of the humour, the sparkle of the sexuality," describing the force of entertainment as "a real life-assertive quality."5 What you discussed in 1973 as an aesthetic of escape emerged in your 1977 essay "Entertainment and Utopia" as a theory of the musical as a cultural form articulating and addressing "a utopian sensibility."6 This notion, a conceptualization of a horizon of experience, expectations, and desires rooted in the contemporary moment, provided an alternative to the language of psychoanalysis in understanding pleasure. While this essay makes no mention of Raymond Williams's concept of structure of feeling, you do evoke it in your 1976–1977 essay on The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965): "Analysing the sensuous level of artistic signification means grasping the links [End Page 164] between the formal, culturally developed rules of an artistic tradition . . . and a sensibility which is crucially, but probably not wholly, determined by a specific culture."7 Mobilizing Susanne K. Langer's vocabulary of forms and feelings, you stress the importance of studying nonrepresentational signs––"colour, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camerawork"––beyond narrative and the representational frame.8 While introducing a phenomenological perspective in the high moment of semiotics and cinepsychoanalysis, you were careful to reject Langer's implication, as you put it, "that the emotion itself is not coded, is simply a 'human feeling.'" Instead, you were "inclined to see almost as much coding in the emotions as in the signs for them."9...
New Killer Star Jacqueline Furby (bio) Images of violence and death are commonly found in David Bowie’s music and film art. This can be violence felt by him, violence he directs against himself, violence that he offers to others, and the violence of others directed toward him. This essay considers how violence and death play out in two of Bowie’s on-screen appearances from the beginning of the 1980s—the BBC teleplay Baal (Alan Clarke, 1982) and the film The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)—in terms of the shadowy, incorporeal space itself around death. This liminal space is clearly suggestive of death’s status as the threshold between life and what comes after, but it also contains other noteworthy implications. For example, the space is an arena where potential events, states, and meanings are held in suspension, such as life and death, presence/absence, and us/them. This is a phenomenon that is represented here by the crossed-out title New Killer Star, the name of a Bowie song that means one thing when written and another when spoken (it sounds like “nuclear star”), thus rendering it ambiguously both there and not there. As such, the idea of the liminal speaks to Bowie’s continued use of ambiguity, conflict, and paradox in his art. This essay is therefore primarily interested in what these performances contribute to an understanding of Bowie and his art rather than other social and cultural readings that might, with equal validity, be applied to them.1 A number of writers have noted how Bowie “creates and exists in certain types of spaces”; for example, Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond cite Bowie’s “urban, alien, tourist and inter-galactic” spaces.2 Tanya Stark has discussed Bowie’s consistent engagement with death and the “symbolic centrality of death that permeates” his career and links this to his “fascination with liminal spaces.”3 Although she doesn’t explicitly refer to the metaphysical [End Page 167] place between life and death, I take up this reading of “liminal” in connection with these two texts because it is in this marginal land where the dual drives of Eros and Thanatos compete for screen time that the action of Baal and The Hunger take place. Alan Clarke’s Baal is an adaptation of German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s first play (1918). Brecht’s Baal has little relationship to the “epic theater” he later pioneered that sought to force the audience into being active by employing his Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), where they were encouraged to remain aware that they were watching a fictional performance in order to promote a social-critical response in them. When Clarke directed the play for the BBC in 1982, he introduced some elements, such as the split screen, the tableau, and the character of Baal singing and speaking directly to camera, to gesture toward Brecht’s later style and deny the audience the passive voyeuristic spectator position. Baal is, as Paul Morley explains in The Age of Bowie, a “lone, angry, messianic, adolescent and heavy-drinking poet idolized by his peers,” and he can be compared to Arthur Rimbaud, the influential nineteenth-century “savage symbolist” poet.4 Morley says that Rimbaud is a model of the “post-adolescent insecurity tipping into fury and rage that’s at the heart of the clichéd bad boy rock star.”5 Baal is an “amoral, anarchistic, anti-authoritarian, anti-social, snarling hater of women but inexplicably attractive to them”; he “spurns and alienates everyone he comes in contact with, leaving destruction in his wake.”6 Rather than lingering on the ruin of other characters, though, the narrative focuses on Baal’s flight toward death. After murdering at least one person (off-screen) and abandoning the mother of his unborn child, we see Baal dying alone and abject in a woodcutter’s cottage. The Hunger also focuses on the prolonged journey toward the annihilation of Bowie’s character. He plays the beautiful undead vampire John Blaylock, who lives with his exquisite six-thousand-year-old wife, Miriam (Catherine Deneuve), and together they prey on and then drain the blood of willing New Yorkers before disposing of their remains...
David Bowie On-Screen Toija Cinque (bio), Angela Ndalianis (bio), and Sean Redmond (bio) Not Here David Bowie has always been a significant figure of the screen. Through appearing in experimental music videos, tense television interviews, controversial live performances, biographical documentaries, and auteur and genre films, he was a seminal, shimmering part of screen culture for more than forty years. His first television appearance was on the BBC’s Tonight program, in 1964, where he was interviewed about his newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. At this stage, when he was still called David Jones, we are introduced to not only his hunger for publicity but also his closeness to difference, of not quite fitting in. David Bowie is, of course, not a single or singular star image: he has appeared as David Bowie and in and through various high-voltage, liminal, gender-bending personae, including Aladdin Sane (1971); he has appeared in self-reflexive cameo roles in such films as Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001); and he has taken on various serious acting roles, including the outcast poet-musician Baal in Baal (Alan Clarke, BBC, 1982), the vampire John Blaylock in The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), the murderous Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), and the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006). Across the body of David Bowie’s screen work, one finds a great diversity in the type of roles he has taken on and the performances he has given, even if they are, nonetheless, all loosely bound by a profound alterity—a signification of difference. David Bowie is a significant screen figure even when he is not on camera, with numerous performers, artists, and film and television texts drawing on his imagery and titular iconography to shape their texts. This is most famously the case in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998), ostensibly a Bowie biopic that Bowie famously disapproved of, [End Page 126] refusing to grant Haynes the rights to his music.1 While Bowie is not in Velvet Goldmine, he is nonetheless presented there as Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), with events and relationships culled from Bowie’s own biography. Bowie’s songs are often used to score a film scene or as the backing soundtrack, to historicize and affectively shape the mood and feeling of the world being brought into view. Bowie’s music, his voice, his fantastic embodiment enchant the screen worlds his soundscapes are used for. In Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014), for example, “Moonage Daydream” plays as the rebel crew of the spaceship Milano enters the spectacular galactic corpse-planet Knowhere. David Bowie’s voice and the psychedelic imagery found in the song lyrics bring his alien messiah identity into the spectacular vistas on display.2 Since his death in January 2016, David Bowie has appeared on the screen in a different and particularly moving way as a type of fan wish fulfillment and cultural haunting. For example, in the Doctor Who episode “Smile” (BBC, 2017), the Doctor faces an army of robots who are programmed to incinerate people if they detect that they are not happy. Retreating while smiling, the Doctor calls out, “I’m happy, hope you’re happy too,” linking the scene to the lyrics of the song Ashes to Ashes (1980). Peter Capaldi’s Doctor was also initially modeled on the Bowie star image, the Thin White Duke, and so Bowie is constantly rematerialized in the body of this alien time traveler who has the ability to resurrect or rejuvenate.3 Even in his death, then, Bowie lives on in screen culture. And in living on so strongly, if in part as apparition, he perhaps points to the material thinness of how our cultural world is held together: Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be, that we would do...
