Uncanny Histories in Film and Media 1978829949, 9781978829947

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Editors
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Introduction: Uncanny Histories / Patrice Petro
Part I: The Disciplinary Uncanny
1. Film and Media in the Double Take of History / Priya Jaikumar
2. Haunted by the Body: Cleanliness in Colonial Manila’s Film Culture / Jasmine Trice
3. Reimagining the History of Media Studies through Games, Play, and the Uncanny Valley / Alenda Y. Chang
Part II: Uncanny Films
4. Flickering Lights and Mischievous Stars: The Uncanny Feminism of My Twentieth Century / Hannah Goodwin
5. The Sublime Body under the Sign of Developmentalism: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Malaysian Politics, and Global Markets / Peter J. Bloom
6. Uncanny Histories of Transnational Cinematic Reception: Eisenstein in Cuba / Masha Salazkina
Part III: Uncanny Figures
7. Julio García Espinosa and the Fight for a Critical Culture in Cuba / Cristina Venegas
8. The Case for (Re)collecting Lotte Eisner’s Work / Naomi Decelles
9. A Widow’s Work: Archives and the Construction of Russian Film History / Maria N. Corrigan
10. Fiendish Devices: The Uncanny History of Almena Davis / Ellen C. Scott
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

UNC ANNY HISTORIES IN FILM AND MEDIA

MEDIA ­M ATTERS Patrice Petro and Cristina Venegas, Series Editors Media ­Matters focuses on film, tele­vi­sion, and media within a transnational and interdisciplinary frame: environmental media, media industries, media and democracy, information media and global media. It features the work of scholars who explore ever expanding forms of media in art, ­every day, and entertainment practices. ­Under the co-­direction of Patrice Petro and Cristina Venegas, the series is sponsored by the Carsey-­Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Center seeks to foster innovative and collaborative research that probes the aesthetic, po­liti­cal, economic, artistic, and social pro­cesses of media in the past and in our own time. Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, eds., Global Cinema Networks Nataša Ďurovičová, Patrice Petro, and Lorena Terando, eds., At Translation’s Edge Patrice Petro, ed., Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Zoran Samardzija, Post-­Communist Malaise: Cinematic Responses to Eu­ro­pean Integration

UNC ANNY HISTORIES IN FILM AND MEDIA edited by

patric e petro

rutger s uni v er sit y p r ess

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 LCCN 2021039293 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2022 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Individual chapters copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) ­were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­rutgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

CONTENTS



Introduction: Uncanny Histories patrice petro

1

part i: the disciplinary uncanny 1

Film and Media in the Double Take of History priya jaikumar

2

Haunted by the Body: Cleanliness in Colonial Manila’s Film Culture jasmine trice

32

3

Reimagining the History of Media Studies through Games, Play, and the Uncanny Valley alenda y. chang

60

13

part ii: uncanny films 4

Flickering Lights and Mischievous Stars: The Uncanny Feminism of My Twentieth ­Century 83 hannah goodwin

5

The Sublime Body u­ nder the Sign of Developmentalism: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Malaysian Politics, and Global Markets peter j. bloom

6

Uncanny Histories of Transnational Cinematic Reception: Eisenstein in Cuba masha salazkina

97

117

part iii: uncanny figures 7

Julio García Espinosa and the Fight for a Critical Culture in Cuba cristina venegas

8

The Case for (Re)collecting Lotte Eisner’s Work naomi decelles

139 162

v

vi

Contents

9

A ­Widow’s Work: Archives and the Construction of Rus­sian Film History maria n. corrigan

10

Fiendish Devices: The Uncanny History of Almena Davis ellen c. scott

185 205

Acknowl­edgments 217 Notes on Contributors 219 Index 223

UNC ANNY HISTORIES IN FILM AND MEDIA

INTRODUCTION Uncanny Histories PAT R I C E P E T R O

Written in the aftermath of world war and a global pandemic, Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919) was published just over a c­ entury ago. Returning to the uncanny now as a framing concept for this volume, it is striking how ideas about phenomena that appear mysterious and eerie, frightful and unsettling, resonate anew in our own pandemic era. With our sense of time disrupted and our notions about history haunted by trauma and repetition, the essays gathered h­ ere take up Freud’s writings and ­those of many ­others in an effort to unsettle familiar narratives in the field of film and media studies, probing the unfamiliarity at the very heart of writing history. Freud was not the first to explore the uncanny, nor would he be the last. Marx, ­after all, famously wrote about the uncanny in Capital, where he explained that “a commodity appears at first as an extremely obvious, trivial t­ hing. But its analy­ sis brings out that it is a very strange t­ hing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”1 The concept of the uncanny, moreover, is not confined to a single discipline, historical period, or theoretical approach. Instead, it has inspired thinking and debate across a range of disciplines, including lit­er­a­ture, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, feminism, and queer theory. Anthony Vidler, for example, in his book The Architectural Uncanny (1992), explores architectural history through the lens of one of psychoanalysis’s founding concepts. Surveying the intellectual and urban history of modern Eu­rope, Vidler observes a new sensibility emerging in the twentieth ­century, provoked by both real and ­imagined senses of “unhomeliness.” Exploring the vari­ous ways the uncanny “erupts in the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture,” he returns to two of Freud’s essays, from 1915–1916 (“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and “On Transience”), and explains: Themes of anxiety and dread, provoked by a real or i­magined sense of “unhomeliness,” seemed particularly appropriate to a moment when, as Freud noted in 1915, 1

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the entire “homeland” of Eu­rope, cradle and apparently secure ­house of western civilization, was in the pro­cess of barbaric regression; when the territorial security that had fostered the notion of a unified culture was broken, bringing a power­ful disillusionment with the universal “museum” of the Eu­ro­pean “fatherland.” The site of the uncanny was no longer confined to the ­house or city, but more properly extended to the no man’s land between the trenches, or the field of ruins left ­after bombardment.2

Vidler unearths the colonial proj­ect at the heart of the architectural uncanny and shows how, over the course of the twentieth c­ entury, ideas of center and periphery ­were destabilized, as expressions of estrangement came to be framed through the lens of class alienation. Probing Freud’s claim that “to some ­people the idea of being buried alive by m ­ istake is the most uncanny t­ hing of all,” he provides a compelling spatial approach to thinking historically, comparing the ancient architecture of Rome with that of Pompeii.3 Rome remains a vast museum, he says, while Pompeii remains a living antiquity. Rome stands for official history, “built at ­great cost in granite and marble,” whereas Pompeii reveals a history of everyday life, frozen in time, preserved for all time with “startling immediacy.” Rome represents an imperial city in ruins, perched atop the detritus of its pre­de­ces­sor cities. Pompeii, the city buried in a volcanic eruption, sustains an uncanny archive of domesticity and intimacy, suspended in a state of historical preservation. Vidler’s is at once a theoretical, historical, and archival approach to the uncanny that has inspired many film and media scholars, including several of the contributors to this volume. Indeed, much like Vidler, the scholars whose work is included ­here probe the uncanny as a mode of historical analy­sis that reveals surprising connections and unsettling continuities. Priya Jaikumar, for instance, provides a detailed genealogy of the uncanny in our field (in psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory) and explores a range of texts, images, and temporalities (across history, historiography, and historical repetitions). Jasmine Trice also takes up Freud’s and Vidler’s ideas, only to extend their findings in an analy­sis of interwar Manila film culture and the tensions between Spanish religiosity and American hygienic consumerism in competing colonial regimes of the body. Alenda Chang calls on us to expand the disciplinary frame of our field, arguing that games and play are central to a more expansive understanding of our mediated real­ity. In essays by Hannah Goodwin, Peter Bloom, and Masha Salazkina, each author explores the uncanny through close analy­sis of an individual film, focusing respectively on the aesthetics, politics, and international circulation of lesser-­known (My Twentieth C ­ entury, 1989), blockbuster (The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013), and canonical (Battleship Potemkin, 1926) films. Fi­nally, Cristina Venegas, Naomi DeCelles, Maria Corrigan, and Ellen Scott explore the histories of founding figures in film and media studies. Some, like Julio García Espinosa and Lotte Eisner, are well-­known even though the scope and ambition of their work remain l­ ittle understood. O ­ thers, like Pera Moiseevna

Introduction 3

Atasheva and Valentina Georgievna Kozintseva (­widows of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein and Grigorii Mikhailovich Kozintsev) are hardly recognized at all. Fi­nally, ­there is the case of Black film critic Almena Davis, editor of the Black newspaper the Los Angeles Tribune in the 1940s and 1950s. Her militancy, critical voice, and ceaseless criticism of Hollywood’s racism provide us with an alternative vision of civil rights strug­gles of the time. In sum, w ­ hether addressing disciplinary contradictions and tensions or exploring individual works or figures, each of the contributors unsettles historical continuities and rethinks the trajectories of foundational movements, thinkers, and prac­ti­tion­ ers, often dismissed or taken for granted in our field. The essays share a common interest in questions of disciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and intellectual historiography, with each essay offering dynamic new ways of approaching long-­standing questions of authorship, archive, reception, bodily sensation, textual analy­sis, production cultures, and what several contributors describe as a feminist uncanny. This collection is or­ga­nized around three central themes: the disciplinary uncanny, uncanny films, and uncanny figures in film and media history. Priya Jaikumar’s essay, “Film and Media in the Double Take of History,” opens the first part on the disciplinary uncanny with a tour-­de-­force reading of the uncanny as a concept, a temporality, and a moving target as a text’s meanings and effects shift and change over time. She begins by tracing the concept of the uncanny to its French and German roots in psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. She provides a close reading of Freud’s 1919 essay, arguing that although Freud appeals to lit­er­a­ture (E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman,” from 1916) to make his case about the uncanny, his ideas are actually more germane to thinking about technologies such as film, tele­vi­sion, animation, cybernetics, and robotics since t­ hese “carry an inherently uncanny charge b­ ecause of their ability to reproduce, simulate, and mimic what is ­human, with mechanical variations.” In her wide-­ranging discussion of theories and theorists, from Freud to Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Aimé Césaire, and more, she brings to the fore her own experience as a teacher of film and media over several de­cades. One of her most impor­ tant insights is the permeability of a film’s or a theory’s meaning over time. “Performing a shot-­by-­shot analy­sis of Stagecoach would be impossible in 2020,” she writes, ­because in the wake of movements for racial and social justice, “the film immediately reads as a masterpiece of invisible editing and white supremacy.” Her point ­here is not to dismiss formalist readings or to relegate ­earlier, now more obviously problematic films (or readings of them) to the dustbin of history. Instead, she encourages us to reckon with the fact that “­there is no inevitable telos to history, no ­future day of reckoning, no historic arc that bends ­toward justice, and no definitive truth tribunal [which] must turn us away from fatalism and ­toward an incessant vigilance of and in our times.” This vigilance requires an understanding that both the films we teach and we ourselves are situated in time, and that dif­fer­ent generations bring with them par­tic­ul­ar sets of assumptions and beliefs that may yield necessary if unfamiliar insights.

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Jasmine Trice’s essay, “Haunted by the Body: Cleanliness in Colonial Manila’s Film Culture,” takes up ideas introduced by Jaikumar, ­here with a specific focus on 1920s and 1930s Manila film culture. Like Jaikumar, Trice is interested in disrupting disciplinary formations in our field by foregrounding colonial history as it emerges in uncanny images, spaces, and sensory experiences. Like other contributors to this volume, Trice begins with Freud’s essay, but only as a starting point for understanding the intimate bodily connections between the uncanny and colonialism, themes that remain underexamined if implicit in Freud’s text. As Trice points out, in the Philippines during the interwar years (1919–1939), colonial powers envisioned Filipinos as subject to regimes of cleanliness, hygiene, and health. Some of ­these ideas and regimes ­were inherited from the Spanish and traditions of Catholicism, while o­ thers ­were imported from the United States. Through an analy­sis of moviegoing ephemera (advertisements, exhibition artifacts, film magazines), or what she calls “an uncanny archive of visual images, haunted by repetitions and doubles,” Trice shows how Manila film culture promoted the colonial proj­ect via consumer culture and discourses of cleanliness. Located within a context of impending in­de­pen­dence and cultural transition, t­ hese visual images reveal an effort to bolster American colonial regimes of gender and race, alongside residual formations of piety and Catholicism. The uncanny, she concludes, thus does not reside in a par­tic­ul­ar time or a par­tic­u­lar text; instead, it describes the very tensions within the colonial proj­ect and its aspirational efforts to shape embodiment. For Trice, the body itself becomes a site of uncanny disorientation, especially when located within the context of a larger colonial proj­ect, which unsettled the bonds between old and new ­orders. The final installment on the disciplinary uncanny is Alenda Chang’s essay “Reimagining the History of Media Studies through Games, Play, and the Uncanny ­Valley.” Chang argues that “just as games are shadowed by numerous underexamined technical, theoretical, and cultural histories, games and playable media likewise haunt the debatably longer or short span of media history and theory.” She explains that the study of computer and video games is itself a broadly transdisciplinary endeavor, involving disciplines like education, psy­chol­ogy, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. In media studies, however, the emergent field of game studies has been haunted by a single origin story, s­ haped by early turf wars between ­those who saw games as amenable to methods from film or literary theory, and ­those who insisted on the medium specificity of games, based on interactivity and code. Such turf wars are strangely familiar to scholars in film and media studies, who have long grappled with questions of medium specificity and the place of other media within the field. Chang’s approach h­ ere is at once historical, polemical, and embedded in media studies. Rather than see game studies as rooted in narrative, or in interactivity and code, or even within theoretical traditions (such as the work of the French sociologist Roger Caillois or the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga), Chang insists that games and game studies are a “constituent part of any historical period’s mediated social, po­liti­cal, and economic realities.”

Introduction 5

The second part of this volume shifts the focus to analy­sis of individual films, but the authors use distinctly dif­fer­ent approaches. Hannah Goodwin, for example, explores the aesthetics of the uncanny through an analy­sis of Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s debut film My Twentieth ­Century (1989). Entitled “Flickering Lights and Mischievous Stars: The Uncanny Feminism of My Twentieth ­Century,” Goodwin’s essay is itself a won­der of critical erudition. Most impressive is her exploration of the film’s appeal to technology, cosmology, and a spectral femininity, each of which is entangled in a repre­sen­ta­tion of cinema as a technology of darkness and light, science and won­der. As she points out, the film is full of mischief, repression, and super­natural forces. It also abounds in uncanny themes: doubled characters, spectacles of electrification, and disembodied voices that carry a detached, uncanny quality. It explores and forges alliances between w ­ omen and their nonhuman counter­parts: a donkey, a chimpanzee, pigeons, and a dog, each of which appears as an uncanny specter. The ­women, too, are deemed nonhuman, but as Goodwin maintains, this is the source of their power. Indeed, their ability to conjure the super­natural from the ordinary constitutes what Goodwin calls a feminist uncanny, which imagines a world of technology that is liberating and forward-­looking, “bewitching rather than destructive.” Goodwin underscores that My Twentieth ­Century shares Hungarian cinema’s obsession with history. And yet, she argues that the film is interested less in “the transmission of memory from generation to generation—­a common theme in Hungarian cinema, and one that uses cinema as a medium of preservation—­and more with the haunting twists and turns of time that defy neat progressive ordering.” Where Goodwin provides a textual analy­sis of uncanny aesthetics, Peter Bloom takes up the production history of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) to explore the uncanny alliance between financial fraud, Malaysian politics, and Hollywood’s repre­sen­ta­tions of extravagance and excess. Based on a true story, The Wolf of Wall Street traces the rise and fall of stockbroker Jordan Belfort, from his early trading schemes that yielded g­ reat wealth to his inevitable descent into crime and corruption. For Bloom, the film is an uncanny cinematic allegory: a Wall Street narrative that functions as a white-­collar adaptation of the gangster film, while the film’s own production bud­get was itself derived in part from the looting of the Malaysian public liability com­pany known as 1 Malaysian Development Berhad (1MDB). Uncanny doublings abound in Bloom’s analy­sis of the film and the context of its production and reception, from its on-­screen display of lavish parties and extravagant expenditures to the production funding that underwrote lavish parties and other offerings off-­screen. Hailed as Martin Scorsese’s most financially successful proj­ect to date, the film was also part of a larger scandal of money laundering on a global scale. Profitability, however, was r­eally not the point. Indeed, global networks of speculative finance function ­here to enhance prestige and reclaim colonial hierarchies and the privatized experience of luxury that link them both. “In the case of 1MDB and The Wolf of Wall Street,” Bloom concludes, the spectacle of the film and the spectacular corruption of its production lead us back to

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“the extended field of prestige and value, in the act of redirecting national assets for personal gain.” In the final essay in this part, Masha Salazkina traces a transnational history of one of cinema’s most infamous films. Entitled “Uncanny Histories of Transnational Cinematic Reception: Eisenstein in Cuba,” the essay offers a detailed analy­sis of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1926) and its place within multiple and asynchronous histories of cultural movements and formations across Eu­rope and Latin Amer­i­ca, with a focus ­here on Cuba. As Salazkina points out, although the film was exhibited in Cuba as early as 1927, its first official theatrical screening took place in 1961 at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), originally the state’s cultural department, which was established just months ­after the revolution. The ICAIC gradually achieved control over film production on the island and promoted an explicit program of “ ‘decolonizing’ Cuban tastes away from the well-­established preference for Hollywood, Mexican, and Argentinean popu­lar cinema and ­toward more po­liti­cally and socially consciousness-­raising fare.” Sergei Eisenstein was an especially compelling figure for Cuban artists and intellectuals. He was a modernist, a communist, and a cosmopolitan with ties to artists and intellectuals around the world. In the early 1930s, he went to Mexico to make a film about that country’s po­liti­cal and cultural iconography, ranging from the pre-­Columbian era through colonization and, fi­nally, revolution. This further solidified Eisenstein’s reputation among Latin American filmmakers. While avant-­garde experimentation was at the forefront of the ICAIC, t­here ­were nonetheless competing models of socialist culture that had haunted Soviet cinema in the past and that now took hold in Cuba. Some party hard-­liners promoted a pro-­socialist realist cinema, while ­others, such as Julio García Espinosa, who became the dominant force at the ICAIC, appealed to Italian neorealism as a model for a progressive film culture. Fi­nally, the liberal wing favored British direct cinema and the French New Wave. “In this broader context,” Salazkina concludes, “the ICAIC’s insistence on the inclusion of Eisenstein in the early 1960s—­with its simultaneous rejection of the notion of socialist realism and assumption that audiences in Cuba needed s­ imple and straightforward messages as means of po­liti­cal education—­further reinforces the exceptional status of Battleship Potemkin as a film that, throughout much of the twentieth c­ entury, continued to act as a catalyst for po­liti­cal, cultural, and aesthetic debates about the nature of spectatorship, po­liti­cal aesthetics, and the role of the state in cultural policies.” In the third and final part of this volume, the authors turn from larger disciplinary and specifically textual analyses to focus on uncanny figures in our field whose contributions have been undervalued, misunderstood, or mostly unknown. Cristina Venegas opens this part with an essay that extends Salazkina’s history of the ICAIC. Entitled “Julio García Espinosa and the Fight for a Critical Culture in Cuba,” Venegas’s essay seeks to unpack the uncanny relationships between personal testimony and the longer history of the proj­ect to advance a truly revolutionary film culture. García Espinosa, Venegas explains, is mostly known in film and media studies for his famous manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969), in

Introduction 7

which he argued for an engaged, experimental, and critical approach to filmmaking.4 He also served as leader of the ICAIC for three de­cades, before he was dismissed as its president in 1991. Venegas first met García Espinosa in 1992 and forged a friendship with him and his wife, Dolores (Lola) Calviño. In this essay, Venegas draws on García Espinosa’s personal papers, some of which ­were edited by his wife and published in an anthology in 2016, the year of his death. She focuses her detailed discussion on a letter García Espinosa wrote to Castro in 1991, nine and a half pages long, in which he defended his decision to greenlight what had become a controversial film that threatened García Espinosa’s leadership and the ­future of the institute itself. García Espinosa’s letter to Castro, she explains, “suggests that the institutional crisis was part of a larger national conflagration that he linked to the continuing difficulty of embracing a strong critical culture.” Although he was eventually fired, and while Castro never replied to him, this letter is yet another kind of manifesto, more personal in tone, which nonetheless gives voice to García Espinosa’s lifelong dedication to the revolution and unflinching defense of a critical film culture. Just as Venegas extends our understanding of a well-­known figure by foregrounding how individuals shape institutional histories, Naomi DeCelles makes the case for re-­collecting the work of the German film historian Lotte Eisner. Eisner had an extensive ­career as a journalist, writer, curator, and archivist, first in Germany and then in France. Like García Espinosa, she is a founding figure in our discipline’s intellectual history, yet t­ here has been no substantial study of the sheer extensiveness her work (including a dissertation, film criticism, curatorial and preservation efforts at the Cinémathèque Française, her memoirs, and her ­later scholarly studies). DeCelles argues that Eisner’s work is often acknowledged in ways that diminish its significance. For example, her postwar writings are criticized for their singular focus on aesthetics, seemingly apo­liti­cal stance, and supposedly retrograde interest in authorship and psyche. DeCelles shows that Eisner’s work is far more expansive. Eisner was one of the few female film journalists who held a PhD in art history; she was a working critic during the Weimar years. Like so many other German Jews who fled the Nazi regime, her work was disrupted in the 1930s, and she suffered a de­cade and more of deprivation in exile. Once in France, Eisner worked to recover and preserve the work of interwar German filmmakers. Her conceptions of authorship and style ­were grounded in her dissertation and her work as a journalist, where she gained an in-­depth understanding and appreciation of the production culture of the Weimar period and its fundamentally collaborative nature. Across her writings, she engaged in a critique of gendered norms of power and access, even though this critique was often couched in misogynist terms. DeCelles explains that the act of recalling Eisner’s work ­today “offers an opportunity not only to re­orient the lodestars of early film theory but also to sketch new constellations in the intellectual history of the field, thereby freeing up lines of inquiry that have been hitherto occluded and dimmed by habits of seeing and the vantage points from which a disciplinary imaginary has

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been plotted.” In re-­collecting Lotte Eisner, DeCelles unearths a vast archive of a well-­known historian’s work and argues for the potentialities it offers for film history and feminist theory ­today. Maria Corrigan’s essay, “A ­Widow’s Work: Archives and the Construction of Rus­sian Film History,” picks up several threads introduced by DeCelles, specifically, the unglamorous work of the curator and archivist who is usually female, and the deeply collaborative nature of artistic creation. Her focus is twentieth-­ century Rus­sian film history, but her argument extends beyond it to include a larger claim about the invisible female l­abor that has sustained the global reputations of film auteurs. Pera Moiseevna Atasheva and Valentina Georgievna Kozintseva, for example, w ­ ere the wives of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein and Grigorii Mikhailovich Kozintsev, respectively. Overlooked in official accounts of Rus­sian film history, their archival and curatorial work is unaccounted for, Corrigan explains, not out of s­ imple omission but b­ ecause a wife’s work was expected and therefore unremarkable. Corrigan expands our understanding of cinephilia to include caregiving, and, much like DeCelles, she underscores the fundamentally collaborative work of artistic creation and reputation. “What could be more uncanny,” Corrigan asks, “than the sudden realization that our lives, autonomies, and ­futures depend upon a network of affective care and ­labor that we rarely acknowledge?” Corrigan maintains that a ­widow’s work offers a challenge to the ways we think about authorship and legacy and l­abor in our field. She writes: “­There is, of course, neither an Eisenstein nor a Kozintsev without the men themselves. But to make sense of the monument that e­ ither man has become, we must also account for the active ­labor, the surrogate-­self relation that enabled the artists and continues to make pos­si­ble their exalted places in film history.” In the final essay of this collection, Ellen Scott explores the uncanny history of a little-­known Black film critic and, in the pro­cess, provides an alternative account of the civil rights strug­gle of the 1950s. In her essay, “Fiendish Devices: The Uncanny History of Almena Davis,” Scott explores the ­career of Almena Davis, editor and contributor to the Los Angeles Tribune, a Black newspaper published in the 1940s and 1950s. As Scott makes clear, Davis possessed an incredibly distinctive critical voice. She wrote with candor, wit, and anger about the core of Amer­i­ ca’s visual, racial proj­ect and even staged on-­the-­ground protests (often with her ­children in tow as picketers) against anti-­Blackness in Los Angeles’s largest industry. As Scott points out, Davis sought to debunk and c­ ounter Hollywood’s constructions of race; among other films, Davis was especially disgusted by the much-­heralded Imitation of Life (1959), which she saw as an assault on Black citizenship and the beauty of Blackness itself. Scott quotes Davis’s description of Sirk’s film as a “ ‘fiendish device to injure the pride of colored p­ eople in being themselves . . . ​and an equally fiendish plot to curse e­ very white child with a complex of innate color superiority, as if the racial superiority complex many of them have ­were not already dev­ilish enough.’ ” Almena Davis wrote and acted with an unceasing urgency. She eschewed the politics of Black respectability and left b­ ehind an

Introduction 9

archive of writing distinguished by an “unvarnished truth of observation—­and a resulting po­liti­cal militancy that she felt, embodied, and believed.” Her legacy renders uncanny our understanding of the strug­gle for civil rights and reminds us that “the deeper one plumbs the archive, the clearer it is that history is full of splinters, competing narratives, alternative realities, moments of speculative possibility that barely or never crystallized.” Ellen Scott’s essay provides a fitting conclusion to this volume. Like the other scholars’ work that is included h­ ere, her essay explores the history of our field and its imbrication within larger histories of culture, repre­sen­ta­tion, and po­liti­cal strug­gle. For Freud, the uncanny is the name “for every­thing that ­ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” For the contributors to this volume, the uncanny is also a concept that complicates a range of inherited ideas—­about disciplinarity, textuality, human/nonhuman relations, po­liti­cal activism and improvisation, and the ongoing work of archival and curatorial l­ abor. The authors h­ ere maintain that writing history compels us to confront the decisive paradox at the core of the uncanny, where a sense of unfamiliarity appears and trou­bles what was once familiar. The uncanny stands for what often eludes us, for what remains unfamiliar or mysterious or strange. ­W hether writing about film movements, individual works, or the legacies of major or forgotten critics and theorists, the contributors remind us that at the heart of the uncanny, and indeed the writing of history, is a troubling of definitions, a challenge to our inherited narratives, and a disturbance of what was once familiar in the uncanny histories of our field. The image that graces the cover of this book features a still of a female diver taken from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary film Olympia (1938). Along with Riefenstahl’s ­earlier documentary Triumph of the ­Will (1935), Olympia was commissioned by Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda to demonstrate and document the power of the Third Reich. Over the years, both films have been debated and discussed as unfettered examples of modern propaganda and also as pioneering aesthetic achievements, widely heralded as two of the greatest documentaries ever made. Early on, historians and critics viewed Riefenstahl’s films as emblematic of an emergent Nazi aesthetic with their depiction of the racially pure community, the authoritarian leader, the ecstasy of the h­ uman body, and the transcendence of time and space. Over time, scholars revised this ­earlier view, probing ­whether Riefenstahl’s films augured in a new, abstract and modern, form of propaganda or ­whether, in fact, a film like Olympia—­the first feature film of the Olympic games ever made—­actually introduced innovative ways of filming and editing sporting events, which l­ater became ubiquitous on tele­vi­sion as well as film. Importantly, the par­tic­u­lar image chosen for this cover depicts a female diver in flight. The image is full of mystery and majesty. It documents a kind of female abandon, which is at once unsettling and otherworldly while si­mul­ta­neously deeply familiar, its sepia tones evoking the ubiquitous image of the new ­woman that graced

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films and fashion and popu­lar magazines during the interwar years. It is entirely fitting for a collection that explores how the explicit and implicit meanings of concepts and images and films change and are revised over time. While clearly the product of its own historical moment and circumstances, it is also bound up in the twists and turns of the historical uncanny and, hence, in the very writing of history itself.

notes 1. ​Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 163. 2. ​Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 7. 3. ​Vidler, 45. 4. ​Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut 20 (1979): 24–26.

THE DISCIPLINARY UNC ANNY

Part 1

1 • FILM AND MEDIA IN THE DOUBLE TAKE OF HISTORY P R I YA J A I K U M A R

Acts of revisitation, such as this anthology’s reexamination of the concept of the “uncanny,” are a significant part of scholarly ­labor. Film and media scholars repeatedly return to the media texts and concepts that they teach and study. Essays and anthologies are frequently presented as platforms for “rethinking” an idea or event in the face of changing circumstances and new insights. In ­these recurring encounters with media texts and theoretical concepts, what feels embarrassingly outdated? What is inspiringly relevant? And what pre­sents itself as an uncanny revisitation of the past? According to Sigmund Freud’s inaugural essay of 1919, the uncanny is predicated on a doubling, or indeed on a series of doublings. For something to be uncanny, it has to linger in the space of double consciousness, suspended in the tenuous realm between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the heimlich and the unheimlich. Freud refers to E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816) to elaborate on the uncanny as an existential blur between feeling at home and yet feeling estranged. In Freud’s reading of the story, the protagonist Nathaniel represses childhood terrors about his ­father’s death in an effort to integrate with normality. As a child, he is convinced that the l­awyer Coppelius, who makes regular eve­ning visits to Nathaniel’s home, is none other than the Sandman, a fairy-­tale monster. The Sandman is believed to throw sand in the eyes of disobedient ­children who refuse to go to bed at night, causing their bleeding eyes to leap out of their heads. Nathaniel also fears that Coppelius may be his ­father’s killer. ­These two irrational anx­ie­ ties erupt in his adult life and plunge him into insanity. Terrors associated with the cautionary childhood tale of a nighttime ogre repeat themselves when the adult Nathaniel encounters symbolic doubles of eyes and of Coppelius. He is disturbed by the sight of spectacles, telescopes, fake eyeballs, automatons, wooden dolls, and an itinerant optician named Coppola, who is the ­lawyer Coppelius’s doppelgänger. Old traumas are triggered in Nathaniel’s adulthood by repre­sen­ta­tional doubles that are reminiscent of an initial emergency. 13

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Yet not e­ very doubling is uncanny, or rather, the perception of recurrence is not an intrinsically uncanny experience for every­one alike. Repeated sightings of eyeballs and automatons are uncanny to Nathaniel and not to anyone around him, ­because he alone suffers from unacknowledged traumas. In drawing on a tale from the tradition of German Romanticism, Freud additionally amplifies a horror-­ inducing ambiguity in the nature of the uncanny. ­There is enough in this story to convey that Coppola may indeed be the ­lawyer Coppelius, who may be implicated in the death of Nathaniel’s f­ather. Given mounting coincidences, it is not always clear if Nathaniel is out of alignment with reason, or if real­ity itself is out of joint. It is pos­si­ble that the young man perceives truths that o­ thers willfully ignore. To be in the throes of the uncanny is to experience the loss of certitude over object-­inherent uncanniness. It is to suffer from an inability to distinguish between consensually accepted fact and subjective fantasy. It is to not know if a menace adheres to external objects and other p­ eople, or if it resolves entirely onto one’s own psyche. Following Freud’s ocularcentric reading, technologies such as film, tele­vi­sion, animation, cybernetics, and robotics carry an inherently uncanny charge ­because of their ability to reproduce, simulate, and mimic what is ­human, with mechanical variations. Additionally, the ability of film and media to rec­ord and replay events and temporally liberate them from h­ uman fatality grants media uncanny powers of repetition, if not always ­those of remembrance. To turn to a scene of instruction from fall 2020, when several university courses in the United States w ­ ere scheduled to be taught online b­ ecause of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself reconsidering how to frame and teach the films on my syllabus. What would be the best way to talk about Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together (1997), for instance, released the year of Hong Kong’s handover to China, when I retaught the film just a few months a­ fter Beijing had issued draconian new security laws for Hong Kong? My lessons w ­ ere to be prerecorded and followed by a live discussion with students who would attend my World Cinema class remotely, from the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, among other places. The text of Happy Together remains the same no ­matter how many times I screen or teach it. Yet my relationship to it as a media text alters with each revisitation, particularly as I encounter it with o­ thers, such as my students, who arrive at it for the first time in the midst of an endlessly changeable world. While the notion that all experiences are essentially unrepeatable is as old as Heraclitus,1 what interests me is the act of repeated viewings and readings in the com­pany of ­those who share neither my historical memory nor the iterative experience of certain encounters, let alone a common base of po­liti­cal and cultural beliefs. Such repetitions bring the pleas­ur­able anticipation of inviting ­others into a significant personal experience as well as the fear of its incommunicability, which is the experiential duality that lies at the heart of the uncanny. I use this sensation of twinned desire cum anxiety to return to familiar ideas and films that serve as provocations to consider the status of recursivity in historical consciousness. From a pre­sent that feels far



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 15

from invulnerable to the past, I make six iterative passes through the concept of the uncanny in relation to film, theory, and historiography.

one: the uncanny as structuring absence A genealogy of the uncanny in film studies leads us to the discipline’s German and French legacies of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. For Jacques Lacan and Jean-­Françoise Lyotard, the German painter Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) provides a generative image to theorize the uncanny.2 The sixteenth-­century painting represents two French ambassadors surrounded by instruments of scientific mea­sure­ment and ­music. Obscured to a frontal view is an anamorphic skull in the painting’s immediate foreground that becomes recognizable only when the artwork is seen at an ­angle. With its intimations of ­human mortality, the uncanny skull mocks the finery and presumption of the ambassadors while also threatening to undo the painting’s compositional centrality and meaning, ­because it addresses itself to an oblique glance rather than a direct one. In dif­fer­ent ways, for Lacan and Lyotard the figural image of the skull draws attention to the shadows lurking within any illusion of ontological and perspectival w ­ holeness, disrupting one’s ­imagined sense of coherence. It points to the constitutive roles of loss, affect, and absence that are repressed in a metaphysics of visibility, rationality, and presence.3 This concept of a structuring absence has yielded rich conceptual dividends for ­those studying the construction of subjectivity in relation to the virtual photographic and cinematic gaze. Lacan’s sway over 1970s film theory is a good illustration of the phenomenon. For Lacan, the subject’s entry into the symbolic order of language, or­ga­nized through a system of differences (à la Saussure), made difference a constitutive part of ­imagined identity. The Lacanian narrative of misrecognition hinged on reinterpreting Freud’s primal Oedipal scene through Western linguistic and structural anthropology, and it would become a touchstone for the influential 1970s Screen theory, named for the British film journal Screen. ­There is poetry and pathos to the insight that category errors and structural differences are an inescapable part of the imaginary creation of one’s sense of self. The notion that “identity is continually being constructed against a lack of ­wholeness, a lack which . . . ​can never be recovered,” proved foundational to a generation of film theorists in the 1970s.4 Although Freud’s writings on the castration complex preceded his theorization of the uncanny, both share the concept of a primal experiential crisis or trauma repressed by the (male) subject to invisibly structure perception, subjectivity, and desire.5 Theories about this disembodied and perpetually fractured pro­cess of subject formation within the symbolic realms of language and culture ­were put to the ser­vice of understanding the complexity of spectatorial positions assumed by the cinematic apparatus. The spectator could now be understood not only as the flesh-­and-­blood person sitting in a darkened auditorium but also as a range of

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­imagined subject positions viscerally constructed by the spatiotemporal techniques of cameras, edits, narratives, and, in the broadest sense, ideology and ideological institutions.6 In a close reading of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), for instance, Nick Browne makes the case that narrative identification in cinema is a form of doubling: “Evidently, a spectator is several places at once—­with the fictional viewer, with the viewed, and at the same time in a position to evaluate and respond to the claims of each . . . ​the filmic spectator is a plural subject.”7 In an essay published the same year as Browne’s article, Laura Mulvey studies the manipulation of visual plea­sure in classical Hollywood cinema to note that this kind of mobility is not shared by the female subject in patriarchy’s erotic order. W ­ omen, she notes, are caught as the passive “signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command.”8 Despite questioning the psychoanalytic method for leaving no room for “the sexing of the female infant” or the “sexually mature ­woman as nonmother,” Mulvey finds its theoretical edifice useful in providing an “exact rendering of the frustration experienced ­under the phallocentric order” that positions ­women as a perineal symbol of castration anxiety.9 In both ­these instances, Browne and Mulvey deconstruct the narrative and visual norms of classical Hollywood cinema: Browne to study its hidden structures of identificatory empathy and Mulvey to examine its formative structures of patriarchy. Unifying both arguments is a critical interest in the structural and social ele­ments that erase their own presence while giving meaning and coherence to Hollywood cinema’s filmic text. Each theorist is involved in meticulously calling out the hidden machinery of a narrative and visual form. When understood as a theoretical shorthand for ­those ele­ments that are a part of our unconscious, invisibly defining our habits of visual perception, the uncanny can be identified as a tool in Screen theory’s deconstruction of dominant cinema’s apparatus. In Mulvey’s reading in par­tic­ul­ar, the spectacularized female around whom Hollywood’s narrative cinema organizes its visual plea­sure turns uncanny when “the destruction of plea­sure as a radical weapon” demands a fundamental dismantling of cinema’s gendered narrative, ideological, and economic structure.10 With Mulvey’s essay, the female figure objectified on screen becomes classical Hollywood cinema’s uncanny, as a feminist theorist stakes a claim on this figure’s recompense through the destruction of visual plea­sure.

two: the uncanny as modernity’s purloined letter Tracing the uncanny to psychoanalysis and speculating upon its direct or tacit influences upon film theory does not take us far enough in contextualizing its historical appeal. What if we put the concept of the uncanny itself on a therapeutic couch? What if we ask why the notion of the uncanny emerged in Eu­rope in the



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 17

early twentieth c­ entury? Why did it offer explanatory power and resonant modes of argumentation to Western theorists? Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s analy­sis of the modern “culture industries” of mass communication holds some clues to the answers.11 Writing as refugees from Nazi Germany, the progressive thinkers collaborated to understand how Eu­rope’s scientific and po­liti­cal revolutions founded on the princi­ples of constitutional democracy and rationality devolved into Fascist barbarism and the bloodbath of World War II. The authors find an inevitability to the Eu­rope’s war-­torn plight, derived from a paradox central to the nature of the Eu­ro­pean Enlightenment. According to them, the Enlightenment built a self-­destructive dialectic into the architecture of its ideals when it emerged from doctrines celebrating reason, individualism, and self-­preservation, while pressing the individual into the most efficient operation of markets, commodities, and technologies. As they note, “­Every individual in bourgeois society is mediated through the princi­ple of self; for one, ­labor ­will bring an increased return on capital; for ­others, the energy for extra ­labor. But the more the pro­cess of self-­presentation is effected by the bourgeois division of ­labor, the more it requires the self-­alienation of the individuals, who must model their body and soul according to the technical apparatus.”12 In the pro­cess of this modeling to meet the abstract needs of a market, the promise that scientific reason and enlightened rationality ­will deliver humanity from the blight of irrational superstition and mythic exaltations of nature “become the mere instrument of the all-­inclusive economic apparatus,” ­under “whose cold rays a new barbarism grows to fruition” in the form of instrumentalized science, inhuman mechanization and extractive capital.13 For the authors, advertising and media are profoundly culpable in a degradation inherent within the Enlightenment, particularly when media become no more than handmaidens of economic and technological advancement. ­There is more to their argument than dismal predictions of media’s inability to create a genuinely demo­cratic commons when functioning within the liberal cap­ i­tal­ist state and ethos.14 Nevertheless, they demand a serious reckoning with the culture industry in part b­ ecause of media’s potential to turn the “civilizing inheritance of the entrepreneurial” impulse into ­little more than “shining white teeth and freedom from body odor.”15 As we turn back to Horkheimer and Adorno’s work from the vantage point of the 2020s, when social media play a key role in battling state repression and systemic racisms while also pushing hate speech, fake news, and compromised ballots, their analy­sis of media’s complicity in the dialectic of pro­gress seems uncanny. Even in their own time, during the first half of the twentieth ­century, this articulation of the destructive dialectic of Eu­rope’s Enlightenment was no revelation to approximately 80 ­percent of the world’s population. In Discourse on Colonialism, originally published in 1950, Aimé Césaire indicts the Eu­ro­pean bourgeoisie for hiding the profound truth of its ontological nature from itself. The rise of the Eu­ro­pean bourgeoisie was directly related to the creation of industrial wealth through territorial occupation, ­human enslavement, genocide,

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and the colonial expropriation of ­labor and resources. In Césaire’s words, the Eu­ro­pean bourgeoisie “tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them . . . ​they absolved it, shut their eyes, legitimized it, ­because, u­ ntil then, it had been applied only to non-­European ­peoples.”16 In other words, slavery, exploitation, incarceration, extermination, territorial possession and resource extraction have been the uncanny of Enlightenment Eu­rope and the demo­cratizing New World, in ways that have been obvious to the exploited, incarcerated, exterminated and territorially expelled. I would argue that the concept of the uncanny found theoretical traction in early twentieth-­century Eu­rope b­ ecause it was a manifestation of modern Eu­rope’s civilizational ontology. Stretching across the long period of modernization from the first to the second Industrial Revolutions, the uncanny has been modernity’s purloined letter. It has been the ­thing hidden in plain sight, ready to disrupt assumptions about what Eu­rope thought it knew about itself. It was a missive ­containing facts that should have been impossible to miss, but that nevertheless remained unacknowledged ­until Eu­rope’s civilizational presumptions ­were blown wide open by two world wars and the Holocaust. Cotton trade and slavery ­were the uncanny of Eu­rope’s Industrial Revolution; coal and global warming w ­ ere the  uncanny of cotton manufacturing; fossil fuel and energy politics w ­ ere the uncanny of international demo­cratic alliances; and the overwhelming ranks of disenfranchised and stateless global poor are the uncanny of ­today’s economic globalization. Several filmmakers and scholars have explored what is repressed in the historical uncanny of Euro-­American patriarchy, white supremacy, and industrial modernity. Tracey Moffat’s Night Cries (1990) uses color, sound, and a heightened artifice to respond to the staged racist naturalism of Charles Chauvel’s Jedda the Uncivilized (1955). With the power of the cinematic uncanny, her short film exorcises Australia’s past of forced Aborigine adoptions, assimilations, and genocide, as well as white control over the national narrative. Todd Hayne’s Safe (1995) uses slow and banal shots of docile white and laboring brown bodies to unearth the environmental uncanny of suburban homes, exposing their edifice of gendered, classed, and racialized vio­lence. Kamal Aljafari’s camera dwells on the precariously inhabited and spectrally uninhabited homes in occupied Palestinian land, rendering them the architectural uncanny of Israeli settlements.17 Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light (Chile, 2010) and Jonathan Perel’s Toponymy (Argentina, 2015) use formal visual techniques to exhume pasts and bodies lost to the unequal recording of a history focused relentlessly on discovering new spaces, from the outer space of Nostalgia to the settler townships of Toponymy.18 Defined by its ability to express what is erased or effaced within a politics of the vis­i­ble by refusing to die or dis­appear, the uncanny has been seized upon as a weapon for the socially vulnerable and repre­sen­ta­tionally extinguished. The uncanny provides a power­ful heuristic with its ability to unseat the presumptions of authority and power assumed by visions of empires, nations, states,



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 19

socie­ties, and schools of thought. Edward Said’s work makes the uncanny a tour de force hermeneutic of the colonies writing back to the empire. As he argues, “The empire functions for much of the Eu­ro­pean nineteenth ­century as a codified, if only marginally vis­i­ble, presence in fiction, very much like the servants in ­grand h­ ouse­holds and in novels, rarely studied . . . ​or given density.”19 The British Empire, as he notes, provides the taken-­for-­granted context for Abel Magwitch’s wealth in Charles Dickens’s ­Great Expectations and Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas possessions in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Colonial wealth enables the social status of the novel’s central protagonists, and domestic moral values of respectability are sustained by the enslavement of p­ eople in an unseen elsewhere. By focusing his attention on figurations of the colonial dominions that enable the geographic imagination of ­these literary texts, Said makes the En­glish novel uncanny. In similar ways, in my writing on the visual renditions of ruined precolonial mansions (havelis) in post-­Independence Hindi-­Urdu films, I have argued that subaltern forces—­ primarily the Muslim and the female as dispossessed subjects of the nation—­ demand the price of their suppression in modern India through tropes of insanity and reincarnation.20 The modes of periodization evoked by such uncanny ruins provide, in a Derridian sense, a “hauntology” of Indian nationhood. In all ­these films and critical readings, the uncanny provides a spectral account of alternative—­ affective, residual, resistant, and melancholic—­histories of a ­people. The uncanny, which replaces certitudes of knowledge with hunches of unease, has been a kind of noninstrumental barometer for the affective histories of p­ eople, places, and regions that rarely enter official rec­ords and archives, or that enter as antagonists and insurgents at best. The Subaltern Studies Group established themselves as historians seeking traces of South Asian “subalterns” condemned to linger at the neglected margins and submerged presumptions of official rec­ords and counterinsurgent texts. Arguing against their desire to write recuperative histories of subaltern subjects hidden in racist archives, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests that the “subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.”21 She flips the historiographic desire to invoke a coherent subaltern consciousness from past texts into a strategy of reading and thinking against the grain of counterinsurgent archives. In effect, she also draws out an uncanny temporality from the archives. To be seized by the uncanny is to lose time and space as devices of precise mea­sure­ment and mooring. It is to experience change as a sensate provocation that defies complete description. Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler turns to French phi­los­o­pher Michel Foucault to write histories attuned to this alternative temporal pattern: “We no longer ask about the definitive break . . . ​we are asked instead to cut a dif­fer­ent swath through the given rubrics of macropolities—­democratic, colonial, fascist . . . ​we are urged to attend to scaling, to co-­temporalities, to the specific sites where they are threaded through one another.”22 As a feeling and as an aesthetic or discursive trope, the uncanny sensitizes us to ruptures, recursive logics, and partial flashes of recognition between the pre­sent and its precursors.

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three: the uncanny as historical repetition The construction of any historical narrative is premised on recording and perceiving (poststructuralists would argue, on creating) patterns among events. When historians identify an event as a repetition or recursion, they are signaling their theory of time and their conception of history. For example, historian Romila Thapar notes that for thinkers ranging from Mircea Eliade to Karl Marx, time in early India appeared to be not merely dif­fer­ent from Eu­ro­pean time but oppositional to it.23 Eu­ro­pean Indologists represented Asiatic time as fundamentally cyclical within the mode of precapitalist feudalism. Challenging this, Thapar finds that while archival rec­ords from early India reveal that time is treated as cyclical in priestly accounts of rituals, in royal biographies and genealogies time is narrated in avowedly linear terms. The coexistence of such conflicting notions of time remains invisible in Indological accounts that essentialize Asiatic time. Extending the assumption that Eu­ro­pean historical consciousness was exceptional u­ nder early modernity, Eu­ro­pean Indologists link linear time to social progression, and social progression to historicity. The corollary is that they conceptualize precapitalistic socie­ties as temporally stagnant, cast out of modernity and history u­ ntil ­those socie­ties come into transformative contact with the West through colonization. I rehearse this argument not to reiterate critiques of teleological time but to note that any act of historicization implicitly or explic­itly takes a stance on the status of repetition and difference in historical narratives. If we presume that time is experienced as cyclical by some civilizations and cultures, we treat the appearance of repetition as an unsurprising and ritualistic event for them. If, contrarily, we presume that socie­ties inhabit forward-­moving time, repetition reads as regression or as nostalgia. Repetition is cast to play the role dictated by the cultural scripts that govern a historiographer’s theory of time. Repetition plays an impor­tant part in the historiographies of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, despite the fact that Foucault moves the needle of his historical writing away from Marxist ideas of causality ­toward an understanding of history as a dispersed field of actions, discourses, and networks of power. On occasion, repetition takes on an uncanny hue in both their accounts. Marx is at his most uncanny in The Eigh­teenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he gives us nightmarish visions of France’s inescapable past. In the essay, Marx’s analy­sis of historical events, individual agency, and collective ­will is grounded in the repeated reversals of the French bourgeoisie’s bloody strug­gle to unseat the monarchy, beginning in 1789. Marx uses the rapidly moving historical events of France’s recent past to illustrate how an unstable state held together by an aristocracy’s exhausted institutions and the self-­interested rapacity of capitalist/landowning classes repeatedly tottered back into power. France lived through a dramatically transformative ­century, marked by the revolution against the ancien régime in 1789; Napoleon Bo­na­parte’s dictatorial coup d’état in 1799; the Second Republic in 1848; the resumption of dictatorship u­ nder Louis-­Napoléon Bonaparte in 1852; and the



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 21

short-­lived insurgency of the Paris Commune in 1871. Although short-­lived, the Commune exposed the exploitative terms of an old order wheezing back into power. For insurgencies (such as the Commune) to definitively revolutionize society, they cannot “take their poetry from the past but only from the f­ uture.”24 Revolutions are doomed to fail, in Marx’s telling, if they lack a foundational vocabulary for the new. The past remains a “nightmare on the brains of the living” when it is invoked as an anxious conjuring act, when it clothes a “new scene in world history” with “time-­honored disguise and borrowed language.”25 As long as p­ eople face social change by donning “a death-­mask” of the past, they are condemned to an unsustainable and sterile ­future while inhabiting an uncanny pre­sent. When socie­ties refuse to slough off old habits in confronting the radically new circumstances of an age, they are caught in uncanny loops of time. History and historical personages repeat themselves, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” and so on ad infinitum, when the past remains available for resuscitation even a­ fter it is dead in all but rhetorical terms.26 ­Under Adolf Hitler, National Socialism was ­imagined as the latest iteration of a global German empire in the form of a Third Reich. In other words, dictatorial Bonapartes ­will keep returning in dif­fer­ent genres and guises, most recently in the United States as a real­ity TV host in a red MAGA cap. History becomes uncanny for Marx when governing institutions turn into mere shills for material structures and social relations that have no basis in the real needs of an era. Revolutions, according to Marx, occur when the past no longer constitutes a recoil from genuine reckonings with prevalent conditions. We step into revolutionary time only when we fully release ourselves from the past as an uncanny revisitation.

four: the uncanny as historiographical praxis The uncanny looks dif­fer­ent in Foucault’s historiography, although he too uses social revolutions to reflect on the nature of time. Similar to Marx, Foucault builds his arguments by weighing history on a scale that balances events burdened by the past against events that break radically ­free of it. Foucault’s essay on the Ira­nian Revolution is a good illustration of this.27 The Ira­nian or Islamic Revolution confounded Western left and liberal support for a ­people’s revolution. While the Pahlavi regime’s corruption and violent persecution of dissenters was aided by Britain and the United States, the Islamic movement that unified the Shah’s opponents supplanted the older regime of West-­facing sycophants with repressive religious doctrine. Seeking to attack the despotisms of the past and the pre­sent, Foucault asks what irreducibly remains “when ­today one is against severed hands, having yesterday been against the tortures of the Savak”?28 In conceptualizing revolutionary acts across the radical break of the Islamic Revolution, Foucault articulates his views on the status of the event, repetition, and rupture that underly his larger body of work as a historian and phi­los­o­pher.

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Writing about ­those who protested the conditions of their existence ­under the Shahs as well as the Ayatollahs, Foucault notes that “no one is obliged to find that ­these confused voices sing better than ­others and speak the truth itself. It is enough that they exist and that they have against them every­thing that is dead set on shutting them up . . . ​it is b­ ecause ­there are such voices that the time of ­human beings does not have the form of evolution but that of ‘history,’ precisely.”29 The existence of a person who speaks (or sings) outside given, accepted, and permitted norms constitutes the locus where hidebound and normative discourses begin to fray. It is thus that the truth governing discursive propositions is ruptured at times of crisis, and consequently clarified.30 Foucault is suggesting that we behold our location in history most vividly at such points of discontinuity. Rebellions belong to their time, and yet in order to speak, sing, or write in new ways, they must escape the familiar. Discursive regimes normatively function through their corroboration of propositions governing regimes of truth. They ensure that we are always only prepared for sameness, habitual repetition, and continuity. It is in this sense that “the man who rebels is fi­nally inexplicable.”31 The rebel’s speech and action exceed familiar frames of reference: “Revolts belong to history. But, in a certain way, they escape from it.”32 The rebel’s position is an impossible one that lies si­mul­ta­neously within and outside the familiar and the known. Foucault’s historiography becomes uncanny in such moments of liminality. How does a society or discourse break from repetition? Who is gifted with the ability to recognize historical rupture? The impossible liminality of historical discontinuity signals what Foucault’s critics find troubling about his own historiographic practice: namely, his epistemological positioning of subjects who, in order to observe change or to affect it, must lie within and yet exceed the dominant discursive logics of their period. This gift of perceiving history within and against the dominant discourse comes from strug­gles to grasp the knowledge (or knowledges) subordinated in one’s own time. In Foucault’s words, it is “based on a r­ eactivation of local knowledges—of minor knowledges, as Deleuze might call them—in opposition to the scientific heirarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power: this, then, is the proj­ect of ­these disordered and fragmentary genealogies.”33 ­Here Foucault is not calling for a rejection of science but opposing the instrumentalization of reason at the behest of uninterrogated hierarchies of knowledge and power. Foucault-­the-­historian studies discourses, while Foucault-­ the-­philosopher rises above them to discern modifications to the rules governing statements and propositions, perceiving alterations to the distribution of the thinkable and unthinkable across a society. The historian/phi­los­o­pher is involved in an epistemologically elusive practice “for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit ­behind politics, at what must unconditionally limit it.”34 A Foucauldian historian is charged with seeing how discursive statements supporting a regime of truth and knowledge are “ ‘always in deficit’ [­because] however many exist, restrictions remain on who may speak and what may be said.”35



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The rebel’s impossible location amid the endings and beginnings of epochs links them, in startling ways, to this Foucauldian historian. Both the rebel’s and the historian’s modes of enunciation are liminal, shifting uncannily between the familiar and the strange. To put it differently, following Foucault (and partially also Marx), history as praxis is defined by two paradoxical urges. The first is to demystify the uncanny of a historical period through acts of explicating the politics and princi­ples governing the past. The second is to render uncanny one’s own presentist sensibilities, through a radical awareness of the gaps, ruptures, and unimagined futurities of the period from which one writes and speaks. In this manner, the ambition to write historically must carry with it a sense of the failure of omniscience, ­because historiography is shadowed by what is at best a partial understanding of one’s own modes of inscription, rationalization, and facticity.36 Self-­reflexive historical writing aspires to make evident the conditions of truth under­lying an era while also attempting to reflect on historiography’s own unsteady authority. This finds resonance in Foucault’s discussion of the Spanish artist Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656), which opens The Order of ­Things. ­Here he elaborates on the Spanish artist’s dispersal of the sources of light and centers of attention, which evacuates the subjects of the painting (the sovereign king and queen) from an authoritatively central position within the work of art. The monarchs stand, instead, as a reflection of the painting’s spectators. The historian/ phi­los­o­pher turns this image into an acknowl­edgment of the perennial uncanny of a historiography that organizes its disciplinary practices around dismantling princi­ples that undergird all vision and knowledge, including its own. The Möbius loop of such a hermeneutic is uncanny b­ ecause it lies si­mul­ta­neously outside and inside its own critical frame.

five: the uncanny as one of many temporalities As a manifestation of the repressed, the uncanny nevertheless has its limitations. To retain its charge, the uncanny must threaten from a position of the marginal, the covert, the repressed, and the hidden. To achieve full expression; to be fully integrated within one’s pre­sent; to be self-­realized in ways that do not harbor unease: ­these actions demand an abandonment of the liminality upon which a sense of the uncanny is predicated. To remain in the realm of the uncanny, we must remain in partial cognition of its true source or nature. This tells us that at par­tic­ul­ar periods and for par­tic­u­lar populations, the uncanny falls short. The uncanny begins to dissipate as one steps into the realm of didactic realization, entering Marx’s revolutionary time and space. Given a choice, no one wishes to inhabit the uncanny. No being wants to remain in the position of the perennially marginalized or repressed subject, threatening dominant institutions of power and knowledge. They desire to be active participants in the construction of a better, equitable, creative world, accepted on the same footing as their fellow constituents and cohabitants.

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In growing out of their oppression, the wretched of the earth are no longer Eu­rope’s uncanny, or no longer just that. Césaire’s student Frantz Fanon grants us a vision of a freed ­people who, courageously, dangerously, and sometimes inadequately attempt to outlive their dehumanizing “thingification” u­ nder the regimes of slavery and colonization.37 The uncanny is a skin to be shed in this pro­cess, as decolonial art strives to undo the repressions of the past rather than explore its confines from within oppressive structures. In the memorable words of Cuban filmmaker and theorist Julio García Espinosa, “A neurotic can produce art, but art has no reason to produce neurotics.”38 Espinosa cites fellow Third Cinema pioneer Glauber Rocha’s claim that “we are not interested in the prob­lems of neurosis; we are interested in the prob­lems of lucidity.” Revolutionary Third Cinema’s new ­human, who strives for freedom from oppression and repression, has an analogue in art and critical interpretation. When Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick talks of paranoid readings as filled with “subversive and demystifying parody, suspicious archaeologies of the pre­sent, the detection of hidden patterns of vio­lence and their exposure,”39 she comes close to describing a hermeneutics of the uncanny, which unseats and destabilizes its subject of engagement from a position of distrust. The l­abor of Third Cinema filmmakers and theorists is to move the creative construction of the self beyond repression, recrimination, and restitution by entering, in Sedgwick’s terms, a “reparative” space. A diminishing margin of the uncanny separates texts that self-­reflexively undermine centers of power and authority from the texts that give unabashed repre­sen­ ta­tional authority to the marginalized. To my mind, this is the difference between Thomas Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018); between Satyajit Ray’s Kanchenjungha (1962) and Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry (2013) or Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court (2014). As a film scholar, I see the complexities embedded in the stylistic visions of all ­these films. I also see the po­liti­cal necessity of disinvesting from the uncanny on occasion. In the creation of new social and cinematic worlds, the uncanny offers but one of many temporalities, ­because the work for better ­futures must have recourse to multiple imaginations. By the mid-­twentieth c­ entury, Third World anticolonial nationalisms provided one of the strongest imaginations for po­liti­cal self-­determination. At the same time, the work of imagining better ­futures remains ceaseless. In the title of Primo Levi’s article for Corriere della Serra in 1974, we can always slip into “A Past We Thought Would Not Return,” w ­ hether we w ­ ere once among the wretched of the earth or walking beside its monarchs. The words of Levi, a survivor of the Buna-­ Monowitz ­labor camp in occupied Poland, bear frequent repetition in this context: “­Every age has its own Fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own ­will. Th ­ ere are many ways of reaching this point, not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned,



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 25

and where the security of the privileged few depended on the forced l­abour and the forced silence of the many.” 40 Writing about the dangers of thinking that decolonization was the finish line of strug­gles for liberation, Fanon made a prescient case for the absolute necessity “to oppose vigorously and definitively the birth of a national bourgeoisie and a privileged caste. To educate the masses po­liti­ cally is to make the totality of the nation a real­ity to each citizen.” 41 The current entrenchment of right-­wing governments in postcolonial nations such as India, bolstered by exclusionary nationalism, environmentally catastrophic privatization, violent caste politics, and a hundred internal colonizations tells us that t­ here is no such ­thing as a closed or complete event. E ­ very age is correctible. In a recent book occasioned by her horror at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, feminist historian Joan Scott asks why, despite knowing that “­there is no closure for history,” she experienced profound shock at the sight of ­people sporting swastikas and waving Confederate flags.42 Apparently, h­ uman memory is short and our capacity to learn l­imited. The conditions that Primo Levi identifies pervade the nations that I identify as my homes: the United States, India, and the United Kingdom. And they are far from the only nations in the grips of misinformation, strongmen, cults of personality, partisanship, compromised media, politicized justice systems, and obscene divisions of wealth. Yet the realization (which hits each generation afresh) that ­there is no inevitable telos to history, no ­future day of reckoning, no historic arc that bends ­toward justice, and no definitive truth tribunal must turn us away from fatalism, and t­ oward an incessant vigilance of and in our times. What enlivens my classrooms now, when I discuss media with students who do not share my historical memories, is an awareness that the uncanny shifts on a generational scale.

six: the uncanny as the index of an age I was a newly hired assistant professor at Syracuse University on the morning of September  11, 2001, preparing to teach Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The events of that day unfolded before this nation and the world to become a defining experience for my current generation of students, who w ­ ere born in 2001 and started their undergraduate education between 2019 and 2020. On that day in 2001, I canceled my screening of the dark Cold War comedy. I could not show my traumatized students an apocalyptic film that concludes with Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) dropping suicidally from the skies on a nuclear warhead, driven by misguided nationalistic fervor and an unhinged army general amid a collapsing international po­liti­cal order. In place of the screening, I led a dialogue on personal and national traumas, and in retrospect a naive discussion on the introspective light that the terrorist attacks would shed on U.S. foreign policy. I taught Kubrick’s film again in January 2019. On this occasion, I reconstructed Cold War politics for students living in an Amer­i­ca where the sitting president had

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demonstrably conspired with Rus­sia to interfere with domestic elections, and where he would soon be impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. We w ­ ere in an Amer­ic­ a where ­those who claimed to be patriots and nationalists did not care if their president was a Rus­sian asset. Irrational paranoia was attaching itself not to communism but to immigrants, refugees, and ­imagined groups of radical left-­wing antifascists. As po­liti­cal philosophies, both capitalism and communism had morphed into something new in nations such as Rus­sia, China, and India, now significant forces in market globalization as part of the BRIC nations. In 2019, Kubrick’s apocalyptic vision felt uncannily resonant to me with its darkly comedic vision of paranoid and militant Americanism. But the 1964 film was powered by a set of geopo­liti­cal preconditions that ­were unfamiliar to my students in 2019, just as they w ­ ere for my students in 2001. My most recent encounter with Kubrick’s film occurred in dialogue with a generation of Americans whose epistemic and geopo­liti­cal premises ­were foundationally dif­fer­ent not only from ­those of the audience’s that first attended the film’s release in 1964, but also from the world view of my 2001 Syracuse University students. The interval of eigh­teen years that spanned my encounter with Dr.  Strangelove in a classroom brought the film’s dif­fer­ent surface and subliminal meanings to the fore, reminding me of Foucault’s argument about historical discontinuities. In Dr.  Strangelove lingo, I was facing an “uncanny gap” between the variable student constituencies who had watched the film at my behest across t­ hese many years. Part of my job as a teacher demands that I dissipate a film’s uncanniness by explicating its text, which in this case meant laying bare Dr. Strangelove’s relationship to its own context in the 1960s. Kubrick mobilizes Peter Sellers in his t­ riple role as a weak liberal U.S. president, a fascist schizophrenic German scientist, and a well-­meaning but timid British officer, to produce an uncanny mirroring of seemingly dif­fer­ent yet collectively ineffectual ideologies that convey humanity’s utter failure to control technological harm or fathom planetary danger. For my students to understand the significance of the Cold War geopolitics of containment and influence, I had to dissect the film’s uncanny. Despite my quarrels with positivism, then, I had to bring the film’s utilization of uncanny doublings and ocular confusions to light through an exegesis of events, dates, and facts. The historical impulse to illuminate w ­ ill not leave the subtle mysteries of a film’s textual uncanny alone. It bears the brunt of deciphering a text by explaining historical affect, so that we can learn what might have felt uncanny about a film to its contemporaneous audiences. I also had to distinguish the 1960s from current distensions of national borders powered by affective localisms, corporate globalization, and recursive failures to think at a planetary level, all of which felt more urgent to me in 2019 than when I first taught the film, in 2001. The explicit and implicit meanings of a film or a concept change with the years, as dif­fer­ent generations of students encounter them from within their par­tic­ul­ar sets of assumptions and beliefs. Sometimes this stumbles into what Foucault iden-



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 27

tifies as a radical discontinuity. We have hit such a point now, subsequent to the #MeToo, the #OscarsSoWhite, and #BLM era. Many a canonical film or concept once taken for granted is now u­ nder interrogation (as it always should have been) for its misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism and racism. Performing a shot-­by-­shot analy­sis of Stagecoach would be impossible in 2020 without acknowledging that the film immediately reads as a masterpiece of invisible editing and vis­i­ble white supremacy. For many of us, this change comes as a relief as it brings to the fore questions repeatedly sidelined by the exclusive focus on a film’s formal or aesthetic qualities. Yet close attention to the textual and formal particularities of each film also teaches us something essential in the midst of current po­liti­cal and politicized judgements, and the uncanny conveys t­ hese lessons well. By way of an extended illustration, I return to the scene of my 2019 class on Dr. Strangelove. On this occasion, my explications of the 1960s went smoothly, u­ ntil our discussion turned to the film’s resonance across dif­fer­ent periods of U.S. history. At this point, one of my students informed me that the planes flown into the World Trade Center in 2001 ­were pi­loted by terrorists from Iran. My student’s conflation of nationalities in an agglomerated image of ­Middle Eastern terrorism alarmed me. Iran was not implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A majority of the 9/11 terrorists carried Saudi Arabian passports. What was uncanny to me about this classroom exchange was not my student’s error (uncontested by o­ thers) so much as her belief that what she said was true. Her misrecognition had a historical basis in U.S. foreign policy, which produces a tableau of faceless Islamic terror. For the United States t­ oday, Iran is antagonistic, Saudi Arabia is congenial, and Af­ghan­i­stan is distant despite Amer­ic­ a’s extended war in the region. My student’s utterance momentarily pulled me into that lonely and horrible place of seeing an uncanny doubling between personal and po­liti­cal misconceptions that was invisible to ­others in the room. Then came a reprieve. Although the circumstances of the film’s critique w ­ ere factually unfamiliar to my students in 2019, and they misremembered details about the 9/11 attacks, they related immediately to Dr. Strangelove’s structure of feeling. Unlike my undergraduate students in upstate New York on September 11, 2001, who w ­ ere not raised on dystopian fantasies, postapocalyptic fiction has been a staple diet for the post-9/11 generation of Americans. Viewing the film in 2019, students w ­ ere immediately animated by experiential cognates between Dr. Strangelove and their shared pre­sent. Whereas Charles Maland tells us that audiences in 1964 w ­ ere puzzled by the film’s “adversary attitude to dominant values” of conformism in the Cold War era, my 2019 students intuitively understood Kubrick’s dark humor.43 They slipped easily into the film’s ironic tone and related it to the paranoias of their time. In par­tic­u­lar, General Turgidson’s conviction that he is perpetually surveilled and subliminally controlled felt familiar to them. They noted that social media devices and data harvesting practices elicit similar fears ­today. In that instance, a Benjaminian “flash of recognition” retrieved the film from its anachronistic past and put it into

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dynamic historical time. I no longer felt alone in the classroom. We returned to experiencing a collective uncanny, discerning patterns of repetition and difference ­under the surface of forward moving time. My work as a teacher of film history is to keep such portals of recognition open while explicating the precise nature of any film’s textual uncanny. Using historical glosses to contextualize a film or media text is part of the routine work of film historians. But keeping portals of recognition open across time is a lofty charge. It calls for a critical historiographical consciousness that perceives the differences between the textual uncanny of a par­tic­u­lar film and the historical uncanny of ­every period. Temporalities of the textual uncanny are dif­fer­ent from the function of the uncanny in historiographic practice, in the manner described in this essay. Even as a film’s text relates to its own historical circumstances through vari­ous socioeconomic coordinates that must be deciphered, the historical uncanny is itself a shifting target that changes with time, place, and politics. I am reminded of this now, as I complete this essay in the midst of teaching courses online for the fall 2020 term, in the wake of widespread protests against anti-­Black racism following the murder of George Floyd. Over the past two weeks, students in my World Cinema course have wanted to discuss Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda, 1962) and Germany Pale M ­ other (Helma Sanders-­Brahms, 1980) in terms of “white oblivion,” referring to the demonstrable insensibility of white folks to their own racial privilege, and to the racial traumas of ­people of color. This gave my students an illuminating connection between past texts and pre­sent concerns, but I have wanted them to pause and think about the presence and precise function of the uncanny in each of the film’s texts. In Cleo, a beautiful flaneuse’s journey from narcissism to a form of self-­ awareness over the course of her stroll through Pa­ri­sian streets is shadowed by the geographic uncanny of Algeria and Francophone Africa. ­These places and their relationship to imperial France lurk in the form of African masks, radio commentaries, and references to the Algerian war of in­de­pen­dence, insinuating their way into Cleo’s consciousness. But, as my students noted, ­these ele­ments never become central enough to displace the film’s focus on the beautiful, white Cleo (Corinne Marchand). The film ends with her sharing the frame with her newly discovered ally, Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), who is a young man commissioned to fight on behalf of France in its continued occupation of Algeria. Germany Pale M ­ other also depicts a c­ ouple who are absentminded racists. Unlike their avowedly Nazi friends, Lene (Eva Mattes) and Hans (Ernst Jacobi) are portrayed as accidental participants in a murderous age. The director, Sanders-­Brahms, frames the film as an autobiography, wherein she examines childhood memories of her ­mother, Lene, and her parents’ culpable moral numbness to the carnage that surrounds them. Germany Pale ­Mother is replete with the uncanny: for instance, in the moments when Hans executes his beloved Lene’s look-­alikes in Poland and France, or when the repressed truth of the Holocaust returns to devour Lene’s postwar f­uture, smiting her with facial paralysis and near-­suicidal unhappiness. My students’ references to “white oblivion” served as an excellent



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 29

means to break down the distances that usually separate a historical text from pre­ sent preoccupations and presentist indifference to the past. But the phrase seemed to me to be too quick a dismissal of both films. It squandered an opportunity to differentiate between the historical circumstance of each film, their specific cinematic uses of the uncanny, and their varied po­liti­cal engagements with the costs of racial oblivion. In discussing ­these aspects, two ­things became clear to me: first, that the past is always open to reassessments and reevaluations; and second, that the pre­sent cannot set itself up to be the only judge of the past. To repeat a point made e­ arlier: history is a praxis defined by the paradoxical urge to demystify the uncanny of a historical period, while si­mul­ta­neously rendering uncanny its own presentist sensibilities through a radical awareness of its ­limits. By extension, film history is a praxis defined by the paradoxical urge to demystify the textual uncanny of a film, while also rendering uncanny the ­limited presentist sensibilities of our lived time or our modes of thought and analy­sis. The challenge is to comprehend the extent to which the uncanny is itself a shifting target. Comprehending this may open us to a kind of film analy­sis and film historiography within what I define elsewhere as “an egalitarian index of self-­abnegating knowledge and epistemic humility.” 44 In the end, revisiting films and theories with dif­fer­ent generations of learners teaches me that my encounter with the uncanny situates me in time. I experience my aging as a shift in the index of what feels uncanny to me. When recursive events, texts, and ideas spanning my life begin to feel uncanny to me, they reconstitute the historical uncanny as something more intimate and personal. My sense of what is uncanny is what ages me. It defines my age. It marks me as belonging to an age.

notes 1. ​I am thinking about Greek phi­los­o­pher Heraclitis (sixth ­century b.c.e.), credited with saying

“you could not step twice into the same river”; https://­plato​.­stanford​.­edu​/­entries​/­heraclitus​/­. The Bud­dha’s teachings (fifth to fourth centuries b.c.e.) are also about the impermanence and flux of all t­ hings. 2. ​Jean-­François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971); Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). The Seminar Book XI includes Lacan’s lecture “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a”; see also Maria Scott, “Deciphering the Gaze in Lacan’s ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,” The DS Proj­ect, 2015, http://­thedsproject​ .­com​/­portfolio​/­deciphering​-­the​-­gaze​-­in​-­lacans​-­of​-­the​-­gaze​-­as​-­objet​-­petit​-­a​/­#​_­ftn5. 3. ​Attending exclusively to the skull distracts from a crucifix glimpsed at the top left corner of the image. The image of the Savior holds forth a promise of redemption to mortals. Historically, this painting has been understood as a repre­sen­ta­tion of the historical strife during the Eu­ro­ pean Reformation ­because in explicit or subtle ways a range of objects symbolizing po­liti­cal power, scientific achievement, artistic accomplishment, and religious redemption clamor for the viewer’s attention. This aspect of the painting has been of less interest to its poststructuralist and psychoanalytic interpretations. For poststructuralists, this artwork illustrates the foundational misrecognition that lies at the heart of any repre­sen­ta­tional logic or spectatorial gaze that presumes complete unity and coherence.

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4. ​Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 168. For summaries of apparatus theory in film studies and related writings published in the journals Tel quel and Cinétique, see Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative/Apparatus/Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Robert Stam, “1968 and the Leftist Turn,” in Film Theory, 130–140; Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, “Cinema as Mirror,” in Film Theory, 63–93, among o­ thers. In Techniques of the Observer, Crary offers a historical and fi­nally more convincing basis for the argument that modern technologies of vision such as the camera re-­create and manipulate the ­human body as a phantom subject. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th ­Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 5. ​Sigmund Freud wrote Interpretation of Dreams and A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men between 1899 and 1910. The essay “The Uncanny” appeared in 1919. 6. ​This is obviously a nod to Louis Althusser’s essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” and its influence on film theorists such as Jean-­Louis Baudry and Christian Metz. 7. ​Nick Browne, “The Spectator-­in-­the-­Text: The Rhe­toric of Stagecoach,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Phil Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 36. 8. ​Laura Mulvey, “Visual Plea­sure and Narrative Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Phil Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 199. 9. ​Mulvey, 199. 10. ​Mulvey, 199. 11. ​Max Horkheimer and Theodor  W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2001). 12. ​Horkheimer and Adorno, 29. 13. ​Horkheimer and Adorno, 30, 32. 14. ​See, for instance, “Part III. Adorno,” in Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor  W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 207–250. 15. ​Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 166, 167. 16. ​Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. 17. ​See Peter Limbrick’s analy­sis in “Contested Spaces: Kamal Aljafari’s Transnational Palestinian Films,” in A Companion to German Cinema, ed. Andrea Mensch and Terri Ginsberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012). 18. ​Thanks to Docalogue, Jennifer Peterson, and Brian Jacobson for introducing me to this film and for their film notes, which appear in https://­docalogue​.­com​/m ­ ay​-­toponymy/ (screened May 2017). 19. ​Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 63. 20. ​Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). See also Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Super­natural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 21. ​Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Gu­ha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16. 22. ​Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 30. 23. ​Romila Thapar, “Cyclic and Linear Time in Early India,” Museum International 57, no.  3 (2005): 19–31. 24. ​Karl Marx, The Eigh­teenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, chap. I (Feb. 1848 to Dec. 1851), n.p., accessed September 1, 2020, https://­www​.­marxists​.­org​/­archive​/­marx​/­works​/­1852​/­18th​-­brumaire​/­. 25. ​Marx, Eigh­teenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, n.p. 26. ​Marx, Eigh­teenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, n.p.



Film and Media in the Double Take of History 31

27. ​Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984,

ed. James D. Faubion (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 3: 449–453.

28. ​Foucault, 452. 29. ​Foucault, 452. 30. ​As Foucault notes in an interview, he is interested in t­ hose moments when ­there are “­these

sudden take-­offs, ­these hastenings of evolution, ­these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist image” of history. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 112. 31. ​Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” 449. 32. ​Foucault, 449. 33. ​Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 85. 34. ​Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” 453. 35. ​A brief and useful essay in this context is Nathan Widder, “Foucault and the Event,” International Po­liti­cal Sociology 2, no. 3 (2008–2009): 276–277. 36. ​See Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside, particularly the description of a heterotopic historiography in “Cinema and Historiographies of Space,” 302. In Roland Barthes’s words, “History is hysterical.” It is always outside the pre­sent moment of writing and comprehension, immersed in the logic of another world that has preceded ours, so that it “encloses in its own particularity the very tension of History.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflection on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday Press, 1981), 65. 37. ​Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 38. ​Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” Jump Cut, no. 20 (1979): 24–26, http://­ www​.­ejumpcut​.­org​/­archive​/­onlinessays​/­JC20folder​/­ImperfectCinema​.­html. 39. ​Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 143. 40. ​Primo Levi, “A Past We Thought Would Not Return,” in The Black Hole of Auschwitz, ed. Marco Belpoliti, trans. Sharon Wood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 34. 41. ​Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 200. 42. ​Scott’s incredulity repeats a sentiment we have seen (and perhaps carried) on banners at the marches for science, Black Lives ­Matter marches, and ­women’s marches over the past four years: “I ­can’t believe I am still protesting this shit!” I make no mention of the Capitol riots of January 6th 2021 ­here ­because the essay was written before they occurred. As I edit this piece in October  2021, the knowledge of a recent failed neofascist insurrection in the United States makes the above discussion appear ever more uncanny. The hope and the work is to ensure that ­there is no successful neofascist-­neoliberal unraveling of democracy. 43. ​Charles Maland, “Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus,” in Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context, ed. Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983). 44. ​Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside, 133.

2 • HAUNTED BY THE BODY Cleanliness in Colonial Manila’s Film Culture JA SM INE TRICE

This essay explores the contradictions that surrounded evocations of the clean, hygienic, healthy body in 1920s and 1930s Manila film culture. Employing a conjunctural mode of analy­sis, I consider the ways that moviegoing ephemera such as advertisements, exhibition artifacts, and popu­lar media interface with other systems of knowledge implicated within the colonial proj­ect, such as bodily piety and public health. This juncture between consumer culture, cinema, and discourses of cleanliness places the cinema within an uncanny archive of aspirational embodiment that evokes older o­ rders of power: accounts of cinemagoing mea­ sure theaters’ worth in terms of sanitation and cleanliness; in both En­glish and Tagalog popu­lar film magazines, advertisements for doctors, medicines, cleaning agents, and beauty products sit beside images of local and foreign stars. Circulating within a context of impending in­de­pen­dence and cultural transition, this uncanny archive not only bolsters American colonial regimes of hygiene, sanitation, cleanliness, gender, and race but also evokes residual formations of religious piety and Catholicism. The visual culture of cinema appearing in print media negotiated ideologies of modernity and pro­gress, scaling t­ hese discourses to the bodies of citizen-­consumers. At the same time however, older regimes of bodily order based on religion haunted this new, popu­lar imagination. Modernity in colonial Manila became a palimpsestic experience, in which the  body played a central role. The uncanny is inextricably tied to the body; it describes an affective sensation, the “unhomely” disorientation that unsettles the bounds between familiar and strange, living and dead.1 When I describe this resonance between old and new ­orders as uncanny, I take Freud’s 1919 essay as a starting point, but I am quite par­tic­u­lar in how I apply his ideas. Quoting phi­los­o­pher F.W.J. Schelling, Freud writes, “ ‘Uncanny’ is what one calls every­thing that was meant to remain . . . ​secret and hidden and has come into the open.’ ”2 What interests me most about the concept is its intimate connection to colonialism. It became a touchstone during twentieth-­century modernism, evincing an obsession with the porous 32



Haunted by the Body 33

bound­aries between civilization and primitivism.3 For postcolonial scholars like Homi Bhabha, the uncanny emerges in the disquiet of mimicry, the dynamic hybridities that upend discrete categories of sameness and difference.4 The “residue of difference” remains, inciting fear in colonial observers. As ­these accounts suggest, descriptions of uncanniness necessitate a par­tic­ul­ ar viewing position. ­Here, I appropriate that viewing position as a mode of cultural criticism, using this perspective to unearth compelling resonances across successive colonial regimes. In this way, this essay is not a history of phenomena that ­were overtly seen as uncanny in their time. Rather, the uncanny describes a way of seeing history move forward and fold back, tracing repetitions that reverberate across a range of quotidian visual and discursive artifacts. The uncanny informs a historiographical mode of analy­sis that unearths indirect connections and unsettling continuities. I am interested in the apparitions of colonial history that appear in an ensemble of images, spaces, and sensory experiences, which together depict the relation between the body and cinema in colonial Manila. ­These artifacts of everyday life constitute what Ann Laura Stoler calls the vernacular “practicing epistemologies” that shape colonial worlds in capricious ways.5 ­These epistemologies of the body evoke the uncanny residue of difference, not simply between colonizer and colonized but between revolutionary and colonial discourses, and between dif­fer­ent stages of colonial history. The residual religiosity of the Spanish order haunts emerging American consumerism in oblique ways, and the body becomes the site of this apparition. Within ­these images, uncanny colonial histories become a subtle undertow, pulling against the ideologies of pro­gress and evolution that ­were such a critical part of the interwar period in the Philippines. During this transitional period, ideas of pro­gress and evolution emerged across new, public practices of cinemagoing, embodiment, and nation-­building. As discourses of national in­de­pen­dence spread, a corresponding, more intimate discourse of bodily conduct and consumerism bolstered them. Conventional histories often date the beginning of “Philippine cinema” to 1919, with Jose Nepomuceno’s Dalagang Bukid (Country maiden).6 Nepomuceno had founded production com­pany Malayan Movies two years ­earlier, in part as a counterpoint to growing American cultural influence. The United States had spent the previous de­cade transforming its new territory into a market for American products, including cinema, despite continued guerrilla re­sis­tance to occupation. In 1911, Manila had approximately 25 cinemas, many owned by Americans and favoring American pictures.7 The United States accounted for 91.7 ­percent of the total footage imported in 1921, and 83.2 ­percent in 1928. By 1929, the Philippines had 275 theaters.8 By the early 1930s, movie theaters had spread across the capital city. As American cinema proliferated, elite nationalists, many educated abroad and of mestizo heritage, established a discourse of Philippine modernity as a means of advocating for national in­de­pen­dence. Manila was not alone in this transformation. In modernizing metropolises around the world, the period from 1919 to 1939 witnessed the paradoxical forces of growing global economic interdependence and, conversely, the rise of po­liti­cal

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nationalism as a challenge to t­hese forces.9 The Philippines encapsulated t­hese contradictions. For the American colonial administration, the interwar period was premised on notions of teleological progression, in which the Philippines would “evolve” from an unincorporated territory, to a commonwealth, to a sovereign state. In 1916, the Jones Act had stated the United States’ intention to “withdraw their sovereignty over the Philippine Islands as soon as a stable government can be established therein”; the Tydings-­McDuffie Act of 1934 superseded this policy, activating a ten-­year transitional period before the Philippines would take in­de­pen­dence on July 4, 1946. While nationalist moves to protect the domestic economy thrived during this period, this impending sovereignty was ambivalent; even as the Philippines and the United States began the pro­cess of separation, economic, military, and cultural policies kept them closely entwined.10 In Americanist colonial discourse, the nation itself became a maturing, embodied youth, a construct that differed from the revolutionary image of the suffering inang bayan (­mother nation). As scholars of Philippine culture have observed, nineteenth-­century playwrights and revolutionaries constructed a maternal nation, whose suffering at the hands of foreign invasion would catalyze revolutionary action.11 Concepts of pain and suffering became linked to long-­standing structures of gender, religion, and sexuality.12 As Martin Manalansan describes, this confluence was tied to the body. Illness and disease are synonymous with a kind of suffering that intersects with religion and sexuality, and images of suffering femininity became a trope of popu­lar culture.13 But if the inang bayan construct became an emblem of revolutionary nationalism, this highly gendered vision of the ­mother nation contrasted with other, postrevolutionary repre­sen­ta­tions, which emphasized dif­fer­ent models. As historian Reynaldo Ileto has described, the turn-­ of-­the-­century revolutionary years became an “origin myth” for the founding of the republic ­under the “tutelage” of the United States.14 Progressivist discourse abounded, sometimes framed within biological meta­phors. In 1926, Filipino nationalist Conrado Benitez’s History of the Philippines became the canonical historical text for high schools, a position it would hold for more than three de­cades.15 As Ileto describes, the book’s overarching “metanarrative” is pro­gress, mirroring other books in circulation at the time, such as Stanley Porteus and Marjorie Babcock’s Temperament and Race (1926). This book describes Filipinos as “highly emotional, impulsive and almost explosive in temperament,” as “a race in an adolescent stage of development.”16 Benitez describes the advancement from national adolescence to adulthood, citing demo­cratic, revolutionary demands as evidence of “a ­people growing into social and po­liti­cal maturity and imbibing liberal ideas.”17 As Ileto observes, “The image h­ ere is a biological one: the Filipino as a child grows and matures whilst fed with liberal nourishment from Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca.”18 At times this progressivist body discourse surfaced in unlikely places, like the cinema. Two de­cades l­ater, for example, a June 1946 issue of the publication Filamerican Movie and News featured a congratulatory spread from vari­ous Hollywood studios, sending “Best Wishes” to the new nation through portraits and



Haunted by the Body 35

figure 2.1. Biological meta­phors of the new nation-­state. RKO Radio Pictures Inc.,

“Compliments on Your Coming-­of-­Age,” Filamerican Movie and News, June 1946, 20.

handwritten notes from their coteries of ­women stars. Representing RKO Radio Pictures, Maureen O’Ha­ra wrote, “Best wishes to all my friends in the New Republic.” The copy above her photo­graph reads, “Compliments on your Coming-­ of-­Age” (figure 2.1).19 Hollywood whiteness refracts the discourses of aspirational embodiment that had anchored nationalist rhe­torics. This colonial perspective traded the suffering, maternal view of nation for a model based on national adolescence, figured against a backdrop of Hollywood femininity. That cinema became a key instrument within this discursive matrix is unsurprising. As scholars such as Vicente Rafael and Bliss Cua Lim have argued, with the rise of cinema as a cultural force in the mid-­twentieth ­century, the star body became a fixture of Philippine visual culture.20 Rafael contends that the Filipino star system that emerged with the consolidation of the local studios in the 1950s was founded on what he refers to as “mestizo envy,” a system based on the Philippines’ historical imagination. He argues, “Mestizoness in the Philippines has implied, at least since the nineteenth ­century, a certain proximity to the sources of colonial power.”21 The hybrid mestizo/a star arbitrates between power and marginalization. Rafael analyzes Jessica Hagedorn’s account of Pucha and Rio, two ­women watching a Douglas Sirk film in the novel Dogeaters. As Rafael describes, they see Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson as “saintly icons.”22 The differences between themselves and the stars is “somatically marked,” with Pucha’s mestiza

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features placing her closer to the American stars. As Rafael writes, “Mestizoness comes to imply a perpetual and, as we ­shall see, privileged liminality: the occupation of a crossroads between Spain and the Philippines, Hollywood and Manila.”23 This essay is not about mestizoness or stardom per se; rather, it is about the structures of knowledge that laid the foundation for what Filipino stardom would eventually become—­a system predicated on proximity to colonial history, represented through the body. If, in the case of 1950s studio era stars, this embodied proximity was indexed through race, in the 1920s and 1930s, it takes slightly dif­fer­ ent form: the cleansed, hygienic, healthy bodies of cinema consumers. If the 1950s mestizo star’s embodiment of a hybridized, Filipino/whiteness connotes the end product of a civilizational discourse, I propose that this civilizational discourse is rooted in ­earlier repre­sen­ta­tions that mediated the transition from colonization to in­de­pen­dence that took place across the 1920s and 1930s. During this transitional period, discussions of movie theaters as healthful, sanitary spaces and cinema consumers as healthy, cleansed bodies mediate rhe­torics of teleology and national becoming. They invoke a hygienic, modern order while also revealing the per­sis­ tence of racial, gender, and class disparities amid discussions of demo­cratic egalitarianism. Older forms of embodiment haunted newer discursive formations. U.S. colonial public health discourse claimed that Filipinos ­were not yet what Charles Briggs and Clara Matini-­Briggs have called “sanitary citizens”: “subjects who possessed a full set of normative economic, cultural, familial, l­egal, educational, sexual and medical characteristics.”24 They ­were instead seen as “sanitary subjects,” who did not yet fulfill the characteristics of modern citizenry.25 In contrast, sectors of nationalist discourse promoted the notion of Filipino maturity. Cinema became one field on which ­these competing discourses played out, mediating the transition from Spanish to American colonial regimes through a discourse of bodily maintenance and control. The matrix of cultural artifacts I examine in the following implicates the cinema within the American colonial state’s “civilizing” mission not through filmic repre­sen­ta­tion or distribution patterns but through a more dispersed ensemble of ancillary paratexts.26 The analy­sis considers how this discursive confluence of pro­ gress, race, gender, and embodiment resonates with older cultural structures. ­There has been much scholarship on the role of the Filipino body as a canvas for the inscription of colonial power; this phenomenon operated in dif­fer­ent ways for Spanish and American administrations. For the U.S. colonial regime, cinema became a critical site within a new, secular form of bodily piety, and the following sections trace two fields in which this discourse of the body circulated. In the first two sections, I examine the cinemagoing space, which transitioned from being seen as a space for potential bodily contamination (sexual encounters, foreignness, sensory excess) to a space of sanitation and modernity during the interwar period. I trace a progressivist discourse of cinema culture and embodiment across a range of artifacts: a 1922 po­liti­cal cartoon titled “Sa Sine” (In the cinema); debates about the building of the new Metropolitan Theater; and a 1934



Haunted by the Body 37

painting that hung in the Capitol Theater. The final section looks more closely at a range of film magazines, examining the “rituals of intimacy” promoted alongside films.27 Such rituals suggest a residual through line between Spanish and American colonial regimes. Historians Julius Bautista and Mercedes Planta describe Spanish colonial rituals of intimacy not as a means of cultivating secular, modern citizens but as a way of producing disciplined, medieval Christian bodies.28 ­These disciplinary rituals of bodily maintenance and be­hav­ior became a means of preparation for the afterlife. Within American colonial discourse, ­these rituals of intimacy continued, taking a dif­fer­ent form. Pedagogies of the body—­how to clean, behave, and comport oneself—­became a key aspect of what Ann Laura Stoler calls vernacular epistemic practices, which exceed specific calculation. As Stoler writes, imperial formations relied on questions of epistemology, elevating concepts of “reason, race, science, and civility” to ­human universals.29 While histories of empire often focus on more explicit epistemologies, more inchoate forms of “worldly practice” can be power­ful epistemological formations.30 If American colonial power rested on epistemologies of aspirational embodiment, the cinema culture that emerged within it promoted an implicit frame of knowledge that resonated with older forms of bodily pedagogy. During this transitional period, images of spatial cleanliness and bodily hygiene became a vernacular, practicing epistemology, appearing across a range of cinema practices and objects. This is an uncanny archive of visual images, haunted by repetitions and doubles. The hygienic consumer body becomes a double of the pious Catholic body, marking the per­sis­tent return of that which a new colonial order would seek to repress.

pedagogies of the colonial body To offer a sense of how t­ hese epistemologies came into being, it is worth providing a brief history of how colonial regimes in the Philippines envisioned Filipinos as embodied subjects. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth ­century, the Spanish colonial authority sought to partition the body into the sacred and the profane, in part through publishing “Manuals of Urbanity,” pamphlets distributed by the church to direct Filipinos in everyday be­hav­iors.31 Small in size so they might be carried on the person, the manuals aimed to create an unassuming, pious populace. They instruct Filipinos not to cough, spit, or create noise during mass. Filipinos are not to stare or open their mouths in shock, yawn, make noise with their throats, fix their hair. They are not to use perfume, but neither are they to allow unpleasant bodily odor. They are not to wink or look pensive, as this is the be­hav­ ior of lunatics. They should not move too much. They are told, “Keep your head straight, your body still and your feet together.”32 The manuals regulated the posture and bearing of Filipino subjects, constructing their bodies as worldly flesh to be overcome in the quest for godliness. The most famous of ­these manuals of urbanity was Urbana at Felisa, penned in 1864 by Tagalog friar Modesto de Castro. Written as a fictionalized series of letters between s­ isters based in the city and the

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country, its success is attributed in part to the rising, literate middle-­class and burgeoning mercantile culture of the nineteenth c­ entury.33 The book remained in print for more than a hundred years, across translations into vari­ous dialects; its final edition was published in 1938, when it was promoted as a tool for the preservation of local, Hispanicized culture against American forms of Westernization.34 ­These practices encompassed a mode of bodily comportment that aligned with ideals of femininity, as Soledad S. Reyes describes: “Some remarks [in Urbana at Felisa] are quite precise directives—­the way one uses one’s hands, the manner of walking in the street, or the way a girl uses her eyes—­and ­these comments certainly indicate an intense preoccupation with the body, as if through prescription, the body parts could be contained within set rules.”35 Through promoting a gendered form of bodily comportment, the canonized text provided a link to a residual culture as emerging forms of material culture promoted a new bodily order. When the United States began its involvement with the country at the beginning of the Philippine-­American War in 1899, it translated this religious order into a dif­ fer­ent regime of bodily knowledge. As Bryan Turner argues in his influential work on the social body, modernity transformed the regimes of religion into regimes of medicine, becoming a new form of social control.36 The body became a “unit” of secular, scientific administration, regulated through scientific programs of personal hygiene, bacteriology, public health, and sanitization. Historian Warwick Anderson similarly argues, “American military and civil health officers thus dedicated themselves to registering and refashioning Filipino bodies and social life, to forging an improved sanitary race out of the raw material found in the Philippine barrio. Hygiene reform in this par­tic­ul­ar fallen world was intrinsic to a ‘civilizing pro­cess,’ which was also an uneven and shallow pro­cess of Americanization. . . . ​Experiencing hygiene thus could also be a means of experiencing empire and race.”37 Hygiene and the body ­were not simply one arena for inscribing colonial power. As Anderson and ­others argue, they ­were among the most impor­tant arenas where this power took root. Integrated into the public school system, where c­ hildren would build latrines as class proj­ects and encourage their parents to do the same at home, t­ hese regimes of hygiene w ­ ere primary mechanisms for legitimating U.S. power.38

the corrupting space of the cinema The cultivation of a controlled, embodied populace so crucial during Spanish rule would take a dif­fer­ent but no less vital role as the U.S. colonial state attempted to stabilize its power. The space of the city was integral to this pro­cess. Anthony Vidler cites Bhabha’s discussion of the postcolonial city as a space of uncanny return for mi­grants and diasporic subjects. As Vidler describes it, this theory of the uncanny is spatial, destabilizing ideas of center and periphery.39 The city was rendered strange by the “spatial incursions of modernity,” in which the uncanny was not “a property of the space itself” but an aesthetic aspect that created a slippage between dreaming and waking.40 If modernity made the city unfamiliar, colonial contexts only height-



Haunted by the Body 39

ened this uncanny newness. The body was implicated in t­hese emerging urban spaces. In her work on the body as a sociocultural artifact, Elizabeth Grosz has argued that “the built environment . . . ​is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced.” 41 Rather than seeing the city as a reflection or product of bodies, Grosz proposes a model in which they mutually constitute one another: the city’s geographies, architecture, and municipal arrangements become one part of the body’s social constitution, while bodies themselves transform urban landscapes to suit demographic needs.42 Cinemas became new social spaces of colonial modernity. Discourses of sanitation and cleanliness intersected with cinema consumption and evolved as cinemagoing gentrified, structuring relations of class and gender. At the same time, Spanish-­era pedagogies of the body haunted them, rendering t­ hese new spaces an uncanny “Other.” When cinema spaces entered the Philippines, they grafted onto an existing geography of bodily piety. The ties between bodies and space had long intersected with colonial culture, and venues like the cinema corrupted spatialized forms of devotion. Spanish religious piety involved spatial practices, and this worked on a meta­phoric level: bodies ­were divided into loob and labas, inside and out, with the former elevated above the latter.43 Bodily protocols defined social space by guarding the doors between ­these realms.44 This embodied spatialization was also literal. Manuals of urbanity took place in scenes at home, at church, at school, and on the roads that linked them, and bodies w ­ ere not meant to circulate outside t­ hese realms.45 As Resil Mojares argues, “This economy of space extends to the organ­ization of time,” in which theatrical per­for­mances (comedia), secular romances (corrido), lewd books and songs, shocking dances, taverns (tanguayan), crowds, and disreputable com­pany constituted an Other.46 As Mojares writes, ­these manuals erase crowds and mass gatherings, addressing their readers as private individuals who needed to guard their bodies’ thresholds.47 Cinema became one of ­these “­Others,” sullying more pious ways of occupying space and time. The American colonial state was also interested in spatial transformations as a means of governing Filipino subjects. But this new, spatiotemporal management emphasized material pleasures within the context of modernity—­specifically, a modern form of capitalism that required a consuming, open body politic. The Manila cityscape was radically altered in the first three de­cades of the twentieth ­century, as American colonial planners sought to transform the spatial logics of Catholicism into a civic, secular design.48 This American colonial space required embodied, consuming citizens to fulfill its self-­appointed civilizational mission, and the cinema was a symptom of how the space of the metro was changing u­ nder U.S. colonial rule. This idea of an active, heterogeneous audience immersed in a collective, sensory experience appeared in a 1922 cartoon titled “Sa Sine,” published in the journal Pakakak (Horn) (figure 2.2).49 The cartoon’s diverse crowd depicts how the cinema space mediated issues of gender, class, and race. A raucous group of Filipino men sits alongside American teachers and Chinese laborers. The captions explain their dif­fer­ent interpretations of the film: “­Those embracing, who are

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figure 2.2. “Sa Sine” (In the cinema), Pakakak, 1922. Pakakak was published by the

Cristianos Filipinos. See Methodist Episcopal Church, Journal of the Philippine Islands Annual Conference, vol. 24, 1931.

carry­ing a book—­there’s no clear story, and it’s all dirty”; “The one smoking: ­You’re smoking [the cigarette] like a mango tree!” (This may refer to a practice of smoking mango trees to produce early flowers and kill pests); “The Chinese: Wa ka nga!! Do it with gusto!”; “The ones with their feet up: Huuu! That’s the way!” The cinema was a space that divided bodies into hierarchies according to intersecting vectors of class and ethnic difference; the poor occupied the cheaper front rows, while the more affluent patrons sat ­behind them.50 As “Sa Sine” suggests, collective cinemagoing was titillating, interactive, and experienced differently across class and gender. Spectators prop up their feet, smoke, and yell at each other and at the screen. Across vari­ous social groups, their ribald calls to the film’s explicit content suggest a cinemagoing culture that embraced the sexualized pleasures of a new sensory experience. Meanwhile, rival forms of romantic encounter compete. A w ­ oman in the corner stands with her mouth agape, her books and dress evoking the American “Thomasites,” public school teachers who came to the new colonial state at the turn of the c­ entury. Her date holds her waist protectively, as they watch the hypersexualized kiss on screen, standing apart from the crowd. The cartoon critiques the new economies of space that ­were emerging across the transition from Spanish to American rule. The cinema space became another Other within a changing city. Its borders ­were not closed and disciplined, but porous, open to the contamination of the material world. As the cinema became a means of reor­ ga­niz­ing space and time, manuals of urbanity like Urbana at Felisa circulated among elite, Hispanicized Filipinos, offering a nostalgic antidote to a new colonial order through their residual models of gendered bodily comportment.



Haunted by the Body 41

In the transition from Spanish to American colonial rule, the body became a site of medicalization. But as the preceding accounts demonstrate, counternarratives emerged that aligned this new order with bodily corruption. This was not always a radical, progressive discourse. Th ­ ese examples suggest that hierarchies of class, gender, and ethnicity persisted within ­these critiques of colonial transformations.

the sanitary modernity of cinema space More than a de­cade ­later, the cinema would occupy a very dif­fer­ent place in the imaginaries of elite nationalists, as cinema spaces gentrified. Within this transition, the figure of the moviegoer shifted. Previous depictions of film consumption portrayed a figure of bodily appetites; cinema spaces w ­ ere obstacles in the path ­toward national becoming, appealing to the basest instincts of the crowd. But the discourse surrounding the construction of the Metropolitan Theater suggests how cinema venues could act as a signal of modernization and a space for emergent, sanitary citizens, aiming to shed their uncanny “Other” status. Nonetheless, t­ hese new structures cast another shadow, in the ways that they intersected with other, racialized aspects of colonial space: the world’s fair and the prison. In 1931, an article in Graphic, a Philippine magazine, described the rapid proliferation of the city’s theaters. The piece depicts the movie theater as a signal of the city’s modernization but places it alongside its architectural and entertainment histories, as images of the Teatro de Bilibud and the Teatro Español share space with the Fox and the Ideal, cinemas described as “two of Manila’s leading theatres.” The article also includes an image of the Metropolitan national theater, which was u­ nder construction at the time, its skeletal frame becoming a promise of new levels of modernization yet to come: “Time was when Padre Burgos Street’s principal edifice-­to-­be-­proud-of was the Legislative Building. ­Today that distinction has perhaps been annexed by the new bureau of posts structure. And tomorrow, maybe, visitors to Manila passing through Padre Burgos Street w ­ ill gasp primarily at the Metropolitan Theater. Rapidly approaching completion, said theater is one of the many in Manila that are e­ ither being or have been recently constructed. They are springing up like the proverbial mushrooms and practically all of them are of the first-­class variety.”51 The theater becomes part of a teleological timeline that frames urban development as gasp-­inducing spectacle, moving from the seat of U.S. colonial governance, the legislative building, to the primary hub of its communications infrastructure, the bureau of posts, to the Metropolitan, the grandest variation of the city’s quickly multiplying cinemas. ­These structures ­were part of a larger proj­ect of urban development that had its origins in the U.S. colonial order’s racial ideologies. Secretary of War William Howard Taft had commissioned American architect Daniel Burnham to spearhead much of Manila’s planning.52 Burnham had grown to fame designing the neoclassical “White City” of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a fantasized city space that positioned the West as civilization’s core, with racially typologized, Orientalist

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exhibitions on its periphery. So, it was in some ways fitting that Burnham became the architect of the United States’ imperial ventures. Burnham transferred the Haussmann-­inspired “City Beautiful” movement developed through the White City to the new colonial capital, advocating parks, symmetrical pathways, classical motifs, and the upkeep of waterways for moving commercial goods, thereby unifying the city.53 As Rolando Tolentino points out, Burnham’s vision required a bird’s eye view of the city; he and his codesigner, Peirce Anderson, could only attain this all-­seeing view from the tower of Bilibid, a prison.54 Bilibid would ­later be celebrated as a city within the city, complete with commerce, recreation (including a cinema), and its own jail within a jail. This rhe­toric obscures the use of its inmates, both living and dead, as “representative samples” for colonial administration, including the group of racial “types” sent to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.55 The prison became an emblem of pro­gress despite, or perhaps ­because of, its involvement in anthropometric surveys, couched within the rhe­toric of scientific achievement. Cinema consumption also became a part of this prison-­as-­progress discourse, serving as evidence of its reform-­minded ideals. A 1923 article suggests that Bilibid, along with other prisons, would eventually become a marker of American benevolence.56 The article frames the prison as a microcosm of the larger city. ­Here, the state could effectively control and reform bodies within the confines of the sanitary, colonial prison system: “A city within a city! Like a well-­oiled machine, Bilibud functions smoothly. . . . ​The shops and departments are large, well-­equipped, and sanitary. . . . ​Cinema shows are flashed on the screen ­every Saturday and Sunday eve­nings.”57 Again, sanitation and cinema become twin markers of benevolent modernization, obfuscating the racialized under­pinnings of both institutions. The Metropolitan Theater was built into this existing cartography. Placed within Burnham’s White City–­inspired government district, the theater, described as “the largest and the best in the Philippines,” would serve as another marker of Filipino modernity.58 Designed by Filipino architect Juan Arellano, the art deco Metropolitan opened in December 1931. Arellano had also designed the neoclassical Legislative Building, which acted as an icon of demo­cratic governance, and the Bureau of Posts, a reminder of the city’s position within a transpacific network of trade and communications. Situated within a small plot of land overlooking the central business district across the river, the three structures integrated arts and culture, infrastructure, and government as facets within a variegated system of power. Cinema played a key role in this assemblage. While the Metropolitan’s film ads do not appear as frequently as ­those for other theaters, Hollywood films such as the pre-­code, backstage musical Won­der Bar was advertised as “The show of 10,000 won­ders comes to Manila.” One Night of Love was billed alongside the Manila Symphony Orchestra. This was a high art space, very dif­fer­ent from the space of embodied, corporeal pleasures censured in Cinematografo! and “Sa Sine.” The Metropolitan featured multiple types of seating across a spectrum of ticket prices. However, t­ hese socioeconomic divisions would ostensibly melt away once



Haunted by the Body 43

patrons ­were inside, through the theater’s “mirrophonic” sound system, developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories (figure 2.3). The system marketed each position within the theater as part of a technologically enabled, homogeneous seating system, which countered tiered ticket prices through the “uniform distribution of sound throughout seating area.”59 With the D-­Phonic Speaker system, the advertising promises, “every­thing recorded on the sound track . . . ​is evenly distributed to ­every seat. With MIRROPHONIC ­there are no ‘corner seats,’ no ‘dead spots.’ ”60 Spectators h­ ere are universalized, positioned in classless relation to the screen before them. It is a discourse of equal access across a disembodied, mass audience, provided via benign, American technology. Nonetheless, the racialized binaries of affect and reason persist in the theater’s investment promotions, undercutting t­ hese rhe­torics of technologically enabled parity. The Metropolitan Theater Com­pany was a joint venture between American trade executive H. B. Pond and the Spanish Filipino Zobel-­Ayala ­family. The com­ pany advertised for investors in both Tagalog and En­glish, framing the proj­ect as an opportunity for all who joined to “become partners,” “irrespective of creed, color, or nationality, including t­ hose with modest incomes” (figure 2.4). However, the differences between its En­glish and Tagalog marketing strategies complicate this notion of parity. The former emphasizes profit, emphatically noting that it is not a civic enterprise: “The Metropolitan Theater Com­pany does NOT wish to encourage the purchase of stock as a donation for a civic enterprise, but as an investment in a business enterprise.”61 It frames its appeals within the cap­i­tal­ist reason ascribed to English-­language readers. Meanwhile, the Tagalog variation appeals to nationalist sentiment, calling the proj­ect “a patriotic act”: “The absence of a proper and orderly theater in Manila stirs the emotions of the Philippine national audience. The nationalist leaders of the city asked the citizens ­whether they are willing to cooperate with the building a new theater, and the consensus is, ‘We ­will help.’ ”62 In this way, the proj­ect mobilizes the rhe­torics of demo­cratic parity while also upholding the systems of difference under­lying t­ hese discourses. Cap­i­tal­ist reason contrasts with nationalist sentiment, evoking contemporaneous, colonial assessments of Filipinos as excessively emotional.63 Such incongruities w ­ ere not lost on observers, and rhe­torics of hygiene, sanitation, and class become an explicit part of this dynamic in l­ater discourse around the Metropolitan. A satirical 1935 letter to the editor of the journal The Critic commented on the theater, citing it as a cause of concern for the director of the Philippine Health Ser­vice, Jacobo Fajardo.64 The writer asks, “May I ask of your good offices to kindly inquire if Dr. Jacobo Fajardo has ever been up the gallery of the Metropolitan Theatre? The reason for this query is the stench pervading the entire floor up ­there.” The editor replies: A citizen’s query need not be forwarded to the esteemed Dr. Fajardo. It could be taken for granted that the gallery seats would be much too low for such a station which the good doctor represents. We doubt, however, if he would notice or smell

figure 2.3. A uniform distribution of sound. “Mirrorphonic Latest Sound System Being Installed at Metropolitan,” Sunday Tribune Magazine, August 1, 1937, 23.

figure 2.4. Dichotomies of passion and reason. “Tutulong Kami,” Liwayway, January 31, 1930,

24, and “Invest in Art for Profit,” Graphic, January 29, 1930, 13.

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any difference of that luxuriant pollution referred to from the exquisite aroma of his Camia. (That is, if he uses Camia [a fragrant flower].) The magnificent structure is now corroding fast. We could only surmise that the distinguished management needs quite a program of fumigating. As a ­matter of fact, the Bureau of Health itself needs one very badly.65

The Metropolitan was built as an emblem of a modernizing city, but in this satirical portrayal, its corrosion, stench, and need for fumigation signal modernization’s failures. If sanitation and cinema claimed Bilibud prison as an emblem of the United States’ modern benevolence, h­ ere, the Metropolitan’s sanitation failures pre­sent a counternarrative. This intersection between sanitation rhe­torics and cinematic space reveals how they operated as parallel institutions of bodily management, drawing connections between the “low station” space of the embodied crowd (the gallery seats) and the elite space of the public health bureaucracy. While I found it difficult to surmise the letter’s precise critique of Fajardo, the accusations of elitism through the Metropolitan Theater are in­ter­est­ing. Nationalist leadership during this period was tied to scientific pro­gress, paralleling the ways that institutions such as cinemas ­were linked to rhe­torics of cultural development. Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols have argued that in the early twentieth ­century, the Philippines was one of at least three Asian countries where “decolonization was yoked to scientific pro­gress” at symbolic as well as practical levels. In ­these cases, nationalist leaders w ­ ere often physicians or scientists.66 Such individuals represented universal laws and knowledge on a par with colleagues in imperial metros; importantly, they tied science more specifically to nation-­building and governmentality, a rhe­toric that countered the baseless American emphasis on science’s role within a broader, “civilizing” mission.67 During the 1930s, ­under Fajardo’s direction the Philippine Health Ser­vice focused on public health mea­ sures aimed at the education of the masses, moving away from the racialized hygiene regime of the American colonial medical bureaucracy to a focus on the socioeconomic ­causes of disease.68 Nonetheless, while Fajardo’s Health Ser­vice troubled the dichotomy between white American medical practices and the Filipino populace, Anderson argues that class structures intersected with internal hierarchies of ancestry and color to frame public health interventions, which ­were still informed by colonial methods.69 In the case of The Critic’s parodic critique of Fajardo via the Metropolitan, the theater becomes a space whose ideals of an egalitarian, sanitary citizenry, formed in the shadow of infrastructure and legislature, conflict with the realities of class difference. A 1953 history of medicine in the Philippines provides insight into the doctor’s bodily pre­sen­ta­tion; the writer describes Fajardo as “well-­built and of aristocratic mien.”70 Alongside the progressiveness of his policies, long-­standing hierarchies of race and class endure in the background, an uncanny shadow for more idealized images of smooth teleological progression. The national Metropolitan theater proj­ect became a point of juncture among sanitation discourses,



Haunted by the Body 47

(dis)embodied crowds, and the conflicting rhe­torics of colonial modernity. The cinema’s status as an arena for gathering the masses became an unlikely ground for satirizing colonial public health. As ­these repre­sen­ta­tions suggest, the cinema became a microcosm for a changing colonial city. Grosz argues that the body and the city exist in isomorphic relation, mutually defining one another. In ­these accounts of interwar Manila, the cinema plays a role in this relation, not merely as one component in an assemblage of architectural, infrastructural, cultural, and economic systems but as a critical meta­phor for understanding the embodied crowd and its relation to an impending, modern nation.

Film Magazines and Ritual Intimacy The movie theater and its viewers became an extension of the spatial and biological meta­phors that s­ haped the burgeoning nation in the early twentieth c­ entury. As a figure in the cityscape and a new mode of leisure, its meaning was uncannily doubled. It both served as an index of a modernizing, hygienic nation and also revealed the per­sis­tence of older, racialized regimes. In this section, I am interested in how the cinema became a part of a more intimate regulatory order, taking shape within protocols of personal hygiene and beauty. ­There has been some scholarship on the links among commodities, class, and race. Anne McClintock has written about the overlap between soap and empire, arguing that advertisements for soap became a part of the “commodity spectacle” that translated racist ideologies to the masses.71 In cinema and media studies, scholars such as Sarah Berry and Jackie Stacey have analyzed ads for beauty products and soap in terms of whiteness and class during the classical Hollywood period.72 In the Philippines, such images are woven into discourses of medicalization and colonial power. Moreover, their focus on the body resonates with older forms of “ritual intimacy” tied to Catholic religious practice. In their extension of historian Resil Mojares’s work from the Spanish to the American colonial regimes, Bautista and Planta argue that the American colonial state imposed new ways of life as a response to health regulations. As they write, this imposition took two main forms: efforts to control a landscape (their geographic space) and a p­ eople (Filipino bodies).73 “Rituals of intimacy” around bodily comportment and cleanliness became a part of self-­imposed routines, rather than the outside surveillance of religious or colonial authorities.74 While the previous sections have discussed how the theater space became an arena for imagining sanitary citizens, this section examines how cinema magazines endorsed new rituals of intimacy, promoting hygiene and cleanliness in a way that bolstered nationalist ideologies of bodily pre­sen­ta­tion. As Raquel  A.  G. Reyes argues, nationalism was constituted through tensions between anx­i­eties about Westernization, on the one hand, and desires to prove the civilized status of local elites, on the other.75 Ensuring the uniquely civilized nature of the elite classes

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involved signs of distinction such as “property, propriety, and social polish,” which solidified the borders around class, sex, gender, and nation; as the previous section demonstrated, life in the city had made ­these borders threateningly porous.76 ­Because this distinction was a key rationale for national in­de­pen­dence, elite intellectuals ­were alarmed at Western prognoses that depicted Malays as sexually promiscuous “savage races.”77 Many elite nationalists claimed Malay ancestry as a means of drawing distinctions between themselves and the country’s more “savage” groups: Muslim Moros of the south, as well as highland Indigenous p­ eoples.78 Rituals of cleanliness and hygiene became a means of racialized distinction. Print culture was a key vehicle for t­hese ideas, as it was a critical part of the transition to U.S. rule. Denise Cruz observes that due to the U.S. promotion of public education, a generation came of age in the 1920s and 1930s who ­were literate in the En­glish language.79 Manila became the capital of literary production, and Filipinos produced a slew of journals, newspapers, and magazines.80 Their readers ­were primarily the elites: t­ hose who w ­ ere university-­educated, urban, and worked in government, politics, or education.81 As cinemas spread across the city, elite nationalists’ justifications for Philippine sovereignty involved the signs of propriety and social polish that offered evidence of Philippine civilization. Print media became a space where the intermingled discourses of hygiene and cinema suggest a malleable, evolving citizen-­consumer, educated in bodily comportment through a combination of advertising and film culture. At the same time, ­these images of the body formed an uncanny shadow discourse, one that had its roots in older forms of racial hierarchy and religion. The year 1922 saw the birth of Liwayway (Dawn), a Tagalog-­language entertainment magazine. An image from 1929 is fairly typical (figure  2.5). The magazine offers gossip about Hollywood-­based stars Renée Adorée, John Gilbert, John Barrymore, and Greta Garbo. Beneath their images, an ad for Dr.  M.  G. Virata declares his expertise in skin diseases and tumors. He can analyze urine, blood, saliva, and feces at his office on the Escolta, home to Manila’s department stores and movie theaters (including, five years ­later, the Capitol Theater). Beside Dr. Virata’s announcement sits an image of Bo-­Kay talcum powder, which combines perfume and boric acid. It ­will both perfume and disinfect the body. The next ad for Flit, an insect repellent, reminds the reader that the body is not the only site that needs to excise pests. Flit promises to rid spaces of flies and mosquitoes. In an issue published the following December, the back of the magazine provides a cata­log of doctors and diseases, flanked by Hollywood gossip. Beside a story about Dolores Del Rio, advertisements for internationally trained doctors list their specialties: birth, the uterus, ­ children, consumption, hemorrhage, asthma, blood, diarrhea, pain, appendicitis, hemorrhoids, sprains, vomiting, conception, stomach, intestines, cough, chest pain, gasping, dizziness, edema, rheumatism, diseases of the brain, nerves, and insanity.82 For the malleable consumer-­citizen, the cinema becomes tutelage in the norms of sanitation, beauty, comportment, and health, filtered not only through the film

figure 2.5. Movie stars, doctors, and hygiene products. Liwayway, February 15, 1929, 40;

Liwayway, December 20, 1929, 62.

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star but also through a medicalized system of bodily care and maintenance. The innocuous hawking of beauty and hygiene becomes a placeholder for the country’s longer histories of colonial power, and the embodied spectator that the magazine addresses is one whose “civilization” is fragile, requiring maintenance to uphold it. The space of the Philippines itself is a challenge to be overcome with pesticides, which aligns with official public health discourse on the specific dangers of the tropics, whose heat elicits both disease and uncivilized be­hav­iors. The body and the space it inhabits become sites to be cleansed. This attention to sanitary, domestic space is also seen in a series of late 1930s advertisements appearing in “The Movie World,” a section of the Sunday Tribune Magazine, an English-­language newspaper published in the Philippines (figure 2.6). Urging readers to invest in domestic plumbing, the ads for the United Plumbing Com­pany counseled movie fans that “­today, the desirability of a home is judged by the bathroom,” and they should “plan [their] plumbing accordingly.” In a showroom space labeled “Bath,” a man in suit and tie uses a pointer to demonstrate his plumbing wares to a browsing ­couple.83 In another scene in the series, a stylishly coiffed young w ­ oman bathes in a porcelain tub. “Hot Days are h­ ere again,” the ad announces, inquiring, “Have you adequate bathroom facilities?”84 “A Bathroom you can be proud of,” another declares, advising, “A modern bathroom is no luxury. It is a necessity for health and con­ve­nience, and the cost is surprisingly low.”85 A c­ ouple gaze proudly at a well-­appointed bathroom, the man in a suit, the ­woman with finger-­waved hair. The ­women in t­ hese scenes resemble the “Modern Girl,” the image of modern femininity that emerged in a range of localized versions across the world, alongside global capitalism and commodity advertising.86 At the same time, the modern girl is ­here aligned with sanitary private property, a site of aspiration for bourgeois readers. The Sunday Tribune covered a mixture of local and Hollywood cinema, with par­tic­ul­ ar attention given to the latter. Th ­ ese sparkling, modern bathrooms fit well with the paper’s usual collection of images, which pre­sent modes of upward mobility for the discerning consumer. Wristwatches divide time into quantifiable units, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal elixirs allow one to enjoy “The Vitality of Youth the Success of Life,” and deodorants prevent embarrassing odors from being impediments to romance. Coverage of Hollywood stars follows suit, offering a vision of sparkling, modern whiteness. Beneath the headline “Glamour Girl Down on the Farm,” a series of photos show Carole Lombard tending ­horses and milking cows on her ranch, a vision of fresh-­faced, pastoral health.87 In a dif­fer­ent vein, starlet ­Virginia Grey demonstrates correct office posture (figure 2.7). Divided into images labeled “right” and “wrong,” the graphic prohibits facial expressions that “denote ­mental lassitude” and “lounging” positions that appear “slovenly.”88 If manuals of urbanity advised readers to keep their backs straight, their feet together, and their heads still in order to overcome corporeal weakness, h­ ere Catholic rituals of religion have become American rituals of gendered, bureaucratic ­labor, mediated through feminine cinema stardom.

figure 2.6. Part of a series of ads in “The Movie World,” Sunday Tribune Magazine, March 6

and March 20, 1938.

figure 2.7. Stardom mediates cleanliness, health, posture, and office ­labor. “Correct Office

Posture,” Sunday Tribune Magazine, October 30, 1938, 30.



Haunted by the Body 53

­These didactic visions of modernity achieved through the body parallel elite nationalists’ broader campaigns for economic autonomy. Established in 1934, the National Economic Protectionism Association (NEPA) brought together Filipino entrepreneurs in a campaign to promote domestic industries.89 Such campaigns included attention to building the national physique through consuming local food products, including domestically grown sugar. A 1937 article titled “Sweet Patriotism” directs readers “Eat more sugar!” to support the country’s sugar industry.90 The image accompanying the article resembles an evolutionary chart of sugar consumption, with the first-­place figure from Denmark towering above the diminutive, last-­place “Filipinas” (figure 2.8). ­These directives made their way to the domestic film industry. In a title that brings NEPA’s “buy local” imperatives to stardom, Filippine Films director Cecilio Joaquin notes that stars must be of “romantic height,” “taller than the average, with a perfect or nearly perfect physique.”91 Started in 1933 through a mixture of U.S. and Filipino investment, Filippine Films brought the U.S.-­style studio system to the Philippines, separating production practices, signing stars to exclusive contracts, and creating a publicity department.92 It was an early iteration of the studio system to come, with its mestizo/a stars, the uncanny remnants of colonial history (figure 2.9).

worldly practice As this diverse collection of artifacts suggests, the uncanny O ­ thers that accompanied rhe­torics of health and hygiene became a point of tension within a progressivist discourse of elite nationalism. Occupying the intersection between medicine and consumer culture, this bodily pedagogy resonated with older forms of corporeal control, evoking a residual colonial order. While the American colonial enterprise universalized epistemologies of science, medicine, civility, and reason, the images described ­here suggest that t­ hese discourses required localized and quotidian practices to take root. Sometimes, ­these forms of bodily knowledge took shape in formalized educational systems, but other times, they became a part of worldly practice, the implicit, material frames of knowledge that shape everyday life. As a multifaceted assemblage of quotidian practices, cinemagoing was implicated in this discourse. The practice of cinema consumption offered a vital platform for imagining the impending nation-­state’s ideal, embodied, hygienic citizen-­consumer. At the same time, the uncanny undertows of residual religious formations and unsanitary citizens pulled against ­these imposed teleologies. ­These images and discourses ­were not emblems of a repressed, “premodern” culture; as in other Asian contexts, the uncanny was intrinsic to the experience of modernity.93 To view them as uncanny within this context registers an uneasy continuity between colonial regimes of the body that would ostensibly oppose one another: Spanish religiosity and American hygienic consumerism.

figure 2.8. A nation to be nourished. “Sweet Patriotism,” Sunday Tribune Magazine,

July 18, 1937, 13.

figure 2.9. NEPA stars. D. V. Bakilar, “Pick a Star—­NEPA version,” Sunday Tribune Magazine, September 19, 1937, 9.

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notes 1. ​Sigmund Freud, quoted in John Jervis, “Uncanny Presences,” in Uncanny Modernity: Cul-

tural Theories, Modern Anx­ie­ ties, ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis (New York: Palgrave-­Macmillan, 2008), 11. 2. ​Sigmund Freud, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 3. ​John Zilcosky, Uncanny Encounters: Lit­er­a­ture, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 4. ​Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 74–75, 86. 5. ​Ann Laura Stoler, “Epistemic Politics: Ontologies of Colonial Common Sense,” Philosophical Forum 39, no. 3 (2008): 349–361. 6. ​Though this is the common narrative (the Film Development Council celebrated the centennial of Philippine cinema in 2019), it is not uncontested. Historian Nick Deocampo posits that the first “Filipino” film was La conquista de Filipinas (The conquest of Filipinas), made in 1912 by Chinese-­mestizo producers. Patrick Campos analyzes this historical revision in The End of National Cinema (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2016), 254. Nepomuceno himself had made short films prior to 1919, as well. See Nick Deocampo, Film: American Influences on Philippine Cinema (Quezon City: Anvil, 2011). 7. ​Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: Amer­ic­ a in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 45. 8. ​Thompson, 144. 9. ​Tani Barlow, “The Modern Girl as Heuristic Device,” in The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, ed. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn  M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta  G. Poiger, Madeline Yue Dong, and Tani  E. Barlow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 288–316. 10. ​Amanda Lee Albaniel Solomon, “Managing the (Post)Colonial: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Literary Texts of the Philippine Commonwealth” (PhD diss., University of California San Diego, 2011), 12. 11. ​Christine Balance, “Dahil Sa Iyo: The Performative Power of Imelda’s Song,” ­Women & Per­ for­mance: a journal of feminist theory 20, no.  2 (2010): 119–140; Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2006); Rolando Tolentino, National/Transnational: Subject Formation and Media in and on the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001). 12. ​Manalansan, Global Divas, 180. 13. ​Manalansan, 180. 14. ​Reynaldo  C. Ileto, “The Philippine Revolution of 1896 and U.S. Colonial Education,” in Knowing Amer­i­ca’s Colony: A Hundred Years from the Philippine War (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Center for Philippine Studies, 1999) 1. 15. ​Ileto, 3. 16. ​Ileto, 6. 17. ​Porteus and Babcock, quoted in Ileto, 6. 18. ​Ileto, 9. 19. ​RKO Radio Pictures Inc., “Compliments on Your Coming-­of-­Age,” Filamerican Movie and News, June 1946, 20. 20. ​Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000); Bliss Cua Lim, “Sharon’s Noranian Turn: Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema,” Discourse 31, no. 3 (2009): 318–358. See also José B. Capino’s discussion of the “desire for whiteness” in Philippine cinema in Dream Factories of a



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Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 21. ​Rafael, quoted in Lim, “Sharon’s Noranian Turn,” 325. 22. ​Rafael, White Love, 163. 23. ​Rafael, 165. 24. ​Charles L. Briggs with Clara Matini-­Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 33. 25. ​Bonnie McElhinny, “ ‘Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him:’ Infant Mortality, Medicine, and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-­Occupied Philippines.” American Anthropologist 107, no. 2 (2005): 183–194. 26. ​For an analy­sis focused on colonization and filmic repre­sen­ta­tion, see Capino, Dream Factories of a Former Colony. 27. ​Julius Bautista with Ma. Mercedes Planta, “The Sacred and the Sanitary: The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body,” in The Body in Asia, ed. Bryan S. Turner and Zheng Yangwen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 147–164, 154. 28. ​Bautista and Planta. 29. ​Stoler, “Epistemic Politics,” 349. 30. ​Stoler, 349. 31. ​Bautista and Planta, “The Sacred and the Sanitary.” 32. ​Bautista and Planta. 33. ​Soledad S. Reyes, “Urbana at Felisa,” Philippine Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 3–29. 34. ​Reyes, 3–29. 35. ​Reyes, 16. 36. ​Bryan Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Newcastle: Sage, 2008). 37. ​Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–3. 38. ​Bautista and Planta, “The Sacred and the Sanitary.” 39. ​Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 10–11. 40. ​Vidler, 11. 41. ​Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies/Cities,” in Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London: Routledge, 1995), 381–382. 42. ​Grosz, 381–382. 43. ​Bautista and Planta, “The Sacred and the Sanitary.” 44. ​Bautista and Planta. 45. ​Bautista and Planta. 46. ​Resil Mojares, in Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003), 178. 47. ​Mojares, 178. 48. ​Ian Morley, “Modern Urban Designing in the Philippines, 1898–1916,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 64, no. 1 (2016): 3–42. 49. ​ Pakakak was published by the Cristianos Filipinos. See Methodist Episcopal Church, Journal of the Philippine Islands Annual Conference 24 (1931). 50. ​See Clodualdo Del Mundo, Native Re­sis­tance: Philippine Cinema and Colonialism, 1898–1941 (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1998), 53. 51. ​“Old Theaters and New,” Graphic, May 6, 1931, 12. 52. ​Rolando Tolentino, “Cityscape: The Capital Infrastructuring and Technologization of Manila,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Socie­ties in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 164.

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53. ​Tolentino, 164. 54. ​Tolentino, 164. 55. ​Francis A. Gealogo, “Bilibid and Beyond: Race, Body Size, and the Native in Early Ameri-

can Colonial Philippines,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2018): 372–386.

56. ​ Philippine Republic, December 1923, 10–11. 57. ​ Philippine Republic, December 1923, 10–11. 58. ​“Metropolitan Theater to Be Largest in P.I.,” School News Review, October 1, 1931, 8. 59. ​“Mirrorphonic Latest Sound System Being Installed at Metropolitan,” Sunday Tribune

Magazine, August 1, 1937, 23. 60. ​“Mirrorphonic Latest Sound System,” 23. 61. ​“Invest in Art for Profit,” Graphic, January 29, 1930, 13. 62. ​“Tutulong Kami,” Liwayway, January 31, 1930, 24. 63. ​Ileto, “Philippine Revolution.” 64. ​ The Critic, March 23, 1935, 11. 65. ​ The Critic, March 23, 1935, 11. 66. ​Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols, “Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-­ Fashioning in Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 93–113, 93. 67. ​Anderson and Pols, 103. 68. ​Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 226. 69. ​Anderson, 227. 70. ​José Policarpio Bantug, A Short History of Medicine in the Philippines during the Spanish Regime, 1565–1898 (Manila: Colegio Médico-­Farmacéutico de Filipinas, 1953), 148. 71. ​Anne McClintock, “Soft-­Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 508. 72. ​Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994). 73. ​Bautista and Planta, “The Sacred and the Sanitary,” 161. 74. ​Bautista and Planta, 161. 75. ​Raquel A. G. Reyes, Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882–1892 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 76. ​Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 78. 77. ​Cruz, 78. 78. ​Cruz, 78. 79. ​Cruz, 78. 80. ​Cruz, 12. 81. ​Cruz, 12. 82. ​ Liwayway, December 20, 1929, 62. 83. ​ Sunday Tribune Magazine, March 6, 1938, 1. 84. ​ Sunday Tribune Magazine, April 3, 1938. 85. ​ Sunday Tribune Magazine, March 20, 1938. 86. ​Weinbaum et al., eds. Modern Girl Around the World. 87. ​ Sunday Tribune Magazine, March 20, 1938, 29. 88. ​“Correct Office Posture,” Sunday Tribune Magazine, October 30, 1938, 30. 89. ​­There is ­little consensus in Philippine studies about the nature of this economic protectionism; see Yusuke Takagi, “Economic Nationalism and Its Legacy,” in Routledge Handbook of the Con­temporary Philippines. Mark Thompson, Eric Vincent Batalla, eds. (London: Routledge, 2018), 254–261.



Haunted by the Body 59

90. ​“Sweet Patriotism,” Sunday Tribune Magazine, July 18, 1937, 13. 91. ​D. V. Bakilar, “Pick a Star-­NEPA Version,” Sunday Tribune Magazine, September 19, 1937, 9. 92. ​Michael Gary Hawkins, “Co-­producing the Postcolonial: U.S.-­Philippine Cinematic Rela-

tions, 1946–1986” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2008), 80.

93. ​See Miri Nakamura, Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

3 • REIM AGINING THE HISTORY OF MEDIA STUDIES THROUGH GA MES, PL AY, AND THE UNC ANNY VALLEY A L E N D A Y. C H A N G

Like all media, games are rife with uncanny histories, but ­these histories are ­little acknowledged in the industry’s constant rhetorical drumbeat of innovation. A surge of recent scholarship has endeavored to rectify the omissions, ­whether through a focus on milestone game titles like Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981), hagiographies of individual auteurs, or technically oriented platform studies. Take, for instance, the University of Michigan’s Landmark Video Games series, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, which kicked off in 2011 with Wolf ’s volume on the Cyan games Myst (1993) and Riven (1997).1 Bloomsbury’s Influential Video Game Designers series, edited by Carly A. Kocurek and Jennifer deWinter, started in 2015 with deWinter’s volume on celebrity Japa­nese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto.2 And MIT Press boasts more than one historically oriented book series about games. The first, Platform Studies (edited by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost), began in 2009 with Montfort and Bogost’s book on the Atari Video Computer System, released in 1977, while the more general Game Histories series (edited by Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins) launched only in 2016 with an edited volume on war games, which date back at least to the kriegspiel of nineteenth-­ century Prus­sian military training.3 The growing number of books in t­hese series attest to a now established, even market-­proven interest in the historical chronicling of games, designers, and game platforms.4 ­There have been far fewer attempts to better historicize the still nascent field of game studies, for example, to more fully understand its relation to the wider domains of film, media, and communication studies, as well as engineering and computer science. Although commercial games developed outside of privileged 60



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university and business settings in the 1970s and 1980s with the golden age of arcades and early home consoles, the academic study of games did not consolidate ­until the late 1990s or early 2000s with monographs like Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, or the first edited readers like Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron’s Video Game Theory Reader, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play and The Game Design Reader, and Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s First-­Person.5 By the time Alexander Galloway’s Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006) or Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations (2006) and Persuasive Games (2007) rolled around, “game studies” had apparently achieved a real esprit de corps.6 Yet more than a de­cade on from ­these pioneering works, game scholars still seem mired in a single origin story—­that game studies was at its outset s­ haped by a formalist turf war between alleged narratologists and ludologists, with the narratologists being t­hose who wanted to see games as continuous with e­ arlier media and thus amenable to analy­sis using concepts and methods from something like film or literary theory, and the ludologists being t­ hose with a passionate insistence on the medium specificity of games, usually premised on their interactivity and instantiation in code. Ludologists, so the story goes, strug­gled to distinguish their work not only from traditional literary and film studies but also from the dizzying whirl of more general “new media” scholarship likewise experiencing a boom in the 1990s and 2000s. Witness Espen Aarseth’s scornful pronouncement in 2001, in the inaugural issue of the journal Game Studies, that “the current pseudo-­field of ‘new media’ (primarily a strategy to claim computer-­based communication for visual media studies), wants to subsume computer games as one of its objects.”7 From the start, some of the scholars involved debunked this founding rift as retrospective mythmaking.8 The heatedness of ­these ­battles was no doubt inflated, but nevertheless palpable, as documented in Henry Jenkins’s essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in which he returns from a conference in Bristol feeling falsely maligned as a narrow-­minded and establishment narratologist.9 Of course, this dubious yet canonical account of the inception of game studies is not the only story worth telling, something “the field” (such as it is) has thankfully taken diverse steps to address. For many, computer and video games ­ought to sit somewhat humbly within the larger ambit of play, which as a broad biological and cultural phenomenon spans disciplines like education, psy­chol­ogy, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. Yet h­ ere, again, game scholars (myself included) have shown a remarkably conservative bent, by repeatedly tracing the academic study of play to e­ ither the French sociologist Roger Caillois, who published Man, Play, and Games in the 1960s, or the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who published Homo ludens in the 1930s, despite ­these texts’ many problematic ele­ments.10 But even with a disciplinarily enshrined Huizinga and Caillois, we have the surprisingly belated decision to acknowledge nondigital games in con­temporary game studies, for instance, with the debut of the journal Analog Game Studies in August 2014,11 and Aarseth’s editorial decision to make

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Game Studies (by now one of the longest-­running games journals) into a venue for “Just Games” in July 2017: “From the next issue, Game Studies actively welcomes articles on games in general, and ­will not be ­limited to an empirical focus on digital games. It is time to recognize that the study of games cannot and should not be segregated into digital and non-­digital, and for most of the field, in practice, as well as in theory, this has never been so.”12 With this constant definitional to-­and-­fro, one could barely fault game studies insiders, let alone outsiders, for experiencing a kind of identity whiplash. From Frasca’s take on the narratology-­ludology feud as the “debate that never took place” to Aarseth’s assurance that the digital/nondigital divide “has never been so,” we see less a stable field than one in active formation. Worth noting, fi­nally, is that t­here have been impor­tant efforts to recuperate neglected histories of feminist game design and scholarship. T. L. Taylor, who has authored formative work on EverQuest, esports, and game streaming,13 likes to remind conference audiences that t­here is a long tradition of such design and research, including her own, that is frequently overlooked in standard accounts. A few worthy examples include Linda Hughes’s “Beyond the Rules of the Game: Why Are Rooie Rules Nice?” on the playground game four square, designer Brenda Laurel’s book Computers as Theatre (1993), or Laine Nooney’s article on Roberta Williams, cofounder of Sierra Online, entitled “A Pedestal, a T ­ able, a Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History.”14 Carly Kocurek, in par­ tic­u­lar, has championed work in this vein, having written a book on gender in the coin-op era of arcade gaming and one on the aforementioned Brenda Laurel, whose com­pany Purple Moon made games for girls in the late 1990s. Kocurek also recently edited a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “feminist video game histories.”15 That much of the ­earlier work was done on the periphery or outside of game studies proper, in corners of the acad­emy more concerned with language, per­for­mance, gender, childhood development, and human-­computer interaction, throws the heretofore formalist insularity of game studies into sharp relief. Clearly, ­there is ample room to reimagine not just the constitution of game studies but its relationships to other disciplines. Th ­ ese relationships are both temporal and intellectual. If we acknowledge nondigital games and link games to the broader phenomenon of play, then games patently precede film and media as conventionally defined. Games like backgammon, Go, and senet go back thousands of years, and many authors have made the case that games and play are indispensable ele­ments of h­ uman (and even animal) culture at large. At the same time, electronic games on computer, console, and mobile platforms are, in fact, developments that followed on the heels of cinema, radio, and tele­vi­sion, with technical and aesthetic characteristics to show for it. Thus, in part, this essay aims to reopen games and their study to the nuances of historical analy­sis, something I model further in the next section on games about history, and on narratives of advancements in game realism. L ­ ater, I conclude by offering a playfully revisionist history of media studies, one in which games are a vital and uncanny component of media theory’s rise to prominence.



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the uncanny and the unreal History and the uncanny emerge in and around games in a number of ways, two of which I examine ­here: when games deliberately engage with real-­world, often contested histories, and when game designers confront the long-­standing “prob­lem” of realism. While the relentlessly presentist and future-­oriented rhe­toric of the game industry seems intuitively at odds with the notion of history,16 as the medium has matured, more and more games have embraced a type of documentary impulse, from the attempt by the game 9.03m (Space Budgie, 2013) to memorialize victims of the 2011 Japa­nese tsunami, to the unreleased Drama in the Delta, a role-­playing game that would put players in the place of Japa­nese Americans forced to live in internment camps in Arkansas during World War II.17 The Indigenous game designer Elizabeth LaPensée has used her games to rewrite entrenched histories of settler colonialism. The sidescroller Thunderbird Strike (2017) arrays Indigenous my­thol­ ogy against modern pipeline extractivism, while When Rivers ­Were Trails (2019) poignantly inverts what many remember as the schoolroom classic The Oregon Trail (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, 1974). Instead of telling the story of sacrifices made by nineteenth-­century Americans traveling westward from Missouri to Oregon, When Rivers W ­ ere Trails follows a native Anishinaabeg forced to leave his ancestral lands in Minnesota for California during the 1890s, at times assisted by other Indigenous p­ eople or harassed by government agents. In a similar fashion, the Taiwanese development studio Red Candle Games has made a name for itself by delving into the island nation’s past oppressions. Its first major title, Detention/返校 (2017), takes place in the 1960s during Taiwan’s decades-­ long “White Terror” period, when newly installed Kuomintang rulers persecuted perceived dissidents and Communist sympathizers u­ nder martial law, following a violent crackdown on antigovernment protests on February 28, 1947 (known t­ oday as the 2/28 massacre). The player of the game begins the story as Wei, a male student at a high school in a remote part of Taiwan, but then transitions to playing Ray, a girl at the same school, a­ fter Wei appears to meet a macabre end. Usually described as an atmospheric thriller or a survival horror game, Detention unfolds a story of betrayal and fear through Ray’s eyes—­mostly exploring a nightmarish school setting populated by the “lingered,” or demonic spirits who savage Ray ­unless she learns to hold her breath and step quietly past them (figure 3.1). The shadowy lingered ultimately represent both a personal history (Ray’s failed affair with a counselor and subsequent, tragic disloyalty to her teacher and classmates) and a national one (the postcolonial trauma of the Taiwanese ­people who have under­gone centuries of occupation, most recently by the Japa­nese and mainland Chinese). Startlingly, perhaps, Detention was nonetheless wildly popu­lar in Taiwan, spurring both a novel in 2017 and a live-­action film adaptation of the same name in 2019, directed by John Hsu and distributed by Warner Bros. Taiwan. When Red Candle Games returned to the wellspring of Taiwanese culture and history with its second game, Devotion/還願 (2019), it quickly ran afoul of

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figure 3.1. The character Ray holds her breath to avoid detection in Detention (返校), ­here

against a period backdrop of patriotic school parade paraphernalia (Red Candle Games, 2017).

con­temporary politics despite the game’s outwardly less radical periodization. Devotion takes place during the 1980s and centers on a troubled ­family living in the densely urban capital city of Taipei. Like Detention, Devotion synthesizes varied ele­ments of Taiwanese and generally East Asian socie­ties and religions. However, unlike Detention, Devotion has gone on less to critical acclaim than to infamy. The game was pulled from Valve’s online store, Steam, a­ fter barely a week of release, following players’ discovery of anti-­Chinese “Easter eggs” and the ensuing uproar, among them artwork comparing current Chinese president Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh, echoing a well-­known satirical internet meme of the leader, and a homophonic Taiwanese phrase that some players interpreted as a slur. Offended Chinese players “review bombed” the game on Steam by entering copious negative reviews of the game, while Chinese censors suspended Red Candle Games’ Weibo account and worked to remove all references to the game from Chinese social media. Red Candle issued both apologies and refunds, explaining that the controversial art was included accidentally. Nearly two years a­ fter the initial kerfuffle, the game was still barred from promised rerelease on GOG​.­com in December 2020, following “many messages from gamers,”18 despite having been scrubbed of any upsetting material. Devotion was fi­nally made available in spring 2021 on Red Candle Games’ own website. In the meantime, both Red Candle games w ­ ere chosen for preservation in the East Asian collections at the Harvard-­Yenching Library as of February 2020, although it is unclear which version of Devotion is available on the library’s computers.



Reimagining the History of Media Studies 65

To see difficult and contentious histories played out through games like ­these is instructive on multiple levels. Th ­ ere is an uneasy but constructive friction produced by the meeting of game fantasy and the grist of history, and games like Detention play on the uncanny in terms of both super­natural ambience and repressed individual and cultural memory. As historian Rob MacDougall has argued, games can be well suited to teaching history as a living document. Yet while some have promoted games like ­those in Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991–) series as historical teaching aides, MacDougall eschews the linearity and in-­the-­ box thinking of commercial games in f­avor of more open-­ended designs. In the Civilization titles, a­ fter all, players must steer their chosen civilization to victory over ­others via one of a l­imited number of routes, typically through military conquest, religious conversion, diplomacy, or superior scientific or cultural development.19 MacDougall therefore prefers to use terms “ ‘history at play’ or ‘playful historical thinking’ more than ‘history games’ or ‘serious games’ ­because of some of the baggage that comes with the word game.”20 Although he concedes that using existing games to teach history may have ­limited use, it is for him far better to have students undertake the task of design, which forces them to engage with the kinds of complex, discontinuous, and even counterfactual thinking required of historical comprehension. Games intersect history in other uncanny ways, where it is less a m ­ atter of historical content than ingrained genealogies of technical pro­gress. In the remainder of this section, I address one such genealogy, by way of the uncanny valley hypothesis—­that of repre­sen­ta­tional realism. Unlike cinema, which even in the age of digital filmmaking still retains a robust association with photography’s indexical authenticity, games have never been “real” or “realistic” in a conventional sense. Nevertheless, many of the most heavi­ly advertised and well-­funded game proj­ects aspire to cinematic quality, and some celebrity game designers talk openly about their admiration for cinema, perhaps most famously Hideo Kojima, the eccentric personality ­behind the Metal Gear (1987–) series, P.T. (2014), and most recently Death Stranding (2019). Yet, as first discussed in a 1970 essay by Japa­nese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the craze for fabricated realism f­ aces a severe challenge in the uncanny.21 Mori postulated that ­humans’ affective response to humanlike ­others would grow more positive as t­ hose o­ thers became more lifelike, but only to a point. When t­hose o­ thers began to approach real­ity too closely, they became eerie, disturbing, causing a noticeable dip in “affinity” as graphed on x-­ and y-­axes. To pinpoint the contours of this “uncanny valley” (不気味の谷現象), Mori uses many Japa­nese cultural examples, like the stylized masks from Noh theatrical dramas, but also includes other objects both real and ­imagined like prosthetic hands, corpses, and zombies. Central to the perception of uncanniness, he argues, is the copresence of the seeming anti­theses death and movement, with the latter seen as especially key to ­human and animal lifelikeness. Mori’s essay has transitioned from relative obscurity to vigorous uptake in fields like engineering and human-­centered

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design, and the uncanny valley is now routinely deployed to describe every­thing from dolls and puppets to sociable robots and computer-­generated figures.22 Think of the animated p­ eople in Pixar’s Toy Story films, the dancing baby of the tele­vi­sion show Ally McBeal, or, not long ago, the robotic headless dogs used to enforce pandemic-­related social distancing in Singapore. While at the time of initial publication Mori’s solution to the uncanny valley was to move away from ­human likeness (“I predict that it is pos­si­ble to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a nonhuman design”),23 for what follows it is worth observing that a mammoth amount of video game funding continues to be put ­toward Mori’s upper limit. Consider Epic Games’ recent unveiling of its newest game engine, Unreal Engine 5, whose capacities are flaunted through a demo on the PlayStation 5 console. (A game engine is a software environment or framework that developers can use to more easily assem­ble a game.)24 In the reveal, Unreal employees discuss two new systems in par­tic­ul­ar, called Lumen (for dynamic lighting and “global” illumination) and Nanite (for “virtualized micropolygon geometry” and real-­time rendering).25 For t­ hose of us who have not worked as an artist on a blockbuster, or “AAA” (triple-­A), video game, it may be hard to understand the liberatory appeal of ­these technologies, which take full advantage of the increased pro­cessing power and storage capacities of next-­generation hardware to spare content creators from the perceived drag of efficiency mindsets. Artists working in 3D usually have to carefully consider their polygon counts when creating scenes and artifacts ­because too many polygons—­although beautiful—­would slow down or overtax a player’s system. But with Lumen, Epic gleefully ups the ante by breaking scenes down into millions, even trillions, of “micropolygons.” At one point in the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” demo video, with its noticeable resemblance to games of the Lara Croft Tomb Raider (Core Design, 1996–2003; Crystal Dynamics, 2003–) variety, the realistic cavern game scene (figure  3.2) is toggled to show what the Lumen “tris” (or triangles) breakdown looks like (figure 3.3). Although the sea of micropolygons resembles nothing so much as the colorized static of old tele­vi­sion broadcasts, the video’s narrator, Brian Karis, who is technical director of graphics, reassures us that what we are seeing is not “noise” but signal. As he effuses, “Nanite can render an insane number of triangles very quickly. ­There are over a billion triangles of source geometry in each frame, that Nanite crunches down losslessly to around 20 million drawn triangles. What does that many triangles look like? This i­ sn’t noise. Th ­ ese are the triangles, each a dif­fer­ ent color. Most are so small that they look like noise. Nanite achieves detail down to the pixel, which means triangles are often the size of pixels.” In effect, ­there are so many triangles pre­sent that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the h­ uman sensorium to interpret the scene, at least ­until rendered by Nanite. As the Unreal demo implies, the game industry and its paratexts tend to treat the uncanny valley as a technical prob­lem in need of a technical solution. Writing for GameSpot, Carrie Gouskos, for instance, takes the human-­computer interac-



Reimagining the History of Media Studies 67

figure 3.2. A scene from the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” demo as it would be experienced by a game player (Epic Games, 2020).

figure 3.3. The same scene from the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” demo as it would be

experienced by a visual designer, with Nanite triangles turned on (Epic Games, 2020).

tion research of computer scientist Karl MacDorman and the work of animation designer Elspeth Tory to heart, arguing that “animators must deal with the phenomenon head-on, working to combat it from the beginning, not only by creating realistic-­looking ­humans and animating them well, but also by making sure that the level of realism pre­sent is both believable and fun.”26 But rather than treat the uncanny valley as the domain of technical experts, or a hurdle to be overcome with copious technological resources, we might find productive disruption in Mori’s charted descent into the uncanny. ­There are, it seems, limitations to our

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inherent tendency to anthropomorphize. The valley is also a reminder that games may aspire to so much more than graphical realism. The desire for visual verisimilitude arguably belongs to a certain strain of “hardcore” (now euphemized as “core”) gaming rhe­toric that often unapologetically excludes w ­ omen, minorities, casual gamers, and so on. In other words, t­ here are prob­lems with games and game cultures that ­will not be solved by more subsurface light scattering or higher polygon counts,27 but also worthy ambitions that have ­little to do with ­those t­ hings. My own work deals with the ways that games can bring ecological relations to life,28 which con­ve­niently allows me to point to Mori’s little-­remembered comparison between the hiker’s experience of scaling a mountain and the roboticist’s push t­oward convincing ­human simulacra. Indeed, Mori compared the uncanny valley to ­actual valleys, seeing both as examples of noncontinuous functions. The undulations and gaps of ­these functions, ­whether topographic or affective, are si­mul­ta­neously indicative of traversing real spaces and the unpredictability of technical progression. In a way, they also figure the patchiness of historical and disciplinary formation, consolidation, and fragmentation described throughout this work in an effort to undermine any straightforward teleology or technological determinism. Given that moving entities are more likely to strike us as uncanny, video games and more generally computer-­generated animation seem predisposed to producing that sensation of eerie disturbance. Just as a rubbery-­looking hand lying motionless on the ground might be rationalized away as a child’s Halloween toy, but the same hand inching across the ground would strike terror into our hearts, the animate beings of video games (and game films) are more liable to trigger our apprehension. For instance, many believe that the commercial failure of the feature animated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), based on the venerable and im­mensely successful game franchise by Square Enix, was largely due to the uncanniness of its computer-­generated characters (figure 3.4).29 Admittedly, games at times reference the uncanny in more obvious ways, from the indie survival horror game Uncanny Valley (Cowardly Creations, 2015) to areas and items marked as such within games, including the Uncanny Caverns in Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout 76 (2018), modeled on West V ­ irginia’s Lost World Caverns, and the Uncanny Incunabula in Fallen London (Failbetter Games, 2009). In other words, if games are much touted by designers and players for their visual pyrotechnics and by theorists as a distinctively action-­based medium, that is also to say games are doubly prone to the uncanny. In the remainder of this chapter, I argue that just as games are shadowed by numerous underexamined technical, theoretical, and cultural histories, games and playable media likewise haunt the debatably longer or short span of media history and theory.

why media studies has always been game studies This essay sees games and their theorization not as a con­temporary offshoot of film and media scholarship but rather as a component that has been ­there all the



Reimagining the History of Media Studies 69

figure 3.4. Dr. Aki Ross, the computer-­generated protagonist of the film Final Fantasy:

The Spirits Within (dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001).

while. I have already worked to construct a richer prehistory for modern game studies, but now I hope to bring the disciplinary genealogies of cinematic and playable media into greater alignment. This pro­cess w ­ ill incidentally shed light on lesser-­known aspects of impor­tant media thinkers’ work, beginning with the German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin’s long fascination with toys, wagers, and risk and continuing on with the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s reflections on sport and games of all kinds. Importantly, I do not argue for the interchangeability of film and media studies and game studies, but rather for an integration that recognizes play as a productive method for the media scholar or historiographer. ­Here I am indebted to Meredith Bak’s interest in early optical toys not just as precursors of cinematic form but also as demonstrating the necessity of play as an epistemological strategy in the media historian’s tool kit. Just as analog and material worlds have usefully reemerged to temper the digital obsessions of game scholars, we might also bring game studies more fully into the fold of film and media studies, less as an accessory or even optional realm than as a constituent part of any historical period’s mediated social, po­liti­cal, and economic realities. Benjamin on Toys, Bets, and Experimentation Since being rediscovered in the 1960s, Walter Benjamin’s work has rarely generated una­nim­i­ty of interpretation. However, what makes Benjamin a particularly rich figure for an uncannily playful history of media studies is less his published work than his lifelong attitudes ­toward childhood and youth, his collecting of ­children’s stories, his interest in toys, and his compulsive gambling, and how that general predisposition to imagination, the wager, and risky experimentation,

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­ hether at the business of roulette or literary interpretation, seems to have guided w the course of his brilliant yet errant ­career. Benjamin’s first years at university (1912–1914) would be marked by his idealistic involvement in the German Youth Movement, and upon fathering his only child, Stefan, he would begin keeping a curiosity-­driven rec­ord of his son’s sundry “opinions et pensées.” As Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, the authors of a recent biography, write, “The proj­ect of youth culture was for him never ­limited to the program for school reform but sought a revolution in thinking and feeling.”30 And Benjamin’s jotting down of Stefan’s idiosyncratic statements was less evidence of a doting ­father than of his “long-­standing preoccupation with the perceptual world of childhood and the mimetic genius of the child.”31 Eiland and Jennings add, “For a thinker such as Benjamin, a child is a virtual laboratory in which the origins of ­human language lie ready to hand.”32 Eiland and Jennings also note that in the second half of the 1920s, Benjamin and his good friend Siegfried Kracauer ­were “virtually inventing popu­lar culture as an object of serious study,” with Benjamin producing essays on “­children’s lit­er­a­ture, toys, gambling, graphology, pornography, travel, folk art, the art of excluded groups such as the mentally ill, and food, and on a wider variety of media including film, radio, photography, and the illustrated press.”33 ­These included Benjamin’s “Old Forgotten ­Children’s Books,” the first published essay on pop culture and a first take on the figure of the collector, who must retain a “childlike delight” in the field, another essay on c­ hildren’s relation to color versus monochrome woodcut illustrations, and Kracauer’s “Travel and Dance.” Benjamin was also notably avid about toys. In the late 1920s, he would travel to Moscow to be at the side of a l­ater love (Asja Lacis), resulting in a flurry of work, but one of his “main preoccupations” never made it fully to print. During his time in Rus­sia, Benjamin apparently made “repeated visits to the Moscow Toy Museum” and even “paid for a series of photo­graphs of some of the most impor­tant objects, and he had purchased a vast pile of toys from shops, street markets, and itinerant vendors.”34 Yet his intended result, an illustrated essay simply called “Rus­sian Toys” never appeared as intended in its full form (a truncated version was published in 1930, yet the original complete manuscript is lost). Fi­nally, Benjamin was an inveterate gambler, particularly fascinated with roulette. In France in the late 1920s, during a f­ amily summer at the Riviera, Benjamin apparently “won enough money in the casinos at Monte Carlo to finance a week’s vacation in Corsica on his own. His taste for gambling (which has something Dostoevskian about it and no doubt ties in with his generally ‘experimenting’ nature), and in par­tic­u­lar his fascination with roulette, is reflected in passages of The Arcades Proj­ect,” as in the section on the Gambler, who like Benjamin “made his own luck.”35 Biographers and critics have been sympathetic, seeing Benjamin’s gambling habit as indicative of his habits of mind, or as method to his madness. Gambling, like drug use, was metaphysically “suggestive”: “Yes, his gambling was an addiction, as we say ­today. But it was also a consummate expression of his will-



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ingness to play life against the odds, to work against the grain of convention, and to place himself in intellectual positions whose tensions and paradoxy bordered on the aporetic.”36 His was a “philosophizing fully attuned to the modernist imperative of experiment, that is, the recognition that truth is not a timeless universal and that philosophy is always, so to speak, on the threshold and at stake. From moment to moment, Benjamin’s is a risk-­filled mode of thought, rigorous but profoundly ‘essayistic.’ ”37 Worth noting at this point are the fundamental similarities between game play and scientific experimentation. Scientists may have more instrumental aims in mind when designing and executing their experiments, but they share distinctive characteristics with players in the sense that both are driven by curiosity, a willingness to tinker, and an interest in systems and how they work. Meanwhile, game studies has largely ignored gambling, which Johan Huizinga famously excluded from his definition of play, an omission Roger Caillois ­later contested. For Huizinga, play had to be unproductive to remain play, where unproductive did not mean frittering away one’s time in a wasteful activity but rather that nothing of material worth was produced, as would be the case if one won a bet and received a financial payout. One major exception to this disciplinary blind spot is Natasha Dow Schüll’s book on slot machines in Vegas,38 but with the rise of in-­game microtransactions in ­today’s most popu­lar games, in par­tic­ul­ar what is known as loot boxes, or loot crates, where gamers pay real money for the chance to win virtual goods, scholarly attention has begun shifting back t­ oward this overlap between gaming and gambling. New politics and policy are also at play, with states like Hawaii and Washington introducing legislation against the perceived psychological manipulation of loot boxes and U.S. senator Maggie Hassan (D-­NH) sending a letter to the Entertainment and Software Ratings Board in February 2018 asking it to investigating companies’ loot box practices, which reportedly net upwards of $30 billion a year. Miriam Bratu Hansen, in her essay “Room-­for-­Play,” also chronicles Benjamin’s fondness for gambling as a model for “innervation” or a bodily, nonoptical knowing of the world, tied to symbolism and myth. Recognizing his veneration of the potency of childhood imagination and make-­believe and broad interest in reviving theories of play, Hansen develops the themes of play in Benjamin’s work, or rather the German term spiel in all its senses of play, game, per­for­mance, and gambling. So, for instance, we could talk about Benjamin’s exegesis of the Trauerspiel genre, or the German play of mourning, while Hansen reminds us that the German word for cinema was Lichtspiel, or literally “games of light.”39 Yet while a few game studies theorists have taken up Benjamin, primarily his work on Baudelaire and the Arcades Proj­ect, to describe mobile gaming, an aesthetics of shock, and innervation, few if any have used Hansen’s work. Distant Early Warnings Understanding Media’s seemingly little-­used chapter on games (chapter  24) is sandwiched between the chapters on ads and the telegraph, yet it is worth noting

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that only this chapter gets the subtitle “The Extensions of Man.” In it, McLuhan ranges widely from alcohol and gambling, to sports, war games, poker, and tennis. With his characteristic aphoristic style, McLuhan describes games both as barometers of social change and as outlets for creativity in an increasingly proscribed modern world. On the one hand, McLuhan suggests that games represent the distillations of prior eras: “The social practices of one generation tend to get codified into the ‘game’ of the next,” and “When cultures change, so do games.” 40 Yet he also describes games as permitting an escape from convention, and less as an emblem of the past than an indicator of pre­sent negotiation: “Games, then, are contrived and controlled situations, extensions of group awareness that permit a respite from customary patterns. They are a kind of talking to itself on the part of society as a ­whole.” 41 Given that McLuhan ends Understanding Media with the dangers of automatism, it seems of special significance that he honors games as allowing us to break from such perils: “We think of humor as a mark of sanity for a good reason: in fun and play we recover the integral person, who in the workaday world or in professional life can use only a small sector of his being.” 42 L ­ ater, he adds, “Perhaps t­ here is, just for this reason, a desperate need for games in a highly specialized industrial culture, since they are the only form of art accessible to many minds. . . . ​Men without art, and men without the popu­lar arts of games, tend t­oward automatism.” 43 Appropriately, then, some have turned McLuhan’s media theory into playable form.44 Yet generations of media students who have been forced to read McLuhan may be surprised that he not only theorized about games but also dabbled in his own game design. Created in 1969, Distant Early Warning was a deck of thought-­provoking playing cards meant to be used as a stimulant to prob­lem solving (figure 3.5).45 The instructions state that the deck may be used to play ordinary card games but also “The Management Game,” where you take one card or sets of three and relate them to your “current hang-up.” As Flashbak writer Paul Sorene writes, “Aimed at decision-­makers and influential p­ eople, the card deck was intended to stimulate problem-­solving and thinking, in a manner that ­later came to be known as ‘thinking-­outside-­the-­box,’ and perhaps ‘lateral thinking.’ The instructions direct the player to think of a personal or business prob­lem, shuffle the card deck, select a card and then apply its message to the prob­lem.” 46 Like ­those tepid conversation-­starting prompts one can now find in Plexiglas cubes at party stores, McLuhan’s game is less fun than curious, tinged with midcentury witticisms and purposeful obscurantism. Originally given to subscribers to the “DEW-­Line Newsletter” published from 1968 to 1970, the deck clearly references the DEW line of Canadian radar stations built in the far northern Arctic in the 1950s as a Cold War prophylactic.47 It may also have influenced the 1974 deck Oblique Strategies, created by musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt as a spur to creative artistry (and which Eno still markets, now at over six editions, with the tag­line “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas”), and the eponymous 1984 song by the Canadian band Rush, in which a young child playing contentedly



Reimagining the History of Media Studies 73

figure 3.5. The Distant Early Warning card game created by Marshall McLuhan.

in his sandbox comes face-­to-­face with the perils of modern life and somehow ends up riding an intercontinental ballistic missile past the Statue of Liberty and other global landmarks. If analyzing Distant Early Warning as a game yields l­ittle, perhaps the more worthwhile questions we can ask of it are: What aspects of McLuhan’s media theory are made more salient through the deck than through his books, interviews, newsletters, cameos, and so forth? Or, how are we asked to engage the deck or our own foibles or each other through the deck in ways that suggest what it was like to live in the late 1960s in North Amer­ic­ a? ­There are, of course, many other generative areas of overlap between film and media studies “proper” and game studies, from fundamental discussions in aesthetics, language, and studies of culture to more specialized considerations of sports media, tele­vi­sion, and film criticism. Friedrich Schiller famously put play at the heart of aesthetic experience, while Ludwig Wittgenstein made games central to his theory of language as a rule-­governed system nevertheless dependent on context and ambiguous to some extent.48 For many, games, movies, and other media forms are all of a piece, ­whether as the lowbrow villains of the culture industry or redemptive forms of cultural commentary and subjects of fan appropriation. In sports, we have a playful and mediated phenomenon that tends to occupy the outskirts of both game studies and film and media studies. Yet this kind of work exemplifies the benefits of bringing the two areas into more alignment. For example, in the forthcoming book Fighting Form: Boxing, Race, and Media in

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American Modernism, Jesús Costantino “connects the seemingly disparate histories of new media technologies, modernist abstraction, and modern identity formations—­ race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality—by accounting for their shared preoccupation with the mass spectacle of boxing.” 49 My own work on the changing environmental preconditions for play, for instance, in the increasing untenableness of winter and summer sports in some parts of the world, ties together environmental media studies and game studies. With tele­vi­sion and film, we could easily find a lineage of work on game and quiz shows, dating back to at least John Fiske in Tele­vi­sion Culture.50 From Tic-­Tac-­Dough to con­temporary real­ity TV competitions, ­there is a clear spirit of gamification at work—­the application of game mechanisms and motivational strategies to nongame areas—­not just in games themselves but in culture at large, something critics have pointed out repeatedly in regard to every­thing from customer loyalty programs to occupational training. Although encounters between the bastions of film criticism and gamer credibility can be tense (witness the late Roger Ebert’s infamous proclamation that “video games can never be art”),51 ­there is much to be gained from media of all kinds sharing a playroom. If thus far I have made it sound as if film and media studies would be the primary beneficiary of an expanded notion of game studies, I should be clear that games and game studies themselves would also prosper from more analy­sis that bears the hallmarks of the larger field. It is still pos­si­ble to count on one hand the nuanced accounts of the game industry’s notoriously grueling production cultures, as well as detailed accounts of what we might call the ludic apparatus, every­ thing from the software engines used to build virtual worlds from scratch to the online distribution platforms like Valve’s Steam that have made game dispersal incredibly easy. Knowledge of broader cinematic history has usefully informed readings of games, for instance, brief forays into the idea of “game noir” via the femme fatale and titles like Team Bondi’s L.A. Noire (2011), which takes place in Los Angeles circa 1947.52 Outside the humanities, of course, games have also been integral to the development of disciplines like mathe­matics and economics, most notably in the form of game theory (one reason we call game studies “studies” and not just theory).53 Play as Method Fi­nally, Meredith Bak’s work on the ludic archive allows us to circle back to history while gesturing to some useful concluding questions of method, more than content—­ways that game studies might usefully unsettle the traditional repertoire of film and media studies methodologies. Bak, who has done extensive work on early optical toys, notes that some of her first exposure to optical toys came in the context of ­silent cinema cultures. She seeks to expand our notion of the precinematic archive and herself has benefited from “a shift within film and media history exemplified by historical accounts that consider the cinema within a broader network of audiovisual experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,”54 like Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. In “The Ludic Archive,”



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Bak delivers an account of her archival research across a number of repositories in search of the agency usually denied to nineteenth-­century c­ hildren as “media-­ makers and spectators,” and I would add, as players. Noting that play as a means of learning or discovery, while common in engineering and educational contexts, is seen as less rigorous or untenable in traditional scholarly activity, Bak ultimately argues “for play as a key methodology in the archival study of pre-­cinema apparatus. I suggest that play is not solely an act but also an attitude, mind-­set, or approach that facilitates productive encounters and discoveries within the archival context.”55 So, for instance, it makes l­ ittle sense to study Victorian toy books or nineteenth-­century optical toys without being able to assem­ble them, h­ andle them, and, yes, play with them, despite the usual curatorial injunctions against touching. In one case, Bak implores an archive employee to hold an old kaleidoscope to her eye and turn the shaft so that she can see its won­ders; in another, she spends an entire after­noon building a twenty-­nine-­cutout cardboard village that occupies the space of an entire ­table in a reading room. Bak’s reflections m ­ atter not only b­ ecause the optical toys she seeks out are typically seen as part of the precinematic archive but more so b­ ecause she so eloquently makes the case for play as a necessary, and neglected, method in the repertoire of the media scholar. In her words, “Some kinds of scholarly inquiry, especially within the humanities, where epistemological pro­cesses and interpretive methods must flexibly adapt to the subject m ­ atter and critical questions raised, necessitate more experimental and experiential approaches.”56

conclusion For a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed like ­every film studies monograph had to include an obligatory final chapter on “new” media, a kind of nod or, depending on the author, grudging or excited addendum to the primary contents of the monograph.57 Paralleling this, the gradual conversion of former film departments to departments of film and media or vari­ous related permutations also seemed to indicate that media was a relative newcomer to the hallowed halls of cinematic study. What might we gain if media studies learned to account for games not as an ancillary or bizarre realm of media inebriation (only for young, cis-­white males) but as a constituent part of any historical period’s mediated real­ ity? In part, as I have already indicated, this is an easy claim to make, as few of us would question the centrality of a more general term like play to h­ uman culture. And even though con­temporary media and communication studies departments that originated in the 1950s and 1960s technically predated commercial computer and video games, we might be sympathetic to the claim that film and other media are themselves playful apparatuses through which we invoke dif­fer­ent kinds of audiences and subject-­object relations beyond the ste­reo­type of the passive spectator. Again, I am not arguing for a conflation of film and media studies and game studies, but rather for an integration that sees games and their influence as essential

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contributors to film and media inquiry within and beyond the pre­sent moment. Given this volume’s call to consider neglected or forgotten histories of media studies, I reason that we have overlooked many impor­tant media thinkers’ ideas on games and play, which in some cases has been vital to their philosophy. Not e­ very film or media theorist w ­ ill have some shameful shuffleboard addiction or secret design aspirations, and not e­ very media scholar needs to adopt a playful approach to their material, but this kind of uncanny unsettling is healthy for our disciplinary understandings. Not only might we uncover a prehistory for game studies not exclusively tied to sociology or anthropology, but we might better understand why Siegfried Kracauer described the turn to photography as the “go-­for-­broke game” of history,58 or why Benjamin was prone to “slow-­moving” chess games played at his wife Dora’s home in Seeshaupt, in which he reportedly “played blindly” and “took forever to make a move,”59 or even why the translators of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter remark that he “cultivates a cool, flippant, and playful style.”60 Interestingly, Brendan Keogh has recently argued for a “videogame studies” distinct from game studies, in essence freed from the historical drag of general games and play and more attentive to the material, embodied, and cybernetic specificity of audiovisual-­haptic play with digital games.61 Bucking the trend of identifying a game’s essential “gameness” as something lying deep within code or algorithm, Keogh argues that the sights, sounds, and feel of gameplay are just as impor­tant to the player experience as code, and are not some superficial layer over computational pro­cesses. Keogh’s conception of embodied literacy—­the ways that players come to know games through hands, eyes, and ears—­speaks not just to phenomenology in the vein of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty but to the realities of all media sensation and perception. We could consider, in that light, the incremental game Cookie Clicker (2013) and the hard-­to-­attain achievement “Uncanny Clicker.” In order to get the achievement, a player must click at least fifteen times a second (each click translates to a cookie baked, which can then be used as currency to purchase upgrades), a rate difficult to attain by standard means. One of the game’s fan wikis recommends using e­ ither hardware or software cheats to achieve the goal, perhaps using an autoclicker program or writing scripts that make your computer do the clicking for you.62 Uncanniness h­ ere stems from a confusion between ­human and machine, w ­ hether it is someone who clicks unnaturally fast, or someone using an amalgam of ­human and machine play to do the same. But, in truth, ­every medium exerts its own distribution of perception and experience, playfully, and uncannily, across lines of our own invention.

notes 1. ​Mark J. P. Wolf, Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 2011). The full list of Landmark Video Games titles can be found at https://­www​.p­ ress​ .­umich​.­edu​/­browse​/­series​/­UM166.



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2. ​Jennifer de Winter, Shigeru Miyamoto: Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). The full list of titles in the Influential Video Game Designers series can be found at https://­www​.b­ loomsbury​.c­ om​/­us​/­series​/­influential​-­video​-­game​-­designers​/­. 3. ​See Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, eds., Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). The full list of Platform Studies volumes can be found at https://­mitpress​.­mit​.e­ du​/­books​/­series​/­platform​-s­ tudies; Game Histories volumes can be found at https://­mitpress​.­mit​.­edu​/­books​/­series​/­game​-­histories. 4. ​The first international conference on the history of games was convened in Montreal in June 2013 and resulted in a special issue of the journal Game Studies in December 2013. The conference was or­ga­nized by Carl Therrien, Raiford Guins, Henry Lowood, and Espen Aarseth. Espen Aarseth subsequently introduced “Game History: A Special Issue,” Game Studies 13, no. 2 (December 2013), http://­gamestudies​.­org​/­1302​/­. 5. ​Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Lit­er­a­ture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, eds., The Video Game Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003); Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, eds., Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, eds., The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan, eds., First-­Person: New Media as Story, Per­for­mance, and Game (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 6. ​Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 7. ​Espen Aarseth, “Computer Game Studies, Year One,” Game Studies 1, no. 1 (2001), http://­ www​.g­ amestudies​.o­ rg​/­0101​/­editorial​.­html. 8. ​Gonzalo Frasca, “Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from a Debate that Never Took Place,” Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), 2003. 9. ​Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 670–689. 10. ​Tara Fickle, The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (New York: NYU Press, 2019). Fickle’s fourth chapter, “West of the Magic Circle: The Orientalist Origins of Game Studies,” provides an excellent breakdown of Huizinga’s questionable cultural assumptions. 11. ​Aaron Trammell serves as the journal’s editor in chief (http://­analoggamestudies​.­org​/­). 12. ​Espen Aarseth, “Just Games,” Game Studies 17, no. 1 (2017), http://­gamestudies​.­org​/­1701​ /­articles​/­justgames. 13. ​T. L. Taylor, Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); T. L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: E-­Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); T. L. Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2018). 14. ​Linda Hughes, “Beyond the Rules of the Game: Why Are Rooie Rules Nice?,” in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 504–516; Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre, 2nd. ed. (Upper S­ addle River, NJ: Addison-­Wesley, 2014); Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, a ­Table, a Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History,” Game Studies 13, no. 2 (2013), http://­gamestudies​.­org​ /­1302​/­articles​/­nooney. 15. ​Carly Kocurek, ed., “Feminist Video Game Histories,” special issue of Feminist Media Histories 6, no. 1 (Winter 2020); Carly Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the

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Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Carly Kocurek, Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 16. ​James Newman, Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence (New York: Routledge, 2012). 17. ​The game was being developed at the University of California, San Diego. See “Japa­nese American Internment: The Video Game,” Angry Asian Man (blog), June 13, 2011, http://­blog​ .­angryasianman​.­com​/­2011​/­06​/­japanese​-­american​-­internment​-­video​-­game​.­html. 18​. ​ ­ GOG​.­COM (@GOGcom), “­Earlier ­today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG. A ­ fter receiving many messages from gamers, we have de­cided not to list the game in our store”; Twitter, December 16, 2020, https://­twitter​.­com​/­GOGcom​/­status​/­1339227388438306817. 19. ​Rob MacDougall, “History Invaders!,” Two-­Fisted Historian (blog), March 15, 2010, http://­ www​.­robmacdougall​.­org​/­blog​/­2010​/­03​/­history​-­invaders​/­. 20. ​Rob MacDougall, “Toys Not Games,” Two-­Fisted Historian (blog), May 25, 2010, http://­ www​.­robmacdougall​.­org​/­blog​/­2010​/­05​/­toys​-­not​-­games​/­. 21. ​Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, June 2012, 98–100. 22. ​Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 23. ​Mori, “Uncanny Valley,” 100. 24. ​As one of Unreal’s main competitors, Unity, describes it: “A game engine is a framework for game development that supports and brings together several core areas. You can import art and assets, 2D and 3D, from other software, such as Ma­ya or 3s Max or Photoshop; assem­ble ­those assets into scenes and environments; add lighting, audio, special effects, physics and animation, interactivity, and gameplay logic; and edit, debug and optimize the content for your target platforms” (“Game Engines—­How Do They Work?,” accessed May 19, 2020, https://­unity3d​.­com​ /­what​-­is​-­a​-­game​-­engine). 25. ​“A First Look at Unreal Engine 5,” May  13, 2020, https://­www​.­unrealengine​.c­ om​/­en​-­US​ /­blog​/a­ -​ ­first​-­look​-­at​-u­ nreal​-­engine​-­5. 26. ​Carrie Gouskos, “The Depths of the Uncanny Valley,” GameSpot, September  19, 2006, https://­www​.­gamespot​.c­ om​/­articles​/­the​-­depths​-o­ f​-­the​-u­ ncanny​-­valley​/­1100​-­6153667​/­. 27. ​Owen Good, “Tomb Raider Gets a Next-­Gen Facelift,” Kotaku, December 7, 2013, https://­ kotaku​.­com​/­tomb​-­raider​-­gets​-­a-​ n­ ext​-g­ en​-f­ acelift​-­1478755324. 28. ​Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecol­ogy in Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 29. ​Marisa Brook, “A Walk in the Valley of the Uncanny,” Damn In­ter­est­ing, May 2007, https://­ www​.­damninteresting​.­com​/­a​-­walk​-­in​-­the​-­valley​-­of​-­the​-­uncanny​/­. 30. ​Howard Eiland and Michael  W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 39. 31. ​Eiland and Jennings, 101. Apparently, Stefan’s first word was quiet, a somewhat sad instance of mimesis that came from living around a distracted and impoverished aspiring academic. 32. ​Eiland and Jennings, 244. 33. ​Eiland and Jennings, 1. 34. ​Eiland and Jennings, 278. 35. ​Eiland and Jennings, 280–281. 36. ​Eiland and Jennings, 6. 37. ​Eiland and Jennings, 7. 38. ​Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012). 39. ​Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play: Benjamin’s G ­ amble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 16.



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40. ​Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1994), 239.

41. ​McLuhan, 243. 42. ​McLuhan, 235. 43. ​McLuhan, 241. 44. ​Alex Kuskis, “The Medium Board Game, Based on Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Technol-

ogy,” McLuhan Galaxy (blog), May 5, 2018, https://­mcluhangalaxy​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2018​/­05​/­05​ /­the​-­medium​-b­ oard​-g­ ame​-b­ ased​-­on​-­marshall​-­mcluhans​-­laws​-­of​-­technology​/­. The game was presented by “Prof. Paolo Granata and his students in Book and Media Studies Program at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, in partnership with the School of Design at George Brown College.” 45. ​Bought from McLuhan’s grand­son Andrew, Eric’s son. 46. ​Paul Sorene, “The Complete Set of Marshall McLuhan’s Distant Early Warning Playing Cards (1969),” August 21, 2015, Flashbak, https://­flashbak​.c­ om​/­the​-­complete​-s­ et​-­of​-­marshall​ -­mcluhans​-d­ istant​-­early​-­warning​-­playing​-­cards​-­1969​-­38776​/­. 47. ​The following quote is often attributed to McLuhan in Understanding Media, but I have yet to find its source: “I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” 48. ​Friedrich Schiller, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 2001); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009). 49. ​See https://­english​.­unm​.­edu​/­about​-­us​/­people​/­faculty​/­costantino​-­jesus​.­html. See Greg Siegel, “Double Vision: Large-­Screen Video Display and Live Sports Spectacle,” Tele­vi­sion & New Media 3, no. 1 (2002): 49–73. 50. ​John Fiske, Tele­vi­sion Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010). 51. ​Roger Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” April  16, 2010, https://­www​.­rogerebert​ .­com​/­roger​-e­ bert​/­video​-­games​-­can​-n­ ever​-­be​-­art. 52. ​See Celia Pearce, “Game Noir—­A Conversation with Tim Schafer,” Game Studies 3, no. 1 (2003); and Jennifer Malkowski, “ ‘I Turned Out to Be Such a Damsel in Distress’: Noir Games and the Unrealized Femme Fatale,” in Gaming Repre­sen­ta­tion: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 19–37. 53. ​See Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Jagoda discusses, for instance, mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Be­hav­ior. 54. ​Meredith A. Bak, “The Ludic Archive: The Work of Playing with Optical Toys,” Moving Image 16, no. 1 (2016): 6. 55. ​Bak, 2. 56. ​Bak, 1. 57. ​For example, Linda Williams explores virtual porn on CD-­ROM in the epilogue to the expanded version of Hard Core: Power, Plea­sure, and the “Frenzy of the Vis­i­ble” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), originally published in 1989. 58. ​From Kracauer’s “Photography” essay, mentioned in Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play,” 11. 59. ​Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 85. 60. ​Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­ Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Winthrop-­Young and Wutz remark repeatedly in their introduction on Kittler’s “spirited playfulness meant to assault and shock conventional scholarly sensibilities” (xxxii).

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61. ​Brendan Keogh, A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 62. ​“Uncanny Clicker,” accessed May 21, 2020, https://­cookieclicker​.­fandom​.c­ om​/­wiki​/­Uncanny​ _­Clicker. As the page notes, “The variable responsible for unlocking this achievement is even called ‘autoclickerDetected.’ ” The game can be accessed at Orteil’s website: http://­orteil​ .­dashnet​.o­ rg​/­cookieclicker​/­.

UNC ANNY FILMS

Part 2

4 • FLICKERING LIGHTS AND MISCHIEVOUS STARS The Uncanny Feminism of My Twentieth ­Century HANNAH GOODWIN

The twentieth c­ entury of Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s debut film My Twentieth C ­ entury (1989) is one filled with modern technologies: strings of light bulbs bedeck trees and ­human bodies alike, railroads crisscross the continent, electricity leaps across a lecture hall in a man-­made lightning bolt, and projectors flicker with moving pictures. Th ­ ese technologies are frequently paired with cosmic images, the lights of modernity mirroring and seemingly harnessing the lights of the sky above. And throughout the film, the resonance between the technological and the cosmological spectacles dovetails with other intermingling oppositions, especially the embodiment and disembodiment of the film’s ­women characters. Technology, cosmology, and this spectral femininity are all entangled in the film’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the cinema, a medium of absence and presence, darkness and light, science and won­der. The credits sequence begins with a shot of the moon that fades into an irised scene from an old, attractions-­era film, suggesting from the outset an interplay between the glimpses of light from the past afforded by the cinema and the mysterious light of our cosmic neighbors. This doubling of screen and sky echoes a larger fascination with cinema’s inherently cosmic qualities from early in cinema’s history.1 A per­sis­tent but muted thread across many twentieth-­century writings on film alludes to astronomy and its more philosophical cousin cosmology as interwoven with cinema’s development and ontology. The confluence of changing technologies and changing theories of the universe created an intermingling of cosmological and technological sublimity in the popu­lar imaginary, as Enyedi’s vision of the twentieth ­century captures. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the cinema, where beams of light in darkness developed into a system of terrestrial 83

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stars and evoked the ethereality, spatial infinitude, and promise of travel through time associated deeply with the night sky. The early film theorist Elie Faure, for example, wrote rapturous predictions of cinema as a medium that would display the “profound universe of the . . . ​telescopic infinite, the undreamed-of dance of atoms and stars.” In moving between microcosmic and macrocosmic scales, moving pictures would express “divine intoxication,” “the spiritual life of the world,” and the joy of feeling “eternity imposed by ourselves upon nothingness.” 2 In its cosmic renderings of cinematic technologies, My Twentieth C ­ entury explores ­these aspects of the medium’s allure: transcendent light and its power to transport us across space and time. The affinities between the cinema and the cosmos are not just about light, though: Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, which became meta­phoric touch points for t­ hose articulating the time-­traveling potentials of cinema and the stars, also suggest that ­there is dark ­matter lurking in the universe. Cinema’s shadows, its per­sis­tent linkage with death and loss alongside imagination and vibrant motion, suggest another, more uncanny side to this cosmic entanglement. The film’s opening shots evince this uncanny link. The graphic match between the moon and the archival footage links cosmos and cinema through light, but the images in that footage evoke something more unsettling. We see a man with his head in a cannon as he attempts to light it, evoking the cannon in Georges Méliès’s iconic Trip to the Moon (1902) but with a twist. ­Here, as we see the same few seconds of footage played forward and backward in a loop, the link between cosmos and cinema is imbued with a dark playfulness and a perplexing temporality of a stymied, undying past. Where Soviet and U.S. visual cultures of this period so often used images of outer space to explore imperialist fantasies, h­ ere the cosmic cinema, perhaps reflecting Hungary’s tangential relationship to the space race, becomes an uncanny vector for mobilizing the marvelous while undercutting any notion of cinema as a medium merely for mankind’s extension or eternalization. The film’s story sporadically follows twins Dora and Lili (Dorota Segda), who are born on the same night that Thomas Edison debuts his light bulb in Menlo Park, New Jersey, setting up a temporal link between the birth of modern technology and the physical birth of our main characters. The twins are ­later separated by two men and a roll of dice as they sleep on a snowy night ­after their ­mother’s death. This event is witnessed by stars, whose voices are the same as t­ hose of the twins, and is surrounded by the ethereal glimmer of falling snow accompanied by eerie nondiegetic electronic ­music. Cutting from another shot of the moon, which seems to be observing them too, we see the twins next on New Year’s Eve twenty years l­ ater, hearkening in the new c­ entury. Dora, outfitted in high fashion and taking a plea­sure trip on the Orient Express, and Lili, impoverished and plotting revolution, pass each other on trains in the night, their fates still entangled despite the disparities in their paths. In the remainder of the film, each twin unknowingly sleeps with the same man, Z (Oleg Yankovskiy), who does not realize they are two dif­fer­ent ­people, and Dora steals diamond necklaces and flirts with wealthy men while Lili works with anti-­imperialist anarchist networks, attends lectures, and at



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one point is stranded in Siberia with only the stars as com­pany. And in the midst of this frenetic plot is a sequence in which a caged chimpanzee, visited by Z and Lili, matter-­of-­factly narrates to us—­and seemingly to them, too—­his story of being captured and taken from his home in Africa. As this synopsis suggests, My Twentieth C ­ entury has a good deal of humor and mischief, but under­neath its scintillating surface is the specter of some of the darker forces that accompanied modernity’s illumination: sexism, capitalism, poverty, imperialism, and rising militancy. And ­running throughout the film’s exploration of technological modernity is the per­sis­tent pairing of stars and screen, light and darkness that gives us glimpses of an uncanny, feminist-­posthuman imaginary in which cinema becomes a cosmic force rather than simply revolving around ­human life. The film is replete with a sense of the uncanny, or indeed with the uncanny in multiple senses. The most prevalent understanding of the uncanny comes via Sigmund Freud’s explanation of the unheimlich, an unhoming, the feeling wherein something is unsettlingly familiar and strange at the same time. Freud wrote of the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”3 For Freud, the uncanny lies in the resurfacing of repressed primal emotions and urges, which ­causes their transformation into “morbid anxiety.” Castration anxiety is a crucial example of this sensation in his writing, as it manifests a primal sense of loss. This version of the uncanny is very much at work in My Twentieth ­Century, which turns ­women into uncanny figures by celebrating their bodies and disembodying them, centering the notion of their repressed sexual anx­ie­ ties. But so, too, is the uncanny as that which is “mischievous” or “unreliable”—­obsolete definitions of the word that nevertheless resonate in its pre­sent incarnations—­and, as it came to mean in common parlance by the mid-­nineteenth ­century, that which partakes in “a super­natural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar.” 4 Enyedi’s summoning of the early twentieth ­century is filled with repression, mischief, eeriness, and super­natural forces alike. Taking ­these definitions as an interrelated set of meanings, the film has a number of uncanny registers. Most obvious is the doubling of the twins, who fi­nally meet in a prolonged culminating sequence in which they frolic through a maze of mirrors and lights close to the film’s end; and the twinning of the twins by the pair of mischievous stars, which help conduct us through this cinematic world with the twins’ voices in a synthesized echo, accompanied by electronic chimes. Then we have the disembodied voices of the main characters, dubbed into Hungarian in a postproduction studio with no effort to surround them with realistic ambient sound, giving them a detached, unhomed quality. The film also has a layered, uncanny relationship to history: Enyedi filmed My Twentieth ­Century on old film stock from the 1930s, which lends it a soft luminosity that evokes the period it represents and gives it an uneasy aesthetic of temporal in-­betweenness. She returns at several points in the film to archival footage that doubles this temporal effect. Her film, like many Hungarian films of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, is obsessed with history. Enyedi is interested less in the transmission of memory

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from generation to generation—­a common theme in Hungarian cinema, and one that uses cinema as a medium of preservation—­and more with the haunting twists and turns of time that defy neat progressive ordering.5 Enyedi also injects the film with an uncanny posthumanism that is both playful and unsettling. The punctuating presence of animals, who seem at first to be tangential to the narrative, is crucial to this posthumanist ethos. In addition to the aforementioned chimpanzee, a donkey wanders through the frame as the twins are separated, and again at their reunion; pigeons deliver messages; and in a sequence to which I w ­ ill return, a dog gallops to freedom in a scene that epitomizes Enyedi’s use of cinema as a cosmic medium. ­These animals are walking, flying visions of the primal forces repressed by modernity: they, in conjunction with the film’s w ­ omen characters, are technological modernity’s uncanny specters. The uncanny also manifests itself in spectacles of electrification, which are vested with a super­natural, cosmic force in Enyedi’s rendering. The film’s opening scene, continuing the imagery of the credits sequence, pre­sents a resonance between electric light and the light of the stars quite explic­itly. We see a crowd gathered around a tree, abuzz with anticipation. Suddenly a string of bright lights flashes on, illuminating the tree with an electric constellation. Throngs of spectators cheer and marvel as a similarly lit marching band parades past, light bulbs atop the musicians’ heads pulsating with light to create a sparkling vision of technological modernity. At the fringes of this crowd, however, the camera comes to rest on a melancholy face. The giggly, disembodied voices of the stars call out to this man, revealed to be Mr. Edison himself, inviting him to look up. The harbinger of technological modernity is disillusioned with his creations and casts his eyes up as if yearning for something more, something that escapes rational explanation. The electric constellation in the background gives way to one of stars twinkling in the sky. Th ­ ese stars become recurring characters throughout the film, their playful voices remarking on and even manipulating the earthly occurrences we follow. The scene summons a sense of excitement and of possibility, and foregrounds this period’s fascination with light, a fascination that went beyond scientific interest, incorporating a larger sense that forces of nature and the universe could be harnessed with the powers of new technologies. The cinema provides the direct link between the technological light and the light of the stars, not only through the compelling graphic match but b­ ecause the twinkling stars in the sky are in fact animated, a product entirely of the cinema’s own invention. But just as the opening credit sequence seems to suggest the futility of man’s desire to reach for the cosmos, h­ ere too, technology is at once alluring and already charged with a sadness and a sense of loss. Enyedi has remarked as follows on her fascination with this period: I chose the turn of the twentieth c­ entury for the center of the film b­ ecause it was ­really a magic period. And a­ fter two world wars, we r­ eally ­can’t imagine what sort of euphoric, crazy times ­those ­were. Archaic, prehistoric wishes of mankind came



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through, which w ­ ere not specifically connected to one or another technological invention. To fly has nothing to do with the telephone or photo­graph or film or electric light. But t­ here was one t­ hing which connected all t­ hese ­things—­that all of them fulfilled a childish, very deep wish of mankind—to preserve your voice, your physicality. So somehow it has something to do with eternity. To fly distance, speak in the distance. All ­these inventions w ­ ere magic.6

Enyedi captures the joy of this moment of pro­gress and pre­sents this wish of mankind, to extend ourselves through space and time, as intrinsic to cinema, echoing the sentiments of early theorists like Faure. The film also leaps from place to place across the globe, taking us from New Jersey to Budapest to Paris to Burma to Africa to Vienna, fulfilling early writing on the cinema’s ability to carry audiences along on the “craziest itineraries.”7 But the excitement surrounding technology’s possibilities is also haunted by the specter of the global upheaval of vio­lence that was already brewing. The doubling that is at the heart of the film’s narrative formally underscores a larger split: that between a world that is able to indulge in the won­ders of technological modernity, and another that is unsettled, that has been colonized and threatened by that modernity, and that rumbles with an anger that ­will not be contained. The opening scene at Menlo Park hints at this umbral side of illumination: the marching band comprises only black members, who are being used as walking infrastructure for displaying Edison’s light bulbs.8 The absence of black actors in the remainder of the film makes this presence all the more unsettling. At one point, Z is guided through the jungle in Burma, where we realize he is harvesting a fiber necessary to make Edison’s light bulbs. The infrastructure of electrification, Enyedi suggests, is not innocent. The urge to “speak at a distance,” to extend one’s physicality across the globe and perhaps beyond, is fundamentally linked, both infrastructurally and ideologically, to imperialism.9 The story of My Twentieth ­Century straddles the world of technology and magic and a world that is exploited to achieve that technological magic: Hungary is caught in the ­middle, colonized but still entangled with Eu­rope’s colonizing forces, and the twins inhabit this uncanny realm of doubled fates. From the 1930s onward, Hungarian cinema has frequently returned to themes of modernization and nostalgia for an older way of life. As a nation that was uniquely situated within Eu­rope’s networks of imperialism—­the second tier of the hyphenated Austro-­Hungarian Empire, and l­ater a satellite state of the Soviet Union—­Hungary has long occupied a liminal position between Western and Eastern Eu­rope, and between technological modernity and a more rural way of life. Hungarian cinema can be traced back to the 1896 millennium cele­bration of the Hungarian nation, where moving images w ­ ere part of the highly technologized exposition. In his history of Hungarian cinema, John Cunningham explains the irony of such an event, celebrating a thousand years of a nation that was not granted full nationhood within its empire, and whose aspirations of in­de­pen­dence had been suppressed in 1848.10 Cinema thus emerged from within Hungary’s

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ambivalent liminality within modernizing Eu­rope, and its filmmakers per­sis­tently explored the tensions intrinsic to this position. Georg Höllering’s renowned epic Hortobágy (1931) exemplifies this tension. The film, which incorporates documentary and fictional ele­ments, tells the tale of a f­ amily of ­horse­men confronted with the arrival of automobiles. As Cunningham describes it, this seminal film is a “lament at the encroachment of the soulless but efficient forces of modern civilization upon an ancient lifestyle which is obsolete, although of ­great emotional attractiveness.”11 Notably, the ­horses are characters as central to this story as their riders. Other central films in the lineage of Hungarian cinema continued to pursue themes of the displacement of traditional ways of life by modernization. One of the greatest filmmakers of the 1940s, István Szöts, consistently made films that “look out on the modern world with skepticism or contempt, find no hope in pro­ gress, and choose instead to validate a primitive existence spent in harmony with nature.”12 In his films, and Hungarian cinema through the 1960s, modernity is often equated with rampant industrialization and the accompanying destruction of natu­ral habitats and traditional values and ways of life. My Twentieth ­Century both inherits and complicates this tradition. Th ­ ere is no ­wholesale critique of modernization or romanticization of its opposite in this film. Rather, Enyedi mobilizes an uncanny resonance between cosmos and technology, providing an alternate view of modernity that is both critical and enchanted. This resonance furthermore imagines the universe as replete with super­natural forces that can be mirrored in h­ uman inventions rather than, as in many science fiction films of the United States and the Soviet Union, as new terrain to be settled and conquered. Technology, ­here, is bound up with such imperialist impulses but not reducible to them. For Enyedi, ­there is beauty and mystery in technologies that also depended on exploitation and wrought destruction. The film seeks neither to disguise that destruction nor to dismiss the beauty that comes alongside it. Katherine Gyékényesi Gatto describes the film as creating a binary between “the miracle of female-­produced life” and that of “male-­produced science,” which she traces from the film’s opening move between Edison’s light show and the scene of the twins’ birth.13 Aga Skrodzka identifies a similar opposition: that between a feminized natu­ral world, which includes the cosmos, and a masculine realm of technological invention.14 While the division between nature and technology is not as straightforward as ­either of ­these writers suggests, the opposition between masculine and feminine is striking, and based in the ­actual history of electrification. Carolyn Marvin has written about how “expertise” was ­imagined as electrification took hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 ­Women, she explains, w ­ ere relegated to a public that was dismissed as susceptible to the unscientific claims of “magicians and performers” who sought to delight rather than inform.16 My Twentieth ­Century shows this sidelining and its absurdity. ­Here, we see ­women banished from the circles of electrical expertise even as their bodies, like ­those of the players in the marching band, are used as moving displays for the new technologies.



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The film makes this positioning of ­women explicit through two parallel scenes: one an electric demonstration at the Sorbonne presented to an audience of men, and the other a lecture by the misogynist Austrian phi­los­o­pher Otto Weininger to an audience of ­women. In the first of ­these two scenes, an intertitle announces the esteemed location: the Sorbonne, France’s premier educational institution. Rows on rows of identically dressed men sit stiffly in rapt attention, watching a stage on which a lecturer grandiosely demonstrates the conduction of millions of volts of electricity through the air. He requests a volunteer for his next demonstration, in which one member of his audience ­will serve to ground the lightning bolt of electricity. The rest of the audience, in unison, parts ways, and the two men face each other, pompously demonstrating at once the visual power of the new technology and their own might in conveying it. Man harnesses a jolt of sublimity, thereby affirming man’s control of technology and, seemingly, its cosmic forces. The absence of ­women from this audience is unquestioned; while the demonstration seems nearly identical in its reliance on impressive spectacle to the public exposition and electric shows we see in other scenes, h­ ere the gentlemanly suits and ties worn by each unsmiling member of the audience impart a sense of solemn dignity. ­These men believe themselves to be among the few who ­will understand, rather than mindlessly marvel at, the new technology. They are participants in the formation of knowledge. Their pompous dignity is undercut by Enyedi’s humorous approach to the scene, which exaggerates the men’s uniform reactions and self-­seriousness. This lightning show is mirrored by a l­ ater scene of Otto Weininger lecturing an audience of ­women. The scene of this lecture begins in a similar way to the one at the Sorbonne, with the camera angled up at an audience of ­women that appears, like the gentlemen before them, fairly uniform: the ­women’s heads move in synchrony as they watch the speaker at the front of the lecture hall. But as the tone of the lecture shifts, marked differences emerge. Where the gentlemen of the Sorbonne moved as one oceanic body to make way for the demonstration, the camera largely maintaining its stable a­ ngle from below, h­ ere, the individual w ­ omen begin to act of their own accord, with the camera’s perspective changing to follow them. As Weininger begins to mount an absurd argument against the rationalism and even the very existence of ­women, some ­women cry out against him, with ­others shushing, and we see some begin to filter out of the audience, one rogue person at a time. The lecture attempts to divide ­women into just two pos­si­ble categories: ­mother and whore. As the story of the film revolves around its trinity of female characters portrayed by Segda—­one a ­mother, one a “whore” of sorts, and one (Dora) who fits neither category—­the film exposes the laughability of such a binary. When Weininger declares with deranged anger, “­Woman is quasi-­logical, amoral, has no symbol, no direction; w ­ oman d­ oesn’t exist, d­ oesn’t exist, ­doesn’t exist,” Enyedi undermines his statement with camerawork that follows individuals and embraces Dora’s first-­person perspective as she listens with a look of skeptical attentiveness, pained embarrassment, and then, perhaps, bottled rage.

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In fact, for Enyedi, the negation of ­women becomes a basis for a power­ful, feminist uncanny. Men are enraptured by modern technology and its powers of light, which seem to extend powers of man but in the end are dissatisfying. W ­ omen, the nothings of society, unravel the trappings of modernization while retaining an uncanny illumination that exists as presence and absence at once. This uncanny status is especially apparent in a visually arresting sequence early in the film, when Z is shown watching an electrified dance at an Edison light show. We see two ­women’s figures, one dark and one illuminated. The bodies are twinned, moving together in a careful, often symmetrical pattern, but one is a shadow, only reflecting and obscuring the light of the other. As the two bodies move, one defined by presence and the other by absence, the shadow is as hauntingly beautiful as the light. It is the darkness that accompanies the scintillating lights of modernity. The ­women’s bodies h­ ere double the cosmic dance of a solar eclipse, one celestial body moving in front of another, masking the other’s light and revealing, in a halo of light against darkness, its own dark form. Light and darkness go hand in hand, one only perceptible b­ ecause of the other, and w ­ omen embody this power­ful, uncanny pairing. In Enyedi’s twinkling intermingling of electricity and a feminized cosmos, we see a vision of the twentieth c­ entury in which the rightful place of technology is as feminine magic. Technology as instrument is associated with disillusionment, but its mysterious forces—­its uncanny registers—­remain potent throughout. In this feminist uncanny, ­women are figures who straddle absence and presence, darkness and light, earthly and cosmic, and who transcend ordinary limits of space and time. Technology mobilized for this—­for freeing the imagination and resisting the “grounding” that is put on display in the Sorbonne sequence—is liberating and bewitching rather than destructive. Karen Beckman, in her book Vanis­hing W ­ omen, traces the staged disappearance of ­women’s bodies from nineteenth-­century magic shows to Hollywood cinema, arguing that the act of making a ­woman dis­appear is a dehumanizing exertion of control over the “very possibility of [her] presence.”17 Beckman argues that absence is at the core of discourse about w ­ omen historically as well, g­ oing back to Freud’s defining of female genitalia as the lack of a penis. Making ­women dis­ appear, Beckman explains, plays with anx­i­eties about this more fundamental absence. But t­ here is also power in invisibility. In Enyedi’s text, the proclamation of ­women’s nothingness becomes a joke as the distant stars surpass all the energy of electrified modernity. The uncanny specter encompasses the simultaneous threats of disappearance and visibility: the specter may be disembodied and invisible, but it also haunts, exerting its forces and making appearances even ­after it was presumed gone. Aga Skrodzka reads the film as defying this erasure of ­women. She writes, “By opening her film with the scene of birth and then throughout the film consistently framing images of female carnal plea­sure, Enyedi gives w ­ oman her body back.”18 This is true, to an extent: the camera lingers on Dora’s flirtatious smile and celebrates her voluptuousness. But the birth scene, which Skrodzka celebrates as



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embodying, is also puzzlingly disembodied: we see the two babies appear, already wrapped in swaddling clothes, from beneath the skirt of a ­woman, also played by Segda, who is clearly well past the pro­cess of giving birth. A subsequent scene that takes place outside the ordinary time of the narrative references the immaculate conception in a way that further removes this ­mother figure from any reference to carnal plea­sure. And the stars, which guide the film altogether, are an utterly disembodied feminine presence strewn through the night sky. ­Women are thus si­mul­ ta­neously embodied and disembodied, and Weininger’s declaration that they do not exist, rather than being a full annihilation, becomes a cele­bration of possibility. For from this void emerges a power­ful feminist uncanny, one that forges an alliance between nonhuman and w ­ omen that hinges on their nonexistence. In being deemed inhuman, w ­ omen are also granted a nonhuman status that is, in this film’s logic, a source of uncanny power—­uncanny in both its capacity for mischief and its ability to conjure the super­natural from the ordinary. Skrodzka notes a “solidarity between ­women and animals” in this film based on their shared embodiment. But I think their bond is stronger yet, grounded in the posthuman ethos that pervades Enyedi’s film.19 I have already mentioned the recurring figure of the donkey and the sad tale of the chimpanzee that finds itself a victim of imperialist voyeurism. The politics of this posthumanism are alluded to when Lili drops a book early on in the film, as she recites the ingredients for making a bomb. We cut to a close-up of the book in the snow: Mutual Aid: A ­Factor of Evolution, it reads.20 It is worth noting that the version ­here is in German, with the title Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Tier-­und Menschenwelt, or Mutual Aid in the Animal and ­Human World, making the book’s focus on animals more explicit. This 1902 text by Rus­sian phi­los­o­pher Peter Kropotkin, notably anachronistic in the context of this film, was a foundational one in the Marxist circles that Lili is a part of. It uses models from the animal world to argue for communism and against Darwin’s theory of natu­ral se­lection. The close-up of the book, from which Z ­later reads aloud, underscores the importance of the nonhuman in this film. The ­human world we see is one in which vio­lence roils beneath a surface of sublimity. But animals look on innocently, representing an aborted alternate path through the twentieth ­century that would be premised on mutual care. Just a­ fter Z happens upon the book and reads about a blind pelican being fed by the fellow members of its flock, we cut to one of the film’s most peculiar, humorous, and yet moving scenes. In it, we see a melancholy dog hooked up to a contraption that seems to be monitoring its brainwaves. Suddenly we—­and the dog—­hear the voices of Segda’s stars. “Hey, you!” they call out to him. One voice whispers to the other, “Let’s screen something for it. Perhaps it likes the cinema, right?” An orchestral score sets in, and suddenly we cut to footage of a dandelion bursting open, animated by the powers of time-­lapse photography. The dog is riveted by this cinematic world, with clips of he­li­cop­ters, faraway lands, skyscrapers, clover, bees, machine gears, masses of ­people: visions of modern life across the globe, and exactly the kind of footage that characterized the cinema of attractions

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and caused rhapsodic musings on the powers of cinema to transport audiences across space and time. We see archival footage of Tolstoy at home on his estate not long before he made his escape from this genteel life via train and subsequently died; this media spectacle was so quickly and widely publicized that it has been conflated with the rise of another modern technology: the tele­gram.21 Fleetingly, and unsettlingly, we see footage of a concentration camp, footage that is for the late twentieth-­century audience archival but that belongs to the dog’s ­future, a contortion of time that only the cinema, and t­ hese omniscient cinematic stars, can accomplish. They exist in a temporality that is unhinged from linearity, one that can move as easily into the ­future as into the past. A ­future haunts a pre­sent, or one past haunts another, as ­these layered temporalities also haunt our pre­sent. The film returns to a humorous register as one star exclaims to the other, “[The dog] ­hasn’t seen anything of the world, except outside of the laboratory! Now, pay attention.” The ­music crescendos to a finale as footage of cats galore floods the screen, inciting the dog to burst ­free of his laboratory confines, bounding across fields, sea, and beach, for the next five minutes of the film, a duration that makes it one of the most sustained scenes of the film despite its narrative remove from the story of Dora and Lili. Cinema occupies a unique place among modern technologies h­ ere. It is associated with exploitation, such as that of the canine research subject. But it also promises an escape from the darker forces of modernity and a means of bearing witness to them. In this scene one might see echoes of Benjamin’s exhortation that cinema might become a tool ­either of oppression—­a means of aestheticizing politics—or of liberation, politicizing art.22 The feminized, cosmic, uncanny cinema offered by ­these mischievous stars is one that ultimately testifies and liberates. H ­ umans are only tangential to this scene of collaboration between cosmos and animal; cinema may be created by man, but h­ ere it is only a manifestation of a larger cosmic idea of a spatiotemporal mobility that precedes ­humans and does not rely on their presence. This mobility, coupled with the film’s preservation of ­human life in the face of the inevitable tug of death, is crucial to the entanglement of stars and screen. My Twentieth ­Century’s uncanny rendering of film’s archival, preservative quality invites us to think about film as a cosmological medium, one that transports light across space and time. The film imagines cinema as a medium of spatiotemporal distortions, of reencountering distant pasts and preserving the pre­sent for the ­future, even of accessing that ­future. As such it sees cinema as inherently cosmic, much like some of the ­earlier theories of film. Elie Faure and Siegfried Kracauer both discuss the ways in which cinema, in recasting light of the past, mirrors the way light from distant stars beams ­toward earth their light from long ago, thanks to the limitations of the speed of light in reaching us.23 Reversing this perspective, both theorists also point out that distant stars in return bear witness to earth’s past, at intervals that vary with their distance from earth. So a hy­po­thet­i­cal viewer on Proxima Centauri, our stellar neighbor at four light-­years away, sees earthly light from four years ago, but a more distant star, equipped with an impossibly



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power­ful telescope, could witness earthly happenings from thousands of years ago, events of ­great import (Moses parting the Red Sea) and ephemeral gestures (a crucifying soldier’s ­horse kicking up dust) alike. A trip away from earth at a speed faster than light would afford the space-­traveling viewer a mobility not only through space, with an omniscient gaze traversing any corner of the earth, but also through time, zipping through history like a reel of film whose time lapse is massively compressed. Enyedi plays with this perspective in My Twentieth C ­ entury, albeit without the biblical references foregrounded by Faure and Kracauer. The stars’ gaze, indicated by the twinned voices’ lively exclamations over what they see on earth, often directs where the film takes us next. ­After the stars talk to Edison in the film’s opening scene, for example, they get distracted by the scene of the twins’ birth in Budapest, and we follow their voices t­ here, a move that sets up the film’s primary narrative. The cinema, then, is aligned with this cosmic perspective, similarly mobile and fluid, able to flit from one corner of the earth to another, zooming in on par­tic­u­lar creatures, h­ uman and inhuman, and able to follow, fiddle with, and abandon their stories. But ­here, the cosmic cinema is guided by an uncanny feminine and used for liberation of the nonhuman, rather than providing means for man to preserve himself for eternity. In My Twentieth C ­ entury, the power­ful absence of ­women is made uncannily palpable in the displacement of voices and the disembodiment of the feminine stars. The doubling of ­women with stars is vital. Stars, notably, are inherently spectral too. Their light reaches us from the past, so that all we see is a trace.24 So the astral presence of ­these characters is playfully haunting; they are at once ­there and impossibly distant. And in their flickering existence, their starry twinkling that goes in and out, doubling and disappearing, Enyedi’s uncanny w ­ omen are linked with the cinema, the ultimate medium of presence and absence entangled. Cinema, a­ fter all, pre­sents us with presences that necessarily belong to the past. Mary Ann Doane describes this cinematic temporality in The Emergence of Cinematic Time; presence is always part of the experience of film, she explains, ­because the index is a testament to presence, yet the film index, unlike other indexes of immediate presence such as the weathervane, testifies only to the presence of something in the past.25 Laura Mulvey further links cinema’s temporality, its oscillation between stillness and motion, death and animation, absence and presence, with the uncanny, writing, “The blurred bound­aries between the living and the not-­ living touch on unconscious anx­i­eties that then circulate as fascination as well as fear in the cultures of the uncanny.”26 Thus cinematic presence is imbued with uncanny absence, just as are the ­women of this film. While other scholars have written of nature and the cosmos in My Twentieth ­Century as providing a perspective on history that counteracts that of a more violent technological modernity, the two are in fact entirely interconnected. The film’s per­sis­tent doubling of electric and cosmic light, rather than putting the two in opposition, allows for the fascination and magic of the cosmos to be reflected in technology. Enyedi’s depictions of the cinema, in par­tic­ul­ar, bring the film’s

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recurring technological and cosmological imagery together. At once a product of scientific development and a source of cosmic magic, cinema provides an ave­nue through history that defies any narrative of pro­gress but does not dismiss technoscientific advances or their inventors. Through her invocation of cinema as a cosmic messenger, Enyedi grants the medium the playful, time-­bending, and defiant modality of the stars at the same time as she imbues it with the power of other modern technologies to enchant. Guided by disembodied ­women, including the feminized stars and Enyedi herself, the film injects a world of masculine modernity with a mesmerizing femininity. Cinema is the medium through which we see this feminine force acting on the h­ uman world. And in its simultaneous luminosity and darkness, its invocation of presence that hinges on absence, and its obsession with corporeality even as it decenters the ­human, cinema is a vector of uncanny powers that echo the film’s narrative specters and doublings. ­Toward the end of the film, another scene provides a further cinematic decentering of ­human agents of which the dog’s adventure is emblematic. We see a ­cinema hall bustling with activity, with many small screens along a wall, each ­surrounded by crowds and displaying familiar films from the era of attractions‚ including Méliès vignettes. The camera tracks from screen to screen, capturing the sheer delight of visual play, of coming together to witness spectacle. Suddenly a grenade explodes—­set off, we know, by Lili—­and the cinema hall vacates immediately. Rather than following the crowds, in a beautiful long take, Enyedi’s camera lingers on the projected images, tracks out along the wall, and then moves ­behind the wall to focus on the line of projectors as they continue to cast their light, indifferent to the lack of ­human audience. For several long seconds, we hear only the whir of the projectors and see only their light beaming out into nothingness. This scene feels eerily apocalyptic, especially now, as we think of what the technological developments of the twentieth ­century have wrought on the possibility of a sustained ­human f­uture. The film seems to ask, What is the cinema without ­human spectators? What happens to the archives of our lives and planet, preserved and recast by film and by cosmic light, when ­there is no ­human audience to see them? The prospect seems at once bleak and remarkable. Th ­ ere is something uncanny in the light of an empty cinema, like the light of stars cast into a universe devoid of h­ uman eyes to see them. The sequence invokes a poignant posthumanism, ruminating on the meaning of archives in a world absent our species. This question has par­tic­ul­ar weight in our current state of global environmental collapse, but the absence in this film is one that resonates with our ­human concession, across time, that our own species presence is contingent. The sequence speaks to our current grappling with the meaning of archives in a world in which our species might soon no longer exist. Notably, too, the archival footage beamed from the stars, while it includes h­ uman beings, does not center them. B ­ ecause the film has explic­itly linked cosmos and cinema—­through the opening’s match between moon and irised screen, and through the stars somehow channeling cinema to the poor lab dog—­this sequence, to me, invites such a cosmological read-



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ing. The stars w ­ ill continue to shine, the images of what we have done w ­ ill continue to circulate and play out in some cosmic sphere long ­after we have gone. The film concludes where it began, with another spectacle of modern achievement. Mr. Edison is demonstrating his new device, the telegraph, as cameras flash all around him. He promises the transfer of a message around the world in just five minutes. It reads, “This is a wonderful world, created by God, and so is Man, who is learning to mold this wonderful world.” At that moment a homing pigeon—­ soon, we presume, to be unhomed by this technology—­appears at the win­dow. Pigeon and man look at each other melancholically, as if silently lamenting the displacement Edison’s technology ­w ill bring. But as the final five minutes of the film tick by, mea­sur­ing the time of the tele­gram’s travel “across oceans and continents,” a haunting orchestral score accompanies a stunning long take in which the camera seamlessly travels along a river, devoid of ­human life, taking us to some unknown place, and releasing us into the open sky. Even as it evokes the path of Edison’s message, this ending suggests something more: a larger world that might be molded by mankind, but that continues to exist in resplendent beauty without us.

notes 1. ​I explore the rich technological and theoretical entanglement of astronomy and the cinema

in Hannah Goodwin, “Archives of Light: Cinematic and Cosmological Time” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2017). 2. ​Elie Faure, “The Art of Cineplastics,” in French Theory and Criticism 1907–1939, ed. and trans. Richard Abel (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1988), 261. 3. ​Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. Alix Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, 1917–1919: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 220. 4. ​ Oxford En­glish Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v., “uncanny,” accessed 15 June 2020, http://­www​.­oed​ .­com​.­proxy​.­mtholyoke​.­edu:2048​/­. 5. ​Catherine Portuges, “Intergenerational Memory: Transmitting the Past in Hungarian Cinema,” “Quo Vadis Eu­ro­pean Cinema?,” ed. Luisa Rivi, Spectator 23, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 44–52. 6. ​“Interview with Ildikó Enyedi,” filmed by Peter Strickland, My Twentieth ­Century, dir. Ildikó Enyedi (1989; Second Run, 2015), Blu-­ray. 7. ​Rémy de Gourmont, “Epilogues: Cinematograph,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, ed. and trans. Richard Abel (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1988), 47–50. 8. ​Amanda Philips and Alison Reed have written about the practice of demonstrating new technologies through the exploitative “othering” of ­people of color in their work “Additive Race: Colorblind Discourses of Realism in Per­for­mance Capture Technologies,” Digital Creativity 24 (2013): 130–144. 9. ​Aniko Imre has commented on the relationship between the film’s feminism and its commentary on imperialism. See Aniko Imre, “Twin Pleasures of Feminism: Orlando Meets My Twentieth C ­ entury,” Camera Obscura 18, no. 3 (2003): 176–211. 10. ​John Cunningham, Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex (New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), 5–6. 11. ​Cunningham, 12. 12. ​Cunningham, 15.

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13. ​Katherine Gyékényesi Gatto, “Her Twentieth ­Century: The Postmodern Cinema of Ildikó

Enyedi,” Hungarian Studies Review 26, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 123–131.

14. ​Aga Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Eu­rope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-

sity Press, 2012), 123–166.

15. ​Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies W ­ ere New: Thinking about Electric Communication

in the Late Nineteenth ­Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 16. ​Marvin, 62. 17. ​Karen Beckman, Vanis­hing W ­ omen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 68. 18. ​Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema, 132. 19. ​Skrodzka, 135. 20. ​“Interview with Ildikó Enyedi.” 21. ​Mary Beard, “Facing Death with Tolstoy,” New Yorker, November 5, 2013. I owe the identification of Tolstoy and the accompanying insights to Dr. Maria Corrigan of Emerson College and Dr. Elena Glazov-­Corrigan of Emory University, experts in Eastern Eu­ro­pean cinema and lit­er­ a­ture, respectively. 22. ​Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008 [1936]), 18–55. 23. ​Elie Faure, The Art of Cineplastics, trans. Walter Pach (Boston: Four Seas Press, 1923), 11; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Real­ity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 78. 24. ​See Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: ­Theses on the Photography of History (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1997), 30. 25. ​Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 219. 26. ​Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 32.

5 • THE SUBLIME BODY ­ NDER THE SIGN OF U DEVELOPMENTALISM The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Malaysian Politics, and Global Markets P E T E R J . B LO O M

The effects of expenditure and loss define the expansive global pump and loot scheme associated with the Malaysian public liability com­pany known as 1 Malaysian Development Berhad (1MDB). Due to the involvement of far-­flung and sensational investment vehicles, including the film The Wolf of Wall Street (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2013), the scandal remains a recurrent international news item and metonym for money laundering on a global scale. The fraud involved the misappropriation of assets held as part of 1MDB, which was established in 2009 as a publicly funded national trust to promote “sustainable economic development” in Malaysia; estimates of the fraud range from $4.5 to $7.5 billion.1 The scandal has implicated not only former prime minister Najib Razak, his ­family, and intermediaries as perpetrators, but also the global financial system that facilitated the flow of misdirected assets. An ongoing investigation has implicated some of the best-­ known investment h­ ouses, including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs, along with Saudi and UAE sovereign wealth funds. In the popu­lar press and U.S. federal court proceedings, the centerpiece of the 1MDB scandal is The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The largest proportion of the $100 million production bud­get was traced to the defrauding of 1MDB via Red Granite Pictures. Though it constituted only a modest segment of the 1MDB money trail, the film title was named as defendant in the extensive U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) money-­laundering civil indictment in 2016. So far, $200 million was returned to Malaysia by the DOJ in May 2019, $60 million of which was paid by Red Granite Pictures, the majority shareholding producer of 97

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The Wolf of Wall Street.2 The 1MDB scandal has become ineluctably tied to The Wolf of Wall Street as cinematic allegory. Just as the film narrative depicts how ill-­ gotten gains within the Wall Street film genre function as a white-­collar adaptation of the gangster film, the film’s production bud­get was derived, in part, from the looting of 1MDB assets. This essay describes the intersection between financial fraud, Malaysian politics, and “Hollywood bling” through an examination of the 1MDB debacle. The uncanny figures within the context of what I describe as the evasive sublime body. The imagination of developmentalism serves as background, global market dynamics as foreground, and The Wolf of Wall Street as an under­lying narrative genre. Georges Bataille’s notion of expenditure (dépense) leads us to consider the relevance of a gift economy of excess and exchange with its own symbols and agents.3 Michael Laurence suggests that Bataille’s conception of “non-­productive” expenditure is key to understanding the narrative agency of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in The Wolf of Wall Street.4 By extension, I consider a broader context for expenditure that references not only the film as narrative, but a larger financial system that underpins it. The dialectical relationship between “Hollywood bling” and developmentalist assertions of value suggests an unfolding context for the uncanny as doppelgänger in The Wolf of Wall Street, but more crucially a space of “group lactification” within ongoing elaborations and adaptations of oral eroticism in psychoanalytic discourse that contributes to another story about financial and po­liti­cal corruption. 1MDB continues to reveal a widening global network in the exercise of po­liti­cal and financial power among the dramatis personae. “Hollywood bling” may then be considered a “hall of mirrors” and suggests operations of distortion.5 The projection of luxury dispels and overcomes qualities of abjection associated with the po­liti­cal and financial system that enables access to excessive acts of expenditure in the first place. More specifically, globalized financial institutions ­were found to have assisted in siphoning assets from a public trust at the behest of a prime minister who then redistributed them within his own network of enablers as part of a “libidinal economy” of value.6 The financial excesses and social depravity depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street as film ­narrative may have merely been a scaled-­down version of the ­actual lavish entertainment and production funding offered by Red Granite Pictures starting in 2010. The context and effects of expenditure allow us to consider how global networks of speculative finance may be understood as part of an exchange economy derived from potlatch.7 The DOJ has claimed that $4.5 billion was embezzled from 1MDB between 2009 and 2014, but additional estimates and calls for compensation have since increased with further scrutiny. A 2018 criminal probe in Singapore has recommended $7.5 billion for repatriation in a bribery scheme that involved Goldman Sachs se­nior officers who facilitated fraudulent bond offerings as part of the same case.8 In February 2020, the newly appointed Malaysian government settled with Goldman Sachs for $3.9 billion, which only amounted to $2.5 billion—an exces-



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sively reduced rate for which Goldman had reportedly reserved $10 billion to cover settlements.9 In the 2016 deposition, the nature of the money laundering and misuse of public funds is described in three discrete phases that involved a wide range of global financial institutions, po­liti­cal officials, and intermediaries that used the financial reserves of 1MDB.10 The DOJ filing specifically focused on money laundering that was channeled exclusively through U.S. financial institutions and sought to return ­these assets to Malaysia. The civil action of July 20, 2016, was filed ­under the name U.S. Government v. The Wolf of Wall Street Motion Picture. Several additional assets w ­ ere named in the deposition, including real estate holdings in New York and Los Angeles; a jewelry collection; a Bombardier jet; and a series of artworks by Jean-­Michel Basquiat, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. Though t­hese assets amounted to more than $1 billion, it turns out that they ­were part of a much larger portfolio. Many personal “gifts” ­were offered to celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Australian model Miranda Kerr that w ­ ere ­later returned as part of the DOJ recovery effort. The civil action did not include the 300-­foot yacht Equanimity—­later sold for $126 million—­among other extravagant excesses.11 The press conference to announce the ­legal action was convened during the last few months of the Obama administration by Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney general, who declared that it was the largest single action ever prosecuted by the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, which was initiated by her pre­de­ces­sor, Eric Holder, in 2010. This initiative was established to forfeit the proceeds of foreign official corruption and, where pos­si­ble, to use the recovered assets to benefit the ­people harmed.12 Though the spirit of this initiative may have since lapsed given that the former deputy finance chairman of the Republican Party, Elliott Broidy, and his wife, Robin Rosenzweig, attempted to lobby the Trump administration to abandon prosecuting the 1MDB case, the investigation and court ruling ­were successfully completed without interference.13 While the initial story was first reported in the Malaysian press by The Edge (Markets Malaysia), the Sarawak Report, and Malaysiakini, it was followed by the investigative journalism of the Wall Street Journal and subsequent DOJ ­legal proceedings that became a basis for significant protests in Malaysia.14 The stream of ill-­gotten gains that have since come to light through ongoing investigation demonstrate the intricacies of a clan-­based enrichment scheme that sought to extend its prestige and legitimacy in the global market system. The reports merge financial malfeasance with entertainment news, involving parties on yachts and in private airplanes featuring expensive champagne and caviar with a cast of American hip-­hop and entertainment celebrities, including Swizz Beatz, Paris Hilton, Kerr, Alicia Keys, and Busta Rhymes. A massive party was held at a Las Vegas casino whose profligate scale dwarfs anything ­imagined by Jordan Belfort in the pages of The Wolf of Wall Street. Belfort, in fact, was l­ ater quoted as having said that the parties and events associated with Red Granite Pictures involved “stolen money” and ­were clearly a “scam.” He claims that it was for this reason that

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he stayed away from ­these promotional events, apparently reformed from a previous life of debauchery and swindle.15 In January 2020, Belfort brought allegations of fraud against Red Granite on the basis of its tainting of the 2009 follow-up book, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street. It was part of an initial contract for which he is claiming $300 million in damages.16 The Red Granite attorney describes the claim as “supremely ironic,” implying a series of chiasmic reversals blurring the line between Belfort’s founding act of fraud and its market value as literary property and film production. Details of the extravagant parties and personal offerings presided over by the Malaysian financier Jho Low (aka Low Taek Jho) have been described in Billion Dollar Whale, the popu­lar book about this unfolding story.17 The authors, Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, are Wall Street Journal reporters who followed the development of the story a­ fter it was first uncovered by Clare Rewcastle Brown. She is founder of the activist anticorruption website the Sarawak Report, well known for its muckraking journalism in Sarawak (East Malaysia, located in the northwest of Borneo Island) about the timber industry and its plutocratic kingpin, Abdul Taïb Mahmud. The Sarawak Report is also the title of a book detailing Rewcastle Brown’s own involvement in gaining access to some of the most significant under­lying evidence. As she explains, Xavier Justo, head of the London office of PetroSaudi International, provided most of the essential documents. Justo initially made contact with her, and she, in turn, served as intermediary for an agreement between him and Tong Kooi Ong, editor of The Edge (Markets Malaysia) newspaper and website, who published many of the initial reports.18 The spectacular parties associated with the release of The Wolf of Wall Street that featured Jho Low and Riza Aziz as benefactors ­were actively covered by the tabloid press, along with the disapprovingly vicarious New York Times exposé that appeared in 2015.19 And yet, another strange twist to the story is that the motion picture rights to Billion Dollar Whale ­were optioned and sold to SK Global’s Ivanhoe Pictures, the producers of Crazy Rich Asians (dir. Jon M. Chu, 2018), soon ­after its publication. In addition, Michelle Yeoh, one of the best-­known Malaysian actresses and former Bond girl, entered into a coproduction arrangement to make this film, which has led to a significant social media reaction among Malaysians who see this as yet another example of dishonesty and profiteering from the ongoing spectacle of corruption at their own expense.20 At the center of the story in Billion Dollar Whale is Jho Low, who served as intermediary for Najib Razak, the so-­called boss who was the Malaysian prime minister from 2009 to 2018.21 Low has been described as a close friend of Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz, and claimed to be the mastermind of a complex money-­ laundering scheme that began with the establishment of 1MDB in July 2009. It was spun off from the Terengganu Investment Authority (TIA) that became incorporated as a sovereign wealth fund in February 2009, a few months e­ arlier, and was claimed to be a model for a new kind of Malaysian strategic investment fund.22 TIA’s financing structure included the issue of RM 5 billion ($1.14 billion)



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Islamic medium-­term notes, known as sukuk, or an Islamic direct investment bond instrument. Islamic investment vehicles seek to circumvent the collection of interest understood as akin to usury ­under Islamic law through other structures. The acceptability of gift exchange associated with titled figures is one pathway for preserving and increasing the value of par­tic­ul­ar assets. While the details remain unconfirmed, it has been claimed that the financing structure for TIA facilitated a subsequent partnership with PetroSaudi International that contributed a significant financial investment; it functions as a private com­pany owned by the Saudi royal ­family for which Sheikh Tarek Obaid served as principal.23 Low has been credited as the architect of this elaborate financial operation, and yet its complexity confounds single authorship. Other recent commentators have pointed to the critical role of the major investment h­ ouses, particularly Goldman Sachs, as directly implicated in the elaborate orga­nizational modeling designed to obfuscate and skirt regulatory scrutiny.24 Low’s role looms large b­ ecause he is closely identified with the junkets and offerings to Hollywood and hip-­hop celebrities and also has a relationship with members of the Saudi royal f­ amily. Th ­ ese involvements are said to have ingratiated him with Najib’s inner circle and the Malaysian sultans. His purported comrade, Riza Aziz, was charged in Malaysia with five counts of money laundering in 2019 as head of Red Granite Pictures, but Aziz’s case was recently “discharged,” and he may be acquitted if he returns $107.3 million of overseas assets to the Malaysian government.25 Red Granite contributed financing not only to The Wolf of Wall Street but also to several other profitable Hollywood films, including Dumb and Dumber To (dir. Peter and Bobby Farrelly, starring Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey, 2014) and ­Daddy’s Home (dir. Sean Anders, starring ­Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, 2015).26 Aziz is the son of Rosmah Mansour from her first marriage, and she is depicted in the popu­lar press as the tyrannical spouse of Najib in a melodramatic sideline that points to a context for “­free” expenditure. Her expensive jewelry, Hermès Birkin tote bags that range in price from $11,900 to $300,000, and large sums of cash in U.S. dollars ­were cata­loged upon her arrest in 2018.27 Revelations of the scandal led to Najib’s defeat in the 2018 Malaysian elections by none other than the nonagenarian Mahathir Mohamed. Dr. M, as he is known in a tongue-­and-­cheek lexical attribution to James Bond’s superior in the fictional universe of Ian Fleming, was also the longest-­standing prime minister in Malaysia since in­de­pen­dence in 1957. He served from 1981 to 2003 and swept into office as the only ­viable opposition candidate from 2018 to 2020. This was in spite of Dr. M’s well-­known penchant for po­liti­cal and financial self-­dealing. Nonetheless, his prominence as a critic of Najib managed to transform the rallying cry for change into po­liti­cal action. While the evidence presented against Najib on trial has been damning, notwithstanding a campaign for his own exoneration involving its own jingle,28 the outcome remains indeterminate with the most recent change in government as of March 2020.29 This par­tic­u­lar dimension of the story retains a quality of ambivalence that serves as a basis for f­uture investigation. Dr. M’s forced

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resignation as prime minister on February 24, 2020, was followed by his assertation that the U.S. DOJ should “think twice” before returning any of the additional 1MDB stolen money given that the same po­liti­cal party accused of graft is back in power.30 And yet, in April  2020 an additional $300 million was returned in response to the pleading of Muhyiddin Yassin, the recently appointed prime minister.31 ­These assets ­were previously held in trust for Malaysia by the DOJ following the return and liquidation of 1MDB assets on U.S. territory.

the wolf of wall street in the film reviews The unfolding story of 1MDB continues to startle not only as a cover-up involving high-­ranking Malaysian government officials but in global centers of financial power. The 1MDB scandal provides a context for symbolic exchange of expenditure that is partially encoded by its spectral doppelgänger, The Wolf of Wall Street. Some of the more theoretically inclined commentary about the film has invoked the symptomatic effects of finance capital, as in Clint Burnham’s recent short book, which reads its narrative intent through the prism of Fredric Jameson’s writings.32 However, it has only been trade publications like Variety and financial news outlets like the Wall Street Journal that have reported on how 1MDB assets w ­ ere involved in financing this production, among ­others, as money-­laundering vehicles. A majority of the reviews and articles about the film describe it through an un­perturbed format of aesthetic, narrative, and social criticism. Given its explicit sexual content and display of criminal be­hav­ior, the film was banned in Malaysia even though it was passed by the censors with significant cuts. In neighboring Singapore, by contrast, it showed in nine theaters with significant cuts and remained ­limited to viewers over twenty-­one years old. The reviews upon its release in The Straits Times, among other En­glish language outlets in Singapore, closely paralleled the positive reviews in the U.S. press as part of a well-­funded promotional campaign ­later enhanced by five Oscar nominations in 2014. In addition, DiCaprio was awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, and the film itself was named one of the American Film Institute’s Movies of the Year for 2013. In the United States, the most active commentary about the film was staged in the New Yorker largely ­because Richard Brody became its strong advocate, dubbing it “wild [and] brilliant.” In the first of two reviews, Brody likens watching it to the experience of snorting cocaine, or “mainlining cinema for three hours.” He fawns over it as one of the most “uninhibitedly pleasure-­hungry, appetitive per­for­mances in recent history.” Its vulgar self-­indulgence and grotesque insensitivity are terrifying, he asserts, and yet give rise to “an ecstatic inner force within the petty monster of vanity.”33 With enthusiasm, Brody also narrated a voice-­over video commentary with clips from the film that is available on the New Yorker website.34 David Denby, who also reviewed the film in the New Yorker upon its release, describes it as “manic and forced, as though Scorsese is straining to make the cra-



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ziest, most over-­the-­top picture ever.” He describes DiCaprio’s per­for­mance as a hectoring exercise involving three long, brazenly overacted motivational speeches that depict moral disapproval as squeamish, unimaginative, and frightened. He also points to its extreme quality of aggressiveness overall and describes DiCaprio’s portrayal of Jordan Belfort as “a low-­rent Richard III.” Fi­nally, he concludes by writing that “The Wolf of Wall Street is a fake. It’s meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene be­hav­ior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking.”35 The stream of reviews about the film, following its general release in the United States on December  23, 2013, have generally fallen into variations of ­these two types that have contributed to its financial success. Many have acclaimed the film for its technical mastery and memorable sequences. In par­tic­u­lar, Matthew Mc­Conaughey’s “money chant” sequence has been pointed to for its violation of taboos regarding sex, money, and dishonesty. Christopher Orr, writing for the Atlantic, implies that it is precisely ­because The Wolf of Wall Street violates acceptable social conduct in a stylized manner that it is a work of art, in step with the conventional wisdom that Scorsese is one of the last surviving American auteurs, an endangered context for artistic creativity.36 On the other hand, a number of critics like Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal pick up on the same prob­lem that Denby points to regarding the gleefulness of its embrace of corruption, which, in turn, undermines the possibility for social critique.37 Furthermore, the film’s depiction of ­women as merely sexualized and manipulative agents, aestheticized in the regime of vintage heterosexism, has been widely commented upon. In one of Belfort’s well-­known internal diegetic voice-­overs, he describes prostitutes by their degree of quality and desirability within the terms of financial markets and stocks, as with “Blue Chips,” “NASDAQs,” and “Pink Sheets.”38 Last but not least, David Bordwell’s lengthy article describes the narrative construction of the film’s well-­known trailer as an exercise in editing and camera technique that is an extension of Scorsese’s exploration of film form.39

expenditure and in­equality It is to be expected that The Wolf of Wall Street as a film production and source for promotional and critical commentary is distinct from detailed financial and po­liti­ cal investigations into money laundering that begins in Malaysia. Nonetheless, they are closely aligned by reference to f­ree and nonproductive approaches to expenditure. The theme of expenditure was developed by Bataille as a rejoinder to Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don” (­later translated as The Gift) that first appeared in L’année sociologique (1923–1924), the journal founded and edited by Émile Durkheim.40 By contrast with Mauss’s further development of potlatch in non-­ Western socie­ties, which bundles together alms, debt, gift exchange, and taxation, Bataille asserts the princi­ple of expenditure as the embodiment of bourgeois existence. Expenditure, in turn, is implicated in a dialectical relationship with class

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strug­gle and social exclusion. In­equality thus becomes a founding social princi­ple by contrast with Mauss’s allegiance to Durkheimian social solidarity. This implies a context for loss that supplants a national context for mutual support. In Bataille’s work, “unreserved exploitation” emerges as counterpoint to Mauss’s emphasis on potlach as a context for ­human exchange in non-­Western cultural communities to dramatize a universality of practices. ­These two perspectives imply alternate approaches to understanding the relationship between 1MDB and The Wolf of Wall Street beyond merely financing a film. Red Granite Pictures was funded through a circuitous financial transfer from 1MDB to a British Virgin Islands holding com­pany known as Aabar Investments Ltd. It was created to facilitate the transaction and circumvent financial regulatory control by creating a business name that was nearly identical to Aabar Investments PJS Ltd., a subsidiary of the International Petroleum Investment Com­pany (IPIC) that was established as a UAE-­based sovereign wealth fund. In addition, Jho Low had cultivated a cordial relationship with Mohamed al-­Husseiny, then chief executive of Aabar Investments PJS, and Khadem al-­Qubaisi, former principal of IPIC, allowing him to list them as directors of the homonymic firm. Al-­Husseiny and al-­Qubaisi ­were remunerated but l­ater indicted for money laundering in the UAE.41 According to the Wall Street Journal, $155 million was transferred via Aabar Investments Ltd., among other shell companies, before being wired into the accounts of Red Granite Pictures.42 It is the use of funding beyond clearly defined film production costs that allows us to gain insight into an under­lying psychoanalytic context for postcolonial developmentalism. The ambiguity of promotion and branding implies a multiscalar platform for spectacle that relies on the allure of the sublime that is contingent upon the elusive nature of otherness. The film production funding offered by Red Granite Pictures and the oblique origins of its principals afforded a theatrical staging of presence. The masking of money laundering through the spectacle of celebrity bodies and star-­studded events leads to a consideration of Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the “sublime body” derived from successive commentary on Ernst Kantorowicz’s opposition between the “body natu­ ral” and “body politic” in The King’s Two Bodies.43 As is well known, the promotional context for significant film productions involves not only print and media advertising but also award shows, public pre­ sen­ta­tions, and the management of celebrity appearances. Red Granite sought to cultivate the entertainment cognoscenti through the offer of exorbitant gifts and over-­the-­top VIP events. I mentioned ­earlier that Billion Dollar Whale details the massive party held in Las Vegas and a nonstop partying spree on a privately leased airplane catering to entertainment icons and their acolytes. It was in fact part of a pattern, Wright and Hope have explained, associated with Low’s shaping of his own image and approach to fostering a risk-­oriented culture of sociality associated with casino culture around which the Trump Plaza H ­ otel and Casino in Atlantic City was an early training ground.44 Nonproductive expenditure typically emerges in ­these overdetermined profilmic scenes reliant upon female sexual appeal in a



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melodramatic narrative register. Within ­these terms, a notable event was that of jewelry reportedly offered by Jho Low to the Australian model Miranda Kerr, with a market value estimated at $8 million. Other romantic overtures that doubled as publicity stunts ­were exhibited in Low’s excessive offerings to Paris Hilton and Elva Hsiao. ­These expressions of magnanimity ­were extended to edifying figures with star power, including Leonardo DiCaprio. He was offered one of Marlon Brando’s discarded Oscar statues, and two paintings, among other gifts that included Pablo Picasso’s Nature morte au crâne de taureau (1939) and a collage by Jean-­Michel Basquiat entitled Redman One (1982), all of which ­were ­later returned following the DOJ ruling.45 Bataille invokes the abundance of wealth in relation to the “positive property of loss” that springs from a desire for nobility, honor, and rank in social and po­liti­ cal hierarchies. A fundamental connection between anal eroticism and sadism is a psychoanalytic princi­ple that Bataille’s conception of loss reaffirms.46 The power to lose thus becomes a potent source of power while also serving as a source of anxiety. Lest we forget, Freud described the uncanny as the repression of castration anxiety and the production of what Samuel Weber has described as indecidability in relation to anxiety as a defense mechanism and a means of anticipating threats to the self.47 The cata­log of excess abundantly reported upon points to the narrative appeal of ­free expenditure as a search for ac­cep­tance in a globalized popu­lar vernacular buoyed by an under­lying quality of “trashiness,” which not only implies eroticizing bad be­hav­ior as commodified personal narratives but reinvents kitsch in new media formats.48 Anal eroticism and sadism are intertwined with money and defecation in the early psychoanalytic lit­er­a­ture. This pairing has become a point of reference and compelling insight that allows us to reinterpret the con­temporary “bling” economy of eroticized public display and theft. Freud’s early writing points to the opposition between gold and excrement as with the figure of the dukatenscheisser (shitter of ducats).49 The symbolic context for money is further elaborated upon as a developmental ontoge­ne­tic pathway in Sándor Ferenczi’s work. He suggests that a capitalistic form of interest, or what might be termed rent, became historically converted into an affect-­driven reaction formation that retains a repressed anal-­erotic component.50 More recent commentary that attempts to develop a psychoanalytic approach to po­liti­cal corruption contends that ­there is a related, and potentially stronger, claim to be made for oral eroticism b­ ecause it refers to the pivotal role of hunger and love as drives in Karl Abraham’s writing.51 Acts of expenditure bestowed upon con­temporary star personas emphasize genealogies of visibility and function contractually within a spectrum of commodified populist sentiment. Their personas are called upon to represent and accessorize assertions of power and value. The association between celebrity presence and the ambivalent positioning of Riza Aziz and Jho Low as producers for Red Granite Pictures demonstrates how displays of ­free expenditure—­expressed as a form generosity enacted within the terms of oral eroticism—­are always

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welcome in the contingent envelope of celebrity conviviality. The Wolf of Wall Street lists Aziz and Low in the final credits, and an extras track on the DVD includes a cameo appearance by Aziz, who talks briefly about the film’s production, reaffirming clichés invoking the genius of the filmmaker and ­those involved in the manufacture of the illusion. Aziz is presented as merely a nondescript benefactor within a promotional filmmaking system. His purported role provides a tentative alibi through the princely charms of arts patronage and participation in a profitable investment for which he was commended by Variety Magazine as one of the ten producers to watch in 2011 for “investment savvy with creative juice.”52

genealogies of malaysian party politics As the stepson of Najib Razak, Aziz is located within a context of Malay familial acquiescence and cultural adaptation to the logic of commodity market logistics. Malaysia has its own genealogy of hereditary monarchies ­under which nine sultans, who represent nine of the thirteen states in peninsular Malaysia, rotate for five-­year terms as Paramount Ruler and known as Yang di-­Pertuan Agong (His Majesty the King), who acts on the advice of the prime minister. However, another type of kinship network that is arguably more significant has evolved among agents of po­liti­cal parties educated in anglophone university settings abroad. In fact, the sultanate system was reor­ga­nized and fostered on a lavish scale u­ nder the British Crown during the late nineteenth ­century. The establishment of a Paramount Ruler serving a five-­ year term was part of a Malayanization effort incorporated into the 1955–1956 framing of the 1957 Malayan constitution. It was carefully engineered by the British administration intent on extending control over the rubber plantation economy and tin production in Ma­la­ya.53 As Abdul Rahman Embong and ­others have explained, this effort attempted to create a national context within the terms of a “rakyat paradigm” best understood as a race-­based construct of Islamic Malay national identity that became integral to the narrative of in­de­pen­dence. It also embodied an invention of tradition that fabricated a vision of precolonial sovereignty onto the emerging nation-­state.54 Najib Razak, the sixth prime minister, is the eldest son of Abdul Razak, the second prime minister (1970–1976) of Malaysia. Abdul Razak was closely associated with the development of the Malaysian New Economic Policy (MNEP), established in 1971 to eradicate racial disparities in support of Malay identity. The MNEP was an impor­tant ideological pre­de­ces­sor to 1MDB and closely aligned with the establishment of the United Malays National Organ­ization (UMNO), the preeminent po­liti­cal party and institutional backbone of the state since the advent of in­de­pen­dence. Najib was the heir apparent within the one-­party po­liti­ cal system, and it is with a strange sense of irony that his ­father was posthumously dubbed Bapa Pembangunan, or F ­ ather of Development, a­ fter his early death from leukemia in 1976 at age fifty-­three. The context for extorting a national trust established to promote equality of opportunity ­under the sign of developmentalism



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does not imply merely acts of corruption but a pathology of po­liti­cal power. In the popu­lar press, however, reports of defrauding 1MDB for personal profit shifted from Najib onto his wife, Rosmah Mansour, and her son, Riza Aziz. Paired with Jho Low, Aziz contributed to a context for “group lactification” within a psychoanalytic context for oral eroticism. This is a term that Maureen Sioh has used to describe a Manichaean structure for desire among ­those charged with managing the developmental state.55 In other words, the defrauding of 1MDB not only served Najib’s inner circle in siphoning off its financial assets, but milked a larger cast of characters in the global banking sector, along with ­those charged with managing Gulf Arab sovereign wealth funds and an extensive list of enablers. A context for jouissance on public display registering as “bling” thus becomes aligned with the exercise of po­liti­cal prerogative in sync with commodified fantasies of privilege and luxury. Žižek adapts Claude Lefort’s critique of Kantorowicz’s thesis in The King’s Two Bodies to assert that the transient material body becomes the incarnation of the sublime body such that “. . . ​as soon as a certain person functions as ‘king’, his everyday ordinary properties undergo a kind of ‘transubstantiation’ and becomes an object of fascination.”56 This is why rumor, intrigue, h­ uman frailties, and love escapades all serve to reinforce the charisma of the “royal figure.” ­These exaggerated features instantiate the construct of the king ­because of its absence. It is the redoubling of the king’s body that then introduces a split between the vis­i­ble, material body and the sublime body. Though not part of Malay royal bloodlines but part of the ruling aristocracy, Najib possessed a genealogical po­liti­cal pedigree that facilitated an extended unchallenged role granted to him in the name of Malay developmentalism. Referencing the construct of the king as a split subject allows us to consider subjecthood that divides the living body of the person and its exercise of prerogative as a ­thing. Žižek makes much of this distinction in one of the most imaginative adaptations of Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of a well-­known scene in Hamlet. It references Hamlet’s exchange with Guildenstern and Rosencrantz when he asserts in a seemingly somnambulant state of mind: “The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a ­thing—­A ­thing, my Lord?—­Of nothing?”57 Žižek contends that the body/thing distinction is parallel to what he terms the material and sublime body by means of object petit a, an idiosyncratic Lacanian keyword that references otherness as a term of mediation between self and other.58 It draws on Freud’s concept of doubleness and extends his approach to the uncanny.59 In this formulation, a stands in for autre (other), whereas otherness is a variable code that includes le ­grand Autre (big Other), which appears intermittently in Lacan’s writing. While ­these concepts remain ambiguous, Žižek meaningfully adapts petit object a to a reading of the sublime evasive body, which he describes as “a t­hing of nothing . . . ​a pure semblance without substance.”60 This reading is especially apt for our discussion of how an entertainment complex that draws on the pumping and looting of a developmental funding machine undermines the

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distributional claims of development. In fact, it implies that a state-­funded development program is primed for looting in the name of the evasive sublime body. A rent-­seeking concept of holding public office in alliance with related supernumeraries thus became aligned with performing a transgressive context of luxury at the expense of taxpayers in the name of Islamic Malay identity that is at once developmental but also integral to the sacred pact of multicultural national citizenship.

mono­poly mechanisms of authority Several commentators have pointed to the under­lying structure associated with the pathology of po­liti­cal corruption, including Peter Bratsis, who develops a far-­ reaching argument that begins with Kantorowicz’s formulation of the national mystical body, or corpus republicae mysticum, as a juristic or fictious corporate person who stands in for the polity.61 Following Claude Lefort, Bratsis explains that decapitation of the po­liti­cal body’s head once associated with the French Revolution, and instantiated by Louis XVI’s demise on the block of the guillotine in 1792, was then dissolved and redistributed through the corporeality of the social. The transformation symbolizes a move from feudalism to the nation-­state and a new understanding of the public. This was accomplished by means of taxation that triggered what Norbert Elias has described as the “mono­poly mechanism.”62 It implies that the monopolization of legitimate vio­lence results in “composite authority” as a polity-­centered kinship joined with l­egal counsel and parliamentary structures. From this standpoint, bourgeois demo­cratic revolutions have tended to reinforce rather than subvert the import of the two bodies doctrine as an under­lying feature of the bureaucratic state itself. ­These larger debates seek to crystallize an approach to the public body within an evolutionary po­liti­cal history of the West. The public body as concept culminates in an understanding of the king’s body as an abstraction of functioning parts that lends itself to intermittent occupation by public officials in a re­imagined nation-­state. This model of the public body was not relevant only in postrevolutionary France and its extensions as part of a far-­flung French colonial bureaucracy but also in the British Empire, given that the institution of kingship lived on, even though it was mitigated as a constitutional monarchy by the mid-­nineteenth ­century. The case of 1MDB underscores the developmental context in Malaysia that privileges the Islamic Malay ethnoreligious majority as originary by contrast with Chinese, Eurasian, and Indian communities. Ma­la­ya, as it was known prior to 1963, was historically multiethnic but was s­ haped by a system of British colonial l­abor migration from the early nineteenth to mid-­twentieth centuries. In the postcolonial era, resource extraction and the plantation-­based economy continued through private owner­ship ­under the terms of commodity markets in the sterling area. Just as expenditure emphasizes in­equality as a founding princi­ple, the introduction of the private/public split enabled by the king’s two bodies serves as an enduring feature of a colonial administrative complex that carries over into the



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pre­sent. A detour through the construction of an evasive sublime body leads us to consider the figure of Malay identity as a self-­othering of national identity. The plunder engineered through the money laundering of assets associated with 1MDB as investment vehicle may then be understood as the reinvention of royal prerogative exercised by po­liti­cal actors in the name of Malay national identity within a constitutionally structured parliamentary system. Let us then examine how this consideration of the series of events and media that define the 1MDB money-­laundering context lead us back to a reconsideration of potlach as a privatized system that ultimately allows us to make a claim about the per­sis­tence of the uncanny ­under the sign of developmentalism.

potlatch, oral eroticism, and the uncanny Mauss’s interest in gift exchange has always been implicated in a conception of a market economy. They are, in fact, mutually defining systems of exchange not easily disentangled from the other. Jane  I. Guyer, in par­tic­ul­ar, has developed this theme in her writing about the logics and logistics of exchange in local and global markets.63 However, the potential openness of global markets as conduit for exchange should not be confused with how the terms of trade are set. While the po­liti­cal economy of underdevelopment has demonstrated how modernization begets structural adjustment, the fragmentation of national priorities into congeries of actors leads to an increasingly narrow set of communities whose self-­ preservation is part of a larger po­liti­cal infrastructure. The anthropological study of potlatch is worth recalling b­ ecause it was part of an effort to define comparative categories of market exchange by reference to the colonial archive. The German-­born American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) borrowed the word potlatch from Chinook Jargon (aka Chinuk Wawa) during his ethnographic work in the Pacific Northwest, among the Kwakiutl.64 As Mauss explains, potlatch refers to a context for nourishment and consumption that is not mutually exclusive. It is, as he writes, citing Boas, a “place of being satiated.”65 The resonance of this philological reference suggested in Mauss’s description of the gift is not merely a context for giving and receiving but a culturally inscribed pro­cess of social exchange. It points to a social system, implicating religious, mythological, and shamanistic modalities that also imply a l­egal framework. A place of being satiated may be understood as a tightly controlled context for community identification. If we expand this thematic assertion into a wider context for popu­lar consumption, we are led back to the psychoanalytic construct of oral eroticism. Hunger and love coalesce as an internalized source of plea­sure to be shared among the few at the expense of the many, but in the name of the other. The relocation and dislocation of plea­sure become part of a logistical construct on a global scale of concealment in alliance with popu­lar cultural forms. In this approach to understanding the logistical maneuvers of 1MDB, a new conception of home emerges as something that is secretly familiar. It is not the

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accented cele­bration of diasporic identities as home-­less-­ness, but a sense of managerial detachment and control over assets created u­ nder the cover of Islamic Malay identity.66 The othering of a national identity formation as a source of unity thus becomes transformed into a context for dispelling fraud as the work of non-­Malay actors such as Jho Low, who is Chinese Malaysian. It is from this perspective that I would like to suggest that arguments in ­favor of ethnicity and development become turned into a site for plunder. Rhetorical claims for national identity ­under the sign of Islamic Malay identity thus inhabit the realm of the uncanny. While Freud claims that uncanniness springs from the castration complex, he notes that it is secretly familiar and has under­gone repression and then returned from it. The recurrence of the uncanny refers to the very act of repression within a psychological construct. In its adaptation to the themes ­under discussion ­here, however, acts of becoming and being satiated stand in for a concept of home within the collective body of the few in the name of the many. It is another type of home that is internalized, remote, and constituted to the exclusion of ­those outside the reigning network. The alignment of film production with 1MDB might fi­nally be considered in relation to who is being satiated and in what context. Mauss’s interest in the comparative ethnographic articulation of a social structure for exchange points to an under­lying universality, and yet this discussion points to how acts of being satiated amplify a universal context for ­human instinct and desire as a context for abjection. It is for this reason that Bataille seeks to reconsider assertions about utility in exchange relationships by specifying nonproductive expenditure, or expenditure without an end in and of itself. Instead of a potential construct for universality, Bataille emphasizes the role of loss by drawing on Mauss’s reference to symbolic destruction in order to emphasize the function of social constraints. This then leads Bataille to consider how “­free expenditure” may be enabled in spite of violating its productive function. In the case of 1MDB and The Wolf of Wall Street, we are led into the extended field of prestige and value, in the act of redirecting national assets for personal gain and a network for gift exchange as a structure for group lactification, the irony being that the gifts being granted that I have outlined w ­ ere not intended to be a good investment. However, The Wolf of Wall Street was reputedly Scorsese’s most financially successful film, grossing $392 million in domestic and international box office sales. In other words, it more than adequately paid for its initial investment.67 Though the intent was not precisely the issue of direct profitability, it is rather the fraudulent use of public funds for personal gain that is mirrored in the narrative spectacle of extracting money from ­others as a pyramid scheme. ­Free expenditure becomes transformed into an un­regu­la­ted space of luxury and excess that serves an extended clan. In the final analy­sis, it was to serve an internal network that includes not only Najib, his ­family, intermediaries like Jho Low, and bankers who enabled the transactions, but also, and crucially, entertainment figures whose iconic status makes them eligible for “gifts.” It also lends itself to a libidinal context for financial and psychological investment that reclaims colonial



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hierarchies and the privatized experience of luxury. Gifts to Hollywood icons legitimize the value of ­those who grant them by invoking the home as elsewhere in the register of the uncanny.

acknowl­e dgments A shorter version of this essay appeared ­under the title “Global Media Logistics of Exchange and Expenditure: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) in the Shadow of 1MDB,” Media Fields Journal: Critical Explorations in Media and Space 15 (2020), http://­ mediafieldsjournal​.­org​/­global​-­media​-­logistics/ (accessed March 27, 2020). Thanks to the editorial acumen of Tyler Morgenstern and Xiuhe Zhang in their contribution to the initial version of this essay as coeditors of the special issue in which it appears, “Media Cultures of the Imperial Pacific.”

notes 1. ​The now defunct 1MDB website has been archived at archive​.­org from October 27, 2009 to

July  22, 2018: web.archive​.­org/web/20180405072838/http://1mdb.com.my (accessed July  17, 2019). 1MDB began as the Terengganu Investment Authority (TIA) established in the northeastern Malaysian state of Terengganu in 2008 as a sovereign wealth fund. It was taken over by the state ­under the Ministry of Finance on July 31, 2009, four months a­ fter Najib Razak became prime minister while concurrently serving as finance minister of Malaysia. As vari­ous commentators have explained, since the takeover by 1MDB was facilitated by Jho Low, it came to serve as a private slush fund for the prime minister. See Trinna Leong, “1MDB Trial: Ex-­CEO Says State Fund Was Designed to Protect Najib from Prosecution,” The Straits Times [Singapore], September  25, 2019, https://­www​.­straitstimes​.­com​/­asia​/­se​-­asia​/­1mdb​-­trial​-­witness​-­says​-­fund​ -­was​-­designed​-­to​-­protect​-­najib​-­from​-­prosecution. 2. ​Andrea Tan, Edvard Pettersson, and Anisah Shukry, “US to Return $200 million 1MDB-­Linked Funds to Malaysia,” Bloomberg News, May  2, 2019, https://­www​.b­ loomberg​.­com​/­news​/­articles​ /­2019​-­05​-0­ 3​/­u​-s­ ​-s­ aid​-­to​-­return​-­200​-­million​-­1mdb​-­linked​-­funds​-­to​-­malaysia. It has been reported that Red Granite Pictures provided $52,004,162 for The Wolf of Wall Street from June 27 to November 23, 2012; $23,939,600 for Dumb and Dumber To from July 6 to December 1, 2013; and $3,650,625 to ­Daddy’s Home on December  22, 2014. Lee Long Hui, “ ‘Stolen’ 1MDB Funds: The DOJ Lawsuit Revisited,” Malaysiakini, March 31, 2018, https://­pages​.­malaysiakini​.­com​/­1mdb​/­en​/­. 3. ​See Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–129. 4. ​Michael Laurence, “Why We Love to Hate the Wolf (of Wall Street): Using Georges Bataille and Friederich Nietz­sche to Critique the Function of Moral Ideology ­under Late Capitalism,” New Po­liti­cal Science 38, no.1 (2016): 81–99. 5. ​The word bling was added to the Oxford En­glish Dictionary in June  2006. The etymology describes it as an imitative form of expression that “represents the visual effect of light being reflected off precious stones or metals.” OED Online, March 2020, s.v., “bling, n. and adj.,” https://­ www​-­oed​-­ com​.­proxy​.­library​.­ucsb​.­edu:9443​/­view​/­Entry​/­257508​?­result​=­1&rskey​=h­ BPJdC&. 6. ​For further discussion of libidinal investment in developing economies, see Maureen Sioh, “Manicheism Delirium: Desire and Disavowal in the Libidinal Economy of an Emerging Economy,” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 7 (2014): 1162–1178. Sioh develops several of ­these themes further in “The Logic of Humiliation in Financial Conquest,” in Psychoanalysis and the Global, ed. Ilan Kapoor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 25–27.

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7. ​The thematization of potlatch as nourishment and consumption in Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur

le don” (1924) is the key text in understanding the functionality of the gift economy as cultural cir­cuit of exchange. See the most recent translation by Jane I. Guyer, The Gift: Expanded Edition (Chicago: HAU Books, 2016). 8. ​Stefania Palma, “Malaysia Snubs Goldman’s Apology over 1MDB Scandal; Minister Demands $7.5 bn Compensation? Pressure Mounts on US Banks,” Financial Times, Eu­ro­pean Edition, January 19, 2019. 9. ​ “Money M ­ atters: How $3.9 bn = $2.9 bn,” Sarawak Report, July  25, 2020, https://­www​ .­sarawakreport​.­org​/­2020​/­07​/­money​-­matters​-­how​-­3​-­9bn​-­2​-­5​-­bn​-­2​/­. In February 2020, Dr, Mahathir Mohamed, the elected prime minister, resigned b­ ecause his governing co­ali­tion collapsed; it was created in opposition to Najib and the United Malays National Organ­ization (UMNO). As a result, Muhyiddin Yassin was appointed as the new prime minister by the king, which in turn facilitated the return of UMNO, whose members, including Najib, benefited from the 1MDB scandal. The money that was repatriated from Goldman Sachs went back into the hands of ­those who benefited from the fraud in the first place. 10. ​For a more explicit description of the three phases of this par­tic­ul­ar event, see Hui, “ ‘Stolen’ 1MDB Funds.” 11. ​Jay A. Fernandez, “A Tug of War, with Scorsese as Rope,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2007, www​.­latimes​.c­ om​/­archives​/­la​-­xpm​-­2007​-­oct​-­03​-­et​-­scriptland3​-­story​.­html. 12. ​U.S. Department of Justice website, Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS), www​.j­ ustice​.­gov​/­criminal​-­mlars, July 17, 2019. 13. ​Bradley Hope, Tom Wright, and Rebecca Balhaus (with Aruna Viswanatha), “Trump Ally Was in Talks to Earn Millions in Effort to End 1MDB Probe in US,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2018, www​.­wsj​.­com​/­articles​/­trump​-­ally​-­was​-­in​-­talks​-­to​-­earn​-­millions​-­in​-­effort​-­to​-­end​-­1mdb​ -­probe​-­in​-u­ ​-­s-​ ­151991932. See also Kenneth P. Vogel, “Trump Fund-­R aiser Received Laundered Foreign Money, Prosecutors Say,” New York Times, November 30, 2018, https://­www​.n­ ytimes​ .­com​/­2018​/­11​/­30​/­us​/­politics​/­broidy​-­trump​-­foreign​-­money​.­html. 14. ​ The Edge (Markets Malaysia) continues to actively report on the ongoing deliberations as part of the “1MDB Watch” tag on its website. Accessed March 21, 2020, https://­www​.­theedgemarkets​ .­com​/­flash​-­categories​/­1mdb​-­watch 15. ​Katharina Bart, “Jordan Belfort: ‘I Knew 1MDB Was a Scam,’ ” Finews, January  26, 2017, www​.­finews​.­com​/­news​/­english​-­news​/­25957​-­jordan​-­belfort​-­wolf​-­of​-­wall​-­street​-­switzerland​ -­speeches​-­donald​-­trump​-g­ reg​-­coleman​-­3. Finews is a popu­lar financial news website based in Zu­rich, Switzerland. It features “breaking news, feature stories, industry developments, opinions plus the latest on ­people, trends and gossip.” 16. ​More recently, Jordan Belfort sued Red Granite Pictures for $300 million in damages. Ryan Faughnder, “Com­pany Town: ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ Told the Story of His Fraud. Now He’s Suing for Fraud,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2020, https://­www​.­latimes​.­com​/­entertainment​ -­arts​/­business​/­story​/­2020​-­01​-­23​/­the​-­wolf​-­of​-­wall​-­street​-­told​-­the​-­story​-­of​-­his​-­fraud​-­now​-­hes​ -­suing​-­the​-­company​-­that​-m ­ ade​-­it​-f­ or​-­fraud 17. ​Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World (New York: Hachette Books, 2018). 18. ​Claire Rewcastle Brown, The Sarawak Report: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Exposé (London: Lost World Press, 2018). 19. ​Louise Story and Stephanie Saul, “Towers of Secrecy: Jho Low, Well Connected in Malaysia, Has an Appetite for New York,” New York Times, February 8, 2015, https://­www​.­nytimes​ .­com​/­2015​/­02​/­09​/­nyregion​/­jho​-­low​-­young​-­malaysian​-­has​-­an​-­appetite​-­for​-­new​-­york​.­html. A series of follow-up articles w ­ ere also published in the New York Times by Richard C. Paddock, among ­others, through 2017.



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20. ​Etan Vlessing, “Billion Dollar Whale Film Rights Nabbed by SK Global,” Hollywood Reporter,

September 27, 2018, www​.­hollywoodreporter​.c­ om​/­news​/­billion​-d­ ollar​-­whale​-fi­ lm​-­rights​-­nabbed​ -­by​-s­ k​-­global​-­1147521. The comment pages in the Malay Mail demonstrate the very negative reactions that Michelle Yeoh’s involvement in purchasing the rights to this story has provoked. Yeoh has been a vocal supporter of Prime Minister Najib Razak. See Joe Lee, “Malaysians Have Whale of a Time Trolling Michelle Yeoh,” Malay Mail, September 28, 2018, https://­www​.­malaymail​.­com​ /­news​/­malaysia​/­2018​/­09​/­28​/­malaysians​-­have​-­whale​-o­ f​-­a​-­time​-­trolling​-­michelle​-­yeoh​/­1677415. Michelle Yeoh appeared in Tomorrow Never Dies (dir. Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) as Wai Lin, who was acclaimed as the first ethnically Chinese Bond girl, serving as a Col­on­ el in the Chinese ­People’s External Security Force, with Pierce Brosnan as Agent 007. 21. ​In the most recent court proceedings against Najib, it has been revealed that vari­ous members of Najib’s inner circle referred to him as “OP,” or Optimus Prime, from the Transformers franchise. Tashny Sukumaran, “1MDB Trial: Jho Low’s Code Name for Najib Razak Was ‘Optimus Prime,’ Malaysian Court Hears,” South China Morning Post, August 6, 2019, www​.­scmp​.­com​ /­news​/­asia​/­southeast​-­asia​/­article​/­3021673​/­1mdb​-­trial​-­jho​-­lows​-­code​-­name​-­najib​-­razak​-­was​ -­optimus. 22. ​Jose Barrock, “1MDB: G ­ iant Ponzi Scheme or Strategic Investment Fund?,” Kinibiz Online, March  26, 2013, http://­www​.­kinibiz​.­com​/­story​/­issues​/­11166​/­1mdb​-­giant​-­ponzi​-­scheme​-­or​ -­strategic​-­investment​-­fund​.­html. 23. ​“Tarek Obaid Questioned in Saudi Arabia: Exclusive,” Sarawak Report, September 24, 2016, https://­www​.s­ arawakreport​.­org​/­2016​/­09​/­tarek​-o­ baid​-­questioned​-­in​-­saudi​-­exclusive​/­. 24. ​One example of this kind of commentary appeared in 2019. Dennis M. Kelleher, “Goldman Sachs and the 1MDB Scandal,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, May 14, 2019, https://­corpgov​.­law​.­harvard​.e­ du​/­2019​/­05​/­14​/­goldman​-s­ achs​-­and​-­the​-­1mdb​-­scandal​/­. 25. ​Agence-­France Press, “1MDB Scandal: Malaysia Drops Money Laundering Charges against Najib Razak’s Stepson Riza Aziz,” South China Morning Post, May 14, 2020, https://­www​.­scmp​ .­com​ /­n ews​ /­a sia​ /­southeast​ -­a sia​ /­article​/­3084411​ /­1 mdb​ -­scandal​ -­malaysia​ -­d rops​ -­m oney​ -­laundering​-­charges. 26. ​Sharon Tan and Richard C. Paddock, “Wolf of Wall Street Producer, Riza Aziz, Is Charged in Malaysia Fund Scandal,” New York Times, July 4, 2019, www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2019​/­07​/­04​/­world​ /­asia​/w ­ olf​-­wall​-s­ treet​-­malaysia​.­html. Four other films ­were also produced by Red Granite Pictures. They include Horns (dir. Alexandre Aja, 2013), Friends with Kids (dir. Jennifer Westfeldt, 2011), Out of the Furnace (dir. Scott Cooper, 2014), and Papillon (dir. Michael Noer, 2017). See also the Red Granite Pictures website, accessed April 19, 2020, http://­www​.­redgranitepictures​ .­com​/­. 27. ​Austin Ramzy, “Tiaras, Purses and Cash: Malaysia Seizes Rec­ord Haul from Ex-­Leader Najib,” New York Times, June  27, 2018, www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2018​/­06​/­27​/­world​/­asia​/­malaysia​ -­najib​-­razak​-­police​-s­ eizure​.­html. 28. ​Kate Mayberry, “Malaysia’s Najib Tones Down the Bling Ahead of 1MDB Fraud Trial,” Al Jazeera News, February  11, 2019, www​.­aljazeera​.­com​/­news​/­2019​/­02​/­malaysia​-­najib​-­tones​-­bling​ -­1mdb​-­graft​-­trial​-­190208033503503​.h­ tml. The jingle was a song set to the Manhattan’s song “The Kiss and Say Goodbye” (Bobby Martin, 1976). Hannah Ellis-­Petersen, “Songs of Innocence: Najib Razak Uses Ballad to Set Rec­ord Straight on 1MDB Scandal,” The Guardian, January 24, 2019, https://­w ww​.­theguardian​.­com​/­world​/­2019​/­jan​/­24​/­najib​-­razak​-­uses​-­ballad​-­to​-­set​-­record​ -­straight​-o­ n​-­1mdb​-­scandal​.­. 29. ​“The Bersatu Point of View-­Why Did 20 MPs Jump with Muhyiddin to Join Back with PAS/UMNO?,” Sarawak Report, March  10, 2020, https://­www​.­sarawakreport​.­org​/­2020​/­03​ /­t he​ -­b ersatu​ -­p oint​ -­o f​ -­v iew​ -­w hy​ -­d id​ -­20​ -­m ps​ -­j ump​ -­w ith​ -­muhyiddin​ -­to​ -­j oin​ -­back​ -­w ith​ -­pasumno​/.­

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30. ​Rozanna Latiff, “U.S. Should ‘Think Twice’ before Returning 1MDB Funds to Malaysia,

Says Ex-­PM Mahathir,” R ­ euters, March 12, 2020, https://­www​.­reuters​.­com​/­article​/­us​-m ­ alaysia​ -­politics​-­mahathir​-­1mdb​/­u​-­s​-­should​-­think​-­twice​-­before​-­returning​-­1mdb​-­f unds​-­to​-­malaysia​ -­says​-e­ x​-­pm​-­mahathir​-­idUSKBN2100RG. 31. ​“Questions Rage about 1MDB Payment ‘Favour’ to Muhyiddin,” Sarawak Report, April 16, 2020, https://­www​.­sarawakreport​.o­ rg​/­2020​/­04​/­questions​-­rage​-­about​-­1mdb​-­payment​-f­ avour​ -­to​-m ­ uhyiddin​/­. 32. ​Clint Burnham, Fredric Jameson and “The Wolf of Wall Street” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). See also Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 259. 33. ​Richard Brody, “The Wild, Brilliant Wolf of Wall Street,” New Yorker, December 23 and 30, 2013, www​.­newyorker​.c­ om​/­culture​/­richard​-­brody​/­the​-­wild​-­brilliant​-­wolf​-­of​-­wall​-­street. 34. ​Richard Brody, “The Front Row: The Wolf of Wall Street,” New Yorker, February 17, 2016, www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­culture​/­richard​-­brody​/­the​-­front​-­row​-­the​-­wolf​-­of​-­wall​-­street. See the online video on this page for Brody’s voice-­over commentary. 35. ​David Denby, “Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street,” New Yorker, December 16, 2013, www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­culture​/­culture​-d­ esk​/­martin​-­scorseses​-­the​-­wolf​-­of​-­wall​-­street. 36. ​Christopher Orr, “The Vulgar Genius of The Wolf of Wall Street,” The Atlantic, December 25, 2013, www​.t­ heatlantic​.­com​/­entertainment​/­archive​/­2013​/­12​/­the​-­vulgar​-­genius​-­of​-­em​-­the​-­wolf​ -­of​-­wall​-­street​-­em​/­282611. 37. ​Joe Morgenstern, “Wolf of Wall Street Skims the Surface of the Skin,” Wall Street Journal, December  24, 2013, www​.­wsj​.­com​/­articles​/­8216wolf​-­of​-­wall​-­street8217​-­skims​-­the​-­surface​-­of​ -­sin​-­1387910228. 38. ​Noam Yuran, “Finance and Prostitution: On the Libidinal Economy of Capitalism,” differences 28, no. 3 (2017): 146. 39. ​David Bordwell, “Understanding Film Narrative: The Trailer,” Observations on Film Art, January  12, 2014, www​.­davidbordwell​.­net​/­blog​/­2014​/­01​/­12​/­understanding​-­film​-­narrative​-­the​ -­trailer. Bordwell’s article was written a­ fter many of ­these revelations about the film surfaced ­later that year. 40. ​Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don, forme et raision de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” L’année sociologique [Nouvelle Série 1, 1923–1924] (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1925): 30–186. Marcel Mauss was Émile Durkheim’s nephew and l­ater became Durkheim’s intellectual inheritor. 41. ​Wright and Hope, Billion Dollar Whale, 187–188. See Bradley Hope’s follow-up article, “Alleged 1MDB Co-­conspirators Sentenced to Prison; As Well as Receiving Jail Sentences, the Two Men Must Jointly Pay More Than $300 Million,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2019, https://­ search​-­proquest​-­com​.­proxy​.­library​.­ucsb​.­edu:9443​/­docview​/­2240529225​?­accountid​=1­ 4522. 42. ​Bradley Hope, John R. Emshwiller, and Ben Fritz, “The Secret Money B ­ ehind ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’: Investigators Believe Much of the Cash Used to Make the Leonardo DiCaprio Film about a Stock Swindler Originated with Embattled Malaysian State Development Fund 1MDB,” Wall Street Journal, April  1, 2016, https://­www​.­wsj​.­com​/­articles​/­malaysias​-­1mdb​-­the​ -­secret​-­money​-b­ ehind​-­the​-­wolf​-­of​-­wall​-s­ treet​-­1459531987. 43. ​Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Po­liti­cal ­Factor, 2nd  ed. (London: Verso, 2008), 255; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Po­liti­cal Theology (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, [1957] 2016), especially the discussion of Dignitas non moritur in chap. 7, “The King Never Dies,” 383–450. 44. ​Hope and White, Billion Dollar Whale, 23–24. They also mention that Low even invited Ivanka Trump to join one of their gambling excursions to Trump Plaza H ­ otel and Casino in Atlantic City, which she declined by saying that she would never set foot in one of her f­ ather’s “skeevy” casinos.



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45. ​Eileen Kinsella, “Art and Law: Leonardo DiCaprio Surrenders $3.2 Million Picasso and

$9 Million Basquiat to US Government,” Artnet News, June 16, 2017, https://­news​.­artnet​.­com​ /­art​-­world​/­leonardo​-­dicaprio​-­gives​-­pack​-­jho​-­low​-­picasso​-­basquiat​-­996377. 46. ​Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 122. 47. ​Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 628; Samuel Weber, “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment,” Modern Language Notes 88, no. 6 (December 1973): 1132. Thanks to Kriss Ravetto for pointing to the relevance of Sam Weber’s reading of the uncanny in her recent book, The Digital Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 144. 48. ​Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch (1953),” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 3–33. 49. ​Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism (1908),” in Money as Emotional Currency, ed. Anca Carrington (London: Karnac Books, 2015), 21–27. 50. ​Sándor Ferenczi, “The Ontonogenesis of an Interest in Money (1914),” in Contributions to Psycho-­Analysis, trans. Ernest Jones (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1916), 279. 51. ​Karl Abraham, “The Influence of Oral Erotism on Character-­Formation (1924),” in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M.D., trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 393–406. This approach to orality and corruption has been developed in Stella N. Orakwue, “­Towards a Psychoanalytic Theory of Financial Corruption” (PhD diss., Middlesex University London, 2017). 52. ​Gregg Goldstein, “Red Granite Pictures: Duo Combine Investment Savvy with Creative Juice (10 Producers to Watch 2011: Red Granite Pictures),” Variety, November 8, 2011, https://­ variety​.­com​/­2011​/­f ilm​/­news​/­red​-­granite​-­p ictures​-­duo​-­combine​-­investment​-­savvy​-­w ith​ -­creative​-­juice​-­1118045458​/­. 53. ​Malcolm Caldwell, “The British ‘Forward Movement’, 1874–1914” and “From ‘Emergency’ to ‘In­de­pen­dence’, 1948–57,” in Ma­la­ya: The Making of a Neo-­colony, eds. Mohamed Amin and Malcolm Caldwell (Nottingham: Russell Press, 1977), 26, 250–251. 54. ​Abdul Rahman Embong, “Knowledge Construction, the Rakyat Paradigm and Malaysia’s Social Cohesion,” in Transforming Malaysia: Dominant and Competing Paradigms, ed. Anthony Milner, Abdul Rahman Embong, and Tham Siew Yean (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014), 59–81. See also Timothy N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Ma­la­ya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 356. 55. ​Maureen Sioh, “Manicheism Delirium: Desire and Disavowal in the Libidinal Economy of an Emerging Economy,” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 7 (2014): 1164. 56. ​Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 255. 57. ​William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 4, scene 2. 58. ​ Petit objet a refers to the concept of otherness in Lacan’s reading of the Freudian object. The letter a refers to autre (other) and is differentiated in his writing from petit a (small a) in a play on the terms of otherness as Autre (Otherness) or (le) ­grand Autre” (the Big Other). Jacques-­ Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 282. 59. ​Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny (1919),” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 619–645; reprinted from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans., ed., rev. James Strachey (1955; London: Hogarth Press, 1971). 60. ​Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 255. 61. ​Peter Bratsis, Everyday Life and the State (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2006), 36. 62. ​Norbert Elias, Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 98. 63. ​See Jane I. Guyer, “Translator’s Introduction: The Gift that Keeps on Giving,” in Mauss, The Gift: Expanded Edition, ed. and trans. Guyer, 1–25.

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64. ​Chinook Jargon originated as a pidgin trade language in the Pacific Northwest that is partially based on the Chinook language. 65. ​Mauss, “Essai sur le don, forme et raision,” 38; Mauss, The Gift: Expanded Edition, ed. and trans. Guyer, 62n13, 129n209. 66. ​For further development of this concept of home and exile referred to h ­ ere, see Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001). 67. ​ The Wolf of Wall Street, Box Office Mojo, accessed March 10, 2020, https://­www​.­boxofficemojo​ .­com​/­release​/­rl3447424513​/­.

6 • UNC ANNY HISTORIES OF TR ANSNATIONAL CINEM ATIC RECEPTION Eisenstein in Cuba MASHA SAL AZKINA

As a way to reflect on the uncanny histories—­and geographies—of cinema, this essay takes as its starting point a screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s celebrated Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1926), which formed part of the Cinemateca de Cuba’s inaugural program “Three De­cades of Soviet Cinema,” held on December  1–3, 1961. This screening was an impor­tant symbolic event in the cinematic culture of the new Cuba. It was on one hand forward-­looking, signaling Cuba’s turn ­toward communism and the Soviet Union, and the iconic commemoration of the revolution as a cornerstone of the repre­sen­ta­tional regime for the new state for de­cades to come. It si­mul­ta­neously looked backward in time, to the history of this film as foundational to the legacy that s­haped the cultural and po­liti­cal elite that came to dominate the cinematic milieu on the island for much of the c­ entury. This gesture of recognition identified a new cinematic canon, created and upheld by the newly formed Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria ­Cinematográficos (ICAIC): one that celebrated Eisenstein as a key figure of all progressive film culture. It was, however, certainly not the first time the film was seen on the island: it was initially exhibited in 1927, resulting in a brief but impor­tant ban on any further official screenings (more on this ­later in this essay).1 It was not even the first exhibition of Eisenstein’s classic in postrevolutionary Cuba, as it had been shown on tele­vi­sion first in November 1959, as an inaugural film in what would become a highly influential cultural/cinematic program: Cine en TV, run by Mario Rodríguez Alemán. It also was screened as part of the Soviet Exposition in 1960.2 Nor would this screening be the last; Potemkin would be shown commercially on the big screen in Cuba at least fifteen times between 1961 and 1984, and the total number of screenings of 117

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all of Eisenstein’s films would eventually reach eighty-­five.3 But this event was the first official theatrical screening of this film in postrevolutionary Cuba by the ICAIC, as what was originally labeled its “cultural department” was officially restructured as the Cinemateca de Cuba. The choice of this film (along with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s ­Mother [Mat’, 1926], another early Soviet classic) as an inaugural program of the main cinematic institution of postrevolutionary Cuba would not surprise anyone familiar with the role that early Soviet avant-­garde cinema, and Eisenstein in par­tic­ul­ar, has played in the development of po­liti­cally radical film cultures around the world. Indeed, the screening history of Potemkin in Cuba in some ways merely mirrors the enormous influence this film has had on cinematic cultures around the world throughout the twentieth ­century, which was as rich in Cuba as in most other places in the world. According to Dina Iordanova, a popu­lar Indian classic, Awaara (Raj Kapoor, 1951), could be considered the most popu­lar film globally (due to its long-­lasting following all over Asia, the former Soviet Union, and Africa and even, although to a lesser extent, in Latin Amer­ic­ a in the 1950s and 1960s).4 Potemkin should most likely at the very least share this honor if, by “popu­lar,” we consider instead the frequency of screenings in noncommercial exhibition cir­cuits around the world. A global popu­lar classic such as Awaara featured memorable songs and the star appeal of Raj Kapoor, a favorite with audiences all over the world, and Nargis, who ­later became iconicized as ­Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957); it played in commercial movie theaters and ­later on TV screens all over the Global South and the Soviet Bloc. Potemkin, in contrast, was part of the standard repertoire of cine-­clubs and film socie­ties, from home screenings to cinematheques, cultural centers, and embassies, all over the world for much of the twentieth c­ entury ­until at least the 1980s. And unlike the screenings of global popu­lar classics (­whether Indian or ­Hollywood) throughout the geographies—­both “East” and “West,” “North” and “South” (albeit at dif­fer­ent times in the course of the ­century)—­covered by ­these noncommercial cir­cuits of film exhibition and circulation, their repertoires and canons w ­ ere remarkably consistent throughout the world. Potemkin seemed to be uniformly pre­sent within them, often screened as an inaugural event, further underscoring its symbolic significance.5 N ­ eedless to say, ­these alternative sites of film exhibition enjoyed a smaller and considerably more exclusive audience, drawing largely on intellectual and artistic elites, budding cinephiles, and cultural and po­liti­ cal activists. And yet the impact ­these institutions and screenings had on the development of cinematic culture around the world cannot be underestimated as it ­shaped the artistic formation of generations of filmmakers as well as film educational and critical canons. The reception of Battleship Potemkin in Cuba forms a small part of this global history of alternative film culture. At the same time, the screening of Potemkin as an inaugural event of the Cuban Cinemateca sets into motion reflections on the cinema’s uncanny temporalities. The function of a film archive like Cinemateca de Cuba is largely understood to be the preservation and revival of the past of cinema; it therefore has a retrospective



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function, looking back to the past, while at the same time, as the act of cinematographic revival implies, seeking to give it a new life in the pre­sent. This forward-­ looking aspect is particularly instrumental for inaugurations, whose goal is to announce the program for the ­future of the institution in question. That is to say, Potemkin’s screening in 1961 in Havana not only brought back a moment of pastness (as any film screening does, in the most general sense, since the profilmic event took place a priori before the film is screened), but also, being part of a retrospective, signaled multiple points in history. It evoked the original screening of this film—in this case, its 1927 premiere in Havana—as well its subsequent screenings, which marked impor­tant nodes in the history of film culture on the island, thus justifying this film’s inclusion in the cinematic canon that the Cinemateca’s collection is meant to represent. To complicate this further, the film Potemkin is a highly fictionalized commemoration of the events leading up to the 1905 revolution in Rus­sia, itself containing multiple temporalities, taking us further into the past and yet also pointing to the f­ uture, as the 1905 bourgeois revolution in Rus­sia was treated as a first step t­ oward the subsequent 1917 socialist revolution. This allowed the commemoration of the 1905 event to be also a cele­bration of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, a particularly fitting choice for an inaugural screening of a postrevolutionary Cuban film institution. Mirroring this complex and uncanny temporality and its multiple ideological and cultural resonances, this essay takes the 1961 Potemkin screening as a starting point for a discussion of Cuban and transnational film history, which moves both backward, to the 1920s, when Eisenstein was beginning to be screened on the island, and forward, following the reception of Soviet cinema and discourses surrounding it insofar as they reflect the key cultural and po­liti­cal problematics of postrevolutionary Cuba. In d­ oing so, the essay seeks to interrogate the debates around spectatorship and state censorship that this film has triggered in Cuba in the course of its long screening history in the twentieth c­ entury.

soviet cinema on cuban screens The choice of a (in)famous Soviet revolutionary film as a starting point for the Cuban postrevolutionary institutional film exhibition history may, indeed, appear obvious and overdetermined from our con­temporary perspective. It is, however, worth recalling that the Cuban Revolution in its inception was not in any way directed by the Soviets, its leaders had l­ ittle prior contact with the Soviet Bloc, and the Soviet Union itself took a cautious attitude t­oward Fidel Castro in the first months following the revolution. Official diplomatic relations ­were not established ­until a year l­ater, a­ fter the Soviet Exposition (held in Havana in February 1960), which included an official visit from First Deputy Premier Mikoyan to discuss trade prospects.6 The exposition played an impor­tant role in establishing the image of the Soviet Union (and by extension of the Soviet Bloc at large) as a model of successful alternative modernity. Importantly, this model included the

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Soviet production and consumption of mass media, and cinema in par­tic­u­lar. Thus as part of the exposition, Soviet movies ­were screened in two of the major theaters in Havana for two weeks, including Potemkin, as well as more recent films like Ivan Pyr’ev’s The Idiot (1958) and Sergei Yutkevich’s Othello (1956).7 It was from this point on that the shift t­ oward the cinematic cultures of “The East” began in Cuba by way of its film import/export and programming practices, translations and uses of Soviet film theory and criticism, festival participation, and early attempts at coproductions. The shift was somewhat gradual: in 1958, 57 ­percent of the films distributed in Cuba came from the United States, 14 ­percent from Mexico, 10 ­percent from ­Great Britain, and 6 ­percent from Italy. In 1960, despite the introduction of films from the USSR and Czecho­slo­va­kia, 44 ­percent of the movies shown in Cuba still came from the United States.8 But starting in 1961, the prominence of Soviet and Eastern Eu­ro­pean films in the programming of Cuban cinematic institutions would become established, eventually leading to their absolute domination of Cuban screens of the 1960s through 1980s. As Miguiro Altuna asserts, 769 Soviet films w ­ ere shown during that period, making Soviet cinema the most screened foreign cinema on the island. Between 1961 and 1984, the Cinemateca programmed 1,042 events dedicated to Soviet cinema.9 This shift from American to Soviet (and Eastern Eu­ro­pean) programming was reflective of the socialist and Third Worldist orientation of the ICAIC, which, as the leading cultural organ­ization established just months a­ fter the revolution, would gradually achieve total control over film production and much of the exhibition on the island, and its program of “decolonizing” Cuban tastes away from the well-­established preference for Hollywood, Mexican, and Argentinean popu­ lar cinema and ­toward more po­liti­cally and socially consciousness-­raising fare. It was also, perhaps, in some ways the inevitable result of the pro­cess of nationalizing the film industry at large, and movie theaters in par­tic­ul­ ar, which took place in 1961, resulting in the transfer of film prints from the distributors to the ICAIC and in severing of ties with the U.S. film distributors with new prints of Hollywood films available for exhibition. In December 1960, the first sign of this new orientation in film programming was evidenced when La Rampa, a newly opened movie theater ­under the auspices of the ICAIC, showcased the first retrospective of socialist cinema in Cuba, which included seven recent Soviet films, and a number of other Socialist Bloc productions. Six thousand p­ eople attended the event, and La Semana, as it became known, would be a regular event in Cuba ­until 1990, and one with the highest international profile on the island u­ ntil the establishment of the Festival of New Latin American Cinema.10 Along with the exposition, the 1960 event marked both a further decisive association between Cuba and the Socialist Bloc, and the creation of a new international cinematic canon for the nation. Indeed, a year l­ ater, in 1961, Castro made his famous speech declaring a Marxist-­ Leninist orientation for the new Cuban state. That year saw a dramatic change in film programming, with only 4.7 ­percent of new films shown in Cuba originating



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in the United States, versus 25.8  ­percent from the Soviet Union and 29  ­percent from six other socialist nations.11 That same year, the ICAIC’s Cinemateca de Cuba was formally established; as its inaugural event, it hosted its first retrospective, “Three De­cades of Soviet Cinema,” screening twenty-­four Soviet films made before 1948, with Potemkin as its opening film. Most of the prints screened at the Cinemateca came from the Soviet film archive, Gosfil’mofond, as part of the strengthening of Cuba’s ties with Soviet cultural institutions, but also from Cinemateca’s joining of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF-­Fédération internationale des archives du film), of which Gosfil’mofond was an active member. Thus, subsequently, while many of the con­temporary Soviet (and other socialist countries’) films w ­ ere screened widely in commercial movie theaters in Cuba, the early Soviet classics such as Potemkin (and many other Soviet films from the 1920s) formed part of regular programming of ICAIC-­run theaters, in par­tic­u­ lar its annual film retrospectives such as the Soviet Semana, in a manner quite consistent with exhibition programming of other international archives (­whether the Cinémathèque Française or the British Film Institute), where the Soviet avant-­ garde formed part of the canon of film education. Reciprocally, Soviet and Eastern Eu­ro­pean film festivals (Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Tashkent, and Leipzig) provided reliable opportunities for exhibiting Cuban films, greatly contributing to their international circulation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, Santiago Álvarez’s Hanoi, Martes 13 won Silver in Moscow and the Best Film Award in Leipzig ­later that year, and Humberto Solás’s Lucia (1968) won the Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1969. Cuban official discourse on cinema, as expressed in par­tic­ul­ar on the pages of the ICAIC-­run journal Cine Cubano, similarly reflected the shift from American to Soviet (and other socialist) cinemas as a point of reference for the new postrevolutionary film culture in Cuba. The importance of this journal’s official position is not to be understated: throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Cine Cubano represented not only Cuban film culture but, to a large extent, the w ­ hole critical apparatus of the emerging New Latin American Cinema, thus making its positions and pronouncements particularly influential for the radical film cultures all over the continent and beyond, as much of the Eu­ro­pean Left in the early 1960s looked to Cuba as the ultimate site of utopian possibility. In the opening pages of the first issue, the director of the ICAIC, Alfredo Guevara, in his address “The Realities and Prospects of the New Cinema,” emphasized the importance of early Soviet cinema thus: “One cannot make cinema without studying the Soviet film tradition, without knowing and reflecting upon the images of ‘October’ or ‘Strike,’ with no familiarity with ‘Potemkin’ or ‘The M ­ other,’ ‘Storm over Asia,’ ‘The Fall of St Petersburg,’ ‘Alexander Nevsky,’ ‘Tchapaev,’ or ‘Arsenal.’ All of ­these films and many ­others, along with all the theoretical movements developed by Rus­sian directors and masters, form the canon of the finest film tradition. It is therefore expected it can still provide us with new and true lessons.”12 Guevara’s references to ­these specific films by Eisenstein and Pudovkin w ­ ere not accidental and heralded a trend: along with

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Italian neorealism, the 1920s Soviet montage would soon come to be broadly seen as an aesthetic signature and ideological inspiration for the more radical manifestations of the New Cinemas of the 1960s globally, and in par­tic­u­lar of the New Latin American Cinema, of which Cuba quickly became the self-­appointed, but largely undisputed, center. The Soviet cinematic avant-­garde had a long reception history in Cuba (as elsewhere in Latin Amer­ic­ a), and Potemkin occupied a special place in this history as the first film to be banned by Cuban authorities on po­liti­cal grounds, an event that triggered many responses, especially among the leftist or left-­leaning artists and intellectuals. Ironically, then, beyond demonstrating the degree to which Cuban film culture, unlike virtually any other cultural sphere (such as theater, painting, or lit­er­a­ture) in Cuba, was impacted by Soviet aesthetic models long before the 1959 revolution, the exhibition history of Potemkin from its first screening inaugurated the emergence of what proved to be an intense century-­long (at least) relationship between state censorship and film exhibition on the island, and of debates over the nature of spectatorship and artistic freedom. For the remainder of this essay, I w ­ ill sketch out Eisenstein’s importance to the prerevolutionary Cuban cultural groups that would emerge as the key po­liti­cal cultural players of Castro’s Cuba, focusing in par­tic­ul­ ar on the role of José Manuel Valdés-­Rodríguez, whose activities from the 1920s through the 1960s ­shaped not only the reception of Soviet cinema but much of film culture on the island, and resulting in the programming vision embodied by the choice of Potemkin as the 1961 Cinemateca de Cuba inaugural screening. I w ­ ill then address the original 1927 screening of the film in Havana and the reaction of artists and the state to it, suggesting parallels between the discourse that this event gave rise to, and its resonances with the ­later moment of the 1960s and beyond.

eisenstein in cuba to the 1950s In order to understand the significance of the 1961 screening of Potemkin as the opening film of the Cinemateca de Cuba, it is impor­tant first to go back to the de­cades leading up to this event. During the 1940s and 1950s, Eisenstein’s films, despite (or, sometimes ­because of) their notoriety, ­were not always easily available, due to state bans and other forms of censorship. And yet it was during this period that they came to occupy central positions in the newly established canons of film institutions emerging in par­tic­u­lar in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay, especially as Eisenstein’s writings, along with the works of other early Soviet filmmaker-­theorists such as Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, began to be translated and regularly published in journals all over Latin Amer­ic­ a. While the first publication of the works in film and literary magazines began as early as the 1920s, starting in the early 1950s, ­these theorists’ works began to appear as edited volumes.13 ­These publications traveled around the continent from one cinephile to another, playing a key role in the formation of several generations of filmmakers



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and critics. When asked about the influence of Soviet cinema in 1977 on the pages of Cine Cubano, virtually all the po­liti­cally engaged Latin American filmmakers who discussed this topic emphasized the key role that Eisenstein’s writings (even more than his films, in many cases) played in their understanding of cinema and their formation as filmmakers generally, and po­liti­cal cineastes in par­tic­ul­ ar.14 Film criticism, film collections at art museums, and film sections of vari­ous cultural socie­ties also came into their own in the 1950s in most major cosmopolitan centers in Latin Amer­ic­ a, from Mexico to Brazil, helping to elevate the prestige of film education and film culture more broadly.15 Both the bourgeois and militant forms of this alternative film culture w ­ ere formative of this pro­cess. The star status of Eisenstein as both a cosmopolitan modernist and a communist militant increased his visibility and prestige both among the new elite bourgeois cinephile cultures ­eager to affirm the new status of cinema as a serious art (often in opposition to Hollywood, seen as a form of “cheap entertainment”) and among the po­liti­cal activists looking to cinema for its didactic potential to reach the masses (also in opposition to Hollywood, seen in this case as the wrong kind of mass art). Both of ­these groups, and ­there was, indeed, overlap between them as many of the militant leftists also came from the cultural elites, embraced Eisenstein as a perfect model for cinema that both was high art and yet capable of inspiring the masses. In Cuba, the film historian and educator José Manuel Valdés-­Rodríguez (1896–1971) is a perfect example of a cultural figure who not only was responsible for a g­ reat many activities aimed at institutionalization of film as both art and education in Cuba from as early as the 1920s and into the 1960s, but also placed Eisenstein—­his film and his writings—at the center of his educational model.16 Valdés-­Rodríguez began working as a newspaper film critic in the 1920s, ­running a cine-­club from his home, looking for films that did not have commercial exhibition and yet w ­ ere available through other channels. This was how he originally encountered Soviet films. In 1929, in the journal Revista de Avance, he reviewed the book Rusia a los doce años by the Spanish writer Julio Álvarez del Vayo, which included a chapter on cinema and which, alongside Léon Moussinac’s monograph Le cinéma soviétique, became an impor­tant source of information on Soviet film in Latin Amer­ i­ca during that period.17 In 1932, Valdés-­Rodríguez began to contribute regularly to the U.S. journal Experimental Cinema and subsequently became actively involved in the journal’s campaign to save Eisenstein’s Mexican picture. Two years ­later, he traveled to the Soviet Union as a correspondent for newspapers Bohemia and Ahora to cover the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, where he met with Eisenstein on several occasions and had an opportunity to discuss Eisenstein’s plans for the curriculum at the Moscow film school GIK (­later VGIK).18 Starting in 1942, Valdés-­Rodríguez was able to implement what he learned from Eisenstein and ­others when he began teaching “Cinema: The Industry and Art of Our Times” at the University of Havana’s summer school (the course’s title was ­later reprised in the name of the film institute ICAIC).19 Like Eisenstein, Valdés-­Rodríguez based his teaching on the idea that cinema was the highest manifestation of ­human activity, incorporating techniques

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from other media in unique ways and capable of revealing complex so­cio­log­i­cal and psychological dynamics more fully than any other form of art. To support his arguments, Valdés-­Rodríguez made extensive reference to lit­er­a­ture and theater, ranging from the modernist lit­er­a­ture of James Joyce and Marcel Proust to the classics. Valdés-­Rodríguez placed Eisenstein’s films (along with Chaplin’s) in the same pantheon as Joyce and Proust, as examples of the greatest achievements of civilization, as well as indicative of cinema’s ­great potential, which, according to Valdés-­Rodríguez, had yet to be fully realized. The first film acquired by Valdés-­ Rodríguez for the film collection that became the cornerstone for his teachings (and which he donated to the ICAIC ­after the revolution) was a copy of Eisenstein’s Aleksandr Nevskii (1938). He showed other Soviet films as part of his university summer course.20 Valdés-­Rodríguez’s influence was even apparent in the decorative panels hanging in the university’s screening room, which included quotations from Eisenstein among t­ hose of Horacio, Dante, and Baudelaire, and in the adoption of early Soviet films as the cornerstones of the newly created university film archive. 21 His influence also extended well beyond the university, as the film section of the cultural society Nuestro Tiempo—­whose members would ­later occupy the key roles at the ICAIC—­was formed u­ nder Valdés-­Rodríguez’s direct influence. While Valdés-­Rodríguez had a profound impact on the reception of Soviet cinema in Cuba in the postrevolutionary era, his stance on cinema could fit just as well within the liberal rhe­toric of au­then­tic artistic expression (as opposed to the commercially driven Hollywood) as within a more po­liti­cally radical platform.22 In fact, among Valdés-­Rodríguez’s disciples w ­ ere some of the key figures of the liberal wing of Cuban culture, who would very quickly emerge as the antagonists to the leaders of the ICAIC, and inevitably end up in exile. The inclusion of Soviet cinema in the cinematic canon for the new generations of the 1950s and 1960s did not necessarily signal any direct allegiance to the Soviet Union, or even support of Castro’s government, e­ ither in Cuba or internationally. This may be particularly evident in the ­career of Jean-­Luc Godard, who, despite naming his radical film collective of the 1970s the “Dziga Vertov Group” a­ fter the early Soviet cineaste, remained openly hostile to the con­temporary Soviet Union; Godard had a somewhat guarded relationship with Castro’s Cuba even in the 1960s, when many of his fellow cineastes saw Cuban film culture as the genuinely radical alternative to the West. In the Latin American context, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Brazil’s first promoter of cinema, who is revered as the founder of Brazilian institutional film culture, was rather hostile to what he perceived as the ideological and intellectual rigidity of the communist militants, despite his ­earlier association with the Communist Party. And yet this foundational Brazilian critic was also a major promoter of Eisenstein, and his own early attempts at filmmaking ­were influenced by Eisenstein’s films and ideas. More impor­tant, in the course of the 1940s, Paulo Emílio became the leading film critic in Brazil, writing first for the influential cultural journal Clima and, in the 1950s and 1960s, for Suplemento literário d’o estado de São Paulo. Eisenstein is one of the key protagonists in his



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writings, along with Orson Welles and John Ford. Paulo Emílio’s work, including a series of articles on Eisenstein published between 1956 and 1965, marks a definitive shift in Brazilian film criticism, thus confirming the status of Eisenstein within the emerging critical and scholarly canon of cinema. 23 With dictatorships and repressive anticommunist regimes further radicalizing Latin American filmmakers through the course of the 1960s, early Eisenstein became a particularly impor­tant point of reference for po­liti­cal artists and critics as a way to signal the revolutionary potential of cinema, often precisely in opposition to the Soviet Union’s model of socialist cinema as socialist realism. In Cuba in the 1960s, the tension between ­these two models of socialist culture—­the revolutionary avant-­garde of early Soviet cinema and that of socialist realism—­were particularly resonant, framing most of the cultural debates of the 1960s, and t­ hose involving the ICAIC in par­tic­u­lar.24 Thus discussions of Soviet cinema (and Potemkin as its paradigmatic example) in Cuba came to stand in as a reference to ­these debates. What is particularly fascinating about this, though, is the fact that the key trope that emerged at the core of ­these debates—­the passive, immature spectator and his relationship with the state (and t­here is no doubt that in this context the assumption is always that the spectator is masculine, as the goal of the transformation is the New Man)—­begins in the Cuban reception of Eisenstein predating Castro’s revolution, in fact g­ oing back to its initial screening in the 1920s. At this point this essay turns to that history and how it s­ haped, and in many ways mirrored, the subsequent 1960s discussions.

potemkin: early reception history The cele­bration of Eisenstein and his films by the communist Left began as early in Latin Amer­i­ca as it did in Eu­rope or the United States, starting in the late 1920s, especially in places where po­liti­cal efforts w ­ ere met with massive forces of state repression, which contributed to his notoriety. ­Here, early Cuba provides the most compelling example with long-­lasting consequences. However, it is impor­tant to highlight again that Eisenstein’s notoriety from the very beginning extended beyond any direct associations with communism. As Sarah Ann Wells noted in an excellent article on the reception of Soviet cinema in Latin Amer­i­ca in the 1920s, “Intellectuals and filmmakers thus sought out Eisenstein as a stamp of approval for the health of their respective national film industries.”25 The Soviet avant-­garde and Eisenstein in par­tic­ul­ar served as impor­tant reference points for the Latin American culture in the late 1920s and 1930s, associated with broader discussions of alternative modernity and national identity, as well as the potential for the explic­itly po­liti­cal function of cinema. Latin Amer­ic­ a’s “belated” modernization and resulting discourse of underdevelopment imparted a sense of urgency to the view of cinema as the art that both represented and promoted modernity and modernization.26 While both cinema and modernization ­were commonly linked to Hollywood and the United States,

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the possibilities represented by the Soviet film industry for creating cultural and po­liti­cal alternatives to Hollywood’s hegemony had g­ reat appeal for liberal cultural elites as well as for more po­liti­cal leftist artists and intellectuals, many of whom ­were explic­itly committed to creating a shared internationalist and cosmopolitan modernist culture. In addition to the considerable international impact and prestige of Eisenstein’s films (and eventually his writings), his cosmopolitan persona was also impor­tant in making him a highly relevant point of reference. His knowledge of languages and broad erudition, his ties to revered artists and writers around the world, and his experience in Mexico further facilitated the sense of connection and provided enduring interest all over Latin Amer­ic­ a. Cuban artists and intellectuals ­were, indeed, some of the first ones to seek contact with the celebrated Soviet filmmaker. One of Eisenstein’s first Latin American interlocutors was Alejo Carpentier, who was to become one of the greatest Cuban modernist writers. In the 1920s, Carpentier was a member of the Minorista group, which brought together young leftist Cuban intellectuals who sought artistic, literary, and social renovation. They considered film criticism an impor­tant part of this mission by elevating cinema to the level of a “high” art capable of exceptional expressive powers, and they took a critical and theoretical stance similar to the French surrealist and impressionist film theories of cinema pur.27 The young Carpentier met Eisenstein in Paris in 1930 through common acquaintances in Pa­ri­sian surrealist circles. Carpentier described walking around Paris with Eisenstein and the surrealist writer Robert Desnos, while also giving an account of Eisenstein’s creative biography. Man Ray was asked to take photos to commemorate the encounter.28 The publication of Carpentier’s interview foregrounded the Minoristas’ cosmopolitan connections and ambitions, but it also established an explicit dialogue between Latin American modernism, of which Carpentier was already a strong representative, and the Soviet filmmaker, suggesting artistic and cultural continuities (in this case, via the shared affinities with the French surrealist vision in par­tic­u­lar). However, this interview was further impacted by the original reception history of Potemkin in Cuba, which served in that par­tic­ul­ar context as less of an affirmation of Eisenstein’s artistic avant-­gardism and its resonances in Cuba than as a catalyst for the radicalization of Cuban film criticism in par­tic­u­lar. The first pre­sen­ta­tion of a Soviet film in Cuba was the screening of Potemkin held in the Nacional (now the García Lorca) Theatre in 1927. Cuba’s leading newspaper, Diario de la marina, initially advertised it as “a bloodcurdling photodrama of Tsarist Rus­sia: Potemkin, recognized by Douglas Fairbanks, Emil Jannings, Max Reinhart and other celebrities as the most grandiose spectacle produced in cinema to date.”29 Such sensationalist pre­sen­ta­tion and emphasis on the international prestige and spectacle, of course, w ­ ere entirely consistent with film advertisement for Hollywood films, which already formed a core of Cuban commercial film culture and did ­little to prepare the audience, including critics, for what was to follow.



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The screening of Potemkin marked a watershed in the history of Cuban film culture, resulting in its ban due to its assumed subversive po­liti­cal impact, and an explosion of public debate, as Smith Mesa affirms.30 It brought about a new discourse on cinema’s po­liti­cal potential and the medium’s ability to arouse “dangerous passions,” as was claimed, for example, in the subsequent article in Diario, as a way to explain the decision to ban the film from further screenings. The passions in question ­were not part of one’s personal life, as has so often been the concern in debates over cinematic melodrama, but in a collective.31 Consequently, as Potemkin was acknowledged by the state to have revolutionary potential and therefore to threaten the state status quo (as evidenced by its ban), it was also quickly recognized and appropriated by po­liti­cal radicals as a weapon in po­liti­cal education and strug­gle. References to Eisenstein as a key figure of the progressive film culture, po­liti­ cally and artistically, quickly became almost expected of any leftist artist, in Cuba as elsewhere. The enthusiasm for his films brought together other­w ise quite diverse cultural and po­liti­cal figures. Thus one of the first Cuban reviews of Eisenstein’s films was written by Julio Antonio Mella, the cofounder of the first Communist Party in Cuba, leader of the student movement, and an enthusiast of the October Revolution.32 While in exile in Mexico in 1928 (where he knew many of the p­ eople Eisenstein would get to know just a few years ­later during his making of Que Viva Mexico), Mella wrote a review of October in a Trotskyite newspaper, Tren blindado. His review followed the familiar pattern of contrasting Eisenstein’s style with that of Hollywood. Mella emphasized the collective protagonist of the revolutionary masses in opposition to the “cine yanqui” of individuals and ­isolated characters: “Octubre es el film de la revolución. No hay la ingenuidad estúpida del ‘boy.’ Tampoco el tonto y romántico desenlace de amor con el beso final de varios metros. La película no tiene héroes. Es la vida, es la multitud.”33 He also highlighted the issue that would haunt revolutionary cinema for de­cades to come: that of spectatorship, and the aesthetic and po­liti­cal education of the public: .

The spectators, accustomed as they are to the bourgeois film style, may not fully appreciate the efforts of the Sovkino production studio in all of its value. It does not ­matter. It would be as much as to ask of them to understand the Proletarian Revolution a­ fter they knew about it through the information provided by the United Press, or the Revolutionary Movement in our country and our national features by means of the repre­sen­ta­tions proposed by Hollywood. Nevertheless, the ideological vanguards have h­ ere the opportunity to enjoy from one of the most intense pleasures that the con­temporary epoch has to offer in the realm of the arts by means of the newest and most expressive of modern arts: the moving picture.34

The potential of Soviet cinema—­and Eisenstein’s films specifically—­for the creation of a new kind of a spectator, and a new kind of film education understood in

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cultural and po­liti­cal terms, would shape much of its reception in the subsequent de­cades, when such efforts ­were taken up by film activists, critics, and cineastes as part of the larger proj­ect of the institutionalization of film culture. It is certainly this idea of awakening the spectator’s (po­liti­cal) passions that can be seen as instrumental in both the banning of the film (in 1920s Cuba as in many other places, including Brazil of the 1960s and 1970s) and its cele­bration in postrevolutionary Cuba, where the aesthetic and po­liti­cal education of the “New Man” by means of cinematic media was at the core of debates throughout the 1960s. Thus the government ban on Potemkin triggered by its original 1927 screening provoked a debate engaging the terms that would become paradigmatic for the Cuban film culture throughout the twentieth c­ entury—­and arguably into the twenty-­first ­century—­regarding censorship and its implications in shaping the opinions and sensibilities of the spectator. The editors of Revista de Avance (Francisco Ichazo, Félix Lizaso, Jorge Mañach, Juan Marinello, and José Zacarías Tallet) responded to the actions of the government with a ferocious polemic in the pages of the journal, highlighting the relationship between the state and the public: What to say of the idea of the Tutor-­State that some politicians promote as the only pos­si­ble way for the salvation of the p­ eople? We thought that twenty-­five years of Republic would have been enough not to need any crutches. But that was not the case. As overgrown infants, the State forcefully leads us by the righ­teous paths; it tells us what nakedness we are allowed to see, what pastimes we can enjoy and which shows we can attend to. According with this aesthetic plan for the salvation of the souls, it goes as far as to institute a Film Review Board, whose first dictates are very well-­known.

This analy­sis combines the meta­phors of infantilization of the ­people by the state and by the church with the infantilization of spectators by cinema, assuming them incapable of making their own decisions or managing their (visceral and carnal) reactions to cinema. The editors ­were particularly enraged by the negative assumptions the censors ­were making about the dangers of the impassioned reactions by audiences: Potemkin was prohibited b­ ecause, according to the censors, it “impassioned the hearts of the spectators.” They ask: What did the commissioner want? [For the film to] put them to sleep? Is it our duty to form ready-­for-­action and virile citizens, or feeble men and w ­ omen, indifferent to all and ­every cry for justice and equity? What did the commissioner want the audience to do once they witnessed the vandalism of the Tsar’s Cossacks, so wonderfully denounced in that film?

While gendering and sexualizing the spectator (as male) and equating po­liti­cal and ethical consciousness with (male) virility, the authors implicitly introduce the



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figure of an active spectator, a figure that is so impor­tant for Eisenstein’s own theories, as well as their reception in the 1960s, in Cuba as elsewhere. They then further connect the themes of po­liti­cal repression depicted in the film itself with the actions of the censors: How much more painful would it be that the audience remained immutable before the slaughter of ­women and ­children by the hands of armed hordes of the Empire! But it seems that what was expected was a less flamboyant display of cruelty by the Tsar’s soldiers. What was expected was a substitution of the filmed Cossacks by cardboard Cossacks more to the liking of the Censorship Commissioner. What sad affair it is that ­there are no expendable cardboard Cossacks for such occasions!35

The irony ­here renders explicit the broader po­liti­cal consequences and relevance of cultural policies and state censorship, linking them to broader forms of state repression and vio­lence.

cultural polemics of the 1960s This notion of an innocent, immature, and underdeveloped national spectator who is to be protected by the state from exposure to any ideologically dangerous and potentially subversive art (which the writers foreground as evident in the ban on the screening of Potemkin), ironically resonated with par­tic­u­lar force in postrevolutionary Cuba. ­These very assumptions about spectatorship ­were instrumental in the po­liti­cal logic of the very cultural figures who, this time around, ­were ­proposing Soviet cinema—­and not Hollywood, as was the case in the 1920s—as the only “norm” for cinematic repre­sen­ta­tion, and as an antidote to the ideological dangers of other cinemas. Often such dangers would be articulated by the proponents of film censorship in familiar binaries: of “de­cadent” (as opposed to the virility of revolutionaries) or dangerous to the public b­ ecause of their depiction of prostitution and sex more generally (and therefore harmfully weakening the spirit: “aflojar el espíritu combatiente, de sacrificio y pelea de nuestro pueblo”). In this context, however, ­these Cuban party hard-­liners w ­ ere deliberately ­erasing any differences between the early Soviet avant-­garde (to which Potemkin belongs) and the subsequent adoption of socialist realism, which was what they ­were effectively proposing, implicitly or explic­itly, as the model to be a­ dopted in Cuba, and which the ICAIC leadership successfully resisted throughout the 1960s. While the Soviet avant-­garde (like most modernist and avant-­garde movements) favored affective and visceral shock as a way to “awaken” the complacent spectator—­and despite its own investment in male virility—it was also, in many of its manifestations, at the very least irreverent and often subversive in its treatment of sex, which came to be replaced by socialist realism’s emphasis on a positive and heroic repre­sen­ta­tion combined with extreme sexual puritanism. The ideological (and formal) difference between the Soviet avant-­garde and socialist

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realism was often erased among many of the Cuban communist party hard-­liners, who, alongside Valdés-­Rodríguez, ­were known specifically for promoting Soviet cinema in Cuba before the revolution. In the period leading up to 1959, the main disseminator of Soviet culture in Cuba was the Popu­lar Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Popu­lar, PSP), which or­ga­nized a wide range of cultural activities, including film and cultural criticism, and cine-­club repertoire. As early as the 1940s, one of the PSP’s militants, Mirta Aguirre, became a model for a certain kind of po­liti­ cally engaged pro-­Soviet (and specifically pro–­socialist realist, pro-­Stalinist) film criticism. In contrast, the ­future leaders of the ICAIC all belonged to the film section of the cultural society Nuestro Tiempo, which was affiliated with the PSP but stood at a certain distance from it. Run by a younger generation of radicals, Nuestro Tiempo largely advanced 1950s Italian neorealism as the privileged model for cinema in Cuba. And the “liberal” wing of the prerevolutionary cultural field—­also initially part of Nuestro Tiempo—­favored British direct cinema and subsequently the French New Wave, while also defending Hollywood, and was hostile t­oward Soviet cinema. ­These three clusters, corresponding to the three dominant cultural/ po­liti­cal camps (often referred to as dogmaticos, revolucionarios, and liberals)36 competed for power in the cultural sphere in the 1960s and ­were distinguishable in par­ tic­ul­ar by their attitude t­oward the Soviet Union and its cultural policies. Thus Alfredo Guevara, the ICAIC director, who originally belonged to the PSP militants, split from them in the 1950s over his criticism of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and his open opposition to socialist realism. The ­battle between ­these three camps constituted the core of the cultural debates throughout the 1960s. As the liberals ­were removed from any positions of power in the early 1960s, the old guard PSP “dogmatists” increasingly gained control over the po­liti­cal sphere as Fidel’s ties to the Soviet Union solidified throughout the course of the de­cade. Meanwhile, the ICAIC’s “revolutionaries” managed to retain almost full control over the cinematic sphere and a g­ reat degree of aesthetic and po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence, at least u­ ntil the mid-1970s. Among them the leading figures ­were Alfredo Guevara, a personal friend of Fidel, and Julio García Espinosa, who became the dominant force at the ICAIC, responsible for its ideological and aesthetic program. And although Valdés-­ Rodríguez himself did not occupy any official position at the ICAIC a­ fter the ­revolution (he resumed his teaching position at the University of Havana), he collaborated with his former students, who ­were among the ICAIC leaders, in their film publications and educational initiatives (including his own book on Soviet cinema published in 1963, which begins with quotes from Lenin and Lunacharskii),37 and represented Cuba at festivals abroad.38 Just two years ­after the inaugural the ICAIC screening of Potemkin, the institute’s leaders got to articulate a very similar response to the attack waged against them in December 1963 by the party hard-­liners on the pages on the newspaper Hoy as the editors of Avance did about the 1927 censorship of Potemkin. This time, the call for censorship came from the PSP leaders, who took issue with the ICAIC’s screening of Latuaro Murúa’s Alias Gardelito (1961), Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating



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Angel (1962), Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (1961). All of ­these films ­were deemed “de­cadent” and harmful to the public by posing a negative example, or simply as being too confusing for audiences, as deemed by the authors of the original article published in Hoy. Alfredo Guevara responded, which led to a five-­part polemic with the editor of Hoy, Blas Roca Calderío, a well-­known communist leader (and a con­temporary of Julio Antonio Mella, who attended the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1935), which took place over the course of a month on the pages of the newspaper. Blas Roca took this occasion to attack the ICAIC for being “representatives of the de­cadent bourgeois art,” which “­couldn’t be good” for the country forging a revolution, and would “weaken the spirit of sacrifice and fight in our p­ eople, contaminating it with the bourgeois cowardice in the face of imperialists, their lackeys and the counter-­revolutionary scum.”39 In his defense of the ICAIC and its programming choices, Guevara again explic­itly aligned ­these attacks with the demand for socialist realism: We all know what this is about, and this is not the first time we hear t­ hose “siren’s songs”: the good, positive hero, the need of a happy ending, the constrictive moral, the elaboration of archetypes, the so-­called socialist realism. He categorically rejects t­ hese demands by arguing: “If, as it is recommended, we ­were to limit ourselves to the exhibition of ­either agitation films or films that have a calming effect, [then] the [real] works of art and the multiplicity of paths that they open up for consciousness and perception, would be substituted by mere propaganda, barely decorated with aesthetic formulas, and the public would be reduced to a hoard of ‘babies’ that are taken care of by baby nurses feeding them the ‘ideological puree,’ perfectly prepared and sterilized, thus guaranteeing its best and fullest ingestion.” 40 The resonance between t­ hese quotes—­one from the editors of Avance from the 1920s responding to the censorship of a Soviet film, and the other from the leaders of the postrevolutionary film institution with an almost complete mono­poly over production and exhibition on the island in response to the pro-­Soviet, antimodernist faction of the party—is more difficult to unpack than it may initially appear. On the one hand, the rejection of the notion of a passive and immature spectator, in need of a predigested and safe “papilla ideológica” administered by the state in ­favor of a figure of an “active spectator” whose awakening is triggered precisely by the shocking, often visceral ele­ments of the modernist/avant-­garde films, is something that unites Eisenstein and Pasolini, as well as the 1920s avant-­gardes and the 1960s New Cinemas. In this sense, the critics of Avance and the ICAIC, respectively, accurately represent the aesthetic (and po­liti­cal) ideologies of the very movements they defend. In fact, as we know, much of the subsequent 1960s and 1970s Anglo-­French film theory was predicated on this concept, and likewise shared by the corpus of the new Latin American film theory/criticism. At the same time, the very idea of the New Man—to be po­liti­cally awakened by the right kind of po­liti­cal passions on the screen (­whether embodied in Potemkin or Accatone) always existed in opposition to the assumption about the wrong kind of

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passions, ­those embodied in Hollywood films. A deep distrust in popu­lar tastes (which, in the case of both 1920s and 1960s Cuba and the Soviet Union, still tended ­toward Hollywood over Eisenstein or Pasolini) likewise assumes a spectator whose original taste is underdeveloped and in need of reeducation. And the very argument between Guevara and Blas Roca can be seen as a strug­gle for the full control over film exhibition and cultural policy on the island. The position that Blas Roca advanced in this polemic was consistent with what the newly formed Consejo Nacional de Cultura presented at its first congress as “política cultural del Gobierno Revolucionario.” By resisting it, the ICAIC was struggling to maintain not only its autonomy from a cultural policy that effectively prohibited artistic experimentation as a sign of po­liti­cal descent, but also to sustain the ICAIC’s mono­poly over all of production and exhibition. This was a mono­poly on both interpreting and dictating cultural policy, as far as cinema was concerned, and therefore it held the power to decide which films may or may not be appropriate for the po­liti­cal and aesthetic education of the Cuban audience. To add to the historical irony of this par­tic­ul­ar pairing, it is quite certain that the opponents of the ICAIC’s programming choices in 1963, in what Guevara rightfully deciphered as their insistence on socialist realism, included Eisenstein in that latter category, effectively proposing replacing “de­cadent” Eu­ro­pean auteurs with “progressive” Soviet ones, with Potemkin standing as an icon of just such cinema. And while Eisenstein’s complicity with Stalinism and socialist realism has been raised by many critics (as early as in 1962, for example, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which was translated into Spanish and had wide circulation in Cuba in the late 1960s), it is still impor­tant to underscore the fact that Eisenstein was, throughout his life, attacked by the Soviet party hard-­liners for not following the very Soviet cultural policies that Blas Roca and the ­others in the PSP and the Consejo Nacional tried so desperately to institute. It may also be worth noting that just three years l­ater, in 1966, Potemkin would become prohibited in Brazil; its screening constituted a po­liti­cal crime, for the first time in Brazil’s ­legal history. This ban lasted throughout the 1970s, for the full duration of the military dictatorship, with only clandestine screenings taking place through under­ground film clubs and militant film gatherings. Similarly, the first films officially banned from exhibition in Argentina by government censorship in 1967 ­were Eisenstein’s Strike and October. In Peru it took the distribution com­pany Libertad seventeen years to get permission from the government’s censorship bureau to exhibit Potemkin; it was only in 1968 that the film was shown in that country for the first time.41 The ban on Eisenstein’s films by numerous military dictatorships in Latin Amer­i­ca in the 1950s through 1970s could appear anachronistic when compared with Eisenstein’s reception in Eu­rope and North Amer­ i­ca, where during the same period his films and writings certainly played a role in further radicalizing generations of artists and theorists, but w ­ ere hardly seen as dangerous anymore. Yet, in much of Latin Amer­ic­ a outside of Cuba at that time, Eisenstein’s work was still perceived as relevant and potentially truly subversive,



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and subject to state censorship. It is in this context that we must understand the claim made by Jose Carlos Avellar, one of the period’s most impor­tant Brazilian film critics and scholars, that in the 1970s in Brazil, “the cinemas of Sergei Eisenstein and of Dziga Vertov act as living forces. As living forces, as acting influences on con­temporary cinema, and not as examples of a classical culture to be examined in film archives.” 42 In this broader context, the ICAIC’s insistence on the inclusion of Eisenstein in the early 1960s—­with its simultaneous rejection of the notion of socialist realism and assumption that audiences in Cuba needed s­ imple and straightforward messages as means of po­liti­cal education—­further reinforces the exceptional status of Battleship Potemkin as a film that, throughout much of the twentieth c­ entury, continued to act as a catalyst for po­liti­cal, cultural, and aesthetic debates about the nature of spectatorship, po­liti­cal aesthetics, and the role of the state in cultural policies. The histories unearthed by tracing the exhibition of this film around the world are often surprising, bringing out the internal contradictions and tensions, as well as the nonlinearity or asynchronicity of cultural movements and historical formations brought into contact through t­hese transnational and transhistorical cinematic encounters: uncanny histories of cinema, indeed.

notes 1. ​Vladimir Alexander Smith Mesa, “Kinocuban: The Significance of Soviet and Eastern Eu­ro­

pean Cinemas for the Cuban Moving Image” (PhD diss., University College London, 2011), 54 2. ​João Felipe Gonçalves, “Premiers in Havana,” in The Socialist Sixties, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 92. 3. ​Carlos Muguiro Altuna, “Kinofikatsia cubana y sus fantasmas: Inventario de la presencia (y de la ausencia) del cine soviético en las pantallas de Cuba (1961–1991),” Kamchatka: Revista de análisis cultural 5 (2015): 288. 4. ​Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Dina Iordanova, “Introduction,” South Asian Popu­lar Culture 4, no. 2 (2006): 79–82. 5. ​See, for example, V. K. Cherian. India’s Film Society Movement: The Journey and Its Impact (London: Sage, 2016), 55 6. ​Gonçalves, “Sputnik Premiers in Havana,” 92. 7. ​Gonçalves, 93. 8. ​Paulo Antonio Paranagua and Roberto Cobas, Le cinéma cubain (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), 32–33. 9. ​Miguiro Altuna, “Kinofikatsia cubana y sus fantasmas,” 268. 10. ​Miguiro Altuna, 267. 11. ​Gonçalves, “Sputnik Premiers in Havana,” 112. 12. ​Alfredo Guevara, “Realidades y perspectivas de un nuevo cine,” Cine Cubano, no. 1 (1960): 8. 13. ​Vsevolod Pudovkin, El actor en el film (Buenos Aires: Losange, 1955); Vsevolod Pudovkin, Argumento y montaje: Bases de un film (Buenos Aires: Editorial Futuro, 1956); Sergei Eisenstein, G. Kosintsev, and M. Bleiman, El arte de Charles Chaplin (Buenos Aires: Losange, 1956); Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovchenko, M. Rom, Alexandrov, Vichnevski, Jachaturian y Shotaskovich, El oficio cinematografico (Buenos Aires: Futuro, 1957); Sergei Eisenstein, La forma en el cine (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Losange, 1958); Vsevolod Pudovkin, El actor de cine y el sistema de Stanislavsky (Montevideo: Pueblos Unidos, 1957); Sergei Eisenstein, Problemas de la composición

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cinematográfica (Montevideo: Ediciones Pueblos Unidos, 1957); Vsevolod Pudovkin, La técnica del cine y el actor en el film (México: Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos, 1960); Vladimir Nizhny, Lecciones de cine de Eisenstein (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1964). 14. ​See the interviews in Cine Cubano 93 (1977): 44–65, or the interventions by the Latin American contributors to the FIAF symposium “Influence du Cinema Sovietique” (Varna, 1977. 15. ​Ismail Xavier, Sétima arte: Um culto moderno (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Perspectiva, 1978), 207. 16. ​For an in-­depth treatment of this topic, see Irene Rozsa, “Film Culture and Education in Republican Cuba: The Legacy of José Manuel Valdés-­Rodríguez,” in Cosmopolitan Film Cultures, ed. Rielle Navitsky and Nicolas Poppe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 17. ​José Manuel Valdés-­Rodríguez, “Letras: Rusia a los doce años,” Revista de Avance (Havana), January 15, 1929, 152. 18. ​José Manuel Valdés-­Rodríguez, “El hombre, el creador, el técnico: Sergei Mijailovich Eisenstein,” Lunes de revolución, February 6, 1961, 24–26. 19. ​Rozsa, “Film Culture and Education,” 298–323. 20. ​José Manuel Valdés-­Rodríguez, El cine en la Universidad de La Habana (1942–1965) (Havana: Empresa de Publicaciones Mined, 1966), vii–­xii. 21. ​Rozsa, “Film Culture and Education,” 309, 312–313; Valdés-­Rodríguez, El cine en la Universidad, 372–380, 393–429, 456–485. 22. ​See Sarah Ann Wells, “Parallel Modernities? The First Reception of Soviet Cinema in Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin Amer­i­ca, ed. Rielle Navitsky and Nicolas Poppe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 151–­; Masha Salazkina, “Eisenstein in Latin Amer­i­ca,” in The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein and Rus­sian Cinema, ed. Joan Neuberger and Antonio Somaini (Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2018), 343–365. 23. ​Salazkina, “Eisenstein in Latin Amer­ic­ a,” 357. 24. ​See Graziela Pogolotti, Polémicas culturales de los 60 (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2006). 25. ​Wells, “Parallel Modernities?,” 168–169. 26. ​Wells, 168–169; Ana López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin Amer­i­ca,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 1 (2000): 48–78. 27. ​“Declaración del Grupo Minorista,” first published in Carteles 21 (May  22, 1927): 16, 25, http://­www​.­cubaliteraria​.c­ om​/­monografia​/­grupo​_­minorista​/­declaracion​.­html. See also Ana Cairo Ballester, El Grupo Minorista y su tiempo (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978); Jason Borges, “High Anxiety: Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Prerevolutionary Film Criticism in Cuba,” Revista de estudios Hispanicos 40 (2006): 341–360. 28. ​Alejo Carpentier, “Con el creador de ‘El Acorozado Potemkin,’ ” reprinted in Cine Cubano 9 (1969): 92–95. 29. ​ Diario de la marina, September 1, 1927, 9 (translation mine). 30. ​Smith Mesa, “Kinocuban,” 54. 31. ​ Diario de la marina, 14. 32. ​Felipe Pérez Cruz, Mella y la Revolución de Octubre (Havana: Editorial Gente Nueva, 1980). 33. ​Julio Antonio Mella, “Octubre,” Cine Cubano 9 (1969): 111–112; first published in Tren blindado (1928). 34. ​Mella, 111–112. 35. ​ Revista de Avance, no. 13, October 15, 1927, n.p. 36. ​For more on this, see, for example, Rebecca Gordon-­Nesbitt, To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015). 37. ​José Manuel Valdés-­Rodríguez, Cursillos de cinematografia cine por paises: Union Sovietica (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1962), 1. 38. ​For more, see Salazkina, “Eisenstein in Latin Amer­i­ca.”



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39. ​Blas Roca, quoted in Pogolotti, Polémicas culturales de los 60, 69. 40. ​Quoted in Pogolotti, 145–148. 41. ​For an account of this, see “Encuesta a cineastas latinoamericanos sobre influencia del cine

silente sovietico,” Cine Cubano 93 (1977): 44–65. 42. ​Jose Carlos Avellar, “Le cinema sovietique muet et le nouveau cinema brasilien,” (paper presented at the FIAF symposium “The influence of s­ ilent Soviet cinema on world cinema,” Varna, May 29 -­ June 2, 1977).

UNC ANNY FIGURES

Part 3

7 • JULIO GARCÍA ESPINOSA AND THE FIGHT FOR A CRITIC AL CULTURE IN CUBA CRISTI N A V EN EG A S

­There are ways to defend the Revolution that are catastrophic. —­Manuel Pérez Paredes, 2016

­After dedicating his energies to the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) for three de­cades, sixty-­five-­year-­old Julio García Espinosa was summarily dismissed as its president on May 13, 1991. The ruling, handed down by the Direction of the Revolution, was in reaction to a mounting controversy surrounding the making of a feature film Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown, 1991) directed by Daniel Díaz Torres. The story of Alicia, a young theater instructor who is assigned to work in the fictional town of Maravillas, is a satirical look at some of the prob­lems of Cuban society. A politicized reception of the film’s absurdist humor led to a disproportionate response by the Communist Party’s leadership that had far-­reaching consequences. The response revealed that the prob­lems García Espinosa faced went beyond the film to the overall changes he had undertaken at the ICAIC. Indeed, the conflict endangered the long-­standing privileged status of the cinematic institution within the Cuban cultural sphere. In keeping with his unwavering commitment to the ICAIC, García Espinosa defended his decision to greenlight the film, which he noted in a long personal letter to Fidel Castro a month and a half before his dismissal. Castro did not reply to the letter, although he had long been a strong supporter of García Espinosa and of the ICAIC. In fact, García Espinosa evokes their long history of collaboration in the opening lines of his letter while also reiterating his loyalty to a shared revolutionary proj­ect. But ­because the letter went unanswered, the apparent snub by the maximum leader suggested that the situation was very serious indeed. What tran­spired in the months that followed was the denouement of an institutional crisis at the center of which ­were García Espinosa, the ICAIC, the film, and the filmmakers. The Alicia conflict was covered by specialists and 139

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critics in Cuba and beyond who saw it as marking a historical juncture for the prestigious institution, as well as presenting new issues for the institution’s leadership on the heels of the post-­Soviet era.1 The event reverberated long ­after a po­liti­ cal solution was found, its memory relentlessly folding into the pre­sent. What could be learned from revisiting this critical moment from the purview of García Espinosa’s letter to Castro? ­There is, to be sure, an uncanniness to the Alicia conflict—­the familiar removal of ICAIC presidents and excessive ideological dramatics—­that mirrors the relationship between García Espinosa’s own ­history and that of the institution of Cuban cinema more broadly. Previously unavailable personal documents, like the letter to Fidel Castro, allow us to remember this uncanny moment and question our understanding of institutional histories and the role individuals play in shaping them. García Espinosa’s letter suggests that the institutional crisis was part of a larger national conflagration that he linked to the continuing difficulty of embracing a strong critical culture. Despite his firing and the mounting tension surrounding the film, García Espinosa’s impassioned words reiterate an unflinching and selfless commitment to the pro­cess of the revolution: “I have dedicated my life to Cuban cinema.”2 García Espinosa is mostly known outside of Cuba for his famous manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969), but what we understand from examining his letter to Castro is a more complex, fragmentary, and personal history at the center of one of the most impor­tant institutions of Cuban culture. It also confirms the per­sis­tence of García Espinosa’s ideas that, in this instance, recall Fidel’s own arguments for defending the institute in 1971, providing new insight into the ongoing ideological challenges within Cuban cultural politics. In the letter, García Espinosa refers to Castro’s role in the institute’s historical trajectory, its unique beginnings, and their shared strug­gles and belief in the revolutionary potential of such an institution. Given the critical circumstances that surrounded Alicia, García Espinosa would have realized he could not continue as the organ­ization’s president. Even so, he believed that the mission of the institution could be preserved and should not depend on him or his historic leadership. He repeated this sentiment seven years ­later in an interview with Jorge Ruffinelli: “It should no longer be so impor­tant who heads the ICAIC,” ­because the participation of filmmakers would sustain and support the institution.3 Essentially, García Espinosa trusted what he and ­others had built over generations as a strong foundation for the ­future. As he had done at e­ arlier moments of crisis, García Espinosa used the opportunity to restate his position in support of a strong critical culture, thus intervening in a chaotic situation. Through personal testimony, he probes fundamental issues that continued to worry him regarding larger “prob­lems of our Revolution.” 4 Could he generate a new conversation with Castro? Should the letter be made public? Typically discreet, he put the letter away. García Espinosa had gone from being the key driving force and leader of Cuban cinema to being forced to watch from the sidelines. The letter marks this pivotal moment and its signifi-



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cance to him, as he moved away from r­ unning the institution and supporting its personnel. In what follows, I examine the letter for what it tells us about García Espinosa and the par­tic­u­lar moment in the history of the institution he once led, with the understanding that other issues also affected how events unfolded. An author’s personal correspondence gives us access to their words and context of writing, but ­these documents are nonetheless only a fragment of a larger experience. One of the in­ter­est­ing aspects of the letter is its rhetorical breath and its double role as personal testimony and po­liti­cal thesis about Cuban critical culture. My investigation into García Espinosa’s history is part of a larger proj­ect that considers his overall legacy, range of creative work, and life experience. His dismissal raised new questions about the politics of the institution, generated discussion about past events, and spurred solidarity among filmmakers. The content of the letter demonstrates his enormous capacity to summon institutional and personal history to conduct a rigorous analy­sis of events leading up to the writing of the letter in March 1991. Although García Espinosa would end up a casualty of the dysfunctional system, the letter reveals steadfastness as he faced the looming catastrophe of the post-­Soviet era in Cuba. It elucidates how the personal commitment to the revolutionary proj­ect and his commitment to the cinema are consistently manifest throughout his life and lets us weigh how an individual’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions connect to larger ideological debates and cultural objectives. The letter as a material fragment of that provides an opportunity to reevaluate García Espinosa’s significance for the pre­sent.

debacle over a film The hullabaloo over the film put the institute in the crosshairs of orthodox Party bureaucrats who saw an opportunity to push for the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of all audiovisual entities in the country—­the ICAIC, the filmmaking studios of the Armed Revolutionary Forces, Cine Educativo (CINED), the Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (ICRT), all of which would be ­under the umbrella of ICRT. Once García Espinosa had been removed from his post, the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers moved to restructure the audiovisual sector and published its intention to do so in Granma, the official party newspaper, on May  13, 1991, announcing that a state commission had been formed to carry out the reor­ga­ni­za­ tion. Said state commission included the se­nior communist leader, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, whom García Espinosa and ­others respected; Carlos Aldana, head ideologue of the Party and third in power; and Enrique Román, head of the ICRT and of the commission. A second state commission led by Carlos Rafael Rodriguez that also included Carlos Aldana and the ICAIC’s founding president, Alfredo Guevara, would si­mul­ta­neously discuss how the engagement with con­ temporary social conflicts could be made productive. Seemingly working at cross-­ purposes, one commission studied how to fuse the institutions, while the other

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worked to arrive at a dif­fer­ent understanding of how to work through the prob­ lems they faced repeatedly. Unsurprisingly, ICAIC-­affiliated filmmakers w ­ ere offended and alarmed by the sudden announcement of institutional fusion and the firing of García Espinosa. The conflict could indeed spell the end of the ICAIC as they knew it. In the month that followed, a group of eigh­teen ICAIC-­affiliated filmmakers or­ga­nized themselves (the Group of 18) representing the dif­fer­ent perspectives within the ICAIC. Given Cuba’s severe economic crisis at the time, the Group of 18 was not opposed to a pos­si­ble integration of production resources with other entities. Indeed, combining resources with the ICRT had been considered by ICAIC leadership at other periods of reform. The difference in 1991 was that the proposal had not been initiated within the ICAIC; instead, the decision bypassed the institute’s top ranks to expedite the pro­cess of reor­ga­ni­za­tion. Furthermore, the Group of 18 insisted that the ICAIC, not the ICRT, should lead any orga­nizational restructuring.5 It appealed first to Armando Hart (a longtime friend and colleague of García Espinosa and lifelong friend of Fidel Castro) to oppose the proposed fusing of the ICAIC with the ICRT and to include the Group of 18 in the discussions. García Espinosa was copied on all this correspondence, though he could no longer take part in the conversations. By June  13, the Group of 18 wrote to Fidel Castro to request that the ideological campaign against the film’s exhibition be examined.6 Castro’s curt reply was immediate, revealing his preference for a broad investigation by the state commission to look into the events surrounding the film, and not to examine the irregular events taking place leading up to the film’s exhibition. At the same time, Castro supported the idea that Alfredo Guevara return from his UNESCO post in Paris to participate in discussions about the work of the committees.7 Guevara’s return reassured García Espinosa, since his po­liti­cal acumen and diplomacy in navigating sensitive issues could secure the organ­ization’s cultural mission if conversations favored the institute. Once in Cuba, Guevara met a few months l­ ater, in October 1991, with ICAIC artistic, technical, and specialized personnel to go over the prob­lems that confronted the film and to convey how the committees would conduct their work. It is clear from a transcript of the meeting that ­there was confusion about what was ­going on. Guevara had been away from the ICAIC for a de­cade, and so the transcript also reveals personal anxiety around the exile to Paris and return to Cuba in the midst of a new crisis.8 But he was cautiously optimistic that his participation in the dialogues meant that the organ­ization still had some support from Castro. Though ICAIC leaders w ­ ere receiving contradictory signals from Castro, Guevara thought the situation could still be managed, despite the chaotic atmosphere. Since its founding in 1959, the institute had more than once faced up to periodic external po­liti­cal obstacles as well as the internal challenges of an evolving culture and organ­ization. In ­earlier po­liti­cal conflicts during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, when cultural hardliners attacked the ICAIC, Castro himself defended the institute against orthodox Party views during the controversial First



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Congress of Education and Culture.9 Years ­after the Alicia mess, García Espinosa maintained his reading of the situation at the time with residual frustration. He explained: “The prob­lem was not so much [with] the film, but what was b­ ehind it, ­because what­ever happens in Cuba acquires a stratospheric dimension. I ­don’t know, Godard can have a prob­lem with a film, or any filmmaker in any part of the world, they censor a film, they stop [its exhibition], they limit it, e­ tc., and it’s just another event in the haphazard life of a filmmaker; but if it happens in Cuba it seems the world is caving in.”10 The government’s response to Alicia suggests that Party ideologues sensationalized the film’s reception, a scenario that, if unquestioned, could undermine the institute’s ­future autonomy and bring the ICAIC ­under direct Party oversight. As he had done before, García Espinosa considered the new yet familiar threat to the institution to be about the role of the ICAIC in the emerging risks of a postsocialist world. Publicly, this anxiety focused on the film. Party ideologues also promoted the idea that the institute was mismanaged and questioned the leadership’s revolutionary loyalty in the media campaign deployed around the film’s exhibition. Alicia eventually opened in theaters in June 1991 in an atmosphere of intense scrutiny in which, as Eduardo del Llano, one of the film’s writers, recalls, each image was interpreted as subversive.11 Though the film screened for only four days in Havana and in capital cities in the provinces, Alfredo Guevara, upon his return, publicly supported it and the filmmakers. The film tells the story of a young theater teacher named Alicia, who is sent to work in the fictional town of Maravillas, where social reprobates are rehabilitated. It is a dark comedy dealing with issues the filmmakers deemed per­sis­tent in Cuban revolutionary culture. As soon as she arrives, Alicia is met with unusual characters and bizarre situations she is unprepared to deal with. The challenge of carry­ing out her work in this context is the source of the film’s absurdist humor. Articles in the Cuban press judged Alicia to be unacceptable for showing ugliness instead of the beautiful real­ity of Cuba;12 of poor professional quality and not advancing the production standards of the director’s previous films;13 deplorable ­because it threatens revolutionary princi­ples;14 indefensible b­ ecause intentionally or not it promotes defeatism;15 and irritating and aggressive in tone.16 Taking a stand against ­these harsh militant views, the ICAIC or­ga­nized a dossier to provide a counterperspective on the film that was published ­later in 1992 in the institute’s journal, Cine Cubano. ­Those articles addressed the complicated critical response the film had generated in Cuba, as well as the reviews from Alicia’s world premiere at the Berlin Film ­Festival in February 1991, to show that the literally incorrect and misleading statements about the film by festival reviewers led to biased and distorted interpretations that ­were ­later picked up at home and abroad in the exile community.17 Filmmakers involved in the Group of 18 remember their own experiences of the or­ga­nized attacks on the film at the end of screenings in Havana. Manuel Pérez Paredes tells that regular theater staff had been replaced with Party militants at the screenings he attended with his wife.18 Ironically, the orchestrated events in the theaters evoked the surreal events occurring in the town of Maravillas depicted in

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Alicia. To further respond to the irregular atmosphere surrounding the film’s exhibition, Pérez Paredes and other ICAIC filmmakers wrote an article that they sent to the press corps addressing each one of the critiques leveled against the film, pointing out that the militant-­led events at the screenings legitimized what the film portrays. The article was never published.19 That a dark comedy about a small town in Cuba should generate such a large-­scale po­liti­cal commotion as to involve the highest leaders of government could not simply be explained, as García Espinosa observed, by the film alone. One would also have to consider the close historical ties between the institution’s leadership and the highest levels of government (Raúl and Fidel).

historical CONJUNCTURES and the inopportune alicia The context surrounding the controversy over the film must be understood in relation to the unpre­ce­dented coincidence of world-­changing events and their impact in Cuba: the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; the devastating effect on Cuba’s economic and po­liti­cal life and the state of emergency it created; the internal po­liti­cal crisis created by the 1989 public trial and execution of ranking Cuban military officers convicted on corruption and drug trafficking charges that aggravated Party fissures; and the Rectification pro­cess that the Cuban government had implemented starting in the mid-1980s to address a number of specific prob­lems in the Cuban economy and society that gave way to a broad range of reform mea­sures to address them. The Alicia crisis coincides with this historical context, underscoring the heightened ideological climate beyond the film. The Rectification pro­cess was an enormous, multiyear undertaking to examine how the Cuban economy could be made less reliant on its trading partners in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.20 The search for solutions included all areas of the economy, such as public subsidies, prices, employment, private businesses, the development of national energy sources, and more. All the changes undertaken had significant repercussions and did l­ittle to alleviate economic decline. Regardless of what t­hese mea­sures added to the po­liti­cal crisis at the ICAIC, the world as filmmakers knew it had changed significantly, realigning old po­liti­cal partnerships and economic interactions during this period. García ­Espinosa’s own fate would be readjusted with it. The Rectification pro­cess had in fact inspired the Alicia filmmakers as they began to sketch out their script in 1988.21 As García Espinosa argues in his letter, the film’s reception became entangled with the culture of rectification, which “is the real prob­lem that concerns us.”22 Despite the potential for concern that any one of the conjunctural strands represented (i.e., post-­Soviet economy, Party crisis, correcting ­mistakes), or perhaps ­because of their gravity, García Espinosa took steps during his ICAIC presidency to shore up the institution’s ­future by creating



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a production structure to support greater economic stability and to advance the next generation of filmmakers who had long waited to make their first features. ­Little did he know that ­these steps would lead to his removal.

garcía espinosa’s icaic presidency During his nine-­year tenure as president of the ICAIC (1982–1991), García Espinosa addressed, among other t­ hings, the internal organ­ization of the production area in order to cope with a growing level of film production.23 In 1984, he talked publicly about launching a new Cuban feature each month, or twelve features a year, which was a significant increase.24 His eventual plan addressed economic, practical, and creative issues in an effort to restructure production into creative groups that would operate as separate units. The logic was grounded in his long-­ established goals to support a variety of aesthetic approaches to filmmaking as well as to create sustainable material conditions for production. The new model would also decentralize the internal dynamics of the institution by generating new ways for creative personnel to interact and thus re-­enliven the culture of debate that had been crucial for a creative atmosphere. Th ­ ese ­were shared goals with ICAIC colleagues such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who, while visiting Prague in 1966, had seen the creative groups model in action. Although conditions in Cuba in the 1960s w ­ ere not ripe for the same structure to be successful at the ICAIC, Gutiérrez Alea thought they could be part of a ­future strategy.25 In 1987, the creative groups model would also help García Espinosa to advance the creation of an industrial model of production, exhibition, and distribution scaled to their objectives and their material and po­liti­cal real­ity. As the organ­ization began to produce more than three or four feature films a year, he surmised that a new production workflow was needed to complete more than three times that number.26 In his ­earlier role as the ICAIC’s artistic director, a position he held from 1960 to the late-1970s, he directly oversaw, mentored, and collaborated with many filmmakers and their proj­ects (Lucia, El otro Francisco, De cierta manera, La bella de Alhambra, ­Battle of Chile, and more), which he managed ­because production levels ­were lower. But with higher levels, it would be impossible for García Espinosa, or for any one person, to fulfill this role. Since he had been able to manage three or four films during the first de­cade, he thought, “Why ­couldn’t other directors do it?”27 To investigate the feasibility of the strategy, in 1987 he sent filmmaker Manuel Pérez Paredes and production area director Norberto Estrabao to the RDA (East Germany), Bulgaria, and Hungary to research the experience of creative groups in ­those countries. Pérez Paredes reported that the RDA creative groups w ­ ere not ­viable. They “­were a lie, . . . ​decoration, mise en scène . . . ​[even though] the dramatic stuff of 1988–89 had not yet started.”28 The model in Bulgaria was equally discouraging as the creative groups w ­ ere tied to an economic strategy whereby each of the groups managed individual bud­gets; if a group was not successful, its

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members absorbed the losses. “They operated ­under the laws of a market,” he said. In Hungary, the experience was more credible ­because the creative groups ­were headed by veteran filmmakers like Miklós Jancsó and István Svabó, but t­ here too the groups w ­ ere tied to a market economic model that would not be sustainable in Cuba. García Espinosa opted for dividing oversight of production activities into three creative groups, each of which would be headed by a se­nior filmmaker, who then would be responsible for developing proj­ects within each group. The new production model was still guided by the ICAIC’s stated princi­ples and with centralized state support, but it was flexible enough to embrace expansion and the new generations of filmmakers. Alicia emerged from one of the groups. The model was straightforward. García Espinosa approved film synopses and the first cut, but each group would have oversight to develop, write, shoot, cast, edit, and have final cut of proj­ects. The directors heading each group had made some of the most impor­tant films of the previous de­cades and ­were veterans of the organ­ization: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), Humberto Solás (Lucia, 1968), and Manuel Pérez Paredes (The Man from Maisinicú, 1973). Despite economic uncertainty, García Espinosa knew it was a necessary risk, and so the creative groups strategy began in earnest in 1988, before the Alicia controversy had erupted. The ­gamble was that the shift in proj­ect oversight would improve the overall production pro­cess, support growth, and involve the filmmakers in intermediary and final decisions. But the scheme raised suspicions beyond the walls of the ICAIC. As the ICAIC was on the cusp of its thirtieth anniversary (in 1989), part of the wager ­behind the strategy was that it would re-­enliven the creative atmosphere of ­earlier de­cades, as well as plant the seeds for a f­ uture harvest. Looking back on this period, Pérez Paredes says that some ­people believed García Espinosa had gone crazy ­because he made the bold decision to grant final cut to the groups.29 From the transcript of Alfredo Guevara’s briefing with ICAIC personnel mentioned ­earlier, we know that the state commission in 1991 intended to examine the entirety of the structural changes generated by the shift to three creative groups.30 The changes appeared to feature prominently in the erosion of the Party’s trust in García Espinosa’s leadership. Party leaders conflated the new structure with a critical tendency in the films that they interpreted as dangerous to Cuban interests. The multiple crises confronting Cuban po­liti­cal culture seemed to converge on Alicia. The film was subjected to the type of po­liti­cal and ideological overreaction that occurs when deeper issues (such as the challenges to a vigorous critical culture) are neglected so they generate overcorrection and, in this case, led to the film’s unwarranted vilification and García Espinosa’s removal from his position. Thinking back on what happened to García Espinosa, filmmaker Rebeca Chávez, who belonged to one of the three creative groups, says that “Julio is condemned for what he believes, what he does, and the type of cinema he believes in and foments.”31



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the impact of shifts in the organ­ization of the cultural field García Espinosa was one of the key found­ers of the ICAIC in 1959, working in tandem with Alfredo Guevara for almost two de­cades (Guevara as director of the ICAIC and po­liti­cal tactician, and García Espinosa as artistic director). In 1978, García Espinosa left the ICAIC to serve first as president of the Advisory Council of the newly formed Ministry of Culture, and then as vice minister of culture in charge of ­music and spectacles ­under the leadership of Armando Hart.32 The creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1976 reor­ga­nized the country’s cultural field, and as part of this pro­cess, Hart requested that some ICAIC personnel join him at the ministry. The decision to leave his ICAIC post could not have been easy for García Espinosa. Personally, it meant setting aside a creative practice at a time when he had hit his stride as a filmmaker with films like The Adventures of Juan Quin (1967) and Third World Third World War (1970). It was also when his film manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969) was circulating widely in Latin Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope, generating interest and debate. It was a time as well when the collaborative and hemispheric efforts of Latin American filmmakers ­were coming to fruition in the founding, in 1974, of the Comité de Cineastas Latinoamericanos.33 Relations with Latin American filmmaking groups and institutions and broader Global South solidarities w ­ ere becoming integral to Cuba’s cultural and cinematographic efforts, which resonated with Castro’s internationalist views. García Espinosa supported ­these efforts and was an integral part of many impor­ tant endeavors. The bureaucratic restructuring of the cultural field by the Cuban state in 1976 put the ICAIC ­under the orga­nizational umbrella of the Ministry of Culture. This concerned Guevara b­ ecause the system of operation and the culture the ICAIC fiercely cultivated throughout its first de­cade and a half would become disjointed; it made the institution vulnerable u­ nder a structure that essentially relegated ICAIC governance to a secondary position. In his inimitable rhetorical style, Guevara delineated the prob­lems he foresaw with this shake-up in an extended letter to Fidel Castro in August 1976, arguing, among other t­ hings, that ICAIC leaders would be expected to become “archetypal functionaries, transmitters of the Minister’s decisions, . . . ​ responding to specific norms and formulas of leadership.”34 He titled his letter, “The Artist Is Above All Else, a Protagonist,” which hints at its orientation and content. Guevara vehemently opposed the institutional change as well as García Espinosa’s move to the ministry. The move also created disagreements between Guevara and García Espinosa that their shared objectives for the institute often helped to resolve. Their united front had made it pos­si­ble to articulate a strong position for the ICAIC as they had faced foundational challenges in the past. Given the amount of time the duo had spent working together building a strong internal culture at the ICAIC, we can deduce that in agreeing to move to

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the ministry, García Espinosa trusted that the institutional cohesion could withstand shifts in leadership. In letters, speeches, and interviews throughout his life, he returned to the theme of the continuity of ICAIC cultural policy as a strength, and to the notion that institutional leaders needed to look to ­future generations to carry on and continue to build the institution. Clearly, the change of a strong leadership model, the ac­cep­tance of a new institutional hierarchy, and the bureaucratic changes that would follow w ­ ere challenging to every­one involved. García Espinosa’s move to the ministry was a loss to the ICAIC ­because of his depth of experience, his unique collaborative style with filmmakers, and his capacity for institutional thinking. But in 1982, García Espinosa was called back to the ICAIC by the Direction of the Revolution to replace Guevara as president (Guevara was removed over the po­liti­cal crisis over Humberto Solás’s 1982 film Cecilia). The leadership transition, however, created new challenges with Guevara. In a letter García Espinosa received from Guevara, dated November 1, 1983 (at the end of Guevara’s first year at the UNESCO post in Paris), he is confronted with Guevara’s highly charged feelings of loss. A melancholic Guevara writes of his separation from the ICAIC presidency in the context of a waning life. His letter reveals the strain of a yearlong transition on his friendship with García Espinosa, as well as their deep bond: ­ on’t take this letter as a reproach, Julio. You too w D ­ ere swept up in a whirlwind for which neither of us was prepared and that only Fidel could placate by returning the faithful to his rightful place. . . . ​If I write to you the way that I do, it’s ­because I  ­don’t want, I d­ on’t know, to leave dark areas in our friendship. . . . ​I hope this openhearted letter d­ oesn’t offend you ­because it only has one objective: to tell you that though I am dif­fer­ent, I am the same, and if the time I have left is prob­ably given over to duties other than film (or diplomacy) you ­will always have in me someone who, ­whether close or far away (I’m not talking about kilo­meters), remembers and values the many years when together, and supporting each other, we traveled the same path.35

The difficulties in their friendship would rear up sporadically throughout the rest of their lives, but García Espinosa valued Guevara’s friendship and his leadership of the institution, so while Guevara was working in Paris, he kept him connected and informed of the comings and g­ oings at the institute back in Cuba. By most accounts of ­those who worked with them, theirs was a brilliant partnership that enabled and supported the heyday of the ICAIC’s creative culture. García Espinosa himself confirms this in his own assessment in a letter he wrote in 1998 to then minister of culture Abel Prieto, recalling that his partnership with Guevara had been ideal ­because “each represented dif­fer­ent aesthetics . . . ​which favored that neither would prevail; on the contrary, it opened up the possibility for vari­ous, or for as many [approaches] from talented filmmakers that w ­ ere coming out of the ICAIC.”36 The changes in the structure of their collaboration, first in



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1978 and then in 1982, disrupted a balance they had achieved together, changing the types of decisions they made separately. In the discussions about Alicia, Guevara insisted that the conflict resulted from the changes forced upon them by the Ministry of Culture in 1976. He said as much to ICAIC personnel when he met them in 1991.37 Meeting transcripts and correspondence from t­ hese moments of crisis reveal how institutional history is forged in the dynamics of internal relationships, circling back to ­earlier periods and especially, in this instance, where the overall proj­ect was so cautiously guarded. It is also clear that the removal of ICAIC presidents over problematic films had become a recurring theme that signaled their waning influence with the Party. Internal conflicts also arose, as the removal of García Espinosa from leadership in 1991 eventually dictated changes in the organ­ization of personnel, and in the forms of decision-­making he had established. However, neither the charges of mismanagement, nor charges of disloyalty to the Party, explain the decision by officials at the Ministry of the Interior to put García Espinosa’s name on a travel-­ban list (by air, rail, or sea) for several years. He was treated for all intents and purposes as a “counterrevolutionary.” When García Espinosa faced the Alicia onslaught in 1991, he acknowledged in his letter to Fidel Castro that in order to save the institute, one had to take a broader view of the situation to better understand how the historical and po­liti­cal context was affecting the country as well as the ICAIC.

julio garcía espinosa’s 1991 letter to fidel castro Dated March 31, 1991, the letter to Fidel Castro was published in the posthumous anthology Julio García Espinosa: Vivir bajo la lluvia, edited by García Espinosa’s wife, Dolores (Lola) Calviño, in 2016, twenty-­five years a­ fter it was written. In the preface to the book, Calviño describes the pro­cess of selecting the texts for the anthology. Daily talks with García Espinosa during the last year of life (he was almost ninety) revolved around “what had been his ideas, anguishes, thought, and the actions of a lifetime as an artist, revolutionary, and man.”38 The letter to Fidel could be a useful reminder of past m ­ istakes to be avoided in the f­ uture.39 The con­ temporary moment was indeed haunted by the m ­ istakes of 1991 as bold new films ­were censored due to familiar fears, this time at the hands of a new ICAIC leadership. Heated debates between in­de­pen­dent creators and ICAIC leaders pointed to another historical crossroads for the organ­ization.40 The publication of the letter in 2016 is also a reminder of the stakes for Cuban culture if the response to criticism continues to be punitive. The letter continues to insist, twenty-­five years a­ fter it was written, on the urgent need to see beyond dogma, wherever it resides, and to acknowledge a pos­si­ble f­ uture for the younger generations. The subtitle of Calviñ­o’s anthology, Vivir bajo la lluvia (Living in the rain), refers to García Espinosa’s homonymous essay from 1963, written in a dif­fer­ent historical context, though the theme of critical thinking is already pre­sent.41 In that essay, the intended recipient was then president of the Cuban Union of Artists and Writers

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(UNEAC), the poet Nicolás Guillen. Vivir bajo la lluvia reflects on the dif­fer­ent tendencies of thought in Cuban culture. A fragment of the essay is also included in Calviñ­o’s edited volume, and its intention frames the concept of the anthology: that García Espinosa spent his life as a fighter, “living in the rain.” The 1963 essay issues a call (one of many in his life) that warns against the dangers of prescribed thinking and to look instead to the charged atmosphere of the new society for inspiration. The essay also establishes his opposition to po­liti­cal dogma, the same type of thinking that years l­ ater, in 1991, is deployed against García Espinosa, Díaz Torres, and the ICAIC by the rigid flanks of the Party during the Alicia debacle. He cautions that fixed ideas truncate the opportunity to re-­enliven perspectives, and that stunted thinking was everywhere on the right and the left. The meta­phor of the “rain that is falling” alludes to a fearless embrace of challenges; to taking risks in order to be truly ­free. García Espinosa’s aspirational and utopian ideas are, however, firmly rooted on the ground—in the new feelings and sensibilities generated by their lived experience of revolution. Some of us, he writes, “have opted to throw away the umbrella. We are soaking wet. We d­ on’t want an umbrella . . . ​ we think it more honest and practical to learn to live in the rain.” 42 Read in the context of the collection’s intended reconsideration of his ideas and the ­earlier essay’s provocation, García Espinosa’s letter to Fidel Castro constitutes a dramatic continuation of the strug­gles he faced (and embraced) throughout his life, of which Alicia would be one of the major ­battles. The text of the letter to Fidel first acknowledges the intense po­liti­cal atmosphere surrounding the release of Alicia before focusing on the key dilemma raised by the situation: ­whether “art, as a critical expression of real­ity, is beneficial or not for the Revolution, despite the risks that this implies as well as the fact that we are living through the most difficult moment that we have had to live through.” 43 ­Because it is a lengthy missive (nine and half printed pages), I ­will address two of its key aspects: what it contributes to the proj­ect of understanding who García Espinosa is and was, and its defense of critical culture as a continuation of his lifelong objective. It should be remembered that for García Espinosa the mea­sure of po­liti­cal risk always incorporated the long view of Cuban history. As he alludes to in his letter, guarantees of demo­cratic pro­cesses must be continuously rearticulated and fought for in historical contexts such as Cuba’s, where they have proved not to yield ­actual demo­cratic benefits for Cuban society.44 As García Espinosa addresses the question of ­whether or not the critical expression of real­ity is a benefit or not to the revolution, he warns of the danger of acting other­wise—in ­favor of restricted, even paranoid views, to the many issues that could arise in relation to the Alicia conflict. Indeed, he identifies the bigger ­battles that lie ahead in the cultural realm should the Party’s ideological apparatus fail to embrace a critical view of real­ity, especially as the dismantling of the Socialist Bloc became inevitable. He works through the implications across dif­fer­ent realms of culture (e.g., tele­vi­sion, plastic arts, cinema) and in dif­fer­ent centers of culture (in Latin Amer­i­ca, Cuba, and the United States), and the prob­lems of cre-



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ating exceptional be­hav­ior around par­tic­u­lar works of art. He aims to clarify the impact of the specific situation and to look at the big picture so as to understand how the limits on freedom of expression work against Cuban interests at home and abroad. What is at stake in the Alicia scenario, then, is more than the film itself. Since the letter was written a few months before the state commission of the Council of State pro­cess got underway, his argument has insight beyond the Alicia controversy, suggesting the ways that the situation could devolve into a critical prob­lem. He notes that he “could critique the film quite harshly,” insisting that his disagreement with it has nothing to do with its right to exist. His leadership at the ICAIC supported this attitude as the backbone of a culture of creative debate that had helped the institution flourish in its early years. Always a provocateur, García Espinosa’s essays, letters, and speeches are driven by questions throughout. This letter is no exception: “Is it pos­si­ble that the ICAIC has become naive, thoughtless, irresponsible? Has it not noticed the times we are living in? Why does it approve a film it ­doesn’t even agree with at this par­tic­u­lar moment? . . . ​W hat has happened?” And ­later, “Can I now so easily disagree with so many works of Cuban culture? What has happened that a critical tendency has become dominant, not only in the cinema, but also in lit­er­a­ture, the plastic arts, in the theater, ­etc.? Does it reassure us to think that the c­ auses of this are due to the weakness of the Ministry of Culture?” 45 The letter recounts the ICAIC’s historical trajectory as an intimate part of the revolutionary pro­cess, noting that if Cuban cinema exists, “it’s b­ ecause the Revolution exists,” making it illogical to consider the making of Alicia a deviation from the institution’s vision of itself or its policies.46 He links what had happened with Alicia to the Rectification pro­cess, being careful to stress that historical conjunctures should not be used to condemn works of art. The distinction is impor­tant, for conjuncture arguments are often used to make the case for banning what are deemed incon­ve­nient works of art in Cuba. ­Here, García Espinosa is specifically opposing this kind of thinking. Critical art, he maintains, “is an intrinsic and permanent need of the Revolution.” 47 Moreover, he argues, the Rectification pro­cess, which sought to address severe economic failings, created certain attitudes t­oward the function of criticism in society. So any analy­sis of the Alicia situation had to consider the nuanced way in which criticism itself was operating in the society against the backdrop of the Rectification pro­cess. Halfway through the letter he writes: I think that every­thing stems from our own pro­cess of Rectification. Together with the Direction, the country felt the need to submit every­thing that ­hasn’t worked and continues not to work to critical judgement. In some way, this has made evident that the risks of the critical exercise are less than ­those generated by the absence of criticism. As I understand it, that’s why the Party’s Po­liti­cal Bureau suggested the need to exercise [the Rectification pro­cess]. What happened [then] was that ­those who ­were in charge of implementing [the pro­cess of criticism] ­were not able to make it a real­ity. My guess is that the intention was not to take any risks . . . ​

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criticism cannot be made normative, you cannot do it without taking risks, without having the right to ­mistakes.48

The embrace of a critical view across the arts then and at any other time, the letter suggests, ­will help to break down the inability to embrace the risks that come with a critical view of society. He is careful, however, not to see the prob­lem as pertaining strictly to the artist or the intellectual, but as a failure of criticism itself to find public space and purpose, thereby leading only to a criticism that, within the government and more generally, becomes corrosive rather than constructive. The atmosphere of the Rectification pro­cess had created a social and po­liti­cal environment that went well beyond the cinema. Th ­ ere also w ­ ere huge stakes for the government as it tried to navigate a worsening economy into the 1990s that eventually collapsed ­under the extreme reduction of Soviet subsidies and the end of trade with Eastern Eu­rope. In his letter, García Espinosa points to the enormous consequences of letting the shortcomings of the Rectification pro­cess set a pre­ce­dent for how criticism should operate. “If one of the ­great triumphs of the Revolution consists in the training of professionals, as in no other period of our history, [the reductionist and simplistic character of tele­vi­sion programming]  .  .  . ​ should not conspire against our own development.” 49 To paraphrase his letter, all areas of culture have the added responsibility of continuing to support (in this case culturally) the revolution’s social investment. Furthermore, the letter considers the impact of a restricted critical space across ­future generations. García Espinosa is impressed by younger artists whose critical approaches differ gen­er­a­tion­ally ­because they are neither too skeptical nor worn out (rendidos). Naturally, he writes, “They are more aggressive, with re­spect to their right to be irreverent . . . ​to deny the existence of taboo subjects in a society such as ours.” He goes on to say, “I have the impression that they have assumed their own pronouncement at the last UNEAC Congress,50 that ‘not only do we have to have freedom of form but also of content,’ as something that marks a substantive difference from ‘within the Revolution every­thing, against the Revolution nothing.’ ”51 Couching his support for young filmmakers in t­ hese terms goes to the heart of the controversy, as Alicia’s director, Díaz Torres, represented a younger generation whose approach to a critical view was grounded in dif­fer­ent historical contexts. García Espinosa underscores that they, too, have a role to play in Cuban culture, within and beyond the ICAIC. This is a key acknowl­edgment of the growing ranks of in­de­pen­dent filmmakers in the early 1990s that by 2016 would demand reforms to the existing l­egal structure of cultural workers not affiliated with the ICAIC. García Espinosa shares his feelings of excitement: “Comandante, I think t­ here is enormous talent in the new generations. What’s more, I am profoundly happy to know that with re­spect to the cinema, we have guaranteed our relief.”52 He further addresses a fear that ­there would be no room for the confrontation of opposing ideas in critical practice in the arts. “On the contrary,” he continues,



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“specialized critics would be in a better place to call ­things what they are. It would get rid of the insecurity that envelops it, in the face of their work having the potential to be used to censure or not a work of art.”53 At the heart of this prob­lem is the ability of critics to write their assessments freely or to disagree with a work of art while still defending its right to exist. As he does throughout the letter, he refers to Fidel personally and directly, writing, “as y­ ou’ve said before, we cannot be ruthless, and we cannot be tolerant,” with re­spect to establishing and shoring up the basis for a strong critical culture. Fidel was privy to the emphasis on a pro­cess of deliberation, at least at the ICAIC. Recalling Fidel’s understanding and support for the institution, filmmaker Manuel Herrera asserts, “Fidel has always been aware that a diverse range of views is impor­tant”; in fact he was also aware of the culture of debate inside the institution as a marker of its po­liti­cal force.54 García Espinosa is thus appealing to this historical knowledge of ICAIC culture of which Fidel was well aware. Moreover, a restricted field of artistic expression also brings potential consequences to partners in Latin Amer­ic­ a. H ­ ere again, García Espinosa makes reference to the strong relationships between Cuba, the wider Latin American cinema, and leftist governments in Latin Amer­i­ca, while emphasizing that ­earlier restrictions on artistic freedoms would alienate some of ­those supporters.55 The looming po­liti­cal shifts as a result of the dissolution of the USSR w ­ ill have an impact in Latin Amer­ic­ a as well, so Cuba’s stance t­ oward freedom of expression m ­ atters significantly in this context. He speaks directly to his critics when he asks, “Is it pos­ si­ble that promoting criticism of our real­ity ­will help the designs of the empire, increase disillusion and skepticism between our Latin Amer­ic­ a and Ca­rib­bean allies? I d­ on’t believe so.”56 The question goes to the heart of the most conservative positions within the Party, often used as legitimate reasons to constrain any type of social or po­liti­cal criticism. As Cuban society began a lengthy and ongoing pro­cess of social and economic transformation in 1991, ­these issues would continue to resonate as the fragile economy challenged the survival of not just the institute, but also the country. The letter also establishes an indelible connection between García Espinosa and the institution, outlining his criteria for the approval of the film. He cites anecdotes of Fidel’s almost daily visits to the institute at the time of its founding, which recognized him as a member of the group. He further reveals a mutual personal and po­liti­cal investment in building the ICAIC, which was established as inseparable from their shared revolutionary commitment. This alone, however, cannot not shield the institution from ongoing criticism. Since his relationship with Castro is underscored by this mutual interest, García Espinosa feels an obligation to “clarify his position.” His relationship with Fidel, though it indicates a level of friendship, also bears a respectful distance. The references in the letter are ­limited to their work together at the institute and for the benefit of Latin American cinema proj­ects. García Espinosa did not have the same relationship with Castro that Alfredo Guevara enjoyed, as Guevara had known Castro since

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university years before the revolution. But Fidel supported García Espinosa’s expansive vision of Cuban cinema, though the situation with Alicia appears to have tested his limits. The text reiterates what we already know about Fidel’s centrality in t­hese pro­cesses and his importance to that generation of ICAIC filmmakers, si­mul­ta­neously revealing how t­ hese moments are impor­tant to how the institute’s policy objectives are reiterated within personal and historical contexts. In the years that followed, García Espinosa discussed the Alicia incident in published interviews. But the letter was essentially the last such official document he produced in relation to the ICAIC. The clear personal investment shapes García Espinosa’s appeal to a longer view of history when filmmakers working side by side with government leadership, scraped together the resources needed to help strengthen the revolution’s po­liti­cal reach and emotional impact. He reiterates the value of the institute’s early hard-­ won in­de­pen­dence from Party ideologues, as filmmakers extended the idea of demo­cratic practice through Cuban film culture in the historic years of its founding. That in­de­pen­dence, he insisted, needed socialism to enact the very promise of transformation. The thrill that filmmakers could lead the creation of their own film culture ­under such an institution encouraged them to defend it. ­After the letter was sent to Fidel, García Espinosa was contacted by Carlos Aldana, then head ideologue of the Party. He was also a member of state commission that investigated the Alicia conflict, and the person who told García Espinosa that Fidel was incensed by both the film and the letter. García Espinosa would never have the chance to personally discuss the situation with Castro, and he believed that it was pos­si­ble that Fidel never actually received his letter. García Espinosa knew Castro well enough to know that if he had read it, he would have responded, especially since the letter touched on provocative topics that would resonate with him.57 ­After all, the history of Castro’s involvement with the ICAIC and the fact that copies of Alicia had been sent to him prior to the film’s premiere in Berlin (“Hart informed you, when the film was sent to you, what the review and approval pro­cess had been, as well as the circumstances that informed our sending it to the Berlin Festival”) would have made him curious and aware of the film’s tone and potential reception. Months ­after the letter was sent, and when the work by the Committee of State had been completed, the solution to the conflict was to reinstate Alfredo Guevara as president of the ICAIC. Th ­ ere would be no fusion of the ICAIC with the ICRT. The Alicia filmmakers continued developing new proj­ects, and new films that pushed the narrow ideological bound­aries would be completed, although not without consequence. The core issues that García Espinosa addressed in his letter remained unresolved. Signs of the lingering distrust in the institute’s leadership turned up not long ­after. In June  1992, Carlos Aldana wrote a letter to Alfredo Guevara, who had already taken over as president of the ICAIC, with a new concern that could lead to another Alicia-­like conflict. As head ideologue of the Party, Aldana objected to



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a new film in development at the ICAIC, The Elephant and the Bicycle ( Juan Carlos Tabío, 1994). It tells the story of the arrival of the cinematograph in a small island town where the townspeople rely on their imagination to dream beyond their situation. The comedic and absurdist aspect of the script, Aldana felt, gave the wrong impression about events in the story. The issue of judging films against a historical moment that García Espinosa warned against forcefully in his letter to Fidel was once again used by Aldana in an attempt to stop the making of this new film. Aldana wrote, “The conjuncture that our society is g­ oing through, and the situation . . . ​ not entirely resolved in the relation Party-­intellectuals, . . . ​­don’t leave room for the tendency that the screenplay attempts to express. . . . ​This proj­ect must be postponed.”58 The volatility of the era would be proved again when, just three months ­after Aldana’s letter of objection to Guevara, Aldana himself would be at the center of a po­liti­cal scandal that led to charges of corruption against him and the abrupt removal from his power­ful post. The Alicia case and Julio’s letter to Fidel would become mired in the po­liti­cal whirlwind of the era. W ­ hether Aldana intercepted the letter and turned it over to state security or w ­ hether Fidel received it and was angered by it, or ­whether he ever read it at all, the fact is that ­people within the Party wanted García Espinosa and the institute gone. A gut-­wrenching pro­cess for every­one involved included the strategic unity of ICAIC filmmakers and other supportive artists to prevent the institute’s absorption into the ICRT. ­Going forward, the institute would still have to navigate the most difficult crisis of its existence that moved it further away from the glory days of its founding. Also, the severely reduced economy l­imited the expansion of film production that García Espinosa had planned for. Effectively, the institute’s organ­ization shifted away from the three-­group creative model he had instituted and returned to the e­ arlier model, with Guevara as central to the pro­cess. The contents of García Espinosa’s office at the ICAIC w ­ ere confiscated and then returned to him selectively. He never requested that his personal correspondence or other documents be returned, but he had kept a copy of the letter at home. In the years following his dismissal, García Espinosa was widely recognized for his contributions to Cuban culture before he passed away on April 13, 2016.

crossing paths, historical junctures, and reinventions I first met García Espinosa in the summer of 1992, when my husband Roger Christiansen and I went to Cuba to document the work of an international group of journalists. The visit provided us with the opportunity to reconnect with Lola Calviño, then vice director of the International School of Film and Tele­vi­sion in San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV), whom we had met at the Sundance Institute in Utah a ­couple of years ­earlier. At a dinner she or­ga­nized in a darkened Havana, we met García Espinosa and a group of filmmakers affiliated with EICTV. The

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school was still in its first de­cade of existence, and they wanted and needed to expand their international networks; we w ­ ere invited to return in the summer of 1993 to teach a course. The summer course turned into de­cades of trips to teach and conduct research that allowed us to become close to each other. It was an excruciating period in Cuba’s history as p­ eople navigated the changes brought about by the disintegration of the Socialist Bloc, making more sacrifices a­ fter being strained to the breaking point. The worldwide geopo­liti­cal realignment that occurred produced incalculable uncertainty for Cuban ­people. Although I was familiar with García Espinosa’s famous essay “For an Imperfect Cinema,” I would not learn the details of what had happened at the ICAIC related to Alicia ­until ­later. As I began work on a book proj­ect about García Espinosa’s legacy, I thought back to the after­noon in 1993 when Lola, Julio, Roger, and I climbed into an old Lada in San Antonio de los Baños to drive back to Havana. Julio, widely known for his warmth, humor, and sincerity, spoke with the familiarity of someone you feel you have known for a lifetime. He was ­eager to talk about new technological developments in media. He had been through the wringer with the Alicia scandal, but on that after­noon, he only briefly revealed his nostalgic disappointment at how ­things could have been. At the time, he was working on El plano (The shot, 1993), a low-­budget experimental feature, the first to be made on Betacam video, and Roger had worked with video since the 1970s. Their friendship was instantaneous. García Espinosa did not speak En­glish, and Roger did not speak Spanish, yet each understood the other perfectly. The devastating economic situation focused our energies elsewhere as García Espinosa was interested in talking about proj­ects he wanted to make. His departure from the ICAIC was public, and the school was a hub of rumors about the controversy surrounding Alicia. A ­ fter seeing the film, I was puzzled, like many other viewers, about why the film had caused such an overblown response. To understand that, I had to appreciate the complicated and tangled historical layers leading up to that point, but I could see that the Alicia chaos followed García Espinosa like a ghost, even though this was not something he would divulge. We focused on the new proj­ects and the challenges of working during even more restrictive economic conditions. Essentially, ­after 1992, García Espinosa rebuilt his life. With the help of his lifelong partner, Lola, and the support of many close friends, he shored up energies, returned to old proj­ects, began writing new ones, and mentored young filmmakers and film critics who sought him out. Though this was a brutal way to leave the ICAIC, he slowly resumed filmmaking, which he had longed to do. Eventually, ­after the travel ban was lifted, he presented new films at international festivals and universities, participated in conferences, and much more. From 2002 u­ ntil 2007, he was EICTV’s first Cuban director, a charge he took on when he was seventy-­six years old. He was interested in working on proj­ects together, and we did. My perspective is thus inextricable from the years of experiences we shared in Cuba, California, New York, Spain, and many other places. His ideas about culture are unre-



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lenting and grounded in the popu­lar culture of his childhood’s neighborhood, and in the realization that what was valued as true culture tended to be something ­else, something produced outside ­those environs. For García Espinosa, the individual artist was an integral part of po­liti­cal conditions that impacted artistic and intellectual work; he found that his own convictions resonated with t­ hose of Bertolt Brecht, whose work he first confronted in 1951, a confluence that would persist throughout his life.59

letter to his ­father The letter to Fidel was not the first missive that tormented García Espinosa. When he was seventeen, he left home a­ fter a heated argument with his f­ather, leaving ­behind a handwritten, three-­page letter addressed to both of his parents. In it, he explained he could no longer abide his f­ ather’s opposition to his interest of working in the theater as he felt strongly that his f­ uture lay in the arts. He pleaded for their support but vowed to go it alone if his ­father did not relent. He would return home, he wrote, but only if they agreed to let him pursue his dreams. A ­ fter a few days, his f­ ather played on Julio’s affection for his m ­ other, letting him know that she was distraught in his absence, and asked to meet with him. García Espinosa has told this story as one of conflict and reconciliation with his f­ather and as a self-­ critical memory about his own youthful arrogance and sense of the ridicu­lous. He arrived early to the meeting with his f­ ather, hiding at a distance to see if his f­ ather would show up; as he waited, he felt a tap on his shoulder from his f­ ather, who was ­behind him and thus surprised him instead. The letter had argued his point with ­great persuasion so his f­ather agreed to a year of minimum support while he finished high school and worked with a theater group at night. Throughout his life, García Espinosa held in high regard the philosophical difficulties that his f­ather faced when confronted with the new policies of the revolutionary government. The story remains as My F ­ ather, an unproduced film script about a f­ amily saga focused on his ­father, which captures the dramatic po­liti­cal shifts of the era. In an interview from 2008, García Espinosa recounted the extraordinary times in which they had lived.60 García Espinosa’s ­father was an artisan whom he saw as mostly apo­liti­cal, certainly not a communist. He was a craftsman with a small, family-­ owned furniture store, García Espinosa and Sons, that sold a sofa bed he had designed and named Aspacia. But in the postwar period, the Simmons Bedding com­pany introduced the Hide-­a-­Bed, which it could sell for far less than his sofa bed, ­because of Cuba’s preferential tax policies for American companies. Rallying against unfair tax practices for local businesses, his f­ ather ended up sympathizing with the ideas of the rebel movement, which earned him the distinction of being the only commercial advertiser in the communist newspaper of the time. But when the revolution triumphed and nationalized foreign businesses, it also nationalized local businesses, causing him to lose owner­ship of his shop. It became increasingly painful for him to reconcile the po­liti­cal shifts taking place, and García

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Espinosa watched him gradually become more solitary. Though he was not with his ­father when he died, he was told that his final words ­were the revolutionary slogan “Patria o Muerte.” Tellingly, the story’s narrative arc highlights the pathos at the heart of this historical pro­cess, as well as the extent to which his f­ ather’s tale at the time of the interview in 2008 had an uncanny resonance with García Espinosa’s own story. The crucial point is that while the revolutionary movement created the opportunity for García Espinosa (and many o­ thers) to put into practice their ideas about cinema, democracy, and popu­lar culture, it destroyed the prospects that his f­ather had built around the small furniture store. While national proj­ects such as the Literacy Campaign, the Agrarian Reform, the ICAIC, and other monumental undertakings would be created to address the existing unjust social and economic practices, the new revolutionary policies could never rectify the destruction of small business ­owners such as García Espinosa’s f­ ather. García Espinosa’s commitment to criticism was grounded in ­these experiences of ­family, friendship, and artistic and institutional work. The letter to Fidel Castro reveals that the history of power­ful institutions such as the ICAIC is nonetheless the sum of individual perspectives, relationships, po­liti­cal compromise, power strug­gles, external and internal conflicts, and hard-­fought consensus. The full history of the ICAIC still awaits the multidimensional historical inquiry it deserves, but new studies are already contributing to a fuller understanding of the dramatic tensions and efforts made by hundreds of individuals throughout the institute’s more than sixty years of existence. Another uncanny aspect of this history is that the ICAIC found its greatest strength in its monolithic identity; nevertheless, this was achieved only through debate, disagreement, dramatic departures, and a fluctuating cohesion. It was made stronger when it defended itself against orthodox and doctrinaire politics of militant Party officials and institutions. As a fragment of this complex history, the letter reveals how individuals sought to find solutions to entrenched conflicts, building internal and external alliances that for the foundational generation hearkened back to prerevolutionary experiences. As material fact of this multifaceted experience, the letter is evidence that García Espinosa lives in this history and is inseparable from it. Fi­nally, the letter bears witness to the importance of personal memory as part of institution building, to the role of argument and debate in ­these proceedings, and to his lifelong insistence that a critical culture is fundamental to cultural production.

acknowl­e dgments I would like to thank Dolores Calviño for her generous and warm support of this proj­ect as we jostled memories and pored over documents u­ nder difficult conditions. Without her archival spirit and sharp focus, much of García Espinosa’s personal documents would never have been saved, let alone or­ga­nized. Her friendship has opened doors, made the impossible pos­si­ble, and working together is an im­mense joy. The research was also made pos­si­ble by generous



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support from a Robert Emmons Faculty Award from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

notes Epigraph: Manuel Pérez Paredes segment of interview with Manuel Herrera for the documentary Retrato de un artista siempre adolecente (Manuel Herrera, 2020), June–­July, 2016, Julio García Espinosa’s personal documents. A segment of the interview appears in the documentary Retrato de un artista siempre adolecente (Manuel Herrera, 2020), Mediapro and ICAIC Production, 2019. My (my translation). The quote in Spanish reads, “Hay maneras de defender la Revolución, que son catastróficas.” 1. ​In addition to the sources cited, see Laura Redruello Campos, “Algunas reflexiones en torno a la película Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas,” Cuban Studies, 38 (2007): 82–99; Arturo Arango, “Entre Cecilia y Alicia,” Cine Cubano, La Pupila Insome (blog), March  19, 2014, https://­ cinecubanolapupilainsomne​.w ­ ordpress​.­com​/2­ 014​/0­ 3​/1­ 9​/­arturo​-a­ rango​-­entre​-­cecilia​-­y​-­alicia​/­; Eduardo Del Llano, “Alicia,” Revolución y cultura 1 (2002): 54–58; Daniel Díaz Torres, “Sobre el riesgo del arte,” Cine Cubano 140 (1992): 20–24; Dennis West, “Alice in a Cuban Wonderland,” Cineaste 20, no. 1 (1993): 24–27. 2. ​Julio García Espinosa, “Carta de Julio García Espinosa a Fidel Castro,” in Julio García Espinosa: Vivir bajo la lluvia, ed. Dolores Calviño (Havana: Ediciones ICAIC, 2016), 167. 3. ​Julio García Espinosa, “Entrevista a proposito de Alicia . . . ​realizada con Jorge Rufinelli en Stanford, California, 1998,” in Julio García Espinosa: Vivir bajo la lluvia, ed. Dolores Calviño (Havana: Ediciones ICAIC, 2016), 165. 4. ​García Espinosa, “Carta de Julio,” 175. 5. ​Ambrosio Fornet, “Contextos históricos y polémicas culturales. Entrevista a Manuel Pérez Paredes (segunda y última parte),” Cine Cubano 177–178 (2010): 24. 6. ​Pérez Paredes, interview with Manuel Herrera. 7. ​Alfredo Guevara, “Un proceso de clarificación,” in Tiempo de fundación Madrid: Iberautor, 2003), 471. Guevara served as Cuba’s representative to UNESCO from 1982 to 1991. Guevara returned to the ICAIC in response to the Alicia crisis. 8. ​Guevara, 466–477. 9. ​Fidel Castro’s intervention at the First Congress of Education and Culture in 1971 is featured in the documentary Retrato de un artista siempre adolecente. This ­earlier controversy has been covered extensively by Cuban scholars and beyond. 10. ​García Espinosa, “Entrevista a proposito de Alicia,” 160. 11. ​Eduardo del Llano, “La maravillosa historia de ‘Alicia’ contada por Eduardo del Llano,” in El cine es cortar, July 26, 2015, https://­www​.­elcineescortar​.­com​/­2015​/­07​/­26​/­historia​-­de​-­alicia​ -­contada​-­por​-e­ duardo​-­del​-­llano​/­. 12. ​Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, “La suspicacia del rebaño,” Juventud Rebelde, June 16, 1991, n.p.; reproduced in “Alicia a traves de los espejos,” Cine Cubano 135 (1992): 20. 13. ​Bernardo Callejas, “Sobre la pelicula Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas,” Trabajadores, June 17, 1991, n.p.; reproduced in “Alicia a traves de los espejos,” Cine Cubano 135 (1992): 20. 14. ​Ada Oramas, “Esas ‘Maravillas’ niegan a nuestro pueblo,” Tribuna, June 18, 1991, n.p.; reproduced in “Alicia a traves de los espejos,” Cine Cubano 135 (1992): 21. 15. ​Roxana Pollo, “Alicia, un festín para los rajados,” Granma, June 19, 1991, n.p.; reproduced in “Alicia a traves de los espejos,” Cine Cubano 135 (1992): 21. 16. ​Elder Santiesteban, “Alicia en su pantano,” Bohemia, June 21, 1991, n.p.; reproduced in ­“Alicia a traves de los espejos,” Cine Cubano 135 (1992): 21. 17. ​Reproduced in “Alicia a traves de los espejos,” Cine Cubano 135 (1992): 16–21. 18. ​Pérez Paredes, interview with Manuel Herrera.

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19. ​Pérez Paredes, interview with Manuel Herrera. 20. ​The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in the Soviet Union was in existence between

January 1949 and June 1991. By early 1987, the Cuban government undertook some twenty-­six mea­sures to address deficiencies of a dysfunctional economy, but eventually t­here would be more. See Carmelo Mesa-­Lago, “El proceso de Rectificación en Cuba: Causas, politicas y efectos economicos,” Revista de estudios politicos (Nueva Epoca), no. 74 (October–­December 1991): 497–530. Mesa-­Lago’s argument points to Castro’s speeches from 1987 through the end of the de­cade as evidence of how he spoke about the worsening outlook for the overall economy and the failure of the mea­sures undertaken as part of this pro­cess. 21. ​“Alicia a traves de los espejos,” 18. 22. ​García Espinosa, “Carta de Julio,” 167. 23. ​García Espinosa’s plan was ambitious during his presidency, and he oversaw the creation of many international initiatives to solidify an expansive role for the ICAIC. 24. ​Lourdes Pasalodos, “Un desafio para los cineastas cubanos: Hacer 12 películas al año,” El Caiman Barbudo, April (1984): 7. 25. ​Juan Antonio García Borrero, “Titón y los grupos de creación del ICAIC,” Cine Cubano, La Pupila Insome (blog), September 4, 2020, https://­cinecubanolapupilainsomne​.­wordpress​.­com​ /­2020​/­09​/0­ 4​/t­ iton​-­y​-­los​-­grupos​-­de​-­creacion​-­del​-­icaic​/­. 26. ​García Espinosa, “Entrevista a proposito de Alicia,” 164. 27. ​García Espinosa, 165. 28. ​Pérez Paredes, interview with Manuel Herrera. The original text in Spanish reads: “Los grupos de creación, era una mentira, una farsa. Existen los Grupos de creación, pero es decoración, puesta en escena. . . . ​En el 87, no había empezado la cosa más dramática, en el 88–89 [sic]” (n.p., my translation). 29. ​Pérez Paredes, interview with Manuel Herrera. 30. ​Guevara, “Un proceso de clarificación,” 467–468. 31. ​Rebeca Chávez, notes to Manuel Herrera and Lola Calviño about first cut of Retrato de un artista, February 11, 2019 (my translation, Julio García Espinosa personal documents). 32. ​The Ministry of Culture’s Advisory Council was established in December 1978 and was made up of artists representing a wide range of artistic interests. Other artists who would join García Espinosa on the council w ­ ere Nicolás Guillen, Alejo Carpentier, Alicia Alonso, Mirta Aguirre, Roberto Fernández Retamar, José Soler Puig, Maria Antonieta Henriquez, Leo Brower, Harold Gramatges, Fernando Alonso, Alberto Alonso, Santiago Alvarez, Sergio Corrieri, Raquel Revuelta, Mariano Rodríguez, Fernando Salinas, Julio Le Riverend, José Luciano Franco, Samuel Feijoo, and Rafael Somavilla. The announcement was made in Granma on December 1, 1978. 33. ​García Espinosa, Alfredo Guevara, and Manuel Pérez Paredes represented Cuba in this impor­tant endeavor along with forty other filmmakers from across Latin Amer­ic­ a and the Ca­rib­bean. See also Mariano Mestman, “Algiers-­Buenos Aires-­Montreal: Third Worldist Links in the Creation of the Latin American Filmmaker’s Committee (1974),” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 2, special issue, “Montréal, 1974: Rencontres internationales pour un nuveau cinéma” (Fall 2015): 29–40. 34. ​Alfredo Guevara, Letter to Fidel Castro, “El artista es tambien y ante todo un protagonista. Arte es para nosotros, en gran medida y ante todo, eficacia,” in Tiempo de fundación, 285. Guevara often titled his letters. 35. ​Alfredo Guevara letter to Julio García Espinosa, November 1, 1983 (my translation, Julio García Espinosa personal documents). 36. ​Julio García Espinosa, letter to Minister of Culture Abel Prieto, April 9, 1998, 3–4 (my translation, Julio García Espinosa personal documents). 37. ​Guevara, “Un proceso de clarificación,” 476.



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38. ​Dolores Calviño, “Presentación,” in Julio García Espinosa: Vivir bajo la lluvia (Havana: Ediciones ICAIC, 2016), 13 (my translation). 39. ​Adalys Pérez Suarez, “Dolores Calviño: Julio siempre fué un gran luchador,” Cubarte, December  9, 2016, http://­www​.­cubarte​.­cult​.­cu​/­periodico​-­cubarte​/­dolores​-c­ alvino​-­julio​-­fue​ -­siempre​-­un​-g­ ran​-­luchador​/­. 40. ​For instance, the film Santa y Andrés (Carlos Lechuga, 2016) was pulled from participation at the Havana International Film Festival and to this day has not been screened in Cuba. 41. ​Julio García Espinosa, “Vivir bajo la lluvia,” La gaceta de Cuba 2, no. 5 (1963): 7. 42. ​Julio García Espinosa, “Vivir bajo la lluvia,” in Julio García Espinosa: Vivir bajo la lluvia” (Havana: Ediciones ICAIC, 2016), 91 (my translation). 43. ​García Espinosa, “Carta de Julio,” 171. 44. ​García Espinosa, 168. 45. ​García Espinosa, 170 46. ​García Espinosa, 167. 47. ​García Espinosa, 170. 48. ​García Espinosa, 170. 49. ​García Espinosa, 171. 50. ​The full name for the UNEAC is Union de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos. 51. ​García Espinosa, “Carta de Julio,” 172. 52. ​García Espinosa, 172 53. ​García Espinosa, 172. 54. ​Pérez Paredes, interview with Manuel Herrera. The original text in Spanish reads: “Yo estoy absolutament seguro de que Fidel siempre ha estado consciente de que esa diversidad de criterios es importante.” 55. ​The Padilla affair is one such significant example from 1971. 56. ​García Espinosa, “Carta de Julio,” 174. 57. ​Dolores Calviño, interview with author, February 2019, Havana, Cuba. 58. ​Carlos Aldana, letter to Alfredo Guevara, June 27, 1992, Havana, Cuba. In Alfredo Guevara, ¿Y si fuera una huella? (Madrid: Ediciones Autor, 2008), 495–496. 59. ​Julio García Espinosa, “Mi relación con Bertolt Brecht,” in Algo de mi (Havana: Ediciones ICAIC, 2009), 93. 60. ​Pedro de la Hoz, “Julio García Espinosa,” in Como el primer dia (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2008), 127–136.

8 • THE C ASE FOR (RE)COLLECTING LOTTE EISNER’S WORK NAO M I DECELLES

It is broadly understood that Lotte Eisner’s interventions in the field of academic film and media studies are twofold: she established a major archive of interwar German cinema at the Cinémathèque Française, and she wrote some of the first postwar scholarly studies about the aesthetic and historical contexts of Weimar-­era films and filmmakers. It is also known that she had a PhD in art history, that she worked as a film critic in the 1920s, and that she was an exile. Often, she is remembered as a satellite of the larger-­than-­life com­pany she kept: Louise Brooks, Werner Herzog, Fritz Lang, Henri Langlois. Over the course of de­cades, she has become a dusty fixture of the dutiful lit­er­a­ture review. Eisner’s best-­known publication, The Haunted Screen, has been reissued at regular intervals in En­glish since its 1969 translation. Gradually, consensus has calcified around an assessment of the book as pioneering but dated, to the point that assertions to this effect have taken on the routine quality of a refrain in introductory remarks to English-­language Weimar cinema surveys. Yet for having become so familiar, Eisner has receded in the discipline’s intellectual history; we think we know her work, and we assume that the edges and extent of its generative potential have been reached. Embedded in this assumption, however, is a central paradox: her archival and scholarly work is widely used and often cited, but no substantial study of Eisner’s corpus at large has been made, and her scholarship is often acknowledged in ways that diminish the significance of its contributions. Her doctoral dissertation and journalism have remained obscure, glancingly engaged when they are mentioned at all. The fact that her archival and scholarly work in the postwar period was s­ haped by her status as an exile is usually assumed, but she rarely figures in studies of German expatriates who fled the Nazi regime and the war. 162



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One reason a survey of her interwar work has not been done may be that Eisner herself disparaged it in her l­ater years. In the interviews she gave to journalists, cineastes, and scholars, she often described this period of her life with reference to a set of anecdotes featuring celebrities of Berlin in the 1920s, preferring to regale her interlocutors with irreverent, sometimes outlandish yarns about Leni Riefenstahl or Bertolt Brecht, rather than describe in detail the scope or importance of her own work. Another explanation of this oversight is that her ­later work has been understood to have been strongly influenced by her training in art history and film criticism, and to have as a consequence less traction in the realm of film theory proper, less portability beyond the ken of Weimar cinema. However, the work of other prominent film theorists of the period who approached film aesthetics and politics from an art historical vantage point—­such as Erwin Panofsky and Rudolf Arnheim—­has been engaged in depth and at length. ­There are also salient examples of film critics and archivists, some of whom published in the same journals as Eisner did—­including Béla Balázs, Iris Barry, André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer—­the translation, exegesis, and disputation of whose work have occupied generations of film scholars. It is also pos­si­ble that in addition to Eisner’s cues and the meanderings of scholastic fashion, a decisive ­factor in the relegation of her work has been the series of interruptions visited upon her ­career by po­liti­cal, economic, and social turmoil, which resulted in the fragmentation of her work in academic, journalistic, archival, and film historiographical domains, all of it scattered across four languages and six de­cades. In this essay, I gloss the reception of her work in English-­language film and media studies, emphasizing certain gaps and inconsistencies in that discourse. I move from ­there to describe the frictions between Eisner’s early ambitions and the tumultuous circumstances u­ nder which most of her professional life was lived. With attention throughout to the issues of historiography in what reception t­ here has been of Eisner’s work in the secondary lit­er­a­ture, I show the ways that close observation of her doctoral dissertation, interwar journalism, archival correspondence, and memoirs can reframe the conventional wisdom on Eisner and her work, and suggest some of the surprising potentialities this work holds for con­ temporary feminist film history. In certain inflections, the uncanny suggests—­beyond the initial shock of (mis) recognition—­the apprehension of a disturbing or unsettling truth. In the context of what has been described by Martin L. Johnson as “a moment in which feminist film history is ascendant,” the potentialities of Eisner’s work might seem straightforward; as Johnson put it, “One could easily imagine a scenario in which feminist film historians march in step with advocates for ­women in the industry ­today, turning [Alice] Guy-­Blaché, [Lois] Weber, Germaine Dulac, Lotte Eisner, alongside lesser known w ­ omen [. . .] such as Lilja Brik, Margit Kornai, and Elvira Notari, as the vanguard of a long revolution.”1 Yet searching Eisner’s interwar corpus, postwar work, or remarks about her upbringing and professional life for the

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traces of a forgotten revolutionary entails reckoning with the bilious misogyny that pulses through a ­great deal of her writing. Often—­even when it identifies blinkered or insufficiently self-­reflexive tendencies in the cultural criticism penned by her male colleagues—­Eisner’s critique of gendered norms of power, access, and movement is articulated in language that is misogynist to the bone. If at first Eisner appears to fit neatly within the model with which we are now familiar—­the overlooked female pioneer, an ally to con­temporary proj­ects of historiography in search of pre­ce­dent and expedient forebears—­upon closer attention, the queasy fact of Eisner’s Unheimlichkeit is impossible to ignore. It is in full relief, light and shade, that we best apprehend the features, familiar yet strange, attractive and repulsive, of an early moment and key participant in the development of film studies.

reception, received wisdom, and mythmaking Citations, acknowl­edgments, and commentary—­typically engaged in isolation with ­either Eisner’s academic or archival work, largely ignoring her film criticism—­ tend to fall into three broad categories: critiques of her Weimar cinema survey The Haunted Screen (L’écran démoniaque, 1952, 1965; En­glish editions 1969, 1973); citations of F. W. Murnau (French, 1964; En­glish, 1973) and Fritz Lang (En­glish, 1976; French, 1984) recounting biographical or historical information reported therein; and accounts, often framed as personal remembrances, of her archival work at the Cinémathèque Française. While The Haunted Screen remains Eisner’s most recognized publication, in some ways it seems to be the least well understood. Many who are familiar with The Haunted Screen think of it as a cata­log of Weimar cinema that demonstrates how certain films prefigure the aesthetics and politics of Nazism: an inaccurate assumption, albeit not of ­whole cloth. Eisner does discuss a reified Germany and German mentality throughout the book, but ­these are addressed in the context of Romanticism rather than Nazism, and her analy­sis is rigorously constrained to film and art historical contexts. For Eisner’s readers familiar with so­cio­log­i­cal and historical studies of right-­wing po­liti­cal theory during the Weimar period, Romanticism also bridges, albeit crookedly, to Nazism via reactionary modernisms and the Conservative Revolution, by dint of what Jeffrey Herf calls a “selective tradition.”2 Although pointed references—­including the book’s epigraph by Leopold Ziegler—­indicate a familiarity on Eisner’s part with the lit­er­a­ture of that selective tradition, it is not the case that The Haunted Screen speculates on the connections between Romanticism and Nazism via Weimar cinema. This widespread misreading is prob­ably due in part to the long shadow of Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and the fact that the two are often read in conjunction. B ­ ecause of their passing similarities—­both published postwar, both written by former film critics and Jewish Germans in exile, both treating (and, to an extent, codifying) a Weimar film canon—­The Haunted Screen is often discussed as a foil or counterpart to From Caligari to Hitler. For her own



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part, Eisner resented t­hese comparisons, expressing her frustration candidly in private correspondence, and publicly in (usually) oblique references to the tendentiousness of certain methods of film historiography that cut their evidence to mea­sure.3 Arriving about a generation a­ fter the first English-­language Weimar cinema scholarship boom in the 1980s—­a wave that itself followed the earliest postwar studies of the period by several decades—­the impulse to compare The Haunted Screen and From Caligari to Hitler in the same breath is common to many of the revisionist histories of Weimar cinema published around the turn of the millennium. ­These third-­wave histories offered fresh archival and historiographical insights, in part as a function of their historical moment; die Wende, the centenary of cinema, and a reinvigoration of early cinema studies in the United States beginning in the mid-1990s all contributed to this increase in scholarly attention. As Sabine Hake points out, “German unification has allowed cultural critics to think about central aspects of German culture, history, and national identity,” in no small part due to the increased accessibility of the DEFA (Deutsche Film-­ Aktiengesellschaft) archives and cata­logs.4 In a review of the edited collection Expressionist Film: New Perspectives (2003), Noah Isenberg observes that “film scholars have been knocking heads with Kracauer and Eisner since their respective works first appeared”; he goes on to describe “Kracauer’s teleological understanding of Weimar cinema” as “an easy target.”5 This passage is paradigmatic in that Isenberg groups Kracauer and Eisner together, but outlines a critique of Kracauer’s methodology alone; even the most self-­reflexive comparisons of Kracauer and Eisner tend to conform to this pattern. Claudia Lenssen’s thoughtful essay on the history of reception of Eisner and Kracauer, for example, identifies some of the key prob­lems in the existing lit­er­a­ture and clearly articulates the need for a complete study of Eisner’s work, including the interwar journalism. However, the bulk of Lenssen’s short essay is focused on Kracauer’s work and its reception, engaging only Eisner’s postwar books and reporting a handful of biographical details from Eisner’s memoirs.6 In Weimar Cinema and ­After, Thomas Elsaesser remarks, “­There have been many objections to From Caligari to Hitler and The Haunted Screen, ever since they w ­ ere published, with Kracauer’s methodology and Eisner’s assumptions continuing to arouse criticism,” but all seven works Elsaesser references in this claim’s corresponding footnotes critique From Caligari to Hitler. Not a single one deals in detail with Eisner’s work.7 When Eisner’s work, especially The Haunted Screen, is directly engaged, it is almost always in parallel to Kracauer’s; evocatively, Elsaesser has referred to Kracauer and Eisner as “the Scylla and Charybdis” of Weimar film studies. Although he grants that Eisner is “persuasive on the intertextualities between film, theater and painting,” he maintains that “the term ‘influence’ fails as an explanatory concept.”8 Instead, Elsaesser suggests that attention to the “institutional, semi-­ industrial, profit-­driven context in which t­hese individuals w ­ ere constrained or encouraged to work” is a more productive ave­nue of inquiry.9 Granted, Eisner’s

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commentary in The Haunted Screen on industrial workflows is typically—­although not always—­couched as supporting detail for her stylistic analy­sis. As a prime counterexample to Elsaesser’s claim, I would highlight Eisner’s interest in the industry-­ standard Regiensitzungen, or production meetings, in The Haunted Screen.10 Moreover, such interest in the industrial l­abor practices and their import for film style is indisputably salient in the monographs Eisner wrote on both Murnau and Lang, and in the introductions to each, Eisner anticipates this criticism, remarking that interested parties might read F. W. Murnau, The Haunted Screen, and Fritz Lang as part of a larger, overarching proj­ect.11 Indeed, in her private and administrative correspondence spanning de­cades that is held at the Cinémathèque Française, Eisner discussed a planned volume devoted exclusively to the work of interwar German set designers, in which she hoped to more clearly make the case that the production culture of filmmaking teams and the collective spirit in which they worked contributed to a hallmark style of the German industry in that period. Elsaesser further argues that The Haunted Screen suffers from a preoccupation with the individual filmmaker, to whom is attributed what he calls a “will-­to-­ style.”12 From this argument also flows the critique that the book is apo­liti­cal in its single-­minded focus on aesthetics; or that it is retrograde in its interest in the auteur and his psyche. Along ­these lines, Hake has made the claim that both The Haunted Screen and From Caligari to Hitler evince a “profoundly anti-­modernist” bent and can only be construed as “self-­consciously German in [their] preoccupation with prob­lems of identity and the metaphysics of space.”13 The first of ­these claims is belied by the methodological and rhetorical significance of interviews and testimony by the presumed auteur’s co-­collaborators: for The Haunted Screen, Max Reinhardt is less a lone mastermind than a node in a network; Murnau’s vaunted stylistics are the product of an innovative team composed of set designers, cameramen, screenwriters, and actors; and the genius of G. W. Pabst consists entirely in his collaboration with brilliant actors.14 Thus, “Reinhardt,” “Murnau,” and “Pabst” serve as shorthand references to technological, industrial, and social clusters. Furthermore, a careful survey of her interwar writing reveals that Eisner’s interest in filmmaking teams as collaborative creative units began in her first months at the Film-­Kurier; over her five-­year tenure ­there (1927–1933), she published dozens of articles, opinion pieces, reports, interviews, and reviews treating the topic.15 In her work at the Cinémathèque Française and in scores of scholarly publications that emerged from this archival work, Eisner continued to develop her thesis that the characteristic feature of the interwar German film industry was the production collective, an argument she flagged as a rebuttal to the auteur theory propounded, beginning in the late 1950s, by her friend André Bazin and his younger successors at the Cahiers du cinéma.16 Without reference to a comprehensive survey of Eisner’s interwar work, much less a thorough study of her archival praxis or her extensive correspondence on the topic in the postwar period, the claims Elsaesser and Hake make seem plausible, but reading across Eisner’s oeuvre it is clear that her conception of authorship and style is more nuanced and



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more firmly grounded in a fine-­grained understanding of the production culture of the period than ­either of them is inclined to grant. Moreover, while the archetypal reactionary preoccupation with authenticity appears to be fundamental to the discussion of many films in both The Haunted Screen and From Caligari to Hitler, carefully tracking the context in which the notion of authenticity figures for each reveals that in The Haunted Screen it is typically deployed ­either as a synonym for verisimilitude, adherence to genre convention, or on-­location shooting—­all stylistic and aesthetic questions—­whereas in From Caligari to Hitler, it can refer both to artifice as contrasted to nature or the natu­ral, and to ideology (i.e., the relative explanatory powers of vari­ous ideological constructions). Leaving aside questions of language and translation, Eisner’s work seems to suffer in almost all instances for being associated with Kracauer’s; the po­liti­cal impetus and implications of The Haunted Screen have been deemed objectionable on the grounds both that they are too strident (and too similar to Kracauer’s in From Caligari to Hitler) and that they are not quite strident enough.17 Tellingly, the most recent edition of From Caligari to Hitler contains a six-­page appendix listing inaccuracies in the text—­mostly consisting of ­mistakes in the reported release dates of films, although some are more troubling, such as citations that have not been substantiated or gross errors in the characterization of a film’s plot or production—­but it also contains a thirty-­six-­page, painstaking introduction by Leonardo Quaresima that frames and qualifies the errata and opens up the work in valuable ways. None of the English-­language editions of The Haunted Screen contain supplements as scrupulous or as generous as ­these. In fact, they have no supplements at all.18 The second general category of acknowl­edgments—­citations and references to Eisner’s work, rather than commentary on it—is the most prolific. By and large, her monographs F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang are cited by con­temporary scholars in neutral tones; the depth and breadth of research represented therein have been indispensable to studies of individual films, filmmakers, and technologies alike, to the extent that one would be hard-­pressed to find a study dealing with Weimar cinema culture that does not cite Eisner’s work in some capacity. Yet in narratives about the intellectual history of Weimar cinema studies, even straightforward citations of her work tend to fall back on diminutive language in describing Eisner and her work. Barry Salt’s pugnacious article-­length survey of Weimar cinema studies scholarship on Expressionism circa 1979, “From Caligari to Who?,” takes aim, as its title suggests, first and foremost at Kracauer and differs from most second-­wave studies in that Salt declines to lump Eisner’s work in with his critique of Kracauer’s.19 However, in the ser­vice of his larger argument—­that Expressionism in the interwar German cinema has been too vaguely defined to date—­Salt makes a handful of misleading, even false, claims about the existing lit­er­a­ture, mostly concerning what has or has not been addressed. Citing only John Willett’s previous work on Expressionism as a positive influence on his own understanding, Salt overlooks Rudolf Kurtz’s Expressionismus und Film (1926), along with a

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raft of short articles and encyclopedia entries Eisner published in the postwar period, and he misrepresents what ­little work of Eisner’s he does engage. Among the ­mistakes Salt makes in his survey are the following: first, he claims that nobody has yet addressed the stylistic variations within a single film’s mise-­ en-­scène, costume, and acting styles, or allowed that single ele­ments might be properly considered Expressionist while the rest of the film might not. In real­ity, Eisner made this argument as early as 1949—­thirty years prior to Salt—in an article for La revue du cinéma titled “Apperçus sur le costume dans les films allemands,” as well as in all editions of L’écran démoniaque and The Haunted Screen. Salt also boldly claims that the Danish influence on German film, especially in terms of lighting, “seems to be unknown to every­one who has written on German cinema of the 20s,” although Eisner treats this theme in an exhaustive 1957 entry on Expressionism and cinema for the Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, ele­ments of which she reprised in the third chapter of The Haunted Screen, titled “The Spell of Light: The Influence of Max Reinhardt.” In the latter, she argues, “Max Reinhardt was far from being the sole source of the German cinema’s celebrated treatment of light and shade. Th ­ ere was also the contribution of the Nordic film-­makers (the Danes in par­ tic­u­lar) who invaded the German studios: Stellan Rye, Holger Madsen, Dinesen, for example. They brought with them, at a time when Expressionism had still not crystallized into a recognizable style, their love for nature and their feeling for chiaroscuro.”20 Even if we leave to one side the passages in which Salt wrongly implies that he inaugurates analy­sis of a certain aspect or producer of this cinema—­such as the importance of Asta Nielsen’s acting style, the super­natural themes in the work of Henrik Galeen or Paul Wegener, German attitudes t­ oward the French seen through the lens of the Frederick the G ­ reat films of the 1920s, the influence of Murnau’s collaborative approach on his film style, or the importance of formalized directorial control for the interwar German cinema style, all of which Eisner had discussed with subtlety and specificity de­cades prior to Salt’s intervention—­his address of Eisner is most obtrusively problematic when it is direct.21 Arguing that previous work has overlooked Expressionist theater as an influence on German cinema, Salt claims: “Even Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen, which has a deal of pertinent information on the influence of Max Reinhardt on the German cinema, says nothing on this point.”22 Begrudging Eisner the standard phrasal modifier (e.g., “a good deal”) and implying that her original analy­sis is less useful than the “information” she reports, Salt also misrepresents her work; aside from the shorter passages and numerous footnotes discussing Expressionist theater that a hurried glance might not catch, the book’s thirteenth chapter, “The H ­ andling of Crowds,” begins with a section on Metropolis titled “The Influence of the Expressionist Choruses and Piscator,” a beacon all but the most lackadaisical reader o­ ught to notice. He continues by offering the ostensibly novel insight that Karl Heinz Martin, César Klein, and Robert Neppach all directly influenced German cinematic Expressionism, a fact Eisner had established thirty years ­earlier in the pages of La revue du cinéma, and that even Salt’s bogeyman, Kracauer, well knew.



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Salt’s difficulties might be chalked up to a lack of familiarity with Eisner’s work and the German-­, Italian-­and French-­language secondary lit­er­a­ture in which she participated, but no such explanation can be offered in the case of other commentators who ­were aware of the extent of Eisner’s scholarship and belittled it nevertheless. Perhaps due to his investment in staking a distinct space in the secondary lit­er­a­ture for his own work, Elsaesser characterizes Eisner’s analy­sis of the Mayer-­ Murnau collaborations of the early 1920s as overly focused on “a specific art historical style or . . . ​a unique or unified Weltanschauung,” in contrast with his own interest in the team as a genre unto themselves, “a genus with a strong f­amily resemblance between its individual specimen [sic], and a collectively worked (proto-)type,” which he calls “Murnau’s ‘corporate identity.’ ”23 Elsaesser goes on in the next paragraph to explain the consistency of style and thematics as a result of the imbrication of all levels of above-­and below-­the-­line ­labor on ­these films, using Eisner’s original research as the source and substantiation of ­these claims, acknowledged in a brusque footnote. ­Here, again paradoxically, Eisner functions as both the prob­lem and the source of its solution: the task Weimar Cinema and A ­ fter mandates for itself is to correct misunderstandings Elsaesser claims Eisner set in motion, but the new information and fresh perspectives brought to bear on ­these alleged misunderstandings are in fact the cornerstones of Eisner’s own monograph, and implicit in The Haunted Screen, as I have argued. Elsaesser’s vexed relationship to Eisner’s work is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in his chapter on Murnau. Bafflingly, Elsaesser states midway through the first page of the chapter, “As with so many other directors of the ­silent era, chief honour [for con­temporary access to and appreciation of Murnau’s work] must go to Henri Langlois, his assistant Lotte Eisner and the members of the nouvelle vague, whom Langlois’s Paris Cinémathèque provided with their filmic education,” in spite of the fact that the second sentence of this very chapter had been footnoted with the admission that her monograph “is still the most impor­tant study of Murnau’s life and work, and the source I am drawing on for much of the biographical information.”24 The chapter’s first in-­text acknowl­edgment of Eisner—­the one that ­will register most prominently for the majority of Elsaesser’s readers—is as Langlois’s “assistant” and second fiddle, yet as the footnotes and an attentive reading of the chapter at large attest, it is as sole author of a seminal text in the field of film studies that Eisner m ­ atters for this chapter.25 It is worth dwelling for a moment longer on this assertion, since it offers a useful example of another problematic tendency in the secondary lit­er­a­ture: the description of Eisner as a helper and subordinate to Langlois. Looking back in her memoirs on the early years of her postwar ­career, Eisner would remark, tongue in cheek: “The first fifteen years of my work at the Cinémathèque Française ­were truly the best. . . . ​I threw myself into t­hings, I flourished. My official title at the Cinémathèque was ‘Conservatrice en Chef ’ but in practice I was the dogsbody. I made acquisitions, I archived, I corresponded, I represented the organ­ization if Henri ­wasn’t available. I watched films, gave introductions, gave lectures, helped

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with the exhibitions and attended the FIAF meetings with Henri. Time flew.”26 Marie Epstein—­the in-­house film preservationist and fourth member, with Langlois, Eisner, and Mary Meerson, of the archive’s central quartet in its heyday—­ would affirm in her oral history of the Cinémathèque Française that Eisner was the originator of the organ­ization’s efforts to establish a collection of interwar German cinema artifacts and film ele­ments, leading both its acquisitions efforts and its public exhibitions: “Henri Langlois himself said that two-­thirds of the riches of the Musée [du Cinéma] w ­ ere due to [Eisner’s] investigations and acquisitions.”27 Langlois had considerably less expertise in the work of the interwar German filmmakers than ­Eisner did, could not correspond in German—he required translations by Eisner of all letters and paperwork in German and English—­and left it to Eisner to negotiate acquisitions and longer-­term relationships with the surviving pioneers she established connections to through tenacious research and unfaltering charm. In­de­pen­dently of any familiarity with Eisner’s extensive Film-­Kurier work from the late 1920s and early 1930s on the use and abuse of intertitles in documentary, Enno Patalas has argued that Langlois “was not very interested in preserving or restoring [German s­ ilent film intertitles]. This was in marked contrast to Lotte Eisner, who was aware of the importance of titles, at least in German films of the 1920s, and who inspired me, 20 years ago, to begin searching for the titles of Der müde Tod (Destiny, Decla-­Bioscop, 1921) and also Nosferatu, which ­were thought lost.”28 Laurent Mannoni has also pushed back on the tendency among subsequent generations of film scholars to center the narrative of the Cinémathèque Française’s history exclusively about Langlois and has advocated consistently for a recuperation of Eisner in terms of her archival praxis, claiming that among Langlois, Meerson, and Epstein, Eisner was “the most psychologically stable, the most intellectual, the most thoroughly cultured. In [the Cinémathèque Française’s inner circle], she was also the only film historian.”29 Julia Eisner has put it more forcefully: “She was, in effect, a middle-­aged ­woman not just d­ oing several dif­fer­ent jobs but crucially d­ oing several dif­fer­ent types of job, some of which w ­ ere considerably beneath her intelligence and ability,” a situation she attributes directly to Langlois’s attitude t­ oward Lotte Eisner, continuing, “This invisible, feminised l­ abour of administration was something that she regarded as a necessary ele­ment of the collecting pro­cess . . . ​and that equally, the l­abour was unrecognized by [Langlois] and therefore also remained unacknowledged by every­one ­else.”30 Without an understanding of the distinctive, in­de­pen­dent archival and historiographical praxis Eisner forged in her time t­ here, particularly in terms of the differences between Eisner and Langlois and the degree to which Eisner directed the Cinémathèque Française’s interwar German acquisitions efforts, Elsaesser’s description of her merely as Langlois’s “assistant,” and his claim that The Haunted Screen was addressed to Langlois as her “benefactor” might pass muster.31 In view of the evidence to the contrary—­ documented both in the Cinémathèque’s administrative archives, and in Eisner’s scholarly work—it is clear that such descriptions not only misallocate credit but fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of ­labor, publicity, and mythmaking that



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have been thoroughly addressed in the lit­er­a­ture about the Cinémathèque’s turbulent midcentury orga­nizational politics.

to (re)member: articulating and reanimating the past A third ­family of texts about Eisner consists of tributes and cele­brations published both before and ­after her death in 1983.32 While they usually trace the connections among her critical, scholarly, and archival work, t­hese texts tend to do so in a straightforwardly biographical mode and along a linear chronology, their authors often slipping into anecdotal, sometimes worshipful registers. Richard Roud’s exemplary essay “The Moral Taste of Lotte Eisner”—­peppered with pithy details and aperçus gathered from conversations with Eisner—­closes with the remark: “To have met Lotte Eisner was a privilege; to have known her was to have known a representative of the best of German intelligence, wit and warmth.”33 A moving tribute to their relationship, Roud’s reflections on Eisner’s work and contributions are displaced by the memorialization of the bygone trope of the good German: the emphasis is on what has been lost, rather than what might persist past the point of her death. In addition to their resonances in the postwar period, particularly in terms of denazification, the tributes in this vein to Eisner qua German can be read, to a certain extent, as exchanges in the marketplace of social capital. Werner Herzog, for example, has been particularly effusive about Eisner’s involvement in his early c­ areer, but most of his descriptions of their relationship reveal less about Eisner or her work than they do about what honors her acquaintance conferred upon Herzog as a young German filmmaker working to establish himself in the postwar period. Indeed, Eisner’s efforts to reinforce the social bonds among the ­people she brought into the Cinémathèque Française’s orbit are nowhere better exemplified than in the case of the New German Cinema group. Eisner’s cele­bration of this group’s work and her personal embrace of the filmmakers and their families have been understood to reflect on her generosity as much as they are supposed to have derived from an essentially nurturing, secondary status vis-­à-­v is the creative genius of Langlois. What this view fails to take into account is, on the one hand, the fact that the second half of Eisner’s life revolved—by her own accounting, as a direct result of the trauma she experienced during the war—­around the Cinémathèque Française as her personal social network, that is, as a chosen ­family unit, and, on the other hand, the degree to which the early histories of the Cinémathèque ­were written by p­ eople whose social experience of it was s­ haped by the jostling, macho antics of Langlois and his partisans. Belonging, for Eisner, seems to have been a question of affinity and shared experience, whereas for Langlois, the definition and enforcement of out-­groups was central to any definition of his own in-­group. Anecdotes illustrating the importance of demonstrating one’s bona fides, of passing tests, and of affirming allegiance to Langlois or his proxies abound,

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particularly in connection with the crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Langlois Affair of 1968 and the difficulties surrounding the opening of the Musée du Cinéma at the Palais du Chaillot.34 Th ­ ese l­ater instances have often been read as a result of Langlois’s paranoid unraveling ­under toxic stress, but early peacetime examples provide insight into Langlois’s baseline conception of how the Cinémathèque Française as a community was defined. In his account of the history of the Cinémathèque Française, Roud describes the postwar Cercle du Cinema’s intimidating initiation ritual (which he, arriving in the early 1950s, did not personally experience). In order to thin the ranks, Langlois instituted a policy, to be exercised at his discretion, of administering an entrance exam: “Typically, Langlois selected ­those who could become members by giving them a questionnaire to see how much they knew—­and therefore presumably cared—­about the cinema.”35 Part and parcel of Langlois’s personal definition and practice of cinephilia was a conviction that other competing models lacked real credibility, as François Truffaut’s assessment, reported by Roud, indicates: Langlois and [André] Bazin ­were not ­great friends, you know. Langlois ­didn’t have too much re­spect for critics. You can tell that when you read his own texts. ­They’re very much like conversation . . . ​although often very apt. But Bazin’s intelligence was more Sartrean, acutely reasoned. Sometimes his arguments had l­ittle to do with the a­ ctual film he was writing about. I think Langlois d­ idn’t like the professorial side of Bazin. Bazin was a professor, he was a proselytiser, and he was didactic. And Henri must have been against all that. He wanted to show films and let it go at that. He believed in education by osmosis, and I felt that way, too. But Bazin liked the Cinémathèque and he liked Langlois. And Bazin went to the Cinémathèque all the time.36

One might quibble with Truffaut’s rigid binary differentiation, but his sense that the rivalry existed mostly on Langlois’s side and that Langlois’s cinephilia was strongly flavored by anti-­intellectual notions of appreciation and taste has been echoed in many other accounts of the Cinémathèque Française and of Langlois’s biography.37 The import of Langlois’s fixation on defining out-­groups for Eisner’s own work is discernible primarily in the contrast between her move on the archival praxis side to build social networks and community, and her consistent efforts to push Langlois to be more attentive, more considerate, more empathetic to the filmmakers around whom Eisner hoped to cultivate archival collections. In forging an archival and scholarly methodology out of the trauma and loss she experienced during the first years of her exile and as a result of the war, Eisner moved to bend history t­oward justice for the community of filmmakers who shared directly and indirectly in that pain. Shortly a­ fter emerging from hiding at the end of the war, Eisner worked to establish the whereabouts of the interwar German filmmakers scattered to the winds, building a network of relationships with the interwar cohort, many of whom she had first met in her Film-­Kurier years,



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including Fern Andra, André Andrejew, Ludwig Berger, Bertolt Brecht, Louise Brooks, Hans Cürlis, Otto Erdmann, Paul Falkenberg, Oskar Fischinger (via his wife, Elfriede), Karl Freund, Valeska Gert, Rochus Gliese, Emil Hasler, Thea von Harbou, Robert Herlth, Otto Hunte, Alfred Junge (via his son, Ewald), Erich Kettelhut, Gerhardt Lamprecht, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau (via his collaborators, his ­brother Robert Murnau-­Plumpe and his cousin Hans Plumpe), G. W. Pabst, Julius Pinschewer, Walter Röhrig (via his ­w idow, Ludmilla, and son, Peter), ­Margarethe Schön, Eugen Schufftan, Walter Schultze-­Mittendorff, Robert Siodmak, Josef von Sternberg, Karl Vollbrecht, Fritz Arno Wagner, and Hermann Warm. In virtually all cases, Eisner initiated contact with ­these filmmakers with the intent not simply of extracting artifacts and trea­sures but to recover the wreckage of what she considered the most vital years of the German industry. Throwing lifelines to the aging and infirm filmmakers themselves and to their w ­ idows and ­children, Eisner would offer not only to purchase their work but to redeem it as the object of serious aesthetic and historiographical contemplation. Soliciting oral histories of the period and of par­tic­ul­ ar productions, Eisner also encouraged them to share any memories, addresses, and contacts they might have, which she would then use to further build out her network. In the case of filmmakers Gerhardt Lamprecht and Julius Pinschewer, each working in the postwar period to establish archives of their own work—­and in Lamprecht’s case, much more than his own, both as a private collector and ­later as head of the Deutsche Kinemathek—­Eisner was collegial and supportive. Eisner’s own narrow escape from the cataclysm imbued her postwar work with a sense of urgency. The Nazi program of cultural annihilation—­encapsulated in the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937, which worked to conflate art and artists that the regime construed as threatening or hostile and to exclude them from the body politic—­left a gaping hole in the cultural fabric of central Eu­rope, into which even ­those vital traces of the interwar period that managed to survive the end of the war ­were inexorably drawn as their authors and caretakers began to die off, lose track of hidden caches, or abandon hope of finding an audience or home for their work. Among Eisner’s most frequently repeated memories about the early postwar frenzy of acquisitions, the stories of how André Andrejew and Max Douy each came to deposit his early work with the Cinémathèque Française illustrate the precarity of even the work and ­people who managed to survive the war. In Andrejew’s case, he confessed to Eisner that many of his set designs and sketches had been fed by his valet to their fireplace during war­time fuel shortages in Paris; Douy, on the other hand, fatefully lent Eisner his personal collection of set designs and sketches for an exhibition the night before a catastrophic fire engulfed his apartment. So struck by the good fortune of having sent the materials into safekeeping in the nick of time was Douy, Eisner said, that he formally placed the entire collection on permanent deposit with the Cinémathèque Française.38 ­These features of Eisner’s work have yet to be taken up on their own terms, and bringing her archival praxis and historiographical work into conversation with

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con­temporary work in archive studies and queer historiography offers an opportunity to reconsider the history of the Cinémathèque Française and of Eisner’s work outside the l­ imited and limiting discourse of her purportedly supportive and secondary status.

(re)acquainting ourselves ­ oward the end of Eisner’s memoirs, an interview conducted by Martje Grohmann, T who edited the volume and was Eisner’s caretaker in her ­later years, is reprinted in which Grohmann asks of Eisner: “Why did you want to write your memoirs? Bluntly put: who cares about your life, which you have dedicated to other creative p­ eople? One reads the memoirs of Buñuel ­because he is a ­great director, but the memoirs of a film historian?” It is a provocation, but one that elicits an answer from Eisner that helps illustrate why, with even the best of intentions, many film scholars have been left with an impression of Eisner as of peripheral and ­limited importance in the intellectual history of the field. She replies: You may as well ask: why does the principal witness keep her mouth shut during a murder trial, although she might exonerate the accused? I am something of a ­witness of our cultural history. My private life, which I have never taken very seriously, has repeatedly crossed with the lives of our most impor­tant intellectual ­innovators. . . . ​I believe in destiny. My destiny was to discover ­people like Bert Brecht, Peter Lorre, Satyajit Ray, Shadi Abdel Salem, and Henri Langlois. I had a nose for originality and the gift for putting my discoveries into words. I saw that as my life’s task, rather than marrying and raising c­ hildren. ­Others can do that better than me. Fate has helped me, though I was often in mortal danger, it has saved me in order that I might finish my work.39

Only about a quarter c­ entury before this weighty destiny befell her, Eisner was a fervent, eccentric, and creative child. Bridling at convention and its enforcers, she was possessed of an appetite for literary and theatrical fiction matched in its intensity only by her boisterous imaginative faculty. Her memoirs describe a young person who felt encouraged within certain limits to think of herself as an intellectual. Eisner’s assumption, seemingly from an early age, was that her education might be pursued as far as and in what­ever direction she desired without any expectations on the part of her ­family that she pursue a professional degree, or be depended upon to contribute financially to her ­family. In this way, she was among a privileged subset of Jewish w ­ omen who ­were able to attend central Eu­ro­pean universities in the de­cades between the official opening of enrollment to w ­ omen at the turn of the ­century and its closing to Jews in the mid-1930s; according to Harriet Pass Freidenreich, the majority of university ­women during this period pursued professional degrees in law and medicine and ­were supported in this by their families with the expectation that a profession would help bolster the f­amily’s eco-



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nomic situation or would allow a ­daughter disinclined to marry to become financially in­de­pen­dent.40 At home in the world of intellectual achievement defined for her by its largely male constituency, Eisner chafed ­under the norms of gender per­for­mance and sexuality within her upper-­middle-­class Jewish milieu. In her memoirs, Eisner describes herself as awkwardly un­co­or­di­nated in the realm of feminine tasks such as sewing, cooking, and dancing, in spite of her dexterity and discernment when the same fine motor skills w ­ ere applied in the ser­vice of artistic or creative tasks: “All feminine skills escaped me. The sewing and knitting teacher, who also taught drawing and handicrafts, once said to me: ‘Lotte, it’s funny: ­you’ve got two dif­fer­ ent pairs of hands. When y­ ou’re cutting out silhouettes, they are nimble and skillful, but when y­ ou’re supposed to be sewing they suddenly become clumsy and un­co­or­di­nated.’ I’ve never been able to cook, e­ ither, and d­ on’t fuss much about food.” 41 Eisner attests to having experienced a profound sense of dysphoria from an early age, identifying more strongly with male role models, including her ­father and ­brother, and rejecting in baldly misogynist terms the social worlds and mores of her m ­ other, ­sister, and female peers, recalling that she relished reenacting Karl May dramas, yet, “Of course, I held my ­mother solely responsible for the fact that I had been born neither a boy nor an Indian, qualities deemed by me essential preconditions to leading a happy life.” 42 Eisner’s ambivalence about gender per­for­mance and identification comes across particularly strongly in her comments in her memoirs on romance and sexuality, and on what she dismisses as an uneventful love life in her twenties and thirties. On the one hand, Eisner says, “I know that I have an Elektra complex, and as a result I have never had a fulfilling romantic relationship, for I always compared my lover secretly with my ­father and no one could match up,” yet ­later she says her difficulties resulted from her disposition: “I was perhaps not entirely normal, or rather masculine. . . . ​W hen I was dancing I always wanted to take the lead; in love, the passive role of the w ­ oman disturbed me. I wanted to be the dominant one myself.” 43 Indeed, Eisner was not alone in expressing such sentiments, as Freidenreich and Claudia Breger have pointed out. The expression of gender dysphoria is a theme among the memoirs of many in Eisner’s cohort of university ­women. Surveying the memoirs written by t­hese w ­ omen, Freidenreich shows that in some cases this was expressed as resentment about having not been born a boy, while in ­others it was articulated as an affinity with ­fathers or ­brothers over ­mothers and ­sisters, or as a lament that they might never partake of affordances like higher education, professional c­ areers, personal freedoms, even military ser­vice, that w ­ ere mostly, if not exclusively, available to men.44 Breger has traced the origins of early twentieth-­century German-­language discourse on so-­called female inversion—­ which she suggests might be better replaced by “feminine masculinities”—to both the medical-­scientific and the literary conceptions of female difference, which in both cases, according to Breger, emerge from and endorse masculinist and misogynist notions of gender and gender per­for­mance.45 Indeed, ­later in life Eisner

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repeatedly identified herself as a misogynist, arguing that at no point in her ­career had she found common cause with feminism.46 In a 1977 interview published in the feminist film journal Frauen und Film, Eisner claimed that she had no need of feminism at any point b­ ecause her work was of equal quality to that of her male colleagues, and this allowed her to move as freely as any man in her professional life. She believed she had often been sabotaged by ­women who ­were jealous of her, whereas she felt proud of impressing her male colleagues and acknowledged no barriers to her own ac­cep­tance within their social world.47 Eisner’s complicated and somewhat fraught writing from the interwar period on gender, class, and w ­ omen, and her rejection, l­ater in life, of feminism as a social movement and po­liti­cal stance all render her ­career and life a somewhat uncanny, albeit profoundly generative, subject of feminist historiography.48 One among a tiny group of ­women at central Eu­ro­pean universities, rarer still within the arts and humanities, Eisner distinguished herself as a good writer and perceptive analyst of visual style. Positioning her dissertation research at the juncture of contemporaneous debate on progressivist stylistic analy­sis and normative developmental theories of art history, Eisner contributed a carefully defined and rigorously argued thesis in conversation with her adviser, Gottfried von Lücken’s research, as well as the work of classicist Arnold von Salis and art historian Alois Riegl. Following the completion of her dissertation and the death of her beloved ­father, Eisner secured a mea­sure of economic and social in­de­pen­dence through work as a journalist. A ­ fter freelancing for nearly a year as a literary and arts critic with the Literarische Welt and Berliner Tageblatt, she established a successful ­career at the leading German film trade paper, Film-­Kurier, again as the odd w ­ oman out. During her five years on the editorial staff, she published almost 900 signed articles, ­running the gamut from reviews and news coverage of m ­ usic, dance, opera, theater, variety and cabaret, lit­er­a­ture, salons and public lectures, art, architecture, design, and fashion to news coverage and opinion on politics and economics in the theater and film worlds of Berlin, on-­set reportage and commentary, film industry conference and trade association meeting coverage, travel writing, interviews, cultural criticism, and sketches of Berlin city life. Her complicated writing on fashion, class, and gender, her nuanced theory of criticism, her commentary on audiences and industrial film, her antiracist film and literary reviews, and her sustained engagement with documentary and educational film all distinguish this body of work not only as one immersed in the vibrant interwar discourse on cinema as an object of aesthetic, po­liti­cal, and cultural contemplation, but, crucially, one articulated from an unusual point of view and informed by substantial scholarly training in visual and historical analy­sis. Eisner was one of the few film journalists holding a doctoral degree in art history and even fewer w ­ omen writing prolifically on t­hese topics, and she brought a sophisticated and broad range of cultural reference to her work. She was also deeply ambivalent about her Jewish identity and gender per­for­mance, and her negotiation of class, leftist politics, and



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German history trou­bles certain generalizations made in the secondary lit­er­a­ture about early film and media theory. Her ­career as a journalist, like that of many fellow refugees, was cut short by the rise of the Nazi regime. In the month of her thirty-­seventh birthday she found herself starting again from scratch in Paris, where she would spend the next seven years scraping together a living from odd jobs, making friends and connections where she could. Among t­ hese w ­ ere the friendship with Langlois and the earliest stages of the Cinémathèque Française’s development. However, the ­mental and physical toll of this prolonged period of instability may account for the fact that—­ save for a pair of articles she was not paid to contribute to Langlois’s short-­lived Cinématographe, and an adaptation for the French publication L’intransigeant of a piece she had written at the Film-­Kurier—­she did not continue to publish ­under her own name. By the mid-1930s, she would have had similar journalistic credentials to Kracauer and Arnheim, both of whom continued to seek out, and ultimately secure, steady work and safe passage out of continental Eu­rope. Kracauer’s lot was by no means an easy one, yet in his case it seems that his connections to U.S.-­based scholars and writers, the success of his novel Ginster (1934) and his “social biography” of Jacques Offenbach (1937), and the fact that his wife, Lili, was able to take on work during their time in Paris and ­later Marseille made continuing to write, and continuing to develop his theory of film, pos­si­ble. According to Mark M. Anderson, “It was in part ­because Americans like Meyer Schapiro ­were in contact with Kracauer when he was in Paris, assisting him not only with the bureaucratic aspects of emigration but also with the intellectual and cultural transition that a move to Amer­i­ca would require, that he did not give up hope in the following desperate years. Walter Benjamin, whom Kracauer saw regularly in Paris in this period, . . . ​did not share this hope.” 49 Yet, as Miriam Hansen argued, “Looking at the Marseille notebooks [1940–1941], one cannot help being amazed by the fact that they w ­ ere written at all, considering the uncertainty, poverty, and danger that confronted Jewish refugees stranded in Vichy France.”50 When she was again uprooted and forced into hiding, Eisner was thrown into an indisputably more precarious and risky set of circumstances than ­either Kracauer or Arnheim, whose midcentury film theoretical output is nevertheless held up as the yardstick by which Eisner herself is judged to be less than “a full-­blown film theorist.”51 In her memoirs, Eisner recalls that in May 1940, she was summoned by the police prefecture to pre­sent herself at the Vélodrome d’Hiver with no more than a hand suitcase, for pro­cessing and ultimately internment at a camp detaining all foreign nationals and po­liti­cally unreliable persons. A harrowing experience, which cost her several teeth and any remaining faith in the benevolence of the French state, Eisner’s imprisonment at Gurs ended with her escape on foot, aided by a sympathetic camp officer. A ­ fter reaching a town nearly fifty kilo­meters from the camp the next morning on foot, Eisner recalls that she bought a third-­class ticket for Montpellier. For the duration of the war, Eisner would move from one

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safe ­house to the next, u­ nder false papers and with an increasing sense of dread and fear. In spite of the occasionally dubious dialogue and events recounted by Eisner about this period in her memoirs, it is impor­tant to give credence to her account of her own ­mental state, and the enormous strain she experienced living ­under a false identity and constant threat of apprehension.52 While the chronology of certain events might have been compressed in retrospect, ­these memories ­were profoundly felt and became fundamental to Eisner’s sense of identity and personal history in the postwar years. Eisner recalls that, shortly before receiving a more legitimate-­looking second set of falsified identity papers and taking on the persona “Louise Escoffier,” she spent a frigid winter by herself in a decommissioned château in Figeac, guarding and inventorying reels upon reels of films cached ­there by Langlois in order to avoid their appropriation or confiscation by Frank Hensel of the Reichsfilmarchiv, with whom Langlois maintained a cagey yet mutually beneficial relationship throughout the Occupation.53 Wary of the highly flammable film, Eisner remembers ­going the entire winter without a fire, breaking her fingernails opening the canisters as she checked each reel entrusted to her care, and trekking seven kilo­meters in the snow to procure ink when she ran dry: “It was a hard winter, but it was harder still without the ability to write.”54 For years following her return to Paris a­ fter the end of the war, Eisner would use variations on her nom de guerre in official Cinémathèque correspondence. ­W hether this was a practical or symbolic choice is unclear; nevertheless, her memoirs detail a postwar climate of anti-­Semitism and uneasy negotiations on her part of identity, belonging, and safety, mediated by her archival and scholarly work of salvage, and her naturalization in the mid-1950s. The reception of Eisner’s postwar work and the neglect of her interwar journalism have as much to do with the dynamics and politics of institutionalized film study in the acad­emy as they do with the ways Eisner described and contextualized the work and herself as its producer. And t­ here have been impor­tant exceptions to the larger trends in the secondary lit­er­a­ture identified e­ arlier in this essay. Laurent Mannoni was one of the young men orbiting the Cinémathèque Française whom Eisner mentored, but, unlike ­others, he has consistently advocated in his own scholarly work for a revision of the my­thol­ogy around Eisner’s role t­ here, recuperating her archival work and, to a l­ imited extent, her postwar scholarship in his 2006 volume dedicated to the history of the Cinémathèque Française, as well as in several articles.55 Mannoni’s work, while illuminating, is oriented exclusively ­toward the context of the Cinémathèque Française, working primarily with source materials held t­ here, and engaging the broader contexts of academic film study or Eisner’s other ­careers only peripherally. More recently, ­there has been further work in key areas. Julia Eisner’s research in the ­family archive promises to shed further light on Lotte Eisner’s postwar years and her work at the Cinémathèque Française. A symposium convened in the fall of 2018 at King’s College London presented work on Eisner by four con­temporary scholars that was received with



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g­ reat interest and enthusiasm.56 ­These recent stirrings suggest that the pre­sent moment is ripe for a reexamination of both ­those descriptions on Eisner’s part and the work itself. How Eisner came to see herself at the moment of her remarks to Grohmann, from the other side of the war and a ­career in exile, as a key witness, rather than the defendant—­and how she came to understand murder, justice, and cultural history as imbricated with one another in her own narrative of identity—is as much a story of her professional life as it is of her personal life, in spite her protestations of not having taken the latter very “seriously.” Why the only and undesirable alternative to such testimony would have been marriage and ­children, in Eisner’s view, was likewise a function of the time, place, and circumstances ­under which she lived. For ­these reasons, reading her memoirs, dissertation, interwar journalism, and the extensive administrative and personal correspondence from the postwar period alongside her more familiar scholarly publications offers an opportunity not only to re­orient the lodestars of early film theory but also to sketch new constellations in the intellectual history of the field, thereby freeing up lines of inquiry that have been hitherto occluded and dimmed by habits of seeing and the vantage points from which a disciplinary imaginary has been plotted. Yet, in so ­doing, I remain alert to the pitfalls of inscribing Eisner into a disciplinary pantheon of forgotten foremothers. Joan Scott warns that “where t­ here is evidence of what seems enduring and unchanging identity, ­there is a history that needs to be explored,” offering the notion of the fantasy echo to describe the “set of psychic operations by which certain categories of identity”—­such as ‘­woman’ or ‘feminist’ at “the vanguard of a long revolution,” as Johnson put it—­“are made to elide historical differences and create apparent continuities.”57 Indeed, Freud observes that “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and real­ity is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in real­ity, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the ­thing it symbolizes.”58 Hastening to impute to Eisner a role in the history of feminist activism without the benefit of a complete understanding and assessment of her entire body of work, much less the circumstances u­ nder which it was produced, runs just such a risk, the reward for which may be the uncanny effect of a familiar symbol sprung disturbingly to life, proceeding reanimated down unexpected paths.

notes 1. ​Martin  L. Johnson, “Field Notes from W ­ omen and the S­ilent Screen (Amsterdam,

May  2019),” Domitor, July  31, 2019, https://­domitor​.­org​/­field​-­notes​-­from​-­women​-­and​-­the​ -­silent​-­screen​-­amsterdam​-­may​-­2019​/­. 2. ​Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 3. ​On occasion, Eisner named Kracauer in her critique of his methodology; e.g., Renaud Bezombes, Michel Celemenski, and Carine Varène, “Die Eisnerin: Entretien avec Lotte H. Eisner,” Cinématographe 73 (December 1981): 28.

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4. ​Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), viii. In addition to

Hake, ­these third-­wave Weimar cinema studies texts include Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and ­After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000); Tim Bergfelder, Erica Car­ter, and Deniz Göktürk, eds., The German Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2002); Dietrich Scheunemann, ed., Expressionist Film: New Perspectives (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003); Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009); Noah Isenberg, Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to the Classic Films of the Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010). 5. ​Noah Isenberg, “Review,” Monatshefte 98, no. 1 (2006): 153. 6. ​Indeed, Lenssen mistakenly reports that Eisner began writing again first in 1950, and demonstrates only a l­ittle familiarity with the postwar publications aside from L’écran démoniaque, Murnau, and Fritz Lang. Claudia Lenssen, “ ‘Die Klassiker’: Die Rezeption von Lotte H. Eisner und Siegfried Kracauer,” in Recherche: Film. Quellen und Methoden der Filmforschung, ed. Hans-­Michael Bock and Wolfgang Jacobsen (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997), 67–82. 7. ​Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and ­After, 21. 8. ​Elsaesser, 51, 25. 9. ​Elsaesser, 37. 10. ​“One of the secrets of the success of the classical German film was the perfect technical harmony achieved by long Regiensitzungen, discussions on the mise-­en-­scène of the film to be made which sometimes lasted for two months or more before the a­ ctual filming began, and to which the director invited every­body due to work on the film, from the chief designer and chief cameraman to the workmen in charge of the lighting. . . . ​[A]t ­these Regiensitzungen every­one was heard; like every­body e­ lse, the cameraman could ask for changes in the sets if he thought he saw a way of achieving a better result.” Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 36–37. 11. ​Lotte H. Eisner, F. W. Murnau (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 7; Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 8. 12. ​Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and ­After, 36. 13. ​Hake, German National Cinema, 27. 14. ​Namely, Asta Nielsen, Greta Garbo, and Louise Brooks. Discussing the latter—in a passage that resonates strongly with her analy­sis of The Joyless Street (cf. 256–263)—­Eisner remarks, “Pabst’s remarkable evolution must . . . ​be seen as an encounter with an actress who needed no directing, but could move across the screen causing the work of art to be born by her mere presence.” Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 296. 15. ​In addition to the previously mentioned areas of coverage in which she treats the topic as part of a larger discussion, in 1931 Eisner initiated a series of articles that would grow to include contributions by other Film-­Kurier editors. Titled “Das Feuilleton des Autors,” it focused on the importance of collaboration for all stages of production, particularly the writing pro­cess. Among ­these she published articles on the collaborative creative pro­cesses of actors (“Ein Komödiant könnt einen Autor lehren . . . ​Der produktive Schauspieler,” 1931), on cameramen (“Der produktive Kameramann wird zum Mitschöpfer. Wege zur Manuskript-­Verwirklichung,” 1931), on collaboration between cameramen and set designers (“Formkünstler werden Autoren: Ein interessantes Film-­Triumvirat,” 1932), and playwrights (“Arnolt Bronnen sagt: “Funk und Film haben nichts Gemeinsames,” 1932). 16. ​As early as 1947, Eisner argued for the necessity of historicizing authorship—­and the industrial context in which film production and authorship occur—­a point to which she would return repeatedly throughout her postwar scholarship. See Lotte Eisner, “Notes sur le style de Fritz Lang,” La revue du cinéma 5 (February 1947): 3–26, and Lotte Eisner, “Les origines de style



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Lubitsch,” La revue du cinéma 17 (September 1948): 3–15, each of which offers early, pointed rehearsals of this argument, which finds its fullest expression in her F. W. Murnau. 17. ​Eisner commented at length in private correspondence and occasionally in interviews about the vagaries of translation, and the degree to which she ultimately found it necessary to supervise the translation of her work. Kracauer’s difficulties with En­glish have been discussed at some length in the secondary lit­er­a­ture; see, in par­tic­ul­ar, Johannes von Moltke, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), and Anton Kaes, “Siegfried Kracauer: Film Historian in Exile,” in Escape to Life: German Intellectuals in New York, ed. Eckart Goebel and Siegrid Weigel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 236–269. 18. ​Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film, edited and introduced by Leonardo Quaresima (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2004). By supplements, I mean ­those written by editors, commentators, and the like. The materials appended to the main body of The Haunted Screen—­the foreword to the English-­language edition, the summary of the Dreigroschenoper lawsuit, the filmographies and biblio­graphies, and all end ­matter—­were all authored by Eisner. 19. ​Barry Salt, “From Caligari to Who?,” Sight and Sound 48, no. 2 (1979): 119–123. 20. ​Eisner, Haunted Screen, 47. 21. ​She had already covered ­these themes, respectively, in Haunted Screen, 260–63, and 39–44; in “Les origines de style Lubitsch,” La revue du cinéma 17 (September 1948): 3–15; and Haunted Screen, 82, 309–311; Haunted Screen, 36–37, 207–222; and her monograph F. W. Murnau, which had been available for fifteen years in French (six years in En­glish) prior to Salt’s article. The unique German production system and its effects on style are discussed extensively in Eisner’s interwar journalism, as well as virtually all of her postwar scholarship, including her 1947 “Notes sur le style de Fritz Lang,” La revue du cinéma 5 (February 1947): 3–26; Haunted Screen, esp. 36–37 on the Regiensitzungen; and her monographs on Murnau and Fritz Lang (the latter was first published in En­glish three years in advance of Salt’s article). 22. ​Salt, “From Caligari to Who?,” 121. 23. ​Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and ­After, 234–235. 24. ​Elsaesser, 223. 25. ​A similar spirit informs the textual analy­sis offered throughout the book, which emphatically reinscribes male anxiety and subjectivity as the engine of stylistic and narrative signification for Weimar cinema at large, in spite of de­cades of feminist film theory and history that have persuasively argued against such parochial optics. See in par­tic­u­lar his curt dismissal of reading The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari “from Jane’s point of view” and the far-­fetched take on Pandora’s Box as properly centering about Alwa—­“surely a contentious choice in terms of the plot,” he admits—­for, according to Elsaesser, “a differently gendered reading [with Lulu at the center] is without pathos” ­because the film “prevents the (male and female?) viewer from constructing [Lulu] as victim, thus recovering one’s emotional investment in her” (Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and A ­ fter, 272–273). 26. ​Eisner, Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1984), 232. 27. ​Traces of Marie Epstein’s work at the Cinémathèque Française are preserved in its archives, some of it related to her regular business as preservationist, some to the deposit of her b­ rother’s work ­there. This quotation is from a three-­page note recording an oral history of her memories of the Cinémathèque Française, but the contents of that note (excepting this quotation) closely map onto the text of the more readily accessible interview by Lucien Patry, “Entretien avec Marie Epstein,” Films & Documents 332 (Autumn 1980): 32–36. 28. ​Enno Patalas, “On the Way to ‘Nosferatu,’ ” Film History 14, no. 1 (2002): 25–31. 29. ​Laurent Mannoni, Histoire de la Cinémathèque Française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 56; see also Laurent Mannoni, “Lotte  H. Eisner, historienne des démons allemands,” in Le cinéma

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expressionniste allemand: Splendeurs d’une collection ed. Bernard Benoliel, Marianne de Fleury, and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière/La Cinémathèque Française, 2006), 1–22. 30. ​Julia Eisner, “Lotte Eisner in Exile: Reinvention and Relocation,” in Ach, sie haben ihre Sprache verloren: Filmautoren im Exil, ed. Erika Wottrich and Swenja Schiemann (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2017), 169–190. 31. ​Elsaesser, comparing The Haunted Screen and From Caligari to Hitler: “On an even more personal level, both exiles also enjoyed patronage, and their books can be understood as addressing their benefactors—­Eisner was working for Henri Langlois, and Kracauer wanted to express his gratitude to Iris Barry at MOMA [sic] and the Institute of Social Research, as well as offering his ser­vices to the US government” (Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and ­After, 21). 32. ​See, for examples, Richard Roud, “The Moral Taste of Lotte Eisner,” Sight and Sound 53, no. 2 (1984): 139–140; Marcel Martin, “De l’archéologie à l’histoire,” Image et son 377 (November  1982): 127–130; Connie Greenbaum, “Entretien avec Lotte Eisner,” Image et son 283 (April 1974): 67–69; and Herman Weinberg, “Review: The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt,” Film Comment 6, no. 2 (1970): 60–62. 33. ​Roud, “Moral Taste of Lotte Eisner,” 140. 34. ​Numerous accounts of the Langlois Affair have reported its timeline and effects in detail; briefly, the circumstances are t­ hese: Langlois was asked to resign his position as director of the Cinémathèque Française in February 1968 on the grounds that he had mismanaged its funds, holdings, and the pro­cess by which it granted access to outside researchers. Pierre Barbin was installed in Langlois’s post, which led to protests, boycotts, letter campaigns, public demonstrations, and staff resignations all or­ga­nized ­under the name “Committee for the Defense of the Cinémathèque Française.” Langlois was reinstated by April 1968, and retrospectively the campaign came to be associated rhetorically, po­liti­cally, and socially with the events of May 1968 in Paris and elsewhere; for more, see Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978). Mannoni has described the chaos and dysfunction of the Cinémathèque Française during the early seventies in some detail in multiple publications. See, for example, Laurent Mannoni and Richard Crangle, “Henri Langlois and the Musée du Cinéma,” Film History 18, no. 3 (2006): 274–287. 35. ​This quotation is from an excerpt of Roud’s book A Passion for Films, published as “­Children of the Cinémathèque,” Sight and Sound 52, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 252–257. 36. ​Roud, 255. 37. ​It should also be noted that Langlois spent several years commuting by airplane to Montreal to lecture as a visiting professor at Sir George Williams University; if he was not figuratively or ste­reo­typically professorial, he was at least literally so. 38. ​Both of ­these stories made their way into almost ­every interview Eisner gave on the history of the Cinémathèque Française, as well as the pages of her memoirs; see, for example, Bezombes, Celemenski, and Varène, “Die Eisnerin,” 36; Edmund Luft, “Wir sind eigentlich alle vergessen worden; Lotte H. Eisner im Gespräch mit Edmund Luft,” Filmgeschichte 16/17 (1974): 92; Lucien Patry, “Entretien avec Lotte Eisner, le 2 février 1980,” Films & Documents 332 (Autumn 1980): 28; and Eisner, Ich hatte, 233–234. 39. ​Eisner, Ich hatte, 291. 40. ​Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central Eu­ro­pean University W ­ omen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 18–20 and passim. 41. ​Eisner, Ich hatte, 29. 42. ​Eisner, 9. 43. ​Eisner, 29, 82. 44. ​Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated, 32. Eisner offers disparaging comments about her ­mother and s­ ister in terms of their gender per­for­mance throughout her memoirs; see in



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par­tic­ul­ar her comments on their dress, language, eating habits, and approaches to education. Eisner, Ich hatte, 12, 17, 18, 23, 26, and 62. 45. ​ Claudia Breger, “Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Repre­ sen­ ta­ tions of ‘Female Inversion’ at the Turn of the Twentieth ­Century,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 ( January–­April 2005): 76–106. 46. ​She points to the first sentence of her review of Mädchen in Uniform: “The impossible has come to pass: a film starring only w ­ omen manages to be gripping, b­ ecause it treats a h­ uman story on the level of social themes.” Lotte H. Eisner, “Film-­Kritik: Mädchen in Uniform,” Film-­ Kurier, November 28, 1928. 47. ​An evocative example of this self-­identification in her memoirs relates to a 1928 interview with Josephine Baker she published in Film-­Kurier. She recalls that she scooped the other journalists (all men) on staff by snagging an interview on the hoof with the busy Baker, dictating the piece to a secretary just before the issue went to print, impressing her peers with her resourcefulness and competitive spirit. Eisner, Ich hatte, 80–81. 48. ​Examples of Eisner’s self-­description as a “misogynist” abound in interviews and her memoirs; see for example Heike Hurst, Dorothea Muenk, and Uscica Perabo, “Film . . . ​das ist so populo! Gespräch mit Lotte Eisner von Heike Hurst, Dorothea Muenk, and Uscica Perabo,” Frauen und Film 11 (March 1977): 35–36. Eisner offered similar statements in Lotte Eisner in Germany (dir. S. M. Horo­witz, 1981) and in Eisner, Ich hatte, 159, 197–199. 49. ​Mark M. Anderson, “Siegfried Kracauer and Meyer Schapiro: A Friendship,” New German Critique 54 (Autumn 1991): 18–29. Arnheim’s Film as Art helped land him work in Italy, and l­ ater in Britain and the United States. 50. ​Miriam Hansen, “ ‘ With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 446. 51. ​While this was by no means the only time such a sentiment has been expressed, this quotation above is a con­ve­niently concise example of the spirit in which Eisner’s work is sometimes described. Michael Wedel’s assertion about Eisner’s film theory bona fides was offered in the context of his talk “Faust in Amer­ic­ a: Sunrise through the Looking-­Glass of Lotte Eisner and Eric Rohmer” (pre­sen­ta­tion at the Lotte Eisner Symposium, London, October 26, 2018). 52. ​ Some readers—­especially German film historians—­have expressed their reservations about Eisner’s memoirs, wondering w ­ hether the inaccuracies or unsubstantiated details suggest editorial oversights, errors of memory on Eisner’s part, or (most troublingly) a cavalier attitude ­toward the facts on the part of Eisner and/or Grohmann; e.g., Karsten Witte, “Ein oft gemischtes Glück,” Der Zeit, October 31, 1986; Werner Sudendorf, “ ‘Nicht zur Öffentlichung’: Zur Biographie des Filmjournalisten Ernst (Ejott) Jäger,” Filmexil 5 (1994): 61–66. I have argued elsewhere that ­these can be considered productively within the rhetorical rubric of gossip and contextualized with reference to queer historiography. 53. ​Rolf Aurich has flatly asserted that Hensel was “a spy” on the international archives scene, but he argues that the evidence suggests Langlois worked with Hensel only insofar as was necessary, and in the final analy­sis Langlois seems to have been working privately to thwart Hensel’s efforts to confiscate certain films; see Rolf Aurich “The German Reich Film Archive in an International Context,” in The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-­Garde in Eu­rope, 1919–1945, ed. Malte Hagener (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 306–337. 54. ​Eisner, Ich hatte, 210. 55. ​Laurent Mannoni, “Kurtz et Eisner: Deux regards sur l’expressionisme,” in Le cinéma expressioniste: De Caligari à Tim Burton ed. Jacques Aumont and Bernard Benoliel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 32–58; Laurent Mannoni, “Lotte Eisner, historienne des démons allemands”; and Laurent Mannoni, Histoire de la Cinémathèque Française.

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56. ​Julia Eisner, Janet Bergstrom, Michael Wedel, Erica Car­ter, and I participated in this sym-

posium and contributed articles based on the conference proceedings to the dossier “Lotte ­ isner. A Reappraisal,” Screen 62, no. 3 (Autumn 2021). E 57. ​Joan Scott, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 304. 58. ​Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 636.

9 • A W ­ IDOW ’S WORK Archives and the Construction of Rus­sian Film History M ARIA N. CORRIGAN

The archive owes its existence to the archivist’s passion. —­Alice Yaeger Kaplan And it’s a hard life for a man with no wife. —­Bonnie “Prince” Billy

The question of f­amily ties is a tricky one in academia. Meta­phors of k­ inship are employed with relative comfort across the humanities: one scholar is labeled the ­father of a par­tic­ul­ar discipline, another figure descends from a specific line of thinking. But outside of fields like psy­chol­ogy, sociology, and anthropology, ­actual f­amily relationships are rarely the subject of scholarly interest, and are more often left to the domain of personal history and biography. What we make of personal histories and biographies is further subject to scrutiny, as we all, at one time or another, have strug­gled to navigate between what we know of an author’s life and the call to banish such knowledge to the outskirts of our intellectual frameworks. The author is dead, a­ fter all, and has been for quite some time. But the personal life of the author is so often an impor­tant site of knowledge for scholars. As Alice Yaeger Kaplan points out, researchers must have a connection to the figures whom they study even to begin their scholarly proj­ects; they must “penetrate the critical ‘industry’ surrounding that author,” with access to manuscripts and archival collections “policed by the author’s heirs.”1 Familial kinships, however, are not the only ­matters excised from official accounts. Yaeger Kaplan describes the pro­cess of historical discovery, and archival research in par­tic­ul­ar, as an “emotionally charged” experience, one that must immediately rewrite itself in order to be taken seriously: “To reveal ­those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence . . . ​or on what unfair forms of friendship, owner­ship . . . ​the discoveries w ­ ere based.”2 185

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This essay roots itself firmly in the domain of emotion, kinship, and marriage (perhaps the most unfair form of friendship) in order to examine the female ­labor that has gone into the consolidation of the global reputations of film auteurs. In line with feminist historians, this essay seeks to expand our focus on “­women as producers, consumers, and historical agents [allowing] for a more complex and expansive understanding of where we have been and where we are t­oday.”3 Specifically, I ­will address the painstaking curatorial and archival practices that have preserved the legacies of Soviet male film directors, often extending de­cades a­ fter their deaths. My analy­sis situates itself in the context of twentieth-­century Rus­sian film history, but the framework travels easily to any time or place where one can find smart, loving, and bereft wives whose husbands maintained a life in the arts. In this context, the death of the author is not a poststructuralist provocation, but instead a historical given: the end of one type of l­ abor and the beginning of another, which has rarely been acknowledged as ­labor (or at least not meaningfully so). The ­labor that places the work of the author in our hands or on our screens is nevertheless a meticulous endeavor, an active form of cinephilia that is discounted precisely ­because of the philia by which it is bound. The work of the author lives on posthumously not of its own accord but carefully, thoughtfully, and, most significantly, lovingly in the hands of his mourners. To be clear, this is an explic­itly feminist history that finds its object of study not simply in female l­abor but in the gendered nature of the marital contract, which, for t­ hese ­women, exceeds the proverbial promise of “­until death.” This essay w ­ ill focus on the creative and affective ­labor that has gone into sustaining husbands, curating their legacies a­ fter death, and preserving them through archival care. My focus ­will be split between Pera Moiseevna Atasheva and Valentina Georgievna Kozintseva, whose husbands—­Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein and Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev—­were filmmakers, contemporaries, friends, and major architects of the film cultures in Moscow and St.  Petersburg (then Leningrad), respectively. By examining ­these ­women’s lives, homes, and pro­cesses of mourning via archival curation, I hope to expand our field’s understanding of the agents of historical knowledge in order to account for networks of care. In Rus­sian film, the strength of the authorial voice has been traditionally bolstered by a pairing of theory and practice; this has led to a hierarchical organ­ization of materials, at the top of which sit film theory and, of course, the films themselves, while the vast number of twentieth-­century memoirs are treated as a border genre and as curious marginalia. Feminist scholarship has provided many tools to challenge entrenched notions of singular authorship, which so often is a male-­ dominated territory. The central contribution of this essay’s history may well be its challenge to the primacy of authoring at all; ­because questions of authorship are always bound up with subjectivity, this essay pre­sents the ­widow as a singular challenge to writing and the predominance of the self, particularly within the construction of history. My contention is that the w ­ idow (as a figure, as a device) opens the door to a knowledge that we very much need ­today. Focusing on her



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work enables a de-­automatization of what we have come to learn about film history, allowing us to explore the twin pro­cesses of memorialization and the construction of national monuments. In this essay, then, I w ­ ill first discuss feminist approaches to the concept of authorship in Soviet film. I w ­ ill then focus on the personal histories of Kozintseva and Atasheva in order to highlight the sites where so much of the work of film culture gets done. While this history is personal, it is, of course, of major po­liti­cal and national significance. As Jacques Derrida writes, “­There is no po­liti­cal power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” 4 Kozintseva and Atasheva w ­ ere responsible for their husbands’ materials before their donation to official state archives. I ­will argue that the domestic nature of mourning and care obscures the significance of the l­abor undertaken on behalf of history and husbands in their archives. Thus, the w ­ idow is more than a useful historiographical device; her ­labor requires (or deserves) a re­orientation of our understanding of the archive in order to fit her creative and productive proj­ect of mourning. This re­orientation ­will include a careful exploration not only of film history but also of the psychoanalytic frameworks that address mourning. In this context, the locations where this ­labor takes place may well be understood as a space of the uncanny, which estranges the familiar—­the home—to reveal objects long forgotten, discarded, or repressed. What could be more uncanny, in this regard, than the sudden realization that our lives, autonomies, and ­futures depend upon a network of affective care and ­labor that we rarely acknowledge? Rather than focusing on the more sinister aspects of the uncanny (ghostly hauntings and fear), I wish to examine the uncanniness of the continuation of marital relations, via care and affective l­abor, beyond the threshold of death.

feminist approaches to soviet authorship Jane Gaines opens Pink-­Slipped: What Happened to W ­ omen in the S­ ilent Film Industries? by underscoring the impossibility of the historian’s task; as it neither inspires confidence nor sells books, the historian “keeps the secret that he or she cannot ‘­really know’ all that happened.”5 The answer to the question that sustained second-­wave feminist historical accounts—­who was this w ­ oman?—is destined at the outset to be incomplete, and is thus more usefully framed t­ oday as “Where was [she] when feminist film scholars had no knowledge of her?”6 I certainly cannot pretend to know all that happened to Atasheva and Kozintseva, but this essay can, at the very least, pre­sent the major contributions made by both of them in the creation of Soviet film history and culture. Reframing Gaines’s question within a national context—­where was the ­widow when feminist Rus­sian film scholars did not know of her?—­might reveal a sorry state of affairs. As recently as 2018, Lilya Kaganovsky pointed out the “lack of scholarly attention to Soviet ­women’s cinema by critics in Rus­sian/Soviet studies,” a lack “mirrored by critics outside of it.”7 However, feminist film scholars have recently turned their attention to the ­women of early Rus­sian film whose achievements have been obscured by the big

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names of the era. ­Today, interested English-­language readers can turn to entries in the ­Women Film Pioneers Proj­ect; to the 2018 publication of a special issue of Apparatus, “­Women at the Editing ­Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s”; and to the 2019 publication of the textbook Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction, which features an entire section devoted to “rethinking authorship in early Soviet cinema,” outlining the work of editor Elizaveta Svilova, actor and director Yulia Solntseva, editor Esfir Shub, and actor Alexandra Khokhlova. Michele Leigh’s recovery of Antonina Khanzhonkova, Rus­sian prerevolutionary actor, writer of film scenarios, editor, and managerial or­ga­nizer of her husband’s film studio, is a brilliant example of the feminist exploration needed to uncover histories hidden ­behind an “offhand remark.”8 This scholarship forces us to reconsider what we think we know about history. It pre­sents a call to any of us who may have grown complacent in our teaching with our annual screenings of Chelovek s kinoapparatom/Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, USSR). Karen Pearlman’s pressing question—­“­Shouldn’t it be called ­Woman with an Editing Bench?”—­should be taken to heart.9 It is amazing to consider the de­cades during which we did not ask the obvious questions of the images in front of us. Pearlman and Heftberger write, “­There Svilova was, onscreen, literally making the movie we ­were watching, and yet only credited as an ‘assistant.’ What did this mean?”10 As a discipline, film studies is often underequipped to reckon with the collaborative nature of artistic creation. I am, however, concerned with more than collaboration in this proj­ect. With the exception of Esfir Shub, all the w ­ omen named h­ ere ­were married to directors—­ Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko, Lev Kuleshov, Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. And to this list we could add more names of artistic ­couples (Vsevolod Pudovkin and Anna Zemtsova-­Li, Grigori Aleksandrov and Liubov’ Orlova, Mikhail Romm and Elena Kuz’mina, Elem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko). The value of Rus­sian wives is by no means a new discovery. Media studies has much to learn from Rus­sian lit­er­ a­ture in this regard, specifically from the collaborative and editorial work of Sofia Tolstaya, Anna Dostoevskaya, Elena Bulgakova, and Nadezhda Mandel’stam, to name the most immediate examples. We owe ­these ­women not only for the ultimate publication of canonical pieces of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture and poetry, but also for the emotional l­abor that went into their partnerships, and the care with which they managed the daily lives of figures who endured personal and po­liti­cal tumult. With ­these new directions in scholarship devoted to recasting “­women’s work as creative work,” I wish to turn our attention momentarily away from the ­women whose l­ abor was overshadowed by their husbands’ success in order to examine the ­labor, by no means small, that has gone to ensuring that success.11 Unlike many feminist histories, then, an examination of the ­widow does not restore lost figures. I am not sure if it qualifies as “an act of historical recovery and retrieval,” alongside feminist work on early cinema, for, as mentioned ­earlier, this work was never lost, just uncounted.12 Karen Pearlman, John MacKay and John Sutton’s examination of Svilova was initiated b­ecause her creative work has remained “hidden b­ ehind the historical neglect both of ­women and of editors.”13



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What researchers have known of Svilova, however, is the work that she did in ser­ vice of her husband’s legacy. As Kaganovsky points out, “Upon Vertov’s death in 1954, Svilova changed her name to Vertova-­Svilova and retired from the film industry to dedicate herself to the preservation of Vertov’s memory and archive.”14 This ­labor, so vital to the construction of history, is not merely uncounted; in many ways, it is expected and therefore overlooked. Natalie Ryabchikova highlights this state of affairs in her work on the actor, theoretician, and wife Anna Zemtsova-­ Li-­Pudovkina, whose husband forms one of the three “pillars of the film-­related collections” at the Central State Archive of Lit­er­a­ture and Art alongside Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. Analyzing a 1982 article by Yuri Krasovsky on the foundations of the TsGALI film archive, Ryabchikova carefully disrobes the constant threat of failure that hovers around the archival proj­ect: ­ fter Anna Pudovkina’s death in 1965, the archivists discovered that she had willed A the collection to a friend of hers, who, in her turn, fi­nally transferred it to the archive. Sadly, they had to conclude that Pudovkin’s collection turned out to be almost fifteen times smaller than ­either Eisenstein’s or Dovzhenko’s. Despite overtly attributing the relative insignificance of Pudovkin’s archive to his own lack of ­predisposition t­owards collecting, by drawing the comparison with the work of Atasheva and Solntseva, the article implied that Anna Pudovkina had also clearly failed to do her work of memorialising.15

Seen from this vantage point, the size of the archival donation is somehow a mea­ sure of the wife’s love, competence, care, and secretarial prowess, all of which, taken together, reflect back on the original prudence of the director’s choice of life partner. Put other­wise, a truly good wife is naturally a fastidious secretary. Atasheva and Kozintseva, then, are in fine com­pany, but, as outlined ­earlier, their ­labor demands a dif­fer­ent type of intervention than that of Pudovkina, Svilova, Solntseva, or Khokhlova. For de­cades, feminist scholars have used the term social reproduction to describe “the activities and attitudes, be­hav­iors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergen­er­a­tion­ally.”16 This affective l­abor may be referred to by many names (­women’s work or l­abors of love), but it has a vital function: the production and maintenance of individuals as well as the larger communities in which they find themselves. This work, Nancy Fraser argues, is for the most part “remunerated . . . ​in the coin of ‘love’ and ‘virtue,’ ” while “productive work” is compensated with money.17 Where does this leave us in relation to the affective ­labor that is translated to archival practice? How can film scholarship account for this form of cinephilia and devotion? The case of Atasheva needs specific qualification, since her relationship to Eisenstein is often downgraded, sometimes to “closest friend and assistant,” in light of Eisenstein’s bisexuality.18 Their 1934 ­union was “universally assumed to have been a fictional marriage,” a step taken to ensure Eisenstein’s safety a­ fter the passing of a law

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that presaged increasing austerity in the criminalization of male homo­sexuality.19 However, the work of Atasheva, certainly dif­fer­ent in nature from that of Svilova, has been evident for a long time. It has fed Western scholarship and is responsible without acknowl­edgment for the vast number of publications on Eisenstein, a publishing industry that has not slowed as of 2020. In short, Atasheva’s work is largely responsible for creating the monolith that Eisenstein is ­today: a monument of Soviet film and a pillar of the discipline of film and media studies. And yet, b­ ecause of the ambiguity of her role as a sexual partner, her unpaid ­labor does not fit con­ve­niently into any category. What­ever the state of their marriage, it seems particularly impor­tant to preserve her title of “wife,” especially b­ ecause any other compensation for her l­abor was so paltry. Her status as Eisenstein’s wife at the very least ensured that his belongings became her property a­ fter his death. Her devotion to Eisenstein should be understood as a devotion to film as such. The same can be argued of Kozintseva, who was, by contrast, publicly acknowledged as a beloved wife.

love, ­l abor, loss I introduce Valentina Georgievna’s personal history with the observation, surprising to no one, that film directors have a tendency to marry actors.20 Less obvious, perhaps, is the comparatively lenient attitude Soviets displayed ­toward the subject of marriage, which was rendered a civil ceremony a­ fter the revolution. U ­ nder the Bolshevik ­Family Code of 1918 designed to grant equality to w ­ omen, divorce was a rather s­imple affair. Such cases w ­ ere certainly not the norm, but in 1935, Pravda reported a story in which “a young ­woman who quarrelled with her husband on the way from the Registrar’s Office where they had just been married, immediately turned back to the Registrar’s to obtain a divorce.”21 More exemplary in this context is the story of Serafima Suok (1902–1983), who developed a habit of marrying impor­ tant literary figures. She was, in fact, married five times throughout her life. Her second partner, the writer Yuri Olesha, married Suok’s older ­sister Olga, a­ fter Serafima left him for the Acmeist poet Vladimir Narbut. Serafima married her fourth husband, Nikolai Hardzhiev, in order to be evacuated alongside him during World War II. Fi­nally, she took on the role of Viktor Shklovsky’s secretary, a position that eventually led to their marriage in 1956, despite her close friendship with Shklovsky’s then wife, Vasilisa Grigor’evna. Thus, the Soviet artistic and theatrical community was, perhaps, least affected by the major social reforms taken in 1936, when the punishment for failure to pay alimony was changed to a two-­year prison term, and divorce fees ­were implemented and raised for each separation, climbing to 300 rubles for “third and subsequent divorces.”22 As I navigate the close, often overlapping circles of Soviet artistic marriages, I w ­ ill try to keep the list of names as short as pos­si­ble; translations of Rus­sian novels usually have a list of characters at the beginning for precisely this reason. The details of the life of Valentina Georgievna Kozintseva (née Drevnitskaya) are, however, thrilling and are characterized by highly unusual circumstances. Valentina’s f­ather, Yuzef



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Shvambaum (1868–1917), was a famous daredevil who performed his stunts u­ nder the name Drevnitsky; he was a pioneer of parachute jumping, who apparently completed more than 400 jumps all across the Rus­sian Empire.23 Drevnitsky died before the October Revolution in 1917, and his young wife, Olga, married Georgi Grebner, a screenwriter, who became Valentina’s ­adopted f­ather and also supplied her patronymic. This second marriage had rather devastating consequences: Grebner happened to be the last name of Leon Trotsky’s d­ aughter in-­law. The mere coincidence of names resulted in two prison terms for Olga Grebner. Thus, Valentina Georgievna experienced a tumultuous upbringing but was also very much at home among the cultural elite, as her m ­ other had worked as Shklovsky’s secretary. In an interview, she spoke of her childhood, accentuating her familiarity with the major literary and theatrical figures of the time: “When asked if I knew Mayakovsky or Meyerhold, I answer: ‘They knew me.’ I was very ­little then, so how can I say that I knew Lunacharsky? So I say, ‘He knew me! He worked with my ­father, and together they wrote a script.’ ”24 She first met Grigori Kozintsev in the fall of 1941 during the three-­week train trip that transported Soviet motion picture personnel to Almaty (then Alma-­Ata, the Kazakh capital) for evacuation during World War II. Her first recollection of the director was seeing him strolling on the platform with his first wife, FEKS actor Sofia Magarill, and her son from a previous marriage. At that time, Valentina Georgievna was in her second year of actor training at the Vakhtangov School and was married to the Soviet director Boris Barnet, who was already well acquainted with, if not directly linked to, Kozintsev through one of his previous marriages.25 Valentina Georgievna was, in fact, Barnet’s third wife. His second wife, Elena Kuz’mina, also studied at FEKS and starred in Kozintsev and Trauberg’s Novy Vavilon (1928) and Odna (1930).26 Although Valentina Georgievna would often be thrown together with Kozintsev in Almaty, she considered herself to be closer to his wife, Magarill, who would join the large and bustling community crammed in Barnet’s room. Their Moscow ­circle—­a veritable who’s who of the literary beau monde—­gathered with them again in Almaty. So Magarill joined the Suok s­ isters (Serafima and Olga), their past, pre­sent, and ­future husbands (Shklovsky and Olesha), and many o­ thers, while Kozintsev found himself more often working with his directorial partner Leonid Trauberg or in the com­pany of Eisenstein. Magarill never returned to Leningrad from Almaty, however, as she contracted typhoid fever and died from the illness in 1943. By the end of that year, Valentina Georgievna had returned to Moscow, to an active schedule of study and per­for­mance. In addition to the completion of her degree, she performed in the eve­nings, was already on salary at Mosfilm, and was planning to begin gradu­ ate work at All-­ Soviet Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). ­These plans would, of course, change drastically ­after a May  1944 telephone call from Kozintsev to Barnet was answered by Valentina Georgievna. Barnet was out of town, but when Kozintsev indicated that he would like to see her personally, she cut her classes and cleared her schedule for the day. At this time,

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Kozintsev would find himself rather often in Moscow, as he traveled between Leningrad and Tashkent, where he and Trauberg ­were filming a proj­ect called Buria (Tempest). By the end of 1945, Buria had been renamed Prostye Liudi (­Simple ­People), and subsequently denounced and shelved. This film would also mark the end of Kozintsev’s directorial collaboration with Trauberg, as Kozintsev cut his ties with his partner of twenty-­six years in 1946. In brighter prospects for the director, however, his stops in Moscow had brought him much closer to Valentina Georgievna, who left her studies to move to Leningrad with him. Although Barnet initially tried to dissuade Valentina Georgievna from such a bold step, he never presented any obstacle to their romance, even having procured a pass for her ­earlier trip to Leningrad to visit Kozintsev. The details of the Kozintsevs’ romantic connection—­personal and tabloid-­like as they may appear—­give only a very partial glimpse into the texture of home life at this time. If Soviet attitudes ­toward marriage and divorce seem mildly carefree, one should not forget to take into consideration the other strong ­family, communal, and po­liti­cal ties that exert other pressures. This was not a standard love triangle. The Kozintsevs maintained a close friendship with Barnet and, as Valentina Georgievna recounts, “I left, and our friendship remained. He would visit us, and we would await and rejoice in each visit. Once when visiting Leningrad, he had an acute case of appendicitis, and I would visit the hospital with special foods prepared by Grigori’s ­mother, Anna Grigor’evna.”27 The presence of parental ties that are alluded to in this recollection is also impor­tant in understanding Barnet and Valentina Georgievna’s ­union in the first place. Barnet was a close friend to her parents, and when her ­mother was arrested and sent to a ­labor camp, she asked Barnet to take care of her ­daughter.28 Barnet married her. And although Barnet very much loved her, and she, in turn, admired him, loving their life and their circle of friends, the marriage was not without prob­lems. Valentina Georgievna explains the cause of her unhappiness rather obliquely: “We had an extraordinary friendship, but as a husband he was unbearable. Every­one loved him—­women, men, ­children, dogs, cats, birds—­every­ one. And he loved every­one.”29 During their marriage, Barnet assisted his wife in sending money and packages to Grebner in Kolyma. Kozintsev, too, took up this task when Grebner was arrested a second time and sent to the Gulag ­labor camp in Vorkuta. The postwar years ­were especially difficult financially—­Valentina Georgievna explains that Kozintsev was not skilled in financial affairs even at the best of times—­but the ­family sent Grebner assistance ­every three weeks. In her recollections, she underscores Kozintsev’s tender treatment of her m ­ other, remembering that, when Grebner was released, her husband said: “In our h­ ouse the most impor­tant member of the ­family is Olga Ivanovna. Consider her always to be right, and never argue with her—­she’s suffered too much in her life.”30 Even with the g­ reat difficulties of the early years of their marriage (postwar stabilization; Kozintsev’s stalled artistic proj­ects in the last de­cade of the Stalin era; the arrests of friends and f­amily; the campaign against cosmopolitanism in film that, despite their identical résumés, attacked Trauberg and not Kozintsev),



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this partnership was a happy one. From the end of 1945 to his death in 1973, the pair ­were rarely apart, spending their time mostly in Leningrad, at their dacha at Komarovo, on set, or, once it was pos­si­ble, abroad. At the end of 1946, their son Alexander was born. Valentina Georgievna’s descriptions of her husband emphasize a rather marked distinction between public and private personas, which is perhaps not unusual for a wife’s experience of her partner. Many at Lenfilm remember the director as a stern, closed-­off man of few words, but the w ­ idow’s recollections give a glimpse of an artist who detested busywork, gossip-­mongering, and empty festivities, much preferring intimate one-­on-­one gatherings that would allow for deeper conversation.31 ­These descriptions also underscore his need for conversation, which Valentina Georgievna at first thought was simply a leftover habit from his creative partnership with Trauberg, but soon discovered to be an impor­tant part of his artistic pro­cess: “During his retelling [of events] he would specify some impor­tant ­things for himself.”32 Valentina Georgievna felt herself to be a valued collaborator in the conversation, but the moment that principal photography began, Kozintsev did not h­ andle criticism well; he ­stopped inviting his wife to screenings of rough cuts ­after she once voiced a critique of his work on the film Pirogov (1947). Mostly, Valentina Georgievna’s recollections of her husband center on his attachment to his ­labor. This work was constant, as he navigated between his creative work as a director and the solitary writing of his monographs. As she recalls, her husband wrote everywhere and at all hours: at home, at work, in transit, between takes on set, at the dacha, where he would write at the win­dow by the light of the moon so as not to wake her. “If ­there was no notebook at hand, he wrote on random sheets, theatrical programs, envelopes. . . . ​He had no idea how to relax, and considered this the most difficult ‘work.’ ”33 Valentina Georgievna, by contrast, did not consider herself to be a writer. The details just recounted come primarily from her only two published pieces in the journal Kinovedcheskie zapiski (Film notes), each in honor of one of her husbands, both of whom she outlived. Her recollections about Kozintsev ­were a long time in the making. Although she was encouraged by friends to rec­ord her memories soon a­ fter Kozintsev’s passing, it was not ­until much l­ater—­during the preparation of the publication of Kozintsev’s correspondence, edited by herself and film scholar Iakov Butovsky—­that she found herself called to the task. Even then, it was not exactly “writing”; she dictated her memoirs to Butovsky. She also frames this work primarily as a practical task, to provide context for her husband’s letters to her (they spoke ­every day in person or by telephone, so their correspondence is not fully characteristic of their relationship). Her account is engaging and provides a glimpse not only of her devotion to the work of her departed husband but also of her own grief, downplayed slightly in order to highlight the details of Kozintsev’s life in art: “It is hard for me to write that we ­couldn’t live without each other, as t­hose words look a l­ittle foolish—­ almost like a sentimental novel. . . . ​But it’s true.”34 A fuller picture of her loss is

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captured powerfully in a letter sent to film scholar Jay Leyda in New York, dated June  22, 1973, a few weeks a­ fter Kozintsev’s death. ­After thanking Leyda for his kind words about Kozintsev, she writes in Rus­sian: “His death was so horrible, so sudden. Before the heart attack, he felt perfectly well. I have to live, as ­there remains so much literary material that only I, it seems, can sort through and preserve. I’m turning into Pera Atasheva.”35 This letter clearly signals, on the one hand, the centrality of Atasheva as a ­widow and archivist within the collection of Soviet film materials. On the other hand, it also pre­sents the task of archivization and memorialization as a preservation of life. And so, when examining Kozintseva’s life work from the vantage point of social reproduction, this maintenance of everyday life (particularly past the point of marriage and the transition into widowhood) becomes an archival pro­cess. Moreover, her careful work with film scholar Butovsky, with whom she shared the responsibility of editing her husband’s five-­volume collected works, involved not only the maintenance of the quotidian aspects of her partnership but also painstaking, decades-­long work including (but not l­ imited to) the pursuit of translators for her husband’s work, the se­lection of vast materials for publication, and the assembly and donation of his work to the St. Petersburg State Archives of Lit­er­a­ ture and Art (as well as the protection of that archive). What exactly did Kozintseva’s work accomplish? Beyond the publication of materials vital to an understanding of St. Petersburg’s foundational film culture or to a c­ areer that spanned five complex de­cades, Kozintseva’s careful se­lection and editorial work served to soften a man who was widely known to be a reserved figure. She contributed her personal correspondence with her husband as well as her own life story to film history in order to expand and preserve her husband’s legacy.

homes and archives I never got the chance to meet Valentina Georgievna. She died in December 2009, and in 2010 I began my work on her husband’s leading role in the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, an avant-­garde artistic collective, when I was lucky enough to meet and interview her son, Alexander Kozintsev, a famous anthropologist in his own right, who subsequently granted me the necessary permission to examine his ­father’s collection at TsGALI (the Central State Archive of Lit­er­a­ture and the Arts). Nevertheless, my current manuscript proj­ect has been made pos­si­ble by her careful work. In his documentary St.  Petersburg Diary: Kozintsev’s Flat (1998), Alexander Sokurov subtly suggests a similar indebtedness, as his handheld camera travels slowly and uncannily through Grigory Kozintsev’s home study, revealing a collection of books, mementos, and photo­graphs from a life devoted to theater and cinema, preserved as it was when he died more than two de­cades e­ arlier. Sokurov’s fascination with memory, history, and museums has been well documented, but this strange and thoughtful film functions a l­ ittle differently from Rus­ sian Ark (2002) and Francofonia (2016), films that explore the role of the museum



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in art preservation and the construction of the ­human subject. Kozintsev’s Flat is, perhaps, a more modest approach to t­ hese themes as it both elevates Kozintsev’s home study to the level of a St. Petersburg cultural monument and quietly introduces the figure of Kozintseva, who shuffles in and out of frame, encouraging and chatting with the filmmaker. This apartment is certainly in­ter­est­ing for historians of Rus­sian cinema, particularly for t­hose who explore the foundational figures of ­Lenfilm. Situated on the Petrograd side of St. Petersburg, Kozintsev’s apartment is just around the corner from Lenfilm, and is identified on the outside by twin plaques indicating that both Kozintsev and his directorial partner Leonid Trauberg lived in the building. Valentina Georgievna’s reaction to Sokurov’s film reflects a comical mixture of her roles as w ­ idow and hostess, as she both praises the filmmaker for capturing so much of her husband’s spirit without having met him, and chides him for betraying the well-­kept nature of her home: “We have bad floors, but they do not creak like that.”36 In this film diary, Sokurov captures both the site of memorialization and the agents of the task. In this way, Kozintsev’s apartment might well be compared to the hearth of Rus­sian film history: Pera Atasheva’s apartment at Number 10 ­Smolenskaya Ulitsa, where, from 1965 to 2018 stood the Eisenstein Memorial Apartment (or Eisenstein Cabinet). The significance of this small apartment cannot be overstated, even if Eisenstein himself never actually lived t­ here. In 2017, Joan ­Neuberger and Antonio Somaini called it a “magic, inspiring space . . . ​a key destination not only for film scholars but also for film directors, artists, and writers visiting Moscow.”37 They rightfully attribute the creation of this space to Naum Kleiman, the historian, film critic, and Eisenstein expert who has actively and generously sustained so much of the field of Rus­sian film scholarship over the last half ­century. Kozintsev was close friends with Eisenstein, and credits the cultivation of this space to Pera Moiseevna. He spends some time describing Pera Moiseevna’s living conditions in his book Glubokii ekran (Deep screen; published in 1971 but drafted throughout the 1960s), capturing a glimpse of the significance of her home even in the days before Kleiman began his work: “It was ­here that N. Kleiman and L.  Kozlov began their research. . . . ​Every­one who knew Eisenstein and loved his work would come h­ ere. Having just arrived in Moscow, Leon Moussinac, Ivor Montagu, Jay Leyda, Henri Langlois, Georges Sadoul, Jerzy Toeplitz would immediately go see Pera. You ­couldn’t count them all.”38 Like Neuberger and Somaini, Kozintsev sees the apartment as a major cultural site for national and transnational exchange, but with Pera Moiseevna seated firmly at the center of an expanding orbit. Both Kozintsev and Kleiman underscore the vital role played by Eisenstein’s ­widow within the context of this home-­turned-­archive. For Kozintsev, Atasheva provides a story of devotion with “no less pathos than the examples of pathetic art that Eisenstein loved to make.” He describes this “short, plump, cheerful ­woman, whose easy laughter was contagious,” as a pillar of unwavering support; neither Eisenstein’s illness from smallpox nor the long years of separation during his travels in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca, nor even his death in 1948 could shake her devotion.

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Pera Moiseevna donated only his published manuscripts to the state archives and gathered all the rest, transferring it to her own apartment, where she lived with her parents. In order to fit all his t­ hings in this new place, she had to throw all of her own away.39 Kozintsev writes, “Sergei Mikhailovich was no longer alive, but still Pera lived only for him. She would sit laboring for days—­surrounded by mountains of manuscripts and an invasion of objects—­deciphering his handwriting and bringing order to an enormous archive.” 40 Devoted as he was to Shakespeare, Kozintsev may have remembered the words “she sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief ” as he drew this portrait. He emphasizes her steadfast adherence to her task, even as she began losing her eyesight, reading only with the help of a magnifying glass, and her apartment disintegrated around her. The state would provide a new apartment to Atasheva in 1962 (the old building was immediately torn down), but Kozintsev writes that this changed l­ ittle of Atasheva’s daily habits or the manner of her work. In order to give a clear glimpse of Pera Moiseevna, I cobble together several accounts, though not all of them are written from this same pathos-­filled ­angle. While each account verifies the horrible conditions of the apartment and the constancy of her care, the portrait drawn by Viktor Shklovsky in his book on Eisenstein underscores, almost comically, her readiness to argue with Eisenstein; no m ­ atter where they would find themselves—­her apartment or on the set of Bezhin Lug or Ivan Grozny—­Eisenstein and Atasheva “argued, disagreed, thought together, quarreled, ­because all you need for a quarrel is two ­people. And for most ­people, art needs a quarrel.” 41 Shklovsky almost finds an equivalent for Atasheva in lit­er­a­ture: “She was his gunman, his Sancho Panza—­only she was an educated Sancho Panza, one who read all the same knight novels differently than Don Quixote.” 42 This combative spirit is, perhaps, doubly touching if one considers Eisenstein’s own emphasis on conflict in art. Shklovsky supplies even more praise, describing her as “uncompromising” and as “a person of masculine intellect, and hard words”; he notes that “they argued as equals.” 43 For his part, Kleiman also depicts Atasheva as someone fully ready for ­battle: “[In her] we found a ­woman who spoke of [Eisenstein] with humor, without any servility, but with warmth and love. I think she loved him all her life. She did not have an easy life, but she remained faithful to him. It was no accident that Eisenstein called her soldadera—­his soldier who guarded him.” In his interviews and lectures, Kleiman often returns to his first visit to Atasheva’s crumbling apartment on Gogol Boulevard and the colossal impact it had on his life. As the story goes, he was studying Ivan Grozny at VGIK and wished to see Eisenstein’s drawings, when a professor advised him to see Atasheva. He went with a schoolmate, flowers in hand, expecting an official encounter, something that resembles the way “the ­widow of a ­great man” sounds. Instead, they found Pera Moiseevna in a wreck of an apartment, surrounded by a stunning amount of unpublished material, carefully preserved ­under plastic, as the cracks in the walls and ceiling often led to leaks. The ­widow was in poor condition as well, suffering from diabetes and poor eyesight, subsisting



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on a tiny pension. Regardless, Pera Moiseevna cheerfully offered them food—­ “students are always hungry”—­and thus began a close working relationship that would bring Kleiman back to the apartment multiple times a week, along with a small battalion of film students (the country’s f­uture directors) who offered their help sorting through heaps of materials and preparing them for publication.44 Kleiman’s portrait, like Kozintsev’s, is full of emotion; in the apartment, he found not only enough work to sustain a lifetime but also a figure who would come to be “a second ­mother” to him and to many of the students of his generation.45 Through this physical space, he also experienced a visceral re­orientation of his understanding of history and historiography: That eve­ning dissolved our relationship to Eisenstein as a monument. We imagine a classic to be a person who thinks, contemplates, and creates on a plane that is totally out of reach! We are so small. We are not taught to see our classics as interlocutors. What­ever they are, they are ancestors who need to be read. This cult of ancestors goes all the way back to ancient times. And ­here suddenly t­ here appeared an entirely dif­fer­ent perspective: we discovered that the classics—­they are our ­children. They need us—­our help, to extend their lives, to take care of them, to swaddle and raise them, as they say. . . . ​Without our attention, our eyes, our care, they ­will be forgotten or distorted.46

Kleiman suggests, ­here, a completely dif­fer­ent approach to the study of history, one that hinges upon notions of care and kinship. If the role of the historical researcher becomes, in this light, parental, ­there is the possibility of a strange and uncanny confusion of lineage; we are si­mul­ta­neously the heirs and caregivers to a line of thinking. The preservation of texts is also a slippery task; Kleiman frames it as a preservation of life itself. This shift in perspective may ask us to reconsider the productive and reproductive tasks inherent in archival preservation. By paying close attention to ­these apartments, I wish to make an intervention on behalf of the creative, cultural production undertaken by Atasheva and Kozintseva in their capacity as w ­ idows. The preservation of their apartments, captured in the recollections quoted h­ ere and in Sokurov’s film, is not merely part of the homemaking tasks feminists have addressed as gendered ­labor; it is a painstaking archival task. Indeed, from the many dif­fer­ent descriptions of Atasheva’s home, t­ here emerges the unmistakable impression that Eisenstein took up, perhaps, too much of the focus, as the homemaking could not contend with the challenges of such a small, decrepit place. Thus, the tension between public and private accounts is nowhere more keenly felt than in an archive. For Yaeger Kaplan, a return to the Greek arche refers only to the “magisterial residence” or “the public office where government rec­ords are kept.” 47 In “Archive Fever,” Derrida lingers slightly longer over definitions, drawing out the concepts of commencement and commandment from arkhe, before focusing on the arkheion: “Initially a h­ ouse, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, t­hose who commanded.” 48 ­W hether or not this

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etymology is necessary to understand what is at stake in theorizing archives—­and what is at stake is po­liti­cal, national, and historical power—it is nevertheless productive to pause in this space that opens up between the public and private archives, between the home and the state, where the w ­ idow’s work translates the husband’s life into a legacy. Derrida’s emphasis on the material and residential aspects of the archive is not merely of theoretical importance; the lecture from which “Archive Fever” emerges was given in Sigmund Freud’s final home, the site of London’s Freud Museum. Indeed, Derrida’s entire exploration of archives—or “patriarchives”—is predicated on the notion of the archive as a f­ amily affair, the site that determines who gets to speak for whom. This may not be entirely surprising, as the site of the ­family is critical in constituting the self in psychoanalysis. But Derrida’s text focuses closely on lineage in both literal and figurative terms, tracing bloodlines from Jakob Freud—­ “grand­father of psychoanalysis”—­through Sigmund to his d­ aughter Anna Freud, and ultimately to us, inheritors of the field.49 Through a curious debate with the scholar Yosef Yerushalmi over paternity and circumcision—­which, according to Freud, produces “a disagreeable, uncanny [unheimlich] impression”—­Derrida maps out the exclusions on which archives depend.50 As Amy Hollywood argues, Derrida “makes the particularly ‘Jewish’ prob­lem of bodily inscription exemplary . . . ​of ­women’s relationship to all (patri)archives and (patriarchal) traditions.”51 One of the central questions of “Archive Fever” is w ­ hether new forms of archivization allow for new subjectivities. Even without the promise of email and virtual archives, which to Derrida might offer an escape from gendered and racial exclusions, one particularly nagging elision in this discussion remains. Derrida returns multiple times to address Freud’s own home “having become a museum: (It is what is happening, right h­ ere, when a h­ ouse, the Freuds’ last h­ ouse, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.)”52 This passive construction misses its opportunity to note both the active work required to transform a ­house into a museum and, more pointedly, Anna Freud’s hand in this preservation and transformation from private/domestic to public/official. If, as Hollywood asserts, “Derrida forces us to ask w ­ hether the generation of the archive, like its handing down, is dependent on the effacement of m ­ others and d­ aughters,” we must also examine the ways in which this effacement is naturalized and habitualized in the very language we use to call attention to it.53

conclusion By raising the question of Anna Freud’s autonomy and authority—­does she speak in her own name or “in the name of the f­ather”?—­Derrida opens up a space to question gendered models of knowledge creation and transmission, from masculine instrument and feminine surface to what Paul Flaig calls the “erotic dynamic between a masculine archivist and the feminine body of the archive.”54 I would like to sidestep the psychoanalytic connotations of conflating wife and ­daughter



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to return squarely to the gendered l­abor at the foundations of archives and memory, in our case, in film culture. What are w ­ idows to feminist film scholarship? They exist both before and a­ fter gaze theory, a benchmark that Patrice Petro sees as artificially dividing feminist scholars into theorists and historians.55 Indeed, the history presented in this essay does not fit snugly into the periodizations that have seemed to dominate feminist film scholarship; once one begins to see the work of the w ­ idow in consolidating archives and preserving the legacies of her husband for the astounding amount of work it is, one can start tracing it in both “early” and “late” cinemas (and certainly outside of cinema, too). In this concluding section, I would like to map out three ave­nues by which the ­widow can have (or has had already) a transformative impact on the writing of film and media histories: namely, the global export of film scholarship, the challenge that expands cinephilia to include caretaking, and, fi­nally, a call to revise the seat of so much this discourse: the liberal subject. As I have argued throughout this essay, the ­widow offers an invaluable vantage point from which to view the pillars of film history. For instance, the change of focus that suddenly reveals ­these ­women to be critical nodes in the transport of global film scholarship also forces us to reexamine the traditional ways that history gets written (“history as usual”), which includes history as “the study of unique individuals[,] the development of aesthetic forms[, and] the evolution of industrial and ­legal structures.”56 This change of focus reveals the paths of translation that have been necessary to export major film monuments, which also immediately brings us face-­to-­face with the construction of national cinema history. From Huntly Car­ter’s 1922 estimation of the state of early Soviet cinema to Jay Leyda’s compendium Kino: A History of Rus­sian and Soviet Film in 1960 to Naum Kleiman’s scholarly, curatorial work in establishing the Eisenstein Cabinet and the State Central Film Museum, scholars have relied on a network of global agents for some kind of understanding of the inner workings of a complex national cinema. Much of this essay has highlighted the work of the ­widow in finding, activating, and nurturing ­these agents, and the field’s current state recognizes ­those scholars’ impor­tant contributions to our body of knowledge. The 2017 publication of The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein and Rus­sian Cinema in Honor of Naum Kleiman and the same year’s conference on Jay Leyda at Mount Holyoke College give some indication that their l­abor is an indispensable part of the field. But both t­ hese figures are directly related to the “critical industry” that is Sergei Eisenstein, one of the biggest figures of film history. An examination of the figure of Pera Atasheva, then, can initiate a greater understanding of scholarship’s reliance on discounted networks of care, which further invites scrutiny of the minute and fascinating work undertaken by ­family members in relation to archives, including the archives of less central figures. Much of this essay was produced and revised during the first few weeks of self-­ isolation brought on by the spread of COVID-19. Readers may well remember the collective shock experienced by so many of us (privileged enough to have a home

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and stay t­ here) over the amount of ­labor that goes into sustaining and maintaining the home and the ­people within it. As I have argued, the ­widow allows us to continue feminist investigation into the realities and subjectivities that have been obscured by gendered divisions of l­ abor. Beth Holmgren has argued that Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s status as ­great writer was hidden both by her status as “caregiver and conservator” to her famous poet husband and by a hesitation within the field of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture to take seriously the “complexities of analyzing ‘boundary genres’ (memoirs, documentary prose).”57 Beyond even ­these issues, however, Holmgren recounts the challenge of arguing for an autonomous subject position when the author herself (for reasons personal or po­liti­cal) e­ ither fully excludes herself from the narrative or describes herself as a product of her husband’s making.58 I have not argued for us to attribute to the ­widow a singular authorial voice, but she too has a tendency to write herself out of the history she devotes her life to constructing. Consider, for instance, Pera Atasheva’s letter to Jay Leyda, in which she lays out a plan for an Eisenstein publication, only to carefully remove her own signature: Besides many other t­ hings, I wanted to discuss with you an idea of mine—to make an ­album of best shots from SM’s films—­w ith a title—­something like that: “Eisenstein—­master of cinema-­composition.” What do you think? With a foreword written by someone who ­really understands (Moussinac?). Very impor­tant: all ideas are yours not mine.59

One small glimpse at Atasheva’s correspondence with Leyda supplies enough evidence for her careful work as she plans publications, tracks down Eisenstein’s materials and photo­graphs spread across the United States and Mexico, and tactfully gives instructions on how to expand and secure her husband’s legacy. She is fully aware of her own ­limited currency when making requests, and so one might be able to read this barter as a selfless act, the removal of her name for the greater proliferation of Eisenstein’s. Such moments are not just indicative of a vast knowledge of Eisenstein’s body of work; they also point to a dedicated cinephilia that is always in danger of being removed from official accounts. Atasheva’s careful and generous unraveling of her position as archon—­the guardian of the archive as established in “Archive Fever”—­brings us to this essay’s principal conclusion: the w ­ idow’s challenge to the primacy of selfhood in authorship. So much of the writing on archives characterizes the researcher’s quest as a narrative of discovery rather than preservation. Yaeger Kaplan describes t­ hese stories as ranging from epic to dime novel, with the researcher cast e­ ither as a version of Odysseus or as a detective with a “single prob­lem, their crime, waiting to be solved at the center of the labyrinth.”60 Derrida’s discussion of the patriarchal dimensions that guard writing allows us to take stock of how t­ hese archival discoveries are mapped out as gendered prerogatives—­male discovery and female landscape—­that replicate the binary oppositions that make up gaze theory (man as “maker” and w ­ oman as “­bearer of meaning”).61 Within this rich field of allusion,



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we might also find ourselves drawn to the ancient world to find parallels for Atasheva and Kozintseva, perhaps to Penelope, who resorted to undoing her weaving in order to preserve her marriage to the long-­disappeared Odysseus (thus also preserving his home). Derrida casts Anna Freud as Antigone, but this allegory is not entirely productive for the work of the wife, who, unlike Antigone, must live for her dead to be honored. ­These ancient tales of vio­lence offer up a host of widowed ­women, whose creative mourning might finely accentuate the portraits I have drawn ­here. Instead of delving into this past, however, I w ­ ill close by quoting recent feminist explorations of our technological ­futures that see robots stepping into the ser­vice roles so recently occupied by w ­ omen and colonized p­ eople, a technological development that erases this ­labor even further and lends itself to a version of selfhood that appears easy (i.e., your digital assistants—­those uncanny female automatons by the names of Siri and Alexa—­may ease your day-­to-­day strug­gles, but they are not [yet] programmed to mourn you). As Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora write, “­There is no liberal subject outside of the surrogate-­self relation through which the ­human, a moving target, is fixed and established. In other words, the liberal subject is an effect of the surrogate relation.”62 In closing, then, I argue that ­there is, of course, neither an Eisenstein nor a Kozintsev without the men themselves. But to make sense of the monument that ­either man has become, we must also account for the active l­ abor, the surrogate-­self relation that enabled the artists and continues to make pos­si­ble their exalted places in film history.

notes 1. ​Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 108. 2. ​Kaplan, 103. 3. ​Patrice Petro, “Reflections on Feminist Film Studies, Early and Late,” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004):

1274. 4. ​Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 11ff. 5. ​Jane  M. Gaines, Pink-­ Slipped: What Happened to ­Women in the ­Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 2. 6. ​Gaines, 34–35. 7. ​Lilya Kaganovsky, “Film Editing as W ­ omen’s Work: Ėsfir’ Shub, Elizaveta Svilova, and the Culture of Soviet Montage,” in “­Women at the Editing T ­ able: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s,” ed. Adelheid Heftberger and Karen Pearlman, special issue, Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Eu­rope 6 (August, 2018), http://­dx​.­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­17892​/­app​.2­ 018​.­0006​.1­ 14. 8. ​Michele Leigh, “Reading between the Lines: History and the Studio Own­er’s Wife,” in ­Doing ­Women’s Film History, ed. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 43. 9. ​Karen Pearlman and Adelheid Heftberger, “Editorial: Recognising ­Women’s Work as Creative Work,” in “­Women at the Editing T ­ able: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s,” ed. Adelheid Heftberger and Karen Pearlman, special issue, Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Eu­rope 6 (August 2018), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.1­ 7892​/­app​ .­2018​.­0006​.­124.

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10. ​Pearlman and Heftberger. 11. ​Pearlman and Heftberger. 12. ​Petro, “Reflections on Feminist Film Studies,” 1273. 13. ​Karen Pearlman, John MacKay, and John Sutton, “Creative Editing: Svilova and Vertov’s

Distributed Cognition,” in “­Women at the Editing ­Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s,” ed. Adelheid Heftberger and Karen Pearlman, special issue, Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Eu­rope 6 (August 2018), http://­dx​.­doi​.­org​/­10​ .­17892​/­app​.­2018​.­0006​.­122. 14. ​Kaganovsky, “Film Editing as W ­ omen’s Work.” 15. ​Natalie Ryabchikova, “The Disappearing Theoretician: From Anna Li to A. N. Pudovkina,” in “­Women at the Editing ­Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s,” ed. Adelheid Heftberger and Karen Pearlman, special issue, Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Eu­rope 6 (August 2018), http://­dx​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.1­ 7892​/­app​.2­ 018​.­0006​.­109. 16. ​Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett, quoted in Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 6. 17. ​Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-­Reproductive Contradictions of Con­temporary Capitalism,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017), 103. 18. ​Joan Neuberger and Antonio Somaini, The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein and Rus­sian Cinema in Honor of Naum Kleiman (Italy: Éditions Mimésis, 2017), 9. 19. ​Joan Neuberger, This ­Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 326. 20. ​I ­will refer to Kozintseva by her name and patronymic (the common Rus­sian naming convention) in this section, as calling her by her married name before the marriage takes places results in some degree of anachronistic confusion. 21. ​V. Svetlov, “Socialist Society and the ­Family,” [excerpt] in The ­Family in the U.S.S.R., ed. Rudolf (New York: Routledge, 2000), 342. 22. ​Schlesinger, The ­Family in the U.S.S.R., 278. 23. ​Liubov’ Khazan, “Syn kinorezhissera Grigoriia Kozintseva doctor istoricheskikh nauk Aleksandr Kozintsev,” Bul’var Gordona, no. 20 (May 2013), https://­bulvar​.c­ om​.u­ a​/­gazeta​/­archive​/­s20​ _­66118​/­8126​.­html. 24. ​Olga Khrustaleva, “Valentina Kozintseva: Shvartz nazval Kozintseva pomes’iu krapivy I mimozy,” Gazeta Kommersant’, no. 168 (1997): 14, https://­www​.­kommersant​.­ru​/­doc​/­185021. In this interview, Valentina Kozintseva admitted to having a small collection of love letters from Shklovsky, who wrote her “twice a day,” despite the fact that she was the same age as his son. ­These letters did not survive, however, as she burned them following her m ­ other’s arrest. 25. ​For more on Kozintseva’s marriage to Barnet, see Valentina Kozintseva, “O prekrasnom cheloveke,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 57 (2002), http://­www​.­kinozapiski​.­ru​/­ru​/­article​/­sendvalues​ /­491​/.­ 26. ​While she is not a central figure in this current history, it is impor­tant to note that Elena Kuz’mina also belongs to the category of productive ­widows of Rus­sian film in addition to her own history as screen star. Her memoirs, What I Remember (1976), ­were written in the wake of the death of her second husband, Soviet director Mikhail Romm, and provide an invaluable personal account of her work and life in Soviet film. 27. ​Valentina Kozintseva, “Vspominaia Grigoriia Mikhailovicha,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 70 (2004), http://­www​.­kinozapiski​.r­ u​/­ru​/­article​/­sendvalues​/­225​/­. 28. ​Natalia Gromova, Imennoi ukazatel’ (Moscow: Litres, 2020) 29. ​Khrustaleva, “Valentina Kozintseva,” 14. 30. ​Khrustaleva, 14.



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31. ​ Kozintseva, “Vspominaia Grigoriia Mikhailovicha.” In ­these recollections, Kozintseva

describes an eve­ning when Kozintsev was given no choice but to attend an event at the House of Art, where he was seated next to the British ballerina Margot Fonteyn. B ­ ecause he knew that she had recently danced the role of Ophelia, Kozintsev asked her about it. “The topic was in­ter­ est­ing to her too, but the ballerina said, ‘how can I tell you about it? I can only show you.’ So they went to some room close by, and Fonteyn showed him her dance of madness or something like that. [Grigori] was pleased that he went to the event, remembering it often and smiling. He would say, ‘They prob­ably thought that I would convince her to stay . . .’ (this was around the time when Nuriev stayed abroad).” 32. ​Kozintseva. 33. ​Kozintseva. 34. ​Kozintseva. 35. ​Kozintseva to Leyda, June  22, 1973, box 5, folder 11, Jay and Si-­Lan Chen Leyda Papers, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner ­Labor Archives. NY, New York. 36. ​“Pokaz fil’ma A. Tuchinskoi Sokurov i drugie,” Muzei Rossii, April  2, 2016, http://­www​ .­museum​.­ru​/­N61594. 37. ​Neuberger and Somaini, The Flying Carpet, 11. 38. ​Grigori Kozintsev, Glubokii ekran [Deep screen], in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh [Collected works in five volumes], ed. Valentina Kozintseva and Yakov Butovsky (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1982), 1:180. 39. ​Naum Kleiman, interview by Ekaterina Golizyna, August  19, 2015, transcript, http://­ oralhistory​.­ru​/­talks​/­orh​-­1921​/­text. 40. ​Kozintsev, Glubokii ekran, 180. 41. ​Viktor Skhlovsky, Eizenshtein (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), 179. 42. ​Skhlovsky, 179. 43. ​Skhlovsky, 178–179. 44. ​Kleiman interview. Kleiman describes how the publication of Eisenstein’s collected works grew from a planned one or two volumes when he met Atasheva to a six-­volume series, the last of which appeared a­ fter the death of Atasheva and w ­ ere significantly delayed during Kleiman’s long ­battle to turn her apartment into an official museum. 45. ​Kleiman interview. 46. ​Kleiman interview. 47. ​Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” 103. 48. ​Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 9. 49. ​Derrida, 19. 50. ​Freud, as quoted in Derrida, 33. 51. ​Amy Hollywood, “Tribute to Derrida,” in Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion, ed. Eric Boynton and Martin Kavka (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 155–156. 52. ​Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 12, 10. 53. ​Hollywood, “Tribute to Derrida,” 155. 54. ​Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 34; Paul Flaig, “Supposing That the Archive is a W ­ oman,” in New ­Silent Cinema, ed. Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo (New York: Routledge, 2016), 182. 55. ​Petro, “Reflections on Feminist Film Studies,” 1274. 56. ​Patrice Petro, “Feminism and Film History,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 8, no. 1 (22) ( January 1, 1990): 10, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1215​/­02705346​-­8​-­1​_­22​-­8. 57. ​Beth Holmgren, “The Creation of Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel’shtam,” in Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Con­temporary Rus­sian ­Women’s Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo (London: Routledge, 2015), 86–87.

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58. ​Holmgren, 87. Holmgren continues, “Nadezhda Iakovlevna herself does not make our task

any easier, b­ ecause she never presumed that she had become a writer. It is only in Hope Abandoned that she at least conceives of the possibility of her own value as subject. ­Here she says that she excluded herself from the first volume b­ ecause she ‘still did not exist.’ . . . ​As a result, her general conclusions seem drastically reductive: Nadezhda Iakovlevna defines the first, formative period of her life as her twenty-­year marital relationship with Mandel’shtam and actually describes herself as ‘the work of his own hands.’ ” 59. ​Atasheva to Leyda, undated, box 2, folder 18, Jay and Si-­Lan Chen Leyda Papers (emphasis in the original). 60. ​Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” 107. 61. ​Laura Mulvey, “Visual Plea­sure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 7. 62. ​Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological F ­ utures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 5.

10 • FIENDISH DEVICES The Uncanny History of Almena Davis E L L E N C . S C OT T

I approach this essay as we await, for the longest time in memory, election results from a presidential election. It is at ­these historical fulcrums that it seems apt to consider uncanny histories—­histories that revive alternative visions of the past and that make us rethink the myths and narratives that are central to our national sense of well-­being and complacency. Th ­ ese alternative narratives challenge our existing optics and narrow majoritarian views of the past and make us aware that the possibilities of the past are in fact as plentiful as the possibilities of the ­future. The deeper one plumbs the archive, the clearer it is that history is full of splinters, competing narratives, alternative realities, moments of speculative possibility that barely or never crystallized. The narrative I offer h­ ere trou­bles an existing narrative of 1950s civil rights strug­gle and of the 1950s as a time of placid, suburban consensus, presenting an uncanny prescient voice from a period in which we comfortably, following civil rights historiography, including work by Taylor Branch and Martha Biondi, define in terms of sit-­in-­style activism. While throughout cinema history, admen, psychologists, and film theorists alike have conceived of movies as having therapeutic value, Black film critics and theorists have seen “the movies” as a far less hospitable space—­one of negative reflection and segregation—­the screen reflecting a caricatured mirror with the dimensions and shape of Kara Walker–­esque grotesquerie.1 James Baldwin’s caustic book-­length essay The Devil Finds Work, for example, sees cinema as an escape valve for whites pursuing insidious neglect of Black citizens, a kind of false therapy that allows oppression to continue and whiteness to remain ascendant. Baldwin saw the cinema as a place for an encounter with Amer­i­ca as it is, but in it he saw a place where denial and oppression w ­ ere as rampant as repre­sen­ta­tion and freedom. It was a place into which Amer­i­ca’s lies w ­ ere packed and could be reviewed in all their pretty frocks. For Baldwin, a profound skeptic about the possibilities of Black flourishing in the United States, Hollywood’s saccharine, imagineered images represented among the deepest signifiers of irony and hopelessness. 205

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This essay ­will explore the ways in which Black writers have used acts of interrogative, hysterical film criticism to provide access to a vital freedom oft denied, focusing on the work and writing of an underheralded Black ­woman film critic, Almena Davis (­later Lomax).2 Davis, editor of the 1940s and 1950s Black newspaper the Los Angeles Tribune, predicted Baldwin’s acerbic critique of Hollywood’s undermining of Black life. In a review that seems to foretell Baldwin’s “On Being White . . . ​and Other Lies,” she found Imitation of Life (1959) a “fiendish device to injure the pride of colored ­people in being themselves . . . ​and an equally fiendish plot to curse ­every white child with a complex of innate color superiority, as if the racial superiority complex many of them have ­were not already dev­ilish enough.”3 She was a consistent attender of the movies—­one of Hollywood’s most regular African American critics and among the most avid Black writers about film of her era. But for Davis, ironically, it was through the act of debunking and countering Hollywood’s toxic white placidity and plasticity that her own selfhood could flourish and emerge. Her loose play with Hollywood constructions opened up a place for the noir, the avant-­garde, and the satirical. And in her interpretive writing, which mixed consideration of film, politics, her c­ hildren, her dogs, and her “premenstrual tension,” it was precisely her embodied unmasking of the screen that made her own liminal, gender-­porous selfhood legible. In this essay, I w ­ ill take Davis as a case study of Black feminized, interrogative criticism as a way of life—­a recourse for the disappointed, oppressed, and marginalized Black subject watching “Amer­i­ca” to draw therapy, life, and possibility through the aegis of unabating, avowedly b­ itter, borderline hysterical critique. Davis’s model of daily, trenchant journalistic critique as self, one also evident in the current cultural criticism and persona of Charles Blow, is as necessary ­today as ever, as we have as much to fear from fascisms of the screen ­today as we did in Davis’s 1940s and 1950s.

the lady editor who refused to edit herself Almena had nine Black lives. Like so many Black ­women, she had multiple ­careers, multiple self-­motivated reiterations, all of them marked by both her buoyant challenge of racial limitation and the country’s stubborn and simplistic reading of her transformative acts through the logic of the color line. She was born in Galveston, Texas, but raised in Los Angeles. She was a reporter for the California Ea­gle but moved on to publishing her own newspaper ­after conflict with Ea­gle publisher Charlotta Bass. Almena began editing the Los Angeles Tribune in 1941 and would edit that paper for nearly twenty years. She claimed to have won the printing press for the paper in a bet. While this claim is unprovable, the paper did indeed go from being the Interfaith Churchman to becoming the Los Angeles Tribune, edited by Almena and published by Lucius Lomax, a ­lawyer and the son of notorious “Old Man Lomax,” who, according to Donald Bogle, was one of the West Coast’s biggest numbers runners, gambling h­ ouse o­ wners and procurers, and “a murderer and a criminal” in the words of his grandchildren but also a godfather of Black



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Hollywood.4 Though mostly clean-­cut by contrast with his f­ ather, Lucius Lomax Jr. fathered two of Almena’s ­children out of wedlock—­and in 1948, his wife, Carmelita Lomax, named Almena (and her coworker Alice Key) in a sensational divorce suit that made headlines in nearly e­ very paper in the Black press.5 This would have silenced most respectability-­minded Black ­women. But for Almena this defamed publicness was only the beginning of a more free-­form existence outside the bounds of Black normalcy. A ­ fter the divorce scandal, Lucius married Almena, and they went on to have four more ­children. All the while, Almena kept writing and editing the paper. The Tribune, a paper that made a calculated show of impropriety in spite of the substantial education of its literarily inclined, upwardly mobile, fiscally middle-­class agents (Almena and Lucius), reveals the American ­middle class for what it is: a ­people only one generation removed from the “street.” Through writing that is grim, wry, and at once literary and vernacular, the paper showcased a penchant for finding itself in what o­ thers considered sinful and an adolescent willingness to wrangle the tabloidesque as the exciting pinnacle of Black middle-­class existence. And through it, Almena and Lucius at once profoundly challenged Black respectability politics with a rhe­toric borrowed from the very real gangsters they knew and made it pos­si­ble to see and “read” the ­middle class (Black and white) as a witty, literate, mooching, semicriminal band of nouveau riche pretenders. Davis’s nine lives included several formative relationships, including one with LA’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley; a pilgrimage to Alabama to be a part of the civil rights strug­gle in 1960 where she published a magazine (more like a linotype “zine”) with her ­children; and an appearance on You Bet Your Life in which she appeared alongside Joe Louis, whom she outshone in her boxing and sports knowledge.6 She often attempted to be a serious writer—of mainstream journalism (for the Los Angeles Times, UPI, the Associated Press, and Copley News Ser­vice, all of which she, upon rejection, attempted to sue for racial discrimination); of criticism (for the New Yorker); of short stories (for Harper’s and McCall’s, which told her, “This is well-­ written but just too fragile for us”); and of a novel and a memoir, all of which met with rejection that must have been as painful as her attempts w ­ ere bold and fearless.7 Her rejections file, found among her personal papers, showcases her b­attles with “becoming”—­and a life of aspirations that never fully blossomed in segregated Amer­ i­ca. She did not respond to failure with defeat, embarrassment, or increasing fervor for “success.” She responded to it with re­sis­tance, with criticism, with the sardonic: she reformed the standard she had failed into something more ­human. In the areas of dignity, respectability, and success, rather than conforming, she reconstructed the canons through her radical practices of writing and selfhood. She was brutally honest—­and the ways she “made it” tell us something about how to survive now. When I first encountered Davis, she seemed almost like a time traveler—­a voice from the pre­sent commenting derisively and with crystalline clarity on a time that was as much the past to her as it was to me. So exacting was her critique in terms of what it required of American racial and gendered vision that it seems to transcend its moment and offer a stinging critique not only of the 1940s and

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1950s but for our own time and its half-­stepping notions of racial “diversity.” I frequently return to Almena—­and usually when I do, I am not sure ­whether to wince or to wink at her. The reason I return is that she teaches me always and again, through sputtered nuggets and poetic shards, how to live rather than survive. She reminds me of what Black brilliance is—­and it is not whitelikeness; it is fast and ­there—­and seeing in the dead of night.

almena on the scene of the movies I am trying to count how many of Davis’s reviews begin with something like “The film was a ­whole lot of bosh from beginning to end.”8 Or “Maybe resignation is the proper mood for approaching movies. Then anything more entertaining than a prayer meeting w ­ ill be positively dazzling.”9 Or “Something happened to me the other night. My husband and I went to the preview . . . ​and I was shocked to find myself enjoying it!”10 She often attended previews, and shock and surprise often guide her reviews and reveal to the reader Hollywood’s often laughable strangeness and misplaced, unintended pleasures. Her writing, sometimes formulated as “notes” rather than reviews, does not engage with the spectacle in the movies but rather confronts the movies as failed illusion—as an ideological Manhattan proj­ect—­one that with each self-­proclaimed success brought American society to the brink. Foreign films like Rome Open City (1945), Dedee (1948), Paisan (1946), and The Baker’s Wife (1938) fared better in her judgment, and she campaigned with local theater man­ag­ers to bring in more of them.11 Often her own desire overrode the film’s narrative as the center of the review. As with the rest of the writing in her newspaper, Almena’s voice is grim, wry, and unafraid of an elaborate vocabulary (exemplified by terms like contumely, lorgnette, and asceticism and descriptions such as “pendulous belly” and “acrid stench”) that exceeded the bounds of the journalistic and of the Black vernacular. Despite being loose and unprincipled, Almena’s writing has a code, both ethical and stylistic, though sometimes the code is so thick, localized, and personal that we have no idea what she is talking about. When Hollywood did succeed, in Almena’s estimation, it was normally through the unpredictable, uncanny, or pure evil. For instance, Hollywood’s ghostly output repeatedly impressed her. Like Richard Dyer in White, Davis read Hollywood’s whiteness as most effective and evocative when it was projecting death or dev­ilish evils, as in her review of Alias Nick Beale (1949).12 Ray Milland is superb as Nick Beale, one of the dev­il’s emissaries who goes around trying to break good men; but I suspect that half of his Oscar should go to whoever made him up. Th ­ ey’re making magic out in Hollywood t­ hese days, a magic that can make a man’s eyes actually dilate with evil and unearthliness, a magic that makes his skin look like something that was just dug up from somewhere cold and clammy; and I’m scared of them. They come as close, t­hose Hollywood boys, to constructing a devil as I am willing to admit he exists.13



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Lest we think that Davis’s reaction was only to the makeup, she had a similar reaction to Elvis Presley on The Ed ­Sullivan Show: “And we never did see the pelvis of Elvis, even when he was standing still: only his bust. The reason his face is phenomenal is that we have never seen evil so triumphant and rampant in our lives as the face of this 21-­year old. If he ­isn’t the ‘strange and ­bitter fruit’ of the South, we ­don’t know what is.”14 She used the brunt of the tabloid style—­with its naked eye and rumored knowledge—­against the studios, whose dangerous mediocrity she discussed not only in film reviews but also in her Hollywood coverage. Her account of Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Hollywood was particularly power­ful in this regard and was reprinted in the Christian Science Monitor. Almena quipped: “He saw emptiness, and self-­aggrandizement, and ‘adult ­children’ playing with gigantic toys which adds up to nothing.”15 Almena also used Khrushchev’s visit as an opportunity to “read” oversold star Marilyn Monroe as an aspect of Hollywood’s failed ideological proj­ ect. “She looked three parts mermaid, one part beatnik. . . . ​Her celebrated bosom was crammed up into her chest so that it looked liable to pop loose from its moorings at any minute and go flopping around like perch. Her waist nipped in unbelievably, like a hair-­pin curve on the road and then ballooned out monstrously into her bottom. Screen stars all look slightly unkempt off the set, like c­ hildren whose mommas left them to dress alone; and Marilyn h­ adn’t both­ered to match her pallid arms to the chalk-­whiteness of her face. . . . ​In our own eyes, accustomed to this ‘de­cadent American culture’ she looked like a gargoyle.”16 If her sizing down of the Hollywood ego was evident in her descriptions of actors, it was also evident in her descriptions of the studio heads. In anticipating disgust for Porgy and Bess, she took aim at Samuel Goldwyn ­after visiting the studio: The ­whole atmosphere at the Goldwyn Studio is calculated to impress you that you are in the presence of a “­Great I Am,” the High Lama of Celluloid. . . . ​The place is dotted with the private preserves of Mr.  Goldwyn. Mr.  Goldwyn Parks H ­ ere. Mr.  Goldwyn Drinks ­Here. . . . ​Mr.  Goldwyn Goes to the Potty ­Here. . . . ​W hen fi­nally you are ushered into the presence of this Napoleon, you find him an ordinary mortal with a face like a plumber’s wrench, a few grey hairs spiraling up on his dome and an expression which is partly that of Leo “Sunshine” Fonarow [first owner of LA’s Victor’s department store] . . . ​and partly that of a man who knows what to do with a plumber’s wrench, plus a l­ittle oil. The air is heavy with sycophancy, although even it has to b­ attle for a place in the sun with Goldwyn’s own worship of himself.17

With a style of critique sharpened through the dozens (and borrowing from its flow), Almena cuts Goldwyn down to size as nearly no other Hollywood critic dared. As her critical voice reached its mature vintage, she discussed the narrative insides of “the movies” even less and concerned herself more with the actors and

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how they ­were sold. For example, she dedicated multiple columns to the advertising of Anna Lucasta (1958); and she, seeing herself as Black film critic-­in-­chief, accused Black press Hollywood writers of selling out to studio interests—­becoming mere “publicity agents” rather than critics.18 She sensed Hollywood was designing publicity events with “the hard sell” to have a “dizzying effect so that you ­didn’t know ­whether the film was any good or not.”19 Even Eartha Kitt, she felt, was dangerously close to succumbing like so many stars to being “bought” by Hollywood and advertisers. Eartha, Almena claimed, “did a regular turn out in Hollywood the day ‘Anna’ opened, giving out autographs. The way Hollywood’s mind operates, and the way she’s typecast, she’s lucky it was just autographs she was asked to pass out at Hollywood and Vine. ­After all, judging by the advertising of the picture, they might have built her a crib, like in the old days at Fort Huachuca, and installed her inside on a chaise lounge, with Rex Ingram on the outside barking, ‘Next!’ ”20 What she revealed was how Hollywood’s image machine was often built on the backs of marginalized Black ­women, who though useful for sex appeal or for maid’s work, could never control the image or be at the center, even of spectacles arranged around them. ­W hether it was critiquing Hollywood’s poor plots or “reading” the bodies of Hollywood stars or Black performers, Almena’s distinctive interpretive style moved beyond the narrative to unearth what was at the radical core of Amer­ i­ca’s visual, racial proj­ect. Accordingly, she uncovered the ideology of ­these films but with a blunt candor, wittiness, and breeziness not typically associated with Hollywood writing.

almena davis/lomax, hollywood, and the triumph of racial hysteria Against this background of Hollywood mediocrity, the movie capital’s racial failures provided a singular clarity on the prob­lem with American race relations. And Almena dealt quite differently—­less smirkingly—­with Hollywood’s racial failures than with its failures in storytelling. The screen had a social import—­and b­ ecause of its local proximity and the fact that so many of her friends w ­ ere caught up with striving ­toward it or watching it, she could look at it with appropriate side-­eye. But she wrote about Hollywood not only ­because it was local but ­because she knew the screen’s impact on Black well-­being in Amer­ic­ a. Thus it caused her to produce not only caustic critique but also on-­the-­ground protest. One might rightfully ask: Why do critics such as Baldwin and Davis return to the oppressive object, especially when it is film, rather than, say, a president, and can be avoided? In part it is ­because critique enables refined vision that cannot be achieved without it. But it is also b­ ecause through the destruction of lies—­against their current—­the truth ascends. And when ­these lies obstruct from view a ­whole race’s selfhood, the destruction of untruths has all the more power to unleash being. Thus on the foundation of a steady stream of reviews flippantly and casually revealing Hollywood’s ordinariness came a fierce challenge reserved for the insti-



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tution’s work around race. Almena protested films more fervently and consistently than any other single Black activist during the classical Hollywood era. She did so with a style that combined intimacy (her own c­ hildren ­were picketers) with clever direct-­action tactics. Th ­ ese protests w ­ ere desperate, acid, aching, personal, sometimes sad but always pulsing with articulate urgency. My first encounter with Almena came through the papers of the NAACP, where I discovered a letter she wrote to Walter White, the organ­ization’s leader and executive secretary. Even his supporters viewed White’s Hollywood campaign as nebulous at best, and troublesome and fruitless at worst. But Almena completely understood it as a vital part of the broader civil rights proj­ect, suggesting ways to extend it through her proximity to Hollywood. She asked White to join her protest of Tales of Manhattan (1942). “Our procedure,” she wrote of the Tribune’s campaign against Hollywood’s racial bias, is “to print a detailed criticism and then picket the first theater where the film was shown. In addition, copies of the criticism and of the picket story ­were sent to writers of the film, actors in it, the director and the producer.” In the case of the Tales of Manhattan campaign, she told White, “The review and the story, or parts of it w ­ ere carried in PM, also the Pittsburgh Courier, in addition to our own paper.”21 White, however, was wary of Davis, whose tactics w ­ ere more direct and who printed Black actors’ skepticism regarding his Hollywood campaign in her column.22 Nevertheless, Almena had a plan that worked not through mass but through direct action in the sight lines of the Hollywood elite responsible for the films and concerned about racial backlash. She used this strategy effectively with Tales of Manhattan, she claimed, scaring the studio out of including even more troubling scenes in Cabin in the Sky. In 1942 alone, Almena used the paper to orchestrate highly vis­i­ble protests against Tales of Manhattan and Tennessee Johnson. During the war years, having heard of Disney’s ­Uncle Remus proj­ect, which would become Song of the South, she would announce in her paper a protest of all animated films “betraying an alarming tendency to caricature Negroes in a vicious manner,” beginning with Angel Puss, a ­little Black Sambo cartoon released in 1944. She would also protest MGM’s projected production of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1944. When Green Pastures came to TV in 1959, she also lambasted it: “Nobody has ever suggested that Green Pastures is a lot of ste­reo­typed crud ­because it is supposed to deal with the Negro’s religion. But we suggest it.”23 It may be that the only appropriate, h­ uman response to fascism is constant, hysterical, creative re­sis­tance. And, as a Black Angeleno, Almena saw fascism most clearly not in Hitler but in Hollywood. She had an apocalyptic, apoplectic reaction to the anti-­Blackness of cinema. At her picketing in 1942 she held a sign saying: “Tales of Manhattan is the ­Bitter End!”24 And when it came to Imitation of Life, which she previewed in 1959, her response was equally totalizing, despite the fact that the film was generally liked by Black critics: “This picture the Negro cannot take. This picture the Negro ­will not take. This picture the Negro should not take. This is the ­bitter end . . . ​the straw that broke the camel’s back . . . ​also the razor’s edge separating the races emotionally in this country, between love and hatred.”25

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She published successive articles lambasting the film and picketed the theater with the Los Angeles Tribune staff and her ­family, as she described in her paper: Our theory is that the financially rocky, shaky, tottering Universal International Studios had its coattails pulled . . . ​by the old and dastardly architects of “Massive Re­sis­tance” [to racial integration] by the bright lads who planted the bug in the ear of . . . ​Orval Faubus and got him to call out the National Guard to oppose the Federal Government . . . ​W hat is worrying the Tribune is that the Universal-­ International has libeled, slandered . . . ​“tended to exposed to public contempt or ridicule,” an international institution known as the “fine brown frame.” . . . ​Lousy, hackneyed, contrived, poorly acted, even unwholesome pictures which find middle-­aged female stars making love to men young enough to be their sons are everyday with Hollywood. Pictures which reveal the p­ eople who make them as ­little used to ideas of adulthood, genuine emotion, and motherhood on celluloid as they are in real life are ground out by Hollywood as regularly as Lana Turner gets a new boyfriend or Dick Haymes a new wife. . . . ​So what if this picture bears no resemblance to real­ity—­not even counting the fantastic hearse drawn by four white ­horses in a day of Capri pants, trapeze dresses and 1959 convertibles . . . ? This is Hollywood. Every­body knows it is crazy-­man-­crazy and get the loot!26

The central Black story line of 1959 for news editor Davis was neither an anachronistic hearse drawn by four white ­horses nor a Black ­mother who apologizes to her white mistress for ­dying nor a fair-­skinned Black child who simply wants to be white ­because “color’s” ugliness induces hysteria. The story of 1959 for Davis was the story of herself and her ­daughters full of race pride, that of Elizabeth Eckford as vis­i­ble leader of the L ­ ittle Rock Nine (whom Almena directly invoked as counterimage in her review of Imitation of Life), that of Black Pearl Bailey and her white husband, Louis Bellson, and their newly ­adopted Black child; it was the story of Black “girls” knowing their beauty and value. And it was hysteria-­inducing that the Black mood she experienced as an Angeleno, one that Hollywood executives clearly knew about but narratively denied, was so far removed from the screen’s rendering—­and worse that their screen, in the stilted Imitation of Life, seemed fit to undermine Black pro­ gress. Imitation of Life was offensive and “should be banned” ­because of its distance from the Black “now” of 1959. Before the phrase “Black is beautiful” became Black Power axiom, Davis intuited Imitation of Life as not only an assault on Black citizenship but an aesthetic assault on the beauty of blackness: “the fine brown frame.” “Imitation of Life sets the concept of democracy not to mention race relations back 100 years, to the day when we w ­ ere held in slavery out of some massive misconception, some propaganda, some theory that b­ ecause their skins w ­ ere darker, they w ­ ere inferior and only of ‘slave caliber.’ ”27 In one of her many review/commentaries on Imitation of Life and before Loving v. V ­ irginia, Davis insisted that white ­people ­were marrying Black ­people and that even young Sandra Dee, Imitation of Life’s teen star, was lia-



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ble to fall for a Black man. Though Imitation of Life flirted with an interracial story line, the narrative of happy, Black-­white intermarriage was an emerging chapter of American interracial history that it decisively avoided: “­There are innumerable white ­people whom the color line has not ­stopped from ‘marrying Negro’ . . . ​ Sandra is young but ­she’d be surprised at how incidental it is if he is blue, green, yellow or a green-­eyed monster if he’s got ‘that certain something.’ ”28 Sex, she boldly suggested, ­here and elsewhere, was the g­ reat equalizer. Perhaps most impor­tant, Davis centered her critique of the film through the eye of the Black-­girl spectator, whose spectatorship she saw not as exception or marginalia but as so axiomatic that she was ready to take down the movie—­bodily—­for violating it: “We feel [Imitation of Life] w ­ ill cause a traumatic shock to e­ very brown child who has ever smiled a shy smile of gratification in the mirror b­ ecause she knew she looked nice. . . . ​I have six ­children, two or three of whom are as fair as ‘Sarah Jane’ or ‘Peola’; my m ­ other with blue-­gray eyes and auburn hair made her living as a white w ­ oman ­because of the foolishness of white p­ eople in denying Negroes jobs as ‘expert alterers’ in ­women’s dress shops—­but she chose a brown-­skinned man to wed and spent her Sundays in her home with her brown-­skinned c­ hildren.”29 Based on her experience with her ­children and her m ­ other, Almena alters the narrative of passing that Imitation of Life offers, suggesting that Black ­people do not pass to avoid other Black folks or ­because of a fear of “color” but rather ­because of the perverse bound­aries imposed by white prejudice. Like Black w ­ oman critic Fay Jackson, who, on the release of the 1934 version of Imitation of Life, had identified the studio’s pathological avoidance of the ascendant “militant mulatto” demanding overdue Black rights, Almena saw herself and her c­ hildren in this off-­white light.30 What the racially motivated films of 1959 needed to show, according to Davis, was the pride and militancy of Black p­ eople, one that Davis knew and that the (white) nation would learn of soon with the ascendancy of Malcolm X and Black Power—­but for Davis this was a militancy that was female and trenchantly witty. If Hollywood dared not to know this in 1959, it deserved, in Almena’s opinion, to face not only pickets but also riots. However, Almena was one of the only Black critics to oppose the film, a fact that she explained by suggesting that other Black press critics had become press agents for Hollywood and sold the race down the river. Nevertheless, her many columns over the course of months lambasting Imitation of Life took the film as the center of a complex of civil rights failures of the 1950s and showcase how her film reviewing became the eye of a broader social problematic she was reading—­the core of an ideological web much larger than the film itself—­one that she aimed to bring down and which was central to addressing the nation’s pressing “race” and civil rights prob­lems.

raising the alarm Almena Davis, through her incisive critique of American culture through film analy­sis, bridges the gap between the idealism of the war years and the trenchant

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politics of the Black 1960s; between the strident 1940s and the cynical, sophisticated, out­spoken Black 1960s; between the reserved politesse of Lena Horne’s on-­ screen image and James Baldwin’s liquidly acerbic prose. Her embodied writing stands apart from the film text, spinning itself strangely outside of cinema’s narrative power, flush with its own poetry, enmeshed spectatorial phenomenology, and her own fleshy substance. In the same way that Baldwin’s and Charles Blow’s New York is the foil against which vision is pos­si­ble, for Davis proximity to the Hollywood factory and its half-­baked products became the prism that made seeing both Hollywood and sick, white Amer­i­ca pos­si­ble. She reveals a version of 1950s Black Amer­ic­ a as forged in strug­gle—­not just a strug­gle to survive or overcome but a strug­gle to see clearly—­ a strug­gle with possessing vision itself in the midst of vari­ous trippy ideological ruptures endemic to the World War II, postwar, “civil rights,” and soul eras—­and, indeed, to the whiteness of Amer­ic­ a itself. She said, remarkably, what she thought. In an era in which even documentary newsreels at best showcased a Black subject imbued with a practiced varnish of gentility and humility as the preferred mode for white consumption and Black race pride, Almena, through writing, got down and dirty. Almena was an icon for an alternative version of the Black 1940s and 1950s, a version of ­these de­cades that repression hid. Even before Martin Luther King Jr., she rankled at the humility that was the price of Black public respectability, choosing instead something less than respectability—­but with an untrammeled voice. What King gave Amer­i­ca was a per­for­mance designed to undo racist ste­reo­types about Black masculinity, and particularly Black criminality and unfitness for citizenship. What Almena gave was a raw, unvarnished truth of observation—­and a resulting po­liti­cal militancy that she felt, embodied, and believed. For Almena, it was impossible for the American to flourish as long as in­equality compromised complete justice. Almena’s radical sensibility about what constituted equality stretched from the court­house to the movie screen. In the screen’s curious symptoms, perhaps more than anywhere ­else, she read Amer­i­ca’s real­ity—­ and its fate. What Almena sought from Hollywood and Amer­ic­ a was recognition of the power, citizenship, and beauty of the “fine brown frame,” an unapologetically Black and distinctively femme frame. This was a striving not only for Black equality but also for truly intersectional equality along lines of gender, class, and race—­and a category that the respectability-­minded had more trou­ble with but which was utterly determinative of American race relations: sexuality. While the American promise went unfulfilled for Almena and so many other Black Americans in her lifetime, what gave her life was the fire in her belly, the many-­angled critique that strengthened her resolve and the writing that was her outlet in expressing that resolve. Through critique, she was able to forge a place in a country that denied Black p­ eople voice and equal opportunity for flourishing. And through that critique was she able to find—­and to give—­the Black power to do more than imitate life.



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notes 1. ​In some formulations, films provide grounds for pleas­ur­able cognitive alignment, in o ­ thers,

opportunities for secondary or primary identification replicating the Lacanian mirror phase, and in still ­others simply a cool, welcoming space of relaxation and entertainment. 2. ​The term interrogative associated with film spectatorship hails from bell hooks “The Oppositional Gaze: Black ­Women Specators” in Black Looks: Race and Repre­sen­ta­tion (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 126. 3. ​James Baldwin, “On Being White . . . ​and Other Lies,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 177–180; Almena Lomax, “ ‘Imitation of Life’ Libel on the Negro Says Tribune Reviewer. Should Be Banned in the Interest of National Unity, Picketed If Shown,” Los Angeles Tribune, January 30, 1959, 20. 4. ​According to his grand­daughter, Melanie (who was Almena’s ­daughter), he rode with Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution and then moved back to Texas and eventually to Los Angeles, pursuing “shady endeavors” all the way. As Bogle says, “he established a series of bootleg operations and whore­houses up and down the West Coast starting in Yakima, Washington. His operations w ­ ere gambling, whore­houses, and bootleg liquor which he ran with his s­ ister.” Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (New York: One World Press, 2006). 5. ​Jane Cook, “Who’s a Lousy Lover?,” Afro-­American, July 31, 1948, A12; Cyril Briggs, “Wife Says Lomax Sired Almena Davis’ Babies,” California Ea­gle, February  5, 1948, 1; Lawrence  F. Lamar, “Almena Davis Named in Sensational Divorce Suit,” Atlanta Daily World, February 10, 1948, 2; Lawrence F. Lamar, “Editor Named Co-­respondent,” New York Amsterdam News, February 7, 1948, 1. 6. ​For issues of the Tribune magazine, see Almena Lomax Collection, box 28, folders 17–23, Emory University Special Collections, Atlanta, GA. Almena appeared on You Bet Your Life with Joe Louis on March 3, 1955. 7. ​Almena Lomax to Richard Nixon, May  14, 1974, box 1, folder 4; Robert Hemenway to Almena Lomax, June 12, 1967, box 1, folder 3; “The Editors” at McCall’s to Almena Lomax, n.d., box 1, folder 4; all in Almena Lomax Collection. 8. ​Almena Davis, “The New Movies,” Los Angeles Tribune, August 3, 1946, 18. 9. ​Almena Davis, “New Movies,” Los Angeles Tribune, September 7, 1946, 18. 10. ​Almena Davis, “New Movies,” Los Angeles Tribune, December 10, 1949, 11. 11. ​Almena Davis, “The New Movies,” Los Angeles Tribune, June  8, 1946, 19; Almena Davis, “New Movies,” Los Angeles Tribune, November 12, 1949, 11; Almena Lomax, “For Adults Only: Being Some Reflections on the Pukka Sahib ­after Seeing Raimu and The Baker’s Wife,” Los Angeles Tribune, January 22, 1949, 10. 12. ​Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 2013), 211. 13. ​Almena Lomax, “The New Movies,” Los Angeles Tribune, April 2, 1949, 11 (on Alias Nick Beale). 14. ​Almena Lomax, “Notes on Ed ­Sullivan, Elvis Presley,” Los Angeles Tribune, January 9, 1957, 17. 15. ​Almena Lomax, “Anti-­Flies . . . ​and the Christian Science Monitor Dug Our Khrushchev Coverage,” Los Angeles Tribune, October 16, 1959, 11. 16. ​Almena Lomax, “ ‘D ­ on’t Imitate the Americans.’ Khrushchev ­Will Doubtlessly Tell ­People,” Los Angeles Tribune, September 25, 1959, 3. 17. ​Almena Lomax, “Notes for Showfolks,” Los Angeles Tribune, August 15, 1958. 18. ​Almena Lomas, “Notes for Showfolks,” Los Angeles Tribune, February 6, 1959. 19. ​ Almena Lomax, “ ‘The Business of Sex’ . . . ​Ed Murrow Program Shows How It’s All Become a Part of the ‘Hard Sell,’ ” Los Angeles Tribune, January 23, 1959, 9.

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20. ​Lomax, 9. 21. ​Almena Davis to Walter White, September 14, 1942. Papers of the NAACP: General Office

File: Portrayals of Negroes in Film, July-­December 1942, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

22. ​Walter White to Almena Davis, April 28, 1942. 23. ​Almena Davis, “Channel-­Time,” Los Angeles Tribune, February 20, 1959, 22. 24. ​Almena Davis, “Newspapers Picket Movie House Showing Offensive Film,” Los Angeles

Tribune, August 17, 1942.

25. ​Lomax, “ ‘Imitation of Life’ Libel on the Negro.” 26. ​Almena Lomax, “Some Afterthoughts on Why Imitation of Life Is a Libel on the Negro

Race,” Los Angeles Tribune, March 20, 1959, 3. 27. ​Lomax, “ ‘Imitation of Life’ Libel on the Negro.” 28. ​Lomax. 29. ​Lomax. 30. ​Fay M. Jackson, “Fredi Washington Strikes New Note in Hollywood Film,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 15, 1934, A8.

ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS

This collection is the culmination of several scholarly conversations. The first of ­these was a panel at the 2018 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. Entitled “Uncanny Histories,” it explored the unexpected trajectories of several foundational movements, thinkers, and prac­ti­tion­ers, often taken for granted within the study of film. Maria Corrigan and Naomi DeCelles, whose essays are included in this volume, presented their ideas about the undervalued legacies of ­women who served as caretakers of ­careers, institutions, and archives. They ­were joined by Elizabeth Goodstein, who explored phi­los­op­ her Georg Simmel’s pioneering if largely forgotten and untranslated writings on money, gender, cities, spatiality, and fashion, which paved the way for con­temporary film theory. The following year, with Naomi’s assistance, I or­ga­nized a larger conference at the Carsey-­Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to further explore the range of uncanny histories in our field. Participants at that event included Dudley Andrew, Nicholas Baer, Peter Bloom, Alenda Chang, Maria Corrigan, Mona Damluji, Naomi DeCelles, Anna Everett, Michael B. Gillespie, Hannah Goodwin, Priya Jaikumar, Ross Melnick, Laila Shereen Sakr, Masha Salazkina, Ellen Scott, Jasmine Nadua Trice, Cristina Venegas, Janet Walker, Charles Wolfe, and Naoki Yamamoto. I am grateful to each and e­ very one of ­these scholars, whose research and ideas and interventions reverberate throughout this collection. I owe special thanks to the contributors to this collection, who thoroughly revised their pre­sen­ta­tions for this book and did so u­ nder the challenging conditions of pandemic lockdown. Both the conference and this volume benefited from the talented and hardworking Carsey-­Wolf staff: Paula Firth, Matt Ryan, and Dana Welch. I would especially like to thank associate director Emily Zinn, who first helped me in organ­izing the conference and then worked with me on ­every aspect of this collection. Miguel Penabella provided excellent assistance in proofreading and assembling the index for the volume. Cristina Venegas, the coeditor of the Media M ­ atters series in which this volume appears, is a g­ reat partner and collaborator. I would also like to thank Nicole Solano, executive editor at Rutgers University Press, for her support of this volume and the Media ­Matters series. Fi­nally, I would like to acknowledge the reports from the anonymous readers who recognized the originality of this collection and prompted me to better understand its larger intervention. As one reader remarked, while the return to the uncanny would seem to recall feminist film theory’s early fascination with psychoanalysis and with Freud’s conflicting notions of home and place, the contributors ­here build on and extend ­those e­ arlier efforts in order to locate the uncanny in an array of transnational, postcolonial, and 217

218

Acknowl­edgments

po­liti­cal contexts. Rather than an in-­depth engagement with Freudian and other psychoanalytic theories, this collection aims to reinterpret and broaden the relevance of the uncanny for our own time, precisely by revisiting forgotten figures and institutions of cinema from the past and pre­sent. I am grateful for the opportunity to explore the uncanny with such gifted colleagues and am honored to be the editor of this collection. ­Needless to say, I look forward to the debates and f­ uture research it w ­ ill inspire.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

peter  j. bloom is associate professor and chair of the Department of Film and

Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Over the past several years his research has focused on film and radio in late colonial Ghana and Ma­la­ya, about which he is completing a monograph. In addition, he has been actively working on two coedited volumes—­one focused on the inadequacies of perception and another on distance and proximity. He has published extensively on British, French, and Belgian colonial media, including French Colonial Documentary, Frenchness and the African Diaspora (coeditor), and Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (coeditor), among other publications. alenda Y. chang is associate professor of film and media studies at UC Santa

­ arbara. Her research and teaching range widely across film, digital media, science B and technology studies, and sound studies, with par­tic­ul­ar interests in environmental media and game studies. Her latest book, Playing Nature: The Ecol­ogy of Video Games, proposes new methods and objects for ecologically informed critique and design. maria n. corrigan is assistant professor of media studies and comedy at Emer-

son College. Her current book proj­ect, Becoming Monuments: Eccentrism and Early Soviet Cinema, explores the history of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor and the comedic roots of Rus­sian cinema. Her work has been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Studies in Rus­sian and Soviet Cinema, and Tele­vi­sion and New Media.

naomi decelles is a film historian and translator currently at work on Recollect-

ing Lotte Eisner, a feminist historiographical critique of Eisner’s legacy and significance to the discipline of film studies. DeCelles’s original research and translations have been published or are forthcoming in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Screen, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. hannah goodwin is assistant professor of film and media studies at Mount

Holyoke College. She has published work in the volume Con­temporary Visual Culture and the Sublime and in Media Fields, and has forthcoming articles in Epistemic Screens, the Journal of Film and Video, and El cine documental de Patricio Guzmán. She is currently working on a manuscript that traces the intersecting histories of cinema and cosmology. priya jaikumar is professor and chair at the Department of Cinema and Media

Studies in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial cinemas, comparative modernities 219

220

Notes on Contributors

and aesthetics, film policy, state power, theories of history and cultural geography, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Cinema at the End of Empire and Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space. patrice petro is professor of film and media studies and Dick Wolf Director of

the Carsey-­Wolf Center and Presidential Chair in Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author, editor, and coeditor of thirteen books, including The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Lené Hole, Dijana Jelača, and E. Ann Kaplan). She served two consecutive terms as president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the United States’ leading professional organ­ization of college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and ­others devoted to the study of the moving image. masha sal a zkina is Concordia University Research Chair in Transnational

Media Arts and Cultures (Montreal, Canada). She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico and coeditor of Sound, Speech, M ­ usic in Soviet and Post-­Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film History and Culture. Her current book proj­ect traces a trajectory of the development of materialist film theory through the discourses of early Soviet cinema, to institutional film cultures of the 1930s through 1950s in Italy, and critical debates surrounding the emergence of New Latin American Cinemas.

ellen c. scott is associate professor and vice chair of cinema and media studies

in the Department of Film, Tele­vi­sion and Digital Media at UCLA. Her research focuses on the meanings and reverberations of film in African American communities. Her first book, Cinema Civil Rights, exposed the classical Hollywood–­era studio system’s repression of civil rights but also the stuttered appearance of ­these issues through latent, symptomatic signifiers. She recently guest-­edited a special issue of Black Camera titled “Black Images M ­ atter: Contextualizing Images of Racialized Police Vio­lence” and is working on two book proj­ects: Cinema’s Peculiar Institution, which examines the history of slavery on the American screen, and ­Bitter Ironies, Tender Hopes, which explores Black w ­ omen film critics from the classical Hollywood era. jasmine trice is assistant professor of cinema and media studies in the Depart-

ment of Film Tele­vi­sion, and Digital Media at UCLA. Focusing on cultures of exhibition and moviegoing, her research interests include Philippine, Southeast Asian, and diasporic film cultures. Her book manuscript, Speculative Publics: Cinema Circulation and Alternative Film Culture in Manila, is ­under contract. cristina venegas is associate professor of film and media studies at UC Santa

Barbara. Her research focuses on international media with an emphasis on Latin Amer­i­ca, Spanish-­language film and tele­vi­sion in the United States, and digital technologies. Her book Digital Dilemmas deals with digital media in Cuba, and



Notes on Contributors 221

she has also written about film and po­liti­cal culture, revolutionary imagination in the Amer­ic­ as, telenovelas, con­temporary Latin American cinema, and coproductions. She has curated numerous film programs on Latin American and Indigenous film in the United States and Canada, and she is cofounder and artistic director (since 2004) of the Latino CineMedia International Film Festival in Santa Barbara.

INDEX

Aarseth, Espen, 61–62 Abraham, Karl, 105 Accattone, 131 Adorno, Theodor, 3, 17 Adventures of Juan Quin, The, 147 Aguirre, Mirta, 130, 160 Aldana, Carlos, 141, 154–155 Aleksandr Nevskii (Alexander Nevsky), 121, 124 Alias Gardelito, 130 Alias Nick Beale, 208 Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in Wondertown), 139–140, 143–144, 146, 149–152, 154–156 All-­Soviet Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), 123, 191, 196 Altuna, Miguiro, 120 Anderson, Mark M., 177 Anderson, Warwick, 46 Andrejew, André, 173 Angel Puss, 211 Anna Lucasta, 210 architectural uncanny, 1–2, 18, 41 Arellano, Juan, 42 Arnheim, Rudolf, 163, 177 Atanasoski, Neda, 201 Atasheva, Pera Moiseevna, 3, 8, 186–187, 189–190, 194–197, 199–201, 203n44 Avellar, Jose Carlos, 133 Awaara, 118 Aziz, Riza, 100–101, 105–107 Babcock, Marjorie, 34 Baily, Pearl, 212 Bak, Meredith, 69, 74–75 Baker’s Wife, The, 208 Balázs, Béla, 163 Baldwin, James, 205–206, 210, 214 Barnet, Boris, 191–192, 202n25 Barry, Iris, 163, 182n31 Bass, Charlotta, 206 Bataille, Georges, 98, 103–105, 110 Battleship Potemkin, 6, 117–122, 125–133 Bautista, Julius, 37, 47 Bazin, André, 163, 166, 172

Beckman, Karen, 90 Belfort, Jordan, 5, 98–100, 103 Bellson, Louis, 212 Benitez, Conrado, 34 Benjamin, Walter, 27, 69–71, 76, 92, 177 Berry, Sarah, 47 Bezhin Lug, 196 Bhabha, Homi, 33 Billion Dollar Whale, 100, 104 Biondi, Martha, 205 Blackness, 8, 87, 206–214 Blow, Charles, 206, 214 Boas, Franz, 109 bodily pedagogy, 4, 37, 53 Bogle, Donald, 206, 215n4 Bogost, Ian, 60–61 Bolshevik ­Family Code, 190 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 20–21 Bordwell, David, 103 Bradley, Tom, 207 Branch, Taylor, 205 Bratsis, Peter, 108 Brecht, Bertolt, 157, 163, 173–174 Breger, Claudia, 175 Briggs, Charles, 36 Brik, Lilja, 163 Brody, Richard, 102 Browne, Nick, 16 Burnham, Clint, 102 Burnham, Daniel, 41–42 Butovsky, Iakov, 193–194 Cabin in the Sky, 211 Cahiers du cinema, 166 Caillois, Roger, 4, 61, 71 Calderío, Blas Roca, 131–132 California Ea­gle, 206 Calviño, Dolores (Lola), 7, 149–150, 155–156, 158 Carpentier, Alejo, 126, 160n32 Car­ter, Huntly, 199 Castro, Fidel, 7, 119–125, 139–140, 142, 147, 149–150, 153–154, 158, 159n9, 160n20 de Castro, Modesto, 37

223

224

Index

Catholicism, 4, 32, 37, 39, 47, 50 Cecilia, 148 censorship, 64, 102, 119, 122, 128–133 Césaire, Aimé, 3, 17–18, 24 Chávez, Rebeca, 146 Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa), 109, 116n64 Christian Science Monitor, 209 Cine Cubano, 121, 123, 143 Cine Educativo (CINED), 141 Cine en TV, 117 cinemagoing, 32–33, 36, 39–40, 53 Cinémathèque Française, 7, 162–166, 169–174, 177–178, 181n27, 182n34 Cinématographe, 177 Cinephilia, 8, 118, 122–123, 172, 186, 189, 200 “City Beautiful” movement, 42 Civilization, 65 civil rights movement, 3, 8–9, 205, 207, 211, 213–214 class, 2, 20, 36, 38–43, 46–48 Cleo from 5 to 7, 28 Cold War, 25–27, 72 colonialism, 4–5, 17–19, 24–25, 32–43, 46–50, 63, 87, 106–110 Cookie Clicker, 76 cosmology, 5, 83–84, 88, 89, 92–94 Costantino, Jesús, 73–74 Court, 24 Crary, Jonathan, 74 Cruz, Denise, 48 Cuba, 6, 117–133, 139–159 Cuban cinema, 6, 34, 117–133, 139–158 Cuban Revolution, 6, 117–120, 122, 124–125, 130, 139–141, 150–154, 157–158 Cuban Union of Artists and Writers (UNEAC), 149–150, 152, 161n50 Cunningham, John, 87–88 Dalagang Bukid, 33 Danish cinema, 168 Davis, Almena, 3, 8–9, 205–214 Death Stranding, 65 decolonization, 6, 24–25, 46, 120 Dedee, 208 Dee, Sandra, 212–213 del Vayo, Julio Álvarez, 123 Denby, David, 102–103 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 187, 197–198, 200–201 Detention /, 返校 63–65, 64 Deutsche Film–­Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), 165

developmentalism, 98, 104, 106–109 Devotion / 還願, 63–64 deWinter, Jennifer, 60 Díaz Torres, Daniel, 139, 150, 152 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 97–99, 102–103, 105 Distant Early Warning, 72, 73 Doane, Mary Ann, 93 Dolce Vita, La, 131 Douy, Max, 173 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 188–189 Drama in the Delta, 63 Dr. Strangelove, 25–27 Dulac, Germaine, 163 Dyer, Richard, 208 Ebert, Roger, 74 Eckford, Elizabeth, 212 Edison, Thomas, 84, 86–88, 90, 93, 95 Ed ­Sullivan Show, The, 209 Eiland, Howard, 70 Einstein, Albert, 84 Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich, 6–8, 117–119, 121–127, 131–133, 186, 189–191, 195–201 Eisenstein Cabinet, 195, 199 Eisner, Julia, 170, 178 Eisner, Lotte, 2, 7–8, 162–184; Fritz Lang, 164, 166–167, 180n16; F.W. Murnau, 164, 166–167; Haunted Screen, The, 162, 164–170, 180n10, 181n18, 182n31 electrification, 5, 86–88, 90 Elias, Norbert, 108 Elsaesser, Thomas, 165–166, 169–170, 181n25, 182n31 embodiment, 4, 32–37, 83, 91 Embong, Abdul Rahman, 106 Emílio, Paulo, 124–125 empire, 18–19, 21, 37–38, 47, 87 Entartete Kunst, 173 Enyedi, Ildikó, 5, 83, 85–91, 93–94 Epstein, Marie, 170, 181n27 eroticism, 98, 105, 107, 109, 198 expenditure (dépense), 5, 97–98, 101, 103–105, 108, 110 Expressionism, 167–168 Exterminating Angel, 130–131 Fajardo, Jacobo, 43, 46 Fallen London, 68 Fallout, 76, 68 Fandry, 24

Fanon, Frantz, 24–25 fascism, 24, 206, 211 Faure, Elie, 84, 87, 92–93 FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), 191, 202 femininity, 5, 34, 35, 38, 50, 83, 94 feminism, 16, 25, 83–85, 90–94, 165, 176, 186–189, 197–200 feminist game design, 62 Ferenczi, Sándor, 105 Filamerican Movie and News, 34, 35 film exhibition, 4, 32, 36–38, 41–47 Film–­Kurier, 166, 170, 172, 176–177, 180n15, 183n46, 183n47 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, 68–69, 69 financial fraud, 5, 97–98, 100, 107, 110, 112n9 Fiske, John, 74 Flaig, Paul, 198 Fonarow, Leo, 209 Foucault, Michel, 3, 19–23, 26, 31n30 Francofonia, 194 Frasca, Gonzalo, 62 Fraser, Nancy, 189 Frauen und Film, 176 Freidenreich, Harriet Pass, 174–175 Freud, Anna, 198, 201 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 14, 32, 85, 105, 110, 179, 198, 217 Gaines, Jane, 187 Galeen, Henrik, 168 Galloway, Alexander, 61 gambling, 69–72 game design, 60–63, 65–68, 71–72 game studies, 4, 60–62, 68–69, 71, 73–76 García Espinosa, Julio, 2, 6–7, 24, 130, 139–159, 160n23, 160n33 Gatto, Katherine Gyékényesi, 88 German Romanticism, 14, 164 Germany Pale ­Mother, 28 gift economy, 98, 101, 103–105, 109–111, 112n7 Godard, Jean-­Luc, 124, 143 Goldwyn, Samuel, 209 Gomes, Paulo Emílio Salles, 124 Goodstein, Elizabeth, 217 Gouskos, Carrie, 66–67 Grebner, Georgi, 191 Grebner, Olga, 191–192 Green Pastures, 211 Grigor’evna, Anna, 192

Index 225 Grigor’evna, Vasilisa, 190 Grohmann, Martje, 174, 179, 183n52 Grosz, Elizabeth, 39, 47 group lactification, 98, 107, 110 Group of, 18, 142–143 Guevara, Alfredo, 121, 130–132, 141–143, 146–148, 153–155, 159n7, 160n33 Guins, Raiford, 60 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 24, 145–146 Guy–­Blaché, Alice, 163 Guyer, Jane I., 109 Hake, Sabine, 165–166 Hanoi, Martes, 13, 121 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 71, 177 Happy Together, 14 Hardzhiev, Nikolai, 190 Harrigan, Pat, 61 Hart, Armando, 142, 147, 154 Hensel, Frank, 178, 183n53 Heraclitus, 14 Herf, Jeffrey, 164 Herzog, Werner, 162, 171 historiography, 15, 21–23, 29, 163–165, 174, 176, 197, 205 Hoffman, E.T.A, 3, 13–14 Holbein, Hans (The Ambassadors), 15 Hollywood, 16, 34–36, 42, 47–48, 90, 123–127, 129–130, 132, 205–215 Hollywood, Amy, 198 Hollywood bling, 98, 105, 107, 111n5 Holmgren, Beth, 200, 204n58 Hope, Bradley, 100, 104 Horkheimer, Max, 17 Horne, Lena, 214 Hortobágy, 88 Hughes, Linda, 62 Huizinga, Johan, 4, 6, 71, 77n10 Hungarian cinema, 5, 83, 84–88, 145–146 hygiene, 4, 32, 37–39, 43, 46–50, 53 Idiot, The, 120 Ileto, Reynaldo, 34 Imitation of Life, 8, 206, 211–213 Industrial Revolution, 18 Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), 6–7, 117–118, 120–125, 129–133, 139–156, 158, 159n7, 160n23 Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (ICRT), 141–142, 154–155

226

Index

International School of Film and Tele­vi­sion in San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV), 155–156 Iordanova, Dina, 118 Ira­nian Revolution, 21–22, 27 Isenberg, Noah, 165 Italian neorealism, 6, 122, 130 Ivan Grozny, 196 Jackson, Fay, 213 Jameson, Fredric, 102 Jedda the Uncivilized, 18 Jenkins, Henry, 61 Jennings, Michael W., 70 Johnson, Martin L., 163 journalism, 8, 48, 99–100, 162–165, 179, 206–208 Kaganovsky, Lilya, 187, 189 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 104, 107–108 Katchenjungha, 24 Keogh, Brendan, 76 Key, Alice, 207 Khanzhonkov, Aleksandr, 188 Khanzhonkova, Antonina, 188 Khokhlova, Alexandra, 188–189 Khrushchev, Nikita, 209 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 214 Kinovedcheskie zapiski (Film Notes), 193 Kitt, Eartha, 210 Kittler, Friedrich, 76 Kleiman, Naum, 195–197, 199, 203n44 Klein, César, 168 Kocurek, Carly A., 60, 62 Kojima, Hideo, 65 Kornai, Margit, 163 Kozintsev, Alexander, 194 Kozintsev, Grigorii Mikhailovich, 3, 8, 186, 191–196, 201, 203n31 Kozintseva, Valentina Georgievna, 3, 8, 186–190, 194–195, 197, 201, 202n24, 203n31 Kracauer, Siegfried, 70, 76, 92–93 Krasovsky, Yuri, 189 Kropotkin, Peter, 91 Kubrick, Stanley, 25–27 Kuleshov, Lev, 122, 188 Kurtz, Rudolf, 167 Kuz’mina, Elena, 188, 191, 202n26 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 15, 107, 115n58, 215n1 Lamprecht, Gerhardt, 173

Lang, Fritz, 162, 164, 166–167, 173 Langlois, Henri, 162, 169–172, 174, 177–178, 182n34, 182n37, 183n53, 195 L.A. Noire, 74 LaPensée, Elizabeth, 63 La revue du cinema, 168 Las Meninas, 23 Latin American cinema, 120, 121, 122, 153 Laurel, Brenda, 62 Laurence, Michael, 98 Lefort, Claude, 107–108 Leigh, Michele, 188 Lenfilm, 195 Lenssen, Claudia, 165, 180n6 Levi, Primo, 24–25 Leyda, Jay, 194–195, 199–200 Lim, Bliss Cua, 35 Liwayway, 45, 48, 49 Lomax, Almena. See Davis, Almena Lomax, Carmelita, 207 Lomax, Lucius, 206 Lomax, Lucius Jr., 207 Los Angeles Times, 207 Los Angeles Tribune, 8, 206–207, 211–212 Louis, Joe, 207 Loving v. ­Virginia, 212 Low, Jho (Low Taek Jho), 100–101, 104–107, 110, 111n1, 114n44 Lowood, Henry, 60 Lucia, 121, 146 ludology, 61–62 “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” 66, 67 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 15 MacDougall, Rob, 65 MacKay, John, 188 Madsen, Holger, 168 Magarill, Sofia, 191 Maland, Charles, 27 Malaysia, 5, 97–103, 106, 108, 110, 111n1 Manalansan, Martin, 34 Mandel’shtam, Nadezhda, 200, 204n58 Man from Maisinicú, The, 146 Manila, 4, 32–33, 36, 39–43, 47–48 Mannoni, Laurent, 170, 178, 182n34 Martin, Karl Heinz, 168 Marvin, Carolyn, 88 Marx, Karl, 1, 20–21, 23, 91, 121 Matini-­Briggs, Clara, 36 Mauss, Marcel, 103–104, 109–110, 112n7

McClintock, Anne, 47 McLuhan, Marshall, 69, 71–72, 73 Meerson, Mary, 170 Meier, Sid, 65 Mella, Julio Antonio, 127, 131 Memories of Underdevelopment, 24, 146 Mesa, Smith, 127 Metal Gear, 65 Milland, Ray, 208 modernity, 18–20, 32–33, 38–42, 53, 85–88, 90–93, 119, 125 Mojares, Resil, 39, 47 Monroe, Marilyn, 209 Montfort, Nick, 60 Morgenstern, Joe, 103 Mori, Masahiro, 65–66 Mosfilm, 191 ­Mother India, 118 Moussinac, Léon, 123, 195, 200 Mulvey, Laura, 16, 93 Murnau, F. W., 164, 166–169, 173 Murray, Janet, 61 Musée du Cinéma, 172 My Twentieth ­Century, 5, 83–85, 87–88, 92–95 NAACP, 211 Narbut, Vladimir, 190 Narratology, 61–62 nationalism, 24–25, 34–36, 41–43, 46–48, 53 nationalization, 120, 157 Nazism, 7–9, 17–18, 21, 28, 162–164, 171, 173, 177 Nepomuceno, Jose, 33 Neppach, Robert, 168 Neuberger, Joan, 195 New German Cinema, 171–172 New Latin American Cinema, 120–122, 131 New Yorker, The, 102, 207 Nielsen, Asta, 168 Night Cries, 18 9.03m, 63 nonhuman, 5, 9, 66, 91, 93 Nooney, Laine, 62 Nostalgia for the Light, 18 Notari, Elvira, 163 Novy Vavilon, 191 Nuestro Tiempo, 124, 130 October, 121, 127, 132 October Revolution, 127, 191 Odna, 191

Index 227 Olesha, Yuri, 190–191 Olympia, 9 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), 5, 97–100, 102, 104, 106–111, 111n1, 112n9 Oregon Trail, The, 63 Orr, Christopher, 103 Othello, 120 Pabst, G. W., 166, 173, 180n14 Paisan, 208 Pakakak, 40, 57n49 pandemic, 1, 14, 199 Panofsky, Erwin, 163 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 131–132 Patalas, Enno, 170 Pearlman, Karen, 188 Pérez Paredes, Manuel, 139, 143–146 Perron, Bernard, 60–61 Petro, Patrice, 199 Philippine cinema, 33–37, 56n6 Pinschewer, Julius, 173 Pirogov, 192 Pittsburgh Courier, 211 Plano, El (The Shot), 156 Planta, Mercedes, 37, 47 Pols, Hans, 46 Porgy and Bess, 209 Porteus, Stanley, 34 postcolonialism, 25, 33, 38, 63, 108 posthumanism, 85–86, 91, 94 poststructuralism, 2–3, 15, 20, 29n3, 186 potlatch, 98, 103, 109, 112n7 Presley, Elvis, 209 Prostye Liudi, 192 psychoanalysis, 1–3, 15–16, 98, 105–107, 187, 198. See also Freud, Sigmund P.T., 65 public health, 32, 36, 38, 46–48, 50, 53 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 118, 121–122, 188 Pudovkina, Anna, 189 Quaresima, Leonardo, 167 race, 3, 32–39, 46–48, 74, 87, 106, 205–214. See also Blackness; whiteness Rafael, Vicente, 35–36 Rafael Rodriguez, Carlos, 141 Razak, Najib, 97, 100–101, 106–107, 110, 111n1, 112n9, 113n20, 113n21 realism, 6, 62–63, 65, 67–68, 125, 129–133

228

Index

Rectification pro­cess, 144, 151–152 Red Granite Pictures, 97–101, 104–105, 111n2, 112n16, 113n26 Reigl, Alois, 176 Reinhardt, Max, 166, 168 Reyes, Raquel A. G., 47 Reyes, Soledad S., 38 Riefenstahl, Leni, 9, 163 Rocha, Glauber, 24 Roma, 24 Román, Enrique, 141 Rome Open City, 208 Roud, Richard, 171–172 Ruffinelli, Jorge, 140 Rus­sian Ark, 194 Rus­sian cinema, 6, 8, 117–122, 125–133, 185–201 Ryabchikova, Natalie, 189 Rye, Stellan, 168 Safe, 18 Said, Edward, 19 Salen, Katie, 61 Salt, Barry, 167–169 “Sa Sine,” 36–37, 40, 42 Schiller, Friedrich, 73 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 71 Scorsese, Martin, 5, 97, 102–103, 110 Scott, Joan, 25, 31n42, 179 Screen theory, 15–16 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 24 September, 11, 2001, 25, 27 Shklovsky, Viktor, 190–191, 196, 202n24 Shub, Esfir, 188 Shvambaum, Yuzef, 190 Simmell, Georg, 217 Skrodzka, Aga, 88, 90–91 socialist realism, 6, 125, 129–133 social media, 17, 27, 64, 100 Sokurov, Alexander, 194–195, 197 Solás, Humberto, 121, 146, 148 Solntseva, Yulia, 188–189 Somaini, Antonio, 195 Song of the South, 211 Sorene, Paul, 72 Soviet cinema, 6, 84, 117–133 spectatorship, 15–16, 23, 43, 50, 75, 119, 125–133, 213–214 spectrality, 5, 19, 83 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 19 Stacey, Jackie, 47

Stagecoach, 3, 16, 27 Stoler, Ann Laura, 19, 33, 37 St. Petersburg Diary: Kozintsev’s Flat, 194–195, 197 Strike, 121, 132 subaltern, 19 subjectivity, 15, 181n25, 186 sublime body, 98, 104, 107–109 Sunday Tribune Magazine, 44, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55 Suok, Olga, 190–191 Suok, Serafima, 190–191 Sutton, John, 188 Svilova, Elizaveta, 188–190 symbolic order, 15–16 Szöts, István, 88 Tales of Manhattan, 211 Taylor, T. L., 62 Tennessee Johnson, 211 Thapar, Romila, 20 Third Cinema, 24 Third World Third World War, 147 Thunderbird Strike, 63 Tolentino, Rolando, 42 Tomb Raider, 66 Toponymy, 18 Trauberg, Leonid, 191–193, 195 trauma, 1, 13–14, 25, 28, 171, 213 Trip to the Moon, A, 84 Truffaut, François, 172 Trump, Donald, 21, 99, 104 Turner, Bryan, 38 Uncanny Valley (video game), 68 uncanny valley, 4, 65–68 ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (film), 211 Unreal Engine, 5, 66–67 Urbana at Felisa, 37–38, 40 Valdés–­Rodríguez, José Manuel, 122–124, 130 Velasquez, Diego, 23 vernacular epistemic practices, 37 Vertov, Dziga, 124, 133, 188 VGIK (All-­Soviet Institute of Cinematography), 123, 191, 196 Vidler, Anthony, 1–2, 38 von Lücken, Gottfried, 176 von Salis, Arnold, 176 Vora, Kalindi, 201

Walker, Kara, 205 Wardrip-­Fruin, Noah, 61 Weber, Lois, 163 Weber, Samuel, 105 Wegener, Paul, 168 Weimar Germany, 7, 162–165, 167, 180n4, 181n25 Weininger, Otto, 89, 91 Wells, Sarah Ann, 125 When Rivers ­Were Trails, 63 White, Walter, 211 whiteness, 3, 8, 18, 27–29, 35–36, 46–47, 205–209, 212–214 Willett, John, 167 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 73

Index 229 Wolf, Mark J. P., 60–61 Wolf of Wall Street, The, 5, 97–104, 106, 110, 111n2, 112n16 ­Women Film Pioneers Proj­ect, 188 Wright, Tom, 100, 104 X, Malcolm, 213 Yaeger Kaplan, Alice, 185, 197, 200 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 198 You Bet Your Life, 207 Zemtsova-­Li-­Pudovkina, Anna, 189 Zimmerman, Eric, 61 Žižek, Slavoj, 104, 107