Byron Davies

It can be difficult to articulate a substantive materialism in film and media studies, owing to the slipperiness of that term and its cognates. Changes in media and their technology can even bring out the materialist elements of supposedly idealist views in past film theory, thus raising the question of whether there is any meaningful contrast with “materialism.” We proffer the hypothesis that these difficulties lose their force as we move away from the global center and toward sites shaped by material scarcity and colonial extraction. Consequently, a materialism thought through to its full implications must be a geographically grounded one. An example is the sololoy cinema articulated by Peruvian filmmaker and programmer Aroldo Murguia: an idea of cinema as materially continuous with cellulose nitrate dolls and related practices of reappropriation in Mexican popular art. We also explore the idea that the more a film is geographically situated away from colonial standardization, the more likely it is to be diegetically transparent to the resources making that very film possible, from its manufacturing to screening to preservation. These hypotheses are presented in the spirit of introducing a set of six written essays and three hybrid audiovisual/written essays, all of them concerned with geographically situated film materials. The essays are organized according to the topics “Infrastructures and Ecologies,” “Archives and Historicity,” and “Concepts and Metaphors.” Ultimately, this Introduction to the special issue “Filmic Matter and Geographic Specificity” frames these essays as models of a vision of geographic specificity’s material survival, as well as of how speaking about the survival of matter is indissolubly linked to place.

In 1961, Stan Brakhage made Sartre’s Nausea for a public television introduction to existentialism hosted by Sartre scholar Hazel Barnes. He returned to that work, editing and directly intervening on it to make Black Vision (1965), which he says was inspired by “the only passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings which has ever specifically concerned me – the passage from Nausea wherein the protagonist sits in a park and imagines his suicide” (Film-Makers’ Co-op). Despite Brakhage’s ambivalence towards Sartre, we argue that he informs our understanding of Sartre by demonstrating continuities between hypnagogic consciousness and nausea, despite Sartre’s sharp distinction between those. We additionally argue that Brakhage was likely the most appropriate filmmaker for “adapting” Nausea, due to his careerlong grasp of how the experience of radical contingency could permeate not only individual consciousness, but also the filmmaking medium itself.

Ernesto Baca’s feature-length experimental film Samoa (2005) was fundamental in kindling a renewed interest in Super 8 in Argentina at the beginning of this century. Its massive collection of shots is organized around a single but multivalent idea: the mirror as site of the contraconquista. The film opens and closes with shots of conquistadores bearing a light-reflecting mirror, a symbol of the “images at war,” that is, of the renaissance perspective against which the film will frequently enlist the flatness of the Super 8 format. Samoa’s non-linear structure itself takes up the figure of the mirror: a symmetrical, palindrome-like curve. Its conception of space is derived from the gap between those sides of the curve, thus making it the opposite of spatial conceptions dominant in “classical” cinema: a whole region of structure and depthless shots versus thin structure and deep space. The film then becomes a sustained interrogation of the notion of a center: the center as a fold between two mirrored representations, which in turn becomes an occasion for interrogating the relationship between metaphysical centers and geopolitical ones (metropoles). The film thus points towards an ethics of liberation not incidental to, but arguably internal to, Super 8 experimental cinema.

El largometraje experimental Samoa (2005) de Ernesto Baca fue fundamental para renovar el interés por el Súper 8 en Argentina a comienzos de este siglo. Su enorme colección de planos se organiza en torno a una idea única pero multivalente: el espejo como lugar de la contraconquista. La película abre y cierra con tomas de conquistadores llevando un espejo que refleja la luz, símbolo de las “imágenes en guerra”, es decir, de la perspectiva renacentista contra la que la película alista con frecuencia lo plano del formato Súper 8. La propia estructura no lineal de Samoa adopta la figura del espejo: una curva simétrica en forma de palíndromo. Su concepción del espacio se desprende de la separación entre esos lados de la curva, lo que la convierte en lo opuesto a las concepciones espaciales dominantes en el cine “clásico”: toda una región de estructura y planos sin profundidad de campo frente a estructura delgada y espacio profundo. La película se convierte entonces en una constante interrogación de la noción de centro: el centro como pliegue entre dos representaciones espejadas, lo que a su vez se convierte en una oportunidad para interrogar la relación entre los centros metafísicos y los geopolíticos (metrópolis). La película apunta así hacia una ética de la liberación que no es accesoria sino que podría decirse que es interna al cine experimental de Súper 8.

This essay is an aesthetic and social account of the series of cartoons—rarely screened or seen in public—that were made as part of a clandestine programme of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in Mexico City in the 1950s. From a broadly Marxist perspective, we focus on the cartoons’ Cold War scenario as well as their documentation and symbolisation techniques. We also focus on the hypothesis that these cartoons were part of a modernist maquila in art that would be experimented with in later decades as part of the productive and social forms of maquila in Mexico as well as in various other parts of the world.

As surprising as it might seem, a better encounter between analytic philosophy and avant-garde cinema turns on conceptions of the human body and their origins in infancy. The basic ideas emerge from philosopher Richard Wollheim’s writing on painting, though Wollheim himself was not prepared to apply his thought to cinema, and even most analytic philosophers of film who purport to draw on Wollheim have under-appreciated the consequences of his writing on “twofoldness”—let alone his writing on painting and the body—for explorations of the materiality of experimental film. Here that thought is pursued by comparing two poles in Wollheim with analogous ones in Annette Michelson’s writing: I argue that it is not an accident that both Wollheim and Michelson understand their respective mediums as sites of “doubled” perception, and that both recur to Kleinian ideas of infancy and the body. Additionally significant to both writers is painter Hans Hofmann’s ambitions for depth-perception as involving a kind of “push-and-pull,” which is here interrogated via a Wollheimian reading of the film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), by Hofmann’s student Ken Jacobs. I argue that the terms of this reading are excluded by Wollheim-cognizant analytic philosophers of film like George M. Wilson, Enrico Terrone, and Gregory Currie. The holistic perception of a painting that Wollheim insisted was necessary for “corporeality” then finds its analog in a heterodox conception of structural cinema, including quasi-narrative adaptations of that genre like Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1975). Taking up the limit case of the conception of the self in Wollheim’s reading of De Kooning, I argue for the significance of child-parent collaborations like Mano de metate (2018) by Mexican filmmaker Bruno Varela and his then six-year-old daughter Eugenia Varela, characterized by electronic analogues of what Wollheim called “those sensations which gave us our first access to the external world.”

This article examines some work by the Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker and video artist Bruno Varela in order to explore the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s view that modern political cinema is characterized by a “missing” people, to which the adequate response is the people-sustaining or people-generating trance. I argue that the element missing from Deleuze’s discussion is how the typical way for a people to go “missing” under capitalism involves the obfuscation of their labor, an idea that sustains the materially grounded trance in Varela’s Papeles Secundarios (2004) and Cuerpos Complementarios (2022), drawn from the filmmaker’s experience as casting director of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s production of her video installation Tooba (2002) in Oaxaca. The article discusses the “baroque critique” involved in Varela’s elliptically representing the workday of the non-professional Oaxacan actors employed in Neshat’s production, understood here as a critique articulated using the detritus of that production. The result is a paradigm of trans-temporal playfulness on film that also challenges the claims to trans-temporal experience sought in Neshat’s work. Thus, the article also locates these arguments within debates about whether films can “do philosophy”, including a hypothesis about the obfuscations of labor lying behind why making-of documentaries—and their capacities to critique the philosophical pretensions of their original subjects—have not figured more centrally in those debates.

This essay distinguishes some significant commonalities and differences between the film-philosophies of Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (especially in his book Poetics of Cinema) and U.S. philosopher Stanley Cavell. I argue that despite shared senses of the poetics of the film image and certain shared philosophical references, Ruiz and Cavell differed over their conceptions of the model spectator and their relations to autonomous films and worlds from which spectators are excluded (on Cavell's picture) versus fragments out of which the spectator might create their own films and worlds in which a spectator might become included (on Ruiz's picture). I then argue that a striking reconciliation between these perspectives takes place via each's conception of television, since it was precisely the features of the medium and its heteronomous parts that Cavell found bemusing from the perspective of his view of film (and its supposedly autonomous works) that allowed for Ruiz's natural career-long relationship with television and heteronomy, especially in Latin American telenovelas. I thus approach Ruiz's relation to telenovelas via Cavell's understanding of the possibilities of soap operas to explore arguments between different temporalities: "dialectical," narrative time and "undialectical" recurrences of needs and drives. I further explore this possibility with a reading of Ruiz's neglected, late-career Chilean TV series Litoral (2008), focused on the construction of stories by sailors aboard a ghost ship. I argue that the series' treatment of these different temporalities reaches its culmination in the poignant image of a sailor-storyteller stuck within a story of his own creation: a stark rendering of his taking a sideways-on view of the role of his own fantasies in its construction.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often associated with a certain political mode of relating to another, where a person is a locus of enforceable demands. I claim that Rousseau also articulated an affective mode of relating to another, where a person is seen as the locus of a kind of value that cannot be demanded. These are not isolated sides of a distinction, for the political mode constitutes a solution to certain problems that the affective mode encounters in common social circumstances, allowing us to see how these modes might be distinct while the political nevertheless shapes the affective. I contrast this approach with that of some contemporary Kantian writers on affective phenomena who, for reasons rooted in Kant’s moral philosophy, have modeled affective ways of relating to others on duty. I claim that Rousseau’s writing provides us with a way of capturing the correct insight of these accounts—that some of our emotional responses to others are ways of appreciating their personhood—while avoiding the characteristic implausibilities of their close association between the affective and the political.

This essay argues that, despite the potential for an encounter between Stanley Cavell’s thought and found-footage experimental filmmaking, this has not yet taken place because the early Cavell’s picture of films as autonomous “wholes,” together with his "global-holistic" conception of modernism, prevented him from appreciating the expressive possibilities of filmic fragments. I then argue that these impediments to an encounter with found footage recede in Cavell’s later thought, as he moves away from a concern with modernism and as J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words comes to play a greater role in his film writing. In this late period, Cavell no longer conceives of topics of film criticism as filmic “wholes” but rather, more loosely, along the lines of what Austin called “total speech situations.” I claim that the culmination of this turn lies in Cavell’s writing on the expressive powers of collections. In closing, I demonstrate the possibilities of the late Cavell’s thinking about collections and “passionate utterances” for found-footage filmmaking by discussing Mexican experimental filmmaker Bruno Varela’s Monolito (2019), with particular attention to how Varela uses archival footage to fulfill the exigencies of finding new modes of expression at just the moment when a world is receding from view.

This essay aims to understand the relations between Stanley Cavell’s theoretical generalities regarding the medium of film and his readings of individual films, with a particular focus on his writing on color in his book The World Viewed. I argue that a specific idea of color as connected to abstraction (as well as a correlative idea of black-and-white as connected to figuration) grounds the relations between Cavell’s general statements about color and his readings of individual color films, and that this conception of color helps to bring out the level of medium specificity required for understanding Cavell’s notion of “projecting” a world. I likewise argue that this idea of color and abstraction lies behind Cavell’s claims about projecting a “unified” world in his writing on color’s connection with fantasy and futurity, in his approach to Jean-Luc Godard’s films, and even in his writing on color that follows The World Viewed.

An analysis of some work by the Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker and video artist Bruno Varela via the latter’s reading of the late U.S. philosopher Stanley Cavell, especially Cavell’s 1982 essay “The Fact of Television.” This essay focuses on the aesthetic possibilities of the very constitution of the electronic image, based in Cavell’s understanding of television’s dependence on notions of “switching,” as opposed to “succession,” as well as how those notions play a role in Varela’s understanding of what it is to critique communications media while retaining their communal potential. Audiovisual work by Varela discussed in this essay include Línea 3 (2010-11) and Materia oscura (Dark Matter, 2016).

Este artículo explora ciertas conexiones entre la representación de la mortalidad en el retrato y el tratamiento filosófico de nuestra necesidad de ser reconocidos por los demás. En primer lugar, se examina la conexión que establece Georg Simmel en su estudio filosófico sobre Rembrandt entre la capacidad del artista para representar en sus retratos individuos irrepetibles, y su capacidad para capturar la finitud de los mismos en tanto que seres mortales. Tras señalar que ninguna de las explicaciones de Simmel sobre el carácter trágico de los sujetos de los retratos de Rembrandt resulta completamente satisfactoria, recupero los escritos de Rousseau sobre nuestra necesidad de ser reconocidos por los otros, para argumentar que consideramos que los otros son insustituibles porque son capaces de satisfacer esta necesidad ; y que es, precisamente, a esta clase de insustituibilidad a la que apunta Simmel al enlazar los conceptos de individualidad y mortalidad en sus escritos sobre los retratos de Rembrandt. A partir de este punto, sostengo que las ideas anteriores son, de hecho, centrales para la comprensión de la escritura psicoanalítica de Melanie Klein, y, en particular, al planteamiento de Klein sobre la percepción de las otras personas por parte de los niños, que relaciona con sus ansiedades acerca de la posibilidad de la pérdida irreparable de esas personas; su planteamiento de que la condición de persona del otro se debe a que los percibimos como fuentes de reconocimiento; y su análisis de la pintura de retratos como una actividad con la que abordar estas ansiedades.

This essay provides an interpretation of the potential and limits of Michael Fried's difficult claims in his essay "Art and Objecthood" (1967) that cinema by its nature escapes the problems of modernism and also escapes the problems of theater. By focusing on Stanley Cavell's account of how cinema as an automatic medium escapes problems associated with variability across performances, I try to render a version of Fried's claim about cinema and theater that can ground a figurative version of his claim about cinema and modernism, where film at least provides us a symbol of relief from concerns about medium specificity. In the second part of the essay I argue that something close to Cavell's and Fried's thoughts (about using the figure of theater to remind us of cinema's specificity, but also of cinema in its character as a symbol of relief from medium-specific concerns) takes on a certain urgency in questions about what cinema is in the digital age, manifested in representations of theater in the digitally photographed "Shakespeariadas" series by the contemporary Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro.

In this paper, I investigate under-explored moments in Rousseau’s and Adam Smith’s writings in which each presents speech, and particularly testimony, as a manifestation of the desire for others’ recognition. I begin by considering some features of Rousseau’s understanding of amour-propre (or the desire for recognition from others) as well as that desire’s relevance for the conception of vocal speech (as in its nature passional) at the center of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. Since a feeling of insult is the characteristic response to the thwarting of amour-propre, this connection between amour-propre and vocal speech might help to illuminate the distinctive insult (remarked upon by several philosophers) in having one’s speech act rejected. But there is also something incomplete in this thought insofar as it cannot yet distinguish the rejection involved in, say, not being believed from just any thwarting of amour-propre (or any instance of taking oneself to be demoted in another’s opinion). I then consider the possibility that this latter sort of observation might lie behind not only Adam Smith’s interest in what he calls our “mortification” in not being believed, but also his interest in a distinctive kind of response that we typically think of ourselves as owed, especially in the context of our addressing another person, but whose satisfactoriness consists in its being unforced. I end the paper by considering how Rousseau’s egalitarian political prescriptions (which contrast with the individual psychological maneuvers that Smith offers to those who go unbelieved) can be understood, in part, as aiming to limit the social significance of our dependence on another’s capricious judgment about our trustworthiness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often associated with a certain political form of relating to another as a person, where a person is seen as a locus of enforceable demands. Nevertheless, as I argue in this dissertation, Rousseau also articulated an affective form of relating to another, where relating to another as a person in this sense involves seeing them as a locus of a kind of value that cannot be demanded. I consider the significance of this affective form for Rousseau’s understanding of the passion he calls amour-propre, as well for his understanding of domination and of the connection between the political and affective realms. Following an introductory chapter, I argue in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 that, against received readings of Rousseau, there is something intrinsically good about being subject to amour-propre in that this passion makes salient to us others’ personhood. In Chapter 4 I consider one way in which the characteristic pathology of the affective realm is the appearance of demands in it. I show how, in a certain kind of domination, the dominator acknowledges the affective personhood of the dominated and at the same time, by treating the dominated’s consideration as the sort of value that can be extracted, is in violation of the very conditions of that acknowledgment. In Chapter 5 I outline Rousseau’s understanding of the connection between the political and affective forms of relating to another by arguing that Rousseau introduces the former as an essential part of the egalitarian measures he proposes for eliminating the necessity of entering relationships of domination. I then contrast Rousseau’s understanding of the connection between the political and the affective realms with contemporary Kantian accounts that condense political and affective phenomena into a single conception of a person. In Appendix 1 I consider the kind of dependence on another person involved in speaking to them. I discuss how that dependence is made apparent when we are insulted in not being believed, and I compare the views of Rousseau and Adam Smith regarding that kind of insult. Finally, in Appendix 2 I bring Rousseau’s notion of acknowledging another as a person to bear on an interpretation of the work of the Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice.