October 3rd and 4th, 2003
Conference
Abstracts | 1
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Diseased
Bodies: Anxiety and Infection in Cinematic Reproduction
2:30pm Friday, October 3
"Mis-Reading the Body: The Posthuman and the Organic in The
Ring"
Stephanie Benn, University of Northern Colorado
Brooks Landon claims in “Staying with the Body: Narratives of
the Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction” that “The
defining environment for the contemporary technologized body is that
of information so any discussion of embodiment in a posthuman context
must inevitably address the complex and shifting relationship between
information, technology, and the body.” My paper will attempt
to articulate precisely this “complex and shifting relationship”
as found within The Ring (the Japanese version, sometimes referred
to as Ringu). The Ring works within each of these
elements (information, technology, and the body) in a variety of ways,
yet inevitably, they are all connected in some interesting ways. The
issue of the body particularly becomes important within the context
of the much-noted ending of the film; one of the reasons that the characters
are not capable of realizing that the false ending is, indeed, false
is that they are unable to look beyond the capabilities and reach of
the organic body. The body becomes the reason for Sadako’s revenge
(wrongful death) as well as the means of dissipating the threat (finding
the body so that Sadako can, presumably, rest in peace). While this
false ending plays, in part, upon the viewer’s consciousness of
film conventions, it also reflects upon the profound misunderstanding
that the characters and, thus, the film viewers have concerning the
role of the body.
The body, in many ways, is not as important as the transfer of information
that replaces Sadako’s body (in the form of a videotape). This
transfer of information constructs the posthuman body by dissipating
the body’s boundaries; the videotape, as a replacement for the
body, invades the minds and bodies of those it “infects,”
thus making Sadako’s information a part of the “information”
of the infected. Sadako encodes the bodies of those infected with both
her own experiences and her own DNA (an observation drawn partially
from Ring 2 and Rasen). This erodes the differences
between the organic and the inorganic as well as the differences between
individual bodies.
Once infected, of course, the only way to avoid death is through copying
the videotape and showing it to another victim. However, even once this
step is completed, the victims of the tape are not “saved.”
The victims are still encoded with Sadako’s information. They
become agents of Sadako. Thus, the victim’s body becomes supplemented
with Sadako’s information, becoming both a part of Sadako (through
the pure information that she disseminates) and losing a part of the
organic nature of his or her own body. Even those who do not copy the
tape and, thus, die become agents of Sadako’s will. Therefore,
they are both converted to pure information (through being absorbed
by Sadako’s information) and contribute to the spread of information
themselves. Through video technology, then, the organic body becomes
alternately replaced and supplemented by information, making the body
both unimportant and posthuman.
"Terrors of the Invisible Spectral Body and the Visible Medium
in Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space"
Michelle Puetz, University of Chicago
This paper examines an unusual relationship between two films –
Peter Tscherkassky's experimental short, Outer Space (1999)
and Sidney Furie's feature-length thriller, The Entity (1981)
– in order to propose a model of cinematic terror that originates
in an antagonistic relation between the body and the technology of cinematic
representation. Horror is located both in the invisible, spectral body
of Furie's The Entity and in the visible, material body of
the film strip in Tscherkassky's Outer Space. As sites of terror,
the cinematic apparatus and the demonic, un-representable body illuminate
and destabilize the relationship between cinematic subjects and signification.
As a 35mm, cinema-scope, experimental film that appropriates footage from
a Hollywood thriller (The Entity), Peter Tscherkassky's Outer
Space is premised upon the establishment of a non-oppositional
relation between Hollywood and avant-garde cinema. By replacing the
invisible spectral body which terrorizes and sexually assaults The
Entity's female protagonist (played by Barbara Hershey) with the
materiality of the celluloid strip, Outer Space suggests that
a "translate-ability" between genres is dependent upon a transformation
of the site of horror. In Tscherkassky’s film, Hershey's narrative
and pictorial space is viscously perforated by the external elements
of the filmstrip – the optical soundtrack, sprocket holes, and
frame-lines.
Outer Space establishes film as a haunted medium that has the
inherent and material power to terrorize and consume bodies. Portions
of the celluloid strip which normally remain invisible to the viewer
take the place of Furie’s invisible supernatural demon, substituting
the materiality and immediacy of the film medium for the immateriality
and un--representability of the spirit world. I consider the terrifying
forces of cinema and the immaterial body in Outer Space and
The Entity through traditions of re-photography and "found-footage"
filmmaking in experimental and avant-garde cinema, and through historical
writings on spirit photography, technology, and magic.
"Scanning for Viruses: Saramgao, Markovic and Lars Von Trier"
Shahnaz Habib, New School University
In Jose Saramago’s Blindness, a whole city succumbs to
a mysterious infection that strikes them blind. As the “white
sickness” advances, human contact is both celebrated as well as
shunned. On the one hand, it is the source of the infection and on the
other hand, of healing and help. In a graphic story about human nature
and society, which abounds in allegories, the diseased body becomes
a metaphor for the connectedness as well as the loneliness of the individual
body. Disease and its cure – these become vantage points of insight
into the glory and limitations of human contact, it’s potential
to affect the whole world.
Saramago is talking about a small nameless community. Shall we risk
the clear border between art and reality and christen this community?
What if we were to call it a “global village”, a phrase
that we have become jaded to by constant usage, but which nevertheless
has value for us if we are thinking of the human body as a site of power
by representation. Because today both representation and disease have
nothing less than global agendas. Governments and citizens agree that
they cannot afford to ignore the outbreak of disease in another, even
remote, part of the world. What is more, we have two different body-realms
and therefore two different disease realms to worry about. Just as we
could pick up a respiratory infection from a neighbor in the subway,
our computers, existing as individuals in a network, much as we human
beings are connected to each other, could receive a virus by email.
Thus even as we romanticize global connectivity, we do so with the painful
awareness of global epidemics, both real and virtual. We realize with
a start, we are still afraid-distrustful of the Other.
As of now, at least seven SARS movies are rumored to be in the works.
How has the film genre dealt with the potential of the human body to
infect and cause disease? What larger allegories about the duality of
human contact, comparable to Saramago’s Blindness and
Camus’ Plague have films given us? Can cinematic portryals
of body and disease lead us to a greater insight about the fragile network
in which we as citizens of the global village are blessed or doomed
to live? One of the films I would like to discuss is Goran Markovic’s
Variola Vera, a film about a mysterious virus that spreads
through Belgrade, which offers a chilling lesson about the politics
of epidemic. The other is Lars von Trier’s Epidemic which
blurs the distinction between the virtual and real disease when a director
and crew who are shooting a movie about an epidemic become afflicted
by the epidemic. Using Saramago’s Blindness, Markovic’s
Variola Vera and Lars von Trier’s Epidemic as
frames of reference, I would like to explore the question, of how bodily
contact can be damning and redeeming at the same time. Further I would
like to discuss recent global health scares such as SARS epidemic and
the Y2K and the media portrayal of these events to ask the question,
has disease become the new apartheid? What old fears and angst come
spiraling through the not-so-deep depths of our cosmopolitan “global
villageness” when we talk disease?
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Inanimate
Objects: Pleasure and Technology in the Dead and Decaying
4:00pm Friday, October 3
"Moving Death: Cinema's Interest in the Dying Body, 1893-1908"
Scott Combs, UC Berkeley
Film moves, even if the film body doesn’t. This paper will focus
on one particular fold in this contradiction—namely, cinema’s
interest in capturing death as a moving bodily event, an event that
takes place over time. Proceeding from a documentary and a fictional
example of early cinema’s interest in the dying body, this paper
argues that moving images of death supplant their own expectation of
capturing the real thing.
Moving images re-enforce and dramatize prior photographic and documentary
attitudes toward the display of the already-dead body, yet they absorb
these precedents by imposing a diagnostic gaze onto a specifically mobile
death. Only movement might capture the moment when death comes. Moving
from photography’s blindness to the actual moment of passage from
life to deadness, we will think of cinema’s deep structural interest
in that moment. Thomas Edison’s animal tests lead to his 1901
filming of the actual electrocution of an unruly circus elephant. This
first snuff film displays the act of dying as a process of cinematic
recording, producing an image of a complete little movement of death.
The film traces the passage from standing elephant to falling /electrocuted
elephant to finally slain elephant. That Edison saw (or didn’t
see) his two great inventions—electrocution, cinema—on equal
grounds suggests that cinema could produce death in order to show it.
Film could accurately and mimetically perform murder (visualize death)
because death’s operation could be pared down to an on/off switch.
On the fictional side of things, D.W. Griffith’s 1908 The
Country Doctor opts for a very different visual attitude toward
seeing a little girl dying of hay fever. In the fictional rendition
of Little Edith’s death, the film moves constantly back and forth
from the dying vertical body to the living bodies of the survivors around
her, culminating finally in a panoramic shot away from the space of
grieving into the landscape now emptied out of her presence. Focusing
on the delayed impact of death on surviving bodies, this film epitomizes
the unique juxtaposition between moving and still bodies that only the
moving image can enforce as a previously-recorded activity. This juxtaposition
dates back to the filmed wake of Tolstoy’s dead body, wherein
the moving presence of a fly around the corpse distinguished the still
image of entombment from its seemingly photographic stance. The fly’s
body becomes the moving image of stillness.
Though documentary and diegetic gazes seem to offer different faces
of death, I will argue that this difference can be thought most usefully
in terms of an alliance between the desire to see death and the desire
to survive the sight. There is no such thing as a visual and bodily
representation of death, for the moment remains invisible before the
mobile gaze. We need to think of the sight of real death as a curious
obscenity pertaining not just to social taboo, but also representational
and visual failure. Film reinforces modern medical hesitations in assigning
visible sovereignty to the end of life, yet does its insistence on staging
it so elaborately mimic medicine’s bureaucratic signification
of death as a process of highly-complex and debatable cellular breakdown?
From low to high culture, from mondo to mainstream and art cinema, the
moving image condenses the entire event of death into a visible little
movement, capable of performing the various medical senses of how we
die.
“'It’s a bit more complicated than that:' Resident Evil,
Late-Capitalism and the Pleasure Principle"
Ben Stork, San Francisco State University
Liberation in contemporary Western culture is increasingly being figured
as an unbridled embrace of consumption. The liberal democratic notion
of inclusion has, its seems, left the field of the political and entered
the market. In terms of the post Vietnam civil rights movements it has
been a testament to the ability of late capitalism to embrace once marginalized
subjects through conscious campaigns to bring them into the retail fold.
The nineteen eighties and nineties witnessed the full-fledged incorporation
of both the feminist and gay political movements into the mainstream
economy through a regulated and protected entrance into the labor market
and a recognition of their increasing buying power. What was once repressed—homosexuality,
female agency—has been outed through a campaign to embrace the
various and once subversive pleasures that define these subjects. This
is not to say that the actual practices of either homosexual sex or
female desire are truly being accepted or accommodated rather it suggests
that what has carried over from these once powerful political constituencies
is a reign of pleasure that would have no limit.
The absence of a political or cultural identity on the one hand and
the initial successes of identity politics on the other have left a
void into which an unrestrained call to consume has been embraced. The
achievements of affirmative action and the anxieties of mainstream culture
have both been similarly addressed through a comodification of possible
identities. No urge need be repressed in our liberated society, especially
if it can be packaged and sold. In many ways we live in a culture that
is wholly ruled by the pleasure principle. However, as Freud theorized
it the pleasure principle is regulated by a reality principle installed
by the death drive. The death drive dictates the subject’s return
to an inanimate state on its “own terms” thus insuring restraint.
Horror is perhaps the genre most well suited for a discussion of the
pleasure principle and its relation to the contemporary cultural field.
While many monsters follow the gothic trope of being pathologized to
an extreme, becoming more human than not, the zombie is a figure of
total pleasure, completely given over to desire. Zombies do not raise
the same ontological questions that other undead do; unlike vampires
or ghosts they have seemingly lost all awareness beyond the basic needs
of food and reproduction (which conveniently are achieved simultaneously).
In this sense they seem to ignore the death drive and heed only the
call of the pleasure principle. The danger they present is not a singular
or individual threat that powerfully defies death but instead it is
the abject horror of a mass of bodies with no definition.
In this paper I would like to look at the parallels that can be found
between the zombie and mass culture. I would argue that zombies are
the corporeal representation of our consumptive society and that the
fear that they inspire echoes the persistent anxiety of unfulfilled
desire and a radically split subject. If late capitalism has offered
commodity fetishism as the answer to the void of identity and political
agency then the zombie is the converse of this embrace of pleasure.
As this is a small piece of a larger work on horror and mass politics
I will discuss only one film, Resident Evil. This is a particularly
apt text as it is fully within the confines of consumer culture (taken
as it is from a preceeding videogame narrative) yet it nearly explicitly
links the horror of zombification with corporate capital and juxtaposes
the selfless monsters with the heroine’s re-discovery of herself.
I will primarily be focusing on a psychoanalytic critical model but
I will also be engaging with other models, most notably poststrucuralist
marxisms and historiography.
"Hyperaging and Cinephilia"
Ara Osterweil, UC Berkeley
To die young, like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean, is in some ways a blessing,
as it allows for the persistence of vision--of beauty and youth--in
the cultural imagination, that vast, archival repository of images and
sounds that form the palimpsest of collective memory. Greta Garbo must
have intuited this, as she notoriously hid from the camera in her later
years, not only to evade the intrusive hand of celebrity, one suspects,
but but to avoid becoming a grotesque signifier of aging and decay as
many of her contemporaries and near contemporaries would become. One
must only think of Marlon Brando or Elizabeth Taylor today, or rather
the series of perverse embodiments they have passed through on their
way to being ridiculed by a public simultaneously terrified and fascinated
by the aging body. To allow oneself to be objectified as a mass of decaying
flesh, as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford do in Robert Aldrich's 1962
film What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? is an act of courage
and defiance that few stars would reasonably wish to attempt.
Postmodern audiovisual flanerie, or the ability to view historically
diverse, often temporally incongruent images through VCR, DVD and other
home-viewing technologies, has enabled spectators to experience radically
different encounters with the cinema. No longer confined to perceiving
moving images in their proper historical context or chronological order,
spectators have grown accustomed to a kind of temporal flanerie, in
which celluloid images of present and past habitually collide. This
phenomenon of anachronistic spectatorship, which has transformed the
ways in which observers experience both real and imagined time, manifests
itself most conspicuously in the perception of the hyperbolically aging
body on screen.
"Hyperaging and Cinephilia" focuses on the way in which classical
film stars, whose screen images were fervently manufactured by the studios
to produce not only an affective experience of plenitude but of immortality
as well, have begun to signify an entirely different affective and corporeal
regime. The pervasiveness of home viewing technologies have made it
not only possible but altogether unexceptional for cinephiles to watch
films from different eras in a relatively abbreviated viewing period,
to watch, for example, a wide selection of Katherine Hepburns films,
from Christopher Strong (1933) to On Golden Pond (1981),
over the course of a single weekend. What happens in this accelerated
viewing process, is the rapid metamorphosis (forgive the pun; I'm currently
in Prague) of the star body, from the youthful, subversively masculine
Hepburn of Dorothy Arzner's film to the decrepit old woman in Golden
Pond, clinging not only to the remains of life, but to the remains
of the body, rendered vulnerable by time's passage. Consequently, the
rapid acceleration of the decay of the star's body has become a salient
feature of contemporary spectatorship. Through a phenomenological process
analogous to the technique of time-lapse photography (in which a rose,
for example, appears to blossom, bloom and decay in a matter of cinematic
seconds), stars appear to age at an unnaturally rapid pace, in sharp
contrast to the viewer's own experience of the corporeal body.
"Hyperaging" is my own term, meant to describe the undertheorized
temporal dimension of the "unheimlich" or uncanny,
in which the notion of Time supersedes the notion of Place in one's
perception of a strange familiarity that is at once too proximate and
as distant as to seem virtually unrecognizable. Hyperaging, however,
is not unique to the cinephile's obsessive viewing practices, but is
a phenomenon which has permeated contemporary visual culture, from the
habitual juxtaposition of young and old publicity shots in stars' obituaries,
to the regular programming practice of screening single star film marathons
on cable networks or in repertory theaters, to the thematization of
this process in experimental video art and installation work. One must
only think of the annual Academy Awards ritual, in which the surviving
past recipients of the Oscar walk out, or are in some cases wheeled
out, to sit like ruined monuments beneath a montage of clips depicting
their former glory, to recognize the violent collision of past and present
in the cultural imagination.
Cinephilia has traditionally been theorized as inseparable from nostalgia;
for the cinephile there is a certain pleasure in consuming images and
objects that the past yields. At the same time that the cinephile's
historiographic impulse embraces the past, however, the cinephile aggressively
disavows Time's destructive capacity. (Hence, why cinephiles always
celebrate the pristine print of their favorite film.) Hyperaging, on
the contrary, confronts this traditional mode of cinephilia with the
new, anti-nostalgic, sadistic pleasure in viewing a body that is not
one's own in the process of rapid disintegration. Using the historiographic
and theoretical writings of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthe's work on
photography, Georg Simmel's essay on the ruin, and the nineteenth century
architectural theorist Alois Riegl's complex theorization of time and
the historical monument, while considering the ways in which gender
consistently inflects discourses of aging and beauty, this paper shall
investigate the notion of the star body as ruin.
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Subject
to Suffering: Bodily Mediations and Manipulations
9:00am Saturay, October 4
"Revolution without Copulation: Découpage, Bodies, and Politics
in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade"
Vance L. Byrd, University of Pennsylvania
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the
Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis
de Sade premiered in Berlin at the Schillertheater on April 29,1964
and enjoyed international success and controversy. Both a synthesis
and continuation of Brechtian epic theater and Antonin Artaud’s
théâtre du cruauté, it was declared the production
of the year by the journal Theater heute and faced cries for censorship
in parts of Germany, Weiss portrayed clinical bodies and politics surrounding
the tragic figure of Marat through emphasis of the body and filmic methods.
In his theoretical work, Avantgarde Film (1956), Weiss praises Luis
Buñuel’s films because his visual language resists verbal
interpretation: images communicate with the audience stronger than words.
This relationship between word and image is at the heart of my study.
I argue that his attempt to rejuvenate German theater through visual
means fails to increase the dramatic force of the drama’s central
revolutionary-political content.
In the first section of my paper, I show how Weiss attempts to renew
German theater with visual techniques such as Körpertheater (theater
of the body) and Barthes’s concept of découpage. In the
next section of my paper, I focus on how ideological, historical, and
political content on and off stage tested the limits of visual representation
in the pivotal years of student revolution (1968) and German reunification
(1989/1990), when the Weiss’s surrealistic-pantomimic-filmic aspects
were backgrounded and/or left out.
"Cut Bodies"
Andrea Bellavita, University of Milan
The 21st century has witnessed a keen and frequently violent referencing
of the human body in virtually every form of creative expression. Its
presence can also be felt in the diffusion of so-called “new conditions”
that the psychiatric profession has identified: anorexia, bulimia, drug
addiction, panic attacks, and the “cutters” phenomenon.
In each of these conditions, the sufferer’s relationship to the
desire for Otherness, in deep dialectical crisis, passes through a violent
and dramatic awareness of his or her own body. The human body, physical
and tangible, undergoes a process of re-appropriation, which is eminently
comparable – even on the level of mediated representation –
with that of film. The approach that we adopt, therefore, is to offer
an interpretation that, with the aid of socio-semiotic analysis and
of psychoanalysis applied to the language of cinema, allows us to establish
associations between the cut body, the cinematographic representation
of the body and the cut, the breaking up, the linguistic fragmentation
of that which is the body of a film: the narrative.
The Cut Body refers to the bodies of these young “cutters” who,
by ferociously violating themselves, seek to connect with their own
corporeality. It also includes the bodies of anorexics and bulimics
who, adopting a different approach, choose instead to deflect the Desire
for Otherness by utilizing their own, disfigured bodies as a mask, as
archetypal image. In the field of body art, however, the body is used
as a tool with which to design and create an artistic experience: the
human body serves as a canvas of one’s physicality.
In the films of Canadian director David Cronenberg, Crash in
particular, the Ballardian body becomes the ritual object of a presentation
of physical defacement. We need only consider the work of Cronenberg
– or of David Lynch or Shinya Tsukamoto – to identify a
particular approach to the representation of the human body. Theirs
is a body abused, hacked at, used as a linguistic structure by which
to articulate a conversation, a phrase.
And so, what happens when the body of the film itself, whose narrative
serves as a place in which language takes root, is cut? The film’s
body is cut at the instant in which its language moves beyond the dimension
of purely symbolic direction and, through the creation of a neologism,
allows reality to materialize. A psychotic language, a language of generalized
forclusion, a language negated by its very use, by the dilution of its
symbolism (understood not in its “qualitative” sense, but
rather its “elaborative” sense) with reality. The cut body
of the film can be perceived as the emergence of Reality in language,
of the identification of the “new conditions” prevalent
within the psychotic structure of the 21st century.
Kubrick, Lynch, Cronenberg, Amenábar, Tsukamoto are all directors
who deal with reality, and who, rather than encourage the creation of
a pathological or psychotic cinema, have paved the way for an emergence
of a psychotic structure within it. Starting with an elaboration of
language. Of an elaboration, and of a re-appropriation, of the linguistic
body of film.
"Grappling with the Body: Race, Sex and the Ritual of the Sun Vow"
Matthew Kiesner, Emory University
The Sun Vow, or Sun Dance, is a controversial Sioux religious ritual
where the participant is hung from hooks inserted in his pectoral muscles.
The Ritual, which appears outwardly barbaric, creates sensations of
extreme spiritual significance in the participant. Initially outlawed
in the United States, the Sun Vow ritual has gained a resurgence in
the contemporary “modern primitivism” movement and is still
practiced today. Attempts at cinematically depicting this ritual have
been problematic at best, since the ritual transforms the body in a
manner incomprehensible to most viewers, exposing assumptions about
race and gender usually left unnoticed. Both A Man Called Horse
(Elliot Silverstein, 1970) and Cannibal Ferox (a.k.a. Make
Them Die Slowly, Umberto Lenzi, 1981) have sequences using the
Sun Vow or a variation of it. A Man Called Horse was an early
revisionist western about an English nobleman, captured by the Sioux.
After learning their ways, he slowly gains rank and eventually becomes
their chief. Cannibal Ferox was part of a trend for Italian
made cannibal films that appeared briefly in the late-70s and early
1980s; a genre that relied on extreme violence (including real animal
death) to shock its audience. Cannibal Ferox is a typical story
of Europeans encountering native tribes, only this time an eager young
anthropologist and her crew go to South America to disprove cannibalism
(which turns out to be a very bad idea). During one of the attacks,
a woman from the expedition is hung up in the manner of the Sun Vow,
not through her pectoral muscles, but through her breasts, leading to
her torturous death. Both of these scenes exhibit extreme anxieties
over racial and sexual difference when white men and women encounter
a native Other better equipped for survival in that region. In the paper,
I will thoroughly explore issues of ritual, race, sex and the body that
these two films share, leading to a better understanding of the Sun
Vow ritual and the problems that arise in its depiction within narrative
filmmaking.
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