Uncanny Histories in Film and Media

By Patrice Petro, Peter Bloom, Alenda Chang and 8 more

Uncanny Histories in Film and Media brings together a stellar lineup of established and emergent scholars who explore the uncanny twists and turns that are often occluded in larger accounts of film and media. Prompted by fresh archival research and new conceptual approaches, the works included here probe the uncanny as a mode of historical analysis that reveals surprising connections and unsettling continuities.  The uncanny stands for what often eludes us, for what remains unfamiliar or mysterious or strange.  Whether 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.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978829961

Peter Bloom

Peter Bloom heads the People and Organisations Department at the Open University, UK. His recent books include The CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life (Zed, 2018) and The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral (Routledge, 2017). His writing has featured in the Washington Post, Guardian, and New Statesman.

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INTRODUCTION

Uncanny Histories

PATRICE PETRO

Written in the aftermath of world war and a global pandemic, Freud’s essay The Uncanny (1919) was published just over a century 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 here 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 thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, 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, 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 century, 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 mistake is the most uncanny thing 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 Century, 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 little understood. Others, like Pera Moiseevna 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, whether 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 practitioners, 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 these carry an inherently uncanny charge because 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 important 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.

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 others 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, these 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, shaped 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 here 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.

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 women 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 great 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 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 simple 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 century, 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 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 there 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 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, were 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 simple omission but because 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 either 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 America’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 counter 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 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.’ Almena Davis wrote and acted with an unceasing urgency. She eschewed the politics of Black respectability and left behind an 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 here, 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 labor. The authors here 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. Whether 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.

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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 human 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 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