Table Of Contenti
The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory
ii
iii
The Anthem Handbook of
Screen Theory
Edited by Hunter Vaughan and Tom Conley
iv
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75– 76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2018 Hunter Vaughan and Tom Conley editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN- 13: 978- 1- 78308- 823- 2 (Hbk)
ISBN- 10: 1- 78308- 823- 0 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e- book.
v
CONTENTS
List of Figures vii
Preface ix
Hunter Vaughan
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction Post- , Grand, Classical or “So-C alled”: What Is, and
Was, Film Theory? 1
Francesco Casetti
Part I WHAT WE ARE
Chapter One The Brain’s Labor: On Marxism and the Movies 13
Pasi Väliaho
Chapter Two Racial Being, Affect and Media Cultures 33
Camilla Fojas
Chapter Three Thinking Sex, Doing Gender, Watching Film 49
Theresa L. Geller
Chapter Four “Complicated Negotiations”: Reception and Audience
Studies into the Digital Age 71
Brendan Kredell
Chapter Five World Cinema and Its Worlds 85
James Tweedie
Chapter Six Screen Theory Beyond the Human: Toward an
Ecomaterialism of the Moving Image 103
Hunter Vaughan
Chapter Seven “We Will Exchange Your Likeness and Recreate You
in What You Will Not Know”: Transcultural Process
Philosophy and the Moving Image 119
Laura U. Marks
Part II WHAT SCREEN CULTURE IS
Chapter Eight Apparatus Theory, Plain and Simple 145
Tom Conley
vi
vi THE ANTHEM HANDBOOK OF SCREEN THEORY
Chapter Nine Properties of Film Authorship 157
Codruţa Morari
Chapter Ten “Deepest Ecstasy” Meets Cinema’s Social
Subjects: Theorizing the Screen Star 173
Mary R. Desjardins
Chapter Eleven Rethinking Genre Memory: Hitchcock’s Vertigo and
Its Revision 193
Elisabeth Bronfen
Chapter Twelve Digital Technologies and the End(s) of Film Theory 209
Trond Lundemo
Chapter Thirteen How John the Baptist Kept His Head: My Life in
Film Philosophy 227
William Rothman
Part III HOW WE UNDERSTAND SCREEN TEXTS
Chapter Fourteen The Expressive Sign: Cinesemiotics, Enunciation and
Screen Art 245
Daniel Yacavone
Chapter Fifteen Narratology in Motion: Causality, Puzzles and
Narrative Twists 263
Warren Buckland
Chapter Sixteen He(u)retical Film Theory: When Cognitivism
Meets Theory 277
William Brown
Chapter Seventeen Philosophy Encounters the Moving Image: From Film
Philosophy to Cinematic Thinking 293
Robert Sinnerbrink
Chapter Eighteen Screen Perception and Event: Beyond the
Formalist/ Realist Divide 309
Nadine Boljkovac
Postface 327
Tom Conley
Notes on Contributors 331
Filmography 335
Index 339
vii
FIGURES
1.1 Karl Marx’s grave at Highgate cemetery 14
1.2 William Friese- Greene’s grave at Highgate cemetery 15
1.3 Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895) 16
1.4 Kinetoscope and phonograph parlor in San Franscisco, 1895 19
1.5 Publicity poster for Edison’s Vitascope, Metropolitan Print
Company, c. 1896 20
1.6 Etienne- Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmagoria at the Cour des
Capucines in 1797 20
1.7 L’Atalante 28
2.1 Rose and Chris 39
2.2 Rose’s family meet Chris 39
2.3 Georgina in Get Out 41
2.4 Chris’s frozen gaze in Get Out 44
5.1 Gomorrah 97
5.2 Gomorrah 98
5.3 Manufactured Landscapes 98
viii
ix
PREFACE
Welcome, readers, to The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory! We cordially invite you to step
inside, meander around and explore. Hopefully, as you open this collection, doors will
open on both sides of the page, and we will enter into a conversation. We may not always
agree, and we may not always even speak the same language, but we are all here because
we (1) believe that critical thinking is important; (2) understand the sociocultural import-
ance of screen media in the unfolding of the twenty- first century, and in the formation of
the century that preceded it; and (3) are ready to explore new horizons and to carve new
folds in the brain that meet the challenge of a world, of media apparatuses, and of social
configurations that have changed radically since film theory was canonized some thirty
years ago. As you will find central to the concerns of this book, from Francesco Casetti’s
Introduction essay to Tom Conley’s Postface, we have entered into a highly mediated
digital era that throws notions of the “filmic” and the “cinematic” largely into question,
the traditional boundaries of medium specificity blurred by the convergent nature of this
new wonderland of wireless signals, mobile screens and virtual windows. An era, simply
put, of screens: screens in our town-s quares and on our wrists, in our classrooms and
on our dashboards, screens in outer space, underwater and in our pockets—a world of
screens that problematizes the conventional notions both of the moving image and of the
social function of cultural practice. These pages may not solve such debates, but we aim
to equip readers to take part in them.
The contemporary film and media student emerges at a unique moment: the prolifer-
ation of digital technology is increasingly turning individuals into daily content providers
and empowering global populations through communications networks, while also
aiding the transnational flow of a borderless mainstream screen culture and, at the same
time, prompting the emergence of local, small nation and counter-c inemas. Because
of the heightened role that image culture plays in today’s individual lives, community
activisms and global economies, and because new technologies such as smart phones
have democratized the means of textual production, theory is needed more than ever
to nurture our complex understanding—a nd use— of screen media and to challenge the
horizons of our sociopolitical and philosophical engagement of the world.
We live in a cinematic—a nd increasingly post-c inematic— civilization, in which no
one alive today was alive before the birth of moving images. Let us pause to really consider that.
Our entire extant species has lived its entire life and will live its entire life in coexistence
with a virtual universe that bends time and space and offers human beings a crystalline
range of liminal screen experiences, from Nickelodeon theaters to online avatars. And,
more than ever, these experiences and lives are linked by networks of fiber- optic cables
