updates

Well, as promised, I finished up my immediate work on Haunted Nerves today, the end of a three-week stretch. I wanted to get as much done as I could before July came, which brings two more projects with imminent deadlines: a book review, and finishing the Paul Thomas Anderson manuscript for UT. The window in time that just passed to beef up my digital cinema project was small.

Even though I have no intention of trying to shop Haunted Nerves around until next summer at the earliest, I wanted to get deeper into it than I was before going back on the job market in the fall. I wanted to feel more comfortable talking about it with prospective search committees, and I wanted them to know that--for tenure-track purposes--the project will be close to conclusion in the relative near future.

The bad news is that I didn't quite finish the chapter I wanted to originally, "Lost Track of Time." The good news is that in the process of writing that chapter I discovered that I was working on two separate chapters on the digital cinema and nostalgia: the "new nostalgia" 20s  films (Hugo, Artist, Midnight in Paris, etc.) and the transmedia blockbuster--TRON being my primary focus. Basically, they are all part of this larger "nostalgia film" trend in the digital age, but I realized that--aside from the logistical problems of sheer length--it was easier to take the pastiche of the 1920s films, and the 1980s nostalgia of the modern event film blockbuster, separately.

Basically the revelation I had yesterday was that there's so much I want to say about the history of the TRON franchise that it will literally be enough for its own chapter. Plus, I suspect they'll make good bookends to the larger project when the time comes.

So, at this point, I have one whole new 20+ page first draft of a chapter more or less finished on the former ("1920s-ness")--though I want to do a lot more with The Artist later, and do more research on the industrial histories of all three films. I also have a sinking feeling that its missing a proper conclusion. In all, there's probably at least another 10-15 pages or so there still to be written.

I also have a chapter--about as long, but less polished and generally disorganized at the moment, on TRON and what I'm calling "nostalgia in the age of transmedia storytelling." I have about as much material here in this one as in the other chapter, but I don't have anywhere near the amount of research done on TRON's paratextual universe that I will get to later. Plus, this will give me the chance eventually to revisit Fan Studies, which I wanted to do somewhere in Haunted Nerves. So its just 20 pages of thoughts about the topic more so than a first draft of a chapter, like the other one is. And I'd guess there's another 15 pages to go on this one too.

So, a lot of quality work done, even though my goals shifted during the process--Haunted Nerves is really coming into clear focus, in ways I didn't even anticipate as recently as the start of the summer. In all, I pumped out about 13K words the last couple of weeks on Haunted Nerves--mostly those two chapters but also a lot of material for a possible introductory chapter.

Bring on July--back to Paul Thomas Anderson and one last mad dash through that manuscript, or at least the last time I will be able to make any significant revisions, such as the new intro, which is the main thing. So, expect a lot about PTA here on the blog in the next month as I work in particular on bringing that project's larger goals beyond authorship into focus.

js

Read More

new intro?

I was trying to work on my chapter of the "new nostalgia film" today, but got sidetracked with an idea for a possible introduction to the book's initial chapter (I am deliberately waiting to write that last because I know I won't know what I'm trying to say overall until I finish a first draft of all the chapters).

BTW--I should also point out that I've decided, after contemplating it for a few weeks, to change the title to Haunted Nerves / Nostalgia in the Age of Digital Cinema, which seems more specific (and more marketable) than the old title. I preferred "time" for awhile because it didn't have the same negative connotation as nostalgia, and because the book's not only about nostalgia. But once I embraced the idea that my definition of nostalgia is taken largely from Jameson--and thus, "nostalgia" in the manuscript also always refers to the equally important concept of "history"--then I made peace with simpler, and perhaps more "sexy" (in that publishing sense of the word), title.

Anyway, here's a draft of what I came up with, but I'm not sure if--in the end--it will ultimately frame the work in the way I want. The postmodern angle, of course, is not yet sufficiently foregrounded, etc.:

We have always been haunted by the future. [. . .] Our sense of past time—dare I say, our nostalgia—is always a reflection of the irreducible anxieties felt in a present time which is always already fading into the future.

How to pull back against—not the lure of the past, but—the rush to the future? In 2011, a series of nostalgic cinematic love letters—The Artist, Hugo and Midnight in Paris—dominated the end-of-the year accolades amongst film critic circles and industry award shows. In their own idiosyncratic ways, all three celebrated the imagined simplicity of moviegoing in Paris in the 1920s. At the same time, though less celebrated, 2011 was also the year that saw two key shifts in cinema’s decades-long digital transition—the wide-scale industrial push both to end celluloid projection in theatrical exhibition in movie multiplexes, and to cease the production of 35mm cameras (Panavision, ARRI) altogether. At the technological dawn of the most fully realized “digital cinema” yet—where every aspect of traditional moviegoing (production, distribution, exhibition) was now quite possibly digital—we instead saw an emphatic celebration of film’s past.

If the intense juxtaposition of film’s past and cinema’s future seemed ironic at the time, it really shouldn’t have. Nostalgia is always the most intense during periods of dramatic cultural and technological upheaval, whereby the perceived reassurances of a simpler past anchor our perception of an uncertain future. Nostalgia is really about death; it’s our awareness of mortality, our sense that everything must one day end, which plants the idea within us that moments and memories lost will never come again. As a result, personal and collective (cinematic) fantasies of a past that often never existed in the first place become the only way to relive it.

Thus, it’s easy to see how the dying medium of film—imagining its own mortality in sight—would resist the inevitability of its own digital mummification by retreating back to its joyous youth (though, as everything from Wild Strawberries [1957] to Broken Flowers [2005] reminds is, there’s always as much pain in the past as there is pleasure). There is certainly something sad, even pathetic, about nostalgia here. But if we see such melancholic impulses as only as an attempt to hold onto an idealized past, we risk missing so much more. After all, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is a painful reminder that forgetting the ambivalences of the past, only to live in a perpetual present, isn’t too wise either. It seems to me that nostalgia is everywhere in the age of digital cinema—the useful question is not how to get rid of it, but what to do with it?

If nostalgia is a cultural dominant in the postmodern era—a guiding impulse to the aesthetic choices, industrial strategies and political (in)action of everyday cinematic life—we need to take its use value (as well as its dangers) more seriously. To begin, I would also point out, with a nod to the work of Svetlana Boym, that there’s a temporal paradox at the core of nostalgia—our obsession with the past is really about the future. Certainly, the notion of loss is inherent to nostalgia, the idea that there is something about the past—a lost moment, person, place—that can never be reclaimed in the present except through the ambitions of the human (and posthuman) imagination.

Yet while some forms of nostalgia disavow that absence through the unconditional love of an illusory, idealized past—refusing to entertain the idea that perhaps life wasn’t really as great as one remembers it to be—other forms embrace that same sense of loss, hoping that attempts to understand the uncertainty will retain a powerful role as one looks ahead. At its most conservative (surely, the more common kind), nostalgia is a rather unreflexive, uncritical attempt to make sense of—or, to outright avoid—the drastic cultural and technological changes ahead that one is powerless to change. More progressively, though, the acceptance of that sense of loss can allow us to reflect on the gaps and contradictions of the past, to create a critical space of reflection, in the hopes of imagining, maybe even enacting, a better future to come.

Read More

Brainstorming Haunted Nerves

“I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there.”

In the last couple years, I’ve reverted to a basic brainstorming exercise (see above) as a way to help me focus and organize larger projects. In the past, they’ve come towards the end of writing—for example, this was one of the first tasks I accomplished when I began to rewrite the introduction from scratch to Disney’s Most Notorious Film in the Spring of 2011. I’ve done it now once or twice for the Anderson project and probably will do so again in the very near future as I sit down to redo the intro for that one too.

But now I’ve thought about doing it as a preliminary process for Haunted Nerves / Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema—hence, the mad, half-arbitrary scribbling above. The whole manuscript is probably already half-written, but in fragments here and there. It lacks the self-evident structure of, for example, a director’s body of work, or the reception and industrial history of a Disney film. 

As the manuscript evolves, I've become less obsessed with defining exactly what its ultimately going to be, preferring to embrace the process. At the same time, though, I do want to touch base every few months with what I think at that moment it will become. Having written a few books now, I have faith that it will come together in the end. Plus, there's really no urgency to rush it to completion.

I’m not going to try to write a whole book introduction this afternoon. As with all blog posts, its less about declaring anything with finality and more about me “talking” aloud as I work through ideas in progress. So, I’ll unpack the heart of that diagram above—find the main rivers and search for the tributaries later.

*                                             *                                             *

I see Haunted Nerves as negotiating three deeply interlocked concepts: the historical emergence of digital cinema since the early 1980s; the ambivalence of postmodernism as the cultural dominant during that/this time; and, building from that, the centrality of nostalgia in informing both industrial practices and historical consciousness. It may help to take each separately:

Digital Cinema: If there’s a central selling point to Haunted Nerves, then it concerns another way to frame the widespread shift in film culture from analog to digital technologies. My initial research question: how do we “historicize” digital cinema, how do we historicize the present? I am concerned with several areas: cinematography, visual effects, archives, and exhibition. I’m also interested in media convergence more broadly defined, particularly as it relates to industrial practices and nostalgia, but am trying to limit my scope to cinema for practical reasons at the moment. As my thinking has evolved, I’m less interested with a sense of time within the ontology of the digital image—sort of my first “postmodern” approach to the topic (as in, a new articulation of the simulacrum, a copy without an original, etc.). I’m still concerned with that question of indexicality—the digital’s ontological difference from the direct light traces which marked film in the age of mechanical reproduction, and its attendant cultural and aesthetic automatisms (as someone like DN Rodowick has already articulated), and more interested in how that simulacric logic is symptomatic of deeper issues of im/materiality—industrially and culturally—regarding a decreasing sense of historical consciousness in cinema’s production, distribution and reception.

Postmodernism: The idea of “historical consciousness” links all three concepts, and my use of the term is rooted largely in Fredric Jameson’s reading of the cultural logic of postmodernism—how to historicize a culture obsessed with the perpetual present of the (now digital) simulacrum. David Harvey’s work, I keep reminding myself, is also worth revisiting. Jameson’s own account—twenty-plus years ago of the social and historical use-value of computers—is highly instructive despite its simplistic misunderstanding of the new medium’s potential in hindsight. The connection between postmodernism and digital cinema has already been repeatedly noted by scholars such as Philip Rosen, Steven Shaviro, Nicholas Rombes, and so forth. But it seems to me that the point is often under-developed, perhaps because the “popularity” of postmodernism itself faded right as discourses on digital cinema emerged. Often times, the parallel between the two is presented as either self-evident or as inadequate, but is otherwise neglected. Of course, the question remains: how do I define (use) “postmodernism”?

Nostalgia: Building on Jameson’s definition of nostalgia (and to a lesser degree affect) in the postmodern era—which has in many ways been my project since the first year in grad school—is really the anchoring to the entire project at the moment. For Jameson, personal and collective nostalgia was a substitute for a dialectical understanding of history. This links up to the oft-proclaimed “end of history” narratives that framed both progressive and reactionary accounts of postmodernism in the 1990s (I may finally get a chance to cite Derrida!). History matters here not just to “remember the past” in some generic way, but because it reflects profound changes in the cultural logic of “late” capitalism in general, and the histories of post-Fordist Hollywood in particular. Both become obscured by a cultural obsession with nostalgia. Yet, at the same time, I’m not sure we cannot get “outside” nostalgia either--this may ultimately be the heart of the project. I hope to draw more on the work of figures such as Richard Dyer and Svetlana Boym, which I regret not doing more with in Disney’s Most Notorious Film, to create a space for nostalgia’s quirks and contradictions—for what Boym's called “reflexive” as well as “restorative” forms of nostalgia. If we accept, as Jameson argued, that nostalgia has in a sense replaced history in the current moment, how might that fatalism be problematized to create a space for critical thought (or ambivalent resistance)?

So, there are some broad sketches of the project at the moment, which is very much by design. As I noted above, probably more than half the project is already written at the moment, but I’m not going to worry about nailing down the introduction until I’ve finished all the chapters and know for sure how every detail will fit. One of the things too that I learned from the last two books is not to worry too much about laying it all out in advance, especially since it will all get rewritten in the end anyway. Blogging about this gets me excited about Haunted Nerves again, and I just have to make sure nothing kills the momentum.

Read More

Prometheus

My piece on Prometheus is up over at Antenna. I originally wrote it last weekend for this blog, but thought it might fit well over there. So, anyway, its not as timely as it was, but still worth checking out.

Read More

catalog debut

Read More

done

This afternoon, I finally finished the last bit of work--indexing--for Disney's Most Notorious Film. See you in December, old friend.

Friday, Prometheus.

Next week, starting another round on Blossoms and Blood. Proofreading and a new-ish introduction. The whole final manuscript is due in at the end of July.

Read More