APCS Spring 2018 Catalogue

Dossier: New Approaches in Moving-Image Studies
Compiled by Laura U. Marks

I'm delighted to present the best essays from an especially thrilling semester. Powerful writing, original insights!

David Avelino's "Vision in the Desiring-Machine" beautifully analyzes the disruptive, intense, and queer desiring-image (after Gilles Deleuze and Nick Davis) in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, and Derek Jarman's Blue, perceptively accounting for how the film’s materiality takes part in the diffuseness of  desire.

Sarah Bakke, in "This is the Revelatory Costume: Surface, Texture, and Authentic Self," writes with great perception on the performative power of surfaces and interfaces, as well as the power of people to perform their desired selves into being (drawing on Giuliana Bruno and Ilona Hongisto), in Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens and Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine.

Bijan Karim, in "Cinema of Process," offers a manifesto for process cinema (drawing on a forthcoming essay by me), articulately arguing that life is process and film can show it, with a sensitive formal analysis of Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust.

Riley O'Neill's "Liquid, Not Gas: The Tangible Reflections of Guadalcanal Requiem" evocatively analyzes Nam June Paik’s collage-style documentary Guadalcanal Requiem, making this rare work available to readers through sensitive description that focuses on the haptic materiality of the analog video medium.

Will Romines, in "Cinema as Revolution: Innervation, Modernity, and the Senses," wrestles Jonathan Beller's gloomy view of modern cinema to argue that  contemporary cinema can generate collective innervation among its viewers, drawing on Benjamin's concept (via Miriam Hansen), as well as Patricia Pisters' rereading of Eisenstein in terms of mirror-touch synaesthesia.

Hannah Wheatley, in "Anarchy in Comedy: The Work of Eric Andre," is inspired to bring Siegfried Kracauer and Hito Steyerl to The Eric Andre Show, arguing forcefully that the low-res anarchy of Andre's show creatively hastens the fallen world's self-destruction.

Logan Williams, in "Following Her on Instagram: Shifting Paradigms in Hollywood Film Aesthetics," argues that Instagram is leveling Hollywood's playing field and transforming cinematic aesthetics, with a sophisticated media analysis focusing on Sean Baker's The Florida Project.

Qiui Wu, "The Double Projections of Desire and Fear In the Artificial Membrane of Cinema," proposes a fantastically original and compelling "glove theory" of cinema as a virtual epidermal contact that relies on dynamics of desire and fear. Complete with diagrams.

– Laura U. Marks

All rights reserved. Copyright held by the authors and Simon Fraser University.