De-Westernizing Film Studies

Saer Maty Ba, Will Higbee, Saer Maty Ba, Will Higbee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415687843
• eBook ISBN: 9781136502514
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on 'Western' ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of 'the West and the rest' in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures 'connect' globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study.

The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics.

Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saër Maty Bâ, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones

Part I
(Dis-)Continuities of the cinematic imaginary

(Non-)representation, discourse, and theory

1
Imag(in)ing the universe

Cosmos, otherness, and cinema

Edward George and Anna Piva(Flow Motion)

The closing of the frontier and the beginnings of American cinema

In 1790 the population of the United States of America was just over 3 million, mostly concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard. Indigenes of the First Nation dominated the landscape as they had done for thousands of years. White settlements extended no more than a few hundred miles (Porter et al. 1890: xix). Within a hundred years settlers had run out of spaces to claim. The American frontier, the line of movement that marked their growing presence – 3,200 miles long in 1790 (Turner 1921: xix) – had reached its limit.

The Bureau of the Census’s Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890 announced that the idea of a frontier had reached the end of the line; that the frontier line had in fact been broken and didn’t really mean anything anymore, because American settlers were, more or less, all over the continent.

The dissolution and transformation of the (frontier) line – from a (border) line of movement into regions of gradually cohering, opaque sentient clusters of whiteness, an opacity of settler presences whose linearity is prescribed by its national borders – is itself bordered by inventions that transformed moving pictures into mass entertainment: significantly, the Edison Company’s Kinetograph motor-powered motion picture camera of 1881 and its Kinetoscope film projector in 1891, patented in 1897. America’s first film production studio, Edison’s Kinetographic Theatre, opens in February 1893; the country’s first commercial movie theatre, the Kinetoscope Parlour, opens on Broadway two months later.

The fading of the frontier line coincides with the appearance of the Western landscape, in the cinematic frame, in the urban landscape. Early cinema provides a technology of nostalgia. Contained within its evocation of the frontier, distinctions between fiction, non-fiction, and meta-fiction are casualties of its preoccupation with performance and re-enactment: vanquished by settlement, the indigene returns. A fabrication of (cinematic) light, an anomaly of whiteness (a trick of forgetting), he is now the Indian, other than himself in name alone, condemned by light to return, and return again: as ethnographic display (Esquimaux Village [Edison, 1901]), as sexual threat, as figure of recurrent fantasies of recent conquest (Sioux Ghost Dance [Edison, 1894]).

The indigene returns as a figure of mimesis, a cinematic extension of minstrel theatre’s tradition of masking¹ (of something terrible that has happened, will happen, here, if not there, to you the Negro, you the Indian, and, perhaps, even you …) and make believe (because something awful has not happened; not to you, the Indian, the Negro…).

Beneath and above the clouds: new frontiers

The emergence, the invention, of the Indian as the Other of American cinema, coincident with the last great act of land divestment (the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, by which around 90 million acres of Native American land became the property of white Americans) marks the return of the indigene as a trick of the darkness (a nightmare figure of the frontier imagination, haunting the darkness of the plains, invading the dreams of the settler, forever threatening to halt the movement and destroy the line of settlement), and marks also the emergence of the frontier as a textual space of remembrance and forgetting.

The frontier as mnemonic trope finds its first comprehensive expression in Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History (1921), an anthology of texts written by Turner between 1893 and 1918. For Turner, the frontier is a mobile space in which the conditions of a distinctly white male European American identity are created, a physical space whose closure signaled the end of what Catherine Gouge calls “a frontier ‘of mind’ – a fear of loss of an imaginative space that could rhetorically and conceptually structure American nationalism” (Gouge 2007: 1).

The frontier as a spatial metaphor is kept alive through political discourse. Nineteen thirty-two presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt evokes the frontier as a negation – a barely existent space, no longer a viable alternative for the victims of the Depression (Roosevelt 1932: 6). For President Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, a “new frontier” line borders a space wholly different to the Western lands, to be conquered by “men whose hearts are aflame with the extraordinary beauty of the scientific, artistic and spiritual wealth now before us” (Wallace 1934: 277).

In Science, The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President (July 1945), a document shaped by correspondence between Roosevelt and Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the lands beyond Wallace’s new frontier would be secured by the corporate and academic receipt of state funding for an agency for “civilian initiated and civilian controlled military research,” to “conduct long-range scientific research on the Services’ research on the improvement of existing weapons” (Bush 1945: 25).

In 1944, in a letter to Bush, Roosevelt wrote: “New frontiers of the mind are before us” (Bush 1945: 4). Fast forward to 1961 and John F. Kennedy’s Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs: space is the new frontier…

Cosmos, space of colonial fantasy

American cinema begins with the figure of the Indian. The film with which Edison premiered his new invention, the Kinetoscope, at the Chicago Columbian World Exposition of 1893, is none other than Hopi Snake Dance (Edison, 1893). The movie with which Hollywood announces itself to the world is The Squaw Man (DeMille, 1914).

The repressed memory of the barbarism of settlement returns in American cinema as something similar to and other than itself. The body of American cinema’s first Other, the Indian (first figure of American cinema’s unconscious), returns as a spatial matrix (an arrangement of light, history, memory, darkness, silence, technology).

Even in the absence of the Indian, this matrix demarcates the space of subsequent figurations of Otherness, providing the figure of the pioneer with his ontological counterpoint. The body and the land of the Indian serve as the pioneer’s projection screen of forgetting: something terrible did not happen here.

Greg Grewell argues that “Underlying most science fiction plots is the colonial narrative, whether or not readers and viewers of science fiction readily recognize it” (2001: 4). American cinema’s narrative of spatial colonization begins with the figure (of flesh and fantasy) and the lands (as phantasmatic space, geophysical space) of the Native American. Its narrative of extra terrestrial space colonization could be said to begin with the transposition of the space of the frontier from the Western lands into the spaces of science fiction. Mascot Pictures’ series Phantom Empire (Brower and Eason, 1935) was the first to merge the western with science fiction: Universal Studios’ Flash Gordon series (Stephani, 1936) inaugurates America’s projection of its pioneering adventurer, the frontiersman of the nineteenth century, into the cosmos in the figure of Alex Raymond’s Euro-American hero, the comic book descendant of American science fiction’s first colonizing hero, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars (1912).

Clifford Vaughan’s Wagnerian score for Flash Gordon (1936) set the emotional and historical tone for the eponymous hero’s adventures (and for the future use of orchestral music in science-fiction cinema). Flash Gordon begins with a martial planet ruled by a despotic Asian, on collision with Earth; the fantasy of the colonizer under threat of destruction from an aggressive, colonizing force could be said to have one of its cinematic beginnings here.

The figure of American cinema’s first Other returns, recurrently, in the image of another, then another, Other. We could trace the figure of Ming the Merciless up and down a metonymic chain of inhuman non-whiteness: backward, to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu in 1913, forward, to the Red Mongols of the first Buck Rogers comic strip in 1929 (“Half breeds!” yells Buck’s girlfriend, blasting a Mongol from the sky), and further forward, to Ridley Scott and H. R. Geiger’s, nameless, un-white, inhuman non-human, alien (Alien [Scott, 1979]).

Always different, always the same, the Other announces the settler’s re-visioning, his/her return, to the space of the founding drama (the founding trauma) of the violent Othering of the body and space of the indigene, foretold by the first delineation of the frontier line.

Perhaps the trauma is mutual: like the European colonizer, the Euro-American settler is condemned to configure as space of fantasy (always different, always the same) the space of trauma prefigured by the absent Indian, by the all but invisible indigene. The Euro-American imagines himself/herself as the about to be (but never) colonized.

The frontier, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (Turner 1893: 5), the founding space of the formation of Euro-American identity, is never final, never closed.

The nature of the frontier changes over time: the disappearance of the land frontier is superseded by the appearance of “spiritual and mental frontiers yet to be conquered” (Wallace 1934: 271–273). The original trauma, reanimated as metonym for that which cannot be contained by the retelling of the frontier narrative, presents not so much new openings as endless revisitations of that which cinema (still) cannot (fully) yet speak.

The endless cosmos, never an end in itself, presents an opening, in the darkness of space, onto the interior of an ongoing national-racial project; “In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race” (Turner 1914: 301).

Here, high above the clouds, there is always savagery, always civilization, always a wilderness, a new world, in which something of the past – an obliterative accretion of incidents and events of settler violence, a silencing, beneath the silence of silent cinema, beneath the noise of sound cinema, of that which must remain out of the frame. The massacre of the Ghost Dance movement at Wounded Knee in the winter of 1890 will not begin to haunt the cinematic frame until long after all concerned in the making of Sioux Ghost Dance (Edison, 1894) are themselves ghosts.

In 1924 Native Americans were granted citizenship of the USA. In 1931, the year of Edison’s death, they were still barred from voting. American cinema grants the indigene a return as a matrix of conquest and forgetting, as some thing, some time, some place – a kingdom beneath the ground in Phantom Empire, a city in the sky in Flash Gordon – as some event, here, in living memory in 1894, or there, a “long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” (Star Wars [Lucas, 1977]).

It does this on the condition that the indigene, as matrix of remembrance, announces themselves as other than themselves, if at all. And yet, in his/her absence, the indigene, as matrix of trauma, haunts, even now, this metaphor of settlement and identity formation, this grapheme, this line of movement (settler movement, camera movement; line of migration, line of thought, arc of narrative) that is the frontier.

Dream space, passive space, empty space…

With its first forays into outer space, American cinema reduces the size of the universe as it inaugurates its Othering – the universe, in diegetic space, is a tiny space in which “the race” renews its founding settler tropes without fear of disappearing into the vast darkness between the stars. No more (or less) alien than the wilderness beneath the earth’s atmosphere, the universe, in diegetic space, is a domestic space, a space-in-waiting for Euro-American (self-)discovery, a clearing for an exceptionalism-to-come.

American cinema arrives in outer space after the French and the Soviets; A Trip to the Moon (Méliès, 1902) and Aelita, Queen of Mars (Protazanov, 1924) are among the earliest examples from those two countries.

There is a shared perception in these examples of early, silent cinema, an evocation of the universe as something with few properties of its own.

The universe is a space in a dream: the Mars of Protazanov’s dream-spaces form a counterpoint to the material realities of building Communism. It is a space of fantasy: in A Trip to the Moon, a magician-director’s moon finds its colonial correlative in the moon’s spear wielding indigenes, the Selenites, a shoe-in as much for the Others of Jules Verne’s and Orson Welles’s worlds as the spear wielding sub-humans of the colonial imagination. The contents of the universe are as anthropomorphemes; the sun, the moon, and the stars, beyond their functions as luminous markers of the expanded scale on which the most familiar of dramas could be performed, eternally, throughout infinity, are as passive and inert as the darkness between them.

In a later silent movie, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929), the emptiness of space is a space of convergence of astronomical and literary-cinematic speculation: “The day will come when a manned rocket will fly to the moon,” reads the intertitle proclamation of the film’s scientist, Professor Manfeldt. And in 1929, or 1924, or 1902, the moon would never have been closer or brighter than in a movie theatre, in whose darkness planet Earth would be viewed in its entirety for the first time, before disappearing into the darkness of diegetic space, viewed from the window of a ro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: De-Westernizing film studies
• PART I (Dis-)Continuities of the cinematic imaginary: (Non-)representation, discourse, and theory
• PART II Narrating the (trans)nation, region, and community from non-Western perspectives
• PART III New (dis-)continuities from “within” the West
• PART IV Interviews
• Index