Karen Beckman

Animating film theory

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously. Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Herve Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahashi

Telescopes, Transparency, and Torture: Trevor Paglen and the Politics of Exposure

At a moment when a number of museums are either planning or exhibiting retrospectives of the politicized art that emerged from the feminist and sexual-liberation movements of the second half of the twentieth century, potentially framing this art of social transformation as a curio of the past, it is timely to ask how artists and art historians understand the relationship between art and politics today. Furthermore, given that representation in general and photography in particular played central roles in the art associated with these movements, we also need to consider whether photography continues to hold a privileged place in the contemporary political-art landscape.

Animation on Trial

This article first considers Kota Ezawa’s video installation, The Simpson Verdict within the broader context of the rising interest in animation on the contemporary art landscape. After exploring three trends within this proliferation of artists’ animation – works that animate moments from film history, works that animate ‘reality’, and works that use popular media such as cartoons, television and video games as source material, this article examines the difference between Ezawa’s work, which re-draws already overexposed live footage, and those documentaries that use animation as a supplementary visual tool when live footage does not and/or could not exist.