Lisa Cartwright

Film and the digital in visual studies: film studies in the era of convergence:

This article examines how the convergence of various media impacts upon the relations between film studies and visual studies. The questions raised are: How did visual studies emerge as a discipline with film studies in its purview? How does the digital, an aspect of late 20th-century visual culture which emerged roughly simultaneously with visual studies, figure into the field? What happens when film studies is embedded in or combined with visual studies? In acknowledging that visual studies is an outcome of and a response to the conditions of media convergence, this article ends by offering a sense of how questions around optical virtuality and medical imaging can make sense of the effects that media convergence is having on the conditions of experience and subjectivity within modernity.

Emergencies of Survival’: Moral Spectatorship and the ‘New Vision of the Child’ in Postwar Child Psychoanalysis

Drawing on the writings of Luc Boltanski on moral spectatorship and a change to Boltanski’s politics in response to images of distant suffering, this article considers a visual turn in psychoanalysis around the period of the Second World War, coincident with the emergence of a new international vision of the child as an entity requiring special protections beyond the purview of the state. Looking beyond the familiar example of child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, this article considers the visual techniques of RenÈ Spitz, a psychoanalyst internationally recognized for his work with institutionalized infants who failed physically and psychically to thrive and survive despite adequate nutrition and health care, due to lack of consistent caregiving. The article describes Spitz’s research films which he turned into media texts to make social interventions internationally in institutional childcare practice and policy after the war through venues including the WHO. His work is one of numerous instances of a visual child psychoanalysis (including Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, John Bowlby and James Robertson, Margaret Mahler, and Thelma Fraiberg) in which child psychoanalysts used film and visual techniques to exert influence on international child policy and institutional reform.

Obama and Shepard Fairey: The Copy and Political Iconography in the Age of the Demake

Blumenthal, Sidney (2007) ‘From Norman Rockwell to Abu Ghraib’, Salon.com, 26 April. URL (consulted 6 June 2009): http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/ 2007/04/26/torture_policy/index.html Chozick, Amy and Crow, Kelly (2009) ‘Changing the Art on the White House Walls’, Wall Street Journal, 22 May. Haberman, Clyde (1998) ‘NYC: Red Sales in the Sunset of the Left’, New York Times, 5 May. Kennedy, Randy (2009) ‘Obama’s Face (That’s Him?) Rules the Web’, New York Times, 30 May. URL (consulted 6 June 2009): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/arts/ design/31pain.html?_r=1 Sturken, Marita (2007) Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

African Kaposi's sarcoma in the light of global AIDS: antiblackness and viral visibility.

Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of antiblackness and intersectionality and the concept of viral visibility, this essay attends to the considerable archive of research about endemic Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) in sub-Saharan Africa accrued during the mid-20th century. This body of data was inexplicably overlooked in Western research into KS during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, during which period European and Mediterranean KS cases were most often cited as precedents despite the volume of African data available. This paper returns to the research on KS conducted in Africa during the colonial and postcolonial period to consider visibility, racial erasure, and discourses of global epidemiology, suggesting that the dynamics of medical research on HIV/AIDS have proceeded according to a tacit paradigm of antiblackness manifest in multiple exclusions of Africa from global health agendas—most recently the exclusion of the region from antiretroviral (ARV) drug therapy during the first decades of the treatment’s availability. During that decade KS all but disappeared among people with access to ARV therapy while KS became even more prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, escalating along with HIV.

The Hands of the Animator: Rotoscopic Projection, Condensation, and Repetition Automatism in the Fleischer Apparatus

This article is concerned with the affective relationship among bodies and film technologies in the process of building and using filmmaking instruments, taking as its object the early Rotoscope, a device patented by the legendary American animator Max Fleischer that entailed the projection of live-action film for use as a template in the drawing of animated figures, to which the live-action trace was thought to impart life-like, normative patterns of movement. Drawing from media archaeology, psychoanalytic theories of repetition, projection, and condensation, and object relations theory, this article offers an interpretation of some of the kinds of psychic interactions offered in animated film through traces of the Rotoscope’s production history found in the device’s patent drawings, its patent embodiments, and its published family legend. It is proposed that the device was the locus of a collective fraternal performance, serving as a shared ground for an array of condensations and displacements and enactments of repetition compulsion among the multiple bodies engaged in the production of the device, as well as among the multiple animated and live-action film bodies that crossed its production screens and patent pages. One objective of this article is to shift the interpretive and analytic focus in film studies from the filmstrip and the projected screen image to the relationship between bodies and technologies in the experience of making films, and making the filmic apparatus. A secondary objective of this article is to suggest that the approach to bodily movement embedded in the design of the Rotoscope was hardly normative. The device offered a means to stretch and distort both norms and stereotypes of human expression through movement. The rotoscoped body sometimes performed in ways that pushed the limits of viewer expectations about how a given body will, or should, move, in space or across the screen.

Introduction: Affect at the Limits of Photography:

This themed issue, inspired by the University of California Humanities Research Institute’s ‘Feeling Photography: a Workshop on Affect and Transmedia,’ investigates the affective dimensions of photography through articles that consider photography as a set of practices ranging from camerawork to curating, and including encounters between artists, subjects, viewers, and keepers of the image. By engaging with a variety of theories of affect in the study of a range of photographic objects and projects, the articles contained in this issue collectively expand the landscape of what might be called ‘affective photography studies’, offering new approaches and broadening the focus on photography to include its constitutive and adjacent social practices, such as curating.

On the Face of the Photograph, and the Moving Image: Geopolitical Affect in the Speculative Landscapes of Connie Samaras

This article introduces the concept of geopolitical affect in landscape photography and video, focusing on two series by the US artist Connie Samaras: V.A.L.I.S. (2004-5) and Edge of Twilight (2011–2018). The article draws on the cybernetic affect theory of the mid-century US psychologist Silvan S Tomkins as well as the artist’s own concept of speculative landscape and critique of identity politics to consider surface, movement, and the face in landscape photography. As well, a photographic and audiovisual theory of geopolitical drive and affect, based on the work of Tomkins, is proposed.

Learning From Philadelphia: Topographies of HIV/AIDS Media Assemblages

ABSTRACT For this contribution to the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author employs an array of public health and popular media texts (especially Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia) to challenge the construction and reconstruction of HIV-positive bodies as sites of bioethical concern. In outlining notions of “digital restoration,” the author argues that there has been of late a remapping of the first decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through media projects assembled from archived materials. Accordingly, the author suggests that in the first decades of the 2000s, we have witnessed a media-archaeological turn, whereby old materials have been reassembled for commemorative purposes that oftentimes perform a reshaping of the topography of the first decade of the AIDS pandemic.