Interaction
February 15, 2006
A vision realized
Photo:
L.A. Cicero |
"People were dreaming of cinema long ago," says Pavle Levi, an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History. The camera obscura, a device for creating images that centuries later would give its name to a prestigious film studies journal, appeared in ancient China and then in ancient Greece. Much later, in early modern Europe, optics became a source of entertainment; a "magic lantern" presented in 1659 was perhaps cinema's first ancestor.
In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of Leland Stanford's galloping horses marked the beginning of a new revolution in representation. His images' direct progeny, film, would become the definitive cultural form of the 20th century.
Today people no longer dream of cinema. They study it.
When the first film studies programs began appearing, they generally were housed in literature departments. Movies, after all, conveyed stories, and the art and theory of criticizing narratives on paper were, it was thought, easily transferable to narratives on a screen.
In the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan's ideas about the massaging influence of the "mass media" gave new prominence to the technology of film, and the subject drifted into media and communication departments.
That is where it has resided at Stanford until now. The announcement last fall of the university's born-again Film and Media Studies Program, housed in the Department of Art and Art History, signaled not only the start of an exciting curriculum and degree program but the resolution of a disciplinary journey.
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Scott Bukatman |
Film is generally studied in two ways, said Associate Professor Scott Bukatman, the director of undergraduate studies for the program: as an art in and of itself (as in "the art of Fellini") or as the bearer of ideology. The name "Film and Media Studies" encompasses both the artistic and the cultural meanings of the medium, he said, acknowledging that film can be studied as an art form or, for example, as a vehicle of ideas about gender, race or class.
But it cannot be studied as an on-screen version of literature, Bukatman said. "Film is different. You can't reproduce film like you can reproduce a quotation or a painting. It's 'something else,' and that something else is more fundamental than narrative." And, he pointed out, "there are also non-narrative aspects of film."
It's not an easy problem figuring out the nature of the beast, though students, he said, understand clearly that the muse required to produce a poem is a different creature than that required to produce a film.
"We're not inventing a discipline," said Levi, Bukatman's junior colleague. "Film studies is already a discipline, and it's interdisciplinary. That's a key point. It's not simply something mapped across other disciplines. It has an autonomy and systems of study of its own.
"I like that film studies at Stanford will be in art," he said. "In many schools, art and art history are separate. Here they coexist, which is the most productive symbiotic relationship. Film studies will have two components—film studies and filmmaking; one academic, the other production. It's a smaller version of the division between art and art history. So it's a great, creative laboratory."
In the new program, a terminal two-year Master of Fine Arts degree will replace the existing master's degree, which was essentially about production. The M.F.A. will be more academic, though practice will never be out of the picture. Aesthetics, technology and social analysis will all have a place. There also will be a new undergraduate film studies major (with various tracks) and a minor, and doctoral students from Art and Art History will be able to concentrate on film (http://art.stanford.edu/graduate.php?content=film).
"Stanford is a latecomer [to film studies], but that can be an advantage," said Levi, whose first book is on the relationship of aesthetics, ideology and ethnicity in the cinema of the former Yugoslavia. "We want to be cutting-edge. So we have a dual task: respecting the past and charting new ground."
At present there are four faculty members in the program: Director Kristine Samuelson, Bukatman, Levi and Jan Krawitz, a documentary filmmaker who will join Samuelson in moving from Communication to Art next fall. They are conducting a search for a junior specialist in Asian cinema; Samuelson hopes that after that, they can hire a film production instructor and then a senior scholar to lead the program once she steps down in three years.
The field of film studies in a way is suffering from its own success. Many classes in humanities and social sciences departments have at one time or another featured films. Partly that may be because it's an easy bet students will pay closer attention, but it also reflects the belief that everyone figures they can "watch" films and understand what they're seeing. What's to study?
Such assumptions on the part of nonexperts are of some concern to the new program's leaders.
"There are lots of intersections" with other fields, "but there also must be limits," Samuelson said. "We have to embrace faculty who teach film, but it can get complicated." The new program therefore will include a rigorous core series taught by film studies faculty. "We have to delicately but clearly establish the parameters," she said.
In Levi's view, "People in other departments study film, and that's fine. We want to encourage that. But it must be mutual, and we must have autonomy. Inversely, I could teach a course in a literature department, but the course pertains to them. That's the dynamic that has to be maintained."
The ubiquity of film in curricula and conferences is, then, good news and bad news. The emergence of "visual studies" and "cultural studies" tacitly or explicitly recognizes and salutes film's key position in modernity, but at the same time these new fields can overlook film's specificity. They juxtapose the textual, the concrete and the conceptual; they link aesthetic and material concerns, art and commerce, the viewer and the viewed. The overwhelming importance of Michel Foucault's writings in the past few decades has made it virtually impossible to disengage looking/seeing from social power or to overlook the performative nature of social acts. Walter Benjamin, a major reference point in literary studies, wrote in his famous 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," that film was different from all other art forms because of its reproducible nature and its subsequent loss of aura. That meant that spectators saw and understood film differently from the way they saw and understood art forms displayed in the hallowed ground of museums. Audiences were "politicized," Benjamin said, as artistic creation ceased being regarded as magical and as reception of images was widely and simultaneously shared.
So, literature, history and theory are paying attention to visual objects in a way they never did before. Nonetheless, film still sits apart. As Bukatman points out, it's not just a visual art. There's sound, too.
"I don't like what happened," Levi said, referring to film studies' movement toward cultural studies. "Why study film? You can study literature and film and furniture, for that matter, and see them all as cultural objects, but then it's not about film anymore."
Bukatman's work exemplifies how film studies can be both rigorously about film and at the same time about many other things. Indeed, the list of his research interests might make other academics realize with a jolt that other people have more fun than they do. Bukatman lately has been studying superheroes and comics, phenomena that are flamboyant, urban, literally in-your-face. He's also interested in performance, be it musicals, comics or pornography, and the links between technology, human perception and bodily experience.
Science fiction, for him, is a place where all these things blend, where audiences are forced to constantly examine themselves, their perspective and their agency. In his brief and articulate introduction to the British Film Institute's book on the film Blade Runner, Bukatman remarked that "through the language, iconography and narration of science fiction, the shock of the new is aestheticised and examined." The relationship between us and the performer, in other words, becomes a means for evaluating our world, its complexity and development. The rules of engagement with on-screen utopias and dystopias do not allow for passivity.
In November it was Bukatman's pleasure to introduce Linda Williams, an acclaimed film scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, who was the Marta Sutton Weeks Distinguished Visitor at the Humanities Center (http://shc.stanford.edu/events/lindawilliams_0506.htm). Williams has written extensively on race, sexuality and pornography; she manages to combine intellectual rigor with both the appeal and the topicality that befits her subject matter. Bukatman's opening remarks and Williams' subsequent lectures and seminars pointed to their field's range. He spoke admiringly about the fact that her work constantly makes unexpected connections—between musicals and pornography, for example, or between race and melodrama—and her talk that evening, about the ins and outs of on-screen kissing, proved him right.
Photo: L.A. Cicero
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On the production end, and for something completely different, take the work of Samuelson, an independent film producer. Last June she produced a project called "Point 25," named for the quarter-second time delay of a fast Internet connection between Stockholm and Stanford. Using a two-screen video installation she designed, two musicians at each of those sites played in full sight (and sound) of each other and of their respective audiences. The event in the "cyber concert hall" was followed by a cyber reception, which at this end was held at Wallenberg Hall (http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/july7/globejam-77.html). Samuelson also collaborates with Media X (http://mediax.stanford.edu/) and with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/).
As Samuelson's and others' work makes evident, if there's something not quite right about stuffing film into "visual studies," there's also a problem with the term "film studies" itself, which is that most moving images we see today aren't film at all; they're digital. "The movies" today are not necessarily in a theater; rather, images are everywhere, and they "move" with us on electronic devices in our pockets and purses.
So, if centuries ago people dreamed of cinema, today they dream of a multitude of portable, adaptable, interactive screen images.
"We need to define what we study and what we don't," Levi said. "We live in a completely image-saturated society, and film studies has to adapt itself. That's the good side of the shift. Film scholars are well equipped to address these expanded forms of moving images."
In exactly that vein, Bukatman, in his Blade Runner essay, commented on "the emergence of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen," that is, the construction "of a new position from which humans could interface with the global, yet hidden, realm of data circulation."
The curator for the new film studies program is Henry Lowood, co-director of the Stanford Humanities Lab and curator of the Germanic and History of Science and Technology collections at Stanford University Libraries. Lowood has a good head start as curator of the film studies collection, Bukatman said, because Stanford has an excellent collection of films and interactive software and games.
Lowood also knows a thing or two about Bukatman's interest in subjectivity and screens. He co-directs (with Tim Lenoir, formerly of the History Department) "How They Got Game," a many-limbed project at the Humanities Lab about video games (http://shl.stanford.edu/research/how_they_got_game.html). Among its spin-offs was an exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco called "Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts" (http://www.ybca.org/inside/press/press03/games.html).
Where Lowood shares common ground with many colleagues in film studies is in his interest in the creative interaction of players (or performers), technology and spectators. In October 2004 he was a referee at the World Cyber Games in San Francisco (which drew a mere 5,000 viewers; in their home, Korea, they attract 100,000 people over three days, he said). Such a spectacle, he said, calls into question the meaning of "performer" and "audience," as the people in the stands, most of them young men, are watching enlarged screens depicting exactly what the player, or performer, is seeing.
Lowood teaches a course called History of Computer Game Design, taken mostly by students from Computer Science or the Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities honors program (http://www.stanford.edu/class/sts145/). He is less interested in game development than in game participation, and the issues raised in his classes include matters such as: How does the structure of a game propel the narrative? Why have games been treated as if they were linear, authored media? To what degree are players consumers or producers? And what sort of community do they create?
Those are all questions that one could imagine being echoed, or at least adapted, in the context of film studies. Indeed, Lowood drew a close comparison. "Game studies means research on game development and the social and cultural contexts of digital games," he said. "The relationship between the development and study of games is similar to art versus art history," or between filmmaking and film studies.
The film studies program will form a vital part of Stanford's fourth multidisciplinary initiative, devoted to arts and creativity, which is being spearheaded by Bryan Wolf of the Art and Art History Department and Jonathan Berger of the Music Department.
But, as with everything else at Stanford, space and money are issues. The latter was alleviated somewhat when alumnus and film director Jay Roach gave $1 million in flexible endowment for the program, which was matched by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
As for space, for the past several years there has been talk of concentrating Stanford's various arts program in one place to create an "arts district" adjacent to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts. Samuelson believes strongly that studio art, art history, film and design (including the School of Engineering's new Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) need to be in the same place. Like people at the Medical School or the Engineering School or any other academic site where new disciplinary partnerships are being forged, she recognizes that proximity is key.
According to Mona Duggan, development director for the initiative, who also is the Cantor Center's associate director, the plan is to relocate the Art and Art History Department from the Cummings Art Building to the old anatomy buildings near the museum. The "art to anatomy" undertaking, estimated to cost some $40 million, will be presented to the Board of Trustees this year. Ideally, the arts district will include classroom and lecture space, an auditorium, state-of-the-art technology for teaching and research, filmmaking and art studios, screening rooms and labs.
While the new buildings would be fantastic, of course, Bukatman says he no longer thinks they're essential at the moment. The program can start without them. Indeed, it has. When he introduced Williams at the Humanities Center, saying he was doing so on behalf of the "Film Studies Program in the Art and Art History Department," he stopped, amazed at what he had just said. "I would never have believed I'd ever be saying those words together," he explained.
Levi, who was hired last year specifically to help get the program going, is equally amazed. "What I love most about Stanford is that from my first day here, there was an insistence on multidisciplinarity," he said. "Film studies can thrive here. We're positioning ourselves in the best possible way."