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Benita Lehmann

Jennifer Peedom's Mountain as a City Symphony

This article explores Jennifer Peedom’s film Mountain (2017) through the lens of the city symphony in view of structural, aesthetic, and thematic parallels between mountain and city symphony films. Analyzing Mountain in the generic context of the city symphony film draws attention to the deep structural links between urban centers and mountains, and their shared technological and urban infrastructures. This appraoch also harnesses the potential of film studies to revise dominant perceptions of mountains and can help viewers understand mountains as places of density and as dense networks that are developed by technological infrastructure and informed by dense technological, social, and cultural networks. By drawing on media ecology, actor-network theory, and media archeology, I will show that, similar to city symphonies, Mountain explores collective networks beyond the human realm to shed light on mountains as cultural spaces, geological manifestations, and eco-social realities. In so doing, Mountain tries to help humans to come to terms with the deep temporalities of alpine spaces and their technological mediations.

Klaus Rieser

First-Person Documentary Film and Self-Life Narration

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution:

My contribution to this forum on life writing contemplates life narrative practices in documentary film and proposes two theses that also bear relevance for other fields and media under discussion here. Firstly, it problematizes the concepts of autobiography and life writing for their applicability to (documentary) film, arguing with Alisa Lebow for a notion of "first person film."^[1] Secondly, it contends that representations of the self in documentary film are more appropriately comprehended as a discourse rather than a genre.

Johannes Vith

Violent Landscapes: James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986)

While serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator's upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred.

This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture.

Alexandra Hauke

Black Im/Mobilization, Critical Race Horror, and the New Jim Crow in Jordan Peele's Get Out

In the United States, people of color are not allowed to move around freely in spatial or social terms. Confronted with the everyday horrors of racial segregation, discrimination, and the legacies of slavery, African Americans continue to be excluded from opportunities of upward mobility and experience cultural displacement based on the immobilizing practices of what Michelle Alexander calls "the New Jim Crow." On-screen representations of Black individuals in the horror genre mirror this racial(ized) ideology. Many earlier horror films, texts Isabel Cristina Pinedo classifies as "race horror," mark them as ferocious monsters who must be villainized, imprisoned, or murdered and thus subscribe to a logic of race as the root of American fears. Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out (2017) provides a counter-argument, depicting racism as the primary horror in American (popular) culture by investing in the decolonizing strategies of critical race theory to uncover the very real horrors of the prison industrial complex, commodification of the Black body, and racial profiling. In this article, I read Get Out as an example of what I term "critical race horror," texts whose narrative, generic, and cinematographic strategies subvert essentialist strategies of racial silencing and thus invest in necessary measures toward (Black) mobility justice.

Silvia Schultermandl

Online Life Writing

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this contribution to this forum:

The advent of Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007, Instagram and Pinterest in 2010, and Snapchat and Google+ in 2011 facilitated the emergence of “everyday” autobiographies out of keeping with memoir practices of the past.^[1] These “quick media” enable constant, instantaneous, and seemingly organic expressions of everyday lives.^[2] To read quick media as “autobiographical acts” allows us to analyze how people mobilize online media as representations of their lives and the lives of others.^[3] They do so through a wide range of topics including YouTube testimonials posted by asylum seekers (Whitlock 2015) and the life-style oriented content on Pinterest.^[4] To be sure, the political content of these different quick media life writing varies greatly. Nevertheless, in line with the feminist credo that the personal is political, these expressions of selfhood are indicative of specific societal and political contexts and thus contribute to the memoir boom long noticed on the literary market.^[5]

Anna Marta Marini

Semiospheric Borders and the Erasure of Latinx Subjectivity in Culture Shock and Sleep Dealer

Recreating the problematic relationship between the U.S. government and the influx of migrant laborers, films Sleep Dealer (2008) and Culture Shock (2019) both reflect a state of exception existing on the U.S.–Mexico border. In both films, the border is represented as a peripheral locus where the migrant subject is emptied of humanity and political subjectivity, in thrall to the panopticon embodied by the American immigration and border enforcement system. In their real world, the migrant protagonists are denied an access to the central, culturally dominant space; instead, they are offered a virtual realm, a digital access that is subordinated to the level of legitimacy they achieve. The blurring between the organic and the cybernetic contributes to shape a dehumanized borderland realm, at the service of a nativist state power that tries to obliterate the presence of migrants despite their fundamental role in the U.S. capitalist economy. However, the cyborg subject embodies the possibility of resistance to that same power. Relying on their humanity, and yet through the projected digital versions of themselves, the protagonists can eventually counter the dominant order—albeit mostly to an individual extent. Drawing on the relatively extensive academic literature on Sleep Dealer, this analysis highlights similarities and differences between the two films, focusing in particular on Culture Shock and how its virtual reality device allows an expansion on the topics of forced assimilation and erasure of Latinx subjectivity.