animating film theory edited by karen beckman

8/13/2019 Animating Film Theory edited by Karen Beckman

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ANIMATING

FILMTHEO

RY

ANIMATINGFILMTHEORY

ANIMATINGFILMTHEORY

KAREN BECKMAN, editor


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Animating Film Teory


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AnimatingFilm TeoryKaren Beckman, editor

201 4


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2014 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-

free paper

ypeset in Chaparral Pro by seng Information

Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Animating film theory / Karen Beckman, editor.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

978-0-8223-5640-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-0-8223-5652-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Animated filmsHistory and criticism.

2. Animated filmsSocial aspects.

3. Animation (Cinematography) I. Beckman,

Karen Redrobe

1765.535 2014

791.4334dc23 2013026435

Film as Experiment of AnimationAre Films

Experiments on Human Beings? Gertrud Koch.


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In memory of Ruth Wright (19172012)


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Acknowledgments ix

Animating Film Teory: An Introduction 1

Part I: ime and Space

: : Animation and History 25

: : Animating the Instant: Te Secret Symmetry between Animationand Photography 37

: : Polygraphic Photography and the Origins of 3- Animation . 54

: : A Living, Developing Egg Is Present before You: Animation,Scientific Visualization, Modeling 68

Part II: Cinema and Animation

: : Andr Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema: Prolegomena for aHistory of erms - ;

85: : First Principles of Animation 98

: : Animation, in Teory 111

Part III: Te Experiment

: : Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments onHuman Beings? ; 131

: : Frame Shot: Vertovs Ideologies of Animation 145

Contents


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: : Signatures of Motion: Len Lyes Scratch Films and the Energy ofthe Line . 167

: : Animating Copies: Japanese Graphic Design, the Xerox Machine,and Walter Benjamin 181

: : Framing the Postmodern: Te Rhetoric of Animated Form inExperimental Identity-Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and1990s 201

Part IV: Animation and the World

: : Cartoon Film Teory: Imamura aihei on Animation,Documentary, and Photography 221

: : African American Representation through the Combination of

Live Action and Animation . 252

: : Animating Uncommon Life: U.S. Military Malaria Films(19421945) and the Pacific Teater 264

: : Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Teoryfrom Japan 287

: : Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, TeCartoon Cat in the Machine 301

Bibliography 317 Contributors 337 Index 343


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Over the last few years, many people have helped me to think more care-

fully about animation, and their ideas and suggestions have given energy

and life to this book. First, I am grateful to the volumes wonderful con-tributors. Tey have all been eager and inspired participants from the

very beginning, and I thank them for their intellectual vibrancy, goodhumor, and grace. What a pleasure it has been to work with each one.

Tanks also to the volumes three readersthey gave great advice andenthusiastic support. Lacey Baradel helped me prepare the manuscriptwith meticulous care and incredible efficiency, and I am most grateful to

her. In addition, Ive had the good fortune to consider the topic of ani-mation in a number of different venues and with a variety of interlocu-tors. Tese include Dudley Andrew, Nancy Davenport, Erna Fiorentini,Maureen Furniss, Vinzenz Hediger, Joshua Mosley, Susan Napier, JaynePilling, Dana Polan, Jason Pos, Bella Honess Roe, Marc Siegel and hisstudents, Vivian Sobchack, Sheila Sofian, Dan Stout, Orkhan elhan,

Rick Warner, Paul Wells, the members of the 201213 Penn HumanitiesForum, the participants of the Enchanted Drawing conferences (parts I

and II), and the members of the Art of Animation seminar. Duke Uni-versity Press has been enthusiastic in its support of the project since

its inception, and Im especially grateful to Ken Wissoker and ElizabethAult. Penns Program in Cinema Studies and the Department of the His-tory of Art have provided me with collegial and thought-provoking envi-ronments for almost a decade, and I appreciate all my colleagues friend-ship and support. In Cinema Studies, I am especially fortunate to be able

to work with im Corrigan, Peter Decherney, Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve,Meta Mazaj, and Nicola Gentili. Dean Rebecca Bushnell and Provost

Vincent Price could not have been more supportive during my time atPenn, and I thank them for their constant encouragement. I also thank

Acknowledgments


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x Acknowledgments

Leo Charney and Brooke Sietinsons for their collaborative, energetic,

and innovative spirits. Robert, Merrilee, Mari, Eric, Dieter, Jane, Robin,Lucy, Suzanne, Claire, orben, Janek, Mikkel, Freya, and mumthanksfor sharing your lives with me. Michael, Siduri, Lua, and Brunohow

did I get to be so lucky to be animated each day by you?


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Animating Film Teorybegins from the premise that cinema and mediastudies in the early twenty- first century needs a beer understanding ofthe relationship between two of the fields most unwieldy and unstableorganizing concepts: animation and film theory. As the increas-

ingly digital nature of cinema now forces animation to the forefront

of our conversations, it becomes ever clearer that for film theorists, it

has really never made sense to ignore animation. om Gunning has re-cently described the marginalization of animation as one of the greatscandals of film theory. Marginalization, of course, is not the same

as total neglect; and in order to respond productively to this apparentscandal, we need to consider both where and when this marginalizationhas happened in the history of film theory, and where and when it hasnthappened.

Flipping through the available film theory anthologies, one could

easily assume that film theorists have uerly neglected the topic of ani-mation. Yet as both Suzanne Buchan and Oliver Gaycken point out intheir contributions to this volume, animation has been a sustained if

dispersed area of interest for a surprisingly substantial and prominentlist of authors. Part of the fragmentary nature of film theorists engage-ment with the term may stem from the fact that animationsignifies inso many different ways. At different moments, it becomes synonymouswith a whole range of much more specific terms and concepts, includ-ing movement, life itself, a quality of liveliness(that doesnt necessarily

involve movement), spirit, nonwhiteness, frame-by-frame filmmaking pro-cesses, variable frame filmmaking processes, and digital cinema, as well asa range of mobilized media that appear within animated films, includ-ing sculpture, drawing, collage, painting, and puppetry. Tese divergentterms do not always sit easily with each other, and though the tensions

Animating Film heory: An Introduction


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Karen Beckman

among them are important and interesting, they have not been ex-

plored as fully as they might, in part because our critical paradigms mayhave foreclosed such lines of inquiry. Film theory and history both fre-quently rely on a series of binary terms, including continuousversus non-

continuous, narrativeversus experimental, indexicalversus handmade, andanimatedversus live action. Tough these oppositions can be useful, theycan lead to inaccurate presumptions in that they do not always accu-

rately reflect the differences contained within any one of these terms,

such as experimentalor narrative. Tis volume aims to unearth and thinkthrough some of these inaccuracies, blind spots, and structural inhibi-tors to clear some space, pose some questions, and set some prioritiesfor the future as well as the retroactive work of animating film theory.

It would be close to impossible to organize film theorists meandering

thoughts on this sprawling term into any kind of coherent category thatwould work as well, for example, as realism, montage, spectatorship, ideol-ogy, or soundseems to do on a film theory syllabus. Yet, as the examplesdemonstrate, by seeking out those places where film theorists have

grappled with animation, we often stumble upon ideas that complicatethose concepts we think we can more easily corral into the straitjacketof the textbook (this may help us to understand animations margin-

alization). No doubt, it would also be difficult to extract and antholo-

gize, for example, writing on animation from the body of work knownas classical film theorybecause of the way animation seems to wind in and

out of the theorization of other aspects of the experience and materi-

ality of cinema. Animations persistent yet elusive presence within filmtheorys key writings makes it both easy to overlook and essential to en-gage. By briefly surveying some of animations cameo appearances in

the history of film theory, I hope to encourage readers to frame todaystheoretical work on the digitals relation to animation (a synonymous

relationship is too easily presumed) within a longer history of think-ing about what cinema is and how it works. I also hope to reclaim andreanimate some of the interesting but underdeveloped questions and

ideas to which earlier and overlooked musings on animation and its re-lation to broader categories such as film or cinema gave rise. Tesequestions cannot be limited to the realm of animation studies as if theywere irrelevant to the broader study of moving images; as Edgar Morin,one of the important bridge figures between earlier and later film theo-ries, suggests: It is obviously the cartoon that completes, expands, ex-alts the animism implied in the cinema. . . . Te cartoon only exaggerates

the normal phenomenon.


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Movement

Paul Wells suggests that abstract animated films always prioritize ab-stract forms in motion, but a close look at experimental film theory

complicates this claim. For sure, Norman McLarens statement thatanimation is not the art of drawings-that-move, but rather the art

of movements-that-are-drawn seems to confirm that movement is

always the priority of frame-by-frame processes, but even for McLaren,things are never that simple. In 1948 McLaren distinguishes between

techniques that lend themselves more readily to creating visual changerather than to action (side to side, and to and fro displacement of imageon the screen), leading us to wonder what the relationship between

visual change and movement is. I dont think that change and move-

ment are the same thing, but the tensions contained within the term

animationprovide us with an opportunity to think about what these

two concepts share and how they differ, particularly within the contextof the visual image. Similarly, writing about the technical process of

making Blinkety Blank (1954), McLaren explains his need to alternate

between small clusters of discontinuous frames and continuous framesthat allowed for flow and motion. Here he makes clear that motion is

not a given in animation, and that discontinuous and continuous, as

well as single- and multiple-frame, approaches often appear within thesame experimental film:

Sometimes . . . I would engrave twoadjacent frames, or a frame-cluster,

(that is, a group of 3, 4 or more frames); sometimes a frame-cluster

would have related and continuous image within it and would thus

solidify some action and movement; at other times the frame-cluster

would consist only of a swarm of disconnected, discontinuous images,

calculated to build up an overall visual impression. Here and there,

to provide much needed relief from the staccato action a single-frameimages and frame-clusters, I introduced longer sections of contiguous

frames with a flow of motion in the traditional manner.

Te Frame and the Shot

aking a more extreme position in relation to the question of movement

in frame-by-frame processes, Peter Kubelka, in Te Teory of Metrical

Film, asserts: Cinema is not movement. Tis is the first thing. Cinemais not movement. Cinema is a projection of stillswhich means images


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Karen Beckman

which do not movein a very quick rhythm. And you can give the illu-sion of movement, of course, but this is a special case. Kubelka resiststhe idea that cinema has to beequated with an illusion of movement

while simultaneously rejecting the assumption that the shot is neces-

sarily the dominant location of cinemas articulation. Tus, he invitesus to think more precisely about the language we use to describe editingand rhythm, particularly in relation to the grammar of animated and

experimental films. Kubelka demonstrates that it can at times be muchmore important to aend to the individual frame and the relationshipbetween single frames than to the unit of the shot; yet as he shifts ouraention toward one definition of animationa frame-by-frame process

of filmmakingmovement is never presumed as a desired outcome. Te

point, rather, is to revise accepted understandings of experimental filmgrammar, rhythm, and editing through a recasting of the frame as a pri-mary unit of production:

It can be a collision, or it could be a very weak succession. Tere are many

many possibilities. Its just that [Sergei] Eisenstein wanted to have a col-

lisionthats what he liked. But what I wanted to say is: Where is, then,

the articulation of cinema? Eisenstein, for example, said its the colli-

sion of two shots. But its very strange that nobody ever said that its not

between shots but between frames.Its between frames where cinemaspeaks. And then, when you have a roll of very weak collisions between

framesthis is what I would call a shot, when one frame is very similar

to the next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame, and the next

frame, and the next framethe result that you get when you have just

a natural scene and you film it. . . . Tis would be a shot. But, in reality,

you can work with every frame.

Animism and Objectification

In Te Art of the Moving Picture(1915), one of the earliest extended pieces

of writing about film, Vachel Lindsay introduces an observation aboutfilms animistic power that persists in the writings of many of his con-temporaries. In chapter 11, devoted to the topic of architecture in mo-tion, Lindsay writes: I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of

the photoplays that while the actors tend to become types and hiero-

glyphics and dolls, on the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphs and mecha-

nisms tend to become human. By an extension of this principle, non-human tones, textures, lines, and spaces take on a vitality almost like


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that of flesh and blood. With impressive economy of style, these twosentences highlight cinemas capacity to anthropomorphize inanimateobjects, including humanoid dolls as well as signs and machines; turn

actors (presumably human) into lifeless dolls or signs; and, in what is

perhaps the most conceptually challenging of these claims, imbue ab-stract tones, lines, and spaces with a sense of life in addition to cor-

poreality. While Lindsay does not explicitly mention the term anima-tion, he identifies early in the mediums history a few preoccupations

that are pertinent to this volumes interest in how the discourse of filmtheory has engaged animation, and how that engagement could enrichcontemporary film theory. Tese preoccupations, which often take on amystical dimension, repeatedly return to cinemas capacity to reframe

the relationship between humans and objects; to evoke, through anima-tion, whether of leer, object, line, or space, aachments and emotionalresponses to nonhuman things; to make us think carefully about whatmovement is and where it is locatedin the object, on the screen, or inthe mind-body of the spectator; and to alter our perception of time andspace through framing, camera movement, and montage, all of which

have the capacity to endow supposedly still objects (animation some-

times makes us question whether true stillness in the world actually

exists) with a sense of liveliness and mobility, or at least potentialmo-

bility, even when the object in question is not being animated in the tra-ditional sense of this term.

Prefiguring Andr Bazins sense of natures on-screen agency, Jean

Epstein declared in 1926 that cinemas greatest power lies precisely in

this quality of animism: On screen, nature is never inanimate. Ob-

jects take on airs. rees gesticulate. Mountains, just like Etna, convey

meaning. Every prop becomes a character. Cinema, for him, is an ani-mistic language that aributes a semblance of life to the objects it de-

fines, and this magical, animating force, along with its impact on theconceptualization of realism, the role of the actor, and the difference be-tween humans and objects or abstract lines and shapes on screen, are allprimary preoccupations for early film theorists.

Te German- Hungarian theorist Bla Balzs is no exception. While

Epstein emphasizes the liveliness of objects, Balzs, like Lindsay, seemsat least as interested, and at times more interested, in how film turnspeople into objects, and in the role of the cartoon in illuminating the dif-

ference between the film image and other types of images, particularlywhere the images relationship to reality is concerned. Balzss most

significant discussion of animation occurs in a chapter titled Te Abso-


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lute Film in Te Spirit of Film(1930), where he opens numerous sugges-tive lines of inquiry. First, he writes of American slapstick comedy as ifthe bodies on screen actually werecartoon bodies, and he argues that

slapstick discovers its tempo thanks to what Gaycken in this volume

describes as time-lapse photographys decomposition of time. Balzswrites, For it was the tempo of time-lapse that determined the tempoof the typical mad chases of the slapstick comedy. And similarly, theirnon-psychological, purely mechanical confusion and chaos expressed

the exuberance of a technology that can do with its creatures as it likesbecause they possess no gravity of their own or any autonomous logic.(We might note here that for Stanley Cavell, writing in 1979, it is cartoon

characters abrogation of gravity that places them outside of the worldof movies.) For Balzs, slapstick comedians and not cartoon charac-ters have no gravity, and it is in the context of slapstick, not cartoons,that he discusses the absence of danger and death in cinema:

Events in slapstick seem unthreatening because they are, after all, no

more than mere images. . . . Tis complete absence of danger is what

makes these old-style comic scenes the absolute products of the image.

For every (wrien) fairy tale, however comic, always contains the possi-

bility of someone losing his life or something being destroyed. But the

worst that can happen to images is that they can be erased or faded outor painted overthey can never be killed off.

Here again we find a direct contrast with Cavell, for whom the impossi-bility of death is one of the hallmarks of cartoon characters in particu-lar: Teir bodies are indestructible, one might almost say immortal.

Midway through this chapter, Balzs, in order to explain the abso-lute image and the absolute film, compares a legend about a Chinesepainting to the world of cartoons created by Pat Sullivan. Tis extended

passage provides an important precedent to the cartoon physics thatSco Bukatman discusses later in this volume. Balzs begins by illus-

trating the centrality of animation to film theorys meditations on thenature of film realism in comparison with realism in other art forms:

Tere is an old Chinese legend that tells of an old Chinese painter whohas painted a landscape. A beautiful valley, with mountains in the dis-tance. Te old painter likes the valley so much that he walks into the

painting and disappears into the mountains, never to be seen again.

Balzs then proceeds to contrast the Chinese painter with Felix the Catand Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, arguing that with them, the maer is

not so simple.


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[Pat Sullivans] pictures do not create a natural reality into which the

artist might enter like the old Chinese painter. Tis world is popu-

lated only by beings sketched with a pencil. Yet their outlines are not

so much representations of the shapes of independent beings; the lines

themselves are those beings only substance. Unlike what happened tothe old Chinaman, there is no transformation here of appearance into

reality. . . . Art is not transformed into nature. Instead, there is abso-

lutely no distinction between appearance and reality. . . . Tere are no

miracles in this world. Tere are only lines that function in accordance

with the shape they assume.

Te Line and the Letter

Te cartoon line, as the thing itself, has for Balzs as much utopian

possibility as it does in Eisensteins more frequently cited writing on

plasmaticness, a concept taken up in this volume by Esther Leslie andGertrud Koch in particular. Balzs suggests, Lines are lines and wherelines can be drawn, everything is possible. But Balzs also cautions

readers against abstract films in which these lines of possibility becomenothing but ornaments in motion without any further purpose or

meaning. If film theory has paid lile aention to the interest that

Balzs expresses in cinemas first innovation of bringing movementinto drawn lines, Andrew R. Johnston explores the possibilities of thatmobile line in this volume in his chapter. While Balzs rejected whathe considered to be the purely ornamental animations of the abstract

film, there are nevertheless effects derived from the abstract film thatpromise to make possible directly materialized meaning. He sees thispotential particularly in the realm of animated leers and intertitles,

which are both explored further in this volume by Yuriko Furuhata and

ess akahashi, as well as by Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay, whoexpand the existing English-language work on Dziga Vertovs use of

and writing about animation within the 1920s Soviet context. Balzsthinks about animated leers symbolic force and he compares the effect

of movement and directionality with the effect of changes in volume

levels in the context of sound: Leers that hurl themselves at us, as-

saulting our eyes just as a scream assaults our ears? He also explores the

affective quality of moving text and variable typefaces: Living leers

are the graphic traces of an emotional movement. Tey are not abstract.Tey are the direct reflections of an inner state.


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Karen Beckman

Evolution and Utopia

Mihailova and MacKay argue that Aleksander Rodchenkos spinning

intertitles have a revolutionary component; but this concern with

transformation is not only found within the Soviet context. Indeed, forEpstein, cinemas animated force is inextricably linked to change. For

him, when the moving image is animated as much as its nature compels

it to be, it shows that everything is diversity and evolution. Evolution-

ary and frame-by-frame, cellular paradigms ultimately lead Epstein to

the same conclusions about cinema: Whether we think about the cine-matographic space according to its discontinuity, from cell to cell, or

according to its continuous evolution, the visual datawhich is, here,the sole informationindicates that most forms do not remain equalto themselves, neither in their transposition from one frame of discon-tinuity to another, nor during their passage from one moment of conti-nuity to another.

Tis association of the animated image with constant evolution pro-vides the foundation for many utopian theorizations of animation, andthey are explored here in different ways by Bukatman, Koch, Esther

Leslie, and Mihailova and MacKay. For sure, cinemas animistic force

disrupts conventions of time and space, but as Epstein points out in

a passage on variable-speed cinematography, where the scientific ex-periment plays a central role (as it does for several of the authors col-lected here, including Alexander R. Galloway, Gaycken, Gunning, and

Koch), cinemas disruption of the natural is to be found in all new waysof thinking: One may object that it is an artificial result. But is there anexperiment or even an advanced observation that does not employ a de-vice and that does not more or less disrupt natural phenomenon whileat the same time communicating new appearances? And yet, we do not

consider those to be false.

Kinesthetic Tinking and Feeling

Germaine Dulac, in Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cingraphie (1926),offers an extended meditation on how cinemas engagement with move-ment changes between the 1890s and the 1920s. Tis essay provides

rich terrain for engaging the phenomenon of movement in cinema as aphysiological experience, as well as a catalyst for both analytic thoughtand emotion. She states that if cinema is only an animated reflectionof the expressive forms of literature, or of music, sculpture, painting,


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architecture, and the dance, then it is not an art. Dulac distinguishesbetween cinema as a mechanical invention created to capture lifes truecontinuous movement and as the creator of synthetic movements.

Furthermore, Dulac here maps an interesting, complex, and perhaps

surprising set of affinities among different types of movement, narra-tive fiction, and documentary. Soon after the arrival of the Lumires

train, she suggests, sympathetic study of mechanical movement was

scorned (it is worth noting here that it is the loss of the study, not

the recording, of mechanical movement that she bemoans). Dulac con-

tinues, In the hope of aracting an audience, the spiritual movementof human feelings through the mediation of characters was added. Dis-tancing itself from the actual experience of movement, cinema be-

comes subordinate to bad literature, as one set about arranging ani-mated photographs around a performance. In the course of the essay,Dulac explores what she considers to be the proper and improper role ofmovement or animation by introducing several different forms of move-

ment: the novels movement of ideas and situation; theatrical movement

that allows for the development of moods and events; the movementof human feelings; and the concept of movement in its plain and me-chanical visual continuity as an end in itself. She critiques the focus oncharacters as the principal objects of concern when, perhaps, the evo-

lution and transformation of a form, or of a volume, or of a line wouldhave provided more delight. . . . Te meaning of the word movement

was entirely lost sight of, and in the cinema it (movement) was made

subservient to succinctly recounted stories whose series of images, tooobviously animated, were used to illustrate the subject. Dulacs obser-vation that the composed films in which movement is subordinate tonarrative offer none of the psychical and visual sensation of prenar-

rative cinema provides an interesting early precedent and useful start-

ing point for contemporary theorists exploring cinemas corporeal andaffective dimensions. Tis kind of theoretical resonance is particularlyrich in Dulacs inquiry into the spectators emotional response to non-human and even nonorganic moving forms, as when she wonders: Canlines unwinding in profusion according to a rhythm dependent on a sen-

sation or an abstract idea affect ones emotions by themselves, withoutsets, solely through the activity of their development?

She extends this passage in a way that opens up interesting ques-

tions about the relationship between variable-speed cinematography

and cinematic truth, and also about the relationship between motionand what she calls a purely visual emotion:


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Karen Beckman

In the film about the birth of sea urchins, a schematic form, generated

by greater or lesser speeds of time-lapse cinematography, describes a

graphic curve of varying degrees that elicits a feeling at odds with the

thought that it illustrates. Te rhythm and the magnitude of movement

in the screen-space become the only affective factors. In its embryonicstate, a purely visual emotion, physical and not cerebral, is the equal of

the emotion stimulated by an isolated sound.

Classical film theory is often distinguished from later theories con-

cerned with questions of identity, subjectivity, affect, and ideology. Buthere, through a mode of cinematic movement decoupled from both thehuman and narrative, we find an opportunity for unexplored conti-

nuities between early and postclassical film theories and among Dulacs

emotion-inducing line, Lindsays flesh-and-blood lines and spaces,Eisensteins plasmaticness, Walter Benjamins theorization of play andinnervation, contemporary interest in thing theory and object rela-

tions, and Judith Halberstams queer celebration of Pixar films as placesthat enable the development of an animated self that disrupts the idea

of a timeless and natural humanity. Tese are sites for people who be-lieve that things (toys, nonhuman animals, rocks, sponges) are as livelyas humans and who can glimpse other worlds underlying and overwrit-

ing this one.Our ability to recognize these types of affinities owes much to the lateMiriam Hansen, whose pioneering work, like that of Esther Leslie, hasdone so much to help us understand the way in which for Benjamin andTeodor W. Adorno, Disney films became emblematic of the juncture ofart, politics, and technology debated at the time. Tese imbricationsare important because they enrich the context in which we might readthe chapters collected here, such as Kochs discussion of animation in

relation to kinesthetic and emotional thinking, akahashis exploration

of the intersection of video-animation techniques and identity politicsin experimental documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s, and Johnstonsexploration of the energy of Len Lyes wiggling lines. But by drawingout such continuities, these chapters also offer a counterdiscourse to the

influential model for thinking about animations relation to the worldthat is proposed by Cavell in his 1979 addendum to Te World Viewed.

Cavell describes a shared world that contrasts with the childish world ofcartoons. Te inhabitants of the former are, apparently, quite certain of

when or to what extent our laws and limits do and do not apply; this isa real world populated by people who are universally recognized as pos-


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sessing a soul and being vulnerable to death, a world in which all bodiesare fed and not stoked. For Halberstam, certain kinds of animation,

like Pixar, encourage not so much escapism from the so-called real world

as critiques of the fictions of equality and permanence that undergird

the unchanging reality that Cavell describes. On this question, Hansenis particularly helpful, for she highlights Mickey Mouses affinities witha contemporary world that resists the clear division of human and non-human on which Cavell relies:

Benjamins Mickey Mouse points toward the general imbrication of

physiological impulses with cybernetic structures that, no longer con-

fined to the domain of cyberfiction, has become standard practice in

science and medicine, architecture and design, and a host of other

areas. Tis cyborgian quality brings Mickey Mouse into the purview ofBenjamins reflections on the body: the problematic of the psychophysio-

logical boundaries supposed not only to contain the subject within but

also to distinguish the human species from the rest of creation.

Worlds and Spaces

In her own exploration of Micky- Maus, Hansen sees no need either

to assert a hierarchy between live action and animated cinema or to de-termine whether animation belongs inside of or under cinema. Butmany other participants in this conversation about the relationship be-tween film theorys proper object (cinema) and its freaky cousin (anima-tion) have often been drawn to this type of spatial mapping. Tese geo-graphic narratives tend either to insist on a total separation of realms, as

we see in Cavells distinction of worlds, or to map out areas of overlapbetween cinema and animation in the context of paradigms where oneterm is always dominant. In 2001 Lev Manovich, in Te Language of New

Media, made this oft-cited claim: Born from animation, cinema pushedanimation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case

of animation. Although Alan Cholodenko, as he points out in his con-tribution to this volume, made a similar claim about all cinema being

a subset of animation more than a decade before Manovich, it is only

within the context of the rise of digital cinema, and the intense criticalfocus on cinemas changing role as what Koch describes as a membrane

that enables us to experience the world, that the radicality and inherent

interest of this claim has been properly taken up. However provocativethese spatial metaphors that draw on the language of geography and


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Karen Beckman

Venn diagrams can be, they also run the risk of becoming defensive, offixing different types of cinema, of generating and enforcing laws inorder to maintain a particular idea of cinema instead of allowing the ex-periment of cinemas mediation of life to provoke our philosophical re-

flections through its evolution.Dudley Andrew struggles valiantly to resist this temptation in his re-cently articulated sense of what cinema is. Yet even as he emphasizescinemas adaptation, he still pursues a more stable sense of cinema, onethat has gathered over time, noting that identity accumulates. He

positions what he calls Bazins aesthetic of discovery at the antipodesof a cinema of manipulation, including most animation and pure digitalcreation, and later celebrates Jia Zhangke for his ability to deploy ani-mation, but always in the service of cinema, not trying to exceed it.At odds with the general spirit of his own book, Andrews mapping andranking end up linking discovery to a rather narrow sense of cinema,and this volume pushes back against that narrowing, primarily becauseit occludes important sites of discovery that help us beer understandour own moment.

We find another potent form of mapping in David Bordwell and

Kristin Tompsons Film Art: An Introduction, which in many cinema andmedia studies programs provides students with their foundational para-

digms and terminology for further study. Te authors locate documen-tary, experimental, and animated films in a shared space that functionsas an alternative to the fictional, apparently mainstream, and live-action

fare that constitutes the primary focus of the books other chapters.

Tere are multiple problems with this approach. First, it leaves unques-tioned and unhistoricized certain assumptions, such as the one that

cinema usually refers to live-action film unless otherwise specified,

an assumption that also undergirds large sections of Manovichs argu-

ment about the disappearance and return of manual construction overthe course of twentieth-century film history. For as Herv Joubert-

Laurencin (a scholar who has elsewhere underscored the importance ofanimation for Bazin) demonstrates in his chapter on Andr Martin, thedivision of cinema into live action and animation, and the assumptionthat cinemameans all films exceptanimation films, occurs at a very par-ticular moment, one almost coincident with the fall, and not the rise,

of the Hollywood studio system. Joubert- Laurencin explores the con-

sequences of this in the pages ahead. Writing in France in the mid-

1950s, Martin asked of those cinephiles who were resistant to animation

a question that should be reiterated for todays cinephiles (who are often


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nostalgic for Martins era): How can one love the Cinema so much, towhat end can it serve to see films, if one is incapable of seeing andfollowing Cinemas?

Like Joubert-Laurencin, Mihailova and MacKay illuminate a further

terminological conundrum that threatens to trouble the boundary be-tween live-action and animation film by focusing our aention on thewriting of another important film theorist who has been ignored or

underrecognized within the English-language context, Aleksandr Bush-kin. Bushkin, they point out,

in particular, took issue with the odd application of the term multiplica-

tionto animated film (still today normally called multiplikatsiiain Rus-

sian), noting that it was live-actionfilm that involved the shooting of

multiple frames with each turn of the cameras handle, in contrast tothe frame-by-frame fixing of every constituent part of a movement typi-

cal of animation. In that sense, Bushkin argues, animation would more

precisely be termed frame shooting (kadro-smka), where the basic

units of the film are taken to be frame-sized modules, rather than shots

of unpredictable duration.

As we ponder the mathematics of specific animation practices, like thevariable-frame, live-action process of Norman McLaren in Neighbours

(1952), it becomes clear that, at least from a mathematical point of view,cinema has always been a bit more similar to an algebraic expression

with changing values than a knowable formula. Tis is why, when it

comes to thinking about film, we will never be posheory. Film theo-

rization involves testing out those shifting values at the borders of a

cinema that evolves across time and space, and as this volume demon-strates, animation, like theory, seems to provide a way of grappling withthese changes before they are properly understood.

A second problem with Bordwell and Tompsons system of catego-rization is that it constructs an intellectual paradigm in which studentsand teachers are encouraged to ignore the differences and interactionsamong experimental, documentary, and animated films, to think of

them only, or at least primarily, in comparison with the live-action fic-tion film. Te organizational structure discourages readers from con-

sidering the experimental documentary, animated documentary, or

animated experiments, and one of the goals of this volume is to invitemore aention to these overlooked or marginalized spaces. Tomas

LaMarres chapter, for example, shines a spotlight on an important

film theorist, Imamura aihei, who may not be well known to English-


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Karen Beckman

language readers. In doing so LaMarre foregrounds how, via the conceptof the apparatus, Imamura simultaneously thought about animationanddocumentary, always emphasizing the (often overlooked) photo-

graphic dimension of cartoons.

Koch explores how animation, like the experiment and like theoryitself, becomes a way to think at the limit of understanding in an at-

tempt to get past that limit, a useful corrective to the notion that con-temporary film theorists should stop trafficking in spaces of confusion.

Drawing on the examples of Eisensteins writing on plasmaticness as

well as Siegfried Kracauers reflections on movement as the alpha andomega of the medium, Koch explores the role of motor-sensory knowl-

edge and moods as filters by which we understand the world and de-velop a sense of both life and being alive. Yet even as she explores whatwe can know of life and liveness through the experiment of film, Kochdistinguishes this from scientific experiments, with their demand for

identical reproducibility, by noting that the aesthetic experiment is

temporally open and interminable.While Koch distinguishes the scientific from the aesthetic experi-

ment in a manner that is analogous to Bukatmans distinction betweencartoon physics and the physics of the real world, other contribu-

tions make clear just how important a role animation has played in

scientific experimentation and visualization, and they explore wheremodeling fits in relation to film theorys discussions of time and space,revelation and creation. Drawing primarily on the writing of Epstein,

Gaycken examines what scientific uses of cinema have in common withthe traditional understanding of what constitutes animation. Here,he continues, the scientist uses cinema in a process that is explicitly

opposed to recording or reproducing an already evident phenomenon.Tese creations are acts of creation, thaumaturgic. While Gaycken illu-

minates the overlooked ways in which three-dimensional modeling hasa long history within the cinematic context, Galloways contribution

generates some productive tension within the volume by placing the

three-dimensional model outside of, or even against, a cinematic nar-

rative. He states provocatively: Te goal then, to give away the endingbefore barely having goen under way, will be to reconstruct a geneal-ogy not for the moving image but for the information model, not for

serial animation but for parallel animation, not for the linear but for the

multiplexed; in short, not for the cinema but for the computer. Gallo-ways counternarrative focuses on Franois Willmes experiments withtwenty-four cameras mounted in a rotunda, with shuers opened simul-


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taneously with the ultimate goal of producing an object that Willme,in 1860, would patent as photosculpture, an object relying on discrete

photographic impressions that are segmented notacross time, as inthe chronophotographic processes that have received quite substan-

tial aention (particularly in the context of animations relation to thecomic strip and serial photography) but rather in a spindle of space.

Tis, Galloway argues, posits an alternative history of photography

in which point of view has no meaning. We are dealing here not withcamera movement or the illusory re-creation of it in animated films,

but rather with the construction of a virtual point of view that, at leastfor Galloway, constitutes an anticinematicway of seeing, a mapping ofspace that preempts computer modeling and sidesteps cinema. Withoutdoubt, this is a contentious claim, but it is one that draws our aentionto the question of whether film theorys language for describing cam-

era movement, editing, and cinematic space and time is adequate for

the task of describing recent image-making practices that often (and

perhaps unhelpfully) come under the spacious umbrella of animation.Furthermore, Galloway asks us to consider what other media histories,in addition to film history, need to be included, or excluded, when ani-mation is the object to be theorized.

Furuhata, Gunning, and Marc Steinberg all raise this same question

about how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyondfilm, even though these authors approach the question in quite distinctways. Furuhata explores how for experimental Japanese xerox artists inthe 1960s, graphic designs material ephemerality was at once counteredby animation through the process of rephotography, a form of archiv-ing, and translated into a temporal formatthe image became newly

ephemeral, not because it was in danger of crumbling or fading away,

but because it was set into motion. Steinberg, drawing on the writing

of two of Japans main animation critics, tsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki,suggests that in order for film theorists to understand how realism

functions in anime, it has to be placed within a broader media ecologythat includes both manga and the culture of otaku(hard-core fans) of

the intertwined media landscape that includes books, comics, maga-

zines, and animation programs. Steinberg pushes film theorists to ex-pand the canons of film and animation theory to include writers fromas yet underexplored critical milieus because it is in these milieus thatwe may find the potential to overturn some of the most naturalized as-sumptions in the canons of film and animation theorysuch as the con-

tinued presumption that realism has to relate to the unmediated real.


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Karen Beckman

Ducks: Teory, Politics, History

By separating our thinking about animation from our thinking about

other crucial terms like realism, and also genre, framing, point of view,

editing, rhythm, continuity, and thephotographic image, we lose the pos-sibility of thinking about these perhaps overly familiar terms in a newlight. While Bordwell and Tompson discuss at length Chuck M. Joness1953 masterpiece, Duck Amuck, within the context of their chapter on

documentary, experimental, and animated films, the analysis they offerpersistently delimits the films inventiveness to the realm of animation.Remarking on the films reflexivity, they state: It gradually becomes ap-parent to us that the film is exploring various conventions and tech-

niques of animation. By contrast, Richard Tompsons superlative

1975 essay on Duck Amuckrecognizes the extent to which the cartoon issimultaneously extremely conscious of itself as an act of cinema, anintroductory film studies textbook (but more fun), and a theoretical re-flection on what film is and how it works. He writes, It is at once a laffriot and an essay by demonstration on the nature and conditions of theanimated film and the mechanics of film in general. (Even a quick checkof film grammar is tossed in, via the Gimme a closeup gag.) Resistingthe urge to defend the borders between animated and live-action film,

allowing them to be considered alongside each other while still mark-ing the differences, Tompson notes a whole variety of featuresaboutcamera movement, revelation, the frame line, off-screen space, space

and time, intertextual reference, genre, and the relationship between

film actor and characterthat make this essay an unusually rich start-ing point for thinking about animation within, and as, film theory. In-deed Tompsons work becomes the foundation on which Dana B. Polanbuilds another exemplary film theory essay that engages animation in a

discussion whose pertinence extends far beyond the realm of cartoons.In Brecht and the Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema (1974), Polans

analysis of Duck Amuckplays a central role in his exploration of the dis-tinction between political and purely formal uses of self-reflexivity. Cru-cially, Polan judges Duck Amuckto be an example of nonpolitical art

notbecause it is an animated film but rather because it remains withinthe realm of fictive characters: If is a metaphor for theconfusions of life (as Tompson suggests), it is a disengaged metaphorat best, for it fails to examine confusion through a politicized perspec-tive. Indeed, the source of Daffy Ducks angstreveals itself to be none


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of the agents of social domination in the real world, but merely Bugs

Bunnyanother fictive character, whose power is tautological in ori-

gin. Te film opens up a formal space and not a political one in viewerconsciousness.

Vachel Lindsay, writing of ducks on screen, associated the film ver-sion of this particular animal with the finality of Arcadian peace andinsisted that nothing very terrible can happen with a duck in the fore-ground. He obviously hadnt met Donald. For Adorno and Max Hork-heimer, this duck actively participated in the violent oppression of theproletariat by the forces of capitalism: Donald Duck in the cartoons and

the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spec-

tators can accustom themselves to theirs. Ariel Dorfman and ArmandMaelart agree, as they make clear in their Marxist publication Para leeral Pato Donald(1971), which was translated into English and republishedas How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic in1975 after it had been banned and burned in the wake of the Chilean coup

dtat of 1973. Te books potent critique of the use of cartoon charactersfor the purpose of colonizationa blurb from John Berger on the coverdescribes the work as a handbook of decolonization and compares itto the writings of Franz Fanonhighlights the importance of expand-ing the purview of Tird Cinema and ideological film theorys concerns

to the realm of animation. A number of scholars have already doneimportant work on how animation has been used for propaganda pur-poses, usually within a frame where the emphasis is more historical than

theoretical. Eric SmoodinsAnimating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons fromthe Sound Era(1993) offers an exemplary model of this type of work, andseveral chapters in this volumeparticularly those of Christopher P.

Lehman and Bishnupriya Ghoshcontinue to explore the ideological

operations of animation within a historical framework. Tese two chap-

ters also intersect with and are enlivened by more general theoreticalspeculation about animation and film. Ghosh, for example, builds on the

pioneering work on scientific animation and microcinematography by

people such as Sco Curtis, Christopher Kelty, Hannah Landecker, andKirsten Ostherr by puing these scholars of the scientific image in con-versation with theorists of global capital as she explores the interactionbetween the individual unit of the cell and the extracellular environ-

ment in her close analysis of the U.S. military s malaria films from 1942

to 1945. Like Ghosh, Lehman finds those moments when live action anddrawn animation combine on screen to be rich sites of ideological work.


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Karen Beckman

He demonstrates the unusual frequency with which African Americansappear on screen through this type of combination. His analysis of thisphenomenon expands in significant ways the existing work of Rey Chow

and Sianne Ngai on how the animated body gets subjected to power and

manipulated by external forces precisely because of the quality of plas-maticness that Eisenstein, Benjamin, and others frame as a source of

utopian possibility. As Ngai states, Although in the last instance Chows

pessimistic reading of the animated-technologized body as a aylorizedbody seems more persuasive than Eisensteins optimistic one, the twoperspectives point to a crucial ambivalence embedded in the concept

of animationambivalence that takes on special weight in the case

of racialized subjects, for whom objectification, exaggerated corpore-

ality or physical pliancy, and the body-made-spectacle remain doubly

freighted issues. Ghosh and Lehman both illustrate the importance of

film history and theory as inseparably intertwined enterprises; but their

chapters can also be read as two possible responses to Leslies questionsabout whether animation has a history and how it registers the time ofits making.

Cinema without Photography?

Leslies question is in part motivated by a recognition of the way live-action film reflects its age into itself through the photographic cap-

turing of every detail, the fashions, the hairstyles, the makeup (even ifthe film purports to be a historical one), the aitudes, and so on. Ani-mation reflects its age differently, although as Lehmans discussions ofthe use of rotoscoping make clear, not always that differently. Further-more, as Gunning points out, there is a secret symmetry between ani-mation and photography that we need to recuperate in order beer to

understand how animation works. Although he recognizes that val-orizing animation as the anti-index played an essential role in shift-

ing theoretical focus from a narrow obsession with photography, he

goes on to ask, does opposing animation to photography really provideour best understanding of its nature? Gunning makes the crucial pointthat most film animation depends on photographyand this includes

cameraless animation, which relies on photographic processes in orderto be transferred to the filmstrip. Te fate of some of Harry Smiths un-photographed material makes clear what happens when this stage of

animation is bypassed. In 1965 Smith says of the film that Jonas Mekascalled Te Magic Feature (#12):


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Tere was also an enormous amount of material made for that picture.

None of the really good material that was constructed for that film was

ever photographed. . . . On that Oz film, that expensive one, of course,

I had quite a few people working; so that all kinds of special cut- outs

were made that were never photographed. I mean really wonderful oneswere made! One cut-out might take someone two months to make.

Tey were very elaborate stencils and so forth. All of my later films were

never quite complete. Most of the material was never shot, because the

film dragged on too long.

No wonder, then, that Smith would ultimately decide: I dont think Illmake any more animated films. Teyre too laborious and bad for the

health.

Although the photographic process is essential for the very survival ofcertain kinds of ephemeral visual material, as both Smith and Furuhatamake clear, Gunning explains that animations symmetrical relationship

with photography goes beyond the recording function. Whether or notthe filmmaker pays aention to the limits of the frame on the strip when

producing the images, these images are, Gunning points out, inevitablytranslated into the discontinuous rhythm of the machine in the mo-ment of projection. Developing two distinct but complementary defini-

tions of animation, Gunning uses the difference between these mean-ings to explore the shared terrain of animation and still photography,

which for him lies in their mutual fascination with the instant. In a keysentence, he explains: Animation reveals the dynamic nature of the in-stant through motion, while photography reveals its potential throughstillnessbut considered together these technological processes also

reveal that stillness and movement depend on and transform into eachother in the production of the instant.

Tis volumes call for the animation of film theory is not a question of

special pleading on behalf of marginalized practices or special-interestgroups, although much writing on animation has this activist dimen-

sion to it (and understandably so). Rather, in this volume, the primarygoal is to explore the kinds of theoretical questions that have remainedunderexplored because we have allowed ourselves to be constrained bytoo narrow a sense of what cinema is. By not exploring our critical termswithin the richest possible context, our analytic language has become

impoverished and stuck. Te consequences of this narrowing have be-

come increasingly visible within discussions of the digital turn, and thisis the fertile terrain out of which these chapters spring to life.


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Karen Beckman

Notes

1. Suzanne Buchan points out in the opening toAnimated Worldsthat animation

is a term whose precise meaning often eludes us, possibly referring to a style, a

technique, a technology, or a way of experiencing the world (vii).

2. Gunning, Moving Away from the Index, 38.3. I am obviously excluding anthologies that are dedicated to theorizing anima-

tion, such as Alan Cholodenkos Te Illusion of Lifeand Te Illusion of Life 2.

4. Here I will not focus on the volumes dedicated exclusively to the topic of ani-

mation, many of which have emerged out of the context of animation studies,

and which tend to adopt an approach that is more oriented toward history and

practice than theory. Tere are now, however, a growing number of authors

whose work crosses over between the worlds of cinema studies and animation

studies. Several of them, including the contributors to this volume, as well as

Maureen Furniss, Chris Gehman, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hames, the lateMiriam Hansen, Norman M. Klein, Laura U. Marks, Gerald and Danny Peary,

Steve Reinke, Bella Honess Roe, Robert Russe, Eric Smoodin, Vivian Sob-

chack, Cecile Starr, Paul Ward, and Paul Wells, very actively engage the inter-

section of film theory and animation theory, practice, and history, and this vol-

ume builds on their pioneering work.

5. Morin, Te Cinema, or Te Imaginary Man, 68. Karl Schoonover offers a useful

summary of Morins place in the landscape of film theory in Schoonover, Te

Cinema, or Te Imaginary Manand Te Starsby Edgar Morin.

6. Wells, Understanding Animation, 44.

7. Russe and Starr, Experimental Animation, 123; emphasis added.

8. Colin Williamsons dissertation, Watching Closely with urn-of-the-Century

Eyes, engages this difference in an interesting way by thinking about anima-

tion and trickery in the histories of time lapse, the substitution splice, and .

9. Russe and Starr, Experimental Animation, 127.

10. Kubelka, Te Teory of Metrical Film, 140. Kubelkas contribution to P. Adams

Sitneys Te Avant-Garde Filmis not a single essay but a compilation extracted

from recorded and transcribed lectures given at New York University in 1974

75, combined with statements he made in preparation for a 1966 interview with

Jonas Mekas. Te passages cited here are both taken from the 1966 statements.11. Several years earlier, at the 1961 Vancouver Film Festival, Norman McLaren

uered what is probably the most frequently cited statements about anima-

tion, which Kubelka both forgets and, through echoing, recalls: What is the

essence of animation? It is what happens between each frame of filmthis is

what is all-important. Quoted in Te Craft of Norman McLaren: Notes on

a Lecture Given at the 1961 Vancouver Film Festival, Film Quarterly16, no. 2

(Winter 196263): 17.

12. Kubelka, Te Teory of Metrical Film, 141.

13. Lindsay, Te Art of the Moving Picture, 133.14. Linsdays statement resonates in interesting ways with McLarens later experi-


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ments with pixilation, which Maureen Furniss defines as animation that is

created by moving a live human or animal figure incrementally. Furniss, Te

Animation Bible, 265. When shootingNeighbours, McLaren explains that he had

to use animators as the actors because they knew exactly how to move them-

selves, for instead of making a series of drawings they made a series of pos-

tures. Quoted in Furniss, Te Animation Bible, 270.15. Furniss writes the following about stillness in relation to realism within the

context of animation: In real life, living beings are never completely still be-

cause bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeats cause at least minute

amounts of movement at all times. Seeing an animated figure that is com-

pletely stillthat is, to see a single image that is photographed for more than,

say, half a secondmight strike the viewer as being unrealistic. Most anima-

tion contains constant motion, even if only at the level of blinking eyes and

moving lips, or a camera movement across a still background. . . . Absolute still-

ness can work against one of the central aractions of animation, the illusionthat inanimate objects have been endowed with life; it could be said that, when

an image within an animated production becomes still, its lifelessness is readily

apparent. Furniss,Art in Motion(2007), 79.And Paul Wells, for example, opens his useful book Understanding Anima-

tionwith the following working definition of animation in practice, even as he is

aware of the definitions insufficiencies: A film made by hand, frame-by-frame,

providing an illusion of movement which has not been directly recorded in the

photographic sense. Wells, Understanding Animation, 10.

16. Epstein, Te Cinema Seen from Etna, 289.

17. Epstein, Te Cinema Seen from Etna, 295.

18. Alan Cholodenkos work here and elsewhere explores the dialectical tension be-

tween films uncanny capacity to turn both the object and the live being into

the living dead. See, for example, Cholondenko, Te Crypt, the Haunted

House, of Cinema. Will Schmenners dissertation in progress (University of

Pennsylvania) also addresses this issue in interesting ways, and I am grateful to

him for being a wonderful interlocutor.

19. Balzs, Te Spirit of Film, 172; and Cavell, Te World Viewed, 170.

20. Balzs, Te Spirit of Film, 172.

21. Cavell, Te World Viewed, 170.22. Balzs, Te Spirit of Film, 173.






28. Drawings in motion. Blueprints in motion. Plans for the future. Te theory

of relativity on the screen. WE greet the ordered fantasy of movement, Dziga

Vertov declares in his 1922 text, WE: Variant of a Manifesto. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 9. For earlier discussions of Soviet animation in English, see, for example:


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k

Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, esp. Eisenstein Shakes Mickeys Hand in Holly-

wood, 21950; Mjolsness, Dziga Vertovs Soviet oys; and sivian, urning

Objects, oppled Pictures.


30. Epstein, Te Cinema Seen from Etna, 397, 398.

31. Epstein, Te Cinema Seen from Etna, 401.32. Dulac, Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cingraphie, 38990. In 1928 Dulac re-

inforces the importance of the study of movement over the illusion of move-

ment when she writes of cinemas decomposition of movement, which allows

for analytic vision. See Dulac, From Visual and Anti-visual Films, 32.

33. Dulac, Aesthetics, Obstacles, Integral Cingraphie, 39091.



36. Halberstam, Te Queer Art of Failure, 46, 2728.

37. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 163.38. Cavell, Te World Viewed, 170, 172.

39. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 176.

40. Manovich, Te Language of New Media, 302.

41. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 140.

42. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 42, 59.

43. Bordwell and Tompson, Film Art, 110.

44. Manovich, Te Language of New Media, 3078.

45. See Joubert-Laurencin, La lettre volante.

46. Martin, Films danimation au festival de Cannes, 39.

47. Bushkin was responsible for the production design of Vertovs animated short

stories that appeared under the title Humoresques(1924). See sivian, Vertovs

Silent Films, 407.

48. Bordwell and Tompson do dedicate one subsection of chapter 5 in Film Artto

An Example of Experimental Animation: Fuji, but my argument here is that

the overall organization of the book actively discourages thinking about these

three categoriesexperimental, animation, and documentaryas anything

other than various alternatives to the mainstream. Bordwell and Tompson,

Film Art, 14951.

49. See urvey, Teory, Philosophy, and Film Studies, esp. 119.50. Bordwell and Tompson, Film Art, 148.

51. Tompson, Duck Amuck, 41; my emphasis.

52. Tompson, Duck Amuck, 41.

53. Polan, Brecht and the Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema.

54. Lindsay, Te Art of the Moving Picture, 174.

55. Adorno and Horkheimer, Te Culture Industry, 1023.

56. Dorfman and Maelart, How to Read Donald Duck.

57. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 101.

58. Sitney, Harry Smith Interview, 9495.59. Sitney, Harry Smith Interview, 102.

animating film theory edited by karen beckman

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