Paula Amad (University of Iowa), presentation via Zoom
This talk offers a reflection upon the profound legacy of Louis Delluc’s pioneering role in French film criticism and culture. But it approaches that legacy from the margins of his voluminous writings and rarer films. I begin by reviewing two research paths I have previously worked on illuminating from those margins: first, his career and writings offer an untapped source for recovering women’s vital shaping of French cinephilia, specifically Colette and Eve Francis; and second, they provide a kaleidoscopic lens through which to think about a unique period in American-French critical exchange in which American cinema, and in particular The Cheat (Cecil B. De Mille, 1915), became, as Delluc ironically argued, colonized by French filmmakers, offering ripe resources for the extraction of any number of advances. Ironically, given the emerging dictates of the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, key amongst these advances was the magnification of the object world beyond narrative motivation. At that point I was deeply interested in how this attention to objects could not only be read as consumerist ideology (the reduction of humans to objects), but opened onto a larger sense of things and their palpitating role in cine-modernity in general and the theory of photogénie in particular. More recently, I have argued that there is another critical axis to the cinema’s pole of magnification and intimacy; and that is the role of the remote, macro vantage point and its ushering in of a distant view. Materialized most explicitly through the First World War’s combination of the airplane and camera, aerial vision, I have argued, marks the aesthetic and ethical ceiling to the arguments of photogénie. Hence, I take the opportunity of this conference, drawing upon Delluc’s pacifist writings about the war, placed in dialogue with unique footage shot in 1918 from a dirigible above of the ruins of post-war France and Belgium, to reflect upon the continuing relevance of Delluc and the first wave of French film criticism between the two poles of cinema’s gaze: intimacy and distance.
CV:
Paula Amad is an Associate Professor of Film Studies and former Chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts, University of Iowa. She is the author of Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (Columbia University Press, 2010) and numerous articles in journals such as Feminist Media Histories, Representations, Camera Obscura, History of Photography, Cinema Journal, Film History, and Framework. She is currently completing a second book focused on the airplane and camera as the twin vision and dream machines of early twentieth-century modernity.