Many thanks to the conference organizers for inviting me here today to say a little bit about my work and the concept of “half-films.”  I am a Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen with research interests in minor cinema, film historiography, and archive theory. I am especially interested in ethnographic film and I am currently writing a book that explores the challenges that this particular mode of filmmaking poses to film history.  I would like to just say a word or two about ethnography before explaining how the concept of half-films developed out of this visual material.  I will conclude by outlining the ways in which half-films encourage us to think differently about our film objects, archives, and histories.

The period of ethnographic filmmaking that I am interested in stretches from the 1890s until just after WWII when ethnographic films become self-reflexive and purposefully experimental (I am thinking here of the work of Marcel Griaule, Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, David MacDougall, and others).  Before this turning point, ethnographic filmmaking existed at the margins of ethnographic practice in the hands of scientists, colonial functionaries, amateurs, and professional explorers.  These films circulated before and beyond narrative film production and distribution, in and for unusual and interstitial spaces: the personal archive, the academic department, the natural history museum, and the colonial government.  Many ethnographic films index “real” bodies and events.  But these indexical claims are undone or undermined by ethnography’s imprecise and wandering search for any and all signs of ethnic, racial, cultural, and geographic difference. 

I often describe ethnography as a cinema of boredom, punctured by radical violence.  The only generic conventions that extend across this cinema include the eruptive representation of death on screen and haptic scenes of ceremonial dance.  Ethnographic films are formally defined by their technical imperfections, disjunctive editing patterns, erratic screen times (from a few seconds to multiple hours), and incoherent or excessive intertitles.  In the contemporary archive, they routinely inhabit a kind of no man’s land or border zone: untitled, unauthored, seemingly infinite in number, and unrestored.  Archives often create compilations of these uncategorizable films with titles like “Etc.” or “Bits & Pieces.”  By way of example to the ethnographic film tradition, I would like to share two short clips.  The first comes from a film entitled Cameroun, which was made by the French colonial ministry in the 1920s.  The second clip comes from Adventures on the Upper Nile, an expedition film made around 1927 for the American Museum of Natural History.

In March of 2011, I visited the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam (formerly known as the Netherlands Filmmuseum).  I spent three weeks viewing ethnographic films not only from the Netherlands, but also from France, Germany, and Britain.  As some of you may know, this particular archive contains large numbers of amateur films, travelogues, home movies from the Dutch colonies, and colonial films made by assorted government institutions around the world.  The boundaries of this national archive are quite unusual and, in many ways, not national at all.  The EYE Institute collects not only Dutch-produced films, but any moving images that were distributed and screened within the Netherlands.  Its vast holdings of non-professional films, combined with this rather unusual approach to determining the boundaries of its national film heritage, give the EYE Institute an expansive orientation toward film history.  Nevertheless, it was during my time in the Dutch archive that I first heard the term “half-films.” 

Nico de Klerk, one of the archivists at EYE and an early film scholar in his own right, used the term to describe the films that I had inadvertently forced him to watch.  I say inadvertently because, before my arrival, I had no idea that many of the films I had requested to view would only be available on nitrate.  The Eye Institute’s policy required that Nico handle the films and be present during the nitrate sessions.  This screening situation ended up being enormously productive.  It forced me to make arguments for these films, to justify their intrinsic value for film historiography and theory, if not their use-value for national film archives, film historians, or contemporary anthropologists.  For many reasonable historians and scholars, these films aren’t films.  They are half-films.  They are incomplete, fragmentary, failures.  From an institutional perspective, there is little in these works to motivate further restoration or preservation.  At most, they will be cleaned before being transferred to safety stock, with their signs of aging and deterioration still intact.  More likely, they will continue to deteriorate and disappear.  

So.  What are the arguments?  Why do half-films matter? 

The term half-film implies a standard that the ethnographic image (and many others) will always fail to meet, a standard that we might call the model, the arché, the good object, or perhaps simply the whole film.  The term half-film also proposes a kind of easy binary for evaluating film artifacts: good and bad, in and out, whole and half.  The measure of half swiftly orders the disorder of the archive.  It categorizes the content waiting to be restored, saved, researched, and written into our film histories.  But half-films are not missing parts.  They are not fragmentary or failed versions of their former, whole selves.  While these films bear the trace of their time in the archive and the projector, we do not lack the “real” origin or the “right” version.  These films were anonymous, boundless, wandering, and technically flawed from the start.  In other words: half-films are whole records of non-normative film practice.  Recasting the term against the original critique of failure or fragmentation, half-films produce a rupture, a tear, a site of resistance to the hegemony of productive, consumable objects and coherent film histories.  They also, in the case of the ethnographic image, resist the demands of a discipline motivated by racial difference.  Half-films force a confrontation with the film object as such, with the standards we have set for film-historical artifacts, and the historical methods we have imported from intellectual history, art history, and anthropology. 

Film history has always come with extensive caveats.  We are warned, not unlike turn-of-the century anthropologists, that our source material is not only on the brink of collapse, but always missing.  Film’s first decades are defined by loss, fire, deterioration, accidents, and absence.  In his mourning/memorial to celluloid, Paolo Cherchi Usai insists upon the absences at the center of film history.  We have lost 80% of our film material and what is not already gone is on its way to extinction.  However, reframed by the concept and content of half-films, the challenge to history is not too few pieces of evidence, but an overabundance of images that do not behave like the others.  These films offer altogether different orders of lack and waste (time and space).  They are excessively present in the archives and yet fundamentally defined by absence (of authors, form, structure, and meaning).  As historians, we have excluded half-films.  We have constructed a half-history of whole objects, bypassing film history altogether.  Half-films force a new historiography, one in which we do not mark out the films/images that are missing, but recognize and analyze the sites of absence and resistance (to history, narrative, telling) that have been there all along.

Adventures on the Upper Nile (American Museum of Natural History, 1927)

This short clip is excerpted from Adventures on the Upper Nile, “a pictorial record of the O’Donnell-Clark African Expedition into the Southern Sudan…for the purpose of securing specimens of the rare giant eland.”  The film exemplifies the rhythms of ethnographic cinema: stretches of empty, unproductive duration (waiting, watching, etc.) punctuated by spectacular, but equally unproductive events.  In Adventures, these events include animal death/dismemberment, ritual dance, and environmental contingencies.  In this particular scene, the boat encounters a series of fires along the shore.  But, here, too, the event extends, repeats, stretches out.  It is an almost lyrical, meditative encounter, one which brings film material as such to the fore.  Here, we are told, birds dive towards the flames for insects.  We strain to see this interspecies interaction, but the birds and insects mingle with the deteriorated image, with its burns, scratches, and holes.

A little late to the moon party…

Lobster Films completed its restoration of a hand-colored Voyage dans la lune (Georges Méliès, 1902) in 2011.  The work took twenty years.  It is the most expensive restoration in the history of cinema.  The print premiered at Cannes with a new soundtrack by Air.  It will screen elsewhere this month (and can be found embedded in Scorsese’s 3D homage to Méliès, Hugo).  Here, one can see an interview with Serge Bromberg, the Director of Lobster Films, on the acquisition of the print (from Spain).  In the interview, Bromberg interestingly claims that the aim of the project was “to promote…and to revive the experience of ‘Trip to the Moon’.”  It would be interesting to put some pressure on the ellipses, to hear more about the promotional ends of this particular restoration and the experience promoters hoped to revive.  More interesting perhaps, is the way in which the hyper-national restoration, promotion and re-release of the film (from Lobster to Air to Cannes) conceals the transnational circuits that the film travelled before finding its way back to origin stories and national mythologies.

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska have gathered the remnants of socialist Poland’s amateur film clubs and made this material available under a creative commons license.  From their site:

These licenses grant you the right to use, copy, sometimes modify and redistribute any film, text or image that you find of interest here. The most important operational clause within the license is that these rights -to copy, modify and redistribute- must be extended to others. The source material, and all derivative works will become in perpetuity, a legally protected creative resource. Artists and others will be able to use and re-use the material for future creative exchange, enriching rather than depleting the public domain. 

It is rare for a virtual archive to be so open, accessible, and self-reflexive (an extension, perhaps, of the counter-forces that made these amateur films possible amid “the breathless flow” of State-sponsored media).  The site is available in Polish, English, Spanish, and Basque.  Films are streamable, downloadable, remixable.  The archive includes extensive notes on the history of the project and Poland’s film clubs.  Interviews with the amateur filmmakers and film club members available here, along with a handful of essays on the cultural, political, and art/film-historical questions that these images pose.

Over the last two to three years, the term “digital humanities” has displaced “interdisciplinarity” as a kind of new bureaucratic buzzword, a rallying cry for administrators under pressure to attract students, make an impact, and embrace the future, whatever that might be.

Anxieties are high among many of those who actually research and teach in the humanities.  What will the digital do to us?  And what can the digital actually do for the humanities?  Does the “digital” have any substance?  For film scholars, the digital poses a number of questions about the boundaries of our discipline, the future of our archives, and the ontology of our beloved objects.

In his most recent piece in the NYTimes, Stanley Fish takes up the term and offers his own skeptical position.  He begins:

This is a blog. There, I’ve said it. I have been resisting saying it — I have always referred to this space as a “column” — not only because “blog” is an ugly word (as are clog, smog and slog), but because blogs are provisional, ephemeral, interactive, and communal; whereas in a professional life now going into its 50^th year, I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive, and most important, all mine.

There are a lot of things to dislike about this opening paragraph, not least of which is Fish’s argument from and for the authority of academic authorship, with 50 years of experience to guide him.  (Coincidentally, this puts Fish’s entry into the field around 1962.  Post-war academic boom-time, esp. for men with Ph.Ds).

More interesting, however, is Fish’s reluctant admission to writing a blog and his dismissive characterization of the process of “interactive” and “communal” writing.  According to Fish,

In the traditional model of scholarship, a credentialed author — someone with a Ph.D. or working toward one — gets an idea (that’s the original part) and applies it to a text or a set of problems, and produces, all by himself, a new text that is offered to readers with the promise that if they follow (that is, submit to) it, they will gain an increase in understanding and knowledge.

If one follows Fish’s vision of the academy to its conclusion, one would have no need for the humanities, much less for the digital.  We could just follow (or…submit to) our mystically-credentialled masters, empty vessels to be filled with “understanding and knowledge.”

But: How does an author get those credentials, if not through a long process of mentorship, collaboration, and dialectic exchange?  And what do those credentials actually mean, if not that one is ready to mentor others, guide the exchange, and continue in a process of thinking, exchanging, drafting, and revision?

Fish turns to the work of Kathleen Fitzpatrick (a credentialed author and the Director of Scholarly Communication for the MLA) to understand the effects of the digital.  Fitzpatrick makes a neo-Barthesian argument for digital futures.  The author is destabilized anew.  Fish pivots from Fitzpatrick’s description of digital “texts in process” to structural annihilation:

Meaning everywhere and nowhere, produced not by anyone but by everyone in concert, meaning not waiting for us at the end of a linear chain of authored thought in the form of a sentence or an essay or a book, but immediately and multiply present in a cornucopia of ever-expanding significances.

Of course, there is a wide and productive field between the authority Fish celebrates and the strawman of digital anarchy and meaninglessness.  I tried to outline one of these positions in my post a couple of days ago.  The digital humanities can widen access to the foundations of humanistic thought: reasoned debate, exchange with opponents, discussion with mentors and colleagues.  Fish, I should note, does not seem swayed by arguments for access, what he calls the “political vision” of the digital humanities.

The fevered embrace of the digital also owes to what Fish describes as a “theological vision.”  Digital theology promises to:

liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated — knowledge at this time and this place experienced by this limited being — and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system. [...]

Fish brings these digital theologians back to earth:

The obstacle to this happy state is mortality itself. To be mortal is to be capable of dying (as opposed to going on and on and on), and therefore of having a beginning, middle and end, which is what sentences, narratives and arguments have: you start here and end there with the completed thought or story or conclusion (quod erat demonstrandum).

How can the digital threaten us simultaneously with ephemerality and fantasies of immortality?   If, as Fish argues, the digital does away with mortality and invites us to worship at the altar of a higher power, it would seem the path was cleared by the cult of authorship.  Fish, we should remember, has his own theology, one which we have been invited to follow (or submit to…) with the promise of understanding and knowledge.

Ironically enough, Fitzpatrick’s book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy was a blog first and a book second.  Fish’s post also plucks a comment that Mark Sample, an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and New Media at George Mason University, left on a graduate student’s blog.  (Sample tweeted on Jan. 10: “A full professor cites an assistant professor’s comment on a graduate student’s blog.  Fish, you just illustrated the new scholarly ecology”).

The ground slips…

In the end I think that Fish and I disagree about what the foundations of the humanities actually are.  Extrapolating from his article (he does not stake a firm position and glides between multiple voices), Fish seems prepared to mourn the loss of institutional power, unidirectional communication, and mythologies of genius.  It is difficult to reconcile Fish’s own work on reading and interpretive communities (not to mention his argument for the intrinsic value of the humanities) with his take on the digital.  Nevertheless, I am not surprised by the resistance.  Fish defends the status quo.  And it is gradually being eroded by, among other forces, the digital humanities.

Michael Clayton, Vascular bundle of a fern rhizome (2010)

I have decided not to attend the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in March.  My reasons are largely financial.  My institution has a limited budget for research expenses and I did not receive any funding for the trip.  This particular year, I can’t afford to pay entirely out of pocket.  The conference has become a major expense since I moved to Scotland in 2009: $200 for the conference, $800 for the plane ticket, $500 for several nights in a hotel in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Boston, Chicago, etc.

I will miss the SCMS conference.  It offers a valuable snapshot of the discipline.  I learn what people are working on and what subfields are developing.  I meet new colleagues and potential collaborators.  And: I catch up with old friends, colleagues, and mentors.  It has become a kind of lifeline to an academic and social world outside of Northeast Scotland.

There are other conferences, of course.  And some outstanding ones in Film and Media Studies across the UK and continental Europe.

But my decision not to attend the SCMS conference this year has me thinking about academic conferences (esp. the large, multi-day, many-paneled, state-of-the-discipline events) and the more inclusive, accessible, and environmentally sustainable alternatives that (I hope) are on the way.

The shape and scope of academic conferences (SCMS, but also MLA, ACLA, etc.) belong to another economic, professional, and historical moment, one in which oil was cheap, humanities budgets were healthier, and long-term, full-time academic employment outstripped part-time, contingent, and unprotected academic labor.  In 2009, Brian Coxhall, wrote a paper for his MLA panel—“Today’s Teachers, Today’s Students: Economics”—on his decision not to attend the MLA.  The panel Chair read the paper in Coxhall’s absence.  At the time, Coxhall was an adjunct professor; today he is a post-doctoral fellow at Emory University.  The paper, entitled “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty” went viral at the conference and has since circulated in regular waves in academic forums online.  From the paper:

I can’t imagine that I’m alone in this dilemma of not attending this year’s convention due to finances and the anemic job market. After all, as The New York Times reported on 17 December, the number of listings in the MLA’s Job Information List was down 37% from 2008’s numbers, the sharpest decline since MLA started tracking job ads in 1974. It’s not like 2008 was a banner year, however. The listings a year ago were down 26% from what they had been in 2007. Landing a job in the professoriate has been difficult for well more than this decade, but the recent economic crisis has necessitated (or allowed, if we’re feeling cynical) administrators trimming budgets so that less and less tenure-track faculty are hired. What this means is that more and more contingent faculty are employed to teach the increasing number of students who are matriculating at the nation’s universities. So…perhaps it’s not that employment is going down for humanists with the PhD. Rather, it is sustainable employment that is evaporating. (I’m looking at you, California.) After all, the demand for contingent faculty labor will probably rise sharply as the number of students enrolling in colleges rises due to the nation’s recent economic crisis. [...]

I especially appreciate how large the MLA is since I can find opportunities to attend panels that represent the full 150 years of American literature that my research covers. Attending this conference (or others) keeps me abreast of the latest scholarship and helps me produce scholarship that pushes the state of my fields forward. As one of today’s teachers, attending conferences helps me be more prepared to teach today’s students these new developments, preparing them to be more effective readers of literature, whether they are English or biostatistics majors. Moreover, it is at conferences that I am most likely to have the opportunity to meet with old and new colleagues whose work intersects most closely with my own. Schools only need so many Shakespeare scholars; not so the MLA! Yet attending conferences isn’t just about seeing old friends; the relationships formed with colleagues at conferences again help us produce scholarship. For just one example, the panel that I spoke on last year has resulted in a book-length collaboration among the four panelists, none of whom had met previously. When the majority of faculty (who are, again, contingent faculty) cannot attend the MLA (or any other conference), it results in a faculty that cannot advance, that does not, in other words, appear to be doing the things that would warrant their conversion to the tenure track. Our placement as contingent faculty quickly becomes a self-fulfilling event.

To be clear: I am not trying to draw any comparison between Coxhall’s economic position/decision and my own.  I also don’t understand the terms of the dilemma in quite the same way. We do not need to improve academic working conditions in order to circulate more scholars through conferences.  We need to rethink the academic conference in order to improve scholarship, expand networks of academic collaboration, and reach contingent faculty.  We cannot wait for the economy or academic institutions to change.  And we don’t need to.  Coxhall reached more colleagues as a virtual voice than he ever could have as a traditional panelist.

Even if the economy was to improve and departments were to respond in kind (increasing research budgets, expanding faculty numbers, improving employment terms, etc.), the traditional academic conference would still need retooling in order to serve the contemporary literary and visual humanities.  Coxhall and I agree that conferences like the SCMS and MLA keep scholars in touch with contemporary scholarship and the state-of-the-field.  But the expense (in money and time) of overseas travel necessarily excludes most academics outside of North America.  Indeed, these conferences tend to represent the state of American scholarship, no matter their disciplinary aspirations or obligations to cross national boundaries.

SCMS held its first conference outside of North America in London in 2005.  In 2009, the conference was to be held in Japan, but the event was cancelled due to the flu pandemic and travel restrictions. The language of the SCMS mission statement importantly reflects an expansive and inclusive disciplinary posture:

SCMS seeks to further media study within higher education and the wider cultural sphere, and to serve as a resource for scholars, teachers, administrators, and the public. SCMS works to maintain productive relationships with organizations in other nations, disciplines, and areas of media study; to foster dialogue between media industries and scholars; and to promote the preservation of our film, television, and media heritage. We encourage membership and participation of scholars and those in related positions not only in the US but around the world.

So long as these aims are tied to physical travel, they will be forever delayed, deferred, rerouted.

A final point contra the traditional conference: they are not good for the environment.  Hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people fly from one coast (or continent) to another to share space, time, and ideas.  The end is admirable, but the carbon footprint is large.  The routes of wasteful, circuitous travel expand exponentially when conferences are joined to the job market.  Schools and candidates fly from coast to coast to be in one place at one time, though they may have been geographically closer before they ever left town.

Small changes have been unfolding over the last couple of years.  The MLA has a twitter feed and an online presence for those who cannot attend.  SCMS recently launched a refashioned website that encourages professional networking in advance and outside of the conference.  But these features remain supplements to the live event, rather than viable alternatives to it.  Smaller organizations seem to have more ambitious virtual projects.  Cornell’s Society for the Humanities live-streamed its last two conferences.  In 2013, the University of South Carolina and the University of Beyreuth will host a conference in two locations, virtually joined together.  According to the organizers, “The conference proceedings will be broadcast via live-stream on the internet and later as podcasts. There are plans for a live audience in Bayreuth and possibly elsewhere to be linked via video-conference. All lectures will be given in English. Additional discussions, questions, and suggestions may be added through Facebook.”  It’s a start.  And I am interested to hear about other plans/projects on the horizon.

However, as Film and Media scholars, we should be experimenting more aggressively with the boundaries of the traditional conference.  We are in a privileged position, trained to read mixed and multimedia texts and analyze the effects (and affects) of hybrid forms of audiovisual expression: at once real and virtual, present and absent, lived and recorded (streamed, digitized) time.

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