BOOK REVIEW_Glick, Joshua. Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977, Synoptique 7.2 2018.pdf (original) (raw)

Noirscapes: Using the screen to rewrite Los Angeles noir as urban historiography

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2016

Noirscapes is a transmedia experience, and the cameras are rolling. Writing its own version of Los Angeles' history, Noirscapes is a filmed scholarly discourse that literally drives through the urban environment of the city of Los Angeles constructing a noir historiography. The authors of this article are film-maker-researchers who, as a mode of creative practice research, are using screens and the medium of film to write with, on and for the screen. The premise of Noirscapes is that film noir can function partly as a surrogate history of Los Angeles, so that film noir screens provide written cinematic evidence of the city's actual as well as imagined history. Noirscapes presents a series of short films that constitute a creative practice research output. Filming and driving across the freeways and boulevards of present day Los Angeles allowed the film-makers to traverse production locations and to discuss their role in urban historiography, as featured through iconic film noirs like Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Chinatown (1974). Noirscapes demonstrates how film-making and spectatorship can be used as complementary research methods that enquire with, on and for the screen.

'Geography is Destiny': Cinematizing the City in the L.A. Quartet

The Big Somwhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World, 2018

James Ellroy's identity as a crime writer is rooted in his extraordinary life story and relationship with his home city of Los Angeles. Beginning with the unsolved murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, in 1958, Ellroy's early life played a large role in shaping his obsessions with murder, the criminal underworld of L.A. and the redemptive power of the feminine. Ellroy's life could be seen as a brutal, visceral and emotionally exhausting realisation of the American Dream, a theme he has explored in his writing to the extent that he is credited with reinventing crime fiction. The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy's Noir World is an in-depth, scholarly study of the work of James Ellroy, featuring leading Ellroy scholars such as Anna Flügge, Jim Mancall and Rodney Taveira. Moving from Ellroy's early detective novels to his later epic works of historical fiction, it explores how Ellroy found his place in the history of the genre by building on, and then surpassing, the works of authors who influenced him such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Joseph Wambaugh. It also examines Ellroy's impact on contemporary writers and on the cultural perception of L.A., which has been his legacy through the L.A. Quartet novels. The 'Big Somewhere' is not a geographical location, but a conglomeration of the cinematic, historical and fictional worlds that influenced Ellroy, from film noir to the Kennedy era in American politics, and on which he, in turn, has left his mark.

Syllabus: The Death and Afterlife of Film in New York

2018

Many claim that film is a dying medium. Movie theaters are closing. Ticket prices have increased. In 2006, the artist Tacita Dean filmed the last standard industrial film factory in France on the final five rolls of stock created in the factory. Millions of film reels have dropped out of circulation. Does that mean the era of film is over? As much as cinephiles have decried the “death” of cinema, the appearance of moving images in the galleries of several major art museums testifies to its persistence. This course examines the renewed appeal of film among postwar and contemporary art and media practitioners. Moving images figure centrally in postwar and contemporary art. But there is nothing necessary or predictable about the prominence they have recently enjoyed in art galleries. Long associated with the spectacle of mass culture, film has been sidelined from narratives of artistic development for most of its history. In order to better appreciate the vast gulf between art and film, this course develops out of the assumption of certain discontinuities, disjunctures and disparities at work in their encounter within the museum. Before considering a range of examples of moving image exhibition from museums in New York and beyond, we consider the art-film hybrid as emerging two systems of thought with radically different aesthetic, cultural and discursive concerns.

Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (University of Chicago Press, March 2014)

2014

Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic to rethink entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. While scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European film-based performance of the 1970s, this study explores the historical and conceptual origins of the idea in mid-‘60s New York. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema to materially and conceptually displace the moving image so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship. The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from practice the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2), to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and the performance stage (chapter 4). The concluding chapter returns to 1966 to understand the Expanded Cinema in crisis at the height of its early popularity – as the introduction of video feedback helps to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse situation of televisual culture.

Teaching Historical Geographies of American Film Production

Journal of Geography, 2002

The geographies of Hollywood are multiple, contradictory, ephemeral and tangible. Our preconceived conceptions of space and place play a dynamic role in what elements we tend to focus on when discussing the cultural industry of American cinema. This essay uses Hollywood as a metaphor for the American film production industry and a historical geography of production as a framework to explore major spatial and structural changes within this industry from its inception to the present. It highlights teaching methods and materials from the course A Geography of Film at Southern Connecticut State University. Mode of production relates to the economic process where capital, labor, knowledge and imagination are blended to produce a culturalized product for consumption. The American film industry is a fine example of the commodification of culture.