This study examines the collaborative work of the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1962-2006) in respect to current and future formations of political avant-garde filmmaking. Throughout their joint career the Marxist filmmakers understood their work as part of an ongoing effort to participate in the class struggle, despite of an overall decline in faith regarding revolutionary politics. Straub-Huillet pursued this desire for radical, social and political change not simply on the level of filmic content, but rather by employing distinct cinematic practices. This study is, at the same time, an effort to combat the political inertia that affected film theory as part of larger disciplinary shifts in the humanities. In order to do so, I am engaging, first and foremost, in poststructuralist discourses that will be discussed on the basis of traditional forms of Marxist-oriented critical theories. Reason for this is an attempt to replace metaphysical paradigms with an aporetic structure that is affirmative of difference, rather than identity. Based on the notion of an elective affinity Straub-Huillet's film adaptations challenged traditional forms of cinematic authorship and collaboration. Instead of simply referencing other authors, Straub-Huillet allow the author as an other to enter and intervene with the film-text. This creative relationship is as much characterized by an act of resistance that is maintained through an overt formal use of direct quotations. This introduces a principle of repetition and reproduction into the films that defines the couple's filmmaking process as a practice of creative labor. The textual figure of the border draws out further how this practice gives rise to new understandings of cinema in regard to nation, culture, and history. Figurations of ruins outline, in addition, how these issues pertain at once to necessity and the limits of representation. This points, in conclusion, to a central dilemma affecting all political film practices: the difficulty of reinventing images that are not already clichés or corporate entities. Straub-Huillet address this problem in a specific way; they aim at the production of an image that pertains to a (future) revolutionary event on the basis of an already existing classical genealogy.

My thesis work explores the visual space of the screen by taking the form of the Sierpinski Sieve, providing a cinematic work that works to be the experience of itself.

Disciplines arrive at moments of crisis. So do those who labor within and at the margins, intersections, outskirts, and centers of those disciplines. This written thesis draws together these moments of both disciplinary and individual crisis, at the intersection of anthropology, nonfiction filmmaking, and film studies. In response to existential, representational, and ethical anxieties, these writings and videos affirm life, within and between the disciplines, myself, and my collaborators — each of whom has experienced or is recovering from an eating disorder. Through navigating the representation of these experiences, the work interrogates the limits and potentials of representation in nonfiction film and video more broadly, and how it relates to anthropology, activism, and pedagogy. It asks: what is a good (ethical) representation of another individual’s experience, especially of something as seemingly private or vulnerable as an eating disorder and the recovery from it? This thesis approaches this question from technological, methodological, ethical, philosophical, and practical perspectives, and in doing so, aims not so much to resolve these disciplinary and personal crises, but to move through and with them, towards a theory and a practice of embodied ethical representation.

This written thesis serves as a public record for the production of Jesse Kreitzer's MFA thesis film Black Canaries, a 1900s coal mining folktale inspired by his Iowan heritage. The thesis includes Mr. Kreitzer's genealogical and historical research as it pertains to his maternal ancestry and coal mining in south-central Iowa. The thesis also accounts for the conceptual, personal, and practical considerations for the production of Black Canaries. Additional materials include the film's production packet, reference guide, production storyboards, and screenplay.

Since its inception in 1897, the annual Cheyenne Frontier Days has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to Wyoming for a 10-day celebration of "Western roots," culminating in the world's largest outdoor rodeo nicknamed "The Daddy of 'Em All." Shot during the 2018 Frontier Days, Daddy of 'Em All tracks the proliferation of settler colonial narratives that the event seeks to ossify through its signs, symbols, and sets. Through dislocated images and interviews with past and present Frontier Days volunteers and attendees including my mother, a then-resident of Cheyenne, the film grapples with heritage, ideology, violence, and borders in a time of growing nationalism.

By discussing how New Queer Cinema and queer theory have informed one another, I aim to understand how the gaze operates when a film prioritizes multiple subjectivities of experience. However, I hope to move beyond the tendency in queer theory to essentialize and categorize subjective or “true” experiences as a pretense to challenging dominant representations of identity. Although the politics of representation are crucial to the identification of social ills, I aim to identify the potential to theorize the gaze as an opportunity to locate desire throughout visual texts from various marginalized positions, not limited to sexuality and gender. If the main goal of new queer films is to offer more “authentic” queer realities – or more accurately, to oppose mainstream stereotyping – then these films maintain the existence of a dominant/heterosexual/homophobic discourse, ultimately reaffirming the hetero/homo binary. Additionally, because these films are primarily intended to address political representation in the mainstream, they essentialize identity once again by only portraying certain positive images, what is “authentic” anyway? As a result, they actively exclude other constructions of identity, coding cultural difference as “deviant” because it falls outside of the hetero/homo binary, rendering other sexualities/difference invisible and unable to resist. This preoccupation with recasting the stereotype, by filmmakers and critics alike, often ignores the value of the visual text and remains oblivious to the potential for the gaze to simultaneously elicit multiple and often contradictory forms of desire. Theorizing the gaze as queer means to interrogate the mechanisms of spectatorship, decode cultural difference, destabilize the authority of experience, and most importantly, reimagine the terms of desire.

La Sagrada Familia is a short film that looks at the complex interactions between three women. A grandmother, a mother, and a daughter must spend the night together in the countryside as they prepare for a wedding. Their already strained relationships will be put to the test as painful memories and unresolved grudges arise to haunt them. The story’s title is inspired by the Sacred Family Basilica in Spain. The monument is a beautiful catholic monument that has remained unfinished for hundreds of years much like the neglected relationships of an otherwise loving family.

When one thinks of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, fear and horror are not terms normally associated with this iconic American cartoon character; however, the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine turns animated bodies (cartoons) into bodies the player fears. In this game family friendly cartoon characters are transformed into figures of fear. Furthermore, Bendy and the Ink Machine does this by making the bending of Black bodies visible through what I call the gameic gaze. The transformation from family friendly into fear happens through the resistive gaze, the gameic gaze, which lingers on the bending of the diegetic cartoons. Bendy and the Ink Machine actualizes the historical contorting of the Black body starting in slavery and continued by the entertainment industry through bending. Bending and the Ink Machine makes the minstrel origins of cartoons visible through the gameic gaze.

This is a critical history of how film criticism and theory have engaged with the issue of race and ethnicity, carried out from a historical materialist position – adopting the Neo-Marxian orthodoxy of Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson, and a concern with class politics. Those theories are used to question the postmodern and poststructuralist assumptions that connect race-related film criticism, racial discourse and racial politics, with a view to better serve the field’s political objectives. Criticism promises to deliver – via the intermediate desire for cultural democracy in the mass media – on the ultimate promise of social justice. How well is that battle being fought? Tracking the development of the field’s different theoretical models, this project examines how each of them defines the ideological function of films. Racerelated film criticism can be divided into First and Second generations, distinct in how each understands cinematic racism to operate through different theories of textual operations. First Generation theory consists of positive image analyses and stereotype studies, but Second Generation scholarship eschews its empiricism, incorporating paradigms of discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Within the field’s progression, theoretical contradictions exist which induce a move towards historical materialism and class-based analysis. Among them is the continued assumption of an autonomous subject in the tradition of Western humanism, which runs counter to the social constructivism and notion of split subjectivities inherent in postmodern theory. By connecting that subject to the authentic, critical and unified subject posited in Adorno and Jameson’s writings about cinema, I argue for historical materialism and considerations of the Culture Industry as the means to study mass media and racial ideology. The final theory section proffers a re-reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and demonstrates how film and media studies have misappropriated it as a poststructuralist theory, when he is actually more in line with the Frankfurt School. The case study examines how the star discourse of actor Keanu Reeves, whose ethnic ambiguity is often attributed to his inscrutable persona and a diagnosis of postmodern symptoms. That view overlooks a unified, modernist subjectivity on Reeves’s part.

Mediating the Mill: Steel Production in Film counters opinions by film scholars and critics who often see films that represent steel production and its spaces as failed aesthetic projects or as dull propaganda or educational films, and who undervalue the importance of the specificity of the steel mills and the industry represented in them. It argues that such films are aesthetically and historically rich texts for film and history, but that they can only be interpreted as such when their historical and industrial specificity is returned to or brought alongside the film texts. Using the work of Siegfried Kracauer and film and history scholars, it argues that such films can be read as artifacts of collectively held understandings, imaginings, and affects. In particular, it argues that films representing steel production provide unique insight into collectively held responses to macroeconomic events in the 20th century--from monopoly capital's consolidation and the introduction of Fordism and Taylorism, to the Keynesian compromise, to the Cold War "consensus," to the breakdown of Fordism and introduction of global overproduction, and finally to neoliberalism. Using the work of Frederic Jameson, it interprets these films as cognitive maps of steel production from subjective position within antagonisms of class and economic control. Indeed, it argues that 20th century steel production was a subject uniquely able to bring forth cognitive maps, due to the difficulty of representing it as a coherent industrial process. When filmmakers "mapped" the process, they created cognitive (and affective) maps that tell us more about the provisional acts of representation, and what drives and informs them, than about what or who is represented. Finally, it argues that this cognitive and affective work can only be grasped by close attention to the films' aesthetics, which always also allows for `suggestive indeterminacy' and polyvalent readings, especially due to the striking material world made spectacular on film. This examination of steel production in film also expands the category of industrial film to include documentaries, animated educational films, experimental films, and popular fiction films. As such, this dissertation is made up of case studies of four sets of films of steel production and its spaces. The first set, state-sponsored social documentaries of the 1930s, includes films by Joris Ivens, Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, and Willard Van Dyke and considers how these filmmakers differently imagined the state's role in steel production in this period. The second, mid-twentieth-century sponsored films, includes films made for US Steel and other steel firms from the 1930s through 1960s, and places these films into the context of public relations as an attempt to shape how workers and the public viewed corporate interests. The third, experimental films of the 1970s, focuses on films by Hollis Frampton and Richard Serra that consider the difficulties of connecting the film artist's perspective with that of the steel worker as the western steel industry began to draw down its workforce and as economic change split the middle class. The concluding chapter examines popular dystopian Hollywood films of the late twentieth century as part of a broader shift in the US to a neoliberal economy that left little room for workers. Despite the breadth of my chapters, this dissertation draws on the work of Walter Benjamin in understanding catastrophe as the line connecting the chapters, but also in following the potential when a mass art turned its attention to the massed workers and mass spectacles of steel production.