Tag: Frankenstein

Shane Denson, “Animation as Theme and Medium: Frankenstein and Visual Culture”

MonsterOfFrankenstein1

Here is the abstract for Shane Denson’s talk at the Illustration, Comics, and Animation Conference at Dartmouth College (April 19 – 21, 2013):

Animation as Theme and Medium: Frankenstein and Visual Culture

Shane Denson

Frankenstein and above all Frankenstein’s monster are emphatically plurimedial figures; already in the nineteenth century, they escaped the confines of Mary Shelley’s novel and proliferated on theater stages and in political cartoons before embarking, in the twentieth century, on a long career in film, radio, TV, comics, and video games. In the course of these developments, the monster in particular has become an unmistakable visual icon, the general contours of which were more or less fixed in our visual culture through Boris Karloff’s embodiment in the early 1930s. The image, however, remains flexible enough as to be instantly recognizable in cartoonish illustrations adorning cereal boxes. In this presentation, I contend that the monster’s image presents a special case for thinking the intermedial networks that constitute our visual culture, owing to the fact that this icon is linked inextricably with “animation” as both a thematic and media-technical topos. The act of animation, or bringing a creature composed of dead corpses to life—subject to only cursory treatment in the novel—becomes the main subject and visual attraction of the tale’s filmic iterations, where animation is motivated not solely by narrative but linked also to a self-reflexive probing of film as a medium. The first Frankenstein film, Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein (1910), used reverse motion and trick photography to animate its creature, and it linked into early discourses of cinema, according to which moving images in general (rather than, as later, a special class of films) were referred to as “animated film”—for the cinema brought “dead” photos (cf. 19th century memento mori) back to life, as attested in the names of early-film companies and apparatuses (Bioscope, Vitagraph, etc). James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), too, probes animation as both theme and medium in the midst of change, reviving this nexus (and the monster) in the wake of the sound transition, with its foregrounding of uncanny figures “electrified” by technical sound, showcased all the more by a mute monster capable only of inarticulate moans. Besides the cinematic trajectory, moreover, there is also a rich Frankensteinian comics tradition—which includes fumetti film tie-ins, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein series of the 1940s and 1950s, various serializations at Marvel and DC, and even crossovers with superheroes like Batman, Spiderman, or the X-Men—that similarly probes “animation” as the thematic/medial wellspring of modern visual culture. Both in film and comics, graphic/visual treatments of Frankenstein approach animation (asymptotically, perhaps) as an enabling frame or parergon and thus relive, again and again, an iconic Urszene of the birth of modern visual culture and its self-reflexive mediality.

Out Now: American Comic Books and Graphic Novels

American Comic Books and Graphic Novels is a special issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies (issue 56.4), edited by Daniel Stein and Christina Meyer (my co-editors on the forthcoming Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads), together with Micha Edlich from the University of Mainz. The special issue, which I just found in my mailbox, has turned out to be a very nice collection of essays, bringing together theorizations of comics and graphic narratives as a medium or medial form and close readings of specific case studies. Also included is an interview with David Mack, conducted by Henry Jenkins. Daniel Stein has posted the full table of contents at his academia.edu page (here).

My own contribution, “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures,” continues my recent explorations of the nexus of seriality and/as mediality. Here’s the abstract:

This essay argues that Marvel’s Frankenstein comics of the 1960s and 1970s offer a useful case study in the dynamics of serial narration, both as it pertains to comics in particular and to the larger plurimedial domain of popular culture in general. Distinguishing between linear and non-linear forms of narrative seriality—each of which correlates with two distinct types of series-inhabiting characters—I argue that Marvel’s staging of the Frankenstein monster mixes the two modes, resulting in a self-reflexive exploration and interrogation of the comics’ story- telling techniques. Furthermore, I contend that this process sheds light on the medial dynamics of serial figures—that is, characters such as the monster (but also superheroes like Batman and Superman or other figures like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes) that are adapted again and again in a wide variety of forms, contexts, and media. Though narrative continuity may be lacking between the repeated stagings of serial figures, non-diegetic traces of previous incarnations accumulate on such characters, allowing them to move between and reflect upon medial forms, never wholly contained in a given diegetic world. Accordingly, Marvel’s depiction of the Frankenstein monster leads to a self-reflexive probing of comic books’ forms of narrative and visual mediality, ultimately problematizing the very building blocks of comics as a medium—the textual and graphic framings that, together, narrate comics’ serialized stories.

Kara: Digitally Rendered Frankenstein

Frankenstein films have always been as much about the technological animation of a monster as they are about the medium’s own ability to animate still images. In all of its renderings, Frankenstein also carries traces of the gendered struggles encoded by its first creator, the novel’s author Mary Shelley, who describes the creation of the famous monster — the visual centerpiece of every Frankenstein film — in far less detail than she devotes to the assembly and violent last-minute destruction of its would-be female companion. Films such as James Whale’s classic Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), or Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein  (1994) consummate this forbidden act of female creation — i.e. the creation of and not by a woman. They oscillate then between their represented storyworlds and a sort of “frenzy of the visible” (as Linda Williams puts it in her classic study of pornography), consisting in these cases of both a filmic objectification of the woman and a foregrounding of the extradiegetic, medial means of her animation.

Quantic Dream (the French game studio most famous for Heavy Rain) follows in this tradition with their recent demo video “Kara,” shown at the Game Developer’s Conference 2012 in San Francisco (March 5-9) and embedded here. The artificial woman’s body is the vehicle by which the technology itself of animation — the realtime rendering of audiovisual content on a PlayStation 3 — can be made the object of attention. The shifting figure/ground relations between diegetic and non-diegetic levels are made concrete in their correlations with the game of peek-a-boo played with the female android’s body: we see right through her, into the deepest recesses of her artificial anatomy, but a hint of clothing prevents any indecent sights once the envelope of her skin is complete.

The — unseen — engineer marvels, “My God!,” as he reflects on the implications of Kara’s unexpected development of sentience, and on the fact that, despite his better judgment, he refrains from dismantling her and allows her to live. Standing proxy for the spectator in front of the screen, the engineer’s exclamation is also centrally about directing our attention towards the visual surface of the screen — both towards the erotic attraction of Kara’s (supposedly) breathtakingly beautiful body, and towards the assemblage of machinery and code that is capable of bringing it to life.

According to Quantic Dream, the program code/video demonstrates the emotional depth that video games are capable of generating. Clearly, though, it is designed above all to demonstrate technological sophistication — and recalling that the spectacle is rendered in real time on a PS3, it is indeed quite impressive. But if emotional maturity and depth were really at stake here, would it be necessary to instrumentalize the female body in this way? Finally, though, we see here a further demonstration of the continued persistence of the Frankensteinian model — with all its problematic intertwinings of biological, technological, sexual, and media-oriented questions and themes — in shaping our fantasies and imaginations, both for better and for worse, with regard to our visions of the (near) future and the possibilities it holds for novel anthropotechnical relations: whether in the field of android-assisted living or in the space of our living rooms, where in the name of “playing games” we have rapidly grown accustomed to interacting with nonhuman agencies.

Happy Halloween, Or: Who’s Afraid of Media Theory?

What’s there to be afraid of anyway? The video above, which I repost here for Halloween, offers one sort of approach to this question by recontextualizing cinematic horror against a more diffuse sort of horror that emanates from a changing media environment.

The video is a screencast of a talk I gave at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Studies Association: “Media Crisis, Serial Chains, and the Mediation of Change: Frankenstein on Film.” Thematizing transitional phenomena of media change and transformation, the paper itself occupies a transitional place between my dissertation, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, and my current postdoctoral research on “Serial Figures and Media Change” (with Ruth Mayer, part of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Practice”).

The talk attempts to excavate a forgotten experiential dimension–an experience of crisis related to changes in the media landscape–that uncannily informs the iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster. The notion that media changes precipitate phenomenological crises, as I put forward here, is informed by Mark Hansen’s view that media define “the environment for life” (or, more generally, the environment for agency, as I propose in Postnaturalism). While media are embodied in discrete apparatic technologies, they are inseparable from the total milieu of agential capacities; media changes thus have both a local and a global dimension, and it is this global aspect (and the networked distribution of human and technical agencies that it signifies) that explains why media changes might occasion affective states of crisis, anxiety, the uncanny, or present themselves as just plain scary.

My talk is also informed by a variety of concerns that I share with people like Jussi Parikka, who along with Garnet Hertz has argued for a conception of “zombie media,” according to which media never simply die but continue to exert a haunting influence that can be appropriated for media-theoretical and artistic purposes. Their essay “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” which Hertz and Parikka presented at the transmediale 2011 in Berlin, is introduced thus:

There is always a better camera, laptop, mobile phone on the horizon: new media always becomes old. We approach this phenomenon under the umbrella term of media archaeology and aim to extend the media archaeological interest of knowledge into an art methodology. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of the repressed, the forgotten, the past, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking, and other exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology, as well as the environment. Media embodies memory, but not only human memory; memory of things, of objects, of chemicals, and circuits that are returned to nature, so to speak, after their cycle. But these can be resurrected. This embodiment of memory in things is what relates media archaeology to an ecosophic enterprise as well.

(Quoted from here at the transmediale website.) And here is a video of the complete talk:

In his “manifesto for digital spectrology,” Parikka expands on the ghostly side of all this, bringing the notion of hauntology into close connection with the materiality of media-technologies and the ecology of media evolution:

Digital Spectrology is that dirty work of a cultural theorist who wants to understand how power works in the age of circuitry. Power circulates not only in human spaces of cities, organic bodies or just plain things and objects. Increasingly, our archaeologies of the contemporary need to turn inside the machine, in order to illuminate what is the condition of existence of how we think, see, hear, remember and hallucinate in the age of software. This includes things discarded, abandoned, obsolete as much as the obscure object of desire still worthy of daylight. As such, digital archaeology deals with spectres too; but these ghosts are not only hallucinations of afterlife reached through the media of mediums, or telegraphics, signals from Mars, the screen as a window to the otherwordly; but in the electromagnetic sphere, dynamics of software, ubiquitous computing, clouds so transparent we are mistaken to think of them as soft. Media Archaeology shares a temporality of the dead and zombies with Hauntology. Dead media is never actually dead. So what is the method of a media archaeologist of technological ghosts? She opens up the hood, looks inside, figures out what are the processual technics of our politics and aesthetics: The Aesthetico-Technical.

– inspired by the work of MicroResearchlab – Berlin/London, the short text was written for Julian Konczak/Telenesia.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that the media-ecological horror of media change is always embedded in (and itself provides a material and affective context for) a political landscape in which technologies are harnessed for oppression, for the maintenance of unequal power distributions, and, of course, for profit. Here, then, are some real-life zombies from #OccupyWallStreet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMsgN2WF0-M

Shane Denson: Interview zu Frankenstein & Film

Neulich wurde ich vom Fanzine Zauberspiegel zu meiner Dissertation Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface und verwandten Themen interviewt. Die Dissertation, deren Cover man hier sieht, wurde von Ruth Mayer (Leibniz Universität Hannover) und Mark Hansen (Duke University) betreut und 2010 bei der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Hannover eingereicht. (Während eine überarbeitete Fassung für die Publikation in einem geeigneten Verlag in Vorbereitung ist, ist die als Eigendruck produzierte Dissertation jetzt schon von der Universitätsbibliothek Hannover direkt oder durch den interuniversitären Dissertationentausch erhältlich. (Datensatz bei der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek hier, bei GetInfo hier und im Online-Katalog der Uni Hannover hier.))

Das Interview im Zauberspiegel, das einige allgemein verständliche Antworten auf die in der Dissertation eher technisch und philosophisch behandelte Fragen geben soll, findet man hier: “Shane Denson über Frankenstein, das Monster und ihre Beziehung in Film und Roman.”

Und hier, schliesslich, ist die deutsche Zusammenfassung der Dissertation, die ich der englischsprachigen Arbeit beigelegt habe:

In der vorliegenden Dissertation argumentiere ich, dass filmische Umsetzungen von Mary Shelleys gotischem Roman Frankenstein ein besonderes Licht auf die Historizität von Mensch/Technik-Schnittstellen werfen—zumindest dann, wenn man sich ihnen in einer konsequent historisierenden Weise annähert. Betrachtet man die verschiedenen Filme im Kontext der historischen Zusammenhänge, die zwischen ihren narrativen Inhalten, sozialen Umfeldern und begleitenden kulturellen Konflikten bestehen, setzt man sie in Relation zu medientechnischen Infrastrukturen, Innovationen und Transitionen und verortet man sie genau in den materiellen und lebensweltlichen Parametern des historisch situierten Zuschauererlebnisses—dann lassen die sogenannten Frankenstein-Filme spezifische Konfigurationen der Mensch/Technik-Interaktion erkennen: Muster, Tendenzen und Abweichungen, die die Momente einer von Umbrüchen geprägten Geschichte bilden, die zugleich eine Geschichte des Kinos, der Medien, der Technik und der affektiven Kanäle unserer eigenen Leiblichkeit ist.

Die Arbeit ist in drei Hauptteile gegliedert. Nachdem Kapitel 1 eine Einleitung in die Argumentation und die Begrifflichkeiten der Arbeit liefert, verortet der erste Hauptteil (bestehend aus Kapitel 2 und 3) eine Reihe experienziell-phänomenologischer Herausforderungen, die die Frankenstein-Filme darstellen. Dafür entwickelt Kapitel 2 eine „Technophänomenologie“ der dominanten Film/Zuschauer-Beziehungen unter den Paradigmen des frühen Kinos und des klassischen Hollywood Filmes; diese Perspektive findet dann in der Analyse zweier Frankenstein-Filme aus den jeweiligen filmgeschichtlichen Perioden Anwendung, wobei sich in beiden Fällen eine Destabilisierung zuschauerlicher Relationen zum Film zeigt, die auf einen unbeständigen Zwischenbereich hindeutet, der zwischen den phänomenologischen Regimes des frühen und des klassischen Kinos liegt. In Kapitel 3 verfolge ich diesen Hinweis in die Übergangsperiode des Kinos der 1910er hinein, insbesondere zu dem aus den Thomas-Edison-Studios stammenden Film Frankenstein aus dem Jahre 1910. Wie ich dort argumentiere, deuten die Dualitäten der Adressierung, die in diesem Film exemplifiziert werden, auf eine breiter gefasste Erfahrung der Transitionalität hin, die sich in Bewegung zwischen stabilen Situationen befindet und sich in negativer Weise zur phänomenologischen Subjektivität zeigt—in Form einer unbestimmten Kluft oder Lücke.

Die charakteristische Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme verorte ich in diesen Lücken der Transitionalität, und im zweiten Hauptteil der Arbeit versuche ich, ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk—nämlich den „Postnaturalismus“—zu formulieren, das den Provokationen der Filme eine Antwort liefern kann. Kapitel 4 kreist zunächst um die Lücken, die feministische Lesarten von Mary Shelleys Roman an den Tag gelegt haben, bevor ich in diese Lücken eintauche, um dort eine Theorie des prä-personellen und daher nicht diskursiven Kontaktes zwischen menschlichen Körpern und der technischen Materialität zu entdecken. Auf Basis dieses Kontaktes, so mein Argument, sind technische Revolutionen (wie die industrielle Revolution, in deren Gefolge Shelley ihren Roman schrieb) in der Lage, die menschliche Handlungsmacht radikal zu destabilisieren, so dass wir experienzielle Lücken erfahren und textuelle Lücken produzieren—die allerdings rasch aufgefüllt und vergessen werden, wenn wir uns an neue Techniken gewöhnen und sie so „naturalisieren.“ In Kapitel 5 widme ich mich diesen Prozessen im Kontext der Aneignung der Dampfmaschine durch die Thermodynamik, um damit die postnatürliche Historizität der naturwissenschaftlichen Natur selbst aufzudecken—also die Tatsache, die sich nicht auf ein epistemisches Phänomen der diskursiven Konstruktion oder Projektion reduzieren lässt, dass sich die materielle Natur in konstanter Bewegung befindet und dass—aufgrund der Rolle von Techniken in dieser Geschichte—die Natur noch nie „natürlich“ gewesen ist. Kapitel 6 übersetzt diese Ergebnisse in eine postnatürliche Medientheorie, die nicht bloß empirisch individuierte Apparate, sondern auch die Historizität des phänomenologischen Raums betrifft, wie er von menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren zusammen artikuliert wird; als filmtheoretisches Korrelat schlage ich eine „kinematische Doppelvision“ vor, die zwischen einer von Merleau-Ponty inspirierten phänomenologischen Sichtweise und einer Bergsonschen Metaphysik pendelt, um die filmische Erfahrung als Produkt eines Wechselspiels zwischen menschlichen Situationen und technischen Verschiebungen zu zeigen.

Der dritte Hauptteil kehrt dann zu den Frankenstein-Filmen zurück, um die besonderen Beziehungen aufzuzeigen, die zwischen ihnen und der postnatürlichen Historizität der anthropotechnischen Schnittstelle bestehen, und eine Art Rapprochement zwischen den konfligierenden menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Akteuren, die den Filmen innewohnen, zu bewirken. Kapitel 7 folgt diesem Ziel, indem es sich den paradigmatischen Frankenstein-Filmen—James Whales Frankenstein (1931) und Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—widmet und die menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Perspektiven alternierend aufzeigt, deren Zusammenkunft die zentrale Kreatur der Filme animiert. In dieser Konfrontation—die unentwirrbar im historischen Moment und besonders im Kontext des Übergangs zum Tonfilm eingebettet ist—suche ich eine nicht-reduktive Weise, um die andersartige Kraft zu begreifen, die die durch Frankenstein-Filme provozierten Erfahrungslücken besetzt. Schließlich bietet Kapitel 8 eine synoptische Sichtweise der weiteren Entwicklung der Frankenstein-Filme; hier versuche ich, die aktive Rolle der kinematischen Techniken in der Produktion kurzlebiger Erfahrungen der Transitionalität aufzuzeigen, die unter dem Gewicht unserer habituellen und „natürlichen“ Beziehungen zu jenen Techniken begraben liegen. Das von mir anvisierte Rapprochement besteht also darin, eine Anerkennung der gegenseitigen Artikulation der Erfahrung durch menschliche und nichtmenschliche (technische) Akteure zu fördern, wodurch die affektive und leibliche Erfahrung einer anthropotechnischen Transitionalität nicht arretiert und der menschlichen Dominanz unterjocht wird, sondern experimentell als gemeinsame Produktion unserer postnatürlichen Zukunft angenähert wird. Dies ist die eigentliche Herausforderung der Frankenstein-Filme.