Film Theory's Animated Map

Author(s): Karen Beckman

Source: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 472-491
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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Film Theorys Animated Map

Karen Beckman

This special issue on The Place of Film and Media Theory brings together
scholars working from a wide range of geographic regions. But why bother
to include a broad, geographically unspecic category like animation in this
conversation? What role does animation have to play in expanding or critiquing
lm and media theorys geopolitical frame?
First, if we think of our eld in spatial terms, as the word encourages us to
do, animation might be cast as the land that lm theory forgot, or rejected, in
part because, according to some, it is a form of lmmaking that leaves the world
behind. Stanley Cavell, for example, describes cartoons as a region of lm which
seems to satisfy my concerns with understanding the special powers of lm but
which explicitly has nothing to do with projections of the real worldthe region
of animated cartoons.1 In my edited volume Animating Film Theory I wanted to
question the presuppositions informing this sense of animations relation to the
real world in order to remap its place in the landscape of lm theory.2 I hope the
volume will foster a more rigorous, theoretical, and widespread engagement with
animation as a terrain of moving image practice that an institutionalized version
of lm theory has generally deemed peripheral (through syllabi and anthologies,
for example), and will enable a more careful examination of how animation acts
on and contributes to that discourse. Here, however, I want primarily to consider
how we might understand the scholarly neglect of animation in relation to the
marginalization of texts written in marginalized geographic regions and languages
other than French and English, and to reect on what we can learn about the logic

Framework 56, No. 2, Fall 2015, pp. 472491. Copyright 2015 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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 Animated Map

of selection at work in anthologization and canonization processes by thinking

of these dual exclusions together.

Systematization and Repetition

Dudley Andrews The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (1976) represents one
early attempt to dene what lm theory is and what it does. Here, Andrew pri-
oritizes the need for the systematization of lm in order to make dialogue with
other humanistic realms of study possible: By putting an activity into rational
terms we can discuss it alongside other schematized activities, be they rational or
not. The lm theorist should be able to discuss his eld with the linguist or the
philosopher of religion.3 While the Aristotelian categories that Andrew employs
(material, process, forms, and value) are open and broad, the need to corral and
systematize the history of conversations about lm is motivated by a parallel need
to articulate a coherent vision for the study of lm within the academic context,
and is haunted by the specter of randomness. As Andrew points out, If this were
not possible, lm theory would become a mere collection of unrelated questions
randomly answered by various men.4 Other inuential gures have followed a
similar logic of systematicity in approaching the question of what counts as lm
theory. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, for example, also seek out lm theorys
perennial questions, even though they try to make room for its shifting emphases
from formalism and realism through the 1960s and social and ideological preoc-
cupations from the 1970s on, to a more hybrid merging of insights from the
mid-1980s.5 In a more recent book that parallels Andrews project of providing
an introductory overview of lm theory, Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hageners
Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses seeks to address and contribute
to a transnational community of ideas that privileges lm theorys debt to
France and the head start of English language theorization, which the authors
understand as a considerable advantage.6 Elsaesser and Hagener highlight
in useful ways the dangers of taking geographic provenance or language as
the primary cue.7 National paradigms, they suggest, articially homogenize
national positions, and jettison the contribution of translation and migration.8
Similarly, they reject approaches that imagine lm theory as a methodologically
opportunistic eld that constantly adorns itself with borrowed plumes, as well
as others that see lm theory as advancing teleologically toward perfection.9 As
an example of this last approach, Elsaesser and Hagener invoke Robert Stam and
Toby Millers Film Theory: An Anthology (2000), and for Elsaesser and Hagener,
At its worst, a revolving-door effect sets in, whereby one approach quickly follows
another.10 Their logical resistance to randomness enables an introduction to
lm theory that almost exclusively addresses lm examples made by white male

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Karen Beckman

lmmakers, and whites out many of the lm theoretical essays that constitute not
unrelated approaches,11 but critiques.
Stam and Millers anthology led the way in taking a strong position on the
importance for lm theory introductions to include Third Cinema theory as
theory, and to attend to cinemas not encompassed by a Euro-American approach.12
Indeed, Stam pushes quite forcefully against the repetition inherent to earlier
models of selection, articulating instead his deliberate effort to rethink the
whole issue of what qualies as theory, to trust a more ecumenical approach,13
and to seek out a polyphonic play of theoretical voices. These voices, he claims,
are saved from an innocuous pluralism by being marshaled, as in earlier lm
theory paradigms, in relation to the same question. Stam also recognizes that
the uniqueness of this twenty-rst-century anthology lies partly in its openness
not only to multiple voices but also to multiple media, stating that here we
treat cinema, television, and video as closely neighboring languages.14 He
subsequently goes on to build on this commitment to aesthetic diversication
in his contribution to Rethinking Third Cinema, Beyond Third Cinema: The
Aesthetics of Hybridity, warning readers against too-rigidly reducing the idea
of alternative practices to the specic aesthetic strategies of Third Cinema (a
Fanon-inected version of Brechtian aesthetics), and turning our attention to
hybridity, chronotopic multiplicity, and the redemption of detritus.15 While it
would be relatively easy to see this expansion of lm theory away from a systematic,
geographically and aesthetically contained model as an apocalyptic sign of the
end of theory per se, perhaps we can negotiate this possibility with the same care
that Edward Said once did when he described the babel of arguments in literary
studies as an opportunity for remaining skeptical and critical, succumbing neither
to dogmatism nor to sulky gloom.16
Or perhaps Stam and Millers expansion is still too timid. For even in the space
of radical aesthetic and geographic openness that they foster, animation remains
completely absent. More recently, Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta
Mazajs Critical Voices in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2011)
has begun to address this absence through the inclusion of an excerpt from Paul
Wellss Understanding Animation, but without really engaging how an openness
to animation challenges what we have known as lm theory to date.17 Animat-
ing Film Theory set out to catalyze further thought about why animation would
be excluded as a concern from even some of the most pluralistic of lm theory
anthologies, and to begin to identify questions and authors that, at an earlier
moment in the elds history, may have seemed either unrelated or random
simply because they emerged out of the apparent no-place of animation. In the
course of developing that project, it became clear that, in spite of Cavells sugges-
tion that animation leaves the physical world behind, the project of considering

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 Animated Map

lm theory through the lens of animation repeatedly turned contributors toward

issues of (trans)nationality and translation, as well as to overlooked histories of
the migration of ideas and practices. Animated practices loosen the link between
the physical site of an images production and the spaces depicted in that image. In
doing so they allow us to reect upon the ways in which that link has become the
locationally determined foundation for one dominant approach to theorizing the
political charge of moving images, and to consider other ways in which moving
images might foster a sense of care and responsibility toward the physical world
and its inhabitants. In this essay, I want to use Animating Film Theory as a starting
point for reecting on how and why animation enriches lm theory, something,
I argue, which is as true in the context of the discourses deprioritized languages
as of its priority languages (English and French). These reections will lead me
in turn to consider animation as both subject and method for a lm theory with
expanded geopolitical concerns.

Texts in Film Theorys Deprioritized Languages

Film theory anthologies have generally prioritized North American and Western
European texts, primarily those written in English, French, and, to a lesser extent,
German. Anthologies certainly also contain limited participation from Soviet
theorists. Braudy and Cohen open their collection with contributions from
Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, although we learn little about the
landscape in which these and other theorists are working.18 Selections of texts by
important Soviet theorists, however, often become overly formulaic as editors
work to shape included pieces into representative positions in the interest of
pedagogical clarity. Soviet essays addressing formalism and montage have been
included, one could argue, because these were the issues of primary interest for
Western European and North American lmmakers and lm theorists. For similar
reasons, lm theory collections work to consolidate the navigation points in the
eld. Canonical Soviet lm theoretical texts resonate well, for example, with
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwells narration of the Montage movement in
Film History: An Introduction. Yet such consolidation allows little room for, and
perhaps even actively prevents, the growth of curiosity in readers about the debates
in which these texts participated, and the divergent strands of thought and practice
taking place at any given moment. By adopting animation as a lens through which
to consider Dziga Vertov, however, Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay do much
more than expand the partial view of Vertov available to us through anthologized
translations, although they also do that important work too.
First, they bring into view for non-Slavic Studies readers less well-known
gures in the history of scientic visualization, a history of vital importance to

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Karen Beckman

our own visualizing moment. These gures include Aleksandr Khanzhonkov,

who produced with Vladislav Starevich some of the rst Russian educational
animated lms, as well as Soviet writers who discussed these animated visualiza-
tions, such as Lazar Sukharebsky and A. Tyagai.19 Second, as Mihailova and
MacKay discuss Russian texts not yet available in English into the realm of
Anglo-American lm theory, they enrich English-speaking scholars ability to
think and write precisely about animation as they grapple with the challenge of
translating Russian critical terms into English as well as the theorists own earlier
debates about which terms were best to use in their mother tongue. For example,
as Mihailova and MacKay explain,

an important strand of Soviet animation theory of the 1920s began dening

animation in effectively modular terms. [Aleksandr] Bushkin, in particular,
took issue with the odd application of the term multiplication to animated
lm (still today normally called multiplikatsiia in Russian), noting that it was
live-action lm that involved the shooting of multiple frames with each turn
of the cameras handle. . . . In that sense, Bushkin argues, animation would more
precisely be termed frame-shooting (kadro-syomka), where the basic units of
the lm are taken to be frame-sized modules, rather than shots of unpredictable
duration.20

In the course of this essay, the authors highlight the importance of animated
advertising traditions to Soviet propaganda lm history, but in doing so, they
simultaneously reveal how dependent Vertovs mature montage practice was
on a frame-by-frame approach that is indebted to both musical scoring and the
animators dope sheet.
Thomas LaMarre offers another example of this kind of enrichment of lm
theorys critical vocabulary, this time drawing on the Japanese language context,
through a close reading and translation, or rather close reading via translation,
of the writing of Imamura Taihei. Asserting the existence of Japanese lm theory
is in itself an important intervention. As in the case of Soviet cinema, Anglo-
French lm theory has tended to treat Japanese cinema as a privileged Other.
However, while Soviet lm theorists as well as Soviet lms have received some
attention, until recently, North American and European critical attention has
rarely engaged Japanese lm theory, believing it not to exist.21 LaMarre translates
passages for non-Japanese speakers alongside his critical reections in the absence
of an English-language translation to which to refer. The presence of this type of
translation-in-passing in anthologies that address a eld-wide audience becomes
increasingly important as Cinema and Media Studies programs are less frequently
housed in language and literature departments than they once were. For when

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 Animated Map

area specialists now publish their lm theory scholarship in region-specic

journals, theres a reduced chance of this scholarship permeating the wider eld.22
This tendency is further exacerbated by the development of the Special Interest
Group structure at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)s annual
conference, which, while deepening the conversations in subelds, runs the risk
of atomizing the eld into regional, media, and period categories that interact
with each other less and less.23
In an essay that elucidates Imamuras nuanced understanding of the relation-
ship of animation and documentary lmmaking, LaMarre quotes Imamura as
stating that Disneys realism comes from the fact that the drawings [e] are not just
drawings; they are drawings combined with photography [shashin to ketsug shita
e]. In fact, in the cartoon, photographic methods prevail over drawings [shishin teki
na hh ga kaiga o shihai shite iru no de aru].24 Within the context of Animating
Film Theory, a focus on animation enables interesting transnational afnities to
come into view across Imamuras argument, made available through LaMarres
essay and translations; Mihailova and MacKays discussion of the inuence of
animations modular structure on Vertovs Kino-Eye work; and Tom Gunnings
observation that keeping animation and photography separate seems nearly
impossible.25 Transnational theoretical resonances such as these are interesting
in their own right; but they also suggest alternative, possibly disruptive, pathways
through established national lm histories and theories, encouraging us to watch
and read more, again, and differently.

Marginalized Texts in Priority Languages

If theres a need to expand the number of languages in which its possible for
lm and media theory to count as such, there is simultaneously a need to
return to the original sources of heavily anthologized lm theory essays written
in prioritized languages such as French to evaluate the criteria for selection and
translation into English at an earlier moment in the elds history. For it may be
that our interests, priorities, and criteria have evolved, allowing scholars in the eld
to see certain texts and practices as important today that did not seem so before.
Such changes are often driven by shifts in the contemporary practice landscape,
which lead scholars to go in search of alternative histories and theories when the
existing discourse seems inadequate for dealing with emerging phenomena. As
Richard Neupert explains in his recent history of French animation,

Until fairly recently, animation remained on the economic periphery of

French lm production. French animation has also suffered from lm critics
and historians who have concentrated almost exclusively on Frances famed

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Karen Beckman

avant-garde movements and narrative auteurism. Yet the history of animation

is essential for understanding French lm culture, its history, and its reception.
Fortunately, there has been something of a renaissance in animation production
within France over the past 20 years, which has motivated new interest in the
long and, as we shall see, frequently torturous history of French cartoons.26

Attending to French animation has the potential to alter how we narrate

French lm and media history. Yet in spite of the strong contributions Neupert
makes to our understanding of French animation practices, the book misses
some critical opportunities that are particularly pertinent to the topic of this
special issue. First, the fraught nature of the question of what the term French
encompasses never properly emerges, even though the tension between linguistic
and national categories strains to be recognized.
Writing of Michel Ocelots Kirikou and the Sorceress (FR/BE/HU/LU/LV,
1998), Neupert begins, Though Michel Ocelot was born in southern France, he
spent an important part of his childhood in Guinea, West Africa.27 He recognizes
that some of the lms distribution challenges were linked to the fact that not
everyone on the left would approve of the lm . . . especially since it is made by a
white European male depicting naked Africans who are often superstitious and
narrow minded, and notes that, Similar to Claire Denis, Ocelot is continually
fascinated with relations between France and its former colonies.28 But Neupert
never really comments further on this problem, and seems unable to extend the
question of postcoloniality into the core rubric of his study.
Neupert narrates the lms complicated transnational production pro-
cess, which in many ways contradicts his claim that the lm is made by a white
European male. Yet the book never really critically engages the lms production
history enough to ask how the word French can survive as an umbrella term
able to encompass the lms Senegalese music and the Latvian women animators
who become the adoptive mothers of a village of black women.29 Kirikou and
the Sorceress, he claims,

proved instructive and inspiring on many levels for European animators, in

part because it provided a new blueprint for a viable option in international
co-productions that nonetheless maintained a personal style. In the end, there
were eight co-producers and ve nations involved in the production. The voices
for the original version and Youssou NDours music were recorded in Dakar,
while the animation was completed in Paris and Angoulme, Brussels, Budapest,
Luxembourg, and Riga, Latvia. Ocelot likes to recount that, One of the most
beautiful aspects of the production was that this village of African women was

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animated by a team of women on the Baltic Sea. . . . These white Baltic women
adopted this village of black women (Ocelot 1998: 126).30

The nal lines of this passage reach toward a sentimental and depoliticized vision
of the human family. And however international the production, Neuperts study
repeatedly holds on to a French man with a personal stylean auteurwho
ultimately makes the lm. Similar issues emerge in Neuperts next example, Les
Enfants de la pluie/The Rain Children (Philippe Leclerc, FR, 2003): the creative
vision for the lm remains tied to Leclerc, physically located in France, along
with his French team, while the labor of the lm is passively accomplished by
unnamed workers in South Korea: Children of the Rain is rather typical of the
modes of production of much European animation. The layout and storyboards
were all directed by Philippe Leclerc and his team in France, where the music was
also composed, while the actual animation, including the nal digital composit-
ing, where the dcor, colors, painted gures, camera movements, and sound are
combined in the computers, was accomplished in South Korea.31 In both of these
cases, while Neupert recognizes that the lm in question is largely produced
outside of France, he resists acknowledging the pressure that animation puts on
the French national cinema paradigm.
While at rst glance, Neuperts decision to write about a French animated
lm set in an African village makes his text seem destined to participate in
the expansion of the geopolitical focus of Cinema and Media Studies, in fact
this volume tends rather to reinforce some of the critical categories that can
nourish a more blinkered approach, such as auteur and national cinema.32
French Animation History rarely disrupts the history of French cinema, which
has largely been recorded as a history of live-action cinema, in spite of Neuperts
early suggestion that motion picture animation fully exploits the potential of
the cinematic apparatus, from camera to lab to projector. Thus, it seems valuable
to situate cartoons at the very heart of cinematic technology and practice, rather
than treating them as some marginal side-show or second-tier subset of national
cinema.33 If the book succeeds in insisting that animated lms are as important
to French cinema as live-action lms, it does so by offering a parallel history
rather than an intersecting history that messes with existing histories of French
cinema. Yet it is this potential for messy disruption that most interests me about
lm theorys animated turn, and it may be that the geopolitical frame expansion
might not happen until the national cinema paradigm is allowed to emerge in
more fragile, vulnerable form.
Herv Joubert-Laurencins work has played a key role in this regard within
the Francophone context, even though he has demonstrated the narrowness of

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Karen Beckman

French lm history and theory not by pointing to Francophone authors and

lmmakers producing outside of France itself, but rather by highlighting the
marginalized writing on animation rst by Andr Bazin, and more recently, by
Bazins contemporary, Andr Martin.34 While one could read his essay Andr
Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema as merely adding another white French
man to the lm theoretical canon, in fact Joubert-Laurencins intervention is much
greater than this. By expanding our view of midcentury French cinema to include
animation, Joubert-Laurencin enables us to see the importance of animators to
the development of a transnational modernity that crossed borders, notably
including the iron curtain of the cold war.35
Drawing on Joubert-Laurencins intervention, I have argued elsewhere that
this expanded view of cinema changes what we thought we knew about French
lm theory in general, and about the journal Cahiers du cinma in particular.36
Animation enables us to think historically about the English-language institu-
tionalization of French lm theory, and illuminates the disciplinary impact of
translation and anthologization practices. In addition to encouraging new transla-
tions and igniting curiosity about important but overlooked texts and practices,
this new awareness of the exclusion of animation has the potential to reframe
well-known gures like Chris Marker in a broader network of conversations and
practices that includes animation theorists and practitioners such as Jiri Trnka,
Norman McLaren, and the Nigerien lmmaker Moustapha Alassane.37 Further-
more, by examining the case of a prolic lmmaker like Alassane, who produced
both animated lms and live action Westerns, we also shine a spotlight on the
ananimation approach of another theoretical categoryThird Cinema theory.
Even in the expanded form articulated by Guneratne and Dissanayakewhich
engages Third Cinema theorys blindness to female and indigenous lmmakers,
its exclusive focus on class struggle, its resistance to popular genres, its occlusion
of China, and its tendency to focus on nationally articulated cinemasanimation
makes no appearance.38

Graphic Theories of Mobility

In addition to highlighting the need for contemporary lm theorists to move
beyond static national paradigms in order to develop critical methods for engag-
ing mobile networks of ideas across borderswhat Edward Said calls traveling
theoryan animated view of the eld also reveals the extent to which graphic
images have played a neglected role in shaping the way we think about both space
and movement, which in turn shapes how the evolution of theoretical speculation
about lm.39 No author better illustrates the inadequacy and logocentrism of lm
theorys methods for grappling with the imbricated movement of people, ideas,

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 Animated Map

and images than Norman McLaren, a Scottish-born lmmaker who turned to

abstract animation while lming the Spanish Civil War in Madrid, who ed to
Canada via New York to escape further exposure to military action, and whose
work with visual music was inuenced in part by the accumulative structure of the
Indian musical form of the raga during a UNESCO-funded visit to India in 1953.40
In his 1978 essay, Part VII: Methods & Materials of Moving and Changing,
McLaren, writing from the perspective of an experimental practitioner, advances
a theory of movement in both words and drawings, with text appearing on the
left-hand side of the page, and diagrams on the right.41 Well in advance of con-
temporary lm scholars, who are only now realizing how infrequently lm theory
has directly engaged the phenomenon of movement, McLarens essays repeatedly
work to break lm movement down into a system of possibilities. He writes, for
example, Making one frame different from the next can be done in three main
ways, which are (1) by shifting or displacing; (2) by adding or subtracting; and (3)
by substituting or replacement. He goes on to propose, again with accompanying
drawings, that, With very simple motion and graphics, the same result may be had
by either of the three methods.42 These methods, he argues, are all possibilities for
animating static things, but, he continues, It is also possible to animate moving
things, by three main methods,43 which are (1) variable frame-rate shooting of
a constant motion or constant frame-rate and a variable motion;44 (2) longer
exposure time with controllable motion;45 and (3) using an optical camera.46 An
optical camera, McLaren explains, re-photographs existing lm on to a new
negative, frame by frame, like an animation camera, & just as slowly. . . . Both the
projector & the camera can move independently of each other. Each can, on its
own, stop, start, go forward, or go backward a frame at a time.47 By examining
McLarens essay as it is written and drawn in pencil in the archival document,
rather than through a printed transcription of the textual material alone, we can
begin to engage the act of drawing as a visualization of McLarens thought. We
are simultaneously privy to the tentative and genuinely exploratory nature of his
theoretical speculation, something he communicates through marginalia that
include large pink question marks,48 extensive crossings out, and self-doubting
comments such as include?, rewrite?,49 and check this sect. with Wally H.50
Although this attention to McLarens handwritten and -drawn texts may seem
to wander from the stated focus of this special issue, McLarens style of thinking
about movement as an animator brings into focus the possibility that animation
theory, which has historically been developed by practitioners in the absence of
interest in animation from nonpracticing scholars, could provide lm theory
with alternative and enabling methods, including visualization techniques, for
considering the geopolitics of lm and media theory. At a moment when human-
ists are receiving ever-more-pressing invitations/mandates to adapt traditional

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Karen Beckman

scholarship to the unspecied promise and forms of the digital humanities, lm

and media scholars have important insights to offer about the history of graphic
visualization and the instrumental image. Thomas Elsaesser usefully contributes
to this conversation:

As lm historians we tend to forget that, from the beginning, moving images

were used to record all manner of physical processes and actions and that not
all were destined for movie theatres. Many if not more moving images were
produced in science labs, medical facilities, for military purposes, as animation,
and in surveillance than ended up in cinema theatres. Only recently have these
parallel histories or counter-histories resurfaced and claimed the attention of
artists and archivists, thus giving us new pre-histories as well as parallel histories
of the moving image. Such images have been called operational images and they
are distinct from images as we generally know themeven in the cinema.51

Although operational imageswhich Elsaesser denes as images that prove

themselves useful for lifehave frequently used animation in ways that ratio-
nalize military action and economic exploitation, and reinscribe the locational
mandate of the indexical image into the animated image, it would be reductive
to argue that operational images are singular in function, as the careers of artists
like Norman McLaren, John Hearteld, and George Grosz demonstrate. All three
artists produced state-funded, animated military propaganda lms, often in the
form of animated maps, but then went on to use the same aesthetic techniques
to critique the state and the war machine. Furthermore, even as we seek out the
parallel histories of operational images, as Elsaesser suggests, it would be similarly
reductive to view all animated images as operational in nature.
Film and media scholars can enrich and nuance the way we think today about
the role of operational and animated images in the purportedly global research
university. At a moment when many institutions are putting all of their humanistic
eggs in a digital basket, and when humanities graduate scholars are actively using
drone technology in research projects, lm and media scholarship can help
prevent the conversation from becoming overly polarized as humanists consider
the possibilities and limitations of the digital research tools at our disposal.52
Lisa Parks, for example, has recently argued, Geospatial images are not benign
abstractions; they are used to catalyze geopolitical agendas, rationalize military
interventions, and develop postwar futures.53 As the co-editors of Observant
States suggest, in these images the logic of geopolitical reason is . . . inseparable
from its visual representation.54 At the same time, however, as Laura Kurgan and
others have suggested, the unique vantage point of the overhead view might enable
ways of thinking about earthly matters from oblique political angles.55

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 Animated Map

With this dialectical approach to geospatial images in mind, I want to end

by considering the animated map as a contemporary research tool, one possible
method for a lm and media theory newly attuned to the transnational circula-
tion of people and ideas, but also a method potentially in danger of resisting
animations ability to transcend the inexible point-to-point relational models
that indexical images tend to establish between a place and its representation, and
to offer alternative ways of visualizing lived experiences of both place and move-
ment. If anthologies tend to strip away the historical and geopolitical particularity
of the texts they include, could a digitally animated map help to communicate the
dynamism and political energy of lm and media theorys history? To push against
the Anglo-Western European point of view found in so many English-language
anthologies, why not make use of a crowd-sourcing approach that would invite
scholars from around the world to map the ow of lm and media theory from
their own perspective, allowing a multifocal, multidirectional, and locally gener-
ated network to emerge? Wouldnt it be great for students to be able to trace, to
take an example Ive already mentioned, the physical and intellectual journey of
a lmmaker like Alassane, noting, for example, his encounter with Jean Rouch in
Niger or McLaren in Montral in 1963,56 not to mention McLarens own creative
movement through Scotland, Spain, New York, Canada, China, and India? Or
to understand better, through a mobile map, the conditions of forced migration
under which theorists like Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin wrote the
essays that have become overfamiliar and perhaps domesticated in part through
anthologizations standardizing effect?
Although I would like to see an animated historical map that graphically
depicts the movements of lm theorists and their ideas in temporally and
spatially precise ways, I am wary of this possibility. While such a map may have
the potential to make students more attuned to histories of thought-in-motion, it
would probably be created using one of the most accessible mapping technologies
for humanities mapping projects: Google Earth. And the use of this particular
platform shapes the relationship between the lm theorist whose movements are
being mapped and the contemporary scholar in particular ways that should not be
neglected. As Caren Kaplan, Erik Loyer, and Ezra Claytan Daniels have argued,
A mapping or navigational program that appears to provide a universalized birds
eye view or precise location is, rst of all, strictly produced by U.S. satellites and
related technologies and, secondly, trains the user to think of identity and location
as targets, as destinations for information, messages, and/or armaments.57 When
humanists make use of military technologies, including something as quotidian as
GPS, Kaplan, Loyer, and Daniels suggest that they are implicated in the blurring
of the distinction between military and civilian spheres, and in participating in
the culture of war.58

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Observations such as these become particularly pertinent when one recalls

how many of the journeys taken by twentieth-century lm theorists occurred
as the result of forced migration and persecution at the hands of the state. The
traditional scholarly medium of words allows the representation of forced
mobility to include an awareness of the affective dimension of such movements,
as we see in Miriam Hansens attempt to situate Kracauers Theory of Film within
the context of his movement across borders. She offers a narrative that is moving
in more than one sense, and that is structured around empathy rather than
omniscience:

For the project that was to become Theory of Film was actually conceived in the
midst of the catastrophe, in extreme poverty and the shadow of certain death
during those months [194041], as Kracauer told Adorno in a later letter,
that we spent in anguish and misery in Marseille. Like many other refugees,
Kracauer and his wife, Lili, were stranded in the French port city waiting for
papers allowing them to escape extradition by the Vichy government and to
emigrate to the United States.59

On the one hand, to use Google Earth as a research and teaching tool is to
subscribe, as Sangeet Kumar points out, to a normative version of international
boundaries, and to the way Google functions in the world as a powerful nonstate
actor that, though a private organization, conates its own interest with the
global good.60 By participating in Google mapping projects, we also implicitly
sanction, through the donation of our intellectual labor and our tting of it to
Googles worldview, the unregulated actions of the company, including its virulent
transformation of human life into usable data, and the concept of security through
which it justies its pervasive tracking.
And yet there are a number of critical positions into which it would be easy to
fall that are worth agging in order to avoid them. First, it is important to remem-
ber that hegemonic systems and uses of technology are never the only option,
however much that seems to be the case. As Said asserts in his (admittedly blunt)
critique of Michel Foucaults theory of power, In human history there is always
something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they
saturate society, and this is obviously what makes change possible, limits power
in Foucaults sense, and hobbles the theory of that power.61 Like Said, the best
new media scholars refuse to accept a monolithic approach to the contemporary
media landscape; indeed, they insist on rejecting the illusion of totality that
companies like Google construct, while simultaneously acknowledging that it
would be impossible to work in the US academy and occupy a military-free zone.62
Lisa Parks insists that the fact that state and military organizations use geospatial

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images strategically does not mean we have to inherit and idly adopt those ways
of looking at and using them. In fact, she continues,

one might argue that the increased circulation of geospatial images has created a
crucial turning point in visual culture in which we have to struggle to maintain
the right to interpret itself, especially given that so many geospatial images come
into circulation as always already readthat is, with dense layerings of graphics,
icons, and arrows inscribed in the view, which regulate acts of interpretation
and sense-making.63

As lm and media scholars pay more attention to, and use as tools, the
locationally based and military-derived operational images that are increasingly
shaping our lives, it becomes important to seek out and examine resistant as well
as hegemonic uses of geospatial images as we critically assess and engage evolving
methods of visualization and sonication, as well as the status and function of
data in twenty-rst-century humanities work.64 While scholars engaged in
digital humanities projects need often to turn toward engineers and computer
scientists, perhaps we need more frequently to collaborate with artists, animators,
and architects as we go in search of skilled image-makers who are deeply attuned
to the politics of aesthetic form and space-image relations.65
A second potential critical fallacy would involve pitting operational images as
tainted research tools in opposition to a language-based scholarship constructed
as benign, innocent, or neutral. Although in the embattled context of the cur-
rent higher education landscape it is tempting to speak only in glowing terms
about every aspect of the humanities, our moments mandate to think and teach
globally requires us to recognize that no area of humanistic study in the United
States is more actively shaped by state and military interests than foreign language
instruction, which is so structurally and nancially dependent on Title VIfunded
Language Resource Centers, Undergraduate Foreign Language Programs, and
Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships.66 Moreover, perhaps
the single most important contribution generated by the linguistic and cultural
movement on which Comparative Literature is founded is that elds recognition
of what Emily Apter describes as the political non-neutrality and inequality
embedded in the technics of any act of translation and cultural exchange.67
Similarly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has highlighted the need to pay attention
to the power dynamics at work and debts accrued in the course of any act of
translation, especially when English is involved, Because of the growing power of
English as a global lingua franca, the responsibility of the translator into English
is increasingly complicated. . . . It is of course true that the responsibility becomes
altogether more grave when the original is not written in one of the languages of

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Northwestern Europe.68 Just as Spivak goes in search, through literary transla-

tion, of an answer to the question, How shall I be encountered by myself in
that text?, so digital humanities mappers working to reframe lm and media
theory as a global phenomenon might ask similar questions of themselves, always
remembering that the presuppositions informing the answers to such a question
have, as Spivak insists, a history and a geography.69

Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media in the department
of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author ofVanishing Women: Magic, Film
and Feminism(Duke, 2003);Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis(Duke, 2010); and is
now working on a new book,Animation and the Contemporary Art of War. She has coedited two vol-
umes:Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photographywith Jean Ma (Duke, September 2008) andOn
Writing With Photographywith Liliane Weissberg (Minnesota, 2013). She is also the editor of Animating
Film Theory (Duke, 2014),which explores the history of lm theorys engagement (and lack of it) with
animation. For several years she served as a senior editor of Grey Room.

NOTES
1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 167. The fullest response to Cavells
implied question about what kind of world or worlds cartoons present is Suzanne Buchan,
ed., Animated Worlds (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2006).
2. For further discussion of this question, see Suzanne Buchan, Animation, In Theory, in
Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014),
11721, as well as Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-
Making in Animation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
3. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976), 6.
4. Andrew, 10.
5. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Preface, Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), xvxviii.
6. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New
York: Routledge, 2010), 1.
7. Ibid., 2.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 4.
12. Anthony R. Guneratne, for example, opens the excellent anthology, Rethinking Third Cinema

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(coedited with Wimal Dissanayake) by identifying Robert Stam as unique among the
authors of introductions to lm theory both in devoting a section to Third Cinema theory
and differentiating it from the broader concerns of postcolonial theories. Rethinking Third
Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1.
13. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Introduction, in Film Theory: An Anthology, ed. Stam and
Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), xv.
14. Ibid., xviii.
15. Robert Stam, Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity, in Rethinking Third
Cinema, ed. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (New York: Routledge, 2003),
3132.
16. Edward Said, Traveling Theory, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 230.
17. See Paul Wells, Notes Towards a Theory of Animation, in Critical Visions in Film Theory:
Classical and Contemporary Readings, ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj
(Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011), 21324.
18. We are told more about Eisenstein than about Pudovkin in the introductory materials.
While readers learn of Eisensteins work as a stage director, his other lms, his conversion
from an artist to a theorist, his questions about synchronized sound, and the roots of his
theory of collision montage in the Marxist dialectical principle, there is almost no context for
Pudokvins essay except the fact that he, like Eisenstein, is one of the great Soviet lmmakers.
See Braudy and Cohen, 12.
19. See Mihaela Mihailova and John MacKay, Frame Shot: Vertovs Ideologies of Animation, in
Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 154.
20. Ibid., 156.
21. Yuriko Furuhata makes this point at the opening of her essay, Returning to Actuality:
Fkeiron and the Landscape, Screen 48, no. 3 (2007): 34562, by citing Nol Burchs
comment that the very notion of theory is alien to Japan; it is considered a property of Europe
and the West (345). See Nol Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese
Cinema, rev. and ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 13.
22. LaMarre, for example, lists only one English-language translation of Imamuras writing,
A Theory of Documentary, translated by Michael Bassett. This translation appears in
Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory, ed. Aaron Gerow,
special issue of Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (December 2010): 5559. While
readers like myself who do not specialize in Japanese lm and media might nd this excellent
special issue through footnotes in an anthology that is geared toward a general audience, and
be grateful for its specialized point of view, they are less likely to nd this journal on their own.
23. Given this tendency toward subspecialization within Cinema and Media Studies, SCMS
might usefully consider either its website or its publication, Cinema Journal, as a venue for a
bibliography that tracks signicant lm and media essays that appear in nonlm and media
journals.

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24. The quotation comes from Imamura Tahei, Nihon manga eiga no tame ni, in Imamura
Taihei eiz hyron 2: Eiga geijutsu no seikaku (Tokyo: Yumani shob, 1991), 13759. Cited in
LaMarre, 224.
25. Tom Gunning, Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and
Photography, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014), 37.
26. Richard Neupert, French Animation History (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 2.
27. Ibid., 128.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 129.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 140.
32. See the lms ofcial website: www.kirikou.net/synopsis.html (accessed October 7, 2014).
33. Neupert, 3.
34. Herv Joubert-Laurencin, La lettre volante: quatre essais sur le cinma danimation (Paris:
Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997), and Andr Martin. Inventor of the Cinema of
Animation: Towards a History of Statements, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 8597. Although Martin is central to postwar
French animation history, he is mentioned only once by Neupert (114).
35. Joubert-Laurencin, Andr Martin, 91.
36. Karen Beckman, Animating the Cinls: Alain Resnais and the Cinema of Discovery,
Cinema Journal (forthcoming 2015).
37. For one example of this expanded curiosity about a German text, see Yuriko Furuhatas essay
Animating Copies: Japanese Graphic Design, the Xerox Machine, and Walter Benjamin, in
Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014),
181200. Here, Furuhata explores the reception by animators of the Japanese translation
of Benjamins Work of Art essay, which appeared three years before the English-language
translation in the Fuji-Xerox corporate PR magazine, Graphication.
38. For a discussion of the reasons why Alassanes work has been marginalized, in spite of the fact
that his animations are imbued with the same undercurrent of social and political concerns
that informs the lms of [Ousmane] Sembene, Souleymane Ciss and Med Hondo, see Sada
Niang, The Challenge of Moustapha Alassane: Animation in Nationalist African Cinema,
in Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations (Plymouth, UK: Lexington
Books, 2014), 91104.
39. Scholars writing about Jacques Lacan and Claude Lvi-Strauss seem to have been more able
than lm theorists to take account of the role of diagrams in the development of theoretical
systems. Perhaps scholars of lm theory have been too concerned with articulating a line that
distinguishes theory from practice.
40. See Terence Dobson, The Film Work of Norman McLaren (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey
Publishing, 2006), 14849.

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41. See www3.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/lmmakers/Norman-McLaren/archive.php?idarchive

=616182&sort=textes (accessed October 14, 2014).
42. Norman McLaren, Part VII: Methods & Materials of Moving and Changing, (1978): 4.
43. Ibid., 6.
44. Ibid., 7
45. Ibid., 8.
46. Ibid., 9.
47. Ibid. McLaren notes that the optical printer takes him into an arena of possibilities that are
not strictly in the eld of animation (9). Later in the essay, he goes on to note, Because an
optical camera is very expensive, most animators cannot use optical animation. But since
animation with simple equipment is so rich in possibilities, it is no real loss (11). For another
example of an experimental lmmaker attempting to articulate the theoretical possibilities
of optical animation in a form that combines words and images, see the television episode
Screening Room with Standish Lawder and Stanley Cavell (WCVB, US, 1973/2005).
48. McLaren, 4.
49. Ibid., 7.
50. Ibid., 9.
51. Thomas Elsaesser, Siegfried Kracauers Afnities, May 16, 2014. www.necsus-ejms.org/
siegfried-kracauers-afnities/ (accessed October 15, 2014).
52. For examples of the use of robotics technology in my home institution, see www.sas.upenn
.edu/series/frontiers/eye-sky-video and www.seas.upenn.edu/~onrhunt/ (accessed October 15,
2014).
53. Lisa Parks, Vertical Mediation: Geospatial Imagery and the US Wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, in Media Geographies / Geographies of Media, ed. Susan Mains, Julie Cupples, et al.
(forthcoming), n.p.
54. Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus J. Dodds, eds., Observant States (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2010), 78.
55. Laura Kurgan, 2013. Cited in Lisa Parks, Vertical Mediation: Geospatial Imagery and the US
Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Media Geographies/Geographies of Media, ed. Susan Mains,
Julie Cupples, et al. (forthcoming), n.p.
56. Niang, 9394.
57. Caren Kaplan, Erik Loyer, and Ezra Claytan Daniels, Precision Targets: GPS and the
Militarization of Everyday Life, Canadian Journal of Communication 38 (2013): 405.
58. Ibid., 418. Moreover, Parks points out, Google, whose revenue hit a record $50 billion
in 2012, began emerging as another key player in the geospatial sector when the company
purchased the digital mapping company, Keyhole, Inc. in 2004 (Google, 2013). Keyholes
3D interactive mapping interface became the basis for Google Earth, which by 2011 had
more than 1 billion downloads (Shaer, 6 Oct 2011). Keyhole had been backed by the CIA
private venture rm Intel-Q and was named after the Keyhole reconnaissance satellite
program (Parks, forthcoming).

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59. Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor
W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 257.
60. Sangeet Kumar, Google Earth and the Nation State: Sovereignty in the Age of New Media,
Global Media and Communication 6 (2010): 155.
61. Said, 247. For a more nuanced discussion of Foucaults theory of power in relation to the
(im)possibility of change through political action, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos:
Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), especially chapters 2 and 3.
62. In another, but related, context, Dudley Andrew similarly rejects a global viewpoint in favor
of the atlass thwarted totalisation. See Andrew, An Atlas of World Cinema, in Remapping
World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee
Lim (London: Wallower, 2006), 24.
63. Parks, Vertical Mediation. Elsewhere Parks notes, I hope to encourage infrastructure
re-socializationa technological literacy project that urges publics to notice, document, and
ask questions about infrastructure sites and become involved in discussions and deliberations
about their funding, design, installation, operation, and use. See Parks, Earth Observation
and Signal Territories: Studying U.S. Broadcast Infrastructure through Historical Network
Maps, Google Earth, and Fieldwork, Canadian Journal of Communication 38 (2013): 303.
64. For one animated example of a critical engagement of geospatial images and the omniscient
point of view, see Stranger Comes to Town (Jacqueline Goss, US, 2007).Goss hijacks and
manipulates state-produced animated operational images as well as Google Earth images, and
juxtaposes these retooled images with other forms of animation as well as critical and reective
voice-over narratives.
65. For other examples of critical image mappers, see Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, eds., Else/
where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006). For some examples of lmmakers who use animated
maps to depict forced migration or prohibitions on movement without either abstracting the
particular subjectivities in question, or adopting a totalizing point of view, see There There
Square (Jacqueline Goss, US, 2002); The Sixth Section (Alex Rivera, US, 2003); Munich
Express Working Title IIII (Alexandra Weltz, DE, 2006); and Slingshot Hip Hop (Jackie
Reem Salloum, US, 2008). Franco Morettis observations about literary maps serve as a
useful guide in the area of humanistic mapping. I nd particularly useful his statement on the
function of literary maps: What do literary maps do . . . First, they are a good way to prepare
a text for analysis. . . . Not that the map is itself an explanation, of course: but at least, it offers a
model of the narrative universe which rearranges its components in a non-trivial way, and may
bring some hidden patterns to the surface. Also helpful is his reminder that not all maps are
geographic in nature, and that the interest of his literary maps, which he renames diagrams,
lies primarily in the way he analyses them. See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract
Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 5354.
66. FLAS fellowships, for example, are only given in accordance with Section 601(c)(1) of
the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), which requires that the secretary of education

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consult with federal agency heads to receive recommendations regarding areas of national
need for expertise in foreign languages and world regions. For a full breakdown of the
US governments current ranking of priority languages, categorized according to the
departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, Labor, State, and
Transportation, see www2.ed.gov/about/ofces/list/ope/iegps/consultation-2014.pdf. This
document stipulates, for example, that the DOD strongly supports the national effort to
create a cadre of U.S. citizens with advanced, professional-level skills in languages and cultures
that are critical to our national security. The DOD list runs in alphabetical order from
Arabic to Vietnamese.
67. Emily Apter, Untranslatability and Inequality in the Literary Humanities, conference paper
delivered at HAIKU: The Humanities and the Arts in the Integrated Knowledge University,
University of Pennsylvania, September 12, 2014.
68. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translating into English, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of
Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 257.
69. Ibid., 274.

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