In 1974 artist and filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek identified the rise of what he called "a new social media consciousness." This dissertation, Social Media: The News in Experimental Film, Video Art, and Performance After 1960, begins with VanDerBeek's statement in order to excavate a history of social media that predates the online platforms that have been associated with that phrase since the mid 1990s. It traces the development of new forms of filmic montage and media appropriation in VanDerBeek's multi-channel "information concerts," Bruce Conner's found footage films, and Carolee Schneemann's "kinetic theater." Taken together, these examples reveal the emergence of a network imaginary bound up with television's increasing importance as a source of daily news. Recognizing television's unprecedented capacity to bring national audiences together, particularly during moments of political crisis and violence, the artist-filmmakers at the center of this study began to question how it might operate differently, and in doing so articulate alternatives to the social form of the mass audience. Each chapter looks at works that cull news images from various sources and employ experimental forms of montage to imagine networked relations that pose a challenge to broadcast's modes of address. Feeling out the complexities of life lived in and through social media, this work offers a surprisingly prescient sense of the way networks both enliven and delimit social life. The figures at the center of this study--VanDerBeek, Conner, and Schneemann--each invest cybernetic feedback with the capacity to redefine social life. A pattern emerges in the case studies I consider: a prevailing concern with formal relations configured through networked feedback--on screen, on stage between performers, or in some instances between members of the audience--starts to falter once historically embedded forms of social difference come to the fore in works that respond to the pressing news events of the day: assassinations, street protests, and war. As a result the capacity of feedback to fully mediate antagonism begins to break down. Social conflict appears as something that cannot be adequately addressed by recourse to feedback or form alone. In these moments, tension arises between gestures that figure social life primarily through physical arrangements between bodies and directives for their interactions, and social life defined by historically bound contradictions, conflicts, and codes. This work invites us to reconsider what it means to understand media as social, which is to say, as something that inflects our experience and understanding of social life in profound and affecting ways.

In this study, I build a case for redrawing the conceptual lines of American post-war poetry and music. My overall argument is that the post-war American and African American poets who engaged with jazz most profoundly were those who heard the music not simply as a set of sounds, but as an ongoing argument about the nature of aesthetic form. These poets responded to the conceptual innovations of jazz by thinking in new ways about the body, and about how a body of sound could relate to the body of the poet. In setting lyric's material limits against its trans-medial aspirations, I show, jazz empowered poets to rethink the very nature of poetic activity, and in turn to construct a powerful new model of race-inflected aesthetics.

The dissertation is divided into two sections, each of which pairs music and poetry to outline a larger historical or theoretical argument. In this it leverages the many years I have spent as a practicing jazz musician. In the first section, I use musicological analysis to develop a new account of jazz-inspired lyric based in Charlie Parker's approach to musical narrative. What Parker's music offers, I argue in Chapter One, is not only a set of imitable sounds, but an improvisational organization of those sounds that resists their being heard as "telling a story," and instead turns musical form into a multi-layered, dialectical phenomenon. In Chapter Two, I use Langston Hughes' 1951 sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred and the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson to establish the poetic resonances of this account, articulating a theory of poetic musicality in which poetry's music becomes a matter less of how a poem sounds than how effectively it translates the structure of hermeneutic opacity that Parker's solos put in place. In the second section, the music of Miles Davis' mid-60's band anchors my excavation of a powerful but overlooked model of (African) American avant-garde performance. Davis' key aesthetic move, I argue, is to play sensuous presence against intellectual reception, so oversaturating notes and rhythms with potential meaning that pinning any of them down to a single implication becomes constitutively impossible. Chapter Four pairs Langston Hughes' 1961 poem Ask Your Mama with the work of Robert Creeley to push this aesthetic into the realm of language, detailing a theory of poetic representation in which language's inherent falsehoods forge identity as a permanently dispersed condition. The dissertation's final chapter extends this model in the work of two contemporary poets, Harryette Mullen and Ed Roberson, who unsettle traditional aesthetics of "blackness" by teasing apart the multiple sensory registers upon which the concept usually rests.

In what ways do the cultural fields of aesthetics and politics transform each other, and how does this relation change under specific historical circumstances? How is it possible to evaluate the history of activities that occur at the intersection of aesthetics and politics? How can we account for the way in which such practices are able to alter the very criteria by which they might be recognized or judged?

This dissertation responds to such questions by tracing the emergence of a distinct field of cultural production in West Germany and Austria in the years leading up to and through 1968, designating this field as "aesthetico-political." It seeks to determine the various conditions of possibility for these emergent forms of activity, and to examine the different models of political agency, aesthetic experience, and subjectivation they proposed. The analysis focusses on four distinct transformations: politicizations of the aesthetic (a term including but not limited to the arts); aestheticizations of politics, especially through the mediatization of the public sphere; the reorientation of artistic practices away from modernist models; and the ascendance of New Left movements. The dissertation's test cases primarily concern activities that I term "events": durational occurrences taking place in the space between aesthetics and politics.

Abstract

The Mid-Atlantic: Fantasmatic Genealogies of the French and American New Waves

by

Jonathan E. Haynes

Doctor of Philosophy in Film & Media

University of California, Berkeley

Professors Kaja Silverman and Kristen Whissel, Co-Chairs

This dissertation re-imagines the contexts for the paradigmatic film movement of the sixties. The French New Wave, I argue, was made and remade in translation, as texts circulated among French and American scholars, critics, and filmmakers. Subtending this circulation was a genealogical fantasy, with deep roots in the 19th century of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. The Baudelaire-Poe liaison has become the defining symbol of la rencontre franco-américaine and is often invoked to characterize the transformative effects of Truffaut's and Godard's politique des auteurs on the reputations of key American filmmakers, like Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray. Ambiguously connected to official traffic between the two nations, and manifest in a decades-long labor of translation that Baudelaire himself compared to prayer, l'affaire Baudelaire-Poe illuminates the degree to which French-American exchange was transferential. In Poe, Baudelaire saw the reflection of his own desire, and he spent the last years of his life making Poe's work his own.

In so far as the Nouvelle Vague belongs to this lineage, the film movement cannot be confined to France and the early sixties; nor are the texts of the Nouvelle Vague (the films and the criticism) fully answerable to the exigencies of post-War phenomena, such as the Marshall Plan and generation gaps. Rather, these designators of historical specificity mediate a more complex, even subversive, family drama, in which French authors write themselves into the history of American art, while American authors re-invent French works in their own image. To capture the Oceanic qualities of a cultural exchange in which transnational logics are subordinate to intersubjective ones, I produce a new term - The Mid-Atlantic. The Mid-Atlantic refers to the actual space between France and America, where planes and boats crossed, transferring materials between the two nations. But the Mid-Atlantic has its own history, independent of its status as a shipping route. In the dissertation's introduction, I examine how the Mid-Atlantic has been figured by authors like Herman Melville, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Godard, in order to make the case that the Mid-Atlantic constitutes a fantasmatic origin for the Nouvelle Vague.

In Chapter One ("Beyond the Zero: Jacques Rivette on Fritz Lang") I argue that la politique des auteurs re-tailored film history in the image of desire. Through a close reading of Jacques Rivette's 1957 review of Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), the German emigré's last Hollywood film, I attempt to show the devious ways in which Rivette assumes "authorship" of Fritz Lang through an act of critical exegesis that re-doubles and sublates the film it describes. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and its author dissolve into Rivette's poetic description (which is also a depiction, the "stylo" transformed into the "caméra"). For the contemporary reader, who can only read this article in the foreknowledge of the legendary Nouvelle Vague films soon to appear, the article is doubly prophetic. It augurs the author Rivette - Paris nous appartient (1961) - as well as the future history of the Auteur "Lang," who ever-after would belong to the past of the Nouvelle Vague.

Chapter Two, "Corresponding Vessels: Truffaut-Hitchcock" develops the larger argument about Franco-American transference through a close analysis of François Truffaut's legendary book of interviews with the master of suspense. In Truffaut's "Hitchbook," each auteur plays a part in the other's film: Hitchcock becomes a character in Baiser volés(Stolen Kisses 1968), while Truffaut, his merciless interlocutor, adopts the prosecutorial features of the detectives from The Wrong Man (1956). Like its literary ancestor, Baudelaire's Histoires Extraordinaires, which spawned a great deal of 20th century modernist art (from Symbolist poetry to le policier), I argue that the "Hitchbook" was the Big Bang of modern film studies in France and America. Published almost simultaneously (in 1967) on both sides of the Atlantic, this classic text was the root of New Hollywood, as well as gaze theory - here, Hitchcock becomes an Absolute Cinematic Value.

In "Downtown Godard," my third chapter, I examine Amos Poe's 1976 "No Wave" film, Unmade Beds. Poe's film restages Godard's A bout de souffle (1959) on the bombed-out streets of New York's Lower East Side, and discloses unexpected affinities between the American Underground of Andy Warhol and Jack Smith and the Nouvelle Vague of Godard and Truffaut. I argue that the eponymonous "unmade beds" refer to one unmade bed - the ransacked hotel mattress in Godard's first feature, around which Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg orbited, like twin galaxies of French-American connotation. A Mid-Atlantic figure par excellence, the unmade bed stands for the primal scene of sixties and seventies experimental film.

My fourth and final chapter ("The Resurrection and the Life") examines the preponderance of the "death of the cinema" metaphor in current film and media discourse, in order to bring into focus how this crucial Nouvelle Vague concept (la fin de cinéma) operates in Mid-Atlantic terms. I read two "post-cinematic" films - Luc Moullet's 1971 "western," A Girl is a Gun: Une aventure de billy le kid and Alexandre Aja's shocking 2003 horror film, Haute tension - in parallel. Both films occupy the modality of le cinéma mort, as emblematized by important films like Godard's Weekend (1967) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò (1975), which put "revolt" under the sign of revulsion. Yet, both also demonstrate the degree to which the "death of the cinema," however taken - as a militant call (Death to Cinema!) or as a simple fact of the mediatic society (the totemistic "cinema" of digital culture) - necessitates the appearance of a new kind of image, which will form the mythological basis for a New Cinema.

In the dissertation's conclusion ("The Embryonic Image"), I extrapolate the consequences of this "new image" for film historiography and theory. Here I turn to Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), in particular a sequence from that work in which a portrait of a young woman overlays a scene from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955). Godard's image, I argue, brings Mid-Atlantic figuration to a late-20th century apotheosis. It invokes the prayerful mood of Baudelaire's Poe translations ("Le voyage" is read on the soundtrack), and it postulates that the Cinema Itself was born in a single spasm of recognition: a French poet seeing his own features reflected in the words of an American poet.

This dissertation examines photography's relationship to beliefs in universal order, and the emergence of a photographic "world picture" in art. It argues that the concept of a "taken" picture arises with empirical scientific methods in the early eighteenth century, and ties the "taken" pictures of four artists in the early modern and contemporary eras to the emergence of period worldviews: Canaletto's paintings to Newtonian mechanics, Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies to structuralism, and Andreas Gursky's large-scale digital photographs to globalization.

Chapter 1 uncovers the "taken" picture's origins as a commodity in Canaletto's paintings of 1730s Venice, and shows how they were made to seem to British tourists like observations through Isaac Newton's eyes--cut from a mechanically homogenous world. Canaletto's paintings, executed through the lens of a camera obscura, "captured" moments of space and time by analogizing the artistic act of "taking views" to the scientific act of "taking samples." Chapter 2 follows Canaletto to London, where the artist creates the first view paintings of an endless built world. The chapter shows how these massive cityscapes evoke a cultural sublime before the advent of sublime paintings of nature. These paintings anticipate the form and scale of Andreas Gursky's digital photographs of globalization by more than two centuries and also presage modern skepticism of Enlightenment humanism: how, they ask, can a human observer see himself as part of universal, deterministic system? Chapter 3 shows how Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies of industrial buildings photographically answered that question when they were adopted into the conceptual art world of the late 1960s and 1970s. The chapter reveals that the Bechers' pictorial formula helped viewers experience their own faculties being as mechanically determined as those of the industrial buildings--just as structuralism and computational cognitive science were then predicting. Finally, in Chapter 4, I demonstrate how Andreas Gursky turned the intangible concept of "globalization" into a photographic experience through digital imaging technology. Gursky arrived at a "photographic world picture" by seeming to have taken a photograph of a systematic fallout to our individual intentions, spread over an indefinite landscape. In doing so, he discovered what Canaletto was looking for in London--a place in the built landscape from which global logic could be observed. The four chapters of this dissertation show how photography gave visual form to notions of universal structural order.