UC Berkeley

“Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives” examines silent film through the prisms of criminality and capitalism, analyzing the ways in which the emerging institutions of modern policing and motion pictures corroborated and subverted each other’s projects from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. I focus on silent films that register the imbrication of modern policing and moving pictures as they were consolidated into dominant social institutions with increasingly standardized practices. Over the course of the dissertation, I show that policing is not simply thematized in silent film, but structures its form and mode of perception. Modern policing does not simply employ the technology of modern image-making; rather, photography and silent film shape the protocols of modern policing and disseminate its worldview. My dissertation argues that policing racially marked bodies, surveying urban vice, and containing women’s mobility offered strategies and material for both institutions to obtain legitimacy, expand power, and train audiences/subjects in the emerging relationship between optics and power in the public sphere. At times, these practices created conditions for institutional critique of the police and the cinema, as well as the broader capitalist system in which both were embedded.By connecting criminality, the capitalist mode of production, and the consolidation of the institutions of modern policing and cinema, I develop a methodology that prioritizes the consequences of capitalist modernity from the point of view of its victims; the capacity of film, as a technological commodity itself, to reflect on its emplacement in expanding industrial capitalism; and the distinct potential of silent film, as a global mass medium, to engage the critical possibilities of the universal. I put silent films in constellation with archival intertexts that illuminate the discursive regimes in which the films intervened and contemporary moving image media. In this way, “Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives” brings together methods from media archaeology, critical theory, and black studies to contribute to a “genealogy of our present”—a present marked by the circulation of digital media that document police abuse of power, as well as collective resistance to state-sanctioned violence.