Research Statement
My past and present research uses interdisciplinary methods in order to understand the relationship between film form, context, and theory. I examine the history of screen culture to think about the ways in which different media and the cultures that surround them shape and reflect social and cultural relations in the United States and beyond.
My book, News Parade: The American Newsreel and World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) examines the history of an overlooked film form and its importance in the development of 20th Century media culture. Focusing on the sound newsreel of the 1930s, this work brings together an historical examination of the newsreel’s modes of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of the form’s aesthetic and representational strategies. I argue that the newsreel represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into the looking relations of commodity culture. By emphasizing the mediated watching of reality – and by framing that reality as a kind of parade – the newsreel privileged spectatorship over other forms of knowledge. For the first time, the commodified experience of watching the news became as important as the news itself. In doing so the newsreel helped redefine the public through spectatorship and the public sphere as a site of identity formation and participation mediated by the screen. The book pays particular attention to the ways in which discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.
My work intervenes in key debates in film history and media studies. By providing the first sustained examination of the American newsreel since the 1960s, it broadens our understanding of pre-war film culture, its organization, and its audience. This varied history is especially important at a moment when screen culture is expanding into virtually all aspects of contemporary life. By looking at representations of diverse newsreel makers, subjects, and audiences, my study reveals the extent to which spectatorship and mass media had already begun to transform the public sphere in the United States before WWII.
My new research interest centers on archival film and the environment. This project, which is in its early stages, deals with the creation and distribution of government and industrial films related to forestry in British Columbia. Drawing on the films as well as archival records, this project will trace the production history of these films and their uses. Whether made for training, educational, or promotional purposes, the films played a key part in the practical business of timber harvesting as well as an important role in aestheticizing the processes of extraction. My work aims to consider these practical and aesthetic functions together in order to better understand the ways in which extractive industries such as logging shape the landscape and our relationship to it. This new project, which draws on Adrian Ivakhiv’s process-relational account of cinematic ecologies, is in dialogue with new work in film studies that aims to examine ecocinema, ecocriticism, and the relationship between cinema and the Anthropocene more broadly.
I also have an ongoing research interest in the intersection between film archives, race, and memory. Prompted by my work on African American newsreels, my participation in the Orphan Film Symposium, as well as my work at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival, this research looks at the creation of non-fiction film by and about people of colour and the uses of these images by filmmakers, historians, and audiences. As part of this research, my chapter “Teamwork: Carlton Moss, US Propaganda Film, and the Fight for Black Visibility in the Second World War,” appears in the collection, Allied Communication during the Second World War: National and Transnational Networks, edited by Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam and published by Bloomsbury. A second article is in process, “A Different Colour: The Home Movies of Matthew Ko and the Politics and Aesthetics of Race on Film,” examines the amateur filmmaking of Matthew Ko – a small business owner and member of the Chinese community in Victoria, BC. Using the power of colour film, Ko’s home movies insert Chinese Canadians into the country’s history while appropriating a visual rhetoric tied to the exoticization and objectification of people of colour. In doing so, I argue, his films force us to re-examine the positivist (and colonialist) logics of the archive itself.
Co-editor, “Teaching with Nontheatrical and Useful Media,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Dossier, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms/teachingmedia
“Material Pasts and Futures in the Newsreel Archive” in Laura U. Marks et al., “Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact,” Media+Environment, October 15, 2020.
Co-author, “Organizing Precarious Labor in Film and Media Studies: A Manifesto,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 4 (2020): 1-7.
“Teamwork: Carlton Moss, US Propaganda Film, and the Fight for Black Visibility in the Second World War,” in Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam, Eds. Allied Communication during the Second World War: National and Transnational Networks (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 81-93.
“From Canada and Back Again: Montreal’s Associated Screen News and the Transnational Flow of Non-Fiction Film before WWII,” in Mark Cooper, Sara Beth Levavy, Ross Melnick, and Mark Williams, Eds. Rediscovering US Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2018), 173-185.
“‘Public Forums of the Screen’: Contesting Modernity at the Newsreel Cinema,” in Vanessa Schwartz and Jason Hill, eds. Getting the Picture: The History & Visual Culture of the News (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 161-167.