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forschungsprojekt
philokratia: Politics of Friendship & the US-American (Moving) Image
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The project examines paradigmatic moments of US-American film and media pasts, from the mid-19th century to the introduction of sound film, with respect to their re/productions and utopian imaginations of a governance of “friends”.
The key term philocracy synthesizes several ‘post-Nietzschean’ philosophical approaches (Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze) that describe the philos or brother as a pivotal figure of thought in debates about democracy. In this context, the project traces philia – non-familial, horizontal, heterarchical and radically relational complexes which depend on the always precarious proximity/distance between independent elements (humans, things, images) – as a narrative, formal as well as techno-medial feature of visual artefacts.
The project builds on a number of case studies (e.g., Mathew Brady’s composite images of 19th century political institutions; pre-cinematic apparatuses [such as Edison’s “Kinetoscope”] during the American Progressive Era; dominant concepts of gender and montage in the work of D. W. Griffith; early experimental cinema; models of community, sympathy, and affect in King Vidor’s melodramas …) to trace the political operations and impact of early photographic and cinematographic image cultures ...
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Gold Ground/Silver Screen: The Byzantine Form in (Post-)Cinema
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The project addresses the potential of “Byzantium” – both as a concrete historical reference point and abstract thought image [Denkbild] – for conceptualizing contemporary film and media cultures.
While conventional theoretical and historical discourses tend to correlate the film image with Renaissance visuality (ocularcentrism, perspective, spatial depth, continuity, subjectivity), the project proposes a “Byzantine” mode to reevaluate often marginalized types of media images and perception: it draws on late antique pictorial practices and models of sight to extract from them basic iconographic, formal and structural aspects (flatness, luminosity, mosaic, tactility, iconicity) that constitute a widely neglected trait of film aesthetics and can even be linked to contemporary screen media and electronic processes of visualization. At the end of the cinematic era, “Byzantium” may shed light on a specific digital vision, on the ontological shift from photographic presence to pixilated virtuality and from optical projection to light-emitting surfaces.
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Video: Gold Ground / Silver Screen: Trailer for the research project, 2018
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