Annotated Bibliography
Some books and articles that inspire me.
Arendt, Hannah, editor. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 2012.
Benjamin was far ahead of his time when it comes to thinking about our relationship to technology in modernity. For this reason, reading his words today feels strangely prescient. In a world so focused on cultivating authenticity, “aura” has become an apt way of understanding our relationship to the image and to each other.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 47. [print.], Hill and Wang, 2006.
Mythologies is one of those books that changed the way I saw the world. Barthes’ deconstructions of everyday phenomena, from toys to soap to professional wrestling, are just as eloquent as they are poignant. His observations seem so obvious in retrospect, but that’s just a testament to Bathes’ uncanny ability to separate nature from history.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” The Film Theory Reader: Debates & Arguments, edited by Marc Furstenau, Routledge, 2010.
Bazin’s prose is so succinct and potent that, within a matter of mere paragraphs, he’s able to make you rethink the history of the image. Understanding the “Mummy Complex” driving the history of image-making, as well as photography’s role in freeing painting from its representational burden, all serves as an essential backdrop for understanding the true power of cinema.
Benson-Allott, Caetlin Anne. The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television. University of California Press, 2021.
As someone who grew up in Hampton Roads frequenting the Commodore and who lives in D.C. frequenting Suns Cinema, this book felt tailor made for me. Benson-Allott’s clever look at film through the lens of material culture feels refreshing and unpretentious, and the sheer variety of topics speaks to her versatility as a film scholar.
boyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press, 2014.
boyd succeeds in the noble task of defusing moral panics surrounding social media. So many parents do not even try to understand social media, fearing that [insert newest technology here] will rot the brains of the next generation. boyd’s bold ethnographic work turns that tired old story on its head by amplifying the voices of children. The landscape of social media networks has changed, but the lessons are still relevant.
Douglas, Nick. “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic.” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, Dec. 2014, pp. 314–39. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412914544516.
Few articles encapsulate what is so special about Internet culture. Even a decade later, this article puts into words the unabashedly amateur ethos of the Internet that corporations try (and often fail) to recreate.
Friedberg, Anne. “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change.” The Film Theory Reader: Debates & Arguments, edited by Marc Furstenau, Routledge, 2010.
Friedberg helps us intellectually digest the cultural impact of such technologies as the cable TV, VCR, and remote control, which have fundamentally changed our relationship to the screen and to the image. The result is a text that emphasizes the interactivity inherent to a new media environment ruled by the logic of convergence.
Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 7th ed, Oxford University Press, 2009.
By deconstructing the legend of behind the screening of the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of the Train, Gunning makes a deeper observation on our beliefs about spectatorship, film history, and the power of the moving image. His idea of the “cinema of attractions” feels especially pertinent in the age of digital video, where short-form videos are all soliciting our attention through visual stimulation.
Hennefeld, Maggie. Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema. Columbia University Press, 2024.
This project would have been interesting enough on its own if it were simply a brief look at a historical curiosity: obituaries of women who supposedly “laughed themselves to death” in movie theaters at the turn of the century. However, Hennefeld takes this one step further by creating a lot of fascinating and cohesive cultural ties that are relevant to contemporary gender politics and spectatorship.
hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” The Film Theory Reader: Debates & Arguments, edited by Marc Furstenau, Routledge, 2010.
hooks does a great job of bringing intersectionality to reception studies, explaining how Black women in particular process mainstream Hollywood narratives. She provides a crucial voice in a field that can so often resort to gross overgeneralizations about the spectator (as if all spectators are the same).
Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text, no. 1, 1979, p. 130. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/466409.
Jameson’s framework of identifying the “reified” and “utopian” elements of a mass culture text provides a simple but incredibly versatile tool for deconstructing any narrative.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006.
Jenkins’ landmark book introduced many new terms that have now become standards for any media theorist: participatory culture, transmedia storytelling, convergence culture. These concepts demonstrate how digital technology has deeply shaped our relationship to the media we consume and to each other.
Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Duke University Press, 1997.
Kirby’s brilliant comparative history of the train and cinema sets the bar for cultural analysis. The sheer number of technological, cultural, and symbolic parallels feels uncanny, and has reframed part of how I think about turn-of-the-century American history.
Lucero, José Antonio. “‘To Articulate Ourselves’: Trans-Indigenous Reflections on Film and Politics in Amazonia.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, Sept. 2020, pp. 1–28. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/nai.2020.a765046.
This article introduced me to a whole new way of doing film research. Lucero is not a film scholar — that is to this article’s benefit. He uses cinema and film culture as a fascinating starting point to discuss memory, power, politics, neocolonialism, activism, and more.
McCulloch, Gretchen. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books, 2019.
It feels like common sense in retrospect: we use text language more than ever in human history, so why wouldn’t our language develop new features to adapt? This simple idea has a lot of power, and helps explain some of the fundamental paradigm shifts we’re witnessing in online culture.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More. Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, 2016.
Mirzoeff’s multi-faceted analysis of sight in the twenty-first century serves as a welcome addition to his already rich catalogue on visual culture. I’m particularly fond of his chapter on trains as a metaphor for seeing in the 20th century, versus the fighter pilot helmet as the new mode of the 21st century.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The Film Theory Reader: Debates & Arguments, edited by Marc Furstenau, Routledge, 2010.
This classic essay set the standard for understanding the cinematic gaze. Mulvey’s dissection of the scopophilic and narcissistic pleasures of cinema boil down exactly what is so appealing about narrative cinema. And of course, the impact of her concept of the male gaze and female “to-be-looked-at-ness” cannot be understated.
Rogers, Ariel. Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies. Columbia University Press, 2013.
Rogers underlines the recurring cultural anxieties related to new screen cultures by applying theories of embodied spectatorship to technologies like Cinemascope and 3D. The result is a book that draws an intelligent though-line across cinema history and reveals the cultural forces underpinning spectatorship.
Tinkcom, Matthew. Grey Gardens. Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2011.
This book is a revelatory look at one of my favorite documentaries. I’m particularly fond of Tinkcom’s ability to situate the film within a lineage of media history that helps explain the appeal of contemporary reality television.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, July 1991, pp. 2–13. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.
Williams cracks open traditional ways of conceptualizing genre and reveals fascinating parallels between horror, melodrama, and pornography.