Since this newsletter landed in your inbox, the odds are strong that you know I teach film classes at Fordham University and Marymount Manhattan College. (If that’s news to you, let’s catch up sometime!) This means that quoting from essays with names like “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” is a bit of an occupational hazard. The arcane title is misleading, though, as the writing itself is evocative and poetic, at least when graded on the curve of French theory. In it, André Bazin argues that “photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time.” He then turns to movies:
The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. […] Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.
The language he uses here is telling. Embalmed. Preserved in amber. Mummified. A photograph—and, more relevant for our purposes here, a film—is distinct from other works of art in the directness with which it depicts the time and place it was made. The real faces of real people are captured not “by the prestige of art, but by the power of an impassive mechanical process.” Every frame is a historical document.
Please excuse the pontificating (another occupational hazard), but the intersection of film and history is something I think about a lot. In August, I launched The Haunted Screen, a podcast about moments and movements in international cinema. Season One—“From Caligari to Hitler”—looks at the film of Weimar Germany, that brief interval of creative ferment and political tumult between the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918 and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Even if you haven’t seen movies like Nosferatu or Metropolis, you’ll recognize their iconic images. The era’s gothic eeriness and expressionistic excess is both unmistakable and deeply influential, building a visual vocabulary for everything from the Universal Classic Monsters to the concept albums of Janelle Monáe to Tim Burton’s whole deal.
Thanks to a serendipitous sponsorship deal with Fujifilm, I was able to pour an almost obscene amount of time into the podcast—over two years of on-and-off work in total. Through the lives of filmmakers like Fritz Lang and performers like Marlene Dietrich, I did my best to investigate how the hopes for a new era of freedom and creativity curdled into the darkest period in modern history. The Criterion Collection kindly praised the show for how it “shapes swaths of cinema’s past into engaging, character-driven stories.” I’m proud of it, I enjoyed making it, and I realized that I want to do more work like it.
After finishing my dissertation and shuttering Blunderbuss—the web and print magazine of arts, culture, politics, and “other aesthetic shrapnel” than I ran for five years with an incredible team of friends and collaborators—I more or less quit writing non-fiction. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but in retrospect, I think was ground down by The Discourse. It’s exhausting to have opinions about other people’s opinions, and even pre-Elon, Twitter was a rage factory that left me hating even people I agreed with. I took some time away and reoriented myself toward film, making an experimental short and writing a feature-length horror screenplay that’s now in pre-production. But the essayistic itch has returned, and in 2023, I’ve resolved to merge my old and new interests. This year, I’m going to expand on the podcast, both by releasing a second season and by making a return to prose writing.
That’s where the newsletter comes in.
Here’s the plan: On this Substack, which, in the name of brand consistency, is also called The Haunted Screen, I’m going to send out weekly dispatches that explore the overlap between international cinema and history, politics, and culture. At this stage, the project is still nascent. I expect its format and voice will come into focus as we go. Right now, I’m envisioning that each installment will include a mini-essay (or “take,” if you will) and some set of yet-to-be-determined recurring extras. Movie recs? Character sketches of interesting figures in film history? Pictures of my pug Rotini? Who knows? Everything is tentative, so I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on what works and what doesn’t. And while I may eventually launch a paid option if things go well, for the time being, the newsletter will remain free.
I’ll also be sure to point you in the direction of any writing I do elsewhere. Actually, I’ve got one such piece today! Just this morning, LitHub published a personal essay I wrote about (surprise!) my obsession with Weimar film and its relationship to a pandemic-era America that can sometimes look disturbingly Weimar in its own right. I’ve included a snippet below. Check it out if so inclined. Either way I hope to see you here next week.
Over at LitHub…
The beginning of my aforementioned essay:
Near the climax of Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi epic Metropolis, an android in disguise delivers an incendiary speech to a crowd of exploited workers. “You have waited long enough!” she (it?) tells them. “Your time has come—!” To us, the viewers, the robot appears unhinged, her arms flailing wildly and her eyes opened unsettlingly wide. The mob, however, is emboldened by their leader’s fervor. They spill into the streets, plow through barricades, climb walls, and push their way up a great staircase to the city’s power center, the Heart Machine.
I’ve seen Metropolis at least a half dozen times, and this sequence is lodged in my memory—a mental benchmark for images of spectacular chaos and crushing waves of humanity. So when I turned on CNN two Januarys ago to watch thousands of indignant rioters fight their way up the steps to the US Capitol, my movie-addled brain couldn’t help but think, “At least the robot had a point.”