Video-Essays
ROADMAP TO MEDIA THEORY
These Roadmap to Media Theory videos give a basic overview of some of the main theoretical paradigms that are important in media studies. All material presented here is based on existing scholarship and meant for educational purposes. There are five paradigms (or ‘the theoretical lines’ if we follow the map); each line has three ‘stations’: Part 1. Introduction: Philosophy, Theory, Method; Part 2. Structuralism: Semiotics, Critical Theory, Feminism; Part 3. Culturalism: Television Studies, Cultural Studies, Audience Studies; Part 4. Post-Structuralism: Postmodernism, Deconstruction, Postcolonialism; Part 5. New Materialism: Actor-Network-Theory, Posthumanism, Media Ecologies. Below the overview map followed by the five videos. For references to each of the videos, see the caption in on my vimeo channel with each video.
ROADMAP TO MEDIA THEORY
Part 1. Philosophy Theory Method
ROADMAP TO MEDIA THEORY
Part 2. Structuralism
ROADMAP TO MEDIA THEORY
Part 3. Culturalism
ROADMAP TO MEDIA THEORY
Part 4. Post-Structuralism
ROADMAP TO MEDIA THEORY
Part 5. New Materialism
Murky Waters: Submerging in an Aesthetics of Non-Transparency
Murky Waters is a video essay that Jaap Kooijman and I made for the 10th anniversary of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies.
See for more information about the essay this Autumn/Winter issue #Future, 2021of the journal.
Now the sun had sunk
Now the sun had sunk is a video essay that I made for the Critics Choice program of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020 by way of introduction to Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (2019). Set in contemporary Dakar, Atlantics presents the point of view of the women who remain in Senegal when their men leave on small boats to find their luck in Europe. Most never return, except as spirits that enter the bodies of those who remain. The film is told in an ingenious genre mixture that combines a love story, fairy tale, zombie movie and political drama. Images of the sea appear with a different affective attraction, ranging from lustful and mysterious to menacing and dangerous.
The starting point for my video essay was this pulling force of the ocean that holds the forces of life and death. In its waves, the sea contains many layers of the history of (forced) relocations between Europe and Africa, ranging from slavery to colonial invasions, and the waves of migration that followed after the decolonization. The video essay raises the spirits of those ‘specters of the sea’ by evocating them through visualizations from film history. Images of the sea give way to different layers of time. Beginning with Ada and Suleiman in present day Dakar from Atlantics (their love literally blocked by waves as tall as a building), the video essay returns to the 1960s and the end of colonial times depicted in Margarida Cardoso’s melancholic and terrifying A Costa dos Murmurios (2004), set at the end of the Portuguese colonial occupation of Mozambique; and to neo-colonial power relations in France in La Noire de… by Sembene Ousmane (Senegal, 1966).
Further back in time, at a deeper level of the sea, enslavement and forced migration during the Middle Passage returns in the deeply haunting drawings of Tom Feelings. Djibril Diop Mambéty’s famous Touki Bouki (1973) is another love story in Dakar pulled apart by the sea that resonates with Atlantics. The fact that Mambéty was Mati Diop’s uncle adds another level of connection. Finally I also inserted a few scenes from an earlier short film by Mati Diop, Atlantiques (2009), where boys at the beach talk about the enduring desire to depart, in spite of the enormous dangers of the sea. The soundtrack equally brings out the whispers and wraiths of the water, combining excerpts from Stella Chiwehe and Fatima Al Qadiri from the enchanting sound track of Atlantics, with Jeanne Moreau’s ‘Dans l’eau du temps’ (‘In the water of time’) and Josephine Baker’s ‘Partir sur un bateau tout blanc’ (‘Leaving on a completely white ship’); and the tones of ‘Various states of colonial unease’ (by Bon Jarno), ‘Humming Ghosts’ (by Haunted me) and ‘Diatonic waves’ (by Lost Radio).
I have chosen for a poetic form, because I did not want to explain or analyze the poetic opacity and evocative power of Diop’s beautiful film. Moreover, inspired by post-colonial philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation,’ I was looking for relations between Black and White that acknowledge difference and unknowability as well as the deep rhizomatic connections that ties the world together and that need to be recognized without universalizing everything to one knowledge system.
And somewhere in the rolling crests of the sea the whispering voice of Virginia Woolf can be heard, as if she already saw the women-ghostly spirits on the verandah in Atlantics. For a more elaborate discussion of Diop’s film, see my the last chapter of my book New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
FOLLOWING SEVEN ALCHEMICAL METALS
# METALLURGY, METALS, MINDS
In each of the seven found footage films in this series of Metallurgy, Media, Minds I follow one of the seven ancient metals that were known of an d used in alchemy: mercury, lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, gold. I follow each metal from the earth where it is embedded (and excavated) through its material and immaterial transformations to it’s connected planet (Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Moon, Sun). This project departed from the idea put forward by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus that “every matter consists of metal” or, metal is in everything. In a new materialist perspective, the materiality of matte also implies its metaphoric and immaterial properties, which directly relate back to alchemy. I became interested in the idea of filmmakers as metallurgists that shape, bend, weld and transform our historical and collective consciousness. As an experiment I started out by looking at gold in both its material properties and its significance in human history. The first film in this series (when I was honing my editing skills, as I still am), was Following the Gold. Obviously many more metals could be followed, especially in the context of our modern media world where every machine, every screen, every gadget is full of (rare) earth metals. But the idea of returning to the old alchemical planets gave the project a clear scope.
Follow the Mercury
Mercury is heavy, dark and full of secrets, hiding many faces. Where tin is a very friendly and light metal, that seems to sympathize with humanity, absorbing its sorrows and pains, wanting to become human from the outside, mercury’s spirit penetrates more deeply into the body and soul of everything it touches, operating as the great transformer. It is for this reason that mercury plays such an important role in alchemy, a dimension that I have tried to honor in this compilation. Mercury can designate (Egyptian) Toth, (Greek) Hermes or (Roman) Mercury, the messenger of the ancient mythological Gods; it is also the name of the planet closest to the sun (and hence considered as messenger of the sun); and it is the name of the silvery liquid metal mercury (Hg), also known as quicksilver. Mercury is obtained from an orange rock cinnabar, which turns into an orange-red powder when grounded and which releases liquid mercury when heated. What is very special is that when mercury is synthesized again with sulpher, an artificial red powder, called vermillion, re-appears. Natural cinnabar and artificial vermillion have been known since ancient times for their use as pigment, mercury has been and still is used as a “magnet for gold” in gold mining. However, mercury is very poisonous; it attacks the nervous system (and many other bodily functions) directly, and makes you go insane.
Follow the Lead
Lead is a heavy but pliable metal with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ‘plumbum’ of ‘plomb’ in French). It is easily extracted from its ore, abundantly present in the Solar System and on earth it is found mainly combined with the mineral galena (Pbs), with zinc ores. The largest lead deposits are located in Australia, China, Ireland, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Russia and the United States. In the US the Missouri lead belt is most significant, and I start this compilation with some historic footage of this mining that for many years has been providing lead for among others acid-lead batteries in our cars, which is still a significant use of lead. Since the 1920s lead was also added to petrol to make the engine of our cars run better, but since the 1970s this is largely contested and abandoned because of the lead pollution this caused in the air. But the use of lead is known since 6.000 BC. The Egyptians used it for facial make-up, in ancient China lead coins and pennies were used as currency, but most well-known for their use of lead were the Romans who used it massively for the piping of their water systems and used it to sweeten their wine. Some even argue that the downfall of the Roman Empire has partly been due to lead poisoning which deranged the Romans, who did not yet know of the poisonous qualities of lead. On the other hand, lead is known for its protection against radiation, even in heavily contaminated areas such as Chernobyl.
Follow the Tin
Tin is a friend, says Primo Levi in his Periodical Table. Because it melts at low temperature, almost like organic materials, that is ‘almost like us’. Moreover tin can scream (the weeping or crying of tin) and it can succumb to ‘tin pest’ (when it transforms into brittle grey matter). Perhaps it is also because of this ‘closeness to us’ that we find tin in Hans Christian Andersons “The Brave Tin Soldier” and in Frank Baums “tin man” in The Wizard of Oz; the tin soldier is hopelessly in love with a paper ballerina, and the tin man longs for a heart, so that he can really be human. In this compilation I follow tin, starting with its cry and transformation into grey tin, and also the tin soldiers, toys and robots play an important role. Tin is often found in alloys, with copper to form bronze, or pewter. Or with lead, in soldering, which is a main application of tin.
But I first move to tin mining that is mainly situated in Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, as well as Australia are main producers of Tin). Tin is also found in Bolivia, Nigeria and also in Cornwall (UK) tin mining has been big. Tin mining, as most mining sites, does not leave the environment untainted. The Bangka Islands in Indonesia, for instance, pay a huge price for tin mining. The islands produces currently 1/3 of the world supply of tin, much used in soldering for smartphones by companies like Apple and Samsung. Mining companies leave the land often barren, stagnant lakes of polluted water make the water undrinkable. And tin is also increasingly mined in the sea surrounding the islands, which has devastating effects on the corals and sea turtle population.
Besides it’s (hidden) use in our smartphones and other electronic devices that need to be connected, and the use of tin in fluoride tooth pastes (Crest, Oral B and Sensodyne, for instance, use tin in their products), perhaps the most common use of tin is in the canning of food (and beverages) that use a tin code. Since the invention of the tin can in the 19th century, and its industrialization in the 20th century, the tin can has become part of every house hold. Tin cans are typically tied at the back of a car of a ‘just married’ couple, when they depart on their honey moon.
Follow the Iron
I never expected iron to be such a moving metal. Primo Levi’s “iron” story in his beautiful book The Periodic Table (first published in 1975 and in 2016 transformed into a gripping radio play by BBC radio 4) first made me reconsider iron. Therefore I start Follow the Iron with a homage to Levi who recalls his how his fellow chemistry student and friend Sandro who discovers “iron” as one of the substances of a powder they have been given to analyze: Habemus ferrum. (A later image from a chemistry lab in a documentary on British Steel works also is meant to evokes Levi at work as a chemist). Sandro speaks with a Piedmontese accent, is generous, brave and seems to be made of iron. He took Primo Levi into the mountains, leading him consciously into challenging encounters with the four elements. Levi is certain it helped him later on to survive under the bitter circumstances in the camps. It didn’t help Sandro: Sandro Delmastro, was killed fighting in the resistance in 1944. Levi’s iron memory is devastating.
Follow the Copper
Contrary to gold, copper is not a metal with fetishistic surplus value. It was much harder to find any fiction films that centered around copper. Copper does not seem to drive us as crazy as gold, nor as cool and futuristic as silver. One of the rare feature films with an important role for copper is Clio Barnard’s remarkable drama The Selfish Giant (2013), about a young working class boy in Bradford, England, getting involved in copper theft. And yet copper is a metal that is actually extremely important for us in our daily life. Therefore most of the clips in this compilation are from non-fiction sources. In the western world each person on average is connected to 175 kilogram of copper (in terms of wires, cables, plumbing pipes and electronic devices). We need copper to get fresh tap water, to receive electricity, to communicate across the oceans, to travel by boat, by train and increasingly also by plane (in alloys with aluminum). We need copper to use our cell phones and computers. In fact we need copper to live, our bodies contain copper (female bodies having on average more copper than male bodies, whose bodies contain on average more iron). Also green plants, certain nuts and fruits and sea creatures contain copper. So copper is everywhere.
Follow the Silver
In only 2,5 minutes I follow silver from the mines into its transformation in monetary coins. On all continents silver is an old basis for monetary value; in many languages the word silver is synonymous for money: “l’argent” in French, “plata” in Spanish, “rupee” in India. Silver was also connected to luxury objects (in spite of its reputation of being ‘the poor men’s gold’). In this video assemblage I have only included flashes of references to the luxury of silver in objects from Europe, China and India. Most silver is found in Peru and Mexico, but most consumption of silver is in India; in 2015 one third of the world consumption of silver was in India.
Silver has anti-septic and anti-bacterial qualities of silver that allows medical appropriations in for instance surgical instruments, which is alluded to by a reference to the television series The Knick where a black doctor in NYC around 1900 introduces silver in the operation room. Probably the purity of silver also explains its legendary power to kill vampires, represented here by Nosferatu. Of course silver’s reflecting qualities have been at the basis for the invention of photography and film. Even in the digital age, silver is still important, not only as conducting material in many camera’s, phones and computers. But also in digital silver printings, in digital touch screens, and in the return of the silver screen for 3D projection.
In the middle of this remix of Follow the Silver, Andy Warhol addresses silver as the metal of the past and the future. Looking back at the Hollywood stars (Katharine Hepburn as silver moth in Christopher Strong, by Dorothy Arzner in 1933) from the midst of the Space Age, he reflects on all this shiny silver from his Silver factory. But of course silver has also been a main ingredient in making mirrors, and so silver is also connected to narcissism. Warhol’s Screen Tests have transformed in the countless 15 minutes (or seconds) of fame in our selfies culture. And in the transmutations that the fashion industry provokes as exemplified by some silver metallic references to this aspect of contemporary culture. Silver is imporant in solar panels and nanotechnology, which I have not yet included in this compilation. Finally, silver is the metal of the moon, which is where both Bjork and the NASA take us to in the last seconds of this trajectory to follow silver. Silver is hard to grasp. It remains mysterious. More is hidden.
Follow the Gold
This audio-visual found footage essay is an explorative study and is part of a research project on the idea of ‘filmmakers as metallurgists’ that bend and shape our collective consciousness by mining the archives of our audio-visual past. Filmmakers, however, are not just smiths of sorts in a metaphoric way. This compilation follows ‘a nugget of gold’ from the mine across its metallurgic transformations into objects, images and stories that have constructed (and still construct) our world. Gold can be considered an ancient and primal metal, it has an allure that speaks to deep desires in humankind, ranging from freedom to greed. Too soft and malleable for weapons, it has been used in art and jewelry since ages; it has inspired many stories of gold rushes, fights and wars; it is connected to the idea of the nation state (including Hitler’s hunt for gold in every country he invaded); it is the basis of market speculations and the suspicion of an empty ‘Fort Knox’; and it is connected to the idea of urban mining (re-transforming the gold conductors in our computers and cell phones back into gold); as such gold is also related to the first transformers of metal, the alchemists, who not only transform base metals into gold, but also and especially were looking for a pure and spiritual transformation and the eternal return of life and death. In the larger project other metals will be followed, metals that connect to different aspects of our media as metallic machines, in connection to the different stories of our collective consciousness that they inspire. The project subscribes to a material ecological approach of our digital media culture that is inspired by Felix Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ (the environmental, the socio-political, and the mental). Here’s my article on Deleuze’s Metallurgic Machines for the Los Angeles Book Review. And a related article The Filmmaker as Metallurgist in Film-Philosophy.
Emerald Transmutations
Emerald Transmutations from Patricia Pisters on Vimeo. This video is part of the Indefinite Visions project, curated by Richard Misek. Published in [in]Transitions.
An Indefinite Corpse Experiment in Digital Alchemy
Emerald Transmutations is an experiment in digital alchemy inspired by the surrealist parlour game Exquisite Corpse and by the Emerald Tablets, the foundational hermetic text in Western alchemy. Starting with the “prima materia” of two scenes from celluloid film history, each transmuted scene was passed along between seven “digital alchemists” who each performed a process of transmutation on the material in an attempt to turn base metal into gold and to find “the philosopher’s stone.” Each participant was only given the previous stage of the transmutation, together with a description of the next stage in the alchemical process, and asked to transform (and add to) the material according to their own insights. The final video presents the transformations in the order in which they have been applied, gradually processing the outer limits of indefinite vision (and eternal revision).
An experiment in digital alchemy inspired by the surrealist parlour game Exquisite Corpse and by the Emerald Tablets, the foundational hermetic text in Western alchemy. Starting with the “prima materia” of two scenes from celluloid film history, the combined scenes were passed along between seven “digital alchemists” who each performed a process of transmutation on the material in an attempt to turn base metal into gold. By Ian Magor, D.N. Rodowick, Jacques Perconte, Polly Stanton, David Verdeure, Rosa Menkman & Patricia Pisters. / 00:19:00 / 2016 / United Kingdom / World Premiere at the Alchemy Film Festival. I will also present at the artist’ filmmaking symposium.
Helmut Newton: Surrealism, Woman and Film
I made this compilation for an evening on Helmut Newton’s relation to surrealims and feminine desire organized by FOAM, photography museum Amsterdam in June 2016. The evening also included talks by Catriona McAra (writer of Sadeian Woman: Erotic Violence in Surrealist Spectacle), Marijke Peyser (guest curator Boijmans van Beuningen) and Matthias Harder (curator Helmut Newton Foundation).
The Blackout Period
Referendum Day, 23rd June 2016. A day I collaborated with Ian Magor at a videoworkshop as part of the Whitechapel Indefinite Visions events. Electricity was on our mind. The skies were full of lightning. The referendum was on our mind. Officiall, it was not on the mind of the British media since the day was a “blackout period” as far as coverage of the referedum was concerned. We wondered what images and sounds were finding their way into the (un)consciousnessof the British voting public. This compilation of memories from the campaign and more nostalgic, personal recollections are the result.
Despair Has No Wings
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Alphaville of 1965.
See also Film Studies for Free‘s Celebration of Alphaville’s birthday on May 5th 2015.
Watching Alphaville fifty years after its making in 2015, most striking is the enduring presence of wounds of the Second World War. The ruins, scars and the horror of the war can be felt in every image of this film, even if it is set in the future. But what is even more striking is that so much of the films traumas related to the past, and related to the cold logic of modernity, still resonates with today’s reality. Just replace ‘Alphaville’ with ‘NSA’ and think of Lemmy Caution as Edward Snowdon, and the future that Godard captured in Paris of the 1960s represented by the totalitarianism of the Alpha 60 machine has transformed into the more invisible algorithms of the billions of metadata patterns that trace, predict and control our steps in today’s global digital networks. The allegory I mention in this video-essay not only concerns to the past and an imaginary future, but to the actual present of our control societies that have taken the snake-like intricateness and hard to grasp modulations announced by Gilles Deleuze about twenty-five years ago.
‘In control societies, the key thing is no longer a signature or number but a code [that function as] password […]. The digital language of control is made up of codes indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied. We’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become “dividuals” and masses become samples, data, markets, or “banks.”’ Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ (1990)
Emoticons
This video has also been publised and peer reviewed in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 2,1, 2015. See for this publication here.
In The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Contemporary Screen Culture (2012), I suggest that cinema gives us increasingly intensely direct access to character’s brain worlds. Our audio-visual images co-evolve in resonance with the knowledge we have of principles of the brain and with a philosophical understanding of the complex entanglements between bodies, brains and world.
The short video-experiment Emoticons departs from a common principle studied in affective neuroscience that facial expressions relate to basic affects that are at the core of more complex emotions and feelings. I took these basic emotions as simple guidelines for evoking a memory or an association with each mood. They all include a reference to film and other audio-visual media. Consciousness has become cinematographic consciousness.
This project was originally conceived as a mini-installation consisting of two video-channels. One video shot and projected in a 360⁰ pan, expressing events inside a brain space. The other video of a talking head projected on a dummy, pronouncing thoughts associated with each basic emotion.
With great thanks to filmmakers Igor Kramer and Pepijn Schroeijers to suggest transforming some theory into practice and to help create a ‘neuro-image’ of my brain.
Below a photo impression of the double channel video installation-version of Emoticons. Pepijn Schroeijers, Igor Kramer, Patricia Pisters at SIN (Straattheater Instituut Nederlands, NDSM wharf Amsterdam, May 2014).
Crystal Cove
Blue is the warmest color. Egg yolk jelly fish filmed in Monteray Bay Aquarium. Summer sounds of crickets recorded in Crystal Cove, California 2014. This film was screened in the Programme A Taste of Red, Yellow and Blue in EYE Film Institute Netherlands on March 31, 2015.
Patricia Pisters 