AnimATION NOTES

see included.

2015

2015

The general goal of my research is to find out what is questioned whenever an animated film is made by an author who chooses to have maximum control over the device automatisms. I am trying to understand in what ways that specific kind of film relates with Cinema and the History of Art as a whole and, more specifically, how its filmic discourse is built within cinematic codes,

Techniques Journal, Issue 1, 2021

These comments are assembled from comments commissioned for and published in Techniques Journal, Issue 1, A [Animating], Spring 2021, edited by Adam Nocek and Stacey Moran https://techniquesjournal.com/issue/animating/ I’ve written my responses to the pieces below with three goals in mind. To increase understanding by emphasizing specific themes in each of the works; to draw out the relationship of these themes to the topic of the special issue: animation, broadly construed; then to begin weaving the themes of the pieces together in a narrative that is informed by but not wholly indebted to the insights of the pieces in the volume. You can find the essays at the links provided below. The in-situ comments are distributed across the essays and can be found by following the “Comments” hyperlink provide by the editors.

Editorial and description of issue contents.

2015

Theories of spectatorship and cinema are nothing new. In fact, they abound. On the other hand, theories of spectatorship and animation are still rare. Rarer still are theories that implicate animation and cinema, including in the area of spectatorship. For us, beyond as well as between theories of cinema spectatorship that attribute a pure passivity to the spectator and those that grant him a pure mastery, and beyond as well as between those that present themselves as purely text based and those that present themselves as purely context based, lies something, something missing from consideration that calls for acknowledgement, something integral to cinema spectatorship as it is to cinema ‘as such’, as it is to film spectatorship and to film ‘as such ’ – animation, film and media studies ’ “blind spot”. In accord with my larger project to bring to the fore the crucial nature of animation for the thinking of not only all forms but all aspects of cinema, of film, of film ‘as such’, thi...

Editorial and description of issue contents.

2015

This essay has two projects. The first is intrinsic to the very question of what constitutes legitimate scholarly inquiry in the study of film and of animation, marking out something ostensibly especially contentious in and for the study of the latter: theory. Proceeding from two related queries – Why theory? And why animation theory? – the paper offers responses based in and on my own theory-driven and theory-focused work.1 The second project constitutes a reply to the cognitivists, or more particularly, those scholars who propound and promote a cognitive theory of film and especially of animation, notably, those who have wielded cognitivism as a weapon of total destruction against my work. Given the nature of the paper, this reply is of a general and in any case partial character. Let me pause to say: I ordinarily do not respond to criticism of my work. But given where these criticisms have been published and their purport, I felt I have had to make an exception to my rule. Theory...

Editorial and issue description.

Editorial and description of issue contents.