[in]Transition

Memory text

I remember I was living in Italy in the 90s, working in a language school with two Scots who would take me drinking. I’d stumble late at night up the narrow stairs to my fourth-floor flat and turn on the TV. The channels showed mostly adverts at that hour and often featured teaser trailers for Italian comedies, riveting in their vulgarity. In memory, these teasers have merged into one — exaggerated regional accents I couldn’t at the time identify; the cartoon physicality and gestures of the men; slow-motion images of that year’s starlets, sometimes topless; the camera’s fascination with trans bodies in bikinis; the tent of bedsheets made by a dead man’s erection — all overlaid with the refrain from a song of the era: ‘Don’t want no short-dick man / Don’t want no short-dick man…’. 

Years later I wrote a book on the films. 

Author’s reflection on the video

I place Clair Richards’ rendition of my text in the feminist tradition of deformative approaches to audiovisual analysis performed by figures like Laura Mulvey and Catherine Grant. I have in mind especially their work on Marilyn Monroe: Mulvey’s remix of a moment from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953), Grant’s “A Girl Like I,” and "Skirt,” also by Grant. These videos have in common the use of estranging techniques, especially slow motion, to emphasize Monroe’s skill as a performer and her self-awareness and agency in playing to the processes of objectification to which she was subject. In “Skirt,” Grant renders in extreme slow motion the famous scene from The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955) when Marilyn’s dress is buffeted by the breeze from a subway grating. Grant’s procedure allows us to notice the minute changes in Monroe’s expression, and how the openness of her smile and her eyes is deliberately calibrated to reward the gaze of her male companion, played by Tom Ewell, and that of the cinema audience. Ewell’s gaze is rendered correspondingly grotesque and predatory by an alienating temporal elongation that drains from it all charm and comedy (something underlined by Grant’s choice of music). 

I confess to my discomfort with “A Song of the Era” because I think that my text and voiceover serve the same function in Clair’s film as does Tom Ewell’s creepy expression in Grant’s video. They are avatars of a sexist symbolic system and the media ecology that nurtures it. I don’t think that “A Song of the Era” is intended as Star Studies, as Grant has described Mulvey’s work and her own (Grant 2019). (I don’t recognize the dancers in the clips that Clair has sourced from Italian TV, though an Italian viewer might.) “A Song of the Era” is instead a kind of non-Star Studies that deals with female labor in the ordinary spectacle of daily television; but it is concerned with a dimension of film and TV viewing that is often investigated in videographic work on stars. This is “retrospectatorship,” the term borrowed by Catherine Grant from Patricia White to describe a mode of viewing shaped by the experiences, fantasies, and memories elicited in the spectator (Ibid.). Clair’s film seems to critically frame my own queasy retrospectatorship, and the bad (that is, multiply phobic) taste it seems to relish. I resist, as I must, this interpretation of my viewing habits and sympathies, but I am impressed by its power. 

Works cited:

Grant, Catherine. 2019. ‘Star Studies in Transition: Notes on Experimental Videographic Approaches to Film Performance,’ in Keathley, Mittell and Grant (eds.), The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/star-studies-in-transition.

Biography

Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor of Film and Media in Digital Contexts at Aarhus University and Visiting Researcher at University of Leeds. He has published video essays in [in]Transition and 16:9 and his manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism appeared in NECSUS in Spring 2021. His most recent book is a study of the 1966 anti-colonial film classic The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis 2019).