Currently in preparation
Film and Things
The cinema has always been fascinated by things. And things have always solicited cinematic attention. In this love affair a new kind of entity arises: the cinematic thing. Film undoubtedly has a peculiar ability to render the world of things via the material dimension of the everyday, on the one hand, and the materialisation of generic iconography on the other. But not all things in film are equal; some are more ‘cinematic’ than others. Lesley Stern itemizes and explores a number of ‘cinematically destined’ objects charmed by the cinema into thingness: telephones, typewriters, banknotes, guns, dark glasses, coffee cups, rain and teardrops, hats, leaves blowing in the wind, kettles, cigarettes, letters, lipstick. A short chapter on each of these provocative objects offers filmic examples and opens out onto a poetic rather than expository exploration of theory and method.
When we speak of things in the cinema, do we mean solid things or something like the force of things? Things in the sense of ‘things happen’ or ‘two or three things I know about’? Do we mean to invoke all objects or only particular kinds of objects, what we might refer to as objects-becoming-things? Like malevolent ghosts, these questions will ruffle the feathers of this book as it jiggles the big question—what is a thing?—to ask instead: How do things acquire presence and meaning in film? How do things grab our attention? How are they themselves grabbed—by the camera, but in a way that cinematic mediation inaugurates a circuit of touch and affect that is primordially human? Do things have a life of their own, independent of film’s gaze and touch? Is there a particularly cinematic kind of thing or a particularly cinematic way of rendering things?
is the author of The Scorsese Connection (British Film Institute and Indiana University Press, 1995) and The Smoking Book (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Her work moves between a number of disciplinary locations, and spans both theory and production. She has published extensively in the areas of film, performance, photography, cultural history and feminism, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Screen, M/F, Camera Obscura, Film Reader, Image Forum (in Japanese), Trafic (in French), Emergences and Critical Inquiry.
