Ring Ring: Telephonic Intermediality

Catalog description

Hello? Is anyone there? “Ring Ring” will explore the history of cinema through the ubiquitous device of the telephone, a changing communication technology inextricably and intimately bound to cinema’s ever-evolving media infrastructures, grammars and narrative forms, geographies, affects, aesthetic experiments, materialities, audio-visual dynamics, intermedial affinities, convergences and antagonisms, performances, and ideological imbrications. As we examine the relationship between these two communication technologies, we will move across scholarly categories of analysis, such as periodization, geography, and genre, allowing conversations to emerge between films that might otherwise be unlikely to be put into dialogue with each other, as well as between histories and theories of cinema and media. We will examine popular, feature-length and well-known films alongside less familiar films that vary in length, genre, location, and mode, and will explore topics such as labor, privacy, surveillance, intimacy, remoteness, home, security, authenticity and phoniness. We will also do a class visit to the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park in Orange, New Jersey, and will perhaps do other site visits too.