Symbolic Systems Forum - Scott Bukatman, Art Department

Scott Bukatman, Art Department, "Comics and the Critique of

Chronophotography, or "He Just Couldn't Help It!""

Abstract: In the wake of Muybridge and Marey's experiments in recording

movement, comics quickly began to emphasize the depiction of continuous

movement. Chronophotography mapped the kinetic body onto the gridded and

regulated spaces of industrial culture: it was both a means of revealing

the body and a tool for its containment and control. Comics by Wilhlem

Busch, Steinlen,Winsor McCay and others, however, mimic the fixed

viewpoints and measured progress of chronophotography, but parody the

instrumental reason that supplied its motivation. Each episode of Winsor

McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze, for example, offered systematic and meticulous

time-motion breakdowns of everyday activities, but the rhythm of efficient

motion is always subverted by the mighty sneeze that turns all to chaos.

With an emphasis on the pioneering comics and animation work of the

American artist Winsor McCay, this presentation will explore the peculiar,

parodic counter-logics that mark an oasis of disorder at a time of

insistent regulation.

Bio: Professor Bukatman holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York

University. He is the author of two books: Terminal Identity: The Virtual

Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, published by Duke University Press,

was one of the earliest book-length studies of "cyberculture", and is

currently in its third printing. The book combined close readings of film,

fiction, comics, games and journalism to identify and analyze an emergent

subjectivity within electronic culture. Bukatman's second book, a

monograph on Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute,

continued to explore the intersection of cinema and technological

experience, this time by reading the film against the background of Georg

Simmel's urban sociology and city films of the 1920s and 1930s.

Courses that Bukatman has developed include the usual array of film

aesthetics and theory courses, but also a range of interdisciplinary,

intermedial offerings including: Cinema and the City, World's Fairs and

Theme Parks, Cyborgs and Synthetic Humans, Phenomenology of Film, Theories

of the Information Age, Film and the Machine Age, and Cinematic Spectacle

Reception to follow.