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"Pierson, Michele"
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Where Shadow Play Is Cinema: The Exhibition and Critical Reception of Ken Jacobs's Shadow Plays in the 1960s and 1970s
Ken Jacobs's first shadow play was made for the New Cinema Festival in 1965. For centuries, shadow plays have used light to back project moving shadows of puppets, objects, and/or
actors onto a screen. In his reviews of expanded cinema performances at the festival, Jonas Mekas grappled with the question of what makes a moving image cinema. The exhibition
spaces in which Jacobs's 2-D and 3-D shadow plays were presented very much determined how critics wrote about them. This essay puts the archaeological gesture of Jacobs's shadow
play and two-projector film performances that he called the Nervous System in the context of work by other artists, journalists, historians, and curators similarly engaged in
expanding our senses of what cinema is or might be.
Journal Article
Special Effects
Designed to trick the eye and stimulate the imagination, special effects have changed the way we look at films and the worlds created in them. Computer-generated imagery (CGI), as seen in Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Men in Black, and The Matrix, is just the latest advance in the evolution of special effects. Even as special effects have been marveled at by millions, this is the first investigation of their broader cultural reception. Moving from an exploration of nineteenth-century popular science and magic to the Hollywood science fiction cinema of our time, Special Effects examines the history, advancements, and connoisseurship of special effects, asking what makes certain types of cinematic effects special, why this matters, and for whom. Michele Pierson shows how popular science magazines, genre filmzines, and computer lifestyle magazines have articulated an aesthetic criticism of this emerging art form and have helped shape how these hugely popular on-screen technological wonders have been viewed by moviegoers.
eBook
Reconstructing sexual divisions of labor from fingerprints on Ancestral Puebloan pottery
An understanding of the division of labor in different societies, and especially how it evolved in the human species, is fundamental to most analyses of social, political, and economic systems. The ability to reconstruct how labor was organized, however, especially in ancient societies that left behind few material remains, is challenged by the paucity of direct evidence demonstrating who was involved in production. This is particularly true for identifying divisions of labor along lines of age, sex, and gender, for which archaeological interpretations mostly rely upon inferences derived from modern examples with uncertain applicability to ancient societies. Drawing upon biometric studies of human fingerprints showing statistically distinct ridge breadth measurements for juveniles, males, and females, this study reports a method for collecting fingerprint impressions left on ancient material culture and using them to distinguish the sex of the artifacts’ producers. The method is applied to a sample of 985 ceramic sherds from a 1,000-y-old Ancestral Puebloan community in the US Southwest, a period characterized by the rapid emergence of a highly influential religious and political center at Chaco Canyon. The fingerprint evidence demonstrates that both males and females were significantly involved in pottery production and further suggests that the contributions of each sex varied over time and even among different social groups in the same community. The results indicate that despite long-standing assumptions that pottery production in Ancient Puebloan societies was primarily a female activity, labor was not strictly divided and instead was likely quite dynamic.
Journal Article
THE OBJECT OF FILM ANALYSIS
How, for instance, might we understand the relationship between the image of a film after watching it over and over again at home, and the experience of viewing it in a theater with an audience? What are we describing when we analyze a film? If this is not the first time such questions have been asked, they have been less often asked about the analysis of experimental film than about the analysis of other types of film.
Journal Article
The Aesthetics of Action Film-making
A review of Adrian Martin's The Mad Max Movies (Currency Press and ScreenSound Australia, Sydney, 2003).
Journal Article
