{"title":"The Hitherto Unknown: Toward a Theory of Synthetic Sound","authors":"H. Frank","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615403","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States created synthetic sounds by printing photographic or drawn patterns directly onto a filmstrip's optical soundtrack. This essay examines these practices alongside the radical film theories of Dziga Vertov and Jean Epstein in order to test the limits of sonic epistemology—and, ultimately, to imagine what it might mean to conceive of synthetic sound as documentary sound.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41691893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The World Union of Documentary and the Early Cold War","authors":"A. Lovejoy","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615445","url":null,"abstract":"This essay traces the evolution of the idea of “international documentary” during the early Cold War through the history of the World Union of Documentary (1947–50), an association spearheaded by documentarian Joris Ivens that aimed to articulate a common purpose for postwar documentary and to facilitate the international exchange of films, professionals, and knowledge in the field. I investigate the links between the association and contemporaneous international initiatives, chiefly film festivals and the peace movement, focusing throughout on Eastern Europe, where the World Union was headquartered for most of its existence. Indeed, the association's history is inextricable from that of Ivens's 1949 film about the East European “new democracies,” The First Years (Pierwsze lata). Both projects, I argue, were impeded not only by the polarized political atmosphere of the period but also by complex political, administrative, and generational dynamics within the documentary community and the international Left.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45514551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Utopia in a Package? Digital Media Piracy and the Politics of Entertainment in Cuba","authors":"Laura-Zoë Humphreys","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615473","url":null,"abstract":"Following the 1959 revolution, the Cuban state nationalized media outlets on the island and has controlled them ever since. Since 2010, however, this monopoly has been threatened by the paquete (package), one terabyte of pirated digital media collected by independent Cuban entrepreneurs and circulated through informal distribution networks across the island using flash drives and hard drives. Combining archival and textual analysis with ethnographic research, this article analyzes how the legacy of state socialism gave distinctive shape to experiences and perceptions of digital media piracy. I show how the state's history of contravening international copyright provided justification for piracy and how cultural producers and consumers worked to reconcile revolutionary aspirations for socialist art with the influx of global entertainment and the rise of new forms of local cultural production, especially advertising, enabled by the paquete. In so doing, this research challenges media archaeology's Euro-American focus and shows how alternate media histories can lead to different understandings of key questions in media studies, including the links between copyright, entertainment, and modernity.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44643312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Suppositionality, Virtuality, and Chinese Cinema","authors":"Jason McGrath","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615487","url":null,"abstract":"In Chinese performance arts, one thing that was largely abandoned in the shift from traditional drama to motion pictures was the suppositionality of Chinese operatic performance, and the transition to digital cinema, particularly in the case of big-budget blockbusters that compete for mass audiences in greater China as well as abroad, raises the question of if and how an aesthetic of suppositionality is related to the emerging virtual realism enabled by computer-generated imagery (CGI). The concept of suppositionality not only helps us to evaluate how contemporary Chinese animation and CGI blockbusters remediate premodern cultural narratives but also provides an analytical measure for approaching the growing phenomenon of motion capture and composited performances. The “virtual realism” of CGI frees Chinese filmmakers to reject the ontological realism of photography and instead favor an aggressively animated style of visual effects while returning actors to a reprise of the suppositional performance style of traditional opera.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48071051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Media Archaeology and the Resources of Film Studies","authors":"Daniel Morgan","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9615375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615375","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction to this special issue traces the interactions between the rise of media archaeology and the field of cinema and media studies. Arguing that media archaeology provided a necessary corrective around the question of media, I aim to show how its focus on historical narratives—especially on models of temporality—has led to a critical stagnation and a blind spot with regard to non-Western media. Drawing on the resources in film studies for thinking about the trans- or international movement of media, I set out the need for and terms of a globalizing media archaeology.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43059687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gertrude and Ludwig's Italian Adventure","authors":"L. Ballerini","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9382032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9382032","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A survey of the ingredients and paratextual elements that converged in Charles Bernstein's “Gertrude and Ludwig's Bogus Adventure,” occasioned by the translation of the poem into Italian. Historical hints and literary echoes are shown to be not merely juxtaposed but intertwined with trivia drawn from B Hollywood movies and accounting for the title itself of the poem. As the making of meaning, especially in the second part of the text, is driven by phonetic equivalences rather than by referential affinities, readers are alerted that ontophony has been chosen as a modus operandi over any attempt at contentual re-creation. The alliterative deployment of the letter p, for instance, has been retained, though this has caused the scene of the poem to transfer from a baseball park to a painter's studio. A suggestion is also put forward that in Bernstein's poetry, the step-by-step logic of Wittgenstein's Tractatus can be made to dialogue with Gertrude Stein's obsessive brushstroke writing.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66133944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"This Working Title Will Be Replaced: Charles Bernstein's Forever Forthcoming","authors":"B. Stefans","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9382314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9382314","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Focusing on two key themes, or vectors, of Charles Bernstein's latest book of poetry, Topsy-Turvy, that of brokenness and the various references to “God” or religious belief, this review argues that there is a new metaphysical dimension in Bernstein's recent poetry that moves beyond his poetry's earlier emphases on the purely interpersonal and material nature of language and its uses. Through a discussion of Bernstein's concept of the never-attained “virtual” in his essay “Poetics of the Americas” and philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concept of the “virtual,” I argue that we can discern something like a “transcendental” aspect in Bernstein's poetry and philosophy, but not one that points to a God, a realm of ideals, or toward a telos, but something that exists now—a very real, but not yet actual, potential. As opposed to the merely “possible,” this potentiality allows for the truly novel to appear, either in poetry or the world itself.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46333130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to Chinese Anthology of American Poetry (19th–20th c.), ed. Li Zhimin","authors":"Charles Bernstein","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9382088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9382088","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Li Zhimin, poet and professor at Guangzhou University, asked Charles Bernstein to write the introduction to his anthology of American poetry, which spanned from Dickinson to Stevens, with Bernstein the youngest poet in the collection. Published here in English for the first time.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43271876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Source Which Is Also a Translation: Toward an Expanded- Yiddish Poetics, with Special Reference to Charles Bernstein","authors":"Ariel Resnikoff","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9382257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9382257","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The present essay contextualizes the poet, scholar, editor, and translator Charles Bernstein (b. 1950), as an artist and practitioner working within a speculative translingual (language-crossing) field and tradition of expanded Yiddish. Reading Bernstein in relation to other expanded-Yiddish figures, such as his elders, Hannah Weiner (1928–77) and Jerome Rothenberg (b. 1931), and ancestor, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), among others, this essay makes a case for Bernstein as a writer who works from a position of antinomian Jewish translational originlessness, and a diasporic poetics of “need” (à la Charles Reznikoff), in which every source can be understood as a translation and every translation might be treated as a potential source. The coda of the essay addresses the stakes of Bernstein's praxes from the perspective of widespread modern and contemporary anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred and concludes with the first ever translation of Bernstein's poetry into Yiddish proper.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41365656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Un-American Tree: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetries and Their Aftermath, with a Special Reference to Charles Bernstein, Translated","authors":"L. Lehto","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9382145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9382145","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Leevi Lehto, in a keynote on American poetry presented in China, outlines the challenges and possibilities of Language poetry outside the American context, with specific relation to the meaning of translation.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42902083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}