On Lyrical Spectatorship: Invocation and Intermedial Encounters in the 1920s and Beyond

This dissertation proposes a new theoretical account of spectatorship in a lyric mode in cinema and present case studies of how media actualize self-authentic participation and imagination. My study begins with the 1920s silent cinema and traces a tradition of gestures in the video installations by contemporary artists. Drawing upon spectatorship studies, lyric theory, cultural studies, enunciation theory, theories of gender and performativity, and Frankfurt School media theory, I show how formal techniques such as apostrophe, the address of inanimate objects, and the use of deixis serve as interfaces to animate and transform the subjectivity of the spectator. I argue that this approach necessitates seeing media as “documents” for actualization, performance, translation, and adaptation. Furthermore, the lyric offers a space for self-authentic enunciation in early cinema that resurfaces as the “real” in a post-truth digital age./nThrough the ethical potential of invocatory gestures found in lyric poems, this inquiry considers the historical material conjunctures at moments of their recording and projection. It takes an openness and receptivity to be central values of that which the lyric documents and generates. This project seeks to answer the invitation by reaching back towards the 1920s. The chapters hinge on Russian, Soviet readers and spectators, whose viewing practices actualize Weimar Germany and 19th century America. As the poet-spectators sought to translate their experience of watching a film into a poem or a poem into a film, they worked across languages, media, and national contexts, in what are also acts of adaptation. These new works crucially retain “lyric gestures” of address in their contingency upon their immediate environments, enlarging our awareness of immanent existential circumstances./nThe resulting effects of this lyric mode in film, I argue, are the construction of a 1) collective interiority – by which I mean, a general atmosphere and tone of longing, quite often elegiac, and 2) an aspectual reflection – a play with rhyme and puns that stand in for points of contact and points of departure between the presence of the image and the absence of words, between the natural world of poetic cycles and structures and the artificial human one of narrative and history./nPoetry, which addresses things, allows us to imagine something other than an “ideal spectator,” interpellated spectator. The address of an object can be an opening for people without the status of the human whether within or because outside of a particular social, cultural, or ideological system of values. It is humanizing because it recognizes speech that is not necessarily usually recognized as “human” within human speech. When objects are animated by intention (cathexis of desire and longing not personified, anthropomorphized), even the commodity becomes particular rather than something with exchange value. The stage of exchange value creates this for the commodity while pointing to the frame in order to change it from situation to circumstance, which the lyric does best. Thinking of a film as a set of objects (even the actors are objects in Brecht’s epic theater) allows for crystallizations and for holding configurations. Sometimes faces hold whole configurations. However, by the last chapter, disfiguration becomes a resistant gesture. The hand over the face.

Advisor: Nesbet, Anne