Introduction: Media Inside Out

Trinankur Banerjee, Richard Farrell, and Ian Laughbaum

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On the 25th of April 2024, in the Mosher Alumni House overlooking the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Goleta Coast, three trailblazing figures of film and media studies–Constance Penley, Janet Walker, and Charles Wolfe–were forced to confront their intellectual trailheads: their dissertations. Except for the mock opprobrium of the trio, it was met with general applause by those of us who were in the room at the “Media Inside Out” conference. Never had so many been so grateful to so few; the aural environment undeniably affirmed that the trio had and has collectively shaped the understanding of humanistic education of a room full of interlocutors. It was a reunion full of ruminations and rejoicings. Old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years were in embrace, mentors and mentees were caught in intense intellectual tete-a-tetes, and new collaborations sprang up across all corners of the room. These events were capped off by a karaoke session in the back of the Pollock Theater—the crown jewel of the department that the trio built.

If the conference was a repertoire of jubilant celebrations, this special issue of Media Fields is an archive and critical distillation of the work presented at the “Media Inside Out” conference. The careers and intellectual genealogies of these three foundational faculty members of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) Film and Media Studies Department are lovingly traced in the articles written herein. We, the graduate students of this department, feel that, given the journal’s germination in the hallways of the Social Sciences and Media Studies Building, there can be no better home for a critical confluence of thoughts on three professors to whom we owe many of our ideations.

The saying would usually go that Penley, Walker, and Wolfe walked so that the rest of us in the discipline could run. However, a more appropriate metaphor would be the inverse–they ran so that we could follow. Just as the poster for the original conference (and the cover of this issue) serves as a fractalized reflection of the topography of the area surrounding UCSB, so too is this issue a refraction of the methodological influences that these thinkers have had on individual scholarly oeuvres.

As indicated on the conference website, the provocation “media inside out” invited scholars, friends, and community members to reflect on “on the hermeneutic, structuralist, and discursive approaches that have been foundational” to the discipline of film and media studies. This provocation was so appropriate for Professors Penley, Walker, and Wolfe as each of them turned the discipline of film studies inside out mere years after its formal induction into the academy, each via their profound curiosities and respective intellectual braveries within the field. However, this conference was not intended to be too much of a hagiographical or a turn to academic nostalgia, but rather a moment to reflect upon the impact that compassionate and rigorous scholars can have on the broader academic community. Even when nostalgia felt like an inevitability, the presenters turned these impulses inside out to trace the subliminal flows of their interventions in our disciplinary present and the ideas-to-come. If the trio has transformed, as the conference website succinctly puts it, the “historical understanding and spatial apprehension: not only of evolving, proliferating media fields, but also of broader experiential registers such as modernity, agency, and planetarity”, this was indeed a demonstrative “symposium” in the platonic sense.

While their careers have already been individually recognized in the interviews conducted by the “Fieldnotes” project initiated by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the conference and this issue seek to illustrate the local reverberations of Penley, Walker, and Wolfe's work.[1] As issue editors, we found a surprising refrain from our invited authors, which went something like this: “would it be within the interest of the journal to write an essay that touches on Connie, Chuck, or Janet beyond the scholarly?” Many of our authors could not imagine writing something which merely articulated the influence these scholars have had on their careers. Instead, what we have in these pages are heartfelt dedications to the manners by which Professors Penley, Walker, and Wolfe have touched the minds and hearts of our authors as mentors, community members, and friends.

If there is anything to which the articles on Constance Penley attest, it is the depth and breadth of her influence as a scholar, mentor, political activist, and friend. Peter Alilunas’ poetic reflection on Penley’s unique style of courage across all four of these aspects thus serves as the best opening point. As the old adage goes, to be courageous is not to be without fear but to forge ahead bravely in spite of fear, and Alilunas traces Penley’s embodiment of this adage throughout her life. Ranging from her modern bravery as one of the trailblazers of Porn Studies to a touching and emblematic moment from her childhood in South Florida, this article foregrounds the fact that Penley was in some ways always the courageous scholar we know and love today.

From here, Ethan Tussey reflects on a specific bravery of Penley’s in the academic realm. Though there are many from which to choose in this regard, Tussey zeroes in on her willingness and passion to rigorously engage with material deemed “beneath” scholarly inquiry. Utilizing her famous article “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn” as a theoretical anchor, Tussey demonstrates that as global media consumption grows past and beyond academically celebrated forms such as literature and cinema and increasingly towards culturally denigrated forms such as online video, pornography and, in Tussey’s specific case of analysis, the Google Doodle, Penley’s intellectual bravery is a direly important model to follow if we wish to make sense of the new media landscape in which we think.

Tackling the personal and societal side of Penley’s bravery, Lucas Hilderbrand writes a tribute to the ways she models being a capacious scholar with many lives and the manner by which her trailblazing serves as an example in how to open up possibilities for those behind her. Honing in on her capacious sense of interest that makes her uniquely able to reach hearts and minds beyond the academy, Hilderbrand examines the many publications and projects on which Penley has worked that emphasize her dedication to working across the divide between the scholarly and the popular. Pertinently, he argues that Penley’s bravery in academia does not merely make her career illustrious: it paves the way for all of us to emulate her intellectual rigor and courage.

As Hilderbrand’s piece looks at the ways in which Penley’s public presence affects many lives, Celine Parreñas Shimizu closes out this section by focusing on how Penley’s warmth and passion for daring intellectual work affected one life: Shimizu’s own. In a loving retelling of Penley’s role as Shimizu’s intellectual idol, then mentor, and then eventually collaborator, Shimizu brings her own testimony as evidence to the kinds of impacts that can be made via radical feminist pedagogy and practice. Her tribute reveals how Penley’s fierce commitment to challenging norms not only shaped a field but also transformed a life.

This section reflects on and contributes to the research, mentorship, and pedagogy of Janet Walker. The opening article is fittingly written by a longtime collaborator and close friend of Walker: Diane Waldman. While an admirer of all of the twists and turns of Walker’s decades long, interdisciplinary scholarship, Waldman’s entry specifically takes the reader through some of their early writings on feminism, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies. First, Waldman contextualizes two co-written pieces with Walker addressing a contested debate concerning the merits and drawbacks of bridging psychoanalytic theory and feminist film studies, and how their responses to this debate fed into Walker’s first monograph, Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry. Here, Waldman praises Walker’s rich analyses of primary source material and several commercial films about psychoanalysis that reveal the intertwined roles of Hollywood cinema and American psychoanalytic psychiatry played in shaping postwar gender norms. At the same time, Waldman commends, Walker identifies forms of resistance across these same institutions. Waldman then explains how their early writings also anticipated Walker’s later research into trauma, memory, and their representation, where Walker developed her notion of the “traumatic paradox,” which holds that the distortions and gaps in traumatic memory are intrinsic, rather than delegitimatizing, to it. Waldman further shows how this research, culminating in Walker’s Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, spoke to the political implications of producing and assessing realist and experimental modes of traumatic representation. Waldman concludes by reflecting on the “particularly sweet” aspects of intellectual collaboration and friendship she and Janet Walker have shared over the years. 

The next two articles are sourced from two scholars whose research crossed paths with Walker’s “in the field.” Noah Shenker met Janet Walker at the 2006 Annual Film and Literature Conference held at Florida State University. After attending her keynote lecture for the conference addressing the theme, “Documenting Trauma, Documenting Terror,” Shenker serendipitously ran into Walker during a mutual flight delay at the Tallahassee Airport where they shared in, by his words, “one of the most consequential dialogues” of his professional and personal life. After these thoughtful opening anecdotes, Shenker explains how numerous conversations with Walker and reading her latest book at the time, Trauma Cinema, significantly reshaped his doctoral research on mediations of Holocaust video testimonies. Making a bit more concrete what Waldman introduces above, Shenker demonstrates how Walker’s concept of the “traumatic paradox” better enabled him to interpret an interview with Julia L., a Romani survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, from the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA). Shenker then notes how Walker’s scholarship and mentorship also inspired his own notion of “testimonial literacy,” which roughly denotes an attentiveness to the too often deemed marginal elements of testimony that typically don’t make it into official or authorized testimonial transcriptions and distillations.

Similar to Shenker, Thomas Patrick Pringle met Janet Walker at the 2018 Visible Evidence conference in Bloomington, Indiana. He attended Walker’s presentation entitled “Media, Mapping, Surveillance, and Survivance: Standing with Standing Rock,” where, thereafter, the two engaged in a fruitful discussion about critical approaches to mapping, geography, and space, and how environmental justice strategies can be further brought into media studies. In his contribution to this special issue, Pringle traces Walker’s inauguration of a “spatial turn” in documentary media studies through several publications she authored between 2009 and 2023. Her term, “spatial documentary studies” describes “a cartographically attuned analytic for the study of site-specific or situated documentaries.” Practically, according to Walker, this analytic entails identifying and mapping where a film was sonically and visually recorded in order to reveal the co-constitution of film and place, or more broadly, “situated documentary’s entanglement in sociopolitics as well as culture.” In addition to contextualizing Walker’s research through this analytic in a number of films set in places such as post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Pringle demonstrates how Walker’s spatial approach to documentary can help reframe the proliferation of media–especially those produced by local communities–documenting Southern California’s major fire events.

This section dedicated to Janet Walker’s career is capped off with a piece by one of Walker’s many former erudite students, doctoral advisees, and now, scholarly collaborators: Sage Gerson. Gerson organizes her essay around two formative and comical interactions with Walker while undertaking her PhD at UCSB. The first speaks to Walker’s humility, integrity, and awareness of graduate student financial precarity when Gerson recounts how Walker apologized for assigning her own writing in their “Media & Environment: Climate Justice” course from 2017. Gerson goes on to share how influential that book, Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment–which Walker co-edited with another former student and advisee, Nicole Starosielski–would be for her own scholarship and teaching in the environmental humanities. Specifically, she acknowledges and commends Starosielski and Walker’s refusal to dichotomize the representational and the material in their approach to media and the environment. Rather, they introduced to Gerson an inspiring relational and ecological form of analysis that she would adopt for her remaining studies and career. The second anecdote Gerson provides addresses Walker’s caring and careful use of language, which, by her account, taught Gerson the importance of meaningfully contemplating how one expresses their interior life with their exterior world. Taken together, these contributions from Waldman, Shenker, Pringle, and Gerson all uniquely communicate what a distinguished scholar, teacher, and collaborator Janet Walker has been throughout her career.

The section on Charles Wolfe opens with Emily Carman’s historiographic mapping, in which she takes us on a meandering journey through Wolfe’s singular insights into media history. If the refrain of “looking past the screen” continues to inform much of the tenor of New Cinema History, Wolfe was, she concurs, an early practitioner, suturing discourses beyond the screen to the images on them. Whether it is the discourses concerning geopolitics, cultural hegemony, or the media industry, she elaborates how Wolfe has been attentive to their myriad mediations within the cinematic form. They, in turn, establish a now-crucial aspect of our discipline: media historiography, after all, is a history of mediations. Pushing the conceptual boundaries of the discipline from its nascency, she concludes, Wolfe also continues to attune young generations to the historical novelty of an “old” media—film.

Carman’s mapping sets up Colin Williamson's mediation on Wolfe’s perennial scholarly affection for Cinema’s “Great Stone Face”—Buster Keaton. His groundbreaking study of the background in Keaton’s slapstick oeuvre to understand how slapstick’s madcap assemblage of spaces indexes an urban dislocation specific to Southern California in the 1920 becomes, in Williamson’s tribute, a methodological provocation. Williamson argues the places in these comedies that inform both the out-of-place nature of the figure as well as the placelessness of the events, in turn, help us think of other instances where cinema mediates these “structures of feeling.” If dislocation or not being in place is increasingly becoming the norm for dwelling in a world in flux, he proposes, Wolfe might offer us new ways of understanding the spatial politics of “placing” in cinema to index such process, especially in the digital where anxiety of the index continues to haunt the image.

Williamson’s provocation to extend Wolfe’s methods beyond its historical grounding finds the ideal response in Hannah Goodwin’s analysis. Drawing on Wolfe’s influential essay on the “voiceover” in documentary, she suggests that his essay remains vital to understand questions of political agency and intervention within documentary form’s continued employment of this narrative device. Goodwin reminds us that Wolfe performs a critical enfleshment of the voice that desires to maintain its disembodied form. The enfleshment thus paves the way for perceiving a “polyvocalism” in the documentary form, which then becomes the ground for dissensus—the place of politics. Turning to Patricio Guzman, her dissection of the myriad voices—metaphoric and fleshed—delineate how a key contemporary concern in documentary studies—the silences of the “other”—become legible when the voiceover is brushed against other voices without letting them pass into discursive silence.

Goodwin’s veiled critique of voiceover’s limits becomes the cornerstone of Scott Ferguson’s careful unpacking of the film theoretical significance of Wolfe’s argument. Placing Wolfe within a larger debate about mediation vis-à-vis film theory, Ferguson shows how Wolfe’s location of voiceover in between diegesis and the spectator returns the question of the “middle” to mediation. The divine attribution to this voice (“voice of god”) might well be cartoonish, but in naming the voice so, the fantasy of omniscience thus brings forth a space subjects can occupy to revel in omniscience—the pleasure principle of film theory. Instead of any primal scene of the lone spectator or the imaginaries of corporeal density that haunt the various strands of film theory, Ferguson sees in Wolfe’s proposition a critical middle ground—where individual and collective participation are facilitated by the lure of omniscience of the cinematic image.

These twelve voices—polyphonic, polylocal, and polyvocal—do appear harmonious in their intellectual exaltations. But much like the intellectual trio at the heart of this issue’s focus, they also conjure critical syncopations. We leave it to the discerning “ear” of the readers for future compositions.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants for this special issue for their voluntary contributions despite their schedules. A special note of gratitude goes to Jennifer Holt, Lisa Parks, Bhaskar Sarkar, and the staff of the Department of Film and Media Studies, whose organizational acumen were integral to the conference’s realization and set this special issue on its course. The Carsey-Wolf Center’s donation to the Media Fields Collective for our editorial labor will remain invaluable. Lastly, we are indebted to Cass Mayeda for their ever-spirited assistance in designing the issue’s spritely homepage.

Notes

[1] These interviews are available via Vimeo for free viewing. For the interview with Constance Penley, conducted by Elena Gorfinkel, see https://vimeo.com/164288278. For the interview with Janet Walker, conducted by E. Ann Kaplan, see https://vimeo.com/660544163. For the interview with Charles Wolfe, conducted by Patrice Petro, see https://vimeo.com/381060015.

Trinankur Banerjee is a soon-to-be-graduating doctoral candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation, Laughter Out of Place, focuses on popular comedy after the Partition of India to show how the genre of comedy unsettles the restitutive logics of popular media in the aftermath of a traumatic upheaval to insist on the persistence of “feeling” out of place. He has previously co-edited another Media Fields issue under the theme of “Media Mutualities.”

Richard Farrell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include but are not limited to documentary and non-fiction media studies, US environmental history and the environmental humanities, and film history and archival studies. His dissertation examines the motion picture culture of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps.

Ian B. Laughbaum is a Ph.D. student in the department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Their major research questions center around the interrelation between marine biological scientific practice and popular culture, namely the influence that mass media products have on laboratory practices, scientific writing, and conservationist discourses. They are also a proud alumnus of the UC Santa Barbara Film and Media Studies Undergraduate Program, so this issue is especially close to their heart.