The Cinema of Extractions
Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at 7:30pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
A lecture by Brian R. Jacobson
Setting aside the standard account of cinema’s development in the late-nineteenth century as a new kind of entertainment—an attraction—designed to appeal to audiences attuned to spectacular performance, in this talk I argue that cinema emerged in these years as a system of environmental simulation and resource management that depended on the industrial-scale integration of extracted materials. Having previously highlighted the film studio’s founding ontological function as a climate control architecture and technological system, whose managed environments were designed to manufacture new environments for the screen, here I focus on the resources film companies consolidated in the mid-1910s, and how resource extraction became a reflexive subject of their studio-produced film worlds.
In the new book from which this talk is drawn, I elaborate on what is becoming an increasingly familiar materialist approach to media history, but I also press on that approach’s limits. How, I ask in the book and this talk, can our expanding knowledge of media’s material histories be used to analyze the films that required those materials to be made?
- BRJ
Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. He is the author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space, as well as editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments.
FREE
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.
Above: Production still from the making of Sunshine Molly (1915).