Professor Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky
Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
“The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor”
This talk draws upon Prof. Skvirsky’s recently published book, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor (Duke UP, 2020). From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Roger’s classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrications of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. The book sets out to introduce and systematically theorize an unrecognized transmedial genre: the process genre. The process genre is characterized by the special, often mesmerizing way it organizes the representation of processes. The represented processes are typically processes of production—both artisanal and industrial— and, crucially, they are represented as having a chronologically ordered series of steps with a clearly identifiable beginning, middle, and end. The book argues that while the process genre’s first exemplars emerge in the early modern period in the domain of how-to manuals, technical machine drawings, and what E. H. Gombrich called “pictorial instructions,” it is in the medium of cinema that the process genre achieves its most impressive and characteristic results. Across the history of cinema, the process film is well-represented in the catalogues of overlapping categories—in particular, the industrial film, the educational film, the ethnographic film. The Process Genre proposes that the broader cultural significance of the process genre is in its formal approach to the representation of labor, which—regardless of the actual kind of labor depicted (often industrial production)—it casts as skilled and artisanal. The centrality of work and labor to the process genre means that its exemplars are often staking out ideological positions—from across the political spectrum—on the meaning of labor in human life.
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About Prof. Skvirsky
Prof. Skvirsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago; she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Latin American Studies and in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.
Presented by the Lafayette College Film and Media Studies Program and Art Department.
Original artwork by Hillary Irons.