University of Iowa Professor Paula Amad presented her research at Princeton University on Nov. 13, as part of Princeton’s Thinking Cinema Lecture Series.

Amad discussed “The Sky of an Image: Modernity’s Cin-Aerial Dimension.” She was one of six key leaders in the field of film studies—including professors from Yale, Berkeley, McGill, Penn, and Amherst—invited to speak in the year-long series.

Abstract:

The fascination and fear aroused by aerial views of the earth seem to be at an all-time high. No longer out of reach, access to and interaction with the history and future of aerial imagery is at the touch of a button, whether sourced from declassified Army archives, Google Earth, or drone-strike footage, and whether serving popular history, environmentalism, or activist art. Still and moving images of the earth from above have come to shape our daily consciousness of what it means to be human, and inhuman, in the 20th and 21st centuries. Indeed, seeing the earth from elevated vantage points has become synonymous, some would argue, with a specifically modern form of vision—that is as much about not seeing as it is about being able to see more than ever before. This talk returns us to the early 20th-century cinematic elaboration of aerial imagery’s ambiguous meanings and focuses upon the relatively ignored realm of aerial cinematography. I will explore the historical and theoretical purchase of my developing concept of cin-aereality, focusing upon a chain of cinematically inflected aerial fixations in the writings of Blaise Cendrars, Fernand Léger, and Jean Epstein. Read in the context of a larger inquiry into early cinema’s aerial vocation, I argue that these writings, in conjunction with early experimentation with non-terrestrial cinematography in avant-garde films such as László Moholy-Nagy’s Marseille, Vieux Port (1929) and Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1929), offer a vital affirmation and contestation of the current Virilio-esque association of the view-from-above, and cinema in general, with the rationalist logic of militaristic surveillance. A fuller inquiry into the evolution of mobile aerial vision, I contend, forces us to reconfigure the standard reading of the static view from above, introducing radical elements of time and space into our perception of the earth.

Amad is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.