At the culmination of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, the Factory Worker (commonly called “the Tramp”) breaks his long silence and sings. [1] The moment is justly famous, as if audiences had been waiting decades to hear the voice of the downtrodden Worker. The Worker, however, does not quite attain to the voice, or the song, that he and his companion, the Gamin, had planned. The Worker has just lost his lyrics, which the Gamin has written on his shirt cuffs. These cuffs fly off his...

He wanted to leave nothing out. Given the film image’s powers of simultaneous arrest and dispersal, he may have believed it the surest means of preserving while imparting some measure of the densities and speeds generated across the spectrum of happenings, impasses, and transfigurations that marked what he and a few allies were engineering at San Francisco State that spring of 1967. The lambent play of sound and image might diffuse some of the private intensities driving their rupture of the knowledge-reproduction operations of the University—and might therefore document some slight tremor in the market systems of which it was part.

Published in conjunction with the author's translation of Günther Anders's “Washing the Corpses of History: The Hollywood Costume Palace," which can be read here. Is it not absurd that at the edge of the quiet Pacific there was a group that gathered to discuss political, philosophical, and sociological questions, while at the same time Hitler was raging in Europe and millions were being burnt to ashes in Auschwitz? —Günther Anders, Günther Anders antwortet: Interviews und Erklärungen [1] Every...

A translation of Günther Anders’s 1941 diary “Der Leichenwäscher der Geschichte ”, which first appeared in print in German in 1967. Published in conjunction with the contextualising essay “Hollywood, Exile and New Types of Pictures” which can be read here. Los Angeles, March 1941 [1] Vita brevis? No, nobody will make me believe that life is short. It’s long—not because of long boredom, but because of its genuinely long duration. At least moving backwards, life is endless. “My” childhood in...

Whether we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-lapse photography or show its form in forty-fold enlargement, in either case a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible. —Walter Benjamin, “News About Flowers” Realism doesn’t do what it says it does. Or at least that’s all that critics of realism today seem to agree upon. Whether we read realism in the old “suspicious” style, as an ideological smoke-screen, or follow...

From its contested origins in Germany’s Black Forest to the Black Sea, Europe’s second longest river connects ten countries and its watershed four more. Navigable along the entire route, the Danube river serves as the artery and border of a diverse geographic region, and frustrates attempts to divide Europe from non-Europe even as it facilitates the flow of transnational environmental, economic, and cultural exchange. Diversity along the Danube has long eluded stable political arrangement; nor...

The 1938 documentary film Mony a Pickle (1938) stages a sequence in which a young couple imagines their future life in a flat of their own. As they each describe what they want in their new, modern home, their wishes come to life through the magic of trick photography.

The crown jewel in the 1937 Hollywood musical Ready, Willing, & Able is an elaborate song-and-dance number called “Too Marvelous for Words.” A lovestruck male theater producer, attempting to write a love letter by dictation, is surrounded by an army of female secretaries: hanging on his words, clinging to ladders, sitting at typewriters. As the music picks up tempo, the secretaries tap their keys in time.

If later testimonies are to be believed, around 1927 Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905-1936) published in Lima, under the title Celuloide ( Celluloid), a magazine devoted to film news and reviews. Literary historians, however, have surmised that the magazine must have only been a project which never came to fruition, as no copy of the publication, nor contemporary evidence of its existence, has to this day been found. [1] The legend of this magazine has undoubtedly become enrooted in...

It will surprise no one to see wartime treated as an especially narrative problem. Indeed, given the long and apparently necessary relation between war and narrative, a relation that goes back at least to the Iliad and the in medias rage of Achilles, it is probably harder to think of them apart, harder to resist the urge to see both old and new wars in the ready and comfortable terms of already available narrative models: war as an epic or a revenge plot or a rescue mission or a buddy film or an echo of a previous war.