Rebecca Sheehan
Professor of Cinema & Television Arts
Works (in Progress)
American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between
(Oxford University Press, 2020)
This book argues that the philosophizing nature of American avant-garde films from the 1940s to the present constitute an over-looked resource in the field of film-philosophy. I show how the films of Hollis Frampton, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Ernie Gehr, Michael Snow, Maya Deren, and Pat O’Neill, philosophize through rather than simply about the film experience by formally and theoretically engaging the interstitial. In this way, they accomplish the epistemological and ethical investigation that film philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell fall short of achieving. Through an investment in the epistemological means of the in-between, I argue the avant-garde’s films advance an ethics of contingent thinking and re-evaluative speculation.
Biker Boys, Muscle Cars, Hollywood Men: Fetish Filmmaking and the Revision of Masculinity in Scorpio Rising and Drive
(Film Studies, special issue on "Cars and Screens," Autumn 2019, vol. 21)
This paper examines Kenneth Anger’s re-appropriation of pop-cultural fetishes in Scorpio Rising (1964) as a major influence on Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). I argue that, like Anger, Refn deploys fetishistic processes that subvert the tendency of Hollywood’s own fetishes to produce homogenous and totalizing representations of normative culture. Drive adopts Anger’s exploitation of the fetishized image’s inherent multivocality and its tenuous relation to the real in order to undo Hollywood’s generic tropes.
Disorienting Design: Experimental Form and “Found Education” in the Films and Architecture of Ray and Charles Eames
This paper investigates the influence of film form on the aesthetics and philosophy of Ray and Charles Eames. In "toy" and "idea" films like House: After Five Years of Living (1955) and Toccata for Toy Trains (1957), the Eameses consistently experimented with scale and depth in their films and film installations of the 1950s and 1960s in a way that imagined an active and self-creating viewer/consumer trained to reconceptualize or repurpose the whole from its contingent fragment. I argue that these experiments and film's form were essential to what Charles Eames imagined as a "found education."
A Series of Surfaces: New Sculpture and Cinema
19: Interdiscplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century (Summer 2016). This essay examines. This essay examines the impact of photographic motion studies, a major precursor to the cinema, on the "vitality" that animated Britain's "New Sculpture" movement. Departing from the demonstrable temporalizing influence of chronophotography on the sculpture of Auguste Rodin (who mentored major figures of Victorian Sculpture, including Harry Bates and Alfred Gilbert), I argue that cinema is an essential yet overlooked factor in the transformation from neoclassical to modernist sculpture in late 19th century Britain.
Cinema’s Laocoön: Film, Sculpture, and the Virtual
(Book manuscript in progress)
Departing from the temporalizing effects of photographic motion studies on sculpture in the late 19th century, this book argues that contrary to contemporary claims, it is sculpture rather than film that offers the first virtual three-dimensional reality. Using sculpture as a conduit into investigating the nature of the virtual in cinema while surfacing cinema’s impact on sculpture as a “spatial” art, this book offers an incisive examination into how sculpture and cinema have historically interfaced. The book begins by considering the influence of chronophotography on late 19th century sculptors like Auguste Rodin and concludes with cinema’s sculptural presence and the cinematic (successional and durational) experience of modern sculpture in the contemporary gallery space.
The Hidden Picture of Race in Spellbound (1945)
This essay explores the possibility that Spellbound (1945) draws a subtle allegory of the history of race in America, a subtext that brushes the narrative’s “surface” and leaves traces that are as elusive as the main character’s repressed memories. At once obvious and subtle, visible and intractable, the very ubiquity of these traces (like the motif of black lines on a white background that set off J.B.'s panic attacks) renders them everywhere and nowhere in particular. Borrowing from D.A. Miller’s illuminating reading of Hitchcock’s “hidden pictures,” I argue that a painting visible in the backdrop of the sequence in which the two main characters meet at Green Manors illuminates this racial subtext by employing the paradox of visibility Miller points to in Hitchcock's other films, this time as a figure for racial consciousness in America.