Blockchain Papers

Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Alex Taylor, Ruth Catlow

The relationships that constitute the global industrial food system tend towards two dominant values that are creating unsustainable social and environmental inequalities. The first is a human-centered perspective on food that privileges humans over all other species. The second is a view of food as a commodity to be traded for maximum economic value, rewarding a small number of shareholders. We present work that explores the unique algorithmic affordances of blockchain to create new types of value exchange and governance in the food system. We describe a project that used roleplay with urban agricultural communities to co-design blockchain-based food futures and explore the conditions for creating a thriving multispecies food commons. We discuss how the project helped rethink algorithmic food justice by reconfiguring more-than-human values and reconfiguring food as more-than-human commons. We also discuss some of the challenges and tensions arising from these explorations.

Kyo Maclear

“Care is the antidote to violence.” —Saidiya Hartman at In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe (2017) “The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away.” —Naomi Klein (2015) “Y’all better learn how to survive now.” —Miss Bathsheeba, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) Louisiana. A dark boiling sky. Beasts of the Southern Wild opens in an anarchic place of car scrap and driftwood, feral animals and tumbledown shacks. We are at the end of the world in a swampy bayou way out in the Gulf of Mexico. A young black girl lays her hand against the body of a pig and tilts her head to listen for the heartbeat. A few moments later, she holds a baby bird to her ear, listens deep, eager to get to the heart of the matter. Animals, for this girl, are close as kin. Their heartbeats (which we also hear, thump-thump-thumping) bespeak the ebb and flow of life. As the girl’s opening voiceover tells us: “All the time, everywhere, everything's hearts are beating and squirting, and talking to each other the ways I can't understand. Most of the time they probably be saying: I'm hungry, or I gotta poop. But sometimes they be talkin' in codes.” The heroine and narrator of Beasts is six-year-old “Hushpuppy,” a preternaturally wise, motherless kid played with mesmerizing force by Quvenzhané Wallis. When we meet her she is stomping around her cardboard-and-tin home dressed only in a dirty undershirt, panties, and rubber boots. Semi-orphaned, Hushpuppy lives in a Louisiana tidal basin—dubbed the Bathtub—with a rowdy, multiracial group of misfits and a sickly, floundering, alcoholic father named Wink (Dwight Henry) who swings between harshly neglecting and aggressively mentoring his daughter. Vulnerable to floods and storm-surge waters, the Bathtub is separated from the mainland or “dry side” by a levee. On the dry side sits a blurry factory, industry, consumerism, and a filthy haze. It may be “rich” and “safe” but it is spiritually desiccated. Life in the Bathtub is bare, bufferless, and broken but it is also full. Full of booze, junk, bacchanal, decay, fireworks, grief, experience, knowledge, extremes of catastrophe, and drunken rapture. People and animals roam freely, untethered to wealth or materialism. Life may tilt toward tragedy in the Bathtub but it is juiced with uncommon liberty and moments of pure communal joy. If this is the frontline of climate change, then carpe diem. A festive fireworks celebration during the opening sequence captures something of the film’s “precarity be damned” ethos. Faced with brewing storms and floods, The Bathtub locals are determined to hang on and protect their autonomy and collective way of life. It is better to be wet and alive in their view than to live in a “dry world”—better to experience self-sufficient squalor than soulless state-dependency; better to stay in place than endure the violence of resettlement. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) is one of the most influential and most discussed “climate change” films in recent American history. On the fifth anniversary of its release, I excavate scholarly and popular debates about the film to probe the film’s virtues and blindspots. Is Beasts of the Southern Wild a means to symbolize “climate resistance” (Mirzoeff 2012) or a naturalizing of “black suffering” (Brown 2013a)? What might we learn from the disunity of response to this film?1 Five years after its release, Beasts continues to offer its viewers various ways of thinking through the present-day world in the context of climate change, neoliberalism, and racialized violence. There are many themes drifting through Beasts of The Southern Wild, several of which I will parse later in this essay, but the central one is a celebration of resilience and independence in the face of durational loss or “slow violence.” The film offers a booming tribute to the tenacity of the Bathtub’s multiracial outliers, who go to extreme lengths to defend their homes and their magical if improbable community in the wake of climactic disaster. (The improbability of this community will be a recurring motif in criticism of the film, as I will soon discuss.) In this all-but-drowned place, there is no character more emblematic of this gritty survivalist spirit than Hushpuppy. Ever capable, Hushpuppy cooks (catfood) and cares for herself and a posse of domestic animals. Ever resourceful, she lives bare and in the near open without even proper attire to protect her from the elements. Her very features, from her wild hair to her fierce scowl to her honed stare, appear sculpted by years of sparring and inclement weather. Her big six-year-old eyes seem to have already absorbed it all—scenes of slow catastrophe and unexpected tenderness. The film’s power derives in large part from its faithfulness to Hushpuppy’s feisty and elegiac perspective. She is the only focal point of a disintegrating world. The camera floats and tilts in her direction, capturing the ruined textures and tones of her tenuous surroundings. She is the story’s motor and momentum. She is the community’s storyteller, recording their history for the benefit of “the scientists of the future.” Her freeform delivery, fanciful, laced with wonder and ecological anxiety, narrates what it means to love a wounded place with all your wounded heart; and, by extension, what it means to be fervently attached to all fragile places (be it a post-Katrina bayou, a grief-stricken community or the planet itself.) Through her empathetic eyes we are connected to the weave of the universe, from visions of particles flying through the air, to melting ice caps to Arctic avalanches to prehistoric creatures. The viewer’s proximity to Hushpuppy’s inner life is deeply stirring but also, as some critics and scholars have argued, gravely unsettling. The film taps into a series of concerns about what it takes to “survive” in a time of growing instability and climate change. What does care look like in an unequal and warming Hushpuppy is to but there is no her Her is with and of her who she a She and with her of care is to his it a his for the and for a time will no be there to protect As “The film a all how does one a for a by Beasts the and for climate means from they are to no we are in a one in the Bathtub at all with or Hushpuppy to the bayou for and a and to for But in the of care and Hushpuppy to a and out for her go the of a young for who there is time for Her is She for her but also for the and She all of this her There is a she her father in the The of his way to the of and then the of The floods have As Wink we of melting ice caps and Hushpuppy out in her I In with her we Hushpuppy she to out of is or a of as of magical many she takes the her very Through her eyes and we the of a of in the but to the warming as they from the ice of are toward the to the in the film, Hushpuppy’s a with the melting ice caps and and the the of the is to In Hushpuppy’s alive as a of her the of the and her If one even a the will be In the face of like an “The on In other if her and the of the world are Hushpuppy she her and the by the broken of it it in the we the have her to her to the of creatures. 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It is the I the A Hushpuppy is a for her a of A and She is to her It is to be with in the The film to a of some It is a of big on a It is Beasts of the Southern Wild viewers during its in the of The film on the film the at and the for at on its way to for and and critics the film’s of and of The Beasts and of The it of improbable and Hushpuppy in a of American and The of and attached to the of the film the film on with for a with a of who a in their and by a collective at the Beasts named a 2012) and a of 2012) anarchic of the to the spirit of the If the “dry collective in for the the film’s as an to American the film with a in and from and to the to in an with the film’s and the American the as and and the to of the film’s of and in the face of all a the of no what they look It the power to of all have to be on for the and the will for all of to be The of the only other critics and the film’s most to the to offer a in the film to a for with as by the the and of for The the film as and even response to one of the most and in American only to of the film about might Hushpuppy’s her to with and what be as Beasts as a climate film and a to more The film is of moments and and and to and to the very of “the and the of and it in the film’s of with to the Bathtub as close to the it might as be part of a time many of have to the the slow the the of life into Beasts is in its to and Hushpuppy’s is in and for an time many Hushpuppy is also a who the world as and alive and herself as in a and beating with other creatures. 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Monica Dall’Asta, Alessandra Chiarini

Women's interest in found footage and compilation has been extraordinarily intense from the very beginning.1 Even the origins of this peculiar mode of film production are tied to a woman's name, that of Esfir Shub, the great director of Soviet cinema who was the first to create an essayistic feature by putting together pieces of archival footage.2 Her seminal film of 1927, Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), depicts the collapse of the Tsarist empire from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917 purely by means of a montage of preexisting footage. Followed by a handful of other films she made with the same method in subsequent years, this first experimentation in compilation film was an opportunity for Shub to demonstrate the creative power of montage, showing how even the most resistant, unyielding materials can generate an entirely new meaning from the way they are combined—as for example in the case of the numerous shots taken by the camerapeople of the Tsarist film industry, which were transformed through her editing into incontrovertible proof of the necessity of the Revolution. In a way, then, Shub's work can be considered the most advanced result of all the philosophy of the Soviet avant-garde, for her films test Lev Kuleshov's intuition about the signifying power of montage by reworking preconstituted materials that had been originally produced to respond to a completely different, and sometimes even opposite, ideological project.3Many more women after Shub have adopted compilation as their privileged approach to film production and experimentation. Once a marginal form even in the documentary field, found footage cinema is now enjoying an extremely vital phase, fostered by both the exponential growth of the audiovisual archive and the improvement of digital editing technologies that have made film images all the more usable. Up to the 1950s and through the appearance of new avant-garde movements at the end of that decade, the history of found footage cinema consists of very few names and a similarly small number of film titles. And yet, even in the first half of the twentieth century women are a notable presence in the field, not only for their sheer numbers, but also by virtue of the quality and originality of their work. In this context we need to cite at least the name of Germaine Dulac, whose archival film of 1935 anticipates many typical concerns of the contemporary debate about the historicity of the film image. Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (Cinema at the Service of History) was assembled by Dulac during a period of intensive archival research at Gaumont, where she had been employed until the previous year as coeditor of the company's newsreel, France Actualités. Her monumental film is constructed from fragments taken from Gaumont newsreels from 1905 to 1935, and presents itself as a recollection, as well as a critical assessment, of the historical experiences made by a generation, her own, that was equal in age with the cinema: the generation born during the Belle Epoque, educated in the myth of progress, and doomed to witness its ruinous dissolution in the disaster of World War I, only to find itself confronted with the advent of dictatorships and totalitarianism. Made in the political-cultural context of the Popular Front (the film was made to be screened on the occasion of the opening of an independent “all-newsreel” film venue), Cinema at the Service of History reveals a thorough confidence in the testimonial power of cinema.4 It is at once a requiem about the atrocities of war and its moral, social, political, and economic consequences, and a warning to the present about repeating the mistakes of the past.Alongside Shub and Dulac, the third female master of found footage cinema before the 1960s is no doubt Nicole Vedrès. Her innovative work on Paris 1900 (1947) combined a “classical” approach to compilation film, based on exclusive use of documentary sources, and a more definitely modern approach, which regards the products of narrative cinema as no less legitimate sources of historical knowledge than documentary materials. Vedrès's work anticipates by several decades the awareness, typical of the debate on film and history of the early 1980s, that every film, whether narrative or documentary, bears a number of specifically historical traits—or, rather, what Vedrès characterizes as a specific form of historical truth that expresses itself in a visual quality on the order of photogénie.5This early phase of the history of found footage cinema, where three women play a primary role, draws to a close at the end of the 1950s. A more critical, irreverent, and playful attitude toward archival images, and a tendency to employ the past to produce an allegory of the present, and often quite a complex one, appears in the work of diverse experimental filmmakers, including Isidore Isou, Stan VanDerBeek, Bruce Conner, and Guy Debord. Again, several women participate as well in this new moment that marks the evolution of found footage film as a major form of experimental cinema, often referred to as collage film. Though the women's names are more obscure today than the filmmakers we have just cited, their position in this shift is far from secondary in terms of their critical awareness and their innovations.Already in 1959, Jane Conger Belson Shimané's Odds and Ends offered a precocious example of a collage film that mixes outtakes of travelogues with abstract animation, both painted on the filmstrip and created with paper cutouts. Since then, the ranks of women involved in the deconstruction of the codes of contemporary culture—and often particularly of its sexist stereotypes—through the reworking of preexisting footage has not stopped growing. Filmmakers such as Anita Thacher, Chick Strand, Dara Birnbaum, Peggy Ahwesh, Michelle Citron, Abigail Child, Hito Steyerl, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Eve Heller, Vivian Ostrovsky, Nina Fonoroff, Sabine Hiebler, and Frédérique Devaux, or, among the younger ones, Lana Lin, Naomi Uman, Deborah Stratman, Caroline Avery, Cheryl Dunye, Cathy Joritz, Barbara Meter, Louise Bourque, Magda Matwiejew, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Rebecca Baron, Meike Fehre, Meryll Hardt, and Lisa Reboulleau—and those whose work is analyzed in this issue of Feminist Media Histories: Myriam Borsoutsky, Cecilia Mangini, Cécile Fontaine, Barbara Hammer, Valentina Monti, and Alina Marazzi—make us tempted to describe found footage cinema as a field where gender parity is close to being finally attained.Yet we want to resist explaining away such a proliferation of female auteurs who choose a most difficult manner of expressing their own imagination and thought—through images created by others in different places and times—with some sort of specific or “essential” female inclination toward montage, maybe even by invoking its similarity to the tailoring operations of cutting and sewing. Such essentialist comparisons can certainly be suggestive, but they hardly help us understand the reality of women's experience in the sphere of filmmaking. Even less could we endorse a thesis that would interpret women's bent for compilation films as an ability to excel exclusively in contexts characterized by a minimum creative coefficient. On the contrary, the innovative content of cases such as those we briefly recall above should demonstrate the opposite—that is, women's extraordinary creative capacity, evidenced by their ability to extract the maximum coefficient of originality from seemingly inert materials.But this would be a simplification, too, a sterile generalization based on a purely reactive attitude. A more interesting approach begins when one considers the apparent affinity between women and the practice of found footage, on the one hand, and on the other the material conditions of film production—more precisely, the difference that exists between the labor involved in editing and researching and that involved in shooting, especially in commercial cinema. All available data show that commercial cinema, which, as everyone knows, is basically a narrative and fictional type of cinema, is a field where only a few women succeed in reaching and holding directorial roles. We are then prompted to ask whether the specific difference that is responsible for found footage cinema being such a favorable field for women's initiative should not be sought at the level of what we mean by “film directing” in the first place.Cameraless cinema does not imply “directing” in the common sense of the word. Women working in found footage do not direct actors and technicians on a film set; they do not preside over complex organizational machines from the apex of the film set's hierarchical system. If they work in a group, they do so by choosing a few close collaborators, often other women. Their work more closely resembles conducting a research project, including immersive sessions in archives and philological interrogations about the materials, than directing a film set. This amounts to saying that women, in the absence of directorial opportunities within the frame of institutional cinema, may have elected the practice of found footage as a way to build an autonomous space of creativity that allows them to transform limitations into a stylistic peculiarity.6The subtitle of this issue, “Women Without a Movie Camera,” alludes in a clearly provocative way to the objective condition of limitation that women experience in their attempts to access professional opportunities for directing in the mainstream film industry, a situation that, in our interpretive hypothesis, can explain better than any tailoring metaphor the remarkable intensity of female creativity in found footage cinema.7 More than a yen for reusing archives, the breadth of female presence in the history of films derived from found footage proves women's tenacious will to make cinema at all costs, even if it means inventing their own modes of independent production under conditions of limitation and lack of means. Clear evidence of this is that even when they leave the particular sphere of found footage and take up the camera, these filmmakers usually keep working beyond the borders of mainstream narrative cinema, that is, in the fields of documentary, experimental, or animated cinema.Put another way, if an affinity between women and found footage cinema exists, most likely it is not because the process resembles “cutting and sewing,” but because cameraless cinema appears as a utopian mode of production that can be practiced in perfect autonomy, or together with a small group of trusted collaborators, in which a lack of means can be countervailed with patience and flair. It is a cinema that, as in the case of Cécile Fontaine, can even be executed at home at the kitchen sink.The remarkable number of women filmmakers who are or were active in found footage cinema could then be taken as confirmation of the famous hypothesis advanced by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929), that we would now have many more female names in the history books if women had had their own rooms where they could work in peace, away from the stereotypes and performative codes of patriarchal culture. The separateness and seclusion of the editing room are more than just metaphors for Woolf's idea of the room of one's own as a space of autonomy and expressive freedom.The field at stake is obviously much larger than is possible to analyze within the limits of the present publication. Unable to cover the entire, rich spectrum of women's contributions to the history of found footage cinema, we chose a series of studies on a few individual figures who represent various different approaches.8The issue opens with a selection of articles by Esfir Shub, as yet unpublished in English, introduced and edited by Liubov Dyshlyuk. The publication of these materials drawn from Shub's autobiographical book Zhizn' moya – kinematograf (Cinema Is My Life, 1972) is a deserved homage to a figure who is regularly presented as the most influential pioneer of compilation film, but whose poetic reflections are almost completely unknown in the Western world. Dating back to the time of the making of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Shub's writings in this issue document her extraordinary awareness in tackling the task of assembling in a coherent montage a host of such heterogeneous materials as old newsreels, home movies, and institutional documentaries. In their rigorous as well as impassioned tone, which continuously emphasizes the political valences of filmmaking, these articles confirm the fundamental position that Shub occupies not only in the practice of, but also in reflections about, the practice of compilation cinema.Monica Dall'Asta's essay on Myriam Borsoutsky and Nicole Vedrès focuses on two French figures who are almost completely forgotten today. In the virtually perfect obscurity of Borsoutsky (better known as Myriam)—who was Sacha Guitry's editor during the 1930s, before collaborating with Vedrès on Paris 1900 and codirecting La Course de taureaux (Bullfight, 1951) alongside Pierre Braunberger—Dall'Asta finds a clue to retracing a possible female genealogy of French found footage cinema. The rediscovery, or rather the discovery, of Myriam, whose skills in editing were so outstanding as to be called “diabolical” by André Bazin, discloses a whole cultural scene that includes as many different figures as Braunberger, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jacques Brunius, Denise Tual, Victoria Mercanton, and Yannick Bellon. Paradoxically, Myriam's obscurity becomes the crucial element that illuminates a gray area in film history, beginning with Vedrès's groundbreaking work.Better known for the documentaries she shot—which register, with the precision of an anthropologist's eye, the transformations of Italian society between the 1960s and the 1970s—Cecilia Mangini also belongs to the crowd of forgotten women filmmakers. Her films based on the technique of assemblage are examined in deep detail in Dalila Missero's essay. Mangini's work in the archives began with the making of All'armi siam fascisti! (To Arms! We're Fascists!, 1961–62), the film she made with her husband, Lino Del Fra, and the socialist film critic Lino Micciché, and continued with Stalin (1962–63), codirected with Lino Del Fra and the great Marxist poet Franco Fortini. As with Dulac's and Vedrès's earlier works, To Arms! We're Fascists! offers a critical reading of the historical experience of the authors' generation, born under the Fascist regime and subjected to the destructive fascinations of its ideology. To find the documentary materials for both this film and Stalin (issued in 1963 in a version reedited by the producer and disavowed by the authors), Mangini conducted research in several archives around the world, facing huge difficulties. Her interest in the meaning effects attainable through the recombination of stock footage is further documented by an intense sequence in her film of women's emancipation, Essere donne (Being Women, 1963–65), of which Missero proposes an extremely accurate analysis.Barbara Hammer's first feature, Nitrate Kisses (1992), is examined by Alessandra Chiarini as an example of a film based on the construction of a complex relationship between stock footage and original shots. In conceiving of her cinema as a means for the expression of “feeling-images,” that is, “inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement,” Hammer is in search of an alternative style to the linear narration of mainstream cinema.9 In the movement of thoughts and emotions that spring from the flow of images in the film, Chiarini sees a method of assemblage that is reminiscent of Maya Deren's theorizations about “vertical cinema.” In Nitrate Kisses this method is adopted to a history of the twentieth century by and footage and original shots are combined in to a critical about history that into the and of between past and present, individual and very different case is presented in essay on Cécile A French who is very of what Nicole has called a approach to found footage, the of preexisting images by way of on the film a of that in and of or of the film her on the relationship between the stylistic and and that the mode of La to the construction of The are where a with the of the film is with an to the content of the the most original of the the of footage to the that her to her from when she was a In these materials a complex whose and quite result is the of the of of film archives to create new films is the of essay. 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