Refereed Articles by Ryan Conrath
Feminist Media Histories, 2021
This paper discusses the practice of contemporary artist Cauleen Smith as an ongoing exploration ... more This paper discusses the practice of contemporary artist Cauleen Smith as an ongoing exploration of the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinematic space, place, and movement. Drawing upon a range of critical frameworks from cultural geography and Black feminism, it locates in Smith's work an aesthetics and politics of errantry that favors radically nonnormative forms of relation and mobility. Borrowing the term from Martinican novelist and critic Édouard Glissant, and drawing more broadly from his thoroughgoing elucidations of the spatial dynamics of colonialism, the plantation system, and their afterlives, the text frames Smith's cinematic errantry both as a formal and technological operation and as a political one grounded in a Black feminist praxis of place.
Film Criticism, 2019
This essay examines the work of two major contemporary artists—Hito Steyerl and Harun Farocki—to ... more This essay examines the work of two major contemporary artists—Hito Steyerl and Harun Farocki—to suggest a novel framework for considering cinematic politics in general, and the politics of montage in particular, in the contemporary moment. Both artists are deeply critical of the ways in which montage, across the history of cinema, has been associated with a range of violent and militaristic images. Discussing the work of Steyerl and Farocki along these lines, this essay seeks to displace the historical analogy between cinema and war by foregrounding the ways in which cinematic politics may be grounded in a spatial and geographic language. Grounding these claims is an examination of two particular works: On Construction of Griffith’s Films (Harun Farocki, 2006) and Abstract (Hito Steyerl, 2012), with the second part of this essay reserved for a close reading of the latter. https://preview.tinyurl.com/y2ekcpxs
View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, 2016
This essay examines the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher as a novel form of bodily figuratio... more This essay examines the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher as a novel form of bodily figuration. This could seem like an unusual angle from which to approach the Bechers' work considering the seemingly total absence of human figures in their photographic grids of industrial modernity. Their “typologies,” as the call them, would seem to testify to nothing if not the effacement of the human body from the site of work. And beyond being totally bereft of bodies, the Bechers' photographs strike us for their ineluctable stillness, flatness, and pastness. And yet upon closer reading the flatness of the photographs gives way to a dimensionality, stillness gives way to motion, and the edges of the photographs begin to expand in ways that lend to these typologies a dynamic, almost corporeal quality. I argue that this occurs primarily via the interstitial space that separates the photos from one another. The in-between space of these grids thus serves as a space of movement, across which the spectator imagines bodies to be moving and looking. I understand the Bechers’ practice of figuration as a way of dealing with the profound consequences of the Second World War not only on bodies, but on the terms of their representation.
Papers by Ryan Conrath
Millennium Film Journal, 2019
This paper considers the role of montage—of the politics and aesthetics of the cut, broadly const... more This paper considers the role of montage—of the politics and aesthetics of the cut, broadly construed as the space between images—in the development of experimental cinema treatment of place and ecology.
It interrogates a prevailing emphasis, in discussions around cinema's ecological poetics, on the long take, arguing that this fixation on duration has severely limited efforts to account for cinema's ecological politics as well as aesthetics. This paper suggests a means of thinking the cut ecologically, of thinking the ecological cut, through experimental film. In this, it takes up the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat’s call for an “ecology of separation,” and posits the ecological cut as a way of thinking cinema's ecological poetics beyond duration and interconnectedness. Case studies include TREES IN AUTUMN (Kurt Kren, 1960), ENGRAM OF RETURNING (Daïchi Saïto, 2016), and TOPOPHILIA (Peter Bo Rappmund, 2015).
Encyclopedia, etc. by Ryan Conrath
Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Sep 5, 2016
Curatorial by Ryan Conrath
Screening event and talkback with filmmaker
Interviews by Ryan Conrath
Film editor Joe Walker on 12 Years A Slave, Hunger, Shame, and more.
Acclaimed cinematographer Sean Bobbitt talks about changes in the industry, shooting news and doc... more Acclaimed cinematographer Sean Bobbitt talks about changes in the industry, shooting news and documentary versus dramatic features and shorts, and working with Steve McQueen on 12 Years a Slave.
Conference Presentations by Ryan Conrath
Temple University Documentary Theory-Practice Symposium: Documentary After Farocki, 2017
Panel chair, "On and Beyond the Screen: Form, Space, and Affect"
Panel: "Cinematic Photography"
Panel: "Visual Resources"
Co-presenter: Peter Bo Rappmund
Panel: "Media, Technology, and the Dead"
Crossing the Boundaries XXI: DIS/PLACE
Panel: "In Ruins"
Books by Ryan Conrath
Between Images: Montage and the Problem of Relation, 2023
Between Images proposes a unique theory of montage as a technique of relation: a way of rethinkin... more Between Images proposes a unique theory of montage as a technique of relation: a way of rethinking and reshaping how humans relate—to ourselves and each other, to the material world, to the planet and its nonhuman inhabitants. Historically, film criticism has cast editing in one of several roles: as a device of spatiotemporal continuity to maintain the viewer's investment in the story-world; as an agent of disorder that confounds conventions of realism to prompt the viewer's intellectual engagement; and as an expressionistic device for augmenting the duration and combination of shots to leave a sensory impression. While not abandoning such accounts, this book ventures closer to the heart of montage by distinguishing the space between images as itself a powerful source of political, emotional, and aesthetic formation. Venturing into an "expanded field of montage," this study traces the cut and the splice across photographic and cinematic media, where the space between images becomes a setting for navigating and renegotiating the terms of relation, of the "being-with" that connects all forms of life. Between Images brings together a diverse cast of established and emerging film artists—Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Steve McQueen, and Cauleen Smith, Daïchi Saito, and Ja'Tovia Gary among others—to demonstrate the abiding capacity of cinema to effect change.
"Ryan Conrath condenses the issue of montage into a simple, political formula: Montage is a relation between people. How to build this relation across screens and even through them? How to punch across? How to withdraw? Between Images brilliantly frames montage as a political and aesthetical algorithm, a crucial operator of people's relations to one another and themselves." -- Hito Steyerl
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Refereed Articles by Ryan Conrath
Papers by Ryan Conrath
It interrogates a prevailing emphasis, in discussions around cinema's ecological poetics, on the long take, arguing that this fixation on duration has severely limited efforts to account for cinema's ecological politics as well as aesthetics. This paper suggests a means of thinking the cut ecologically, of thinking the ecological cut, through experimental film. In this, it takes up the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat’s call for an “ecology of separation,” and posits the ecological cut as a way of thinking cinema's ecological poetics beyond duration and interconnectedness. Case studies include TREES IN AUTUMN (Kurt Kren, 1960), ENGRAM OF RETURNING (Daïchi Saïto, 2016), and TOPOPHILIA (Peter Bo Rappmund, 2015).
Encyclopedia, etc. by Ryan Conrath
Curatorial by Ryan Conrath
Interviews by Ryan Conrath
Conference Presentations by Ryan Conrath
Video here: https://youtu.be/L0xQzk0BlPI?t=5h55m6s
Books by Ryan Conrath
"Ryan Conrath condenses the issue of montage into a simple, political formula: Montage is a relation between people. How to build this relation across screens and even through them? How to punch across? How to withdraw? Between Images brilliantly frames montage as a political and aesthetical algorithm, a crucial operator of people's relations to one another and themselves." -- Hito Steyerl
It interrogates a prevailing emphasis, in discussions around cinema's ecological poetics, on the long take, arguing that this fixation on duration has severely limited efforts to account for cinema's ecological politics as well as aesthetics. This paper suggests a means of thinking the cut ecologically, of thinking the ecological cut, through experimental film. In this, it takes up the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat’s call for an “ecology of separation,” and posits the ecological cut as a way of thinking cinema's ecological poetics beyond duration and interconnectedness. Case studies include TREES IN AUTUMN (Kurt Kren, 1960), ENGRAM OF RETURNING (Daïchi Saïto, 2016), and TOPOPHILIA (Peter Bo Rappmund, 2015).
Video here: https://youtu.be/L0xQzk0BlPI?t=5h55m6s
"Ryan Conrath condenses the issue of montage into a simple, political formula: Montage is a relation between people. How to build this relation across screens and even through them? How to punch across? How to withdraw? Between Images brilliantly frames montage as a political and aesthetical algorithm, a crucial operator of people's relations to one another and themselves." -- Hito Steyerl