An Interview with Meghan Sutherland
The Cinema Studies Institute welcomes one of its newest graduate faculty member Meghan Sutherland, who teaches at the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. In 2011-12, she will be teaching CIN1005HS L0301 (Media/Participation). We asked her to tell us a bit about herself.
What's your background in cinema? What are your areas of specialization, and what drew you to those areas?
Meghan Sutherland
I was practically raised by cinema and television, but I first began to study them at NYU, where I completed a Bachelor's degree in Cinema Studies, and in the process, had the pleasure of really learning the history of cinema in various different parts of the world in intensive ways--from the avant-garde to classical Hollywood cinema, from Murnau to Haile Gerima, from one New Wave to another. I think I was initially drawn to writing about cinema based on the impression that, even more than in another disciplines, writing about it well required that one learn everything--literature, art, architecture, theater, the political history of different nations--and moreover, that one learn to read style very carefully in all of these different aesthetic forms (even history). Reading just a small snippet of Godard's La Chinoise, for instance, demands many different types of knowledge, and many different efforts to show sensitivity to aesthetic form. I really felt invigorated by that demand, and by how open the relation between the moving image and the world seemed to be. Of course, as time went on, this interdisciplinary approach to studying cinema through close reading led me into many different types of courses, and I got really interested in theoretical questions about the way that moving images intervened in the production of social and political existence. So I ended up doing a Master's in an interdisciplinary theory program at NYU that allowed me to keep working on both mainstream and avant-garde traditions of film in the Cinema Studies department while also expanding my horizons to include more close readings in continental philosophy, more courses in performance studies, and more courses in American Studies. I also started to work on television with Anna McCarthy. From there, my interest in the relation between moving image aesthetics and social and political discourse simultaneously broadened and narrowed. During my PhD at Northwestern, I focused primarily on really crass genres of television and on the early years of video art, and began working even more intensively with continental philosophy--especially postructuralist approaches to the relation between politics and aesthetics. And in many ways, this institutional itinerary does a great deal to explain my rather unusual combination of "high" and "low" culture specializations, which most broadly include the history and theory of American television; the history and theory of popular aesthetics; film and television theory; avant-garde film and video; and continental philosophy. At some level, all of my work tries to grapple with the multiplicity of the ways in which the aesthetic contours of moving images--whether they issue from the technology of film or television, and whether they solicit the categories of mainstream or avant-garde--open onto our experience of the material world.
What are your top 3 favourite films of all time? Why?
Jeanne Dielman
I am preternaturally unable to play "favourites", even if we're just talking about films. My mind just doesn't work that way. But if any film has come close to attaining that timeless, constantly pleasurable and constantly provocative status for me it would probably be Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Never has the material facticity of the time and the things that constitute everyday life been so deeply imbued with the abject excess of horror and melodrama. Other than that, any attempt to account for the films I most love would have to include something made by either the Farrelly Brothers, Jody Hill, or Broken Lizard (mostly directed by Jay Chandrasekhar), or something starring Will Ferrell or Danny McBride, but preferably both of them at once (that includes Land of the Lost). I see virtually every gross-out comedy that is released, even if it comes out on DVD alone--not only because I think these films deal so beautifully, and often in interesting ways at the level of spectacular form, with the limits of what we mean when we talk about "culture" at a given moment, but also because I just love them. Is there a keener refutation of America's Defense of Marriage Act--and moreover, of the intensified role that classical Hollywood style has played in upholding the institution of heterosexual marriage since the dawn of the Divorce Age--than the Farrelly's remake of The Heartbreak Kid? I think not. Of course, there are some things that Hollywood simply cannot do, so if I am hoping to give a full sense of my cinematic sensibilities and habits I would have to give the final spot ion my non-list of more than 3 favourite films to one of the avant-garde pieces that is running through my mind most intensely at the moment--none of which counts as "film" in the most proper sense: either a Nervous Magic Lantern performance that Ken Jacobs gave last year; Ernie Gusella's 1978 double-channel/single-channel video piece Exquisite Corpse; or Phil Solomon's Grand Theft Auto-inspired Rehearsals for Retirement. Each of these pieces makes me think about vision, medium, and the material status of the moving image in new ways. What is more, they are simply a pleasure to look at.
Tell us about your course, Media/Participation.
It is perhaps unnecessary to detail the various ways in which contemporary media culture implores us to "participate" in the construction of convergence culture--to "interact" with our friends and to form social and political networks through social media, to determine the endings of various television shows by "voting" on contestants, to "customize" our consumption of both media (newspapers, television shows, novelty clips) and every other product or service by leaving "feedback" or "comments", and so on. In the most basic sense, this course is designed to generate a theoretically and historically informed conversation about what it means to "participate" in this context of media culture by attending more carefully to the long history of appeals to the ideal of "participation" that inform the history of radio, film, television, and theater, but also inform the history of democracy. One of the interesting things about the rise of "participatory media" culture in the age of convergence culture is the fact that, despite all the novelty and the sense of democratic possibility that is so often attributed to it, it looks, works (economically and institutionally), and frames itself more like the media produced in the hey days of "mass-media" culture--trashy courtroom game shows and makeover contests from fifties television, "man-on-the-street" interviews from early radio, and novelty acts from the days of vaudeville and burlesque. So along with this material history of media participation, we will look at the work of Tocqueville, J.S. Mill, and other theorists of democracy, and the work of various contemporary philosophers working on the question of how aesthetics and politics relate (Laclau, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe), in order to help us think more about the ideal of participation as it informs our ideas of what constitutes democracy, and to figure out exactly what we participate in when we participate in contemporary media culture.
What do you think might be the next evolution of participatory media?
If Bentham's vision of the Panopticon is any indication, then we still have the 18th century to look forward to!