Papers by Jenny Gunn
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2024
This article discusses the short films of the Atlanta-based black American filmmaker Olamma Opara... more This article discusses the short films of the Atlanta-based black American filmmaker Olamma Oparah. Oparah's film The Importance of a House was the winner of the inaugural ATLFilmParty (AFP) free film competition and industry networking event created by Brooke Sonenreich in the summer of 2021. Produced and directed in the era of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the US racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, The Importance of a House iterates the home as a site of refuge. This article analyses Oparah's short in the context of two other films she directed in the same period, Laundry Day and No One Heals Without Dying that similarly explore the meaning of home as a black, female, and spiritual space. Using an object-oriented and artist-centered methodology informed by the author's work with the liquid blackness research group, this article argues that Oparah's films as texts speak to the contextual needs that AFP meets in fostering a local and independent home for filmmakers in Atlanta facing global Hollywood's increasingly dominant presence in the city and the region.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Frames Cinema Journal, 2021
This dissertation examines the impact of technologies of self-mediation on contemporary visual cu... more This dissertation examines the impact of technologies of self-mediation on contemporary visual culture. Since the standard inclusion of the forward-facing camera on the iPhone 4 in 2010, self-mediation has become a widespread form of digital media engagement. Approaching digital self-mediation as a durational event, this dissertation focuses on narrative films, or what I deem “narcisscinema,” and other serial aesthetic practices. In order to address the range of practices possible through technologies of self-mediation, I mobilize the various aesthetic aids through which narcissism has been approached in critical theory. Following an introduction in chapter one, chapter two, “The Pool: Narcissism and the Moving Image,” establishes the use value of cinema as a mapping tool that exposes the affective complexity of self-mediation. Chapter three, “The Mirror: Narcissism as Affective Form,” analyzes Black Swan (Aronofsky 2010) as a poetics of narcissism, examining self-mediation as a disciplinary practice. Chapter four, “Play: Narcissism and Creative Invention,” reviews Deleuze’s reaffirmation of narcissism as a form of play, addressing forms of self-assertion that disrupt the faciality of contemporary selfie culture. Chapter five, “Allure: Narcissism and the Object,” extends this analysis further into a discussion of the insipid narcissism of theories of ontology and phenomenology including the recent object-oriented philosophy. Here, I interpret object-oriented ontology as a philosophical form of self-mediation given its preoccupation with the human as object. While the first chapters consider contemporary films as immanent critiques that reproduce the zeitgeist of contemporary digital culture—essentializing the mediated self as a white heteronormative female and thereby reproducing the ideal object of the gaze—the latter two chapters further develop a critical racial analysis of photo-sharing and social networking sites, arguing that digital visual culture underscores a formal notion of the subject that first emerged in Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy and which always necessitates a problematic racial and gendered hierarchy. Finally, in the coda, I briefly examine British-Nigerian filmmaker, Jenn Nkiru’s music video for Kamasi Washington’s “Hub Tones” (2018) as an alternative model of self-assertion that disrupts contemporary digital culture’s commerce in faces and its commodification of difference.
Frames Cinema Journal, 2021
This point of view featurette examines the usage of the smartphone by rioters documenting their p... more This point of view featurette examines the usage of the smartphone by rioters documenting their participation in the insurrection of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, in protestation of the certification of the Electoral count for then President Elect Joe Biden. As is by now well known, much of this footage, which was shared willingly across social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Parler, quickly became crucial documentary evidence for the FBI’s initial identification and later arrests of suspects. As this essay argues, for media studies scholars, this footage likewise calls for a new interrogation of digital smartphone mediation as a moving image form that passes fluidly between subjective and objective modes. As a “first response” to January 6th, 2021 as both a political and media crisis, this short essay serves to initiate further scholarly discussion of the complex theoretical questions left in the wake of this historical event, particularly concerning practices of digital self-mediation.
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2020
This essay considers British-Nigerian filmmaker, Jenn Nkiru's 2017 short film, "Rebirth is Necess... more This essay considers British-Nigerian filmmaker, Jenn Nkiru's 2017 short film, "Rebirth is Necessary." Included in the JCMS In Focus: "Modes of Black Liquidity: Music Video as Black Art," the essay argues that "Rebirth is Necessary" enacts an "intergenerational pedagogy" through its form—sampling a variety of sonic and moving image archives of black diasporic culture—and its distribution across widely-accessible digital streaming platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.
Black Camera, 2019
Using the figure of the anamorphosis, this essay explores the critical labor of the music video f... more Using the figure of the anamorphosis, this essay explores the critical labor of the music video for The Carters' "Apeshit" (Ricky Saiz, 2018, United States). By playing off the canonical artefacts of the Louvre collection, "Apeshit" stages a stunning array of lessons in contrast, thinking through blackness in relation to ontology, capitalism, and aesthetics. With "Apeshit," The Carters claim blackness as an aesthetic and affective force of sociality incompatible with canonical archival methods. Instead, the genre of the contemporary music video emerges as a form of radical archival practice.
Mediascape, 2018
A look at the monetization and exchange of race and gender in the visual culture of the selfie.
... more A look at the monetization and exchange of race and gender in the visual culture of the selfie.
Cinephile, 2018
This paper considers Object-Oriented Philsophy's interest in the human as object in the context o... more This paper considers Object-Oriented Philsophy's interest in the human as object in the context of the emergence of technologies of self-mediation such as the forward-facing camera and the selfie. Furthermore, the author argues that OOP's notion of object relations shares an affinity with the theory of pathological narcissism proposed by Freudian psychoanalysis.
Film Philosophy, 2018
This article examines Harmony Korine's 2012 film, Spring Breakers. Arguing that Korine's film ex... more This article examines Harmony Korine's 2012 film, Spring Breakers. Arguing that Korine's film explores the bankruptcy of ethics in advanced capitalism, the article considers two predominate and contrasting theories of contemporary subjectivity: Slavoj Žižek's psychoanalytically-inspired conception of the subject as radical lack and Deleuze's affirmation of the subject through attention to affect and the virtual. In reference to Kant's radical reformulation of the moral law as an empty and tautological form with the concept of the categorical imperative, this article shows that Korine's allegory of the spring break adventure correlates the subject's eagerness to surmount any and all obstacles toward enjoyment to late stage capitalism's increasing encroachment on the absolute limit of deterritorialization. In so doing, the film suggests that neither Deleuze nor Žižek, affirmation nor lack, offer an effective ethical principle for the subject in the face of the real of global capital.
Shortlisted for 2019 Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award
Conference Presentations by Jenny Gunn
CAA 2016
Session: Material Culture and Third-Wave Feminism
Chair: Deborah Johnson
At Gagosian in ... more CAA 2016
Session: Material Culture and Third-Wave Feminism
Chair: Deborah Johnson
At Gagosian in the fall of 2014, Richard Prince exhibited a series of now infamous appropriations from Instagram. Among the many pressing questions that Prince’s “New Portraits” series provokes, perhaps none is as interesting as the question of the selfie. What are we to make of Laura Mulvey’s famous ideological critique of the apparatus in the age of the selfie? If women control the camera they pose for, does it remain an always already patriarchal apparatus? It seems that, for a new generation of third-wave, post-selfie feminists, Mulvey’s definition of the gaze may no longer be a given. To support this assertion, this paper will consider Prince’s Instagram series in the context of a much broader self-obsessed and gender-bending visual culture; possible objects of comparison include James Franco’s “New Film Stills” series, the media coverage of Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn, and Kim Kardashian’s recently published collection of selfies, Selfish.
Book Reviews by Jenny Gunn
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media & Culture , 2021
A review of Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism by
Nicholas Brown. Durham, NC:... more A review of Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism by
Nicholas Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2019.
Alphaville Journal of Film & Screen Media, 2017
A book review of Elena del Rio's Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas and Ta... more A book review of Elena del Rio's Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas and Tarja Laine's Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Daren Aronofsky published in Alphaville 13_1
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Papers by Jenny Gunn
Shortlisted for 2019 Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award
Conference Presentations by Jenny Gunn
Session: Material Culture and Third-Wave Feminism
Chair: Deborah Johnson
At Gagosian in the fall of 2014, Richard Prince exhibited a series of now infamous appropriations from Instagram. Among the many pressing questions that Prince’s “New Portraits” series provokes, perhaps none is as interesting as the question of the selfie. What are we to make of Laura Mulvey’s famous ideological critique of the apparatus in the age of the selfie? If women control the camera they pose for, does it remain an always already patriarchal apparatus? It seems that, for a new generation of third-wave, post-selfie feminists, Mulvey’s definition of the gaze may no longer be a given. To support this assertion, this paper will consider Prince’s Instagram series in the context of a much broader self-obsessed and gender-bending visual culture; possible objects of comparison include James Franco’s “New Film Stills” series, the media coverage of Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn, and Kim Kardashian’s recently published collection of selfies, Selfish.
Book Reviews by Jenny Gunn
Nicholas Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2019.
Shortlisted for 2019 Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award
Session: Material Culture and Third-Wave Feminism
Chair: Deborah Johnson
At Gagosian in the fall of 2014, Richard Prince exhibited a series of now infamous appropriations from Instagram. Among the many pressing questions that Prince’s “New Portraits” series provokes, perhaps none is as interesting as the question of the selfie. What are we to make of Laura Mulvey’s famous ideological critique of the apparatus in the age of the selfie? If women control the camera they pose for, does it remain an always already patriarchal apparatus? It seems that, for a new generation of third-wave, post-selfie feminists, Mulvey’s definition of the gaze may no longer be a given. To support this assertion, this paper will consider Prince’s Instagram series in the context of a much broader self-obsessed and gender-bending visual culture; possible objects of comparison include James Franco’s “New Film Stills” series, the media coverage of Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn, and Kim Kardashian’s recently published collection of selfies, Selfish.
Nicholas Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2019.