Classical Projections

Abstract

Classical Projections theorizes a new term, “film quotation,” for the medium-specific repurposing, re-framing, and re-viewing of preexisting films within subsequent films. As a visual corollary to literary quotation, film quotation embeds film fragments within on-screen televisions, movie theaters, and computer screens. Quotation accesses the way the humanities make meaning; the pull-quote, epigraph, and quotation are standard for citing evidence, invoking authority, or interrogating literary and scholarly writing. Film studies has yet to seriously examine how film quotations convene interaction and create new knowledge across time. Classical Projections focuses on film quotations of classical Hollywood film—mainstream American studio production, 1915–1950—as quoted in post-classical Hollywood, roughly 1960 to present. Though film quotation has been used since early silent cinema, this strategic historical frame asks, How does post-classical cinema visualize its own “belatedness,” its awareness of coming after a “classical” or “golden age”? How do post-classical filmmakers claim or disavow classical history? How do historically disenfranchised post-classical filmmakers, whether marginalized by gender, sexuality, or race, grapple with exclusionary and stereotype-ridden canons? As a constitutive element of post-classical authorship, film quotations amass and manufacture “classical” Hollywood in retrospective, highly strategic ways. Considering both archival quotations and “created-quotations,” which are fabricated by the quoting filmmakers, uncovers the images, voices, and fragments of the “classical” canon that either never existed, were never preserved, were mired in caricature, or that classical Hollywood could not “image/imagine.” By revealing how quotational tellings of film history build and embolden exclusionary, myopic canons, Classical Projections uncovers opportunities to construct more capacious cultural memory.