Shoot!? Describing the Hand-Cranked Camera and Filmmaking Practices from a Posthumanist Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT Posthumanist approaches to cinema and film studies have so far focused on the posthuman theoretical potential of film content, rather than on cinematic form and filmmaking practices. This article develops a posthumanist approach to these practices by focusing on a case study: the interaction between the hand-cranked camera and the human operator in the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and Jane Bennett’s definition of vibrant matter, I argue that this interaction constitutes a manifestation of material-discursive processes that decenter the anthropos and enact performative entanglements between human and nonhuman agencies. Early descriptions of the technological affordances of the hand-cranked camera, informed by anthropocentric and humanist perspectives, reduce the material constitution of this instrument to its role in the discursive practices of the cinema industry. This article deconstructs these accounts from a posthumanist perspective and develops situated epistemic and ethical reflections that stem from a material-discursive description of the nonhuman instrument and its interaction with the human operator.