Feature Filmmaking Research Articles

Paranoia, (Para)cinema, and the Right-Wing Mindset: Making Sense of My Son Hunter

This article aims to make sense of My Son Hunter (The Unreported Story Society and Breitbart News, 2022; dir. Robert Davi). The first part of the analysis discusses My Son Hunter as an example of right-wing counter-cinema that tries to simultaneously tap into the cultural prestige associated with feature filmmaking and provide niche audiences with “paracinematic” pleasures. The second part of the analysis explores cinematic form and filmmaking techniques in My Son Hunter, demonstrating how the movie extends a promise of “truth” via an affective bombardment that draws on melodrama and paranoid fiction as well as the flexible modes of docudramatic approximation. The overall effect is to make logic and argumentation superfluous, which is indicative of how the film can be regarded as both symptomatic and productive of a “post-truth” condition.

From Yale to Hollywood: A Journey in Film Directing with John Badham

John Badham is a film and television director whose creative works are notable for the ways they have influenced a range of American cultural norms and attitudes, especially in the 1970s. Indeed, his commercial and creative success, Saturday Night Fever (1977) was recognized by the Library of Congress in 2001 for its cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance. The director began his career in theater and television and quickly broadened into feature filmmaking. His films have been nominated for five Academy Awards and two Emmy Awards, and he has won three Saturn Awards from the Academy of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In this interview for Film Matters, John Badham—also a professor at Chapman University—shares his early influences, his formative years in Hollywood, and his creative approach to filmmaking, including the importance of sound and innovative adaptation.

The Inception of the Film Adaptations Based on the Novels, in the Sri Lankan Cinema

Filmmakers often pursue other source materials to discover inspiration for their narratives and create feature filmmaking in an important way on true events and fictional stories. A film adaptation is a cinematic work, adapted from a work of fiction or nonfiction. Common fiction source materials include novels, short stories, stage plays, radio plays, television series, comics, or video games, while nonfiction sources are memoirs, biographies, or works of journalism. International filmmaking regularly uses an existing work of art as inspiration for their art, and the Film Awards even have an entire screenwriting category devoted to film adaptations such as Best Adapted Screenplay Award. In Sri Lanka, the film adaptation has been practiced for seven decades to date, and its inception is marked in 1953 with the film ‘Kela Handa’ alias "The Wild Moon" based on the novel of the same name first published in 1933. There are 10 film adaptations from 1953 to 1959 and seems ‘Kela Handa’ has created a trend-setting introduction. Where Sri Lankan Cinema has a span of 1350 locally produced films released since 1947 to date, the film adaptations are over 100 in the list. ‘Kela Handa’ adapts the best-selling novel of the same name and reflects the interplay between the two mediums, without compromising the prominent egos of the Sri Lankan first filmmaker and the Sri Lankan best-selling novelist.

Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Intimate Public of Asian American Cinema

The multiple Academy Award winning sci-fi absurdist multiverse film Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniels, 2021) uses transpacific film genre conventions to represent the possible life variations of its Asian American immigrant family protagonists. An exception to the seeming incommensurability of commercial feature filmmaking and the anti-capitalist and anti-racist traditions of Asian American cinema, the film highlights how the conventions of transpacific genre films condition the intimate public of Asian American audiences. To be legible as an Asian American, the film shows, is to be attuned to the conventions of its dominant, often hegemonic and repressive, representations. By illustrating how genre conventions condition the sense of belonging amongst its Asian American protagonists, the film offers new ways of imagining and relating with Asian America Cinema.

Review: Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang, by Nicholas de Villiers

Review: <i>Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang</i>, by Nicholas de Villiers

"Open the Door and I'll Get It for Myself": Minority Production Assistant Programs and the Politics of the Urban Location Shoot, 1969–1974

This article traces the development of the Community Film Workshop Council's minority apprentice program and its attempt to break through decades of exclusionary hiring practices in feature film production. The program coincided with the rise of feature filmmaking on location in New York City and the corresponding need to integrate the city's film crews. Through an archival study of the program and the essential roles that the apprentices played on films, including The Landlord (Hal Ashby, 1970) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (Ossie Davis, 1970), I demonstrate how media activism, policy, and labor relations are fundamental to both challenging and maintaining industrial power structures.

Special issue introduction: utilitarian filmmaking in Australia 1945–80

ABSTRACT While Australian cinema is generally defined by the feature filmmaking tradition, at least since the 1970s, ‘utilitarian filmmaking' represents a significant but barely visible portion of screen culture in Australia, a portion that has had an emphatic but unexamined influence on the media industries, education systems, industrial relations, research culture and national culture. Recent scholarly work undertaken internationally has shown how this vital strand of cultural and industrial history has often been overlooked; worse, it has often been expunged from cultural memory, either by critical neglect or through the destruction of archives previously deemed worthless by businesses and collecting-agencies. Given the insights and impacts of the latest studies of utilitarian filmmaking in the US and Europe, it is no exaggeration to propose that local, Australian holdings in the genre will come to be understood as a hitherto overlooked skein of ‘DNA’ in our national media systems. To study this heritage is to deepen our understanding of general/global and local/national characteristics of audiovisual culture and aesthetics as they operate in Australia, as well as to contribute in a major way to the burgeoning scholarship in international media archive research.This Introduction will focus on the manner in which ‘utilitarian cinema’ operates in relation to conceptions of Australian national cinema as well as to how this term can also contribute to formulations of transnational cinema. It will introduce the findings of this Australian Research Council funded research project being conducted by Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, Stella Barber, Mick Broderick, Ross Gibson, John Hughes, Grace Russell and Deane Williams as well as introducing the case studies that were undertaken.

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Disruptive poetics in The Five Provocations

ABSTRACT The Five Provocations (2018), Angie Black’s debut low-budget, independent feature film, began production without a script. Free from the requirements of development funding and operating with what she described as a ‘no budget’ model, Black worked with her actors to develop characters and stories in an extended period of improvisation. While improvisation in low budget, independent cinema is not new, Black’s film distinguishes itself in several ways. Firstly, it uses an additional improvisation mode in which performers, working with feminist burlesque traditions, interrupt the narrative at certain key moments. In this way, the film doubles its improvisation. Furthermore, in queering its realism it also naturalises its queerness. Improvisational strategies in low budget, feature filmmaking, and the unpredictability they produce, are often associated with notions of authenticity and realism. Using the cinematic theory of Jacques Rancière to frame a textual analysis of the film, we argue that, while the film works with conventions of realism, it also disrupts them through transgressive performance and cinematic moments that escape its story logic.

The Female Voice in Low budget, independent cinema of Australia: Strange Colours, The Second & Hot Mess

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impediments that Australian, female, independent filmmakers face in bringing female-centred stories onto the screen. In 2016, the federal screen funding agency Screen Australia launched Gender Matters to better understand the many barriers facing women filmmakers and create opportunities for female screen creatives to gain equity in the screen industries. But how have this impacted and improved conditions for female filmmakers? The authors of this current study are female screenwriters, directors and producers who have experienced and witnessed the many difficulties women face in the Australian screen industry. The article comprises case studies of recent, successful, female, independent feature filmmakers, the AACTA Award nominated creators of Strange Colours, The Second and Hot Mess. The research explores emergent themes and recommendations based on interviews with the filmmakers. They observe that while some impediments in the low budget, independent sector continue, others have subsided and a considerable number of promising developments are emerging. Screen Australia’s Gender Matters and other initiatives by State-based screen agencies have encouraged this progress, but changes in the global socio-cultural discourse have also been influential.

Leveraging collaboration: script development processes in low budget Australian feature filmmaking

ABSTRACT For independent Australian filmmakers working outside traditional funding sources, the script often provides the sole means of raising finance to take the film into production. In the case of the low budget Australian feature films Pimped ([2018], “Directed by David Barker. Playground Films.” Apple TV) and Watch the Sunset ([2017], “Directed by Tristan Barr and Michael Gosden.” Barr Lipp Productions. STAN), however, script development was elevated and sustained by the filmmakers resisting a rigid adherence to writing, directing, and producing roles and opening up input from actors. This research employs case study analysis supported by interviews with the writers/director of Pimped and co-writer of Watch the Sunset to examine the script development processes that led to the successful completion and distribution of two low budget Australian feature films. Born out of the necessity to self-fund development, Pimped and Watch the Sunset provide insight into script development processes that value flexibility and receptiveness to the contributions of creative practitioners traditionally divided by above and below-the-line roles and exemplify how creative collaboration can facilitate successful development of low budget films operating beyond the constraints of screen funding bodies.

Coming of age in Milano: Ermanno Olmi from sponsored cinema to feature filmmaking

This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep engagement with the sponsored cinema he made as director of the Sezione Cinema Edisonvolta. It begins by spelling out some of the stakes and challenges of a ‘sponsored turn’ in Italian cinema studies, which during the past decade has inaugurated the long archival and critical process of revaluing the corporate roots of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and, to a certain extent, Ermanno Olmi. It then elaborates on the relation between Olmi’s sponsored cinema (1953–61) and feature filmmaking (1961–2014) by analysing two films that mark the director’s transition from the small to big screen: Michelino 1 a B (1956) and Il posto (1961). The central contention is that these films tell two different versions of the same coming-of-age story: a young boy from the provinces finds work in a downtown office building, where he must come to terms with the fact that he will remain there all his life. The distance between the two films is a measure of Olmi’s own coming-of-age as an intellectual: from a resolved promoter of the guiding role of business in modern life to a sceptical interrogator of white-collar mundanity. After a comparative reading that reveals general similarities of structure and specific scenes of quotation, the article concludes with some remarks about education, a concept through which Olmi’s feature films show themselves to be aware of – even commenting on – sponsored cinema.

Sundance 2021 Introduction

Introduction to the Sundance Film Festival 2021

Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar

Reviewed by: Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar Pamela Robertson Wojcik (bio) Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar. Duke University Press. 2019. 416 pages. $109.95 hardcover; $29.95 paper; also available in e-book. As the disciplines of film and media studies have expanded and diversified, with academic publishing following suit, there has been a much-needed decentering of the field but at the same time a tendency toward siloing. While many of us may have interests that align with more than one subfield, few of us read broadly across the plurality of subjects that constitute the larger fields of film and media studies; instead, we tend to focus more closely on one or a few specific areas or approaches, and our cloistered views sometimes prevent us from noticing books that may be vital to our interests. Even more interdisciplinary fields, such as area studies or spatial analyses, can become insulated specialties. A cursory glance at Priya Jaikumar’s book Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space might point one to consider it predominantly a book about Indian cinema, mainly of interest to those who specifically focus on the expansive Indian film industry. The Indian case study may lead someone who works on film and space but tends to focus on Europe or the United States to think it beyond her ken. However, Where Histories Reside not only illuminates how India has been filmed, negotiated, misrepresented, shaped, maligned, and celebrated in various cinematic forms but also offers a theorization of filmed space in general. Jaikumar is interested in both filmic space, the space within the film frame, and filmed space, the “captured artifact of an encounter between a camera and its environment.”1 In focusing on India, Where [End Page 204] Histories Reside seeks to displace film theory and criticism from its normative attention to “one (Western) modality of capitalism and modernity” and consider India not as Other but as operating in tandem with Western cultures in “mutually implicated histories of global modernity.”2 Through an analysis of filmed space in India, Jaikumar works to unseat assumptions within film theory, and especially within approaches to space, that take for granted European and American reference points. Offering a critical spatial film historiography, Where Histories Reside breaks down the notion that cinema’s indexicality gives it a privileged connection to reality and dislodges “the centrality, though not the significance, of cinema’s representational space” to focus on the ways in which Indian space and cinematic space are both constructed via “multiple underlying determinants of a moment, not only in time but also in space.”3 More than simply broaching the spatial turn in film studies, Jaikumar brings to bear on her spatial analysis of India other approaches to cinema, including the perspectives of history, the law, government, education, media industries, archival research, labor practices, authorship, and colonialism. Her analysis further draws on prior studies of feature filmmaking, useful cinema, documentary, travelogues, and Indian and European filmmaking. Where Histories Reside shows the deep interconnectedness of the many approaches needed to understand cinema and filmed space as well as the complex interplay between and among “states, institutions, economies, societies and ideologies” that constitute filmed space.4 The book aims to show how space is both a product of and an agent shaping human life and social relations; it further posits the persistence of spatial logics that exceed a normative Western spatial understanding. Overall, it convincingly argues for understanding the situatedness of film in space and synchronically through complex interwoven histories. Where Histories Reside attends to the way in which the colonial imagination shapes perceptions of Indian space. In a chapter dealing with what she calls disciplinary space, Jaikumar shows how educational British geographic films inculcate an “imperial understanding” in school children and highlight intersections between the visual practices of geopolitics and geography.5 Indian Town Series films, intended to teach British children about Indian geography, flatten differences between places in India or places with connections to India that have “distinct roles in imperial administration”— including Afghanistan, Darjeeling, Bikaner, and Udaipur— to focus on “vocation or ethnic types of inhabitants . . . an incongruous range of transportation (camels...

Introduction: The Eurocentric Gaze, Postcolonial Gothic, Indigenous Visions

Introduction:The Eurocentric Gaze, Postcolonial Gothic, Indigenous Visions Eva Rueschmann (bio) Introduction In keeping with Antipodes's focus on literary and other cultural texts from the Pacific region, this special section features six new essays on Australian and New Zealand fictional feature and documentary films. While Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand are separate and distinct national cinemas, this section's coverage of narrative films from both nations reflects a tradition of scholarship based on the significant cultural crossovers between them.1 Beyond the nations' common origins as former British colonies and their Pacific location, Australian and New Zealand filmmakers have both drawn on their respective settler histories and postsettler social development as multicultural nations for narrative subjects and inspiration. Ian Conrich has noted that "Australian and New Zealand cinema share a use of powerful landscapes, they also share a post-settler Gothic, a cinema of isolation and travel, similar screen representations of masculinity, and similar fictional depictions of small-town communities" (5). An expanded list of commonalities includes the important rise since the early 2000s of Indigenous film and filmmakers in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand alike, which Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye called in A Companion to Australian Cinema (2019) a necessary challenge to the previously dominant "uninterrupted whiteness of Australian screen culture" (37). Discussed here are a diverse range of contemporary films including the director Christine Jeffs's Rain (2001), Richard Roxburgh's Romulus, My Father (2007), Taika Waititi's Boy (2010), Tony Krawitz's Dead Europe (2012), Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), and Natalie Erika James's The Relic (2020). In addition, this section includes new critical reappraisals of notable earlier works such as Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table (1989). The essays in this special section offer fresh and original critical perspectives on three facets of feature filmmaking in Australia and New Zealand: the representation of Europe as colonial metropole in the antipodean imagination, the postcolonial [End Page 233] Gothic as a film mode or genre, and Indigenous representations on-screen. The section begins with a long-neglected topic in film scholarship: the image of Europe in contemporary Australasian cinema.2 As former British settler colonies, Australia and New Zealand have had a long and complicated relationship—both politically and artistically—with Europe and specifically Great Britain. For instance, in twentieth-century Australian literature, attitudes toward imperial Britain oscillated between "a yearning for a distant Home and the rejection of the Old Country" (Bader 109). Despite this ambivalence, Australian and New Zealand writers and artists long remained intrigued and even drawn to Britain and the European continent as an imagined center of cultural sophistication. While this theme is treated in literary works depicting the journeys of Australians and New Zealanders to Europe, very few feature films focus on the return of descendants of former colonists or immigrants to their European homelands. In the first essay in this special section, Janine Hauthal discusses four films that make visible shifting perceptions of Europe in relation to antipodean cultural identities. If Australians' and New Zealanders' journey back to Europe in these works shows a sometime idealized but now more often problematic "imaginary homeland" for the descendants of white settlers, its dark mirror image can be seen in Australasian Gothic cinema, which not infrequently seems haunted by the traumatic dislocations and tragedies of European colonization. In the Gothic, protagonists perceive and experience the antipodean unfamiliar landscapes as a source of dislocation, psychological terror, melancholy, and the uncanny—an unsettling reversal of Europe as a putative homeland. In Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction, the film scholar Jonathan Rayner has called the Australian Gothic "a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, … suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature" (25). Although Australian and New Zealand Gothic is often associated with horror and fantasy films, less generic dramas such as the well-known art house films Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Piano (1993) also draw on this Gothic mode. While the Gothic was imported to the antipodes through the eighteenth-century British Gothic novel, it adopted regional inflections as...

Steve Neale (ed.), Silent Features: The Development of Silent Feature Films 1914–1934

In its basic outline, Silent Features: The Development of Silent Feature Films 1914–1934 is as its title suggests: a collection of essays on fifteen features and two serials from the global silent era, examining two decades of stylistic, generic and structural characteristics. Yet its exclusively silent focus has resulted in a unique and noteworthy volume. Rather than a conventional overview of early feature filmmaking, this is a work with a corrective impulse: to highlight underexamined, and in some cases little-known, examples of such films in all their diversity. As Steve Neale’s introductory remarks on the multivalent origins of the term ‘feature’ suggest, the emergence of longer films was a matter of extreme complexity, irreducible to the story of a single evolving entity. Accordingly the collected essays historicize multi-reel production with a pronounced emphasis on specific industrial moments, sociopolitical contexts and aesthetic traditions. Teleological explanations are eschewed, and variations, discontinuities and transnational exchanges are stressed – even though major American and European productions still predominate (perhaps because all but one of the contributors are based in the UK or USA).1

Virtually Real: Cinematographic Verisimilitude within the Construct of Artistic Referentiality

The creation of so-called realistic images is seemingly incongruously a key aspiration for many feature film cinematographers creating dramatic films today. This may be, as theorised by Charles Pierce, that the lens-based imagery of photography, and by extension cinema, is connected to reality in a way unlike any other artform. Prince refers to the cinematographic form as a tension between perceptual realism and referential artifice. He uses the term perceptual realism in reference to Peirce’s claim of the photograph as icon. With the term referential artifice though, Prince is suggesting the artificial proposition of film making is in reference to the subjects and object within the frame. This concept can be extended when connected to Bordwell, Thompson and Smith’s claim that stylistic choices are made in reference to the film’s content, its script. For example, a period film may be captured on celluloid film negative whilst a science fiction narrative may be captured with the newest digital cinema camera. Realism, however, does not necessitate the same or even a similar cinematographic form response for feature filmmaking. This essay will explore how feature film cinematographers interpret realism or verisimilitude within the construct of artistic referentiality as a response to narrative content.

‘Don’t Read This on a Plane’: a case study in microbudget feature filmmaking

ABSTRACT This paper presents demonstrable insights from the creation of a microbudget feature-length narrative drama film with high production values. As a case study, I am using a feature film I have written and directed titled “Don't Read This on a Plane”, which was filmed in 10 countries, produced on a budget of A$125,000 including all post-production, fees, and deliverables, and has been acquired for international distribution. I argue that by practicing pragmatism and bricolage, and by utilising a small professional crew who handle multiple roles, a microbudget filmmaker is able to transcend financial limitations. To support my argument, I detail my lived experience as a filmmaker from the project's conception in 2016 to its completion in 2020. In additional to describing my roles as the film's writer, co-financer, co-producer, director, editor, composer, and sound mixer, I also outline the involvement of key crew members. “Don't Read This on a Plane” embodies my tacit understanding of pragmatism and bricolage, and this paper shares my demonstrable approach to microbudget filmmaking.

Blurred Boundaries: Ethnofiction and Its Impact on Postwar Japanese Cinema

This article explores the use of ethnofiction, a technique emerging from the field of visual anthropology, which blends documentary and fiction filmmaking for ethnographic purposes. From Imamura Shōhei’s A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu, 1967) to Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Cafe Lumieré (Kōhi jikō, 2003), Japanese cinema, including Japan-set and Japan-associated cinema, has employed ethnofiction filmmaking techniques to alternately exploit and circumvent the structural barriers to filmmaking found in everyday life. Yet the dominant understanding in Japanese visual ethnography positions ethnofiction as an imported genre, reaching Japan through Jean Rouch and French cinema-verité. Blending visual analysis of Imamura and Hou’s ethnofiction films with an auto-ethnographic account of my own experience of four years of visual anthropology in Kansai, I interrogate the organizational barriers constructed around geographical perception and genre definition to argue for ethnofiction as a filmmaking technique that simultaneously emerged in French cinema-verité and Japanese feature filmmaking of the 1960s. Blurring the boundaries between Japanese, French, and East Asian co-production films, and between documentary and fiction genres, allows us to understand ethnofiction as a truly global innovation, with certain regional specificities.

Extensions of Our Body Moving, Dancing: The American Avant-Garde's Theories of Handheld Subjectivity

Extensions of Our Body Moving, Dancing:The American Avant-Garde's Theories of Handheld Subjectivity Adam Charles Hart (bio) Introduction: Rhetorics of Presence Film history is littered with casual assertions about the meaning and merits of handheld cinematography. In its current usage, the technique is perhaps most frequently described as "intimate" or "immediate" or, more vaguely, "realistic," while it sometimes is understood to be conveying a sense of "presence" within the world of the film or to be asserting an urgency or present-tense temporality: you, the viewer, are there in the world of the film, following the events as they unfold. These are all valid and valuable observations, often explicitly borne out by the rhetoric of directors and cinematographers. But there have been specific historical meanings to handheld camerawork developing out of specific cinematic contexts, each evolving different inflections and associations as new filmmakers adapt it within their own styles. This essay chronicles one of the founding discourses of handheld camerawork: that of the post–World War II American avantgarde in which handheld's registrations of the camera operator [End Page 37] within the image makes it a privileged vehicle for conveying—and expanding—subjectivity. Handheld cinematography made sporadic appearances in the 1920s in France, the Soviet Union, and even Hollywood but remained a minority practice, one that was further relegated to the margins of even nonprofessional cinema once feature film-making transitioned to sound. In the 1940s wartime newsreels and documentaries as well as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) introduced shaky camerawork to global audiences within the rigidly delimited context of the battlefield but with little immediate influence. In the subsequent decade, handheld camerawork made marginal inroads into independent, documentary, and low-budget feature filmmaking around the world until, at the end of the 1950s, documentary filmmakers in Canada, France, and the United States began to develop new technology and new techniques. These new techniques inaugurated an observational style of documentary, following aspects of the films of Robert Flaherty, Italian Neo-Realism, and a variety of docufiction hybrids of the 1950s, that was dependent on the flexibility and unobtrusiveness of handheld filming. From there, those techniques became more visible not only through their gradual adoption by feature filmmakers but also through the dissemination of TV news programs.1 By the mid-1970s, these new techniques largely redefined the norms of documentary form and function away from a more instructional mode toward one characterized more by observation. In the 1940s, however, handheld camerawork off the battle field was not just unprofessional or "amateur." A shaky camera was, within the professional and amateur cinematographic discourse, antiaesthetic, an indicator of limited or nonexistent artistic aspiration. Shakiness of any kind supposedly betrayed a lack of technical proficiency or a lack of care. A shaky camera betrayed limited resources, a poverty of means and effort that moviemaking guides advised amateur filmmakers to cover up. Or, more simply, shakiness indicated that a film was no more than a "home movie,"2 suitable only for living room screenings among close friends and family (and, as the amateur filmmaking guidebooks never tired of relating, its shakiness placed an unwanted burden on its viewers). So, the handheld camera's widespread embrace by the avantgardes, documentarians, and new wave filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s was one of the most drastic aesthetic shifts in postwar cinema, an emblem of the overturning of Hollywood and the norms of other classical cinemas. This embrace also initiated a major shift in the function of style. Whereas the classical ethic had preached invisibility, handheld insistently gestured toward the presence of [End Page 38] both camera and cameraperson, and that literal notion of presence became the source of its authenticity and its power as a technique.3 Contrary to conventional notions of cinematographic function, filmmakers began using handheld cameras because they wanted to draw viewers' attention to the cinematography. As viewers, we need to identify a shaky camera as a reference to its camera operator in order to understand its full significance, and no tradition relies more on that recognition than that of the postwar American avant-garde. As battlefield footage introduced one handheld discourse to audiences in the 1940s, Maya...