Guest Lecture: Research Colloquium in Film and Audiovisual Media - Cinema's Racialized Vectors of Pollution and the Hygiene Theatrics of "White Safety" Films During Jim Crow

Prof. Karl Schoonover (Warwick University)

Title of the Lecture: Cinema's Racialized Vectors of Pollution and the Hygiene Theatrics of "White Safety" Films During Jim Crow.

Abstract: As if anticipating Kracauer’s vision of the film image as a “rag picker,” a surprising number of Hollywood films from the 1940s and 1950s, refuse to use the medium of cinema to disappear rubbish, debris, scrap, runoff, residues, and smog. Some of these films revel in exuberant expenditures, while others simply seem unbothered by detritus taking up space in the image. This talk examines how both groups of films invite various kinds of pollution into their images in ways that inflect the dominant modes of waste management often associated with the period. Accumulation, effluence, and particulate dirty air often appear as adjacent phenomena in these films, appearing to overwhelm all forms of life with their presence and their indiscriminate visuality. Here, late modernity’s various and mounting modes of waste and pollution threaten to crowd out the world, cloud over organizing distinctions, and reduce everything to a field of indiscrimination. Looking closely at scenes from films depicting dirty air, I explore how the subjective burdens of pollution’s menacing indiscrimination register not only the effluence trailing behind the Great Acceleration but also a paranoia about shrinking “breathing room” of desegrated spaces. From the late 1940s onwards, the visual presence of pollution indicates how intimately bound up late modernity’s eco-catastrophe was with the segregationist racial logics of Jim Crow America.