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Decolonial Encounters with Hollywood Cinema: The Fragment as Audiovisual Metonym in Artists' Moving Image
Professor Sarah Smith (Glasgow School of Art)
Visual culture theorists have long connected visuality (the dominant image system of the western world that determines how we look and what we look at) and imperialism (Mirzoeff, 2014; Azoulay, 2019). From the late twentieth century, politically engaged artists’ moving image (AMI) has explored forms of countervisuality to address social and environmental justice issues. A strand overlooked in this context is AMI that appropriates or imitates cinema. This paper explores three examples of AMI that include iconic fragments from Hollywood films, proposing that these act as audiovisual metonyms for imperial visuality: In Deadpan (1997) Steve McQueen re-enacts a scene from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill (1928); in Zoo (2006) Salla Tykka imitates Madeline from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); and in Zarathustra (2008) Jesse Jones uses Richard Strass’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ (1896), which is synonymous with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968). Disrupting conventions of what is sayable and seeable, these films give visibility to cinema’s minority bodies (the black man, the animal, the socially disadvantaged, and children in state care). In different ways, they surface the vestiges of colonialism to bring the marginalised and excluded into view and, in so doing, point to other ways of seeing and understanding.
Sarah Smith is Professor of Visual Culture and Head of Research at The Glasgow School of Art. Her research interests are in visual culture, with groundings in art history and film studies and her specialist areas are artists’ moving image and feminist art. She is completing a monograph on sampling and imitations of cinema in artists’ moving image to be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. As well as being an active researcher, Sarah also frequently contributes to peer review and advocacy for Higher Education art and design. She served on the College Art Association’s (CAA) International Committee (2014-17), the Arts & Humanities Panel for FCT, Portugal (2019-2020) and the UK’s REF Sub-Panel 32: Art & Design and AHRC’s PRC (2019-2022). She is a current member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College and the Irish Research Council’s International Assessment Board.
This is a hybrid event; if you would like to join us online, please contact Karl Kinsella: karl.kinsella@abdn.ac.uk
- Venue
- NK01, New King's