The Cinema of Extractions and Resource Integration

Please join the Anthropocene Group on Wednesday, February 5, for Brian Jacobson's talk, "The Cinema of Extractions and Resource Integration."  The event, sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, will take place at 3:30pm at Dartmouth Hall 104. 

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the creation of the film studios that gave a name to Hollywood and similar studio-based production systems around the world helped define cinema as a system of environmental simulation and resource management that depended on the industrial-scale integration of extracted materials. Having previously highlighted the studio's founding ontological function as a climate control architecture and technological system whose managed environments were designed to manufacture new environments for the screen, Jacobson focuses in this talk on the resources studios consolidated in the mid-1910s and how resource extraction became a reflexive subject of studio-produced film worlds. Methodologically speaking, the talk asks not just what kind of material knowledge we need to understand what cinema and its studios were and how they worked but also how that knowledge can be used to analyze the films studios used to make. Reading formally between film texts and the contexts of both their creation and their depicted subjects, Jacobson models an approach to film analysis that accounts for material histories of extraction and resource dependence but without taking material knowledge—and the method he calls "raw materialism"—as an end in itself. Instead, he argues that such knowledge should be reconnected with Film and Media Studies' and related fields' longstanding investment in questions of form and an approach to formal analysis renewed by material histories and their stakes.

Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. He is the author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, 2015), a finalist for the Theater Library Association's Richard Wall Memorial Award. His edited volume, In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020), won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection and the Limina Prize for Best International Film Studies Book. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited "Media Climates," the Winter 2021 issue of Representations. He is currently completing "The Art of Oil in France: A Global History, 1944-1975."

Questions? Contact martina.broner@dartmouth.edu