The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor

by Salomï Aguilera Skvirsky

Overview

From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478005407
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2020
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Art  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: The Process Genre  1
1. The Process Film in Context  51
2. On Being Absorbed in Work  77
3. Aestheticizing Labor  116
4. Nation Building  146
5. The Limits of the Genre  193
Epilogue: The Spoof That Proves the Rule  219
Notes  239
Bibliography  287
Index 305

What People are Saying About This

The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism - Jonathan Kahana

“Thank goodness there are still film genres to discover! Covering a broad historical and geographical range, from Japan to Chile and from early cinema to YouTube, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky's study of the cinematic work of work is both meticulously argued and strikingly original.”

In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema - Ivone Margulies

“After reading Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky's original take on the process genre one wonders why this essential cinematic genre had not been an object of systematic study earlier. The book draws on the genre's connection to modernity, cinema, magic, and technique, and it develops a textured reading of Latin American cinema and its discourses on labor. With examples ranging from slapstick to process manuals and art cinema, the book is impressive in its historical and contextual depth and textual deftness. Skvirsky's vivid readings convey the unavoidable interest in following a sequence of concerted steps toward a predefined end—in the cinema.”

Editorial Reviews

"The Process Genre is required reading for those working in the domains of useful cinema, visual anthropology, labor and capitalism, and national cinemas. . . . It is rare to find a book that brings together so many academic audiences and fields that tend to work independently in an opportunity to reorient our scholarship along our common interests. We need more books that do the same."

New Review of Film and Television Studies - Kit Hughes

"[The appeal of the process genre] is impossible to ignore while reading The Process Genre; even Skvirsky's step-by-step accounts of the texts she cites elicit a distinct sense of gratification." 

Film Quarterly - Madeline Collier

"The Process Cinema is the labour of love of a cinephile and academic pursuing a passion; it proves its own point by showing the great ideas that can sprout when humans engage in intellectual work. In this way, it also shows the ethical and political importance of extending this privilege to everyone, whether in the form of work or play."

Bright Lights Film Journal - Juan Velasquez

The Process Genre is clearly a labour of love.... The book’s points are accompanied by small black and white frames throughout, but also through a number of grids.... These beautifully produced and reproduced works in themselves add yet more to the great human pleasure of reading this book.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television - Helen Hughes

After reading Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky's original take on the process genre one wonders why this essential cinematic genre had not been an object of systematic study earlier. The book draws on the genre's connection to modernity, cinema, magic, and technique, and it develops a textured reading of Latin American cinema and its discourses on labor. With examples ranging from slapstick to process manuals and art cinema, the book is impressive in its historical and contextual depth and textual deftness. Skvirsky's vivid readings convey the unavoidable interest in following a sequence of concerted steps toward a predefined end—in the cinema.

In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema - Ivone Margulies

"[An] absorptive and accomplished monograph.… Skvirsky's clear organization and approachable writing when engaging thematically rich areas make the book appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses both as a case study in its entirety and through individual chapters that offer new perspective into the cinematic treatment of topics such as labor, the nation, or affect.… For a book about the appeal of watching a precisely accomplished technique, The Process Genre illuminates the pleasure of reading a well-executed scholarly work."

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies - Juan Llamas-Rodriguez

"A meticulous, carefully reasoned, and riveting polemic that argues that the process film is really about celebrating the centrality of work to human activity."

Discourse - Jonathan Buchsbaum

Thank goodness there are still film genres to discover! Covering a broad historical and geographical range, from Japan to Chile and from early cinema to YouTube, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky's study of the cinematic work of work is both meticulously argued and strikingly original.

The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism - Jonathan Kahana