I see you, American, yearning for a less polarized electorate, for parties that are pragmatic, a public sphere less riven by ideology, a president with less power—I hear how you name these things, with a hopeful quiver in your voice, democracy. Continue reading
A Cluster of Essays
edited by Kris Cohen and Christa Noel Robbins
The Persistence of Form: Introduction - Christa Noel Robbins and Kris Cohen | Beyond Formaldehyde: An Interview with Lauren Berlant - Kris Cohen and Christa Noel Robbins | Andrew Raffo Dewar on Form - Andrew Raffo Dewar | Form-as-Movement - Michele Matteini | Daniel Morgan on Form - Daniel Morgan | A brief and provisional rumination on a Black Form - Matthew Metzger | Form Fatigue? - Anahid Nersessian | The Persistence of Formalism - Scott C. Richmond | Michael Robbins on Form - Michael Robbins | Dash Shaw on Form - Dash Shaw | Religion and Narrative Form - John Paul Spiro | Digital Form and the Human - Janine Utell | The Historicity of Form: Challenges Posed by Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic - Lisa Zaher
conducted by Kris Cohen (KC) and Christa Noel Robbins (CR)
Question 1 You said in the lead up to this interview that you’re writing a lot about form right now. What’s driving that interest in form? Why now?
I always feel stupid in front of “why now” questions, because they seem to presume a shared “now” and, you know, I don’t think we can presume that, since I think of the present as an effect of mediation, a time-genre giving form to an affective sense that gains traction through circulation. I have always written about form: the nation form, the couple form, the form of life… Think of Formica, a laminate that appears as a single hard substance so stable it can be cut to order. Continue reading
Daniel Morgan
I’ve been trying to develop a way of thinking about film, and other audiovisual media, in which form is both necessary and primary.
Matthew Metzger
Colors cannot be divorced from their surfaces in order to be sensed or known.
Scott C. Richmond
In U.S. colleges and universities, just about every intro to film class takes, under the juggernaut force of “Bordwell and Thompson,” a finely articulated, explicitly formalist approach to the movies.
Andrew Raffo Dewar
In Umberto Eco’s seminal meditation on “open works,” he states that “the comprehension and interpretation of a form can be achieved only by retracing its formative process, [and] by repossessing the form in movement.”[1]