The Process Genre

Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor

Add to my list

by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky

Type: Studies
Subject: Technique > All techniques
Keywords: technique, occupations, social aspects
Publishing date: 2020
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 336 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4780-0540-7

User Ratings

(0 vote)

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
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 Salom 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.

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

Press Reviews:
"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." - Jonathan Kahana, editor of The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism

"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." - Ivone Margulies, author of In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

"[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."
- Madeline Collier, Film Quarterly

"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." - Juan Velasquez, Bright Lights Film Journal

"The Process Genre is a valuable addition to the study of visual culture. Its multidisciplinary approach effectively shows the transmedial nature of this rich genre. However, its insistence on film's unique capacities to address the genre's historical, political, and cultural implications make it an important contribution to film studies as well. Aguilera Skvirsky goes beyond the simple production of a new film genre here. She also shows how film studies methods can help us evaluate and analyze the aesthetics of other audio-visual materials in order to address the complex processes by which ideologies of labour are communicated." - Marco Meneghin, PUBLIC

"[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." - Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

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

"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." - Helen Hughes, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

"The meticulous research that makes up Skvirsky’s text becomes only more impressive when one considers the immense and vast historical ground she covers." - Dafna Kaufman, Synoptique

"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." - Kit Hughes, New Review of Film and Television Studies

"[The Process Genre] will contribute to a new wave of scholarship in cinema and media studies that rethinks genre history and theory. The book’s relevance to contemporary internet culture and its rather accessible language make it a reading option for general enthusiasts of how-to media." - Zizi Li, The Moving Image