Epistolary Entanglements in Film, Media and the Visual Arts

280 Pages·2022·1.794 MB·English

by  Teri Higgins, Fowler

Epistolary Entanglements in
Film, Media and the Visual Arts

Epistolary Entanglements in
Film, Media and the Visual Arts
Edited by
Teri Higgins and
Catherine Fowler
Amsterdam University Press
The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Division of Humanities at
the University of Otago.
Cover illustration: Photo by Nicolas Thomas on Unsplash
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn 978 94 6372 966 6
e-isbn 978 90 4855 511 6
doi 10.5117/9789463729666
nur 670
© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Doing (Audio-Visual) Things with Words – From Epistolary Intent
to Epistolary Entanglements: An Introduction 9
Teri Higgins and Catherine Fowler
1. Performance and Power : The Letter as an Expression of
Masculinity in Game of Thrones 39
Louise Coopey
2. ‘My dearest little girl, I just got your letter and I hope that you
will continue to write to me often’ 55
Epistolary Listening in News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1976)
Catherine Fowler
3. Dead Letters 71
Epistolary Hauntology and the Speed of Light in Personal Shopper
(Olivier Assayas, 2016)
Shiamin Kwa
4. Attention to Detail: Epistolary Forms in New Melodrama 89
Teri Higgins
5. The Spiritual Intimacies of The Red Hand Files: How Long Will I
Be Alone? 105
Sean Redmond
6. Video Authenticity and Epistolary Self-Expression in Letter to
America (Kira Muratova, 1999) 125
David G. Molina
7. Epistolary Affect and Romance Scams: Letter from an Unknown
Woman 139
Hito Steyerl
8. Delivering Posthumous Messages : Katherine Mansfield and
Letters in the Literary Biopic Leave All Fair (John Reid, 1985) 157
Rochelle Simmons
9. The Interactive Letter : Co-Authorship and Interactive Media in
Emily Short’s First Draft of the Revolution 173
Jenna Ng
10. Epistolary Distance and Reciprocity in José Luis Guerín and
Jonas Mekas’s Filmed Correspondences 191
Emre Çağlayan
11. Instagram and the Diary : The Case of Amalia Ulman’s
Excellences & Perfections (2014) 207
Susan Best
12. Civil War Epistolary and the Hollywood War Film 225
John Trafton
13. Epistolarity and Decolonial Aesthetics in Carola Grahn’s Look
Who’s Talking (2016) 241
Christine Sprengler
14. Epistolary Relays in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (On the
Other Side/On the Edge of Heaven) (2007) 259
Sunka Simon
Index 275
Acknowledgements
This project began by focusing largely on letters and diaries in romantic
dramas. The proposals we received from our contributors forced us to
re-think and re-examine our assumptions about where and how epistolary
forms occurred across screen media. We would like to thank all contributors
for their willingness to explore this ill-defined field with us, on paper,
in person, and via online meetings. Thanks also go to all at Amsterdam
University Press who have been part of the smooth journey from proposal
to publication.
Editing a collection across time zones during the COVID-19 lockdowns
that began in 2020 added extra pressures. The University of Otago library
staff were, as usual, magnificently helpful with Interloans, borrowing and
purchasing materials in a timely manner when (ironically given our subject)
the postal system seemed to be collapsing. In addition, Subject Librarian
Thelma Fisher was endlessly patient and resourceful when it came to sorting
out endnote complications and our research assistant Lizzie Ross provided
meticulous formatting help.
Financial support for this collection was provided by several University
of Otago grants including a humanities research subvention and research
and study leave for Catherine.
Teri would like to thank Sally Milner and Gabrielle Hine for the ongoing
discussion and development of this topic from a distance through emails,
postcards, and voice notes. Special thanks to Guillaume Leclancher for
his unwavering support and for (almost) always being up for a Sex and the
City rewatch.
Catherine would like to thank Deborah Jermyn, Paola Voci, Miriam
de Rosa, and Sean Redmond, who each offered advice on the project, but
especially Rochelle Simmons, for her on-going dialogue on all things visual/
textual.
Hito Steyerl’s ‘Epistolary Affect and Romance Scams: Letter from an
Unknown Woman’ was originally published in October 138 (2011) pp. 57–69. It
is re-printed with permission from the journal and the author. John Trafton’s
‘Civil War Epistolary and the Hollywood War Film’ was originally published
in the book The American Civil War and the Hollywood War Film (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). It is re-printed with permission from the publisher
and the author.

Doing (Audio-Visual) Things with
Words – From Epistolary Intent
to Epistolary Entanglements: An
Introduction
Teri Higgins and Catherine Fowler
Abstract
In this introduction we outline the notion of epistolary intent through
which, we argue, the textual adds to and disrupts the audio-visual in
particular ways. We also explain the use of the term ‘entanglements’ to
encapsulate the disruptive nature of epistolary forms on screen. As a
meshed shape for communication and intra-active exchange, entangle-
ment describes complicated situations. We isolate three examples of
epistolary disruption – with narratives, genres, and the audio-visual
– in order to pin-point the intervention this book makes into existing
scholarship. Finally, we outline the structure of the collection through
summaries of the fourteen chapters.
Keywords: epistolary intent; epistolary entanglement; intimacy; romance;
testimony
A Great Epistolary Age
We are living in a great epistolary age, even if no one acknowledges it.
Our phones, by obviating phoning, have reestablished the omnipresence
of text. Think of the sheer profusion of messages […] that we now send.1
1 Taken from an interview between Lauren Collins and Sally Rooney; Lauren Collins, ‘Sally
Rooney Gets in Your Head’, The New Yorker, 7 January 2019. This comment is in reference to
Rooney’s novel, Normal People (2018), the second of three novels (published between Conversations
Higgins, T. and C. Fowler (eds.), Epistolary Entanglements in Film, Media and the Visual Arts.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463729666_intro
10 TEri Higgins And CATHErinE FowlEr
As novelist Sally Rooney observes, sending a message to someone who is absent
from us is a familiar part of our everyday lives in the twenty-first century,
hence, we have all become writers in one form or another. Text has become
intricately woven into our lives and plays an intimate part in the way we
build relationships, therefore writing has inevitably found its way into screen
narratives in the form of text messages and emails, sent and received. This
collection is conceived as a response to the ‘omnipresence of text’ on screen
and it explores how the visual/textual texture of screen media is changing.
First, it argues that contemporary online forms of communication such as
the email, blog, text message, tweet, are actually haunted by older epistolary
forms such as the letter and the diary. Second, it examines what is at stake for
our understanding of the self when it communicates through epistolary forms.
By accounting for the ‘omnipresence of text’ across a variety of media,
this collection intervenes in debates about how the textual adds to and/
or disrupts the audio-visual. On-screen epistolary forms adopt a number
of different shapes. In mainstream cinema and television series epistolary
forms have become narrational and plot devices. They operate as corre-
spondence between characters who write messages, communicate, and
form relationships. In less mainstream films and media epistolary forms
often contend with an injunction. They present ways to play with the space
of the personal and auto-biographical and provide intersections with the
essay film genre and accented cinema. Beyond cinema, in the art world and
on other online media, it is the themes of intimacy, privacy, self-expression,
and masquerade that we find most frequently addressed, in critical and
creative ways. As our outline suggests, a broad history of epistolary forms:
letters, diaries, blogs, emails, texts, and tweets on screen would certainly be
a worthwhile project but that is not our intention here; instead, our focus is
upon how the substitution or virtual presence that defines the epistolary act
has increasingly come to powerfully express entanglements of contemporary
life and media. By coining the term ‘epistolary entanglements’ to describe all
sorts of uses of text on screen, we are both claiming a literary heritage for our
examples and pondering what shifts occur when we turn to the audio-visual.
This collection has been inspired by Teri Higgins’s research on epistolary
discourse in contemporary cinema,2 which established that a focus upon
with Friends (2017) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)) that employ her distinctly epistolary
narrative style.
2 Teri Higgins, Attention to Detail: Epistolary Discourse and Contemporary Cinema (Dunedin:
University of Otago, 2013). Accessible at <https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/handle/10523/3659>
[accessed 15 June 2022].