Editorial

The “spectator’s imagination filled the atmosphere with electricity.”¹ This evocative phrase could apply to much of cinema, if not art, but it particularly suits the work in Framework 57.1, illustrating, as it does, the relationship between art and the perception of art. The perception of art is part of art’s conception, part of its formation.

The issue’s three pieces—Brian R. Jacobson’s essay “Instructural Affinity: Film Technology and the Built Environment in New York circa 1900,” Sarah O’Brien’s essay “Why Look at Dead Animals?,” and Deane Williams’s interview with Cecile Starr—have interesting and unexpected connections. All three detail, articulately and exuberantly, ways in which a person’s experience of film becomes part of film’s influence on culture. Jacobson argues that the American emerging film industry, on the East Coast, and the rising and falling urban New York cityscape, in the turn of the twentieth century, had an innate symbiosis, something he terms “instructural affinity,” which influenced constructions of both of these material and electric architectures. Cecile Starr, not as well known as she should be because she was a vital force in cinema, once said, “I can’t imagine how empty my life would have been without film.” Williams’s long interview covers many aspects of her remarkable, proactive life, which spanned ninety-two years. In those years she worked for the March of Time; taught cinema studies at Columbia University; promoted and restored the work of experimental filmmakers like Mary Ellen Bute, Hans Richter, and Oskar Fischinger; launched a women’s film collective; and much more. O’Brien shows how people absorb tropes to deal with their lives, creating, in turn, subliminal and lasting cultural tropes. Jumping off from John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?,” O’Brien takes on the complex subject of “dead animals,” arguing that people use these images, in an industry she dubs “slaughter cinema,” to create a self image that hides uncomfortable information.