Editorial

Situate

This is a focus in Framework vol. 57, no. 2, as each author concentrates on newly situating their subjects. Besides the topics themselves—jazz, French film criticism, video history, adaptations, and experimental cinema—the writers’ examination of small details in these subjects that are not typically examined is fascinating. The writers ask questions: How are these facts and ideas situated in our culture, and why would we look at them? How do they fit into a longer view? Teresa Heffernan’s “When the Movie Is Better Than the Book: Fight Club, Consumption, and Vital Signs” examines the film Fight Club as “better than the book” and digs into reasons that go beyond a comparison of content, positing that reasons answers lie in why “origins and sources … should continue to haunt adaptation theory.” In “The Film That Almost Was: John Fowles’s ‘The Black Thumb’ and His Collaboration with David Tringham,” also about novel-film adaptation, Michelle Phillips Buchberger links the screen work of novelist John Fowles, whose writing dominated some important films of the 1960s and 1980s, to his struggles with the studio machine. Matthias Mushinski, in his detailed essay, “Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life as a Free Jazz Critic/Thinking Free Jazz as an Avant-Garde of the Masses,” uncovers jazz influences in 1950s French film criticism. Christopher Robé’s “Criminalizing Dissent: Western State Repression, Video Activism, and Counter-Summit Protests” reveals an involved and persistent history of video activism, through an analysis of specific moments, which, he argues, have a key importance and are precursors to major movements today, such as Black Lives Matter. Scott MacDonald’s interview with the “Orpheus of Nitrate,” Bill Morrison, looks closely at the lesser-known world of Morrison’s filmmaking origins, discussing how Morrison developed his ability to take a tiny detail in celluloid footage and resituate it, allowing the viewer to see it differently.