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  • The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky
  • Juan Llamas-Rodriguez (bio)
The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor
by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky.
Duke University Press.
2020. 336 pages.
$104.95 hardcover; $28.95 paper; also available in e-book.

Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky begins her absorptive and accomplished monograph by describing in detail exemplary sequences from a range of different films that illustrate the key characteristics of what she calls the process genre. From A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works (Cricks and Sharp, 1906) to El Velador (The Night Watchman, Natalia Almada, 2011), the variety and abundance of examples in this early section of the book reveal both the aims and ambition of Skvirsky’s project: to theorize a “phenomenon with which we are all familiar but that does not have a name.”1 She coins the term process genre to describe films that organize the representation of processes (usually production processes) into sequentially ordered series of steps. For Skvirsky, it is a ciné-genre since it achieves its fullest expression in moving image media by utilizing the medium’s “constitutive capacity to visually and analytically decompose movement and to curate its recomposition.”2 The process genre is also “a genre of modernity” insofar as its method for representing a way of doing something functions simultaneously “as an index of a mode of production” and “of the status and character of a people or civilization.”3 The process genre’s robust cultural life in the present, the author argues, marks a renewed anxiety and uncertainty about the conditions of human life in light of today’s significant changes in the organization and management of [End Page 200] production.4 In the process genre’s methodical representations of technique, Skvirsky finds a humanistic genre that commands fascination, glorifies labor, and allegorizes alternative national formations.

The first two chapters of the book define what the process genre is, first extrinsically and then intrinsically. Chapter 1, “The Process Film in Context,” situates the ciné-genre within a longer tradition of processual syntax present in forms such as live demonstrations of crafts and pictorial instructions. Processual representation’s stability of form, the author contends, accounts for its persistence across multiple centuries and for a variety of functions. The chapter also differentiates the process genre from established categories of film analysis, including the industrial, educational, and ethnographic film. Skvirsky argues not only for considering the process genre as separate from these other types of films but also against subsuming the genre in a subdivision of these types. The process genre must be thought of as separate lest our theorization fails to seriously consider the genre’s anti-instrumentalist ethos as part of its distinctive politics.

Chapter 2, “On Being Absorbed in Work,” analyzes the formal elements of the process genre’s most notable phenomenological aspect: its mesmerizing sense of absorption. Skvirsky establishes that the genre’s appeal cannot be reduced to an “operational aesthetic”— that is, the pleasure in understanding how things work— nor to a basic fascination with watching movement. Rather, it is the process film’s overarching narrative structures that drive its signature sense of absorption. The process film lies in the tension between the generic and the singular; though devised as a how-to, or a general protocol of a kind, the genre’s reliance on film’s indexicality means that each representation of a process is still unique, still a record of an unrepeatable past moment. By analyzing the famous “How People Make Crayons” segment of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (NET, 1968– 1970; PBS, 1971–2001), Skvirsky argues that the generic character of processual representation indeed holds the key to its absorptiveness. She then proposes three expositional discursive structures that the process film may deploy: surprise, suspense, or curiosity. Close readings of The Unstable Object (Daniel Eisenberg, 2011) and A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956) offer representative examples of these three discursive structures and how they can interact within a film. The author concludes by affirming the importance of narrative closure for the process genre. The spectator must realize that the narrative has answered all their lingering questions— that...

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