Overview

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 Salome 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.

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9781478006442

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After reading Salome 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 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, Salome 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

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, Salome 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 Salome 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 *

Author Information

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

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