Shoot!? Describing the Hand-Cranked Camera and Filmmaking Practices from a Posthumanist Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Posthumanist approaches to cinema and film studies have so far focused on the posthuman theoretical potential of film content, rather than on cinematic form and filmmaking practices. This article develops a posthumanist approach to these practices by focusing on a case study: the interaction between the hand-cranked camera and the human operator in the first decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and Jane Bennett’s definition of vibrant matter, I argue that this interaction constitutes a manifestation of material-discursive processes that decenter the anthropos and enact performative entanglements between human and nonhuman agencies. Early descriptions of the technological affordances of the hand-cranked camera, informed by anthropocentric and humanist perspectives, reduce the material constitution of this instrument to its role in the discursive practices of the cinema industry. This article deconstructs these accounts from a posthumanist perspective and develops situated epistemic and ethical reflections that stem from a material-discursive description of the nonhuman instrument and its interaction with the human operator.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".