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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00860
- Thesis Title
- A Field Guide to Exit Zero: Urban Landscape Essay Films, 1921 Till Now
- Author
- S Topiary Landberg
- E-mail
- stopiary AT ucsc.edu
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- PhD
- Year
- 2020
- Number of Pages
- 300
- University
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Thesis Supervisor
- Rick Prelinger
- Supervisor e-mail
- rpreling AT ucsc.edu
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Jonathan Kahana, Miriam Greenberg, Scott MacDonald, Jennifer Peterson, Sharon Daniel
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Film & Digital Media
- Copyright Ownership
- Languages Familiar to Author
- French, Spanish
- URL where full thesis can be found
- ProQuest
- Keywords
- city symphony, documentary, essay film, landscape, queer, urban
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- This theory-practice dissertation advocates for a landscape mode of documentary media-making. Providing case studies from the history of non-narrative city filmmaking, this work breaks new ground by locating this form in the context of urban environmentalist and social justice concerns. Having been guided by a central question: what is the subjectivity of a city landscape, this research provides an historical overview of non-narrative methodologies for representing urban nature as a collective subject and a collaborative agent. Foregrounding the function of musical and temporal structures, the use of improvisational techniques, and highlighting queer strategies of representation, this dissertation expands considerations of the city symphony genre to attend to jazz, feminist and environmentalist developments of form. It also considers the lyric role of the acousmatic (off-screen) voice in relationship to the visual landscape and explores how the spoken word inspires productive forms of identification and dis-identification with the visual environment. The practice-based component of the research is Exit Zero: An Atlas of One City Block through Time, an interactive documentary of a single city block located in central San Francisco. This web-based media work presents a long-view of the processes of gentrification and urban transformation. As a synecdoche for the hyper-gentrification of San Francisco, Exit Zero provides a poetic framework in which to explore the multiple dramatic metamorphoses of a city block made famous by Hayes Valley Farm, the temporary community garden built on top of a former freeway exit. Using the interaction metaphors of the compass and the timeline, the work juxtaposes the impacts of government policy and freeway infrastructure against the forces of anti-freeway activism and community social practice. Visitors are encouraged to explore the various transformation of this block in a non-linear fashion, enacting a collaborative and improvisational relationship to the project’s content and enabling the discovery of uncanny interconnections between seemingly disparate time periods. Arguing for the urgency of articulating collective forms of identification, this practice-theory dissertation catalyzes a new understanding of landscape as a collective subject.