Review of bonnie lenore kyburz's Cruel Auteurism: Affective Digital Mediations toward Film-Composition

Ben Wetherbee, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma

(Published May 11, 2020)

 “Ideally, this book is a film,” writes bonnie lenore kyburz in the introduction to Cruel Auteurism: Affective Digital Mediations toward Film-Composition (10), which is the second entry in the WAC Clearinghouse #writing series. A complex and playful work, Cruel Auteurism represents a personal and endearingly vulnerable attempt to integrate the academic writer into the act of scholarship—seen here as kyburz shares her own history of authorial joy as a digital filmmaker, as well as her professional frustration with the academic devaluing of such work. In the spirit of cinema, I envision kyburz (slow-motion, windblown) taking a maul to the rickety but stubborn ramparts separating personal narrative from the auspices of scholarly rigor. Hans Zimmer or Miley Cyrus can supply the soundtrack. You get it.

This is the sort of visual, visceral, pathos-first moment that rarely accents written scholarship, and yet I’m glad Cruel Auteurism is a book. The modality of the sustained, written monograph allows kyburz to precisely articulate the theoretical, pedagogical, and disciplinary problems she perceives as a digital filmmaker within rhet-comp, even if the primacy of the monograph epitomizes those problems. kyburz is aware of such irony. The friction between affective ideals (joy, ambition, emotional gratification) and professional constraints (what “counts” on a CV) undergirds much of kyburz’s study, which combines theory, history, and personal testimony of what she calls “film-composition”—a compelling, somewhat slippery term meant to encapsulate the theoretically informed techne of filmmaking as rhetorical, artistic, and emotionally motivated production (29-30, 56-57).

As an avowed film-compositionist, kyburz has been publishing video shorts as scholarship since 2008,[1] despite what I would characterize as rhet-comp’s general neglect of film and filmmaking within the postmillennial digital turn, which has favored, well, newer “new media.” True, teacher-scholars in the discipline have long employed film as a pedagogical aid in writing classes (e.g. Bishop), and digital theorists like Sarah Arroyo have led a serious push toward web video as both rhetorical scholarship and a key medium within digital literacy practices (e.g. Arroyo; Arroyo and Alaei). But the intellectual and affective breath of film and film theory generally elude us, even as our colleagues in adjacent disciplines—communication and literary studies, especially—retain film as a focal point. Cruel Auteurism, ergo, stands as both an eye-opening retrospective of one scholar’s attempts to remediate scholarship itself and a welcome return to the long-overlooked intersection of rhetoric, composition, and film.

On this note, enculturation’s readers will appreciate the interdisciplinary traction kyburz creates among rhetoric, composition, film theory, new media studies, and affect theory—a scholarly nexus that brings the emotional and intellectual entanglements of the individual rhetor into unusually sharp relief. To describe these complications, kyburz draws on affect theorist Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” or what happens when “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (qtd. in kyburz, Cruel Auteurism 27). kyburz swaps in a fittingly optimistic term, “auteurism,” to evoke the parallel challenges of cinematic auteur theory. Auterurism, or the director-as-author movement most famously identified with critic Andre Bazin and French New Wave directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, offers a striking parallel to kyburz’s own efforts as a DIY digital filmmaker. In each case, one weighs the merits of filmmaking as personal, passionate, intellectually serious craftmanship and public rhetoric—the optimistic view—against the cruelties of market forces and film budgeting (for the New Wavers’ ilk) and the skepticism toward film as serious academic work (for a film-compositionist like kyburz). Reflecting such tension, kyburz’s chapter titles articulate affective, emotional responses to the question of film-composition. They are, in order: “Hope,” “Fear,” “Desire (I),” “Desire (II),” and “Pleasure.”

In the “Hope” and “Fear” chapters, kyburz offers a rigorous and novel history of film and filmmaking within rhet-comp scholarship, which highlights a scholarly undercurrent usually forgotten in recent disciplinary history. This movement saw sparks of life during cinema’s early decades and a small boom during the cinematically heady years of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which coincided with the French New Wave and Hollywood’s second golden age. In the former chapter, kybruz identifies her own sublime attachment to digital filmmaking with the attitudes of these early film-compositionists, who proffered a callow but hopeful attitude toward moving pictures as a promising frontier for English studies, an attitude kyburz appreciatively seeks to “boost [in] production value” toward a bold, robust, digital-era vision of filmmaking as rhetorical production (37). kyburz cites only one comparable historical sketch of film-composition: a 2011 master’s thesis by yours truly (34-35). It’s delightful and unexpected to see my old opuscule cited in print, though the fact that kyburz turns to a master’s thesis at all evidences the scarcity of scholarship dealing with film and filmmaking in our disciplinary history.[2]

The “Fear” chapter persuasively explains this gradual erasure of film. Here, kyburz depicts fear as hope’s historical shadow-image, or the specter of disciplinary anxiety casting film as a false hope or frivolous stepchild to proper writing and literature. kyburz parries historical examples of such cynicism with barbed wit, as if arguing with an erudite but behind-the-times uncle over Thanksgiving dinner. Echoing Blue Öyster Cult, she coins a very quotable riposte: “Don’t fear the rhetor!” (71). That is: how grand it would have been if early film-compositionists had taken more seriously the rhetorical autonomy of film and the unique rhetorical texture resulting from film editing, cinematography, sound design, and the rest of cinema’s modal affordances. kyburz’s account of “fear” persuasively contends that many compositionists pessimistically collapsed film into the paradigm of expository verbal rhetoric, thereby hamstringing their own disciplinary appreciation of one of the most vibrant rhetorical media of the twentieth century.

kyburz’s move to “Desire” signals a more theoretical turn in her argument, one that foregrounds similarities between film theory and rhetorical theory that might interest fellow multimodal rhetoricians. In the “Desire (I)” chapter, kyburz sustains a fruitful comparison between her own creative desires as a new-media rhetorician and those of Godard, whose prolific output of experimental, low-budget films (Breathless, Contempt, Alphaville, and other hallmarks of ‘60s French cinema) parallel the author’s own will toward joy-fueled play and rhetorical open-endedness. kyburz fruitfully places Godard and Bazin in dialogue with earlier film-compositionists’ struggling to understand cinema’s rhetorical potential. This juxtaposition affirms the striking kinship between rhetorical theory and film theory, both of which emphasize the material affordances of specific media and relationships among author (or auteur), text, and audience. More specifically, kyburz’s resurrection of auteur theory reimagines the filmmaker in terms resembling the Ciceronian orator—as a figure motived by rhetorical effects, sure, but also awash in the emotional delights of creation.[3] If intersections between rhetoric and film theory remain fettered by disciplinary boundaries, kyburz imagines cross-disciplinary inroads between the positions of the rhetor and filmmaker that others might follow.

Though beholden to affective desires, kyburz’s film-composition also transmits affective desire to her viewers. In the “Desire II” chapter, kyburz nests her desire for experimental film-composition within the theoretical frameworks of rhetorical velocity and affect, building toward an especially powerful moment in her argument. Despite her recurring skepticism toward analytical “reading” of films, the “Desire (II)” chapter’s deepest theoretical payoff occurs in kyburz’s quick analysis of David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., an innovative, powerful, and famously difficult dream narrative that oscillates among multiple visions of reality. Much of the plot revolves around a mysterious blue box that initiates transitions between different realities; in kyburz’s words, this device, “so elusively meaning-full in the narrative, never quite materializes a clear attachment, and we are left to wonder” (111). Following Lynch, kyburz wants to validate such wonder, to recognize cinematic rhetoric as, like Lynch’s box, rhetorically powerful but argumentatively indeterminate—an apt characterization I ascribe to the connotative density but denotative diffuseness of film’s aural and visual modalities. In one evocative scene from Mulholland Dr., a tearful, frightened Naomi Watts and Laura Harring bear witness to an unsettling but beautiful Spanish-language performance of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” before encountering the box. The scene kills me. I have theories about what it all “means”—but that’s not the point, is it? The point, rather than any one explanatory interpretation, is that Lynch and company have employed cinematic modalities to pose a logically indeterminate but emotionally concentrated range of experiences that powerfully converge at this point in the film. As kyburz closes the chapter, she regrets that the pursuit of such rheto-cinematic effects rarely jibes with “the good life” of material validation in academia (115)—an argument she bravely supports, again, though cruelties of her own experience.

This lament speaks to a problem of disciplinary affiliation, one kyburz orbits continually but doesn’t quite pin down. So I’ll try. In some fields (art, music composition, creative writing), the sort of experimental, imaginative media production kyburz desires counts toward academic advancement: sculptors sculpt; creative writers write creatively; and Cinematic Arts faculty at USC, for instance, make films. Not so in rhet-comp. We write critical, theoretical, and pedagogical scholarship that—even when accepting of some digital-era experimentation—rarely looks like kyburz’s digital filmmaking, despite her own theoretical grounding in composition and rhetorical theory. This disciplinary cruelty backlights kyburz’s final chapter, an impassioned but even-keeled manifesto on rethinking motives for scholarship. In particular, she cites Brian Massumi and Cheryl E. Ball to suggest that “pleasure”—her final affective title—ought to compete with “rigor” as the central motive for scholarship, inasmuch as pleasure spurs kairotic encounter and an embodied sense of purposeful creation (126-27). This sublime wraith we’ve all felt in our fondest moments of writing and production demands pursuit.

Much earlier in the book, during her discussion of my master’s thesis, kyburz postulates that she and I work from “a shared hope” (35). I agree—and in closing, I’ll take the invitation to articulate a few of my own affective responses. First, a hope: while I would still defend “rigor” as a scholarly enterprise, I share kyburz’s optimistic will to recognize the experimental, playful, and affective dimensions of rhetoric, especially as they apply to practices like filmmaking. I might pose Aristotle’s sister arts of rhetoric (pragmatic, purpose-driven expression) and poetics (artistic expression that borrows strategies from rhetoric) as precedent for our own sister arts of scholarly and creative production. In other words, kyburz’s digital films might be less “scholarly” than a monograph like Cruel Auteurism—a defensible claim, I think—but they might still matter socially and academically outside the exclusive rubric of “scholarship.” Why shouldn’t the practice of rheto-poetical techne like kyburz describes count toward tenure?

On a related note, I differ with kyburz on one significant point, which gives me pause if not quite fear. A recurrent tension in Cruel Auteurism pits the creative poetics of film production against the evaluative rhetoric of film criticism, which is understandable, given the disciplinary privilege we’ve afforded analysis. kyburz quips that “analytical textual work about film is fine, except that it’s not” (86). I’m not so sure. I agree that academic film analysis can be done badly, often as an obtuse facsimile of literary criticism, but I would rejoin that rhetorically sophisticated film criticism and pedagogical use of film needn’t antagonize experimental film production. I note a difference of emphasis: while kyburz’s subtitle points us toward Film-Composition, my thesis was dubbed Toward a Rhetoric of Film. kyburz identifies primarily as a filmmaker (or film-composer) whose work is informed by rhetorical and composition scholarship; I identify as a rhetorical critic and theorist particularly drawn to the suasive effects of film. But we both seek movement toward a revaluing of film as a rhetorical and artistic medium within our discipline. My defense of such a project would configure analysis and production as mutually informed endeavors. The sort of creative sublimity kyburz values can also infuse the practices of film criticism and film spectatorship; rhetorical criticism and analysis need not be (should not be!) inert or affectless.[4] Such work has surely afforded me real pleasure, even if I’ve rarely picked up a camera in the process.

But none of this is to devalue kyburz’s work as a digital filmmaker or her argument about such work, which plots terrain wholly untapped by rhetorical critics of film like David Blakesley, Thomas W. Benson, and myself. I’ll offer one final, summative point of praise, which is that kyburz’s complete argumentative arc—a bold peregrination among disciplinary history; diverse theoretical perspectives, past and present; and autobiography—offers a valuable prototype for other multimodal rhetoricians in search of intellectual heritage. While scholars often fold digital and visual rhetorics into the domain of “new media” studies, it’s notable that kyburz draws so fruitfully from older sources of intellectual inspiration, especially Godard and Bazin, who enjoyed a heyday in film studies but never in rhetorical studies. What is new, then, is kyburz’s conceptual through line between the French New Wavers and the affective commitments of latter-day rhetoricians and compositionists. kyburz offers a Janus-faced look, forward, at the modal affordances of digital modernity and, backward, at the conceptual insight inscribed in intellectual traditions like film theory. Her affective joy as a rhetorician and filmmaker takes root at this intersection of past and present. I suggest we follow her—in both directions.