Abstract

Considering the 2022 film Nope, this essay pushes beyond indexical and ontological readings of blackness in film in order to consider how invisible forms of blackness—in particular, the labor of black film workers—are inscribed in the film text. It argues that the inscription of black labor and a reading of film as an effect of labor supply a reformulation of a deracinated film formalism. Mining Nope's self‐reflexive gestures, the essay explores the film's reformulation of American film history and its navigation of the invisible and the spectacular as the limited forms of manifesting blackness in cinema.

Form and formalism are not antithetical to the analysis of blackness in the cinema—rather, form is constitutive of black representation. If representation is a matter of a symbol put to work, then as much attention should be paid to the labor of signification as is to the form of signification. What follows is an attempt at redressing formalism—a reformalism—that acknowledges the labor of filmmaking as meaning-generating—which is to say, discursive—as well as the labor entailed and embedded within the formal structures of films.

The analytic method I am asserting—one that builds upon the deconstructionist charge to conduct a sort of vivisection of the text so as to see the text's inner workings—can expose the constructedness of the black film image by foregrounding those workings as fundamental to representation. Because race itself is a discursive social construct, formalist approaches must also interrogate the presumptive ground of signification, which is always heavily contoured by the historical, social, and cultural moment of its production and interpretation. The obfuscation of the labor of representation is a project of modern racial logics that naturalizes racial significations. Blackness is the sign whose significations as mere form and pure essence circulate as beholden to a priori, seemingly innate structures of meaning. This interpretive collapsing of form into essence is, as Alessandra Raengo notes, the acute burden and structure of black representation: a “way of seeing and saying that confuses the object with its representation, visual with discursive knowledge.”1 Reformalism provides critical redress to this interpretive slippage that eclipses the distance between object and representation, between symbol and sense. Cinematic blackness is best interpreted with, rather than against, this version of form as contiguous with culture and discourse in mind.

This acknowledgment of form as contiguous with, rather than outside of, discourse and culture marks a significant departure from versions of formalism that depend upon essentialist assumptions (even as they attempt to distance themselves from the pitfalls of essentialism). That is, the discursively implicated version of formalism proposed here is in stark contrast to the formalist genealogy narrated by Eugenie Brinkema in their 2021 essay on form.2 While admirably seeking to mine formalism for its abiding utility in a resolutely heterogeneous post-structuralist world, Brinkema's essay evinces a commitment to a form-substance, image-essence binary supported by classical Greek philosophy (Plato and Aristotle, specifically) and by literary modernism (Cleanth Brooks).

This is because the term “form” is always double and contradictory. The fundamental dilemma of form is that it refers, simultaneously, both to a minor showing—mere appearance, a visible, outward shape or display (as of religiosity), or attention to superficial rather than substantial qualities (with resonances of the formula and the formulaic)—and to the specifying principle of some thing, an inward kind or an essential type.3

Where this embrace of form's provocative but doomed duality risks falling down, however, is precisely at the feet of figures that have been constructed by film texts and by social texts as pure signs. The forms of these figures are intended to be construed as derived from their essences. Their circulation in film and other texts repeats and consequently reinforces the sense of their self-apparent presentation (rather than representation) and their alienation from methods of formal investigation.

If film is a factory of meaning wherein symbols and signs are assembled to produce sense, instead of assuming that blackness arrives in the factory as raw material, I argue that it is better understood as having already been rigorously worked upon, work that includes its own formal interrogation—and offers an approach that permits us to appreciate and recognize the labor involved in putting blackness to work.4

Making labor legible as constitutive of form—and, relatedly, making blackness legible as art5—is a project of the sci-fi horror film Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022) and its investigation of American film history. The film's self-reflexivity and its attention to various types of labor (on-screen versus off-screen, biological and analog versus digital, exposure versus disclosure) invites an examination of how blackness reformulates established narratives about American film history and its modes of production. As a backstage film committed to foregrounding production and labor in its narrative, Nope explores the multiple threats to filming spectacle and foregrounding labor within an industry driven by escapism, illusion, and exploitation.

Writer-director Jordan Peele's mining of the cinematic archive, evinced by his insertion of Eadweard Muybridge's images of a horse being ridden by a black jockey, speaks to the disavowal of blackness in, and the disappearance of black labor from, American film history.6 In revisiting this archive and restaging its technological evolution—while forestalling the totalizing arrival of digital filmmaking in favor of a mechanics of the body—Nope retells the history of the disappearance of black labor from its role in engendering cinematic spectacle. Overall, Nope posits uncredited black labor as a primary source of cinematic spectacle, and it would seem that the spectacle of the horse in motion obfuscated the black jockey's labor despite their on-screen presence. The story of Nope spins out from this refusal to see black labor.

Nope roots the origins of the motion picture in the United States in the contributions of black people, and specifically in the uncredited appearance of black labor. The fluid capacity of blackness to penetrate all aspects of culture, including film art, resonates with Toni Morrison's enjoinder to acknowledge the “Africanist presence” that is embedded in any text or tradition called “American.”7 In an early scene Em Haywood (Keke Palmer), one of the main characters, whose name evokes a core American cinematic intertext—The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)—corrects this misconception by delivering a snappy speech that begins with the rhetorical question, “Did you know the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a black man on a horse?” While the remark conflates media formats—the images were published as a sequence of still photographs, not moving images—and confuses the edition—the images appearing in Nope are from a subsequent series of photographs made after Muybrige's first exercise in May 1872 and featured another of Leland Stanford's horses, named Occident—it nonetheless references Muybridge's animal locomotion study of Stanford's horse, Sallie Gardner, that was published by Morse's Gallery in 1878 as a cabinet card entitled “The Horse in Motion” (figs. 1 and 2).8

Em's declaration crucially reorients her audience's attention by highlighting not the horse but its rider, whom the card identifies as “G. DOMM.” Looking at the photographic sequence that appears in Nope as an animation played from a promotional VHS tape for an animal wrangling business run by Em's family, one notes that the rider is clearly visible although silhouetted to the point of making his features relatively indistinguishable. This visual obscuring is itself an artifact of the technological and scientific racism that undergirds the use of photography in anthropological studies of the era, such as the work of chronophotographer Félix-Louis Renault. In his late nineteenth-century photographic catalogs of racialized and gendered human movements, Fatima Tobing Rony observes, “the subjects are rendered as mere silhouettes, pictographs of the langage par gestes [Regnault was pursuing]. Their faces are unimportant: it is the body that provides the necessary data. . . . They become hieroglyphs for the language of science: race is written into the film.”9 The Muybridge images thus indicate another counterfactual disappearance of black labor in the production of the moving image. Similarly, critical discussions of these images have tended to highlight the collaboration between Stanford and Muybridge. Rarely do they consider Domm's essential labor in the image's production.

Rather than regard cinematic blackness as adhering to a strict binary of disappeared labor and vivid spectacle, reading for the evidence of black labor and performance provides radical disruptions of American narrative film's cinematic vocabulary and, indeed, its history. Nope demonstrates how form can be interpreted as evidence of engagement and refusal, revealing rather than concealing the work of constructing blackness for film.

Cinematic blackness is not reducible to the body. Film scholar Michael Boyce Gillespie has identified “film blackness” as an important and identifiable element of narrative film that has often been uncritically interpreted as a faithful presentation of a racial real, indexed by the visual simulacrum of black flesh, that manifests in the social realm. Restoring attention to film's conventions of expression, Gillespie's film analyses dispense with enduring il-logics of racial stereotyping and the presumed mono-logic of film representation in order to highlight the discursive dimensions of film blackness. His argument—to resist presumptions of a racial “real” as the bedrock for considerations of film art—bears substantially upon the interpretation of form: “Accounting for film in a manner that does not adhere alone to a focus on how cinema must oblige, portend, or emblematize social truth requires attention to cinema as an art practice with attendant and consequential questions of form and politics.”10

Reading in the interstices of film form, Gillespie mobilizes Stuart Hall's embrace of semiotics and the study of the representation of blackness as authorizing “a regard for discursivity instead of enduring claims of political and cultural obligation”11 and his insistence that “in the analysis of culture, the interconnections between societal structures and formal or symbolic structures is absolutely pivotal.”12 In other words, the problem of black representation in film marks the core crisis of representation tout court wherein representation is called upon to fulfill an ontological function it does not have. But instead of bemoaning the misrepresentation of blackness and presuming the existence of an authentic and singular preexisting blackness, I advocate here for attending to the node upon which the meaning of blackness hinges—the labor entailed in the construction and circulation as well as the suppression of blackness. Further justifying this approach is Hall's admission that “Race is more like a language than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted”—a declaration that heralds the contiguity between discursive and formalist approaches to race.13

How does one see the labor involved in the engendering of film form? Mauro Resmini's attention to the figure of the worker helps us focus on its function as “a form of thought, dialectical in nature, that is proper to the image.”14 The figure of the worker is not a type or stereotype subjected to a simple positive-or-negative ideological determination but rather a point of articulation for film language that is always available for critical investigation. Resmini's description of the essential but morally unstable figure of labor within midcentury Italian neorealist film resonates with Raquel Gates's challenge to reductive evaluations of on-screen representations of blackness. As she argues in her book Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, “Taken as straightforward descriptors, [‘positive’ and ‘negative'] are limiting categories that do not allow us to access the full, complex range of images that circulate in the media, nor do they allow for the possibility of nuanced engagement with these images by the people that consume them.”15 The narrow assessment of black representation is itself a mode of critical racism as it alienates blackness from concerns about form. Such hobbling of critical analysis reverberates as a disavowal of labor. As Gates adds, “We cannot seem to shake the assumption that representations do the work by themselves. In other words, there is an unshakable belief that images do work outside of the histories and contexts in which they circulate.”16

Gates's resistance to throwing the baby of “negative” representation out with the bathwater of audio-visual forms is well taken and resonates with Resmini's insistence that the two—representation and media forms—cannot be separated. Rather, representation is not merely aesthetic or ideological—it is formal. As Resmini explains,

The figure does not give up on form altogether, but comes into existence as a disturbance of identity, an operation of the disruption of self-sameness whereby the other emerges from within the same. There is a durative, labor-like dimension to the action of the figure: it carves into figuration, molds it, shapes it from within—to the point where it is barely recognizable anymore, but not yet irretrievably lost.17

As such, the figure of the laborer is itself put to work by the film and in turn works upon the film's form. Nope literalizes this operation of labor by centering its plot around the labor entailed in capturing the photographic image. Thus, it is essential rather than incidental that Nope's labor narrative (re)turns to the analog and protocinematic in its attempt to reformulate the legacy of African American labor within American film history as a refusal to participate in the limited ways in which it has appeared or disappeared.

The black jockey's disappearance from motion picture lore is redeemed in Nope's illustration of an attempt to capture photographically, like Muybridge did, the nearly impossible-to-see lifeform that haunts the skies above Agua Dulce, California. Having failed with security cameras, the team attempts to capture IMAX footage of the alien, Jean Jacket, with a hand-cranked camera a director, Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) has retooled to work without electricity, as Jean Jacket's appearance always coincides with a complete disruption of electrical flow (fig. 3).18 This device and its use—to achieve what the film terms “the Oprah shot”—harkens back to Cecil B. DeMille's early Hollywood filmmaking in the Southern California desert. Yet the director's fixation upon getting the most cinematic shot at the “golden hour” of an exceptionally beautiful sunset leads him directly and fatally into the creature's maw to fulfill, it appears, his own death-driven desire for The Shot. Holst's death invokes a latter-day Ahab, a man undone by his obsession with capture, illustrating an enduring and ill-fated desire for mastery over nature and over the image.

Though Nope bears witness to the death of Holst, it elects to disavow the modalities through which blackness has historically most vibrantly come into view: the spectacle of black death. This decision has implications for the film's formal techniques that align with the psychological horror genre and the monster/alien genre—namely, to build suspense by delaying the spectacle of violent encounter. (Even the death of Otis Sr. [Keith David], which occurs early in the film, is not spectacular since it takes place in the interstices of the cut.) Peele has explained that “the part of African-American history that this [film] addresses more than anything is the spectacle-isation [sic] of Black people, as well as the erasure of us, from the industry, from many things.”19 This observation declares a commitment to withholding scenes of spectacular black suffering and death in recognition of the fraught circumstances in which blackness comes into view.

Nope's plot of achieving the “Oprah shot” of Jean Jacket is repeatedly thwarted and delayed by alien encounters, bugs, electrical failures, and other elements. That delay, which contemporary horror films have self-consciously parodied through the trope of the black character dying first, forestalls narrative closure and is as invested in the development of characters as it is in reaching its conclusion. The film's self-reflexive pursuit of the media image via multiple image-making apparatuses (security cameras, hand-crank film cameras, cell phone footage, live performance, and still photography) renders the making of the image the backbone of its narrative structure, even while withholding the image of the alien Jean Jacket and the sacrifice that begets its photographic capture—a moment of great satisfaction and spectatorial indulgence—emphasizing instead the labor and cost of creating the spectacular image.20 While the deaths of black characters do occur within Nope's narrative, the implications veer away from antinarrative spectacle and toward interrogations of cinematic inheritance and legacy.

In Nope, the black subject and the animal subject are both sites of analog labor deemed inefficient and approaching obsolescence. These anxieties about the digital displacement of blackness are expressed in Ruha Benjamin's description of “the new Jim Code” which she defines as “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”21 Responding to the ways that the press toward the digital comes at the expense of the humans who were already marginalized within laboring economies (which I proffer might also include the production and creative economies that underwrite film), Benjamin proposes a “race critical code studies” that, like my theory of reformalism, enjoins the critic “to pay closer attention to the surfaces themselves.”22

Indeed, the film's first death—that of Otis Sr.—occurs early in the film and heralds an intergenerational passing of the torch that registers not only as a family crisis but also as an anxiety about the obsolescence of the analog and organic in the rising era of the digital. An early scene that takes place on a studio lot, the character OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluyya) handles his horse, Clover (another is named “Lucky”), in front of a green screen, in preparation for an unexplained shot (fig. 4). When the horse is spooked by a mirrored ball set before it by a clueless lighting technician, the labor of Haywood Horses (OJ, Em, and Clover) is dismissed in favor of a rather pathetic looking ball-and-stick substitute. Labor in the flesh is too unstable and less amenable to the imposed order of contemporary filmmaking than digital postproduction work. As such, Nope stages not only an antagonism between humans and animals (and aliens) but also a struggle between analog and digital labor.23

In his consideration of the outmoding of the worker in media, Joel Burges observes that “as machinery displaces and replaces workers, however, obsolete laborers discover themselves falling not out of history but into it.”24 And yet, he argues, a reparative reading project that aligns the work of interpretation with the outmoded work portrayed in films exposes the way in which cinematic depictions of

the techniques, technologies, and technicians that seem to have fallen out of the mode of production but in crucial ways remain within it . . . aesthetically rework and politically reinvent the past [and] crystalliz[e] the intensification that the obsolescence of labor has undergone in the present, revealing a historical experience that, much as some retreat from this fact, more and more of us are confronting in the crisis that is capitalism now.25

Death is the consequence of Otis Sr.’s irresistible and identifiable desire to see—to rely upon his own eyes rather than a mediating screen to assess a phenomenon both quotidian—gravity—and strange—household objects such as coins and keys falling from the sky above him. If, as Jean-Louis Comolli argues, “the cinema intervenes to keep the machinery [of its making] fastened and secure”—in other words, at a safe distance from the spectator—here, surreal horror emerges via the fatal penetration of unsecured metallic objects entering the spectator's eye, as though a gear from the cinematic apparatus has sprung loose and endangered its riveted viewers.26 The scene invokes the transgressions that denote both surrealist cinema—the famous eye-slice of Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou (1929) made by an editorial cut into which footage of the slicing of a cow's eye creates the illusion of a woman's eye being cut—and horror cinema such as Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), the Japanese film Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) and its American adaptation The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), and several others in which the screen of the image is violently transgressed. Comolli suggests that the cinematic apparatus inserts itself as the only safeguard against the danger it has unleashed—that of seeing too much.

As he writes, “This is the essence of fiction in the cinema: to lie, from the outset, about the conditions of production.”27 Thus, as it alludes the promise of voyeurism that motivates the cinematic spectacle and to the protocinematic coin-operated nickelodeon of the early twentieth century, the nickel that kills Otis Sr. by penetrating his eye and lodging in his brain is not simply a threat to the Haywood family's film horse-wrangling business, it is a warning about the investment in spectacle that is heeded by OJ, who thenceforth assiduously avoids gazing directly at the sky's mysterious occupant.28 When the subsequent pursuit of the alien is then negotiated, to varying degrees of success, by camera lenses that serve as prosthetics of—and shields for—the eye, the search for the “Oprah shot” becomes an enactment of the resistant hope toward which Burges's “residual reading” strives—“the reemployment of the past in the present of reading” for the purposes of “mak[ing] obsolescence itself legible” to facilitate “moviegoers deciphering the cinematic past in the present of their reading.”29

OJ—identified by the narrative as the first black rider's living descendant—takes it upon himself to entice Jean Jacket to the now-abandoned amusement park Jupiter's Claim. It is there that his sister Em is able to photograph Jean Jacket with a hand-cranked, still camera, embedded in a wishing well.30 Utilizing the analog, the animal, and the human to achieve the sought-after shot marks a return—albeit a costly one—to what Mal Ahern asserts is unachievable through automation (digital and otherwise): dynamic feedback. As Ahern writes, “A visual recording . . . is any image generated by a process that does not dynamically react to the image it produces in the course of producing it.”31 With Holst and his motion picture camera now lost, Em is compelled to return to an even earlier photomechanical process that requires her to dynamically respond to the evasive movements of the alien and, therefore, to redeem the previous failures of the automated security camera through the responsiveness of her body and the acumen of her eye. With this scene Nope effectively represents for us the labor that is inscribed in, but not registered by, the analog photograph—a labor that, as Ahern notes, is always present if invisible in processes of inscription: “Within every recording, then, hides another, secret recording—a record not of what occurred in front of the camera, but of what occurred in the factories and laboratories that reproduce all camera-made images.”32

The film's final medium-long shot of OJ astride his horse resolves a desire to see the main character after his heroic intervention, but ultimately leaves viewers unsure of OJ's fate in terms of its narrative. A viewer might be reassured of OJ's survival were it not for the dust-induced lack of focus and, more directly, by the placard above him that declares “Out Yonder” (fig. 5). The plot's pursuit of the “Oprah shot” involves Jean Jacket, not OJ and his horse.33 The ambiguous image of horse and rider once again becomes central to the film as it indexes what is not registered in the film as its primary objective—visual evidence of the alien. OJ's sacrifice and figurative, if not literal, death brings the off-camera to bear significantly upon the on-screen. OJ is situated in what might punningly be termed the “hors(e) champ”—a neologism that combines the French cinematic term hors champ, meaning “off-screen,” with the English word for the animal, horse, the movements of which index a primal fascination with photography's connection to moving pictures and the bio-organism that initially eclipsed the black jockey in Nope's protocinematic genealogy. With the deployment of the hors(e) champ, Nope manages to have it both ways: supplying (some) narrative resolution to its plot while also signaling the incommensurability of this resolution to the meta narrative of American film history in which labor and black heroic agency are disappeared as a matter of course.

Through its depiction of labor in pursuit of the shot and its recollections of what has been neglected in prior pursuits of the shot, Nope complexly invokes the double binds of visibility and invisibility, depiction and destruction that characterize the long-standing fraught relationship between blackness and representation. It is “out yonder” that OJ's most crucial and likely fatal labor is evocatively figured. The off-screen, out yonder, out-of-sight locating of a black death decidedly disrupts the centrality of anti-black brutality to American spectacular culture. No salacious delight is offered to viewers as has been available to publics via cell phone videos of police-motivated murders to lynchings to theatrical reenactments of slavery's degradations.

Reformulating Formalism

Addressing the alienation of blackness from formalist film studies, Gladstone Yearwood cautioned in 2000 that “without a proper attention to formal issues, black film criticism will fall easy prey to empty formalism and a meaningless historicism.”34 This charge is met by a formalism rooted in semiotics and an exploration of the structures of representation themselves. Examining the formal and structural components entailed in the constitution and dissemination of the image illuminates the formal and discursive contours of blackness in film.

This formalist approach to blackness has been stymied by a specific film studies pedagogy that reifies the Hollywood model of industrial filmmaking and draws upon an analytic method rooted in a significantly decontextualized structuralist formalism.35 This centering of industrial filmmaking, its inheritances from the representational and analytic systems of the North and the West risk occluding other forms of representation as well as other forms of formalist analysis.

Roland Barthes's concept of “myth” as the ordering system that mobilizes terms as signs of cultural value is still helpful here. As he remarks,

what must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form. . . . Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no “substantial” ones.36

Barthes's assertion disturbs claims of ontological proof and interpretive certainties that do not consider the ideological flows of culture. Raengo mobilizes a similar analytic dynamism where she dethrones the authority of the index in racial representation. Echoing Hall's conception of race-as-structure and furthering Mary Ann Doane's call to rethink photographic indexicality, Raengo challenges a strict, a-cultural formalism by positing that “photographic indexicality emerges more and more [in our increasingly digital age] as an affect rather than a sign function that can lay claims on the real. The index emerges as a reality a(e)ffect.”37 Insofar as the film image depicts race, its formal analysis must supplement the promise of indexical proof with a consistent acknowledgment of the discourses that warrant proof of race—to reveal one of the lies upon which Comolli tells us cinema is based. What is called for, then, is an attention to the warrant and to a demystification of the myth.

From a cultural formalist perspective—which is to say, in my terminology, a reformalist perspective—the figure of cinematic blackness can be interpreted alongside a narrower notion of form in order to perceive the labor involved in putting blackness to work in film. Black reformalism responds to and illuminates how conditions of racialization rooted in labor organize film's systems of signification.

If, as per Yearwood's charge, black film criticism must go beyond a deracinated formalism and an informal race analysis, these oppositions should be reframed as instead mutually penetrating and coextensive, appreciating the ways in which blackness's presence and resonance (in the form of traces of black labor) have informed American film language and narrative since its inception, even when blackness and race are not identified as a film's proper subject. Against the tendency for blackness to be construed as additive to film form, I have instead investigated how it is constitutive of it. Lingering equations of image with identity are reductive: they explain some things but not others. More importantly, they cannot account for the formal operations of blackness in American cinema.

Ultimately, Nope functions as an investigation into the challenges of visualizing black labor when it is thwarted by the spectacularization of the work it performs rather than the work it is. Nope reclaims film as a form of black articulation that is not reducible to authenticating on-screen presence. Instead, it attends to the work, not reducible to the visualization of bodily labor, of blackness in constituting American cinema.

Notes

4

Work and labor are, of course, deeply intertwined. In this essay, “work” indicates a specific retinue of tasks and seamless functioning (the work needed to produce a film, the work of art). “Labor” is used to emphasize the physicality of the task and the presence of intentional effort, either singular (e.g., the black jockey's labor) or collective (e.g., black labor in film production).

5

See Udinn and Gillespie, “Black One Shot and the Art of Blackness”; Baker, “b.O.s 10.2/Operation Catsuit.” 

6

Nope includes both the human and the animal in its critique of the push toward digital filmmaking, suggesting, in the spirit of Zakkiyah Iman Jackson's Becoming Human, a recognition of Western modernity's dual abjection of the animal and the black subject as nonhuman. Nope acknowledges this alignment through the perspective of labor rather than humanity that supplies the film instead with “conceptions of being that do not rely on the animal's negation, as repudiation of ‘the animal’ has historically been essential to producing classes of abject humans” (Jackson, Becoming Human, 2). Indeed, the film stages a sort of class alliance between horse and human that both displaces Western denigrations of that association and makes visible the industrial and capitalist interests in that association.

7

Morrison defines her interest in what she terms the “Africanism” of American literature as an endeavor to read through the “codes and restriction” that enfolded themselves in the literary corpus and in the society at large. My interest in her project lies in her attention to a liquid and confounding “denotative and connotative blackness” that “makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless” Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6 – 7.

8

Muybridge, Animals in Motion, 13 – 14; Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion: “Sallie Gardner,” Owned by Leland Stanford, Running at a 1:40 Gait over the Palo Alto Track, 19th June 1878, 1878, photographic print, albumen, 22 × 14 cm, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007678037/.

13

See the 1996 lecture featured in Hall, Race.

16

Gates, Double Negative, 13; emphasis added.

19

Peele, quoted in Travis, “ ‘Our Addiction to Spectacle.’ ”

20

Nope pointedly resists the spectacle of black death that has come to characterize much of twenty-first-century racial terrorism and antiracist visual activism and hearkens back to one of cinema's earliest blockbusters, the infamous Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915). By de-spectacularizing the death of black characters, Nope is able to bracket the uncritical affect elicited by spectacle in order to address American film's historic and generic reliance upon the death of black characters (an American horror trope conspicuously spoofed in the film The Blackening [Tim Story, 2022]).

28

This presumption of voyeurism better indicates cinema's motivating desires rather than its actual achievement within the cinematic apparatus. As Amy Herzog explains, the body of the viewer is also on display in the peep show scenario, even as the peep show apparatus promises discretion (Herzog, “In the Flesh”). I consider similar issues of the visible viewing body in my analysis of the anti-lynching exhibition “Without Sanctuary,” which diffuses the violence of voyeurism by staging onlookers in visible relation to one another as a component of redressing lynching's violence (Baker, Humane Insight).

30

Nope adds the set—here, the faux-Western amusement park called Jupiter's Claim—to Mal Ahern's roster of “factories and laboratories” that constitute the conditions of image production (Ahern, “Cinema's Automatisms”). The film's viewers are enticed to think about what is left on the cutting-room-cum-factory floor with a crucial narrative resolution.

33

The demise of Jean Jacket is permitted by the film to drift into another, more distant “Out Yonder”—one that perhaps promises a vengeful return in the form of a sequel in the spirit of another of Nope's apparent touchstones: the animal-revenge series inaugurated by Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975).

35

The orientation of “Hollywood and its others” persists in introduction to film curricula that standardize formalist approaches to film analysis inherited from the structuralist European theories of narrative and visual art that gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s through influential outlets such as the French Cahiers du cinéma and Tel quel as well as from the American art history journal October, with its intellectual inheritances from the prior Soviet Constructivist arts movement, and most especially from the rigid structuralism of Russian formalism. Invested as these approaches were in their respective political landscapes of pre – and post – World War II Europe and the Soviet bloc, alight with the fires of resistances to colonization and fascism, their attentions to form and to the materiality of film objects and of Film itself (an approach subtended by a psychoanalytic investment in Film and Cinema as externalized organs of desire) tended to deny their own conditions of production and consequently naturalized both the artifacts of study and the method of study.

36

Barthes, Mythologies, 109.

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