Steven Shaviro examines "The Cinema of Absence," a phenomenon in which films turn on an event so important, intense, or ineffable that it's never shown. The Mudede brothers, Kudzai and Charles, assay the figure of the all-knowing black sidekick in Hollywood movies like The Legend of Bagger Vance and Shrek (and the sidekick's immemorial forbears), begging the question why--if this fellow has all the answers--he is unable to rise above the role of man Friday to any number of hapless white heroes. Annie Wagner defends the much-maligned MTV influence of rapid-fire editing as a means to associative thinking. Also included are articles championing the career of Timothy Carey and the fortitude of homeless movie houses.
True to the spirit of the word itself, the conception of "The Periphery" was intentionally nebulous--perhaps it's well to think of this supplement as being on the periphery of "periphery." It's no news to contemporary Seattle audiences that advances are always to be found around the fringes, rather than down the middle of the road. We aren't talking about the literal edges of the frame, nor of minority groups, nor of the cinematic underground per se (though all of these are addressed). Rather, the periphery comprises the figurative space in which film, that most central of the popular arts, does its evolving.
This evolution can be a matter of mainstream stylistic development (see the hypertext visual fusilladery of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge or Mike Figgis' Time Code); outré subject matter from abroad (as in Jean-Pierre Sinapi's National 7, a blunt soap opera of sexual longing among invalids); cautionary thematic confluence in independent films (Wayne Wang's Center of the World and Jonathan Nossiter's Signs and Wonders both deal with moral and emotional deadening as a consequence of economic prosperity); the democratization of technological advancement; or even the persistence of undie film programmers right here in Seattle. All of these developments seem to signal an unobvious and ongoing progression in the media of film and video away from conventional reason, and toward contemporary communion with an increasingly peripheralized audience.
