{"id":11788,"date":"2021-05-08T14:06:34","date_gmt":"2021-05-08T19:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=11788"},"modified":"2021-06-14T06:44:30","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T11:44:30","slug":"camera-as-anaconda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/05\/08\/camera-as-anaconda\/","title":{"rendered":"Camera as anaconda"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>To say that Billie Eilish&#8217;s &#8220;Your Power&#8221; video is intended to get under your skin (as many online commenters have suggested) is understating things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First, there the topic of the song itself (which I won&#8217;t comment on). Then there&#8217;s the interspecies intimacy (which I also won&#8217;t comment on, except to say, I can&#8217;t imagine doing this myself). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then there&#8217;s the video itself, but here I&#8217;ll issue a spoiler alert and just say: watch the video, from start to finish. Watch it full-screen. Pretend you are the camera. What are you feeling? What are you doing? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fzeWc3zh01g?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>As a camera (\/drone), as an anaconda, you draw in gradually, then wrap yourself around her, then give a stunning, triumphantly upward stretch and graceful twist at the 3-minute mark, come back in briefly, and retreat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But your retreat turns out to be feigned. (How else to explain what happens at the 4-minute mark?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I first watched that (if you haven&#8217;t yet, read no further), I was sure I had lost power and was waiting for my computer to reboot. I waited. It didn&#8217;t.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Who has lost power? Who has regained power? Who pulled whose plug?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Questions for the Eilish Studies department (and film\/media studies, and animal studies, et al): What are the subject (and object) positions here? (Film viewing, like everything, is a matter of <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/05\/28\/how-a-film-becomes-a-subject\/\">subject\/objectivation<\/a>.) What&#8217;s the interplay between camera\/anaconda and Eilish? Between camera\/viewer and Eilish\/anaconda? Between her subject (object\/predator she is singing to) and her subjectivation (with anaconda)? Who is <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/10\/23\/documenting-the-act-of-killing\/\">predator<\/a> and who prey? Who is allied with whom? How do you (we, us, me, I, viewer) become an ally? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally, what is the place of the anaconda\/serpent in these multiple power relationships? What is the kinship here, the alliance, the friendship, the risk, the fear, the transgression, the subversion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Note: This post first went up earlier today in a shorter form; I&#8217;ve added little bits to it as they&#8217;ve come to me. Now I&#8217;ll stop.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To say that Billie Eilish&#8217;s &#8220;Your Power&#8221; video is intended to get under your skin (as many online commenters have suggested) is understating things. First, there the topic of the song itself (which I won&#8217;t comment on). Then there&#8217;s the interspecies intimacy (which I also won&#8217;t comment on, except to say, I can&#8217;t imagine doing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,196,692399],"tags":[660373,660368,301,406,660374,660363,660367,123558,16813,660369,660370,660372,12575,660364,454977,660365,660371],"class_list":["post-11788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-ecoculture","category-music-soundscape","tag-anaconda","tag-animal-cinema","tag-animal-studies","tag-animals","tag-archie-the-anaconda","tag-billie-eilish","tag-camera-movement","tag-cinema-studies","tag-ecocinema","tag-film-theory","tag-music-videos","tag-objectivation","tag-power","tag-predators","tag-process-relational-theory","tag-sexual-abuse","tag-subjectivation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-348","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5083,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/07\/22\/moving-environments-day-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":11788,"position":0},"title":"Moving Environments, Day 1","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 22, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"What follows are notes from the first day of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema. These are, needless to say, my own hastily drawn up notes (and I'm still a little jet-lagged from my arrival yesterday). Forgive the point form and abbreviation inconsistencies. Any errors are my own; any wonderful\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1231,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/06\/cinema-poetry\/","url_meta":{"origin":11788,"position":1},"title":"cinema poetry","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 6, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I just discovered the video blog Cinema Poetry, which has collected twenty (so far) of the most remarkable scenes in the history of cinema. The first of the two ride films below, the Lumiere brothers' rickshaw film from an Indochinese village, is beautiful (watch it in full screen with the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/C5XlKaii0OE\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1101,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/07\/11\/cinematic-ecologies\/","url_meta":{"origin":11788,"position":2},"title":"cinematic ecologies","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"As ecocriticism expands and deepens in scope (of subject matter & media examined), extent (internationally), and diversity (in approaches, connections with other schools of thought, etc.), its interactions with non-literary fields such as cinema studies, theatre\/performance studies, and musicology (as I posted about recently) are starting to develop in healthy\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"stalker7.png","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/07\/stalker7.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1181,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/18\/ways-to-shoot-starlings\/","url_meta":{"origin":11788,"position":3},"title":"ways to shoot starlings","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Shoot\" as in film, photograph, capture and display, but also fly with them, shoot the rapids of their movement, accompany them, become starling. These mesmerizing videos of moving masses of starlings, \"murmurations\" as they're called, like other YouTube animal videos, tell us as much about the phenomenon being watched as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/XH-groCeKbE\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8995,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/10\/25\/loznitsas-ethical-witnessing\/","url_meta":{"origin":11788,"position":4},"title":"Loznitsa&#8217;s ethical witnessing","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I've written about ethical witnessing before -- both in the eco-trauma chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image and in my reflections on Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing. Seeing Serhii Loznitsa's latest\u00a0film, Austerlitz, at Kyiv's Molodist Film Festival a few days ago, prompted me to think some more about\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"31rvffloznitsa-2-master675","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2016\/10\/31RVFFLOZNITSA-2-master675-275x145.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6842,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/07\/30\/first-after-thoughts\/","url_meta":{"origin":11788,"position":5},"title":"First after-thoughts&#8230;","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"It arrived a few days ago. Feels good to grasp in the hand: thick, solid, \"capacious\" (as Steven Shaviro says in one of the cover blurbs). And Tarkovsky has rarely looked as green as on the cover. But I've already found an indefensible oversight: I acknowledged many people for helping\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"EMI-shot","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2013\/07\/EMI-shot-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11788"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11800,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11788\/revisions\/11800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}