Event

Nicholas Baer

Future Perfect: From Kino-Eye to the Poor Image

A 2009 essay by Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” endorses the low-resolution images of dubious, often-illicit provenance that circulate widely in the digital economy. Where the forces of neoliberalism and privatization have threatened the accessibility of non-commercial media, digital networks are facilitating the dissemination of rare and marginalized audiovisual content, albeit in a substandard quality. Steyerl posits the emergence of these compressed and degraded copies as a distinct phenomenon of digital technology, and yet she recognizes that the creation of nonconformist media circuits has notable precedents in twentieth-century global film culture. Central to Steyerl’s genealogy are Dziga Vertov’s “kino-eye” and Julio García Espinosa’s “imperfect cinema.”

Taking Steyerl’s essay as its cue, this talk examines the concept of perfection across the global history of film and media. I argue that digital networks shift the constellation of moving-image culture, political liberation movements, and aesthetic and technological understandings of perfection. Through analysis of key texts and moving-image works by Vertov, García Espinosa, and Steyerl, I demonstrate that the semantic field is significantly reconfigured as we move from the “perfected” kino-eye to the “imperfect cinema” of the Global South to the “poor image” of the digital commons. Intervening in contemporary debates on the “rich” and “poor” image, and “high” and “low” definition, my talk offers a reconceptualization of perfection for the age of digital media and neoliberal logics.

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Critical Theory, Film & Media, Jewish Studies, New Media, and Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).