Tory Jeffay on Surveillance at SCMS
Tory Jeffay received a Spring 2019 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, Washington. Tory presented "Body/Camera: Viewing Raw Images of Policing through the Lens of Early Film." Read more about her experience in her own words below!
I am incredibly grateful for the support of the Berkeley Center for New Media to attend this year’s conference for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in Seattle. It was my first time attending, and the experience was invaluable. My paper was part of a panel titled “Immersion and Surveillance in New Screen Modalities,” which fruitfully connected disparate objects—body cameras in my case, fictional humanitarian drones and animatronic animal cameras in the case of my co-presenters. My paper, “Body/Camera: Viewing Raw Images of Policing through the Lens of Early Film,” looked at the similar modes of spectatorship engendered by both early phantom ride films, in which a camera is mounted on a vehicle in motion, and contemporary police body camera footage, in which the camera is on the officer’s body. I argued that in watching a body camera video, the shakiness of the camera in motion and the association with the officer’s physical body and point of view encourages an endangered mode of spectatorship, engaging the viewer affectively in ways antithetical to the videos’ usage as evidence in court. At the conference I was able to attend a wide range of panels on both new media and early film—and everything in between. Especially useful to me were the panels "Reframing Documentary Media in the Digital Age" and "Black Visual Historiographies," as well as a seminar I participated in on studying moving image journalism from a Film & Media Studies perspective. SCMS is the flagship conference for Film & Media Studies, and participating offered an overview of the field that is so useful as I move toward conceptualizing my dissertation project.