John Frankenheimer's Untimely Media

My dissertation argues that the work of John Frankenheimer (1930-2002) provides a series of lenses for looking differently at several crucial turning points in media history. Each chapter takes up one or more moments of media change, showing how specific works directed by Frankenheimer can enlarge our thinking about these moments, thereby opening up new theoretical, historical, and aesthetic questions. I argue that Frankenheimer's oeuvre can serve this function because the director was so frequently out of synchronization with large-scale trends in media culture, resulting in a collection of what I call "untimely media," which either rushed ahead or lagged behind what other media makers were doing and thinking at the same historical moment. Rather than providing a biographical study of Frankenheimer, my dissertation instead mobilizes his untimely media as a critical toolkit, one that derives its explanatory power from the fact that Frankenheimer causes so many problems for the standard historical narratives and theoretical frameworks that cinema and media scholars depend on. My four chapters proceed roughly chronologically, though several juxtapose media from different moments of Frankenheimer's career. Chapter one, "The Great Chain of Mistakes," considers Frankenheimer's beginnings as a director of live television drama in the 1950s, at a moment when this programming format was already in precipitous decline. Chapter two, "After Videophobia," brings together several Frankenheimer films from the early 60s that prominently feature television, including The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and contextualizes them in the media-historical moment immediately after television becomes the dominant media technology in the United States. Chapter three, "Image-Generating Bodies," focuses on a single Frankenheimer film, Seconds (1966), in order to show that its body-mounted camerawork fills a gap in the history of cinematography between the handheld camera and the Steadicam. And, finally, chapter four, "In the Zone of the Blockbuster," treats Frankenheimer's varied engagements with the Hollywood blockbuster as a means of tracking significant shifts in blockbuster aesthetics, especially changes in blockbuster effects practices.