Closing Time at the People Shop: A Saturn Dealership in Ruins

Research Statement

Context

Closing Time at the People Shop originated out of a series of photographs I took during a trip to Tallahassee, Florida where I documented an abandoned Saturn automotive dealership. Subsequently, I began to reflect on details recorded in these photos with the accompaniment of an essay by communication scholar John Sloop entitled “People Shopping.” Sloop’s 2009 analysis of the Saturn Company’s advertising discourse posits that Saturn generated a concept of its vehicles that deeply and substantively identified people with their cars—conflating people bodies with auto bodies. This conflation underscores the materiality of a rhetorical culture that linked American identity to automotive objects of innovation and progress. My turn to a multimedia exploration of Saturn’s material trajectory extends this analysis further by examining the company’s after-matter, embodied in the persistence of abandoned adverts and avenues, the ruins of car lots and televisions spots. 

Methods

The production process for making this video essay involves composing Saturn’s remnants into a bricolage of multimedia artifacts. How to describe this thrown-together-ness as a method? Does it really make much sense to look for order in the disorder of ruins? The materiality of Saturn’s ruins recorded in my photographs pose alongside aural and visual remnants of Saturn’s discursive media-scape. Through this segmented and overlapping collection of reflective narrative, television advertisements, promotional footage, and other fragments, the essay aims to involve the senses in sifting through the ruins of an abandoned place, loosely guided by visual encounters with Saturn’s ruins themselves. The timeline for my initial encounter with the abandoned Saturn dealership is interspersed within a visual palimpsest. I use these media in ways that attempt to manifest what Doreen Massey (2009) has called the “contemporaneous multiplicity” of spaces that are compressed over time into the very shapes and conditions of places new or old, maintained or abandoned. In this sense, a screen or a photograph does not simply present the space’s double—its representation—but rather emphasizes how ‘real’ space is always already doubled, multiplied, as such space evinces a “sphere of relations” (148). Because as Massey also explains, “places…necessitate invention,” I juxtapose and reorganize fragments of Saturn’s past mediations to enhance our attunement toward the company’s contemporary ruins and the photographs that reframe those ruins for posterity. Similar to how audio narration gradually originates in but then begins to slip out of sync in Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1971), or how audio segments of classroom films jam-up propaganda with ironies surrounding the social impact of atomic weapons in Atomic Café (1982), the narration in Closing Time at the People Shop ventures in, between, and across the visual narratives of television advertisements and other company promotions. 

Outcomes

Through this audio/visual bricolage I beseech viewers to encounter the unexpected discourse emerging between now and then, language and matter, commerce and culture. This encourages an alternative viewing experience from traditional montage, in which one might discern clarity concerning how ideas emerge from the edited images and/or sound. I explore the capacity of moving images to interpose divergent visual and aural (dis)connections, which I believe have the potential to produce meaning(s) generated by juxtaposition, overlap, and collision. Rather than explicitly dictating what those meanings might be, I have presented the variety of images and sources here as overlapping lenses for providing what Michael Calvin McGee refers to as the “invention of a text suitable for criticism” (McGee 1990). My hope is for this video essay to serve as both a discreet encounter with the material of Saturn’s ruins and a model for how one might entreat other material to disclose its identities and rhetorical culture through experimental compositions. Once the ruins of Saturn I encounter are read through and alongside this visual presentation of television ads, corporate promotional copy, and labor discourse, I am hopeful that they will light up with opportunities for interpretation that, taken alone, might otherwise escape our notice. The video essay in this sense serves as a completed draft, and as such, it may not satisfy conventional expectations of polish for scholarly consumption. Rather it aims to inspire perceptions of an onscreen process for thinking with Saturn’s material remains. It is not criticism per se, but rather a productive criticism that simultaneously draws upon process as a rhetorical outcome in its own right (Ivie, 2001). The potential for this kind of critical disclosure draws insight from Walter Benjamin’s observation that “photography…can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens…or it can use certain processes…to record images which escape natural optics altogether” (220). Of course Benjamin should probably not be read as endorsing technology’s potential for precision but rather be understood as imploring us to test the limits of what kinds of “aspects of the original” photography has the potential to disclose, even when the original is a ruined version of its former self. 

Impact

Because this video essay adapts passages from a traditional essay I published this past spring (Kutnicki, 2024), I view it as both an extension of the arguments introduced in that work and a research remnant, a record of practical and experimental elements of twenty-first scholarship. I take my cues for this way of thinking about video scholarship from Sarah Pink’s presentation of the use and potential of visual ethnography, which uses images and visual technologies in fieldwork to record both human and nonhuman subjects in new ways (2007). I also share in Evelyn Kreutzer’s view of video essays as having a special ability to “reframe, oppose, and unite multiple temporal planes and seemingly distinct historical moments” (2018). As both a model of research practice and a product of that practice, a performance of sense-making without having the final say on what constitutes “sense,” Closing Time at the People Shop presents the video essay format as a way to engage with a site that speaks across the passage of time and through the inertness of neglect.

Note

The narration segments in the video essay are extracts from a longer work that was published while the essay was being reviewed (Kutnicki, 2024)

Bibliography

Benjamin, W. (1968) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, pp. 217-251.

Ivie, Robert L. (2001) "Productive Criticism Then and Now" American Communication Journal 4(3).

Kreutzer, E. (2018) Berlin Moves. [in]Transition. http://mediacommons.org/intransition/2018/03/07/berlin-moves

Kutnicki, S. (2024) Encountering material rhetorics in the ruins of Saturn. Western Journal of Communication 88. 4, 802-820. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2024.2324384 

Massey, D. (2005) For Space. New York: Sage.

McGee, Michael Calvin (1990) “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54(3) p. 274-289.

Pink, S. (2007) Doing Visual Ethnography. 2nd Edition. London: Sage. 

Sloop, J. (2009) People Shopping. In: Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics. Eds. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 66-98.

Filmography

Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton, 1971, USA)

Atomic Café (Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, & Pierce Rafferty, 1982, USA)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

The enigma of the title and the opening advertising images give way to what begins as a first-person narrated documentary about an abandoned car dealership in Florida, although what we first see are recycled images of rural scenes before finally arriving at the site in question, and the voices of former employees. The narration continues throughout, perhaps a little too dense, but the visuals which accompany and interrupt it shift register from present-day photographs of the deserted location with not a car in sight to increasingly brain-teasing clips from advertisements. What kind of world are we in? There seems no beauty in it, only the workers’ nostalgia.

The filmmaker’s research statement speaks of attempting to visualise what Doreen Massey has called the ‘contemporaneous multiplicity’ of space itself as a ‘sphere of relations’. This sounds promising, except that Massey, as I understand it, is speaking of what in vulgar language is called ‘real space’, and the space of the screen is not simply its double, certainly judging from what we see here. Yet somehow we’re still able to distinguish profilmic reality from the fantasies of advertising, some of which are truly bizarre. 

He also speaks of Walter Benjamin’s explanation of how ‘photography...can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens...or it can use certain processes...to record images which escape natural optics altogether.’ This is absolutely true, and the video makes subtle use of ‘certain processes’, but Benjamin’s thoughts on these matters are much more pregnant than this, and the video instances them without saying so. It performs a balancing act between montage and the dialectical image. The dialectical image is ‘the figurative appearance of the dialectic, the law of the dialectic at a standstill’, which points to the space of history because it represents a momentary aspect of a dialectical process. According to Benjamin, ‘History decomposes into images, not into narratives’, and the image thus becomes an emblematic trace removed from the historical continuum, the concrete graphic representation of small, particular moments which can nonetheless be illuminated and reveal historical truth through the process of retrospective mediation.

Film is the natural medium for doing this, because it is constituted by the discourse of juxtaposed images called montage. Every image has the capacity to become a dialectical image, and montage is the process of bringing the dialectic to life again, and overcoming Bertolt Brecht’s objection, which is also made by Henri Lefebvre, that the photographic reproduction of reality says very little about that reality but merely its fragmented surface. Montage plays with both space and time precisely by segmenting them. What Noel Burch called the Institutional Mode of Representation employs a kind of montage that creates illusion by artfully fusing the elements together to eliminate gaps and contradictions, but for Benjamin, as Susan Buck-Morss puts it, ‘the technique of montage has ‘special, perhaps even total rights’ as a progressive form because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ and thus ‘counteracts illusion’. This video does that successfully enough, and perhaps it’s no criticism that it fragments towards the end, leaving open the question of where it leads, and what comes next. If this is the reality, then there’s no closure.

Review 2: Invite resubmission with major revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

Through a collection of 3 questions, Saul Kutnicki sets the task of exploring what kinds of video essay compositions lend themselves to engaging with the rhetoric of a seemingly inert world of objects. This framing of the research, suggests a method of trying out multiple essay forms to uncover multiple kinds of video essay compositions that might do this work. With the research question so strongly framed around interrogating the video essay form, the author would do well to more effectively engage with the breadth and depth of existing scholarship and creative practice research that is focused on the moving image essay. 

In the written statement, Kutnicki states that the video essay, Closing Time At the People Shop, seeks to extend Sloop’s 2009 analysis of the Saturn Company’s advertising, which explored ‘an understanding of the materiality of a rhetorical culture that links American identity to innovation and progress’. Using ‘the after-matter of Saturn now embodied in the persistence of abandoned objects and places’, Kutnicki is aiming to ‘enlarge perspectives on how things communicate—what material rhetoric is, what it can be, and how its messages might be recorded and received’. I agree that the video essay is an ideal form for this kind of exploration and indeed, Kutnicki has gathered compelling archival material from past advertising campaigns mounted by the Saturn Company. However, I find that the tendency to play out the advertisements, mostly in their entirety with minimal editorial comment or intervention leaves the stated question, of how to ‘entreat the material to disclose its identity and rhetorical culture’, left largely unanswered.

These are interesting and worthwhile ideas to explore, and I agree that there is much potential in the video essay form to use the medium specific qualities of sound and image in combination to see (and hear) what emerges when the detritus of an abandoned company location is interrogated alongside the quirky advertising campaigns employed by the company during its heyday. However, at this point the submitted essay does not yet deliver on that promise. Claims that the audio ‘peels back layers and slides in and out between segments of visual content’ are not yet realised.

This feels like a very early, rough draft which would benefit greatly from further iteration and more direct interventions from the full range of moving image essayistic tools.

The voice over content is undoubtedly interesting and I assume it is drawn from the traditional essay mentioned in the research statement under Impact. There is scope though to further loosen up the text to better suit the spoken performance of the words and to integrate increased commentary and analysis of the included archival footage and audio from the Saturn advertising campaigns. I would forgive the poor audio quality of the voiceover if it could be better deployed as part of a strategy to reveal insights, make perspicacious observations and direct my attention to intriguing, perhaps even revelatory connections and points of friction. I strongly urge the creator to lean more into the possibilities of what the video essay can do. For example, there is scope to incorporate the stated research goals of the video more explicitly in the voice over text to enlist the viewer in the project of encountering the ‘unexpected discursive frameworks that emerge between now and then, language and matter, commerce and culture’.

The statement that the work is seeking to ‘juxtapose and reorganize fragments of Saturn’s past to stimulate the more contemporary ruination of the company’ is unclear. Perhaps ‘stimulate’ is a typo? It is also likely that there needs to be more context regarding the Saturn company’s ‘contemporary ruination’ provided for non-USA based viewers.

The hope that the video essay will ‘serve as both a discreet encounter with the material of Saturn’s ruins and a model for how one might entreat other material to disclose its identities and rhetorical culture’ appears to be potentially engaging with new materialist conceptions of objecthood without citing key, contemporary thinkers in this area. It would be good to be clearer about the conceptual framework that is underpinning the theoretical approach being taken so that the ontology for the research is more clearly articulated. There is also scope for a more cohesive design to the conceptual framework or a more effective drawing together of the sources that have been cited so that we can see the resulting video essay as a reasonable outcome of bringing these different strands of thought into contact.

I am missing a clearer understanding of the aesthetic choices that have been made in the video essay itself. Tell me why the essay starts off by showing company adverts rather than the photographs taken as accompaniment to the introductory voiceover. Tell me what we are looking for or meant to see in the advertisements being shown. Tell me why the choice was made to run the advertisements in full. The weirdness of the advertising footage (e.g. prom night/leaving high school and the people not cars commercials) is quite compelling but makes it very difficult to focus on the content of the voice over. Perhaps there is potential to pause and rewind footage at moments where both sound and image are currently carrying important, perplexing or thought-provoking content.

A more rigorous approach to citing archival material used in the project is required. I am left wondering how the interview voices have been sourced, whether they are the creator’s own interviews or if they are drawn from the Saturn Company’s promotional material. It is important that citation information is included in the film.

The epilogue of the full, uncommented Rolls Royce commercial is an awkward note to end on. I think I understand the connection the creator is trying to make but it does not quite land, leaving the piece to finish on a perplexing note.

I encourage the filmmaking to further iterate the work, perhaps even looking to masters of the film/video essay form such as Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Harun Farocki, Black Audio Film Collective (Handsworth Songs), even Adam Curtis and Michael Moore for possible techniques to apply. I am intrigued by the ideas the creator is exploring but there is potential to take these much further and more effectively align the aesthetic choices with the thesis that is being prosecuted. I look forward to seeing the work after further refinements have been undertaken.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response.