Vital Infrastructures: The Affects, Power, and Environments of Infrastructural Media
Maren Loveland is a 2022-2023 “Mending and Transforming” Graduate Student Fellow
In a 1939 issue of the Daily Worker, a headline reads, “‘Uncle Sam,’ Producer of Vital Films.’” As the brief article explains, in 1939, the United States government began distributing state-produced films to the general public, who could watch federal cinema at their local “labor and church organizations” as well as various “schools and societies.”
These silent and sound motion pictures were produced by a variety of agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, and the Department of the Interior, among many others, and covered a broad range of topics, with the article bringing attention to two films in particular: “Posture” and “Stop Silicosis.” The article, therefore, suggests that these “vital” films are just that—they are essential instructions from the state on how to properly live, how to prolong life, and how to interact with the environment.
Moreover, I consider infrastructure to be an existential form, and as such, infrastructure must be understood as permeating through all facets of life in both creative and destructive ways.
One of the most prominent topics of state-sponsored “vital” cinema is the documentation of infrastructural projects like dams, roads, bridges, and other terraforming ventures. Similar to the supposedly life-sustaining qualities of federal filmmaking, public infrastructures are often touted as indispensable systems actively structuring the everyday tasks of life. Like the cinema that captures these projects on film, public infrastructures are intensely visual objects that demand to be seen, documented, and preserved.
In my research, I examine the interconnected vitalities of infrastructure and media by analyzing films and other kinds of narratives and texts produced by and about the state’s vital infrastructures, focusing specifically on media created by the Bonneville Power Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Moreover, I consider infrastructure to be an existential form, and as such, infrastructure must be understood as permeating through all facets of life in both creative and destructive ways. With this in mind, my research is interested in bringing to light how infrastructures and their mediations structure ways of living and dying, and ultimately, understanding relationships between human and nonhuman beings with greater clarity.
In order to accomplish this task, my research is devoted to analyzing the media archives of two infrastructural projects: the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) archive of cemetery relocation surveys and materials, and the rich film and photography archives of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), an agency of the Bureau of Reclamation.
By drawing attention to the media archives created in, around, and about infrastructures, I argue that infrastructures are media apparatuses of the state, controlling the distribution of state power(s) through the production of carefully designed films, photographs, maps, and records. In the same moment that infrastructural agencies like the TVA and BPA terraformed environments to accommodate the creation of nuclear and electrical power projects, they simultaneously became invested in controlling landscapes of cultural and political power.
Maren Loveland is a dual-PhD student in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice whose research focuses on the relationship between media, infrastructure, and the environment. She specializes in twentieth-century literature and film studies, documentary studies, energy humanities, and critical race theory.