LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film

ZerO Books, 2011


If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? In today’s surplus world of communication overload and cultural clutter, writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn turns to the media matrix of Twitter to explore the changing ways that we construct and consume narrative. Loosely applying the discerning aphorism—a compressed genre in itself—to a 21st century context, LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM offers meditations on film and popular culture that resonant with laconic meaning and personal insight while getting to the heart of the matter. Inspired by Chris Marker's free-associative film impressions in La Jetèe and Sans Soleil, LACONIA is part film diary, part cultural inventory, and part mashup. Pulling from an array of film, popular culture, books, and mainstream media, it offers penetrating critical commentary on an increasingly muddled virtual world. LACONIA consists of brick by brick prose, as Tupitsyn thinks in sentences and lines that culminate in an architecture of thinking.

Praise for LACONIA

"In LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Films, Masha Tupitsyn explores the curious intersection of the print tradition of books and the micro-narrative model of Twitter. The project is essentially an experiment that appropriates the forms of social media — soundbites, fragmented commentary, quotes, condensed reactions — in a work of film criticism that preserves the cultural purpose of the genre but divorces it from its traditional medium of essayistic narrative. What makes Tupitsyn’s project exceptional is that it reverse-engineers the now-familiar frameworks of Twitter anthologies — unlike Tweets from Tahrir, for instance, which sought to capture of a slice of the social narrative about the Egyptian revolution by culling tweets after the fact, Tupitsyn’s approach put the intention of the book before the composition of each tweet, so that every tweet was deliberately crafted with the larger narrative in mind. Rather than a cohesive analysis of one idea at length, however, that narrative instead connects dots across diverse sources and constructs a mosaic of cultural patterns that explore the relationships between films. At its heart, the book is as much about film itself as it is about how Tupitsyn thinks about film in the age of infinite connectivity and on a platform that has more in common with poetry than with prose. LACONIA is an ingenious experiment in fragmented film criticism."
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

"Masha Tupitsyn helped establish the genre of 'micro-criticism' with LACONIA---a series of studied, architecturally arranged tweets on cinema."
—Flavorwire, "A Brief and Incomplete Survey of New Types of Online Literature"

"In Masha Tupitsyn’s extraordinary new book of cultural criticism through film criticism, LACONIA: 1200 Tweets on Film, the use of the tweet-form dramatizes the kinds of remembering and thinking at stake in contemporary social media and the culture it informs and is informed by. How can we begin today to think about the relationship between virtual memory and cultural memory; between digital memory and embodied memory? So much of what is moving in Tupitsyn’s criticism is her way of locating, animating, and mourning the loss of the material, the loss of texture, the loss of the real—where material, texture and realness are qualities as spiritual and moral as they are embodied; where fidelity to those qualities can be a way of calling out a culture of violent alienation and commodification. The idea of a radiant wholeness only elusively possible through fragments is an apt way of thinking about LACONIA. The book’s radical and engaged nostalgia is also a radical and engaged anger, indignance and grief. What has been lost? And what can be recovered?

Rather than respond to the corruption of brevity with a long-form book or essay, LACONIA does something more provocative; it takes brevity back. So that the wit, clarity and concision of the short form are organized around, rallied around, the kind of criticism that currently feels as sorely needed as it is sometimes sorely lacking: a deeply feminist criticism, invested in the personal and the interpersonal (and their burgeoning degradation at the hands of individualist and capitalist culture), a profound attention to how dehumanizing and exploitative gender relations and equally dehumanizing and exploitative systems of production manifest themselves in popular representation—and perhaps most of all, an attention to attention...LACONIA is testament to the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute act (each fragment time-stamped and dated) of what Susan Sontag called paying attention to the world."
—Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

"When I first read Masha Tupitsyn’s hybrid-genre book Beauty Talk & Monsters, I was completely floored by it…There is something beautiful about the way Tupitsyn 'reads' culture; how she honors the connections and resonances of the media she encounters; the way it is processed, assimilated and re-invented when it is filtered through her perception; intermingling with specific memories and preoccupations. Tupitsyn integrates the subjective and the critical in a way that demonstrates the specificity of our encounters with media. Both Beauty Talk & Monsters and LACONIA could be described as a literary approach to film criticism, but it’s also fitting to describe the works as a cinematic approach to literary writing…Tupitsyn’s commentary on film accomplishes what a lot of contemporary cultural criticism fails to do— it’s accessible while still being complex, philosophical while being specific; it strikes a balance between the subjective and the social in its approach. Her perspective is totally singular and specific to her way of looking without making you feel bludgeoned by some kind of Critic Ego. By the end of the book, you actually do get a feel for the architecture of Tupitsyn’s thinking.”
—Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

"The 1200 tweets that constitute Masha Tupitsyn's LACONIA are--each one--an aphorism in a bottle set adrift into the midst of all the other crisscrossing messages that movies and the media universe have spawned and continually and more or less blindly emit. Everything is happening in real time – not recollected in tranquility, but intercepted in passing – even when the messages emanate from the deep past or (perhaps) a future around the next bend. It's a collage of the present moment; a continuous and unyielding dialogue; open-ended and extremely alert to the barrage of signals that has become our home."
—Geoffrey O'Brien, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century

“In 2011, New York-based critic Masha Tupitsyn published LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (Zero Books). In this Twitter feed in book form, the author’s impressions of films scroll down the page, interspersed with dates, times and the breaks imposed by the 140-character limit of the medium. It’s less of a news feed - Tupitsyn jumps from new releases to films she has just caught up with, as well as revisited classics—more an experiment in how criticism could be built, line by line, from in-the-moment responses to art. Reading LACONIA, you notice all the elisions and interruptions not only endemic to Twitter, but typical of how thought and impression and memory jump, and snag in odd places. The exception is when lines of dialogue are quoted: they have an aphoristic charge perfect for Twitter. They recall the way dialogue samples are used in music as discrete events, hooks that propel a song. Since LACONIA, Tupitsyn has continued to experiment with writing about film online, now mostly using Tumblr. On her multi-media blog Love Dog, she samples from film more directly, at first with images, more recently with embedded passages of dialogue or monologues from films. This has built up to her film Love Sounds, a preview of which can be seen on the site. Intended to run to 24 hours, in the manner of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). Love Sounds edits together dialogue from English-speaking films on the subject of romantic love—declarations of it, descriptions of a desired person, and so on. The internet enables and perhaps even encourages this kind of accumulative response to film. But Tupitsyn’s claim that her work ‘dematerializes cinema’s visual legacy and reconstitutes it as an all-tonal history of listening’ prompts the observation that a parallel process of writing cinema’s history from an aural perspective has been happening—most notably in rap, metal ,and dance but also in more experimental fields of music—for many years.

RP Boo’s music contrasts with the unaltered dialogue in Tupitsyn’s Love Sounds, both artists define a relationship between cinema, sound, and cultural memory through digital tools. One involves a feat of recollection that would be near-impossible without the web’s own accumulated digital memories; the other demonstrates the freedom to break apart and reconfigure memory. Aural histories of film can now be embedded on blogs, written on social media; it’s no surprise that they will also be written in music software, on dancefloors, in headphones."

-Frances Morgan, “Soundings: Frances Morgan Hears the Movies Being Rewritten in Music,” Sight and Sound

"Tupitsyn dedicated her latest book, LACONIA: 1200 Tweets on Film, to the film critic Robin Wood, a writer known for elegantly lasered analysis, as well as his refusal to split that analysis from the personal and political. LACONIA is of a feather, and not gimmickly so at all -- it’s a prismatic mix of head and heart, love and death, onscreen and off, plus the gem notes of Joubert, the tightness of LeWitt’s geometry. It’s so chiseled that at first I wished Tupitsyn’d let herself laugh a little, but then I realized she just wasn’t wasting any of her 140 characters, just wasn’t using any to waffle or acquiesce, as folks so often do on the Internet. I finished it in a rush, with a rush."
—Bookslut

"Masha Tupitsyns LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film considers the question of intimacy and visual culture at large through the private/public sphere of the internet. LACONIA is a fascinating experiment in both form and thought, creating what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant would call an intimate public…LACONIA, written entirely on Twitter between April 2009 and June 2010, uses popular culture to a create a personal world. It stays focused and intimate; personal albeit public. Tupitsyn seeks to do what seems almost impossible—inhabiting the present moment to its fullest. The book calls to mind Blaise Pascal’s Penséesor Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, fragmented texts or aphorisms that are innately spiritual and political in nature. LACONIA, however, is not so much steeped in religious mysticism as much as it is a demystification of image, celebrity, and consumerism. It is at once diary, film criticism, and cultural collage.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

"Reading Masha Tupitsyn’s LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, you make notes in the margin in the same aphoristic manner as the content. I came to LACONIA cynically and skeptically. I was suspicious of the delegation of content’s role to form; that by tweeting about film Tupitsyn was hoping that this device would hold far more than it should: the burden and necessity of argument. Because the form itself already made oblique comment on the subject at hand, the content was relieved of its obligation to be rigorously argued. Yet somehow the opposite is true, content sweeps up form, and LACONIA creates a rigor all its own, a remarkable series of tumbling thoughts through and about visual culture. At points it is quite stunning. The tweets carry over to one another, reflect, argue with one another. The potential problems of this sort of formal construction – that each tweet would be isolated, irrelevant to anything beyond itself, a casual observation that has no particular interest or quality – dissolve as you read. Because you read. You make narratives, connections. Including Tupitsyn herself."
—Glasgow Review of Books

"There's something about the way Masha Tupitsyn's mind works when she addresses gender and film. It is different from how other contemporary feminist theorists do it. Amid so much detached deconstruction, Tupitsyn's criticism is refreshingly full of life. LACONIA, a document of Tupitsyn's public thoughts on film, is a stream of intimate, immediate, and specific reflections on movies, as well as a broad and sustained interrogation of things like whether we can any longer truly see corporatized cities like LA and NY other than in old movies, how to understand David Lynch's women, and whether there is any real possibility for connection in social media. Or for that matter, in watching films."
—Make/Shift Magazine

"The sheer number of films and books to be encountered in LACONIA is remarkable: 421, as indexed in order of appearance at the back of what is an extraordinary (and somehow unlikely) book..With LACONIA, Tupitsyn does for Twitter what Kevin Killian did for the Amazon review in his two-volume Selected Amazon Reviews. They’ve taken the structures and conventions of networking features on internet mega-sites and attuned and altered them into art forms and vehicles for their particular, nuanced, extraordinary artistic intelligences."
--3AM