Picture Cycle
Semiotext(e)/MIT, 2019

Picture Cycle
Amazon

With her debut collection Beauty Talk & Monsters in 2007, Masha Tupitsyn established a new genre of hybrid writing that melds film criticism, philosophy, and autobiography. Picture Cycle continues Tupitsyn’s multi-genre investigation of the personal and cultural annals of memory, identity, and spectatorship, both on and off the screen. Composed over a ten year period, Picture Cycle is a pioneering collection whose sharp and knowing vignette-like essays form a critical autobiography of the daily images in our lives. Deftly covering a range of theoretical and cinematic frameworks with rigor, Tupitsyn traces here the quickly vanishing line between onscreen and off-screen, pre-digital and post-digital. The result is a unique intellectual study of the uncanny formation of our life’s biographies through images.

Audio readings of "I Give You My Word" and "Famous Tombs" (read by Caitlin Mulligan)

"Picture Cycle is a brilliant work of cultural criticism. At once lyrical and incisively analytical, it investigates, with great acuity and undercurrent of mourning, 'the new emotional schematic,' where lives and screens become hauntingly inseparable. 'Digital means no breath…What is time now but a perfect body double?' In essays that reach back into pre-digital childhood, and fast forward into an ever-spreading simulacrum, Masha Tupitsyn’s gaze is always vibrant, curious, and compellingly alert to the telling detail and revealing contradiction. From the films of Robert Bresson to Diane Keaton’s clothing to the nature of sound, these formally inventive essays bring to mind—in their rhythmic vibrancy and intellectual range—both Gertrude Stein and John Berger, as they illuminate with beauty and tenderness a world that 'stopped being The World and became something else.'
-Laurie Sheck, A Monster’s Notes

"Masha Tupitsyn’s singular style avoids the binary trappings of neo-Luddite editorialists, who hypocritically depend upon the digital media they disavow, as well as the accelerationist hubris that attempts to repress the slow organicity of psychic temporality. Picture Cycle is not just a socio-political argument for formal complexity, it is also an artwork that pushes criticism, art, and philosophy towards the immaterial, spectral, and sublime while maintaining exemplary attention to formal detail. Pressing against our lossless digital surfaces, Tupitsyn uncovers cuts, dissolves, frames, gaps, and junctures that revive our capacity for making sense. The contemporary apotheosis of the lush and rigorous essays of Barthes and Sontag."
-Felix Bernstein, Burn Book, Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry

"Masha Tupitsyn’s Picture Cycle rescues films of our generation from the memory hole to which everything but box office is now consigned. Her writing is intimate and analytical,
laced with radiant perceptions about movie stars, memory, and lost time."
-A. S. Hamrah, The Earth Dies Streaming

"If Emily Dickinson wrote for Variety."
-Kevin Killian

"There is something in this collection for everyone simply because Tupitsyn’s gaze seemingly knows no bounds and, luckily for us, it invigorates each subject upon which it touches...In shaping Picture Cycle as a kind of memoir-of-criticism, Tupitsyn offers the potential for a perpetually capacious cinematic gaze that reflects not only its changing technologies of seeing, but also for exploring the evolving ways of looking that audiences bring to that gaze over the course of their lives...It’s a text that shows us the whole range of a critic who has been trying to figure out movies and the people who make them since she was a child."
-Mary Pappalardo, Full-Stop

"Masha Tupitsyn’s remarkable, essay-collection, Picture Cycle...cut[s] through the noise of our time with precision, clarity, and elegance. Jean Baudrillard once said that 'as for ideas, everyone has them. What matters is the poetic singularity of the analysis.' Tupitsyn’s singular essays shape shift between analysis, intervention, critique, and lyric essay, meeting her subject matter where it needs to be met. Tupitsyn makes the familiar unfamiliar once again and, at their best, her essays return and transform their subjects back into the strange, unfamiliar, unknown things they once were when we first encountered them. As a writer, what rang most powerfully in my ears as I read this collection was the power and beauty of Tupitsyn’s words at the level of sentence."
-Nicholas Rombes, 3 AM Magazine

"The act of imitation becomes a central theme in Masha Tupitsyn's new collection as she studies the ability of actors and celebrities to manipulate their own image, to oscillate between authenticity and artifice. Tupitsyn relishes in the narrow space between the actor as a public figure and the roles he takes on...She retains an apparent affection for the vantage point of an audience member, pulling from the same impulses, the same set of desires ... she is level headed, sharp and perceptive."
-Garage Magazine (Vice)

Other praise:

“Masha Tupitsyn’s writing is more a détournement of high theory, a rerouting of it on some detours into everyday life. As with the rites and rituals of cinema as the modern faith, so too with its scriptures: Tupitsyn is a kind of heretic. Let dead theory bury dead theory with its gentrified hermeneutics of doubt.”
-McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, I'm Very Into You

"Like all good criticism, [Masha Tupitsyn] takes the esoteric or ineffable elements in art and renders them obvious, instinctive. What is so envy-making about her writing is that she does this with such graciousness that she makes it look easy."
-Moira Donegan, n+1