For Karel Doing's Meni (1992–94)

There is an exacerbated form of scenography, of intense questioning of time and space through the body: dance. In choreography, bodies make the spatial relations amongst phenomena explicit and their trajectories intensify them. Dominique Païni has referred to the “choreographic fatality of cinematic invention”—in extreme cases, with dance, a character is its place and the body is the only place. How can two kinds of movement be confronted— that of movies and that of dance? What kinds of figures do these encounters produce? To what degree does dance shed light on cinema?

Several statements and preliminary observations are required. First, reflections on cinema have taken very little account of the extraordinary culture of movement dance has developed. One could even say these reflections have ignored dance to the point of exercising a kind of permanent hold-up on the question of movement—as witnessed, for example, by the title of the wonderful catalogue published by the Musée National d’Art Moderne’s film department: L’art du movement (The Art of Movement). Suggestive and appropriate as this title may be, it also seems singularly imperialist: “the art of movement” is also, first and foremost, a definition of dance itself. On the contrary, it is necessary to bring a bit of choreographic culture back into cinema, to consider how dance flourishes and blossoms in films, how it informs and even structures cinema—especially if the cinema does not want to know about it.

We will much more easily discern dance's deep inf luence on cinema if we avoid their typical disciplinary crossovers, that is, dance's three standardized uses in movies: filmed dance performances, musical comedy and ethnological recordings. It is therefore necessary to describe a field that has not yet been established: non-scientific instances of dance on film. Balls, surprise parties, celebrations, games and excitement expressed in dance: all opportunities to show non-skilled dancing when it is not yet an art, but still an exercise, not a repertoire but a bodily practice— while, symmetrically, cinema does not serve and is not ruled by dance the way musical comedies and ethnographic films tend to be.

Introduction

In this chapter I offer a scene-by-scene analysis of one of Hitchcock's most important films, his 1927 silent classic, The Lodger. This type of analysis is different from the approaches pursued in the other chapters in this book, but I have in mind the same ambition despite the shift in method. I want to illustrate several of the broader issues at work in Hitchcock's films as these are revealed not by placing the work under a specific philosophic or ideological lens, but by adhering strictly to the task of describing the film's various tableaux in sufficient detail as makes apparent the underlying principles on which the narrative is based. In other words, I construct my argument as a sequence of scenic analyses. However, rather than train my eye on a single scene, or mise en scène, I consider the film as Hitchcock might have described it: the arrangement of individual elements in the style of cinematic montage. The relative brevity of the film makes this a more feasible approach than is possible with one of his later, and thereby more complex, films. Moreover, the fact that the film is silent eliminates the need to consider the relevance of sound as a contributory element in the design of the production.

Yet I would be guilty of misdirecting my reader should I be understood as saying that these are the only reasons why I have selected The Lodger for this form of analysis. There is a further reason for choosing this film over the later, more mature works, and that is the fact that the argument can readily be made that The Lodger is the first of his films to define for Hitchcock the cin¬ematic aesthetic that would come to signify his style, his narrative interests, his directorial preoccupations – in short, his artistic vision.

This proposition is not an original proclamation. In 1966, Hitchcock himself commented that The Lodger “was the first time I exercised my style […] you might almost say it was my first picture.” In offering this description, Hitchcock was hinting at the idea that with this early, black and white, silent picture he had come to understand his role as a filmmaker; that is, he could look back to 1927 and see, in nascent form, the formal properties of all his later works.

In a discussion of the hermeneutical problem of symbolism, Paul Ricoeur draws attention to the double-sided nature of discourse. Multivocality or polysemy, Ricoeur points out, is a constitutive feature of all human communication. Meaning is a plurality, a kind of semiotic surplus. “When I speak,” Ricoeur says, “I realize only a part of the potential signified.” This condition, as Derrida famously argued, is the “indefinite referral of signifier to signifier […] which gives the signified meaning no respite.” Meanings are excessive, spilling beyond the perimeters delimited by dictionary definitions. The problem of symbolism, according to Ricoeur, is how communicants make sense out of signs which are duplicitous by their very nature, for if “only a part of the potential signified” is realized in a communicational event, then what passes the outskirts of our understanding undetected is an infinity of interpretative

possibilities. When we communicate, it is by virtue of our capacity to limit ourselves to partial conceptions of the world that any comprehension can occur.

Yet despite this semantic partialness, our communications are intelligible, a consequence of the astonishing collaboration between symbols, reference, and contexts. But the fact that our semantic intentions are accomplished at all indicates that we manage to arrive at mutual understanding in the face of persistent alternative interpretations. Our concentration on a single intended meaning does not neutralize other potential interpretations, Ricoeur states, but is facilitated by the individualizing focus of specific units of speech, such as sentences. Indeed, Ricoeur maintains that

Introduction

One of the lessons my students have taught me over the course of many Hitchcock seminars is that The Birds (1961) can be a difficult film to interpret. There are several reasons for this opinion, of course, some focused on the surrealistic atmosphere Hitchcock achieves in the film, others concentrated on the way the narrative casually brings the quotidian world into contact with the fantastic. Naturally, my students recognize these issues and regularly bring them forward for discussion, but this is rarely their main concern. Indeed, their principal complaint regarding The Birds is that the film fails to conclude with the traditional offer of a unifying resolution.

This argument is not easily refuted, for there is no disputing that the film concludes on a bleak note, just as there is no disputing that the nature of the narrative's problematic all but guarantees no easy escape from the birds – figuratively, of course, and perhaps in a more literal sense as well. But then, Hitchcock's tendency was often to leave his viewers suspended between apprehension and frustration, at times preferring uneasiness to contentment as a concluding sentiment. The Birds follows this pattern closely, leaving its audience suspended over an abyss of terrifying uncertainty, with Hitchcock refusing the call for the satisfaction of release. Owing to the discomfort produced by being held in a state of suspension, it is hardly surprising that this feeling of deferment is experienced by many as a disappointment.

My students’ protest rarely includes displeasure that the film closes unhappily because the expected romantic liaison has potentially been frustrated, or because a beloved character has been sacrificed to the mayhem. Instead, they object to the fact that The Birds doesn't actually end – at least not in the conventional sense. And it is on this point that they frequently raise an interesting argument that focuses not on the conventions of the Hollywood film, but on the empirical problem of causation.

In this chapter, we address one of the most famous manifestations of the supernatural in the Gothic: the ghostly. First, to define terms; ‘ghostly’ refers broadly to supernatural manifestations of spiritual entities. I will throughout differentiate between ghosts (the spirits of the deceased) and apparitions (supernatural manifestations appearing human more broadly). The emphasis in Gothic dream accounts on the interpretation of an accepted ‘event’ cannot be directly transferred to a consideration of the ghostly. Outside the fictional world, the ubiquity and continued mystery of dreams left them firmly within the remit of theological interpretation. ‘Ghost’-sightings, on the contrary, were usually experienced at second hand. The ‘evidence’ for the ghostly was almost always ‘less than the evidence of our senses’ (Hume 1795, 17), and encountered, and challenged, as testimony. Ghost testimony was particularly suspicious as it was often related to private (rather than public) experience and associated with heightened, unpredictable emotions capable of distorting perception. It was moreover frequently declaimed a priori the result of ignorance and either enthusiasm or superstition. The enduring association of ghost stories, articulated in John Locke's ‘Of Education’ (1698), with the ‘indiscretion of servants’ and nursemaids’ tales (1727, 81) connected ghost ‘testimony’ with the lower classes, women and youth rather than the ‘ideal’ educated rational adult male subject. For Hume and other sceptics, moreover, ghost tales were a form of testimony in which ‘the incredibility of a fact…might invalidate’ the testimony (Hume 1795, 23). In both contemporary ghost discourse and Gothic fiction, then, the focus is not only on the interpretation of ghost-sightings but on their very possibility.

Before investigating the particularities of ‘ghost’ discourse in the period, it is worth noting that while I am writing separately on the ‘dream’ and the ‘ghost’, the contemporary distinction was not so clear cut. As a reflexive reaction, the idea of a ghostly encounter being ‘just a dream’ certainly appears in contemporary accounts. For example, in the anonymous Life after Death (1758), in the account of George Villiers' ghost, the ghost-seer ‘believed all this to be a Dream, and considered it no otherwise’ (1758, 45).

Bellomont

In “The Background,” the opening chapter of A Backward Glance, Wharton ties her ecological awakening to a specific moment in her childhood: “I cannot remember when the grasses first spoke to me, though I think it was when, a few years later, one of my uncles took me with some little cousins, to spend a long spring day in some marshy woods near Mamaroneck.” It is especially notable that she connects this awakening to the Hudson Valley, an area that features prominently in some of her novels. As an adult writing about an event that took place many decades before, Wharton includes vivid tangible detail regarding blossoms and sward. Westchester county was “where the earth was starred with pink trailing arbutus, where pouch-like white and rosy flowers grew in a swamp, and leafless branches against the sky were netted with buds of mother-of pearl.”

I propose here that Wharton's literary narratives restage and reassess this ecological awakening or moment of being through “garden plots.” She indicates how her creative faculty flows from a heightened consciousness of this natural terrain:

Wharton's conception of a “coiled” imagination—implying a living organism—invites comparison with Katherine Mansfield's “love” for a type of artistic “mind” that “must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two” and “paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind”. For Wharton, as for Mansfield, gardens comprise “such a subtle combination of the artificial and the natural—that is, partly, the secret of their charm.” Wharton's garden imagery shows how she tunes her own aesthetic gifts to the frequency of “things” that make visible the point where domesticated (human) nature and the wild (psychic) hinterlands contend, negotiate and converge. Wharton crafts her own version of “negative capability” here—an acute responsiveness to “dream,” fancies, native auras and subliminal potencies that emanate from local soil.

Methods

Data included meeting minutes (i.e., transcripts recorded during advisory council/committee meetings), news documents (including newspaper articles, press releases, newspaper blogs and news transcripts), and remote interviews with representatives and participating stakeholders from the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Using the appearance of mass coral bleaching events along the Florida Reef Tract as a temporal threshold, denoting a shift from historical to contemporary ecosystem functionality and management needs, I compiled a total of 1,122 individual data points (n = 1,122) from both organizations, FKNMS (n = 541) and SEFCRI (n = 581), throughout the summer of 2021.

News document data were collected from the Nexis Uni database, which initially revealed over 10,000 results when searching “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” or “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative.” However, many of these results were irrelevant within the scope of this study; therefore, modifiers were added to narrow the search results. First, for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, 179 documents were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” AND “management.” These results were then filtered using the category “Newspapers” and the date range “1996 - present.” The reason I focused on newspaper articles was to make the amount of FKNMS news data more manageable. Additionally, 1996 was selected as a starting point because the first mass bleaching event to occur in Florida after the creation of the FKNMS was in 1997. Of the 179 results, 79 were deemed relevant to this study, and 100 were excluded. The results were manually sorted to determine their relevance to this research. Any articles that were outside the scope of this study were therefore excluded. For example, one article focused on new funding for habitat restoration in the Everglades National Park and mentioned both the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and “management” in that context. However, this had no direct relevance to the management of the Florida Reef Tract (Wadlow, 2010).

Second, for the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative, 99 results were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative” OR “SEFCRI” OR “Ecosystem Conservation Area.” Because SEFCRI is a newer organization (established in 2003), there was no need to limit the date range.

“Danger of Death.” A sign suddenly opens up from the crotch of the hermaphrodite whose separated limbs appear one by one to the accompaniment of a drum roll against the black canvas of the Hotel of Dramatic Folies. In Le sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930), Jean Cocteau invents graphic creatures that cannot be defined based on criteria of fullness or conservation but instead, criteria of dispersion, heteromorphism and redundancy contrary to any classical economy: He returns figures to their concrete state of corporeal sketches. Still, Cocteau does not renounce anything: In cinema, “[t]he two-dimensionality of film produces the illusion of the physical world without any need for supplementation,” in cinema, the slightest trace of a silhouette creates hope for a body full of its powers and faculties.

Horror, sci-fi and fantasy films use formal dynamics that deform or blur appearances; in some films, figurative syntax itself becomes the subject to the point of sometimes hindering effects of “corporal supplementation” and freeing up possibilities that allow the human silhouette to refer to other figurative forms. The ability of a figural movement to avoid crystallizing in order to continue on its own and proclaim itself an autonomous force is described in Cat People ( Jacques Tourneur, 1942) with a rigor that Charles Tesson has described. Tourneur's film is not only concerned with invisibility and irrepresentability, but also with the principles of cinematic figuration: How does a constellation of visual and sonic signs dispersed across the discontinuity of time and space form a figure? By sketching its incarnation, Cat People deals with the question in its formal purity.

“Pictures—Get Rid of Them”: Cat People, the Latticework

The swimming pool sequence quickly appears like a metaphor for cinema’s power of fascination: a play of shadows and sounds, silhouettes and light. But it is the strangest and most suspect being, Irena (Simone Simon), who turns the light back on so that all of reality finds itself infected by monstrosity: Anxiety leaves behind the plastic register to address the proliferation of motifs, their capacity to multiply, reproduce, contaminate each other. In the absence of an origin that draws together the traces that pretend to point it out, the sign acquires its full importance.

In a letter to Bernard Berenson's secretary Nicky Mariano on May 31, 1932, Wharton described the Sibylline mountains thus: “The run today was indescribably beautiful, with changing skies & such endless plays of mountain forms—.” Her response to the shape-shifting plasticity of this terrain is suggestive of the ways in which summits and peaks function in Wharton's fiction more broadly. Her writing project evinces an abiding and acute fascination with the metaphorical, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of mountains. Her eye-catching stress on “plays” here implies that these landforms become, in her oeuvre, much more than a source of creative inspiration. They operate as a “stage” for heroic striving or galling tragedy; a site of arduous, even transformative physical and emotional struggle; or a lyrical “performance” in which heightened states of feeling are converted into the sensuous particularities of narrative language. In the previous part of this book, Lily Bart saw the Maritime Alps from her window, as if it were a boundary, an unconscious demarcation of space. This second part considers not only the Alpine milieu but other specific examples of mountainous nature on both sides of the Atlantic that feature in Wharton's fiction. Given the dense mesh of cultural, biographical and philosophical concerns that emerge through the conjunction of Wharton and mountains, the challenge facing the researcher is the imposition of some cogent structure on a topic that rings with so many resonances. It is vital to remember that, as Linda Costanzo Cahir proposes: “Wharton was born amid the dark and bright energies of American romanticism.” I will show that Wharton's subtle evocation of the varied phenomena found among the snowy peaks and precipices often confronts—and rethinks—two legacies of what we might call “Romantic” mountain affect: the attribution of moral qualities to wild nature and awe of “sublime” vastness.

Astrid Bracke argues that “ecocriticism has long broadened beyond its original concern with wilderness and non-fiction writing to incorporate a wider variety of environments and texts.” The second part of this book construes key Wharton texts through this ecocritical lens, arguing that mountains and hills can be interpreted as “edgelands at an altitude.” According to Marion Shoard, “edgelands” exist between “town and country” where “there has developed a new type of landscape different from either and endowed with distinctive characteristics of its own.

In her 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton refers to her own literary production as her “secret garden”: “Therefore I shall try to depict the growth and unfolding of the plants in my secret garden, from the seed to the shrub-top—for I have no intention of magnifying my vegetation into trees!” It is a striking choice of metaphor, but not a surprising one: Wharton was passionate about the arts of writing and gardening. Parkland, subsistence plots and ornamental gardens feature conspicuously in her life and work. Indeed, Renée Somers contends that Wharton dedicated so much of her time to studying “the complex relationships that exist between people and their built environments,” as well as shifting conceptions of the garden's cultural meaning, scope and worth, that we should view her as a “spatial activist.” Somers rightly prioritizes Wharton as an author for whom the garden or park was an “imagined” as well as a “material” zone; and to get a better purchase on that imagined zone she became fluent in, and savvy about, the socio-economic discourses in which that imagining was expressed. Somers has proven useful in reminding scholars to look at Wharton's fictional gardens not only in terms of her deep knowledge of environmental history, or her appreciation of certain large-scale landscape designers. We should also consider how her characters, especially female protagonists, use these areas—to anchor themselves socially (in a world of money, marriage and fashion), emotionally, morally, even spiritually.

Wharton embraced the chance to develop ambitious estate designs for her myriad properties: The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts; the Pavilion Colombe and Castel Sainte-Claire in France. Her library contained work by the Michigan-born Liberty Hyde Bailey, one of the most industrious and eloquent horticulturalists, rural journalists and botanists in the early years of the twentieth century. Hyde Bailey's avowed ambition was to help America arrive on the world stage as a self-assured and robust civilization. This would be attained, he averred, by pushing gardening into the realm of a national art form: constructing “great pictures out-of-doors.” Wharton, like Hyde Bailey and Sarah Orne Jewett, saw intriguing links and contrasts between horticultural labor and cultivating unexpected configurations of narrative pathways.

In the face of rapid global environmental change, there has been an interdisciplinary movement among scientists to reconsider how ecosystems are managed. Governing in the Anthropocene, or the age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the Earth's climate and environment, comes with novel considerations. As the human population continues to grow, interactions between people and the environment are becoming more common and more complicated. These interactions are often described as socio-ecological systems, or the relationships between linked human and natural systems (Folke, 2006; Folke et al., 2005; Ostrom, 2009; Walker et al., 2004).

Due to the fact that coastal communities rely on coral reef ecosystems, the relationships between them are important to consider as a single socio-ecological system (Cinner et al., 2012; Cinner et al., 2016; Kittinger et al., 2016). This means that impacts to the reef, through human action or natural change, can come back to impact human systems like economies and cultures. For example, fishermen access a reef for different species, such as conch, lobster, snapper and grouper. These different anglers might overlap in their target areas, limiting the ability of other reef users, such as divers, to view these species. People looking to develop stretches of the coastline for condos may clear coastal dunes, resulting in cloudier water that inhibits both angler and diver activity. A member of the public that may never even see a reef firsthand might place a high value on a healthy reef merely existing so that they can be passed down to their children. Decision-makers are tasked with understanding these overlapping uses, and designing management systems to balance uses while maintaining essential features of the reef ecosystem.

Dr. Elinor Ostrom, a pioneer of the socio-ecological system concept, likens the complexity of a resource system to the complexity of a biological organism, where many subsystems interact to produce feedback loops which compose a greater whole (Ostrom, 2009). While the idea of a socio-ecological system was initially developed to help explain the interconnected nature of people and their environment, it has since become a staple within the field of natural resources management being applied to topics as diverse as cattle ranching, forestry and coral reef conservation (Berkes et al., 2000; Fischer, 2018; Herrero-Jáuregui et al., 2018; Pendleton et al., 2016; Walker et al., 2004).

Life Sketch and Works

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 19, 1930, to Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl A. Hansberry. Her home was a center of African American social, economic, political, and cultural life. She grew up in an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a powerful realtor who has built his fortune on the sale and rental of kitchenettes to relieve the crowded housing conditions of the African Americans. He won a Supreme Court case against housing discrimination. Her mother was a ward committee woman who helped to manage the buildings and tenants. The parents taught their four children pride in themselves and in their race. In African American Writers Conference in 1959, Hansberry said, “I was born black and a female” (qtd. in Burke 125). She, thus, acknowledged her identity of being black and female. This double consciousness marks her dramatic writing.

In 1938, Carl Hansberry moved his family into a “restricted” (Carter 40) area near the University of Chicago to test real estate agreements excluding African Americans. Mobs threw bricks and concrete stabs through the family's window toward them. Hansberry recalls her “desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our house all night with a loaded German luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in [The U. S. Supreme Court]” (qtd. in Burke 125). This incident forms one of the themes of A Raisin in the Sun in which an African American family tries to move from a ghetto into the suburbs.

In 1944, Lorraine graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary School. During 1948 and 1950, she attended University of Wisconsin studying art, literature, and drama and stage design. In the early 1950s, she worked as a journalist and associate editor for Freedom, an African American progressive newspaper in New York City founded by Paul Robeson. During this time, undercurrents of social protests were mounting and these protests filled the pages of Freedom. In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff and they moved to Greenwich Village where she began writing. Their settlement in Greenwich Village forms the setting for her play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. In 1964, her marriage to Nemiroff ends in divorce, but their creative collaboration continues. And she dies of cancer on January 12, 1965, at the age of thirty-four.

Methods

Case selection

The 2015 Port of Miami dredging project in Florida, United States, was the selected case study for this research. An environmental dispute emerged due to the organization of local stakeholders who were concerned over the uncertainty over ecological impacts of these projects on reefs. The project took place in Miami, which is a popular destination in the tropics, whose economy is strongly tied to trade and the tourism industry. Furthermore, the port project takes place in a wealthy location based on gross domestic products and has institutions and resources that allow for coalitions to emerge. We apply the Narrative Policy Framework as the theoretical lens to assess how narrative strategies were used to influence policy outcomes regarding these port projects.

Research design

The case study is the research design for this study, and it is appropriate because it allows the researcher an in-depth investigation to answer why and how decisions were made, examines contemporary events over which the researcher has no control over and enables multiple sources of data to converge toward an explanation (Yin, 2018). The project specifically uses a case-study design and mixed methods to provide more rigorous and robust findings (Creswell & Clark, 2019; Johnson et al., 2007; Yin, 2018). Mixed methods research is when a researcher combines qualitative and quantitative elements of research methods and integrates multiple forms of data (Creswell & Clark, 2019). We collected document and interview data from local stakeholders involved in the port project to identify the narrative strategies that were employed.

Data collection

For the Port of Miami case study, data were collected from four sources: the Nexis Uni database, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Jacksonville District news archive, the Miami WaterKeeper press and blog archive, and the World Access News database. A total of n = 103 documents were collected, which consisted of news releases, articles and position statements. Using the search terms “Miami” and “Deep Dredge Project” between 2010 and 2020 in Nexis Uni resulted in n = 65 documents. This date range was chosen because political leaders announced the start of the deep dredge project in 2010, and even though the project was completed in 2015, coral mortality reports and papers were published from 2016 to 2019.

Introduction

What did Alfred Hitchcock mean by the concept, pure cinema? The question is worth asking not only because Hitchcock frequently spoke about pure cinema, but also because his many references to the idea of cinematic purity were anything but consistent. Equivocation can be charming at times, of course, but it can also be confusing. That Hitchcock was equivocal as to how he framed his conception of pure cinema may be a bit of both, but however one regards his tendency for semantic slippage his lack of precision has not passed unnoticed among Hitchcock scholars. For instance, Thomas Leitch says that Hitchcock seems to have understood pure cinema in three different ways: as an aesthetic concern based on the principle of montage, as a technical matter rooted in a particular style of editing, and as an empirical issue best understood in relation to audience response. This list guides my analysis in this chapter, though I include a fourth item I refer to as the primacy of the visual. Of course, these categories are not completely isolated from one another as we will see shortly. Furthermore, my claim that Hitchcock was inconsistent is neither a slight nor an accusation. In fact, it may turn out that the differ¬ent ways in which he developed his notions of cinematic purity are joined at deeper epistemological levels despite their surface differences.

The fact that Hitchcock offered different answers when questioned about his theory of pure cinema has prompted some critics to regard the concept with suspicion. For instance, the variation that is evident in Leitch's three formulations prompts him to conclude that Hitchcock's understanding of pure cinema was “dated, self-aggrandizing, and inconsistent.” Yet even as he acknowledges the slipperiness of pure cinema, Leitch concludes that the importance of the concept for “both Hitchcock and cinema in general can hardly be overstated.

This chapter deals with an intense and mediated form of the encounter that could be called the “visual study.” What is a visual study? The form gathers together a group of filmic enterprises that are at once numerous, diverse and contemporary. It involves a direct, face-to-face encounter between a “readymade” image and a figurative project that comments upon it—or, to put it another way, the study of an image using the very means of the image itself. What are the techniques, forms, stakes, constraints and models, what is the corpus corresponding to such an investigation? Straight away, five problems arise.

• 1. The primordial question that every visual study raises and reworks can be formulated thus: “What can an image do?” Can an image explain, criticize, argue, demonstrate, reach a conclusion—and if so, how? Does it suffice, as Godard has believed for many years, to simply place one image after another? Does the comparison clinch an argument? And why is it not enough to have a single image, that is, an absent or missing image?

• 2. As compared with the written study of an image, is a visual study capable of analytical initiatives? Or to put this differently, is visual study another version of literary ekphrasis (description), or rather does it offer new analytical models?

• 3. To these instrumental questions, another of a more theoretical type can be added: As every analysis assumes or presumes a particular conception of history, how does a visual study reflect its own relation to history?

• 4. The visual study refers to two non-literary, non-linguistic models: the musical study, that is, the exploration in music of a technical formula; and the pictorial study, at once the copy of a work which defines the “school” in which the artist is an apprentice, and an analytical departure from it. The serial studies of Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, and Velásquez by Picasso—their hermeneutic power analyzed by Hubert Damisch in response to Michel Foucault's account of Las Meninas—offer a major example. What is the relation of the cinematic study to these two prior forms?

• 5. Finally, a problem of method: Can we really analyze a visual study? Isn't it enough to simply describe it?

Research Methods

Research design

This case study uses an exploratory sequential research design, where qualitative data is collected first, followed by quantitative analysis to further our understanding of qualitative results (Yin, 2009). The purpose behind exploratory sequential-design studies is that the qualitative findings can inform the quantitative model and in our case become a new theoretical framework for why lawmakers support coral conservation policy (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). We used qualitative methods to characterize the messages and themes that political entrepreneurs used to describe their rationale for supporting bipartisan coral reef conservation bills. Quantitative analysis of these statements examines (1) whether there were significant differences between Republicans and Democrats over the ways they framed the problem; and (2) whether support for these bills (i.e., co-sponsorship and “yea” roll-call votes) could be predicted by representatives’ jurisdictions being located in coastal zones and/or adjacent to coral reefs. Roll-call votes occur when a representative or senator votes “yea” or “nay,” so that the names of members voting on each side are recorded, compared to voice votes which do not record the stance taken by individual members (U.S. Senate, 2021). Thus, the qualitative findings (how lawmakers defined the problem) informs the quantitative analysis (differences in message content across political parties and spatial/political party variables of interest). We added the spatial variables after recognizing that a compelling alternative explanation for support for coral reef legislation may come from the fact that congressional political entrepreneurs may live next to and therefore care more about coral reef ecosystems, regardless of political party or long-term political ideology. Overall, we are theorizing why lawmakers cross party lines to support conservation legislation for climate-vulnerable ecosystems. Understanding this rationale may help enact future bipartisan climate policy.

Qualitative sampling logic

To understand how policy entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs discussed their rationale for supporting these bills (a process that we conceptualize as “defining the problem in the problem stream”), we collected all statements made on The Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, the Tropical Forest and Coral Reef Conservation Reauthorization Act, and the Offshore Wind for Territories Act. Statements were collected from the Nexis Uni Database, Congressional Record archive on congress .go v, and on the social media platform Twitter for statements made by relevant legislators, NGOs and other members of civil society.