Brian R. Jacobson
Brian Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture.
Jacobson is a historian of modern visual culture and media. His writing about film, art, energy, technology, and the environment has appeared in Representations, Cinema Journal, Screen, Film Quarterly, Framework, Film History, Environmental History, History and Technology, Post45, Early Popular Visual Culture, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television as well as numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Musée d'Orsay. He also writes criticism, including essays and reviews in The Atlantic, the Berlinale Forum, the Literary Review of Canada, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
He is currently completing a book about the visual culture that emerged in and around the petroleum industry in post-World War II France.
Jacobson is the author of The Cinema of Extractions (Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, forthcoming 2025) and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, 2015), a book that situates the world’s first film studios in the architectural and technological developments of urban industrial modernity and argues that cinema should be understood both as a system of environmental regulation and as a critical component of what historians of technology have termed the “human-built world.”
He is the editor of the award-winning book In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020), a volume that examines film, television, art, and new media studios in a range of historical and geographic contexts.
With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited "Media Climates," the Winter 2022 issue of Representations.
Jacobson is the recipient of Fulbright, Social Science Research Council (SSRC, US), Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC, Canada), Carnegie Trust, and other fellowships. He was a 2016-2017 fellow at the University of Rochester Humanities Center and a 2023-2024 fellow at the Cambridge University Centre for Visual Culture.
Jacobson is a historian of modern visual culture and media. His writing about film, art, energy, technology, and the environment has appeared in Representations, Cinema Journal, Screen, Film Quarterly, Framework, Film History, Environmental History, History and Technology, Post45, Early Popular Visual Culture, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television as well as numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Musée d'Orsay. He also writes criticism, including essays and reviews in The Atlantic, the Berlinale Forum, the Literary Review of Canada, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
He is currently completing a book about the visual culture that emerged in and around the petroleum industry in post-World War II France.
Jacobson is the author of The Cinema of Extractions (Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, forthcoming 2025) and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, 2015), a book that situates the world’s first film studios in the architectural and technological developments of urban industrial modernity and argues that cinema should be understood both as a system of environmental regulation and as a critical component of what historians of technology have termed the “human-built world.”
He is the editor of the award-winning book In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020), a volume that examines film, television, art, and new media studios in a range of historical and geographic contexts.
With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited "Media Climates," the Winter 2022 issue of Representations.
Jacobson is the recipient of Fulbright, Social Science Research Council (SSRC, US), Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC, Canada), Carnegie Trust, and other fellowships. He was a 2016-2017 fellow at the University of Rochester Humanities Center and a 2023-2024 fellow at the Cambridge University Centre for Visual Culture.
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Books by Brian R. Jacobson
The Cinema of Extractions explores the ties between the worlds of movies and the materials that make movies possible and between the industries that make movies and the industries that use movies to reshape the world. Jacobson retells the history of cinema through the lens of extraction, considering its roots as a material form and its use as a tool for corporate and industrial world making. He brings together the material and industrial history of cinema with close formal analyses of films that depict extractive processes, juxtaposing early films and classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with industrial films made by companies like Shell Oil. Linking film and media studies with the energy and environmental humanities, this book models innovative historical and materialist approaches to formal film analysis and proposes a new poetics of industrial cinema.
Limina Prize for Best International Cinema Studies Book, Cinéma & Cie (2021) -
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/limina
cinema and architecture
film architecture
cinema architecture
architecture and film
architecture and cinema
Articles by Brian R. Jacobson
The Cinema of Extractions explores the ties between the worlds of movies and the materials that make movies possible and between the industries that make movies and the industries that use movies to reshape the world. Jacobson retells the history of cinema through the lens of extraction, considering its roots as a material form and its use as a tool for corporate and industrial world making. He brings together the material and industrial history of cinema with close formal analyses of films that depict extractive processes, juxtaposing early films and classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with industrial films made by companies like Shell Oil. Linking film and media studies with the energy and environmental humanities, this book models innovative historical and materialist approaches to formal film analysis and proposes a new poetics of industrial cinema.
Limina Prize for Best International Cinema Studies Book, Cinéma & Cie (2021) -
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/limina
cinema and architecture
film architecture
cinema architecture
architecture and film
architecture and cinema
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hollywood-in-flames/#!
A great review by Brian Jacobson (U of Toronto) of _Inhospitable World_ and Hunter Vaughan's _Hollywood's Dirtiest Secret_