Neptune Frost: Movies Minute by Minute(Timecodes)

A minute-by-minute analysis of Anisia Uzeyman’s and Saul Williams’ film, Neptune Frost (2021). This book traces the complex structure of the film, working through its rich tapestry of images and sounds while exploring its dual themes of resource exploitation and extraction and gender oppression. Neptune Frost shows how Africa stands at both ends of the production cycle: minerals are mined from the soil and sent to the West to make electronic devices, and the detritus of broken and obsolete devices is ultimately sent back to Africa to be abandoned in waste dumps. An indigenous community of hackers establishes a utopian community in the midst of these wastes and seeks to seize power over the network. At the same time, the movie centers upon a trans character, who starts out as a man and then transitions into a woman. She flees patriarchal domination and abuse and, almost magically, embodies the counter-power of resistance. This is all conveyed in the unusual form of a science fiction musical. Visions of altered technology are extrapolated ever so slightly beyond what actually exists while song and dance convey the desires, dreams, and solidarities of characters who are rarely given voice in more mainstream cinema. The movie gives accessible human and more-than-human expression to the usually hidden forces that lie beneath the world we take for granted.

Table of Contents:
Preface Minutes 1-101 Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Steve Shaviro is Professor Emeritus of English at Wayne State University, USA, after forty years of university teaching. He has published numerous books about film and music videos, and about science fiction, including Digital Music Videos (2017), Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), and Cinematic Body (1993).

Review :
Neptune Frost is an extraordinarily dense audiovisual experience, full of quick but oftentimes global transformations. The formal experimentation nevertheless holds the viewer, sustaining a paradoxical continuity despite incessant change; as Steven Shaviro convincingly argues, “there are no meta-levels at all.” This paradoxical situation means that the film can both maintain a vibe and leave the viewer feeling like they need a guide. This book is the perfect answer: Shaviro’s minute-by-minute engagement keeps the reader immanent to the flow of events; his eye for detail, punctuated by interpretive and philosophical asides, respects the vibe while gently guiding us to greater understanding. Steven Shaviro’s close textual reading of the groundbreaking film Neptune Frost is a tour-de-force, scene-by-scene exegesis of Saul Williams’s and Anisia Uzeyman’s Afrofuturist masterpiece. Moving beyond conventional film criticism, Shaviro offers a precise and deeply engaging reading of the film’s revolutionary politics and its kaleidoscopic visual and sonic poetry. Ideal for scholars and students alike, this book is a masterclass of one of the most significant speculative texts of the 21st century. In this unique companion guide, Steven Shaviro unravels and reweaves the complex fabrics and landscapes within Neptune Frost’s alternate world. Each event and gesture becomes a nested time–sound–image portal for his commentary, looping outward and back in refrains that reveal a planet-wide mesh of contexts and implications. From the geopolitics of coltan mining to the film’s distinctive production history and aesthetic of accretion and connection, Shaviro approaches the film as braids and sheaves of polyglossic, imbricated interactions. His text co-creates, with the film, a structure of feeling that re-sounds and celebrates the multidimensional political resolve embedded in every frame.