Phenomena that glue us to screens, such as gambling (Dow Schüll 2012), clickbait, or binge-watching, may offer examples to study how sticky media affect our behavior and feelings. By choosing and placing films or objects side by side, curatorial decisions can also create desired or unwanted connections through stickiness. The level of such stickiness can be measured to see which types of content cause especially long periods of dwelling (Brinberg et.al. Some traces can be found in concepts referring to the “stickiness” of media content that creates deep investment and is likely to be spread (Jenkins/Ford/Green 2013:5). Sticky objects are connected in “a chain of effects” (91), their relations traceable through times and spaces. Stickiness can be “what objects do to other objects” (Ahmed 2014:91). How can we conceptually think of these (un-)desirabilities of stickiness in relation to objects in film and media studies? This technique also permeates digital infrastructures as part of cut&paste culture. Using glue to repair an object might get our hands sticky. Stickiness can repair and mend, or accelerate the decomposition and destruction of materials. The archival storage of magnetic tapes may cause “Sticky Shed Syndrome”: over time the stock can shed a residue that makes it stick together, slowly hiding away the content between increasingly sticky layers of material (Schüller 2014). Adhesive tape ages differently compared to celluloid. At the same time, this posed new challenges to archival and restoration work. The introduction of sticky tape in editing rooms of the 1960s allowed for more flexibility in the editor’s work as its use was more forgiving than former gluing techniques with film cement (Turquety/Gaudreault 2018:254). Sometimes we want to avoid stickiness, and sometimes we need it. Just like in the Filmkleberin, we invite you to think through these sticky instances and interstices in which glue, paste, gender, care(ful) work, creation, and destruction are (re)configured as, through, or with film. Cutting, gluing, and pasting enable creative restructuring and care of film but are also used for censorship and control (Hennessy 2021). When stickiness is part of the operation, creating and destroying go hand in hand. They throw tomatoes at the screen and eventually tear it apart. She mixes up boxes of film material, involuntarily sticking together a chaotic yet subversive compilation that causes dramatic reactions from the cinema audience. Daydreaming about a man, the Filmkleberin (a female editor, lit. The 1925 short film Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat… opens with women dressed in lab coats using scissors and glue to cut and paste together strips of film. This international conference is organized by the Graduate Research Training Program 2279 “ Configurations of Film” Argument
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