By Payton Alexa McCarty-Simas
“But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum.” -Baudrillard
“must a movie ‘exist’ #is it not enough that it brings me joy #goncharov” -Tumblr user valdomarx
In late November 2022, bloggers on Tumblr spent a little over a week creating fanart, exchanging theories and analysis, sharing old Gene Siskel reviews, and posting screenshots from JSTOR articles about a 1973 film written by Martin Scorsese. According to these fans, it was the single most important entry into the gangster canon, has been subject to queer reclamations, and has influenced everything from Scarface to Monsters Inc..[1] The film, Goncharov, never existed. Nor do the articles or reviews tumblr users shared. However, the archive created by Tumblr users (in response to a single post from August 2020) is voluminous and gleefully replicates a wide range of discourses from “excerpts” of academic books to YouTube video essays to popular magazine articles and reviews to the artistic work of fandom itself. Looking back on this fabulous piece of collective mythmaking and archival production, now a year old, I will argue that the cultural production of film/fandom Tumblr playfully highlights the constructed nature of film culture, film theory and the historiographic processes involved in those forms of discourse through the simulacrum of Goncharov and its layered, collaborative analysis. Ultimately, the archive is a self-referential one–– including arguments like this one–– begging the question, what if any distinction can be made between “legitimate” academic historiography and popular cultural production if the critical pastiche at hand is so complete? What can be learned about the process of historiography through its parody?
On August 21, 2020, Tumblr user zootycon-archive posted an image of a pair of boots with a label on the tongue that reads: “the greatest mafia movie ever made/Martin Scorsese presents/GONCHAROV/a Domenico Procacci production/a film by Matteo JWHJ0715/About the Naples Mafia.” The post, asking for an explanation as to why, instead of the brand name, their boots seemed to be advertising a “fake Martin Scorsese movie???” was promptly reblogged with the comment: “this idiot hasn’t seen goncharov.” Later, the updated post prompted user dogsufferage to look into its potential origins, eventually concluding that the shoes were likely intended as a reference to Matteo Garrone’s real 2008 film, Gomorrah, which was indeed produced by Domenico Procacci and “presented,” in its US marketing materials, by Martin Scorsese.[2] On November 18, 2022, user beelzeebub posted a detailed poster for Goncharov, casting Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, John Cazale, and Cybil Shepherd in the film’s central roles in reference to their real roles in classic 1970s gangster and crime films, namely Mean Streets (1973, dir. Martin Scorsese, starring De Niro and Keitel), The Godfather II (1974, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, starring Pacino, De Niro, and Cazale), The French Connection (1971, dir. William Friedkin, starring Hackman), and Taxi Driver (1976, starring De Niro and Shepherd).[3] Quickly, other users began making posts based on this poster, and a basic plot for the film emerged: Discothèque owner Goncharov (De Niro), flees Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union (despite the fact that the fictive film was made in 1973–– absurdism is essential to the meme) with his wife Katya (Cybil Shepherd) and her brother, Valery Michailov (Gene Hackman), finally settling in Naples. Soon, the family meets Andrey “The Banker” Daddano (Harvey Keitel) a mobster with whom Goncharov “has strong sexual tension.” Katya, for her part, meets and becomes deeply emotionally (and potentially sexually) involved with a mysterious woman named Sophia. The plot, in typical gangster fashion, revolves around Goncharov’s rise in the Naples mafia, his loss of moral fiber and intimate ties, and his eventual downfall and death.[4]
The poster that inspired the broader Goncharov phenomenon, which replicates the common practice of creating fan posters for beloved movies on Tumblr, is exemplary of the tone and style of a significant amount of the initial contributions to this meme. Tumblr, a hub for internet fandom culture, is a space of highly participatory creativity unique among social media sites. According to one study of Tumblr fandom, the site is defined by a strong sense of unity and connection on the part of its users, and a ubiquitous use of images in its fandom production.[5] Goncharov reflects the aesthetic forms of cinephile “film Tumblr” as a non-specific, affinity-based form of cultural fandom in many of its practices. For example, sets of stills and fake trailers for Goncharov created through the amalgamation of shots from real films starring the same actors produce posts that appear indistinguishable from other posts on film Tumblr, a space that connects users whose interests are already variegated. For example, one user creates a unified visual style for the nonexistent film by carefully coloring stills of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino from the Godfather films and placing them next to a stylistically similar shot of Cybil Shepherd in the 1980s television show Moonlighting, adding a series of captions “from the film” to unify the stills and create a sense of the film’s plot.[6] The end results of this bricolage are designed to appear indistinguishable from “#aesthetics” posts of other films. Film Tumblr’s already-liberal reappropriation of content from films to create trailers for fanfictions about existing films or “headcanon” trailers for films that don’t exist (for example a version of Anna Karenina starring Katie McGrath and Tom Hiddleston) renders the diegetic reality of the original largely irrelevant, further heightening this sense of indistinguishability.[7]
Similarly, the fluidity of Tumblr users’ relationships to different fandoms makes Goncharov a highly effective meme that reflects the artificiality of film fan culture online more broadly. According to the same study of Tumblr’s fan communities, the site is unique for the “fluidity” of fandom. Rather than engage with one fandom via a page a user has to join, as on Facebook for example, “You are part of the fandom when you think you are,” based on more casual engagement with a wider variety of blogs by users in a more omnivorous form of “cross-pollination,” meaning that users will often encounter mems and fan content from fandoms they do not actively participate in themselves–– and thus media they do not consume.[8] This comes in tandem with the broader logics of the internet, defined by what technology scholar Mark Andrejevic calls “infoglut,” wherein the incomprehensible amount of information available online “has highlighted the incompleteness of any individual account [of any given topic].” An era of information overload coincides, in other words, with the reflexive recognition of the constructed and partial nature of representation both on Tumblr and online more broadly.[9] Goncharov as a simulacrum highlights the constructed nature of all media fandom. As one Tumblr user describes this sensation:
“seen so many posts that are like ‘I was so confused when I saw all this posting about some non-existent movie ‘Goncharov’ like it was real’ I wasn’t. this happens 5 times a week. my dash is routinely filled to the brim with passionate analysis of absurd-sounding movies and tv shows I have never heard of. I never for a second doubted the existence of [goncharov]…. this is Tumblr. this happens daily. not one thought crossed my mind except “ha, looks like a few of my mutuals have a new hyperfixation.” [10]
This post, directly conflating the experience of receiving information about a piece of real, entirely decontextualized media with a piece of media that doesn’t exist outside of, as Baudrillard describes, “the signs which attest its existence,” flattens any distinction between the two and renders it ultimately irrelevant to the experience of enjoyment. Indeed, many posts by others foreground this ironic simulacrum, positing it as central to the meme’s appeal. If to be online is to be “compellingly confronted with the impossibility of ever being fully informed,” and to participate in fandom and meme culture is to, in the words of scholar Line Nybro Peterson, “actively take ownership of the media technologies and platforms… and thus contribute to a ‘bottom-up, consumer-driven process’” based on participation rather than passive consumption, Goncharov becomes a means by which to reappropriate social media spaces from the anonymous algorithms and corporations that control them via the recognition that media in this context is already a simulacrum.[11] [12] As another user puts it: “Goncharov is… a reminder that the internet and social media can be fun. It’s not all algorithms and selling things to you… Sometimes it’s about coming together to have fun over something… meaningful because we gave it meaning.”[13] In a period of what media scholar Jay Owens calls “post-authenticity” online (defined in opposition to the “hipster” sensibility of the late-2000s and 2010s and “the desire to focus on the perceived, more-real ‘essence of things'”), self-representation is so highly mediated, and limited by definition, that irony and meme culture provide “unexpected, witty truths [which emerge] through the most inauthentic, borrowed, or stolen stock photograph content possible,” and thus, “through humor, and exaggeration, and irony—a kind of truth emerges about how people are feeling.”[14]
In much the same way that Goncharov replicates fandom culture by way of irony-inflected simulacrum, the meme also replicates the “artifacts” of film history by producing the forms of evidence scholars use to historicize individual films. In tandem with the production of memes and gifsets, fans created and posted pieces of music “from the score,” “excerpts” from the script, and even photos of “DVD copies” of the film claimed to be found at the local library.[15] [16] [17] In her essay, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” Katherine Hayles examines a dialectical shift in how information functions in the internet age. Whereas before, physical media provided a bounded relationship between signifier and signified, (i.e. a letter key on a typewriter directly corresponds with the letter it produces in physical space), now this relationship is unfixed (i.e. a keystroke produces a letter that can be deleted or moved easily, with no relationship to the physical world) leading to a paradigm shift away from a dialectic of “presence and absence” and towards one of “pattern and randomness,” wherein the relationship between signifier and signified is “arbitrary” and made up of “flickering signifiers.”[18] In this new context of digital information, the internet becomes a “highly heterogeneous and fissured space in which discursive formations based on pattern and randomness jostle and compete with [more traditional] formations based on presence and absence.”[19] The same formulation can be applied to the dynamics of historical “evidence” being parodied by Goncharov. While in the context of a real historical investigation into a difficult-to-track-down film that is unavailable online, the discovery of a DVD copy at a small local library would be integral to researching the subject, because Goncharov is a digital simulacrum, a “flickering signifier” whose substance is predicated on the digital information paradigm of pattern and randomness, the discovery of a “DVD copy” becomes parodic. The humor of this post exists precisely in the discordance of a flickering signifier being translated into an older analogue paradigm because, of course, in these terms though the DVD case may be “present” in the user’s photograph, the film itself is “absent.” A real piece of music produced for Goncharov as a “flickering signifier,” that is then applied outward and replicated across fan trailers and other forms of media that are themselves part of that same simulacrum, is in a sense music “from the film.”
Beyond fandom production, another significant element of the meme is the detailed thematic analysis of the film that fans are producing–– a project that speaks to Tumblr’s value as a pedagogically oriented social media platform. In “Fandom and the Fourth Wave: Youth Digital Feminisms, and Media Fandom on Tumblr,” Briony Hannell argues that in addition to its role as a hub for fandom content creation, Tumblr is defined by its use as a space for self–and collective–education, particularly around issues of visual culture and representation. According to recent surveys conducted of Tumblr users, “‘media representation is a chief concern’… forming ‘the subject of much of their sophisticated criticism, creative production, and pleasure.’ Tumblr has subsequently secured a reputation for its users’ ‘in-depth analysis of representational politics,’” particularly around questions of queer identity and feminism.[20] This phenomenon is often jokingly described by Tumblr users (and the platform) as “Tumblr University.”[21] The same active, participatory practices of fandom more broadly, then, are projected outward into a practice of analysis and meta analysis that, in turn, fundamentally shapes the fandoms on the platform––Goncharov included. “okay but you guys realize our shared obsession with hit mafia drama Goncharov (1973) by Martin Scorsese is just all of us taking a film studies course after we finished our literature seminar on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, here at Tumblr University,” one user posted, making this connection explicit with a reference to another educational meme from 2022.[22] For example, one user mounts a real critique of Scorsese’s filmography using the meme as a vehicle: “i think the reason so many filmbros hate goncharov is because katya actually got fleshed out as a character as opposed to like, most other scorcese [sic] women.” It is also common to encounter links to scholarly articles or excerpts of books or essays on Tumblr, often (though by no means exclusively) in relation to film. Thus, in response to Goncharov, users began posting “excerpts” from articles or screenshots of “top search results” for articles related to the film. This pastiche extends the parody of the process of film history begun by the “evidence” and “archive” of Goncharov itself as created by Tumblr users. Users posted screenshots with photoshopped articles like “Subtextual Homoeroticism as Analogy to Cold War Politics’ -JSTOR,” as well as “excerpts” from nonexistent film history books that neatly parody the rhetoric and discursive structures of academia and popular film criticism simultaneously.[23]
These posts in turn generate discourses and meta-analyses so detailed, their creators have been semi-jokingly called, “tumblr movie theorists” on the site.[25] For example, one user’s text post, attributed to “Francine Rubek and Samson Jian, Under the Queer Gaze (2014, Palgrave Macmillan),” frames Goncharov as a queer underground phenomenon in England under Margaret Thatcher, parodying the conventions of both queer history and film history in the process: “[Goncharov’s] underground cult following became a proxy for queer men to explore the extremes of desire without actually exploring the extremes of desire; the breakdown of the heterosexual marriage… the entanglement of violence and hunger, all drew in an audience of punks, young artists, and counter-culture rebels…”[26] The post goes on to historicize the film as part of a queer scene where audiences would participate during screenings and perform reenactments of scenes from the film in a manner similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Replies to this post participate in heated “debates,” wherein posters discuss queer film history, with some defending the film against accusations of negative representation in a more casual vernacular–– “THIS is why i get so mad when i see kids on tiktok insisting that goncharov shouldn’t be in queer cinema lists… it was a different time… i remember the first time i was at a reenactment and the man playing andrey and katya made a point of using a higher voice for andrey, and i just felt so seen.” This particular poster, a young nonbinary person, is themself engaging in a form of historical performance (they are too young to have seen the fictive film at the “time of its release”) and enacting another element of historical debate around queer media while using it to mount a critique common to disagreements on “film tumblr.”
While most analyses of Goncharov predicate themselves on a largely deadpan tone and queer/feminist perspective, some of them playfully engage with the absurdism of the meme itself, winkingly establishing an academically-coded premise that is then disrupted. For example, one post historicizes Goncharov as lost media until 2006 due to the “actual” mafia trying to destroy it, ending with the entreaty, “Please consider looking into the absolutely batshit history behind that, and then tell me that’s not just as interesting as the actual cyclical ending of the film!” The link within the post is a Rickroll, the ubiquitous early internet meme wherein someone hyperlinks to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 pop song, “Never Gonna Give You Up” at unexpected moments while pretending it’s something else.[27] Because the Goncharov meme is so highly participatory, with Tumblr users circulating links to YouTube for fake trailers, Spotify for “the score,” AO3 for fanfiction, and even Google Docs where a collaborative document maintains internal consistency about the film (itself an academicized space complete with Chicago style footnotes), the Rickroll–– a meme that is both incredibly simple and which was, at one point, so virtually inescapable online as to be unsurprising (even infuriating)––becomes particularly effective in this context due to the intricate attempts at verisimilitude extant in much of the fandom’s “historical” production. The contrast reminds the viewer that Goncharov is, in fact, a meme. This sense of humor is in keeping with some of the more confusing elements of the meme’s raison d’être, the original boot (“Matteo JWHJ0715” is so named, according to Tumblr, because “his father was a license plate”).[28]
While for the most part the logic of Goncharov is remarkably and concertedly consistent, there are limits to this meme’s ability to replicate accurate historiographic discourse about film. For instance, based on the information provided on the tag of the original boot, Martin Scorsese should be listed as the executive producer of Goncharov (“Martin Scorsese Presents”), whereas Matteo Matteo JWHJ0715 should be the director. That being said, this particular discontinuity has provided a separate avenue for “scholarly debate” between Tumblr users, many of whom frame it as an erasure of a less famous director in what one poster called “a Nightmare Before Christmas situation” in one of several references to director Henry Selick, whose work is often (mis)attributed to Tim Burton who produced several of Selick’s films and shares a similar visual style.[29] [30] Another presents the error as a simple marketing tactic in light of a younger, less well-known filmmaker working with an auteur producer: “I get why whoever designed that iconic poster emphasised the more famous, (and let’s be real, the recognised-as-American name), but it’s still sad,” concluding, “If he’d lived longer, JWHJ0715 would surely have been a household name.” Another poster took the opportunity to laud Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s long-time editor: “everyone’s all like ‘scorsese directed goncharov’ ‘no matteo jwhj’… the films true director was editor thelma schoonmaker, who spent over a year whittling down over 30 hrs of footage into the masterpiece we know today.”[31] It is worth noting here, too, that thirty hours of footage for a three hour long film (a 10:1 ratio of unused footage to used,) is more in keeping with the tight shooting schedules of Classical Hollywood, whereas the shooting ratio for The Godfather (a gangster film of comparable length to Goncharov), for example, was approximately 35:1, making this post exceedingly unrealistic.[32] [33] [34] Indeed, the film itself is predicated on Scorsese’s ability to produce a lavish three-hour-long film in 1973 after having directed only small, low-budget feature productions (i.e. Mean Streets). That being said, the tone of this post still evokes a strain of feminist anti-auteurist discourse that captures the sensibility of this sort of conversation if not the precise facts, particularly in the context of a platform characterized by its function as a “democratizing pedagogical force” that facilitates “discussions of media texts [that] offer[s] an informal and accessible entry point for fans” to gain media literacy.”[35]
As a form of ironic digital historiography, Goncharov unintentionally evokes several scholars’ works on queer historiographies. In her essay, “Historiographies of the Invisible,” Jennifer Ponce de León describes the art-activism of the LA-based guerrilla group Pocho Research Society of Erased and In-visible History (PRS) whose work focused on mounting guerilla art in public spaces that informed the public about alternative, anti-hegemonic histories, typically focusing on Latino communities in the city. She uses the term “aesthetics of history” to highlight how “subjects perceive, think, and feel history and their relationship to it, where history is understood as a socially constructed past.”[36] Ponce de León then concludes that this group’s praxis employs the “tactic of critical mimicry… to denaturalize the ideological function of [histories] and challenge their poses of neutrality and claims to universality… a guerrilla practice of historical production… ironizes the authority such institutions wield in producing historical representations.”[37] Similarly, in an essay on the Black lesbian historiographic productions of Cheryl Dunye’s classic “fictional documentary” in The Watermelon Woman (1996), Alana Kumbier posits the film is an act of “critical fabulation” which “exceeds the limits of the archive” to “manifest a history that is present in memory and structures of feeling and absent from the archival record.”[38]
This sort of queer historiography is central to the critical analyses in Goncharov and can often be found on Tumblr more broadly. Steeped in irony and absurdism, this fictive film, unlike the work of the PRS or Cheryl Dunye, is not the product of a directed queer/feminist goal, rather it evokes a collective sentiment that ironizes the hegemonic forces of internet culture and academic discourse, in the process destabilizing institutional authority. In the words of one user, “goncharov (1973) is simply a product of the very human urge to create stories in community and pass them on through word of mouth. we are bored peasants working in the field with no way to pass the time and a need to create folklore,” a sentiment which evokes both nonhegemonic historiography and a desire for organic, unmediated community in a similar fashion to the desire for something to be “meaningful because we gave it meaning,” rather than have information controlled by passive, algorithmic modes of internet consumption.[39] The anti-capitalist sentiment implicit in this post is made tangible in another that “wish[es] every member of the disney-mcu [Marvel Cinematic Universe] marketing team a very happy screaming crying throwing up as they learn that despite every algorithmically targeted test audience development by market analysis megahit they attempt to manufacture” Tumblr users will instead direct their passionate involvement and attention to a nonexistent film “premised entirely on the tag label on a pair of knock off boots.”[40] In so doing, these users directly “[ironize] the authority” of these corporations to control user tastes through the “arbitrary” (to quote Hayles) nature of this anachronistic, absurdist, empty fan production, affectively serving as an expression of how users “feel history and their relationship to it” by way of this flickering signifier that reorients the very logic of the internet by revealing its constructed nature.
Ultimately, Goncharov as a historiographic project provided its own conclusions on its significance before the first think-piece was written about the phenomenon–– less than a week after its inception. Whereas outlets like the Washington Post attempted to historicize Goncharov in relation to the collapse of Twitter, an event that drew renewed attention to the thriving fan communities of Tumblr, user asordidbarwere argues:
truly is a beautiful masterpiece of modern art that an online community largely fueled by fandom and media analysis has come full circle into creating a detailed and thorough pastiche, via gifsets and faux analysis essays and letterboxd reviews and more, of a “forgotten 1970s film classic” that does not actually exist. Goncharov (1973) (the memetic phenomenon) has quickly become one of the most biting statements about the current state of art and its consumption. A work of art that exists not in and of itself, but as a discussion of itself. an analysis of itself. An appreciation of itself. pure unadulterated simulacrum.[41] [42]
Historiographer Hayden White argues that “the historical narrative does not image the things it indicates, it calls to mind images of the things it indicates, the same way that a metaphor does,” concluding that “by drawing historiography nearer to its origins in literary sensibility, we should be able to identify the ideological, because it is the fictive, element in our own discourse.”[43] Though Goncharov as a spontaneous popular form of collective “self fabulation” lacks many of the markers of “legitimate” history, its “artifacts” do call to mind the histories it indicates–– queer and feminist film histories, New Hollywood, and cinephilia in general. Like Dunye’s “fictional documentary,” the meme does allow queer subjects to collectively insert themselves into the historical narrative as “theorists” by not only creating a film full of “sexual tension” between its characters, but by historicizing that fact as well. Goncharov serves to flatten many of the distinctions between legitimate and popular archival practices by revealing the constructed nature of both through pastiche, irony, and “guerrilla historical production,” and by, in Hayden White’s terms, drawing historiography nearer “the fictive, element in our own discourse” by embracing a movie that doesn’t (quite) exist.
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notcaycepollard, “wishing every member of the disney-mcu marketing team a very,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022,https://at.tumblr.com/notcaycepollard/wishing-every-member-of-the-disney-mcu-marketing/6cxqsg8n2qpc
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Owens, Jay. “Post-Authenticity and the Ironic Truths of Meme Culture,” Seizing the Memes of Production. Edited by Bown, Alfie & Bristow, Dan. (Punctum Books, 2019) 77-114. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hptdx.7
Paúl, María Luisa. “Martin Scorsese fans dub ‘Goncharov’ the best mafia film (n)ever made,” November 29, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/29/goncharov-martin-scorsese-movie/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fb_news_token=uxZuaguFq0PEOPO13fso1Q%3D%3D.2NUj55YJmCfZJtoFXKyDiinqN0Ks0rGV9JO%2BE7Jt%2Bwhc5WSSDK6KpiTYZGw%2FS2fgwtDmeiOCKs2BbzKM2Szdh3DIcb6XjCwBClL3siDWDmHg22JsTm44zpt5jh%2FUIcjq0CI9fJFDYjVaJw9ys7RtOj5PrxgvXVRNGmPP8zX0YS28q7lQRLz7WSqjSFUDVZ%2BvBONuSe0eMM%2BeoE07mVRngzj5xWCtr11fiTMO60MlTP%2FzStUCl0FOzA%2F7S37bgGcfP5WB%2FZrRH0%2BHnMYaws6ZepfZ5G23tGgFzcFnLo4kKNxJiHoIkcOvWlPANBsCQden67MUAeH8gFiqEoAGRe1fL7z0YNTjx118qE%2FiY9uvqLY%3D
Ponce de León, Jennifer. “Historiographers of the Invisible.” In Another aesthetics is possible: arts of rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021), 80-125. https://apps-crossref-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/coaccess/coaccess.html?doi=10.1215%2F9781478012788
Scorsese, Martin. Mean Streets. Taplin-Perry-Scorsese Productions, 1973. 1 hr., 52 min.
Scorsese, Martin. Taxi Driver. Bill/Phillips Productions, 1 hr., 54 min.
Sokol, Tony. “The Beauty of The Godfather’s Long Takes.” Den of Geek. April 3, 2022.
tan, “films inspired by Goncharov (1973)” Letterboxd, last updated December 2, 2022, https://letterboxd.com/foxantoine/list/films-inspired-by-goncharov-1973/
tessabennet, “Anyway here are some of my favourite articles on, Goncharov,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://hussyknee.tumblr.com/post/701527808715997184
tichuly, “goncharov (1973) is simply a product of the very human urge to create stories,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/tichuly/goncharov-1973-is-simply-a-product-of-the-very/iyux4k91xfew
trupowieszcz, “CLOCK THEME omg,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/trupowieszcz/okay-guys-so-someone-already-beat-me-to-the-main/9qm89rncpa5q
valdomarx, “must a movie ‘exist,'” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/valdomarx/must-a-movie-exist/4380tt4k051y
White, Hayden. “The Historical Text As Literary Artifact,” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 81-100.
winters-orbit, “I think what I love most about current day tumblr,” Tumblr, November 23, 2022, https://bscully.tumblr.com/post/701720570617790464
wondersmith-and-sons, “The eighties rolled on,” Tumblr, November 22, 2022, https://libertineangel.tumblr.com/post/701621797557288960
zootycon-archive, “fake scorsese movie???,” Tumblr, August 22, 2020, https://hussyknee.tumblr.com/post/701542319589146624/i-got-these-knockoff-boots-online-and-instead-of?_branch_match_id=1132921184403066667&utm_medium=Share&_branch_referrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAAwXBQRKAIAgAwBcRNZ3qN5aYZoATONXv283uzVbE4IN33q572JUxd7OvChEWONTBMxlBFd2rpgSbqhuoXEUIgkQoYk4hgibkfi7zw2Pj6f0BDgBM110AAAA%3D
[1] tan, “films inspired by Goncharov (1973)” Letterboxd, last updated December 2, 2022, https://letterboxd.com/foxantoine/list/films-inspired-by-goncharov-1973/
[2] dogsuffrage, “i got these knockoff boots online,” Tumblr, October 25, 2022. https://tmblr.co/ZFkExmcprov4au00
[3] Beelzeebub, “The greatest mafia movie (n)ever made,” Tumblr, November 18, 2022, https://beelzeebub.Tumblr.com/post/701284869475614720/goncharov-1973-dir-martin-scorsese-the
[4] “Goncharov (1973)” Google Docs, November 21, 2022, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fbcn96MKyc1Bky6c0Ffex4APtar9iNht8ytfZHPpSss/edit#heading=h.cc5r9rw8jo2
[5] Serena Hillman, Jason Procyk, Carman Neustaedter, “Tumblr Fandoms, Community & Culture.” Conference: Proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, 2014, 4 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262246094_Tumblr_fandoms_community_culture.
[6] ms-musers, “Goncharov (1973),” Tumblr, November 21, 2022. https://www.Tumblr.com/ms-musers/701523133165944832/goncharov-1973-dir-martin-scorsese
[7] lady-crowned-with-stars, “I am in love with this video,” Tumblr, December 9, 2018, https://at.Tumblr.com/lady-crowned-with-stars/i-am-in-love-with-this-video-wish-they-truly/xofz4ddws547
[8] Hillman, 4.
[9] Mark Andrejevik, “Infoglut and Clutter Cutting,” in Infoglut: How Too Much Information is Changing the Way We Think and Know, (Routledge, 2013), 15. https://clio.columbia.edu/catalog/15091592
[10] e-the-village-cryptid, “seen so many posts that are like,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://at.Tumblr.com/e-the-village-cryptid/seen-so-many-posts-that-are-like-i-was-so/knxgut9zxhy8
[11] Infoglut, 12-13.
[12] Line Nybro Petersen, “Sherlock fans talk: Mediatized talk on tumblr,” Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 12(1) 91.
[13] winters-orbit, “I think what I love most about current day tumblr,” Tumblr, November 23, 2022, https://bscully.tumblr.com/post/701720570617790464
[14] Jay Owens, “Post-Authenticity and the Ironic Truths of Meme Culture,” Seizing the Memes of Production, Ed. by Alfie Bown & Dan Bristow, (Punctum Books, 2019) 90, 105, 103 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hptdx.7
[15] trupowieszcz, “CLOCK THEME omg,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/trupowieszcz/okay-guys-so-someone-already-beat-me-to-the-main/9qm89rncpa5q
[16] frunbuns,”I can’t stop thinking about this part of the script,” Tumblr, November 23, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/frunbuns/cant-stop-thinking-about-this-part-of-the-script/xhxjrdtnslap
[17] artfulgruesome, “You’ll never believe what I shelved last night,” Tumblr, November 24, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/artfulgruesome/big-news/2m9nktr2m4s5
[18] Katherine Hayles,”Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” How we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 26, 33, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25147527.pdf
[19] Ibid., 28.
[20] Briony Hannell, Fandom and the Fourth Wave: Youth Digital Feminisms, and Media Fandom on Tumblr, (University of East Anglia, 2020), 167. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/80510/1/2020HannellBJPhD.pdf
[21] Nichole Dominik Marchesi, “Tumblr University,” Know Your Meme, December 2019, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tumblr-school.
[22] “Dracula Daily” was a meme wherein Tumblr users collectively read Brahm Stoker’s Dracula over the course of a year, one emailed chapter at a time, on the same timeframe as the epistolary novel itself. (See:Phillip Hamilton, “Dracula Daily,” Know Your Meme, May 2022, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/dracula-daily)
[23] tessabennet, “Anyway here are some of my favourite articles on, Goncharov,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://hussyknee.tumblr.com/post/701527808715997184
[25] leona-florianova, “tumblr movie theorists,” November 21, 2022, https://leona-florianova.tumblr.com/post/701559760420585472/i-think-one-of-the-funniest-goncharov-things-so
[26] wondersmith-and-sons, “The eighties rolled on,” Tumblr, November 22, 2022, https://libertineangel.tumblr.com/post/701621797557288960
[27] formerlyanon, ” the absolutely batshit history behind that,” Tumblr, November 19, 2022 https://at.tumblr.com/formerlyanon/yeah-sure-everyones-finally-talking-about/9gxz0saodgfu
[28] HELLOITSBEES, “his mother was italian and his father was a license plate,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://agendratum.tumblr.com/post/701560702514741248
[29] countesschewi, “Nightmare Before Christmas situation,” Tumblr, November 19, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/countesschewi/seeing-a-lot-of-people-not-quote-understand-this/oka8r1v5e3oq
[30] morepopcornplease, “fake Goncharov fans don’t even realize that Scorsese did NOT direct the 1973 cult classic,” Tumblr, November 20, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/morepopcornplease/fake-goncharov-fans-dont-even-realize-that/dfjgwmiabjjt
[31] muppeted, “everyone’s all like ‘scorsese directed goncharov’ ‘no matteo jwhj,” Tumblr, November 20, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/muppeted/everyones-all-like-scorsese-directed-goncharov/dpgjz895kz02
[32] Murch, Walter. “Cuts and Shadow Cuts,” In The Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, 2nd ed., (Silman-James Press, 2001), 2.
[33] Tony Sokol, “The Beauty of The Godfather’s Long Takes,” Den of Geek, April 3, 2022
[34] Justin Morrow, “Shooting Ratios, From Hitchcock to ‘Fury Road’ to ‘Primer’ (and What They Mean to You),” No Film School, March 4, 2016, https://nofilmschool.com/2016/03/shooting-ratios-mad-max-fury-road-primer-hitchcock
[35] Hannell, 165.
[36] Jennifer Ponce de León, “Historiographers of the Invisible,” in Another aesthetics is possible : arts of rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021), 85. https://apps-crossref-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/coaccess/coaccess.html?doi=10.1215%2F9781478012788
[37] Ibid., 81.
[38]Alana Kumbier, “Inventing History: The Watermelon Woman and Archive Activism,” in Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive, Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, (Sacramento, California: Litwin Books 2014).https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip&db=e025xna&AN=2145293&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
[39] tichuly, “goncharov (1973) is simply a product of the very human urge to create stories,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/tichuly/goncharov-1973-is-simply-a-product-of-the-very/iyux4k91xfew
[40] notcaycepollard, “wishing every member of the disney-mcu marketing team a very,” Tumblr, November 21, 2022,https://at.tumblr.com/notcaycepollard/wishing-every-member-of-the-disney-mcu-marketing/6cxqsg8n2qpc
[41] asordidbarwere, “truly is a beautiful masterpiece of modern art,” Tumblr, November 20, 2022, https://at.tumblr.com/asordidbarwere/truly-is-a-beautiful-masterpiece-of-modern-art/kqg6x4cn8dts
[42] María Luisa Paúl, “Martin Scorsese fans dub ‘Goncharov’ the best mafia film (n)ever made,” November 29, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11/29/goncharov-martin-scorsese-movie/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fb_news_token=uxZuaguFq0PEOPO13fso1Q%3D%3D.2NUj55YJmCfZJtoFXKyDiinqN0Ks0rGV9JO%2BE7Jt%2Bwhc5WSSDK6KpiTYZGw%2FS2fgwtDmeiOCKs2BbzKM2Szdh3DIcb6XjCwBClL3siDWDmHg22JsTm44zpt5jh%2FUIcjq0CI9fJFDYjVaJw9ys7RtOj5PrxgvXVRNGmPP8zX0YS28q7lQRLz7WSqjSFUDVZ%2BvBONuSe0eMM%2BeoE07mVRngzj5xWCtr11fiTMO60MlTP%2FzStUCl0FOzA%2F7S37bgGcfP5WB%2FZrRH0%2BHnMYaws6ZepfZ5G23tGgFzcFnLo4kKNxJiHoIkcOvWlPANBsCQden67MUAeH8gFiqEoAGRe1fL7z0YNTjx118qE%2FiY9uvqLY%3D
[43] Hayden White, “The Historical Text As Literary Artifact,” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 91.
Author Bio: Payton McCarty-Simas is a freelance writer and Columbia University MA student studying film. Their academic and critical writing focuses primarily on horror, sexuality, and psychedelia. Payton’s work has been featured in Film Daze and The Brooklyn Rail among others. Their first book is scheduled for release in early 2025.
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