the chutry experiment

"Entirety" is such a huge claim. The longstanding parallel to this in music has been the "Celestial Jukebox", the Holy Grail of pop music where every song ever made is available to anyone at anytime. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would want everything. To quote Steven Wright, "Where would you put it?"

My own feelings about these projects is that they forget the progress is sometimes contingent on forgetting and there is more than one way to forget. Don't get me wrong. I am a historian by training and I have gone about trying to rescue many a lost object from the conversation of popular music. But I am also postmodern enough to understand than any discussion of "totalities" should get the red flag. Totalitizing efforts have, by nature, fascist tendencies. They demand the kind of compulsory coordination between parties that is frightening and somehow inhumane. Film, records, books... they are part of the humanities and to subject them to totalizing efforts like this somehow scares me. It runs the risk of some sort of Orwellian oversight where we are promised "freedom" but only if our access to information is "total".

Kristin Thompson, IIRC, riffs off of the concept of the Celestial Jukebox, calling Scott's fantasy a kind of Celestial Cineplex. I was actually going to compare Scott's image of a complete cinema library to D.W. Griffith's similar fantasy of a complete, objective cinematic history, that instead of reading up on past events, people could "press the button and see what happened." It's not a perfect fit, but that desire for total access comes across in both cases. Karina's title ("Poking Holes in Tony Scott's Futurism") also highlights the problems with this kind of technophilia.

But Thompson's best point, and it's related to what you're describing is that Scott's comment forgets just how enormous the cinematic library actually is. Even if we ignored documentaries, industrial films, home movies, and other marginal films, having all entertainment films subtitled in multiple languages with multiple versions to avoid local censorship laws, would seem to be a logistical nightmare.

Of course, the logistics would be a nightmare. But in its own way the general conceit of any Celestial Mediaplex is even more nightmarish to me. I guess when I read Thompson's piece that was my main problem: somehow I get the feeling that people want all of this stuff available at all times and, well, I find that problematic for all kinds of social and educational reasons. I know that this is not a popular notion, but somehow the disregard for the necessity of limits is where I find myself at odds. As utopian and post-structural as I may be in my philosophy, that doesn't necessarily translate into what I view is an un-analytical embrace of "accessibility". I could go on about this but this basically is a Benjaminian tension: the issue of "aura" and how it diminishes through reproduction. As much as I love my DVDs and CDs, I am always a more engaged viewer and listener when I know that I am presented with an object for a limited period of time. So, yeah, in short, I think limits are important and somehow this needs to be thought through as well.

This is an interesting argument, Tim. I tend to think that more access is better, but I'm also aware that a desire for a Celestial Mediaplex may be problematic. I think you're right to point out, for instance, that it's probably too easy to celebrate the shattering of the aura, a position I find somewhat seductive for a variety of reasons.