the chutry experiment

« June 2005 | Main | August 2005 »

July 31, 2005

Instant Replay

I've been thinking about the concept and technology of instant replay this afternoon. Because of my interest in media and time, I've thought about replay in passing from time to time, but while I was reading an essay about video this morning, I began thinking about how instant replay might represent a fairly significant shift in television's temporal flows. Most of the sources I've encountered identify ABC's Wide World of Sports ("the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat") broadcast of the 1963 Army-Navy fooball game as the original use of instant replay, at least as we understand it from sports broadcasts. The technology was invented by Jim Wheeler, who has also been very active in video preservation efforts. The concept apparently gained some degree of cultural awareness fairly quickly. By 1967, Green Bay Packers offensive lineman Jerry Kramer titled his diary of the Packers' Super Bowl season, Instant Replay.

But digging around the web, I noticed that the technology had other early uses, including some military applications (surprise!), allowing the Navy to add stop-action to jets' on-board cameras in order to avoid bumpy landings (Dennis Dodd's CBS Sportsline story implies that instant replay wasn't used for sporting events until 1964). Dodd speculates that instant replay has changed our viewing habits forever, and on the level of sports scrutiny, our ability to view and review any and every possible play, where every play is now a potential highlight, he's clearly right.

But, on another level, instant replay has a secondary significance that has, perhaps, been overshadowed by the Sports-Centrification of American life ("He...could...go...all...the...way!"). Specifically instant replay, as a concept, invokes what Wolfgang Ernst describes as "that oxymoronic relation between presence and its storage." Ernst pushse the boundaries of what is normally called instant replay, dating it back to the CBS Eevening News broadcast on November 30, 1956, in which, for the first time, a network news program was recorded on videotape for rebroadcast on the west coast.

The archivability of television is now widely accepted of course, whether via videotape, DVD collections of favorite shows, or TiVo (or even through the re-run). But the narrower definition of instant replay seems significant precisely because the manipulation of the temporality (replay/slow motion) of the image becomes the subject of the shot, rather than the technological possibility represented in the news broadcast Ernst describes. It also inaugurates the (illusory?) control over time that had more commonly been associated with the cinema. Ernst even argues, following Samuel Weber, that TV watchers can no longer tell whether a broadcast is "live," unless it is "interactive digital TV," allowing the viewer to participate in the narrative (voting contestants off the show, perhaps), a claim that I'm not quite willing to accept (in fact, some of ESPN's humor derives from our conscious recogniion of the play between live and "pre-recorded" images).

But there are aspects of Ernst's argument about instant replay that I find frustrating, particularly the way that he unpacks the concept of "liveness," which he associates with "amnesia." Ernst argues that "early TV, like radio, is characterized by its lack of storage abilities -- it shows a tendency to amnesia" (632). He later reiterates this perception of televisual amnesia, arguing that "we are made oblivious to the amnesia of TV in the enduring flow of transmission." (633). I don't doubt that countless early TV shows/episodes are "lost," in the sense that no physical recording exists. But the equation of "liveness" with "amnesia" seems imprecise, in part because the programs themselves, particulalry using repetition (of characters, mise-en-scene, or plot elements) to mitigate against amnesia in order to ensure that audiences would be motivated to return, but even the serialization associated with soap operas would seem to work against this notion of amnesia.

Posted by chuck at 11:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"I Have No Script"

Via Green Cine, a 3AM Magazine interview with Jonas Mekas, one of the godfathers of autobiographical cinema. In the interview, Mekas, a Lithuanian-born poet and filmmaker who emigrated to the US, describes his practice of recording hours of footage, often over the course of several years, before compiling that material into a film:

I have no script. The story is me and the people around me. It's there, it's real life and there is no other. I'm not carrying any other story. There is no suspense. There is no violence. There is no drama.

Posted by chuck at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Radio Free Washington

I haven't been in Washington, DC, very long, but it hs quickly become clear to me that DC radio sucks. Other than the NPR station, it's pretty much awful in a Clear-Channelled-for-your-protection sort of way, leaving me longing for Atlanta's twin gods of college radio, Georgia State's Album 88 and Tech's slightly more obscure WREK. So, now that I (finally) have high-speed internet, I've been exploring the wonders of Internet radio.

So far, I've been enjoying Seattle's KEXP quite a bit (thanks for the recommendation, Jason and Dave), and Northeastern University's WRBB looks promising. WREK also happens to be available, so I'm sure I'll be listening in there from time to time. But I'm new to this wonderful world of Internet radio, so I'd love to hear your recommendations. What Internet radio stations/shows do you enjoy? I usually listen to indie rock, punk, alt. country, or hip hop, but I'm open to other suggestions.

Posted by chuck at 12:15 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Instant Replay

I've been thinking about the concept and technology of instant replay this afternoon. Because of my interest in media and time, I've thought about replay in passing from time to time, but while I was reading an essay about video this morning, I began thinking about how instant replay might represent a fairly significant shift in television's temporal flows. Most of the sources I've encountered identify CBS's broadcast of the 1963 Army-Navy fooball game as the original use of instant replay, at least as we understand it from sports broadcasts. The technology was invented by Tony Verna, whose work was recently profiled in Beano Cook's ESPN column on the Top 10 "moments" in college football history. The concept apparently gained some degree of cultural awareness fairly quickly. By 1967, Green Bay Packers offensive lineman Jerry Kramer titled his diary of the Packers' Super Bowl season, Instant Replay.

But digging around the web, I noticed that the technology had other early uses, including some military applications (surprise!), allowing the Navy to add stop-action to jets' on-board cameras in order to avoid bumpy landings (Dennis Dodd's CBS Sportsline story implies that instant replay wasn't used for sporting events until 1964, which isn't quite right). Dodd speculates that instant replay has changed our viewing habits forever, and on the level of sports scrutiny, our ability to view and review any and every possible play, where every play is now a potential highlight, he's clearly right.

But, on another level, instant replay has a secondary significance that has, perhaps, been overshadowed by the Sports-Centerification of American life ("He...could...go...all...the...way!"). Specifically instant replay, as a concept, invokes what Wolfgang Ernst describes as "that oxymoronic relation between presence and its storage." Ernst pushse the boundaries of what is normally called instant replay, dating it back to the CBS Eevening News broadcast on November 30, 1956, in which, for the first time, a network news program was recorded on videotape for rebroadcast on the west coast.

The archivability of television is now widely accepted of course, whether via videotape, DVD collections of favorite shows, or TiVo (or even through the re-run). But the narrower definition of instant replay seems significant precisely because the manipulation of the temporality (replay/slow motion) of the image becomes the subject of the shot, rather than the technological possibility represented in the news broadcast Ernst describes. It also inaugurates the (illusory?) control over time that had more commonly been associated with the cinema. Ernst even argues, following Samuel Weber, that TV watchers can no longer tell whether a broadcast is "live," unless it is "interactive digital TV," allowing the viewer to participate in the narrative (voting contestants off the show, perhaps), a claim that I'm not quite willing to accept (in fact, some of ESPN's humor derives from our conscious recognition of the play between live and "pre-recorded" images).

But there are aspects of Ernst's argument about instant replay that I find frustrating, particularly the way that he unpacks the concept of "liveness," which he associates with "amnesia." Ernst argues that "early TV, like radio, is characterized by its lack of storage abilities -- it shows a tendency to amnesia" (632). He later reiterates this perception of televisual amnesia, arguing that "we are made oblivious to the amnesia of TV in the enduring flow of transmission." (633). I don't doubt that countless early TV shows/episodes are "lost," in the sense that no physical recording exists. But the equation of "liveness" with "amnesia" seems imprecise, in part because the programs themselves, particulalry using repetition (of characters, mise-en-scene, or plot elements) to mitigate against amnesia in order to ensure that audiences would be motivated to return, but even the serialization associated with soap operas would seem to work against this notion of amnesia.

Update: This entry had mistakenly attributed the invention of instant replay to the wrong person. I apologize for any confusion.

Posted by chuck at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 30, 2005

"We Were Street Punks..."

Today's Washington Post features an interview with Jim Jarmusch, whose Broken Flowers will be hitting theaters in the next few days. Word on the street is that Jarmusch's latest is a very good film, so I'm looking forward to it.

The article focuses on Jarmusch's production process, noting that for his films he always retains full creative control. Jarmusch also discusses his excitement at winning the Camera d'Or, the award for best first feature, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984 for Stranger Than Paradise.

Also, folks who live in or around Washington, DC, might be interested to know that the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring is featuring a Jarmusch retrospective this month in celebration of the release of Flowers.

Posted by chuck at 7:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 29, 2005

Video Time

Somehow, I'd missed Mark Hansen's fascinating Spring 2004 Critical Inquiry essay, "The Time of Affect." In the essay, Hansen discusses Bill Viola and Douglas Gordon's experiments with time and video, using their work to explore phenomenological approaches to time-consciousness (specifically the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), while criticizing Deleuze's cinema books for their implicit assumption of a disembodied spectator. It's a great essay, though I feel like I need to revisit it a few times before I'm ready to discuss it in detail.

Instead, I'll use my reading of Hansen's essay to frame my pointer to a couple of essays on video art that have appeared in the last few days. In The Age, there's an article about video artist Bill Viola, whose experiments in slowness generally sound fascinating:

At first glance, the exhibition, appears almost conventional - portraits on a wall. But these portraits move. Slowly. Very slowly. The faces are shown in extreme slow motion and capture every delicate shift of emotion. This is not work that reveals itself instantly. Indeed, some works reveal themselves so slowly that viewers are advised to look, move away, then return. For Viola, that's part of the purpose. Because, as Gandhi once said, there's more to life than increasing its speed>

Many of Viola's images are projected in extreme slow motion, with a brief event often stretched out over several hours, and excerpts of several of his video installations are available at his website. (check out The Passions for one very powerful example of his work). As Viola notes, this approach is also a highly political one:

The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that's been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window.

I'll admit to some ambivalence about Viola's project, at least when it comes to automatically identifying slowness with contemplation, but Viola's project also presents a significant third term for Nick's recent comparison between real-time film and the fragmented, fast cutting of many contemporary films. If Nick is right that viewing real-time film and video may remind us of our own mortality, then Viola's project takes us to another register altogether.

Hansen also mentioned the work of Douglas Gordon, whose 24 Hour Psycho stretches the Hitchock film over a twenty-four hour duration, so that rather than seeing 24 frames per second, the frame changes only every few seconds. Gordon's work, mentioned in the context of an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Musuem (recently profiled in the New York Times). As Hansen points out, it would be impossible to see the entire film in a single sitting (or at least within the limited hours that a museum is open). But what makes the work so powerful, in my reading, is the sense of anticipation. Because most viewers will be familiar with the Hitchcock film, watching and waiting for the next shot to unfold would, I think, make someone acutely aware of her position as a spectator. Hitchcock's film, which itself is acutely aware of its role in positioning spectators, would seem to serve this kind of project very effectively.

Posted by chuck at 12:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 28, 2005

Theorizing Adaptation

Just a quick pointer to Laura's comments at The Valve about the study of literary adaptation. Laura cites Dudley Andrew's claim that adptation theory is "the most narrow and provincial area of film theory." Like Laura, I have some investment in thinking about issues of adaptation. I've published on Charlie Kauffmann's Adaptation, cinematic interpretation of Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, and an essay I wrote about the experience of teaching Fight Club (both the film and the novel) is currently finding its way towards publication. While writing these essays and talking about the differences between the Fight Club novel and film with my students, I struggled to find a satisfactory vocabulary for talking about adaptation. These questions seem valuable to any discussion of film, especially given the prominence of adaptations in film studies and literary studies classrooms.

Laura notes that she

can’t think of another sub-discipline of either literary or film studies which is so widely taught, studied and discussed, at all educational levels and in all types of fora and publications, yet remains so undersupplied with concepts and vocabularies purpose-built for talking about the things (texts? or processes?) under investigation.

She later speculates that this lack of concepts is largely institutional. Adaptation essays that simply compare novel and film are "ast to write and relatively easy to publish." They are also the kinds of books that libraries are more likely to purchase.

But I also think Laura's conclusion that the lack of a developed adaptation theory is "perhaps a manifestation or symptom of adaptation presenting itself to us for consideration: a (naive) response to the way adapted movies irresistibly invite comparison with their sources, openly or furtively." This reliance upon comparison is certainly a complicated problem (and extends even to the "low-brow" adaptations of graphic novels, as this screen shot-comic panel comparison from Sin City indicates). It's tempting to develop these comparisons, even if you don't hold the original in high regard, but such comparisons, even if they account for and appreciate historical differences between the two texts (adaptation theorists that embraced Clueless, for example), I'm not sure that's a sufficient way to establish a more effective vocabulary for thinking about adaptation (this critique becomes more explicit in one of Laura's comments on the same entry).

One possible solution may be to ground these questions historically in a more precise fashion. In the comments (a great discussion in general, by the way), Chris desscribes his work on postwar social problem films and the preference given to literary adaptations during the 1940s, as Hollywood sought greater cultural legitimacy. These historical positionings seem crucial to me, as would a more precise attention to the role of the two media themselves in shaping teh adaptation (or even the decision to adapt). But again, I'm fairly convinced by Laura's argument that a more developed vocabulary for talking about adaptation would contribute to film and literary studies.

Posted by chuck at 2:25 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 27, 2005

Anticipating Southland

Marc mentions the website for Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly's latest film, Southland Tales, due to be released sometime in 2006. Marc notes that the film is set in Los Angeles in the year 2008, with the war in Iraq still ongoing, giving the film an interesting contemporary/political subtext, an aspect of Donnie Darko that I'd argue is often overlooked (in fact, the film's first line of dialogue is Maggie Gyllenhaal's intentionally provocative breakfast table comment that she's "voting for Dukakis").

But for now, I'm more interested in Marc's discussion of a planned 6-volume graphic novel series, with each novel exceeding 100 pages, to be released in advance of the film itself. Marc notes: "It should be interesting to see how these books are pushed, given that Kelly is far from a household name and that graphic novels, despite their renewed academic and cultural status, are far from mainstream reading. Regardless, a six-hundred page prequel story for a film is quite unheard of, especially when it is released before any other chapters of the story have been told."

In a sense, I think it's an interesting gamble, one that can build onto the cult status of Kelly's reputation as the director of Donnie Darko (a status that was powerful enough to score a theaterical release of his Darko director's cut). And as Tim noted in a comment to a recent entry on my blog, the contemporary Hollywood economy may allow for (and even encourage) building on the enthusiasm of a niche audience, creating what might be called a "culture of anticipation" that builds buzz for that film (and I'll be the first to admit that my blog entries are participating in that buzz).

The website itself is fascinating. This screen capture, with its washed out, off-color, left-right divided American flag recalls the iconic flag paintings produced by Jasper Johns, giving the website itself, at least in my experience of it, a slightly haunted quality.

Posted by chuck at 10:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Celluloid Fading

Just a quick blog-and-run entry on a recent New York Times article reporting that film studios have reached an agreement on "new technical standards that will make it easier for movie theaters to show digitally produced movies." The studios, facing the increasing costs of making and marketing movies (but ignoring the fact that they could make cheaper movies), are looking to cut corners (movie film prints cost as mcuha s $1200 each, while digital copies are far cheaper and can even be distributed electronically).

It will take some time for individual theater owners to purchase the projectors, so celluloid will not disappear anytime soon, but I think it's worth emphasizing what is lost when we move to digital projection.

Posted by chuck at 5:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hollywood's Death Spiral

In Slate, Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, discusses what he calls "Hollywood's death spiral," the increasing reliance on profits acquired from the home entertainment divisions of major studios, specifically through pay-per-view and DVD sales and rentals. Epstein challenges recent claims about a "box-office slump," noting that studio revenues have actually increased in the first quarter of 2005 over the same time period last year, adding that the declining audience in theaters "came mainly at the expense of independent, foreign, and documentary movies. For the Hollywood studios (and their subsidaries), in fact, there was no slump at all."

In his article, Epstein also argues that the supposed lull in DVD purchases has also been manufactured to some extent, specifically criticizing media reports about heavy returns on Dreamworks' Shrek 2 DVD that speculated that the DVD boom had reached its peak. In fact, sales of the Shrek 2 DVD outpaces sales of the original film over the first few months of each film's release. But Epstein's larger point is more crucial: "In any case, the attempt to divine an overall "slowdown" in DVDs from the sales of any particular title is dubious: No one knows whether consumers who elected not to buy the title in question bought another title instead (in which case overall sales would be unaffected)." In fact, DVD sales now account for 59 percent of the feature film revenues for studios. Epstein's research is documented in several charts, which show studio receipts for the first quarter of 2004 and 2005; DVD and VHS revenue during the same 3 month intervals; adn finally, what he calls "the rise in the home entertainment economy," in which he tracks the decreasing percentage of revenue derived from theatrical box office.

Essentially, Epstein's major point is that what has changed in the last few years, and dramatically so since 1980, is "the location of the studios' crucial audience." As Epstein notes, in 1948, studios receieved all of their revenues from the box office, but with the advent of video, and now DVD (and other new formats), those numbers have changed considerably. More importantly, the "window" between a film's premiere and its release on DVD has shrunk dramatically. In 1980 (when 55% of profits were still based on box office), when studios wished to "protect" films running in theaters, they established a six month gap between theatrical premiere and DVD release. That gap has been reduced to as little as three to four months for many films, especially for studios seeking to market summer blockbusters as Christmas gifts.

I've summarized Epstein's argument in some detail not only because I find it rather persuasive, but also because I think it points to a significant change in our habits of film spectatorship, a question that ought to be fairly important for film scholars and theorists. Because the home entertainment divisions have established themselves as the power centers in the studios, this may eventually dictate what films receive the greenlight, and it will certainly limit the opportunity for smaller films to slowly build an audience theatrically. Another result is that theaters themselves now rely more heavily on concessions in order to make a profit.

But I also wonder how these industrial factors effect how viewers access films or how they experience them, and this is a difficult argument for me to unpack. We clearly have a situation where more viewers are seeing films at home rather than going out to theaters, and one of the aspects of the filmgoing experience that I value most is the "public" nature of that activity. Even though I'll occasionally have an oblivious tall person sit directly in front of me, I enjoy watching a film with a larger audience, especially when they respond deeply to the film (whether laughing at a comedy or shrieking at a horror film). I realize that watching films at home doesn't imply that you're watching films alone, and there are benefits to watching films at home (it's cheaper, you don't have to watch the pre-show infotainment), but I have to wonder what else is driving this ternd to stay at home rather than seeing movies in the theater.

Thanks to Green Cine for the links.

Posted by chuck at 11:57 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 26, 2005

It's Raining Ads

Via Anne: Researchers in Japan are working on what they call "information rain," which would allow projectors to display images of raindrops hitting the ground, hoping that curious consumers will open their hands allowing small advertisements to be displayed on their open palms.

Anne's right that personal computing--no matter what else it does--will inevitably be a conduit for advertising, as her reference to the interactive ads parodied (portrayed?) in Steve Spielberg's Minority Report illustrates, so this intensified form of advertising should come as no surprise. Science-fiction novels such as Feed and Jennifer Governement have been describing similar advertising phenomena for some time.

But the "information rain" concept really creeps me out. I think, in my case, it has something to do with personal space and the way in which the researchers anticipate how consumers will incorporate the advertisements into their shopping experiences (or perhaps even more specifically onto themselves):

"It's quite natural that you hold out your palm when it starts raining," said Yoko Ishii, a chief researcher in the human interaction project.

"People jot things down on their palms. The palm is the information tool closest to humans," she said.

Much as the Internet gave way to unique pop-up and interactive advertisements, the new technology can develop in its own fashion to find ways to make the hand ads more attractive, she said.

"Advertisements are usually something that's given to you, but it would be different if they showed up on your palms. You would feel more familiar with the message that appears in your personal area," she said.

An advertisement on the body would help convince people that the message is really meant for them, she said.

Posted by chuck at 11:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 25, 2005

Ghostly Machines

I've been revising some of the arguments in my media horror article (I may have more to say about said article's status in the near future), and watching White Noise last night has opened up some of the ideas in that paper considerably. At least one reviewer (I'll track her/him down later) noted that the screenwriter for White Noise ws inspired by the Japanese film, Ringu, which was remade as The Ring and which may have inspired Blair Witch Project as well. But the film has me thinking about some other questions about the portrayal of communications technologies as haunted.

First, I'm trying to think about the role of cell phones and land-line phones in these films. Of course, The Ring's premise includes the fact that viewers of the killer videotape receive a phone call from the dead (usually on a land-line phone). But it also seems significant that the film's major characters often fail to make contact because their cell phones are out of service or out of range at inopportune moments. In White Noise, Jonathan (Michael Keaton) becomes convinced of the existence of EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) when he receives a cell phone call displaying his wife's cell phone number even though he can see that her phone is not in operation. I'm trying to remember similar "haunted" moments involving cell phones in media horror films, but more crucially, this sense of ghostly cell phones seems to be a larger discursive phenomenon. One example I've recently discovered: Digital artist Leslie Sharpe has a “ghost story” for wireless handheld devices (PDAs), Haunt>Pass. She comments that the project is "about a ghost, in the form of an electronic signal, which is discovered haunting the ship. It jumps onto people’s devices." Sharpe's art, of course, expresses a great deal of self-consciousness about the ways in which communications media shape perception, including our concepts of "presence," something I believe to be at the heart of these media horror films.

White Noise also has raised my curiosity about Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), the belief that the dead can communicate with the living via electronic devices, an idea inspired in part by Edison's fantasies of such a device (a more skeptical take is available here). This premise clearly informs White Noise, but it also seems to be a subtext in The Ring, as well. I'm tempted to read the current vogue for EVP in horror films in several unrelated ways, including the continued understanding of electronic technologies as "living" (a concept already unpacked by Jeffrey Sconce). But I also wonder to what extent something like EVP might be connected to blurred definitions of living and dead produced by medical technologies that can keep people alive even when they are, for example, in a permanent vegetative state. In this regard, Bill Frist's tele-diagnosis of Schiavo might be an interesting cultural touchstone. And an early plot twist in White Noise itself hinges on Jonathan's doubt about whether or not his wife is actually dead because her body has not yet been discovered (note: because of the emphasis on shared grief, it's also tempting to wrap the film's pervasive gloominess into some general post 9/11 malaise, but that seems a little too simplistic

Update: The Wikipedia entry on the topic reminds me that Cayce's mother in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition uses a form of EVP to try to communicate with Win (Cayce's dad), who disappeared during the 9/11 attacks.

Update 2: An Indianapolis Star article on "cell phone addiction," which starts with an anecdote about an assignment requiring students to turn off their cell phones for three days. I don't think the article covers any new territory. Cell phone addiction stories are commonplace, as are suggestions that a lost cell phone can cause people to feel absolutely "helpless." Mostly thinking out loud here about how popular narratives about cell phone use overlap with how they are represented in these horror films and novels.

Posted by chuck at 3:40 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

"Dark Acres"

Just came across a Screen Magazine article promoting Tara Wray's autobiographical documentary, Manhattan, Kansas, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. The artcile highlights some of Wray's inspirations for making the doc, including Nicolas Philibert's To Be and To Have, which I've been planning to see for several weeks. The article also mentions many of the challenges involved in making a personal documentary. Wray's description of her interviews with her mother is interesting, especially given the degree to which the camera is often seen as increasing the tension between the documentary filmmaker and her subject:

Sometimes it felt a bit self-indulgent, though, talking about myself to my own camera. But, at this point, enough people have taken an interest in the story. I’ve allowed myself to let go of the fear that I’m just gazing at my navel. Sometimes I held the camera, sometimes I used a tripod. Mostly I just tried not to drop the damn thing. The camera was a really effective distraction for me, a nice buffer between my mother and me – a shield. It was a way for me to feel like I was invisible while still being in the same room as my mom. It would have been way too intense to spend a month with her without the weight of the film pulling me through.

Posted by chuck at 2:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another Book Meme

G Zombie has tagged me with yet another book meme, this time featuring general questions about book collecting practices. Since I've recently moved, these questions are now in the process of being renegotiated, which is a little disorienting.

1. How do you organize your collection?

I separate fact from fiction. American novels go on one giant shelf. British novels go on a smaller shelf. Theory, criticism, and other non-fiction fill the other three shelves. These rules are somewhat fluid, however. I regard Brecht's plays as theory as much as they are drama. And Dennis Rodman's autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be goes on the shelf with my collection of American fiction. I'm also careful to alphebetize each section by author so that I can find that book quickly.

2. What books or records do you keep separate from your collection for easy access?

Until this year, none. My organization made it very easy to find whatever book I needed (plus my theory bookshelves were about three feet from my computer desk). But now that I have a real live office, I've gradually been bringing many of my media history and theory books into my office. I usually keep a few style manuals available for easy access as well.

3. When you take down a book for reference, how long after you finish it does it take you to reshelve it?

Usually when I've finished a final draft of whatever article or chapter I'm currently writing. In some sense, this is a significant ritual for me, providing me with a sense of completion. This process also works really well when I return a huge stack of library books.

4. What resources do you keep separate from your collection because you don't want anyone to know you have it?

None, really. I have a huge baseball card collection (thousands of cards, easily), but I don't currently keep it in my apartment because I move too frequently (3 times since 2000) and don't want to lug them all over the country.

If anyone else wants to play along, they're welcome to do so.

Posted by chuck at 1:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

White Noise (2005)

"Nobody knows whether our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere, but if we can evolve an instrument so delicate to be manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life such an instrument ought to record something." Thomas Edison 1928

White Noise (IMDB), a January 2005 horror film that has no connection to Don DeLillo's novel of the same name, was almost universally reviled when it was released to theaters, and yes, the film is poorly executed, particularly when it comes to the ease with which the main character, Jonathan (Michael Keaton), accepts the film's supernatural premise that we can communicate with the dead through contemporary information technologies (as Cynthia Fuchs notes, the film fails to offer any characters who really question the supposedly scientific premise). Or when it comes to a mildly incoherent final act in which much of the film's violence is grounded in a rather trivial source. It's basically Ghost meets The Ring, but without the pathos of the former and the professional sheen and even the limited pop philosophy of the latter.

But White Noise is interesting, at least in its treatment of haunted media technologies. White Noise opens with a Thomas Edison quotation, fantasizing about the potential for communicating with the dead intercut with television static. In the film's opening scenes, we learn that Jonathan's wife, Anna, is pregnant, which pretty much seals her fate as a character. Jonathan, distraught at his wife's death, eventually meets Raymond, an expert in Electronic Voice Phenomenon, in which the dead communicate with us via our TVs, computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices (Jeffery Sconce's discussion of Haunted Media seems relevant here). Eventually, Jonathan meets others who share his belief in EVP, and there are some potentially interesting time shifts when Jonathan gets messages from characters who won't die for several hours or days (recalling Rene Clair's whimsical newspaper yarn, It Happened Tommorow), but the film shows little self-awareness in unpacking the high concept it introduces.

Still, it's worth asking why this film appears at this particular historical moment. There is an implied post-9/11 subtext: Jonathan's inability to prevent the deaths foreseen by Anna seems to be trying to communicate the impossibility of preventing all meaningless death, a point hammered home by Jonathan who notes that Anna only warns him of deaths that he could potentially prevent ("she didn't warn me about some explosion overseas"). But I'm also intrigued by the film's idea that our communications technologies provide us with some sort of link to the dead. The film's fascination with alienating urban spaces and the flat screens of TVs and computer monitors conveys this desire for spiritual (or emotional) connection rather effectively. These shots, which often show Johnathan simply staring at staic, his face reflected in the dead screen, are the most effective moments in the film, with Fuchs noting that these scenes potentially implicate the viewer of the film:

To indicate John's simultaneous loss of self and slide into self, the film has him literally scritch off the screen, transformed into the very static he can't not watch. It's a striking effect, and gestures toward critiquing the culture that invests in such reflective abstraction and emptiness. Indeed, it almost indicts your desire to see something in nothing.

And, of course, as in many recent horror films, the family subtext (the dead, pregnant wife; Jonathn's rescue of a small child; a daughter's ability to hear from her mother who died in childbirth) virtually overwhelms the film. Unfortunately, White Noise never really follows any of these leads with any degree of interest, which makes it a mediocre horror film, if mildly intriguing in its treatment of our fears about communications technologies.

Posted by chuck at 12:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 24, 2005

Amateurism and the Avant Garde

Nick has recently raised some important questions about the potentially false divide between the post-World War II avant garde and post-war home movie practices. Chris questions some of Nick's arguments, stating that the difference is not merely discursive but registered in the films themselves.

I'm inclined to side with Nick in this discussion in that the framing narratives of DIY amatuer film production in the 1940s-60s are relatively similar to those found in some avant-garde film practices:

Both operated outside the realm of Hollywood. Both worked in genres that were largely absent from the big screen. Both experimented with the camera and openly embraced a logic of mistakes and trial-and-error. If today we associate the cinematic avant garde from that period with a handful of names, then this must be due, in part, to the movement's self-canonization, which was made possible largely through writing

Nick's comments primarily seem to emphasize production issues (how to use the tools available to you as a filmmaker) and have less to do with the individual content of the films. In other words, I don't think the avant garde's later "camp-ironic quotation" of the home movie matters as much as the practices themselves and how the filmmakers in both camps understood themselves. Nick's arguments about self-canonization also seem persuasive to me, although I recognize my own complicity as a critic/scholar in replicating that canon, especially after attending a screening of some of Stan Brakhage's films at the National Gallery of Art yesterday afternoon.

I think Nick's questions about avant-garde and amateur practice are significant, and my still incomplete article on Capturing the Friedmans seeks to tackle some of these issues, especially regarding the documentary's ambivalent relationship to the family's extensive collection of home movies, most of which were taken in the post-WWII context that Nick discusses. The discourses that Nick is unpacking, in my reading at least, can have profound implications for how we think about practices of filmmaking, including the politics of memory often associated with amatuer filmmakers, many of whom saw their practice as a means of remembering and recording family life.

Posted by chuck at 12:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 23, 2005

Hustle & Flow

Craig Brewer's Hustle & Flow (IMDB) tells the story of DJay (played by Crash's Terrence Howard, who will likely score a few acting awards), a small-time Memphis pimp and drug dealer who dreams of becoming a successful hip-hop artist. He's learned from a local bar (Isaac Hayes) owner that local hip-hop legend, Skinny Black (Ludacris), will be in town to hang with his old friends and that DJay's drug connections might come in handy. DJay sees this as his ticket to the top. Slide Skinny Black a demo tape after sharing some weed, and he'll have his ticket out of the ghetto. Add in the mandatory recording sessions, and you've got a Showgirls for crunk. A Rocky for the Dirty South. A. O. Scott sees in this use of genre conventions elements that are "both naïve and cynical," and that mixture might be what colors my own ambivalent response to ths film.

I still haven't decided whether or not I like Brewer's film, which won the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Amy Vincent's washed out cinematography gives Hustle & Flow's Memphis a shabby, run-down quality that beautifully captures the lost souls who inhabit the film. The film also complicates many of cliches of the "star is born" genre. It's no surprise, of course, that the hiphop star Skinny Black turns out to be a shallow party animal who has Forgotten His Roots, the hardscrabble Memphis streets that gave his music soul. But the film does make DJay a more complicated character. While he waxes poetic about our human awareness of our mortality in a potentially powerful opening scene with one of his prostitutes, Nola (Taryn Manning), he is occasionaly abusive towards the prostitutes who work for him and seems oblivious about the difficulty of their work.

The film also does little to contest the misogyny of some aspects of hiphop culture (Laura Sinagra of the Village Voice also notes the demeaning portraits of all of the film's female characters, including the shrill church-going wife of DJay's demo producer, though, to be fair Armond White offers an alternative, class-inflected reading of DJay's relationships with the women who work for him). DJay's first recording is "Whoop that Trick," with all of DJay's friends chanting the catchy hook. While some of DJay's friends gently push him for something more "radio-friendly," the humor of characters such as the white church musician, Shelby (DJ Qualls), singing the hook undermines any real critique. In addition, because these lyrics come from the heart, the pain of the south, as Shelby attests, they are "authentic" and presumably beyond critique.

But Hustle & Flow did hook me with some aspects of its rags to riches fantasy narrative. Terrence Howard's performance was riveting, and the film's implied criticsm of the power politics of the music industry was fairly effective, especially when Skinny Black shows complete disregard for his musical roots. This critique is also evident in the film's final shot, which features DJay walking directly towards the camera repeating his mantra, "Everyone's gotta have a dream." Even with these solid moments, unlike Roger Ebert (an intelligent pimp with a heart of gold--haven't seen that in a Hollywood film before), I don't think the film quite moved beyond the limitations of its genre.

Posted by chuck at 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 22, 2005

Things to Do in D.C. When You're Distracted

There's a film festival, Slapsticon, this weekend in Arlington featuring primarily "silent" films. The schedule of films looks great with features by Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and Harold Lloyd. The silent films will be accompanied by a wide variety of musicians. If you're in the DC area, this sounds like an entertaining film series. But right now, I'm more excited about the fact that I'll finally get the chance to check out the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, which sounds like a really cool place (of course, any place with central air sounds cool to me right now).

Ralph tipped me off to the Smithsonian's collection of previously unpublished photographs from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Included are several photographs taken in downtown Dayton, Tennessee, during that summer's trial. While these photographs appeal to the documentarian in me, they also have a strange personal resonance because I've been to Dayton once or twice because the undergraduate college I attended played Bryan College, named after Scopes prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, in basketball (Bryan College recently staged a re-enactment of the famous trial). Given all of the recent debates about "intelligent design," it's interesting to revisit some of these historical images (and a reminder that I'm pretty lucky to be living in museum central, even if it's only for a short time).

Update: Speaking of the Silver, there will be a film series showing the work of Jim Jarmusch in August to accompany the release of his latest film, Broken Flowers. And speaking of evolution, there's a film series sponsored by the National Istitute of Health called Science in Cinema that also looks interesting (admission to the science series is free, which makes it sound a little more interesting).

Posted by chuck at 1:41 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 21, 2005

The 'Bad' Guy

I happened to be skimming Steven Johnson's blog this afternoon (after hearing him interviewed yesterday on NPR) and came across a June 21 Washington Post article on his latest book, Everything Bad is Good For You (I was either in the midst of moving hell or broken compter hell at the time, so missed it). I've already discussed my response to Johnson's book, which was clearly written as a polemic, so won't repeat my earlier arguments.

Instead, I want to rethink some aspects of his argument, in part because I may teach some sections from his book in one or both of my media studies courses this fall. Specifically, I'm a little suspicious of the privileging of cognitive development as the primary benefit of engaging with media texts. The Post offers a thumbnail account of Johnson's argument:

To summarize briefly: He's talking trends, not absolutes, and over the past 30 years, the trend in both video games and television shows has been toward forms that are more cognitively demanding. (He doesn't dwell on the Internet, which he thinks needs little defense.)

Why the upward trends? When it comes to gaming, Johnson invokes some of the neuroscience he studied for his last book. Human brains are drawn to systems, he suggests, in which "rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment." The exploration part is key: Gamers have to figure out the rules as they go along, and "no other pop cultural form directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus" the way video games do.

With television, Johnson's argument rests more on economics. Complex narratives that "force you to work to make sense of them" have been rewarded by a marketplace where profit now depends heavily on repeat performances, whether on DVD or in syndication. Making shows more challenging to decode makes perfect sense if you're assuming they'll be watched more than once.

Games aren't "Hamlet" or "The Great Gatsby," Johnson writes; they're more like mathematical logic problems. As such, "they are good for the mind on some fundamental level: They teach abstract skills in probability, in pattern recognition, in understanding causal relations that can be applied in countless situations, both personal and professional."

I'm willing to entertain the idea that many (maybe most) TV shows require viewers to sift through multiple narrative threads and to concede the fact that juggling narrative threads can teach some of the problem-solving skills that he is describing (perhaps making playing video games the equivalent of eating vegetables), but I have become more suspicious of the political or social ends of developing these skills, at the expense of other habits of thinking about and interpreting the world (note: an excerpt of Johnson's book is available on the NPR website).

Johnson's examples are invariably "safe" games, such as The Sims, which he mentioned in his NPR interview, and a simulated baseball game, which he discusses in the excerpt cited above, which generally allows him to dodge the question about so-called harmful games, such as Grand Theft Auto, but there seems to be an implicit suggestion that the simulations are somehow more authentic representations of how a system operates. A computer simulation can take into account more variables, such as ballpark conditions, than a complicated baseball-dice game. The brief passage doesn't take into account the fact that both simulations are representations (just as The Sims is a representation of human interaction that programs certain decisions about relationships in advance), competing narratives that might inform our experience of baseball or human relationships. I'd also wonder what it means to value texts that are "rewarded by the marketplace," rather than other criteria (I'm not sure what these criteria would be).

Posted by chuck at 1:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 20, 2005

Media Times Two

Just a quick pointer to Ken's insightful comments about my recent discussion of "Media Times," which he aptly defines as "the various types of temporality depicted within and derived from various media." He's right to note that I've primarily worked out this problem via film, but I've recently become more interested in the multiple temporalities of television. Because my dissertation advisor wrote about television and time, I've generally been interested in the topic, but because I couldn't afford cable and didn't have television reception for over five years, I rarely watched--or thought about--TV, although I did watch certain TV shows, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, on DVD.

In writing about TV time, I've been thinking about the early history of TV and the number of early TV shows that featured time travel or other sorts of time twists, such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits (Jeffrey Sconce mines similar territory in Haunted Media), but I'm also intrigued by TV's treatment of what Mary Ann Doane refers to as the temporal modes of information, crisis, and catastrophe, especially when it comes to major media events, such as the September 11 attacks.

Some of these issues are addressed in Lynn Spigel's fascinating essay, "Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11," which focuses not only on the coverage of September 11 but also the television programming in the weeks and months after the attacks. My specific interest in the essay (for now) derives from her discussion of "liveness," and to compare that with Nick's recent discussion of "real-time" cinema (and before continuing, I think it's important not to conflate these two modes).

In his discussion of real-time cinema, Nick argues that "by plugging us back into natural time, real-time movies reject the symbolic triumph over time that editing promises; in this regard, they are sweetly sorrowful reminders of The End." In short, real-time movies remind us of our own mortality. I found Nick's arguments persuasive (and still do), but Spigel's dicussion of live television broadcasts characterizes them in precisely the opposite terms. She argues that the live broadcast of the 9/11 funerals actually served to assuage our fears: "Like all televised funerals, this one deployed television’s aesthetics of liveness to stave off the fear of death. In other words, not only the “live” feed but also the sense of unrehearsed spontaneity and intimate revelations gave viewers a way to feel that life goes on in the present” (250). I didn't get a chance to watch the 9/11 memorial services because I didn't have TV reception at that time, but Spigel's comments remind me, to some extent, of my experience of watching Ronald Reagan's funeral a few months ago. While a state funeral is highly scripted--complete with network commentators who explain the script--there was a potential for the unexpected or the unscripted that haunted those images, something that may have been complicated by the fact of Reagan's public struggles with Alzheimer's Disease and the resulting difficulties of memorializing him.

I'm tempted to attribute this difference to the properties of the two media. TV's live, potentially infinite, transmission is inherently different than film's finite, temporally-bound, and pre-recorded "screening." But I'm not quite willing to attribute this difference solely to the technologies themselves, and it seems crucial to look at other test cases as well. Are there real-time films that don't have the effect Nick describes? Are there "live" TV events that don't conform to Spigel's account?

Spigel's discussion of "liveness" does remind me of certain reality TV shows, specifically American Idol and my new favorite guilty pleasure, Rockstar INXS (in which rock singers audition to be the new lead singer of INXS), which rely on highly managed forms of liveness, to the point that viewers are allowed to "participate" by voting for their favorite rockstar. Now, I don't see anything particularly "liberating" about this form of participation, but these shows do seem to tap into cultural desires that might be related to a greater sense of control over the passage of time.

Posted by chuck at 1:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 18, 2005

Derrida

I finally caught Derrida (IMDB) on DVD and found the film to be a compelling take on one of the 20th century's most important philosophers. As one might expect, Derrida proves to be a recalcitrant subject, unwilling to disclose too much personal information and more interested in reflecting on the documentary process itself, at one point noting that the situation is "completely artificial," in its attempt to achieve some new understanding about the subject.

Because Derrida has frequently been mischaracterized as too obscure or even "meaningless," the filmmakers are careful to portray him as accessible and personable, and teh film works against Derrida's resistance to revealing the personal by cross-cutting between Derrida in public as a "star" and Derrida at home (an early sequence shows him searching for his house keys). Interspersed with interviews with Derrida, his wife, and other family members, who can offer no familial explanation for Derrida's intellect, are quotations from some of Derrida's key texts.

Not surprisingly, the film places emphasis on Derrida's discussion of the temporality of the archive in Archive Fever. At the same time, the filmmakers themselves, in collaboration with Derrida, raise some valuable questions about the documentary process itself, an aim that becomes clearer in the directors' commentary track (I've only listened to about twenty minutes, but so far it's among the strongest commentary tracks I've heard).

Posted by chuck at 1:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

"Nannies Gone Wild," or Ivan Tribble, Meet Helaine Olen

Helaine Olen's New York Times essay about reading her nanny's blog has been making the rounds this weekend. The nanny, Tessa, has her response to the Times article, and Bitch Ph.D. joins in with some valuable insights as well. Olen reports that "within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn't want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I'd just as soon not have to face as well." In short, Olen reports that she became uncomfortable with having Tessa as a nanny because of what Olen describes as Tessa's "accounts of semi-promiscuous couplings and tales of too much drinking for my comfort."

Like Dylan, I'm concerned about the effects of Olen's article for Tessa, who is naturally defending herself against Olen's representation of her and seeking to debunk the "nannies gone wild" image that Olen fabricates, and while the blog furor over the Chronicle article on blogging has subsided, these two articles seem to serve as companion pieces to illustrate some of the misconceptions about blogging.

As Professor B notes, one purpose of Olen's article seems to be that Tessa's writing "brought feelings of mine to the surface I'd just as soon not have to face as well," which is certainly valuable and a testament to teh strength of Tessa's writing. It's one of the reasons that I enjoy reading the academic bloggers who speak so honestly about their experiences. But, as Professor B adds, "Olen's understanding of her nanny's humanity goes beyond what it has with previous nannies," which ultimately leads to the decision to fire her (or "let her go" to use Olen's self-protective phrasing). Professor B's analysis of the situation is, in this regard, very similar to mine. Olen's essay isn't really about Tessa or her blog; it's about Olen herself and her own desire for her nanny to fulfill a specific role.

In this regard, Olen's discomfort with her nanny's blog is not unlike Tribble's reactionary comments in the Chronicle several weeks ago. Tribble plucks several remarks out of his job candidates' blogs and concludes that these candidates might be too interested in technology or too opinionated to fit into his department, implying that they might not fulfill what he imagines to be the role of the ideal colleague. As he puts it: "we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job" (my emphasis).

I've already discussed the professional connections I've made via blogging, so I won't repeat that argument here. Instead, I think it's worth noting the degree to which blogs are seen to complicate what Professor B aptly describes as the "necessary fictions," whether of a nanny or a colleague. I'm troubled by Olen's reaction to Tessa's blog and by Tribble's treatment of his department's job candidates. But I'm intrigued by the degree to which a weblog's personal writing can disrupt these "necessary fictions." Because both articles take such a cautious tone about the effects of blogging, it's tempting to think, in fact, that these bloggers have are succeeding, to some extent, in challenging definitions of what it means to be a good colleague or confronting expectations about the work expected of nannies (expectations that, quite clearly, have significant gendered implications).

Posted by chuck at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 17, 2005

Urban Ensembles, or How to Cultivate Community in the Age of Terror

2005 is starting to look the year of the Urban Ensemble movie. The two most prominent films in this cycle are Paul Haggis's Crash and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know. Haggis's Los Angeles film was, in my opinion, terribly reductive in its treatment of race relations, to the point that some unexpected weather was the only means of resolving the city's tensions. July's film, set in another, less-polarized corner of Los Angeles, offered what I regarded as a more convincing treatment of individuals desperately longing for community. More recently, two other Urban Ensemble films have been released, and both films seem caught up in the genre's more significant pitfalls, specifically the overly contrived or schematic plots that rely too heavily on coincidence.

Don Roos's Happy Endings (IMDB) focuses on a group of loosely-connected Angelinos who are confronting a variety of sexual problems. Lisa Kudrow's Mamie plays an abortion counselor in her early 40s. As a teen she became pregnant after having sex with her step-brother, Charley (Steve Coogan), who is now gay and partnered with Gil. Charley and Gil become suspicious that their best friends, a lesbian couple, may have been artificially inseminated with Gil's sperm. We learn early in the film that Mamie, who claims to have had an abortion, actually gave birth, putting the child up for adoption. All of these stories interweave with Maggie Gyllenhaal's Jude seducing the gay drummer of a rock band (Jason Ritter), in order to meet and seduce his father (played by Tom Arnold, in the film's most explicit stunt casting), presumably to cash in on the family's wealth.

While I enjoyed Roos's playful storytelling style in The Opposite of Sex, the film's constant attempts to wink to the audience, uisng split-screen images accompanied by white titles on a black background, were ultimately grating. Unlike Manohla Dargis, whose review is almost entirely to blame for my spending $9.50 (plus Metro fare) to see this film, I was somewhat unsatisfied with the film's navigation of the question of community these films often address. Dargis argues that "Mr. Roos doesn't pretend that a collection of spiky, selfish, self-serving individuals, even a group as white and comfortably situated as the one he has concocted, necessarily makes a community. In a lot of ensemble films, the moral of the story is that everyone is lonely, but at the end of the day and those empty nights, no one is alone. Mr. Roos doesn't peddle such off-the-rack comfort." However, the film's final scene, at a wedding between two characters I won't identify and even with the ironic use of a Billy Joel song, retains this deep-seated desire for community. Roos has made a well-crafted film, one that does navigate sexual politics in a thoughtful way, but Happy Endings retains many of the qualities of the Urban Ensemble.

Another recent urban ensemble, Heights (IMDB), focuses on the experiences of five New Yorkers over the course of 24 hours. Like Happy Endings, the film focuses on characters whose stories are related in various ways, their interactions often produced via chance or coincidence, though by the end of the film, a kind of tentative community is produced. I found Heights to be generally unmemorable, outside of Elizabeth Banks' performance, and the film never strays far from the opening sequence monologue by Diana (Glen Close), a stage performer who is directing Macbeth, in which she urges her actors to get in touch with their passions. But the coincidence of watching these films on the same weekend has left me contemplating the recent emergence of this cycle of films. It certainly seems connected to the desire for safety and community after September 11, but there also seems to be something else going on. The films are, of course, set in global cities, centers of culture and commerce most explicitly associated with urban isolation, an experience that is explicitly underlined in Heights. I'm inclined to think there's something significant about the form of the films, about the narrative complexity of juggling multiple characters and storylines (perhaps Steven Johnson's comments about audience sophistication are relevant here), something that Happy Endings sends up in its playful use of titles (some reviewers felt these titles were condescending, but I read them as parody). I don't have any final interpretations here, but I am curious about the cultural work that these Urban Ensemble films are supposed to be doing.

Update: This is several months after the fact, but I came across an interesting blog post by Amy H. Konig on ensemble films and didn't want to lose the link.

Posted by chuck at 1:54 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 16, 2005

Media Times

One of the courses I'll be teaching this fall at Catholic University (henceforth CUA) is the senior seminar in media studies, for which I have chosen to focus on what I am tentatively calling "media times" (suggestions for a cooler name would be appreciated), which will draw from my research on cinematic and televisual representations of time, and Nick's recent discussion of real-time cinema raises some of the questions that I'd like to address both in my research and in the seminar.

Nick starts with the canonical distinction between editing (Melies) and long-take realism (the Lumieres), adding that this opposition has resurfaced in the age of digital filmmaking, in which both techniques -- long takes and fast-paced editing -- are made easier (or at least more imaginable), as the examples of the quick-cutting Run Lola Run and real-time Russian Ark illustrate.

Nick then adds, drawing from a comment by Jean Baudrillard, that time-shifting can be identified with fantasies of immortality. In The Perfect Crime, which I need to read, Baudrillard writes, "It's a good thing we ourselves do not live in real time! What would we be in 'real' time? We would be identified at each moment exactly with ourselves. A torment equivalent to that of eternal daylight—a kind of epilepsy of presence, epilepsy of identity. Autism, madness. No more absence from oneself, no more distance from others" (53).

Nick then speculates that real-time cinema, including the Warhol experiments and Mike Figgis's Time Code, remind us "too deeply of our own termination," noting that time-shifting via editing may provide us with some form of illusory control over time. This argument is one I've been trying to articulate for some time, and within the time-travel films that I discuss, the ability to travel in time, often linked narratively to cinematic time-shifting, seems clearly identified with those desires for immortality. These fantasies of control over time are implicit in cinema's origins, as Mary Ann Doane's The Emergence of Cinematic Time argues. But time travelers, of whatever sort, are inevitably associated with this control over narrative time, and many time-travel films revolve around the desire to delay death for as long as possible (Primer's devastating critique of this desire for mastery is worth noting here).

I think that TV complicates this opposition between real time and "reel time" to some extent. The real-time flow of TV, even when a show is highly edited, seems inescapable, as broadcasters compete for viewers' attention spans, against potentially hundreds of other simultaneous channels. Of course, it could be argued that commercials and other elements disrupt that continuous flow, but the direct address of the viewer is never interrupted (of course Tivo, a classic time-shifting technology, could disrupt this real-time experience of TV). These questions might be complicated even further, as Nick observes, by the popularity of real-time strategy video games (here's a good overview of the history of these games). Essentially, I'm interested in how these media might produce different, often competing, representations and experiences of time, and I'd like to think about these "transitions" in and between media.

This post entails a fair amount of brainstorming and thinking out loud, but Nick's point about the ways in which real-time cinema might make viewers more aware of their own mortality is a significant one when it comes to unpacking these questions about media and time.

Posted by chuck at 3:14 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Box Office Blues

The summer slump for Hollywood studios continues, and historically one of the explanations has been that home theater systems have allowed people to stay at home rather than going out for a movie. Studios were still cashing in on DVD sales, but now, according to Marginal Revolution, DVD sales are also hitting a lull. In the past, I've refrained from seeing a larger box office trend, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to hold that position, as gross receipts have been below last year's for nineteen out of the last twenty weeks. And the decline in DVD sales also has to be a major cause for concern, at least for the studios.

Some of the explanations for this decline make little sense. A Govindni Mutry editorial published in the LA Times asserts that the lost profits can be attributed to that classic monster, the Hollywood liberal. She blames the "box office blues" on blue-state screenwriters, actors, and directors, who make "constant gibes about Republicans, Christians, conservatives and the military." She comments that conservatives are turned off by the snub of Mel Gibson's Passion, adding that liberal writers "are out of ideas and have to resort to endless sequels and remakes" (which raises a question: wasn't Mel's idea essentially a "remake?"). I'll agree that I'm sick of sequels and tired of remakes, but Murty's political claims rely only on anecdotal evidence describing a few studio meetings, not necessarily how those films have been received by audiences. Essentially, Murty is making an argument about the perceived quality of Hollywood films, and I'm not sure that the quality of the blockbusters is entirely to blame (even old ideas can be recycled in interesting ways).

Daniel Gross, in a slightly more convincing New York Times article, compares Hollywood's problems to Detroit's, arguing that the Hollywood business model is obsolete. Both industries face increased competition (foreign car manufacturers or video games and the Internet), and Hollywood's expensive production costs are not unlike the auto industry's. Of course this is complicated by the fact that studios can benefit from a thriving game industry through video game tie-ins.

Tyler at Marginal Revolution adds a few other reasons for declining box office, including the increasing quality of high-profile television shows and better home theater systems, adding that declining DVD sales may be attributed to the fact that casual film fans no longer feel the need to add to their collections. Tyler's argument might also be suported by the Netflix Effect. With Netflix, film fans no longer even have to go to the video store to check out movies, and because there are no late fees (Blockbuster's pseudo-no late fees policy might have a similar effect), I'd imagine people feel less need to buy movies in the first place.

In general, though, I'm inclined to agree with Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Gate that the current box office malaise doesn't have a simple explanation, though I think he identifies several other important factors, specifically teh degree to whcih multiplexes now feel comfortable selling the attention of their captive audiences to advertisers before the movies (or even the previews) start. I'm not going to get into predictions or speculation here (after all, this is just a blog entry), but Wiley's description of a 1970s-style Hollywod re-organization, in which studios experiment with new, possibly cheaper, forms of production and distribution, seems like a possibility.

Posted by chuck at 1:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 15, 2005

Soldiers Pay

Tricia Regan, David O. Russell and Juan Carlos Zaldivar's Soldiers Pay (IMDB) was originally scheduled to be included as an extra on a DVD re-release of Russell's Three Kings; however, because Russell had been critical of the Bush administration, Warner Brothers chose not to release the film, citing "production issues." The documentray has since found its way to the public via an election-eve screening on IFC and is now available on DVD. The documentary itself, filmed on an extremely low budget, consists almost entirely of talking-heads interviews with Gulf War veterans, psychologists specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder, and some Iraqi civilians (including participants in Russell's Three Kings).

After watching the doc, I'm not sure that it adds anything particularly new to the dicussion of the war. As the Philadelphia City Paper critic notes, Russell makes a "crude" attempt at balance by including Iraqi civilians who dealt with Saddam Hussein's brutal leadership. The documentary also spends too much time following a story that closely parallels the narrative of Three Kings, about a group of soldiers who found several million dollars in a house. Had this narrative been folded more effectively into a critique of the treatment of the soldiers, the documentary might have been stronger.

Despite these flaws, the documentary raises some interesting questions about representations of the war in Iraq and its aftermath. As I was watching this doc, I couldn't help but think about Michael Tucker's Gunner Palace, and the degree to which both films are careful to cultivate a rhetoric of authenticity in representing the experiences of the soldiers. It's probably nothing new that both war films and documentaries return to the question about the impossibility of true representation, but the degree to which these documentaries insist on that impossibility seems significant. In fact, I'm inclined to think that the war film and the documentary are two of the cinematic genres most concerned with authentic representations, and that it's worth asking how these genres seek to establish their authenticity (and how that authenticity is defined).

I'm in the process of writing a paper on Gunner Palace, so I'll likely be talking about these issues frequently over the next few days, and one of the questions I'd like to consider is the degree to which both Gunner Palace and Soldiers Pay are indebted to or informed by previous generations of war films (Vietnam, World War II), but also by other media. Specifically, I've been thinking about Thomas Doherty's discussion of Vietnam as the first "living-room war" in Projections of War, the ways in which TV (or at least represenations of TV) so heavily informed representations of Vietnam and the first Gulf War. In this context, I'd also like to think about the ways in which films about the current war in Iraq might be framed by discourse associated with the Web, including (discussions of) blogs maintained by Iraqi citizens as well as by American soldiers. This idea is still developing, but I think the language of authenticity, usually rooted in personal experience or first-person narrative, is remarkably similar in both the documentaries and the blog narratives about the war and its aftermath.

Posted by chuck at 4:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2005

Return of the Zombies

Over at schizzes and flows, Scot discusses the recent cycle of zombie films, including 28 Days Later, the Dawn of the Dead remake, and George Romero's latest, Land of the Dead, explaining that he is a fan of the genre and speculating about the reasons why these films are so effective. Scot then mentions a recent article in which Romero asserts that the appeal of the zombie film derives from our fears about our neighbors:

"It's the neighbors, man," Romero said. "That's the scariest thing in life, the neighbors. Who am I going to move in next to?

"I don't think metaphysically about this. It's not about death or an afterlife or anything like that. This is a new situation, it's a change. A new species that just happens to be related to us."

Scot empasizes the degree to which these films reflect our insecurities regarding privacy, and with my recent move to a new apartment in DC, I've been a little more attuned to these types of insecurities, especially when one of my new neighbors, a sixty-something woman, immediately greeted me with all sorts of personal information about her health and her family history. But horror in general seems to tap into this fear of the other that Romero describes. After all, The Ring deals with similar fears of home invasion via the VCR and even David Fincher's underrated Panic Room makes this fear the subject of his film. I'm thinking about revisions for my media horror film article again, so it might be worth revisiting some of these questions, especially as I expand the article to focus on more films.

Update: I just came across Steven Shaviro's discussion of Land of the Dead in terms of social class and Glen Fuller's reading of the film in terms of spectacle and Hardt and Negri's concept of the multitude.

Posted by chuck at 1:10 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

July 10, 2005

Catharsis Now!

New York Press critic Armond White has a compelling and frustrating review essay that compares Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds adaptation to the recent spate of soldier docs, including Gunner Palace and Operation: Dreamland. I'm currently writing a conference paper that focuses in part on Gunner Palace, so White's take on that film (and his continued adoration of Spilberg) seems worth noting, if only for selfish reasons.

First of all, I think he's probably right that fiction filmmakers are actively seeking metaphors for the war on terror. Zombies (Dawn of the Dead, etc) and monsters (the Texas Chainsaw remake) continue to haunt as directors raise the bar in terms of violence. And what makes the essay so compelling is the fact that White joins this impulse in blockbuster film with the similar impulse in soldiers' eye docs, which themselves convey a certain kind of horror. He's also right that in the post-Vietnam context, critics of war have found themselves in the rhetorical bind of the popular bumper sticker: "Is it possible to support the troops, not the war?" Before continuing, I do think that White's question creates a false alternative between "supporting the troops" and "opposing the war," but White is correct to recognize the question as informing much political discussion of the war.

In addition, I think that White misses a lot in the development of this metaphor. While I don't want to completely evacuate documentary's claims towards truth or authenticity, White's assertion that Gunner Palace and other soldiers' eye docs present us with reality of the war seems a bit simplistic:

We are there with them on the missions, evading land mines, dodging explosives, interrogating the non-comprehending Iraqis, bringing them "freedom," receiving their rebuffs and feeling caught in the middle (my emphasis).

White's suggestion of a pure identification with the grunts in Gunner Palace seems overstated. While the subjective camera and the emotional interviews (often featuring the soldiers' freestyle raps) are designed to create identification, there's also a distancing effect ("you can't really know what we're going through"). There's also a problem with the horror film metaphor. Horror villains, such as Dawn of the Dead feature villains or monsters who are unknowable. Extending White's metaphor, the Iraqi civilians that appear in Gunner Palace would seem to take on that role, and to a certain extent, that's true of the film in my reading of it. Iraqi civilians are portrayed as unknowable, as a threat, a portayal that should have been complicated considerably.

White's implicit critique that these soldier docs don't provide "patriotic cheer" also seems misplaced in that the Iraq War itself has been the subject of tremendous skepticism, especially since the Bush administration's WMD claims have been disredited. That being said, White's claim that Speilberg's War of the Worlds allegorizes aspects of the war on teror is almost enough to make me want to see Spielberg's film, even if Tom "Psychiatry is for Dupes" Cruise is involved (thanks to IFC Blog fo the link).

Posted by chuck at 3:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mysterious Skin

I've never really been a big fan of the work of filmmaker Greg Araki. Like A. O. Scott, I felt that many of his films sought to shock viewers without offering anything larger. In retrospect, part of my distatse for Araki's films may have derived from viewing them on poor quality VHS, but that's another story, but in part because of Christopher Sharrett's discussion of Araki, I believe in the essay, "The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture," I'd been wanting re-evaluate my take on Araki's films, and Mysterious Skin (IMDB), speifically with its celebration of community and alternatives to the nuclear family, ultimately deeply impressed me.

The film is based on Scott Heim's novel and couses on the experiences of two 8-year-old boys on a Kansas Little League baseball team. The film's opening shot, of the 8-year old Neil, brightly lit, with Froot Loops raining down on him appears to be a playful image of childhood innocence, is re-interpreted when we realize that the cereal shower is the means by which Neil's "All-American" coach seduces his "star player," before molesting him sexually throughout the summer (titles mark the date as 1981). Because Neil's father has left, he relishes the attention from this father figure. As many critics have noted, Araki's staging of these scenes is very effective, often isolating the young boy to emphasize his emotional response to what's happening.

Neil's teammate, Brian, has a much different trajectory, as he relates in voice-over that several hours of that summer were erased from his memory, and that he'd been working to figure out what happened during those lost hours, when he woke up in his parents' cellar with his nose bleeding, ever since. Araki's film elegantly cross-cuts between the two characters as they grow into adults, with Neil growing to become a male hustler, first in his Kansas hometown and later in New York, where he lives with a childhood friend. Neil's cool exterior clearly masks the pain associated with the molestation. Brian, meanwhile appears nerdy, and as one character describes him, "oddly asexual." Desperate to learn what happened, Brian logs his dreams in a journal and eventually becomes obsessed with the idea that he may have been abducted by aliens after watching a TV show called World of Mystery, featuring a disabled girl from a nearby town. Although it's clear to the audience that Brian was also molested by the coach, Araki reveals this information visually on gradually, allowing Brian's memories to unfold slowly, as he remembers the presence of one of his Little League teammates, who turns out to be Neil, and then later as the alien hands that caressed his face become human. The film culminates in a Christmas Eve reunion between Brian and Neil, when they are around 19 years old, and without being too specific they acheieve a sense of community through their shared need for discovery and understanding about this traumatic moment from their past.

What I liked most about the film was its celebration of community. Neil is supported by fellow teenagers, Wendy and Eric, who care about Neil despite his emotional distance. Eric later "adopts" the lonely Brian when he begins looking for Neil to find answers to his questions about his lost past. The film also has several amazing sequences, including the Froot Loops scene, but also a compelling sequence in which Neil encounters a dying AIDS victim who asks him only to rub his back, making explicit Wendy's reminders of the dangers of hustling. Mysterious Skin, in general, handles these emotional complexities very well, explicitly criticizing child abuse and some of the dehumanizing ways in which lost souls like Neil are treated, while clearly relishing the ways in which new communities can be created.

Posted by chuck at 1:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 9, 2005

Blogging on the Job

The academic corner of the blogosphere is buzzing about the now infamous Chronicle article/rant writen under the pseudonym, "Ivan Tribble," a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Tribble writes that academic bloggers who publish under their real names risk being rejected for jobs by search committees concerned that the applicant might like technology too much ("we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job"), because they might reveal deep dark secrets about their new job, even if they've never done so in the past ("a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum"), or even because they have interests beyond the academic (the Professor Shrill rant).

Several other bloggers, including KF, GZombie, The Little Professor and Bitch PhD have already weighed in with insightful comments about the article, so I'm answering Matt's call for blog entries about the professional dividends that our blogs have garnered. And as Matt implies, many of those dividends are the product of the networking opportunities that blogging offers.

Among the many connections I've made via blogging: Collin, based almost entirely on the strength of my blog writing, recommended me as a participant at the Convergences symposium last fall. My use of blogging in the classroom also gained som good publicity in The Guardian, questions that I've since developed into a short, forthcoming essay for Pedagogy's "From the Classroom" section. I've also received some valuable feedback from colleagues and friends about my research, including extended discussions of my now-published essays on Dark City and Sans Soleil. And moving to DC has been much more exciting, knowing that I'll have a social network of bloggers here in town that I've been reading for some time now.

Tribble's observation that blogs are easily Googled is also nothing new (Invisible Adjucnt talked about this almost two years ago). Most academic bloggers know how to limit themselves. After I began teaching a composition course focusing on the 2004 election, I refrained from discussing politics as explicitly as I had in the past. I rarely discuss my "midnight anxieties" here, even if I sometimes write late into the night. In short, I've found that presenting some of my research, even if it's still in its most formative stages, has been tremendously productive. I've made contacts that have clearly helped my career, and my readers have provided me with some suggestions that have been very helpful for my work.

Like Matt, I'd like to encourage other academic bloggers to post some of the ways in which blogging has paid dividends for their careers and to send a trackback to Matt's entry.

Update: After talking with Matt IRL last night, I remembered that some of my blog movie reviews have been cited by the official websites of the film I was reviewing, including the recent documentary Gunner Palace. And I've been planning to mention the fact that Ralph E. Luker referred to my use of blogging in an article for the American Historical Association's Perspectives, but I kept forgetting until now.

Posted by chuck at 1:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 8, 2005

Independent Film Scoop

I recently received an email about a cool new independent film currently in production. Chris Hansen's a.k.a. Brian Barr is a mockumentary focusing on a guy named Brian Barr who happens to believe that he is a messiah.

A few technical details: the start date for filming is July 14, and it will be filmed on HD, with several alums of Second City. More information is available at Audio Rebellion, and Chris informs me that he will be blogging the shoot from the film's official website once the shoot officially starts.

This looks like a cool indie project, so if you get a chance, check out the film's website and maybe give the film a little grassroots blog love.

Posted by chuck at 12:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 7, 2005

Visual Music

Just wanted to briefly mention the Hirshhorn Museum's "Visual Music" exhibition, which will be open until September 11, 2005. The exhibit is a solid collection of paintings, films, and audio recording produced since the early 20th century that focus on the concept of synaesthesia, the principle that senses, such as sound and vision in this case, can be mixed.

In general, the materials included in the exhibition were compelling, even if the number of films eventually overwhelmed me, but I would have liked a clearer historical narrative about the concept and the ways in which these filmmakers, artists, and musicians were addressing it. The framing narrative generally did a good job of addressing ways in which the introduction of new technologies (such as various digital media) allowed artists to address these concepts in new ways.

If you're in DC (or planning to be in DC), it's well worth a trip into the Smithsonian district (and, as is the case with all Smithsonian museums, it's free!).

Posted by chuck at 1:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Dreams of Sparrows

First-time Iraqi director Hayder Mousa Daffar's documentary, The Dreams of Sparrows (IMDB),purports to "tell the truth about Iraq." Daffar collaborates with other members of the Iraqi artistic community, including filmmakers and cinematographers who were unable to make films under the regime of Saddam Hussein. At first, I worried that the film was going to be an uncritical look at the coalition's removal of Hussein from power. One of Daffar's collaborators proudly displays a newspaper photograph of George Bush that he keeps in his wallet. But Daffar, shooting primarily in low-budget digital video, quickly complicates this narrative. In addition, because Daffar generally speaks in English when addressing the viewer, it seems clear that his primary audience is outside Iraq, another point of interest for the film.

Travelling with a small film crew, Daffar visits several sections of Iraq, including Fallujah, during the eraly moments of the insurgency, and it quickly becomes clear that there are no easy answers in Iraq. This claim in itself, of course, isn't terribly surprising or new (although I'll admit that I find these politically ambivalent documentaries to be rather compelling). Many Iraqis quickly acknowledge that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous and cruel leader, but others miss the relative stability that his regime provided, including consistent access to electricity and gasoline (Daffar places emphasis on the gas shortages that severely affected Baghdad). Others are suspicious about the reasons behind the US-led invasion. And Daffar generally avoids any explicit claims about Iraq. But what makes the film (available on DVD) more interesting is its position as one of the first Iraqi productions after the fall of Hussein. And the low-budget aesthetic adds to the film's sense of crisis in Iraq.

It has been a few days since I watched Sparrows so this review is a little short on specifics, but it is an interesting take on the US invasion of Iraq that seems specifically aimed at US audiences.

Update: Via Green Cine, the news that the film's producers are calling for people to organize house parties to gain a wider audience for the film.

Posted by chuck at 1:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sympathies

I'm going to add to the chorus of voices expressing that my thoughts are with those people effected by the London train explosions this morning. It's hard to know what to say in the face of this tragedy, so instead, I'll follow Marc's example and point to the Guardian's collection of eyewitness accounts of today's events.

Posted by chuck at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 6, 2005

Blog Silence

As Jason notes, the Wordherders have been hit by an avalanche of spam, requiring that our host disable our cgi scripts to prevent server overload. Comments are still down, but at least we can now post again.

I'm hoping to be back to full-time posting in the next day or two, but I'm still working on getting my wireless antenna in my apartment working, so I'm still working from a cool cafe with free wireless (College Perk Coffeehouse) or from Kinko's, as I am now (with some wheeler-dealer dude speaking way too loudly into his cell phone about used cars at the computer next to me).

Posted by chuck at 10:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 3, 2005

Settling In

The move to Washington is now starting to feel official. My book boxes are somewhat neatly stacked in my apartment waiting to be unpacked. I've found the local independent video store (last night's rental: The Office Special, which for some reason, I'd never managed to watch). And I've made more trips to Target in the last three days than I normally make in a year as I learn the quirks of my new apartment. I'm still blogging from Kinko's so this post will be a little short, but hopefully in the next day or so, I'll have the wireless on my new laptop working, so I'll be able to return to a relatively normal blogging schedule. And hopefully I'll have some time to watch and review a few movies, too.

Speaking of movies, I just noticed that the DC Independent Film Festival's Summer Series begins this weekend. Any other film suggestions here in Washington?

Posted by chuck at 2:54 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack