the chutry experiment

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August 31, 2005

Transitions, or the Anticipation of a Future Post about Teaching

I've spent a significant chunk of the evening thinking about how I could contribute to G Zombie's Teaching Carnival, but because it's the first week of class and because I'm learning the ropes at a new university, I'm pretty exhausted, but that's pretty typical for me during the first week of class, especially in the fall. For this reason, my contribution to the Carnival might end up being a little disjointed. That being said, G Zombie's suggestion has inspired me to dig around in the "teaching" catgeory of my archives to see precisely what I talk about when I think I'm talking about teaching. It's probbaly not surprising that when I think I'm talking about teaching, I'm less focused on the process of teaching, of the specific narrative of a course, and often more interested in the "content" of the class (as my film class brainstorming posts illustrate).

So, perhaps this post will allow me some room to think about how at least one of my classes will provide an opportunity for me to reflect on my pedagogy in a more self-conscious way. In some sense, this process of reflection is determined by the shift in disciplines, in that I'm moving from teaching freshman composition almost exclusively for three years to teaching media studies courses. I'm also able to take advantage of a much different academic/research community. I think that regular readers of my blog can probably guess that I'm very excited about the courses that I'll be teaching this year and the opportunity to learn alongside my students about DC's fantastic media archives.

But one of the most interesting changes in my teaching practice will be the fact that I'll have a teaching assistant working with me in the junior seminar, which is completely new to me. In fact, I've never served as a teaching assistant, which means that I'm still learning the basics, especially when it comes to asking someone to do a lot of the busywork (copying, making PDFs, etc) that I would normally do. Because I know it's tedious work, I feel mildly guilty about asking others to do it. At the same time, I'm quickly learning that my TA can also teach me a lot about my classroom practice, in part by observing the dynamic in the class from a position slightly closer to the students' POV. So, perhaps this post is actually a moment of anticipation, preparation for a future post or two (which is okay because there will be other Teaching Carnivals), as I learn to navigate this new pedagogical community.

Posted by chuck at 9:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Helping New Orleans

G Zombie has an entry that lists several ways that people can contribute to the relief effort in New Orleans.

For people who might be looking for specific information about survivors (or for more information about what's happening), Technorati has been tracking blogs and other news sources. The front page of the Tulane University homepage has been temporarily transformed into an information source as well.

Posted by chuck at 9:17 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Digging in the Archives

So, basically this blog entry has turned into a paragraph summary of a phone conversation, but I don't want to lose track of all of these cool film and media resources....

For my junior seminar in media studies, I've been working on setting up guest lectures featuring speakers from various libraries/archives here in DC, and I'm amazed at the amount of material "out there," waiting to be explored. I just got off the phone with one of the archivists from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History Archives Center, where they have a really cool collection of materials, including a collection of industrial films and National Zoo Training films (!).

She referred me to several other collections, many of which are available online. The coolest highlight is the Prelinger Archives, where you can watch everything from Are You Popular?, a 1947 social-guidance film, to Duck and Cover, a civil defense film in which Bert the Turtle teaches chldren what to do in case of atomic attack. I could easily spend days scouring the Prelinger Archives (and probably will).

She also reminded me about Home Movie Day (I've been talking about this topic for a while), an annual event that usually takes place around August 16th, or 8/16, a sly reference to the two most popular (8mm and 16mm) home movie gauges. I wanted to attend DC's event at the Warehouse Theater, but only heard about it a few hours in advance. Maybe next year (here's an older NPR story on Home Movie Day and a blog entry).

She also mentioned some cool new films that I haven't seen, including Karen Shopsowitz's 2000 film, My Father's Camera, which explores the role home movies play in social and family life (produced by the National Film Board of Canada, another cool resource), as well as the PBS American Experience documentary, Tupperware! (IMDB), which apparently made use of some of archival materials available at the Smithsonian.

And, here's one more archival resource worth visiting: the National Anthropological Archives' Human Studies Film Archives. My connection at the National Museum of American History mentioned their extensive collection of travel and ethnographic films. Finally, although I already knew about the fantastic Treasures from American Film Archives, I'm glad to have the link handy.

I'm also planning to introduce my students to the National Archives, and of course, the Library of Congress.

Posted by chuck at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 30, 2005

Media Times: Baudelaire and Griffith

Classes started this week at Catholic U, so I've been running non-stop for the last few days doing all of that typical beginning-of-semester work, including making appointments for guest speakers (more on that later) and arranging for passcodes for classrooms, that sort of thing.

But for now, I just wanted to re-bookmark an old entry of mine that discussed the controversial online "docu-game," JFK: Reloaded (lots of good discussion of the game in the comments to that entry). The post seeks to connect the game's rhetoric of authenticity with D.W. Griffith's cinematic theory of history, which imagines motion pitcures as an unmediated window onto the past ("There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history").

For the first day of class (it's a 3-hour seminar that meets on Friday), I'm thinking about discussing Griffith in relationship with Charles Baudelaire's famous rejection of photography in the Salon of 1859 (of course, Baudelaire's distaste for photography did not prevent him from being photographed). I think the two short pieces will prexent an interesting juxtaposition for establishing how potography and cinema were received, specifically in terms of the concepts of time, memory, and history that I want to unpack in the class.

I'll try to post my syllabi online in the next few days so that I can get some feedback and comments from media studies scholars who read my blog. I've already learned a lot from KF's media studies syllabi for my junior seminar.

Posted by chuck at 5:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 28, 2005

Caffeine Dreams

This news article about the potential benefits of drinking coffee made my morning (please ignore the fact that I'm posting this in the early afternoon--morning is a relative term around here). It turns out that coffee has more antioxidants that any beverage in the American diet.

Posted by chuck at 12:47 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 27, 2005

DC Shorts

The DC Shorts Film Festival will be taking place from Friday September 16, through Sunday, September 18. Several interesting special screenings, including Lunafest, a series of short films by and about women, are planned. It's also worth noting that all proceeds from Lunafest will be donated to the Breast Cancer Fund and to local organizations that support short films. Also promising: the Arts on Foot program, which will screen films by Canadian filmmakers.

Posted by chuck at 5:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Junebug

Phil Morrison's contemplative Junebug (IMDB) opens with shots of Appalachian men "catapulting their voices in shivery hill country hollers." The shots have a grainy, documentary feel, and while Voice critic Laura Sinagra notes that the images set up the film's treatment of "outsider art," they also establish Junebug's reflective tone. The film's story focuses on Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicago art dealer who specializes in "outsider art," and through her scouts, she learns of an unknown outsider artist, David Wark, whose images depict surreal slave rebellions (all the slaves have white faces) mixed with computers and other contemporary objects. Madeleine's husband George happens to be from that same postage stamp of North Carolina soil, setting up the film's homecoming narrative. Although Madeleine and George have been maried for six months, George has never introduced her to his family.

The homecoming narrative is a staple of southern literature and fim (You Can't Go Home Again is the classic reference here), and it would have been easy for the film to trade in simplified red-state-blue-state gags, but Morrison's quiet camerawork and Angus MacLachlan's script are a little too subtle for that. George's family is certainly suspcious of Madeleine, with the mom worrying that a woman as smart and pretty as Madeleine cannot be trusted. George's return is greeted by his North Carolina community as something of a hero's return. While his family regards te return with caution, the church welcomes him home eagerly, even coercing him into singing a hymn about returning home before the congregation.

Part of what I liked about the film was the way that it sets teh atmosphere. Rather than the gaudy, kitschy images of the south you sometimes see, camera shots quietly reflect on the spaces George's family inhabits. One sequence simply and silently shows static shots from every room in his parents' house. Later, George and his father meet for breakfast at a Waffle House, very much a southern staple, but rather than playing up the restaurant's bright yellow signs, a menu in the bottom of the screen suffices to establish the shot's location. These visuals support the understated dialogue between characters who are often uncomfortable with their emotions, particularly George's younger brother, Johnny, who is clearly less loved by his parents than his older sibling.

The film is quietly critical of Madeleine's enthusiasm for outsider art, which sometimes views these objects as quaint. More specifically, she is criticized for playing outsider artist David Wark's anti-Semitism against a rival bidder for his art. Wark's name, as some film buffs might note, recalls the name of David Wark Griffith, the director of the pro-Klan film, Birth of a Nation, and Madeleine's willingness to exploit Wark's art offers an interesting, if under-explored critique. In general, Junebug is careful to treat all of its characters with dignity and to recognize that basically, all of the cahacters have good intentions, but I sometimes felt that it also stayed a little too narrowly inside the Sundance/indie film formula to offer anything completely new. Of course, it does offer a brief appearance by indie rock star, Will Oldham, so that's a point in Junebug's favor.

Update: So far, the Cinetrix is the only other reviewer I've seen who has caught the reference to that infamous southern filmmaker.

Posted by chuck at 10:04 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 26, 2005

Media Miscellany

I've been spending most of my Friday recovering from my trip to Montreal. As I mentioned, my panel went really well, but whether that has any connection to the quality of my paper is another issue. But because my plane was delayed, I didn't get back to my apratment until late last night. So, I'm in short-attention span mode this afternoon, and here are a few of the places I've been surfing (perhaps my previous entry about drunk librarians should make me a little more cautious?):

First, I just heard on KEXP that Radiohead is blogging the recording of their upcoming album on Dead Air Space (nice name). Lots of photos, but also some interesting entries about the recording process (apparently it's exhausting).

Also just learned that NBC anchor Brian Williams has a blog, the Daily Nightly (sorta goofy name). Williams offers an interesting window into how certain decisions are made about the content of the news, including the important decision about what "ribbon" to include on the bottom of the screen. You know, stuff that matters. To be fair, this New York Times article argues that Williams does offer some self-criticism when he feels the NBC news broadcasts fall short.

I came across Williams' blog via the "related articles" on this Yahoo article about a hoax by a student newspaper at Southern Illinois University. For two years, tey published articles by Kodee Kennings, a small child whose father was a soldier in Iraq. All of the participants are distancing themselves from the hoax. I never read the articles, but what a bizarre story.

Classes here at Catholic U start on Monday, so expect lots of healthy procrastination blogging over the next few days.

Posted by chuck at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"The Internet's a Drunk Librarian...."

Cat and Girl engages in a bit of media studies, comparing representations of TV to representations of the Internet. Hat tip to McChris.

Posted by chuck at 6:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[VE] The Conflict in Question

Just a few thoughts on my panel at Visible Evidence. The panel was well-attended, and the discussion session afterwards was very productive, with the Q&A running well past the scheduled end of the panel. After I read the paper (which focused on Gunner Palace), my immediate reaction was how much the clips I showed--the long take of the Baghdad firefight and the soldier's comedic monologue about using scrap metal as impovised armor for their Humvee--affected the audience's reception of the film. Both scenes generated a lot of discomfort, and in retrospect, at least one clip of soldiers talking sadly about the unecessary deaths they've witnessed might have altered their reception of the film.

To some extent, I was surprsied at how few people had seen the documentary, although I learned after the fact that Gunner Palace had received a smaller international release. But the post-paper discussion of GP seemed to confirm my argument that the film is "politically ambivalent," rather than politically neutral, in the sense that the film egenrates both strongly pro-war and anti-war readings. In fact, one commenter noted that the film could be read as a "recruitment video," which might overstate slightly, but it does point to the way in which GP provides viewers with a sense of purpose and intensity that might not be available to the couch potato sitting at home.

At any rate, given some of the conversations I had at the conference, I now want to fold the questions I addressed, however broadly, in this paper into some larger questions about the role of the war documentary in shaping contemporary political discourse.

Posted by chuck at 3:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 24, 2005

[VE] Documentary, Interactivity, and Social Justice

Another bookmark post from Visible Evidence, where I attended this morning's panel on Documentary and Social Justice. One paper, which focused on video-based activism, seemed particularly relevant to some of the issues I've been thinking about in relationship to the war documentary in general, and Gunner Palace, in particular. The presentation focused on the human rights organization, Witness, which "partners with human rights organizations, training them to use video to document abuse and create change." At least one member of Witness was present at the panel, and there was some useful dialogue about definitions of human rights and documentation.

I don't want to discuss the author's paper in detail here, but his discussion of Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, which addresses the possibility of using war photography in preventing war, raised some important questions about how photographs and video images of war might have the rhetorical effect of convincing audiences of the undesirability of war (I need to read a larger chunk of the Sontag book before I go into further detail). Gunner Palace, which received a much wider commercial release, may not be explicitly an anti-war film, but some of the same questions of representing war and violence persist, respecially when it comes to the institutional factors that constrain production and distribution. Another panelist mentioned the work of Joel Sternfeld in documenting the G8 protests in Genoa a few years ago, work that I'd like to revisit when I have more time (and with classes starting Monday, I don't imagine that will be anytime soon).

Another panel I attended focused on issues of interactivity, and the main point for my purposes was the question of instutional authority and the problems of representation. One person on this panel emphasized the challenges that directors face in pitching documentaries to potential sources of funding, which no doubt, has a major effect on what kinds of documentaries are produced (David O. Russell's problems in distributing Soldier's Pay would be one example here). Some of these arguments were already implicitly developed in my paper, but I think there's some value in connecting my questions to the larger themes that have been so eloquently developed throughout the conference.

I'm still working through some last minute paper ideas right now, so apologies for such a disorganized, and potentially self-serving, conference narrative. More later when I'm home from Montreal tomorrow night.

Posted by chuck at 4:10 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 23, 2005

[VE] Copyright and Conditions of Production

I'm Blogging from a cafe on boulevard de Maissoneuve across the street from Concordia University, where I'm attending the Visible Evidence conference. I'll write a longer discussion of the conference later, but I just wanted to briefly mention one of the panels I attended this morning, which focused on copyright issues for documentary filmmakers and scholars, including the problem of clearing rights to copyrighted film and TV footage or music (significant examples included Eyes on the Prize, a civil rights documentary that includes copyrighted music, including the song "Happy Birthday" and Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed, for which Greenwald cited "fair use" in using short clips from FoxNews. I'll hopefully write more about this panel, because the panel offered valuable comparisons of copyright law in the US, Canada, and the UK. But certainly one o fthe main concerns was the potential for copyright to inhibit documentary filmmakers, preventing them from telling certain kinds of stories because of copyright law (during the Q&A, there were also some valubale questions raised about the role of peer-to-peer and other forms of distribution).

For now, I'm just bookmarking the website to the Center for Social Media, an organization affiliated with American University and directed by one of the copyright panelists, Pat Aufderheide.

Posted by chuck at 1:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 20, 2005

Sad News

I've just learned that one of my favorite bloggers, George Fasel of A Girl and a Gun, died on Wednesday. While I never met him, I always enjoyed George's reflections on film, particularly his willingness to challenge the received wisdom about many contemporary films. Following Lance Mannion's tribute to George's final entry on a James Cagney film, I've decided to post, in its entirety, one of my favorite blog entries from A Girl and a Gun, in which George criticized the recent Enron doc, challenging me to reconsider a film I'd previously embraced uncritically:

The documentaries are starting to roll in, confirming many predictions that they are coming into their own as credible contenders for a larger slice of the ticket-buyer budget. In NYC now, we have Mad Hot Ballroom, for which I saw a trailer and immediately rang up a notional saving of seven dollars on a geeezer discount ticket (that much saccharine has to be bad for one); Born into Brothels, Stolen Childhoods, Shake Hands with the Devil, and Tell Them Who You Are are also around, none of them tempting me much. I am also excited to report that there is on its way a documentary on bowling, for crying out loud, and if that doesn't stir you, then you'll certain want to catch the one on wheelchair rugby (this is not a joke).

I did wander into a showing of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a film which sports all the right prejudices--this was bad, it went to the top of the corporation, whose big guys robbed their employees and electricity consumers in the state of California, the Bush administration and family was at the very least "involved," and so forth--and which I'm therefore feeling sorry I didn't like more. To begin with, the filmmakers couldn't leave well enough alone, telling the story through film clips and interviews; they had to throw in a lot of extraneous footage that is both intrusive and false. Example: Jeffrey Skilling liked to organize motorcycle trips through the outback with other senior guys, trips over rough country where broken bones and the like were common. There are a few stills from these childish undertakings, but we also get footage of professional cyclists doing huge loops in the air and other dangerous tricks. Patently not the Enronnies, who presumably weren't up to such stunts; so why is the footage there? Example: when quoting from important internal documents or other written sources, the camera closes in on significant sentences or passages, and highlights them. But it's immediately plain these are not the original documents, but copies made up for ease of photographing and viewing. The whole idea of employing such sources is to give an air of authenticity, which is undercut by these surrogates. Example: the suicide of Cliff Baxter, a senior Enron exec caught in a web of shame and guilt, is dramatically staged, which because we know it is a reenactment, and at that on the level of a cheesy History Channel documentary, subverts any power the simple story might have had.

The talking heads are also pretty flat and uninteresting. None is out-and-out terrible, but there is nobody we want to see again, nobody whose presence lights up the screen and helps tell his or her part of the story with the force of personality along with the substance. I think of Nathaniel Kahn's mother in My Architect (2003), or (the now late) Frank Conroy in Stone Reader (2002), or Stanley Crouch in Ken Burns's tv series Jazz, to name only some recent strong presences. We go from one bland account to another, and with the exception of a buccaneering type named (I think) Mike Muckleroy, there are very few human juices flowing.

Finally, we leap from one peak to another, one Enron reinvention and fraud and outrage to the next, preferably one where we can get some footage of Skilling being embarrassed before Congress, or Lay making a fool of himself in some public statement, or jumping from the California electricity crisis to the election of Arnold, with lots of footage of the latter. Context would have been much more helpful. Skilling keeps saying he's not an accountant, so he couldn't say what was going on, which is the same thing Bernie Ebbers said about World Com and not far from what Dennis the K was claiming about Tyco. How much more useful to have seen a pattern of corporate abuse, lies, and manipulation of which Enron was a part. There is a clip of W saying, by way of trying to minimize his connection to Ken Lay, that Enron gave a lot of money to a lot of people in Washington. That is true, but the film doesn't follow up. How much more interesting to look not at squirming millionaire bilksters but at that wholly-owned corporate subsidiary called the United States Congress. Enron is two hours' worth of missed opportunities and a film budget squandered on mediocrity instead of incisive reporting and therefore, in my book, memorable principally as a waste.

Posted by chuck at 11:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Filmakers Library

Just another bookmark post: While doing some creative Googling, I came across the Filmakers Library, which rents rare videos and DVDs. One of those movies is Salam Pax's Baghdad Blogger, part of what looks like a very interesting media studies collection. In other news, I'm gonna have a late, late night working on this paper before my flight tomorrow. Keep those iced coffees coming.

Posted by chuck at 10:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cultural Studies CFP

The Cultural Studies Association will have this year's conference here in Washington, DC. I attended the Boston CSA conference two years ago and liked it quite a bit, with the coference featuring a broad range of papers on a variety of topics.

More later, but I should be working on a paper for another conference right now....

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

August 19, 2005

Visible Evidence Links

Yeah, I know I'm hopping on a plane in just over 35 hours, but while doing a convoluted Google search, I came across a few links I don't want to lose. The first is a Green Cine interview with Gunner Palace co-director Michael Tucker that looks really promising. In particular, Tucker's comments about his political biases:

"I don't even know what my bias is anymore," says Tucker. "My bias has completely changed. I think that sometimes I sound like a raving right-wing lunatic and other times I sound like a raving socialist or something. But I'm trying to make something that's honest. And soldiers have a huge hang-up about it. All they want is for someone to tell the truth. Not embellish it."

David's interview also provides some useful background information regarding how Tucker became involved in making the film and how he became embedded with this particular military unit.

I found the link to this interview via an incredibly fascinating blog, Camera/Iraq, that focuses on "the war of images in the Middle East." The blog is a project of the Cinema and Media Studies Department at Carleton College.

Finally (for now), I'll use this Cinemocracy blog entry to bookmark the debate about Gunner Palace's PG-13 rating. People who followed teh story may remember that Tucker's film initially received an R rating, due to the profanity, but the rating was changed to PG-13 on appeal. Of course what makes this story so frustrating is that the film's portrayal of (actual, sometimes brutal) violence was less of a problem for the MPAA than the language. I absoultely do not think teenagers should have been prevented from seeing the film, but Gunner Palace's ratings battles illustrate just how arbitrary misguided the ratings system can be.

Update: Just another self-reminder to go back to Ken Tucker's total misreading of Gunner Palace, as well as some other links I'd like to have nearby.

Posted by chuck at 11:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 18, 2005

Visiting Montreal

I've probably mentioned at least once the fact that I'm going to a conference in Montreal next week. The conference, Visible Evidence, looks fantastic, and my paper is slowly falling into shape. So here are my questions for you, dear readers. I've never been to Montreal and would love to know a few places that I absolutely should not miss. What restaurants would you recommend? What are the cool bars and cafes that I should check out? Any recommendations and suggestions would be much appeciated.

Posted by chuck at 4:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Tragedy in Real Time

Recently I mentioned the news that filmmaker Paul Greengrass would be making Flight 93, a film portraying the 9/11 hijacking that ended with the plane crashing in a Pennsylvania field. Now, via Cinematical, I've just learned about 102 Minutes, a Paramount film based on a book by New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, which will focus on the time between the first plane hitting the tower and the collapse of that tower. Like Greengrass' film, 102 Minutes will unfold in real time, a coincidence that seems fairly significant when it comes to representations of these events.

In some sense, this real-time resentation fits the already existing narrative of the days' events, with a shocked world watching as events unfolded on television while they happened. And ceratinly real-time presentation fits within the temporal structures of TV's presentation of catastrophe. By disrutping normal TV programming, our daily routines are also disrupted, as Henry Jenkins and Shari Goldin argue in "Media and Catastrophe." In most cases, our memories of September 11 are shaped by the live televisual presentation, so real-time films, portraying only a small protion of the day's events, make a lot of sense.

But following Jenkins and Goldin, who were writing in the immediate aftermath of the day's events, I wonder what effect this real-time narration will have on shaping our interpretations of 9/11. Drawing from Svetlana Boym's arguments, Jenkins and Goldin point out that

the catastrophe creates a context where ordinary judgement breaks down, when emotions push us forward, and where we arrived at decisions which we might otherwise reject. We hold off panic in such a situation by returning to familiar terms, comfortable values, normal ways of thinking, but this may make it hard to think through the problem from a fresh perspective or arrive at new truths about a changing situation.

Perhaps my question here is this: how will these mass-spectacle, real-time presentations affect our ability to think critically about the events of September 11? And to what extent might these films silence other perspectives on 9/11? In other words, by showing these micro-narratives of the last moments on a hijacked plane or the last few minutes before the first World Trade Center tower crashed, what stories and narratives will be lost?

Update: The re:constructions website offers an outstanding resource of responses to the media coverage of the 9/11 attacks by media studies scholars. Given Hollywood's "return" to 9/11 and the upcoming Freedom Walk, these questions suddenly seem more pertinent, particularly when it comes to thinking about how various media shape our experience and how they contribute to a sense of cultural memory.

Posted by chuck at 10:13 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 17, 2005

DC Bloggers Meetup

I've just returned from tonight's DC Blogger Meetup at Pharaoh's Bar and Grill in Adam's Morgan, my first visit to that DC neighborhood. The organizer, Rob Goodspeed, who also contributes to the DCist has the full list of attendees with some details about the night's events (yes, that's my arm and head in the corrner of the picture). Wayan of Metroblogging DC and Belly Button Window also has a pic (I'm the one trying to look away from the camera).

I'd found a few of these blogs before the meetup, so it was cool to meet everyone in person. Scott at Broke Kid tipped me off to free documentaries. I also met Pat, whose blog I've been reading for several days. Shannon from Playful in DC and I talked about theater, grad school, and filmmaking (we're also both from the south). Michael's blog addresses a wide range of science topics. Robert's photoblog has some cool photos of DC. John of Prod and Ponder is an adjunct professor at George Mason, where he once taught a course on cybercultures. I'll let you go over to Rob's blog and explore the blogs of the other attendees, but I always enjoy meeting and drinking with other bloggers, and the vibe at Pharaoh's--and in Adam's Morgan in general--was very cool. In other news, tomorrow, I may try drinking liberally.

Update: Here's another photo from the blogger meetup on Wednesday, courtesy of John. I'm pretty much obscured in the photo, but here's furtehr evidence, if it was ever needed, that I do have a social life after all.

Posted by chuck at 11:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Grunts

Via the Gunner Palace website: I've been working on my conference paper (yeah, I know, it's just a week away), and I've been thinking about how representations of the war have been framed. These questions are no doubt informed by the recent history of war coverage in the United States, dating back at least to Vietnam's status as the first "living-room war," and certainly through the criticism of the U.S. media for its uncritical coverage of the first Gulf War, as well as more recent failures of the major media outlets to challenge the Bush administration claims about WMDs in Iraq. Of course, it's probably worth emphasizing that these questions about war coverage have a much longer history (the Vietnam film as a response to the heroism portrayed in World War II movies), but these question about representing war persist, especially when it comes to the portrayal of the American soldier. Most TV rpodcuers claim that by portraying the soldier, or "grunt," they are remaining politically neutral.

In this context, Cynthia Littleton's Hollywood Reporter article illustrates this logic very effectively:

Fighting the global war on terrorism is vexing enough in real life. Fighting it on the small screen from a highly politicized point of view would be a tactical mistake, according to a group of top television writer-producers.

Steven Bochco, co-creator and executive producer with Chris Gerolmo of FX's Iraq war drama "Over There," said during a panel session Monday that they sought from the inception of the show to keep its focus on the lives of "grunts" on the ground and not on larger questions of U.S. foreign policy, morality or geopolitical concerns.

Panel moderator Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times, suggested that the lack of explicit discussion of the politics of the war in Iraq among the main characters in "Over There" was in and of itself an anti-war statement given the show's gritty portrayal of the chaos and carnage enveloping those grunts. But Bochco and Gerolmo disagreed.

"It seems to me that if we make an overt political statement in 'Over There' about the war ... then immediately the debate becomes not only about policy, but it becomes about our politics, Chris' and mine, as opposed to a discussion or a provocation about the human consequences of war," Bochco said. "The moment we become overtly political, half the audience dismisses us and doesn't pay attention to us because they disagree with our politics. And the other half discuss us ... in the context of our political leanings. And that's just not what my goal is with this show."

The panel, I believe, should raise some important questions about the politics of representing war, but Kinsley's claim that texts that identify with the grunts are making an anti-war statement seems wrong to me. I think that Kinsley is implying that by identifying with the soldier, we become more aware of the absurdity of the war and of the harmful Bush administration policies that endanger the men and women of the military. But I don't think identification is that simple, and Kinsely's claim relies on the assumption that the troops have a more authentic experience of the war than anyone else.

But I also think that Bochco's response--taking on the cloak of political neutrality--may be even more misleading. I don't think Bochco is being disingenuous when he argues that he didn't want to alienate "half the audience" by making a show about policy, but it seems perfectly clear that any approach to the portrayal of war will inevitably have political consequences. Choosing not to look at policy would seem to be an implicit acceptance of those policies. In short--because I should be writing the paper, not blog entries--these claims about "political neutrality" have dominated war coverage, and that neutrality has often been channeled through claims of offering a "grunt's-eye-view" on the war, a claim that necessarily gives me reason to pause. That being said, I don't think that a film or TV show that identifies with soldiers necessarily supports a pro- or anti-war position, although Kinsely's reading of Over There as anti-war rings pretty false in my opinion.

Posted by chuck at 2:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

But Will We Still Have To Watch "The Twenty?"

Just learned via The Reeler (his title's far better than mine) about a Bruce Weber New York Times article discussing the emerging trend of motion picture chains that want to redefine the moviegoing experience (and, of course, make a tidy profit along the way). Perks at these thetares include gourmet snack bars, valet parking, and, of course, booze. Weber notes that up until recently, very few first-run theaters served alcohol in the United States:

The first first-run theater to offer alcohol was the Commodore, a one-screen palace in Portsmouth, Va. And according to In Focus, a trade magazine published by the theater owners association, by 1997 only 14 theaters allowed patrons to drink, either in the lobby or their seats. At the beginning of this year, the magazine said, the number was 270, most operated by independent owners or small chains. Places like the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Tex., and two small chains in northern New England, Chunky's and Smitty's, seat customers at tables and offer different versions of dinner and a movie.

One restaurant, I mean theater, in Boca Raton, Florida, serves shrimp cocktail and sushi to selected patrons while they wait for the movie to start. Now, of course, these specialty chains represent one possible response to flagging movie ticket sales and, more importantly, to the ways in which the giant multiplex chains have made moviegoing feel more like watching television through extensive pre-show advertising.

While I don't want to dismiss other factors behind the decline in movie attendance, I'm fairly convinced that theater chains should be in the process of redefining the moviegoing experience in order to make it more attractive than staying at home, and these theater chains offer an interesting alternative, especially for adult audiences. Obviously, these luxuries will only draw in a certain niche market, and I do find some of the upscale pretensions to be a little excessive, especially the valet service. I think these chains may be a useful alternative to the cattle-herding experience offered by most multiplexes, although these luxury movie palaces might also be read as an attempt to avoid rubbing elbows with the general public (the "crying babies, giggling teenagers, [and] rude patrons" who populate multiplexes). There's certainly a history of theaters offering luxuries, such as air conditioning, to entice customers, so I'd imagine that these chains will flourish, especially in urban centers, but as I've been writing this entry, the underlying subtext of disdain for general movie audiences is fairly striking (not that I'd pass up a beer and a California roll to go with my movie).

Posted by chuck at 1:39 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 16, 2005

Tracking Flight 93

S.T. VanAirsdale at The Reeler, a great new-to-me film blog, passes along the news that filmmaker Paul Greengrass has been given the go-ahead to make Flight 93, a real-time version of the 9/11 hijacking that ended with the plane crashing in rural Pennsylvania. This follows pretty qucikly in the wake of the announcement that Oliver Stone has begun making a 9/11 film. In his treatment, Greengrass writes:

I ... believe that sometimes, if you look clearly and unflinchingly at a single event, you can find in its shape something precious, something much larger than the event itself ... the DNA of our times. Hence, a film about Flight 93.

I'll admit that I'm curious about the idea of a real-time film of the hijacking, in part because it seems consistent with the modes of crisis and catastrophe that Mary Ann Doane associated with live television broadcasts, but to claim that you're looking "clearly and unflinchingly" at anything that happened on September 11, without the existing frames and narratives that have developed around it ("Let's roll") seems misguided at best. It may seem obvious to suggest that the film will distort these events by emphasizing their "immediacy," but those distortions are far from trivial when it comes to definitions of national identity.

Given how quickly this announcement follows the news of Stone's film, I'm curious about these attempts to dramatize the events of September 11, which as Nick points out, had been relatively rare. These fictional representations seem caught up in the same sentiment that has led to the planned Freedom Walk, Department of Defense event to memorialize victims of the September 11 attacks, which has been criticized for serving primarily as a rally of support for the war in Iraq (specifically given that it will culminate in a concert by Clint "I Raq and I Roll" Black).

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The Wal-Mart Code

Edward Jay Epstein's talking about sex in his most recent Slate column. More precisely, he's talking about the lack of sex and nudity in recent Hollywood films. Epstein starts by tracing the early history of sex in the cinema. Many films made before the 1932 Hays Code featured sexually-charged images, including De Mille's biblical epics. I've often taught the Marlene Dietrich film, Blonde Venus, to illustrate Hollywood's lively early days. He then illustrates, quite effectively, how a combination of factors have prevented studios from explicitly showing sexual images. These factors include the Hollywood rating system, FCC-imposed network TV restrictions against nudity, and perhaps most importantly, Wal-Mart's status as the studio's major customer for DVD purchases (Wal-Mart paid studios over $5 billion last year).

Epstein's argument won't be unfamiliar to film students and scholars who have read Kevin Sandler's work on the ratings system, and how it restricts what movies the studios make, and I think this argument is generally sound. And while Wal-Mart's restritions on movie content may be relatively trivial compared to some of their other practices (Epstein's comments on Wal-Mart's "deceny policy" are worth checking out), I think it does illustrate to some extent how Wal-Mart's buying power can be harmful. Ultimately, Epstein concludes that independent productions are more likely to take the "risk" of dealing with sexual topics, and given the lower budgets for most independent films, I don't think there's much of an argument there.

That being said, I think Epstein overstates his case to some extent. Certainly one of this year's most successful films has been the Vince Vaughan-Owen Wilson comedy, Wedding Crashers, which has made well over $100 million, and the summer also has seen the Deuce Bigelow sequel and The 40-Year Old Virgin. It does seem significant that all three of these films feature male leads who are essentially children in adult bodies (Steve Carrell's 40-year old virgin; Rob Schneider's Bigelow; the wedding crashers), rather than the high school or college students of the American Pie films, for example. And by redirecting sexual images and behavior through comedy, it strikes me as a means for avoiding studio censorship (and I don't mean censorship here in the narrow, legal sense). In other words, Hollywood hasn't left the sex business entirely, but it has reworked it to imply that Vaughan, Wilson, and Schnieder are engaging in "risky" business by making "hard" R-rated films.

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Home Movies as Cultural Artifacts

I've already discussed my plans for the senior seminar I'll be teaching on "media times," and that course is starting to come together, but my plans for my junior seminar course are still developing. The goal for the junior seminar is to "introduce students to the methods and problems of research and writing on media." Students are required to find, describe, and use primary and secondary sources and tow rite two short (6-8 page) research papers, but within that framework, they should have a lot of room to find subjects that interest them.

For this class, I'd like to work through several examples of cultural artifacts, and one that I think would work particularly well would be the home movie (Super 8) and home video cameras. I've been thinking about some of these questions ever since I started working on my Capturing the Friedmans article (still somewhat in limbo due to the move), because of the father's home movie hobby, which I find to be one of the more significant subtexts of the film (in a sense, it's really a movie about images). I probably won't show the film to my students, but I'm intrigued by how home movies and home movie cameras were used, as well as how the marketing of the home video camera might change things. In that sense, I think these technologies (and their products) would work very well as examples of cultural artifacts.

Nick has already discussed in some detail questions about do-it-yourself filmmaking and the discourses that emerged around amateur movie-making. For secondary sources, I'll likely use James Moran's There's No Place Like Home Video and Patricia Zimmermann's Reel Families, among other sources (other suggestions are welcome). The "home movie" (or D-I-Y filmmaking) discussion won't provide the primary content of the course. This is primarily a brainstorming post, allowing me to work through some ideas for the course, and suggestions are welcome.

Posted by chuck at 12:50 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

August 15, 2005

National Archives Events

So, today appears to be Announcement Day at The Chutry Experiment. But I just received an email tip about two upcoming events at the National Archives, both in late September. On Thursday, September 22, The National Archives Experience will be sponsoring a panel on blogging and journalism entitled "Blogging: Free Press for All or Free-for-All?" Here's the full scoop from the National Archives website:

In honor of Constitution Day, the Newseum and the National Archives present a program examining how technological advances are reshaping interpretation of the first amendment, which guarantees, among other things, free speech and free press. It has been said that the power of the press belongs to the person who owns one. Today, as the Internet turns desktops and laptops into personal presses, first amendment rights are challenged, and a power shift seems to be under way. Bloggers are staking a claim to "grassroots journalism," and print and broadcast journalists are looking to the future and wondering where their reporting skills fit in. What’s credible? What’s not? And, just how far does the first amendment protect this new wave of journalism? Frank Bond of the Newseum and former Channel 9 anchor will moderate a discussion with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association and managing editor of "The National Debate"; Bruce Sanford, a first amendment lawyer with the D.C. office of Baker & Hostetler, LLP, and chairman of the board of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression; Jay Rosen, chairman and professor of journalism at New York University; and Deborah Potter, president and founder of Newslab as they examine the issues on the line when technology meets traditional journalism.

The following night there will be a panel on documentary film and copyright issues, entitled "Copyright, the Constitution, and the Crisis in Historical Documentary Film," and focusing specifically on the copyright issues that have prevented such documentaries as Eyes on the Prize from gaining a wider release. If you're interested in attending, both events are free, but you'll need to go to the National Archives website to make reservations.

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Free Documentaries

Via Broke Kid, a DC blogger I found on the Meetup website: FreeDocumentaries.org, a website dedicated to supporting free distribution of documentary films using Bittorrent. FreeDocumentaries.org operates according to the principle that "a true democracy depends on full access to information. In an era of an increasingly censored television media, FreeDocumentaries.org aims to provide you with films which you may not be able to find on the mainstream networks." I might never have to go to a video store again.

Some of the films they offer have been hard to find inside the U.S., including Le Monde Selon Bush, a film I've been wanting to see for over a year.

Posted by chuck at 1:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August Blogger Meetup

Just got an email reminder about the August Blogger Meetup here in DC, which I'm planning to attend. Here are the basics, thanks to playfulindc, in case any of my other DC readers want to attend:

When:
Wednesday, August 17, 2005 at 7:00 PM
This is United Weblogger Meetup Day

Where:
Pharaoh's Bar & Grill
1817 Columbia Rd. NW
Washington, DC 20001
202-232-6009

Posted by chuck at 1:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 14, 2005

Last Days

I caught Gus Van Sant's Last Days (IMDB), Van Sant's most recent film, following after Elephant, which I liked quite a bit, and Gerry to portray characters who suffer an early death (Dennis Lim explains this comparison nicely). Last Days was "inspired" by the often banal final days of Kurt Cobain, but the film itself claims that it is not "biographical" in the narrowest sense of the term.

The film is beautifully photographed, and Michael Pitt's performance as Blake, the dying rock singer, effectively captures the mental and emotional haze of someone completely addled by drugs and by perosnal isolation. Blake's face is often hidden behind his blond hair, and he speaks in mumbles and grunts while stumbling through the commune-like house where he is crashing. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the pople who share the house seem almost oblivious to Blake's needs. As Salon's Andrew O'Hehir notes, the film captures the self-absorption of Blake's hangers-on beautifully, especially the guy, Scott, who listens incessantly to Lou Reed's "Venus in Furs." The film also captures the tedium of those final days (several shots are virtually repeated, suggesting a lack of progression) and carefully refuses to impose a significance to certain events (Blake watches an entire "Boys II Men" video; he takes out an ad in the Yellow Pages; Mormon missionaries stop by). This decision not to seek out larger explanations, to avoid digging into Blake's psyche, gives the film its strength.

For some reason, I don't have much to say about the film. Perhaps the tight focus on Blake and his death prevents any real commentary or critical response, and I'll admit that I find that a little frustrating. It's not that I don't value the deliberate pacing or the apparent lack of focus (one critic wrongly compared watching the film unfavorably to watching paint dry--I won't reward him with a link), but I'm not sure what to do with the film's treatment of Blake's tragedy. Of course the "last days" title also has vaguely apocalyptic imagery, further emphasized by the Mormon missionaries who discuss their eschatology with Scott, but even there,I'm not sure I have a larger claim about the film. This review is a very tentative one, so I'd like to hear other reactions to Last Days, so that I can better understand my own conflicted response to what I regarded as a very well made film.

Posted by chuck at 11:54 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Grizzly Man

Like Matthew Ross of Filmmaker Magazine, I really liked Werner Herzog's fascinating documentary, Grizzly Man (IMDB). Herzog's doc focuses on grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, who spent 12 summers living with and "protecting" grizzly bears from poachers. Treadwell was a mini-celebrity of sorts. He once appeared on David Letterman's show and spent hours speaking to children about animal rights. The film opens with the revelation that Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were attacked and killed by a grizzly, leaving behind hours of footage of Treadwell and his relationship to the grizzlis he admired (significantly Amie rarely appeared on screen, and Treadwell often spent days alone with the bears).

Herzog is a sensitive interpreter of Treadwell's footage, mixing Treadwell's fascinating, often deeply confessional, images with interviews with Treadwell's family and friends. And Herzog wisely allows Treadwell's footage to carry the story, sometimes showing us Treadwell's own professional ambitions (he'd often do several "takes" of a shot he was preparing for his documentary) but also showing us those unexpected images that would emerge when Treadwell simply allowed the camera to run.

As Herzog notes, Treadwell's charming persona (laid-back, childlike Californian) masked a deeply haunted psyche, and we get several segments where Treadwell curse repeatedly in front of the camera, his paranoia about the threats to the bears magnified by his isolation. Herzog's interpretations of Treadwell's story--conveyed largely through voice-over--are often quite insightful, especially when it comes to Treadwell's inner demons, but Cynthia's point that Herzog may have romanticized Treadwell, seeing in him another version of the "holy fool," may be right. When Herzog compares Treadwell's relationship to the grizzlies to his own highly-conflicted relationship to actor Klaus Kinski, it seemed as if Herzog was appropriating Treadwell's story.

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

August 12, 2005

Rumsfeld vs. Zizek

Also via GreenCine: At the recent New York premiere of Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener, Focus Films co-President, James Schamus, invoked both the Bush administration's resident epistemologist and the Slovenian philosopher:

"There are known knowns," Rumsfeld said back then. "These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

Schamus then went on to quote the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who discussed Rumsfeld's comments in an essay appearing in In These Times entitled "What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows about Abu Ghraib" and which I excerpt from below:

"What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the 'unknown knowns,' the things we don't know that we know -- which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the 'knowledge which doesn't know itself,' as Lacan used to say.

"If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the 'unknown unknowns,' that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the 'unknown knowns' -- the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values."

Zizek's article is over a year old, but well worth revisiting, especially given Zizek's parsing of Rumsfeld's notorious early attempts to defend the Bush administration against charges tha Saddam Hussein did not have a WMD program. Specifically, Zizek focuses on the "theatricality" of the use of torture in Abu Ghraib, the use of cameras to film what happened and the staged, or posed, quality of many of the images. Zizek's comments might provide an interesting starting point, or reference point at the very least, for the paper I'm writing for MLA, although I'm not quite prepared to go into specifics just yet.

But Schamus's comments also make Meirelles's follow-up to City of God, easily one of the best films of the decade so far, sound that much more interesting. Gardener, which has been marketed as a relatively run-of-the-mill thriller, is based on John Le Carre's novel about a "Big Pharma in Africa" conspiracy, focusing specifically on unsafe drug testing in Africa. Le Carre also discusses the pharmeceutical industry in a 2001 article that orginally appeared in The Nation.

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

Winter Soldier Screenings

Via GreenCine Daily: I've been following the news about the re-release of the 1972 documentary, Winter Soldier, to art house theaters across the country (for my DC readers, it'll be playing at E Street in early December). Although the film was essentially buried, receiving only a few showings on New York's WNET, the Winter Soldier conference marked a major turning point in the anti-war movement, so it's certainly a timely document (the Winter Soldier event was briefly featured in George Butler's documentary, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry).

Also worth noting: documentary auteurs, including Barbara Kopple, whose Harlan County, USA is one of my favorite docs, contributed to the making of the film. Anthony Kaufan discusses the Winter Soldier story further in his blog and in a Village Voice article.

Posted by chuck at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 11, 2005

Science on the Silver Screen

Somehow I missed this story until now. Cyndi Greening and Anbruch both point to a recent New York Times artcile reporting that the American Film Institute (AFI) is participating in a workshop to train scientists and engineers on screenwriting. The work is funded by grants from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research ($100,000 a year annually for three years) and the Army Research Office ($50,000 this year), who seek to promote "accurate" portrayls of scientists and engineers in Hollywood films. So what's the motivation behind hosting these workshops?

Exactly how the national defense could be bolstered by setting a few more people loose in Los Angeles with screenplays to peddle may be a bit of a brainteaser. But officials at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research spell out a straightforward syllogism:

Fewer and fewer students are pursuing science and engineering. While immigrants are taking up the slack in many areas, defense laboratories and industries generally require American citizenship or permanent residency. So a crisis is looming, unless careers in science and engineering suddenly become hugely popular, said Robert J. Barker, an Air Force program manager who approved the grant. And what better way to get a lot of young people interested in science than by producing movies and television shows that depict scientists in flattering ways?

Now, as Anbruch notes, this is the ultimate example of "product placement," as the defense industry attempts to attract young viewers into the sciences. This kind of relationship has a relatively long history, as David Robb's Operation Hollywood points out, with movies such as Top Gun serving as little more than 100-minute recruitment videos for the military and apparently led to a major spike in military recruitment.

But while I'm suspicious of the motivations for this seminar, I am intrigued by some of the questions it's raising. It is interesting to see these scientists reflecting on questions of audience and what it means to write for non-professionals outside of peer-reviewed journals. Also worth noting: in the past, I've commented on my frustration at how college and university professors are represented in Hollywod films, and it sounds like the seminar has focused to some extent on these "representation issues," with the seminar participants debating about Michael Douglas's portrayal of a defense-industry engineer in Falling Down.

Here's the AFI press release on the workshop (note: this might explain the NIH Science in Cinema series playing at the AFI Silver).

Posted by chuck at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2005

Experimental Film Anthologies

Chris and Nick both mention the good news that two major collections of American and European avant-garde and experimental films are hitting DVD in the near future. Kino has just released a 2 DVD collection, and Unseen Cinema has a 6 DVD set, apparently due for an October release. Among the highlights: Ferdinand Leger's Ballet mecanique, which I used to teach at the University of Illinois.

I should really be working on conference papers, syllabi, and articles, but just wanted to mention these anthologies, both of which look very cool. Chris's descriptions also make Dmitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant and Jean Epstein's La Glace à Trois Faces/Three-Way Mirror sound particularly interesting.

Posted by chuck at 4:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 9, 2005

"Just Another Day in Baghdad"

Working on my paper on war and documentary for the Visible Evidence conference in a few weeks. Initially I pitched the paper broadly as a treatment of "war and the everyday," with the intention of looking not only at documentaries but also at some of the blogs authored by Iraqi citizens and, possibly, American soldiers. One of the goals was to see how blogs and some documentaries, particularly Gunner Palace, construct a concept of "the everyday" when it comes to the war in Iraq. And while I was rewatching the film last night, I began to think about how the film offers a compelling use of the everyday lives of the soldiers as an implicit critique of the war.

In particular, I was fascinated by Tucker's use of camera movement throughout the film. Gunner Palace alternates between static talking-heads interviews and freestyle raps by the soldiers and the constant motion of the soldiers' patrols and raids. It would be tempting to note the ways in which the camera clearly identifies with the position of the soldiers, especially when the camera's POV is aligned with the guns the soldiers carry. And that identification is there. But the film also works hard to gesture towards the ways in which the constant movement of the soldiers in their (inadequately armored) Humvees lacks any real direction. I'm working on mapping out how those shot sequences contribute to an implicit critique of the war in Iraq.

At any rate, I've been thinking about a specific segment of Gunner Palace all morning. A soldier comments in an interview that an IED has exploded, destroying two civilian buses and killing dozens of civilians. The soldier is obviously deeply pained by the unnecessary death and Tucker's film reflects that beautifully. After the first soldier completes his narrative of what happened, Tucker cuts to a second soldier who comments bleakly, "Just another day in Baghdad." It's one of the final segments in the film, as the event takes place just a few days before Tucker was due to leave Baghdad, but the placement of that scene near the film's end now seems particularly apt, given the continued violence in Iraq.

I don't have a specific conclusion here. In fact, I was actully simply planning to link to a few blogs, so that I'd have them nearby if I choose to discuss them in this paper. It probably goes without saying that blogs have, in some way, shaped the discourse surrounding the war in Iraq, in part because of the ability bloggers living in Iraq have to post their eyewitness accounts virtually every day. Here, I'm most interested in blogs such as Riverbend's Baghdad Burning, Khalid Jarrar's Tell Me a Secret, and Raed's Raed in the Middle, all of which provide a much different take on the phrase "just another day in Baghdad." Again, I don't have a specific claim to make just yet, at least not here, but I wanted to put some ideas together and to collect a few links.

Also check out Lance Mannion's discussion of Al Giordano's Wounded Warroir Project, a national effort to help wounded soliders return to civilian life. As Mannion notes, the Bush administration seems determined not show that the war in Iraq has had any "nasty consequences." One of the things I noticed last night in Gunner Palace is that we actually do see some of the effects of the war, including some of the wounded soldiers who are being transported in Tucker's plane (also check out Salon's recent article on the US government's decision to review 72,000 cases in which soldiers have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, claiming that PTSD has been diagnosed too often, while the veterans themselves argue that this is just another attempt to cut costs on an increasingly expensive war.

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

SAMLA Panel Details

Just looked up my SAMLA panel (PDF) and it looks like I'll be waking up very early on Saturday morning (scroll down to panel 38). But I'm excited about hearing what my panleists will have to say about documentary film.

Posted by chuck at 12:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 8, 2005

The Edukators

Hans Weingartner's The Edukators (IMDB) focuses on three young activists who engage in various forms of resistance against global capitalism. The film opens during a protest at a sporting goods store, with the activists alerting customers to the sweatshop labor that went into producing the shoes. The handheld camera during this opening sequence effectively captures the urgency of their quest, but given the power of the police, media, and corporations, their actions seem offer only a temporary disruption in the flow of corporate profits. But after this opening sequence, the film narrows its focus to the three activists, Jule (Julia Jentsch), Jan (Daniel Brühl, of Godbye, Lenin), and Peter (Stipe Erceg), developing what I found to be an intellectually compelling and emotionally moving reflection on political commitments.

After this opening sequence, we learn that Jan and Peter engage in various Situationist activities, "educating" Berlin's wealthy elite by breaking into their homes and rearranging their furniture (a stereo in the refrigerator, piling chairs in the living room floor), but never stealing anything. They leave cryptic notes in the homes, stating, "Your Days of Plenty are Numbered." Jule, evicted from her apartment due to her debts incurred when she crashed into the Mercedes of a wealthy businessman, Hardenburg, moves in with Peter (her boyfriend at the time). Jule then becomes initiated into these activities with Jan while Peter is away in Barcelona (merely a convenient plot point), and Jule and Jan eventually break into Hardenburg's home to "educate" him; however, Hardenburg returns to the house while they are still there, recognizes Jule, and the three activists suddenly find themselves with no alternative but to take the businessman hostage. This set-up reminded me, as it did The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, of Michael Haneke's more chilling, Funny Games.

The "hostage" segments of the film build nicely from this earlier material. Hardenburg is patient and charming with his captors and reveals--at a strategic moment--that he had once been an activist, a leader in the German Students for a Democratic Society. This revelation sets up a dialogue between the film's four central characters, as Hardenbug warns that the young activists will eventually tire and seek the security that might even lead them to vote conservative. He even cites the classic cliche about politics and youth: "Under 30 and not liberal, no heart; over 30 and still liberal, no brain." Meanwhile, he also seeks to exploit the developing love triangle, as Jule and Jan gradually fall in love, despite their loyalty to Peter.

But unlike Jesica Winter, the Village Voice reviewer, I don't think The Edukators endorses Hardenburg's conventional, bourgeois position. Given Hardenburg's exploitation of Jule (he could have forgiven her debt after the accident), and given the film's identification with Jule, Jan, and Peter, it seems unlikely that the film would endorse his position. Winter is right to connect The Edukators to the spirit (and plot) of Truffaut's Jules and Jim, but I was also reminded of Bonnie and Clyde, Bertolucci's The Dreamers, a film I've gradually come to appreciate after some initial misgivings (A.O. Scott also emphasizes the film's '60s cinephilia, although I disagree with him sharply about the film's final shot).

The Edukators is, by no means, blind about the possibilities for political revolution. In fact, unlike Ekkehard Knörer, the Jump Cut reviewer, I read the film's narrative uncertainty as a sign of today's complicated political moment. The film is also well aware of the limits of nostalgia for the revolutions of the 1960s, and yet the film still managed to make me feel energized by the political passion of its central characters, particulalry during the final sequence in what Knörer calls the film's "Utopian moment."

Posted by chuck at 6:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Postcard From Music City

I got a postcard from G Zombie the other day, but it took me a few days to figure out how to get my printer's scanner to work.

Update: In completely unrelated news, my car, a 1989 Mazda with 196,000 miles on it, failed Maryland's very tough safety standards. The cost of reparing the car for inspection far outweighs the value of the car, so I'm thinking of giving it back to my parents (my car will easily pass inspection in Georgia--not sure what that says about either state).

What this means is that I'll likely be living without a car, at least for a few months, something I'm fairly prepared to do. I can walk to at least two grocery stores, to the laundromat, to the bank and post office, and to a Metro station (and Metro goes everywhere in D.C.). I can get to the E Street Cinema and the AFI Silver movie theaters (among many others), so I don't feel any real pressure to buy a car right now, even if it sucks not to have a car.

Posted by chuck at 12:57 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 7, 2005

Broken Flowers

Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (IMDB) is, on one level, a road movie. The film opens with Don Johnston sitting on the sofa as his current girl friend, Sherry (Julie Delpy), breaks up with him. Don, who has made a fortune in home computers but doesn't own one, barely seems to respond. After Sherry leaves, Don receives an unsigned letter from an ex-girl friend telling him that he has a 19-year-old son who may be looking for him. Don's first impulse is to ignore the letter, but his Ethiopian neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), who is fascinated by the letter, tracks down all five of Don's lovers from that year and plans an itinerary for him. The film's plot consists primarily of Don visting unannounced the four women who may be the mother of his son.

Even when he is traveling, Don seems utterly passive and unresponsive. We see him sitting in an airport waiting for a flight or sitting quietly in an airplane between two other sleeping passengers. This idleness wouldn't work without Bill Murray's quiet charm, which surfaces several times during the film, particularly when he chats with a young woman florist. Don's idleness is set in contrast with the highly active Winston, who works three jobs to support five children, and still manages to play amateur detective by Googling Don's old lovers and planning his journey. Winston even plans the detective work. Bring pink flowers to all four women and see how they respond. Look out for a typewriter.

As Filmbrain notes, this type of set-up could easily lead to a fairly shallow "man-in-midlife-crisis" film, but Jarmusch records conversation, the awkward pauses and uncomfortable moments of human interaction, as well as any contemporary American filmmaker. And Jarmusch also provides the four women Don visits with distinct personalities, a feature that is only magnified by the four solid performances of the actresses (Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton).

Significantly, each of the four women have distinctly different lives. Stone plays the widow of a NASCAR driver who died in a crash, and we see her personality reflected, to some extent, in her teenage daughter, Lolita. Conroy plays a former hippie turned real estate agent who, with her husband, sells pre-fab homes. The couple lives in a model home, and their perfectly arranged dinner table looks as if it could have been removed from the set of American Beauty. Lange plays an "animal communicator," someone who mediates between pets and their owners, claiming to hear what the pets are saying. Finally, Swinton plays a backwoods motorcycle enthusiast. It's tempting to read into these scenes images of the possible lives that Don could have led, but I don't think that's quite what the film is doing (although I think the class affiliations of all four women are significant).

Instead, I think the film taps into some profound uestions about identity and about one's relationship to the past. During these brief reunions, we do see some sense of conection with each of the four women, but the scenes convey that Don's personal journey deeply disrupts the lives of the four women, and particularly in the scenes with Swinton, Lange, and Conroy, the film seems explicitly critical of Don's behavior.

It's also significant that Broken Flowers leaves many things unresolved. There is a scene near the end of the film in which Don believes that he is meeting his son, and he gradually attempts to connect with the young man who is on a road trip of his own. Broken Flowers is a gem of a film, one that explores aging and regret in a fairly powerful way.

Posted by chuck at 10:42 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The Fundamental Paradox of Recording

I had a chance to catch two films this weekend that I'd highly recommend, Jim Jarmusch's latest, Broken Flowers, and Hans Weingartner's The Edukators. I'll write reviews later (hopefully tonight). But for now, I just wanted to bookmark some connections I'm making for my media horror essay/project. I've been reading Tom Gunning's "Re-Newing Old Technologies," in which he discusses the ways in which "old" media technologies sometimes regain their uncanny properties, which is basically the phenomenon I'm trying to unpack in my article on contemporary "media horror" films.

Anyway, he briefly mentions Theodor Adorno's essay, "The Curves of the Needle," noting Adorno's recognition that the phonograph "derived from a tradition of inscription rather simulacrum" (53), a distinction that seems relevant to the depiction of some "old media" technologies in the horror films I discuss, particulalry the use of analog recorders in White Noise.

Also worth noting here: Joseph Tate's citation of Zizek's discussion of Radiohead in On Belief:

In "The Curves of the Needle," a short essay on the gramophone from 1928, Adorno notes the fundamental paradox of recording: the more the machine makes its presence known (through obtrusive noises, its clumsiness and interruptions), the stronger the experience of the actual presence of the singer--or, to put it the other way round, the more perfect the recording, the more faithfully the machine reproduces a human voice, the more humanity is removed, the stronger the effect that we are dealing with something "inauthentic" (44).

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August 5, 2005

Technologies of Time

Just a quick bibliographic reference. I've been having trouble finding a published copy of William Uricchio's essay, "Technologies of Time," but came across this "draft" version on the Web. I don't have time to read it right now because I have other essays and articles that I have to read first, but looks promising, especially for the type of research that I'm doing.

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Screen Door Jesus

I had a chance to watch a preview copy of Kirk Davis's ambitious indie film, Screen Door Jesus (IMDB), last night. Screen Door Jesus, based on the short stories by Christopher Cook (which I have not had a chance to read), elegantly weaves together several narratives set in the small east Texas town of Bethlehem, reflecting on race, class, and politics, particularly as they are inflected by religious belief and practice.

Screen Door Jesus's central plot focuses on Mother Harper's startling discovery that she can see the image of Jesus in her screen door. News of Mother Harper's door immediately spreads across the small town and everyone, from drifters with a get-rich-quick oil scheme to the new kid in town, gather to see what the fuss is about. Several locals even find a way to profit off of the fascination with the door, with one character justifying his actions by claiming that he's selling pictures of a screen door, not of Jesus. But even if I haven't read Cook's stories, I knew similar stories, and not only because I was in Atlanta when the "Spaghetti Jesus" appeared on a Pizza Hut billboard in 1991. When I was an undergrad at a small religious college, a videotape of the Campus Choir's trip to Eastern Europe, in the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, apparently depicted an image of Jesus in the background during a healing service. Needless to say, the tape created quite a buzz on campus, which was, of course, far more interesting than anything in the tape itself.

It would be easy to view these locals who want, or in some cases need, to see Jesus through the lens of satire (that's not to say the film isn't funny, but to say I rarely found the humor to be mean-spirited). Instead Davis's film (and I'd assume Cook's stories) complicate that need to witness a small miracle in thir littlke community, in part through its satire of the media frenzy that converges upon Mother Harper's lawn, trampling her gladiolas and mocking the gullible locals. And one of the major strengths of the film is the degree to which it conveys the reasons that many of the characters in the film are invested in their religious beliefs, while also conveying the reasons that others have reason to doubt or dismiss this apparition. These plots include a teenage boy who questions his faith because his mother is dying of a potentially treatable bacterial infection, but his grandmother refuses to allow the mom to be taken to the hospital. A bank officer feels remorse after refusing a loan request from an African-American who had attended his church. Two security guards are pressed into the duty of guarding a splinter church convention with some beliefs that go against standard Baptist teaching. Meanwhile, a couple of locals plot to blackmail the corrupt mayor by snapping photos of him with the town party girl in a local hotel.

These stories often coment on each other, particularly when it comes to the sometimes uneasy mixture of race, religion, and politics in the south. Screen Door frequently crosscuts between the town's two most prominent churches, a predominantly African-American Pentecostal church and the primarily white Baptist church. In the Pentecostal church, parishoners fan themselves because of a lcak of air conditioning while the Baptists clearly have financial and political power in Bethlehem. The rhythms of these services are conveyed very effectively, especially the cinematography during the baptism scenes and the rapid-fire delivery of the Pentecostal preacher.

Screen Door Jesus is Kirk Davis's first feature as a director, and while I was occasionally frustrated with the film's pacing (the shifts between narratives were sometimes unnecessarily jarring), Davis, who is from Memphis and "preached his first sermon at 10, read Nietzsche and drank his first bottle of Jack Daniels at 18, and studied Faulkner at 20," demonstrated an impressive eye and ear for religious life in the south.

Posted by chuck at 9:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 4, 2005

"We Were Running from the Burning Houses"

Via Kottke: drawings by Sudaese refugee children of their experiences of the war in Darfur (from Human Rights Watch).

From the BBC: An article about a Nigerian-born blogger living in Spain, Sokari Ekine, whose blog, Black Looks, is "giving a voice to African women and highlighting gay and lesbian issues on the continent."

Posted by chuck at 5:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Heath Ledger is "This Year's Hottest New Star"

Via an email tip from McChris: Boing Boing reports that Sony has agreed to refund $5 (PDF) to anyone who saw Hollow Man, Vertical Limit, The Animal, A Knight's Tale, or The Patriot because they may have been influenced to see the films by a fictional film critic, David Manning, whose blurbs appeared on advertisements for these Columbia Pictures films.

Making fun of Sony's folly is too easy, even if it is tempting to compare this story to Jeff Gannon's foray into White House reporting. As the Museum of Hoaxes article on Manning points out, one has to wonder why Sony felt the need to manufacture quotes from a made up film critic when studios routinely pamper critics during the press junkets for these movies. Perhaps this more blatant lie (a made-up film critic) serves to mask the ways in which the real hype is manufactured in the first place.

I somehow managed to miss seeing all of these films in the theater (in fact, of the films, I've only seen brief snippets of A Knight's Tale and maybe Hollow Man on TBS while waiting for a Braves game to start), so I won't be able to claim a refund. But for those of you who were enticed by promises of seeing "this year's hottest new star" or, for Hollow Man, "the summer's best special effects," please claim your well-deserved refund.

Posted by chuck at 12:07 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

August 3, 2005

Shijie (The World)

I caught Jia Zhangke's 2004 film, Shijie (IMDB) over the weekend, but haven't been able to find a satisfying way to approach my review of the film. Shijie (English title, The World) takes place in a Beijing amusement park called "The World," where replicas of the Eiffel Tower stand next to a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa. A short monorail ride will deliver you to the Pyramids of Egypt and a small-scale version of Manhattan, with one park employee sardonically commenting that "we still have our twin towers" (the World Socialist Website has a good read of this "façade of cosmopolitanism").

Employees of the park perform dances from some of the countries represented in the park's attractions, inviting readings that interpret the film as a commentry on China's engagement with globalization. Roger Ebert offers one variation of this reading, noting that "The World has been made in China by Jia Zhangke, a director who has been in much trouble with the authorities -- not because he embraces the West, but because he mocks modern China for trying to become Western in such haste. He doesn't yearn for the days of Chairman Mao, but he doesn't find the emerging China much of an improvement; the nation seems trapped between two sterilities." Ebert's read is a compelling one. The film clearly finds some humor in the park's shabby simulacra, partciularly when it shows tourists posing for photographs in front of the Leaning Tower as if they are holding it up, but it's not nostalgic for an idealized past before globalization.

The film focuses primarily on Tao, a dancer, and Taisheng, who also works at the park, but opens broadly on their network of co-workers who have come to Beijing to improve their lives. The shiny surfaces and elaborate costumes of the park are visually contrasted with the rundown apartments where the employees live (a point also raised by Ebert and the World Socialist Website). We also see Russian workers who are imported to work in the park, with their "manager" demanding to hold their passports. These "labor issues" are also explored through Tao's younger brother, called "Little Sister," who takes a job as a construction worker.

But my most vivid memory of the film is its "slowness." The World is dominated by long takes and often portrays characters in the act of thinking or reflecting. And while I'll admit that I found this slowness frustrating, it's the kind of film that I'm convinced would reward repeat viewings.

Update: Here's an interview with The World director, Jia Zhang-ke, who discusses, among other topics, some of the institutional and industrial pressures of making a film in China.

Posted by chuck at 4:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

What We Talk About When Other People Are Listening

Via Girish: the fascinating blog, Overheard Lines, which consists entirely of "things actual people actually said, captured by an eavesdropping playwright in San Francisco named Tim (or his spying friends)." Warning: once you start reading, it's pretty difficult to stop.

Posted by chuck at 1:41 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 2, 2005

The End of Time

Via McChris: a WSJ.com article about a US proposal to the United Nations to "simplify the world's timekeeping by making each day last exactly 24 hours." essentially, the US wants to eliminate "leap seconds," which are added every few years because the earth takes slightly longer than 24 hours to fully rotate. As the article notes, adding leap seconds can often be a big hassle for computers that were not programmed to accept 61-second minutes, and because some computer programmers assert that such imprecision can be costly, the leap second may become a thing of the past.

This change would, of course, also have its costs. Sundials and sextants would no gradually lose their accuracy, although with GPS, that concern has generally been dismissed. It would also lead to teh sun rising later and later, a problem the US argues could be avoided by adding a "leap hour" every 500 years or so. Others, including the Earth Rotation Service's leap-second chief, Daniel Gambis, of the Paris Observatory, are concerned about removing time's representation from its ground in the earth's rotation: "As an astronomer, I think time should follow the Earth." His comments are echoed by astronomer Steve Allen, who comments, "Time has basically always really meant what you measure when you put a stick in the ground and look at its shadow." Gambis's concern also has financial implications. Re-setting telescopes to the new time would cost thousands of dollars each. And, of course, the sun would set on the role of Britain's Royal Observatory in establishing universal time, poetntially setting off a plot that only Joseph Conrad could have imagined (thanks for the Conrad tip, McChris).

The WSJ article is right that the question is essentially a philosophical one, or perhaps more precisely, a representational one, raising questions about what, exactly, time represents, and in some sense, the removal of the leap second might seem to represent an increased abstraction of time, moving it away from the "natural" rotation of the earth. Of course, even universal time (Greenwich Mean Time, now relaced by Coordinated Universal Time, measured by atomic clocks) is a relatively recent phenomenon, as Stephen Kern explains in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (has anyone read Kern's new preface?), one largely connected to increasing industrialization and faster transportation in Eurpoe and the US.

Posted by chuck at 4:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Return of the Death Spiral

Part 2 of Edward Jay Epstein's "Hollywood Death Spiral" appeared today in Slate (check out part one plus my response). The basics of Epstein's original argument: the "window" between the theatrical relase date and DVD release date is shrinking, allowing consumers to wait for the DVD release rather than seeing a film on the big screen. With less people seeing the movies in theaters, the window shrinks even further (and so on). I'm a little less convinced by Epstein's argument than I was last week. While home theater technologies and industry distribution practices have likely affected movie attendance, this cause-effect relationship seems far too easy. Tim's comment about "displays of consumption" (scroll down to comments) should certainly be part of the equation, but I wonder if there aren't other factors (increased emphasis on family life? increasing cynicism towards movies as media events?) that are driving people to stay at home. In short, it's not just about a new technology or even a new economic practice, although those factors are certainly relevant.

But I'm willing to take Epstein's claims at face value, at least for the duration of one blog entry. In Part Two, Epstein considers the solutions for such a problem, noting that some studio executives have even considered eliminating the window altogether, releasing films to theaters, video stores, and pay-per-view on the same day. Like Epstein, I think theater chains, whose profits almost entirely derive from concession sales, might have something to say about that. I do think that theaters could make themselves more attractive by offering better and more varied concessions (Landmark's coffee has become part of my theater-going routine, and their desserts are generally tasty, too). Other potential solutions include studios taking a larger chunk of the box office take in exchange for keeping the DVD window at five months, but that's probably not going to make theaters very happy.

But as Green Cine Daily points out, Epstein doesn't really offer a solution (maybe he wants us to buy his book). Ultimately, Epstein suggests that studios will likley take a wait-and-see approach, and that's pretty much his best guess, too. I'm not really in a position to predict what's going to happen, so maybe I'm copping out, too (of course I never promised a solution). Given the degree to which the Hollywood hype machine has been saturating TV, the Internet, billboards, and other media spaces, I'm wondering if studios might find themselves redefining how movie releases are "media events." I've seen so many ads for a certain movie based on a certain 1970s TV show that I actually believed the movie had already been released several weeks ago. I also feel like I've already seen the movie, even if I don't have the foggiest notion of its plot (other than lots of stunt driving). And I had a similar experience when I watched Wedding Crashers last week. There was not a single moment in the film that the previews had not already anticipated for me. In other words, I wonder if one of the problems of the studio system is that they've oversaturated our airwaves with ads for the big summer movies and that by the time the movies get to theater, watching the film itself feels like an exercise.

Posted by chuck at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 1, 2005

Wedding Crashers

Stephanie Zacharek owes me $9.75 plus $2.70 Metrofare. I went to see Wedding Crashers (IMDB) for two reasons. First, I've really been worried about the big Hollywood studios lately. I figured that maybe I should buy a pity ticket, just to keep things going. I'm always happy to help. Second, reviews like Zacharek's led me to believe that the latest Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughan collaboration would be at least a slight departure from Hollywood's formula comedy factory.

Zacharek praises Wedding Crashers as "that rare contemporary mainstream comedy that seems to have been made without parental supervision." In other words, I was prepared for a film that didn't moralize about its characters' rock-and-roll wedding-crashing lifestyle. But after a relatively brief, and mildly funny, wedding-crash montage, the film quickly shifts into the narrative expectation that these guys need to grow up.

To be fair, it's not entirely Zacharek's fault. Debra Dickerson, also of Salon (did they get a kickback from New Line?) celebrated the film for its willingness to be a litte raunchy: "'Crashers,' at least in the beginning, wasn't about love. It was about making multi-orgasmic lemonade on love's fringes until it was your turn to star in a wedding." She later criticized the film because the entire opening montage, set to the Isley Brothers' "Shout" (which I thought was a weak touch, anyway), showed Wilson and Vaughan at dozens of weddings, none of which featured African-American characters, though other ethnicities were represented (a fair criticism, Dickerson's argument is well worth a read). Dickerson's reading of this montage as "a celebration of sex, carnality and the feminine ideal" and "the lion-tamer aspect of being a straight chick" wsn't teribly apparent, either, although I'll acknowldege that Isla Fisher's performance as Claire (the clingy woman from the ubiquitous previews and commercials) was entertaining.

Ultimately, what bothers me about the hype for Wedding Crashers is that the film has been described as risky or edgy simply because it received an R rating and shows Vaughan and Wilson shagging lots of women at weddings where they weren't invited. Now, to be fair, I didn't really expect the film to endorse their behavior, nor would I want that, but Wedding Crashers seemed to feel somewhat guilty about its premise, jumping way too quickly into its efforts to redeem Wilson and Vaughan. This is particularly evident when Will Ferrell, who continues to strke me as remarkably unfunny, cameos as Vaughan's mentor, a legendary wedding crasher who is now in his 40s, living at home with his mom, and has now taken to crashing funerals. Basically, Ferrell serves to remind us that when wedding crashers reach a certain age, their behavior is no longer charming, but grating and embarrassing instead.

Posted by chuck at 11:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

NEH Docs

Via my Site Meter referrals: a National Endowment for the Humanities press release announcing grants for 16 documentaries, including ten that have been named We the People projects.

Projects include a two-hour documentary on the life of Walt Whitman, a four-hour doc on Andrew Jackson, and a two-hour TV documentary on the life of Helen Keller by Straight Ahead Pictures. Also cool: two Filmmakers Collaborative projects, one on Louisa May Alcott and another on the Ellis Island immigrant hospital.

Posted by chuck at 2:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dusty Fossils and Dead Media

Ken offers an important challenge to the "hype narratives" associated with the emergence of new media. Basically, as Ken notes, the narrative goes as follows: "a new medium will remove [or] replace an older, related medium, and in so doing send that old medium to the junk bin of history." These naratives often turn out to be false, of course, as Ken illustrates. Typewriters haven't killed writing. Hypertext hasn't killed the practice of reading books. Ken's making this claim in response to a Rob Pegoraro Washington Post article investigating hype that podcasts "will turn radio into a dusty fossil," but I think that Ken's comments also apply to the current claims that cinema is being replaced, or maybe displaced, by the Internet and video games.

Ken argues that these claims are often incorrect because they confuse "the current function of the medium with the medium itself." He adds that these claims also ignore "the importance of temporality in assessing mediation." To use Ken's podcast-radio comparison, radio's liveness is something that podcasts cannot emulate. I'd add here that there are "industrial" factors as well. Radio, film, and the publishing industry are powerful industries that are very interested in sustaining their profitability and may, in fact, also have an interest in perpetuating the illusion of crisis.

Still, there are certainly "dead media" out there, including many "proto-cinematic" visual technologies such as the camera obscura and magic lantern that now exist solely as curiosities more than anything else.

Posted by chuck at 11:02 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack