the chutry experiment: April 2007 Archives

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April 30, 2007

MIT 5 Links

Still recovering from a long weekend of conferencing and travel. There's no easy way to travel from Fayetteville to most major cities, so I spent most of the day Sunday on various modes of transportation. But I very much enjoyed my first Media in Transition conference and will certainly try to return to the conference in the future. I probably won't have time to blog the many panels and plenaries that I attended, so instead, I'll try to point to some other people who have been posting about the conference, including Axel Bruns' impressive report on my panel, "Culture 2.0."

Other blog reports on MIT 5 are available from Jason (see especially his discussion of his lost panel), redline, Jill (who also notes the number of folks who Twittered the conference), Jean (who posted slides from her paper), Mike, and Tarleton Gillespie. While I'm thinking about it, I also want to mention Ravi Jain's very cool videoblog, Drive Time, which Ravi discussed during the panel he shared with Mike.

Henry Jenkins also has an extended post requesting further comment as the organizers plan for MIT 6 as well as providing links to podcasts of the plenaries (a very cool idea). Reading all of the other conference posts and Twitters, I now wish that I'd made the effort to drag my laptop around Boston and Cambridge for the conference because the panels I attended gave me a lot to process as I move into summer writing mode.

Update: I completely forgot to mention that I met "cyborganize," the person behind these great Battlestar commentary vlogs, which came across my path a few months ago when I was doing research for my "future of science fiction TV" paper. Also worth checking out, Jean has an extended post on the ways in which Twitter and blogs and other social networking technologies served to mediate the conference in various ways. Hoping to return to that point later, in part because I made the deliberate decision not to carry around my laptop for this particular conference (except on the last day when I had to read my paper off the monitor because of an unexpected printing problem).

Posted by chuck at 7:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 25, 2007

Bill Moyers: Buying the War

Bill Moyers is back on PBS tonight (at 9 PM in most locations) with an investigation of the reporting on the buildup to the war in Iraq. The special aims to explore not only how the Bush administration marketed the war but the role of the press in reporting it.

Also includes interviews with John Walcott and Warren Strobel, who were among the only skeptics regarding the Bush administration claims that Iraq had WMDs. Sounds interesting, and I'm glad to have Moyers back on PBS again (via Eric Alterman, who also points to Scott McLemee's interesting IHE article on declining coverage of books in newspapers).

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Politics and the Public Domain

Via Atrios: Lawrence Lessig is heading up a bipartisan effort to request that the RNC and DNC allow convention and debate footage to be placed in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. Such a move would allow campaign footage to be placed on sites such as YouTube or Blip.tv without fear of legal repercussion. It would also allow more people to participate in the political process. Like Lessig, I'm sure that I won't like all of this user-generated content (politically or aesthetically), but I think, or at least hope, that placing this footage in the public domain will make for a more invigorating and inclusive debate.

Posted by chuck at 1:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mashups and Gender, Part 2

Just wanted to mention that Karina followed up on my question about gender and parody trailers in a column on the NewTeeVee blog. Her read helped to clarify a couple of points I'm working through in my article on trailer mashups.

Karina identifies a couple of cases that tested my speculation that "fake trailers are more commonly identified with male producers." She first points to the very popular Scary Mary that reworks Mary Poppins as a horror film, but notes that the trailer reworks a "girl-friendly" text with a "masculine (and maybe even misogynist) gaze in mind." Her second example, Notes on a Queen creatively mixes Notes on a Scandal and The Queen based on the "rivalry" between Oscar contenders Helen Mirren and Judi Dench. But, as Karina notes, the use of the Rocky theme still evokes a predominantly male genre.

All of which leaves open the question of why online parody seems to be a largely male domain. Karina's observation about pop culture geared towards women seems like one reasonable hypothesis, although I would argue that Rocky IV through VI don't need to be subverted any more than Pretty Woman or the other chick flicks that Karina names (that being said, I still think Rocky parodies are lots of fun). I'm in paper writing mode for the rest of the day but would continue to welcome suggestions or observations (including examples that might test the limits of this observation).

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

April 23, 2007

Resonances

A few months ago, I mentioned the launch of Ironweed, which bills itself as "a monthly progressive film festival on DVD." My initial interest in Ironweed grew out of their use of a "DVD of the month" distribution strategy to support a progressive politics, but more recently, I've had a chance to review or revisit some of Ironweed's recent offerings, including Deborah Scranton's underrated The War Tapes (my review) and Ian Inaba's American Blackout.

While American Blackout structures its narrative around the political career of former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the documentary's primary focus is the issue of voter disenfranchisement, a topic that continues to be relevant in the scandal at the Department of Justice (see also this article by Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers). As American Blackout astutely illustrates, the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio in 2000 and 2004 helped to feed a deeper cynicism regarding the election process. It was also interesting to revisit McKinney's volatile political career, especially after closely following her short-lived return to office in the 2004 election.

I'm also very glad I had the chance to revisit The War Tapes, which was one of the first films I saw when I moved to Fayetteville, thanks to a special screening targeted toward soldiers serving at Fort Bragg. I think that what sets Scranton's film apart from other war documentaries is her decision to show not only how the war affects the soldiers themselves but their families at home. Living in a military town and having a number of students who are married to soldiers, their stories really hit home for me this time, and most Iraq War documentaries haven't really provided that perspective. I'll try to do a little more writing about The War Tapes soon (I'm thinking about including it in my cinema and autobiography course next fall), but some other deadlines are demanding attention.

I'm also hoping to write a little further about Ironweed and the role that a progressive film club can serve. I think my original comparison with the Robert Greenwald documentary house parties still holds, especially given Ironweed's more recent attempts to cultivate a larger progressive film community. The documentaries they distribute are often very timely and include a number of the more significant documentaries made over the last few years, including Sir, No Sir (my review) and Boys of Baraka, and Black Gold (which I still haven't seen).

Posted by chuck at 10:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 21, 2007

RFD: Fake Trailers and Gender

Quick question: I'm working on my MIT 5 paper on trailer mashups, and I've been curious about something. I've noticed that many of the fake trailers that receive the most attention are for films that are more commonly associated with male audiences (Scorsese, Kubrick, etc).

I know that slash fiction, for example, is more frequently done by female authors, but I'm wondering if fake trailers are more commonly identified with male producers. The reason I ask is that I see these trailers as participating in the ongoing process of canonization of certain films by well-established directors. Of course, the parody wouldn't work if audiences were unfamiliar with the original film, so maybe these choices reflect a canon that has already been established (it's also interesting to observe how articles such as the ones I linked are also participating in a second-level form of canonization by preserving certain fake trailers as worthy of attention).

The paper itself is taking shape, but I happened to think about this question as I was writing and wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts about the issue.

Posted by chuck at 12:25 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The Bank

Phil de Vellis, who made the "Vote Different" advertisement I wrote about for Flow, has returned with a new mashup that criticizes World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz (via MyDD). It's an interesting video, one that makes good use of NBC's The Office but one that may also require some knowledge of the World Bank to be entirely successful. The comments about the video at MyDD are also worth checking out.

Update: MyDD also links to a petition you can sign calling for Wolfowitz to be fired. Sign on, if you're so inclined.

Posted by chuck at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 19, 2007

Jump Cut 49

Just wanted to mention that a new issue of Jump Cut is now available. There's quite a bit of reading material here, incluidng a special section on Chinese cinema, a spotlight on horror (including an essay on The Ring and the obsolescnece of VHS, a topic I tackled in a conference paper a long time ago), an interesting article on the role of gossip blogs in constructing stardom, an essay on the lost ancestor hoax in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, and an article on environmental skeptics and An Inconvenient Truth.

Also worth checking out, Julia Lesage's article on social bookmarking, which I had the chance to read in a draft version a few weeks ago. Interesting stuff.

Update: In skimming the table of contents, I somehow missed this article on Iraq and Vietnam documentaries (thanks to a social bookmarking pal for pointing it out).

Posted by chuck at 1:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 16, 2007

Hollywood Is So Money

In a recent Hollywood Reporter article, Paul Bond reports that Wedbush Morgan Securities is predicting that 2007 will likely be a big year at the box office. The article cites Wedbush Morgan's 40-page report, which asserts that predictions that new technologies would damage the exhibition industry were exaggerated. I've written quite a bit about these issues in my blog, and in general, I've tried to remain skeptical about these predictions of Hollywood's decline.

And, in general, the Wedbush Morgan report sounds about right. Most of the people who purchase home theater systems and have Netflix memberships are also the people who have the disposable income to attend movies in theaters (as their research illustrates). I disagree, to some extent, with their assessment that the recent lull in theater attendance can be attributed to "poor quality" movies. Instead, what I see happening is that in the years 2003-2005, there simply weren't as many movies with the high franchise potential. To suggest that "bad" movies are responsible, they cite a correlation between lower critics' ratings and a slight decline in movie attendance, but that may simply be a coincidence because the taste of film reviewers and mainstream audiences is often quite a bit different. The article is useful, though, in dispelling the myth that movie theaters will be obsolete sometime next week.

Thanks to Michael for alerting me to the article (and check out his reading of a recent Variety article on how digital technologies have changed movie acting).

Posted by chuck at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 15, 2007

Full Frame 2K7 Friday

In addition to the Jem Cohen films, I caught four other films on Friday at Full Frame (two features and two shorts). The first short, Alice Sees the Light, focused on light pollution using female narration and statistical information, underlining that information with visuals that depict our attachment to bright lights in the night sky. The other short, Liza Johnson's South of Ten depicts a group of Mississippians recovering from the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina. Johnson uses a poetic, elegiac tone to show a number of haunting scenes, including most memorably, an elderly man who finds a trombone amidst the rubble left behind by the storm.

One of the features I caught on Friday was the environmental documentary, Everything's Cool, which focused primarily on the efforts of people such as writer Bill McKibben, White House whistle-blower Rick Piltz, and and journalist Ross Gelbspan, as well as Weather Channel global warming expert, Dr. Heidi Cullen. Rather than merely making the argument that global warming is happening, the film explores the frustration these men feel about the slowness of the response to the global warming crisis. While the film clearly takes an activist stance, I found it more interesting as an illustration of the long battles that many of these activists faced in getting their story heard and accepted by resistant and often hostile members of the government and news media.

Finally, I caught Radiant City an anti-urban sprawl documentary that is likely to provoke some controversy if and when it receives a slightly wider audience (the title comes from a phrase used by French architect Le Corbusier). The film offers many of the usual anti-sprawl suspects, including James Howard Kunstler, who also appeared in The End of Suburbia, but Radiant City appears to be attempting something different, first by openly acknowledging that most suburbanites know the anti-suburb arguments but may find themselves with few options when inner-city housing is too expensive and too far from good schools.

At the same time, the film introduces us to a couple of typical suburban families, best represented by the Moss family where many of the tensions about suburban life play out. The father, Evan, decides to put on Suburb the Musical, a clearly satirical take on suburban life, while his wife, Ann, complains about Evan's negative attitude towards suburban life. Notably, the family's life is neatly planned out on a dry erase calendar color-coded for all the members of the family, but as we see at one point, the son quietly sabotages his mom's best laid plans by erasing certain events and re-arranging others. The focus on a typical family recalls a number of reality TV shows (Wife Swap and Trading Spouses come to mind), but the references to Evan's musical suggested something slightly different, as I'll explain below the fold to avoid spoiling a key component of the film (but if you've seen the film I'd love to hear your interpretation of this element of the film).

It becomes increasingly clear that the Wood family is fictional, a detail that becomes explicit when the son accidentally shoots his sister from his bedroom window. The film drops a few hints along the way--Ann's angry glance at the camera, Evan's open speculation about whether he should have married--to suggest that the film may be fictional. Once the fiction is clearly revealed, the film's true precedent, the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest and friends, becomes clear. Of course, we are led to believe throughout the film that the Wood family is "real," and several audience members complained about being duped, especially at a festival dedicated to documentary. But the directors, Gary Burns and Jim Brown, sought to use the "fakeness" of the film's subjects to comment n some way on the fakeness of suburban life itself.

It's an interesting point, and I have no real complaints about faking out the audience in this manner (some of the best "documentaries" in recent memory have done something similar), but I'm not quite sure that their point makes sense or even functions as a critique of suburbia. While it's easy to fault suburban developers for using names such as "Copper Valley" or "Heather Ridge," to use the name of my own heather-free apartment complex, I'd imagine that most home buyers attach little specific significance to the name of the subdivision itself and even though shopping malls may evoke lost images of town squares, I'm guessing that most shoppers are not attarcted to the mall in search of a lost public sphere. In short, I don't think the "fakeness" (or ideological) critique the film offers works as well as the film itself would like to believe. Still, the families involved are entertaining and make a subject that could easily have become tedious a little more enjoyable.

Posted by chuck at 2:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Full Frame 2K7 Jem Cohen

Friday at Full Frame I had the chance to catch several great films, including three films by Jem Cohen, whose work often focuses on musicians, including Benjamin Smoke and the Fugazi doc, Instrument. Because the Cohen films were a major highlight of the festival, I want to cover them in some detail. One of Cohen's films this year, Building a Broken Mousetrap focused on the Dutch punk band, The Ex, who played a show in New York City on September 11, 2004, just days after the Republican Convention. Cohen crosscut between some of the more compelling and intimate concert footage I've seen, much of it filmed on a 16mm Bolex in black-and-white, and footage filmed on the streets of New York, including shots of several of the anti-war protests at the Republican Convention. One of the highlights is a brief interlude in which Cohen was filming in front of an electronic store and a destitute, probably homeless, man remarks on the expensive prices of radios, noting that he would never pay $200 for a radio. The brief scene only adds to some of the marked contrasts between rich and poor (among other polarities) in a city such as New York.

Cohen's other films were two shorts, Blessed are the Dreams of Men and NYC Weights and Measures. The former is a contemplative short feature filmed from the window of a bus traveling across Europe at 5 AM, its windows blurred by morning dew and its passengers sleeping awkwardly as rural and industrial landscapes rapidly replace each other. Dreams, like much of Cohen's work, reminded me a bit of the opening sequence of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil in its contemplative, almost meditative, tone. NYC is a "short elegiac comment" on prohibitions against street photography in New York after 9/11. Cohen has an eye for interesting, unexpected images, and NYC beautifully illustrates that. The film concludes with a brief note telling us that at some point after 9/11, Cohen was stopped on the street while was filming and had the footage he had taken confiscated. Now, over a year later, that footage has yet to be returned.

Posted by chuck at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Full Frame 2K7 Saturday

After driving through a torrential downpour, I'm back in Fayetteville after two very cool days after seeing about a dozen documentaries--several of them shorts--at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham. I can recommend pretty much all of the films I saw with some degree of enthusiasm and will try to write short reviews for at least most of them, but the Fest was an opportunity to catch up with or meet several bloggers and filmmakers I've been reading, including the cinetrix, AJ Schnack, and Paul Harrill of Self-Reliant Filmmaking. Here are some quick mini-reviews from Saturday's lineup, which I'll follow up with the movies I caught on Friday.

My Saturday began with two films focusing on the war in Iraq and its aftermath. The feature, Meeting Resistance, is one of the most compelling documents to come out of the war in Iraq. The directors, Steve Connors and Molly Bingham, managed to gain access to several members of the Iraqi "insurgency" over the course of several months providing us with a compelling portrait of the resistance that challenges both media and official accounts. Meeting Resistance was preceded by James Longley's short, Sari's Mother, a portrait of an Iraqi woman caring for her son who contracted the AIDS virus through a blood transfusion. Longley originally planned to include Sari's Mother in his Academy Award-nominated documentary feature, Iraq in Fragments, and the short, at least in my experience, felt like a continuation of that project.

Later on Saturday I watched The Devil Came on Horseback, an emotionally powerful and provocative documentary about the genocide in Darfur, as told through the eyes of former US Marine Captain Brian Steidle. After his military service was complete in 2003, Steidle takes a job as a monitor for the African Union where he becomes one of the few witnesses to gain photographic evidence of genocide in the Darfur region. Steidle is clearly troubled by the fact that he was unable to do more than watch helplessly as these actions were taking place and similarly troubled by the lack of a clear government response. The film itself is a profound meditation on what it means to be a witness.

I finished Saturday with AJ's Kurt Cobain About a Son (IMDB), which uses audio recordings of journalist Michael Azerrad's interview with Cobain to allow the famous singer to tell his own story. AJ used images of Cobain's hometown of Aberdeen, including the lumber yard where Cobain's father worked and the high school he attended, as well as Olympia and Seattle to tell Cobain's story. While the film provides valuable access into Cobain's personality, challenging many of the myths about the singer, it also works as a portrait of a specific place, of the Pacific northwest where Cobain lived. Kurt Cobain was paired with the humorous short, Talk to Me (see also), in which the filmmaker Mark Craig compiled twenty years of answering machine messages to narrate his life story over those two decades. I don't think the movie would have worked as a feature, but as a short, it was a lot of fun and used the audio from answering machine messages very effectively.

Posted by chuck at 1:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2007

April 11, 2007

Documentary and the Oscars

I don't have time to write a full response to the ongoing debate about the changes in the Academy rules guiding the nomination process for documentary features, but the discussion speaks not only to the increasing prominence of documentary films in the public sphere but also the technological changes that are altering how motion pictures are distributed and exhibited. For now, I just want to map some of the key arguments in the debate, and hopefully, when I have some of that mythical free time, I'll come back to these discussions.

As A.J. Schnack, whose Kurt Cobain doc I'll be seeing this weekend, points out, the documentary category has long provoked heated (often political) debate, especially during a stretch in the 1980s and '90s where a number of worthy and memorable films either failed to receive nominations or lost to other documentaries under suspicious circumstances (most famously, Roger & Me, The Thin Blue Line, Buena Vista Social Club, Four Little Girls, and Hoop Dreams). Schnack helpfully points to Carl Bromley's 2001 Nation article, which focuses primarily on Wim Wenders' disappointment at losing out to Arthur Cohn's One Day in September, a documentary about the killing of several Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. Wenders' complaints don't take into account that One Day in September is actually a pretty compelling film, but Bromley's article highlights the widespread position that the documentary committee often treated the genre like "cinematic Castor oil." These complaints ultimately led to rule changes in 2003 that, Schnack suggests, may have finally helped documentary auteur Errol Morris finally win an Oscar for The Fog of War (the rules included an expansion in the number of cities where a film must play before being considered for a nomination).

The new changes in 2006 include a further strengthening of the number of cities in which a film plays (AJ has the details, and you can also see them in the Academy's press release), which has led to a number of complaints from the documentary community, including this letter from Iraq in Fragments producer John Sinno, in which Sinno asserts (probably incorrectly) that Iraq in Fragments would not have qualified for a nomination. Worth noting: Sinno's letter also complains about Jerry Seinfeld's jokey introduction to the documentary category, a performance I found inoffensive but not terribly funny.

I do think some of the changes, including a relaxation of the technical standards, will make getting a nomination both cheaper and easier for filmmakers and show an awareness that interesting films can be made and distributed on a modest budget. And the Academy has wisely made a concession to films funded by "television entities," narrowing the window between initial theatrical exhibition and TV broadcast considerably, with films now required to wait only 60 days after they have completed their rollout requirement.

At any rate, a few of the other key articles and blog entries in this discussion include: Agnes Varnum's "Doc Oscar Rules Continued," Sasha Stone's "Acad Docs in Fragments," Nikki Finke's DHD piece, and Bilge Ebiri's "Documentaries in the Oscar Ghetto." More later, hopefully, but again, I think a lot of these questions come back to some interesting debates about changing technical standards and viewing contexts for documentary films. I think it also speaks to the increasing relevance of documentary filmmaking as a practice.

Posted by chuck at 12:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 10, 2007

Full Frame 2K7

I'm planning this at the last minute, but I may try to travel up to Durham this weekend for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. As usual, there are a number of interesting films on the schedule. Among the films/events I'm interested in checking out: AJ Schnack's Kurt Cobain: About a Son; Jessica Yu's Protagonist (her previous film was In the Realms of the Unreal); Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway; and Steve Connors and Molly Bingham's Meeting Resistance. Mark Craig's Talk to Me, which comiles twenty years of answering machine messages also sounds compelling. Other suggestions are welcome, but given my teaching schedule, I may only make it up to Durham, which is about one-two hours from Fayetteville, for one day.

Operation Homecoming, which I caught a few weeks ago is also playing. It should also be airing on PBS in the next few days. BTW, documentary bloggers, if you're going to be in Durham, let me know and maybe we can grab a coffee or something.

Update: Oh, and I can't believe that I forgot to mention that there will be a screening of three new Jem Cohen films. Chain is still one of my favorite films from the last two or three years.

Posted by chuck at 2:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 8, 2007

What Are You Reading?

In the hopes of starting a mini-meme, I'm pointing to Girish's recent post, which asks a very simple question: What are you reading? When I first moved to Fayetteville, I made some effort to participate in Dr. Crazy's Reading for Pleasure Wednesdays, but then the fall semester started and I wasn't really reading enough to participate consistently. But I like the idea of doing a reading post every few weeks or months to get suggestions from other bloggers about what I should be reading.

Like Girish, I sometimes spend several weeks or months working on a book, picking it, starting it, and returning to it weeks or even months later. Also, when I lived in DC, I would read on the subway or while waiting for a movie to start. In Fayetteville, I rarely find myself in situations where I have to wait, and so my time for pleasure reading has diminished somewhat. The good news is that because I've been traveling quite a bit lately, I've had a little more time to read than usual, so here a few of the books I'm reading. And, if you feel so inclined, feel free to offer suggestions here in the comments or over at Girish's place (or create your own post).

At any rate, for whatever reason, I've been in the mood for non-fiction lately. This is partially due to the fact that I'm planning to teach a senior-level course on autobiography in the fall, and I may include a couple of memoirs in the reading list (of course, this is really just an excuse to feed my compulsion to collect and buy a bunch of books). So I'm either reading or planning to read the following:

Memoir: Mary Karr, The Liars' Club; Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes on a Phobic Life; and Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People. On the way from Amazon: Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq (after seeing Operation Homecoming).

Other non-fiction: Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael; Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City; and Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Planning to read: Ross Melnick and Andreas Fuchs, Cinema Treasures: A New Look at Classic Movie Theaters.

Fiction: I came across Max Barry's latest, Company, and may try to read that (in part because I thought Jennifer Government was incredibly funny), and I'm also planning to read Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document.

Update: At the suggestion of several cool people, including the folks at >> mind the__GAP*, I've been reading some of Bruno Latour's recent work on the politics of things, including his Introduction to Making things Public and Reassembling the Social.

Posted by chuck at 10:44 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Just Say Yes

I'm in the process of taking Google Analytics for a test drive on my blog, in part because Site Meter has been working inconsistently lately, so this is a test post just to make sure everything is still working okay. But I'll also use this post as an excuse to link to some funny and interesting videos, all courtesy of Eli at The Recycled Cinema.

First, Eli's collection of the best movie mashups includes some old favorites (Shining as family comedy) and some that are new to me (2001 Goodfellas and C for Cookie, which mixes V for Vendetta with Sesame Street).

He also points to Cliff Roth's The Reagans on Drugs, which remixes the Reagans' "Just Say No" speech.

And since I'm working on these issues, I should also mention Eli's essay on "Found Footage on the Internet." Like him, I'm thinking about these films in terms of detournement and culture jamming, but I also think he's right to complicate these terms as they apply to "found footage" on the Internet.

Posted by chuck at 12:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2007

Short Attention Span Saturday

Completely distracted today, so why fight it? Here are a few more links that I've been checking out this afternoon. First, via Feministing, the news that Kiri Davis's "A Girl Like Me" is up for a $10,000 prize from CosmoGirl (all three finalists are worth checking out, so go there, watch the films and vote).

Second, on her website, Miranda July playfully promotes her new collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You. For more on July's creatively low-tech approach, see Bob Stein's post at the if:book blog. July's Me and You and Everyone We Know remains one of my favorite films from the last two or three years, so I'm looking forward to checking out this collection, maybe after classes are over.

Finally, an interesting Deadline Hollywood Daily post on Grindhouse's disappointing box office. It's expected to do only $13 million or so, far less than the predicted $20-25 million. Bad news for the Weinsteins, but I wonder if this is one film that will benefit from word-of-mouth and/or eventual DVD sales. I'm not sure I have an answer for that question, but given that Tarantino's biggest successes (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction) are 13-15 years old, is Tarantino's audience increasingly becoming the kind of audience that will encounter films at home? Rodriguez is obviously a more complicated case here, but QT's star power as a director was probably a bigger selling point for Grindhouse. Worth noting: the three-hour screening time probably doesn't help box office very much.

Posted by chuck at 7:38 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Grindhouse

In one of Grindhouse's (IMDB) ubiquitous chase scenes, we get a fleeting glimpse of the Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse, the movie theater that represents a kind of mecca for film geeks. The shot is clearly no accident, of course, and I think it provides the best illustration for the kinds of shared cinematic pleasures that the film seeks to evoke.

Grindhouse allows Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino get their film geek on, paying tribute not only to the trashy high-concept horror films of the 1960s and 70s but the grindhouse theatrical experience itself. As A.O. Scott observes, Grindhouse is less interested in a certain style or genre than in a "lost ambience of moviegoing." The film, as many critics have noted, is a double-feature, with Rodriguez's zombies-in-Texas flick, "Planet Terror" opening for Tarantino's car chase thriller, "Death Proof," in which Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) has created a car that is, well, death-proof. In between the features, we get a brief intermission featuring parody trailers for horror films made by Rob Zombie and Eli Roth (among others), and the film itself seems to be plagued by technological glitches--reels are missing, the weathered film appears to pop and crackle. In short, Grindhouse is meant to evoke the decaying multiplexes described by David Denby in a recent New Yorker article.

As a bit of a film geek fascinated by the moviegoing experience, I enjoyed the film's unabashed nostalgia for the tawdry pleasures watching these movies offered. Of course, as Scott points out, the joke is that most of these gags--the snapping and popping of the film, the missing reels (during the sex scene, of course)--were produced digitally, but again, that's part of the fun. And, of course, the playfully "bad" filmmaking--the awkward cuts, the random close-ups--are part of the fun, too. Still, there was something strange about watching a movie meant to evoke those tawdry 1970s movie houses in the local art house, and sometimes, watching Grindhouse felt more like an academic exercise than anything else.

The individual features themselves went on a little too long, I think. Like Drew, I felt that Rodriguez's zombies-deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas feature was pretty much on assignment. The bravura elements--Rose Macgowan's go-go dancer Cherry Darling being outfitted with a machine gun as a prosthetic leg--were just goofy enough to be funny, but I'm not sure that Rodriguez did anything terribly new.

My initial reaction to Tarantino's segment was that the pop-culture heavy dialogue felt like a lazier version of the conversations in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction where characters deconstruct everything from Madonna to kung fu movies. But a comment to Drew's post has me convinced that there's a little more happening than I initially noticed. As usual, Tarantino mixes a number of genres (slasher, car chase, blaxploitation), and the car chase scene offers one of the giddiest illustrations of the sexualization of cars imaginable. Still, I think, perhaps unlike Drew, I wanted more of the crackling Tarantino quips and self-referential humor. Given that Reservoir Dogs is now fifteen (!) years old, I'm starting to find myself becoming nostalgic for the moviegoing pleasures of the early 1990s and the excitement that Tarantino's earliest films offered.

Update: The Guardian film blog has a nice round-up of the critical take on Grindhouse across the blogosphere. And I'd say that even if they didn't mention me.

Posted by chuck at 1:09 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Ghost Maps, Laptops, and Wikis

Getting a bit of a late start this morning, but here are a few links worth checking out. First, fellow Wordherder Jason interviewed Steven Berlin Johnson (blog) for PopMatters. The interview focuses primarily on Johnson's most recent book, The Ghost Map, but Johnson also discusses books from earlier in his career. Scroll way down for a YouTube clip of Johnson discussing Ghost Map.

Interesting Wired article, The TV Is Dead. Long Live the TV, which tracks the ongoing fragmentation of the television audience. According to the article, the average television viewer now has over 100 television channels. Not that we have time to watch TV now that we're all on YouTube.

Jason's discussion of his class wiki project illustrates some of the unintended consequences of incorporating technology in the classroom. My wiki assignment hasn't worked this semester, and I think that's probably the result of not defining my expectations for the assignment very clearly.

Related: a Wikieducator tutorial on setting up a wiki and David Cole's Washington Post editorial on laptop use in college classrooms. Cole explains why he has chosen to ban laptops from his law classes, arguing that laptops offer too many distractions and often inhibit class discussion as students frantically transcribe notes rather than engaging with ideas. Cole's argument is interesting, although I'm not quite sure that I'm fully convinced that an outright ban is beneficial. In my "Technology in the Classroom" class, we've been considering how to use technologies (podcast lectures, blogs) to make better use of class time, and in that sense, laptops might be a distraction, but in other circumstances, I've benefited from having students do a quick Google search on a topic pertinent to class discussion (in fact some of my best class discussions have taken place in computer classrooms). Curious to know what others think.

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April 6, 2007

Behind the Bush

This is really cool: that CSPAN video of Dick Cheney lurking in the White House gardens during a Bush press conference with Radiohead's "Creep" playing [h/t to Kottke and my del.icio.us network].

Another good Cheney vid from a few months ago: "Impeach Cheney First," to the tune of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang," with the added bonus of a Lego re-creation of Cheney's hunting accident.

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Lazy Friday Videos

Video inspirations of the day: First, via an email tip, "It's Raining 300 Men" and "If Dick Cheney Was Scarface." [Update: I just realized the Cheney video is a couple of years old, but somehow I'd missed it until now.]

Also, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing retold using Fisher Price Sesame Street toys. Via Michael, who raises a question I've been mulling for a while now.

In pointing to Virginia Heffernan's article on that Seven-Minute Sopranos video, Michael observes that attention from the mainstream press serves as "a kind of endorsement of value" for these videos that seem to come out of nowhere. I've been trying to think through how certain videos become valued or recognized as objects worthy of attention (or study) and what that means. There's an interesting tension between the novelty of those videos that seem to come out of nowhere (LG15, Vote Different, etc) and their eventual contextualization (and popularization) in MSM articles that ought to be addressed in some detail. Obviously the artists behind these videos are often rigging the system, parodying or playing off of better known cultural texts (300, Scarface, The Sporanos the Apple 1984 ad) in order to find the wider audience MSM attention brings.

But what I like about Heffernan's article is the interpretive tension that she describes when it comes to the "Sopranos" vid. Noting that some viewers see the video as an homage while others see it as a parody, Heffernan illustrates the degree to which these videos sometimes remain elusive, beyond the easy interpretation that categories such as authorship provide.

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April 4, 2007

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

In "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin observed that soldiers returning from the First World War returned from the war "not richer, but poorer in communicable experience." In the essay, Benjamin illustrates the challenges of putting the experiences of mechanical warfare into narrative form. This difficulty of communicating the experience of war has provided a challenge for writers and filmmakers who have attempted to describe soldiers' experiences, as we saw in a number of Iraq War documentaries, including Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, as well as the fictional adaptation of Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir, Jarhead, but as the Iraq War continues to unfold, we are again faced with the challenges of putting the events of the war into narrative form.

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts created the "Operation Homecoming" program to help soldiers write about their experiences during the war. The program, which featured a range of writers including Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Tobias Wolff, inspired an anthology of journal entries, short stories, poems, and other writings, and now some of these writings have been compiled in the documentary film, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (IMDB), which is set to air on PBS stations on April 16, as part of their "America at a Crossroads" series.

Operation Homecoming, directed by Richard E. Robbins, takes on the challenge of putting the soldiers' stories into visual form. The film mixes dramatic readings of the soldiers' writings by actors including Aaron Eckhart, Blair Underwood, and Beau Bridges with interviews with the soldiers and other writers, including Tim O'Brien, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tobias Wolff. In all cases, the soldiers' stories return to the question of using narrative to make sense of their experiences, and the value of this documentary is, in part, its illustration of the varied approaches the soldiers take in trying to represent their wartime experiences. These stories are represented visually through a variety of techniques, including a memorable animated sequence recalling the blocky images seen in graphic novels to illustrate Colby Buzzell's story, "Men in Black," as well as a variety of visual styles designed to distinguish each individual story.

The segments touch on a variety of aspects of the war experience. In "Medevac Missions," Ed Hrivnak describes the experience of attending to wounded soldiers and speculates about how the soldiers will cope after they return home from the war in language that recalled, probably unintentionally, the Walter Reed scandal and the very problems with the medical treatment soldiers have received. Edward Gyokeres' "Camp Muckamungus" uses dark humor to capture some aspects of the absurdity of war, creating what he calls "a primer for desert life." And Jack Lewis's "Roadwork" describes the experience of identifying with an Iraqi man who had lost his son.

The film typically avoids taking an explicit political position on the war, and as a critic of the decision to go to war in Iraq, I sometimes wanted a documentary that took a more explicit anti-war position. And as someone who has written quite a bit about grunts' eye documentaries, I also wonder whether these documentaries romanticize the war, but I think that Homecoming underplays that impulse to some extent. As Robbins observes in an interview, "we wanted to talk about the human side, the personal, the experiential." Of course, it's impossible to completely avoid "politics" when it comes to representations of war, but my sense is that the film's relationship to the war is an ambivalent one. As Buzzell observes in "Men in Black," one of the goals of such a project is not to take a position on the war but to continue writing and, therefore, continue living.

Update: Just came across a blog promoting Buzzell's book, My War, which I'd love to read at some point in the future.

Update 2: Also worth checking out: this Janice Page Boston Globe review of Operation Homecoming. I think she's right to emphasize the fact that the film is about the writer's ability to be a "witness."

Posted by chuck at 7:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Wednesday Afternoon Videos

Working on a couple of projects this afternoon, one of which includes some further thinking about political mashups (currently working through some of Howard Rheingold's ideas on participatory media literacy). But I also came across a couple of cool movie trailer remixes that I don't want to lose.

First, check out Davis Jung's "Last Lion King of Scotland," which nicely remixes the Idi Amin biopic with the Disney film. Davis raises some interesting questions in his artist's statement, and the video is a nice remix not only of two very different films but also a useful take on the rhetoric of movie trailers in general.

I'm not sure how long this remix of Little Miss Sunshine into a horror film has been around, but it's pretty funny, although I'll admit that my enjoyment probably comes from being caught up in the backlash against LMS.

Posted by chuck at 2:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 2, 2007

Onion News Network

Quick pointer to the new Onion News Network, The Onion's new web video newscasts. So far, they only have three videos posted, one on illegal immigration (which doubles as a critique of corporate crime), another on Condoleezza Rice, and a third on using Civil War re-enactors in the Iraq War, but it's interesting to see the deadpan humor of the Onion being deployed in a parody of the breathless fear and paranoia of cable news. NYT's Virginia Heffernan has a longer review [h/t to Michael].

Speaking of cable news, Mark Andrejevic put together a nice mashup of Fox News clips for today's In Media Res clip.

Posted by chuck at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Same Name Game

Odd coincidence: just minutes after watching Alan Berliner's 2001 documentary, The Sweetest Sound, in which Berliner explores his ambivalence about sharing his name with dozens of other people, I came across Chris's blog post about sharing a name with an NBC news personality. Berliner's documentary is a pretty cool meditation on the relationship between names and identity, a topic that becomes even more interesting when Berliner explores the uncertain origins of his last name.

But the documentary raised a number of interesting questions for me. The relationship between naming and identity is always complicated for me, especially since I'm a "junior" and share my name with my father. Berliner also mentions using the Internet as both a research tool ("egosurfing" to find other Alan Berliners) and a means of establishing a legacy, but I wonder to what extent the web has made people more conscious of all the other people out there who share their name. I know that when I've been on the job market, I've done my share of vanity Google searches just to find out what other Chuck Tryons are out there. Turns out there's a management expert, a computer programmer and fantasy writer, an expert on fly fishing in Missouri, and a police officer in Texas. It also turns out that I'm avoiding linking to them because I don't want them to get page rank over me.

In order to sound a little less threatened by the fact that I share my name with a few dozen complete strangers, I'll add that what I liked best about The Sweetest Sound was Berliner's use of home movie footage as means of thinking through these identity issues. And I'll add that I'm doing a course on autobiographical film and video in the fall and Berliner's films and videos might work well in that course.

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April 1, 2007

Sunday Links

Via Dr. Mabuse, news that the Visible Evidence community now has a list-serv. Visible Evidence is an academic community focused on the study of documentary images. They have an annual conference (next year's conference will be in Bochum, Germany) and an associated book series published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Brian Flemming points to the YouTube interview with Phil de Vellis, creator of the Hillary 1984 video and raises an interesting point: "The weird thing is that YouTube is giving its implicit endorsement to a video that probably could have been red-flagged off of YouTube back before it was popular." I don't think YouTube's behavior is that unusual here. Isn't their usual practice to leave content online until somebody complains? No matter what, Brian's larger point that such content should be protected under the fair use doctrine is the more important issue.

Ryan Stewart of Cinematical responds to Kristin Thompson's discussion of A.O. Scott's article on the future of movies. I've already written at length about the Scott article, but I'd like to address Stewart's argument that "Thompson misuses Scott's phrase 'surviving history of movies.'" Stewart argues that Scott is talking not about all the ephemera--home movies, instructional films, etc--recorded by a motion picture camera but what Stewart calls "movie-movies." However, even that category becomes unmanageably large when we take into account not only all of the independent titles but also the multiple versions of those titles (including versions subtitled or dubbed into other languages and versions edited for local censors). And as a film historian, I think it's worth making a case that we should be saving the very films that Stewart dismisses as not quite "movie-movies."

Posted by chuck at 9:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others (IMDB) opens with a classroom lecture in a East German classroom in the early 1980s. A Stasi (secret police) instructor, Gerd Wiesler, teaches his students about the best methods for conducting interrogations of suspected political subversives. Playing an audio recording of one interrogation, Wiesler expresses complete confidence in the surveillance methods, even when a student asks whether it's appropriate to keep a suspect awake for over 24 hours, adding that "it's inhuman." It was tempting at this point to identify resonances between these interrogation techniques and the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists in Guantanamo, but The Lives of Others, writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's feature film debut, turned out to be far more interesting as an account of the paranoia and absurdity at the heart of East Germany's totalitarian state just as it is on the verge of collapse (in this sense, Lives of Others reminded me of Kieslowski's mid-career Polish films, including Blind Chance and Camera Buff).

After the classroom scene, Wiesler, along with other members of the Stasi, attends the performance of a play by Georg Dreyman, described as one of East Germany's few "non-subversive" writers. Still, the Stasi suspect that Dreyman may be becoming increasingly political, and Wiesler is assigned to spy on the writer, listening in on his apartment in alternating twelve-hour shifts with another member of the secret police. During these scenes, Wiesler is initially the perferct example of bureaucratic competence, carefully detailing Georg's daily activities and writing them up in reports that he types up white listening to the apartment on clunky headphones. On Dreyman's birthday, for example, Wiesler describes the birthday party and noting that Dreyman's girlfriend, Christa-Maria stayed after, speculates "presumably they have intercourse." Of course, as J. Hoberman observes, Wiesler's initial attraction to Dreyman is no doubt the opportunity to live vicariously through the charismatic writer having an affair with one of East Germany's most talented actresses (Hoberman is more critical than I am of the film's "squishy humanism").

Eventually, Wiesler begins to develop some sympathy for Dreyman, recognizing his humanity and he begins working subtly to protect the writer from further persecution, making him kind of a Stasi version of Harry Caul, a comparison that comes up in this very good Cinematical review by Martha Fischer from the Toronto International Film Festival. This sympathy works through the doubled identification that is produced through the surveillance subplot. Through cinematic identification we see the world through the perspective of Wiesler, but within the film, similar processes of identification allow (or require) Wiesler to see the world through Dreyman's more romantic and humanistic perspective. At the same time, Dreyman's actions are not unambiguous. He has been favored by the state because of his "political neutrality," but several of his colleagues, including the director who interpreted several of his plays for the stage, have been far less lucky.

The Lives of Others is one of the more compelling films I've seen in some time. Stephanie Zacharek's Salon review conveys much of what I like about the film. While von Donnersmarck's movie never shies away from "the repressiveness of the GDR," it also shows compassion for the characters who inhabit that world.

Update: While I was waiting for this entry to publish, I was skimming Alison Willmore's IFC Blog review of Lives, and I think she may be right to point out that the GDR is painted in relative absolutes, noting that the film fails to acknowledge that the GDR had its supporters. She also adds that von Donnersmarck states that he made the film in response to his "disgust" at the ostalgie, the popular nostalgia for the GDR. I still think the film is a bit more complicated than Willmore suggests. Even the petty tyrants within the Stasi are seen as products of an overarching system, one that seems fully aware that it is on the verge of collapse.