June 13, 2007
Transitions
Hey, the Wordherders are in the process of moving over to WordPress. URLs may change slightly, but I'll keep you posted. Please pardon the dust. But hopefully this will mean that I'll have functioning comments again soon.
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Nuts
My Curator's Note on the fan campaign to save Jericho is now available on MediaCommons. I originally wrote the short commentary before I knew that the show would be renewed, but I found the use of internet video in rallying the show's fans to be worth exploring.
Comments are still broken here, but you can comment over at MediaCommons if you're interested.
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June 11, 2007
The Sense of an Ending
Sopranos spoilers galore here. You've been warned. I've been fascinated by the reactions to the final episode of The Sopranos. Most of the people on the discussion boards I've skimmed have expressed disappointment at what has been described as the show's "life goes on" final scene, but I think the ending is fitting, not simply because life goes on--that's obvious--but because of the life that Tony finds himself living during that final scene. Because of all of the suspense cues--Meadow can't parallel park her car, the mysterious guy at the counter in the diner--we become acutely aware of Tony's situation, the fact that he's constantly aware of potential threats. But also the scene suggests that everything he's done to provide for his nuclear family has also potentially put them at risk. The denial of closure during that final sequence--I believe--worked really well.
But what I really wanted to mention, at least for now, is my fascination with a couple of YouTube clips that I discovered while skimming Sopranos spoiler sites last night before the show. One clip was actually recorded outside the Holstein's diner as Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) struggles to parallel park her car before running into the diner to meet her family. The person who recorded this clip correctly predicted that it was from the final scene of the show and claims that it was the last scene ever shot for the series (a claim that I can't confirm). A similar clip depicts someone from the show being thrown from a third story window. But I'm wondering how or if these clips will fit within the micro-histories of The Sopranos, especially given that show's rich cultural roots in the state of New Jersey, and how YouTube and other video sharing sites might be able to contribute to a richer history of media production.
I'll post a somewhat revised version of this entry on Newcritics because I'm curious to get your comments.
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June 7, 2007
Travel Day Links
Getting ready to drive over to hang out with George for a couple of days, but before I leave, here are a few of my late morning coffee reads and viewing tips:
Via David, a short film about time travel! The Timebox Twins! is a fun short video directed by Tipper Newton and starring Newton and Ice Cream Floats bandmate and LOL director Joe Swanberg. In the vid, a brother and sister discover the "timeboxes" that keep schools on schedule. Steal four of them and you can build a time machine. Fun stuff.
Jason and Nikki both comment on the recent appeals court ruling that states that the FCC overreached in its excessive fines for "fleeting obscenities." As Jason points out, the harsh punishments are a product of the post-nipplegate era and focused on unscripted content (Bono's off-the-cuff remark that winning a Golden Globe was "fucking brilliant!"), which the appeals court ruled does not fit into the category of obscenity. Jason's post has the added bonus of an audio version of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine.
Finally, via the comments to Sam's post on self-Googling, I learned about a new documentary on the topic called Google Me, which judging by the Google iconography was made with Google's cooperation. I'm certainly intrigued by the topic of naming and identity--as my post on Alan Berliner's The Sweetest Sound indicates--but I do have some questions about what it means to identify Google as a stand in for community or unity as this film seems to do (as the trailer and the film's description imply).
Comments are still broken. Hopefully they'll be running soon.
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June 6, 2007
Wednesday Links
Via Ted Z: A Variety article on Regal Cinemas' decision to equip one patron per theater with a pager to alert theater management to problems. The pager will have four buttons, with one each for picture and sound quality. The other buttons are for piracy and for "other disturbances," which presumably is a way of regulating unruly theatrical audiences, including, I'd imagine, viewers who are texting too conspicuously.
Via Filmmaker Magazine, a VideoNation web documentary on the Iraq Veterans Against the War street performance, :Operation First Casualty" (OFC), over Memorial Day weekend. This mini-doc was made by producer Laura Hanna and Zizek! director Astra Taylor. Taylor reports that she will have a second clip, on industrial food pollution, posted soon. My Flow column on OFC should appear over the next few days.
And, it's official: the fan campaign to convince CBS to renew the post-apocalyptic TV series Jericho has succeeded. After hearing that the show had been canceled, fans sent over 50,000 pounds of nuts to CBS headquarters in New York and Los Angeles. I'll have a short commentary on this topic on MediaCommons sometime next week.
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June 4, 2007
Operation First Casualty
Thanks to Jason Mittell, I just came across the Iraq Veterans Against the War video, Operation First Casualty, available on YouTube and on the meerkat media blog. In the video Iraq War veterans simulate sniper fire and mass detentions on the streets of New York, bringing home the experience of the war in an interesting way.
Like Jason, I'm wondering whether YouTube and other video sharing sites can be used to engage new kinds of audiences politically. Certainly, street theater has a long precedent--including the flash mob performances that became briefly popular a few years ago. The video also reminds me, in other ways, of the construction of authenticity established in so many "grunts' eye" documentaries (such as Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland).
Still working through my thoughts on the video, so hopefully will have more to say about it later.
Update: Via Rez Dog, news that at least one of the soldiers involved is now under investigation by the military and could receive a less than honorable discharge, which would potentially threaten "educational and other benefits."
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June 2, 2007
The Public Living Room Experience
Via Jim Emerson's Scanners blog, Christopher Hawthorne's architectural review of the new 12-screen flagship Landmark Theatre at the Westside Pavilion. The theater is clearly designed to compete with LA's other art houses, including the ArcLight and the Bridge, but as Hawthorne observes, what is significant about the new Landmark is its desire to reproduce the home theater experience:
But it is also designed to compete directly with your living room--with your sofa, your flat screen and your ability to pause, rewind, turn on the lights or just give up on the movie idea altogether and switch over to "The Daily Show."Of course, it's easy to point out that the Landmark has targeted a very specific niche audience (or taste culture) with this new architectural design, which Hawthorne, perhaps correctly, reads as "congratulating" that small segment of the population.As if to acknowledge how tough it's becoming to drag people out of their houses for a night at the movies, with home-theater technology getting better and traffic getting worse, the Landmark includes a number of domestic architectural touches. The most striking are three "Living Room" theaters on the top floor that hold between 30 and 50 people each. They include sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset.
Like Hawthorne, I'm intrigued by what these "Living Room" theaters say about attitudes towards moviegoing in a digital era, but I'm curious about how the use of couches and overstuffed loveseats will work out. As Emerson points out, many of the screening rooms only accommodate 30-50 people, making it reasonable to ask whether they will generate enough revenue to be profitable, but perhaps the bigger question, at least for me, is how these screening rooms will negotiate the boundaries between public and private represented by bringing a certain version of the domestic screening experience into the more public space of the movie theater (keeping in mind that theaters have always only been "semipublic spaces" as Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues in Recreational Terror). Given that moviegoing is often a solitary act for me, I'm wondering how couches and loveseats--rather than individual seats--will shape how strangers share this semipublic space (if at all). Ideally, it could contribute to the public film cultures discussed by Barbara Klinger in Beyond the Multiplex. At the very least, I'm fascinated by the desire to re-create the home theater system at the movie theater and the continued characterization of the 1980s-era multiplex as the bad object against which contemporary screening experiences, whether at home or in the art house, are defined.
Update: Here's a second LA Times article on the new art house theater at Westside Pavilion. Not sure it adds much to what I've already written, but the discussion of movie theaters and public space or movie theaters and their relationship to the local community is interesting. It also gives me a chance to complain about Landmark's annoying decision to refer to themselves as Landmark Theatres rather than using the standard American spelling of "theater."
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May 31, 2007
Thursday Links
Still writing for some relatively immediate deadlines, so just a quick pointer to a couple of links. I'm still apparently having problems with comments here (again, signing in through TypeKey seems to be working), which has made blogging seem like much more of a one-way activity lately and seems like it may be changing how I blog. Kathleen wrote recently about the ways in which blogging consistently changes the way she sees the world, and I think that my uncertainty about whether anyone is reading has changed how I blog, which in turn, may be changing how I see the world (and I'll be the first to admit that I'm guilty of not commenting on others' blogs as frequently as I should, especially now that I'm reading blogs through an RSS feed). I'm blogging relatively consistently this summer, but for whatever reason, the blog feels less like it's part of a conversation and more like it's part of a monologue.
At any rate, via Adrian, I just discovered that film and media scholar Sean Cubitt now has a blog. Given my own interests in the relationship between screen and media cultures and configurations of public and private, I was particularly taken by his discussion of Virilio and the iPod. I like his reading that one of the main distinctions between the iPod and the Walkman is the "shuffle" function, which perhaps intensifies the sense of privacy in public already associated with the Walkman.
Thanks to Tama's delicious page, I also came across yet another trailer mashup, this time combining Star Wars with Boogie Nights, which is just a great combination on about fifty different levels. Enjoy.
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May 29, 2007
Tuesday Links
My original post on On the Lot disappeared, and I'm too busy to re-create it, but here's the Cinematical review of the show best described as American Idol meets Project Greenlight minus Simon Cowell. I like the idea of a competition show about making movies, but a big part of the appeal of Idol has always been the liveness of the performances, something that is harder to reproduce in a moviemaking competition. Plus most of this week's comedy shorts played like Farrely Brother scripts as directed by David Lynch--exquisite visuals to tell fart jokes. I want to like On the Lot, in part because the show seems to be working to cultivate an interesting online community, but so far I'm uninspired. Gabe at Gabe's Declaration of Principles appears similarly unimpressed.
One of my projects this summer is a co-written article on political mashup videos. We're obviously focusing on "Vote Different" and "George Bush's Imagine," but I found a few others I'd like to discuss, including this Godfather 4 trailer that satirizes the Department of Justice scandal. And while it's not strictly a mashup, I find this Tom Tancredo 24 video very funny (although I imagine that the humor in this case is unintentional).
I can't remember how I stumbled across the news about Jonathan Demme's latest documentary, Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower 9th Ward, but it sounds like a compelling film, an important companion to Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. From what I understand, the film will be playing at Silverdocs, but segments of the documentary will be airing on the Tavis Smiley Show (many of those segments are available online at the link above). More than anything, I think it's important to continue to focus attention on the rebuilding process in New Orleans, and I'm glad that Demme is using his clout as a filmmaker to tell these stories. Felicia Lee has an article on Return in the New York Times (which may be where I learned about the film).
Also worth checking out: Jason Mittell crunches the box office numbers and debunks an article arguing that this year's sequels are underperforming at the box office. In fact, Spidey 3, Shrek 3, and Pirates 3 are drawing about as well as, if not better than, the third films in most film cycles. And while not explicitly mentioned in Jason's post, these sequels are also keeping alive all of teh ancillary sources of income associated with film franchises.
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May 28, 2007
Monday Links
Spent last night watching movies with friends until late into the night, so I'm getting a slow start this morning. Worth mentioning: we caught Adrienne Shelly's Waitress at the local art house. Like Film Snob, I enjoyed the film's primary framing device, Jenna's (Keri Russell) habit of inventing new pies to reflect her current mood (I Don't Want Earl's Baby Pie), and while Film Snob is probably right to point to some narrative gaps, Waitress, which I found to be far less self-consciously quirky than last year's Little Miss Sunshine, generally hit the right marks for me. More than anything, I enjoyed the camaraderie among the three waitresses (Russell, Shelly, and Cheryl Hines). It's a nice antidote to the blockbusters that tend to dominate the summer schedule.
I also wanted to mention, at least in passing, the fan uprising to save the CBS series Jericho, one of my favorite new shows in 2006. Virginia Heffernan is reporting on a campaign to send thousands of pounds of peanuts to CBS headquarters to protest the series' cancellation (the use of "nuts" refers to a specific line from the show during a confrontation with a neighboring town). So far over 14,000 pounds have been received, according to Nancy Baym, who has also written extensively on the fight to save Jericho. Baym also discusses the anti-fan backlash when the fight to save Jericho got Slashdotted. I may return to this topic in the next few days in my next column for Flow, which will come out in just over a week.
Baym also has a post about the very cool project, Pop Songs 07, in which Matthew Perpetua is posting mini-reviews of every R.E.M. song. Growing up near Athens, GA, in the 1980s, I "discovered" R.E.M. relatively early, so this project not only taps into my mini-music geek but also into my memories of listening to the band. As Baym points out, the reviews have inspired some interesting conversations about those kinds of memories, about politics, and even the songs themselves.
Comments may be working soon. I was able to leave a comment by signing into TypeKey, so if you feel so inclined, you should be able to comment that way. But we should have comments working correctly soon.
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May 27, 2007
Lazy Sunday Links
Thanks to some thunderstorms near Chicago, I returned from my visit to Champaign very late last night, so I've spent much of the morning recovering from the trip. I very much enjoyed my visit, especially catching up with old friends, but I was also vividly reminded of why I enjoyed my two years as an instructor at the University of Illinois. Champaign-Urbana is an underrated college community, even livelier than I remembered.
But because of the travel and a general desire to escape from the wired world for a few days, I've fallen way behind the rest of the blogosphere, so here are a few links that I've been following this morning over my second--soon to be third--cup of coffee:
- It's somewhat old by internet standards (it was posted a month ago), but I think this "Introducing the Book" skit from Danish television, in which a medieval reader is being introduced to the book as if by an IT expert is pretty funny. It might also fun to watch in a media studies class.
- There are some interesting conversations going on over at Dr. Mabuse's place. One of the most interesting is the discussion of Cinema Tour, a website devoted "to thoroughly research and document the locations and histories of cinemas throughout the world." This prompts Jason to propose a game in which he asks whether you can remember where you saw a specific film. I generally have a pretty good memory for this sort of thing, and in some cases, I can even remember the specific screen on which I watched a certain film. But Cinema Tour looks like a great resource for people interested in screen culture.
- Jason also has an interesting post on the politics of cinephilia, something I've been thinking about in my own work lately (Jason includes a mention of Richard Porton's Cineaste essay, "The Politics of American Cinephilia," which I need to revisit).
- On a related note, Michael at Zigzigger offers a useful taxonomy of film blogs in order to give that discussion a little more (media) specificity.
- Finally, the Cinecultist points to Mike Mills and Miranda July's Blonde Redhead video. Enjoy.
Update: Forgot to mention that comments are still down because of ongoing security issues. We're working on it.
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May 19, 2007
100 Movies and More
Like Michael, I really enjoyed the 100 Movies 100 Quotes 100 Days montage on YouTube, which counts down from 100 using quotes from Hollywood films. It's a gentle parody of the AFI video montages, but the video also wears its fannish enjoyment of the movies on its sleeve, relishing both classical and contemporary Hollywood films. Michael mentions Clint Eastwood, but there's also Humphrey Bogart, Bettie Davis (at #32), and, my personal fave: Emilio Estevez talking about fake IDs.
Still having some trouble posting entries here (and with comments as well), so I may re-post this and some other material over at Newcritics, just because I've been a slacker about posting over there.
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May 15, 2007
Blogs, Reviews, and Buzz
The Alliance of Women Film Journalists has another interesting discussion this week. This time, they're addressing whether "buzz" belongs in film reviews. In particular, they're looking at the recent examples of gossip about Lindsay Lohan's partying in reviews of Georgia Rule and details of Adrienne Shelley's untimely death in reviews of Waitress. Interesting question, because in some cases, repeating such buzz may put the reviewer in the position of promoting the film by repeating what amounts to studio publicity (I'm thinking here of something like the Brad-Angelina gossip that was used to promote Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the Jennifer-Vince rumors that were used to promote the stunningly mediocre Break Up).
But because I see the publicity as part of the film's overall meaning, I have to admit that I think it's inappropriate to completely ignore this kind of buzz. It would be impossible to view Georgia Rule completely in a vacuum, and Lohan's partying ways will inevitably inform how we view her character. But there's a second issue for me when it comes to Lohan, and it's the gender double-standard when it comes to partying. In her response to this question, Eleanor Ringel mentions the ways in which Lohan's partying seems to be treated much differently in the press than, say, Johnny Depp's behavior when he was a young star trashing hotel rooms.
The Shelley case seems a bit more complicated. In a sense, knowledge about her death shouldn't matter, but I can't imagine watching or writing about the film without thinking about it (Waitress doesn't come to Fayetteville until May 25th). Again, the discussions taking place at the AWFJ blog are worth checking out, especially given the ongoing conversations about the new directions that film reviews and criticism are taking.
Note: I had trouble posting this entry earlier today, so reposting to see if things are working properly. In other news, I've accepted an invitation to post occasionally at the very cool Newcritics blog. More on that in the next few days.
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May 9, 2007
Blogger Critics Redux
I'll try to return in a more focused way to this topic later, but for now some links to various versions of the ongoing and quickly evolving conversation about blogging and film critcism.
First, Anthony clarifies yesterday's post and points to Kurt Cobain About a Son filmmaker AJ Schnack's contribution to the discussion. I think AJ is right to distinguish between film bloggers and IMDB commenters, which AJ calls "online know-it-alls" or OKIAs, and to raise questions about what exactly constitutes an "average" moviegoer and how those moviegoers might be using film blogs to make decisions about what movies they watch. There is an issue of "taste" that needs to be considered here and those readers who consult OKIAs rather than Manohla Dargis or A.O. Scott probably already recognize that they fit into the taste community addressed by the OKIAs.
That being said, Anne Thompson has pointed to some of the fundamental economic and industrial shifts that are rapidly changing the status of the film critic, with many critics being fired or replaced by wire services or other cheaper alternatives. Most recently affected is Eleanor Ringel-Gillespie, who was replaced after thirty years of service by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by a wire service. Because I grew up reading the AJC, I know Ringel-Gillespie's reviews rather well and always appreciated her work (even if I didn't always agree), and I'm dissapointed by the AJC's decision.
There's a much longer disussion of this issue at the Alliance of Women Film Journalists that is worth checking out. They point out that while the media landscape is clearly changing, "moviegoers have relationships--love ‘em or hate ‘em--with their local movie reviewers. Local critics provide priceless perspectives that simply cannot be replaced." In reading through the AWFJ article, however, I'm wondering the real villain isn't the film blogger but media consolidation itself as media conglomerates increasingly find ways to reduce expenses. I do think it's important to preserve these local perspectives, and I think AJC readers will quickly discover that the paper is underestimating Ringel-Gillespie's valuable contribution to the city's film coverage.
There's also an elitist assumption going around that most film bloggers are merely celebrating the popular, that they are complicit with the ongoing "homogenization" of mass culture, which strikes me as a serious misreading of what many film bloggers are doing. Certainly a number of film bloggers go out of their way to promote independent and non-US cinemas rather than merely adding to the noise about the latest franchise film to hit the local megaplex (on five screens!). It's probably also worth noting that these discussions of the state of film criticism usually take place over the summer when the biggest excesses of Hollywood are most visible and when the gap between critical perspectives on Hollywood films and populist tastes are probably at their widest.
Somewhat unrelated: Ted Pigeon has an interesting reading of Dargis's article on the relationship between the critic and the modern blockbuster. That being said, I'm not sure I agree with many of Dargis's conclusions. I don't think that negative critical opinion of Top Gun or 300 necessarily derives from the "literary bent" of critics who are horrified at the "infection" of movies by MTV or videogame aesthetics. While I more or less enjoyed Top Gun when it came out (I was about 12 years old at the time), it's the film's politics that troubled me, not some other aesthetic form that threatened the "purity" of cinema. I don't think that many film critics object to action sequences if they're well done--witness the critical praise for Spider-Man 2, which probably helped feed the disappointment over the more recent film. That being said, I'm probably inherently suspicious of any film whose budget exceeds that of a small country, in part because as the budget increases, there's less space for taking certain kinds of risks.
I need to get back to some last-minute grading (and some other work that has been on my desk for a while), but David at Green Cine also points to a few more articles that are discussing the changing role of the film critic.
Posted by chuck at 1:20 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
May 8, 2007
Blogger Cloggers
Anthony Kaufman has an interesting read on Anne Thompson's Variety article on film blogs. While Kaufman agrees that film blogs are becoming a permanent fixture of film culture, he also introduces a welcome note of skepticism on the implications of film blog culture, explaining that film critic bloggers, or cloggers, have, in some cases, made it more difficult to find reliable reviews, especially of smaller films that often depend on good internet buzz in order to find a larger audience.
Kaufman cites the example of Sujewa's frustration at Cynthia's review of Hannah Takes the Stairs as one example of this potential for frustration. But I would argue that Cynthia's review tells me more about Hannah than any plot summary or "straight" film review ever could. This may be because I've read Cynthia's blog for several years and know something about her style, but I think her parsing of the film's gender politics is an important perspective on the film, and one that contextualizes Hannah within the larger context of the Mumblecore movement.
The discussion of film blogging, which spills out into the comments on Sujewa's blog, points to an ongoing conversation film bloggers have been addressing for some time (inspired, in part, by Scott Karsten's Boston Globe column), one that opens into larger questions about how we validate authors or, more specifically, film reviewers and critics, and film blogs, which are often self-published obviously upset many of the criteria we use for finding reliable readings of films. I don't think this has to be a bad thing for filmmakers or audiences. Even while living outside of an urban center, I've been able to remain connected to much of what is going on in the indie and documentary scenes. And much of what we see on film blogs might simply be the equivalent of bar chatter, the word-of-mouth conversations that we've always had about movies rather than cultural pronouncements along the lines of Pauline Kael, Manohla Dargis, or Roger Ebert.
I'm not sure if I have any specific answers yet about what effects film blogs have on the larger film culture. I think it's an important conversation, though, and one that probably doesn't have a simple answer.
Posted by chuck at 5:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 7, 2007
Monday Morning Coffee Reads
Slowly but surely moving into summer mode. I'm planning to make a serious dent in writing the book this summer and hoping to get back in the habit of exercising frequently, which may mean a little less blog time. But here's a quick tour of my morning blog and newspaper reading:
- Via CCC: I've been meaning to write a longer blog entry on MoveOn's Video Vets Project. The documentary project features interviews with Iraq vets and their families about their views on the war in Iraq. Hoping to get a chance to write something longer about this project later, but for now, Sam's blog entry on VideoVets is worth checking out.
- Pretty much everyone has pointed to this article on YouTube's decision to share revenue with some its most prominent videobloggers, including lonelygirl15. There's lots of good debate out there about this decision, including the observation that it creates a kind of "YouTube elite."
- Clancy mentions FitDay, a cool resource for tracking your carbohydrate, fat, and protein intake. I've gained a little weight this year, in part because I'm not walking nearly as much as I was in DC last year, so I'm trying to find ways of encouraging myself to lose a little weight.
- Anne Thompson has a nice column about the effects of blogging on film coverage. Lots of good stuff here, including a discussion on how bloggers often speed up the celebrity buzz machine. Thompson also notes the ways in which studios have learned to "play" fan bloggers by using them for advance publicity for their films.
- Manohla Dargis has an interesting article on the modern blockbuster written in anticipation for some superhero movie that came out last weekend. Rumor has it the film even did pretty well at the box office, countering some of those "moviegoing is dead" stories we've been hearing.
- Interesting article on the continued evolution of the super-small screen. While Hollywood has begun to embrace the mobile screen, apparently advertisers are lagging. But isn't the super-small screen really just a place for advertising content on larger screens elsewhere, a way of directing our attention to certain franchise narratives?
- Interesting LA Times article on GreenTeaGirlie, the latest YouTube celebrity. Her meteoric rise to popularity has left many YouTube viewers suspecting that GTG might be a marketing hoax of some kind.
Posted by chuck at 12:04 PM | TrackBack
May 5, 2007
Debate Update
Good for CNN. Daily Kos passed along the good news that CNN, hearing the requests of academics, activists, and bloggers, has decided to release all debate footage to the public domain (I blogged about this a few days ago). In other good news, several Democratic presidential candidates, including Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, and John Edwards have joined the call.
Posted by chuck at 11:08 PM | TrackBack
May 3, 2007
DVD, Internet Radio, and Copyright
Still in grading mode, but I just wanted to mention a few more links that have crossed my path. First, Laura has an important post on the code that can decrypt the new HD DVD format, "Copy protection, web 2.0, and education." The issues of decryption are important, especially for film and media scholars who rely on clip compilations in class, and as Laura notes, it's important for film and mdia professors to continue asserting their fair use rights or risk seeing them lost as the market continues to evolve.
On a related note, I had somehow missed the news that the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) had severely hiked the royalty fees for internet radio stations. As of right now, Internet radio will remain safe until July, but basically the CRB ruling would cripple most internet radio stations with expensive royalty fees. Living in Fayetteville, I've come to depend on (commercial-free) internet radio stations such as KEXP Seattle for access to any kind of independent music scene, and KEXP and similar stations have helped launch the careers of a number of great indie rock musicians (including recent personal faves, Silversun Pickups and Wild Sweet Orange). Such a ruling, I believe, could hurt artists as well as audiences. The bipartisan HR 2060 would essentially reverse the CRB ruling and would allow internet radio to continue to thrive, so if this is an issue you're invested in, it might be worth contacting your representative.
As Laura notes in her entry on decryption, these stories don't receive a lot of play in the mainstream media, so it's important to talk about them and remain informed about what's going on with these copyright issues.
Posted by chuck at 3:41 PM | TrackBack
May 2, 2007
Wednesday Afternoon Links
What I've been reading and looking at instead of grading student papers:
- I've lost the source, but here are a few photos tagged "MIT5" from last weekend's Media in Transition conference. I can't find myself in any of the photos, which is a good thing because I have an aversion to being photographed, but David did take a few photos of the audience for our panel.
- I think I somehow missed Kim Middleton's post on MIT 5. Sam Ford's posts from the Convergence Culture Consortium are also worth checking out.
- On a related note, Karina has a follow-up to her New TeeVee column on movie mashups by women, a point I addressed in my MIT 5 paper. Karina did find the interesting looking film review series, Girls on Film. More on that tonight when I've had time to watch a couple of episodes (or at least feel less guilty about not grading).
- Anne Thompson cites a USA Today article arguing that comedy shorts are the "killer app" of the online video world.
- Also worth noting: Lost Remote points to a Wired article reporting that the US Army has ordered soldiers not to post to personal blogs or send emails without clearing the content with a superior. Failure to comply could result in a court-martial among other penalties. Soldiers' blogs and writings have provided me with an important perspective on the war, and I'd hate for that to be taken away.
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May 1, 2007
Lazy Tuesday Links
Today's the last day of class, which means I'm looking for any excuse not to grade papers. Here's how I've been procrastinating this afternoon:
- Via Lost Remote, news that The Washington Post has acquired Jeff Jarvis's PrezVid videoblog.
- Agnes Varnum has a column (also posted at indieWIRE) on the recent rush of "green" docs. As she points out, An Inconvenient Truth seemed to come out of nowhere last year, but since then, we seem to have reached a "tipping point" on climate change, something reflected in the lineups at Full Frame and other documentary fests.
- One of the topics I addressed at MIT 5 was the "Seven Minute Sopranos" vid (and the similar "5 Second Movies" series). Now Sony has announced its own series of "minisodes," which will take vintage TV shows, such as TJ Hooker and Charlie's Angels and crunch them down to 3.5 minutes or less. I'm not terribly convinced that there will be a large audience for this kind of mashup kitscsh; after all, most mashups have relatively small audiences.
- On a related note, Liz Losh points to some new Colbert Nation mashup fun as well as Discovery Channel's You Spoof, which invites viewers to mashup their content.
- Finally, via Mike, the latest mashup of action movies and children's entertainment, Pulp Muppets.
Posted by chuck at 3:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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).
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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).
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April 7, 2007
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 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."
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March 31, 2007
ParkRidge47 Speaks
Via Jill, a PoliticsTV interview with Phil de Vellis, the creator of the "Vote Different" viral video that has been getting a lot of play lately. De Vellis has some interesting things to say about his decision to post the video anonymously and the potential role of citizen media in the 2008 election. Not sure I have anything to add right now, but I'm thinking of expanding on some of the ideas in my Flow article, either into a longer essay or something else.
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March 30, 2007
The Whole Shebang of World Cinema...
...will soon be available at the click of a mouse. At least according to NYT movie reviewer Tony Scott. Scott speculates that you, the film viewer or internet user (or whatever you are), "will be able to watch whatever you want whenever you want in the setting of your choice. The handful of Web sites that now offer streaming or downloadable feature films, along with wider video on demand through the cable box or satellite dish, offer a glimpse of what is to come." Consider me more than a little skeptical. Because Kristin Thompson has already ripped apart most of Scott's claims, I won't bother (Karina also has a nice summary of Thompson's post). But I am fascinated by Scott's desire for access to "the entire surviving history of movies," even if he ignores the very technological, social, and institutional barriers that make such access virtually impossible.
Scott's article is part of a series of NYT articles focusing on the brave new media world, with Manohla Dargis offering both praise and blame for the new video service, Jaman, which claims to be "pioneering social cinema." Jaman offers a number of ultra-indie films for download and allows viewers to comment on films as they watch, creating their own virtual commentary tracks. I haven't had time to explore Jaman's offerings that closely, but my guess is that the longer features will continue to struggle to find an audience. Noah Robischon is somewhat more enthusiastic, pointing out that the films on Jaman "are the antithesis of mainstream," and adding that the social networking features on Jaman and Joost will help viewers find new content. Robischon does acknowledge that most filmmakers are still going to see digital distribution as "a last resort," but again, the article conjures up the image of an unlimited digital library available at the click of a mouse.
I may return to these articles in further detail in the next few days, if only because they are caught up in some of the same questions about the status and definition of cinema that appeared in the far gloomier articles by David Denby and Neal Gabler and because I'll be addressing similar issues in my talk at the Media in Transition conference at the end of April.
Update: In other news, VHS is dead, at least according to Variety. Michael, correctly, begs to differ.
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Reinventing Scholarly Publishing
I'll have more to say about the changes that are taking place over at MediaCommons over the next few days, but for now, I just wanted to post a couple of pointers to some of the more important discussions that are taking place. During our editorial board meeting earlier this week, we generated a number of principles that will guide the new model of "open peer-to-peer review" that we hope MediaCommons will foster. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has posted an overview of these principles on the MediaCommons (MC) blog, and we'd all appreciate your feedback on them. I'm especially excited about the discussions of how MC can foster academic community and collegial support through digital networking technologies.
Kathleen has also posted the text of a talk she recently gave at the University of Buffalo, "Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet." The talk addresses some of the problems with blind peer review and how some of those problems might be addressed by what she has been calling "open peer-to-peer review," as well as the challenges presented by the economics of academic publishing. Kathleen's paper models this new mode of review in that it is published in Commentpress , a publishing tool built on Wordpress blogging software that allows readers to comment on individual paragraphs or pages in addition to an entire document. Obviously such a tool could be valuable for fostering conversations about academic texts (see, for example, this page from Kathleen's paper or this version of the Iraq Study Group Report). No matter what, there are some great conversations taking place about academic publishing, and I'd like to see as much participation as possible.
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March 28, 2007
MediaCommons and Post-Identity
Just wanted to mention that I have a new article in a special issue of the journal Post-Identity. The special issue focuses on the topic of "New Writing for New Media" and features what looks like a great collection of essays on videoblogging, e-cinema, and other similar topics.
I'm planning to write up a longer report about this week's MediaCommons editorial board meeting when my allergies stop raging, but I will say that the meeting itself was very exciting. We were introduced to a number of new publishing technologies that will enable much more flexible uses of text and video, but I think we also had some valuable conversations about rethinking peer review and academic community (Jason Mittell has some valuable comments about these topics). Look for a number of exciting projects in the near future. By the way, Faye Ginsburg's In Media Res post on Amanda Baggs' video, "In My Language," is worth checking out.
Oh, and while we weren't rethinking the concept of peer review, some of us even played some serious Wii Tennis. Check out my killer backhand and my mad volley skills.
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March 19, 2007
Four
Somehow I lost track of the fact that this week marks four years of blogging for me. But instead of writing yet another long post about how my blogging practices have changed over the last [insert number] years, I'd rather link to a few of my morning coffee reads:
- Chris at Category D has a reminder about what sounds like a pretty cool conference, "Media History: What are the Issues?" Added bonus: the conference is in Austin, one of the coolest cities in the country.
- That Little Round-Headed Boy mentions that it's Spike Lee's 50th birthday, using that as an opportunity to revisit Lee's masterful Do the Right Thing. I'm tempted to agree with TLRHB that Lee is one of the "most interesting" (and prolific) contemporary directors. Everybody has been complaining for years that Marty had never won an Oscar. What about Spike?
- Twittervision, a Google Maps/Twitter mashup, shows you what the whole world is thinking, one Twitter post at a time
- I watched Inland Empire (IMDB) Saturday night. For a variety of reasons (mostly grading), I don't have time to write a full review, but it's one of the more compelling films I've seen in a long time, all the more so because of Lynch's experimental approach (which included writing the screenplay as he was filming). Manohla Dargis of The New York Times liked it for similar reasons: "Like the surrealist practice of automatic writing, the film feels as if it could have been made in a trance, dredged up from within." Like her, I found the film somewhat less approachable than Lynch's earlier Mulholland Drive, but Inland Empire is definitely a film I'd like to revisit in the future.
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March 17, 2007
Constructing Authenticity
Jose Antonio Vargas has an interesting Washington Post article suggesting that various presidential candidates have struggled to adapt to the medium of web video. Vargas notes that John Edwards's most popular video, his announcement that he is running for president, has only been viewed 116,000 times, a few thousand less views than the satirical "John Edwards Feeling Pretty." Vargas cites James Kotecki, a Georgetown University student and YouTube mini-celebrity (Dennis Kucinich even responds to Kotecki in one of his videos), who speculates that the campaign videos are falling flat because the candidates do not understand the medium, that their videos lack the irreverence and "authenticity" inherent to (or at least popular in) the web video form. Others who have thought quite a bit about web video, including Jeff Jarvis and Micah Sifry echo the desire for what Sifry calls "that rare, unscripted, revealing moment."
My use of scare quotes indicates my own skepticism regarding the concept of authenticity when it comes to presidential politics, and this probably has to do with how authenticity itself is a construction, a carefully crafted strategy to define the candidate in a specific way.Jarvis and Sifry both cite the example of a video featuring conservative British politician David Cameron washing dishes, his child crying in the background, as an authentic or "unscripted" moment. While there are unscripted elements, especially Cameron's interaction with his child, it seems significant that authenticity is explicitly tied to domesticity, to the family home. I'm not faulting the video at all (In fact it's pretty interesting and better than a number of similar videos); I'm just skeptical about how the video establishes itself as conveying something authentic about the candidate, or more generally, what we're talking about when we use the word "authenticity" in the first place.
Still, it's an interesting argument, but I think the lack of viewership may also reflect a lack of interest in an election that is still twenty months away (even the Iowa caucuses are months away). It also points to the fairly narrow line that candidates will have to navigate, especially given that what happens on YouTube won't necessarily stay there. I'm still convinced that the more interesting uses of web video will not be by the campaigns themselves but by the political junkies and others who are watching and participating in the process in new ways.
Posted by chuck at 11:21 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 14, 2007
Free Is the Best Price
Hey, this is pretty cool. The New York Times has decided to make its Times Select features available for free to any student or faculty member with a valid college or university e-mail address, and that includes me! Now I can read about Tom Friedman's trips to Malaysia and chuckle at David Brooks's oh-so-snarky digs at blue-staters like me (and make fun of them in this very blog)!
In all seriousness, I think this is a pretty good idea in that it will bring additional traffic to the Times columns and, by extension, add value to those columns. I'd almost stopped reading the Times online because of the Times Select feature that blocked much of the newspaper's content (thanks to Thers, posting on Eschaton, for the news).
Posted by chuck at 4:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 12, 2007
Lazy Post-SCMS Blogging
Still recovering from SCMS, but here are some links I don't want to lose:
- First, via the cinetrix, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced its list of new documentaries in competition at this year's festival. Among the many cool choices, blog friend AJ Schnack's Kurt Cobain About A Son, North Carolina neighbor Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway, and Talk to Me, filmmaker Mark Craig's compilation of twenty years of answering machine messages.
- The cinetrix also points to The Onion's list of movies starring "Magical Black Men." I still think the Nic Cage Wonderful Life rip-off, The Family Man belongs somewhere on that list.
- Dr. Mabuse has a few SCMS links, including Michael's wrap-up post and Chris Cagle's review post.
Update: Via GreenCine, Joe Swanberg and Kris Williams's Nerve video series Young American Bodies is entering its second season. I was a big fan of the first season, and the first video of the second season looks promising. GreenCine also has a video interview with Swanberg.
Update 2: GreenCine also has a report from Austin about Austin native Richard Linklater's SXSW conversation with John Pierson.
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March 10, 2007
SCMS 2K7 Blogging
I'm hoping to write a longer SCMS post later, but because of a mild cold, I haven't had a lot of energy. Plus, I'm poaching wireless and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to stay connected. But Tim Anderson has been blogging quite a bit. I did get a chance to catch Drew Morton (of Dr. Mabuse fame) and Michael Newman's panel on independent cinema, which raised a number of useful questions about how we define indie cinema.
Also worth checking out: Michael has a great post about a number of films that are readily available on the web, including tons of Griffith, Melies, and Lumiere films, as well as films by Maya Deren and others. As Michael points out, there are enough films out there (on Google video, YouTube, etc) to supplement an entire film history course.
I'll be presenting on Unknown White Male tomorrow. More on that later.
Posted by chuck at 12:04 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 7, 2007
Twitter Thoughts
Instead of finishing my paper for SCMS, I've been checking out the latest social networking site, Twitter. So far, like Jill, I'm still not quite sure how useful Twitter will be, at least for my interests, but I generally feel some obligation to see how sites like Twitter work.
In Jill's comments, Liz raises the valuable point that Twitter combines the communications features of IM and text messages with the permanence of blogging archives. Karina has suggested that using Twitter might be a useful way of keeping track of people at conferences, and if I had more time, I'd experiment with it at SCMS. I've never really used text messages that often, so I don't know how much experimenting with Twitter at this particular conference would tell me.
Meanwhile, McChris observes that Twitter's limited post length of 140 characters potentially invites relatively inane posts (which would certainly describe my early contributions to Twitterdom). Still, I'll be interested to see what uses of Twitter emerge. And if you want to become my Twitter friend, that's cool, too.
Posted by chuck at 10:13 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
March 1, 2007
"We Have Become Our Own Movies"
Via Robert Young (and my del.icio.us friends): Neal Gabler's fascinating Los Angeles Times editorial on the state of Hollywood, "The Movie Magic is Gone." Gabler argues that despite a reported increase in box office in 2006, that the central place of moviegoing in the American psyche is being lost, adding that movies no longer "matter" in the same way they once did. He adds that the shift in emphasis away from moviegoing to other forms of entertainment is independent of the quality of the films themselves, as audiences increasingly seek out other forms of entertainment and amusement, including social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. But like David Denby did a few weeks ago, he sounds a cautionary note about the changes in moviegoing and moviemaking as prctices.
Gabler's article has a lot to recommend. I think he's right to argue that the activity of moviegoing has lost its appeal for a number of people, including the 18-24 group which has been one of the major audiences for Hollywood films, in recent history at least. And I think he's also right to point out that the adventures of TomKat, Brangelina, and Britney have been far more exciting than the relatively tepid films they've been making recently (we don't need yet another Mission Impossible sequel, and quite frankly, I'm just as interested in Angelina Jolie's commendable humanitarian efforts as I am her next film). And, finally, there's no denying the power of social networking and video hosting sites such as YouTube and MySpace that produce their own micro-versions of stardom and celebrity (or at least infamy); just look at the instant popularity of lonelygirl15 and The Pit Breakup.
But Gabler's comments miss (or at least misconstrue) pretty much everything that is valuable about this new shift in entertainment. First, it's a slight overstatement to suggest that movies no longer have a central place in American culture, or what might be called a popular culture public sphere. For better or worse, few cultural events have mobilized political opinion as effectively as the two recent documentaries, An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11. While both films were probably more frequently discussed than seen, both films also reignited conversations about global warming and the Iraq War respectively. Certainly there are dozens of other films that pass by unnoticed, disappearing from theaters before we even know they are there, but hasn't that always been the case?
It's also worth complicating Gabler's numbers about MySpace and Facebook use as well as the implications of those numbers. Gabler reports Fortune magazine research that suggests that 54 million of those visitor spend, on average, 124 minutes on a visit to MySpace. What may get lost in these numbers is the fact that MySpace users are likely multitasking while "visiting" the site, keeping multiple windows open while engaging with other forms of media content. At the same time, many of these pages are filled with references to favorite movies and television shows (including a number of videos that remix Hollywood films in creative ways), suggesting that these narratives have not lost their vitality entirely.
Finally, as Robert Young argues, I think it is a mistake to regard media democratization as leading to narcissism as Gabler does. Instead, like Young, I think that a better way of characterizing the new landscape is in terms of “digital self expression.” While part of this self-expression may be the escape that Gabler associates with the fantasy of "imagin[ing] ourselves to be Cary Grant or Bette Davis," the modes of direct address associated with videoblogging seem to imagine a different model of self-expression. In this sense, I think there is less reason to be alarmed or concerned about these changes in definitions of community and desires for new narrative structures than Gabler suggests. And as more people continue to participate in sites such as YouTube, we may find that the movies themselves will be reinvented.
I didn't intend to write at such length about Gabler's article, but I will be talking about related talks in my paper at MIT 5 in April, so I've been waiting for an excuse to work through some of these ideas.
Posted by chuck at 3:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 28, 2007
Wednesday Evening Media Links
With Spring Break and the annual Society for Film and Media Studies conference fast approaching, I'm in full writing mode this week, but before I forget, I just wanted to post a quick pointer to a blog post at MediaCommons. In just a few weeks, the editorial board for MediaCommons will be holding its first meeting, and we're seeking discussion of the role that MediaCommons can play in the scholarly community.
While I'm thinking about it, Michael has linked to several of fun and interesting videos, including one belonging to one of my favorite genres, the mock film trailer. This time, it's David Lynch's Blue Velvet transformed into "Something Blue," a romantic comedy. But I think I'm even more intrigued by "What Does Marcellus Wallace Look Like?," which Michael aptly describes as feeling like a form of "found poetry," especially in the way that Tarantino's words move across the screen. Happy viewing.
Update: Just received an email reminder that Frank Popper's insightful documentary, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is now on sale at the film's official website. I remain convinced that Mr. Smith is one of the best documentaries I saw in 2006, an incredibly valuable commentary on the the challenges of running for political office. As the 2008 presidential election heats up, the lessons of Mr. Smith about the fund-raising demands and other challenges are becoming all the more palpable. The film has also been playing on the PBS "Independent Lens" series, and it is certainly deserving of an even wider audience.
Posted by chuck at 6:03 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 27, 2007
The Pit Breakup
Ryan uses Facebook to get over a thousand of his closest friends to meet in "The Pit," a central location on UNC Chapel Hill's campus, where he would break up with his grilfriend Mindy. Within days, hundreds of people join his Facebook community. Ryan drafts the services of the Lorelais who serenade Mindy with an a capella version of the Dixie Chicks' "Not Ready to Make Nice." Hundreds of people, many equipped with digital video cameras, show up on Valentine's Day to watch the drama unfold. Many in the audience chant "slut! slut!" when her infidelity is revealed. Within days, hundreds of thousands of people watch the video on YouTube (as well as post-breakup interviews), and Ryan and Mindy become the latest "stars" on the internet, their private drama revealed to a mass public. Eventually the story gets picked up by mass media outlets, including a planned segment on Good Morning America (which ultimately didn't air). Then, as the buzz peaked, we learn, via The Charlotte Observer that the video was staged.
Ryan and Mindy never dated, but both were interested in showing that the media "don't always accurately gauge what teenage and college kids are interested in." In fact, Ryan planned the hoax video to promote a company he'd like to start to promote musicians. The video has provoked quite a bit of conversation, including a report in Inside Higher Ed apparently written before the video's status as a hoax was confirmed. The response to this latest bit of Web 2.0 performance art illustrates just how much our response to web video remains unsettled, with many of the responses to the video commenting on the "public humiliation" of the woman involved or suggesting that kids today have no morals. Of course, the video is far more complicated than that. Taking the video at face value, Mindy turns the tables on Ryan, embarassing him for needing hundreds of people to break up with her. And because the video was staged, I think it makes more sense to note the power of the social networking sites that make such hoaxes, performances, and viral videos possible. More later if I have time.
Update: Some interesting letters to the editor in The Daily Tar Heel (scroll down a little).
Posted by chuck at 11:10 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 24, 2007
Net Neutrality Video
I've linked to it everywhere else, so I might as well mention it here. Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the filmmakers behind the independent feature, Four Eyed Monsters have put together a cool little video on net neutrality. Definitely worth a look.
Posted by chuck at 1:10 PM | TrackBack
Sunstein on Wikipedia
I've already mentioned this in the comments section to Jason's MediaCommons blog post, but wanted to mention Cass Sunstein's Washington Post editorial on Wikipedia here as well.
Sunstein describes Wikipedia as "one of many experiments in aggregating knowledge and creativity, that have been made possible by new technologies." He also notes that Wikipedia is now cited four times as often as Encyclopedia Britannica in judicial opinions, but I think his definition of Wikipedia is perhaps more useful in illustrating how the site functions for me.
Update: Not related at all, but I also wanted to mention the interesting Washington Post article on Al Gore and the Oscar buzz surrounding An Inconvenient Truth. As I've said elsewhere, Gore's presence in the film is so magnetic, it's easy to forget David Guggenheim's excellent work in making a well-crafted documentary, but Gore is obviously the biggest star here, even if I think the speculation that he's planning a presidential run is probably wrong.
Posted by chuck at 11:20 AM | TrackBack
February 22, 2007
The Great Wikipedia Debate
Via Altercation: A New York Times article on the decision of the Middlebury College history department to ban students from citing Wikipedia in their papers and exams. While I recognize that Wikipedia has its limits, I'll join the chorus of those who think this policy is a bad idea, but this debate illustrates the degree to which educators will need to rethink how they teach academic research.
Like Jason Mittell, who is heavily quoted in the article, I think the history department's policy misses a tremendous opportunity for thinking about changes in research methods and knowledge acquisition. In fact, like Jason, I have assignments in one of my classes requiring students to participate in a course blog and wiki. In my case, I have asked students to contribute to a course wiki rather than editing or adding to an existing wiki such as Wikipedia (others are obviously welcome to participate in the blog and the wiki). While the blog and wiki are relatively rudimentary, I think its useful to consider how these forms can inform our goals as educators and researchers. Such activities seem far more effective in thinking about information literacy than an outright ban on using certain sources.
That being said, I encourage students to think critically about such sources as Wikipedia, namely its status as an encyclopedia that offers very little in the way of specialized knowledge and one that may be more subject to factual errors than other encyclopedias. But banning Wikipedia prevents us from having some valuable conversations about how these online tools can be used.
Update: Tim Anderson has a useful defense of Wikipedia on the MediaCommons blog. I'm inclined to agree with Tim that Wikipedia can be especially useful in tracking popular culture ephemera that might otherwise fall beneath the academic radar or get caught up in academic publishing limbo. While he's right to argue that Wikipedia may appear to be poor starting point for researching events or texts that have been discussed for decades, if not centuries, the site can be of value for those of us who teach and study popular culture.
Posted by chuck at 3:56 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
February 18, 2007
Interactive Oscar
Today's buzz is that Oscar is joining the YouTube generation with a reworked website that will include games, quizzes, an Ellen DeGeneres videoblog, and, perhaps best of all, a "Thank You Cam," which will allow winners to continue their speeches off-stage. You can guess randomly at Oscar trivia questions and take a quiz to find your ideal Oscar date (mine was Renee Zellweger, then, oddly, the game selected Charlize Theron when I answered questions "requesting" a short brunette).
It's easy to make fun of some of this stuff, especially when one of the show's creative consultants comments that, "All of the major sponsors of the Web site are holding sweepstakes, so it's very interactive." Of course, thus far, the site offers a fairly limited range of interactive features. I couldn't find chat rooms or discussion boards where fans could gossip about the Oscars or talk about other awards ceremonies (or whatever). All of the "interaction" seems to be directed back towards the show. But the video clips with many of the 177 nominees, including those in relatively minor categories, look interesting (with the added bonus that the interviews were produced by Errol Morris).
Plus, I've just taken the "What Oscar character are you?" quiz and discovered that I'm Atticus Finch, so everything is all right.
Posted by chuck at 10:59 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
February 17, 2007
Blogumentary
I've been menaing to watch Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary for a while now and finally took some time this afternoon to watch it on Google Video. I had been following Olsen's project for some time via his personal blog and knew that Olsen was an avid blogger who had a lot to say about this new medium. I think Blogumentary works best as a short video history of blogging, in providing an overview of how blogging fits within a rapidly changing media ecosystem. A few highlights for me:
- A segment featuring an interview with film blogger Matthew Clayfield, whose blog I've been reading regularly for a couple of years.
- Blogumentary is really good on the role of blogging in connecting people who might not otherwise meet. During one segment, Olsen describes meeting people andmaking freinds through links on his blogroll, concluding that "finding a blog you like is like making a friend."
- Olsen spends much of the documentary discussing whether blogs are a form of citizen journalism and how many bloggers define themselves against what often gets described as the mainstream media. Noting the role of bloggers in challenging racist comments by Trent Lott and in questioning the authenticity of the 60 Minutes report on Bush's Air National Guard documents, Olsen explores this complicated relationship between print and television journalism and blog commentary. And the documentary is careful (and correct) to differentiate blogging from genuine journalism.
- One of the more compelling segments of the documentary featured an interview with Stuart Hughes, a BBC journalist and blogger who was wounded during the first few months of the invasion of Iraq. Hughes eventually had part of his right leg amputated and credits his blog audience with suporting him through the recovery process, Olsen also describes a similar story of being able to counsel a friend who was going through an emotional crisis, again emphasizing the role of blogs in creating and sustaining communities.
- An interesting discussion of the role of blogging in the Howard Dean campaign. I'm still relatively ambivalent about the contributions of blogging to the public sphere, and while I certainly embraced Howard Dean and Joe Trippi's message of "people-powered politics," I'm still skeptical about the degree to which political power has been decentralized, and the merciless attacks on the Edwards campaign bloggers, both of whom were eventually forced to resign, leaves me wondering to what extent blogs have shaped political discourse for the better (Olsen's discussion of this controversy is quite good).
- Olsen also addresses the blogging "gender gap," the observation that while over half of all bloggers are female, most of the so-called A-List bloggers are male. I think this is an important question, but I'm also sure that I can't do it justice in the space of a single bullet point.
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February 14, 2007
From YouTube to YouNiversity
Grading today, but I just wanted to mention Henry Jenkins' Chronicle of Higher Eductaion article, "From YouTube to YouNiversity," in which he argues for specific changes in the field of media studies in response to Web 2.0. More discussion at MediaCommons, where I found the article.
I'm in agreement with the basics of Jenkins' major arguments that media studies needs to become more comparative; that media studies needs to become more attentive to the further blurring of the lines between media consumption and production; and that media scholars should attend to public interest in our current moment of media change. Jenkins' article may disappear behind the Chronicle's pay wall, but for now it's available for free.
Posted by chuck at 11:46 AM | TrackBack
February 11, 2007
Web 2.0, The Movie and the Inevitable Sequels
In my previous post, I mentioned Michael Wesch's ubiquitous Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us, a compelling and beautifully-crafted five-minute video describing the basic concepts of the Web 2.0 concept.
The video has now inspired a number of video responses, including several by people who appear to be Wesch's students. Some of the more interesting responses include CoryTheRaven's response, which addresses some of the limitations of the Web 2.0 emphasis on participatory culture and Research 2.0, which raises a number of interetsing questions about the ways in which the web is reshaping how we do research. Also worth cheking out: Digital Democratic Media, which reads reality TV (and our impatience with it) as a symptom of our desire for a more participatory media culture.
Posted by chuck at 3:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 10, 2007
Media Miscellany
The big writing project I've been mentioning, a book chapter on the future of science-fiction television, is out of my hands, for a few days at least, so I'm gradually looking ahead to future projects and hoping to get back in the habit of a more consistent blogging schedule. I even got a chance to get out and experience Fayetteville's exciting nightlife for the first time in several weeks. My next project is my conference paper on SCMS, which will be focusing on the documentary, Unknown White Male, which I re-watched last night (and was pleased to discover was even better than I remembered). More on that project over the next few days, but I've been thinking about that paper for a while now.
What I really wanted to do this afternoon is to link to the videos I've been watching. Michael at Zigzigger tipped me off to the very cool and entertaining videoblog, 39 Second Single, about a thirty-something woman's dating experiences. The main character, Liza, has great presence and comic timing, making it one of the more interesting videoblogs I've seen in a while. Of course, the series also makes me miss living in a big city, but I'll ignore that for now.
Michael (and Clancy) also pointed me to the currently ubiquitous clip, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. Like Michael, I may show the clip in one of my classes, in my case my graduate course on Using Technology in the Language Arts Classroom (or I suppose I could just post it on the course blog).
Finally, Tim has a link to a YouTube clip taken from the documentary Zizek! The clip features an interview between the Slovenian philosopher and an evening news talking head who is quite clearly baffled by Zizek's arguments and even stumbles over the pronunciation of his name (to give him credit, the newscaster's comment that Jacques Lacan makes Freud "sound like a simple valley girl" is pretty funny).
In other news, I'm pleased and honored to mention that I've been invited to join a distinguished group of scholars on the MediaCommons editorial board. I've enjoyed watching MediaCommons develop over the last few months and am very excited about this news.
Posted by chuck at 1:31 PM | TrackBack
February 7, 2007
Media Legends Old and New
A grab-bag of topics I've been meaning to blog: First, Michael at Zigzigger comments on Anne Hornaday's glib description of early cinema audiences in her recent article on YouTube. In describing YouTube audiences, Hornaday makes reference to the legend of panicked filmgoers diving under their seats when they first encountered the Lumiere bothers' film of a train entering a station, an account that most film scholars now regard as fabricated. As Michael adds, however, Hornaday's article, which charcterizes YouTube as an "uncurated museum" of video clips and home movies, is generally pretty insightful.
David Bordwell has an interesting read on Sharon Waxman's recent New York Times article on the limited output of many of today's indie auteurs such as David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kimberly Peirce, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, and Baz Luhrmann. Boys Don't Cry for example, was released nearly eight years ago, and Punch Drunk Love came out four years ago, and Aronofsky's The Fountain appeared seven years after his previous film, Requiem for a Dream. Bordwell outlines five basic explanations offered by Waxman and addresses whether they are credible explanations.
I think he's mostly right, but the fourth explanation he identifies--that today's indie auteurs don't know how to deal with the post-9/11 world--doesn't really hold water in my opinion (Bordwell also seems relatively skeptical regarding this explanation). After all, a number of indie directors have already produced elegant and thoughtful responses to these issues, including Russell himself in I [Heart] Huckabees. I'm also inclined to agree with Bordwell that the entertainment industry has changed considerably since the 1970s. Karina also fact-checks many of Waxman's claims and finds them rather lacking, noting that her desciption of Russell's Huckabees as "disastrous" might be motivated by her personal "contempt" for Russell (Karina also points out what many people seem to have forgotten: when it first hit--and quickly disappeared from--theaters, Fight Club. was considered a box office bomb).
Finally, I've been meaning to mention that In Media Res, the MediaCommons videoblog has been putting out some interesting material over the last few days. Worth checking out: Jeffrey Sconce's reading of the press conference after the Cartoon Network's guerilla marketing campaign set off a war on terror panic in Boston a few days ago.
Posted by chuck at 10:27 AM | TrackBack
February 2, 2007
Valuing Viacom
Via Talking Points Memo: Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and many other cable networks, has demanded that YouTube take down over 100,000 clips containing content from those networks.
I don't really care about Viacom's bottom line, but this strikes me as a really bad idea. As a YouTube spokesperson noted, Viacom will no longer benefit from YouTube's "passionate audience," thus losing out on potential audiences for their shows. Video sharing sites such as YouTube would seem especially beneficial for shows such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show that make use of short sketches that work well in the format of streaming video and often find wide audiences very quickly via email and blogs.
Update: Here's another article on this controversy from the Washington Post, including a comment from CBS indicating that clips on YouTube may have helped boost the network's ratings. In the previous version of this entry, I may have overstated the relationship between finding audiences on YouTube and translating those audiences into larger audiences for specific shows, but I do think the ratings controversy itself is part of a larger definitional issue, as television networks and movie studios attempt to make sense of how new media fit into the entertainment industry.
Posted by chuck at 4:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 26, 2007
Searching for Hillary Clinton
Interesting Washington Post article by Sara Kehaulani Goo about the attempts to refine video searching on the web, comparing video searching to the early days of the web when text searching "was clunky and largely incomplete." Goo notes that if you conduct a search using Hillary Clinton's name on one of the big online video search engines, her online video announcement will not appear among the top search results. I'm generally sympathetic with the idea that we need more sophisticated video search technologies, but I'm also intrigued by the "problems" that search engines are facing in terms of video search, in part because these problems speak to important questions about how web video will be defined and what kinds of videos will be privileged.
I tried the same search for Hillary Clinton on YouTube and with some minor tweaks--ranking by date instead of relevance, adding another keyword--her announcement moved to the top of the listed results. But what I found instead of Clinton's official announcement was far more interesting, in my opinion. There were already dozens of video mashups and other responses to Clinton's announcement, many of them deconstructing the language and the camera techniques used in the announcement. Others posted homemade commercials endorsing Clinton for President. While I'm not a big fan of Senator Clinton, I'm even less of a fan of her conservative critics, but it was interesting to see their (apparently homemade) videos ranked "above" hers in the YouTube search. This is something that will no doubt be lost if the monetizing potential of web video is privileged over other criteria.
I need to get to some other writing projects right now, but I just wanted to point to the article because I think it does raise some interetsing questions that we'll be thinking about for some time.
Posted by chuck at 10:23 AM | TrackBack
January 22, 2007
The YouTube Campaign
The Washington Post has an interesting article on the potential uses of web video in the 2008 elections. Obviously, one of the biggest benefits of web video is that it is relatively inexpensive. Candidates can post videos online for free, dodging the expensive ad buys on television, and political junkies can create their own videos, with one recent example being the footage of the 1994 Mitt Romney-Ted Kennedy debate, in which Romney expresses support for abortion rights and gay rights, positions members of his Republican base might find undesirable. Romney's campaign immeditely posted a response in which he distances himself from those positions (a similar advertisement by MoveOn.org attacking John McCain's position on the war has been making the rounds). Others have suggested that web video will provide something closer to "backstage access" to life on the campaign trail--kind of a web video version of The War Room or Journeys with George.
Of course, the potential effects of web video were dramatically illustrated by the video of George Allen using a racial epithet to describe one of his opponent's campaign workers. The video quickly caught the attention of cable news pundits and helped put Allen's record on race back onto the table. Similarly, footage of Rush Limbaugh mocking Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms may have helped galvanize support for Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. I think it's reasonable to speculate that web video may even foster political participation in ways that television has discouraged.
But, at the same time, I wonder to what extent web video will give credibility to false attacks. Obviously the most famous recent example is the "swiftboating" of John Kerry's 2004 campaign, but even the Romney video is clearly an intentional distortion of his current positions on abortion and gay rights. And Romney's campaign is free to respond, just as Kerry campign should have responded to the Swift Boat ads. I'm a little uncomfortable with my skepticism here because I think it risks sounding undemocratic (and I'm not particuarly interested in shutting down new avenues of expression), but I have to wonder how web video's appearance of authentic, direct communication can be manipulated, especially by the campaigns themselves.
Posted by chuck at 9:38 AM | TrackBack
January 20, 2007
Netflix Guilt Revisited
A few months ago, in response to a WSJ Online article, I mentioned the fact that my DVD watching habits had been radically altered by my Netflix subscription. Because of the paper I'm currently writing, I have been burning through lots of DVDs lately, but that remains the exception. I still let the DVDs I get from Netflix gather dust on my shelves, often for weeks or months at a time.
In the article I'm writing, I'm currently working through what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls the "paradox of abundance" made possible by TiVo, Netflix, and other similar services and happened to come across Brad Stone's concept of "Netflix guilt" and didn't want to lose track of it. Not sure I have much to add right now, but I still find these concepts useful for describing my own encounters with TV and DVDs.
Update: Not really related, but just thought I'd point to Bill Gates's comments about what he sees as the convergence of TV and the Internet. Not sure there's anything new here: broadcast TV will soon be abandoned because the internet is so much more flexible--you know the drill.
Posted by chuck at 9:18 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
January 19, 2007
American Idol, MySpace, and Micro-Celebrity
I've been planning to blog Lakshmi Chaudhry's Nation article on the role of YouTube and other video-sharing services in the "democratization" of celebrity but have been pretty distracted lately (she uses the term "micro-celebrity" to describe this phenomenon, which sounds about right).
Her article might compare usefully to the American Idol juggernaut (the ratings for last week's audition episodes beat all other major networks combined) that shows little sign of slowing down. On a related note, Michael has a pointer to the MySpace pages of some of AI's rejected performers. The blogger who tracked down all of these MySpace pages also has a fascinating narrative about (1) how he tracked down the performers' pages and (2) how dramatically his blog traffic spiked after several high-profile blogs linked to him.
Posted by chuck at 11:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Lazy Friday Post
I'm still in the midst of my writing project, but Michael has been blogging up a storm and points to a couple of articles I don't want to lose.
First, he mentions that Netflix is experimenting with offering streaming video service to its subscribers, amove that seems intended as a response to predictions of the company's eventual death.
Also worth checking out: Michael's "Notes on Web Video Form" is a useful reading of the form. This entry has the added bonus of a pointer to the very cool video, "Season 4 of '24' in 2mn30s" (all events in real time, of course), which as Michael implies, makes Mike Figgis's Time Code look like child's play.
My latest paper-related semi-addiction: streaming vids of the first season of Jericho, the CBS show about the aftermath of a nuclear attack.
Also, for future reference: this Chris Hedges article, "The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair." I've long admired Hedges' previous book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (I saw him speak on this topic at Emory several years ago), and Hedges latest project looks equally interesting.
Posted by chuck at 9:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 14, 2007
Democracy in Fifteen Seconds
I have a new column up on Flow. It's about a contest sponsored by CBS inviting participants to submit 15-second videos to YouTube, with the winning video possibly being aired on Super Bowl Sunday. I think the contest is an interesting one, but I'm not quite sure I'm satisfied with whether I adequately explained my reservations about how "participatory culture" has been framed recently.
As usual, there are a number of interesting columns in the current issue of Flow, several of which are pertinent to my current writing project, including Jennifer Warren's "The Final Frontier: Myth and Meaning in Science Fiction Television," Jean Anne Lauer's "'They finally killed off Kat': Battlestar Galactica's and the Limits of its Politics," and Hector Amaya's "Film is the New Low, Television the New High: Some Ideas About Time and Narrative Conservatisms."
Update: Just a quick pointer to my syllabus for my "Technology in the Language Arts Classroom" and the course blog. I decided to experiment with Google's page creator following Michael's advice. I found the page creator a little clunky, but like Michael, I wanted the page to be accessible to anyone and was looking for something relatively easy to use.
Posted by chuck at 6:28 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 12, 2007
Mobile Television
For the paper I'm writing:
Via the SciFi Channel's Tech blog: Live television streamed to cell phones. Includes a mildly interesting discussion of whether customers will embrace such a feature.
No time to write much more, but I've been interested in this topic for a while.
Posted by chuck at 2:08 PM | TrackBack
January 6, 2007
Lazy Saturday Night Reads
One or two other notes about the Bordwell blog entry I mentioned earlier. Like Jim Thompson, I was intrigued by Bordwell's discussion of the connections between storytelling techniques in film and in other media such as television and graphic novels. Both Thompson and Bordwell point to Jason Mittell's recent Velvet Light Trap article "Narrative Complexity in Comntemporary American Television", which addresses many of these concerns (more on the Mittell article later, hopefully).
Jim Thompson's pointer also reminded me to revisit Kristin Thompson's discussion of the various DVD versions of The DaVinci Code, where she explains that an extended version of the film is available pretty much everywhere except the US. But I was more intrigued to learn that Bordwell and Thompson are planning to include "recommended DVD extras" at the end of every chapter of the forthcoming edition of Film Art. I've been using Corrigan and White's The Film Experience recently, with some success, but I'll be very interested to see how these revisions play out. Like Chris, I've been thinking about film textbooks quite a bit lately, and I think that DVD extras can be used in the classroom in some very effective ways.
Completely unrelated to the above: I drove up to Durham last night to catch Old Joy (IMDB) at the Carolina Theater, based laregly on the recommendations of a few film bloggers whose taste I appreciate, and I'm really glad I made the trip, even if that meant driving over an hour back to F'ville in a monsoon. Kelly Reichardt's quiet, minimalist film follows two old friends, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham) as they travel to hot springs in the mountains. There is a gap between the two old friends who have drifted apart after Mark married and settled down while Kurt continues to drift from job to job and place to place. I shouldn't keep promising to write longer reviews, but I really liked this film and would like to encourage others to see it by giving it the attention it deserves. I'm just not sure I'll have time to do that with all of the syllabus prep and other writing I need to be doing this weekend.
Posted by chuck at 6:14 PM | TrackBack
January 5, 2007
More Denby Links
Michael at Zigzigger tackles a few points I missed in my original bullet-point read of Denby's New Yorker article on the state of Hollywood (and, no, I have no idea why I called it "brilliant" in my original blog entry--blame it on the lack of caffeine).
In particular, Michael reminds us that Denby's article seems to ignore or misread some of the big changes in exhibition that have taken place since the 1970s. In praticular, Michael correctly takes Denby to task for "neglecting the boom in theater construction in the 1990s and early 2000s that has perpetuated and exacerbated opening-weekend mania." And, like Michael, I found the Denby piece most useful when describing digital viewing experiences.
Michael also points to a second Carpetbagger blog entry that more or less rips Denby's article to shreds. The Bagger offers an eloquent take on many of the holes in Denby's argument (movie theaters aren't the "graveyards" Denby imagines them to be, box office actually increased slightly 2007, Hollywood studios *know* the game has changed). But the Bagger's response to Denby is also helpful in its characterterization of corrupt studios and their relationship to a relatively compliant entertainment press. Not much to add right now, but these readings have complicated my original comments to some extent.
Also worth checking out: The New York Observer's "Stardust Memo" to Hollywood.
Update: AO Scott weighs in on the Denby discussion, concluding:
Moviegoing, though unlikely to disappear, will probably never again be the universal rite it once was. This is not a catastrophe, just a change of habit. Going to the movies may survive as an acquired taste, and also, therefore, as an activity through which taste is acquired.Scott desrcibes the practice of taking his own children (ages 10 and 7) to a variety of movies over the last few months, reading the moviegoing ritual through Frank O'Hara's 1960 poem, “Ave Maria.”
Update 2: Jim Thompson also has an overview of this debate, and, even better, a pointer to David Bordwell's analysis of the structures of several recent Hollywood films. Bordwell's read on Fast Food Nation's rewarding use of the "network narrative" structure is especially helpful and underscores much of what I like about Linklater's film.
Posted by chuck at 10:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 3, 2007
Wednesday Morning Media Links
Two urelated links I don't want to lose: First, an article in today's New York Times about this year's Oscars finalists, noting that many of the films address controversial political topics (global warming, Iraq, free speech, etc). The article suggests that the finalists reflect "a shift toward gritty, guerrilla filmmaking, a willingness to tackle controversial subjects, no matter the obstacles." There's certainly no shortage of political docs getting national attention this year, but given the long history of political documentaries, including the work of organizations such as Newsreel since the 1960s, this narrative seems imprecise to me. Still, I'm happy to see a number of films that I admire getting national attention.
The Washington Post has an advertisement, I mean article, on SeenOn.com, a new website that allows TV viewers to purchase the clothing, accessories, and other items seen on their favorite TV shows. Dig "Ugly Betty's" sweater? You can now buy it through the magic of the internet. This kind of service isn't terribly surprising, I suppose. In fact, I'm somewhat surprised it didn't hapen sooner, but it probably does represent another means for television and cable networks to profit off of human attention in the age of TiVo.
Posted by chuck at 9:48 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
January 2, 2007
Star Trek Interactive Links
For an article I'm writing:
- Slice of SciFi: "G4 Makes Star Trek Interactive"
- G4's Star Trek 2.0 website
- TrekWeb.com: "G4 Following Star Trek 2.0 With The Next Generation 2.0"
- Voodoo Extreme: "G4 to Butcher Star Trek: TNG"
- Reuters: "Videogame network G4 tries to keep men's attention"
Posted by chuck at 5:12 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
The Future of Movies
Via David Carr's Carpetbagger blog, David Denby's brilliant and occasionally frustrating New Yorker essay on the potential changes in cinematic production and distribution, "Big Pictures: Hollywood Looks For a Future." I want to return to Denby's essay later, perhaps in another blog entry and certainly in my book, but for now, I'll mention a few immediate reactions:
- Denby begins with a discussion of what Nick Rombes has called the "shrinking screen," describing his discomfort with watching a Hollywood film on a video iPod. He notes that he could never quite achieve a comfortable position in relationship to the screen and implies that watching a "big" film on the very small screen showed the limitations of the technology. But later he points out that all formats (multiplexes, art house theaters, TV sitcoms, etc) encourage certain kinds of content. I think this is already happening with modes pf direct address seen in video podcasts, videoblogging and other "small," intimate texts that fit the tiny screen.
- Denby's description of the effects of digitization is quite helpful. He describes in detail the experience of watching Million Dollar Baby on a high-def screen, comapring the detail offered on a (very expensive) home theater system with the film's murkier look on the big screen (a look that resonated with me when I saw the film originally, even though I didn't mention Denby's review at the time).
- The article could work incredibly well in an introduction to film course as a supplement to class discussions of what Tim Corigan and Patricia White have called "the film experience." Ranging from the movie palaces of the 1930s and '40s through the "tawdry" multiplexes of the 1980s built in the wake of blockbuster culture to the new art houses, Denby effectively, if sometimes nostalgically, conveys how moviegoing is a shared public experience and why that is so important.
- Denby also discusses what gets lost when viewing Brokeback Mountain on a small screen. I finally caught Brokeback last night and was impressed by the film's storytelling but didn't find myself feeling terribly passionate about the movie. Denby's description of watching the film, with its majestic mountain vistas, suggests why the film might have been more powerful on the big screen
- Like many media theorists, Denby imagines a near future in which all media is distrubuted through a central entertainment/media center in the home, and to some extent, convergence is taking place, but like Henry Jenkins, I'm not convinced that all media technolgies will converge into a central media appliance anytime soon (see one version of Jenkins' discussion of the "black box fallacy" here).
- Denby also offers a good overview of some of the new Hollywood business models, noting the degree to which the studios are invested in blockbuster franchises such as the Spiderman and Superman series. But he's also attentive to new moes of independent and specialty distribution that may make it possible for smaller films to gain a wider audience. In partciular he cites Richard Linklater's observation that some of his smaller films never screen in theaters outside of big cities and college towns and that digital distribution could change that, allowing film fans in smaller towns to become more involved in the conversation about these films.
Update: Just wanted to point to some of the other responses Denby's essay has been getting. Bright Lights After Dark briefly mentions the essay, and Ryan at Cinematical favorably discusses Denby's treatment of the state of cinema in 2007, although I don't think Denby believes it's quite as bad as Ryan implies.
Finally, Eugene David, the One-Minute Pundit, is far more critical of Denby, in part because of his complicity with the industry in offering favorable reviews to mediocre Holywood product and because Denby favorably describes the new art house theater renovations by National Amusements, a theater chain owned by entertainment conglomerate Viacom. To be fair to Denby, he hardly seems like the worst offender in ad-blurbism (at least compared to certain other critics who are all thumbs), but I think the bigger problem here is David's dismissal of all things Hollywood. My read of Denby's piece doesn't leave me with the impression that movies are necessarily getting worse (Denby praises Million Dollar Baby and Brokeback Mountain among others) but that economic, technological, and social factors are changing the kinds of movies that get made as well as changing how we watch them, a far different kind of argument than the jeremiad David describes (even if Denby doesn't like the video iPod). Some of those changes, including teh reliance on tentpole blockbusters, are negative, of course, but I think Denby leaves a lot of room for showing how the "specialty" wings of the major studios can produce some interesting and innovative work.
David also implies that "the principal accomplishments" of the Web are The Blair Witch Project, Ain't it Cool News, and the Snakes on a Plane hype, but I think that overlooks a lot of the truly independent porductions that are promoted and distributed via the internet, including services such as Green Cine and Netflix that allow folks who live in cities and towns without an independent video store or art house theater access to far more film titles than they might otherwise have.
One more note: John Podhoretz also favorably cites Denby's article, echoing the observation that the internet is contributing to the decline of American movies.
Update 2: Annie Frisbie also discusses Denby's article in relationship to a rather unpleasant experience at a Dreamgirls screening.
Update 3: Did I say "brilliant?" I meant "obvious." David at Green Cine links to Anne Thompson's far more critical take on Denby's piece.
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December 23, 2006
Lazy Pre-Christmas Eve Media Links
A few links before my last-minute dive into the holiday shopping madness:
First, via Michael at Zigzagger, Virginia Heffernan's multimedia year in review, which is pretty interesting. As Michael points out, Heffernan pronounces reality TV, network news, and parent-child bonding shows such as The Gilmore Girls dead, while seeing a glimmer of hope for the sitcom. Related: Heffernan's NYT article.
A mildly interesting AJC article about Ted Turner's decision to purchase MGM/UA in the 1980s, which famously gave the media mogul access to MGM/UA's massive film library, which included Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, and Wizard of Oz, as well as RKO's Citizen Kane and the now annoyingly ubiquitous A Christmas Story (a movie I used to like before it was sampled in pretty much every Christmas commercial this year).
Finally, McChris linked to a post offering some interesting Nielsen Top Ten lists, including a list of the ten most time-shifted shows. The most time-shifted show happens to be Studio 60, followed by Heroes and Gilmore Girls, suggesting that these shows have prestige audiences but that these audiences are likely zapping through the commercials. Scroll down the Nielsen entry for other goodies such as the ten most cited Wikipedia entries (Web 2.0 is number one) and the top ten advertisers in "traditional" and online media (interesting to see where certain advertisers target potential customers).
Blogging will almost certainly be infrequent until after Christmas now that all the local coffeehouses (and their high-speed internet service) will be closed for the holidays. And then I'm off to Philly for MLA (where I may have some time to blog the convention).
Update: The Nielsen post also has the ten programs with the most occurences of product placement and the ten brands with the most cases of product placement on network TV. Perhaps unsurprisingly, reality TV shows dominate the first list.
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December 19, 2006
Distribution, Exhibition, Promotion
Hiding out at a well-known franchise coffeehouse catching up on some blogging and blog reading and just wanted to keep track of some links that have crossed my path. Via GreenCine, a discussion of teh distribution plans for John Sayles' Honeydripper, which just wrapped. The film's producers have set up a blog, where they discuss their intentions of fixing a broken distribution system while still working to see the filmmakers manage to see some profit from their hard work. More: Brendon Connelly compares the distribution strategy for Honeydripper to Steven Soderbergh's simultaneous distribution of Bubble in multiple formats. I'll be interested to see how this story unfolds (see also: the Emerging Pictures website).
Also from GreenCine, Stuart Klawans' review of Blood Diamond, which is pretty similar to my own.
Finally, and I'm very late in pointing to this one: Anne at the Risky Biz Blog has an interetsing entry on the potential (?) role for MySpace in promoting indie film. As she points out, MySpace is often dismissed as a dating or social site "for kids," but it can also be used for networking and promotion, as many musicians (and their publicists) have discovered. Her question: have there been any MySpace indie film "success stories?" She notes that Filmmaker Magazine has embraced the site, but while their MySpace friends are a who's who of indie films and festivals from the last year, I'm wondering what role MySpace has served in raising awareness of these films (or whether the social networking site is the best tool for promoting these films).
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December 12, 2006
The Lost Room
Despite the fact that I'm currently getting crushed in my Weblog Awards category, I just wanted to mention that I found myself pretty engrossed in the new Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, The Lost Room, which debuted last night (the series runs through Wednesday). The series focuses on Police Detective Joe Miller (Peter Krause) who discovers a motel key that allows its possessor to open any door into the mysterious Room 10 of the Sunshine Motel, which serves as a kind of portal allowing you to travel virtually anywhere, with the room magically resetting every time the door is re-opened. As the Sci-Fi Channel plot summary reveals, the mundane contents of the room (a bus ticket, eyeglasses, and a ball point pen, among others) all take on unique powers. The bus pass, for example, allows its possessor to "zap" anyone who approaches out to a distant highway in Gallup, New Mexico.
Of course, possession of one of these Objects poses any number of psychological and physical risks, as Miller quickly learns. One of the subplots of the series is Miller's custody battle over his daughter Anna (Elle Fanning), who vanishes when the door to Room 10 closes and the room resets to its original state. Anna's disappearance sets in motion Miller's attempts to recover additional Objects that might allow him to rescue her. And because the Objects posseess such useful powers, other collectors seek to possess as many Objects as possible. The room's powers are, thankfully, never fully explained. There are some vague supernatural speculations, but at least in the first episode, the mystery is left relatively open.
My interest in the series derives in part from the vaguely nostalgic style of the series. Room 10, as the SciFi Channel's description suggests, suggests those lonely hotel rooms that dotted Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles during the 1950s and '60s, while Detective Miller, in some ways, recalls the hard-boiled detective of film noir (including some nice low-key lighting during several key sequences). I'm not yet ready to come to any conclusions about The Lost Room, but so far it's good pulpy fun. Also check out the Pop Matters review and the discussion at TV with MeeVee.
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December 10, 2006
Tentative Syllabus: A Request
Because one of my students in my spring semester graduate course, "Technology and the Language Arts Curriculum," requested that I provide her with a reading list in advance, I've put together a tentative syllabus (or at least a reading list) for the class. One of the stated goals of the course is to provide high school teachers with a few strategies for using technology in the classroom, and I've been working to balance theoretical debates in media studies with the specific, practical problems that my students will face in the classroom. I've added the reading list below the fold, and I'd very much welcome any suggestions my readers might have. And of course I'm very grateful for interesting courses by Kathleen and Scot (among many others) that have informed my thinking about this course.
To name one example, I'm considering spending one week of class discussing the debates about plagiarism detection services, drawing in part from Clancy's discussion of that topic a few weeks ago. But I'm very much looking forward to teaching this course, so I've enjoyed taking a break from grading today to put this reading list together.
January 16: Introduction to Course
January 23: Blogging and Writing Instruction:
Julian Dibbell, “Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man.”
Charles Lowe and Terra Williams, “Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom.”
Rebecca Mead, “You’ve Got Blog: How to Put Your Boy Friend, Your Business, and Your Life On-Line,”
Chuck Tryon, “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition.” Pedagogy 6.1 (Winter 2006): 128-32.
January 30: Understanding Media Change
Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” Understanding Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. 7-21.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation,” Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 20-51.
Raymond Williams. “The Technology and the Society.” Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1974. 9-31.
February 6: What is New Media?
Lev Manovich, “What is New Media?” The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press 19-61.
N. Katherine Hayles, “Material Metaphors, Technotexts, and Media-Specific Analysis.” Writing Machines. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. 18-33.
February 13: New Media and Authorship
Jay David Bolter, “Seeing and Writing.” The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003. 679-90.
Lev Manovich, “Models of Authorship in New Media.”
Jill Walker, “Feral Hypertexts: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control.”
February 20: Composition and New Media
Geoffrey Sirc, “Box Logic.” Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Ed. Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2004. 111-146.
Anne Frances Wysocki, “With Eyes That Think, and Compose, and Think: On Visual Rhetoric.” Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction. Ed. Pamela Takayoshi and Brian Huot. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 182-201.
February 27: New Media Cultures
Richard A. Lanham, “Stuff and Fluff.” The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 1-41.
Lev Manovich, “Generation Flash.”
Jeff Rice, “21st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging.” CTheory.net. June 7, 2005.
March 6: Spring Break
March 13: Interactivity
Luis Arata, “Reflections about Interactivity,” MIT Communications Forum.
Dan Gillmor, “The Read-Write Web,” We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Cambridge: O’Reilly Press, 2004.
Cass Sunstein, “The Daily Me.” Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 3-22.
March 20: Participatory Cultures
Henry Jenkins, “Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars.” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 169-205.
March 27: New Media and Democracy
Henry Jenkins, “Photoshop for Democracy.” Technology Review. June 4, 2004.
Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Digital Deployment(s).” Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream. Ed. Chris Holmlund and Justin Wyatt. London: Routledge, 2005. 245-64.
JibJab and other videos TBA.
April 3: Video Sharing
Joshua Davis, “The Secret World of LonelyGirl.” Wired 14.12 (December 2006).
Bob Garfield, “YouTube vs. Boob Tube.” Wired 14.12 (December 2006).
Christopher Conway, “YouTube and the Cultural Studies Classroom,” Inside Higher Ed, November 16, 2006.
Selected YouTube videos TBA.
April 10: Digging Through the Archives
Browse the following web resources:
American Memory Project
EDSITEment
Making MediaCommons
April 17: Wikiality
Brock Read, “Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?” Chronicle of Higher Education. October 27, 2006.
Alan Liu “Developing a Wikipedia Research Policy.” Kairosnews. June 29, 2006.
Jeff Rice, “Wikiality.” Yellow Dog. August 3, 2006.
April 24: Computer Classrooms and Writing
Richard Selfe, “Goals in Action: Student Workers at the Center of Things.” Sustainable Computer Environments for Teachers of English and Language Arts: Creating a Culture of Support.
May 1: Student Presentations.
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December 4, 2006
Teaching Media Literacy
Just wanted to mention that an article I wrote for the newly launched Re:New Media blog is now available. The article, "Teaching Media Literacy in the Age of YouTube," is meant to address some of the challenges media studies professors now face when it comes to teaching media literacy and reflects some of my recent interest in the role of YouTube clips in shaping political discourse (as well as my long-term interest in "homemade media"). In particular, it focuses on the tendency to treat video sharing sites as mere content, kind of a giant, virtual video library, rather than considering the discourses that have already grown up around video sharing and videoblogging (and how that, in turn, has come to reshape the contents of these sites).
Re:New Media is the new name for National Video Resources. The organization seeks to promote independent artistic production through a variety of venues incluidng public screenings and discussions, as well as other educational uses of independent media and, of course, the Re:New Media blog where my article was posted. It looks like a valuable resource for independent artists, as well as educators and audiences interested in independent media. Worth checking out: Neil Sieling's "Digital and Tangible: How DVDs Are Impacting Independent Media."
Thanks to Agnes for inviting me to contribute to this exciting new resource. Comments on the article are definitely welcome.
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November 28, 2006
365 Films
Via the if:book blog: the incredibly cool news that experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas is planning to make a short video every day for a calendar year, beginning January 1, 2007, with the director stating that "It will be my diary of sorts." The project will be formatted for the video iPod but will be viewable in other formats.
As a fan of Mekas's films, I'm very much looking forward to watching this project unfold. Also worth checking out: Mekas now has a number of his films available online.
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November 25, 2006
Kopple on Counterspin
I'm still waiting for Barbara Kopple's documentary about the Dixie Chicks, Shut Up and Sing, to make it to the 'ville, but until then, here's an audio interview with her on FAIR's Counterspin series (note: the interview is about twenty minutes into the show).
Completely Unrelated Update: Just a quick pointer to this NYT article on DC's new graphic novel series aimed at teenage girls. If you push aside some of the marketing hype, there's an interesting discussion about the representation of women in most superhero comics, as well as their attempts to recruit writers for this new series.
Another Unrelated Update: Some Saturday video fun courtesy of David at GreenCine. First, this priceless video of Rex Reed talking about the Oscars with Dick Cavett in 1971. Second, the cool new blog Expanded Cinema, which curates some obscure and compelling avant-garde and experimental films.
Also, I've been planning to link to Girish's very interesting post about the categorization of his massive VHS collection (related "VHS is Dead" post, in part because his comments helped inform my reading of Barbara Klinger's discussion of video collections in her recent book, Beyond the Multiplex, but alas, I've been a little distracted lately.
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November 24, 2006
Media Studies and Fair Use
Some good news regarding media studies and fair use. According to an AP report, the US copyright office has just announced several new exemptions to copyright law, at least one of which will benefit media and film studies professors. The exemption would allow film and media professors to copy clips from DVDs for educational compilations (an important teaching tool in Intro to Film courses). As the AP article explains it:
The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.Other exemptions dealt with computer obsolescence, allowing copy-protection controls to be circumvented for archival purposes for computer prorgams and video games that require obsolete machines. The full list of new exemptions is available at the US Copyright Office website.While I'd like to see Fair Use extend a little more broadly, these changes will certainly benefit scholars and teachers working in film and media studies.The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes — for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under "fair use" provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.
Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.
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November 21, 2006
All Over the Map
I have an article/book chapter on YouTube and other video sharing services percolating, so I've been following the recent discussions of the site with some interest. First, David at GreenCine points to Youtubers, an interesting montage featuring a number of YouTube personalities, most of whom are directly addressing the camera with the hope of connecting with a wider audience, as Ajit at TickleBooth points out. The montage makes especially good use of LonelyGirl15 (remember her?), who first rose to prominence because she played to that desire for connection so effectively.
Henry Jenkins has an interesting and convincing read of YouTube's "vaudeville aesthetic," noting that like vaudeville sketches, most YouTube performances are relatively brief. He also points out that "the YouTube performer courts a sense of the amateurish which also places a high emphasis on seeming spontaneity." Many YouTube videos cultivate this "unrehearsed" style. Jenkins is careful here to distinguish between a sense of "liveness" and what he calls the "realness" of these YouTube clips.
Finally, we have (at least) two new cases where videographers using camera phones have been able to record and upload videos depicting, in one case, a student at UCLA being brutally tazered by the UCLA campus police, and in a second case, Seinfeld's Michael Richards unleashing a racist tirade in response to a group of African-American hecklers (Richards later apologized on Letterman, with his apology available on YouTube, naturally). Both videos dramatically illustrate the documentary potential of these new technologies, but the UCLA video in particular recalls, for me at least, the video recording of the beating of Rodney King in the ealy 1990s (possibly more on this topic in the next few days).
Somewhat related: The most recent elections have frequently been described as the "first YouTube elections," with Brett Arends of the Boston Herald making an interesting case that online videos might have greater potential to "pull" centrists than the more highly-polarized political blogs that shaped the 2004 elections.
I realize this entry has been all over the map, as my title suggests, but I'm intrigued by how quickly YouTube, in particular, has become such a crucial component of media culture. Even though many of these videos were seen by fewer than one million people on YouTube, they also have the potential to push stories onto television (George Allen's attachement to the Confederacy likely would never have become a national news story without online video, to name just one example). More later, but I had genuinely planned for this to be a quick linkdump.
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November 16, 2006
The Weinsteins at Home
Via Ezra Klein, the news that Blockbuster and the Weinstein Company have signed a deal allowing Blockbuster exclusive United States rental rights to movies produced by the new studio, thereby preventing Netflix from renting copies of the new studio's films, including Bobby, The Nanny Diaries and The Protector. The move likely makes financial sense for both sides, especially with Blockbuster striving to compete with Netflix and video-on-demand services, but it may also have the effect of limiting audiences for the Weinstein Company's films. While I've rented from Blockbuster occasionally over the last decade, I only do so as a last resort, which likely means I'll simply skip most Weinstein films that don't make it to theaters in Fayetteville.
Ezra's blog also has an interesting discussion of the legal issues involved in this agreement.
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November 14, 2006
Teaching YouTube
The folks at MediaCommons have pointed to an interesting Inside Higher Ed article by Christopher Conway on the potential uses of YouTube in cultural studies classrooms. The discussion at both IHE and MediaCommons is worth checking out, and I'm writing this post in part as a reminder to revisit these ideas in my "Technology in the Liberal Arts Classroom" seminar next semester.
Specifically, Conway, a professor of Latin American studies, points out that clips uploaded to the service can provide a useful accompaniment to course readings, documentaries, and other assignments, adding that in one recent course, he was able to show Hugo Chavez's notorious "Bush is the Devil" speech (with a Noam Chomsky book playing a key prop). Conway points to a number of other useful clips including the Chomsky-Foucault debate and Malcolm X appearing at Oxford. I think there's little doubt that Conway is right that scholars and teachers should plunder, I mean borrow from, YouTube at every opportunity, and Conway is also right that blogging software makes it relatively easy for professors to link to these clips (although I don't think it's necessarily fair to assume that students will have access to the high-speed internet connections required to view the clips, at least not at my university). At the same time, YouTube's "video library" vastly exceeds the resources available at my local university or at the high school libraries where many of my students will eventually teach, so I think he's right that it can be a very useful resource.
Conway's article also raises some imprtant questions about YouTube and copyright, asking whether a professor who links to an illegally uploaded YouTube clip is "complicit in infringing on someone’s copyright." And, of course, now that Google owns YouTube, we may see some of this valuable material removed from the website. I think that the MediaCommons position, which emphasizes "fair use" addresses many of Conway's concerns, but these legal and institutional issues will significantly effect what kinds of material remains available on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.
And yet, I find myself wanting to read Conway's article somewhat "against the grain," emphasizing not the "hidden gems" that he describes but the amateurish, home movie clips that he describes at the beginning of the article before asking what YouTube can do for professors "apart from giving them something to look at during their lunch breaks." Instead of looking at YouTube as a source of content, why not look at it as a technological form, focusing with our students on how the site not only changes what we (can) watch but how we watch (the beauty of the SNL "Lazy Sunday" clip is that I didn't have to watch an entire SNL episode to see it). I think these questions are implied in Kathleen's question about how we could re-imagine YouTube as a "scholarly tool."
Lots of interesting questions here, and I'm not sure I have any answers yet, but I'm happy to see others thinking about the role of media sharing in the liberal arts classroom.
Update: Jeff's reading of the IHE article is also worth checking out. In particular, Jeff offers an insightful reading of Conway's passing comment that instructors who use YouTube may not want their students to view the sometimes inane comments that accompany most videos, and like Jeff I see comments (and the video responses inspired by such video series as the LonelyGirl15 saga) as a crucial component of the medium. Again, some interesting questions.
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November 7, 2006
Making MediaCommons Launched
A few months ago, I mentioned the very exciting new digital publishing initiative, MediaCommons. Like Kathleen, I am enthusiastic about the possibilities for and implications of electronic scholarly publishing, and MediaCommons should offer a valuable new venue for media studies scholarship (and, yes, I'm hoping/planning to participate in this project). The project is still in the planning stage, but I'd like to mention that The Institute for the Future of the Book has launched Making MediaCommons, a planning site where this new project will begin to develop.
Some of the current features include a blog where the site's organizers are working to imagine just what an electronic publishing network can do, as well as a series of short videos, "In Media Res," with different media scholars offering impressionistic responses to short video clips, including Jeffrey P. Jones' insightful reading of Keith Olbermann's recent "Special Comment" segment on his MSNBC show. There's also a call for "papers" that explore media history, theory or culture, using technologies made available through the digital network.
While Making MediaCommons has only recently launched, I think it can be a valuable resource for media studies scholarship. In this sense, Kathleen's recent post calling for participation in the site sounds about right to me. As more people become actively involved in MediaCommons, I think it can become a valuable community and resource for media studies, so please do check out the site, leave some comments in the blog, and offer suggestions about how the site can contribute to the field of media studies.
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November 4, 2006
Saturday Video Fun
In order to get back in the blogging habit, I'm thinking of adding a weekly feature here at The Chutry Experiment: Saturday Video Fun. As many of my readers will know, I'm a big fan of online video, and there are countless videos out there to choose from. This week's favorites:
First, via the cinetrix, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema featuring Slavoj Zizek sitting on a toilet in order to explain the similarities between two key scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 thriller, The Conversation and Hitchcock's Psycho. In related news, I'll be joining the cinetrix at SCMS (not to mention several folks from Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope), where I'll be giving a paper on the recent documentary, Unknown White Male.
With the election coming up, I couldn't resist throwing in a couple of political videos, including this fun little video using George Michael's "Freedom" to comment on the Bush administration. Somehow this line seems especially fitting: "All we have to do is take these lies and make them true" (via TPM). Related: via Altercation, a short video about Bush's spech writer.
Finally, I wanted to mention a few videos from the new video service, Motionbox, which I learned about via email this week. With the implications of Google's purchase of the video hosting service YouTube still unclear, I think it's worth looking at what other video hosting services can offer. There's a lot to like about Motionbox, most notably the fact that Motionbox claims no ownership rights to videos submitted to their site (which isn't always the case wih other video hosting sites). The other feature I've grown to like is deep-tagging, which allows you to add tags within a specific video to make it even more navigable (this functions much like chapter stops on a DVD).
I mention Motionbox in part as an excuse to point to Bush's Beatbox and the very interesting experimental video, Blackbird, which features a hybrid of digital and analog animation techniques. Finally, Motionbox is also hosting a trailer for the new personal doc, 51 Birch Street, which I'd love to see.
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November 2, 2006
Thursday Night Links
I keep waiting for that mythical moment when I'll feel caught up again, but until then here are a few of the things I've been reading while taking a break from grading this evening:
First, Chris's pointer to the very cool resource, UbuWeb, which archives the films of a number of avant-garde filmmakers, including Guy Debord and Stan Brakhage. Also available: the famous interview with Jacques Lacan from French television. It turns out that I mentioned UbuWeb about a year ago, but it's a resource well worth revisiting.
Second, I just wanted to mention that I'm curious to see The Quiet Revolution, a short documentary produced by Alliance for Justice, a group working to oppose reactionary court appointments, as reported in this Nation blog post. I'm still way behind on my movie watching, but that's probably going to be the norm for a while at least.
Also, I wanted to mention a couple of blog posts by Derek Kompare, whom I met last week at the Flow Conference. In one recent post, Kompare marks the 30th birthday of VHS by reflecting on the technology's persistence even in our current "digital comfort zone." Of course he's right to note that while there's very little nostalgia for VHS (at least compared to a format such as the LP), the very physicality of videotape has contributed to the medium's persistence. Like Derek, I find myself using VHS far less often, and most of my VHS tapes have been collecting dust for years. In fact, I'm no longer sure my current VCR even works, but also like Derek, I'm aware that there is so much out there that remains available only on VHS, so I don't expect VCRs to disappear completely anytime soon.
Derek also has a post on The Vicissitudes of Serial TV, which focuses at some length on one of my new addictions this fall, Ugly Betty (IMDB), a show that impresses and surprises me every time I watch it (the subplot about her father's status as an illegal immigrant is especially timely and, so far, thoughtfully handled). And like him, I've been very impressed by America Ferrera's performance as Betty (Salma Hayek's guest role tonight was also quite fun).
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October 24, 2006
The Formula
Via both GreenCine and Vince Keenan, a discussion of Malcolm Gladwell's October 16 New Yorker article, "The Formula," in which Gladwell describes a computer program designed to predict hit movies using a system called an "artificial neural network." As Gladwell explains it
Neural networks are used for data mining -- to look for patterns in very large amounts of data.Essentially, Hollywod screenplays would be treated as mathematical formulas, using elements isolated by the programmers to predict with uncanny accuracy the box office for a given film. They can even predict the box office benefits of adding a youthful sidekick or a romance subplot.
The article's case study, Sydney Pollack's UN thriller, The Interpreter, is a relatively persuasive example, in part because of the number of rewrites involved. As we learn from the article, the final film diverges radiacally from the original screenply, written by retired philsophy professor, Charles Randolph. The computer program did conclude that the rewrites made The Interpreter a more profitable film, but as screenwriter Scott Frank points out, it's not entirely clear whether the revisions made for a "better" film. And it's also not clear whether Pollack could have made an even more profitable film. Some of the suggested improvements do make a great deal of sense: Pollack could have made better use of the locations in the United Nations building. The fictional African nation where the plot began may have confused and turned off certain audience members.
I don't know that I can offer more than a quick reading of the Gladwell article right now, but it's difficult not to read it as anything other than an advertisement for Epagogix, the company founded by the two men who designed the software. I'm also more than a little skeptical of their reduction of the Hollywood marketing machine to various, sometimes arbitrary, plot formulas. At one point, a member of the Epagogix team confesses that he had no interest in seeing V for Vendetta because of the main character's mask, not really acknowledging the significance of the mask to the graphic novel on which the film is (loosely) based. That being said, I'm not entirely sure there's anything terribly new here other than the specifics of the formula (which the article doesn't entirely reveal, of course). I need to think about the article for a while before I come to any real conclusions about it, but the article is a provocative read, especially for those of us in media and film studies.
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October 5, 2006
Spring Teaching (Already)
I've just received the very cool news that I'll be teaching my first graduate-level course in the spring (in addition to the anticipated three sections of freshman composition), one that will present some interesting challenges for me. The course, "Technology and the Language Arts Curriculum," is designed for teachers seeking their M.Ed. in English education, and as the course catalog suggests, the class is expected to focus on emerging media technologies and their effectiveness as pedagogical tools, with one of the goals being the production of a syllabus for a "computer intensive language arts course."
So far, I'm only in the very earliest stages of brainstorming about what such a course should look like. Because I have quite a bit of experience with using blogs in the classroom, we'll certainly discuss how blogs can be used in writing classes (something that went particularly well in my Rhetoric and Democracy course a few years ago, a course that also taught me a lot about teaching in a computer classroom). I'm also thinking about setting up a course wiki, which will (hopefully) introduce them to the possibilities and challenges of using wikis in their classrooms. Finally, I'm also hoping to spend some time working with my students on how they might set up video projects for their students (and to discuss the questions that such projects raise). There are some challenges here--including the availability of equipment--but it seems like it could be a fun class to teach.
Hoping to have more to say about the course in the next several days, but I still have one last round of grading tonight and I need to stop procrastinating.
Update: Forgot to mention that I'll almost certainly discuss pedagogical uses of iPods and podcasting in general, but I don't want podcasting to be considered merely a form of (course) content delivery. Still brainstorming. Must grade.
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September 26, 2006
Believing is Seeing
I'm doing a unit on "visual literacy" in my freshman composition classes this week, and because the photographs in our textbook aren't that interesting, I've been trying to find images that will make class discussion a little more compelling. With that in mind, I'm thinking about introducing the recent debate over Thomas Hoepker's "Brooklyn, New York, September 11, 2001," discussed most recently in this Richard Cohen Washington Post op-ed. Hoepker's photograph became the ubject of some controversy when it was mentioned in a Frank Rich editorial published in the subscription-only section of New York Times. The CBS news blog, Public Eye quotes Rich as arguing that
Mr. Hoepker found his subjects troubling. ''They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon,'' he told Mr. Friend. ''It's possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.'' The photographer withheld the picture from publication because ''we didn't need to see that, then.'' He feared ''it would stir the wrong emotions.'' But ''over time, with perspective,'' he discovered, ''it grew in importance.''Hoepker found his phoographs so troubling that he withheld publication of the photograph for five years until it was included in the recently-published anthology, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 (see David Friend's blog entry on the discussion).Seen from the perspective of 9/11's fifth anniversary, Mr. Hoepker's photo is prescient as well as important -- a snapshot of history soon to come. What he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what's gone right and what's gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today.
Of course, as Slate's David Plotz and others have pointed out, the subjects of the photograph do not appear as if they are enjoying just another relaxing fall afternoon but instead look as if they are engrossed in the events taking place across the water in Manhattan, and while I wasn't present when the photograph was taken, it's not hard to guess that they are discussing the attacks, a reading confirmed by two of the photograph's subjects, Walter Sipser and Chris Schiavo. Slate has also included a response to the controversy written by the photographer, Thomas Hoepker. I don't know that I have anything specific to add to the debate about the photograph, but I think the debate itself would be interesting to teach.
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September 23, 2006
Memory Prosthesis
I mentioned the SenseCam, a tiny camera that allows "continuous, verbatim recording of an individual's life" a couple of years ago when it first came out, but I've been thinking about technologies of memory for an article I'm writing and didn't want to lose track of a few links. I'm also intrigued by Sunil Vemuri's "What Was I Thinking?", which records audio and organizes it by memory triggers, but Josie Appleton's "Slices of Life" is also worth checking out.
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September 12, 2006
Closer to Spock
I heard about this potentially NSFW Star Trek slash video (NIN's "Closer" plays on the soundtrack) a few days ago but hadn't thought to mention it here until now. Of course there's a long history of Star Trek slash fiction, so this video is picking up on a much longer tradition, but it's still very funny stuff (interesting discussion in the comments at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels). Also didn't want to lose track of this video because I may address it in the project I mentioned a few days ago.
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September 7, 2006
More LG15 Links
Still fascinated by the speculation about the LonelyGirl15 videos on YouTube and whether they are the real confessions of a precocious, homschooled teen, a viral marketing scheme of some kind, or something else altogether. In some sense, for me at least, the speculation is at least as interesting as whether the videos are "real" or not (although I'll admit that I'm taken by the narrative of growing up in a strict religious family), and because I'm in the mood to procrastinate today, I figured I'd point to a few LG15 links rather than doing some real work.
Via thedayislikewidewater, Adam Sternbergh's New York Magazine article on LG15, which describes the series as a kind of David Lynchian narrative. Stenbergh points to gohepcat's YouTube videos that question the authenticity of Bree's videos, noting that gohepcat has become a character in the LG saga. Sternbergh concludes that "maybe this, and not some NBC shows for sale on iTunes, is the future of television--or the promised land of a new narrative form." I'm not ready to make such grand pronouncements yet, although I think it's clear that there is a fairly refined narrative sensibility at work here (and that sensibility wouldn't preclude the possibility that LG15's story is "real").
Alexander at GayGamer.net, operating under the assumption that Bree's story is fictional, has a good read on the ways in which participants in alternate-reality games (ARGs) become enmeshed in the game. And Tanner at The Means' Blog also has an interesting read, praising the LonelyGirl15 narrative as "a great example of how New Media and Internet technologies can be used to create unique and dynamic new forms of media," while commenting on the ways in which viewers become "co-conspirators" in perpetuating the fiction.
Friday AM Update: Via milowent, an LA Times scoop that emails sent from an LG15 account were sent from the offices of the Creative Artists Agency. In the same post, milowent quotes a "letter" posted on one of the prominent LG15 forums from "the writers" of Bree's story. I'm not convinced that the forum post is genuine, and if it is, the writers tipped their hands way too quickly. As usual, Virginia Heffernan continues to provide a good play-by-play of the ongoing saga. More later, but I have to teach in a few minutes.
Update (Sat AM): New LG15 video is up. Mostly plot filler, so it's not that interesting, and now that the scripters have pulled back the curtain, it seems like some of the recent enthusiasm has faded.
Update 9/12/06: NYT reports on Jessica Rose, the actress commissioned to play Bree in the LonelyGirl15 storyline. Sounds like LG15 is fading gently into YouTube obscurity (via Risky Biz; also see Virginia Heffernan's Screens).
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September 6, 2006
Late to the Party
I'm very late to the LonelyGirl15 party. The basics as I understand them: Bree, a sixteen-year old homeschooled girl living in the middle of nowhere ("300 miles from the nearest mall") has been posting videos on YouTube for the last two months, in which she complains about her parents, talks about her friend Daniel, and discusses everything from Richard Feynman to religion. The videos have recently spawned a number of debates about their authenticity, including a recent discussion of her "Swimming" video, in which one attentive viewer identifies a plant that appears to be native to Southern California (to name just one example of the details that viewers are poring over).
I've only just begun rewatching the videos and reading the forums, but my current take on the "LonelyGirl15 conspiracy?" Brian Flemming is right: It's all about the game, and I'll be playing all night. More later, but I've got a lot of catching up to do.
Update One (the first of many, I'm sure): Lonelygirl15's MySpace page, Virginia Heffernan's NYT blog entry with an email from Bree; her arguments that LonelyGirl15 is a fraud; and yet another email from Bree. I'm fascinated by the conspiracies, whether true or not, including one theory that makes much of the coincidence that the outdoor footage appears to have been filmed in a section of SoCal not too far from....wait for it....the headquarters of YouTube.
Update 2 (yeah, there will probably be more): Jon Fine has done some digging and believes that LonelyGirl15 is the work of a performance coterie working to get a deal for a web serial, a theory that seems mildly convincing, especially given some of Brian's questions about Bree's decision to post "I Probably Shouldn't Post This..." And, he's right, the Aleister Crowley allusions are a great plot twist. Also notable, while I'm in the neighborhood: Brian reads the "proving Science Wrong" videos much like I do. They are clear parodies of anti-science videos that actually seem to imply that scientific reasoning is right. What that means for the larger narrative is a whole 'nother matter. I've officially been at this for 2.5 hours tonight.
Update 3: Also worth checking out: Terryfic's very funny video response to LonelyGirl15, "I am the very model of a popular YouTube auteur."
Update 4: I'll start a new entry on LG15 soon, but I just wanted to mention Dee Cook's interesting post about the LG15 phenomenon on the Alternate Reality Gaming Network.
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September 5, 2006
TV on the Web
More details later, but one of my planned projects this year will be an article on the "future" of science fiction television. One area I'm planning to explore will be webcasts of material not broadcast on television, including these "webisodes" of the Sci-Fi Channel series Battlestar Gallactica, which will be appearing every Tuesday and Thursday from now until the season premiere in October. Interesting stuff and a cool way to generate enthusiasm for the new season (thanks to Atrios for the link).
Update: A quick pointer to Grahame Weinbren's "In the Ocean of Streams of Story" from the Spring 1995 issue of Millennium Film Journal for another, more immediate deadline.
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August 21, 2006
Smile, Senator Allen, You're on YouTube
I never got around to commenting on the recent controversy surrounding George Allen's use of the racial slur, "macaca," to refer to S.R. Sidarth, an audience member of Indian descent who had been attending many of Allen's public speeches on behalf of Allen's rival for a Virginia Senate seat, Jim Webb. But the discussion of Allen's slur has prompted a wider conversation about the role of YouTube in shaping political discourse, particularly in this somewhat alarmist New York Times article by Ryan Lizza that worries that YouTube will remove any remaining spontaneity from political campaigns, even at the local and state levels.
In the video Allen is shown telling the all-white audience, "Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." Sidarth, who was born in the United States and happened to be taping the encounter posted the video on YouTube, where it has been viewed over 200,000 times since it first appeared on August 14. Allen's remarks have also been picked up by Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, and other late-night talk shows, forcing Allen's campaign to enter serious spin mode. The story is further complicated by Allen's previous behavior, which includes " a lifelong embrace of Confederate symbology -- lapel pins, bumper stickers and, until recently, flags -- while exhibiting some worrying behavior toward African Americans," documented in this New Republic article (also by Lizza).
The remark has sparked a number of interesting conversations about what Allen intended, including this insightful discussion at BlackProf.com and a characteristically playful one at Wonkette. I think it's fair to say, as the New York Times article suggests, that YouTube may be altering the political landscape, keeping the elections in the public eye during August, a month typically characterized by its lack of news. For the most part, YouTube's presence has been read as a means of democratizing politics, but Lizza asks an important question, "If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?"
I think it's valid to ask whether YouTube might be negatively affecting political discourse, but the tone of the article borders on alarmist, particularly the implication that online videos might "destroy" politics (by which he means, I assume, politics as we know it). Lizza also worries about the loss of "authentiicty" that YouTube seems to represent, another concept that warrants unpacking. What makes a politician working from a carefully-worded script less authentic than someone who appears to be more spontaneous? And, in the case of Allen, his slur warrants attention, whether it was planned or not, as a way of provoking an important conversation about Allen's racial politics.
But what seems most explicit in Lizza's article is the implication that YouTube seems to function primarily as a mode of surveillance, yet another means of catching candidates (and possibly the jounalists themselves) off-guard. Overlooked in this article are the ways in which candidates can use YouTube as a means of connecting with voters. I'm thinking in part of something like Spike Jonze's video of Al Gore during the 2000 election, in which we see Gore at home relaxing with his family and talking about his taste in movies. In general, I think the article exaggerates the effect of YouTube and online videos on political discourse, but I've been intrigued by the ways in which the Allen video has been read and discussed.
Update: Also check out MyDD's discussion of the Lizza article.
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August 19, 2006
Buying Into Iraq
Interesting Washington Post article about the innovative fundraising efforts used by Robert Greenwald and Jim Gilliam's Brave New Films for their latest agitprop political doc, Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers (trailer), which takes on "the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so."
As regular readers of my blog will no doubt know, I've been intrigued for some time by Brave New Films' innovative efforts to use the netroots to distribute their films, and like many of Greenwald's earlier efforts (including Outfoxed, which I now think may be his best doc, and Uncovered), Iraq for Sale will be distributed on DVD for screenings at homes, churches, synagogues, and community centers. But, as the Post reports, Iraq for Sale is unusual in that Brave New Films turned to the "thousands of people who had purchased DVDs or expressed interest in Greenwald's movies" to raise money from its audience before shooting even began on the documentary. Needing approximately $300,000 to complete the film, Gilliam wrote a passionate email asking for donations with the promise of a credit at the end of the film. Within 10 days, they had raised $267,892 from over 3,000 donors.
As always, I'm looking forward to seeing Iraq For Sale, in no small part because Greenwald's films function not only as documentaries but also as "events" that now attract relatively significant audiences (the Wal-Mart doc was shown at around 7,000 screenings with around 500,000 people in attendance), and I will also be interested to see how Greenwald's film contributes to the political discourse in the upcoming midterm elections.
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August 18, 2006
Friday Film Reads
I managed to survive day three of faculty orientation without any major scars, so here's yet another lazy entry with links to what I've been reading and thinking about this afternoon. First, Henry Jenkins, responding to an email from a former student, discusses in "City Blogging in Beirut," the role blogs and other digital media have played in the current Middle East conflict. Jenkins concludes that "We might think of these practices as a low tech form of grassroots convergence -- people taking up the responsibility to transmit information, stories, and images from one medium to another and in the process, broaden their circulation." I'm currently skimming Jenkins' Convergence Culture for one of the articles I'm writing, so I may have more to say on that a little later.
Second, via a comment on Eric Alterman's blog, I found a mention of WTC View (IMDB), which sounds far more interesting than Oliver Stone's 9/11 rescue story World Trade Center, and as Ruth Rosen points out, it's worth noting that Stone's film does little to dispel some of the false perceptions about the WTC attacks.
Finally, Green Cine has some early (and generally positive) Snakes on a Plane reviews, including Stephanie Zacharek's review for Salon, which reads the film less as a movie than as an experience: "Because while Snakes on a Plane barely stands up as a movie, it definitely qualifies as an event. A fellow critic present at the same showing said that afterward, he couldn't quite tell if the crowd actually liked the picture. But everyone sure liked being there." I'm going to try to catch a late screening (maybe at midnight) to see how SoaP plays down here, but the local art house is showing Who Killed the Electric Car?, and I'm enough of a documentary geek (and car hater) to delay seeing Snakes, even if it's only for a few hours.
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August 17, 2006
TV and Documentary Miscellany
I'm exhausted after two long days of benefits orientation seminars here at my new gig, but I came across a few links I don't want to lose.
First, Steve Rosenbaum points to a discussion of Current TV, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt's San Francisco-based cable and satellite channel featuring three- to seven-minute video clips produced by amateur filmmakers and other citizen journalists. As Joe Garofoli's article points out, early reviews of Current TV were relatively tepid, but in a post-YouTube universe, Current TV has become just a little more timely. I'm hoping to have a little more to say about Current TV later (I just realized this afternoon that my local Time Warner sevice carries it).
Matt Dentler discusses a Boston Herald article on this weekend's premiere of Snakes on a Plane, noting that the film's success as a "user-generated movie" may not be measured on its much-anticipated opening weekend, but the following week when word gets around about the film's quality.
And via Green Cine, a link to Anthony Kaufman's review of Nice Bombs, Usama Alshaibi's Iraq documentary, which draws from Alshabi's perspective as both Iraqi and American. Worth noting: filmmaker Alshaibi has a blog.
Update: I forgot to mention that I caught Jeff Tweedy in concert last night in Raleigh with George (pics). Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm so exhausted this afternoon. Not that I'm complaining--it was a great show.
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August 13, 2006
Home Movies in Raleigh
Made the trip to Raleigh yetsreday to participate in their Home Movie Day 2006 screening event, sponsored in part by the AV Geeks, and very much enjoyed it. as the Home Movie Day website points out, home movies present an important problem for archivists and film scholars who are concerned with preserving these valuable windows into the past. Most home movies are simply sitting in boxes in basements or attics, in part because families have no way to watch these films because they don't own a projector. I don't have very many home movies, but I very much enjoyed watching family movies, some of which dated back to the 1930s (or possibly even the late 1920s) and using those films to see images of family and community life throughout the US over the last fifty or sixty years.
Many of the home movies were taken in the 1960s and '70s, often centering on holidays and special occasions such as Christmas, weddings, and graduation ceremonies, allowing a glimpse not only into that individual family but also into the fashions and tastes of a middle-class, southern family in the 1960s, the decrations on the Christmas tree, the children's toys and preents, and other remarkable details that might go unnoticed. Other films included home movies taken at Yankee Stadium in the 1930s, footage of a family picnic featuring the biggest lobster claw I've ever seen (the claw was nearly as big as someone's head), a 1970s Taiwanese family eating sushi likely in a Manhattan restaurant, and some incredible black-and-white footage taken through the bottom of a glass-bottomed boat. But the phrase "home movie" can also be misleading in that much of the footage was taken on vacations or other locations that aren't exactly home. It was interesting to watch as people tried to recall when and where footage was taken, and at the Raleigh screening, we had home movies filmed all over the world, from as far away as Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, and Brazil, in some ways complicating any simple definition of home.
Home Movie Day also served as avaluable reminder of the effect of the various film stocks and cameras on what we saw. Alternating between Super-8, 8mmm, black-and-white, and color film with a veariety of lenses, these home movie screenings can also serve as a valuable illustration of the history of how families documented themselves and the kinds of products developed and sold by Kodak and other comapnies specializing in marketing cameras for the home market. Simply a cool event all around. I even won a DVD collection of eductaional films, The Modern Housewife, compiled by the AV Geeks.
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August 11, 2006
Friday Afternoon Film Notes
The 'heders have had some technical difficulties over the last few days, but hopefully things are returning to normal now. Last night's Deerhoof concert up in Chapel Hill was excellent, and I also liked Pleasant, the Chapel Hill-based band that opened for them. Pleasant's sound reminded me quite a bit of Pavement, with the vocalist's occasional use of falsetto recalling, for me at least, Ted Leo. But I really want to blog about some documentary news that crossed my radar this afternoon.
First, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes (IMDB) will be coming to Fayetteville in the next few days. I'm slated to catch a special screening on Monday, but apparently, the film will officially open on Friday. To make The War Tapes, Scranton sought volunteers from Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Mountain Infantry, with 21 soldiers filming at least some material and five soldiers filming for an entire year. The final film features three of these soldiers, with Scranton directing by IM and email and eventually editing the footage into the film in collaboration with the soldiers themselves. When the soldiers returned stateside, Scranton also filmed over 200 hours of interview footage with them. I'll be very interested to see the reception of the film here in F'ville, given the city's relationship to Fort Bragg and Pope AFB and, of course, I have been looking forward to seeing the doc for some time. A number of bloggers, including Black Five and Joi Ito have already written about the film, so I'm looking forward to contributing to that conversation.
Now a few notes thanks to Green Cine Daily, starting with Kirby Dick's petition to the MPAA requesting that it overhaul it's secretive (and often arbitrary) ratings system. The petition is related to Dick's documentary about ratings board practices, This Film is Not Yet Rated (blog).
Also intriguing: the documentary Anytown, USA, which, like Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, takes a much-needed look at how we go about electing people to office. And finally, there's Helvetica a feature-length documentary about typography and graphic design. As the website points out these questions intersect with issues in media studies and urban studies.
Update: Entry edited to correct and clarify information about the making of The War Tapes.
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August 7, 2006
Home Movie Day 2006
As I've mentioned several times, I'm fascinated by home movies and other forms of amateur media. I can't quite remember why, but I missed the annual Home Movie Day last year when I was living in DC, which always takes place on the second Saturday in August. This year's event takes place on August 12, 2006, and there are home movie screenings scheduled throughout the United States, including ones in Raleigh and in Durham, one of which which I'm planning to attend. As the Raleigh-Durham website points out, home movies not only provide valuable records of individual families, but they can also offer valuable informtion about the communities and hometown where they were filmed. The Home Movie Day also raises important questions about preservation, challenging the notion that digital copies are inherently more stable and permanent than the original movies themselves.
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August 4, 2006
Synthetic Actors
Via Blank Screen Media, a New York Times article about a new camera system to be unveiled at Siggraph that promises "to create compellingly realistic synthetic actors by capturing the facial movements of real actors in much greater detail than is currently possible." The Contour camera system has already been embraced by David Fincher who plans to use it in his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," about a character who ages in reverse. The Contour system, I think, raises some interesting questions for how we define visual entertainment and what we'll expect of it in the future.
According to the Times, the Contour system will allow filmmakers to transform the appearance of actors in the computer, making it possible for viewers to control the point of view, creating what is being called a form of "navigable entertainment." Times reporter John Markoff goes on to write, "the Contour system requires actors to cover their faces and clothes with makeup containing phosphorescent powder that is not visible under normal lighting. In a light-sealed room, the actors face two arrays of inexpensive video cameras that are synchronized to simultaneously record their appearance and shape. Scenes are lit by rapidly flashing fluorescent lights, and the cameras capture light from the glowing powder during intervals of darkness that are too short for humans to perceive."
As Grand Text Auto explains it, filmmakers get "an extremely high resolution digital model, photographed textures and motion capture of the actor’s face." While the phosphorous powder cannot be used on certain body parts (on the eyes, inside the mouth), Contour is working on plastic teeth molds with embedded phosphor powder. Of course such a camera has clear implications for film production, making it possible for directors to digitally control camera angles. But the larger question is whether the technology will allow filmmakers to cross what Masahiro Mori, the Japanese robotics specialist, has called the "uncanny valley," which describes the negative emotional responses people have when encountering robots and animated figures begin to very closely resemble humans (as the Times argues, some have attributed the negative responses to Tom Hanks' Polar Express to this principle).
Andrew at GTA argues that the Contour system does nothing to cross the "uncanny valley of AI," but one or two of the commenters have a slightly different reading. I don't yet know enough about the Contour system, but it's difficult for me not to feel some sense of loss whenever I read about a new "advance" in digital video technologies. I'm not terribly attached to recording on film, but as systems such as Contour develop, I have to wonder what kinds of narratives it will enable and what kind of stories will be supplanted by the new medium.
Cross-posted at Dr. Mabuse's Kaleidescope.
Posted by chuck at 12:55 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 2, 2006
Fall Teaching Topics
I'm still in the earliest stages of thinking about my freshman composition classes this fall. I know that the course will focus on digital media topics, but beyond that most basic framework and a few specific themes, I'm still thinking about specifics. With that in mind, I'll likely be pointing to articles, blog entries, and online videos that seem to raise useful questions. Given that I'm teaching the section of composition that focuses on the research paper, I do think it's worth spending some time discussing both the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia with my students, a topic that Alex addresses in some detail in relationship to Stephen Colbert's coining of the term "wikiality," although I think Alex's more important point probably pertains to what he calls Wikipedia's "lumpiness," its tendency to place more emphasis on current events topics.
I'd also like to spend some time talking with my students about issues of copyright and YouTube offers an interesting case for discussion, as Bob Cringley points out (thanks to Agnes for the link). Cringly notes that while filmmakers who post to YouTube retain ownership of that material, YouTube's license "explicitly gives them the right to do whatever they want with your video. They say they don't have the rights to sell users' content, but the wording says otherwise and there's nothing in the license to prohibit them from doing so." Cringley also speculates about why people feel compelled to post video to YouTube, a question I want to raise as well. I'm sure there isn't an easy (or single) answer to this question, which will hopefully make it an interesting topic to address with students.
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August 1, 2006
Colbert and Composition
Summer "vacation" is quickly coming to an end, and with classes soon to begin, it's time to start thinking and writing about teaching in higher education again. With that in mind, George has announced this year's schedule of teaching carnivals where he explains the whole concept of the teaching carnival and how you can participate.
If you're not sure what to write, George suggests a number of possible questions you might address, including a question about whether you'll be doing anything differently in the classroom in the approaching academic year, a topic I plan to address as I make a transition between two very different student populations, although I'm hoping that my experiences teaching media studies this past year will inform my approach to freshman composition. I flaked out on a number of the carnivals last year, but I'm planning to contribute more consistently this time around.
Speaking of media studies, I continue to be amazed by The Colbert Report. The commentary about language and media is incredibly sharp. Last night's "Word" sequence, in which Colbert coined the word "Wikiality" to describe the ways in which "anyone" can edit an entry to change the facts based on their whims (and, yes, I know that Wikipedia is more complicated than that). I happened to have my laptop nearby while watching Colbert, and within seconds (I believe before the end of the "wikiality" segment), the Colbert Report entry had been changed to reflect Colbert's mention. Colbert's "truthiness" won last year's American Dialect Society Word of the Year. Wikiality might make it two years in a row. BTW, if anyone has the video on that segment, I'd love to have a link to it for my composition classes. It seems like a humorous way to remind students about the credibility of internet research.
Update: At least for now, it's available on YouTube.
Update 2: While skimming some of the blog buzz on "wikiality," I came across the news about Lewis Black's planned series for Comedy Central called Red State Diaries, which also looks like a lot of fun.
Update 3: There's an interesting overview of the controversy over "wikiality" at the No Fact Zone, a Colbert Report fan blog.
Posted by chuck at 12:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 27, 2006
Reading for Pleasure Wednesday, Thursday Edition
I'm a day late to the "Reading for Pleasure Wednesday" meme suggested by Dr. Crazy and also seen at George's place, but because I've only briefly mentioned two of my summer reading books, I thought I'd mention them again. My picks risk bending Dr. Crazy's rules to some extent because I originally picked up both of them for their unique approach to documentary, a subject that's important for my research interests, but both books also have proven meaningful to me in ways that ultimately have little to do with my scholarship. Plus, it's a really cool idea and many of the books suggested by other bloggers will now find their way to my reading for pleasure list.
The first is Joe Sacco's 1995 graphic novel "documentary," Palestine , which seeks to represent the Israel-Palestine conflict from the perspective of the Palestinians, a perspective we rarely see in the US media. I read Palestine about a month ago, well before Israel and Hezbollah began fighting again, but Sacco's intelligent, insightful attempt to represent a myriad of Palestinian experiences is truly illuminating (as is Edward Said's thoughtful foreword).
Also worth checking out: Margaret Sartor's Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s,, a compliation of diary entries Sartor wrote as a teenager while growing up in Louisiana I first learned about through Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. My initial attraction to the book grew out of my interest in memoir, autobiography, and popular culture, but the book grew into a more pleasurable reading experience, one that benefits from Sartor's careful crafting of these journals into a larger narrative (and one that seemed to comment on my own experiences of growing up in another part of the south about a decade later). Both books are relatively quick reads, especially Sartor's, which I read in a couple of afternoons.
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July 25, 2006
Facebook Communities
Patricia J. Williams' Nation article on online communities, "The 600 Faces of Eve" (subscription only) looks like it might be a useful resource for my planned freshman composition course focusing on new media topics. Williams rather quickly moves past the questions of sexual predation to address what she calls the "invisible hands" that guide the activity of these social networks. Williams notes that when you create a MySpace profile, you are encouraged to "choose" interests that reflect your personality, which in her read isn't an entirely benign activity:
You proceed by filling out themed questionnaires and following links and pursuing guided suggestions. If you choose a Paris Hilton-themed path, you might be asked how often you go shopping. If you choose hip-hop, you're asked to "fess up to the acts of a true thug."Of course she's right to point out that Rupert Murdoch's ownership of MySpace raises important questions about what kinds of information MySpace participants post about themselves in a public space (and to what extent that information is subject to data mining), but in my experience, these quizzes are often treated with at least some ironic distance, a point that Williams acknowledges when she describes the practice of trying on different identities within MySpace. Not sure I have much to add for now, but Williams' essay looks like something that might be useful for starting a conversation about the relationship between social networks and constructions of identity.
Posted by chuck at 5:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
David Lowery's Some Analog Lines
Because I learned about David Lowery's Some Analog Lines soon after I arrived in F'ville (and before I had internet service at home), I almost forgot to mention it here. Lowery's Some Analog Lines is a playful but philosophical meditation on the materiality of cinema and the ways in which digital video remediates film. In thinking about these issues, Lowery not only theorizes the production process but also offers a theory of spectatorship that explores how the processes of production shape our reception of a film. Lowery explores this process in part through an observation that a number of Cineaste reviewers have expressed a "preference" for claymation over digital animation, with Lowery speculating that this preference derives in part from the materiality of claymation and the awareness that an animator such as Lowery might have moved the clay object hundreds, if not thousands, of times in order to render the illusion (?) of motion. The film explores this concept of handmade films even further, describing the construction of a wooden bookshelf next to his computer, a shelf that seems to morph into a strip of film, in part through the magic of animation.
While I can't provide a full description of Some Analog Lines, I think it's a profoundly insightful short film and well worth checking out. It's also in competition in the SXSWclick "Popularity Contest," so once you've seen the film, please consider voting for it as well.
Posted by chuck at 1:47 PM | TrackBack
July 24, 2006
War Documentary Links
With the release of Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, and MTV's Iraq Upoladed, as well as the number of YouTube videos and blog entries documenting the effects of bombings in Haifa and Beirut, questions about representing the war are gaining renewed attention over the last several days. I've been planning to write this entry (or something similar) for several days but haven't been able to get my thoughts together.
First, I found Ana Marie Cox's Time article on Iraq dcumentaries interesting as a framing device for thinking about how digital and online media have shaped the reception of the war, with Cox calling the Iraq War "the first YouTube War." Starting with a discussion of The War Tapes, which is being billed as the first documentary about the war filmed by soldiers fighting in it, Cox observes that the soldiers' videos offer a relatively grim depiction of the war. She then points to te number of videos posted by soldiers on YouTube and other video hosting services, observing that these videos offer "an even grimmer reality" as they attempt to make sense of the war. Cox's article pointed me to an MTV documentary, Iraq Uploaded that I missed the first time around (hopefully I'll catch it soon--the next scheduled screening is Tuesday at 10:30 AM). Cox argues that while many of these videos offer an "unvarnished" depiction of the war, they lack the context for interpreting the depicted events.
MTV's article on Iraq Uploaded offers an interesting overview of the documentary, drawing explicit connections between the subjective camera of many of these digital videos and the first-person shooter video games that have become a widely discussed feature of contemporary culture (if only to blame the games for promoting violent behavior). In fact, Marine Scott Lyon reports that many soldiers rigged hands-free cameras so that they could shoot all the time, noting that one soldier's helmet camera "helped him catch more intense footage, because you don't have to stop and put the camera down. I just think it captures things people want to see." From what I can tell in teh article, it appears that many of the people viewing these videos are soldiers themselves, manyof whom are attempting to make sense of their experiences of the war, often weeks or months after they have returned from a tour over there.
There's also an article in The Economist about Iraq docs (thanks to GreenCine Daily for the tip), describing a second generation of Iraq documentaries focusing on the experiences of Iraqis living with the effects of war, many of which use cinema verite techniques, with the filmmakers working to make themselves invisble. The article argues that the "first generation" of Iraq documentaries, such as Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland focused primarily on the experiences of soldiers while more recently journalists and filmmakers have turned their attention to the experiences of Iraqi civilians. The article doesn't mention two very good early documentaries, Sinan Antoon's About Baghdad and Hayder Jaffar's The Dreams of Sparrows, but it's a good introduction to some of the more recent war documentaries to emerge.
Finally, I learned from George while we were chatting about this NYT article about "online war diaries." The article describes Galya Daube's jittery, first-person video as she rushed to her family's bomb shelter, with air raid sirens blaring loudly. There are a number of similar videos of Haifa residents hiding in bomb shelters, making phone calls to family members, and waiting for the bombings to subside. Similar footage has been posted by residents of Beirut, depicting their experiences of being bombed by the Israelis. But we also see footage such as this video taken on a trip to a Beirut McDonalds several days into the most recent fighting, with the video functioing in part as an archive for a city that has seen several sections completely demolished but also as a way of putting a more human face on the civilian victims of the violence (it also stands in stark contrast to this more recent video footage, which depicts downtown Beirut just over a week later, the city a virtual ghost town on a warm summer night).
Posted by chuck at 2:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Monday Morning Times Reads
The New York Times has two interesting articles about film production and promotion. First, Scott Kirsner's article on the increasing use of digital cameras in Hollywood films. Kirsner points out that many filmmakers, including Steven Speilberg and M. Night Shyamalan continue to insist that they'll only shoot on celluloid, and many cinematographers still prefer film when it comes to subtle lighting differences. But other filmmakers, including Michael Mann (Collateral and Miami Vice) claim to prefer the look of digital, while Dean Devlin, currently filming a World War I pic, notes that he was able to film "for nearly an hour during airborne dogfight sequences." Nothing particularly new here, but I'm interested in tracking the ongoing transition from celluloid to digital.
Also worth checking out: Alex Mindlin's article on film promotion and internet buzz. It's a relatively brief article outlining the research of assistant professor of marketing Yong Liu, who argues that "movies that generated many messages in a given week tended to have high box-office receipts the week after, and movies with much prerelease buzz did well over all." Liu reached these conclusions by looking at over 12,000 messages posted on the Yahoo movies dicussion boards. Perhaps Liu's most important point is that the content of the messages mattered less than the number of messages. I'll be curious to read Liu's article when it comes out, although I'm more interested in the specifics of "buzz" and the degree to which these online discussions function for audiences.
Posted by chuck at 12:03 PM | TrackBack
July 20, 2006
Why I Don't Watch DVDs Anymore
Interesting Wall Street Journal article by Matt Phillips arguing that Netflix may be altering people's DVD habits, noting that the constant availability of Netflix DVDs may actually be leading to DVDs sitting on people's shleves (or in their queues) for weeks or months without being watched. As Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University, describes it, it's "a paradox of abundance," something that I've experienced over the last year as I've uncomfortably tried to adjust to using Netflix rather than renting movies from an independently-owned video store.
To be fair, I'm still watching a lot of movies, but for whatever reason, that is happening less often on DVD. I've found that when I rented from video stores, it was much easier to gauge what kind of film I'd like to see, and the late fees, even if they were relatively minimal, were punitive enough to motivate me to watch and return movies quickly. I'll be curious to see how that changes now that I'm in F'ville and have less access to the art house and indie movie scenes in Atlanta and DC, but so far, I've been ambivalent about using the video service.
Among other notable observations, Phillips points to an experiment described by Daniel Read, George Lowenstein, and Shobana Kalyanaraman, in which subjects were asked to choose from a list of 24 movies what they'd like to rent. When choosing movies to watch immediately, subjects were more likely to choose "low-brow" action or comedy films, but when asked what movies they'd like to see in the future, many subjects would choose "high-brow" films (I need to read the full article to find out how "low-brow" and "high-brow" were defined). To some extent, these results do reflect my current Netflix practice, with my Netflix queue ambitiously loaded with films I ought to see or TV series (namely The Time Tunnel) that I need to watch for my research. But potential access to these films and TV shows makes it easier to delay seeing them, and many of the DVDs that do make it to my apartment collect dust for weeks and occasionally months (I think my personal record is having a DVD collect dust for three months before I gave up and returned it).
The WSJ is a pretty good overview of the topic, and it has the added bonus of a quote from Girish on his Netflix habits.
Posted by chuck at 1:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 19, 2006
Pirates and Snakes and Critics
I've been thinking about A.O. Scott's New York Times article on the disparity between the tastes of film reviewers and film audiences, a distinction measurable in part by the box office success of The DaVinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, both of which were critically panned. Scott is picking up on a topic of much discussion in blogworld this summer, perhaps most notably in Andrew Horbal's Blogcritics essay, which also stands as a review of Philip Lopate's anthology of American film criticism since the silent era. Scott's essay has remained on my radar in part because it relies so heavily on an opposition between the "elite" professional reviewer and the "populist" film fan who celebrates the experience of going to the movies.
It's worth noting that Scott's reading of the disparity between the taste film reviewers and the average filmgoer is probably overstated. Pointing to the critics' grades for Pirates, Scott points out that Metacritics averages critics' grades at 52 (now 53) while Rotton Tomatoes averages out at 54, reading these scores as critics giving the film an F, even with "grade inflation." In fact, a quick glance at Metacritics' explanation of their scoring system would place Pirates' grade closer to C-level (pardon the truly awful pun). Further, while Scott acknowledges that box office success does not contradict "negative critical judgment," he doesn't extend the same logic to the average moviegoer. While Pirates has been filling theaters and selling popcorn, sheets, towels, and action figures, its IMDB users' grade is a relatively average 7.5 on a 10-point scale, hardly the territory of The Godfather or Citizen Kane, to name two IMDB faves.
I think Scott is right to note that film reviewers are sometimes precariously placed (or place themselves) between a Hollywood studio system that warrants suspicion and a "populist" desire among audiences to particpate in the "happy communal experience" of experiencing the latest summer blockbuster the weekend it debuts, but I also wonder if Scott is too quick to dismiss the pleasures of this form of participation. While I will admit to a degree of art house and indie snobbishness, I readily and enthusiastically participate in a smaller-scale version of this "happy communal experience" when I've attended the debuts of An Inconvenient Truth or Fahrenheit 9/11 or movie events such as Silverdocs or even MoveOn.org sponsored screenings of the latest Robert Greenwald doc. Scott argues that studios "spend tens of millions of dollars to persuade you that the opening of a movie is a public event, a cultural experience you will want to be part of." As my comments suggest, audiences have already accepted that movie openings are public events, something to be shared communally, which means that studios are doing something else when they spend those promotional dollars (in fact, I'd argue that Scott gets rather dangerously close to asserting that filmgoers are cultural dupes fooled into seeing a film because of a few flashy previews).
So, I think it's worth thinking more carefully about what precisely is being "bought" when moviegoers pay to see a film on opening night. To be fair, I do think that studio marketing efforts are far from benign, and to a great extent, these marketing efforts are designed to persuade audiences to commodify these public events, the "happy communal experiences" described by Scott. I don't think that makes someone who buys a Pirates t-shirt or DVD a cultural dupe. Instead, I would be interested in thinking about what kinds of public, communal experiences are being "sold" when we participate in these blockbuster events.
The elephant in the screening room that Scott fails to mention is Snakes on a Plane, and while not everything that's happened this summer can be tied back to Samuel L. Jackson, I think that the Snakes phenomenon is perhpas the best recent illustration of what I'm thinking about. While New Line has rather cleverly redirected its marketing campaign for Snakes, it has tapped into the alienation from the studio system that many audience memebers have felt recently, allowing film fans to feel like participants in the making of the film rather than mere passive viewers, a sensibility reflected in the Snakes parodies and trailer mashups that are already cropping up on YouTube (including this great send-up not only of Snakes but Bono of U2 as well). And I think that's an important part of the film, whether it's a "good" film or not. In fact, it's worth noting that New Line has decided not to screen Snakes for critics, taking the film "directly to audiences" and avioding the risk of negative reviews. In this sense, rather than reviewing films such as Pirates or Snakes or even An Inconvenient Truth as discrete objects that begin and end when the projector starts and stops, a film review methodology that takes into account these supplemental materials is what is needed.
Update: Check out Alex's response to my entry. Alex points out that audience members generally arrive at theaters with a set of expectations that may vary from film to film (and may be as minimal as central air conditioning (which was certainly an incentive for me last summer when I lived in DC) or the lesser expectations associated with sequels.
Related: The cinetrix mentions a Film Comment editorial by Gavin Smith that addresses the ongoing conversation about professional and amateur film critics (I can't find the actual editorial--maybe I'm missing something, but I was up awfully late last night).
Also related and just a little lame: Kevin Smith takes on the critics, booting Scott Foundas and David Poland out of critics' screenings of Clerks 2. Poland apparently inspired Smith's wrath because of an off-hand comment about the writer-director's calves he made six years ago. In the comments to Poland's entry, there is a good discussion of the ways in which blogs and gossip websites have made these kinds of scandals more public. But Smith's concern about the getting good buzz for Clerks 2 smells mildly desperate to me.
Update to End All Updates: Peet's not-so-subtle commentary on evaluative film criticism desrves the final word around here.
Posted by chuck at 11:44 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack
July 18, 2006
Introducing MediaCommons
As many of my readers will know, Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Planned Obsolescence has been working with the Institute for the Future of the Book on the possibilities for and implications of electronic scholarly publishing, including the potential for new modes of peer review and possibilities for interaction among scholars and texts. After some discussion, they have devised a draft proposal of a "scholarly network" in which media studies scholars can "write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees inbetween." This scholarly netwrok, MediaCommons, looks like a promising resource for media studies scholarship, and I hope other academic bloggers will particpate in this scholarly network.
The focus on media studies scholarship makes a lot of sense (and I'd say that even if I wasn't a media studies scholar), in part because scholars in that field often explore in their research the very technologies that this network will use. And as KF points out, electronic publishing can be valuable for media studies scholars who need "to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about" (something I've discovered in my writing on new media).
I think I'm most enthusiastic about this project, however, because it focuses on the possibilities of allowing academics to write for audiences of non-academics and strives to use the network model to connect scholars who might otherwise read each other in isolation. As Kathleen points out,
Most universities provide fairly structured definitions of the academic’s role, both as part of the institution’s mission and as informing the criteria under which faculty are hired and reviewed: the academic’s function is to conduct and communicate the products of research through publication, to disseminate knowledge through teaching, and to perform various kinds of service to communities ranging from the institution to the professional society to the wider public. Traditional modes of scholarly life tend to make these goals appear discrete, and they often take place in three very different discursive registers. Despite often being defined as a public good, in fact, much academic discourse remains inaccessible and impenetrable to the publics it seeks to serve.My initial enthusiasm for blogging grew out of a desire to write for audiences wider than my academic colleagues, and I think this is one of many arenas where MediaCommons can provide a valuable service. In addition to writing for this wider audience, I have met a number of media studies scholars, filmmakers, and other friends, and my thinking about film and media has been shaped by our conversations.
Be sure to read Kathleen's full post about the goals for MediaCommons, available at both Planned Obsolescence and the Institute for the Future of the Book blogs. This looks like an incredibly cool idea, and I look forward to particpating and hope others will as well.
Posted by chuck at 11:49 AM | TrackBack
July 17, 2006
Anticipating Snakes
In her Salon article on the Snakes on a Plane hype, Aemilia Scott manages to name-drop both Chuck Klosterman and Theodor Adorno in the space of just a couple of paragraphs, criticizing both Klosterman's "prefab populism" thesis and Adorno's "culture industry" thesis as inadequate explanations for the enthusiasm for Snakes on a Plane, basing her argument in part on the film's unusually specific title and on the studio's decision to tap into the blogosphere as a massive focus group, reading both as illustrating the ways in which Snakes exposes the artifice of Hollywood film production.
Like Scott, I've argued that there's nothing new about testing films on audiences (whether through test screenings or reading blogs), leaving me relatively unconvinced by Klosterman's argument that Snakes on a Plane will usher in a new era of prefab populism. Scott also notes that the film likely was not conceived as a "ready-made cult classic," that it was likely originally imagined as a standard-fare summer action pic (she called it a "PG-13 snoozer," while I called it a "PG-13 yawner"). In this context, I find Scott's reading to be relatively convincing. The audience enthusiasm for the trailer has less to do with "honest" cult directors such as John Waters and more to do with our boredom with Bruckheimer-style blockbusters (although given Pirates' boffo box office, we're obviously not that bored). This positioning is implied in Snakes' playful trailer, which offers the film as an alternative to the pirates, Pixar, and superheroes who've been dominating the megaplex. So, yeah, arguably, part of the film's appeal is the film's tacit acknowledgement "that the industry itself doesn't believe in its own magic."
However, Scott misreads Adorno in order to dismiss the relevance of his critique of what he calls "the culture industry," using Adorno's pessimism to stand in for all cultural critics. Building on the false assumption that Adorno believed that exposing the artifice of the culture industry would lead to "riots" against the status quo, Scott argues that "Americans don't just love the culture industry; they fetishize it. But Americans are also savvier than most theoreticians believe. The lamest and most transparent attempts of the culture industry to deceive us are defeated not by outright rejection, but by assimilation." I don't think this exposure of the artifice is all that unusual. In fact, DVD commentary tracks, blooper tracks, and making-of videos constantly call attention to the ways in which films are constructed. In fact, it's not unreasonable to argue that sites such as Box Office Mojo and strategy games such as Hollywood Mogul have also contributed to our knowledge o fthis artifice. But I think her more explicit argument, that cultural critics believe all audience members to be passive dupes, is probably the most insidious one. Quite a bit of cultural studies scholarship in recent years has sought to investigate how audiences use poular culture in a variety of ways, including ways that are remarkably resistant to the initial attempts at "deception," a concept she never quite defines clearly (who is deceived by Hollywood? what is the nature of this deception?).
I'm still not convinced that Snakes on a Plane represents anything more than a remarkably savvy, if accidental, marketing coup by the folks at New Line, but I continue be interested in the promotion of the film and the online discussions of this promotion (which are pretty much inseparable at this point).
Salon article via stark ranting by way of Shakespeare's Sister. Cross-posted at Dr. Mabuse.
Update: Via the Cult News Network, a report that New Line will be skipping press screenings for Snakes on a Plane so that they can take the film "directly to the fans" (which seems to assume that critics aren't also, potentially, fans). The decision to release the film to "select theaters" before opening widely seems pretty savvy, though, as internet/blog buzz will be far more important in promoting this film than two thumbs up from Ebert and Roeper.
Posted by chuck at 12:12 PM | TrackBack
July 15, 2006
Cable TV and Me
For now, a quick pointer to Steven Johnson on The Daily Show (thanks to JBJ at The Salt-Box), promoting Everything Bad is Good For You, in which he argues that TV and video games are actually making us smarter. I briefly discussed Johnson's book a few months ago when I was reflecting on my own television-watching habits and have been revisiting some of his ideas recently because I have cable television for the first time since the spring of 1998. I don't want to rehash those arguments here, and it would be unwise to generalize about cable television from the very limited sample of cable programs I've watched since installing cable (itself a concession to living in a smaller city with fewer art house screens), although cable news has been as bad or worse than I'd been led to believe.
That being said, it's difficult for me not to feel somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer number of channels and television shows available at any given time, with the result that I often feel like I should be watching something else or at least watching two or three shows at once, which probably means I'll be getting TiVo soon. I've been trying to pay careful attention to how regular access to cable television changes my TV watching habits because even though I have cable and sometimes face the difficulty of choosing between 2 or 3 shows at a given time, I don't think I've been watching more television and I remain virtually incapable of watching TV without also doing something else (cooking, eating, reading, blog surfing, even exercising). But I'll still be curious to see how I learn to incorporate cable TV into the habits and practices of my daily life. More on this topic later, but I initially planned this entry as a quick link to the Johnson interview and his recent blog entry on Raymond Williams.
Posted by chuck at 12:32 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
July 11, 2006
Bush Pilot
Remember that mysterious bulge on Bush's back during the first debate? Thanks to Google video, here's the real (and very funny) explanation (thanks to Alterman for the tip).
Posted by chuck at 1:42 PM | TrackBack
July 7, 2006
New Media Studies and Freshman Composition
Inspired by a conversation with George, I've decided to use a "new media studies" theme in my freshman composition class this fall. I had originally planned to put together a course similar to my Fall 2004 "Rhetoric and Democracy" course, which focused on the various kinds of argument used during the presidential election, but because there is no central national election, such a course doesn't seem feasible in 2006. I'm still thinking about what such a course would look like and how it might serve Fayetteville State's student population, but given the number of important questions raised by new media, I think students could benefit from such a course.
I'm still debating about whether to require students to maintain blogs this time around for a variety of reasons. I do think it's important that students produce new media texts in a new media studies course, and blogs are becoming one of the more accessible versions of that kind of "democratized" new media production. When I taught the "Rhetoric and Democracy" course, blogs also made it easier for students to generate content for class discussion by linking to news articles or op-ed pieces on their blogs, a practice I found especially useful and informative when I taught the election-based course. But I've also found that when I don't have actual paper assignments to return to my students that I find it much more difficult to remember their names (and I'll have a lot of students this fall). I'm also becoming less patient with the role of being a default blog administrator for seventy-five or so students and am somewhat unsure about what kind of technological access students will have. I have obviously had good success with using blogs in the classroom in the past, but I'm also ready to try something different.
Also, because the course is the composition course focused on teaching the research paper, it may make more sense to look at significant debates about new media to provide contexts where students can write argumentative essays. Here, I'm thinking about the debates about the place of copyrighted material on YouTube, whether it's the "Lazy Sunday" clip from Saturday Night Live or fans filming themselves dancing to their favorite songs, to name one example. But I'd also like students to think about issues such as YouTube's popularity rankings and comments features and how those functions might affect how and what we watch, as well as pointing students to writers who are performing interesting interpretations of amatuer media, such as Henry Jenkins. And, of course, amateur media raises all sorts of questions about public and private boundaries that students need to consider, especially with many of them maintaining Facebook and MySpace pages, which often feature their names and contact information.
This is sort of a brainstorming post, and I'd be happy to hear your suggestions, but there seems to be at least some enthusiasm among my colleagues for this kind of composition course. I'm planning to keep some aspects of the course flexible under the assumption that as new media practices continue to evolve, so I'm a little cautious about imposing too many required readings at the beginning of the semester. Plus, I think that this flexibility may, in fact, provide one way of modelling some of the challenges of doing new media research.
Oh, while I'm thinking about it, I've been invited to join the group blog, Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, and so from now on, some of my posts may be cross-posted over there.
Update: Via Planned Obsolescence, Alan Liu's draft policy statement on student use of Wikipedia. Like him, I've seen students increasingly rely on Wikipedia as a source, and I think it's worth discussing that practice with my students. I'm probably less inclined than most English or composition instructors to expect my students to spend time in the library stacks, but I do think it's important that students gain some self-consciousness about how they research and how they come to conclusions about what's reliable and what isn't.
Posted by chuck at 2:06 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
June 27, 2006
The Grey Lady Watches YouTube
Peter and Nick have both recently mentioned Virginia Heffernan's new blog, Screens, which focuses on viral videos, vlogs, video podcasts, mashups, and other web-based visual media, hosted by the New York Times. Because I've written about these topics from time to time, so I will certainly be interested in what Heffernan has to say. I'm in the midst of packing up my library for The Big Move, so a quick pointer to Screens will have to suffice for now.
Posted by chuck at 11:36 AM | TrackBack
June 23, 2006
Entertainment Empire
The Nation recently devoted a special issue to the topic of entertainment and politics. The special issue featured a chart that lists (PDF) all of the media properties of the major media empires (Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS). It's an eye-opening chart in terms of illustrating where and how most Americans get their news. As the authors point out, the lnadscape has changed considerably since they produced their original chart ten years ago in part due to the rise of new media, but because television remains the primary source of news for most Americans, this chart remains an important resource.
I've only had time to skim a few of the articles in the entertainment issue, but Rebecca MacKinnon's " The Self-Expression Sector" is a useful analysis of the popularization of self-expression tools such as blogs and podcasts, and Robert McChesney continues to raise important points about media deregulation, while Mark Crispin Miller and Amy Goodman describe the continued threats to real reporting presented by corporations primarily interested in the bottom line. While Markos (Daily Kos) Moulitsas Zuniga and Robert Greenwald are slightly more optimistic, the overall picture is rather dire (with good reason).
For this reason, I find Richard Morin's Washington Post column to be deeply misguided. Morin argues that "Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy," pointing to a study that viewers who watched The Daily Show were more likely to view both 2004 Presdiential candidates negatively than people who watched the CBS Evening News. He goes on to cite the argument that the negative perceptions of the candidates "could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls." While I think it's important to note that watching TDS or CBS does not take place in isolation (which I believe deeply complicates the result of this study), isn't it also important to speculate about why these negative perceptions persist and what it says about the political process itself. It's not Stewart that's poisoning democracy. Instead, his appeal--not to mention Stephen Colbert's--grows out of the fact that so many of us feel alienated from a democratic process that is already deeply flawed.
Posted by chuck at 12:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 20, 2006
Documentary and Fair Use
Via an email tip, a pointer to this Wired article reporting on a comic book by three Duke University law professors on the difficulties that documentary filmmakers face in dealing with copyright law. The entire comic book is available for free online at Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain and provides a good overview of the ways in which copyright law can both promote and inhibit good documentary work. As the book illustrates, fair use protections do give filmmakers a lot of freedom, but uncertainty about what constitutes fair use still leads to a lot of confusion. The book also points to useful resources such as the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse that may be useful to filmmakers and other artists who are engaging with (or even passively capturing) copyrighted material or even trademarks that hapen to be visible in the background.
Update: While you're in the neighborhood, Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain looks like an incredibly useful resource for the topic of documentary and copyright, including this collection of films and videos that explore "the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film."
Posted by chuck at 12:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 12, 2006
Indie Web TV
I've been relatively distracted by The Big Move lately, so haven't really had the time or energy to blog. Plus, I'm moving quickly on 1-2 writing projects (including an article for a book collection), but just wanted to throw a quick pointer to some other folks who've been thinking about some of the new "homemade media," the DV films and series that I've recently found so intriguing. In particular, David at GreenCine has written a short blog essay addressing the comparison between Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation) and Joe Swanberg (LOL and Kissing on the Mouth, both of which I'd love to see). But David also discusses Swanberg's NSFW series for Nerve, Young American Bodies (also check out the MySpace page), now in its sixth episode (of course you should start with the beginning).
I don't have much to add to David's analysis right now, but I think that one point he makes is important (and it's something I want to address when I have more time to write on web television), and that is that with estimates of 50,000 uploads to YouTube and 50,000,000, "YAB is a prime example not so much of the future preferred alternative to television but of the present preferred alternative." This might be a relatively obvious point, as David implies, but still a point very much worth noting. Also check out Cynthia's analysis of Young American Bodies. Hoping to revisit this later, but with Silverdocs starting soon and all the other stuff, I might be pretty distracted for the next few days.
Posted by chuck at 1:43 PM | TrackBack
June 10, 2006
Lazy Saturday Coffee Links
Quick Saturday morning coffee links: I just came across a an academic group blog focusing on film and media studies issues, Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope. Lots of good posts on teaching film studies and related topics.
Via GreenCine: Anne Thompson has a useful primer on the use of MySpace in "personalized participatory grassroots marketing." I think she's probably right that it's difficult to measure the effect of these grassroots campaigns on theatrical attendance, although similar (non-MySpace) grassroots campaigns for the upcoming Snakes on a Plane should be quite successful, but the jury's still out on that. The article culminates in an interesting discussion of how various websites have been used to promote some Hollywood and indie films, noting that the MySpace page for the film version of Strangers with Candy struggled to accumulate 500 friends while its YouTube trailer quickly scored over 200,000 views (related: a Wired News article on fan sites devoted to the Whedonverse, the alternate reality where Joss Whedon's films and TV shows, including Buffy and Firefly, take place..
Also worth watching: Kimberly Peirce, who directed the amazing Boys Don't Cry, has plans to make an Iraq War drama, Stop-Loss. with Ryan Phillippe slated to star.
Just came across the new-to-me online film journal, 24LiesaSecond, which is edited by James Moran, who wrote There's No Place Like Home Video, one of my favorite recent books, a really great read on the topic of home video (I liked the book so much that I taught it last fall in my junior seminar).
BTW, I caught the Quotidian Theater's production of Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune last night. Looks like its playing for a few more nights, so I'd recommend checking it out if you're in the DC area. The play is almost nothing like the Pacino-Pfieffer film adaptation, which terrence McNally adapted from his play, but the play itself, which takes place entirely in Frankie's bedroom probably wouldn't have worked as a film.
Posted by chuck at 11:00 AM | TrackBack
June 9, 2006
Cellphone Cinema
Via Eugene Robinson's Washington Post column: the You Tube video, "Bus Uncle," which features an oddly compelling argument between two passengers on a Hong Kong bus captured by a third passenger on his cell phone.
The basic plot: a middle-aged man has been talking too loudly on his cell phone and a younger pasenger behind him taps the older man on the shoulder to ask him to lower his voice. The older man then begins lecturing the younger passenger, repeatedly alluding to the "pressures" of daily life while gradually becoming more and more profane. And as Robinson points out the episode concludes perfectly with the older man getting another cell phone call and turning to answer it. Of course, Robinson points out that the scene is fascinating in part because it illustrates just how easily a scene from everyday life in Hong Kong can very quickly be transmitted across the globe with millions of potential viewers ready to watch. The version I watched has been viewed nearly a million times in less than a month. Not sure I have much to add, but it's an intriguing little video.
Posted by chuck at 3:29 PM | TrackBack
Consuming Videos
Andrew's pointer to David Leonhardt's New York Times article on Netflix reminds me that I've been planning to write a blog entry on my ambivalence about Netflix for a while now. In the article, Leonhardt argues that the Netflix model, which allows viewers to rate movies on a five-star scale and to choose from a far wider catalog (60,000 DVDs) than any video store could ever offer, has expanded the movie-watching horizons of home entertainment consumers (although I find his example of The Conversation as a potentially "lost" film a bit odd). Given that most chain video stores, especially those with a blue and yellow color scheme, focus almost exclusively on promoting new releases, that's probably true, and evidence is pretty strong that consumers are digging deep into Netflix's archives, with anywhere from 35,000-40,000 of its titles going out on a daily basis. Arguably, Netflix is making it possible for films that might otherwise be forgotten to find new and wider audiences than ever before. Even better, there are no late fees if you hold on to a video for a few extra days, and because the movies are delivered in the mail, you don't have to worry about rushed late-night trips to the video store.
But for whatever reason, I've found it incredibly difficult to adjust to using Netflix. When I decided to live without a car this year, a Netflix subscription seemed like a necessary investment in my professional career, but instead of expanding my viewing horizons, I've found that I've never watched so few movies at home than I have this year. Now, there are a number of complicated factors that might explain why this is happening. Because I'm in Washington, DC, I have access to a number of good art house and repertory theaters (two Landmarks, the AFI Silver, the Smithsonian theaters), which means that I've been going out for movies relatively often, although probably not significantly more often than I did in Atlanta or even Champaign-Urbana and Lafayette. I've had to adjust to teaching new courses, which required a little more background reading than in the past, which means less time for late-night movie watching (I find watching a movie before it's dark outside almost completely unbearable, and if it's still daylight when I leave the theater, I get what feels a bit like jet lag). And to be honest, I think the lack of late fees puts less pressure on me to see whatever film I've rented immediately. As a result, I sometimes hold on to movies for days or weeks without returning them with the good intentions of watching them eventually.
Still, I think the biiggest factor in making it difficult to adjust to Netflix is that I genuinely enjoy (and miss) skimming the shelves of the independent video stores I used to frequent in Atlanta, Champaign-Urbana, and Lafayette. I enjoy the tactile experience of looking at the DVD (or VHS) cover, holding the box in my hands, and seeing the other videos stacked nearby, and obviously that's something that Netflix or video-on-demand services can't offer. I also miss the sense of community that I typically found at many of the independent video stores I've frequented, the conversations with video store clerks who were bigger movie obsessives than I am. I realize that my nostalgia for these video stores may be coloring my perceptions of them, but those places are a big part of my cinematic eductaion, and I haven't yet figured out how to incorporate Netflix into that.
At the same time, I realize that moving to Fayetteville will change my movie watching habits yet again. Fayetteville does have an art house theater, the Cameo, downtown, and I'm sure I'll get my art house fix there and in Raleigh, but I imagine that the availability of services such as Netflix will mke it easier for me to feel connected to the independent and foreign film scenes that are typically associated with major cultural centers. I realize that my experiences thus far with Netflix are probably exceptional, but I've found it somewhat surprising that I've actually watched fewer movies than I did when I actually had to make the trip to the video store.
Leonhardt's Times article is well worth a read, though. In addition to addressing how Netflix changes our movie watching habits, he explains how the service has become such a massive enterprise, becoming "a logistical operation that has few peers outside of FedEx, U.P.S. or the post office itself." In fact, the head of operations is a former postmaster general.
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June 8, 2006
YouTube and Me
While self-indulgently skimming my Site Meter stats this morning, I came across an interesting blog post by a student in Matt Kirschenbaum's graduate seminar, "Inscribing Media," on YouTube, textual studies, and media theory. Drawing from Henry Jenkins' discussion of fan cultures, Helen discusses the ways in which YouTube users are developing new ways of responding to video content, such as the SNL "Lazy Sunday" skit that went viral and was then widely imitated and parodied by other YouTube users: "Like Flickr, YouTube allows users to comment and discuss videos, but, in addition to written comments, many users choose to comment by creating original video that is at once unique and also tied to a previous video to which it is directly responding." The entry is an excerpt from a longer seminar paper, and the paper itself sounds really interesting.
On a completely unrelated note, I got an email tip on a cool event here in DC at the Provisions Library, which is a couple of blocks north of Dupont Circle. It's a "Teach In on the Poetics, Politics and Practice of Films for Change." The event is scheduled for June 24, starts at 11 AM, and will last all day. The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Social Media at American University.
Posted by chuck at 11:51 AM | TrackBack
May 29, 2006
NYT Linkfest
I'm putting the finishing touches on an academic article on new media, and this New York Times article on MTV's plans to develop broadcasting material for PDAs, cell phones, and video iPods, in shrt for the mobile screens that are becoming more commonplace. As the article points out, most of the shows are designed with the format in mind, running no more than three minutes, with lots of close-ups and static scenes. While the mobile video phenomenon is still in its earliest stages, one model speculates that the market for mobile TV will approach $27 billion by 2010. I'm not sure I have much more to say about the article right now--I'd rather expend that energy in my academic article, but it's a pretty useful treatment of how visual entertainment is rapidly changing.
While I'm in the neighborhood, The Times also has an article on the history of The Internet Movie Database, which is probably my favorite website.
Finally, Andy pointed me to yet another Times article on the need for a film that will give science or scientists that same type of appeal that the Godfather films gave crime and that The West Wing gave politics. I'd like to believe that film will be called An Inconvenient Truth. But what I really want to mention about the article is its passing mention of Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador's The Mist in the Palm Trees, which recently played at Tribeca and has now spiralled to the top of my film wish list. Here's the Times' description:
Directed by Lola Salvador and Carlos Molinero, "Mist" is a presented as fictional documentary about a Spanish photographer and physicist, one Santiago Bergson. In it, the dead Bergson muses on his atomized life and lack of memory as old photographs and grainy home film clips shuffle past, over and over again, arcing from his childhood in Asturia, in northern Spain, to the cataclysmic climax of the Manhattan Project. In one much-repeated grainy clip, a man in a suit leaps headfirst over a row of chairs on the lawn and lands in a somersault.I'll be fascinated to see how Salvador and Molinero convey the idea of a "quantum film," but as of right now, this sounds really cool.
Posted by chuck at 11:51 AM | TrackBack
May 27, 2006
Saturday Coffee Links
Just a quick note to say that the Wordherders' server has been down for most of the last several days. I'm hoping that the problem is resolved, but we'll see how things go. For now, a couple of pointers to articles I don't want to lose.
First, a Washington Post article by William Booth on The Market, the business side of Cannes Film Festival. Booth explains that Hollywood studios now make the majority of their profits outside the United States and that many big Hollywood films, whose budgets now average $100, are made with international audeinces in mind. He points out, in particular that films that bombed in the US box office, Master and Commander and The Island, actually made big bucks oversaes (Booth attributes the success of The Island in South Korea to the real-life genetic engineer who notoriously faked his research data). While I was well aware of the fact that most Hollywood films make major profits overseas, Booth also lists what kinds of films tend to do well in what countries, with horror playing well in Spain, comedy in Australia, and raunchy sex comedies (such as American Pie) in Germany. The number one movie in France right now? Robin Williams' RV. Mon dieu!
Also worth noting, Jamison Foser's Media Matters essay arguing that "the defining issue of our time is the media." For the most part, Foser revisits many of the claims already established in Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? and similar texts that dispute the notion of a liberal media. But I mention Foser's essay because he addresses what he describes as a "pattern" of depicting progressives (Al Gore, Hillary Clinton) as stiff or insincere and conservatives (Bush, McCain, Giuliani--more on him later) as real or authentic, including this Jacob Weisberg article in which he faults Hillary for being politically calculated in reporting the contents of her iPod playlist wile giving Bush a pass for a similarly narrow list of "baby boomer" rock and praising classical pianist Condi Rice for including a mix of classical (Brahms) and pop on her iPod. Foser tears apart Weisberg's artcile with far more enrgy than I have, but his essay is worth pointing out because a similar tactic is once again being deployed to discredit Al Gore and, by extension, his new documentary An Inconvenient Truth, in this case by Jonah Goldberg, who attempts to use apparent discrepancies in Gore's records and his public recollections to foster the illusion that Gore is aloof or that everyting he says is politically calculated. I think the one issue I have with the Foser article, however, is that it doesn't explain why these narratives work so well. I think te assumption is that news audiences are passive dupes who accept the storylines they are fed by the media, but I don't think that's an adequate description of what is happening, and I'm less convinced that there is a media conspiracy against liberalism (even if prominent media owners such as Rupert Murdoch are conservative). I don't have time to work through this question in further detail right now, but I think it's worth pointing out the ways in which members of the media are framing the reception of Gore's film (and his rumored candidacy in the 2008 presidential election).
Posted by chuck at 10:45 AM | TrackBack
May 7, 2006
Sunday Procrastination Reads
Here's what I'm reading and watching instead of grading student papers:
- Via an email tip: Henry Jenkins' "Taking Media in Our Own Hands," a very cool article focusing on grassroots media, specifically Machinima and PXL THIS, an annual film festival devoted to the Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera. The Pixelvision camera never caught on with the children who were its intended consumers, but experimental filmmakers such as Sadie Benning have put the toy camera to highly innovative uses.
- A trailer for a promising indie film, The Puffy Chair, which I'm now looking forward to seeing.
- Also via the Filmmaker Magazine Blog, a pointer to what sounds like a fascinating film, Gary Tarn's Black Sun, which eventually led me to Tarn's London Film Festival diary, where he names Chris Marker, Dziga Vertov, and Errol Morris as influences. The documentary focuses on the experiences of painter Hugues de Montalembert's experiences with going blind.
- Filmmaker Magazine also mentions that Southland Tales director Richard Kelly's passport has been placed "under review," ostensibly because there is a terrorist on the watch-list named James Kelly (James Richard Kelly is the director's full name). The fact that Kelly has just written and directed a film about a futuristic US police state is entirely coincidental.
- '80s nostalgia is alive and well. The cinetrix calls attention to Tribeca's Screenplay section prize winner, Milton Liu’s "John Hughes Ruined My Life," which focuses on a 30something woman who grew up on John Hughes movies and finds that "searching for her Jack Ryan is more like 'Some Kind of Terrible.'"
Update: Blogger was down earlier, so I couldn't find the link, but I also wanted to mention Joe Swanberg and Kris Williams' web series, Young American Bodies (video is NSFW), which is playing on Nerve.com. Joe reports that the series will be running for twelve episodes, and thus far, it looks quite promising.
Update 2: The grading is done, and my "summer vacation" has begun. I also feel somewhat obligated to mention the fact that I made the Washington Post Express Blog Log again, this time for my snarky comment about Richard Kelly's passport difficulties. Here's a PDF if you want to see for yourself (I'm on page 32).
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May 1, 2006
A Star is Blogged
Interesting Washington Post article on the rapid popularization of YouTube, which amazingly debuted only five months ago, even if it feels like it has been around much longer. The Post article places emphasis on the relationship between YouTube and celebrity, highlighting viral video hits such as David Lehre's MySpace: The Movie and wanna-be net celebrities such as Terry Turner who produces weekly political video podcasts with the hopes of becoming the next Bill Maher (or at least the next Wonkette).
Both Lehre and Turner are explicit in viewing their work on YouTube in terms of celebrity, with Lehre describing the site as a "promotional vehicle" for the 50 other short videos he has made and discussing his negotiations with one of the major networks to work on a show on Fox. The desire associated with YouTube celebrity seems not unlike the desire for celebrity associated with "reality TV," including shows such as American Idol, and while it seems to underscore a desire to be a producer of media rather than a mere consumer, I think that's only a partial explanation for the appeal of posting these videos online.
At the same time, the article emphasizes the do-it-yorself aspects of the site, implied in YouTube's marketing slogan, "Broadcast Yourself," and to some extent, I think this is where the site's politics become fairly interesting, even if it also limits how the technology is used. This slogan suggests that the videos are based in personal expression, that the videos are in some sense, drawing from one's identity. Such a characterization might seem to situate YouTube as little more than a glorified version of America's Funniest Home Videos minus Bob Saget's snarky comments, but I think that these videocasts can be used to play with identity and performance in complicated ways (the example of the British collge student who pretended to be an emo kid from Ohio is one potential example). In addition, many of the more adept video makers demonstrate an acute awareness of the codes of films and other media, perhaps reinforcing Nick's argument about "self-theorizing media."
Still, by framing YouTube in terms of personal expression, I wonder whether the "broadcast yourself" slogan isn't a constraint of sorts. In this sense, it's worth thinking about the fact that YouTube is compelled to remove copyrighted content, such as the SNL "Lazy Sunday" sketch that appeared briefly on the site before being pulled (the first SNL skit I've seen in nearly a decade and possibly the last I'll ever see). By positioning the content on YouTube as personal expression and by limiting the ability to show copyrighted images, does that make it more difficult to use YouTube for certain forms of political commentary, especially the media or political process commentary associated with series such as The Daily Show? Of course I'm assuming that people would want to use the medium in this way, which is a major assumption. But the Post's article oes raise some interetsing questions about how YouTube will be and can be used.
By the way, you can see one of Terry Turner's videocasts at the Washington Post website.
Posted by chuck at 11:13 AM | TrackBack
Instructive Games
Jeff of Kinshasa on the Potomac mentions yesterday's rally here in DC to save Darfur. I now regret not attending the rally, but as Jeff points out, rallies such as yesterday's draw desperately needed attention to a serious humanitarian crisis. Jeff also mentions the Washington Post article on a video game that was "launched" by MTVu in conjunction with the rally called "Darfur is Dying." The game is part of what is described as a "games for change" movement that intends to instruct game players on social issues as well as to move the player to take action, whether by writing a letter to the President or one's Representative in Congress, as well as other actions.
The primary game itself is relatively basic. You take on an avatar representing a Darfurian in a refugee camp. You can be Poni, a thirteen-year-old girl or Jaja, a twelve-year-old boy, and your goal is to obtain water from a distant well 3,000 meters away before you are swept up by the members of Janjaweed patrols in passing jeeps. After you are captured, the game explains the likely fate of a Darfurian child under those circumstances, explaining that a Darfurian girl is likely to be raped while a boy may be killed or abused if he is captured, as well as describing the difficult circumstances that many Darfurians face.
As Jeff's entry points out, such a game risks exploitation: "I realize that, when conducting an information campaign, one has to appeal to people using whatever methods seem most likely to get a positive response. But, this particular idea is in such poor taste, that it should be stopped." I think the game avoids any of the voyeuristic or lurid qualities that would at best be in "poor taste." And it depicts in relatively explicit terms the defenselessness of the Darfurians. Your only options in the game are to run and hide. Of course a relatively simple Flash game cannot depict the scale of the crisis, but I'm not sure if that is even possible. Like Jeff, I'm somewhat conflicted about the game, but I do think that calling attention to the genocide in Darfur is urgent and hope this game can contribute to the public's awareness of what is happening in Darfur.
Posted by chuck at 10:35 AM | TrackBack
April 25, 2006
Rethinking Mobility
A few months ago, I contributed a short essay to a roundtable on the new video iPod, and I'm now reworking some of those ideas on "video mobility" for another writing project (one with a relatively immediate deadline). But while I was doing some last-minute reading to refresh my memory on some of the concepts I want to address, I came across Clive Thompson's "Remote Possibilities," an essay on cell phone use originally published in the New York Times, but now (freely) available on his blog, collision detection, which is also well worth checking out.
Also notable: via Risky Biz, Rob Pegoraro's review of Intel's Viiv (he was disappointed) and a New York Times article arguing that consumers are less than enthusiastic about mobile video thus far.
Posted by chuck at 5:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 22, 2006
Saturday Afternoon Media Links
Just a couple of links I don't want to lose: first, via Steven Berlin Johnson, Dan Hill's fascinating blog post arguing that Lost is genuinely new media. I've been thinking about, writing about, and theorizing new media a lot this week and Dan's post about Lost and the fan cultures it has inspired cut through many of the poblems I've been trying to address. In particular, I've been thinking about Fredric Jameson's discussion of what he calls the "volatilization of the individual work of art or text" in "Symptoms of/for Theory" (Jameson's notion of volatilization is not unlike what Nick refers to as "incompleteness"). Jaemson proceeds to argue that "it is now the cultural production process (and its relation to our peculiar social formation) that is the object of study and no longer the individual masterpiece. This shifts our methodological practice (or rather the most nteresting theoretical problems we have to raise) from an individual textual analysis to what I will call mode-of-production analysis" (408).* The approach imagined by Jameson is certainly consistent with what I regard to be the most productive work in media studies that focus on artistic and cultural production rather than the individual work, and Lost, with its multiple layers of cultural production (individual episodes, the show's official website, as well as "unofficial" productions such as blog analyses), provides but one interesting case study. I'm deep in the middle of some last-minute writing, not to mention grading and final exam prep, or I'd have more to say about this topic.
Also via Green Cine, this interesting contest sponsored by security expert Bruce Schneier calling for readers to "submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with." As Schneier points out, audiences are fascinated by "movie-plot threats," although homeland security experts might be advised to focus their energies on intelligence and investigation rather than preparing for the next movie-plot terrorist threat.
Finally, I caught Taiwanese filmmaker Hsiao-hsien Hou's Three Times at Filmfest DC and deeply enjoyed it, although I'm not prepared to write a full review. The basics: the film tells three love stories, one set in 1966, one in 1911, and a third in 2005, with two actors playing the main characters in all three stories. James Berardinelli's review of the film is quite good, so I'll defer to him for now.
Update: The blog world comes full circle. Via a commenter on Pharyngula, an article about the guy who created the George Bush Imagine video I mentioned the other day.
Update 2: Elbert Ventura's review of Three Times captures much of what I liked about the film. If I have time, I may write something longer in response to his comments. In particular, I like his reading of the film's use of "silent film" techniques during the film's second section, which was set in 1911, and the failures of communication (suggested by unreturned phone calls and incomplete text messages) in the contemporary segment. He also mentions the good news that Three Times will receive all well-deserved US release.
* Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004) 403-08.
Posted by chuck at 3:58 PM | TrackBack
April 20, 2006
Valuing Slowness
Jean at creativity/machine has some intriguing entries about her PhD research on new media. In particular, I'm interested in her criticism of a certain brand of new media scholarship that is "too busy trying to find the cutting edge," adding that she "was gobsmacked to find that it said there was not enough emphasis on the future" [an aside: I need to figure out a way to work "gobsmaked" into my everyday vocabulary]. Jean then offers some "manifestoey statements" the need for slowness when it comes to evaluating new media, calling for more attention, in particular to slowness and boredom because they might, in fact, have a lot to tell us about the celebration of all things accelerated.
She's also talking about online video sharing sites, such as Youtube and JumpCut, a topic I've been thinking about quite a bit lately [worth noting: Jason McElwain, the autistic high school student who gained some brief web fame when a video of him sinking six three-point baskets hit the web now has a movie deal with Columbia Pictures. Magic Johnson is set to executive produce.].
Update: Odd timing. As soon as I posted this entry about Jean's discussion of "slowness," I found Michael Joyce's treatment of the same concept in "Forms of Future," anthologized in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Joyce writes that "in our technologies, our cultures, our entertainments and, increasinbgly, the way we constitute our communities and families we live in an anticipatory state of constant nextness" (227), later adding that "I hope I do not disappoint you with my slowness" (228). More later as I work through this concept.
Update 2: I forgot to mention that I found this entry at Purse Lip Square Jaw. While I'm in the neighborhood, I also want to point to Anne's entry on Rick Poynor's essay, "The Death of the Critic."
Posted by chuck at 1:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 18, 2006
My Tuesday Procrastination Reading
Whenever I write on new media, i find myself getting easily sidetracked. For example, I'll go to Robert Greewald's blog to refresh my memory on the excellent political work done through his unique documentary distribution strategies and will find myself redirected to Don Hazen's Alternet article on progressive politics and new media. I don't have time to discuss Hazen's article in detail, but he makes a strong case for explaining how new media technologies should be used to promote progressive politics. Hazen also points to important projects such as New American Media, which focuses on sustaining and developing journalism for "51 million ethnic Americans, 150 languages, and 2,000 ethnic media outlets."
I've also been planning to link to A. Horbal's "Alt-Weekly TV" for several days now, and because TV Turn-Off Week is fast approaching, now seems to be as good a time as any. In particular, I found David Edelstein's call for good TV critics to be rather compelling. Of course there is already some outstanding TV criticism being done at Flow and Pop Matters, but I think he's right that we need to think about TV more carefully, (I remain unconvinced that activties like TV Turn-Off Week are the best way to engage with TV), but perhaps more to the point, I'm not sure that TV criticism works best when engaging with TV at the level of an indvidual show or episode (and Edelstein is right to note that in some contexts, TV can be a "genuinely liberating force").
Posted by chuck at 2:49 PM | TrackBack
April 17, 2006
Sounds, Images, and Smells
Here's some of what I've been reading today instead of working on an article with a relatively imminent deadline:
- k-punk's review of Burial's self-titled album, which they describe as a "MASSIVE new addition to the sonic hauntology canon." Burial sounds like an incredible CD, but I also wanted to point to the reference to Erik Davis's "Dead Machines: A review of The Ghost Orchid and electromagnetic voice phenomena." In his review of The Ghost Orchid, a CD collection of EVP recordings, Davis, echoing arguments by Jeffrey Sconce, explains that "From the moment that human beings started communicating with electrical and electromagnetic signals, the ether has been a spooky place."
- I continue to envy everyone who has been able to attend this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham (the good news: I might be able to attend next year). Eugene Hernandez reports on the fest for indieWire, with an emphasis on Katrina docs.
- Finally, a Yahoo article reporting that Japanese film distributors are planning to use digital technologies to incorporate smells into film screenings. While the article suggests that these plans are unprecedented, film historians may recall that there were brief and generally unsuccessful experiments with "Smell-o-Vision" in the 1950s. There's a similar discussion of "immesrive TV" at the Hero website, with a brief historical overview of the 1950s scent experiments. In both cases, the emphasis seems to be on producing a fully immersive experience, providing the viewer with a sense of virtual "presence."
Posted by chuck at 3:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 14, 2006
Rethinking "Incompleteness"
Nick's concept of "Incompleteness" overlaps nicely with a recent discussion of the DVD version of Lodge Kerrigan's haunting film, Keane, which includes a "director's cut" or re-mix of the film not by Lodge Kerrigan but by friend and colleague Steven Soderbergh (for more see the Washington Post). Sodebergh's reworking of Kerrigan's narrative would seem to illustrate perfectly Nick's principle of "incompleteness," the idea that "there is no properly finished product any longer; nothing is complete." Nick's right to add that no film or work of art or text was ever truly complete, and I'm curious to explore the implications of this notion of incompleteness even further.
Such a principle is clearly present in the deleted scenes that are now included on many DVDs, often with actor and director's commentary tracks expressing regret that a scene could not be included in the theatrical release of the film. Often, DVDs will even include alternate endings (one significant example is The Butterfly Effect, which with its time-travel plot, adds a new wrinkle to the question of alternate endings). Even director's commentary tracks themselves can explode the idea of a final version of the film, but just as often the commentary track might also serve to reinforce the cult of authorship with the director's vision as, in some sense, final.
But Nick's discussion of "incompleteness" with regards to the digital archive also has implications for art that is archved digitally on the Web. Nick points to the constantly-updated art isntallations available on a site such as Rhizome.org, noting the "sheer abundance" of art projects, many of which are concerned with "a sort of madness of indexing, a madness of database." Even blogs, of course, might participate in this "madness of indexing," especially entries that detail, sometimes quite painstakingly, the everyday experiences of their authors (or their results on countless personality tests or their weekly iPod shuffles). And I think that Nick's right to suggest that the incompleteness can allow for a perpetual recontextualization or rethinking of what is already there. Again, blogs offer a useful model here: the constant updates recontextualize what comes before.
An even more interesting example might be Day-to-Day Data, an art exhibition that "exhibits the work artists who seek inspiration from insignificant details in their own or the publics’ everyday lives," with Adele Prince's Trolley Spotting, for example, taking an interest in abandoned trolleys (or shopping carts). Miranda July shows a similar interest in the quotidian in her on-going web project, Learning to Love You More, which invites others to contribute to her site by responding to certain "assignments."
But while blogs offer one useful model, I think Nick is right to point towards wikis, most famously Wikipedia, as a more useful model for illustrating this notion of incompleteness. As he points out, wikipedia entries change rapidly, especially when the definition of a term or concept is under intense scrutiny or deliberation (see, for example, this discussion of the September 11 wiki). This incompleteness, the instability of a site such as Wikipedia, certainly introduces a number of questions about the degree to which these terms are constantly being contested and the difficulty of achieving consensus on the meaning or significance of certain terms.
I do have some reserveations about the historical novelty of this notion of "incompleteness." Nick notes that Lev Manovich has argued that "Historically, the artist made a unique work within a particular medium. Therefore the interface and the work were the same; in other words, the level of an interface did not exist" (Database as a Genre of New Media). IManovich's comments echo Benjamin's discussion of the aura, and while the institution of art certainly valorized unique works of art, I think it worth noting that there is a parallel history of incompleteness. One might make the case, for example, that scribal culture fostered a version of incompleteness, with scribes often making imprecise copies of prior versions, whether out of boredom, exhaustion, or out of some other motivation. Even marginalia could be seen as a form of "revising" what comes before. Hollywood studios often had multiple versions of the film they made, with scenes cut (or deleted) either appease local censors or, later, to remain in compliance with the Hays Code. I certainly agree that digital media offer a new way of thinking about incompleteness, a concept that Nick's blog entry unpacks quite effectively.
Posted by chuck at 11:53 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 27, 2006
Progressive Voices and the Media
FYI DC readers: Just received an email tip that Media Matters is sopnsoring a forum, "Media Matters: Progressive Voices and the Media," here in Washington, DC, onWednesday, April 5th, at 4 PM, at George Washington University 's Jack Morton Auditorium, 805 21st Street NW. According to the Media Matters website, Al Franken will be featured on the panel, and my email lists David Brock, Media Matters President and CEO, along with Eleanor Clift, Danny Goldberg, and Helen Thomas as participants. Reservations are required and available from the Media Matters website.
Posted by chuck at 4:46 PM | TrackBack
March 24, 2006
Friday Afternoon Film Links
Just a few links I don't want to lose:
First, Sujewa tipped me off to The War Tapes, which looks like it should be a fascinating documentary:
In March 2004, just as the insurgent movement strengthened, several members of one National Guard unit arrived in Iraq, carrying digital video cameras.The documentary follows the soldiers throughout their tour and has been endorsed by Chris Hedges, author of War is the Force that Gives us Meaning, who comments that The War Tapes is "a film of rare honesty and power that exposes, from the eyes of those who fight the war, the revolting and soul-numbing world of combat." It's worth noting that Scranton has emphasized that she worked closely with the soldiers in editing the film and sought to earn their trust in representing their experiences of the war. Regular readers may know that I've done some writing on documentaries about the war in Iraq, and so I'm very curious to see this film.THE WAR TAPES is the movie they made with Director Deborah Scranton and a team of award-winning filmmakers. It’s the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves on the front lines in Iraq.
I also want to point to a Washington Times article from a few weeks ago about the use of digital projection at some local movie theaters. According to the article, it sounds as if audiences are responding positively to digital projection, but given the money involved, I have to wonder whose financial interests are being served by here (the article reads a bit like a promotional piece).
Finally, both Sujewa and David have reminders calling for donations to help keep AIVF afloat during its current financial difficulties.
Posted by chuck at 5:11 PM | TrackBack
March 16, 2006
Bubble Wrap
I came across this MIT Convergence Culture Consortium blog entry on Bubble this morning, and because of my own interest in the film and its "day and date" release, wanted to hang on to the link. It's clear from Alec Austin's entry and the subsequent comments that I liked the film quite a bit more than they did. Alec is responding to a blog entry from The Artful Writer.
I'm still not sure that I can predict whether releasing a film to theaters and on DVD will prove to be a useful long-term strategy given the continued decline in box office. I do know that the expense of attending movies, the improvement in home theater systems, and perhaps even the development of quality TV programming have made theaters less attractive options, but I don't think the trends away from moviegoing are inevitable. At the same time, I think it's probably a mistake to judge day and date release from a single movie.
Posted by chuck at 11:07 AM | TrackBack
March 14, 2006
State of the News Media
For now just a quick pointer to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's "State of the News Media," an analysis of the state of journalism in the United States in a variety of media (network news, cable, newspapers, blogs, alternative media, etc), which I came across most recently via Lost Remote. The Project for Excelelnce in Journalism took what they call a look at "a Day in the Life of the News," in which they examined how audiences might get news over the course of a single day. It's an interesting approach, although I'd argue that it might have some limitations, especially for alternative media where articles or research might be part of a much larger context.
In the Lost Remote entry, Steve Safran records many of the more interesting results. They note that network news audiences continue to decline in numbers, even as their audience gets slightly older. At the same time, NBC abd CBS were praised for efforts in making news reporting more transparent through such online tools as CBS's "Public Eye" and NBC's "Daily Nightly."
But their "day in the life" approach to blogs misunderstands how blogs fit within news media culture. First, they report that they "examined seven blogs, selected to offer a range of types, so as to closely examine the subject matter discussed, the places bloggers get their news, the level of reporting that exists, and the relationship with readers and with the mainstream media." While the blogs they chose are among the most widely read--and therefore potentially more influencial--I have to wonder if this approach actually corresponds to how blog readers and writers actually read blogs. The seven blogs they chose--Daily Kos, Eschaton, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, and Power Line--also offer very little diversity (do I really need to link to them?). Far from a range of types, these blogs seem remarkably similar in their focus on national politics from a partisan perspective (even if those political perspectives are all over the map).
They note that these blogs tended to focus on the same issues as the mainstream press, which is generally true, but again, such a focus closes off other forms of "news" blogs that might focus on specific issues (one quick example: Lost Remote's reporting on media and technology). They do read each blog closely and make some good points about the "triggers" for each post, including Instapundit's tendency to link pointers to other blog posts. And they are right that many blogs do not offer what might be regarded as "original reporting," but I'm not sure that's the point of all of the blogs they analyze. I don't intend these comments as a defense of blogs but instead want to suggest that blogs and their role in the public sphere have not been fully defined and that to read them in terms of newspaper and TV journalism doesn't quite work.
Update: Susie at Suburban Guerilla also addresses this analysis of blogging. Again, I think that focusing on the Seven Big Blogs skews the survey considerably and doesn't take into account the practices of news consumption and production associated with blogging.
Posted by chuck at 11:23 AM | TrackBack
March 1, 2006
Cell Phone Cinema
This story is a few days old, but given my upcoming talk, it's still worth mentioning. South African filmmaker Aryan Kaganof has just completed the first cell phone feature film, SMS Sugar Man, which focuses on a pimp and two high-class prostitutes. The film, which was shot using available light, was completed for about $164,000US according to the article, and according Kaganof, using cell phones allowed actors greater improvisation with multiple cameras recording at the same time.
There's a clear marketing angle with Sony Ericcson providing the W900i cell phones Kaganof used to record his feature. Also interesting: there are plans to blow the film up to 35mm and to have a "collapsed" release with DVD, theatrical, and Internet versions launching at around the same time.
More discussion at Metafilter and JD Lasica's blog where I found the story. Kaganof has a blog, and it seems like he updates fairly consistently.
Posted by chuck at 11:53 AM | TrackBack
February 27, 2006
Spring Break Monday Linkfest
It's spring break here at CUA, which means it's really time to catch up on all of that work I should have been doing several weeks ago. I'm still wrapping up my talking points for my workshop panel at SCMS, but GreenCine Daily (as usual) provided a few links I wanted to mention or to stoer for future reference.
First, a link to an entry on the WFMU blog, "Videomania," which points to quite a few online video resources I hadn't encountered. Lukas also offers a handy guide to the strengths and weaknesses of many of the popular video hosting websites, including iFilm and Veoh, among others (worth noting in this context: the IP issues that came up recently when NBC forced YouTube to pull down a popular Saturday Night Live skit that had been stored there. But the coolest aspect of Lukas' entry: he has links to dozens of online videos to support your procrastination habit.
I've been hammering the point that there were no women among the best director nominees and the fact that there have been only three women nominees for best director in Oscar's 78-year history. The Guerilla Girls and MoviesByWomen.com have erected a billboard in Hollywood to remind us of these depressing facts. Sharon Krum covers this story in more detail in The Guardian.
Update: One more link, via Wiley Wiggins: Democracy Player, which allows viewers to "download and watch all the best internet TV shows and videos in one powerful application."
Update 2: Here are some basics on Machinima, as well as a link to the politically interesting French Democracy film that was making the rounds for a while back in November. And, while I'm thinking about it, here's a Boing Boing pointer to an upcoming DIY film festival.
Update 3: Okay, technically it's Wednesday but Mark Caro's discussion of the IFC-Comcast deal to release several IFC films simultaneously on pay-per-view and in theaters is worth noting (thanks to the Risky Biz blog).
Update 4: Even later on Wednesday, but this Washington Post article on the role of iTunes in creating online communities is worth noting, as is their discussion of Derek Slater and Mike McGuire's "Consumer Taste Sharing Is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture," although I'm generally skeptical about claims regarding the democratization of media.
Posted by chuck at 12:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 25, 2006
Plan Nine from MySpace
Susan Carpenter has an interesting article in the LA Times on David Lehre's My Space: The Movie, a new short video satirizing the popular social networking website. Lehre's film is rapidly gaining a wide audience on the internet. In fact, in less than a month, the video, which is available for download at YouTube.com (just search for "My Space"), has already been viewed an estimated 3.3 million times.
My Space: The Movie gently parodies many of the familiar features of the website, including the narcissistic photographs and the "angles," the practice of taking self-pictures from flattering angles in order to appear more sexually attractive. I've had some problems viewing the entire film (due to downloading problems), but it looks like a fun little video and, more significantly, fits the online video medium quite well.
Lehre, who is a 21-year old self-taught filmmaker, has been able to translate his success into a development deal with MTVU, has already managed perhaps one of the biggest compliment a filmmaker can receieve: My Space: The Movie has already spawned several parodies and imitations.
Posted by chuck at 10:07 PM | TrackBack
February 24, 2006
Early Visual Media Links
I'm putting together some ideas for my SCMS workshop and came across this really useful web resource, Early Visual Media, which would have saved me a lot of time the last two weeks when I was talking with my Media and Hitsory students about daguerreotypes and other early forms of photography, as well as prot-cinematic devices such as the phenakistoscope, the magic lantern, and other optical toys (such as the thaumatrope).
I did get a chnace to show my students some of the cool materials archived on the Library of Congress website, including the amazing Farm Security Administration photos, which I could easily browse for hours, and this quick overview on the 19th century practice of taking daguerreotypes of dead family members (now that I've taught sections of Jeffery Sconce's Haunted Media and this discussion of daguerreotypes, my students think I'm way too preoccupied with death).
At some point, I do want to think about what it means that we encounter these old media outside their original context (that is, the physical/material qualities of these older media), but for now, I just want to point towards some of these valuable resources.
Posted by chuck at 4:00 PM | TrackBack
February 23, 2006
A Question of Representation
William "The Gambler" Bennett and Alan Dershowitz have joined forces in The Washington Post to Attack the Press for choosing not to publish the offensive anti-Muslim cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper a few months ago. Ester at babblebook summarizes the basic argument far better than I could. Essentially they're arguing that "the terrorists have won because the American press refused to publish the Danish caricatures." While I've generally avoided the discussion of these caricatures in a free speech context, I think the logic of their editorial should not go unchallenged, especially when it comes to their characterization of "freedom of expression" and of what ought to be represented in the public sphere.
First, I think it's worth challenging their characterization of the media as a monolithic entity. In his foreword to The Future of Media (a great collection of essays by the way), Bill Moyers expresses his discomfort with the term, "the media," as a catch-all phrase. While Moyers is primarily addressing the distinctions between individual journalists, as a media studies scholar, i find that the phrase obscures more than it reveals, especially when it comes to distinctions between newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and other media.
In fact, their attack on the press relies upon the assumption that people who follow the news get their information only from the mass media, from the newspapers who have, correctly in my opinion, chosen not to publish the Danish cartoons. While most newspapers have made this choice, the cartoons are widely available in multiple outlets on the internet. To be sure, not everyone has access to the internet, but the cartoons would not have been disseminated so rapidly without it once they became useful as a tool for stirring up outrage.
Dershowitz and Bennett's other arguments, however, are far more insidious. While they imply on the one hand that The Media has capitulated to the terrorists, they also fault the same Media for printing stories that inconveniently call attention to the illegal and unethical actions committed by memebrs of the Bush administration in the name of a war on terror, namely the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and their practice of wiretapping without obtaining a warrant, suggesting with just a small degree of caution that such stories "could harm our allies."
Of course, they are assuming that we will forget that several major newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times felt compelled to apologize for their reporting before the war because their reports accepted at face value Bush administration claims about WMD and links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden (among other issues). To suggest that mjor news outlets have effectively challenged Bush administration claims about the war, much less actively undermined that effort, seems utterly unsupportable.
They also make a false comparison between the role of watchdog journalism and the "need" to disseminate the Danish caricatures. One of the main reasons free expression is guarded so religiously is that it is an important tool in protecting against public officials who might abuse the trust voters have placed in them. While the First Amendment protects the right to publish the cartoons (I'll never argue otherwise), there's a larger issue at stake in terms of responsibility. Again, the Danish images are already widely available. Smart reporters can describe them quite effectively in their articles, so I think tolerance should win out here.
Finally, they make massive generalizations about the "Islamist street" (is that anywhere near Evangelical Avenue?), throwing around phrases such as "cartoon intifada" that reduce and trivialize the real differences among the responses to the cartoons (Ramzy Baroud's response is just one example of this). In fact, this notion of the "Islamist street" is used to portray all of the protests and protestors as violent, citing the obviously troubling signs that read, "Behead those who insult Islam." While I condemn the violent protestors, I think it's somewhat unreasonable to characterize any outraged response to these cartoons in this manner (did they have similar objections when Ann Coulter demanded after 9/11 that the US "kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity").
In short, Bennett and Dershowitz are essentially complicit with the talking points that have been repeated ad nauseum for the last four or five years, as their conclusion implies in which they imply that "they [whoever they are] hate our freedoms" when it's really our policies they hate.
Update: Just noticed that Glenn Greenwald has made a similar argument about Bennett and Dershowitz's masqerading as free press advocates when in fact they are actually attacking teh foundations of journalists' attempts to investigate and challenge the Bush administration. I still disagree with Greenwald's claim that newspapers ought to publish the offensive cartoons, but he offers an important defsense of the rights of journalists to investigate the Bush White House.
Posted by chuck at 12:06 PM | TrackBack
February 21, 2006
Reading "Sunday Morning"
I have been intrigued by the discussion of the Media Matters (MM) paper, "If It's Sunday, It's Conservative," which detects a consistent conservative slant in the Sunday morning gabfests, and while I don't have time to write about it in detail (still hoping to do that), there are one or two points I'd like to address. To a great extent, MM's research and the responses to it depend on definitional claims regarding the distinctions between "conservative" and "liberal" guests.
One example: Eric Alterman points to Vaughn Ververs' critique of Media Matters' methodology for tracking "conservative" and "liberal" guests. MM explains that they "classified each guest based on her/his general partisan or ideological orientation." Although such classifications are not always clear, this method seems relatively reasonable, and given that conservatives appear on these shows with far greater frequency than liberals, it's not unreasonable to argue that political discourse, as much as these shows contribute to it, has been shifted to the right.
Ververs seeks to complicate MM's definition by arguing that their approach fails to acknowledge one important definitional factor, what he calls "the intra-party dynamic." He notes that MM classifies Zell Miller as "conservative" for his loudly and frequently professed support of George W. Bush but then compares Miller to Sens John "Maverick" McCain and Chuck Hagel, who have been outspoken critics of the President. Several things get lost in this comparison: first, McCain has never actively campaigned against a Bush presidency to the degree that Miller campaigned against a Kerry presidency. In fact, it might be argued that both McCain and Hagel are criticizing the Bush administration from what they regard as a more principled conservative position. So even if McCain criticizes Bush, he's not doing so from a liberal or progressive position.
The "pundit" argument is a little more complicated, and I think Ververs may be right to demand some clarification of the terms used to classify one pundit as "conservative" and another as "moderate." While I'd agree with the MM classifications of David Brooks as conservative (yes, I know he supports gay marriage, but he's reliably conservative on most other issues) and Broder as moderate (see Alterman's What Liberal Media? on Broder), those definitions should be as clear as possible.
Note: Media Matters' Paul Waldman has a response to Ververs that pretty much reinforces my point, and they make a strong case for explaining the pundit gap.
Posted by chuck at 1:12 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 16, 2006
Broadcast Noise
I'm doing the final touches on my article on war documentaries this weekend and wanted to gesure towards another project I'd like to tackle. A few months ago, I mentioned interest in David Mindich's Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, even while expressing some suspicion towards one of Mindich's argument. Mindich was kind enough to arrange for the publisher to send me a copy, and I've been thinking about his arguments about American news-watching practices ever since (my suspicions that Mindich imagined a "golden age" of informed citizens, it turns out, weren't warranted).
I'm not yet sure what this new project will look like. I'll certainly continue thinking about these documentaries about the Iraq War by both embedded reporters and Iraqi artists and filmmakers, but more recntly, debates about the network and cable news coverage of the war and American politics in general have been attracting my attention. Eric Alterman points to an October 2003 study by the Program on International Policy Issues (PIPA), "Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War" (PDF) that raised some important questions about how the American public saw the war in Iraq much differently than the rest of the world (and as Alterman illustrates, the problems identified in that report persist to this day).
I'm also intrigued by the Media Matters report, "If It's Sunday, It's Coservative" (PDF) that offers some fairly compelling data to illustrate a conservative bias on the Sunday morning talk shows (and the reasons that such a bias is important). But I think that all of these texts, from different angles, help illuminate some of my own frustrations about politics and the news media (yes, I know that term is way too broad). I'm still sorting through these ideas. Hopefully I'll have time to write a longer post on this topic over the weekend, but if anyone has read either report (or Mindich's book), feel free to comment.
Update: Eric Alterman's Nation column offers an insightful analysis of the Media Matters report and raises one of the key points I wanted address: even without analyzing Fox's Sunday morning shows, the Media Matters folks were able to detect a strong conservative bias in Sunday morning guests.
Update 2: This WSJ.com article by Farnaz Fassihi about her experiences as a reporter covering the war in Iraq is fascinating and chilling.
Posted by chuck at 10:32 PM | TrackBack