Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Where Does Film Studies ... oops ... Media Studies fit into this?
I don't even know if that's a relevant question but i think it's an interesting video especially as I used the very technology highlighted in the video to bring it to you guys ...
UPDATE: It is truly the age of the mash-up ... well, if not the "age of ..." the kids seem to be doing a lot of it these days. Hilari-ass case in point:
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7 comments:
Thanks Paul, for providing me a snappy video to show on the first day of my Media Archeology class in the Fall!
What the video exemplifies extremely well is that digital technology, and the communities that form in and around it, inherently engages with the concepts of collaboration, non-linear thinking, revision and re-mix, challenging top-down hierarchies of communication in which a certain text or reading of a text is granted authority over another.
This is very important for any academic discipline to take into account but especially film and media studies if only because our students are not living in a world in which they conceive of "film" as just about "film" anymore. Or "film "in the same sort of purist sense that we may have at their age (and maybe still do now!) When students can find and create multiple re-mixes of Citizen Kane on YouTube, then it is necessary to adjust how we conceive of and teach film history.
Obviously, digital technology is also an amazing tool with which scholars can engage in new forms of writing, establishing innovative and creative links between history and theory through practice. Paul's Citizen Kane piece is a great example of this (Paul, you should provide link for all), as is Eric Faden's piece, Tracking Theory.
Thanks Michele ... here's a link to the You Tube version of it which is sort of crappy quality but you get the idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-kiPXy_m_E
Leave it to me to be the wet blanket on stuff like this....
Even after taking Steve Mamber's informative, enlightening new media course, I'm still not persuaded of the "inherently... challenging" (hopefully that's not too obscene an edit of Michele's argument) nature of digital technology. As this video demonstrates, digital technology can encourage us to rethink information, relationships, etc. -- but it can also just as easily be used by the same media corporations (CNN, MSNBC, ESPN, et al.) to present the same information that they present on their traditional media sites.
The proliferation of sites like YouTube and the dissemination of parodies like "Ten Things I Hate about the Commandments" (which is a stitch) don't suggest any meaningful retort to "top-down hierarchies of communication" because those sites and parodies can just as easily be incorporated into corporate strategies for the promotion and dissemination of traditional media. Isn't the re-envisioning of 7-11s as Kwik-E-Marts effectively the same thing as mash-ups? I think Limp Bizkit has released an album of authorized remixes and mash-ups of their songs. Moby has made much of his money by taking old blues and spirituals, remixing them into dance tracks and then selling the advertising rights to said songs to a gaggle of well established corporations more than happy to throw some money at his digital remix happy self.
In short, digital technology poses no more of an inherent threat to any hierarchy than any other technology has. That cinema could be used by avant garde filmmakers as diverse as Maya Deren, Chris Marker, Michael Snow and John Waters never caused the mainstream film industry in any country to bat an eye. The same will be true, methinks, for digital technology.
Even if mash-ups question the possibility of not only received opinion but of an inviolable text, those questions and their answers can still be accommodated within the existing hierarchies, in which capitalist corporations own and others don't yet are still able to exist and amuse themselves within that system. This may or may not be televised, but it's definitely not a revolution.
I agree, Mookie, entirely.
The problem that capitalism IS an inherently revolutionary force ("All that is solid melts into air" is, of course, Marx's famous description), that it IS inherently opposed to static fixities of meaning, and that concepts like "revision" and "re-mix" actually BELONG to its self-revolutionizing potential.
Or, in other words, there's nothing logocentric about capitalism, Derrida be damned.
I don't disagree with Mookie and Rob but while partaking of capitalism's inherent opposition to any fixity of meaning, the kind of "mash-up" (and i hate that term by the way) or "re-mix" exemplified by the "Ten Things I Hate about the Commandments" clip brings to the fore the very properties of recontextualization that makes capitalism such a potent foe. ;)
To make one of those things, you not only have to be well versed in the visual language and narrative formulas of Hollywood cinema but you also have to recognize, or at least have some basic awareness that, that these same strategies can be employed to remake and recontextualize literally any text, whether it's The Ten Commandments or the tragedy of Darfur.
I think what Michele is pointing out is that this ability is now in the hands of viewers made producers which is something entirely new made possible by digital media. Unfortunately, I think the vast majority of these new digital producers is that they are making these mash-ups not to undermine capitalist representation but to display their command of it in order to better participate in it. Which is to say that I suspect most of the people making these things want to be the next Brett Ratner, not the next Chris Marker.
Paul, what I'm trying to say is that this technology isn't placing anything new into anyone's hands. These kinds of video mash-ups were by and large possible with VHS -- as an undergraduate, I did something not dissimilar. John Waters somehow got his hands on plenty of film footage and made his own films that tweaked cinematic conventions and language. Audio samples, usually identified with hip hop culture, can be traced to work William Burroughs did in the 1960s in between shooting up heroin and his wife's head.
In other words, I think a lot of new media apologia looks at mash-ups, etc., and wants to say that hulking, hacky figurs isn't Brett Ratner, it's Chris Marker. Adding to the irony is, of course, the fact that no one really knows what Chris Marker looks like, since he won't allow himself to be photographed. Perhaps we want to call new media revolutionary because we have no idea what a "true" revolutionary medium would actually look like?
Agreed, Mookie. More of the same, only different.
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