Hansen, Hubbert and Youtube
While Miriam Hansen's article "Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere" begins with a dated assertion that the blockbusters of the moment, including Gremlins, "[offer] something to everyone…[appeal] to diverse interests" (136) (Gremlins appealed to diverse interests?...I do remember a lot of playground discussion about its "multiple levels of textuality" [136]), the rest of the essay is still remarkably applicable to the breakdown of classical media structures we're experiencing now, and dovetails precisely with Prof. Julie Hubbert's presentation last week.
During Prof. Hubbert's talk, I was struck by the idea of a film's reception being unavoidably linked with the talent of a live musician. As Prof. Hubbert said, an experience in one theater would be completely different from an experience in another; the music for a screening in New York could be a distinctive interpretation (of different quality?), completely unlike a show in Peoria. The Hansen essay makes an identical point: "[silent] films were viewed differently and were likely to have a wide range of meanings depending on the neighborhood and status of the theater, on the ethnic and racial background of the habitual audience, on the mixture of gender and generation, and on the ambition and skills of the exhibitor and the performing personnel." (147)
Prof. Hubbert specified that there is no evidence that music directors or musicians of particular theaters ever collaborated with film directors. This relinquishing of control over a major aspect of a finished product undermines the image of a film director as a god-like, controlling figure; even if a score had been prepared to accompany the release, silent film directors still weren't able to influence the quality of the music played during their films. Taking up Miriam Hansen's comparison of the fractured media environment we live in now to the formative days of early film, the lack of control over silent film presentation can be situated alongside the new genre of youtube mashups, in which pre-existing popular films are edited with other films, given new soundtracks and intertitles, and/or intercut with webcam confessionals, cute cats, fan art, President Obama and children falling over.
Of course, the element of live performance is absent, but online video still, like Hansen's definition of the silent film theater, "[creates] a margin of improvisation, interpretation, and unpredictability that [makes] it a public event in the emphatic sense and a collective horizon on which industrially processed experience [can] be reappropriated by the experiencing subjects " (147). Additionally, the comments section that appears beneath most videos adds a live element, as each viewer who is personally affected by the video shares their impressions, whether through insane profanity-laced tirades or encouraging good wishes. Perhaps this could help bridge the gap Hansen delineates between personal viewing experiences and broader definitions of spectatorship.
-- Anna Bak-Kvapil
No comments:
Post a Comment