Two points

1. I agree with Greer's assessment of Virginia Heffernan's discussion of Alice Guy Blache and the emergence of 'new media' back in March. Lev Manovich, in his introduction to The New Media Reader (eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), outlines eight propositions for the definition of "new media", the seventh of which divides "old media" from "new media" thusly: "1. The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, and simulation. 2. The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material" ("New Media from Borges to HTML", 20). While I don't entirely agree with Manovich's generalizations as regards all new media production (he is speaking largely within an avant-garde art context, after all), he articulates important concepts behind new media that Heffernan largely ignored in her presentation. The "cinema of attractions", as postulated by Tom Gunning and of which Guy Blache's films represent a significant portion (e.g. her experiments with sound technology in film), does not translate entirely to all new forms of media: exhibition spaces, audience reception, and the technological specificity of the medium are all informed by different historical circumstances. Heffernan was accurate in that YouTube does constitute a new kind of "cinema of attractions" but she did not go so far as to explore the ways in which it differs from early cinema, (such as the difference between film's theatrical origins and new media's reliance on previously existing technological forms, or the class makeup of early cinema audiences versus the effacement thereof via the democratizing presence of the Internet) - ironically, in doing so, she overlooked Altman's repeated Biblical invocation of "pouring new wine into old wineskins".

2. Anyone interested in the evolution of the music video as a cultural development: my colleague Jonah Volk rightly pointed out Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger as avant-garde predecessors to the music video format. Additionally, there was also the 1960's phenomenon of film jukeboxes, such as the Scopitone and Cinebox, which were hugely popular in France, England, West Germany, and Italy (they existed in the US as well, though to not as great as extent here as the other countries). In Europe, these machines were often set up in movie theaters, cafes, and other places where young people gathered to socialize while listening to (and watching!) the popular music of the day. This youth demographic was soundly ignored in America, having mostly been installed in upscale hotels and restaurants, which maybe goes some way to explain why film jukeboxes never quite caught on stateside. These aren't truthfully music "videos" in the sense that none of them, as far as I can tell, were ever shot on videotape (accommodating the day's video formats would likely have resulted in a much bulkier and more expensive contraption in which to play them), but the majority of Scopitones feature a singer "performing" one of their popular hits of the day. With the exception of collectors who passionately hoard this material, the Scopitone is more or less totally forgotten in America today, but it arguably played some role in the formation of the music video as an audiovisual medium that tied art and music to youth purchasing power, and is worth considering in any discussion of the medium's history. (More info, including how they actually worked, and video clips of select Scopitones, here: http://scopitones.blogs.com/)

-Joseph Gallucci