I joined the ranks of the video bloggers with a series posted on the New Statesman website in the early months of 2011. (1) The videos can also be seen at my blog Putney Debater. Following a few earlier experiments in short videos for the web in video diary style, I had a clear instinct when I started going out to film the upsurge in student protests in the UK in December 2010 about what to do and how to do it. I remembered Glauber Rocha’s formula for Cinema Novo in Brazil—to go and make films with a camera in the hand and an idea in the head. The selection of events was serendipitous. My plans were minimalist and responsive to the events (the movement expanded until half a million people demonstrated in London on March 26, 2011, the last episode of the series). I filmed things that I could get to easily by public transport (except one day in South London when a colleague from the University came along, and drove us around in his car). On more than one occasion other colleagues or students did additional filming. For several months I didn’t think about the theory of the thing but got on with the job.

Looking back raises various questions. For one thing, I call myself a video blogger but it’s a term without a precise meaning. The point of calling something a blog is to flag it as the work of an individual, but like written blogs, video blogs cover a huge range of subjects, styles, genres, and purposes. (Moreover, the web produces a highly problematic version of individual identity, an abstracted form of voice which can all too easily be fabricated: corporate blogs are written by professional copy writers; there are companies nowadays that run Facebook pages for their clients.)  For myself, I think of the video blog more as a form of documentary than citizen journalism, because of the work of editing each episode. But in that case, it’s quite different from conventional television documentary in its mode of production: the labour process is quite distinct — the blogger doesn’t have a budget handed down to them, and doesn’t work with a crew (only the help of friends).

This is not a topic that figures in academic film studies, which is not premised on practical knowledge of film production (and has little appreciation of production practices beyond the Hollywood studio system). The labour process of the individual video blogger contrasts starkly with the conventional mode of documentary production, but it also differs from the more egalitarian collective practices of politicised film-making thirty or forty years ago (including the workshop movement in the UK in the 80s). Both methods involved small crews and a given, although flexible division of labour, combining technical specialism with creative feedback and collaboration. The video blogger, thanks to digital technology, is able effectively to work alone at all jobs at all stages of production. This gets very close to the concept of the ‘caméra-stylo’ introduced in the late 1940s by the French avant-garde film-maker Alexandre Astruc: the idea of the camera as a tool to write with—indeed twice over, first when you shoot and then when you write the film on the timeline. But this solitude also becomes a liability, because it deprives you of the creative feedback that goes with the teamwork of a crew. Added to which, when you work alone you also tend to work unsocial hours and to take as long as it needs to do the job without bothering to count the minutes. In short, the regime you work is the epitome of free aesthetic labour. I don’t mean the managerialist notion that workers should look good and behave nicely, but the Marxist concept of creative labour, which is not subject to the external constraints imposed on regular labour by the conditions of employment; of which Marx himself once wrote, ‘Really free labour, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort.’ (2)

The tax authorities call it freelance, but this kind of labour is essentially unquantifiable: there is no rule that says how long it should take to write a song or a poem, let alone shoot and edit a video. Indeed the artist who lives from their work knows that there’s no determinable relation to the exchange value, if any, eventually earned. The video blogger doesn’t even think of earning anything. This is also ‘free labour’ in a new sense: the donation of those who supply the social media with content, off whose backs, in their hundred of millions, enormous profits are made by feeding them paid advertisements. (3) Nevertheless, this independence, which the video blogger shares with various other kinds of web videographer, is the basis for the expression of countercultural voices which are either ignored or stereotyped by the mainstream but here acquire the status of free authors. Often these voices are politically unformed, some are subcultural expressions of tribal ideologies. The web tends to multiply and magnify existing tendencies and trends in the body social, and thus becomes a space of implicit ideological confrontation (not to mention narcissistic exhibitionism). Nevertheless, these confrontations, skirmishes, even battles, are carried out in the virtual first person. Video clips are circulated by individual digital subjects posting their links here and there, often pseudonymously. The effect is (if I can be allowed the word) to ‘personalise’ the message. What you understand about the video you get to by following a link depends on who sent it to you and how. It’s like putting quote marks around it. Irony abounds. But the emphasis on voice may also embolden the video blogger, who must work to grab and sustain the viewer’s atomised and distracted attention. (There is a big difference between page loads and completed viewings.)

The character of video authorship has a history which reaches back through underground and expanded cinema in the 1960s and 70s to the rise of the workers’ film movements between the two world wars, both of them, like the experimental cinema of the 1920s, prime sites of free aesthetic labour. This history was always separate from commercial cinema, whose costliness placed it in the hands of monopolists and the studio system, which imposed formal controls over the labour process (aided and abetted by the trade unions). Here, aesthetic labour was regulated by time sheets and schedules. If directors who imposed themselves in this system came to be identified by young idealistic film critics in France after the Second World War as auteurs, the true authors of cinema, film theorists of the next generation would explicate the ways in which authorship might be shared (you have to take into account the cinematographer, the editor, the producer, etc.) or even ascribed to the studio itself. These explications have their counterpart in legal documents (and copyright provisions). As quarrels over credits demonstrate, the labour process that stands behind such authorship is always shared. It precludes the individualised character that on the other hand is privileged by video, because the videographer is now able to engage in the same individual form of aesthetic labour as the writer, the poet, the painter, the composer.

In the process, however, a new kind of aesthetic practice emerges, as video reveals a potential for alternative uses outside television and corporate publicity, and is taken up by new kinds of users who evolve their own forms of teamwork. One arena is education, where anthropologists have used it for ethnographic documentation, medics for teaching, social workers for health and sex education (not to mention local photographers, who started offering neighbourhood customers videos as well as photos of all the usual family events). But it has also become an agent of parallel cultural production in the hands of a new generation of activists, who take it up as a new form of speech in the open spaces of civil society. A Brazilian video activist told an interviewer, in 1992, “The social movements appropriated the medium before the professionals.” (4) Here, video spreads beyond the exclusive province of professionalism, and begins to become a common competence, like riding a bicycle or driving.

In this way, the well-known formula suggested by Bill Nichols for the classic documentary, “I speak to you about them”, is transformed into “I (or we) speak to you about me (or us)”, or even “We speak to each other about ourselves”.  There is inevitably a utopian streak in it when this transformation is collective. It would fulfill the task envisaged by the Cuban cineaste Julio García Espinosa in a key manifesto of 1970, “For an Imperfect Cinema” (Por un cine imperfecto ), where he spoke of the need to break with ‘culture’ as the property of social elites, and ‘popular culture’ as commodities on the market, and discover instead “the conditions which will enable spectators to transform themselves into agents — not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors.” (5)

Endnotes:

In 1996 I began a Masters in Film Studies at York University, Toronto, with a plan to write my thesis on Jean-Luc Godard’s post-Dziga Vertov Group work.  The ability to graphically interface with the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and the notion that anyone could create their own website was not yet quotidian.  I was interested in experimenting with a site reflecting, in some fashion or another, my interest in Godard.  Since I was a poor graduate student, I chose GeoCities as a host; they offered free space in exchange for some banner ads and control over the URL.  Originally conceived as part of a larger project of director pages called “The Pantheon” (Sarris reference intended) which never came to full fruition, Cinema=Jean-Luc Godard=Cinema was initially given an awkward “Hollywood” address: geocities.com/Hollywood/Cinema/4355/. This is the URL listed under “Weblinks” in the 2001 Fox Lorber DVD releases of Breathless, Le petit soldat and Les carabiniers (not that they asked, or even let me know of their intention to link my site).  In 1999, Yahoo acquired GeoCities and soon after changed the URL to geocities.com/glen_norton. This first incarnation was archived by OoCities.org in 2009 when it was announced that Yahoo would be ending its GeoCities hosting services.  In October of that year the site’s second incarnation, with a more focused mandate as an “academic hub for information and discussion”, was created on WordPress. 

To be quite honest, when I first began I wasn’t sure what the site was going to “be”.  There were no rules.  I do remember, however, that Alan Liu’s Voice of the Shuttle, which had already been in existence for a couple of years, was inspirational both in its capacity as an academic resource and for the embedded list structure of its content.  In retrospect, my initial self-imposed mandate was based in part on what Liu was doing: link every scrap of information I could find pertaining to Godard.  Over time this information was streamlined into various sections: interviews, essays, reviews, images, film clips (a rarity in the early days), scripts, letters, latest news/gossip, etc.  My headings were dictated by what I could find.  The dearth of information on the web caused me to be fairly indiscriminate at the outset, and thoughts of legality or ethics rarely crossed my mind.  If it was on the web, I assumed it was fair game.  I’ve never had an issue with the site in this regard; no one has ever asked me to remove a link or an image.  Hosting work other than my own was (and still is) not a priority, save for a few uploaded interviews, the origins of which I’ve long forgotten (I certainly don’t remember transcribing them myself).  My early method for finding information was quite primitive: a repeated search for “Godard” on the various engines available at the time (AltaVista, Lycos and Yahoo were my mainstays).  This inefficient method was at first an all-consuming obsession; later, however, it simply became a nuisance.  I just didn’t have the patience, so I wouldn’t bother to update the site for months on end.  I thankfully now rely for the most part on Google Alerts. I must also acknowledge the numerous well-informed and gracious members of the Godard Mailing List, created by Gloria Monti around the same time as my site (and now undergoing a reincarnation of its own), for bringing important items to my attention.

At first my trawling for all things Godard-like came up with little more than various film blurbs and reviews which I linked to a filmography, some barebones interviews (for the longest time, the only one I could find was from the 1995 Montreal Film Festival), and a handful of essays (again, for the longest time the only scholarly essay I could find was “Scandal to the Jews, Folly to the Pagans: A Treatment for Hail Mary,” by Stuart Cunningham and Ross Harley, perhaps the first openly web accessible essay on Godard).  Early versions of the site also hosted some now slightly embarrassing undergraduate essays I had written on Godard and others.  The fact that what I uploaded might remain indelible was not much of a concern; the Internet was a brand new toy to play with, and its long-term implications were simply not evident (at least to me) at the time. 

The look of the site did not change in any significant way from its inception through 2009, even though this first incarnation was, let’s face it, ugly.  I was learning to write my own code, and a flashy, aesthetically interesting, easily navigable site was neither my goal nor within my limited technical abilities.  As for the title, I was trying to be clever, vaguely referencing Godard’s own penchant for strange equations and graphically interesting titles.  I wanted to place Godard in the middle of cinema, something like what he himself had done in Bande à part:

Around the time I changed hosts I also dropped the “Jean-Luc” in order to streamline the title.  By then I found it illogical and more than slightly pretentious (and still do – why two equals signs?), but I was hesitant to change it any further.  For better or worse, it was under this name that the site had become known.

Indeed, over the years I became increasingly aware that the site really was becoming more and more well known.  My labour of love was showing up earlier and earlier in my Godard searches, eventually becoming one of the top results.  I was surprised to find it regarded more and more as the web authority on Godard, even though other important sites had begun to appear, such as Julien d’Abrigeon’s Jean-Luc Godard, Cineaste-Ecrivain, along with countless more that have come and gone.  From the beginning I’ve remained adamant that the site should be interactive, so my email address has always been available on the front page – a practice that has resulted in countless requests for me to “pass along” information to the man himself (no, I have never met Godard, and no, I do not have any “special” way to contact him).  During the dot-com boom of the late 90s the site was even popular enough to be approached by some now long-forgotten online store, which offered me one free movie of my choice per month in exchange for a banner ad.  This deal lasted long enough for me to “earn” VHS (yes, VHS) copies of Bresson’s Une femme douce, Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park, and even Godard’s For Ever Mozart before the bubble burst.  Apart from the mandatory banner system implemented by GeoCities and then Yahoo, this was my first and last attempt at making the site “commercial”. 

The second incarnation of the site is dedicated to open access information of academic import and interest.  I do still try, of course, to report on the latest news about Godard and his work, but I am less inclined now to discuss rumours, gossip and other incidental items unless I think it is truly warranted.  This is not a fan site in the adoring or reverential sense; my interest lies primarily with the work and not the man himself.  Take, for example, the infamous “anti-semite” charge in late 2010, sparked, it seems, more by Godard receiving a Governors Award and then declining to attend the ceremonies than by any solid evidence.  I was preparing a scholarly response looking at what the films themselves might have to say on the subject, but in the end opted for an approach outlining my take on the relationship between film authorship and scholarship in general.  The most recent “rumour” (at the time of writing) which seemed worthy of a posting was the May 2012 report from production/sales company Wild Bunch that Godard’s next film, Adieu au langage, would be shot in 3D.  Although this rumour had been circulating since 2010, the claim initially seemed suspect, since Wild Bunch immediately removed any reference of the film from their website.  Subsequent news about technical aspects of the film, along with the fact that Wild Bunch has since restored the film’s webpage, attests to the fact that Godard in 3D will indeed become a reality.  Comprehensive realtime reporting on ongoing rumours such as these was simply not possible in the early days of the site.  I am not opposed to posting this type of information, but the site’s permanently nested pages now remain dedicated exclusively to open access items of scholarly importance: a list of books (including links to chapters and reviews); conference announcements, calls for papers and reports; a list of dissertations and theses (including links when possible); and scholarly essays listed by journal.  These headings are by no means set in stone; I am always searching for ways to make the site more logical and streamlined.  For example, I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a separate “calls for papers” section, as well as perhaps dividing the books section into sub-sections on chapters, languages, etc.  Currently, even though I remain highly skeptical about their scholarly value, I keep a page dedicated to interviews.  Godard’s cryptic pronouncements and observations are fascinating, to be sure, but it is highly doubtful they should be taken at face value, especially in a purely academic sense.

My intention is to keep the site’s second incarnation guided by an ethic that balances academic interests with concerns about open access.  This ethic is certainly evolving, as are opinions about open access, so for now I operate on a case-by-case basis.  I still remain adamant that the site should, for the most part, not host work other than my own.  I have been hesitant to link to anything in Google Books – for now it remains an awkward interface, often with sections missing, and questions of copyright still linger.  Print material is still the main focus of the site, but it seems I will have to rethink this approach in the near future.  I have so far disregarded the myriad of films, interviews and other relevant Godard clips that exist on sites like YouTube and Vimeo – it is a daunting task to keep up with the speed at which information is posted and removed on these sites, and I simply do not have the time to catalogue and link everything.  Again, I approach what to include on a case-by-case basis.  If I find what to my mind is a relevant piece – for example, A Weekend at the Beach by Ira Schneider – I do try to post about it, but so far I have not had time to devote an entirely separate section to moving images. 

Cinema=Godard=Cinema has gone hand-in-hand with my academic life for so long that I have difficulty considering it as “pioneering”.  I am still amazed when others mention how their work has benefited from it.  When I do get the occasional note of thanks, or when those who have devoted much more energy to open access (such as Catherine Grant with her invaluable work on Film Studies For Free) cite it as an inspiration, I am not only flattered but truly surprised.  It has been fascinating to watch how this occasional hobby of mine has transformed over the years, eventually taking on something like a life of its own.  Since ideas about open access are continuing to evolve, who knows what the site might become in the future?  I am not ruling out a third incarnation.

Copyright:

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-07-02, this article © Glen W. Norton

March 19, 2012

I was not born again when film studies went digital because I was always and already post-film. Starting in graduate school in Cinema Studies at New York University in the 1980s, my medium of choice was (activist) video, and by this I don’t mean simply that I thought and wrote and taught about the medium, but that I also made it, and this in relation to the communities and political issues that matter to me. (1) Hence, like many others at the edges of the field of Film Studies, I have always done my scholarly writing as an activist/art practice and visa versa. This I call my media praxis, (2) where I join those who “theorize and make media towards stated projects of world and self-changing. This ongoing project, as old as cinema itself, links culture, theory, and politics, in the 20th century, through mediation technologies and indebted to Marxist theories.” (3)

I took my media praxis online because I could and it was there. I don’t mean to be cavalier. Quite the opposite. If one engages in film and moving images studies as part of a committed practice of world and self-changing (through a range of social, intellectual, and political practices that include teaching, (4) mentoring, (5) writing (6), organizing (7) about and making media (8)) then one is compelled to make use of (all) the resources at hand. I learned this early through films, books, articles, classes, videos and conversations with a range of teachers, friends, and colleagues both actual and virtual: Laura Mulvey, Raymond Williams, Isaac Julien, Dziga Vertov … You get the picture:

Once there, of course you quickly realize that writing media scholarship online (9) really means that you get the picture, and the video, and sounds and montage, (10) too. Once there, who could miss the demands for new forms of writing (11) for new audiences? (12) 

(13)

So at this point, you’ve seen a jpeg, and a video by my students—but have you noticed all the links? (and, better yet, have you clicked?) They indicate volumes, troves, nay piles of thinking and writing by me that sit, freely and readily available, online (I told Catherine I’d write a simple 500 words, and I’m almost there, but as you see, that kind of tabulation (14) is nonsensical in this environment. [Please do click that last link on tabulation {or see footnote 14}, which leads to the self-referential online reprinting of my contract negotiations with Doug Sery at the MIT Press, and our debates about the obsolescence of word-counts and other holdovers of paper publishing, as I labored with him to create a contract that made sense for digital publishing]).

Thus, while it may be true that by moving one’s media studies writing online, access expands and uses and users shift, it remains unclear how thorough or attentive or committed one’s online readers will ever be (given the volumes of undifferentiated stuff, not to mention readers’ altered reading practices in this medium. [That’s why I put in honest-to-goodness footnotes: holding on to an earlier and clunkier but somehow still satisfying system of validation or authentication or verification. {Now these brackets inside of paragraphs are another matter, but I think fruitful when trying to stay flat and yet also signify new depths and layerings of writing systems}]). And this, at last, gets me to what I really want to say here (and also how I want to write it: through a series of arrows to or redactions of what and how I’ve already written online).

The Internet, and digital media more generally are simply new tools with which we write and share ideas to readers with the hopes of being understood and perhaps thereby changing our reader, our field, and/or thus, the world.

Thus, I’d suggest that the “digital” part, while being primarily the new technology of the day, is perhaps what was needed to push more scholars to engage with the personal and political implications (15) of their practices. (“Digital Humanities,” Alex Juhasz) (16)

I write some of my “media scholarship” on my blog because this happens in pretty much real time and to a small, living and lively community of readers and fellow bloggers. It is at once a platform, a record, and the real possibility of an exchange (as was writing on paper, surely, which was merely slower and less obvious in its associations). Online, we efficiently interact with each other, across discipline, rank, oceans, and medium (which is how I “met” Catherine, by the way, who then asked me to write this, which isn’t exactly a blog, although I’m writing it like it is one, given the casual nature of the online world, and given that I believe our writing forms need to change to acknowledge new audiences, new distribution, and new reading practices). For example, I recently shared this comment on Miriam Posner’s blog post, (17) “Things We Share.” I’ve never met her, but I hope to:

Just got turned on to your blog. How thrilling! When I think (and write and do) about doing as making as thinking I have often made videos (18) as well as books (19), and more currently “ video-books” (20) (which are really just big web-pages), so what I think has been lost in this “all Digital Humanities are communities of practice speak” (and particularly that this is a radicalizing moment for humanists) is not simply that people crafted before in that twee sense, but that academic writing is and always was doing, as it was craft, and that these added digital technologies have merely exposed that scholars were always making things, in ritualized ways, for particular users, with machines and for special(ized) uses (and now actually have to be accountable for this). I spoke with Victoria Szabo about this at length (21) for a panel she co-ran recently, Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates at the 2012 MLA Convention. (22) I love your four points at the end for the reason that it marks practice as political, and hope you’ll take a peek at some of the similar principles I’m working through at my Feminist Online Spaces (23) site (a work in progress to be sure).

Get the picture? Some of my film writing is now video on Vimeo. And that is where I started. (24) (And you do need to watch this to “get” all of my argument. Don’t worry, it’s short).

MLA 2012 Workshop Case Study #5 – Public Intellectuals and Politics from Victoria Szabo on Vimeo.

Endnotes:

The advent of open video—web-native video that creates opportunities for interactivity, layering, tagging, optional subtitles and more—poses challenges to traditional understandings of the documentary form. This is a format whose experience depends upon the viewer, that might morph and grow with viewer contributions, and that might act as much as archive or raw material as it does as final product.  Is this still documentary?

That question is puzzling scholars, at the same time that trying to execute open video is puzzling makers. There are few examples of successful open video, either measured by participation or profit, but many people are developing projects on the bleeding edge of innovation, all of which will provide useful feedback for those to come.  The Living Docs project brings together five partner organizations in the U.S., all differently working on creating open video; in Canada, the National Film Board is taking a lead in sponsoring such work; and organizations that host events and activities on new media, for instance IDFA’s DocLab and the European Union-funded Crossover Labs have this emergent form on the agenda.

Examples of open video include:

• Chris Milk’s The Wilderness Downtown, a music video in which your home town’s streets (thanks to Google Street View) will merge with an ambiguous runner’s journey;
• Kat Cizek’s One Millionth Tower, a combination of website, blog and documentary on the challenges and possibilities of high-rise culture;
• Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison’s Bear 71, a poignant portrayal of wildlife experience in an increasingly complex space;
• Yasmin Elayat and Jigar Mehta’s 18 Days in Egypt, a video, a collaboratively produced set of narratives and a website combining social media records of the Egyptian Spring;
• Steve James’ Interrupt Violence platform based on the film The Interrupters, featuring interactive stories, virtual shrines to the dead, and short videos drawn from the film. 

Whatever documentary filmmakers think of the web or technology or interactivity, they all will be wrestling with how these new opportunities change their aesthetic challenges. This is because, first, their users are increasingly living in the user-centric, interactive ecology of the web in which such options are normal (as advertisers now recognize and exploit). Second, the features provided by open video match deliciously the goals of many documentary filmmakers: to reach users, influence them, and motivate them to act. 

This is an emergent moment, with very little established. At the South by Southwest 2012 conference, panelists posited that this was open video’s “montage moment,” when the basic language of the form was still being experimented with. As an example, they showcased a scene from 18 Days in Egypt. An interview taken after the fact with a woman who was at a demonstration was shown in a box in the forefront. In the background ran video taken at the time of the same protest. The interview was 5 minutes long, the background video only 15 seconds. Designers looped the background video and used it as wallpaper behind the woman’s remarks, and tagged both pieces with identifying chronological information. “Someday this will all seem like, ‘Oh, of course,’” said developer Brian Chirls, “but we’re still figuring it out.” 

Jigar Mehta, one of the creators of 18 Days in Egypt, noted that the project is grounded in the notion of accessing and recombining authentic social media and citizen journalist records, but that this then requires reliable information on both what is being shown and when it was uploaded. He noted that video is often uploaded some undetermined time after the fact, and that tweets might not be written at the time that they are uploaded, or even by the people who are purportedly writing them.

Like makers, documentary film scholars will similarly be exploring the evolution, impact and implications of this emergent form. This moment provides a rare opportunity to study in real time the evolution of expression that both draws upon different aesthetic sources—including narrative film, documentary film, journalism, gaming, software design, and graphic design—and also is becoming a distinctive form of its own.

Copyright:

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?, 2012-07-02, this article © Patricia Aufderheide

1. The digitization of films suggests a new way of thinking about a film as discrete images rather than as part of a flow.

3. It is not simply that films themselves can now be randomized (2) with ease, but that this potential randomization mirrors the decentered architecture of the Web.

4. What does a poetics of randomization—i.e., randomly selecting (or having a computer program randomly select) X number of images/frames from a film as the basis of inquiry—mean for interpretation? Is it possible (or desirable) to break just a little bit free from the traditions of film theory—grounded as they are in interpretation—and move towards a form of film writing that relies on chance?

5. “Every tradition has special ways of gaining followers.  […] Depending on the tradition adopted this way will look acceptable, laughable, rational, foolish, or will be pushed aside as ‘mere propaganda.’ Argument is propaganda for one observer, the essence of human discourse for another.” [Paul Feyerabend] (3)

6. What is the ideology of randomization when used as a critical tool? If it privileges disorder, this is only at the symbolic level, for randomization itself is made possible by highly ordered and functional technologies. It is already coded for something, but for what? It is more than a tool, as all tools are. Lev Manovich’s work with ImagePlot, (4) for instance, is a story not just about the development of a new set of tools, but also a story about the aesthetics of such software, which is beautiful and elegant in its visualization. 

7. What is the location of a film in the digital era? Netflix, for instance, streams its movies using content delivery network servers hosted by the company Level 3 which, in a section of their website entitled “Streaming,” (5) describe themselves this way:

Level 3 delivers a superior streaming media experience to your broadband users. We are uniquely positioned to support the rich-media delivery that users demand. Powered by one of the most connected content delivery networks (CDN) in the world, the Level 3 Streaming platform is designed to support the next generation of streaming for leading media formats. Using this network, combined with Level 3 Vyvx video broadcast backhaul services, we can be your single-source transport provider, from Content Creation to Consumption.

8. More than ever before, film has no body. Its presence is obscure and uncertain. The projection booth is haunted. The images we see, what is their physical origination point? No longer projected, they emanate, but from where? And yet, the disembodiment of cinema makes sense, since movies have always transported (“moved”) us to someplace else. 

9. Time-shifting—the act of recording a program to view at a later date, pioneered by Sony in the 1970s—created the foundations for randomization as a cultural prerogative.

10. In cinema studies, randomization and chance are the equivalent of pure research. 

11. “On the very last page of the postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes of people’s willingness to stake everything on the chance of salvation. Chance makes the difference, says James, between ‘a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.’” [Geoff Dyer] (6)

12. Before the increasing number of procedural, technical, and economic standardizations that accompanied the emergence of film as industry, the experience of the film spectator was subject to variables that resulted in sometimes drastically differing experiences of the same film. In some instances, the projectionist had a hand in editing the film through the selection of reel order. In Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery, the placement of at least one shot—the bandit firing directly at the camera—has an element of chance or surprise depending on the local context of the film’s exhibition:

The spectators start out as railway passengers watching the passing countryside, but they are abruptly assaulted by a close-up of the outlaw Barnes firing his six-shooter directly into their midst. (This shot was shown either at the beginning or the end of the film. In a Hale’s Tours situation it would seem more effective at the beginning, in a vaudeville situation at the end as an apotheosis.) [Charles Musser] (7)

13. It may be more accurate to turn our thinking around and claim that it is not we who select this or that image or film to study, but rather than it is the film which selects us. “Randomization” thus refers not to the process of investigating the film in question, nor to the digital technologies that create the possibilities for chance-based retrieval of a film’s images, but rather to our own predilections, disguised as they may be within the discursive practices of academic inquiry. In other words, we are the ones selected—randomly it would seem—by the films we study.

Endnotes:

(1) Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 151.

Copyright:

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?, 2012-07-02, this article © Nicholas Rombes

Considering that David Bordwell and I were relatively late to acquire our first computers, we certainly did not expect to be regarded as pioneers in exploration of possibilities of taking academic film writing online.

Our early forays were tentative enough. In 2000, David put up a website on the ill-fated Geocities server. It contained his curriculum vitae and a statement about “Studying Cinema.” (The statement is still on his website.) A modest attempt, but he was the first faculty member in the Department of Communication Arts here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to have a personal website. In 2005 he started adding essays, beginning with “Film and the Historical Return.” The idea was to respond to issues in the field, as well as to add supplements to his published books. One such was “Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging,” commenting on David’s book of the same title. The site was essentially a way of doing traditional academic essays and getting them to readers more quickly than journal publication could do. The site remained a small part of David’s publishing.

I had no desire to establish my own website, and yet I was very much online. In 2003 I launched a project to write about the Lord of the Rings franchise which eventually became The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (University of California Press, 2007). Not only was I doing a great deal of my research online, but I was studying the relationship of the Peter Jackson’s film and the internet. I examined the official website, which was a pioneering one in a day when very few films had their own websites. I also studied the quasi-sanctioned unofficial sites and the range of fan sites that sprang up in response to the film. I got so much cooperation from webmasters and contributors to such sites that a planned single chapter on the Internet became two. I sent the manuscript to the press in early 2006.

The Textbook and the Blog

That year we happened to be revising our textbook Film Art: An Introduction for its eighth edition. As part of this process, McGraw-Hill always solicits sets of comments from a mix of professors who use Film Art and others who don’t. We can’t possibly take all the suggestions these reviewers offer, since most of them involve expansion of the text and we are strictly limited as to length. Inevitably, too, the suggestions one reviewer proffers are often exactly the opposite of what another would like to see us do. Every set of reviews, though, brings some intriguing and practical suggestions that we adopt. One such was buried in the reviews we received in August, 2005, when we were planning the eighth edition. In an answer concerning the Online Learning Center on McGraw-Hill’s website, an anonymous reviewer commented, “I think it would be quite innovative to offer an author’s blog or podcast. This would allow users of the text to interact with the author about film or to hear discussions between the authors and with experts.” (More on the second part of that suggestion below.) Our editors like the idea, and so did we.

That was during the era when huge numbers of blogs were coming online every day. Some were just ways of keeping in touch with friends and family—a function that Facebook subsequently took over, thinning out the blogosphere. Others were ways for young professionals to put themselves in the public eye in the hope of getting a job or even finding some way to monetize the blog and make a living with it. At that point the number of blogs created each day was rapidly rising, and it peaked in roughly April to August, 2006. By 2007, an average of a mere 120,000 new blogs was being created daily. (See the “New Blogs Per Day” chart here.) Countering all this enthusiasm was the fact that many bloggers abandoned their sites within months. In May, 2007, only about 21% of blogs then online were active.

Not great odds for success. Still, we were intrigued by the idea of having this new way of getting ideas and information out to Film Art users and anyone else who cared to visit our blog. We didn’t want to commit to a two-week schedule, since we had no idea of predicting how often we would be inspired to write something. We certainly had never aspired to be film reviewers, so that idea didn’t appeal. Most of all, we didn’t want the blog password-protected. If the blog was to promote Film Art, it had to be available to non-users as well as those who had already adopted it.

Finally, and I think we knew this intuitively from the moment all this was proposed, we could not allow comments on the blog. People have asked us about this or even complained, but we’ve read the comments sections of blogs. Some, like those on sites like Jim Emerson’s Scanners or Girish Shambu’s Girish, are intelligent and original—but both are moderated. We didn’t have the time or inclination to moderate comments. We also suspected we would get questions from students covertly looking for help on their term papers. (The more persistent ones can still email us occasionally, and we ignore them.) For these reasons and more, the comments feature on Observations on Film Art is not enabled. We have, however, posted some items that include “discussions between the authors and with experts.” David and I have had dialogues on Ratatouille and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. A group of students and alumni of the film program here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison got together to discuss the merits of sequels. These were crafted as entries, however, and not as a series of comments.

In fact when our blog went online a little over a year after it was suggested to us (September 26, 2006), it went by a more cumbersome name: Observations on Film Art and film art. The idea was to suggest that, although the blog was tied to the textbook, it would range further afield in exploring the art form. Eventually we dropped the second “film art.”

Our Own Private Journal

One of the pleasures of the blog was that we could upload the entries and post them ourselves. Meg Hamel, our amiable and efficient web czarina, who had been taking care of David’s website, set us up on WordPress. It’s so simple that even we could use it, though occasionally it would do odd things like render half an entry in bold type. At such points we went running to Meg for help. But as we have gained experience and WordPress has improved, such panics rarely occur.

For our first few months we were exploring this new outlet for our work. We tended to post often, and some of the entries were relatively short. David happened to be going for the first time to the Vancouver International Film Festival, so he reported, in two brief entries. Odd though it seems in retrospect, there were no pictures in those first entries. We soon learned to put images in, sizing and placing them. On November 12, 2006, David posted the first of many analytical pieces jammed with frame enlargements. We quickly discovered that one of the advantages of a blog is that there is essentially no limit on the number of illustrations we can use, and they can be in color, something that is seldom possible with print publications. Sometime later we established the policy of using illustrations in every post.

We use these frame enlargements on the same basis that we use the ones in our textbooks and scholarly books: as fair use reproduction for educational and analytical purposes. Twenty years ago I had the privilege of chairing an ad hoc committee of the Society for Cinema Studies (now the Society for Cinema and Media Studies) that examined the issue of fair use of film frames. The report, which called upon experts in copyright law, concluded that publishing even extended sets of frames was most likely fair use. The crucial and helpful provision of the fair-use law is that the copyright holder would have to prove that a specific set of illustrations damaged the commercial value of the original work—something that’s hard to do with a cluster of printed film frames versus a full-length film. The common-sense belief would be that the use of frames in an analytical context can only increase interest in a film and make people want to see it.

The SCS report, “Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills,” is available online. I know that the report has helped many authors get their work including film frames published without being required to seek unnecessary permission from copyright holders; some presses, both commercial and academic, have changed their policies as a result of the report and no longer require their authors to seek such permission. In the intervening decades, there has been no court case involving film frames that could set firm legal guidelines for use usage—probably because a copyright holder would foresee difficulties in winning such a case. Still, other court cases involving images and fair use have tended to favor the scholar or journalist’s right to use such images, as I discuss in “Fair is still fair, and more so.” This entry quotes a lawyer who deals in intellectual-property rights; he states unequivocally that the ways in which David and I use illustrations online should be considered fair use.

No doubt in part because of this ability to use images lavishly, our entries tended to be longer and more like academic articles than like typical blog posts. Some run up to around 5000 words, which is the size of a journal article. Still, they are not exactly like academic articles. They are more argumentative, analytical, and backed by evidence than typical blog poses, but we aim them toward a general public. A good student, while reading Film Art, should be able to go online and understand any entry.

One thing we quickly discovered was that we could not tie our entries closely to the textbook. It just wasn’t possible to, say, watch and film and write about the editing in it, hoping that classes using Film Art could use it as a supplemental example to the editing chapter. To keep up regular contributions to a blog, we needed to seize upon things that intrigued us, whether the results related to the textbook or not. Often the entries’ relevance to Film Art, if any, becomes apparent only after we’ve finished them. So we blog from film festivals; we try to refute debatable claims made by industry officials or journalistic pundits; we explore technology, from aspect ratios in Godard’s films to the ups and downs of 3D; and most of all we analyze films, old and new, formally and stylistically.

We’ve often said that the blog quickly became our own private film journal, with entries posted as soon as they’re finished and feedback given in the form of other bloggers and journalists linking to our new pieces. There’s no waiting a year for the result to appear, as is typical with print journals. Plus with a service called “StatCounter,” we can see how many hits we receive on which pages, how many visitors have been on the site before, how many pages they looked at, how long they stayed, and what country they “came” from. When you write for a print journal, you send an essay out into the world and wonder if anyone is actually reading it.

The blog has had the unintended but welcome consequence of broadening our horizons beyond the academic film world. Although we do have students and professors among our readership, our blog is also visited by film buffs, journalists, film-festival staff members, archivists, and filmmakers. At times we receive press passes for festivals and other events. Such contacts often mean that doing research is a very different thing than it would be in a more strictly academic context. In researching his recent “Pandora’s Digital Box” series on the move into digital filmmaking, exhibition, and preservation, David came into contact with film distributors, projectionists, and theater owners who were buying (or resisting buying) digital equipment. When I visited Wellington, New Zealand, in 2007, an invitation to sit in on sound-mixing on The Water Horse led to an entry, “What Does a Water Horse Sound Like?” (Barrie Osborne, who had produced The Lord of the Rings and supported my work on The Frodo Franchise, also produced The Water Horse.) In short, occasionally the blog allows us to step outside the ivy-covered walls of academe and into a world of films and filmmaking that we had previously studied mostly from a distance.

A Second Blog

In the first ten months or so of Observations’ existence, I posted a few entries related to what would turn out to be the long and convoluted progress toward the making of The Hobbit. David intimated that if I wanted to keep on in that direction, perhaps I should start a second blog. The result was the launch in August, 2007 of The Frodo Franchise, named for the book that had been published the month before. At first it consisted mainly of links to reviews and interviews, but it soon became a news site as well.

The blog largely focused on the many months when legal difficulties, MGM’s financial woes (the studio owned the distribution rights to The Hobbit and is co-producing it), and labor threats and other problems were delaying the commencement of filming on The Hobbit. I tried to offer some analysis of news events involving the film industry. Fans tend to assume the worst. For example, many took the Tolkien Trust’s lawsuit against New Line Cinema to be a sign that the author’s heirs wanted to scuttle the Hobbit project. I pointed out that the lawsuit was over money that was due to the Trust and publisher HarperCollins, stemming from a condition in the original 1969 film-rights contract sold by Tolkien himself; the studio was to hand over 7.5% of gross revenues, minus certain expenses. I also blogged constantly (110 times!) through the 2010 threats by labor organizations and the subsequent threat by Warner Bros. to take the production elsewhere if New Zealand didn’t sweeten the deal with further government incentives. It was an interesting few years.

The larger Tolkien-related websites have “spies” all over the world, sending news and tips and photos. I couldn’t match their coverage, but I did come to have a few spies myself, people in Portugal and Hong Kong and England who sent me all sorts of links. That’s an interesting phenomenon of Internet publication. People you don’t know and who aren’t scholars themselves get in touch and voluntarily help you out, with links and suggestions and, yes, corrections. By the way, once something is in print, you can’t do much more than ask for a correction in the next printing if it’s a book and for an errata note in the next issue if it’s a journal article. Now we can correct, add to, and otherwise tinker with old entries.

I kept the Frodo Franchise blog going in the hope that eventually I would be able to write a follow-up book on the making of The Hobbit. After years of delays, both in the film’s production and my attempts to solicit permission to do such a book, it turned out that I almost certainly will not be allowed to do so. Keeping up a blog takes a lot of time, and I decided that I would give it up. I suspended it on August 25, 2011. It remains online, since I hope it provides a useful record of the important events that happened during the long gap between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

To my pleasant surprise, TheOneRing.net, the largest Tolkien-related website, dealing with both books and films, immediately invited me to join their staff. Given that TORn occupied a major portion of Chapter 6, on fan-run websites, I was delighted to accept. I have contributed a few news items and plan to do a series of features about my experiences back in 2003-2005, when I was traveling to New Zealand and elsewhere to conduct the interviews that were the foundation of my book. Being on the staff of TORn allows me to become a part of what I studied and wrote about years ago. One section of the book covered the parties TORn ran for fans in Los Angeles after the three Oscar ceremonies where The Lord of the Rings won its total of seventeen awards. Recently the staff started preparations for post-Oscar ceremony parties for 2013, on the assumption that The Hobbit will at least pick up some nominations, if not wins. There will no doubt be another in 2014. I hope to make it for at least one of these. Participating in things that one has studied is a novel and so far pleasant experience.

Blog into Print, Book onto the Internet

In the summer of 2009, nearly three years after we launched Observations on Film Art, Rodney Powell of The University of Chicago Press raised the possibility of our collecting some of our blog entries into a book. This seemed rather odd to us at the time, especially since there was no requirement for us to remove those entries from the blog—something we would have been reluctant to do, given that the blog was in part intended to serve as an online resource for teachers and students. We soon agreed that it was worth a try. The University of Chicago was one of the first to venture into the new genre of blog-based books. At the time we were considering our project, they were about to publish Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner’s Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism, based on their popular economics blog. (Another early example was classicist Mary Beard’s blog-based It’s a Don’s Life, published in early 2010 by Profile Books.) It seemed worth the experiment. Besides, by that point we had about 250 entries on the blog, and despite an excellent search engine and many category tags, it wasn’t that easy for the new reader to explore the whole thing. (As I write in early 2012, we are approaching 500 posts.)

Preparing the collection of entries was an odd experience. Once we had chosen a selection with a considerable range of subject matter and not too many illustrations, we set in to polish the prose and to write a short postscript to each entry. The idea was to update each post without rewriting it. We wanted to preserve the original entries and their contexts as much as possible. Compared to our previous academic books, the process was relatively quick. An academic writer in our neighborhood teased us about doing a “free” book. It almost felt that way. Most of the prose was already there, and the process felt more like revising for a final version than doing a first draft. The book, Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking, appeared in the spring of 2011, and it has sold briskly—as well, at any rate, as most of our other academic books. Keeping the original entries online doesn’t seem to have hurt sales substantially. The book represents about a tenth of the total amount of prose that the blog contained when the manuscript went to the press.

I personally still prefer to publish on paper for anything I really want to remain available well into the future. Whatever provisions one may make for a blog or other publication to remain online after we no longer can maintain them, I fear that such things will eventually disappear. David, however, is more intrigued by the advantages of publishing on the internet in a more ambitious way.

His first experiment with putting work online in book form came after his book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema went out of print. Noticing that the University of Michigan Press had launched an online series of out-of-print English-language books on Japanese cinema, David offered Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema to them. On the first pass, the book’s pages were scanned and converted into pdfs. But the result was murky, and the back-and-white stills looked ugly. So Abe Markus Nornes, who was working as the sponsor of the series, persuaded the press to redo the project with newly-minted stills. Markus used DVDs to generate the color images, while David rescanned the black-and-white ones from his original negatives. The result was a very presentable version of the original. Many people have told him that they were happy to have the book in such useful and searchable form. (It’s available for free download here.)  

This seems to me one of the most promising purposes for online books. Once a book is in print, it can be put into libraries and other collections where it is preserved in hard copy. But once it goes out of print, why not make it available online? These days that usually means a pdf, though no doubt more sophisticated file programs will soon make online books even more attractive. My own Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907-1934 was published by the BFI in 1985 and went out of print in record time. The BFI was switching American distributors, and as far as I know, the book never got released in the USA at all. Now it’s available as a pdf on David’s website. Other books will follow as time allows.

David has taken this notion a step further. When his Planet Hong Kong was taken out of print by Harvard University Press, he revised it extensively into a second edition and began selling it online. With three new chapters and updating of existing ones, it was significantly different, and the illustrations reproduced in black and white in the print edition are all now in glorious color. The book hasn’t sold a huge number of copies, but the expenses of having it professionally laid out with a new design have been paid off. A few teachers are assigning it in classes, so it promises to have long if modest sales. David did want some print copies. He had several locally printed and bound, which proved handy when libraries preferred copies to pdfs.

To some extent the online sales of Planet Hong Kong, second edition, in pdf form has been an experiment in how viable online academic self-publishing is. David is currently contemplating other online projects of various sorts, each of which will probably be slightly different in nature: further experiments along these same lines.

There are advantages and disadvantages to such publication. One does not have the professional editorial staff of a university press doing the work on the book, so it falls to the author to learn how to do it or to hire someone else (as David did). There is no outside peer review, so someone working with an eye to tenure or promotion or an impressive CV for grant applications should probably steer clear of this sort of publication until later in his or her career. But if such considerations are irrelevant, the advantages are obviously complete control and a speedy dispatch of the work into the world once it is ready. Various services offer the possibility of tracing the number of online views and often the location of the visitors. 

Conclusions

By now David and I have explored several options for online publication, though we have certainly not exhausted the possibilities. Whether the blog has really achieved the initial goal of having an impact on the sales of Film Art is difficult to judge. One of our reviewers who commented on the ninth edition said he or she discovered the book through the blog and adopted it, which of course is gratifying. Some teachers do use the blog in their classes, assigning individual entries or simply drawing upon material for their lectures. We have no way of gauging how widespread such usage is.

Whether or not the blog significantly promotes Film Art and our other books, we are committed to continuing it. Given that we launched Observations on Film Art shortly after David’s retirement, for him it provides somewhat the same sort of professional satisfaction that teaching previously had. It has allowed us to write prose that is a blend of the academic and journalistic: substantive and yet accessible to non-specialist readers. We can be topical in ways impossible in the world of printed academic journals, where getting an article into print can take a year or more. With one or the other of us posting something every week on average, we seldom do the sort of intense research necessary for a refereed print article, and yet it has turned out to be remarkable how much substantive material one can bring together in a piece written in a day or two, or even an afternoon.

Retirement is the ideal time for blogging. To a student struggling with a dissertation or an assistant professor trying to finish that tenure book, a blog is an easy distraction and a heavy drag on one’s time. Some professors teaching full-time manage to maintain excellent blogs: Henry Jenkins’ Confessions of an Aca-fan, for one, and Jason Mittell’s Just TV and j. j. murphy on independent cinema. So it is possible, but it’s something to be undertaken with caution. One consideration is how large a readership will prove satisfying enough to motivate the author to keep on blogging. When we started out there were still quite a few aggregator blogs providing links to individual entries, but the number of those has dwindled considerably. Now a lot of hits come from twitter feeds and other somewhat ephemeral sources. Certainly one should not undertake a blog hoping to make money at it. We don’t have any direct income from the blog, and we can but trust that our book sales are probably higher as a result of it. We blog because we enjoy it, we learn from it, and we trust that it is of interest and use to the two thousand or more people who on average visit our site every day. Surely that is far more than read our printed articles and academic books on a given day.

Copyright:

This article © Kristin Thompson

What exactly is the relationship between cinephilia and criticism? It turns out there is no easy answer to this question. In the mid-70s, Laura Mulvey, in her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” (1) pitted one squarely against the other. For her, cinephilia reached its apotheosis at especially those moments when the movement of the film seemed suspended – when the narrative was stilled – to permit the spectacle of the woman to emerge, so she could be “looked at”. With the viewer lost in the spectacle, and unaware of its political implications, the critical enterprise collapsed, killed by cinephilic pleasure. Cinephilia had moved inward – but it remained there, without moving outward.

30 years later, in her book Death: 24x a Second, (2) Mulvey returned to this opposition between movement and stillness – but this time with a radical reorientation. DVD technology now allowed the flow of a film to be halted, but it enabled the viewer to both move into the image (scan every inch of it, temporarily lose oneself in it) but then, spurred by critical reflection, move out into the larger, surrounding world of social and political realities. This is not to say that such a process of halting followed by critical reflection was impossible in the pre-video era – we haven’t forgotten Raymond Bellour’s micro-level shot-by-shot analyses. But by putting this ability into the hands of the ordinary cinephile, it gave film culture at least the potential for an enhanced criticism.

While I believe that DVD- and Internet-era cinephilia doesn’t automatically result in a deeper, more penetrating criticism, it can, at its best, help generate a wellspring of new and richly suggestive material on the Net for the curious and searching scholar.

To take one example: Kansas Sire is the pseudonym of a cinephile based in Cadiz, Spain. She can be found on the Internet at Facebook (where her admirers include filmmakers and critics like Jose Luis Guerin, Pascal Bonitzer and Alain Bergala) and at Tumblr. Daily, she posts still images, well chosen for their mystery and evocativeness, from little known or unknown films. Here is a small sample of films whose arresting and memorable images I discovered on her Facebook page one week: La Corruzione (Mauro Bolognini, 1963), Tomorrow is Another Day (Felix E. Feist, 1951), Kriminal (Umberto Lenzi, 1966), The Easiest Way (Jack Conway, 1931), and Sudden Rain (Mikio Naruse, 1956). Let alone seeing them, I had not heard of any of these films!

Kansas Sire may not be “doing criticism” in the traditional sense, but she is involved in a kind of work that conflates the cinephilic and the critical. Her image-posts suggest correspondences, provoke speculation, and spur our cinephilic curiosity, all of which are necessary for new criticism to be born. This is why such cinephiles – and there are many on the Internet – can be of value to the large, international project of film studies.

Recently, Sire posted a haunting still from Michel Deville’s Le voyage en douce (1980), an unpopulated frame in which we see a neatly made bed, in a corner of the room, with a painting hanging above it. “I said: “I was lost,”” read the subtitles at the bottom of the image, translating (we assume) an offscreen voice. Falling into a reverie, I stared at this sharply evocative still image for a while, and then read the Facebook comment immediately below, by Bonitzer: “Sometimes there is more cinema in one photogramme than in the movie from which it is extracted…”

Endnotes:

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up an email that had been sent to the address of the colonial film project. It read simply ‘Hello, the district officer ID 20034 is my Dad!’.

The email refers to District Officer, (1945), which was produced by the Government unit Information Films of India, and which shows the work of an Indian district officer as he mediates local disputes and manages local affairs in the district of Bengal. This 15 minute film is one of more than 6000 catalogued on the Colonial Film website, and one of more than 350 to contain a detailed historical essay (divided into the fields of ‘context’ and ‘analysis’), in this case written by Colin MacCabe.

In his account of District Officer, MacCabe argues that the District Officer is presented as ‘a man apart’, a man ‘without family or background – that is to say he is a man outside any history except that of progress.’ (1) Through an email correspondence, initiated from this original brief message, we are now able to fill in this background, to glimpse the family and history that the film so carefully omits.

Not only does the email correspondence now identify the District Officer and indeed the filmmaker, it also provides a wealth of contextual information, which invites fresh readings of the film. After further correspondence, we received the unpublished memoir of the District Officer, Samar Sen, which contains a passage on the making of the film. The passage dates the filming to the end of 1943, which alters the context both in relation to the War and the largely unmentioned, but ongoing, Bengal Famine. Sen was serving at the time as the Regional Controller of Procurement of Rice, responsible for buying up rice for the government and distributing it to the starving millions. As Sen notes, ’the procurement of rice which was my specific job did not feature in the film.’[2]

The memoir also discusses the Government’s intentions for the film. In contrast to many IFI films, and in particular to their intensely unpopular (but historically fascinating) domestic newsreel Indian News Parade (1943-1946), District Officer was intended primarily for an American audience, so that ‘the USA should not misunderstand the British objective in India.’ The memoir is also able to provide additional information on the reception of the film – the gap between ideological aim and popular response – as Sen later asked officers in the Ministry of Information about the film. He was informed that ‘on the first showing in New York there was so much shouting, hooting, and malicious handclapping and cheering that the British authorities had decided to withdraw it forever.’ Sen then explained to the officials his reasons for wanting to know more about this film. ‘As I was the central figure and was going to NY’, he wrote, ‘I wanted to be sure that I would not be mobbed on arrival. There was much mirth all round.’[3]

It is not my objective to discuss the significance of this particular film here, but rather to illustrate the ways in which the open access colonial film site has initiated an exchange of information between the archives in the UK and the former colonies depicted on screen. Many of these films – particularly the instructional films – sought to relate the colonies back to the imperial centre, whether through maps, intertitles, economic products or through scenes of modern transport and movement across the screen. The colonial film site re-examines this exchange, and moves these rarely seen images from London back to the former colonial territories.

District Officer is one of more than 150 films that are freely available to view on the website without restriction. This sets the project apart from many online projects – for example InView or Screenonline – which are restricted to the UK and largely to academic institutions. Colin MacCabe and Lee Grieveson, the co-directors of the project, insisted from the outset that, given the nature of this material (colonial film), these films should not be contained within geographical or institutional boundaries. While recognising the challenges that this presents for the archives (the films are available to stream rather than download), the website helps to introduce and open up these British archives, to make connections across the three archives and to ensure that films and research that previously could only be viewed at a cost in London are accessible beyond what was once the imperial centre.

Despite officially ending almost two years ago, the project receives emails on a daily basis from all parts of the world.[4] The responses can broadly be divided into three categories. Firstly, there are emails either requesting or providing further information about the films. Secondly, a regular stream of emails discuss possible events that the project might collaborate on, for example talks, film screenings, festivals, educational programmes, and tv documentaries. Finally, as in the case of District Officer, we receive emails from people who have either identified, or are searching for, people within the films.

The District’s Officer’s son, Jupiter Sen, explained how he came to find the film. ‘I had thought of it [the film] but with no title, the passage of time, and the obscurity of the subject – where would we start to look? Idly I then went on the internet and that’s how I came across it almost immediately under the Colonial Film banner.’ For Jupiter Sen, the film now provided a connection to a father and a world that had passed. In an exchange that Andre Bazin would no doubt have enjoyed, Sen discussed his reaction on finding the film. ‘It was, I can tell you, a jolt to suddenly see my father at an age when there were not even photographs of him. Strange too for my mother!  In fact we asked someone to be with her when she got to see it, in case it was perturbing, but she took it in her stride.’[5]

The films are evidently connected here to issues of memory and to the trope of recognition. A large number of the requests we receive relate to the fascinating war rushes, brilliantly catalogued by the curators at the IWM, as relatives look for ‘living flashes’ of family members in the unedited Second World War footage. If the Empire is now a more distant and – as many on the project would argue – repressed memory, these films help to connect across time and space (Jupiter Sen noted the comments of his cousin who had watched the film in Dubai) and also, through the contextual essays, between ideological aim and political ‘reality’.

The project held monthly seminars, conferences, film seasons and produced two edited book collections, but the academic basis for the project was always the 1000 word historical essays (I wrote 206 of these, but who’s counting…).[6] The important point here is that this was never a digitisation project. The digitisation was intended as a way of glimpsing into the collections, of supplementing the historical research. This is increasingly unusual with archival projects, but it was not the intention to merely posit the films on the internet, but rather to curate, contextualise and analyse a selection from the archive. This was particularly important given the sensitive and politically charged nature of this material, but also given the fact that these films are so often about what they are not or, as Colin MacCabe notes, they reveal more through their omissions.[7]

In his essay, MacCabe examines District Officer within its historical context, noting the significant omissions from the film (‘perhaps the most striking feature of this film is what it does not contain – any explicit discussion of Independence’). ‘What is interesting about this particular film’, MacCabe adds, ‘is how it portrays the liberal imperialist dream of India ruling itself without any British direction but in a completely British manner.’ MacCabe further notes here that the most ‘evident marker of this absence’ is when the District Officer travels to Calcutta to see his superior, a figure not depicted on screen. Samar Sen’s memoir reveals that a lengthy sequence was filmed in Calcutta, showing the ‘training the Indian Officials had undergone’, but this was evidently cut from the final film.[8] The essays thus provide a way to acknowledge what was missing (the voice of the subaltern) and to recognize disparities between the ideological intent and the social and political situation of the time.

To an extent, the colonial film website is a history of the archives, an institutional record of those films that have come into these three British archives. As the vast majority of the materials preserved are those of the colonial authorities, the essays provide a way to connect to the films, people, audiences and voices, not represented within the corpus.

The format of presenting the academic essay alongside the digitised film also offers an online model for studying and analysing the films. As the vast majority of these films fall outside established film canons, the juxtaposition of academic essay and film invites further reexaminations of these rarely seen films. We were, perhaps naively, unaware at the outset how important the digitised footage would be in drawing readers to the academic essays. However, we were acutely aware that in selecting the digitised films the project was potentially creating a new canon or, at least, directing future students in their research. History is written by the archives, dictated by the material that is readily available and privileged. In selecting the 350 films that would receive ‘enhanced entries’ (the historical entries) and the 150 films that would be digitised, the project merged idealistic aims with the more practical considerations.

So how did we select these ‘enhanced entries’? In writing historical essays, we sought to select at least one film from each colony, across the spectrum of dates from 1896 to 1997. Some examples were outstanding because of what they showed (for example footage of Mau Mau or Gandhi’s release from incarceration), while others assumed significance from a film perspective (for example previously unseen Basil Wright footage from British Guiana). We would also consider the audiences here. Who was this film made for? Where was this shown? For example, the site includes the only three surviving films of the Bekefilm xperiment (1935-1937), which contains some of the earliest films made specifically for African audiences. Yet, often these considerations were accompanied by more practical demands – is there a viewing copy of the film? What do we know about this film or what do we think we might find here? Given the scale of the collection, it was neither practical nor possible to view the entire corpus.

The project was also eager to ensure that the digitised films were representative of the collection, rather than simply the outstanding or unique examples. As all of us on the project would attest, not every film was a gem. There are tropes and patterns across the corpus and our entries and digitisation needed to acknowledge this, rather than skewer the corpus by prioritising the exceptional 5% and making the exceptional the norm. There were further practical decisions here. Is this film available elsewhere? Is this film of interest to other audience groups (for example in different countries or disciplines)? Is this film commercially lucrative (and if so does the archive want it online)? What condition is the film in (is there any money to preserve or restore?)? Which version should we put up? Perhaps most crucially, who owns the rights to this film and can we put this online? Thanks to the fantastic support and perseverance of the archives, we were eventually able to include the vast majority of our chosen films. 

These decisions also informed (and were informed by) the design of the site, as we considered the various ways in which scholars and the general public might approach these films. The interactive map became the visual navigator for the site, but the films are grouped not only by country and date, but also by production company, by theme (for example ‘Empire and Health’), genre and historical events. We wrote lengthy essays on the most significant of these production companies (for example, Gold Coast Film Unit, Jamaica Film Unit, Information Films of India).

The earlier example of District Officer is a far from isolated example of the ways in which the colonial project has moved images beyond national and institutional boundaries in order to better understand these films. As a final example, early in the project the BFI posted a film, Springtime in an English Village, on its YouTube channel. The film depicts an African girl that is crowned May Queen in an English village. Initially little was known about this film. It was dated as 1948 and there was no information on the location or the personnel. However, after finding an article in Colonial Cinema magazine, we were able to date the film to 1944, specify the village depicted (Stanion, Northamptonshire) and provide information on the production company, the Colonial Film Unit, which made films specifically for African audiences. This information not only reshaped our reading of the film – as a part of the British Government’s war propaganda for the colonies – but also now brought the film to viewers directly connected to the events depicted on screen. 

A few months later, one of the curators at the BFI noticed a comment that had been posted beneath the film on the BFI YouTube page. It was sent from the daughter of the May Queen depicted on screen, who was now living in Maryland (it should be noted that not all YouTube comments are so helpful). The BFI contacted mother and daughter, and this led both to interviewswith the ‘May Queen’ about her experiences, and also contact with friends from her time as an evacuee in the village 60 years earlier. Mother and daughter have since revisited Stanion. While long lost reunification was not a stated aim of the project, it does reiterate the ways in which these films can connect across space and time, but also the importance of contextualising and curating these digitised film materials.[9]

Endnotes:

Style in The Wire from Erlend Lavik on Vimeo.

Though I only published my first video essay, “Style in The Wire”, on April 4 2012, I have been interested in the format for some five years. (1) Initially, I sought to explore, from a purely theoretical perspective, the potential of digital technology to enhance film and television criticism. In a series of polemical essays (written in Norwegian) I tried to give an idea of how the incorporation of sound and moving images could reinvigorate contemporary debates about audiovisual art.

This preoccupation springs from a belief that film criticism matters. It is not – or ought not be – some expendable enterprise on the periphery of film culture, a mere accessory to the core activities taking place on the inside. To be sure, film criticism would not exist without filmmaking, but what would “film” be without analytically, theoretically, and historically informed deliberation? While it would be an exaggeration to claim that individual critical contributions are essential, film criticism as a collective undertaking is not something we could just as well do without. From a bird’s-eye view, film criticism and film production are interdependent. Film culture requires a discursive infrastructure, and the makeup of this infrastructure affects our notions of what film – as popular entertainment and as art– is and can be. The medium’s aesthetic, social, and political significance is not given in advance, but at least partly shaped by what we collectively have to say about it. And it has seemed to me for a long time that our communal conversations about film could use a shot in the arm.

One problem is the gulf that has developed between journalistic and academic film criticism. The former lacks intellectual ambition (especially evident in a small country like Norway, where gifted and knowledgeable writers are at a premium, and film has never really been an integral part of the cultural heritage); the latter is frequently rather exclusionary. Certainly, scholarship requires specialization, and it is both inevitable and appropriate that many disciplinary concerns appear esoteric or immaterial to outsiders. But at the same time I think that, on the whole, film studies has become too hermetic and too often fails to engage a wider audience.

Personally, I also find that academic film criticism has gone a bit stale. To my mind the best analyses offer something that is both unexpected and plausible, yet all too rarely do I come across scholarly work that deftly steers a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of the obvious and the far-fetched. There is reason to believe that recourse to audiovisual quotations enables us to strike a better balance. On the one hand, it provides the means to study films and television series in greater detail and depth, increasing the chances of breaking past – or at least enlivening – commonplace observations. On the other, it might rein in excessively fanciful explorations, grounding them in the concreteness of the works under examination. Or even better: make them less fanciful by equipping critics with the tools to fashion more evidential, exacting, and accessible accounts.

In short, I believe that digital technologies and the Internet afford an opportunity to rejuvenate film criticism. Certainly, blogs represent a different kind of publication outlet. It allows film scholars to address a wider and more diverse audience than academic journals and books, and also to bypass the lengthy peer review process, making it possible to write about recent releases and take part in current debates, rather than merely commenting upon them after they have faded from public consciousness. It also offers new means of expression, such as hyperlinks and easy-to-use frame grabs, as well as freedom from editorial policies.

Still, it always seemed to me that it was the video essay that held the greatest promise. It is not just a way to dress up research and make it more available, valuable as that is; I believe it may also broaden, or at least reframe, intellectual inquiry. The means of expression available to us tend to act as a kind of prism that focuses our attention on some aspects of a film, but not others. Recourse to sound and moving images allows light to enter the object of study from a slightly different angle, thus bringing into view other avenues to explore. Seeking to disclose and describe the potential of digital film criticism led me to several fine video essays. Still, much as I admired many of the efforts, I usually found myself wanting more. The analyses often seemed somewhat sketchy, and would end just as they were getting really interesting. Of course, conventional wisdom has it that the overabundance of choice on the net triggers impatience, so everything should be broken down into easily consumable chunks. But the potential audience is so vast online that there tends to be a considerable niche market for just about anything.

I wanted more detail, more information, more ideas, or ideas that were more fully developed. I wanted something that was less like an abstract, and more like the audiovisual equivalent of a full-fledged academic article. Or perhaps a kind of short scholarly documentary. There are of course a number of documentary films about filmmaking – about genres and styles, about individual filmmakers and films – that can draw on the same resources as the video essay. But they typically consist of interviews with experts and/or celebrities who each provide different perspectives on the same topic. This approach has its advantages, of course, but I also find that it tends to blunt the analytical edge. The documentarian is largely a mediator. His or her task is to obtain and talk to appropriate participants, then hopefully to piece together in the editing process a somewhat coherent argument from fragments of conversation, while also supplying suitable illustrations. The video essayist, by contrast, is the expert. Everything is conceived and executed by one person. Words and images spring from the same source, so the analysis is more organic, and the point of view more consistent. Whereas the argument, as well as the composition of the audiovisual material, has an unmistakably ad hoc character in documentary films about film, it is fully premeditated in the video essay. Documentaries come at the object of analysis more broadly, but tend to be more superficial; the video essay’s pursuit of insight is – or can be – more single-minded and piercing.

In 2009 and 2010 I wrote a couple of pieces on The Wire, and after narrowing the scope of inquiry I had some leftover material. Initially the plan was to expand it into a new a article, but the topic – the series’ visual symbolism – turned out to be awkward to deal with in writing, so I decided this was a good time to try my hand at a video essay. That some sections of the voiceover were originally part of a traditional academic article is one reason I think of “Style in The Wire” as a piece of scholarship in its own right, rather than simply as communication of research – though it is that too, of course.

Another reason I wanted to make a video essay was that I was hired as a postdoctoral researcher on an interdisciplinary project on copyright called Of Authorship and Originality. I had heard about the travails of Kevin B. Lee, whose entire archive of essays was deleted by YouTube in 2009 because they were alleged to infringe (http://www.heranet.info/oor/index) on the owners’ intellectual property. I figured that working on a video essay would be of relevance to the new project, while at the same time allowing me to pursue scholarly interests that were already up and running.

So I rewatched the whole series in the spring of 2010 and – with the different format in mind – came to notice new features of the show that were now possible to integrate into the analysis. I extracted all the clips that I reckoned would go into the essay, and wrote a 15-page manuscript for the voiceover. The question I have been asked most frequently since the essay was published is how long it took to create. I am afraid I cannot give a very exact answer. As other projects took priority, I had to abandon the video essay for long periods of time. Also, I had no experience with editing software, so I had to learn everything from scratch. I tried iMovie, but found it a bit too basic for my purposes. Finally, in February 2012, I bought Final Cut Pro X, and for some two months I worked intensively to put everything together, learning as I went (a big thank you goes out to all the people who have uploaded instruction videos on YouTube). At times it was frustrating and quite time-consuming, but I found comfort in the fact that it is basically a one-time investment. I am sure the next video essay will take considerably less time to create. I can honestly say that no one should be put off by the technological challenge.

When it came time to publish the video essay, I explored various options. Ideally, I would have liked to submit it to an academic open access journal. Unfortunately, there are not many such outlets that publish audiovisual work. Audiovisual Thinking  is the only one I know of that is peer reviewed, but they do not accept submissions of more than seven minutes in length or over 50 MB (my video is 36 minutes and 3,87 GB). Hopefully this will change in the future.

However, I was familiar with the superb efforts of Catherine Grant to collect and comment on open access scholarship on moving images on Film Studies For Free, as well as the group forum she curates on Vimeo called Audiovisualcy, which is explicitly dedicated to video essays. I knew she has a considerable following, so there was a good chance the essay would reach at least a few film academics and aficionados if she would promote it. Thankfully she did, and I was very happy with the response. After the first five days the essay had received almost 3000 page loads and been played 257 times – a wider audience, I suspect, than any of my academic articles has had. The next day it was mentioned on Slate and the numbers skyrocketed. Soon other major media outlets picked it up, like The Washington Post, A.V. Club, and the popular blog kottke.org (which has generated more hits for the essay than any other site). A very busy week followed. I was first interviewed by a couple of university periodicals, then by the main regional paper, an interview subsequently reproduced in the largest newspaper in Norway. I was invited to speak on national radio, to give a talk at a conference, and I was interviewed by Co.Create. Since then I have also been asked to create a shorter version for high school students, and to talk about the video essay format at other universities looking to integrate it into research and teaching activities. Most pleasing of all, however, were the hundreds of emails I received from all over the world. Many of them were from fans of The Wire, from students, or other academics, and I even got one from a Los Angeles-based author and television scriptwriter.

At the time of writing, some six weeks after ”Style in The Wire” was published, the statistics show 472,065 loads and 56,637 plays. Of course, we regularly hear about videos that get millions of hits on YouTube. But keep in mind that this essay is not really addressed to a general audience, but primarily to people who have seen The Wire. Also, it lasts for more than 36 minutes and is, after all, a piece of scholarship (it does not announce itself as such, of course, and it has crossed my mind that it might have helped its circulation on the internet that it is not branded as “research”). Readership figures for academic articles in scientific journals are hard to come by, but are likely very low. An essay from 2009 suggested that monographs in the humanities, even at the most prestigious publishing houses, usually sell between 275 and 600 copies, and many of those are library orders. In academic terms, then, “Style in The Wire” is something of a blockbuster – and not once, I am happy to say, have I come across the dreaded acronym, TLDW! I do not expect to ever make another video essay that will be as widely seen as this one, but I will definitely continue to explore the format, both theoretically and practically.

Endnotes:

(1) Editorial note: please also see Erlend Lavik’s peer-reviewed essay in this issue of Frames, ‘The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism?’.

Copyright:

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?, 2012-07-02, this article © Erlend Lavik