Shifting Time: Video Culture 1976 - 1996

Follow the link below to go to a lecture I recently gave for the Channels Australian Video Art Festival (September 18-21 2013). In this lecture I explore some of the characteristics of the video generation. I am using the term generation here in the broad sense of referring to a specific social group or, put another way, a particular cohort made-up of three generational types: Generation Jones, Generation X and Generation Y.(1)

What makes-up the video generation are individuals who grew up as children, teenagers or young adults between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. Such individuals had formative years of media exposure that were directly influenced by a number of changes that were occurring within the realm of consumer electronics. For one thing, the video generation went through the transition from an analog based environment to a digital one; in other words, they went from using media technologies like record players and the cassette Walkman to CD players and the CD Walkman (and in the area of visual media the transition was from VHS tape to DVD).(2) The video generation also experienced the last stages of the mass broadcast period. By the late-1970s, early-1980s, mediums like television were transitioning into what is often referred to as the era of narrowcasting. 

One of the key things that characterised this transition was the development in cable and satellite network television (or subscription TV) which, at least in the countries like the United States, was being adopted by consumers as early as the late 1970s. The cable-satellite platform had an immediate impact upon the television industry because it represented a new way of addressing audiences. As Patrick Parsons has said (speaking about the US market): "From an industry dominated by three national networks, television evolved into a multichannel environment in which viewers had access to dozens of highly specialised program choices." (3) In other words, the broadcast model of cable was based upon diversity and attracting niche audiences rather than on finding mass appeal for a limited number of shows.

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But, perhaps, the most defining feature of the video generation was the revolution in home entertainment technology that occurred with the introduction of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR), a technology that had a number of impacts upon the home viewing experience. One of the most crucial of these impacts was time-shifting. As I discuss in the lecture, time-shifting can be understood in a number of ways; however, in its simplest sense, time-shifting refers to the act of recording shows broadcast on television and watching them at a time that is more convenient. Among other things, this deceptively simple act of personalising home viewing helped to create a new kind of active audience.

In addition to explaining the various ways VCR technology shifted time, I also explore the role that the VCR had in creating not only another ancillary or secondary market for theatrically realised films, but also a new market for film distribution; namely, the straight-to-video film (which has its contemporary counterpart in the straight-to-DVD film). As I discuss, drawing on the work of Tom O'Regan, the VCR played a significant, indeed indispensable, role in bringing about new market formations for film distribution and consumption, new market formations that continue to shape our current digital revolution. (5) 

In order to illustrate my argument I show clips from two documentaries that have recently come out on VHS culture: Rewind This (Josh Johnson, 2013) and Adjust your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector (Dan Kinem & Levi Peretic, 2013). 

To listen to the lecture please click on this link: 

https://vimeo.com/77479592

Endnotes

(1) The label Generation Jones is generally used to refer to those born between 1955 and 1967. It is used to distinguish a generation of people who, in the words of social commentator Jonathan Pontell (the man credited with coming up with the label), "are neither Boomers or GenXers" but rather a social group with their own particular attitudes and sensibilities. For more information see Jonathan Pontell's article in The Independent: "Clegg's rise is the sound of Generation Jones clearing its throat". Also, visit the website http://www.generationjones.com/ My overall point here is that the video generation was made-up of different cohorts of people and also different age groups. 

(2) DVD did not actually enter the retail market for consumer electronics until 1997. However, by the end of the millennium, it had already started to dramatically strip away analog video's market share of film distribution (including rental distribution). For more information see Mark Parker and Deborah Parker's (2011)The DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text. 

(3) Patrick Parsons, "The Evolution of the Cable-Satellite Distribution System", Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Vol. 47, Issue 1, March 2003, pg. 1. 

(4) First aired in August, 1981, MTV was the most popular and influential 24-hr music video cable channel of the 1980s (and it, and its sister channels like Video Hits One, have continued to cater to large television and online audiences (see "Move Over, MTV" http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-08-21/move-over-mtv). Although it should be pointed out that, since the mid-1980s, the MTV network has also broadcast event based shows, such as "The MTV Video Music Awards", and also non-music programs. The image above is taken from the first stream of images that were broadcast by MTV at 12.01 am Eastern Time. MTV CEO at the time, Bob Pittman, has explained why imagery from the Apollo 11 space flight was used: 

"We were trying to figure out what icon we were going to use to say, 'This is a change in TV.' So we had this idea that we were going to use the words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Those were Neil Armstrong's words, so we sent a letter to Neil Armstrong, saying 'We're going to use this...unless you tell us no.' We had the video already cut. Every hour, it's supposed to say,'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind' [then sings top-of-hour music]. Literally, the week before, we get a letter from him, saying, 'No, you can't use it.' Then we have the decision, do we have to scrap this whole iconography? And Fred Seilbert convinced ourselves that it was OK to be more abstract, that we didn't have to say it. We could still just have the video there and the guy jumping around on the moon...And that's the way we went. But the whole idea was to use the space motif, which was very hot at the time. You know, the shuttle was just coming out [Space Shuttle Columbia launch]. To really say, 'We're new, different, cutting edge etc.'" (See MTV Ruled the World: The Early Years of Music Video, Greg Prato, 2010, pg. 31) 

(5) Tom O'Regan, "Remembering Video: Reflections on the First Explosion of Informal Media Markets through the VCR", Television and New Media, Vol. 13, Issue 5, April 2012.

Images of War: The Politics of Aesthetics in the Work of Werner Herzog

Follow the link below to go to a video recording of a lecture I delivered in June, 2011 for the Melbourne Free University film course 'An Introduction to the Politics of Representation and Aesthetics in Cinema'. In this lecture I tease out some of the responses that have historically been given to the questions: Does cinema actually have a politics? Is there a politics of cinema?

I also analyse two 'non-fiction' war films made by the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. These films are Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984) and Lessons of Darkness (1992). I situate the work of Herzog in terms of the socio-political climate of the 1960s and 70s, the New German Cinema movement, and media spectacle and technology.

I argue that Ballad of the Little Solider and Lessons of Darkness reveal some of the complexities that are involved in thinking about the politics and ethics of war representation. 

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_EkPw2y6c&feature=youtu.be

The Wild Blue Yonder

Follow the link at the end of this post to read my Cinematheque Annotation on Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder (2004). This annotation is published in Senses of Cinema as part of the Cinematheque Annotations on Film Series. The Wild Blue Yonder has been described as a science fiction film; indeed, in the film's opening credit sequence there is a superimposed title that reads: ‘A science fiction fantasy’. Herzog has said that by 'science fiction fantasy' he means that the science fiction genre always involves imagination and fantasy: "science fiction, of course, goes into fiction...it has to be fantasy". (1)

This observation of Herzog's is interesting because science fiction stories often draw on empirical facts as well as speculative propositions that stem out of scientific research. Nonetheless, as a number of writers have pointed out, however much a depicted state of affairs draws on actual reality, the science fiction genre operates in the realm of imagination. (2) Steve Neale, for example, has suggested that from 'a general cultural point of view', science fiction deals with the unlikely and/or the unbelievable; objects like extra-terrestrial space ships and entities such as alien monsters are not things that are considered probable or likely to exist based on our current understanding of the natural world. (3) Vivian Sobchack has argued that in American science fiction films elements of magic and religion often indirectly interact with scientific ideas and methods. (4) In other words, however much 'science' there is in science fiction , the genre is also about imagination, fantasy and the supernatural (supernatural in the sense that a depicted event is not able to be explained in terms of the commonly accepted rules and principles of reality). (5)

In The Wild Blue Yonder not only does Herzog explore what the science fiction genre is, he also contextualises the work of living mathematicians and scientists in terms of science fiction themes and imagery. For example, one of the interviewees in the film is Dr. Martin Lo, a research scientist whose main area of investigation is the Interplanetary Transport Network. As Lo explains in the film, the Interplanetary Transport Network designates a chaotic model of space-time travel. According to this model there are invisible highway lanes in space that crisscross and dynamically interrelate. These highway lanes wind between planets and moons. The proposition is that these pathways will provide low-energy transport for space craft undertaking long-term travel and will dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes to reach distant points in space. (6) The implication is that human beings will be able to colonise other parts of the Milky Way galaxy and perhaps also explore other solar systems. Martin Lo imagines that human beings will be able to build shopping malls in space and that the Earth will become a national park that people can visit on vacation; one of Lo's charms is the fact he is an un-reconstituted modernist utopian who believes that human 'freedom' and 'progress' will come about through science and technology.

Lo's work is presented in a way that suggests his ideas operate in a realm of pure fantasy. For example, through the story that The Alien (Brad Dourif) narrates in the film, Herzog is able to express his belief that the distance between Earth and any potentially hospitable location in space (if indeed any such location exists) is too great; in an interview Herzog has said of Lo's Interplanetary Transport Network that "it only occurs in science fiction movies". (7) In The Wild Blue Yonder Lo's theories are also integrated into the film's fictional narrative. This narrative has to do with alien space missions and human time travel. In other words, the scientist's ideas are situated in terms of the improbable and fantastic story world presented in the film.

To read more about The Wild Blue Yonder please follow this link:

http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/the-wild-blue-yonder/

Endnotes 

(1) "Exploring with Werner". The Wild Blue Yonder. 2006. DVD. Subversive Cinema

(2) Warren Buckland (1999) has made a distinction between science fiction films that take scientific ideas to there logical or illogical conclusion as opposed to those science fiction movies which are based purely on fantasy and imagination. He suggests that films such as Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The Lost World (Steven Spielberg 1997) 'articulate a possible world because they show one possibility that can emerge from a state of affairs in the actual world' (177). Such films employ modal logic; that is to say, they explore 'non-actual possibilities', possibilities that 'correspond to an abstract, hypothetical state of affairs, which has an ontological status, but one different to the actual world' (180). While such a distinction is important to recognise, and can be used to qualify Herzog's suggestion that the science fiction genre "has to be fantasy", it does not detract from the overall point that the science fiction genre shows imagined and hypothetical worlds as opposed to worlds that only reference what is actual and scientifically factual. For more information on Buckland's argument see 'Between Science Fact and Science Fiction: Spielberg's Digital Dinosaurs, Possible Worlds, and the New Aesthetic Realism'.

(3) Steve Neale (1990) '"You've Got to be Fucking Kidding!" Knowledge, Belief and Judgement in Science Fiction' in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, pg. 163. Obviously, alien life may exist - a proposition that cosmologists and planetary scientists have investigated for some time (for an overview of the equation that Frank Drake developed in the 1960s to try to work out the probability of whether extra-terrestrial civilisations exist in the Milky Way see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB_v99FSTYc ; for a summary of Sarah Seagher's 'revised Drake equation' see http://io9.com/what-a-brand-new-equation-reveals-about-our-odds-of-fin-531575395 ). Neale's point is that while extrapolative or speculative science may research the possibility of alien life, most individuals in society do not believe they have ever encountered extra-terrestrial space crafts or alien organisms. It is also a convention in Western culture to treat the question of whether alien life exists in the Milky Way galaxy as a question that cannot be adequately answered at this time. For such reasons, when science fiction films (and television shows and books) represent strange and other-worldly figures, or pictorialise wondrous and imagined examples of technology, they show what is unfamiliar and/or non-existent to audiences in their normal, everyday lives. In other words, they give expression to the unknowable.

(4) Vivian Sobchack (1987) Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film.

(5) By commonly accepted rules and principles of reality it is meant those rules and principles that are part of social cognition. Social cognition refers to the structures of knowledge represented in civil and bureaucratic institutions, and in established disciplines like science and philosophical logic, that arguably create a set of default mental conditions in individuals. These mental conditions are part of the basis of organised, cultural life in Western society. The question of how film genres relate to, and indeed shape, wider structures of knowledge is a huge and complex question; suffice it to note that the aesthetic and narrative conventions of a given film genre interact in different ways with the knowledge that is produced by institutions and disciplines in the outside world. These interactions between filmic representation and the default mental conditions that spectators have contribute to social perceptions of what is actual and factual. For more information on genre see Steve Neale (1990) 'Questions of Genre' and Tom Ryall (1998) 'Genre and Hollywood'.

(6) For more information on the Interplanetary Transport Network see Shane D. Ross' 'The Interplanetary Transport Network' http://www2.esm.vt.edu/~sdross/papers/AmericanScientist2006.pdf

(7) "Exploring with Werner". The Wild Blue Yonder. 2006. DVD. Subversive Cinema.

Human Rights, Docufictions, and Danfung Dennis' Hell and Back Again (2011)

A presentation given at the 2012 Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand 16th Biennial Conference. 

I examine what is meant by human rights cinema, particularly in the context of the wave of docufiction films that are currently being made at the moment, films such as Danfung Dennis' Hell and Back Again (2011) and Pawel Kloc's Phnom Penh Lullaby (2011). These docufictions creatively combine 'fictional' and 'non-fiction' film techniques in a way that not only allows spectators to become critically engaged with the tension between what is real and what is staged but to also enter an ethically uneasy space. I draw on my own experiences programming for the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival and discuss how Hell and Back Again can be classed as a human rights film. 

You can listen to the presentation here: 

https://soundcloud.com/t-w-music/docufictions-and-the-human