The cinematic condition

One of the great projects of criticism and of inquiries into media aesthetics is the philosophical inclination to try to answer the question of what a medium is. But I resist this tendency simply because in defining something, we lose that which we are defining. It becomes just another filled space in a field of language and identification, serving little purpose and holding little meaning outside of that. Having said that, I accept that these practices are inevitable and I engage in them as much as anyone else. Film theorists, for example, are plagued by the question "What is Cinema?" It's a seemingly simple question commonly used as a spring board for philosophical reflection and debate. Yet the problem of thinking this way about media and communication may not be in the discourse to come from asking the question, but in the question itself.

Over at Elusive Lucidity, Zach Campbell asks another question. Instead of focusing on what cinema is, he asks what is cinema for. In other words, what are social, aesthetic, cultural, economic conditions under which images are produced and consumed? I would add that we maybe shouldn't study the act of consumption or production, but of the position of the producer, consumer, and any other individual within this scheme. He problematizes very efficiently the notion of thinking in terms of essences and definitions. For example, he lists off all that cinema is, can be, and in some cases isn't:

"To what all can we equate the cinema? For starters: lost causes, mirror images, failures, dream-food, a drug, a certain form of reality, lèse majesté, toadying, bullying, pleading, pornography, a captured sequence of sounds/images that may give a reasonably identical experience to the viewer over multiple viewings, a substitute for action, a displacement of life, a patriarchal funhouse, today's Grand Guignol, faith, celluloid, maybe pixels, beginnings and ends, a two-lane blacktop."

I do recommend visiting Zach's site to read his reflections, which are far more compact and (dare I say) lucid than my own.

Losing my SCMS virginity (Part I)

I have been in graduate school for two and a half years, and I regret to admit that (until recently) I have not attended an academic conference in media or communication studies. I've read abstracts, paged through programs, and read reports, but I've never actually been to one. Had I not been asked by bloggers and PhD students Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb of Dr. Mabuse's Kaleidoscope, I still would not have been to one. Being only a part-time student with a full time job makes traveling and preparing a presentation unrealistic in most cases. But with Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual conference taking place in my hometown of Philadelphia this year, and having the unique opportunity of being asked onto a workshop panel (which I will discuss in my second of two posts on SCMS), the situation was ideal for my first conference attendance and presentation.

The workshop in which I participated was slated to begin at 4:00 pm on Saturday, March 8th, but I arrived at the conference around 10:30 in the morning so as to gain familiarity with the atmosphere of the participants, attendees, and the minglings in the hallways. I made sure to attend a variety of panel presentations to get a sense of the overall flavor of the conference -- its academic and social policies. Although I initially paged through the program with the intention of attending as many panels as possible with presenters whose work I've read, I stuck to my guns and wandered in and out of different presentations.

I brief poked in to a panel on documentary filmmaking, entitled "Claiming the Real: Documentary as Practice." Chaired by Shilyh Warren of Duke University, this panel examined the ways in which documentary filmmaking not only provides voice, but enables a kind of agency that is elsewhere non-existent, such as in mainstream news media. I didn't stay long, but found the presentations provocative, especially in light of my increased viewings of documentaries, which are desperately in need of greater study, not so much as a separate kind of cinema, i.e. Cinema B to narrative cinema's Cinema A. Documentaries are wide-ranging, and very accessible now. As more films become available and more people become aware of them, it's nice to know there is a devoted body of scholarship out there. It's not my focus of study, but it's one that interests me greatly, as it should any student of cinema.

I then attended a textbook writing workshop, where Louise Spence, Jeremy Butler, Kristin Thompson and others gleaned social and economic issues of text book writing. I felt I was in the company of other text book writers, mostly, which is a shame because I found their dialogue especially enlightening. The central question that kept coming up was, "How can text book writing remain relevant?" and it's an important one for non-text book writers because text books are the vehicles through which professors teach. They are physical manifestations of canonized film criticism. Writing one requires great care and knowledge, even though none of the topics discussed in these books do not provide the in-depth commentary to which most text book writers and other film professors are accustomed. Their design is such that real, analytical film criticism is not possible. And yet they are utterly essential as tools for guiding and reflecting the pulse of film scholarship.

One of my very favorite lectures from the conference was the panel entitled "More Notes on Soundtracks," chaired by Carol Vernalis, who, despite proudly "taking on Bordwell" (in her own words), was arguably the least interesting of the four presentations. Her central premise --that "music video aesthetics" represent a new kind of cinematic aesthetic, one that is less based on intensified variations of continuity established by classical cinema-- is intriguing, but ultimately works better as a conceptual model than the proposal for a new direction in sound and image studies. What she fails to consider, in my judgment, is that there may be an inherent rhythm to cinematic images made in the classical tradition, with or without music. I'm sure she didn't present her whole thesis, and that time did not allow her to really articulate this music video aesthetics model. But, however interesting it was, it seems that she, like many contemporary scholars, is too quick to draw a line between contemporary aesthetics and classical aesthetics.

Also on that panel, Jeff Smith examined the significance of music in cinema, specifically detailing the function of music and the manners in which film scores are situated in a film depending on the genre, time period, and setting. His exploration of the deviation from the classic tradition of symphonic film scoring was very noteworthy, especially in an age of pop cinema in which the film score is but a distant memory.

Finally, I attended Malcom Turvey's panel on Noel Carrol's influential work in cognitivism, Mystifying Movies, which featured two wonderfully articulate presentations (neither by Carroll himself, who spoke after them) on contemporary film theory. Turvey's analysis of cognitivism and critique of criticism aimed at it was challenging and provocative. In particular, his musings on the spatiotemporality of cinema I found most interesting. He noted that most scholarship seeking to overturn the common bias of space over time to favor time over space ultimately fails because it presupposed a spatial order within which any conception of time is brought forth.

The last panel, on Carroll's Mystifying Movies was one of the few panels providing an in-depth look into film form. I'm not referring to neoformalism or cognitivism, specifically, when I invoke the term "film form." I use the term as a broader notion for the audiovisual relations of cinema. Where a great deal of scholarship seems to look at form of content, there seems to be little of it (at least at this conference) focused on forms of expression, and the relationship between forms of expression and forms of content. Too often that binary is honored in film scholarship, as if form and content can be isolated from one another.

Despite this qualm, I was overall mostly impressed with the diversity of the presentations, even though I didn't see 90 percent of them. Paging through the program gave me a sense of the overall conference, especially when situated against the panels I did attend. One of the panels on Sunday I would have loved to attend was the panel entitled, Untimely Bodies: Towards a Comparative Film Theory of Human Figures, Temporalities, and Visibilities.” Steven Shaviro, a respondent on the panel, recently posted his three-page piece from the panel on his blog. Having read it, I only wish more that I had attended this panel on Sunday. Here is an excerpt from his presentation:

"The speakers on this panel all point, in one way or another, to the hauntological dimension of the movies. They testify to the ways that -- as Gilles Deleuze puts it in a different context -- the cinematic image is never simply in the present: for it contains, rolled up within it, virtual dimensions of pastness and futurity. But beyond this, they suggest that film is itself the hauntological art par excellence. It is not just that a certain practice of cinema might be described as hauntological; but more importantly that hauntology itself, in its evanescent yet more-than-real spectrality, is inherently cinematic. Film does not capture and reproduce the real, so much as it always already haunts reality, sapping its apparent solidity from within. Film is implicitly an art of specters: of what Brian Wall calls “spirit,” and what Chika Kinoshita designates as “the passive regime of the image.” The presence of the movie star involves an uncanny doubling of physical presence and ghostly evanescence, of fiction and lived experience, as Prakash Younger shows in his discussion of the career of Meena Kumari. In the most general sense, and from its nineteenth-century origins to its twenty-first century actuality, cinema is most essentially what Tom Gunning describes as a phantasmagoria of “invisible bodies” and “intangible images.”

...

I discuss Tom Gunning's talk last, because it engages in a more general consideration of the issues that the other three panelists raised in relation to specific films. Gunning traces the ways that spectrality has been crucial to film from its very beginnings. The familiar concern with vision and the gaze, with the powers of surveillance and visual control, has always been doubled and undermined, within the cinematic apparatus itself, by the play and display of a resistant opacity. The very thickness of material reality disrupts the perspectival organization of the world by the gaze. Material density and embodied vision find their correlates in “a rhetoric of invisibility and a very complex form of disembodiment.” This is less paradoxical than it might seem at first. For the depth of bodies – and one might also say the sheer givenness of matter, or of what we characterize as “objects” – exceeds and exhausts the capacity of even the most phallic and penetrating gaze. Or to make the same point in an entirely different register, the temporality of the body-as-image is irreducible to the spatializing logic of “the model of vision as total transparency and surveillance.” which Gunning rightly dismisses as an “ultimate fantasy of totalitarianism,” but never an actuality.

What's crucial to Gunning's account, as to those of all the speakers on this panel, is the way that invisibility, impalpability, disappearance, and disembodiment are by no means opposed to an insistence, not just upon the materiality of the film itself, and of the cinematic apparatus, but also upon the embodiment of the spectator, and the materiality of the images or bodies or things that appear onscreen. That is to say, spectrality is not an effect of “lack,” or of the supposed gap between representation and its referent. Rather, we encounter the specter at the very heart of materiality and presence. Or – if a phenomenological manner of speaking be preferred – spectrality is a supplemental dimension of manifestation and appearance themselves. Cinema is not a Platonic cave of illusions, as the old-style film theory would have it, but a hauntological apparatus, a machine for raising ghosts."

One could only hope that Shaviro more explicitly focuses his future writing on some of the issue he talked about on the panel. Although I have not personally read or seen any of the individuals' work he cites, Shaviro is after a new way of thinking about cinema. Whether he was aware of it or not, his piece broadly functions in some way other another of the beginnings of a model for a new kind of film criticism: one not focused on "form" or "content," but of figures, temporalities, and visibilities.

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In wrapping my thoughts on my experience at SCMS as an observer, I'd say the overall experience was overwhelming. It took place more than three weeks ago, and there are still ideas bouncing around in my mind; some totally random asides I picked up from conversations, others are gestating critiques and/or expansions on theoretical inquiries put forth by the variety of presenters whom I saw give their presentations.

If there's one thing I learned --or at least was reminded of-- from my wanderings, it's that there is no end to the amount of ways for thinking about (and with) media, specifically cinema. Some of these theoretical frameworks were built and maintained over decades, such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism. These are the old reliables of media theorizing; but for as lucrative as each of these established bodies may be, they are perhaps employed too often and stringently to reveal anything about media and cinema. Other theoretical bodies are relatively recent, such as cognitivism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism, all of which lend significant insights into film scholarship. The problem with these schools of thought is in how proponents of them position themselves as the extreme reverse of established theories like psychoanalysis. In other words, many of these more trendy contemporary theoretical inquiries tend to be substituting one Grand Theory for another. This idea is the central argument of my own presentation, and is currently the topic of the project I'm working on right now in my independent study of Deleuze and media. (More on this in the next post...)

Although film and media scholarship has fractured into countless factions and schools of thought, there was a distinct flavor to most of the proceedings I witness at SCMS. Based on the the sessions I attended and reading through the program, I gathered that the conference errs on the conservative side (for the most part) with regards to modes of theoretical inquiry. I can't say that for certain, since I'm basing this observation on one day of attendance at one conference, but I get that feeling.

What this year's offerings lacked in terms of media content, however, it somewhat made up for in media content. This may not so much be to the credit of the Society itself, but to media scholarship as a whole in the last 15 to 20 years. Nevertheless, I attended a few panels and workshops representing diverse interests and inquiries into world cinema, documentary filmmaking, many of which were well versed in cultural studies. One hopes that this is not a short-lived trend, but instead the beginning of a larger movement within scholarly cinema and media research that will blossom into a greater understanding of various forms of content and expression reflected in and enacted by new and old media.

I acknowledge my overtly optimistic attitude toward cinema, concerning its limitless aesthetic and communicative possibilities, but the shear diversity of the kinds of films, social policies, and and modes of cultural agency that is currently being explored by students and scholars is wide-ranging, and inspiring to say the least. I do not envision this "cinema of tomorrow" as a much-needed cultural convergence through the various forms of analogic and digital media now available. Rather, electronic and digital media that have re-calibrated individual and collective means for participating in social policies and institutions. And since these forms of media are increasingly constitutive of our cultural agencies, cinema's relevance as an aesthetic means of communicating, sharing and experiencing narrative, and a form of discourse. This last notion is perhaps most intriguing, but the extent to which it is realized and developed hinges on necessary paradigm shifts which have yet to play out.

Socializing the senses (of cinema)

Many would argue that cinema is an experience that simulates a kind of reality. To see a movie and make sense of it depends on the viewer understanding the spatial and temporal relations of the compositional economy of the film, as well as possess an extensive knowledge of language, narrative, and the cultures and behaviors both depicted and reflected in the movies themselves. Since the rise of cinema, television, and videogames in the 20th Century, one could say that we have created multiple realities wherein viewers partake in a sort of co-constructed world by perceiving and interpreting the sights and sounds of movies, television shows, and games. Academia has attempted to grapple with our individual and collective abilities to interpret sensory perceptions, to separate "real" affective responses from "simulated" ones. It's certainly a provocative debate, one that's been dealt with by a number of 20th Century thinkers in a variety of ways.

On his blog, Steven Shaviro (whose book, The Cinematic Body, is a must-read for anyone interested in cultural meaning-making of bodies, sex, and violence in cinema) sounds off on the subject by considering the assumptions of an individual (Satoshi Kanazawa) who claims to know a thing or two about sensory perception and experience from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology. Shaviro strongly refutes Kanazawa's claim that our brains often cannot tell the difference between what's simulated and what's real. Shaviro explains:

"'Pretend' (as my daughters call it) or simulated experience is perfectly real in its own right, of course; and we get scared from movies just as 'authentically' as we get scared when something dangerous or horrible threatens us in 'real life.' But not only does this have nothing to do with not being able to tell the difference, it absolutely depends upon being able to tell the difference. Vicariousness is crucial to aesthetic experience (it is the basis for what Kant called “disinterest”). I eagerly go to watch horror films. I do not eagerly go to places where there is a strong likelihood of feral monsters or chainsaw-wielding psychopaths dismembering me limb from limb. And I cry much more readily at the movies than I do in real life situations.

Probably if I said this to Kanazawa, he wouldn’t disagree with me, exactly, but rather say something about how the fear response evolved in such a way that it operates on its own, on the assumption that what is being seen is real — before some other, more highly conscious, part of our mind can remind us that, after all, 'it’s only a movie.' But I don’t think this gets him off the hook. For the point of the example — and, I’d argue, the point of aesthetics (among other things) overall — is precisely that the brain, or the mind, or 'human nature' in general, is massively underdetermined by the particular biological traits of which the evolutionary psychologists make so much. In the example here, the dismissal of vicariousness, together with the unexamined assumption that the physiological fear-response is meaningful in itself and enough to account for all the varied situations in which human beings can possibly feel afraid, or give meanings to being afraid, exemplifies the extreme naivete to which evolutionary psychology in general is always prone.

I am inclined to think that William James is right in saying that we feel afraid because we have a certain physiological reaction, rather than we have the physiological reaction because we feel afraid. But this is precisely why it is a category error to think that fear can be defined in cognitive terms, which would have to happen in order for the question of whether the experience is real or simulated to even come up. A corollary of this is that, when the cognitive question does come up, it is not constrained by the physiological response in the way that Kanazawa assumes. This is the ground of possibility for the astonishing diversity, between individuals and even more among cultures, of the meanings that are assigned to fear, of the situations that give rise to fear, of the ways that fear is dealt with, and so on and so forth. Evolutionary psychology can dismiss these differences as inconsequential (just as it dismisses the question of vicariousness as inconsequential) only because it has already assumed what it claims to prove. Its cognitivist assumptions (such as the assumption that the physiological fear-response has something to do with a cognitive judgment as to whether something is real or simulated) leave it utterly incapable of dealing with the non-cognitive, affective aspects of human life, as well as (ironically enough) with the ways that 'cognition' itself contains far more than it can account for."

For as much that we know about the brain, perhaps even more expansive is what we don't know about the brain. Ever since I started reading about cognitivism in cinema and media studies, a movement popularized by David Bordwell in the 1980's, it's been difficult to take a stand on the issue of affective response. So much of what cognitivism posits stands in direct contrast to much of my own stance on behavior, one which focuses more on discursive norms of language as constituting that which we refer to "time" and "space", or lived experience. Nonetheless, several theorists have made compelling arguments, including Bordwell himself. (Although much of his work dates back to the 1980's, Bordwell has written an intriguing entry on cognitivism and cinema more recently on his blog entitled This is Your Brain On Movies, Maybe.)

The general problem I have with the cognitivist camp is that it seems to leave very little wiggle room for the social factors entrenched within the biological and physiological experiences of sensory perception and experience. Rather than attributing the interpretation of sensory perception and constitution of self, memory, and culture solely to quantitatively measurable aspects of brain function, communication scholars tends to look at language itself as mediating device from which our infinite webs of discourse flow.

That's not to say that physics or psychology cannot account for behavior in more scientific terms, but rather to suggest that how our social behaviors and institutions are organized according to the principles of language greatly influences what is performed or understood within those practices and institutions. Communication theorists (by and large) don't necesarily reject the notion that a "real world" exists out there, but are instead more focused on how individuals or groups of individuals structure it and contribute to it via their understanding of and participation in the signifying principles of language. Systems of signification, i.e., language, have developed in oral, written, and textual form over thousands of years, and they enable us to differentiate between objects and to categorize sensory perceptions according to the structural makeup that language has constructed.

For these broad reasons, I find it difficult to accept phrases like "human nature" when describing emotions such as fear, jealousy, rage or any other behavior or affective action/reaction. Beyond these conundrums, however, is an even greater concern for the relationship between the self and that which is outside the self. A question as simple as, "How does one interpret sensory perceptions in a ways that makes sense?" becomes quite problematic when considering the ideological assumptions deeply embedded within the methodologies and discursive norms of empirical research. In that sense, I would argue, quantitative data is as much informed by qualitative methods as qualitative data is informed by quantitative components. They are entwined much in the same way that the social and the physiological/biological are inexorably wrapped within one another. To assume that these binary relationships, i.e., real/fake, subject/object, masculine/feminine, quantiative/qualitative, good/evil, are defined by two opposing forces, a yin and a yang, not only speaks more to the categorical properties of language shaping cultural understanding, but also foolishly undercuts the nuances, ambiguities, and vastness of lived experience.

"Because You're On Television, Dummy."

[Update, Monday, 9/17: The following article is now slightly longer and much more coherent than when I originally posted it on Friday.]

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! You think you've merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars. It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today."

The above quote comes late in Sidney Lumet's Network (1976), long after Howard Beale's infamous "mad as hell" speech, and long after Beale was imprinted into the collective conscious of the American TV-watching public. Although Beale's early speeches are the locus of the film's ideas, I would argue that the real center of its themes is Arthur Jenson's speech to Beale from across the board room table (pictured above). Enveloped by the ordered surroundings of commerce, a brightly lit Jenson occupying a small portion of the frame informs Beale that there are no countries, no individual voices, and no real humanity beneath our surfaces. This inspires Beale to accuse his audience of having become "humanoids", in doing so Howard becomes just another blip on the screen. After single-handedly reviving a news division and a network, his ratings dip and executives discuss ways of getting him off the air. Audiences didn't want to hear they were humanoids -- they wanted to remain passive recipients of a message about revolution while complacently sitting in front of the television.

Sidney Lumet made Network more than 30 years ago. The film is remembered for Howard Beale's many famous speeches, in which the seemingly crazed news man preaches a revolution from the shackles of capitalism, war, and corporate power. Today, Howard Beale is considered a prophet. Critics and scholars cite the film's relevance in this time of hyper media attention and saturation. The cliche is that we are currently in the "here and now" age of digital reproduction. While I often despise the use of cliches and broad, familiar claims, there may be some amount of truth to this widely held belief. For example, popular magazines of the pre-digital age were known for long articles exhausting all angles of the given subject. Today, however, articles are becoming shorter. Online versions of popular news sources such as CNN or MSNBC routinely make errors in attempt to get something online or in print ahead of the competition. Networks now report "Breaking News" every 20 minutes on their websites without adequate information. Fearing that the consumer will choose another source, news Web sites and shows will do whatever it takes for those precious ratings so as to attract more advertisers. Moreover, our technological gadgets have further enabled us the convenience of shrinking the world into our own hands. Now we have more people to call or text message, more things to consume, and more pictures to take with our camera phones. And "news" -- both in presentation and content -- becomes a passing headline on the screen; faster, less trustworthy, and more controlling.

But it would be a great misunderstanding to assume that these digital media are displacing analogic media. Mechanical reproduction of electronic media enables the benefactors of capitalism to maintain dominion over the public, and digital technology only helps to sustain that. We are now experiencing a greater onslaught of the same systems of power, a greater reproduction of them in which the illusion of choice now becomes more believable to consumers. What appears to be pure democracy as represented by blogs, onDemand service and choice, YouTube, and digital downloads is just another veil of ignorance. Suddenly, Howard Beale's comments strike a resounding chord. Much like he says in his now famous speech, we have learned to isolate ourselves in our homes, cars, and in front of computer screens, surrounding ourselves with the comfort of brand names and products that we've been instructed to "need".

Perhaps, digital media are an intensification of our transformation into a culture of humanoids. Research, inquiry, and real living thought are argued to be devalued in our contemporary media culture in which the mainstream media will do everything in its reach to ensure that we choose between the Right and the Left. There we remain under the illusion that we "know a thing or two" about what's important in this world, totally oblivious that we think in product names and are conditioned to be good consumers. But now I'm starting to sounds like Howard Beale, aren't I?

Although it's tempting to reflect on the film and only think about Howard's illustrious speeches, perhaps our being so struck by them makes us just like the audiencing applauing his death at the end of the film, passive, acting and thinking that we're not going to take it anymore, but really taking all of it. The film poses this question by offering a narrative to which Howard Beale's plotline is the counterpoint. While Howard's speeches endure as some of the most memorable expressions of passion in cinema, the movie is so brilliant because it embraces the very real nature of its satire and the illusory nature of its drama. Lumet juxtaposed the biting satire of Beale's program with a subplot involving television executives Max Schumacker (William Holden) and Diana Christensen (Faye Dunnaway), the former a committed news man, father, and husband approaching the autumn of his life, and the latter a young, ambitious woman who thinks, lives, and breathes her job. Their work on popularizing the Howard Beale show brings them together. It isn't long before Max leaves his wife and home for a relationship with Diana. The film follows this subplot along with the behind-the-scenes subplots with Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), who manipulates the business end of the Howard Beale show. Intercut with these subplots are new episodes of the Howard Beale show, as he continues to gain popularity by articulating "the rage of the people", as Diana puts it.

These seemingly disparate story threads of drama, comedy, and satire converge as the film reaches its end, and this convergence is Lumet's pedigree. The late scenes represent the movie's punishing blow. Otherwise, it would be just another smart satire about media and capitalism. In these moments, Network really becomes about Max and Diana's dwindling relationship, to which the Beale storyline becomes the counterpoint and mirrors its demise. Although Max's mistakes are many -- and he is by no means a protypical hero -- his leaving Diana represents the only bit of hope in the film; hope that some people will resist the commodification of life and fight for whatever humanity has left. But he too has fallen victim to the overwhelming power of the media that surround him and constitute his life at all. When he's telling Diana why he's leaving her as if he's pitching a script, he describes his own ending as a hopeful one in his desire to re-unite with his wife. If he wasn't so influenced by the illusory nature of his life's work, he'd realize that there is likely no happy ending for him and his wife. He has burned the bridge between them. But the film never shows us what happens to its characters. In fact, what happens to them is essentially besides the point.

The final tragic scene between Diana and Max encompasses the human side of the film's themes, where we see that the line between life and fantasy that Howard Beale speaks of no longer exists, between real people and flickering images on a screen. Those images inhabit our existence, which results in a disconnect from what's real and human, one from which we as a culture cannot return. Much like the heartbreaking exchange between Max and his wife earlier in the film (which won Beatrice Straight the Oscar), Lumet finds a dramatic pulse to the film that is both unexpected and bittersweet. Here we realize that Network is far more than just an intelligent satire. Lumet is not content to just let Howard Beale act as a symbol of his film's messages. Instead, he makes a film with a real story made with concern; it's about real people whose lives and personal relationships become the hollow network plots they discuss in meetings. By the end, these characters are speaking only in television terminology to convey their defeated emotions. Their artificial surfaces have enveloped them to the extent that artifice constitutes their very being.

This is made tragically clear when Howard Beale's popularity begins to slip and becomes just another passing trend. His message is the same, but he delivers it with a more defeated tone and disgust for humanity. Perhaps he finally acknowledges that he is himself another pawn of the corporate power that packages and markets him to consumers. Maybe he realizes that he spouts off messages which resonate only superficially with the massive audience he's amounted; for if it really did have the desired effect, no one would have to watch the show to begin with and Howard wouldn't be on the air ranting. But he is on the air, and his very presence reproduces the problems about which he preaches. His tirades against television fundamentally ignore the fact that he is the content of the medium he so detests. The irony of the film therefore is its McLuhan-inspired acknowledgment that the medium is the message. Control lies not in the message of the medium, but in the medium itself. Network therefore posits that television is an institution in which relatively few can control the interests of its viewers, where capitalism exploits even the smallest trace of humanity and knowledge, transforming it into a means of controlling consumers. This is perhaps best said by Beale himself:

"Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America; there's a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the twentieth floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?"

To talk about Network is to talk about issues of media, corporote control, and, of course, being mad as hell. But the film is far deeper than its satirical surface. It's a deep ponderance of humanity in the age of hyper-capitalism as manifest in the mechanical reproduction of media sources and corporate power. But, it also examines these notions within the dramatic spectrum of relationships and characters. Underneath its depictions of a news anchor turned media spectacle named Howard Beale is both a tragic narrative and a profound inquiry into media relations.

Howard Beale tapped into the fears and rage of the people so much that they kept tuning into his program, playing right into the very traps he was enraged about. Therefore, viewers remained in their passive states of inactivity and Beale was reduced to just another image on the screen, one that will vanish with the click of a button. And when Beale began broaching issues that no longer appealed to viewers' passive states of faux-rage, they did precisely that: they changed the channel. Then, a real, breathing individual preaching a message that wasn't condusive to the corporate interests that undergird the medium of "the tube" is shot down on his own show. The camera zooms in on his lifeless body, the lights come up, and the room fills with applause, signaling not just the end of the Howard Beale show and tragic media image that was once a man, but the death of individual voice, reason, and humanity. The finals image of the film consists of four television screens at the corners of the frame repeatedly displaying graphic images of his death intercut with various commercials and advertising. They show quick images at different times; a sensory overload accompanied by a mechanical voiceover narration.

The questions raised by the film's juxtaposition of Howard Beale and the personal struggles of the individuals who made him accessible to the public are startling and troubling: Can humanoids even recognize that they are no longer human if they have purged themselves of the means by which they once embodied humanity? Can one recognize the problem/s with a system (let lone try to solve them) if that very system has provided the tools with which one can determine the problem at all? Since we started speaking these words, writing them down, and reproducing our means of communicating, have we really been able to understand ourselves and that which is outside ourselves to even understand what it means to be human?

The scene I quoted at the start of this article evokes these questions and more when viewed in relation to the rest of the movie. Watch it real closely; the dialogue, the performance, the sound, the framing; it's all right there. Jenson is more right than he, Howard, or any of us really know. Maybe we're not as mad as we think. Maybe we're happy as hell and will continue to take it. After all, it's all we know, and it's all we are.

The Great Divide

Dennis Cozzalio's recent reflections on the "31 Days of Spielberg" captures the dread that some of us feel right now the blogosphere. As he observes, the film blogging community (if it can be called that) has experienced something of a ripple that struck a chord with many of us, whether we have written about it or not. As for me and my place in online film writing, I will admit that I've been a little unsettled of late. Although I have remained relatively quiet until this point, I have kept up with its backlash over the weeks. Right now I still don't have much to contribute outside expressing my upset over the situation. Arguably more interesting than Damian's actions, however, is how others have responded and used these media to express their views. Some have lashed out on Damian and others have shown their support, but sparing you all a disertation-length analysis of the communicative proccesses of online writring, I think it's important at this time to maintain a certain amount of professionalism as us film bloggers grapple with this situation and its implications. In light of my recent SCMS research assignment of cinephila, film criticism and blogging, I will say that the events have given me much to think about regarding the implications of blogging and the free-wheel form of writing its participants have enacted. In many ways, this event has elucidated for all of us the major schism between blog writing and published writing, no matter what the style (which I touched on somewhat recently). This divide must be taken seriously, even as we try to break it down.

Language and Images

Although I often suggest that visuality does not adhere to the same signifying principles of language (i.e., orality, literacy, textuality), I concede that moving images are often constructed and interpreted via a system of representation influenced by language. Images may not inherently exist as such (although many would disagree), but our perception of them is shaped by our use of language. Images may include language or complement language, and even though they require language so as to enable perceivers to interpret them and form meaning, images nor their elements intrinsically function as representative system of meaning. While images and language (i.e., letters, words) are not analogous to one another, it's clear that they need one another. That necessity assumes a relationship that can only be comprehended within the structures of language.

Despite not exploring this relationship specifically, David Abram nevertheless elucidates the connection between language and perception --which in my mind is closely linked to understand images-- in his book, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Images may not be a language, but one particular passage struck me as utterly essential as we seek to gain more knowledge of the elusive relationship between perception, language, and that which language signifies. Abram's note of the expression of language (or images) is particularly intriguing. Try substituting image/s for language and you'll see what I mean:

"The enigma that is language, constituted as much by silence as by sounds, is not an inert or static structure, but an evolving bodily field. It is like a vast, living fabric continually being woven by those who speak. Merleau-Ponty here distinguishes sharply between genuine, expressive speech and speech that merely repeats established formulas. The latter is hardly 'speech' at all; it does not really carry meaning in the weave of its words but relies solely upon the memory of meanings that once lived there. It does not alter the already existing structures of language, but rather treats the language as a finished institution. Nevertheless, those preexisting structures must at some moment have been created, and this can only have been effected by active, expressive speech. Indeed, all truly meaningful speech is inherently creative, using established words in ways they have never quite been used before, and thus altering, ever so slightly, the whole webwork of the language. Wild, living speech takes up, from within, the interconnected matrix of the language and gestures with it, subjecting the whole structure to a 'coherent deformation.'

At the heart of any language, then, is the poetic productivity of expressive speech. A living language is continually being made and remade, woven out of silence of those who speak... And this silence is that of our wordless participations, of our perceptual immersion in the depths of an animate, expressive world."

Heavy stuff.

Let the Cleansing Begin

This is a sad day for Nick Naylor. Just months two months after the MPAA announced that depictions of smoking in cinema will figure greatly into the ratings system (essentially saying that smoking equals a higher rating), Disney today announced that it will purge all representations of smoking in their films. From Reuters:

"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday became the first major Hollywood studio to ban depictions of smoking, saying there would be no smoking in its family-oriented, Disney-branded films and it would "discourage" it in films distributed by its Touchstone and Miramax labels.

Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger also said in a letter to U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, whose committee last month held hearings on the effects of movie images on children, that the studio would place anti-smoking public service announcements on DVDs of any future films that feature cigarette smoking.

He said the company would encourage theater owners to show screen anti-smoking public service announcements, or PSAs, before such films.

Iger cautioned, however, that "cigarette smoking is a unique problem and this PSA effort is not a precedent for any other issue."

Markey described Disney's commitment as "groundbreaking" and urged other studios to follow suit.

Dr. Cheryl Healton, president and CEO of the American Legacy Foundation, commended Disney's move but said the studio left "some ambiguity about what would happen in relation to Touchstone and Miramax."

Research cited by American Legacy, a nonprofit created out of landmark litigation between the tobacco industry and states attorneys general, shows that 90 percent of all films depict smoking and children with the highest exposure to smoking in movies were nearly three times more likely to start smoking.

Tobacco is featured in three-quarters of G, PG and PG-13 rated movies and 90 percent of R-rated movies, the studies showed.

The independent Weinstein Co. already is using PSAs produced by American Legacy ahead of its films that depict smoking, Healton said."

I'm sure child advocacy groups and those in support of "cleansing" entertainment will rejoice when they hear of this news. Yet the implications for these actions are massive as well as unsettling. What troubles me most about this report is that Disney will now "discourage" its subsidiary brands -- Miramax and Touchstone -- from employing images of smoking in their films. But there is something even more troubling about all of this.

Gradually, the movies are becoming the equivalent of the advertisements they are purported to be by the MPAA and other lawmakers. Rather than invoking a dialogue concerning matters of representation and consumption in the digital age, these "clamping down" effects actually limit our perceptions and interpretations of electronic media, imposing particular ideologies onto the collective so as to build a world of commodity and hypercommercialism. Disney's decision in reality has little to do with the harmful health effects of smoking or promoting more positive lifestyles in American youth. If it did, than the diet-promoting Shrek probably would not have had the endorsement deals with McDonald's or Coca-Cola. No; this is about something much larger and discomforting. Smoking is now just the trendy target for the massive corporate interests whose influence set the larger ideological agenda.

Once again, we seem to be hung up on the message, while the real changes are happening on the level of the medium, which is continually shifting so as to serve these interests. Under the guise of public health interests, institutions of power are really promoting a larger movement of commodifying everything to the point that we are gradually becoming numb to it. It seems that we are being lured into gentle complacency as we learn to be better consumers.

Of course, the "cultural cleansing" had to begin with Disney.

"Political" Considerations: Documentary as Narrative

Like them or not, documentaries are in. They are the rising trend in contemporary audience sophistication and niche markets. But before I sing the praises of the documentary, maybe I should temper such a blanket statement. A documentary may never top the box office or come anywhere near the hundreds of millions raked in by the overmarketted products currently dominating the cineplexes. But anyone who follows the box office knows that net grosses are all relative. It's a bigger accomplishment for a movie like An Inconvenient Truth to make $49 million than it is for Transformers to make $250 million. It's a statement that Michael Moore's Sicko has cracked the top ten and has experienced a rise in box office receipts since its release. While the blockbuster movie industry directs all marketing efforts to opening weekend grosses, yet another signal of the shift toward cinematic fast food in the mainstream, documentaries (particularly political documentaries) have found their niche in certain markets and arguably outperform the mega-blockbusters. Personally, this pleases me immensely. It's great to see that audiences are seeking out thought-provoking movies (documentary and otherwise) and that this movement is actually starting to make a dent at the box office. Sure, it may not turn around the tidal wave of commodification that has overrun popular cinema, but it's a step in the right direction.

But this whole idea of a "political" movie troubles me. I hate to use the word "political" when describing certain popular documentaries, simply because one could argue that just about any action -- including making a movie in a specific way, marketing it, and distributing it -- is inherently political. Politics and power run deep within the very foundations of human communication that they are simply unavoidable. Certainly, some movies such as Michael Moore's Sicko (still unseen by me), Fahrenheit 9/11, and Bowling For Columbine are surface-level "political" documentaries in that they deal directly with matters of government control and influence. But I would argue that these movies are about much deeper political forces and movements than (dumb as it sounds) politics. Michael Moore seems to divide people and create debate like no other figure in media prominence today, other than perhaps She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (or, as Jim Emerson refers to her, The Creature from the Puddle of Mud) and the Televangelist-in-Chief (another one of Jim's titles). Moore is known as an ultra-left wing fact-fudger by some and a working class hero by others. His movies vary in quality; their best and worst elements are a direct extension of Moore's empassioned personality. But they represent a collection of accessible documentary filmmaking which resonates with audiences today. Blending humor with seriousness, thought with emotion, Moore's movies represent the pop face of the contemporary documentary.

It always humors me when I hear someone say things like, "Michael Moore's movies aren't documentaries because documentaries are based in fact and are supposed to be objective." Really? I had no idea. Documentaries differ from fictional movies in their presentation of narrative, certainly, but they are just as much of narratives as fiction movies. There, I said it. Let the masses be up in arms for someone suggesting that "fact" and "objectivity" are idealistic concepts which work fine in a vacuum but not in motion. No matter how factual, everything is narrative; containing perspectives which reflect the experiences and background of the individual, organization, or institution telling them. Some consider this a bad thing. I do not. I think the sooner we all realize this, the better. Narrative is the basis of our conception of self, culture, family, country, and memory etc. It reflects the principles of the language which enacts us to perform as social actors within organizations and the great web of discourse that is communication.

Documentaries may jettison the notion of creating fictional characters to structure a narrative, but they are still representative of some interest, even if they use facts and data to build around. In that sense, even the most fact-based of documentary filmmaking functions like empirical research, which -- in its structure, focus of study and manner of inquiry -- reflects underlying assumptions (both individual and cultural) about the supposedly objective world. That's not to discredit quantitative research or to disparage it. Rather, it's important to understand contextual and relational details that are always in play, for it is those underlying assumptions (even ones we're not conscious of) that constitute consciousness, providing a limited number of interpretations of the world.

To think that documentaries (or anything else) should be fact-based, lacking in perspective, feeling, and experience is a highly unproductive approach to information. It's good that documentaries (like all narratives) express perspectives, thoughts, feelings, opinions, and experiences. As viewers of them, we shouldn't feel positioned by them to either agree or disagree with their "presentation of facts", but instead think about why they provoke us; how they uphold or deviate from our own individual or cultural values, beliefs, and conceptions of how the world outside functions.

As I have said many times before, cinema is about feeling, emotional abstraction, and empathizing with the experience of others - whether that's the experience of fictional characters, artists, storytellers, and people of all different backgrounds and perspectives. This is not exclusive to fiction films, but all films. Good documentaries can be fascinating stories/films/accounts of the most seemingly mundane things, such as the life of a troubled, fascinating comic artist in Crumb, or a deep contemplation of life, death, and choice as in The Bridge; they may shed light on political, ecological, and social issues such as the The Corporation (which I just recently viewed) or An Inconvenient Truth. These movies enable the viewer to see the eccentricities and details of human behavior. They inquire into what it means to be human in a wide variety of challening and provocative perspectives through diverse subject matters. I still can't fathom that so many sophisticated scholars, viewers, and critics of cinema often treat documentaries as having a fundamentally different makeup than so-called fiction films. I believe that documentaries are a necessary component to the greater affective, cerebral, and artistic prism of narrative as channelled through the visuality of cinema. The beauty of this medium is that its affective capabilities are not limited to certain narrative "types" or genres. The narrative is only the beginning...

Along with the above mentioned titles, other favorite documentaries of mine include Nanook of the North, American Movie, The Thin Blue Line, and Man with the Movie Camera. I'm interested to hear the favorites of others. So I ask you: what are some your favorite documentaries?

Thoughts on Television and Cinema

In conversation, I often hear the phrases, "It's just entertainment" or "I don't want to have to think, I just want to watch something and enjoy it," and countless others coming from people who claim they are unashamed to watch shows/movies they know aren't "quality drama". This is usually the case with most television and a fair amount of commercial films. Television and cinema are similar in design and function, but the split between them strongly exhibits my adopted notion that not only can nothing be understood or interpreted without context, but that context decides the content; to the point that context is more important than the text. Contextual elements include social, economic, and technological factors (all which are intwined), and they work together to allow consumers/viewers to interpret the difference between television and cinema.

Many have argued that technological and economic factors are drawing together in these media to the extent that the difference between them is growing thinner. Home theater systems and the hypercommercialism of the theater experience, I would argue, blend the boundaries the most. First, home theater systems boast audio and visual perfection so as to replicate one's experience in the theater. Television screens are getting larger, surround sound systems more crisp. Though traditionalists offer that theaters have biggers screens, in reality, one's position in relation to a screen however small or large is more important in terms of the "size" of the image. So what separates these media? It's tough to say. I touched on similar issues recently, which is why I'd rather now look at the texts themselves.

Generally speaking, the medium of television as a visual mode of narrative yields a high level viewer passivity. It seeks to gain a viewer's familiarity with its easily identifiable visual styles and conventions and then loops it, encouraging one to switch off and retreat into a state of numbness. "I don't want to have to think," is one of my favorite phrases because I find it a complete hypocrisy. The process of watching something on a screen, making sense of its narrative and visual cues (however simple they are) requires a lot of thought, actually, and investment. The cognitive and sociocultural elements of watching moving images on a screen and making sense of them are far more complex than most people allow themselves to think about.

Part of the lure of seeing something on a screen as a form of narrative almost entails a bit of shameless voyeurism, as if we know we're not supposed to be watching. This element is intrinsic to all of narrative, but visual narrative especially. And TV is the height of convenient passivity for viewers. That's not to say I'm above it. We all enjoy a little television or simple movies to take our minds off things. It's enjoyable in a very basic sense and for a number of reasons. But the primary source of enjoyment is the desire sameness rather than innovation, which is something that everybody deals with. It is part of our social makeup to fall victim to the lure of convenience and simplicity. Even the most sophisticated of critics cannot deny their indulgences in "guilty pleasures."

But this conflict is much more intricate. Consider the viewer's activity in television. Aside from process of comrehending a moving image, there is a very fundamental essence about TV that enacts its ability to embody passivity yet also breaches this conflict. If we are entertained by something to the extent that we maintain a weekly schedule of watching a show, there is not only thought in that show but investment. Despite readily acknowledging the simplicity of a simple or cliched television show or movie, many of us will invest in spite of this acknowledgment. Where does this come from? Why are we so compelled to watch the screen and engage in thought and feeling (which no one can deny the experience of watching a sitcom or drama is, over long periods of time) yet keep our distance from things we see on that screen that don't adhere to familiar structures and courses? I wish I knew. But it's fascinating to think about. Perhaps even the most sophisticated defenders and/or participants in these media are constantly at battle with some kind of inner desire for the movement-image, which, Deleuze says, is an image one can easily anticipate, and situate within a recognizable field of visual perception. Of course, Deleuze theorized that the time-image frees both the image and the viewer from the limits of the movement-image. But he notes that the movement-image is essentially inevitable, alluding to what seems to be a desire for visual familiarity both social and cognitive in origin.

Though I have only begun reading David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film, its contents have already struck me as revelatory and intriguing. In an early chapter on narration and film form, Bordwell uses constructivist psychology to explore filmic perception and cognition, which proves useful in a discussion of visual perception in light of different visual media. He writes:

"Speaking roughly, the typical act of perception is the identification of a three-dimensional world on the basis of cues. Perception becomes a process of active hypothesis-testing. The organism is tuned to pick up data from the environment. Perception tends to be anticipatory, framing more or less likely expectations about what is out there."

He continues:

"Taken as a purely sensory experience, seeing is a bewildering flutter of impressions. The eye fixates many times per minute, using short and fast movements (called saccades); the eye rotates to compensate for head and body movement; the eyes trembles involuntarily; and most of the visual information we receive is peripheral anyhow. Yet we do not experience a flicker or smear of percepts. We see a stable world, smooth movements, constant patterns of light a nd dark. To the extent that seeing is a bottom-up process, the visual system is organized to make its inferences in an involuntary, virtually instantaneous manner. You 'immediately' see a visual array as consisting of objects distributed in three-dimensional space, and you cannot help seeing this. The automatic construction is also affected by schemat-driven processes that check hypotheses against incoming visual data.... Seeing is thus not a passive absorption of stimuli. It is a constructive activity, involving very fast computations, stored concepts, and various purpose, expectations, and hypotheses."

While Bordwell acknowledges that this concept requires more unpacking if it is to account for the intricasies of visual perception, this theoretical framework for seeing is nonetheless fascinating. The important point about this approach, in my mind, is how it blends the cognitive and the social to the point that they are nearly inseparable. We perceive and interpret according to our own perceptual schemata, hypotheses, and familiarity of visual and auditory conventions.

These concepts intriguingly tie together with the discussion of visual perception in different visual media. The reason I have been thinking about these ideas in more detail of late is that I have observed an a slightly more prominent mention of television's influence over cinema in many reviews of current films. For example, many have written that Live Free or Die Hard is less an organic extension of the previous films featuring Bruce Willis' John McLane but instead a direct inspiration of high intensity action programs such as 24, an assertion I would agree with. While Live Free demonstrates a slick use of action convetions and objects in motion, it rings up hollow as a pure cinematic experience. Perhaps this loose connection to television may have a hand in that. The similarities exist on narrative and stylistic levels, especially since often times the two converge. Other summer movies fall to similar patterns. For example, Evan Almighty contains an unusual amount of infantile "potty" humor for a story that wishes to be so prophetic. This, one could argue, is a direct extension of the sitcom sensibility of sequencing action-reaction shots (e.g. Shot A: squirrel bites Steve Carrell's crotch, shot B: close-up of Carrell's face, eyes widening as he prepares to yell in pain). This trend is seen not just in sitcom-inspired comedies, but also in the action epics like Pirates of the Caribbean. The film's talking-based scenes largely adhere to the same practice of cutting between two actors -- one's face screen left, the other screen right. This aesthetic borrows heavily from sit-coms as well as day time soap operas, both of which came to fruition in the 80's and 90's. For more on this, check out Henry Jenkins' excellent article.

In contemporary mainstream cinema, the "talking heads" method of editing and framing greatly determines the nature of the acting, performance, visual perception, and narrative interpretation. But the influence of contemporary television is much more vast on cinema. The Live Free or Die Hard example works well in this argument, since its visual style, both in its action sequences and expository scenes of establishing its villains heavily borrows from 24, among other shows. Observe the framing of the the villain as he watches a computer screen. Even the lighting gives us the slick, but intense 24-like feeling. The plot of the film could very easily had felt less like a television show than it does. Yes, the screenplay definitely demonstrates its influences, but the real feeling of similarity comes mostly from the editing techniques and compositions, which feel more like a contemporary television show than a movie. Another fascinating example of television affecting "big" cinema is The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which offers a lot of close-ups and talking heads editing contrasted with stereotypically epic compositions (wide open vistas, sustained helicopter shots. While the movies work better in their smaller moments of detail and precision, they definitely represent a strange tension of aesthetic design that echoes the convergence of the visual styles of television and cinema .

While such editing/framing techniques have always been used, they are emphasized much more since the explosion of television as drama/comedy in American culture. This, in fact, is a strange irony. In matters of technology and visual convention, TV was influenced primarily by cinema. But now cinema seems to be more influenced by TV than by its own growth as a medium. Perhaps its growth today is television, which is why so many films abide by conventions employed by TV shows, which themselves are filtered copies of film conventions.

This apparent shift in framing sensibilities no doubt emerges, at least partly, from the tried and true success of sitcom-style, passive-inducing framing styles. In a discussion of mainstream visual perception, one could say that while television was always the influence of the innotivation of cinema, movies are now one step behind television. I am referring to the visual style of its hour-long dramas, not reality television or sitcoms. Shows like Lost, The Sopranos, and various others seem to be pushing into new visual territory (again, by popular standards). They are often more daring and visually unique than genre offerings as served up by Hollywood today.

Yet these shows are not the real trend-setters. Since Hollywood by-and-large seems content to rest safely on conventions of editing, staging, and framing, non-commercial films seem to be the ones now that are exploiting the technological advances of visual media such as digital technology. (Of note, its massive productions employing technology in daring ways often fail, as last year's masterpiece Miami Vice did from a commercial standpoint.) Many of smaller these films engage these technologies and inquire into their role in visual storytelling. I would argue that Television has looked to non-commercial cinema for its influences, and it has done so with great success. Perhaps audiences have embraced these "new" framing and editing techniques because they are loosely and liberally applied to familiar structures that television offer and movies do not. One of the many potential reasons for this is that audiences may have more room for intrigue when they know that something still needs to pan out, whereas the anticipations and expectations of a movie are different. But this is just one of many potential reasons for such varying shifts in visual style in various visual media.

This is really just the beginning of a bigger dialogue about nature of inter-medium influence, connectedness, and disconnectedness and the varying shifts in visual style in various visual media. Situated within David Bordwell's theory of hyperclassical visual style in modern movies as layed out in The Way Hollywood Tells It, an analysis of film and television (on both popular and non-commercial levels) may yield a greater understanding of inter-media influence of visual style and spectator consumption. An even more lucrative entry point into these inquiries is the use of emerging technologies such as HD and digital film.

Media "Literacy"

I first came across Henry Jenkins' blog via Observations on film art and Film Art. The entry referenced by Kristin Thompson is a defense of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and an introduction to a greater dialogue regarding criticism and mainstream moviemaking, two subjects I have written about quite a bit over the last month or two (here and here). I hope to comment on these issues in the future -- specifically regarding how different visual narrative media influence each other, i.e. television's influence on cinema -- but right now I'd like to highlight Jenkins' recent post about the implications of shifting modes of acquiring information via digital domains, i.e. Wikipedia and other online forms of writing. Though it's not mentioned, blogging definitely enters into the conversation. Here is an excerpt:

"The practices and tools that sustain Wikipedia are designed to insure the highest degree of transparency -- the most controversial entries come with the maximum numbers of warnings. Yet, realistically, many young people are going to the site in search of quick data and may lack the critical vocabulary necessary to use its contents meaningfully. So, at the most basic level, a media literacy practice around Wikipedia needs to focus attention on the basic affordances of the site, so that students are encouraged to move beyond the top level and see what's going on underneath the hood.

Researchers have shown that the current generation of young learners often exploits digital tools to copy and paste information, sometimes getting confused about where any fact came from, or blurring the lines between their own insights and those from secondary sources. Preliminary work from the researchers at a MacArthur funded project at the University of Southern California suggests that differences in access to digital technologies further impact young people's research practices. Those children who have the most extensive access to networked computers are most likely to look critically upon the kinds of information that they draw from Wikipedia: they have the time to experience knowledge production as a collaborative process. For those young people whose only access is through schools and public libraries, however, they need to get in quick, get the information they need, and make way for the next user. These time constraints encourage them to see the web as a depository of information and often discourages them from taking time to closely examine where that information comes from or under what circumstances it was produced. This is only one of the many consequences of what we are calling the participation gap.

The participation gap is shaped by uneven access to technologies but also by unequal access to formative experiences and thus unequal opportunities to acquire the social skills and cultural competencies we are calling the new media literacies. Participation in these online communities constitutes a new hidden curriculum which shapes how young people perform in school and impacts the kinds of opportunities they will enjoy in the future."

While only an introduction to a greater dialogue, Jenkins' piece represents the beginning of an essential dialogue about education, information, and meaning structures in the digital age. Therefore, Jenkins approaches these issues more as an observer and inquirer, and therefore has more questions than answers. But that is his whole point. More difficult and demanding questions must be asked if we are to be responsible advocates or opponents of cultural staples such as Wikipedia and YouTube.

With all that's being taught on electronic and digital technology, how to utilize it and understand its role in the workforce and classroom, it continues to amaze me how little we really know about these various technologies and media. Terms such as "visual literacy" and "media literacy" are routinely used in schools and organizations, yet, outside of serious media and culture graduate and doctoral programs, questions concerning the implications of various media on culture and organizations are rarely asked. If they are, it's often for the explicit purpose of supporting an opinion of favor or doubt. What isn't being looked at in any serious manner is the nature of the relationships and negotiations resulting from our participation an relation to the so-called breakthroughs in technology.

Look at the release of the supposedly revolutionary iPhone. Take notice of what's being discussed, focused on, and the nature of the general discourse surrounding this new device. (Note: I haven't performed a formal analysis of the critical and popular discourse, so I am therefore basing this on my own observations.) Consumer culture dictates that if something can be done, then it should be done. This is a dangerous mentality fueled more by capitalistic ideology rather than the appropriate critical thought. But this is a reflection of an apparent emphasis on commodity in cultural relation and identity negotiation, which has restructured public consciousness inasmuch that it imposes controlled meanings by limiting the possibilities of response and participation, directing our thought-processes and abilities to think critically at all.

What does it mean to be media literate, after all? Moreover, what is media? What is technology? Are they interchangeable? How do they relate to one another? Simple questions such as these often cannot be answered simply because they are never asked. We use these terms daily, in conversation and in practice. Our economic institutions and scientific discourse are structured around them and progress according to them, yet many of us cannot sufficiently understand or even conceptualize the very fundamental terms that make them up. "Culture" and "organizations" are discussed as if they are real, tangible things, as notion of efficience and productivity are continually emphasized. All the while, these functionalist ideas to which we cling largely ignore the fundamentally constitutive nature of the communication, e.g. language, media, technology, through which we structure and produce the world we perceive, interpret, and act on. Therefore, these dialogues regarding media literacy, visual literacy, and (my personal favorite) cultural literacy should be reflexive and critical of the very tools and processes with which we understand these concepts. Communication is the air we breathe. It is not something that be "made more effective," as if its another cog in the machine. It is the machine. A focus on "the message" severely limits one's understanding of and participation in such discourses, which is why we should think critically about the medium itself, not just of these emerging trinkets of convenience like the iPhone, but all socially structured and shared meanings.

On a reflexive note, I say all of this as somebody who engages in many of the digital practices that (as I complain) aren't be thought of and discussed in a productive manner. I am more than aware of this, which is why I take the time to write posts like this... complete with hyperlinks and pictures pulled from the Web. This discussion (at least on this blog) is not going to end, and it affects the very practices of reading and writing in this format, which Jenkins observes in his post. Stay tuned to his blog for at least one more entry on this subject, or perhaps more. And I recommend checking out some of his other entries as well, since it seems he's written extensively about digital information and culture. It's worth your while.

Shifting Reflections

I am deeply suspicious of "movements" within critical discourse of any medium or mode of communication. I tend to align myself more with a McLuhan-esque model of thinking which holds that media are extensions of ourselves and of each other.* To simply state where, when, and how one era, movement, or period ends and another begins is too simplistic and problematic. Nevertheless, this manner of thinking restructures thought to the extent that media and institutions come to embody the properties and categories through which we understand them, despite not intrinsically existing as such. In other words, I would venture to guess that even though categorizing modes of thought, media, narrative, etc. is inherently reductive, it nonetheless enables our cultural institutions and media to embody the oversimplifications that we impose on them.

In terms of the cinema's technological evolution, there are undeniably certain "movements," e.g. the introduction of sound, color, animation (though animation preceded photographic properties of cinema), and countless other subtle advances which affected the construction of images. There were also institutional, economic, and social factors that guided particular movements in cinema such as the implementation of the Hays Code in the early days of cinema or the MPAA in the late 60's. Even beyond these factors specifically relating to cinema and its production are cultural and social components that have yielded certain stages in the development of the movies as an art form, critical artifiact, and technological medium. There are probably hundreds, thousands more factors that influence periods in cinema, and this broad idea should be something that all critics, viewers, and scholars should take note of. Interestingly, many of these factors convened in the late 1960's and early 1970's, resulting in many undeniable changes in the direction of American cinema. However, in favor of highlighting these changes and asserting a liberated filmmaking atmosphere (an attitudes that persists even today) in which American cinema "came into its own" and made great strides to catch up with European art cinema, it's very tempting to screen out certain elements of the time that may call the consistency and tidiness of such an argument into question.

No one can deny that American cinema changed immensely at that time, but the reception of that (or any) change often depends on the already established context and conditions under which such change takes place. In terms of stylistic and narrational aspects of filmmaking, of which there were many shifts in the 1970's, many of these aesthetic properties were influenced by the technical knowledge and expansion of cinematic media. For example, that filmmakers began employing widescreen cameras changed how shots could be framed, which then affected how filmmakers envisioned compostions. This example is overly simple, yes, but it effectively captures the notion that many of the artistic changes were undergirded by not only subtle technical changes in technology as well as the cultural familiarity and preparedness for that change. If a culture, audience, or individual is accepting of change, they/she/he are usually already accustomed to what to expect in this change and are therefore more willing to embrace it. This is usually the case in more subtle alterations in films and filmmaking capabilities as the increased use of widescreen camera lens late 60's and 1970's American cinema shows.

However, when it comes to changes that greatly affect the technical, stylistic, narrational, and even structural aspects of cinema, cultures/audiences/individuals are almost unanimously opposted to such change. This is likely because they have built a familiarity (consciously and unconsciously) with the specific elements that contributed to cinematic storytelling before sound and therefore came to view sound in cinema as bastardization of all that cinema was. But the overriding claim I'm making -- one that deserves much more critical thought -- is that how positively or negatively a movement or change is received seems to vary according to social and technical conditions, i.e. the nature of the change is measured and understood by manners in which the "new" elements interact with existing familiar styles and cinematic elements, which are influenced by social and technical conditions. Thus, epistemological and phenomenological questions about cinema are central to responsible criticism of and thought about it.

Today, we are experiencing something similar to the introduction of sound in cinema: digital cinema. While there was no one film that signaled the onset of a new mode of cinematic intrepretation -- a la The Jazz Singer -- many movies of the past 20 years (Young Sherlock Holmes, The Abyss, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Toy Story, the "Star Wars" prequels, Miami Vice, Inland Empire) have given ushered (in some cases, demanded) new ways of constructing and interpreting cinematic images and movements. The digital movement is happening continually, and its effects are seen in movies of all shapes and sizes, not just films using the technology. It has been met with plenty of resistance, i.e. those claiming that the only true form of cinema is that which is captured on celluloid and projected onto a screen. This perspective is baffling in how stubborn its advocates are. It also doesn't hold up under close scrutiny, but instead only works in generalities. The very discussion of whether it's "good" or "bad" for cinema is more revealing of the ideological issues that sustain particularly limited approaches to media, art forms, and organizations. Nevertheless, ideology enables us to make sense of and advance these very modes of communicating, so to try to act independently of them is foolish as well.

My argument (in very broad terms) is that we are married to forms of language and categorization, which enable the formation and understand of eras, movements, etc. We are trapped within them but inevitably constituted by them. While I am skeptical about movements, I cannot deny their very real presence and take part in the construction of said changes as well. Nevertheless, it's very important to be reflective participants rather than passive viewers of cinema (or any medium) and ask questions of such "changes" that reduce so many technological, social, and cultural factors contributing to all media to one simple plane. Maybe we should question the glory of the American 1970's, actively ponder the validity of the overwhelmining critical denouncement of digital cinema, or the basic claims that certain modes of storytelling or film styles are inherently bad or not "artistic." That is not to say that any broad assumption is incorrect; just that we should push ourselves to think about all factors that may contribute to any advances or movements of any kind. Reducing them to generalities promotes highly reductive understanding of them.

Assuming we choose to engage in critical thought about cinema that refuses to abide by a single plane of understanding, one that takes easily tagged movements and simplified understandings of periods, genres, and visual techniques with a grain of salt, what then is cinema? This is harder to answer. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge the nearly infinite amount of elements that contribute to an experience many consider to be simple: watching a movie. For those who approach cinema on a critical level, this becomes all the more important (as the digital movement reminds) as the medium itself and the other media that influence it continue to change along with our relation to them. Approaching the production and interpretation of cinema from affective, cognitive, and social schools of thought may reveal much about position to and understand of it; its narrational, representative, and structural properties as they pertain to the relation to and understanding of visuality. Doing so may finally spark the critical thought that such an influential, complex, and important medium demands.


* Note: I do not worship at the altar of McLuhan in all matters of media since I find him overly simplistic regarding some things, but I think his contributions to communication and media studies are essential and innovative in the age of electronic media.

Cleaning Up The Movies: Commodification Cloaked in Morals

Scarlett Johannson smoking a cigarette in "Lost in Translation". It's ok though: the film is rated R.


It's official: smoking has now joined the ranks of illicit sex, homosexuality, teen alcohol/drug use, extreme violence, and foul language as cinematically taboo, unless your film is rated R.

Some consider the MPAA's recent efforts to discourage smoking in the movies long overdue. When the news broke last week, there was a strange aura of positivity to the many reports published online and in print. Based on these reports and reactions to them, it appears as though this ratings system change is a good thing. It is only the culmination of something our movie culture has been moving towards for the better part of 20 years. The actual news itself is secondary to the point that this newer, more strict view of smoking has actually been in practice for quite some time in the MPAA's biased assessment of ethical standards in cinema. But the news reports seem to support the notion that it's long overdue and desperately needed. No doubt this news is constructed to be positive and that we - the recepients of news media - are conditioned to believe it. Those who don't support it are painted as promoters of poor health. Though this may seem appropriate on the surface, its implications are disturbing.

The big question is this: do movies promote/support/encourage smoking via their representations of it? In the eyes of many, yes they do. According to these folks, the entertainment industry "glorifies" decadent acts, among them mentioned above. From this perspective, a child's exposure to these acts in entertainment may lead them to consider partaking (Could you imagine all the kids who would be smoking if Peter Parker was a chain smoker?). This "life imitates art" stance, however, is numbingly simplified and too easy an explanation (if it can be called that) for the relationship of entertainment and a culture, or, more specifically, an image and a spectator. The common response to "life imitates art" ideology is, unfortunately, equally wrong-headed and simplistic. This is of course the "it's just entertainment" defense, held by those who claim to have no connection to that which they see. I suppose one naive view deserves another in response, one that only regurgitates the problem of simplification rather than enabling it to expand. The simple nature of these perspectives often demand that things exist in dualities.

There is no question that viewers are greatly affected by entertainment, individually and culturally. Not only does exposure to entertainment (television and movies) physically account for substantial portions of the average individual's day, but the narratives and images themselves reflect and project concerns, preoccupations, fantasies, fears, and desires both unconscious and conscious to an individual/culture. The question still remains, however, of just how much influence these narratives and images have. But there is no easy answer to that. One's relation to the social world and participation in it is dependent on so many factors, both subtle and overt. To simplify the innumerable contributing aspects to one's sociocultural existence greatly undermines potential for abstraction and nuance in relationships and institutions of the social, in particular artistic representation. Walter J. Ong (whose book Orality and Literacy is indispensable) claims that technologies and media outlets not only emerge from acknowledged existence of one another, but that they gradually restructure thought-processes so as to accord to the structures of those media. Framing this discussion through the Ong lens then suggests that simplified approached to media with a strict emphasis on content reshapes the medium to accord to its perceived content. In other words, the medium itself changes to enable the very content it's been perceived to promote. And the medium is commodification.

Ever so slightly, art forms and useful media are transforming into products. Obviously, the commerce aspect of cinema has and always will be exist; but in terms of classical US filmmaking, the commerce is progressively eradicating the art. The current sanctions of the MPAA best reflect and sustain the view that movies are nothing more than advertising enterprises meant for consumption. Rarely can an image, character, action, or idea serve the purpose of abstraction or aesthetic value. In this hyper-commercial culture, we are made to think that the only way of interpreting anything is from a standpoint of consumption, promotion, and advertising. Objection to product placement or ruthless advertising campaigns is secondary to the fact that their overwhelming prominence in all facets of society is restructuring how we view and act upon social institutions and members of them. Commodification has become a mode of cultural discourse. It's the air we breathe. Some claim that this only affects the young, but the recent news of the MPAA clamping down on smoking is evidence that this movement affects all areas of American culture. And as long that we remain focused on the ethics of smoking, violence, or any other controversial representation, we are missing the the real issue that commodification is the means by which we process and interpret lived experience in consumer culture.

Nowhere is this more evident than in mainstream entertainment, cinema, television, music, and beyond. In keeping with a discussion of cinema, the issue of smoking is an interesting manifestation of the problem of thinking in terms of consumption. Critics and film scholars aside, movies are largely perceived as endorsements. Given the amount of product placement in films, it's hard not to see them that way. An image can rarely exist outside the sphere of commodity insofar that even attempts to move away from this line of thinking is a self-conscious attempt at doing so and is still defined by it. In this model, product placement and advertising represent the medium, but the message is the image itself, the representation of an idea or lifestyle that becomes commodity. In a consumer-friendly PG/PG-13 movie atmosphere, a character cannot smoke unless: she or he is a villain or if the smoking is part of her or his character arc (representing something that must be overcome. Either way, that character must have a good reason for smoking that cigarette. This is a small example, but it succinctly exemplifies the cultural attitude toward mainstream movies and has contributed to shaping them as such. Replace smoking with sex, alcohol use, violence, etc. and the model is the same. These cultural ideas of consumption are so deep rooted in American cinema and economy and is perfectly reflected in the ever-shifting MPAA rating system, which infantilizes movies and conditions them to be neatly packaged products ready-made for consumer purchase. This affects how they are made and perceived and therefore shapes an understanding of cinema a consumer enterprise. While no one can deny the billions of dollars spent by studios to make films and the billions more their films make, this very machine keeps growing larger and larger our perceptions of the medium itself have gradually been conditioned to understand it as such.

The problem that is becoming ever-more pronounced in this heightened age of electronic commercialism is one of representation. In a medium/message model, the medium is the image and the message is the narrative. While I prize the collapsing of this duality, as it would enable greater ways of perceiving and building our social reality and technologies, it's hard to escape. Images do not intrinsically exist is symbolic representations, but they unfortunately become that in a narrative framework, and gradually we condition ourselves to not see the images and instead perceive them as representations of the narrative underneath. This results in an awkward tension between abstraction and cliche, one that underlies cinema as an art form. But if spectators move away from the comfortable familiarity of convention and a "film as commodity" perception towards cinema, the medium itself can expand and enable the depth of nuance of which it is capable. Outside the focus on plot, narrative, and representation, an image can exist differently, create abstraction, and yield a greater mode of thinking outside the same narrative and representative structures that enable their existence. While one must always acknowledge narrative, new narrative and image possibilities are only unlocked when narrative serves the images, rather than the other way around. Only then can we culturally de-commodify the moving image.