Megan Loucks
*Extra Credit* Thematic Essay

To begin this musing on YouTube, I think it is only appropriate that I refer you to something that began this class for all of us way back in February: the 300. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNqiSkd1M6k&feature=related
This is the PG Version, where swords and guns are replaced by cakes and candy. It is international relations done right. Utopia indeed.

As of 2007 it was calculated that every month, YouTube receives 20 million visitors. Each day, 100 million video clips are watched and 65,000 new videos are posted. Much has been made about the popularity of YouTube and the reverberations felt in mainstream news outlets by its videos. The phenomenon surrounding such video-sharing web sites (the social, political, and/or economic) has been called “The YouTube Effect”. In the current presidential race, campaigns have used the YouTube platform to reach out to young voters. And who could forget the first ever “CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate” on July 23rd 2007, which as some people said, helped make political debate matter again.

Millions of people spend time on YouTube, but what are they watching? The question posed to me for this class was what this week’s list of the most popular videos on YouTube say about the influence of YouTube and society at large. But I wonder, does video popularity necessary translate into influence? Does this really mark a shift in how the average person interacts with the media, and the community around them? These are big questions, and perhaps a look at the “most popular list” will help.

For those YouTube newbies, one should know that the politics and strategies behind making it on the “most viewed”, “most favorited”, or “most discussed” lists are heated points of discussion (and controversy) among the YouTube community. In fact, the ability of these lists to accelerate a video or user’s popularity can not be underestimated. I, like many others, have often clicked on a video in the “most viewed” list, only to finish the video with the aching feeling that I deserve those five minutes of my life back. You learn quickly about the capricious nature of celebrity and that numbers are too often misleading. The influence that the sheer set-up of YouTube (layout, list organization, featured videos ,etc ) has on the dynamics of video sharing and thus, “The YouTube Effect”, deserves its own separate discussion.

So in acknowledging that these different lists give different meanings to the term “popularity” I chose “most favorited videos of the day” as a good balance. On Monday night I looked up the Top 10 most favorited videos of the day and spent the next half hour watching… a Michael Jackson impersonation, a pseudo-music video, a video game review, a time-lapse painting, and the always popular booty-shaking female. The latter will not be included in this analysis. Yes, a very typical day on YouTube. More entertaining than it sounds.

In describing the list, I will do my best to connect these videos to broader YouTube trends, and if I’m lucky maybe even psycho-social critique.

So taking the #1 spot is a clip from Britain’s Got Talent, favorited 4,446 times and viewed over 400,000 times. No surprise with this one. The demonstration of exotic and impressive talents is a hallmark of YouTube. The average Joe or Jane or even Mohamed, can easily have their spot in the starlight. In this clip, Suleman Mirza, who notes himself as “one of the best Michael Jackson tribute artists”, adds an Asian Banghra flair to his dance with the help of a turban-clad dance partner.

The second place video, favorited 1,578, is difficult to describe, because I am withholding the particularly strong feelings I have about the band’s music. It’s the teen sensation the Jonas Brothers and their song “Kung-Fu Grip” played in time with a slideshow of the three dark-haired bushy-browed brothers in their signature tight pants and purity rings.

A moment of Jonas Brothers lyrical zen before going on to the #3 spot.

“ Sometimes I wish I had a kung-fu grip;
Never let her slip away, she'd be my girl
….
I'm so in love with her.
I don't care who knows that I'm ready to fight, ready to go;
Just like a GI Joe ”

Walter B couldn’t have said it better.
In third place is something this class will appreciate. “Funny Cats #4”, subtitled “Caturday Forever!”, shows us all that the internet’s mutual celebration of cat obsession will never stay contained to Fridays. Favorited 1,396 times on Monday night, a check today revealed that over 637,000 people have tuned in. The #4 heading belies the impossibly large volume of similar pet-hommage videos, particularly of cats. Users compile funny cat photos into slideshows, often with some animation to amplify the sheer hilarity of seeing kittens tucked inside a woman’s bra. I have stayed away from these videos in the past, but while watching the whole 1 minute and 55 seconds worth of cats and kittens (set to pulsating techno music), I couldn’t help but crack up at the sight of “zombie cat” or “invisible onion and knife cat”. Kudos to user “HilariousVideosLOL” for converting me to the dark side.

Grabbing the #4 spot with a close 1,068 favorites is “Grand Theft Auto 4 Video Review – Exclusive!!! (Xbox 360)”. I am not a video-gamer, but the review was informative and well done. Praising the storyline, the game play, and the ability to play your friends online, user Mysteriouskk shows continuous scenes of the game being played in all its realistic graphic glory. He adds that a new feature is the “occasional morality twist”, meaning that your decisions to kill or not to kill somebody will affect dialogue and future missions. It appears that reality has finally been inserted into virtual reality. With all the hubbub about GTA being a violent soul-sucking video game, it seems that the makers finally threw parents a bone.

The #5 spot is a video of an artist painting a classic Pin-Up-themed woman, but sped up to meet the continually decreasing attention span of our generation (a quick search on YouTube reveals 24,700 time lapse videos). To be quite honest, even just five minutes left me unsatisfied. In a strange way, watching it made me long for The Joy of Painting; those simpler, better days, when Bob Ross would explain why we never really make mistakes, but rather just “happy little accidents”.

#6 or “RSMV Lay Down- Priestess” is a music video of the song Lay Down by Priestess made by assembling graphics and characters from the video game Runescape by Jagex. In the description the user explains “If you are not a fan of Runescape, and found this as a search result for the band Priestess or the song Lay Down, please simply go back and continue searching the results. It's not my intention for this to be a common result”. To him I say, enjoy the accidental fame, enjoy it! The video does seem to have a serious contingent of fans though, who inquire with such questions as “How'd you do the sleep emote?”, which is of course “a spell from the Lunar Magic spellbook”, not to be confused with “a teleport orb from goblin city Dorgesh-kaan”.
Trust me, I am just as lost as you are.

#7 is Prince performing Radiohead’s “Creep” live at Coachella. Famous musicians frequently are in the top favorite lists. This is especially true for music videos for songs that are on the Billboard Top 100. And the nature of online video posting frequently produces an instaneous concert clip or celebrity snafoo caught on tape (or both – see “Beyonce Falling Down Stairs”).

Taking the #8 spot is “Speak Out Against Hate Speech” : a seven minute video posted by tyleroakley but made through the collaboration of about a dozen youtubers. The video description explains, “Through the new Sharing options, this message could spread internationally and could be featured globally. Do your part to fight for peace and equality and make the message be seen.” The video shows YouTubers, many of them well-known faces among the YouTube community, repeating certain words of hate and then asking the viewer how they think those words make people feel. It’s a simple, well edited video with a powerful message.

A frequently overlooked aspect of YouTube is the networking done within the YouTube Community. Video collaborations like these are a frequent siting. The ability of YouTube to connect people across the world through video adds a whole new dimension to internet socializing.

#9 is “Many Chinese Students attack Tibet People in Seoul, S Korea 2008. 04. 27.” There have been many videos posted recently in reaction to the olympic torch run and violence in Tibet. The chinese government has received repeated hits from YouTube's free media. Frankly, I am surprised such a serious topic made it to number nine, though “violent titles” automatically get an advantage in attracting hits.

For #10 or “Ron Paul Hits it out of the Park on CNN American Morning”, Ron Paul proclaims to John Roberts that the “GOP can’t shut me out” and that he is still in the race. The author celebrates the fact that the video made the front page of Digg magazine, reflecting yet again, the ability of YouTube to infiltrate other media sources.

Despite all my loyalty to YouTube, I still question the hype about the “YouTube Effect”. I see it more as an evolution, rather than a revolution. In many ways this way of video sharing is a great equalizer. The common man is both judger and judged. There is much excitement about the interaction of YouTube and mainstream television news outlets. Yet the videos referenced, like any other news clip, are often taken out of context, used to advance political agendas, or meaningless fluff. The biggest effect in my mind is that the average American, presented now with so many diverse video formats, is being forced to learn that video, like any other medium, is something that must be read. And this, is a major contribution.

But above all, YouTube is what you make of it. Depending on what you are looking for, and where you click, YouTube can be bare bones escapism or mind-opening education. It can be a source of exposure to other cultures or a place where stereotypes are mocked and reinforced (for example the Japanese seem to dominantly represented by gameshows like Human Tetris). And yes the trash, hate speech, and propaganda videos are there. The mainstream wins more than you would hope. The amount of tribute videos and movie re-edits seems to reveal an America ( a young America? ) that is bored, so so bored. YouTube can seem to embody a neverending pursuit of and obsession with celebrity. And of course, it is a place where reputations are made and broken. Many an awkward teenage boy have been forever sent into hiding. (The first to fall was Star Wars Kid, I predict “Fat kid on rollercoaster” will be the next).

The ability of YouTube to give people a sense of voice and influence is undoubtedly incredible, however contested that actual influence is. The ability to film and upload a video doesn’t require the kind of technical know-how of website creation. You don’t need to have a mastery of language (the butchery of the english language is more than welcome on discussion boards). While scouring YouTube videos, one can’t help but marvel at the sheer diversity and complexity of humanity. YouTube can be the source of that warm nostalgic feeling when a video awakens a memory like nothing else ever could. It often appears like condensed soup: American pop culture in a can. And in a world where time is crunched, saved, and cherished, YouTube fills a necessary niche: compacted entertainment for the ever growing pace of this global human network.

1. Naim, Moisés. « The YouTube Effect ». http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3676. Foreign Policy Online. January/February 2007.

Posted by Megan Loucks at 06:49 PM | Permalink

In the Introduction to “Worship at the Altar of Convergence,” Henry Jenkins defines convergence as the “flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences” (2). He mentions that media convergence is where “old and new media collide” and where “grassroots and corporate media intersect” (2). Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” also discusses a sort of convergence between the old, more contemplative forms of art like unique paintings and sculpture and photography or the new, faster-paced media of the cinema. He sees the newer art form as a new mode of representation because of the technological advances on which it depends—particularly the advances in mechanical reproducibility—as well as the fact that it presents new ways of viewing and interacting with art. In the same way that Walter Benjamin considered photography and later, film, new stages in representation, the convergence of media is also a new stage in representation because it too relies on technological advances and mechanical reproduction, and it also changes the way that people view art.

Mechanical reproduction, in Benjamin’s view, makes art more about exhibition and less about a cult experience. Of course Benjamin does mention that this reproducibility diminishes a piece’s “aura,” or authenticity, by removing it from its original context. But he also discusses how it “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” Accordingly, reproducibility means that one no longer needs to travel to a specific church to see a specific statue, new works of art such as photographic prints can be moved to a museum, and movies are even less limited to one location because they can be reproduced in multiple towns. Further, each of the distributed copies is indistinguishable from the original piece. Benjamin even claims that “mechanical reproduction is inherent in the very technique of film production.” In this way, film is the epitome of a type of art that is made to be reproduced, thus following his progression of art which claims that the “work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” With mechanical reproduction, art in general becomes more about exhibiting and being seen by more people.

With modern convergence of media on the web, even more people can view the art than could view the films that Benjamin describes in 1936. For example, as of April 26, 2008, 15,388,580 people have viewed the popular YouTube video “Shoes,” which was posted only two years ago (YouTube). Moreover, these works get even more exposure because of convergence of media, and the ability of major media companies either to republish or at least reference the artwork in another context. In the same way that mechanical reproduction spreads art to many more viewers, the technology that allows viewers to broadcast their art over the web also expands that art to many more viewers.

Not only can more people view art with the convergence of media on the web, but convergence of new technologies also represents a new form of representation because it allows more people to partake in art production. Starting with the 8mm Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination in 1963, now many people can capture news events on their cameras, cell phones, or on whatever recording technology they have. Moreover, web technology like YouTube allows people to share their art globally. Unlike news of the past, news channels are likely to broadcast an event as a composite of footage from many of these ordinary people who happen to capture an event with their personal technology.
***

For Walter Benjamin, film presents new art techniques that combine to make a totally new art form. He describes how the technique of montage allows filmmakers to put images together in a completely new way, thus conveying the artist’s point of view in a new manner. Close up and slow motion options expand viewers’ horizons. Furthermore, for the first time, worlds with which many of us have little practical experience are opened up to us. This “immense and unexpected field of action” includes every location from taverns to office buildings and allows many of us to explore and see them for the first time.

Benjamin discusses how film is a change in representation because unlike earlier art forms, it successfully creates “changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator.” One critic identifies the technique of montage, introduced with film, as the way through which film creates these changes. Specifically, he describes how montage “rips things from their original place in an assigned sequence and reassembles them in ever changing combinations” (Nichols).

The development of montage, according to Benjamin, affects how the viewer interacts with art. Whereas a painting “invites the spectator to contemplation,” the film moves too quickly for the viewer to meditate on one image. He claims that the images “cannot be arrested” and even quotes a radical thinker who posits that in watching movies, his “thoughts have been replaced by moving images” (Duhamel, quoted in Benjamin).

Montage is extremely important for the current artwork on the web because it allows an artist to take known things and splice them together to make a new meaning. An artist can take a speech (for example, Barack Obama’s 2004 national convention speech) and cut it down to what he or she thinks are its essential elements. This editing destroys the illusion of objectivity and enhances a specific point of view, along the lines of what David Hoffmann discussed recently in our class. So though it’s Obama’s speech from the 2004 DNC, it’s the parts that a filmmaker thinks are salient, and set to the music (in one case, the Gladiator soundtrack) that he or she chooses. He or she may not be painting a subject, but is still creating art with his or her message and point of view.

Of course, this technique is what film and montage introduced to the world many years ago. What’s new in the modern era is that people end up distributing their points of view widely over the web. YouTube’s tag line, after all, is “Broadcast Yourself,” which encourages people to do just that. Furthermore, because media corporations can also access the web, your information might reach an even larger audience if they choose to comment on it, either on TV or radio broadcasts or even in Op/Eds in newspapers. In conjunction with convergence of media on the web, montage becomes a much bigger player in the modern world because these point-of-view films can be broadcast much more widely.

Another way that film establishes a new form of representation is that it separates the actor from directly influencing the art. Benjamin comments that film separates the actor from the art because the cameraman inserts his or her point of view into the filmmaking. Whereas an actor on a stage has control over how he presents himself to the audience, in a film the cameraman can film the actor from different angles, or use B roll during the actor’s speech, and thus manipulate how audiences view the actor. Similarly, with convergence on the web, one media source (film) interacts with the publication on the web. As a consequence, viewers are even farther away from the actual event (behind the filmmaker, and then the publication site). They are seeing a YouTube video as a “YouTube Video,” not as a “film by so-and-so” or simply “such-and-such event.”

Moreover, convergence of media on the web allows a shift in how art interacts with reality. While art has always provoked thought and even controversy, with painting the provoked thoughts were more like personal reflections. Now, with widespread YouTube distribution, these thoughts become international discussion and debate. A very clear example is the Bert/Osama picture, which Jenkins focused on. What began as a simple image on a website from California made its way onto anti-American propaganda in Pakistan, which made later appeared on CNN. The convergence between Photoshop technology, worldwide distribution, and attention from news sources such as CNN fueled a very intense international debate. Even the author of the image claimed that his “Bert is Evil” site “has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open” and moves the image “too close to reality” (Dino Ignacio, quoted in Jenkins, 2). Convergence now means that art suddenly and acutely influences how we interact on an international level.

Along these lines, Benjamin saw that the evolution of art into mechanically reproduced cinema changed the way that art interacted with politics, in that cinema gave political leaders (and especially the cult of personality, Fascist leaders) more power over the people. Web publication similarly signals a shift in the way that art and politics interact because new and more available technology allows filmmakers to portray political figures in new and interesting ways. We already discussed the filmmaker’s control in broadcasting the salient elements of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. Certainly, that sort of montage means that political leaders are presented in radically new ways. However, the ‘Obamagirl’ video presents Obama in an entirely new way-mashing together song lyrics, pictures of him, and a video of a girl strutting around New York City. No longer is the political leader’s appearance restricted to the speeches that he presents to the crowds. New technology allows all of the separate elements listed above to be combined into a single (hilarious) video that portrays the presidential candidate in an entirely new light.

Moreover, the widespread video distribution on YouTube allows political candidates to get much more exposure. Now, Obama’s 2004 convention speech is all over YouTube (there are ~22 different videos of the speech), and one can see 378 videos of the recent Philadelphia presidential debate. In January, Facebook even broadcaster the New Hampshire debates and allowed people to comment on them. CNN later reported on those public comments, meaning that television viewers were bombarded with news information from many different angles and sources. Considering these effects of convergence, candidates are surely reaching wider audiences. But whereas Benjamin was afraid of increased political audience, this increased distribution results in a dramatic increase in voter participation. In California, 31% of the eligible voting population voted in the in 2004 primary and 41% voted in 2007. In Iowa 6% caucused in 2004 and 16% this past January 2008 (GMU Website).

Another intriguing aspect is that Benjamin wrote about the relationship between art and politics in 1936, before World War II. Considering his emphasis on the interaction between art and politics and war, Benjamin would probably find the following quote, by Hollywood producer William Harrison (Will) Hays in 1939, very interesting: “The primary purpose of motion pictures is entertainment—entertainment which will be effective as such, and entertainment which is, at its best, inspirational” (Cited in Koppes). Clearly, this producer does not see film as promoting a political position, or as trying to influence the public at all. Towards the end of Benjamin’s essay, he writes that “distraction as provided by art presents a covert control” over the masses. If he heard this quote, he would probably point out that though the film industry’s goal may be to provide entertainment, even passive entertainment can be influential. He would point to the masses’ ability to absorb architectural changes passively and thus aid in the evolution of architecture. In the same way, the masses can absorb political messages from film.

Film on the web is clearly a new art form. Suddenly, a video of a man who can fit himself entirely in a rubber balloon is a work of art, as is a compilation photo of Bert from Sesame Street with Osama bin Laden. Convergence of media on the web allows this new art form to exist. Moreover, convergence of media on the web changes the way that art interacts with politics, much like the creation of film changed the way that art interacted with politics in the early part of the 20th century. In this way, convergence of media on the web certainly does represent a new art form.

From this realization, the important question becomes: “what role will this new art form play in the world’s future?” This idea echoes the question that Benjamin put to art in 1936 when he titled his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Not only does work of art mean the piece of art, but it also means the job of art. In this way, Benjamin examines the role of art in his society. Film and photography certainly continued to play key roles in politics after his essay. Despite Will Hays’ comment, 2500 Hollywood films were released between 1939 and 1945, many of which had to do with the war (Koppes). War photography throughout the Vietnam War sparked a lot of controversy about America’s actions there. In a similar vein, we can discuss how the convergence of media on the web will interact with politics today. As I already mentioned, the convergence of media on the web will have a profound effect on political campaigns including the current presidential campaign because the candidates receive more exposure as well as different types of exposure. Moreover, as the Bert and Osama picture demonstrates, the convergence of media on the web will have a profound effect on how we view, enforce, or condemn freedom of speech internationally and internally. Finally, on a more basic level, convergence of media on the web means that individual human beings will be suddenly much more visible to the world, either by creating videos (or Bert/Osama pictures) or by being in videos that are distributed on the web. I believe that this increase in individual exposure will eventually affect how we live our public lives. Some will become fearful that anything we say or do may be broadcast, and some will be encouraged to pursue new and exciting artistic adventures that themselves push the limits of our new technology into the next form of representation.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. [Accessed April 23, 2008]. < http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/rcrooks/toolbox/common_knowledge /general_communication/benjamin.html>.

Jenkins, Henry. Introduction. Worship at the Altar of Convergence. By Jenkins. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 1-24.

Koppes, Clayton and Black, Gregory. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II. University of California Press 1990. viii, 21.

LIAMKYLESULLIVAN. 2006. Shoes [online]. [Accessed April 26, 2008]. Available from World Wide Web: < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3ywukQYA>.

Nichols, Bill. “The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems.” Screen. 21 (1): 22-46. Winter 1988.

Presidential Primary Turnout Rates. March 17, 2008. United States Elections Project at George Mason University. April 26, 2008 .

Posted by Julia Hellman at 11:45 PM | Permalink

Verónica Cortez
Global Media
Thematic Essay
April 22nd, 2008

…there is a shame as well as a shock in looking at the close-up of real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it – say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken – or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be (Sontag, 42).

CNN and Al Jazeera are understood as peculiar developments, news networks that operate 24-hours a day 7 days a week and continually provide their audiences with breaking news. News networks like these have gained quite a following amongst audiences that want to know what is happening around the world in real time. Cable News Network was started in the 1980s while the Al Jazeera network much more recently, in the late 1990s. Both of these networks have different methodologies in presenting the news while also giving importance to different events throughout the world based on their location and core audience. The two networks’ differences ultimately define the audiences they gain favor with and those with whom they do not, but are they truly that different?

To understand what is happening today in Iraq many Americans rely on CNN to give them the facts on the goings on both in the United States and the rest of the world. The CNN effect is the idea that with images the media is controlling the responses of the government and citizens of the U.S. Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others argues that images is one of the only ways we learn and experience war. “The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images” (21). Americans in essence are using the pictures and images that are displayed 24-hours a day via these types of news networks to understand and sympathize, or not, with the soldiers that are fighting the war or another such story.

Al Jazeera has had its own effect with its development. This particular news network was originally understood to change news because of its willingness to show images and videos that other stations would not. One of the network’s most striking and/or controversial moments, the Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda videos during the aftermath of September 11. “Conscripted as part of journalism, images were expected to arrest attention, startle, surprise” (Sontag, 22-23). These videos, images, etc are what Sontag is talking about, they startle and surprise, but most importantly they achieve the goal of getting people’s attention. The Al Jazeera network is accused of promoting anti-American sentiment; it also garnered the U.S. government’s notice in an episode where President Bush reportedly considered bombing one of their stations. It is arguable whether attention like this is good or bad, but stations that are critical of governments expectedly create animosities between themselves and those that they are criticizing.

Which is more powerful the Al Jazeera effect or the CNN effect? Professor Yaron Ezrahi, during the April 16th lecture spoke about the role of the media and how it controls and shapes our reality, both of these networks shape the realities of those that use it for information. Sometimes images presented by television news networks create a different message than the one that governments and important players are trying to present. No other news format can compete with television and the images it has the ability to show. Al Jazeera is an autonomous network, politically and economically, and therefore has no reason to abide by government rules, although, recently, under pressure from many different countries and their governments has “become civilized.” Does this mean that its power will diminish? The pressures that these other governments are putting on this news network revolve around the images they show, and if that is where real power lays will the agree?

Sebastian Kampf also made some interesting points during this same lecture. Those that want to win today’s media wars must use the media as a part of the military. By controlling the media, governments can make it appear that it is a “costless war” and through this continue receiving support. Invariably, other networks are able to present a different side of the story and through this create support on that side of the war. The visual framing of wars is no longer only granted to one side of the conflict, but has become more accessible and more prominent on all sides. The CNN effect is that which is used as a part of the military that which causes governmental responses that the general population can agree with because of the images they see. The Al Jazeera effect does not necessarily create governmental responses but creates a response amongst its audience nonetheless that can then be harmful to the U.S. or to another governmental body.

Images are the ones that create these responses. Susan Sontag gives a sort of explanation:
It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked…No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties…There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching (41).
The audiences cannot turn away from images like these; they cannot turn off the television when a news reporter is presenting the exact same gruesome footage over and over again. People have even come to seek out these types of images in movies like SAW which desensitize them to the brutality of certain images. Human beings want to be able to look at these pictures and videos and be able to flinch or not do so presenting their own humanity. The melodrama of movies like this with victim, villain and hero exist only to later be passed on to the real world. During the coverage of September 11th there was not just news reporting, but a story itself unfolding about the evil villains, the fallen victims and the incredible heroes that would come to the rescue. The coverage was no longer just unbiased coverage, but came with adjectives and descriptions of people that elicit certain responses from those that hear them.

Which is most powerful the Al Jazeera or CNN effect? There is no real answer for that, but there is something else, the media is the most influential and most powerful in the end. No one network or one type of news reporting wins, they all do because of the impact they have on their audiences. When there are thousands or millions of people recurring only to the media for their news and information whatever comes out on that news network, with whatever spin they put on it, has an effect. Media in general has the most powerful effect.

Posted by Veronica Cortez at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Extra Credit Thematic Essay
Megan Billman

Director Deborah Scranton has pioneered a new method of filmmaking: directing from a distance, or "virtual filmmaking". She created her documentaries, "The War Tapes" (2006) and "Bad Voodoo's War" (2008), by giving cameras to soldiers deployed to Iraq and directing them via e-mail and instant messenger. Footage captured by the soldiers was sent to Scranton's home in New Hampshire where it was edited. In this essay I will relate the practice of "virtual filmmaking" to existing theories of virtualization, in an attempt to shed light upon the significance of this methodology in the context of critical film studies. In Virtuous War, James Der Derian asserts that while virtualization enables the effects of proximity (the ability to attack) through unprecedented perceptual mobility, this transformation also enables the denial of death. I assert that in film- making as in war- making, virtualization has the potential to enable virtual mobility and the effects of unprecedented proximity, and yet may also encourage denial (in this case denial of the cinema apparatus) and result in misguided claims to objectivity and realism. I will conclude by relating Scranton's responses to these challenges, which is, appropriately, to remain loyal to the local and specific, to the personal and the subjective.

Of our newly mobile mode of war- making, Der Derian writes, "Virtual war is the ability to choose [any] spot on a map and effect damage upon it or the people residing there." This mobility is crucial not only to offensive attacks but also to military training. Reflecting upon a trip to the US military training camp at Fort Irwin, Der Derian describes the efforts undertaken to "take American troops as close to the edge of war as the technology of simulation and the rigors of the environment will allow."(3) Our virtual mobility enables the effects of proximity. It "collapses the distance between here and there, near and far" (10).

Mobility and proximity have been crucial concerns for filmmakers and critics since the evolution of the medium in the late nineteenth century. The camera enabled a revolution in perception, offering the average individual the chance to 'see' events and places far from her everyday reality. Dziga Vertov wrote of the transformation effected upon him by film. "Starting today," he wrote, "I am free forever of human immobility” (Virilio, 20).

In making "The War Tapes" and "Bad Voodoo's War", Scranton was more mobile that Vertov could have ever imagined. Twenty-one soldiers filmed for her and cameras were "mounted on gun turrets, inside dashboards and [on] POV mounts on their Kevlar helmets and vests" (thewartapes.com). Thus Scranton was (virtually) able to participate in raids, make dangerous night passages across mine-laden roads, and spend time in the unit's barracks.

Der Derian identifies the ways in which virtualization enables the denial of the traumatic dimensions of war. He writes, "virtuous wars promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars" having the "power to commute death, to keep it out of sight, out of mind" (xv-xvi). In drawing parallels between this theory of the virtual war, and dominant frameworks in critical film studies, I am struck by the relation between the denial of death by the soldier and the denial of the cinema apparatus by the spectator. In the same way that the virtualization of war facilitates the denial of the traumatic fact of mortality, the virtualization of filmmaking encourages the spectator's denial of the cinema apparatus and her mistaken identification with the look of the camera. The relation between denial, misrecognition and cinematic identification is not new. However, it seems to me that in the age of virtualization it is easier to suspend disbelief than ever before.

The virtualization of filmmaking facilitates the denial of the director to such an extent that, during a recent Global Media Lab, Prof. Der Derian was led to wonder whether Scranton was in fact, “showing the path to [her own] disappearance” (GML 4/9). Scranton replied that her methodology in no way diminishes the significance of the director. She sees it as her task to “amplify the voices of the soldiers” and to provide a context and framework for the audience to understand their stories. Though she does not appear in "The War Tapes," her intervention is foregrounded in "Bad Voodoo's War," which includes shots of her seated at her computer messaging with the soldiers, and collecting tapes from her mailbox.

Der Derian asserts that virtualization has rendered the relationship between reality and representation highly ambiguous. He writes, "virtuality collapses the distance between fact and fiction" (10); It “represents a convergence of the means by which we distinguish the… original from the reproduced” (xx). In the field of literary criticism, academics have, for many years, gone to great lengths to articulate the degree of proximity between the filmic text and reality. In his seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin describes the promise that mechanical reproduction holds for the individual "to get closer to the original by way of its likeness, its reproduction"(2). Claims to realism have been particularly contested in relation to documentary whose very name expresses an ontological assumption that film can show the truth in a transparent way (Silverman).

If we equate proximity with access to objective reality it would seem that virtual filmmaking, which enables the spectator to get ‘closer’ to the subject than ever before, might enable unparalleled access to the real. Scranton, however, staunchly refuses the possibility of objectivity in film, asserting that the notion of critical distance is "an incredibly egotistical construct" as "everyone brings their life experience" to their work. She is hopeful that we might catch glimpses of reality in “"contrasting ground-level narratives" but maintains that "it is only when we are human beings first that we approach that truth."

Virtual war- making and virtual film- making represent manifestations of the "urge to expand the range of vision and detection," to “push back… the limits of investigation, in both time and space " (Virilio, 75). At this moment in which “the surfaces of the globe are [effectively] directly present to one another”(Virilio, 46) it is more crucial than ever that we remember that war does kill and that representations are mediated.

References:
Allen, Tim. "Perceiving Contemporary Wars," 1999
Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy," 1996
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 1935
Aufderheide, Patricia."Your Country, My Country: How Films About The Iraq War Construct Publics" in The Journal of Cinema and Media - Volume 48, Number 2, Fall 2007, pp. 56-65
Der Derian, James. Virtuous War, Westview Press, Oxford 2001
Jenkins, Henry. "Worship at the Altar of Convergence," in Convergence Culture, New York University Press, New York, 2006
Musser, Charles."Film Truth in the Age of George W. Bush" in The Journal of Cinema and Media - Volume 48, Number 2, Fall 2007, pp. 9-35
Silverman, Michael, class notes, Cinematic Coding and Narrativity.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema, Verso, London, 1989

Posted by Megan Billman at 12:11 AM | Permalink

Thematic Essay
Josh Sargent

“Al Quaeda is winning the media war.”

Col. Lawrence Killmeier

“O Muslim youth in the East and West, who listen to God calling you: ‘Go forth to war, whether it be easy or difficult for you, and strive hard in God’s cause with your possessions and your lives.’ ”

Abu Yahya Al-Libi

"Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

President George W. Bush

Continue reading "Who is winning the media war?" »

Posted by Joshua Sargent at 08:46 PM | Permalink

The “Morbid Symptoms” of Online Journalism

Q. If the old media is dying and the new is not fully born, what morbid symptoms do we see online?

Drawn from:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” (Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks)

Before I begin my diagnosis of any “morbid symptoms,” it would help if I gave some background on the author quoted above. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist whose philosophy went on to influence everyone from Fidel to Foucault. Writing behind prison walls he described a “cultural hegemony,” whereby the ruling class uses media, education, and other institutions to maintain its power. Marx’s predictions of a proletariat revolution had not come to fruition, he argued, because the working masses were caught up in those same capitalist values which suppressed them. In order to break free from this bourgeois influence, Gramsci called for a redefinition of social values – in essence, a “culture war.” (“Antonio Gramsci”)

I like to think that, if he lived today, Gramsci would have been a blogger. I could imagine him sitting at some Italian internet café fighting the culture war one keystroke at a time. In some ways, Gramsci’s Marxist fantasy has come true in our computer age. As Jay Rosen noted, one need only look at Ukraine’s recent history to see how the web can disrupt state power. It is no surprise that the internet poses such a threat to oppressive regimes; where anonymity meets an endless supply of information, freedom of expression is all that much easier to express.

But what about in America, where First Amendment laws have long been a part of our national identity? If we the people are fighting a culture war, then who exactly are our enemies? At some point not too long ago, corporations and Washington represented the cultural hegemony and the mass media was on our side. War reportage from Vietnam was perhaps the clearest example. But sometime around the early nineties the media came to be viewed as an arm of the corporate machine. Perhaps it was a reaction to Reagan’s talking head politics, or the collapse of the Soviet Union, or something else altogether, but American youth culture, Generation X, grew to distrust all things corporate. In music, art, even typeface (see Gary Hustwit), they demanded authenticity.

Yet if the Rupert Murdoch’s of the world had their media machine, Generation X soon found its own in the blogs, what Jay Rosen calls the “little First Amendment machines” (Rosen “The People…”). For a while, it was an Us versus Them binary, an underground “authentic” blogging to counter the supposedly manufactured reporting of professionals. In recent years, however, the media moguls have caught on to the success of blogging, both in terms of its popularity and its coverage. More than ever, the reader has become the writer, and a two-way conversation has begun to emerge. As Rosen notes, “bloggers vs. journalists is over” (Rosen “Bloggers…”); the debate has come to an end.

Or has it? The “little First Amendment machine” has its kinks like any other, and the benefits of blogging, a culture still in its infancy, are perhaps not so clear. Problems will arise whenever the alternative becomes mainstream (just look at break dancing or Avril Lavigne) and electronic journalism is no exception. This is an exciting time to be reading the news, but we must do so with a critical eye. The real problem is in finding and defining trustworthy reporting. And somewhere in this transition from top-down to bottom-up journalism, in this interregnum of old and new, the “morbid systems” appear.

The first problem is linked to the very freedom of speech that makes the internet possible in the first place. Given the First Amendment, there is no licensing process to become a journalist; anyone with a computer can publish online. However, this does not mean that everyone must do so. The web is not the intellectual wellspring that its founder made it out to be; in fact, the vast majority of online content is porn. For every Deep Throat there are thousands of Deep Throat’s, and that disproportion cannot be overemphasized. My point is not to rant on porn, but rather that finding the right online news source is more complicated than your regular visit to the newsstand. Consider the New York Times, for instance, a daily general interest paper whose editors and publishers decide what an educated person needs to know. Politics, stock quotes, even crosswords are included; the status of Britney’s crotch is not. The New York Times has barriers, a front and back page that contain within them “all the news that’s fit to print.” The internet, on the other hand, is borderless; any given website is linked to a vast network of other sources, some of which are bound to be unreliable. So while a Google search may gauge popularity, it overlooks authenticity.

With free speech also comes a tendency toward anonymity, which can be a blessing and a curse. Since this essay focuses on the latter, I will address the problems of bloggers who hide behind pseudonyms, who speak their minds without taking responsibility for those ideas. The blogosphere is full of these “trolls,” as they are called, hecklers with too much time on their hands. At best the trolls are annoying; at worst they can disrupt a productive discussion or even change policy. I once sat in on a meeting where a Brown administrator made reference to the Jolt, our on-campus discussion forum. It comes as no surprise that Deans read the Jolt. The frightening part is that they sometimes use the forum to gauge student opinion. In truth, some Jolt contributors do not even attend Brown, and those who do make up a vocal minority that seeks, more than anything else, to instigate controversy.

Anonymity also allows for plagiarism. With no top-down structure, no built-in system for fact-checking or cross-referencing, the internet is a hotbed for intellectual theft. This is only magnified by the fact that bloggers are not held accountable for plagiarism; with pseudo identities, there is no one to accuse. Professional journalism has had its fair share of unoriginal material in recent years, but the barriers to entry, and, more importantly, the byline holds reporters accountable for the words they write.

Finally, a newspaper is an institution with a physical building, traceable history, and material product sometimes dating back to the 19th century. The newspaper is tied to a community and mirrors that community. It is permanent and tangible, a primary source in the making. If I wanted to find out about violent crimes in 1950s St. Petersburg, Florida, then I would go to the archives of the St. Petersburg Times. Will blogs play this same role twenty or thirty years from now? Perhaps, but probably not to the same degree. Blogs are constantly evolving and changing; an entry can be revised or deleted, and a website can be shut down altogether. The electronic text simply does not have the same veracity as the printed word. Seeing is believing, and I think that, in the back of everyone’s mind, the internet or parts of the internet can still disappear.

From a Gramscian point of view, the internet is the best thing to happen since the printing press. It gives an uncensored, instant voice to the masses, an alternative to institutionalized media. Yet blogging is still in its early stages, and, as it becomes more accepted, the rules and expectation are bound to change. We are witnessing a point of transition, a revolution in the access of information and the ability to freely express our thoughts. Morbid symptoms are a part of any major transition; with time, perhaps these symptoms will cure themselves.

References:

“Antonio Gramsci.” Wikipedia.

Rosen, Jay. “Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over.” 2005. Pressthink.

Rosen, Jay. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” 2007. Pressthink.

Posted by Michael Schub at 10:41 PM | Permalink

Media forms, from their inception, are constantly debating between veracity and virtuality, between the representation of “truth” and the practice of storytelling. The practice of photography once thought of as an unfiltered representation of reality went about a radical break with the introduction of dark room manipulation. The way media was viewed went through a similar break when European philosophers like Ferdinand de Saussure made a distinction between the sign or word and its signified. Such thinking exposed that it is the gap between the image and its signification where meaning is produced. Critical theories of media begin here and developed throughout the 20th century with technological advancements in media and further expansions in thought on media.

In our current global political arena as an information society saturated in media there is a much greater need for seriously thinking about current media forms. Inspired from John Phillip Santos lecture in the Global Media Seminar at Brown University on Wednesday, March 12, 2008, this essay will argue that in order to have any form of resistance in our current era of information culture, critical theory and practice of media must examine these chasms between reality and illusions, especially in how they differ from previous forms.

Media comforts a viewer, as she or he is allowed to be outside of oneself in front of a canvas, in a movie theater, or even browsing the web. This comfort as Guy Debord gives the spectacle in his famous book, The Society of Spectacle, is aligned with the passivity of viewership, the promise that the sole message of “a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned” is “What appears is good; what is good appears.” Due to the saturated and sheer numbers of images that strike us every day, we desire a moment of rest leaving us vulnerable to media’s force. Critical theory arose in order to fight this passive reception and investigate media’s power. The evolution of critical theory is a genealogy or evolution of human consciousness. Critical theory in other words is the understanding of how humans are manipulated by media’s modalities.

The evolution of media theory, which in essence is media itself, is a fairly recent story in the realm of history. The story begins with the emergence of photography in the 1800s. The work of William Fox Talbot and his predecessors created images that were considered “a pencil of nature.” The prevailing context of photography for 25 years was that the photographie represented reality. Even from the start of photography it was evident that the meaning of an image as a piece of evidence was complicated by the factors that shaped it: ownership, cultural settings, and viewing context. For instance Matthew Brady’s civil war pictures brought the battlefield to the public in a political context. Viewing the actual photograph was much powerful than the engraved newspaper image, but the same message came across and the public became image weary all the same.

By the 1880s, the illusion of reality was crushed when it became evident that manipulation in the darkroom was possible. Photography went in two directions. Some photographers took up the practice of storytelling in their photography. For instance one of the most famous hoax photographers was the writer and artist Lewis Carol and his fairies series. While others stayed dedicated to the practice of truth telling, this divide was also inherited in early cinema. The camp dominated by the Lumiere Brothers filmed a train arriving at the station, workers leaving the factory. While the work of Georges Melie created artifice with his film “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). Media began to create a space that constructed both reality and artifice for a viewer. The Lumiere Brothers’ film about a train arriving at a station made early cinematic viewers jumped out of their seats in fright of a reality that was too real. While at the same time, voyeuristic films for pleasure and the cult of stardom became extremely popular. The line between illusion and reality in society began to blur.

In the realm of philosophy similar advancements went on, most notably with the work of linguist philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure broke the notions of a unified sign and signified to reveal that not only are they separated but also there is a gap between the two that produces meaning. “Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance. ... The arbitrary nature of the sign explains why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself, the individual is incapable of fixing a single value.” This thought that meaning is socially constructed lead to media theory, which took as its aim the underlying issues that structure media. No longer was the issue of reality versus fiction, but how reality is turned into fiction and fiction into truth through media.

This field of discourse surrounding media brought to light importance issues that shaped media, most significantly temporality and ubiquity. The temporality of a photograph and film, a frozen moment or a moving past, complicates the space of time for a viewer. This issue becomes more pronounced with the introduction of live transmission, but media is instantaneously present from the moment of projection yet not immediately evident. The ubiquity of the medium was that anything, one, time, where was subject to its presentation in media. This unimaginable concept complicated the issue of surveillance and the creation of subjectivity in modern society.

In the 1920s at The Frankfurt School, a German school of neo-Marxist critical theory, a group of philosophers who had the impulse to theorize media emerged and developed the foundation of media theory. These theoreticians began to look at how culture is influenced by media and look into the deeper sources of social meaning. For instance one member, Siegfried Kracauer, developed the idea of the “mass ornament” in every day culture. The “mass ornament” was in ordinary places, especially urban, an antecedent to theories on mass culture. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer progressed the concept that industrial processes were also a factor in constructing cultural meaning. The most famous forerunner for media theory, Walter Benjamin and his essay “ The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” developed the aesthetic side of culture in an industrial, mechanical age. His work, unlike his other colleagues, inspired strategies of resistance against the mechanized culture. As readers, thinkers, producers of media, one was an actor and poetic agent. The producer has the power to redefine and alter media rather than be a victim to the conforming system.

The institutional media systems, Hollywood and Network Television, developed throughout the 1900s and were rarely critiqued, especially in America. Resistant work and critique were silenced or non-existent. With technological advancement in media production and contemporaries of The Frankfurt School finally beginning to speak, independent media emerged by the 1960s. In the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan developed popular theories critiquing mainstream media, in particular television. His theory was that the proliferation of information flows was deeply complicated. On the technical side, handheld cameras became accessible and a “do-it-yourself” media production industry began to develop. Television, a medium that crystallized the American social dynamic, was one important place for such change. Politically and socially television held the most influence and access to the American public, particularly seen in the American presidency or historical moments caught on television. It was a space that allowed for short documentary series in news shows, for example CBS’s “CBS Reports.” The independent movement gained momentum with such broadcasting.

Another factor in this story was the globalization of subcultures. Mass media allowed for a globalized virtualization force or as Paul Virilio, in his essay “The Visual Crash,” warns us the seductive “globalization of the collective imagination.” The most famous example of globalized subcultures is the Rock n’ Roll media artifact, most notably seen in Beatlemania. The ubiquity of music makes it perfectly transmittable through various media modalities from the radio the television. As non-local connections set in with a single beckon of meaning, it was possible to connect non-local people. Media environments and ecologies began to take hold. With this came the understanding that an unfathomable number of global media environments existed and there could never be a single frame for the entire concept of media. This fact, supported by postmodern theories of subjectivity, made new forms of resistant media and critique necessary to create self-sustaining media apart from the conforming and generalizing mainstream media.

Baudrillard:
"This could be a strategy of the media, to offer spectacles that are more hollow and meaningless than reality – hyperreal in their stupidity and therein giving spectators a differential possibility of satisfaction…Somewhere, we carry the mourning of this naked reality, of this residual existence, of this total disillusion."

The globalized independent media movement took place in the 1980s, although its roots lay in the 60s and 70s. Its form was documentaries that worked to shape and redirect political culture. Video art also began to emerge at this time. This fusion of theory and media practice worked on how images produce meaning. The crucial year for this movement to be independent was when the UN took up the McBride Commission in 1980. This commission worked to create a global media equity program; the result was the “Many Voices One World” or McBride report. The 1990s gave way to documentary culture in a culturally remarkable way. A documentary vernacular was developed and amplified with increased broadcasting.

Documentary rhetoric’s and modalities shape meaning. Bill Nichols is famous for his modes of documentary, but inevitably a documentary will use various modes in order to create complex effects for the viewer. The most interesting forms of documentary are not the mainstream modes, but the forms that break away and alter those stereotypical forms. These forms of documentaries take theoretical backgrounds and speak to current conditions of subjectivity. For example when an elliptical form complicates the classic literary documentary, as seen in Chris Markers film “A Grin without a Cat” (1973), history is rethought and restructured for the viewer. Most recently, radical forms of documentary immerse the viewer in aesthetically arresting array of images and animations in order to reintegrate a sense of self in an environment saturated with images, see Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy.

Presently we live in massive media environments. The globalized world has exciting possibilities for unprecedented creativity and invention as never seen before. However we must be cautioned. Lev Manovich writes that we must think of the “trajectories through the space of cultural history that would pass through new media, thus grounding it in what came before” in order to come to terms with current media. As media producers we need an understanding of what has come before as all culture and history has passed through media modalities. To return to the point that meaning is in the chasm between veracity and virtuality, I will turn to Baudrillard in his famous book from 1993, “The Precession of Simulacra”:

"We are no longer in the society of spectacle, of which the situationists spoke, nor in the specific kinds of alienation and repression that it implied. The medium itself no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new era. There is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it."

In our controlled society constantly under surveillance the point is not to draw the line between reality and illusion, but to understand how that line has been blurred. Virilio fears that we will reach a “visual crash” where the disinformation of capitalism will become the truth that we comfortably believe, this warning may be a reality now. Resistance is found by creating a space between the capitalist virtual stories and conceptions of raw reality, a space where the apparatus is exposed. In an age of great possibility, the task is ever more complicated.

Continue reading "Veracity and Virtuality in an Age of Visual Crash: Extra Credit Thematic Essay" »

Posted by Megan Goetsch at 09:18 AM | Permalink

(*extra credit* Thematic Essay)

“We also have to work through... the dark side… it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective” – Vice President Dick Cheney to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” 2001

“We didn't bring this crisis on ourselves, but we'll be the ones to settle it. This is a dirty business and we have to get our hands dirty to clean it up!” – President Wayne Palmer, 24

“War is cinema and cinema is war.” – Paul Virilio, War and Cinema, 1989

Although the leap to Paul Virilio’s understanding that “war is cinema and cinema is war” takes some time to fully comprehend, what is fairly transparent is the long historical relationship between war and cinema. Cinematographic technology flourished during WWI, as the lens of reconnaissance blurred sight for soldier and civilian, but crystallized it for the military strategist. War and cinema share the same technologies (telescopic lenses, freeze frames, virtual reality, point-and-shoot), mutually inspire each other’s narratives (WWII accounts Saving Private Ryan and Triumph of the Will), and, in turn, construct the realities of their audiences. While this essay will not address Virilio’s second declaration that cinema is war, it will explore Virilio’s assertion that “war is cinema” and, in doing so, answer the question – is war inherently cinematic? To do so in a comprehensible way, I will give a brief note on the necessity of speed and, then, examine the centrality of the constructed narrative in war and cinema. Lastly, to round out the understanding of how war is cinematic, this essay will comment on the participation of both war and cinema in the derealization of reality.

Speed, Virilio contends, is the essence of war. According to Virilio, with the advent of new technologies, war takes place in time, not geography. Instead of bringing us closer to experiencing far-away places and people, the goal of new technology is to move us ever farther away from the other, into a re-imagined reality. Just as war does, cinema also takes place in time, as the primary commitment we make to experience it is time-sensitive, not place-sensitive, and as space disappears in the cinema when scenes are flattened onto a screen. After making the time commitment, without moving we are transported quickly in our railway-car styled theater through 1-dimensional celluloid topography. Fittingly, “cinematic” functions occasionally as a form of “kinematic,” and kinematics, or, as it used to be called, cinematics, the name originating from the French cinématique, which is the geometry of motion (“Cinematic”). Cinema simulates the feelings of movement, speed, and immediacy, creating, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, an imposture of immediacy. Cinema also requires the acceleration of time to condense a story into a digestible segment – Six Days of the Condor becomes just three. Thus, both cinema and war share a sense of the primacy of speed.

The struggle between good and evil is another ever-present part of war. For this reason, Virilio writes: “War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose it to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instill the fear of death before he actually dies” (Virilio 5). The war story locates every participant within it, as all become part of and are awed by its immensity. The most obvious case of this creative function of war is the construction of the hero-villain paradigm.

First, let’s take the hero. An excellent example of the relationship between war and cinema and hero construction is the Army Strong US Army Campaign. According to the Army Strong Fact Sheet, which features the clean and bold Arial font, the campaign started in November 2006 in an effort to re-invigorate recruitment. See an example of the Army Strong clip here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hosiAsy8dhA

As described on the US Army Strategic Communications, Marketing and Outreach website the campaign “captures the unique brand of strength found in the U.S. Army Soldier” and “the voice of the U.S. Army Soldier” (Strategic Outreach Directorate, US Army Accessions). In this way, the individual is presented as the collective and becomes a marketable brand. Even though the linked add favors a crescendo of rousing trumpets and clashing cymbals to the “unique voice” of these individuals, its producers emphasize the truthfulness and authenticity of their representation of reality. As one of the fact sheets explains, actual soldiers were used in the ads since: “No actor could ever authentically convey the power and intensity of an Army Strong Soldier. That’s why every Soldier portrayed in the new Army Strong advertising campaign is an actual U.S. Army Soldier” (Strategic Outreach Directorate, US Army Accessions). This suggests that soldiers are never actors, actors are never truthful, and that only by joining the Army will one be able to create the Army Strong character.

Yet, is anyone represented as his or her “true” self when artfully lit by a setting sun or climbing to a soundtrack of heralding trumpets? While the producers apparently wanted authenticity in regards to the soldiers featured in the ad, that old Hollywood magic was used proudly to sell the Army Strong brand, again reaffirming the relationship between Hollywood and war. The director for the ads was Samuel Bayer, who is well-known for producing numerous award-winning videos for the likes of Green Day, The Rolling Stones, and Aerosmith, and his work on campaigns for Nike, Coke, Pepsi, Lexus, and Mountain Dew (Strategic Outreach Directorate, US Army Accessions). The composer is Mark Isham, a top Hollywood film composer who has produced scores for many notable films, such as Eight Below, Running Scared, Crash, and Men of Honor (Strategic Outreach Directorate, US Army Accessions). Thus, with Bayer and Isham’s help, the army creates the identity of the Army Strong hero-soldier, with just a touch of Hollywood glamour. As noted by John Whiteclay Chambers II and David Culbert in the introduction to a 1994 issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, “Pierre Sorlin reminds us, movies [or in our case commercials] are images, derivative perspectives on the world, that are marketed for profit” (Chambers II 353). The profit to be had here is augmented recruitment numbers and a national identification of soldiers as heroes, crucial to morale during war.

The construction (or is it obstruction?) of the opponent’s identity is another critical element of the war story. For the viewer at home, and for that matter the soldier on the field, the enemy is presented as obscure and unidentifiable, nothing like us, especially in the War on Terror. He/she/it morphs into an evil villain shrouded in a mist of anti-freedom and anti-American sentiment, characterized by the grizzled fonts that shout “TERROR TARGET” on CNN headline news. This distance between the villain and hero, which facilitates their alienation, is upheld “through [war’s] hyper-generation of movement, mixing the accomplishments of the means of destruction and the means of communicating destruction” (Virilio 24). By doing so, “war falsifies appearance by falsifying distance” (Virilio 24). This cancellation of time and space during war, as described by Virilio, is just like Albert Gace’s definition of cinema, which finds it “magical, spell-binding, capable of giving to the audience, in every fraction of a second, that strange sensation of four-dimensional omnipresence canceling time and space” (Gace in Virilio 26). War, like cinema, alienates us from the enemy, and holds us spell-bound in its fear-driven, cinematic, and oh-so-climactic fable of us vs. them. The beginning of a newsreel on Osama bin Laden from CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360˚, featuring thumping ominous music that signals the segment will be another part of the war story, does just that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoGFPLeCFM. It’s interesting that the networks feel the need to characterize war news with scary music and flashy graphics. Perhaps they think we wouldn’t know whom to hate, otherwise.

The images and sounds of war news create cinematic suspense not just because of their theatrical quality, but also because war is actually highly suspenseful, as a result of the omnipresent shadow of uncertainty that follows it around. At this point, for instance, no one knows what will happen in Iraq or Afghanistan, when troops will leave, or if/when there will be another attack on the United States. While it is becoming clearer what exactly the CIA did during interrogation of suspected terrorists and what the Bush Administration’s role was in sanctioning torture, the haze is just lifting. This story in particular is so rife with the elements of a thriller that it is no surprise that VP Cheney’s “dark side” served as inspiration to President Wayne Palmer’s “dirty hands” on 24, one of the most popular thrillers on television. The uncertainty of wartime thus lends itself well to suspense, which translates seamlessly into cinema.

In addition to having the cinematic elements of a compelling narrative and suspenseful mood, war is also inherently cinematic as it participates in the same kind of derealization of reality as cinema. For soldiers, for example, seeing is done through virtual reality, as it is a mechanical eye that reinterprets the outside world into flickering green dots on a screen. As James Der Derian has noted, the proliferation of simulation in military training has led to the inability of some soldiers to think outside of the simulations, rendering them unable to adapt to “actual” reality when it changes something on the screen. This dependency on simulation has led to some serious mistakes, like the destruction of an Iranian commercial airliner cruising over the Gulf. Virilio describes the effect of refracted sight on the soldier, noting: “As sight lost its direct quality and reeled out of phase, the soldier had the feeling of being not so much destroyed as derealized or dematerialized, any sensory point of reference suddenly vanishing in a surfeit of optical targets” (Virilio 15). Virilio adds: “The soldier’s panic-stricken distancing from static warfare is transferred to the technology of lightning-war, to the telescopic lenses and the stereoscopic glass of military photo-analysis, in a medium which seems aqueous, glass-like, with all its phenomena of refraction and diffraction” (Virilio 74). The technology and methods of war, thus, create a new space in which the soldier’s very existence is called into question, as all sensory input enters the thought through viscous, distorting lenses. Cinema, in a similar way, provides distance from reality, while constituting a new space of existence.

The consequence of this derealization (and this is where we close the loop) is a desire for a rematerialization of images, motion, and story – a cinematic interpretation of reality. So, not only does war lend itself to cinema, it requires the use of cinematic methods to construct its own version of reality in which it can thrive. War must construct this reality through a sustained, identity shaping narrative, in the small confines of the closed cockpit, the war bunker, or the submarine, so that war continues and all of its participants know what they are, or maybe more importantly what they are not. While this has failed at times, as is clear from the various interviews conducted with Iraq War veterans that attest to their feelings of a lack of purpose and their insight into the non-heroic aspects of the soldier’s life, the narrative of war has at least proven sustainable enough that the US is still at war with Iraq.

War requires a narrative if it is to survive – what else would keep soldiers from running away from the bullets and a populace from allowing clear violations of its precious civil liberties than the belief in the war narrative of honor, brotherhood, and good vs. evil? Without the narrative, death is denied its heroic overtures, villains look like ordinary people, and the measured suspense we are fed through news media could give way to panic and paranoia by tainting the war’s sense of purpose. War needs cinematic interpretation, a story, for all those who witness it to attempt to understand its horrors and tragedies. If one is not readily available, as it was during WWII, then one must be constructed.

Virilio remarks that crew from members of the aircraft carrier Nimitz told a journalist from Libération: “Our work is totally unreal. Every now and then, fiction and reality should get together and prove once and for all that we really are here” (Virilio 66). The soldiers want a reintegration of the cinematic elements and reality of war to reaffirm they are there, to reaffirm their existence, and to reaffirm who they are. This is perhaps the essential purpose of the war narrative, as without being convinced one is on the side of good, that one is in his or her own right a hero in the American story, it seems there would be little incentive to continue witnessing the suffering and death endemic to war. War is not beautiful and while the Army Strong soldiers are surely brave and strong, they still cry when they get hurt and they do return in coffins. It is screaming one hears, not the crescendo of trumpets.

Perhaps society is so comfortable with this war narrative because to face “actual” reality, without the ornamentation of an epic struggle or a non-human enemy, would be too difficult. Maybe we need the mood lighting and suspense to refract the reality of war so that we can feel at ease with our national identity that has, for the last few years especially, been suffused with war. Hitler realized the importance of creating these alternative conceptions of self and reality during wartime, noting that people needed to forget about the suffering of war and instead be pacified into a comfortable, unquestioning state of existence, in which their subconscious, influenced by Hitler’s propaganda, drove their identities. Goebbels noted that the regime needed a mechanism to make the German people a mass of common visionaries “obeying a law they did not even know but which they could recite in their dreams” (Goebbels 1931 in Virilio 54). Thus, war needs cinema, and cinema is essentially a stylized and constructed narrative. This narrative influences our collective identity, and that identity allows us to breathe in the sanitized and composed space of refracted reality.

Works Cited/Consulted

Army Strong. Dir. Samuel Bayer. Perf. US Army Soldiers. 2006. YouTube. 10 Mar. 2008 .

Chambers II, John Whiteclay and Culbert, David (1994) "Introduction." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 14:4, 353-356.

Cheney, Dick. Interview with Tim Russert. 2001. 11 Mar. 2008 .

“Cinematic.” Oxford English Dictionary. 10 Mar. 2008 .

CNN: LATEST OSAMA BIN LADEN TAPE. Dir. CNN. Perf. Soledad O'Brien, Osama bin Laden, and Paul Cruickshank. 2007. YouTube. 10 Mar. 2008 .

"Memorable Quotes for 24." IMBD. 2008. 11 Mar. 2008 .

Strategic Outreach Directorate, US Army Accessions. “United States Army Accessions Command: G7- Strategic Communications, Marketing and Outreach.” US Army. 11 Mar. 2008 .

Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: the Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989.

Posted by Amy M. L. Tan at 11:32 PM | Permalink

*Extra Credit* Thematic Essay

During World War I, film was introduced as part of the strategic war-waging mechanism to capture a bird’s eye view of the enemy. That niche evolved in the Second World and Cold wars when film became fodder for the propaganda machine, and, hot or cold, war was the popular dynamic between clashing ideologies. More recently, film has exported the experience of war beyond the real-time audience of boots on the ground. By making the human carnage of the Gulf and Iraq wars (as well as of humanitarian crises) visible (read: “real”) to an otherwise uninvolved public, and given an international community struggling to substantiate the lip service it pays to international law and assumptions of human dignity, film has turned the idea of “cinema as war fodder” on its head and made the declaration of war in fact less viable. Whether used to inflame or arrest public support for military intervention on behalf of nationalism, capitalism, “freedom”, or [insert your favorite call to arms here], for both its sensory appeal and elucidation of human tragedy, filmic representations of war make for good cinema.

As described by the French director Abel Gance, cinema is unique for its ability to give the audience “that strange sensation…of cancelled time and space.” Because war is already ingrained in the cultural logic of men, when used to portray the “facts” of a war story such a temporal vacuum easily absorbs the audience. Barthes adds to this the idea of the studium of war, its “application to a thing, a taste for someone…[participation] in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.” Great cinema magnifies real human truths: just as comedians are funny when they reflect real-life frustrations (See Ellen Degeneres on mechanized toilet flushing), and drama is sad when the tragedy is relatable, so too is war universally feared (or, if not, then respected) for its wake of human destruction. Everyone can relate to something in that; everyone knows or at the least can understand the humanity in a war film, the frequent ambiguity of good and evil, and the extenuating circumstances and cultural logics that prevent absolute distinctions. The sensory and emotional appeal of war is such that every individual is drawn into the proverbial bigger picture, regardless of spatial or temporal displacement.

Good cinema is emotive and “travel[s] straight to the hearts of audiences” through a conduit of individuals: it is through the vicarious experience of characters that the experience of war is internalized. Film viewing can be likened to a hallucination in which the screen acts as “point of passage,” transporting the audience to someone else’s time and place. The sensory overload of war is sufficient in its own right for the purposes of historical transportation; what defines “war” as a cinematic genre, however, is the handling of truth through individual suffering without the expense of macro-world depth. As Peter Almond explained, in film stories, it helps not only to have dramatic characters in dramatic situations that determine their direction in the story and make the story compelling, but that there must also be a strong, familiar premise (e.g. war). The war backdrop presents the audience with the inherent absurdity and depravity of war. As such, its continued representation through a medium of recognizable characters may contribute to its obsolescence (a new angle on the democratic peace theory).

War is cinematic because the micro-level storyline allows for unpredictability, despite the known outcome of an historical event. The characters that carry the film against the backdrop of epochal issues are the instruments of suspense, such that a script must be character-oriented, thereby attaching the audience to their fate, when that of the world has long-been decided.

“War is cinema and cinema is war,” says Paul Virilio. Without experience in the film industry, it’s difficult to back up that latter statement, but the first assertion speaks to the fact that society often tries to make sense of reality, of tragedy, loss and the gamut of human emotion in a cinematic way: that is, by presenting them via the experience of believable film characters, proxies for real world people.

In his efforts to bring well-known historical events (and non-events) to life, Koji Masutani used several stylistic tools: augmenting the background noise at President Kennedy’s press conferences such that those scenes completely filled Joukowsky as if it were Kennedy’s own stage; trapping modern footage in black and white such that the passage of thirty years was blunted; and using as few filters as possible, thereby allowing Kennedy to speak for himself. Without the juxtaposition of modern-day interviews with Kennedy’s contemporaries, the audience saw Kennedy not as a historical figure but as someone speaking to them about carrots and sticks.

The premise of Kennedy’s ability to avoid recourse to violence against the Red Threat in Cuba and Vietnam, while interesting of itself, is already known to “Thirteen Days” and “Virtual JFK” audiences. What makes the threat – and, in other cases, practice – of war cinematic, is the careful character development against the larger premise and alongside a powerful musical score such that the viewer is transported into the storyline and lives the anxiety and absurdity of war. Assuming a world of rational actors for whom human suffering is, at best, distasteful, continuing to bring war into the cinematic realm may increase the pressure for nonviolent resolutions to transnational conflict.

My lease on this idealism expires in May; let me enjoy it until then.

Posted by Kathleen Fleming at 12:36 PM | Permalink

Toward the end of the Second World War, a race began. Mistrust that had been brewing beneath the surface bubbled over as the Soviet and Western armies chased the prize: Berlin. In the years that followed, as the smoke from the battlefields dissipated, a chill settled over the great powers and split most of world into two spheres. Whispers and murmurs of suspicions and secrets replaced the din of artillery. From a distance, the Soviets and the Americans observed each other. From what little they saw or knew, they began to speculate about one another, to create their own images of the “other,” the enemy. In this way, the media became the primary architect of the Cold War narrative in the United States.

This narrative was constantly evolving, as understandings of the conflict, the enemy, and the collective “we” took on new meaning. In the form of advertisements, newscasts, and films, information blended with propaganda; the narrative fed back into the reality, framing the way in which people perceived one another and shaping their interactions. The media was both an instrument and an independent actor in the Cold War. It created a pseudo reality that, in the end, may have collapsed upon itself by virtue of its speed, outpacing the capacity of the public to adapt; after forty years, people grew tired of it. As Arno and Dissanayake comment, “Intercultural awareness has lagged behind the means of communication” (Arno and Dissanayake, 13). When it all began, the enemy was simple, concrete, distinct, and identifiable. By the end, the enemy was amorphous: anyone or no one. Who could tell anymore?

Propaganda came into prominence as a wartime tool in the United States during WWII. Racialized portrayals of the Japanese as twisted, heartless animals sought to remove them from the sphere of humanity and make it easier for the troops to conceptualize and kill the enemy without remorse. The Germans received different treatment, as the propaganda often distinguished between “good” Germans and evil Nazis. Propaganda galvanized the war effort by glorifying the strength of the American way and presenting the war as a zero-sum conflict. The media’s message was one of dire urgency; we had to confront the enemy or risk losing our American liberty. The conflict was framed ideologically; our liberty became that of the world as we faced off against the forces of tyranny. The enemy had attacked us and was therefore one we could not coexist with.

Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, the American media had looked upon Russia with mistrust. When the Soviet Union became an ally against Nazi Germany, the mood somewhat shifted to portray them as such, yet the underlying perceptions remained. The film Ninotchka (1939) contrasted the communist life with Western life from the perspective of a Soviet woman sent on business to Paris. She is overwhelmed by the splendor of the city and tempted to stay when she finds love. Her experience in the West is contrasted with that back home, where life is more difficult and individuality is unfamiliar. This film starkly sets the Soviet Union apart from the West as a stifling and backward land. Unsurprisingly, the West claims her and grants her love in the end. This early/pre-Cold War film does not present the Soviets as an enemy per se, but rather as the “other.” Their system is inferior and artificially imposed upon the people. They are confused, but once they have experienced Western life, who could go back? There is confidence that the West will win them over.

When the Cold War fully got under way, however, the relationship turned to one of rivalry in which each side feared falling behind the other. Both powers endeavored to position themselves to better their images while entrenching themselves within their particular spheres. In this phase of the Cold War, the concern arose that if the United States did not actively “win over” other states, then they would fall to the Soviets. America had to show the superiority of its capabilities and ideology. Its capabilities came in the form of military, economic, and cultural strength. Its ideology was one of morality, individual liberty, and equality (if only in theory). These “pure” American characteristics were set against those of the Soviet Union.

Hollywood aided in espousing these characteristics with The Ten Commandments (1956). Though set in a time thousands of years before the founding of either state, some have argued that this film allegorically portrays the ideological differences between the Soviet Union and the United States (Shaw), with the Egyptians representing Soviets and the Hebrews representing Americans. The Americans are the chosen people of God, who through their persistence, virtue, and faith overcome their oppressors. All they desire is to live freely. The Soviets are powerful yet misguided, placing their faith in false gods who fail to guide and protect them. They are cruel and take advantage of those whom they have enslaved. The film grants religious and moral authority to the allegorical Americans. At the same time, it strips the allegorical Soviets of their artificial authority. America is destined to prevail while the Soviet Union is destined to crumble. In this film, the Soviet Union is portrayed as a more direct threat to Western civilization, actively suppressing liberty and with no regard for humanity. By enhancing the identity of the enemy, it made the Soviet Union all the more important for the United States. The greater you make or perceive your enemy, the more your enemy comes to define you. By raising up the Soviets as such a profound threat, America bound itself ever tighter to them.

Some have argued that the media fueled and perpetuated the Cold War while others have credited it for helping to bring down the Soviet Union (Arno and Dissanayake). Both arguments offer interesting insights into the media dynamic of the Cold War. By creating a villain, you inherently create a hero. In this unity of opposition, both sides mutually reinforce each other, and by doing so constitute each other. One of the reasons that the Cold War was so “stable” was that at a certain level, both superpowers realized that they needed one another. As the portrayed villain became greater, so did the portrayed hero. The media elevated both sides to a hyper real plane, which gave the Soviet Union and the United States, in one form or another, power. This self-reinforcing thrust of the media likely promoted the vitality of the Cold War.

Nonetheless, the characteristic thrust of consumerism by the media may have simultaneously contributed to the downfall of the Soviet system. Tony Shaw posits, “The Cold War was won as much in the shopping basket as at the negotiating table” (Shaw, 33). Not only was media intended for consumption itself, but also it pictured and promoted American goods to those around the world. By flaunting capitalist luxury, the media indirectly compared the bounty in the West to the dearth in the East. Such a disparity in the quality of life could not endure, because you cannot wall in your own deprived people and expect them to loyally submit forever. In this light, the dissolution of the Soviet Union resembles Moses leading his people out of Egypt, with the Pharaoh powerless to stop him, just like Moscow was unable to suppress the social movements in its satellite states in the late 1980s. In these ways, the media maintained the Cold War and yet constantly chipped away at the enemy.

Eventually the enemy grew so great and complex that it became more than itself. The enemy ceased to have concrete meaning anymore and became more of an idea creeping around in American social consciousness. In Three Days of the Condor (1975), a book reader for the CIA thinks that his section has been taken out by some enemy force. When he tries to bring himself in, he is attacked by his superior and escapes. He soon discovers that the enemy is not a hostile, foreign group, but rather one of their own. This enemy was created by the hyper reality in which the intelligence community operates. In this film, the Soviets are no longer the enemy; we are our own enemies. This is what happens when the rivalry and conflict are taken too far and are played out for too long. This is what happens when surveillance and simulation are coupled with the accelerating speed of technology and interactions; reality cannot keep up and is enveloped by the hyper reality. Arno and Dissanayake put it this way: “Mass media began to mediate government-citizen communication. People became alienated from one another as cultures moved inexorably from association (Gemeinschaft) into abstraction (Gesellschaft)” (Arno and Dissanayake, 30). As the pace of media, technology, and information accelerates and people move farther away from each other into abstraction, will we become so ensnared in the hyper reality that the only enemy we can find is ourselves?

Works Cited/Consulted:

Arno, Andrew and Wimal Dissanayake, Ed. The News Media in National and International Conflict. Westview Press, Inc., Boulder, Colorado, 1984.

Chilton, Paul, Ed. Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today. Frances Pinter Publishers, Dover, New Hampshsire, 1985.

Clayton, Koppes R. and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1990.

Der Derian, James. “The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed.” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies. (Sep., 1990), pp. 295-310.

Shaw, Tony. Hollywood’s Cold War. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2007.

Three Days of the Condor. Produced by Stanley Schneider and Dino De Laurentiis. Directed by Sydney Pollack. Paramount Pictures. 1975.

Posted by Alan Johnson at 11:11 AM | Permalink

Willem Van Lancker - Thematic Essay

Massimo Vignelli called graphic design, and more specifically what graphic designers do, “a fight against ugliness.” He likened it to a doctor battling disease; designers are working to cure the visual disease that infests our surroundings and environment (Helvetica Hustwit). It is true that typography, and on a broader scale, graphic design, affect our response and communication to and with our world subconsciously every day. “Design is solving problems. Graphic design is solving problems by making marks. Type is a uniquely rich set of marks because it makes language visible” (A Type Primer, Kane viii).

So, since typography and graphic design make language visible what dictates how we respond to it? In other words, do we choose fonts, or do fonts choose us? Just as Gary Hustwit provided us with the anecdote of seeing the word “welfare” set in his grungy “punk-rock” font on CNN; seeing words depicted in some qualitative visual manner very often influences and even changes their meaning. The viewer instantly associates the word welfare with something dirty, wretched and negative. However, if the same text were set in a clean, modern font, the viewer’s reaction to the topic could easily be completely the opposite. This phenomenon is very apparent and obvious for some fonts and design elements. For example, if I were to use a rounded, bubbly font such as Comic Sans, the viewer would likely associate the text with fun, children, and light-hearted content. Furthermore, many fonts, though they do not fundamentally imply a certain quality or aesthetic, have become such a part of our mass-culture that they are instantly recognizable or identifiable with a particular message or an unmistakable image. Think of the Coca-Cola script; if you were to see that font forming any other word it is likely you would still think of Coke. At the same time, there are fonts like Helvetica that mean absolutely nothing at all when viewed singularly and objectively, but which can take on such a different character depending upon how they are juxtaposed, that they become the most important font families of all. It is this insidious, subconscious power that typography wields over the population that makes it so interesting. Graphic design allows us to communicate with each other but it also has the power to subliminally dictate our actions every day.

This is definitely not a modern phenomenon, as many would assume. Long before the proliferation of movable type with the invention of Gutenburg’s printing press (circa 1493), fonts have existed and been identified as products and representations of certain cultures, religions, languages and regions. These hand-carved and hand-written fonts have withstood the centuries and are now found on nearly everyone’s personal computer. Fonts like Times, Trajan, and many of the transitional serif fonts, all are rooted in ancient Rome and more specifically, transcribed from the Trajan Column (circa 114 A.D.), believed to be one of the finest examples of truly “Roman type.” The writing styles of the characters in the illuminated manuscripts can be seen on nearly every Irish pub in America, (A Short History of the Printed Word Chappell, Bringhurst). Even then, there was a sort of association by font that people adhered to, each locale having its own way of carving and designing letters.

When the printing press arrived on the typographic scene at the end of the 15th century, fonts and typography in Europe were primarily controlled by the Catholic Church. To differentiate their type style from the Catholic printings, Protestant Dutch monks designed their own letterforms that they carried on their backs to avoid persecution from the Diocese while still spreading their message, (Graphic Design: A Concise History, Hollis 68). So here we have the Protestant people or the clergy at least, attempting to identify and separate themselves as a group in part by using type. The fonts they created eventually led to the common fonts, Caslon, Baskerville, and other modern English fonts. This is where most people get lost in the slight differences between fonts, things like the subtle nuances between Adobe Garamond and Garamond Premier Pro or even greater differences like those between Verdana and Univers. The layperson sees the Target logo and the logo for American Airlines as two entirely different fonts and designs. All the while, it is in fact a careful ruse, a manipulation of the tools and devices that are at a graphic designer’s disposal (and I do not mean the computer). Devices such as leading - the amount of vertical spacing between lines of type, kerning - the adjustment of letter spacing in a proportional sense, and tracking - the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in text, color, and weight, are just a few that have allowed fonts like Helvetica to take on so many disparate forms and connotations.

Helvetica, with its rigid conformity was born out of the modernist world. The Twentieth century led to the rise of modernism in graphic design as well. The Modernist school of thought was born out of the Bauhaus in Germany as well as the Swiss style of typography. It relied on the simple tenet that less is more. Modernist designers worked out of grids, using strong contrast, and only a few fonts. Years later, during the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies, design entered the post-modern stage in its development. All of the rules that designers had previously adhered to were often discarded in favor of “humanistic fonts” and hand-drawn designs that often were born out of mistakes in an artist’s work. This period stood in strong defiance to the order and structure of the modernist discipline. Helvetica survived this era as well.

I do not want this to become an essay on the development of typography, so here I will break from my historical and technical recap. Today, in the digital era of typography where virtually no one in the trade physically creates their designs in metal type any longer, the ease of creating type and being a “graphic designer” has become as simple as buying a mac with the latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite. In reality, being an effective graphic designer, the doctor of visual maladies and communication, takes so much more. It does not necessarily only take a degree in the discipline to make a good graphic designer. Instead, a good designer must be an artist, as well as a student of human communication and a keen observer of how people interact with each other and react to their environment. As we have entered the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) generation for nearly every aspect of life, this has led to a proliferation of unsuccessful fonts (just go to 1001fonts.com, fontfreak.com, etc to see for yourself) and uninspiring amateur graphic design.

Though we are living in a state of nearly total media saturation, graphic design still retains its fundamental influence over us, contrary to the idea that if something is such a part of our culture it becomes ubiquitous and invisible. It is entirely duplicitous and insidious in our world - on the Internet, television, the printed word and in our surroundings. However, even though we are bombarded by advertisements every second of every day, we are not immune to their power. We still recognize the giant, iconic Texaco sign as a place to stop for gas and not just a word set in Helvetica Bold.

This argument takes me back to the question that prompted this essay to begin with; do we choose the fonts or do the fonts choose us? I think that it is a combination of both. When someone sets out to find a font that expresses exactly what he or she is looking for, they fall back on the conventions that have been set by our society (i.e. trying to find the perfect font for a new sushi restaurant, nine times out of ten he or she will select the typical “ninja/Asian” style font that everyone is familiar and identifies with). So in this sense, the fonts are choosing us but at the same time this is merely a reflection of the stereotypes and norms that the globally mediated society has created. It is the groundbreaking designs in figure-ground relationships and the balance of form and counter-form that shake the foundations of these trite stereotypical communicators. This is why Helvetica has become the ubiquitous behemoth in the world of typography for the past fifty years. Paula Scher gave Helvetica the tag as the “font of the Vietnam War,” (Helvetica Hustwit) because of its representation of nearly every corporation and government that supported the war; I could not disagree with this more. Helvetica is a font that has redefined how people react to typography because it transcends any one specific tag. If sixty years ago I had told a graphic designer that in 2008 there would be one single font used by mega-corporations including the likes of BMW, Target, Staples, Verizon, USPS, American Apparel, American Airlines, the IRS, Crate & Barrel and Texaco, (just to name a few) I would have been laughed out of the building. All of these companies indeed use Helvetica as their logo typeface. Yet their individual logos each express a visual icon that communicates a powerful message to the viewer. The viewer would never think twice that they were looking at the same font family. Helvetica, has become, not the voice of the totalitarian, but the most essentially human font. So today, in a world where we are beyond modernism, beyond post-modernism, a place where everyone with a computer and an internet connection can communicate their views to millions of people, what will become of typography and graphic design?

Posted by Willem Van Lancker at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thematic Essay Question: Can genocide be used in an analogous way in a documentary film?

There are a few things you’re just not supposed to do in this world. You don’t laugh at a funeral, you don’t take candy from a baby, and you most certainly don’t throw around the word “genocide,” particularly as associated with the Nazi Holocaust. Politicians attempting to make grand statements and emotional appeals have, again and again, landed themselves in hot water for comparing a perceived injustice to genocide or an arch nemesis to Hitler. Just do a Google News search on “genocide analogy” and you discover that Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been condemned for calling the Prime Minister’s passive policies on global warming to “Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis” (Aubry), a national anti-abortion group is under fire for juxtaposing images of aborted fetuses with images from the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide on the University of New Hampshire campus (Dorgan), and a Second Amendment advocate who argued that the Holocaust occurred because the Jews were not allowed to possess the weapons they required to protect themselves has been confronted with a storm of criticism at his university (Hiller).

This backlash against irresponsible attempts to exploit the intense sentiments evoked by the concept of genocide is certainly valid—it is extremely dangerous to cheapen the meaning of such a volatile word in the public eye when the repercussions of a loose definition in the legal and political realms hold life or death consequences in many corners of the world. It seems that there are two major questions built into the topic of this thematic essay. 1) Can documentaries make an analogy to genocide in a legitimate way that does not simply exploit, and therefore cheapen or denigrate, this protected term? 2) If the analogy is legitimate, is there any point to comparing something that is not genocide with genocide?

Is the documentary different in some way than the media featured in the anecdotes listed above? I would argue yes, most certainly. First of all, a documentary is not a flip or callous remark like the ones I cited. Even Michael Moore films show evidence that some thought and honest reasoning went into the construction of whatever argument they seek to make, whether the argument is valid or not. Genocide comparisons are most offensive when they temporarily seek to exploit the inflammatory nature of the word, but refuse to commit to their analogy in the form of a reasoned argument for their case. These cases look more like a temporary verbal hijacking or cooptation than a real comparison. An image of a dead fetus sitting next to one of a dead Holocaust victim seeks to dramatize and enhance the first image, but it ends up altering and ultimately cheapening the meaning of the second. It makes its point, then disappears from the discussion. What makes this use of the genocide comparison exploitative and illegitimate? I argue that the difference lies in the intention. If the intention is to stifle debate by using the forbidden word and thus casting all intellectual/political enemies under its shadow, then this is an illegitimate use of the genocide analogy. However, if the intention is to provoke discussion and serious thought, then this is a legitimate use of the genocide analogy. Note, I do not argue here that any legitimate use of the genocide analogy is necessarily valuable or relevant, but simply that it is possible.

Additionally, documentaries are inherently manipulative in a way that other media (e.g., non-fictional books and articles) cannot quite achieve and in a way that we do not permit them to be. This is not to say that books with a political aim do not also tell a highly biased narrative, or that they are not also edited to depict only realities conducive to the arguments they advance, but in the simplest terms, political documentaries own their viewers for a couple of hours while books are automatically more distant to their audiences because they do not directly approximate real life in the way that moving images do. We allow ourselves to be taken by the documentary, as it does not demand critique until the show is over. As Alex Gibney made clear in his presentation when addressing the use of reenactments in his documentary on torture, documentaries seek to make a point about certain experiential truths and not just empirical ones. They say “This is what it’s like to be x,” rather than “This is how it is to be x.” If they did not seek do achieve this emotional manipulation on some level, it would be difficult to justify the use of film as the primary medium.

Now what does this have to do with genocide analogies in documentaries? The qualities separating non-fictional film from non-fictional print are key to legitimizing the use of these analogies. Because the documentary is based almost entirely on metaphor and representation—the film itself is only a representation of the story it depicts—it can draw on the genocide parallel in a way that is legitimate in the sense that its purpose is artistic. It is designed to convey a similarity in experience, not necessarily in reality. When politicians utter the word casually or when non-fictional publications use it to illustrate a point that is presented as empirical, the rules against exploitation are a little different.

Now that I have suggested that documentary films can in fact use the genocide analogy in a “legitimate” way, I analyze the value of pursuing this path. In my view, documentaries based on a bad analogy are at least as bad as offensive or exploitative ones. Is there really a point to comparing something that is not genocide with genocide? I think the answer is almost always no. When we say that two things are similar, we rarely qualify what about them is alike (if everything about them were alike, they would be the same and it would be a statement of fact, not an analogy). Once we have identified this, the point on which they converge must be substantial and relevant for the political message at hand for this similarity to be meaningful in any way. To make a meaningful parallel, the film-maker must know his purpose. Not all things that appear similar are actually alike, and so the maker of the analogy must know beforehand exactly what aspects are alike and be certain that these are the most important ones. Genocide means many different things in different contexts, each of which demands a different level of specificity for a valid comparison. If the analogy is meant as legal commentary, it must be able to fit under the UN definition of genocide, which is based on the intentions underlying genocide. If it is meant as social commentary, it must be driven by the same social purposes and group dynamics as genocide. If it is meant as historical commentary, it must share certain driving forces, purposes, and underlying causes with genocide. Fully understanding what about a given subject resembles genocide is vital to making a comparison that is not superficial and therefore irrelevant.

The problem with trying to make the analogy relevant and interesting is that documentaries typically seek to liken social realities with the social purposes of genocide (e.g., the need to define “the other,” which is followed by fear of “the other,” etc.). But unlike historical analyses, which require a common driving force underlying the genocidal process, and unlike legal analyses, which require a common intention behind it, social analyses do not require as strict an adherence to the features we know to define genocide. Therefore, they resemble a lot of other things too. The genocide analogy is a slippery slope once its goal is simply to make people think, or to make them consider the social implications of certain policies, rather than to make a concrete argument stating that the intentions behind these policies are actually like those defining genocide. The argument then seems so unambitious that one has to wonder why the policy or social reality at hand was not compared to something other than genocide. In short, I believe it is very possible to use the genocide analogy in a legitimate way, but much more difficult to use it in a relevant and compelling way.

Although the genocide analogy as social commentary is most likely a dubious undertaking, some of what I have identified as its weaknesses may in fact highlight a much greater and more relevant point about the nature of genocide itself. In other words, the comparison between a social reality familiar to those in the audience and genocide does not seem to strengthen the argument that the social reality is like genocide without meeting standards that are virtually unattainable, but merely juxtaposing the two in a documentary may illustrate something about Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” concept. While thinking about the question at hand for this thematic essay, I came to the realization that my perceptions of genocide, at least in the sense of experiential truth, are largely shaped by documentaries depicting only the most dramatic and in-your-face elements, and not the subtler qualities that uncover some of genocide’s most dangerous and evil dimensions. Seeing a familiar phenomenon depicted with much the same intensity and in the same format as those documentaries centered around genocide may force viewers to consider the more banal and routine aspects of genocide itself. While it does not make the comparison any more relevant to the phenomenon under analysis, simply the use of the documentary as the medium of representation may inadvertently shed some light on the nature of genocide. In short, I believe that the genocide analogy can be legitimately used to depict social phenomena in a documentary, but that this is a tenuous undertaking if the aim is any more ambitious than capturing an experiential truth.

Works Cited:

Aubry, Jack. “May Unrepentant about Criticism.” Ottawa Citizen. May 1, 2007. http://www.canada.com/topics/news/politics/story.html?id=41a9655e-59c2-4ab0-a87a-4d18c0f67c3e&k=17322

Dorgan, Lauren R. The Concord Monitor. “Campus Reacts to Ghastly Images: Activists Compare Abortion, Holocaust.” April 10, 2007. http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070410/REPOSITORY/704100398/1043/NEWS01.

Hiller, Tim. “7 Degrees to Genocide.” The University of Maryland Diamondback. April 30, 2007. http://media.www.diamondbackonline.com/media/storage/paper873/news/2007/04/30/Opinion/7.Degrees.To.Genocide-2886810.shtml.

Posted by Bethany Gerstein at 10:05 PM | Permalink

I just knew there was a reason I hated mimes. The panhandling, the bad jokes, the frightening make-up, the….silence – they all swirled together into a perfect storm of annoyingness. The great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche shared my sentiment. He viewed mimesis as a strategy of the weak against the strong – a threat to life, passion, and power. As a budding übermensch, I took Nietzsche’s prescribed defense against mimesis – to rely on one’s creative instinct – to heart. And my instinct always told me that those quiet bastards were responsible for the sorry state of our doomed 21st century.

So it came as no surprise to me to find that one of humanity’s greatest thinkers, Plato, had a similar attitude towards the ancient “art” of mime. The Greek philosopher denounced overly imitative representation, which he deemed “mechanical accuracy,” and called instead for a “rightness of mimesis” in the arts. In class last Wednesday, another great thinker, Professor James Der Derian, again invoked…I won’t say “repeated”…the dangers of mimesis. He observed that, less than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and I note as I write this that the media is currently buzzing with news of Boris Yelstin’s death) it seems that we are again fighting a global war against a monolithic ideological enemy who wants to defeat us and destroy our way of life. Let’s call it the “mimetic quandary” – somehow, we continuously find ourselves haunted by the ghosts (or the zombies) of political, economic, and social history. Despite our best efforts to learn history, we still seem doomed to repeat it.

In fact, I’ll do Professor Der Derian one better, and charge that the Cold War itself was just another example of political mimesis – an ideological aping of World War II. In that war we really were engaged in a global conflict against monolithic ideological enemy who wanted to defeat us and destroy our way of life – barely comparable to the hardly monolithic and often over-estimated enemy we faced in the Cold War. The fact that televised news and mass media took off in the United States around this period gels nicely with Professor Der Derian’s assertion in class that the “mimetic quandary” is fed and perhaps even created by the media. He went on to cite “poesis” – creative expression – as the alternative and the solution to the “mimetic quandary,” and proposed that new technologies may soon put this ability into the hands of the masses. Ten minutes later, after class, he assigned me a thematic essay in which I had to find a “media solution” to the “mimetic quandary.” Always eager for a chance to beat up on mimes, I got started right after Spring Weekend (hangovers help me study).

The first question, naturally, is: “How does the media feed the mimetic quandary?” In fact, I think someone asked this in class but I wasn’t really paying attention and it’s not in my notes. Anyway, the way I see it, the news media, by its very nature, is pledged to mimesis. The holy grail of “objectivity” pushes journalists to merely report the “facts as they happened” – to give the most exact, neutral, thorough account of what happened in the world. The New York Times proudly labels its paper, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” as though the news is reproduced exactly on its pages, without any intermediary journalists or filters. To an American journalist schooled in the necessity of objectivity and the evils of media bias, the ideal form of reportage would allow the audience to personally experience the events themselves. Some kind of advanced, alien-technology from the 30th century, which tapped into users’ brains and directly stimulated the correct nerve endings in order to recreate the news. Mimesis in its purest form.

The second way in which the news media tends towards mimesis is that it is their job to explain very complex, confusing, and often foreign concepts and events to the American people. The media’s natural reaction – in fact, most peoples’ reaction to such a difficult task – is to simplify and to explain in terms that the audience will understand. The American people understood World War II, so, in the news media, “Nazis” became “Communists.” Almost 60 years later, “Communists” have become “terrorists” or, in an even more striking form of mimesis, “Islamofascists.” The news is also over-simplified by a media eager to attract an audience and afraid of alienating or confusing their customers. The complexities of the Sino-Soviet relationship and the differences between Maosim and Stalinism were deemed too confusing and complicated for the “average American,” so instead there was a vast and monolithic Communist menace. Though the civil war in Iraq has forced many Americans to learn the hard way about the realities of the Islamic world, news coverage of the events, especially in the first few years after 9/11, remained very much in the “us versus them” mentality. Saddam Hussein was a secular, nationalist, oppressive leader whom the United States supported throughout the 1980s. Al-Qaeda was a revolutionary, fundamentalist, internationalist terrorist group (many of whose members the United States also supported throughout the 1980s). In reality, the two were bitter enemies, but were quickly lumped together in the media’s desire to simplify the complexities of international affairs following 9/11 (people who want to kill us vs. people who don’t want to kill us…yet).

The dangers of the “mimetic quandary” are twofold. On one hand, mimesis blinds the American people to the realities of the international situation. One can almost hear the droning chant of “It’s just like the Cold War…It’s just like the Cold War…It’s just like the Cold War” reverberate from the White House. Neoconservatives have only just begun to recognize their mistake in believing that the “liberation” of the Arab world would work just like the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. At the same time as it distorts one’s perspective, mimesis warps reality to fit itself. This seems to contradict the first danger of mimesis, and it does, but, unfortunately, rather than cancel out its harm, it merely complicates it. By viewing the “War against Terror” as another “Cold War,” Americans manage to recreate all the bad bits of the Cold War – the fear of internal subversives, the global and monolithic threat, and the terror of imminent destruction. Edward Said notes that, if one believes that all lions are fierce, then it is more likely that the ways in which one would handle a lion will actually increase its fierceness (Said 94). In the same way, the more new media mimesis makes the American people feel as though we are in an “us vs. them” situation, the more the world really will become “us vs. them.” The more we tell ourselves that terrorists hate our freedom and want to exterminate us, just like the Communists, and just like the Nazis, the more we engender that reality.

The topics for this week’s class, 9/11 and the “Al-Jazeera Effect,” come into play as failed media solutions to the mimetic quandary – to again invoke the ancient Greeks, both 9/11 and the “Al-Jazeera Effect” are “pharmakons,” potential cures for the mimetic quandary that ultimately became poisons which only added to the problem. The terrorist attacks on September 11th, in their horror, devastation, and cruelty, were, to again invoke Professor Der Derian, events too big for our theories. In fact, they may also have been too big for our news media. For a brief period, the attacks seemed so heinous, so enormous, and so terrifying that the news media could no longer resort to mimesis in order to explain them – just as in academics, September 11th shattered the American people’s notions of history, of ideology, of global culture, and of international affairs. Yet soon enough, 9/11 was churned through the new media’s mimetic machine, re-emerging as the return of Pearl Harbor, the return of a global conflict, and, even to Osama bin Laden, as the return of the pain of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the complicit United States. Bin Laden invoked this mimetic view of the attacks in his October 2004 recorded message to the American people, “While I was looking at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust one in a similar manner by destroying towers in the United States so that it would feel some of what we felt and to be deterred from killing our children and women.” Sadly, on top of all its physical horror, 9/11 served to only worsen the mimetic crisis by sparking another wave of “us vs. them/Nazis/Communists/terrorists” mimesis.

With the actors on both sides of the conflict blinded and driven by the mimetic quandary, even in the wake of the potentially discourse-shattering events of September 11th, Al-Jazeera seemed to offer hope for an end to mimesis. Before 9/11, the U.S. government routinely praised the Arabic television network, headquartered in Doha, Qatar, as an uncensored, independent, progressive voice in the Arab world. To those frustrated by the mimetic quandary, Al-Jazeera promised not to be restricted by the traditional perceptual frames of the American media, because its principle audience, its newscasters, and its journalists were Arab. Thus, they would not continuously draw on World War II and Cold War paradigms to present contemporary issues, but, rather, would offer an “Arab” perspective that could free Americans from the binds of mimesis. Ah, if only it were so easy. Instead, Al-Jazeera became a pharmakon – a cure but also a poison. First of all, Americans don’t read or watch Al-Jazeera. It’s not completely the nation’s fault, either, as, following 9/11, the Bush administration and American media outlets such as FoxNews repeatedly smeared the Arab network and casted it as the “terrorist” news station. No cable networks are currently willing to carry the Al-Jazeera channel for dread of appearing sympathetic towards “the enemy” and, by this point, I fear that many Americans are probably too afraid or too hateful to watch it. What happened, sadly, is that Al-Jazeera itself was also sucked into the American news media mimetic machine, becoming just another character in the 21st century’s new Cold War. Though the network has an excellent English language webpage which I encourage everyone to read, this has had little impact on political discourse in the American media. Additionally, Al-Jazeera is also trapped by the mimeticism inherent in the journalistic pursuit of objectivity – their motto translates as “The Opinion and the Other Opinion.” Their mimesis may draw on different sources than does the American mimetic quandary. However, just looking at the history of 20th century relations between the West and the Arab world (conquests, imperialism, exploitation, terrorism), Al-Jazeera’s mimesis does not portend to be any more pleasant an experience than our own.

Now, after all this pretentious, academic posturing, is there a media solution to the mimetic quandary? I believe there is. And it comes, surprisingly, waving an American flag, proudly “supporting our troops,” and riding a bucking Bill O’Reilly. That’s right – FoxNews. The FoxNews Channel’s producers seem to grasp the concepts of post-modernism better than any other media outlet. There must be a few Brown grads working there, hiding deep within the steaming bowels of the FoxNews Manhattan headquarters. No other news media outlet has managed to harness post-modern concepts like the impossibility of objectivity (Fox insists that it’s “Fair and Balanced,” but it does so with a wink and a smile), the influence of perceptual frameworks, the power of media effects, and the phenomenon of virtual immersion like FoxNews does – it’s just that Fox uses those concepts to advance the hegemonic, Bush administration agenda. Call it the “FoxNews Effect” – watching Fox, you don’t see the news, you experience the news, with hip headlines, flashy presentations, cinematic sensibilities, self-conscious framing, and attacks on media competitors. And FoxNews journalism is only half the story. If you’ve been watching FoxNews just for the reportage, you’ve been missing the whole point. Pundit shows like “The O’Reilly Factor,” “The Big Story with John Gibson,” “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” “Hannity’s America,” and “Special Report with Brit Hume” (all conservatives...sorry, O’Reilly, “traditionalists,” which I also encourage everyone to read) are what make Fox work. Although the phenomenon is also present in the standard FoxNews reportage, it is on these shows that the news isn’t just reported, it’s produced. Here the “objective facts” take on flesh – they become something dynamic and living and potentially revolutionary (were they not so pro-administration). Like a good student of continental thought, FoxNews understands that journalists can never simply neutrally recount “the facts as they happened.” Instead, Fox sees how the media creates, and often even impacts, the news. Rather than remain dedicated to objectivity and mimeticism, FoxNews pursues poesis and embraces the ways in which media effects and virtualism allow journalists to create. The sad part of it all is that they use it merely to ape the Bush administration’s worldview and to promote its policy – a perspective that relies heavily on the continuation of the mimetic quandary.

So, in the words of Che, I hope for two, three, or many FoxNewses to flourish as the media solution to the mimetic quandary. Naturally, these “post-FoxNewses” should apply the techniques of the FoxNews channel but not its politics – they should embrace journalistic poesis as a counter-hegemonic tool. Naturally, there should be more than one of them, as the fractionalized post-modern condition on which they are based demands a multitude of perspectives from which viewers can glean to form their own perspectives. They shouldn’t all be liberal, either, as any kind of ideological hegemony is dangerous and a diversity of news-media-experiences, even that offered by FoxNews, is essential to maintaining an informed, educated, and alert populace. With many FoxNewses producing journalistic poesis, there may just be a chance to escape the mimetic quandary and finally see the world in a new way. Accepting the notion of journalistic poesis and praising FoxNews may be difficult and painful, but I believe it is the best media solution to the mimetic quandary. Unless you want to live in a world full of mimes.

Posted by Jacob Schuman at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Shveta Raina
Thematic Essay
IR 180 (95)

Q. Is it possible to make a documentary about ‘big ideas'?

Based on discussion from 4/11/2007.

A.

The discussion between Gar Alperovitz and Andrew Jarecki in last week’s Global Media Lab prompted the question – “Is it possible to make a documentary about ‘big’ ideas?”

The reason this theme became especially central to the discussion was that Alperovitz wants to make a documentary about one such ‘big’, and rather abstract idea. He is pitching the idea of potential political reform and experiential development through grassroots movements that will collectively drive a systemic change in the coming years. Alperovitz has written a number of papers exploring his theme, which can be found at http://www.garalperovitz.com/gar_auth.htm and a very interesting working paper that discusses the paradigm of asset-based community-building and its relation to 21st century development, http://www.americabeyondcapitalism.com/;section=2&part=1.pdf. While he believes that America should have a future “beyond Capitalism”, it is unclear whether he can project his beliefs and ideas in a successful documentary.

Andrew Jarecki, on the other hand, seems to use a completely different approach to documentary film-making. In Capturing the Friedmans, he does not begin the movie with the intention of leaving the viewer with his ‘big idea’. In fact, I left the screening with the feeling that I was forced to think of my own conclusions to the documentary based on the evidence that was provided to me. No opinions were thrust upon me at all, instead both sides of the issue were presented, evidence was put forth, and the viewer was left to decide for himself whether the Friedman duo were guilty of some very heinous crimes.

The class seemed divided on whether a movie can be made about ‘big ideas’ like those of Alperovitz. I believe that a movie like this can be made. I have watched some brilliant movies that argue a certain point – and sell their point – knowing that about half the viewers will probably disagree with them. The reason that such movies do well is because people often go into a movie because they want to hear about somebody else’s viewpoint, and don’t want to actually come up with their own opinion. While Capturing the Friedman’s was an outstanding movie, it was a lot of work for me – both while I watched it and after I watched it – because it has left me to think a lot and make up my own mind on the issue. A specific idea about a certain kind of systemic change, as pitched by Alperovitz on the other hand, might leave a viewer to think, but perhaps could leave a viewer to act on the idea instead of ponder it. It could be ideal for a viewer that is tired of the status quo and is looking for change, is looking fort an ideology to mentally guide him out of the problems as he sees them and provide him with the necessary hope for action.

So to answer the question after providing some background, I would have to say yes. It is definitely possible to make a documentary about big ideas, even abstract ideas, because in order to make a movie you need a filmmaker who is excited about his ideas and an audience who wants to learn more about the idea. In most cases, you will have both. It is just a matter of what the motive of the filmmaker is – and if the idea has enough support.

As far as Alperovitz is concerned, it seems like he definitely has a clear picture of his idea. The issue is that he is not talking about a historical, or even a very current event. Instead, he is using his skills as a visionary to project a future occurrence that may or may not happen. This could definitely be made in a variety of ways, and the filmmaker could really get creative, in fact someone in the class even interpreted the futuristic angle as an indication that the movie should be a science fiction flick! However, I personally believe that someone like Alperovitz who is such an academic should not try and script the movie or decide on the exact medium to put his idea across himself. He should focus on developing his thesis, making it clearer within his mind and explaining it better to people around him, until this complex thesis is simple enough and easy enough to be put forth to the general public. And that is when he should bring in an experienced film producer/director and together they should work on the documentary. I believe this would work because academic papers are most successful when they pitch complex ideas that no-one has heard of before. However, it isn’t the same for documentaries. Even if they explore big ideas they should be able to touch every viewer and leave some sort of impression on him. This is important especially if the goal of this documentary, like many others, is to create awareness and perhaps spark action along the lines of the theory that it discusses.

I believe that there are many big ideas to talk about – and it is not only possible, but absolutely essential to make documentary films about them. Working with Rob Jensen and understanding his thesis on missing women has alternately shocked, stressed, confused and inspired me. I say shocked because I live in India, but I had absolutely no idea that the number of women missing was on such a large scale. And recently I read an article by Amartya Sen, dated December 20th, 1990, that already highlights this theme in great detail and explores it. I wished then that someone had looked into the future and made a film about what could happen if this problem was not contained, about why its happening and how we can stop it. Ultimately almost seventeen years later, we are still debating the same ‘big ideas,’ female infanticide and gender discrimination. With the television revolution sweeping through India and parts of South Asia, it seems like film is the medium to reach out to general people with about these big ideas, to use easily put a stop to unjust practices on a mass scale, to tell people that the world is changing – there is this world out there and it is very different than how you see it in your village where one in four girls is missing.

A major worry for a person making a documentary on big ideas though, is that ideas can be shot down, they can be ridiculed, they can be shelved, even before they have been fully understood, because people don’t like to listen too long if they have already decided that something is wasting their time. On the other hand, a documentary on an event, or a person, will have always have viewers unless it is really badly made. When it comes to ideas, people need proof, and they need explanation. It is not only the way the documentary has been made, but also in large part the content that is up for speculation, debate, and dreaded criticism. In class a few ideas were shot down before they had even been fully explained, perhaps because they seemed ‘contrived’ to a few. That is the danger of making a documentary about ideas – the story line will risk seeming contrived in order to pitch a certain idea.

Despite the above risk, and the need to combine an academic with an experienced filmmaker when making a documentary about big and abstract ideas, we still need to do these films. It’s because these ideas need to reach the general public so they are thinking, they are listening, they are aware and they are acting. And film is too widespread a medium to miss out on. So forget possible, I would conclude that it is imperative to make documentaries about big ideas. You just need a little conviction, a lot of courage, and a very thick skin.

Posted by Shveta Raina at 11:31 AM | Permalink

“The first casualty of war is the truth. Truth is not always killed in war, more often it is missing, or being held prisoner”
-David Benjamin, “Censorship in the Gulf” http://web1.duc.auburn.edu/~benjadp/gulf/gulf.html 1995.

Vietnam was the first media war, but successive international conflicts in which the US has been involved have been subject not only to increasing media exposure, but also to increased military and government censorship as time, technology, and journalistic practices have progressed. Successive conflicts to be discussed here include the Gulf War and the current, ongoing, and ambiguous “War on Terror” which includes US invasions in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Vietnam was a very special war because it was the first media war, and the media brought the war into the homes of the American public. The images and stories the media brought home ignited unprecedented public protest to an international war. The Gulf War was also a media war historically important in its own right; this was a war in which the media was used by the military as a propagandistic tool to ensure public support for the war by severely limiting reporting (Knightly 488). The most recent series of conflicts is perhaps the most difficult to define, and arguably the most complex in many ways because of its ambiguity and evasive enemy(ies). The “War on Terror” is a very unique media war not only because of the government’s carefully-crafted media control mechanism, which is “embedding” American reporters and journalists with the troops, but also because of the huge technological advancements since the Gulf War which allow the public to more easily and openly share and debate opinions and information about the international situation.

Vietnam was the very first media war. The pervasion of television into most American homes allowed images of the war to be brought straight into people’s living rooms for the first time. The 60% of Americans who got their news from television at this time “would agree that [they] saw scenes of real-life violence, death, and horror on [their] screen[s] that would have been unthinkable before Vietnam” (Knightly 451). The impact of these images at the time of Vietnam is certain to have been huge on Americans, as evidenced by unprecedented public decent and protest of the war. Even though there were only a maximum number of 47 journalists of 400 on the field at any time, “the nature of the Vietnam War made for fairly easy coverage” because little movement was involved in Army and Marine operations (Benjamin). While this was an optimal situation for journalists who wanted to cover as much of the war as possible and impact American viewers, the military was at a loss because journalists had relatively unhampered access to the negative side of the war. The television reporting of Vietnam had made it very difficult for two American administrations to continue that war, ‘which was going on in American homes’…The war on colour-television screens had made Americans far more anti-militarist and anti-war than anything else. ‘One wonders if in future a democracy which has uninhibited television coverage in every home will ever be able to fight a war…however just’ (Knightly 452).

As became evident during the Gulf War, the military’s solution to uninhibited television coverage which caused negative public opinion of a war was to inhibit the reporters’ access to the war and severely limit their freedom to dispel information about the war to the public. While the military did keep secrets from the press in Vietnam such as a 14-month “clandestine bombing campaign against Cambodia, whose neutrality Washington then professed to respect” and falsification of statistics (Knightly 463), the press was still able to bring enough negative coverage of the war to Americans to have a significant impact on the public. During the Gulf War, however, such increased restrictions on reporters paralyzed their abilities to leave such a significant impact upon the public.

By limiting reporters’ access to and ability to report “information on the effectiveness of ineffectiveness of enemy military measures, information on the operating methods and tactics of the military” and by obligating reporters “to stay with a public affairs escort on Saudi bases and at the discretion of the commander on U.S. bases” (Benjamin), the military effectively tied the hands of reporters. As a result, “the military won extremely positive coverage during the war at the price of a dissatisfied press corps and lingering doubts about whether what the press saw was the whole story” (Benjamin). As the second media war, the Gulf War could have been an opportunity for journalists and reporters to hone their skills and offer the public the information to oppose shady military operations abroad. Yet, military restrictions hampered this effort. As John R. MacArthur wrote, “’It was difficult to find anyone who didn’t…count Desert Storm a devastating and immoral victory for military censorship and a crushing defeat for the press and the First Amendment’” (Knightly 529).

The “War on Terror” which is the most ambiguous war of all three, so far entailing ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, is a different type of media war than both Vietnam and the Gulf War. The government and military’s censorship practices have evolved, creating even more propagandistic reporting and arguably more public skepticism than in both past wars. Because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were so long in coming, media outlets were especially geared-up to provide the most extensive wartime coverage in history, but these plans were intercepted by government restrictions of a new sort (Knightly 529). According to Knightly, Bryan Whitman, Deputy Secretary of Defense, created a plan to control the media that had four goals: 1) Emphasize the dangers of the Iraqi regime; 2) Discredit those who question these dangers; 3) Appeal to the public’s hearts and minds instead of logic; and 4) Emphasize the message, “Trust us. We know more than we can tell you” (Knightly 529).

With these four points in mind, Whitman devised a new version of “embedding” a journalist with an infantry unit. At first glance, it appeared that “embedded” journalists were conveying first-hand, accurate information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Upon deeper consideration, however, it is clear that this practice during this war is an ingenious way of maintaining government control over the media and holding the media to these four points. By embedding journalists with a military unit, the journalist is bound to create personal attachments to the soldiers and their causes, and may even feel a part of the unit. This is problematic because journalists can easily become biased in their reporting, as was the goal of Whitman. Journalists would also take a special interest in the troops, focusing more during this war than during others on creating a human interest aspect by reporting on the troops. This takes the focus off of the military’s operations abroad, while also appealing to the “hearts and minds instead of logic” of the American public (Knightly 532). Even if the journalists were able to gather unbiased information and images showing what was really happening on the ground, the Pentagon was undermining their efforts by gathering “back-up” images which it would edit itself and sell to media outlets in ready-to-watch packages (Knightly 534). In fact, reporters who tried to gather their own footage or create their own story that might go outside of the government’s approved boundaries may be in danger. As President Bush said, “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” This was proved when American missiles bombed Al-Jazeera and targeted a BBC correspondent working with the news broadcaster that had aired interviews with Osama bin Laden and other key American “enemy” figures (Knightly 537).

While the government was effectively able to deceive the American public about the initial operations abroad in the “War on Terror” by severely limiting the journalists and reporters and purposely placing them in situations of bias in favor of the military, the government is losing this power. This is due in part to the huge technological information boom in the past few years. With so many video, blog, and other informational websites available today, the government is hardly able to effectively regulate all of the information available on the internet. Nearly anyone with a cell phone who witnesses any noteworthy event can record a video and post it on YouTube or blog about it. Certainly, there are questions of authenticity when such unregulated information is immediately available to all on the internet, but the public finally has the opportunity to take back the media which is supposed to serve it by creating it. Images and stories which the government wishes to withhold from the network television airwaves can be easily released to the public online, and images that cast a negative light on the government can be replayed endlessly by web-users (consider the scandalous truth that there were never any WMDs in Iraq. Viewers can watch the video clip as many times as they want at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPwWnW-SGeU). Therefore, the “War on Terror” is an unprecedented media war not only because of its unusual circumstances, and the new take on “embedded” journalism, but especially because the public is having an increasingly free role in releasing information and exchanging opinions on the war.

Each of the three main wars fought by the United States since the infiltration of image-based media from television to web images have been historically important for distinct reasons. Vietnam was the very first media war in which the media had the power to most greatly impact the public; the Gulf War was a media war strongly restricted by the military; the “War on Terror” is a uniquely circumstanced war in which the American military and government initially tried to somewhat subtly push the media to report in a way that was both biased towards the US and focused on the troops rather than the real events. The “War on Terror” is also the first instance in which the public has gained the ability to freely report and exchange their opinions on the internet. The question is, will the internet be a lasting free outlet and venue for information exchange about this and future wars, or will popular sites like YouTube owned by corporations eventually be subjected to similar government restrictions that the major television networks have experienced?

Posted by Miriam Altman at 11:29 PM | Permalink

“This is madness!”
“This is SPARTA!”
— 300

Though I doubt few would deny that Zack Snyder’s 300 is a sausage-fest of a film, 300 surprisingly (and somewhat refreshingly) also functions as an interesting example of the changing nature of social and international relations as manifested in new media. In his book The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord claims that society has degraded from being into having and finally into appearing (Thesis 17). The emphasis on visual representation in Debord’s analysis seems to indicate that the spectacle as a kind of centralized entity has grasped onto the proliferation of images as a way to ensure its survival, to ensure its hold over society. At the same time, Ronald Deibert in his book Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia depicts the current hypermedia environment as fostering multiplicities in the form of identities, media, and purposes, as a challenge to a more centralized network of power. 300 both literalizes and (whether intentionally or not) satirizes the traditional ways in which we both view (and preview) films—as hyper-represented, -glorified, and as a tool for an increasingly unraveling and unstable structure.

For Debord, society’s reliance on visual appearances makes it susceptible to the power of ideology:

Ideological entities have never been mere fictions—rather, they are a distorted consciousness of reality, and, as such, real factors retroactively production real distorting effects; which is all the more reason why that materialization of ideology, in the form of the spectacle, which is precipitated by the concrete success of an autonomous economic system of production, results in the virtual identification with social reality itself o an ideology that manages to remold the whole of the real to its own specifications. (Thesis 212)

Ideology is a dangerous yet effective tool used by society in order to maintain a fabricated and illusory status quo. Instead of lived or real experiences, the spectacle instead “erases the dividing line between self and world … it likewise erases the dividing line between true and false, repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the organization of experiences” (Thesis 219). Or, in other words, the spectacle has blurred the line between the real real and the unreal real—or the real that we now perceive to be the true real. The spectacle has changed all that was “directly lived [into] mere representation” (Thesis 1)—and, as Debord seems to argue in the theses that follow, representation or the spectacle “is a concrete inversion of life” (Thesis 2) and “the very heart of society’s real unreality” (Thesis 6). Ideology no longer represents a choice but a social hallucination in which history and process is lost; now, it is simply reality, ahistorical, permanent.

Thus, freedom from this social situation relies on “self-emancipation … from the material bases of an inverted truth” (Thesis 221) and this self-emancipation depends on restoring “all their subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths—or, in other words, that have been transformed into lies” (Thesis 206). The device Debord proposes to carry this out is détournement:

Détournement is the antithesis of quotation … Détournement, by contrast, is the fluid language of anti-ideology. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. (Thesis 208)

Perhaps 300 is a kind of manifestation of détournement not only as a story but also as a work of film-art...

Continue reading "Freedom, Liberty, Mysticism, Reason--Oh my!" »

Posted by chk at 05:41 AM | Permalink

“300,” Zack Snyder’s action-packed depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae, takes glorious violence to a new level. When it opened last week, movie-going crowds watched in awe as heads rolled, armies plummeted off rocky cliffs, rhinos suffered massive brain trauma, and many a Persian infantryman was torn to shreds. But more was torn to shreds than oriental-esque soldiers—“300” achieved glorious victory, smashing box office records, and racking in the third-best opening of all time for an R-rated movie. It seems as if everyone was enchanted by 300’s Spartan glory. Well, maybe not everyone. While the masses rushed into the theater, the critics walked out, literally in fact. In Berlin, several critics didn’t even make it through the movie. Those who stayed appeared to regret doing so. On the whole, reviews were less than favorable, to say the least. Just to give a sampling of some of the remarks the movie evoked from critics:

“Despite the fantastic visuals, action and sometimes rousing story, the needle flickers between grandiose and laughable -- in part because the film takes itself sooo relentlessly, slow-motion, music-swellin', see-you-in-hell seriously.”—Mark Rahner, Seattle Times

“300 is at its best when it settles for purely visceral thrills”—Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

“History is inconveniently complex. And so we get Frank Miller's version, in which everything is simplified to the point of porridge.”—Stephen Witty, Newark Star-Ledger

“Put bluntly, the movie's just too darned silly to withstand any ideological theorizing. And 'silly' is invoked here, more or less, with affection.”—Gene Seymour, Newsday

“It is undeniably exciting and awe-inspiring; but it also lacks a sense of tactile warmth, a crucial core of reality.”—Tom Long, Detroit News

“There's nothing remotely like reality to be had in this film.”—Tasha Robinson, Onion A.V. Club

“300 is about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid.” –A.O. Scott, New York Times

This last remark gets right to the point—all in all, the critics thought the movie was stupid—either it was stupid fun, or just plain stupid. “300” is not only over-the-top, it is a veritable departure from reality, maybe even a venture into “hyper-reality,” as Staci Layne Wilson of the Sci-Fi times suggests, and thus very hard for critics to take seriously. Neal Stephenson, writing for the New York Times, elaborates on this point:

“Such criticisms aren’t really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place — and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie.” (It’s all Geek To Me—New York Times 3/18)

If “300” is indeed a shining example of pure entertainment, it would appear that as the cultural commodity approaches perfection, the critics are left with little to say. They can scorn, they can snob, but ultimately, they cannot hail these products as legitimate textual entities.

What has happened to the critic that has left him/her able only to snob a work like “300,” rather than, well, criticize? Perhaps we should begin our quest to find the critic by looking into the changing nature of the work/text and its origin—the Author. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are not short on insights into this subject.

For both Barthes and Foucault, the idea of “Authorship,” is ultimately a myth of modernity. As Barthes wrote, “the author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’”(DA 143). Basically, modern society ties text to the author. This myth of modernity compels the reader to see the text as inseparable from the author—and therefore who wrote/produced it is crucial to its meaning. As Foucault observes, the text was viewed to be meaningless if it did not have an Author tied to it—“‘literary’ discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author’s name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing” (WA 126). To change who wrote the text would change the very meaning of the text itself (see Foucault’s discussion of author’s names). The role of the Author, then, was analogous to a fixed meaning of the work—the one meaning centered upon the individual deemed the author. Hence, for Barthes and Foucault alike, the Author is a product of modern structuralism. Barthes fleshed this point out, writing, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified to close the writing” (147). What, then, is responsible for the “death of the Author?” Sure enough, it’s the rise of post-structuralism. When culture is revealed as decentered, the myth of modern structuralism is annihilated, and the author meets his/her demise.

But before looking into culture-after-authorship, we should pause to examine the role of the critic with respect to the Authored text. If the job of the critic is to judge the value of a work based on its meaning, the critics first task is to find the meaning—which, before his/her death, lies in the Author’s identity. It is as Barthes wrote, “when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been the reign of the Author”(DA 147). Thus, the critic thrives off of the structuralist myth. And, sure enough, as post-structuralism tears away the fixed signified and thus the author, “criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the Author” (DA 147).

So, then, what becomes of the critic in de-centered post-modernity? More immediately, what is there after the Author is gone? Barthes believes that the removal of the author “utterly transforms the modern text” (DA 145). The work, and writing in particular, “can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’” (DA 145). Furthermore, “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (DA 146). In short, the single meaning of the text attributed to the Author (what Barthes called the theological meaning, since it is unitary and absolute), is replaced by a multiplicity of meanings, which depends on the reading. In another essay in Image-Music-Text, From Work to Text, Barthes claims that the reader gives the text its meaning, not the Author. Since the text is not a mere representation, there is no innate meaning to the text that one can decipher; rather, since there are many meanings that can be extracted from the text, depending on the reading, “In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, not deciphered” (DA 147). If this is the case, what role can the critic have? There’s no meaning to criticize! The reader bonds directly to the text—the mediation of a critic is superfluous. Thus, the only thing a critic will be able to say about truly decentered text is that there is no meaning to be found in it—and thus they can do little but not take it seriously.

This analysis implies that the individual can no longer express himself through writing (or the work in general). What, then, becomes of the individual him/herself? If one expresses more meaning through reading that through writing, then the individual can only be expressed by mixing writings, rather than by writing oneself—one can only express oneself by translating themselves into “words only explainable by other words” (DA 146), as Barthes puts it. Therefore, after the death of the author, “life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred” (DA 147). After the death of the Author, we ourselves become decentered. One life becomes a copy of the model, the referent is obliterated, and the sign is infinitely deferred (one should recall Baudrillard’s writings on hyperreality and the precession of simulacra). Thus, the true post-Authorship text is not based on “reality,” it can only be said to exist in “hyperreality.”

Which brings us back to “300,” a film (and a film is to some extent just another sort of text) bashed (or, in some cases, praised) by critics for being totally out of touch with reality and for having no decipherable meaning besides the blatant themes of liberty and valor, but adored by the moving-going masses, who managed to connect to the movie nonetheless. A movie based on a comic book based on another movie based on accounts of a war. It may be mindless entertainment, but it gets right to the core of what Foucault and Barthes were talking about. There is no Author-god who bestows the film/text with some kind of “theological meaning.” “300” lays thousands of infantrymen to rest—and the Author along side them. The movie can only be disentangled, not deciphered—leaving a minimal role for the critic. Sure enough, the critics could do little but snob the movie, or praise it as cheap thrill. And yet, the film-text continues draw in audience/readers by the millions, who seek to interact with the text and disentangle their own meanings from it. The audience/reader has no need for the critic. If anything, “300’s” ability to appeal to audiences (and therefore provide some sort of meaningful experience for them), while drawing a scornful response from critics, who could only pass it off as stupid/stupid fun, is evidence that culture has in fact become post-modernized. Hyperreality may indeed be our reality.

However, the critic, though stumped in this particular case, does not appear to be dead at all. On the contrary, one can turn to the Arts and Leisure section on any given Friday and find critics doing their thing, week after week. Two explanations account for this fact. Foucault provides the first explanation. Foucault notes that even if the Author as such is declared to be dead, the Author-function, as he calls it, might still be carried out by other means, arising from that which has come to take the place of the Author. As he wrote, “It seems to me that the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change” (WA 118). He then goes on to pinpoint two such themes that have emerged after the “death of the Author,” but continue to imply the Author-function. Thus, the death of the Author does not necessarily change the nature of the text—the Author-function must be eliminated entirely from discourse to bring about “genuine change.” And, as long as the nature of text remains unchanged, the critic will still have a role to play.

Secondly, and this is merely a corollary of the first point, contemporary culture, even if it has seen the rise of the post-modern, has not seen the end of the modern and its myths. There is no reason to believe that the two are mutually exclusive. Hence, the Author might have only died a partial death—or it might be dying a slow, elongated death. Where modernity’s myths persist, there the critic will find his role; where they are replaced by endless deferral of reference, the critic will find himself impotent. Thus, in the end, the survival of the critic may speak to the persistence of modernity, but his/her defeat at the hands of “300” is a testament to the force of the decentered and the hyperreal in today’s world.

DA = Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author
WA = Michel Foucault, What is an Author?

Posted by Andy Garin at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The War Tapes exacerbates the issues of truth that we've been dealing with throughout the semester — what is truth? What is objectivity? What is an authentic account of an event?

Nonfiction narrative, whether in film, literature, or journalism, is always running into this issue. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces drew harsh criticism last year when it was discovered that the critically acclaimed book, which Oprah had chosen for her popular book club, was a "fake" — incidents in the memoir had been fabricated or exaggerated. Unsurprisingly, readers across the country were self-righteously indignant, and it seems likely that Frey will never write again. I don't know Frey or why he chose to write what he did. It's possible that he figured that more salacious details sell more books, which is not a surprising conclusion in our day and age.

In Frey's defense, though, one has to wonder: even if the actual events did not occur, does it make the story less true? What does truth in a narrative entail? The problem is partly that nonfiction walks a fine line between objective fact (whatever that means) and subjective experience. I am less wedded to fact than to realism; I'd rather know the truth of experience than the truth as is, which sounds radical, but is not that new. Many artists use surreal language or images to show a truth that is hard to tell, a truth that maybe can't be rendered merely by factual retelling.

In fact, when it comes to the documentaries that we've been watching in class, this seems all the more relevant. Criticisms of national media aside, we in this class are, generally speaking, informed Brown students. We are exposed to reports of Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, we see the grainy, night-vision images of explosions, we look at pictures of the torture in Abu Ghraib, the maps and schematics and diagrams. We've seen it all, but watching the news is not going to give you an idea of how it really is out there. Yet, the War Tapes, with its far less comprehensive amount of raw data and information, gives its viewer a slice of experience — a few completely subjective perspectives from three soldiers, what they've seen, what they've heard, and how they feel about it. As Maj. Duncan Domey said in class (and I hope I got his rank right), that is really what it's like.

A.O. Scott mentioned The War Tapes in a larger article about "Inconvenient Truths" that was also posted on this blog ... in it, he writes that the film is "one of the most formally radical films of 2006, even as Ms. Scranton’s method seems, in retrospect, head-smackingly obvious..." I find myself agreeing with the sentiment, and I attribute it to the nebulous nature of the pursuit of truth that we find ourselves in, especially in this conflict. We watch films and narratives of some of the most complex issues of our time — problems that don't have solutions, wars that don't have easy outs. There is no easy truth, at least not as far as I can see. We are bombarded by souped-up war spin on one hand and images of torture and a hanging Saddam Hussein on the other. How can a film get to the truth of a conflict that engages thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people? How can there only be one truth there? Perhaps I am more cavalier with the idea of one objective truth than most, but I don't think that any one person or any one film is going to expose the heart of what is wrong with our world. I'm not even sure I believe in objective truth; a camera is biased to begin with. Rather than despair, though, at the inability to find such truth, I think the approach in The War Tapes offers a certain amount of hope: we can get the small truths, the individual experiences, and maybe that can shed light on the larger truth.

We spent a lot of time in class discussing the authenticity of Alex Gibney's portrayal of torture in Taxi Cab to the Dark Side. One scene, probably about 5-10 minutes long, was almost entirely dramatized with the exception of the narration of excerpts from the log the soldiers kept to record their interrogation procedures. The validity of this as a method of narration is still open to debate, but in my eyes this was an example of portraying the truth of experience. I didn't think I was watching actual footage of the torture at any point, but the blurring of fact and dramatized narration in that scene, for me, drove the point home. I didn't want to know it was staged. No one can know what that scene was like, because we have no footage of it, but Gibney tries to shed light on it with his (in my mind) well-edited but dramatized portrayal of the event.

But then, my particular bias comes through — I believe a documentary has a duty to tell the truth, but I am willing to accept, if not already convinced, that the truth comes in many different forms. I'd be interested to hear: what do you expect from a documentary or nonfiction film? Do you believe that total objective truth can be found and portrayed? What is the value of subjective truth or perspective, if any? And does all of this even matter? Why do we care about truth so much?

Posted by Sonia Saraiya at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Alexandra Trustman
Global Media
Balkan Effect
Professor Der Derian

Thematic Essay: Is the Camera a Humanitarian Tool?

The Balkan Effect refers to how the media was used to influence and represent the ethnic conflict and civil wars that took place in the Balkan Peninsula during the last decade of the twentieth century. The two wars that are referenced specifically are that in Bosnia between 1992-1995 and in Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. “After the Gulf War, Bosnia became the most televised, most real-time, most virtualized conflict of the nineties” (Der Derian, 50). Thus, the camera—as the instrument of television, real-time feed and even still photographic images—became responsible for constructing a perception of the war to those abroad, both by increasing awareness and in its potential mission to effect change. This marriage between the “virtual,” war represented and exposed through new technologies, and “virtue,” morally sound behavior, creates what Der Derian coins as “Virtuous War,” war represented through technology that works to raise ethical consciousness and to evoke change based on this new found ethical awareness. Is Virtuous War as Der Derian outlines it, possible? Can visual and virtual exposure to war galvanize people to act in a positive humanitarian way? Is that even the camera’s role? Through a study of the Balkan Wars it becomes apparent that the camera has the potential to effect change, but is limited by its inherent positioning of the spectator.
In his article “Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia—the Case of ITN versus Living Marxism, Part 2” David Campbell explores the dispute between LM’s Thomas Deichmann and Michael Hume and ITN’s Penny Marshall and Ian Williams over a photographic still from some footage shot at Trnopoljie, a Bosnian concentration camp. The photograph was of an emaciated prisoner, Fikret Alic, and was used as evidence to prove “the Bosnian Serb authorities’ ethnic cleansing strategy that lay at the heart of the war” (Campbell, 143). It is thought that this photograph, taken as “proof” is “an example of the demonization of the entire Serbian people by the Western media, for the purposes of making US military intervention necessary and inevitable” (Campbell,143). The still was taken from footage that was included in Britain’s Independent Television News report in August 1992. Thus its purpose was to inform England about the conflict in Bosnia. Whether the segment’s intent was to invoke humanitarian action as well is unclear, however if this photograph is in any way responsible for Western military action to help end the conflict in Bosnia, as implied in the Campbell article, it does become humanitarian in use. This position is complicated however, by Deichmann and Hume’s stance for they challenge its accuracy in its link to a system of ideology. Deichmann argues that the Holocaust, as an event that has become naturalized is signified by the combination of emancipated prisoners and barbed wire. He takes issue with this comparison—although potentially unintended and unavoidable by the photographer—for in his view it “demonizes” the Serbs. S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, admits that “to sell a war in a democracy when you’re not attacked, you have to demonize the leader to show that there are humanitarian reasons for going in” (Knightley, 502). Deichmann is not wrong to criticize American or Western use of images to demonize, however, he is unfounded in his accusation that the photograph purposefully invokes Nazism. In terms of the ethical question, which Deichmann touches on but is unable to fully communicate— Is over exaggeration of the enemy justified if the end is humanitarian action? Is the ethical outcome of the camera’s use undermined if this initial exaggeration is used to gain political support at home as Lichter suggests, as opposed to being specifically for change in light of humanitarian cause?
The ITN/LM conflict is only further complicated when considering whether “Virtuous War” is actually virtuous. In his book “First Casualty” Phillip Knightley notes that despite “the revolution in communications technology—instant television links from the front to the studio and between correspondents in the field; electronic transmission of still photographs and the internet— that should have provided the public with an unprecedented overview of the war… instead the public drowned in wave after wave of images that added up to nothing” (Knightley, 504). The over saturation of images not only overwhelms the public, but ironically prevents the communication of significant information. This lack of meaningful knowledge in turn creates a state of stagnancy, where spectators do not act. In this way the camera fails as a humanitarian tool for it stirs no attempt or effort for change. This sentiment is further addressed in Thomas Keenan’s essay “Publicity and Indifference: media, surveillance, ‘humanitarian intervention.’” Keenan quotes the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger as saying, “Here there are no secrets. There are journalists here, from here pictures are transmitted, there are satellite communications, all of this is known. In this city there are soldiers of the United Nations, well armed, and nonetheless it all continues to happen” (Keenan, 2). Mark Danner reinforces Lustiger’s claim, stating, “what we did and didn’t do with what we saw was all the less forgivable, because we could see” (Keenan, 3). Much of this lack of motivation to act humanitarianly can be attributed to the way in which the camera positions spectators. While live feed works to collapse the reality represented on television with our own reality, this convergence is constantly being mediated, and as “mediated images of the world are mere representations that lend an air of unreality to the things that they represent” spectators find themselves positioned outside of the reality they are consuming (Keenan, 8). Keenan mentions Baudrillard’s view that “the West has to watch helplessly,” it seems however, that this helplessness is not a choice, but rather is forced upon the spectators by nature of the new technology (Keenan, 9).
This idea is furthered in Keenan’s essay by citing Paul Virillio, who explains how the virtuality of television works to strip spectators of their agency and points out that as television moves at the speed of light “we no longer have time to reflect; the things we see have already taken place. And we must act immediately” (Keenan, 6). The simultaneous need and inability to act once again renders spectators helpless. Here what the camera transmits is of no consequence, because the way in which it is transmitted, the very speed that makes television possible, paradoxically prevents it from catalyzing humanitarian efforts.
The camera can potentially work as a humanitarian tool, but ultimately it is the person behind the camera who has the choice whether or not to use the camera for an ethical cause. Live-feed news on major broadcast networks, has serious constraints, namely capitalist and governmental and unfortunately these don’t often coincide with humanitarian endeavors. The Balkan Effect, or Balkanization refers to when great powers interfere with smaller powers in order to preserve their superiority. Just as the camera can potentially be used humanitarianly, it can also be manipulated to contribute to maintaining western hegemony, and more often than not is used in this way. Live-feed news is interference in small nations itself, for depending on the choice and context of footage television manipulates its viewer and functions as propaganda for a particular perspective. The way in which both Milosevic and the Serbs were demonized is an example of how television can impinge on the events of other nations. States function in their own national interest, thus it is possible that Western countries whose hegemony benefits from the turmoil of smaller nations, like Britain and the U.S. would cover the conflicts such as those in the Balkans with less of an urgency to help in some kind of humanitarian way. The only real way to prevent this is through supra-organizations like NATO and the UN for they claim to work in the favor of the majority of represented nations. However, as seen in the failed assassination of Aleksander Vucic and ultimate inability to solve the conflict, NATO worked more in the interest of NATO rather than in Kosovo’s favor. There may be no way of escaping bias then, even within supra-structures. However, when it comes to news broadcasting the camera is seen as contriving a point of view. This perspective, however is always subject to change given the intentions of the user. Despite any potential political agendas that can sway the function of the camera, it is also important to recognize thayjt there is something inherent to the medium of television, both in its functionality and through its implicated agendas that prevents it from ever creating a truly “Virtuous War.”

Posted by James Der Derian at 11:58 AM | Permalink

Hey everyone: Here's my thematic essay for this week. Viva la revolucion!
Download file

Leora Fridman
3/21/06
IR180.95

Thematic Essay: Are we living the society of the spectacle?

According to Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle” is the society in which individuals no longer actually experience events, but in which all action is instead conducted through the represented image. Debord points to an institutional center that allows for communication and divorced-representation at the same time. He writes, “Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another.” (Debord 22) Despite today’s endless conversation about the isolating ability of networked media, are we of the contemporary era in fact linked only by this center that Debord describes? Is any kind of communication possible in a fashion not mediated by institutional forces? More concretely, what is it that we actually experience or see through today’s media?

In an era that continually defines itself with words such as “network” and “connectivity,” it may seem counter-intuitive to call its people isolated, but Debord’s society of the spectacle gives a name to the multiplicity of imagery that makes intimate communication so difficult today. In an internet chat-room for example, one individual’s statement is multiply translated before another individual understands it – be it through language or through the meanings that that statement holds for the receiving individual. Without the visual interaction that at one point in history was necessary for communication, these multiple meanings are much more available than they were in the past.

When we look to the concept of spectacle in the light of global media, we must first consider the institutions that most define our concept of the spectacular. The spectacular to Debord is a mode in which a person’s experience becomes mediated by capitalism and its prioritizing of consumption in the place of personal satisfaction. In a more popular-culture meaning, to make a spectacle of onself is to make a show of one’s experience or imaged self. These meanings shed light on one another because they allow us to realize that while one can create oneself as a spectacle, one creates it for a society made up of various institutions and classes of individuals. When one makes a spectacle of oneself, one displays awareness of this society. For Situationalists like Debord, there is no distinction between performed real-life and performed pretend-life. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” (Debord 12) Experience becomes a commodity that can be exchanged in order to reach across to people. Though it is primarily referred to in a negative light, the spectacle is a unifying force, for “in the spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece.” (Debord 33) The spectacle is in a sense necessary if we wish to establish discourse on image-related content.

In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin articulates the concept of “aura,” which he explains as a reaction of awe to art and other tokens of past moments. Benjamin argues that capitalist culture allows for the “decay of the aura” by mass-producing relics to the point that they no longer hold this type of awe. While he differs from Debord in his emphasis on the historical, like Debord, Benjamin expands his theory of images to the social realm. He writes, “The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” (Benjamin III) It is important to note that Benjamin stresses the “organization” of human perception, rather than its existence or observation. This top-down language is similar to the central and singular imaging force that Debord describes. Benjamin draws a balance between the natural ability of many to organize his own perception with the historical necessity to organize this perception. When we consider the spectacular qualities of today’s image and media-relations, we must draw on this historical emphasis in order to understand the political workings of our global media.

With the advent of embedded journalism in today’s War on Terror, we are governed by an administration that clearly knows the power of journalism to communicate spectacle and has taken steps to integrate this communication into its definition of meaning in the War. A character like Saddam Hussein has been imaged differently throughout very recent history, but the contradictions of these multiple images are always held together by the spectacular connection necessary to communicate between the political arena and the general public. In the talk held in class last week by a panel of students at the Army War College (Lecture 3/15/06), one of the most striking characteristics of the discourse was the continual usage of the terms “good guys” and “bad guys.” Phil Scuda, Marine Career Infantry Officer, introduced his job with the description, “We find the bad guys and take care of them.” Speaking to a class at Brown University, the team must have been aware of the fact that they were not exactly “preaching to the choir,” so to speak. They in fact took several steps to defend military-press relations in a liberal light, but the “good guys” and “bad guys” remained unchallenged representations.

In order for a military to engage in a war on the other side of the world, it must remain spending and unbending, as well as vague, in its construction of the spectacular. While Scuda could rely on the historical awe and aura of the “bad guys” image to engage his audience in a unified understanding of who the War on Terror is fought against, in order to do so he had to separate this image from specific interpersonal connections. Corporal Frazier said at one point that, “Democracy is the freedom to…Fill in whatever you want.” However, in order to have a conversation about democracy, these fill-ins must fit within a limited number of blanks approved by the military administration.

In his 1988 follow up “Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” Debord specified the idea of the spectacle to the “integrated spectacle,” the most hazardous and commanding form of spectacle, which he posits operates today. The integrated spectacle is one in which the spectacle is controlled by individuals considered experts, who often operate in secrecy in order to protect against an enemy (terrorism) of the spectacle “liberal democracy.” It is essential to this integrated spectacle that terrorism exists comparatively, which was demonstrated in the un-critiqued language of the Army War College speakers. At another point in the discussion, Scuda emphasized that, “One of the most effective weapons we have in the War on Terror is the truth,” and used this as a reason for not taking away the freedom of speech of others. This protection of an image of truthfulness requires careful consideration, a fact that became even clearer as the discussion turned to the role of an embedded journalist.

The increasing use of embedded and immersion journalists in today’s media points at our fascination with the ability to insert ourselves in an image—especially one fraught with power and danger. Though there is no question that the journalist develops a form of empathy when living the every day life of troops, we as viewers “back home” are in our turn empathetic with the journalist who we see in a battlefield through our television. In “Truth and Power,” an interview in Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault outlines truth as a concept that exists through “multiple forms of constraint” (Foucault 73) of power. These forms of constraint are certainly at work in the embedding of journalists, both through the restrictions that the military places on embedded journalists as well as the lifestyle constraints that we as viewers observe the journalist undergoing through embedding. Viewers tend to believe the truth of embedded journalists because they are constrained by the same constraints as the troops with which they are living. Viewers see the culture of home, of America (particularly white upper-middle class America), portrayed in a journalist who is constrained both the lifestyle of a soldier but who also constrains us in our understanding of what an individual of our culture would experience were we to be placed in such a foreign combat zone.

The process of a viewer’s determination of what side we are on in the conflicts narrated by global media allow an unfocused culture to understand itself behind a vague set of images. Debord describes modern culture as the locus of search for lost unity in an isolated representational world. (Debord 130) Benjamin further articulates a viewer who, unable to actually enter a world, instead consumes the image into him or herself and what he knows to be truth. He writes,
Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. (Benjamin XV)
This viewer ingests an image, rather than places himself into the world of the image to individually and thus critically comprehend it.

This idea of distraction is particularly meaningful in the context of today’s obsession with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) as both mental conditions and societal descriptions. Benjamin writes, “Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise…The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” (Benjamin XV) What does examination entail if it is “absent-minded,” as Benjamin describes? Many have observed that it is the fault of today’s fast-paced media that so many children and adults develop symptoms of ADD. Critics of the influx of ADD diagnoses, such as Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the ADD Child, put forth the suggestion that viewers in fact use distractedness as an excuse not to accept what is actually going on in the world. In “ADD As a Social invention,” Armstrong notes the following;
During the 1992 political campaign, CBS News attempted to introduce an innovation in its newscasts: 30-second sound bites from the politicians to give the viewer more 'depth" into their views. The project had to be abandoned because the average adult viewer could not sustain his or her attention that long (the industry average for sound bites is around seven seconds). If this is true of adults--who grew up during the days of radio and early TV--then how much truer it is of today's children, who are inundated with Nintendo, the Internet, MTV, multimedia, and more.” (Armstrong “ADD As a Social Invention”)
Armstrong argues that as viewers today we remove ourselves to a condition or a point where we don’t have to see what’s going on but we can just catch glimpses of its production. Are viewers then distracted in Benjamin’s sense? Viewers have an immense multitude of modes of media and specifically news media, with which to engage ourselves. Yet if, as discussed earlier, these multiple images are in fact all centered, why do we find them so isolating that we are endlessly distracted? When the viewer is called into the cultured constraints of media journalism, he or she does not have to create his or her own versions of power. Instead, he or she has only to switch the channel to be again overwhelmed by power constraints and specified terminology behind images such as “bad boys.”

Today’s viewer is in fact centered by distraction itself. Louis Althusser in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” expresses the concept of “hailing,” in which a subject of an ideology is called into being as such when he or she is called (“hailed”) by labels internal to this ideology or system. In today’s media-public relationship, one can see that the more aware of this hailing the viewer is, the more lazy he or she is able to be, because he or she realizes that they can come into being without defining him or herself individually. Here we seem to have come full circle back to the substitution of the personal for the multiplied image. Debord writes, “In a society where no one is any longer recognizable by anyone else, each individual is necessarily unable to recognize his own reality. Here ideology is at home; here separation has built its world.” (Debord 152) Today’s media imagery is continually multiplied to the point at which a viewer can no longer concentrate on an image individually and can no longer relate to another individual as a concentrated and focused self outside of the image. As watcher-consumers today, we have been inculcated with the idea that “the first casualty in war is truth,” but directly tied into this casualty is the casualty of the individual attention span. Perhaps instead of living exactly the society of the spectacle, we are living the society of the spectacular distraction.

Bibliography and Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc, 1998.

Armstrong, Thomas. “ADD As a Social Invention,” Education Week, 18 October, 1995.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Walter Benjamin. February 2005. UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. 21 March 2006. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Der Derian, James. “Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos.” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1: 23 – 37, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. New York : Pantheon Books, 1984. 51-75.

IR180 Lecture. “Students from Army War College.” Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, Brown University, Providence, RI. 15 March 2006.

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