Friday, October 22, 2010

The Heart of the World

This week's screening My Winnipeg (2007) makes use of the language of early cinema to convey director Guy Maddin's personal memories of his hometown.

In the short film The Heart of the World (2000), Maddin commemorates cinema itself by crashing Soviet montage head-on into German expressionism and Hollywood melodrama. It's a celebration of stylistic excess. but also a strange alternate-world dream of cinema history, an act of memory which reforges the medium's past in the crucible of the present:

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Database and narrative

Lev Manovich, in his influential book The Language of New Media, discusses the relationship between database and narrative:
As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world (Manovich 2001, 225).
Digital media, by virtue of their dependence upon database structures, are often thought to undermine the dominance of narrative as a cultural form. What, then, are the implications for representing memory in digital media? For Paul Arthur,
the 'natural' fragmentation and dislocation that is part of digital textuality actually much more closely mirrors the chanciness, randomness and fluidity of memory than does traditional narrative (Arthur 2009, 51-2).
Do you find these arguments persuasive? Does the cultural form of the database rule over narrative when it comes to digital media? And is the database better suited to representing the fluidity of memory?

These ideas can be explored by looking at the online multimedia work Dust on My Shoes. According to its creators, this work:
is based on an epic travel book written by Peter Pinney, an Australian adventurer who journeyed overland from Greece, through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Assam and India, to Burma in 1949'.
Dust on My Shoes knits together material from Pinney's book with images, maps, audio recordings and animations, together with stories provided by other travellers. In doing so, it explores the possibilities for creatively combining the 'competing' forms of the narrative and the database, in ways that suggest the workings of memory.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Remediation and nostalgia

Remediation, according to J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, is 'the representation of one medium in another' (1999, 45). The video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Rockstar Games, 2002) remediates film, TV and radio, using specific forms and techniques to produce a sense of ironic nostalgia for the 1980s through the dominant media formats of the period.

Vice City draws upon the storylines and aesthetics of a number of gangster films, but is particularly indebted to Brian De Palma's film Scarface (1983) and the TV show Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-89).



The other contemporary phenomenon mentioned in this week's lecture is the use of analogue tape effects in digitally-produced music (achieved either by mastering to analogue tape or by applying digital effects to emulate analogue audio saturation). I've included here some examples from Boards of Canada and Neon Indian, in which a nostalgic atmosphere is created through the remediation of analogue tape/audio effects (although, as demonstrated by Neon Indian, trying to sing like '80s pop duo Hall and Oates is another handy way to capture that elusive nostalgia-effect).

Dawn Chorus by Boards of Canada

 Boards of Canada: Amo Bishop Roden

Boards of Canada: Sunshine Recorder

Deadbeat Summer by Neon Indian

Collective memory in the digital archive

Via its website, SkyNews UK offers an interactive overview of news highlights from 1989 to 2008:


The site invites users to 'explore the biggest news stories from the last 20 years in video, text and pictures and send us your memories'. News photographs, headlines and television are thus remediated via a spatial interface that encourages its users to see personal memory and public history as closely intertwined.

Personal memory in the digital archive

This clip introduces Microsoft's 'MyLifeBits' project, including project leader Gordon Bell. MyLifeBits offers multimedia tools that allow users to record events from their lives and then retrieve them at will. In this way, personal memory is transformed into a fully searchable digital archive.





How persuasive is this notion? José van Dijck suggests that it overlooks:
  1. the fundamental differences between human memory and digital memory 
  2. the way that technology does not simply mirror 'natural' memory, but also shapes the ways in which we remember.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

TV montages as 'memory texts'

Amy Holdsworth (2010) argues, in opposition to the prevailing critical consensus, that TV is not an amnesiac medium. Discussing three types of television montage (the news montage, the 'necrology' and the dramatic montage), she suggests that these can function as a type of 'memory text' (to use Annette Kuhn's term), in which fragmentation and collage techniques echo the unpredictable workings of human memory itself. Here are examples from each of Holdsworth's three types of memory montage:





War and 'new memory'

Andrew Hoskins (2001, 2004) argues that television is a key site for the production of 'new memory': a type of collective memory that is highly mediated, subject to manipulation, and continually reshaped to meet the needs of the present. He focuses in particular on the way that news coverage of wars (such as the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War) provides examples of this 'new memory'.

As an example, here's a retrospective item based on the recollections of CBS news correspondents who were embedded with US troops in Iraq. These accounts represent a highly partial version of events in Iraq, constrained by the fact that the reporters were not independent from the military (highlighted by the intertitle showing how many 'tours' were undertaken by each reporter), and shaped by the mediated memories already generated by previous reports on the war.

News, the present tense and amnesia

These clips from the BBC satirical show Broken News reflect common criticisms leveled at television news: that it is perennially obsessed with the present and lacks any genuine engagement with the past. Broken News switches abruptly between different news formats, as if a bored and easily distracted viewer has been given the remote control. Based upon these (exaggerated and comical) examples, we might be persuaded that TV is truly a medium without a memory.



Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Drunk history

As we prepare to talk more directly about the relationships between mediated memory and history, here's a relevant (and very funny) example of history mediated by memory. In this clip from the ongoing 'Drunk History' series, inebriated comedian Duncan Trussell recounts the life story of Nikola Tesla, famous inventor...

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Mediated memory - remembering 9/11

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 generated an excess of mediated depictions of the events and their aftermath: from live coverage across global news networks, to dramatisations such as United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) and World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006), to the official September 11 Museum and online memory-sites such as 9/11 Memorial, which archives images and stories from members of the public.

The following clip shows a virtual flyover of the planned 9/11 memorial site. In a sense, it is an image of the projected future that points back towards a memorialised past...


Blade Runner - the original ending

This clip contains the final scene from the original 1982 release of Blade Runner (the version you should have seen this week is the 'Director's Cut', which was released in 1992). See if you can recognise the landscape shots, which consist of unused footage from another famous film of the early 1980s...

 

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Nostalgia and irony

Although we've been focusing on nostalgia in cinema, advertising is another key media format that makes use of nostalgic depictions of the past. It's also one place where we often see nostalgia tempered by a sense of irony, as discussed by Paul Grainge (2003). This ad for L & P is a fine example of ironic nostalgia...

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Where were you in '62?

Here are the trailers for two prominent examples of what Fredric Jameson calls the 'nostalgia film' (1984, 66): American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)...



... and Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)...

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Analogue nostalgia

Media themselves often serve as objects of memory, as exemplified by http://tapedeck.org/, a website which archives images of vintage audio cassette tapes.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

The memory of noir

Return of the repressed: the noir parody Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (Carl Reiner, 1982) gains comic mileage from the hero's traumatic memory disorder...



Death Be Not Deadly: appearing on Saturday Night Live in 1987, Robert Mitchum makes fun of his background as a noir hero (recalling in particular his role in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past 40 years earlier)...

Sunday, August 1, 2010

The memory of film

Here, Bill Morrison's 2002 experimental film Decasia 'remembers' excerpts of damaged and degraded found footage:

 

...and this character from Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988) 'remembers' a generation's worth of excised romantic scenes...

Welcome to FTVMS 219/326

I'll be using this blog to share interesting images, links and video clips relating to the content of the course.