I saw this Candice Breitz piece last year at the Yvon Lambert Gallery and I actually feel asleep. It was a dark room and it was well heated. But I bumped into this blaring Candice Breitz piece over the weekend while facilitating a new media training at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival….
….and it helped me rediscover what makes Him + Her interesting from a remix perspective.
Him (1968-2008) remixes a narrative between 23 Jack Nicholson films made over a period of 40 years. Her (1978 – 2008) remixes 28 Meryl Streeps movies made from 30 years’ worth of films. I find Her most appealing/appalling as the self-worth of Streep’s characters are largely dependent their relationship to the men in their lives. It lives in stark contrast to Him, where Nicholson’s male characters narcissistically struggle with issues of self-definition, sanity and sexual performance. Breitz says the focus of her work lies in the “unconscious of mainstream cinema, the values and layers of meaning that slowly start to make themselves legible when the big plots are stripped away.” Critics say that she’s reinforcing stereotypes by repeating them continuously.
Pieces like Breitz’s are created within the art world where there’s a history of practice and discourse around appropriation, but this work also clearly straddles the world of fandom and remix, a term which she uses to describe her work. She appropriates footage from particular movies for the purpose of critical commentary but the work is produced as an art installation, within 7 channels, for a gallery space. Breitz runs into copyright problems despite the work’s physical location. She apparently had to ask (and perhaps never received) permission from Yoko Ono to screen her video of fans singing a John Lennon song (Ono holds the rights to the collection). And it looks like she even speaks on the topic of fair use.
One major problem I have with the YouTube removal process is the robot-maintained content ID system which lacks human reasoning and thus, a consistency in determining what a Fair Use of copyrighted content is. The result is sporadic YouTube removals and unwarranted DMCA notices.
The impact is disastrous: links to videos are disabled, comments and hit counts deleted and networks disrupted. It’s difficult to demonstrate the importance of remixing on participatory culture and within media literacy when you can’t access the videos. More importantly, if a remix video can’t be found, it’s political or subversive message can’t reach it’s audience and it’s now absent from the canon.
I think Kevin’s mockup is a great start. We can go even further, though. When you upload a video and agree to YouTube’s terms of use, there should be a box to check off for Fair Use of copyright content and then a menu to justify it as a parody, commentary, critique, homage, etc. If removed, disputed, and restored, I’d like to see a notice that attributes it’s re-appearance to Fair Use.
I just love this NY Times article and keep referring back to it in my remixing thoughts. Written last May to various Hollywood CEOs and Directors, the papers’ movie critics finally air their grievances with the business. Perhaps it’s the holiday season, but upon review, I am reminded of the traditional Festivus airing of the grievances of which I am accustom. I don’t agree with all their memos but, overall, the critics’ attempt is heartwarming and long anticipated.
I got a lot of problems with you people! And now, you’re gonna hear about it. Frank Costanza
To: Straight filmmakers
From: M.D.
Enough with the gay slurs, the gay baiting, imitating, limp-wristing, so-not-funny lisping — in other words, enough with the hating. Yeah, some gay men are hilarious (Oscar Wilde). But people are funny, their identities are not. Try this simple test: Every time you feel the need to mock or denigrate gay men or lesbians, replace that joke with an equally vicious dig about African-Americans or Jews. Doesn’t sound so funny anymore, does it?
To: Heads of production, Sony, Universal, Paramount, Fox, Disney
You all keep trying to make Rock Hudson-Doris Day-style romantic comedies with the golden guys and gals of the moment, and the results are sexless, subtextless, bland career-girl-in-search-of-Mr.-Right retreads. Meanwhile, a bunch of hungry directors with digital cameras, time on their hands and not much money are making free-form studies about tentative hookups and long conversations among actual, overeducated, undermotivated young folks.
I finished up teaching a Fair Use and Copyrights class at Cambridge Community Television and wanted to passing along my resource list. It’s important for online video producers to understand Fair Use because it protects free speech and allows them to legally use copyrighted culture for comment, illustration, critique among other things. In Cambridge we are lucky enough to have an extremely lively and active community television station that promotes locally grown video and offers trainings to help community members navigate the often sticky waters of media production and distrobution. But regardless of location, producers need to be aware that Fair Use is a case by case judgment call, which you can help make yourself based on the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
Because most of the members at CCTV are documentary focused, I featured this video from the Documentary Filmmaker’s Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use as well from Center For Social Media.
I must admit that when I first heard the term transmedia, I got real excited because I thought it was related to media made by trans people, ie transgendered or “transexuals”. Trans people continue to queer the gender paradigm, illustrating that gender and sexuality aren’t inherent but performative. For example, a trans man (F-M) attracted to women isn’t what we would classify as ’straight’, or ‘gay’, for that matter. But that mind-fuck of messing with and subverting what we all thought was so fixed and predetermined is queering. So, I was real excited to see some queer’d media made by trans people, called, transmedia.
Well, that’s not what transmedia is.
Transmedia (as defined by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 book Convergence Culture ) is storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to an understanding of the story world. By using different media formats, it attempts to create “entry points” through which consumers can become immersed in a story world. The aim of this immersion is decentralized authorship. (wikipedia)
I’m working on Sex and the Remix Season 2 now. While Sex and the City had a huge following and tapped a virgin market (pun intended), it didn’t attract a participatory fan following that created vids and remixes, comic books and alternate reality games that contributed to a distinct understanding of the story. However, the story did expand through different types of formats. The first narrative incarnation of Sex and the City was a column in the NY Observer. Then the story was expanded into a book, then into six seasons of an HBO series, which had enough “entry points” for consumers (ie, markets) to be made into a movie. Just as previous incarnations of the characters took place, I too have expanded the story in the remix.
Day dreaming, the Sex and the Remix Series would spawn into a legit TV series, Queer in the City, that encourages audiences decentralized participation through remix, vids, etc. The premise is the 4 women come out later in life, kinda like that lady who came out this week.
…just an idea of where transmedia + remix concepts can go in terms of storytelling and a hope for it’s more subversive, queer future.
I’m proceeding with Season 2 of Sex + the Remix series but not without looking back on Season 1.
Below are questions I received from a student in Erin Reilly’s women’s studies class at MIT. They are working on a wiki that compares the women’s movements to the media lit movements, a fabulous idea that, once public, I’ll post here.
Why pick Sex and the City which has a few gay story lines compare to many sitcoms that are clearly only in a hetro world?
First off, having 3 gay storylines does not mean the show is queer positive. I would would even go as far to say that SATC is queer-negative – Samantha is considered not normal once she begins to date a woman. Here, the viewer is encouraged to cringe at her description of gay sex. (fast fwd. to 1:45 for the best illustration)
When a show is queer positive, queer or gay characters are complex. They have conflicts, thoughts and feelings. We see things from their perspective and are encouraged to identify with them. In queer negative texts, gay or queer characters are cast as a girl’s best friend (ie, all the joys of a male companion without the sex). These characters are not complex. Stanford is the oddball, weird or quirky stereotypical effeminate male side-kick character.
Charlotte’s fascination with lesbians furthers the concept of queer as ‘other’, a new trend, something different, exciting, and non-normative. I would even say this episode illustrates the exoticfication of queerness: the objectification and displaying of certain characteristics and lifestyle choices:
Samantha: Nobody told me it was B.Y.O. Man.
Carrie: What did you expect? It’s a lesbian art show.
Samantha: I know. But don’t straight guys follow them around to see what they’re going to do?
“By midnight, Charlotte discovered Manhattan’s latest group…
…to flaunt their disposable income:
The power lesbian. They seem to have everything.
Great shoes, killer eyewear and the secrets to invisible makeup.”
“One drink at G-Spot, the hottest new girl bar in town…
…followed by dinner and scintillating conversation at Luke’s…
…a hot new French-fusion restaurant with an even hotter chef…
…followed by late-night dancing at Love Tunnel…
…left Charlotte exhilarated and happy as she’d been in ages.
There was something relaxing and liberating…
…in traveling in an alternate universe that contained no thought of men.”
I choice SATC for a number of reasons:
1. It’s a highly gendered text: the show illustrated womens’ sexual candor and was a positive shift in cable television where women publicly staked claim to previously male territory of sexual frank-ness and sexual language. This meant I could have a lot of dialogue and images to work with and around to re-edit out of context.
For more on this concept of sexuality and confession see Confession is the basis of sexuality in Foucault’s History of Sexuality.
2. The show’s narration appropriates the language of radical feminist politics only to retell old patriarchal fairy tales of women longing to be loved by men. This popular feminine text provided an outlet for women’s dissatisfaction with male-female relationships in which they never questioned the primacy of these relationships. I hoped that they would question it after 6 seasons of dissecting their failed interactions with men. Furthermore, the voice-over provided the narrative thread to hold the story together. The use of radical feminist language only helped my new storyline.
There were a few interactions that seemed very unnatural, like the sexual encounter over a tampon. It creeped me out.
There can be 2 readings of that scene:
Essentialist/2nd wave – Carrie feels the essential female-ness and connection to the female spirit that represents menstruation.
Radical/3rd wave – Refers back to Andrea Dworkin’s Occupation/Collaboration. Women don’t reach orgasm through penetration but still “collaborate” in their own oppression by being ‘occupied’ through penetration. The tampon scene came after the heavily male beef cake scene. “My desire over came my fear” = She realizes the only penetration she’ll be participating in is through tampons.
What do you think worked or didn’t with this remix?
Where would you like to see Queer Carrie’s character go?
I’ve been thinking alot about telling stories using existing narratives in the context of remixing. How can remixers tell a new, well developed story by re-purposing the originals?
This overlaps somewhat with the ever-trendy transmedia storytelling topic that’s been heavily talked, tweeted and tracked. I found this video from DIY Days LA interesting because Elan Lee (Co-Founder and Chief Designer at Fourth Wall Studios) bluntly admits that the first steps in transmedia storytelling haven’t been good.
Successfully developing a new method of storytelling means time is needed to work out the kinks…but in the mean time, what lessons can be learned from past failures in tranmedia storytelling and can any by applied to remix?
Will the new model of transmedia storytelling make remixing much easier as there will be more readily available content for complex story lines and characters?
I have some issues with transmedia, mostly that it creates media franchises to engage target audiences in new and “interesting” ways to sell products. I wonder if it’s the spawn of product placement.
@starkness do you have actual accumulation yet?! nothing here. not a flake. 7 hours ago
@JessicaGottlieb no, shtick is good. everyone needs a shtick. you've got good delivery & not afraid to go out on a lim. r u going to sxsw? 15 hours ago
