(IN)appropriation

A couple weeks ago, I went to the 2009 “Festival of (In)Appropriation,” hosted by the Los Angeles Filmforum and curated by two UCLA film studies graduate students. It was the first program of what is intended to be an annual celebration of contemporary found footage filmmaking.

In the program notes, the curators write, “Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, detournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of previously shot materials into new artworks is a practice that has generated novel juxtapositions of elements which have produced new meanings and ideas that may not have been intended by the original makers, that are, in other words ‘inappropriate.’ This act of appropriation may produce revelation that leads viewers to reconsider the relationship between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion.”

As they lay it out in their description and in their parentheses, these found footage works both appropriate (verb) and are inappropriate (adjective) at the same time. The series of binary relationships these films and videos help us think about (past/present, here/there, etc., and many more not listed) can be understood as being foregrounded by the parenthetical “(in)” of the program’s title, which draws our attention to the simultaneity of a thing or quality and its opposite. (Ironically, though, inappropriation and appropriation are not quite opposites. Appropriation is to take property; inappropriation–not technically a word–is of the inappropriate, the not proper.)

I think the two projects that were most (in)appropriate were the first and the last on the program: Daniel Martinico’s The Blockbuster Tapes and Scott Stark’s Speechless. The Blockbuster Tapes selectively documents a three-year project the filmmaker did, in which he rented videos from Blockbuster, made subtle, brief, but humorous manipulations into the videos and returned them, leaving these glitches to be (not? barely?) experienced by future renters. Stark’s film interwove 3-D reels of female genitalia with footage of landscapes. The very graphic nature of these images and their recombination were explicitly inappropriate.

There were several great shorts in the program. Some of my favorites were those that were less “inappropriate” but  had more of a poetic formalism to them, such as Sandra Gibson’s Untitled (“Tiny Bits”) and Gregg Biermann’s Utopia Variations. Gibson’s short abstract film visually recalls films such as Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight. She “chopped up and reconfigured” bits of film in an optical printer–so that we see sprockets and margins of unknown filmstrips pass before our eyes, slowing down, then going in reverse. Biermann’s film broke up the “Over the Rainbow” sequence from The Wizard of Oz in an algorithmic way, so that screens kept splitting, building to a climax of 25 screens simultaneously, with each screen from the sequence playing the song simultaneously but slightly syncopated. It then symmetrically returns to just one screen by the end of the song. It is a very captivating video, an aesthetic experience in its own right, but it also seems to speak to the unique properties and powers of manipulation—-and common glitches (like a scratch on a CD)–in digital contexts. I also really enjoyed “Repeat Photography and the Albedo Effect,” which was a collage of a boxing scene from Raging Bull, NPR coverage on global warming, and sound art. It is the first part of Caroline Koebel’s tripartite Flicker On Off.

(In)appropriation–repurposing already existing footage–of course has a prominent place in popular cultural practices, and this is something that the curators and that many of the pieces in this program were engaging with, explicitly and implicitly. Recently, for example, “literal versions” of various music videos have been circulating in high rotation on YouTube. These videos take familiar music videos and rework the lyrics to the songs they are for to humorously reflect what we “literally” see in the video.

Conversely, there are also “misheard lyrics” videos that take an actual pop song but pair it with images for words that the song’s lyrics resemble, or often sound more like, which is helpfully and humorously reiterated by typing the “misheard” text over the images. One of the first of these that I saw, which I saw a couple years before I saw any “literal versions” music videos is for Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man” (misheard as “Ain’t No Weather Man”):

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Here’s a video by Eric Faden, whose title makes admirable use of parenthetical play. “Fair(y)” is the video’s joke on Disney, demonstrating how the public can fairly appropriate copyrighted material. It uses clips from several Disney movies to string together different characters’ words to tell a story whose happy ending is its own legitimacy.  

(nostalgia)

I’ve been thinking and reading a bit about experimental film recently. Text is generally more prominent in experimental film than in other modes of filmmaking, especially once sound began regularly assisting in conveying narrative.

Experimental cinema is also often understood as being in dialogue with, responding to, rejecting more conventional modes of narrative filmmaking. Indeed, one of the main things that experimental cinema generally experiments with is narrative. 

If narrative cinema uses parentheses in screenplays to indicate nonverbal or unspoken elements of a film, it might not be surprising if one were to find that in efforts to foreground processes of production (which certainly include writing), parentheses, along with the cues inside them, would take on marked roles in experimental cinema and screenwriting. Su Friedrich, for example, has an interesting short screenplay, “(Script) for a Film without Images,” which is just dialogue for a conversation.

And perhaps the most notable example would be Hollis Frampton’s 30-minute (nostalgia). In this film, Frampton takes a group of photographs from his past and, one by one, burns them on a boiler plate. As we watch each one melt, a narrator, Michael Snow, narrates a story about the following image, as if he were the photographer of the image, effecting a doubly disjunctive cinematic experience. 

This 1971 film is a canonical work of experimental filmmaking, raising questions about the essence of cinema–the relationships between words, sound, and images, and between memory and truth. But one question I’m not sure that has been asked–and given the significance of written text and words for Frampton, it is especially worth asking–is why is the film’s title in parentheses?

For one, they signify displacement, which happens in the narration, both on the level of the voice speaking someone else’s first-person, and on the level of the discrepancy between the image seen and the image being described.

Visually, an explanation might be found in the placement of the photographs on the boiler plate. As in the above image from the film, the photographs generally sit on the plate so that the visible part of the plate in the film resembles two parentheses enclosing an image that is perhaps too big for it to really contain. As the plate burns the image, a series of the plate’s rings begin to leave concentric parenthetical burning marks upon the image.

Eventually, as the plate continues burning the image, the outer sides of the plate do contain the photograph but lose definition as visual parentheses because the image disappears. One could certainly then read the title (nostalgia) as a stand-in for the film’s main visual motif: if the “nostalgia” is in the photograph, the parentheses are the fire in which the nostalgia vanishes, which themselves only reliably exist when the image of the memory is still discernible. 

()bama

Another post about New York Times parentheses. Last week, the well-known op-ed columnist, Thomas Friedman, wrote about the presidential election that was coming up in a few days. The title of the article is “Vote for ( ).”

Friedman explains that because “Times columnists are not allowed to ‘formally’ endorse candidates,” and because “the context of this election has changed so much from the policy positions the candidates started with,” he proposes three “character traits” his readers ought to consider when voting:

1. “We need a president who can speak English and deconstruct and navigate complex issues so Americans can make informed choices.”

2. “We need a president who can energize, inspire and hold the country together during what will be a very stressful recovery.”

3. “We need a president who can rally the world to our side.”

He concludes, “So, bottom line: Please do not vote for the candidate you most want to have a beer with (unless it’s to get stone cold drunk so you don’t have to think about this mess we’re in). Vote for the person you’d most like at your side when you ask your bank manager for an extension on your mortgage. Vote for the candidate you think has the smarts, temperament and inspirational capacity to unify the country and steer our ship through what could be rockiest shoals our generation has ever known.”

Presumably because he is not permitted to endorse a candidate, and to say “Vote for Obama,” or “Vote for McCain,” Friedman instead just gives us parentheses in place of a candidate: “Vote for ( ).”

Since Friedman proceeds to identify these traits we should “vote for,” we can understand the text of this piece as filling in the empty parentheses of its title. It’s interesting that parentheses act as a place-holder in this context. The nature of the parenthetical embrace, inviting to its interior contents, seems to be one reason why parentheses would serve as Friedman’s place-holder. He’s telling us, without naming names, who to embrace. Obama certainly seems to be the unnamed name in Friedman’s parentheses.

But there are other, related and unrelated, ways to read “Vote for ( )”:

-The empty parentheses seem to recall an empty oval shape on a ballot for a voter to mark in, to inscribe his or her vote.

-”Vote for ( )” is very close to being “Vote for 0″–”Vote for 0(bama)”–it’s just asking the reader to fill in the empty lines and make a full circle.

-Speaking to Friedman’s point, we need to vote for traits, qualities, structures, not a name, a face, an image. So he chooses a mark, a structure, rather than a name. The structure he chooses inscribes a set of relational qualities–withinness, asideness, inclusion–which perhaps overlap with the qualities he’s saying we should seek–someone who will “hold” things “together.” Implicitly too, though not directly endorsing Obama, perhaps qualities of parentheses speak directly about him–a candidate who, racially and maybe ideologically, is aside from what America is used to seeing in a president, a candidate who continually emphasizes an America that is inclusive.

-However, there’s also perhaps a more unsettling way to read “vote for ( )”: Vote for emptiness; vote for a placeholder; there is no name there to vote for.

What would it mean to actually vote for parentheses?

Note the O in HOPE–a half circle, a parenthesis turned on its side, opening onto a red-and-white-striped road. The “O” is the letter that stands out in HOPE–an open vowel sound, the O of Obama, and of 08.

Thai or pizza?

Just read this in a New York Times article about the Bailout Plan stalling:

“After the address, the drafting effort continued through the night on both sides of Capitol Hill — with pizza on the House side, and Thai food in the Senate. (Negotiations between the House and the Senate can be nearly as complicated as negotiations between Democrats and Republicans.)”

 

No comment.

(Pump Up the) Volume

When I turn the volume on my MacBook up or down,  I see an icon appear in a small box on my screen. It seems to be a speaker with three closing parentheses side by side to the right of it, increasing in size. The parentheses come out of the speaker, as if spreading out the sound. 

“Um, uh, hello, Internet”

Here is an ad for ooVoo, an online video chat application.

It’s called “Emoticon Suicide.” It features three emoticons–Elaine, Hans, and Don–doing a three-way video chat. 

Emoticon Hans, in the middle, laments having tried to “represent” us when we “needed” them. “There was even a time when you seemed to like us. When things were simpler, and we were just open parentheses and semicolons. Now, you all use video chat devices like this one. It’s just another nail in our coffin.” While Hans says this stuff, Elaine, in a chat box to his left, sobs uncontrollably, an emoticon in a puddle of her tears. Meanwhile Don tries holding back his anger. 

They each proceed to commit suicide, one by one, in varying styles that reflect their emoticon-state. 

Hans talks about “open parentheses” with nostalgia, recalling a simpler day, before humans could represent their own faces in communicating with each other, a feature of ooVoo that the application’s designers wish to advertise here. Parentheses-generated emoticons are dead with this new technology, standing in for a past phase in an evolution of communication technologies.

(No rating, 1:50, in French)

If you search databases of New York Times articles for the word “parentheses,” a bunch of the hits you’ll retrieve are movie listings, because they open the listings with the sentence, ”Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/movies.”

For example, this week, a New Yorker might go check out ’A GIRL CUT IN TWO’ (No rating, 1:50, in French). It could be interesting to compile some sort of list of these parentheses and isolate what’s inside them. And then to study something like whether or not certain ratings correspond with certain running lengths.

(IMDb)

One seed of an idea I’m thinking about is what a parenthetical archive might be. 

Parentheses often contain and store information. In what ways does a parenthetical perform an archive-function, especially in relation to media studies and academic scholarship more generally? In academic writing, when we introduce a film into a discussion, we follow it with parentheses listing its director, country of origin, and year of production. I usually acquire this information from IMDb, along with names of actors, which are also written in parentheses following a character’s name. 

Could IMDb be considered a parenthetical archive, a website gleaned to fill in empty parentheses?

Hail to the Thief (The Gloaming)

Each track on Radiohead’s 2003 release Hail to the Thief lists a title followed by a parenthetical alternate title.

Here is the list of tracks:

2+2=5 (The Lukewarm)

Sit Down, Stand Up (Snakes & Ladders)

Sail To The Moon (Brush The Cobwebs Out Of The Sky)

Backdrifts (Honeymoon Is Over)

Go To Sleep (Little Man Being Erased)

Where I End And You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In)

We Suck Young Blood (Your Time Is Up)

The Gloaming (Softly Open Our Mouths In The Cold)

There There (The Boney King Of Nowhere)

I Will (No Man’s Land)

A Punch Up At A Wedding (No No No No No No No No)

Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner)

Scatterbrain (As Dead As Leaves)

A Wolf At The Door (It Girl. Rag Doll)

“The Gloaming,” too, which was the original title for the album, ended up becoming the subtitle to “Hail To The Thief,” clearly a political reference to Bush “stealing” the presidential election. 

The Age’s preview of the album writes of its parenthetical double-titles, “That should provide nice ammunition for all those who find this band too intellectual by half. Greenwood explains the idea for the subtitles came from ‘old Victorian playbills which chronicled the kind of moralistic songs which were played in music halls. That whole theatre culture was wiped out by the development of cinema.’”

I understand what Greenwood’s getting at, of course, but saying that that culture was “wiped out” by cinema is a stretch–early cinema and vaudeville programming interacted with and borrowed from that theater culture, too. Here’s a cinema/theater playbill advertising a “special flying matinee” of MAN AND SUPERMAN in what seems to be a rather crowded program at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh!

With Hail To The Thief, Radiohead recalls the contexts of these older texts and performances in the wordiness of their presentation. They also capture this wordiness in the great cover image for the album, with all its words stacked up on top of and alongside one another, falling over, on blocks of solid colors, signs signaling all the (mixed) messages we encounter everyday. Hail To The Thief uses parentheses in all of its titles to say more, to contain messages. This is after all one of the things parentheses let us do best; they accumulate words and expand signification. 

The Age’s preview also notes that Hail To The Thief’s primary title not only expresses a seriously sarcastic political (and historically political) sentiment, but it also refers to the state of the music business, where we often gain access to material that has leaked online ahead of time. As a major band, Radiohead has significantly experimented with ways to “hail” the pirate-thief and work with shifting consumer and new media climates, evidenced most recently with their pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows online.