Camera Stylo - Volume 15

O VOL 15

CAM

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A ST R É

CAMÉRA STYLO

CAMÉRA STYLO Volume 15

The Cinema Studies Undergraduate Student Journal University of Toronto 2015

Caméra Stylo is the undergraduate journal for Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Its purpose is to promote cinema studies at the undergraduate level and to provide the undergraduate level and to provide the opportunity for undergraduate students to publish their work related to film. This project aims to contribute to an atmosphere of critical discussion and debate about cinema at the University of Toronto.

First and only edition, April 2015. ©CINSSU. Individual essays copyright their individual authors. All rights reserved under the Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part o fhtis journal may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. Published and funded by the Cinema Studies Student Union. Printed in Canada.

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“I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra stylo (camera pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language...The most philosophical meditations on human production, psychology, metaphysics, ideas, and passions lie well within its province.”

- Alexandre Astruc From an article entitled “Du Stylo à la Caméra au Stylo.”

Originally published on March 30, 1948 in L’Ecran française.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 9 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 12 AMANDA GREER

Political Implications of Cinematographic Technique in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

24 DENISE NOUVION

Touching and Becoming Objects: ASMR, Photogenie, and Immersion

40 ALEXANDRA MCCALLA Nollywood and The Figurine: Digital Disruptions and Transnational Cinema

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54 JULIA BENEY

When Music Asked Image To Dance

70 LAUREN ASH

The Beat-Beat Goes On: Navigating the Duality within the NFB’s GDP (2010)

82 MEI MEI XIAO

“Bending” the Diaspora: Sexuality and Nationality in Bend It Like Beckham

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EDITORIAL BOARD Editor-in-Chief

Bronwyn Nisbet-Gray

Graphic Designer

Grace Quinsey

Illustrator

Sarah Crawley

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Benjamin Wright

Editorial Committee

Aaditya Aggarwal Katie Armstrong Ivana Dizdar Bronwyn Nisbet-Gray

Selection Committee

Aaditya Aggarwal Katie Armstrong Emma Burtch Ivana Dizdar Bronwyn Nisbet-Gray

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR To all you lovely readers, I’ve had a fantastic year working on this journal. From the early days receiving submissions, through to the final proof reading, I feel like I’ve learned an immeasurable amount throughout the process. I have truly enjoyed this opportunity to facilitate and further academic discussion about cinema.

The selected essays all recall Astruc’s ideal of cinema as a pen, capable of writing and rewriting commonly held perceptions of things that extend beyond the visual image. Each essay suggests that films do not exist simply as formal or aesthetic spectacles; instead, each writer chooses to explore how films can comment upon and change how we view the world. It’s especially interesting to see how each writer has chosen to comment upon how cinema not only creates, but also disrupts our worldviews. It’s apt in the context of this edition to think of the camera lens as not simply a pen, but a digital stylus, capable of not just writing, but also manipulating and mediating our perceptions of the images we see on screen.

Throughout this process, I’ve worked with some amazing people. I would first like to thank our graphic designer Grace Quinsey and our illustrator Sarah Crawley for putting up with my uninformed design opinions and humoring what I guess you could call my “artistic vision”; I would like to thank Camera Stylo’s faculty advisor Dr. Benjamin Wright for his ongoing support and insights; I would like to thank our selection and editorial committee members for giving up their time to make this issue possible, and for choosing these amazing papers; and finally, I would like to thank our six writers for sharing their ideas and helping to widen the discussion on cinema within the University of Toronto community.

Happy reading,

Bronwyn Nisbet-Gray

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POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF CINEMATOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUE IN KATHRYN BIGELOW’S

ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

AMANDA GREER

is a fourth-year Trinity College student double-majoring in English and Cinema Studies. In the Fall, she will be pursuing an MA with a focus on representations of women on-screen. Passionate about women’s roles in the film industry, Amanda has worked as the Special Events & Communications Assistant for Women in Film & Television-Toronto, and, since 2013, as the Co-Editor of Women Writing Letters, Volumes 2, 3, & 4 with Professor Tara Goldstein.

When Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty hit theatres, only a year had passed since the shooting of Osama bin Laden in May of 2011. The film depicts the decade-long hunt for bin Laden, led by Maya, a tenacious CIA operative. Throughout the film’s two-hour runtime, audiences witness brutal scenes of torture, suicide bombings, and terrorist attacks, culminating in a lengthy final sequence showing Navy SEAL Team 6’s entry into bin Laden’s compound and his eventual death. Bigelow’s film is both emotionally affective and convincing; she manages to construct an authority around her images that renders them blindly believable. The film’s trustworthy images result from Bigelow and cinematographer Greig Fraser’s attempt to create a journalistic aesthetic, seen most prominently in their use of a hand-held camera, grainy quality, and the film’s point of view (POV) and subjective shots, which further generate problematic political and ideological implications by taking on the appearance of objective and truthful representations of events.

One of the salient features of Bigelow and Fraser’s journalistic aesthetic is the hand-held camera and its accompanying untethered movements, which create an all-seeing objectivity around the image. After using a similar technique in her 2008 film, The Hurt Locker, Bigelow “once again wanted a handheld, guerilla-filmmaking feel to the production, and she was open to whatever format would work best.”1 The format eventually chosen involved the use of lightweight backpacks on which were mounted cameras, batteries, and transmitters. The team also selected the Arri Alexa M camera as their main tool for shooting the film. The camera’s makers boast on their website that the Alexa M is “tailored for action and aerial photography” as well as “tight corner shots” to enhance mobility.2 By combining the lightweight backpack method with the Alexa M camera, Zero Dark Thiry’s filmmaking team was able to shoot the film with unlimited movement—the camera is entirely untethered.

Out of this mobility come shots wherein the camera operator runs before or after a character, turning corners quickly, and following the action up close in an almost invasive cinematographic style. As discussed in Jean-Pierre Geuens’s “Visuality and Power,” the use of hand-held cameras allows camera operators to move through space without being bound to a dolly, “visually echo[ing] the excitement that accompanies the physical endeavor,” such as following characters up stairs. Coupled with this mobility is Zero Dark Thiry’s use of a “spatial omniscience,” a technique Geuens aligns with the Steadicam. This technique renders the gaze “all-transcendental”3 and instills in the viewer, the perceiver of images, a sense of power. Bigelow and Fraser allow their viewers such a feeling in Zero Dark Thiry’s Abbottabad sequence, when the camera is suddenly positioned on the building’s roof, shooting the SEAL team from above. This shot is especially unusual, as the film generally remains at eye-levcaméra stylo •

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el with its human figures. Shooting from above gives the camera supremacy over its objects—it can shoot them without their awareness or consent. The audience absorbs this feeling of power, placing their faith in the image by equating omniscience with truth. By emphasizing its untethered camera movements, the film’s cinematography produces compliant viewers who place their trust in the seeming objectivity and omniscience of the image.

Zero Dark Thiry’s unmoored camera also adds shakiness to the image, which draws attention to the filmmaker’s presence, thereby giving the impression of a documentary that has been created simultaneously with the images depicted. As Geuens has explained, using a hand-held camera to follow characters up and down stairs or around corners recreates “some of the sensations experienced by a human being undertaking these actions.”4 This cinematographic technique is seen most frequently in documentaries, such as Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), shot entirely with a hand-held digital camera. Throughout the film, Varda calls attention to her hands, the tools she uses to shoot the film. Her self-reflexive approach constantly exposes the film’s constructed status, and herself as its constructor. Bigelow and Fraser’s cinematography achieves similar ends through subtler means. Their images’ shakiness implicitly points to the the camera operator who is directing its gaze, exposing the film’s artificial nature. This effect is seen frequently during the Abbottabad compound sequence. Whenever a SEAL team member enters a new room or turns a corner, the camera follows them, moving so much that, at times, the image is barely discernible amidst the camera’s jerkiness.

Through this shakiness, the filmmaker’s presence is emphasized, adding credibility to the image since, as Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”5 Such a presence asserts the truthfulness of the image—the filmmaker had to have been present at the event, so the event must have taken place as depicted. While Zero Dark Thiry never purports to be a documentary film, by adopting certain cinematography techniques, the events portrayed become truthful, journalistically realistic and believable.

The film’s shaky images also gain authority by establishing the belief in its viewers that the events depicted are occurring simultaneously with the images’ capture, thereby closing the temporal gap between camera perception and audience reception. In his essay, “The Visible Camera,” Michael Albright says that the hand-held camera creates images built on the “phenomenological process of experiencing and witnessing history.”6 In other words, the image seems to capture events as they occur. Zero Dark Thiry clearly attempts to achieve this effect. In an interview, Bigelow is quoted as saying that she and screenwriter Boal think of it as a “reported film” in which “the story and the

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film are sort of contemporaneous.”7 The film’s opening scene demonstrates this effect. Maya and another CIA operative, Dan, enter a filthy, darkened room to interrogate an al-Qaeda member, Ammar, thought to have ties to bin Laden. As Ammar is beaten and waterboarded, the camera hovers around the three central figures, cutting between close-ups of their faces. However, these cuts are often languorous, allowing the camera to linger over objects as the operator sees fit. For instance, as Dan begins to put gloves on and speak to Ammar, saying, “I know you know him,” in an effort to get Ammar to reveal information, the camera first focuses on Dan’s hands, then drifts up to his face after he begins speaking. Instead of ensuring that Dan’s face is framed whenever he speaks, the camera dawdles, focusing on other things, resulting in what some would view as an imperfect film in terms of continuity editing.

However, this imperfection actually adds to the film’s illusion of authenticity, infusing the image with instantaneity, or the illusion that it is being constructed as the event happens. The camera’s shakiness, then, combined with its untethered movements, creates a journalistically realist aesthetic in which image recording and event are contemporaneous and in which attempts to persuade the viewer that the events depicted, though recreations, are truthful to the originals.

Although the camera’s hand-held aesthetic serves to authenticate its images, at the same time it keeps viewers distanced from the violence being depicted, creating a morally ambiguous film. Jake Howell of the Toronto Star, in an article on the popularity of the shaky camera in Hollywood film, writes that, “Hollywood can take potentially R-rated ideas…and shape them into multiplex-friendly packages by blurring, darkening, and cutting away from violent images.” He cites The Hunger Games (2012) as a film that uses the shaky camera to transform the R-rated concept of children killing each other into a mainstream, 14A-rated film. Howell also brings up Zero Dark Thiry, saying that it “looks as though it was shot on an active fault line.”8 Howell criticizes the film’s shaky images for constantly directing the audience away from the violence at hand. Looking again at Ammar’s torture scene, there is no doubt that the viewer is prevented from seeing the totality of the CIA’s actions. At one point, Ammar is pinned to the ground by Dan and another masked CIA agent before being waterboarded. As he struggles, the camera shakes and moves around him, seemingly attempting to get a clear shot of his face. However, the frame is often blocked and confused by images of flailing limbs. These confused and complex images prevent the viewer from seeing the entirety of the event. Bigelow and Fraser employ this technique again in the Abbottabad compound sequence. As the SEAL team infiltrates the building, shooting people from room to room, the images become so unstacaméra stylo •

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ble and dark that they are almost indecipherable. Bin Laden’s companions who are shot are usually only shown after the fact, when they lie lifeless on the ground. The film’s hand-held cinematography, then, performs the dual function of convincing viewers of the image’s authenticity while preventing them from experiencing the totality of the violence depicted. As a result, the film’s aesthetic, can be placed in the milieu of shaky-cam popularity, used both to construct the illusion of truthfulness and reality in the image, and to soften the violence of popular films. Zero Dark Thiry, along with The Hunger Games and Cloverfield (2008), are only some of many films being produced thatemploys these cinematographic techniques to persuade the viewer that the images being projected on-screen are accurate and truthful representations of events, even when contained in a fiction film.

Bigelow and Fraser also generate trust in the image through subjective and POV shots, which align viewers with the film’s CIA agents. This technique is carried out in two ways: by employing subjective shots, which give viewers access to certain characters’ perspectives, and by giving the camera its own status as a character or presence, and therefore its own point of view.

Bigelow has said that she, “wanted to tell [this] story through the eyes of the workforce, through the eyes of the people on the ground.”9 She achieves this goal, quite literally, by employing subjective shots during many of the film’s segments, especially the Abbottabad portion. At one point in this sequence, a Navy SEAL shoots a man in the compound, approaches his body, and turns it over with his foot. As the Navy SEAL looks down at the dead man, the viewer is offered a subjective shot directly through his eyes, framing the dead man’s face. In shots like this, Bigelow aligns her viewers with the SEAL team member’s perspective, enhancing the illusion already established by the handheld aesthetic that they are present at the scene of the event. As Alexander Galloway defines it, the subjective shot “pretend[s] to peer outward from the eyes of an actual character rather than simply to approximate a similar line of sight.”10 Such shots are used sparingly, but once again evoke a documentary aesthetic while ensuring that the viewer never strays from identifying with the American soldiers.

An exception to this rule occurs during the scene in which Jessica, another CIA agent, awaits the arrival of an al-Qaeda higher-up who has agreed to deliver classified information. At the meeting place, a base in Afghanistan, Jessica anxiously anticipates the operative’s arrival, unaware that he is actually a suicide bomber who will kill her and six other people in only a few moments. As the al-Qaeda member arrives, the camera suddenly takes on a POV position from inside his car, looking over the driver’s shoulder. The POV shot, as defined by Galloway, is not as extreme as the subjective shot, but uses

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“correct eyeline matching…to create the illusion of a coherent visual space.”11 This type of shot occurs twice during the in-car sequence. Apparently, Bigelow has broken with a strict American-centric identification position by offering the terrorist’s line of sight. However, in the context of the rest of the sequence, these shots are clearly used to increase dramatic tension by moving the camera from the wild, windy expanse of the desert to the eerily serene confines of the car. Such a shot, then, demonstrates fiction and style creeping into Bigelow’s journalistic aesthetic. While a documentary filmmaker or journalist would not have access to this space, Bigelow allows her camera infinite positions and movements, thereby betraying her “reported film” style. After this shot, Bigelow quickly returns to a journalistic aesthetic, seen best through the voiceover used after the bombing takes place, in which a man reports that, “The CIA says seven of its employees were killed and six other wounded in a suicide bombing at a base in Afghanistan.” The voiceover, in addition to the shaky, hand-held aesthetic and an aerial shot of the destroyed base returns viewers to the realm of pseudo-journalism, or the purported sense of image recording and event contemporaneity, before they realize they even left.

Zero Dark Thiry’s POV shots also enhance its docurealist aesthetic through the camera’s placement at eye-level. The camera rarely leaves this height, and when it does, it is usually narratively motivated, such as with aerial shots from helicopters, which do not try to hide the aircraft from the shot. Through this technique, Bigelow literally shows the perspective of “the people on the ground.”12 By matching the camera to the characters’ eye levels, Bigelow and Fraser transform it into a character in its own right, enhancing its status as a being present at the events depicted. For instance, the torture scene with Ammar, which keeps the camera at eye-level, manages to stay close to the different characters, forming an intimacy that, along with the camera’s shakiness, lends the camera a further sense of immediacy. The camera’s adherence to human eye-level, combined with its hand-held aesthetic, constructs a humanness that increases the image’s believability even further.

Bigelow and Fraser’s convincingly authentic journalistic aesthetic, namely, the film’s imagistic declaration of a realistic reproduction of events, harbours some political and ideological issues, especially pertaining to its depictions of CIA interrogation techniques. Richard Brody of The New Yorker has described the film’s aesthetic as a “superficial realism,” that is entirely unnatural, “a careful and calculated contrivance.”13 The falsity of the film’s realism is exposed in moments such as the subjective or POV shot in the terrorist’s car just before the suicide bombing, when fiction seeps into the film, momentarily dismantling the production’s authenticity. However, the majority of the film adheres to the grainy, shaky, hand-held camera aesthetic that purports caméra stylo •

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total realism, persuading the audience to accept the on screen events as fact.

The film’s idea of realism is in direct relation with its adherence to a journalistic aesthetic—if something is reported through a journalistic medium, it must be real. This conception of and adherence to realism is problematic, especially considering the reported inaccuracies of the film’s representations of torture.

Michael Morell, acting CIA director, has said that, “The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques…were the key to finding Bin Laden [sic]…That impression is false.”14 Zero Dark Thiry depicts torture as the only means of retrieving information. Bigelow and Fraser never offer an alternative method, but only show torture scenes in their blunt, shaky-cam way, thereby ignoring the dissent surrounding the CIA’s methods. Steve Coll reports that FBI agents stationed at American “black sites,” or places of torture, objected strongly to the CIA’s interrogation methods, seeing torture as immoral and unproductive.15 Through their cinematography, namely by using a journalistic aesthetic and aligning viewers with the CIA agents, Bigelow and Fraser construct a convincing argument that, not only was torture the only possible option to retrieve information, but that it was unanimously selected. As Brandon Cooke writes, “Since [Zero Dark Thiry’s] authors have presented themselves as operating with the virtues of sincerity and accuracy, there is a good chance that viewers of the film will acquire the false belief that torture is sometimes useful and sometimes justified.”16 In other words, the film’s conception of realism as an outgrowth of journalism, its attempt to become a “reported film,” as Bigelow intended, leaves viewers with a one-sided examination of torture, exposing the dangers of employing a journalistic, documentarian aesthetic in a fiction film.

Other critics have defended Zero Dark Thiry, saying that its artistic rendering of events is necessary and makes for a more morally complex film.

For instance, Roger Cohen of The New York Times writes that, “while reality is the raw material journalism attempts to render with accuracy and fairness, it is the raw material that art must transform,” ultimately determining that Zero Dark Thiry’s inaccurate recreation of events is simply an artistic rendering.17 However, Bigelow and screenwriter Boal’s numerous statements about wanting to convey the film’s events with the utmost accuracy complicate Cohen’s argument. In addition to referring to the film as “reported,” and “journalistic,” Bigelow has also called Zero Dark Thiry an “imagistic living history.”18 Her statements render most arguments for the film’s artistic licensing of events negligible. By declaring total accuracy and adherence to reality, then failing to meet those standards or accurately explore the moral landscape surrounding the events depicted, Bigelow and her team are left with a problematic film that contradicts itself—it is at once a declaration of truth, and a

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visual and narrative manipulation of fact.

Even almost two years after its release, Zero Dark Thiry continues to find itself the subject of much discourse surrounding the events of bin Laden’s death and the war on terror. Bigelow’s tackling of such political and controversial subject matter is inarguably brave, especially considering how quickly the film was written, produced, and released after the events in the Abbottabad compound. However, Bigelow and Fraser’s aesthetic decisions cast a light of doubt over their film. Visually, Zero Dark Thiry presents itself as a journalistic film. Looking more closely at the information surrounding the CIA’s operations in the Middle East, it is clear that Bigelow’s docurealist aesthetic is not upheld by the film’s depiction of events. Her artistic choices, then, become both an offering and a denial of truth. Zero Dark Thiry is a case that should remind cinemagoers that through very subtle means, cinematographic techniques can alter reality, objectivity, and, by extension, the truth.

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ENDNOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Michael Goldman, “The World’s Most Wanted Man,” American Cinematographer 94, no. 2 (2013): 33.

“Arri Alexa M,” ARRI.com, n.d., Oct. 16, 2014.

Jean-Pierre Geuns, “Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam,” Film Quarterly 47, no. 2, 1993-4: 11-16.

Ibid, 4.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (France: Hill and Wang, 1980), 87.

Michael Albright, “The Visible Camera: Hand-Held Camera Movement and Cinematographic Embodiment in Autobiographical Documentary,” Spectator 31, no. 1 (2011): 35.

Peter Keough and Brett Michel, “Press Conference for Zero Dark Thirty,” in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, ed. Peter Keough (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 225.

Peter Howell, “Camera work—shaken and stirring,” The Toronto Star (Toronto, Canada), Aug. 2, 2013.

Peter Keough and Brett Michel, “Press Conference for Zero Dark Thirty,” in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, ed. Peter Keough (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 222.

Andrew R. Galloway, “Origins of the First-Person Shooter,” in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 43.

Ibid, 41.

Peter Keough and Brett Michel, “Press Conference for Zero Dark Thirty,” in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, ed. Peter Keough (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 222.

Richard Brody, “The Deceptive Emptiness of Zero Dark Thirty,” The New Yorker, December 2012, n.p.

Steve Coll, “Disturbing & Misleading,” The New York Review of Books, February 2013, n.p.

Ibid 15.

Brandon Cooke, “Ethics and Fictive Imagining,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no.

3 (2014): 322.

Roger Cohen, “Why Zero Dark Thirty Works,” The New York Times, February 11, 2013, n.p.

Peter Keough and Brett Michel, “Press Conference for Zero Dark Thirty,” in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, ed. Peter Keough (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 226.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, Michael. “The Visible Camera: Hand-Held Camera Movement and Cinematographic Embodiment in Autobiographical Documentary.” Spectator-The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television 3, no.1 (2011): 34-40.

“Arri Alexa M.” ARRI.com. n.d. 16 October 2014. http://www.arri.com/camera/alexa/cameras/camera_details/alexa-m/ Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. France: Hill and Wang, 1980.

Brody, Richard. “The Deceptive Emptiness of Zero Dark Thirty.” The New Yorker, December 2012.

Cohen, Roger. “Why Zero Dark Thirty Works.” The New York Times (New York, NY), February 11, 2013.

Coll, Steve. “Disturbing & Misleading.” The New York Review of Books, February 2013.

Cooke, Brandon. “Ethics and Fictive Imagining.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 3 (2014): 317-327.

Galloway, Alexander R. “Origins of the First-Person Shooter.” Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Geuens, Jean-Pierre. “Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam.” Film Quarterly 47, no.

2 (1993-1994): 8-17.

The Gleaners and I. Directed by Agnes Varda. 2000. Ciné Tamaris. Film.

Goldman, Michael. “The World’s Most Wanted Man.” American Cinematographer 94, no. 2 (2013): 32-38.

Howell, Jake. “Camera work—shaken and stirring: Increasing in popularity, shaky cams create tension and realism in a movie.” The Toronto Star (Toronto, Canada), Aug. 2, 2013.

Keough, Peter and Michel, Brett. “Press Conference for Zero Dark Thirty.” In Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, edited by Peter Keough, 219-233. Mississippi, USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

Zero Dark Thirty. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Performed by Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Joal Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and Kyle Chandler. 2012. Columbia Pictures, Annapurna Pictures, and First Light Productions. Film.

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TOUCHING AND BECOMING OBJECTS:

ASMR, PHOTOGENIE, AND IMMERSION

DENISE NOUVION

is a fourth year Cinema Studies specialist, interested in early cinema, new media, and issues of spectatorship.

Outside of her academic career, she is also a published photographer, filmmaker, and half of a pop music duo.

Cinema is an immersive medium. It is immersive because it allows the stasis of the body, the anonymity of the spectator, and the illusion of fullness of experience on the screen. The spectator’s lack of physical movement results in a kind of separation of mind and body that reimagines and reanimates the senses in relation to the eyes and ears. Our affinity for immersion raises questions about whether our identification with a virtual cinematic body – a body imagined by the film – lends itself to a physical experience in the spectator.

How does the materiality of visual touch and sonic texture relate to the spectator’s body? If cinematic perception is different from our everyday perception, how can cinema feel so real to us? Whether it is the simple but affective sensation of “being there” amidst the action – which both easily consumes our attention and is theoretically complex (think shifting identification and omnipresence) – or the physical, emotional, and sensorial reactions we often experience, there is something engaging about cinematic viewing concurrent with the stasis of the body, that requires a different form of sensorial interaction than everyday life.

Vivian Sobchack argues that the cinematic experience compels a kind of synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense causing a perception in another.1 Cinema replicates the cognitive experience of synaesthesia through its reconfiguration of vision and hearing as sources of direct haptic and sensorial information that engage the other senses. Similarly, Sobchack employs the concept of coenaesthesia, a heightened awareness of one’s body, in order to suggest how the hierarchical arrangement of the senses is a learned function, and can therefore be rewritten.2 The specificities of cinematic viewing forces the spectator to reconfigure their senses towards vision and hearing in order to compensate for the dulling of other senses, especially touch. Combining the two concepts, Sobchack posits that the conventions of cinema create a cinesthetic subject of the film viewer – a subversive body artificially created through the conjunction between the spectator and the film.3 She suggests that viewing tactility on screen allows for a mirrored experience of touch in the theatre, one not related to mental process but physical sensation; to “touch and be touched by the substance and texture of images.”4 This essay will not only grapple with the question of the extent that cinema elicits a sensorial reaction that exceeds aesthetic and emotional pleasure, but will more specifically argue how representations of touch compel the most “medium specific” pleasures known to cinema. Sobchack’s perspective of seeing touch and correspondingly feeling touch is difficult to prove, considering her argument is formed on the basis of a rare medical condition.

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sensual cross-modality.5 Furthermore, it does not successfully explain the universality of film spectatorship as something innately pleasurable, hypnotic, and absorbing. The need to use a concept like synaesthesia to explain immersion suggests that there is something inarticulable about the perception of the “average viewer.” I would therefore like to propose an alternative metaphor that better explains the pleasures associated with representations of touch and how it relates directly to immersion, one that considers cinema not merely as a convincing reproduction of normal sensorial experience, but as a manufacturer of an entirely new form of pleasure.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)6 – a pleasurable sensation caused by visual and auditory stimuli – presents a more realized possibility for understanding cinematic experience, one that goes beyond the metaphor of cross-modality. Often defined as a euphoric sensation commonly referred to as “brain tingles,” an ASMR experience is associated with pleasure and a hypnotic physical stupor.7 Common triggers for the response include hearing a sound that denotes materiality, such as a smooth tone of voice, or watching someone closely attend to a task. While this phenomenon is unlikely to be new, the term “ASMR” was only conceived recently in online discussion groups by those affected since childhood.8 Reflecting its pervasiveness, ASMR has also spawned a large community on YouTube concentrated on triggering the sensation, with videos often reaching a few million views.

ASMR experiencer Andrea Seagal on This American Life outlines how often she sought out triggers on YouTube even before she knew what ASMR was, targeting “show and tell” videos that contained soft speaking.9 As Seagal outlines, television and YouTube are places where ASMR experiencers can indulge in highly specific and obsessive trigger-seeking, an alternative to the affective but fleeting moments occasionally triggering the response in everyday life.10 These outlets are undoubtedly preferred not only for their convenience, but also because ASMR exhibits characteristics of voyeuristic scopophilia and audiophilia, when pleasure is obtained from watching and listening to others, usually without their knowledge.11 While synaesthesia suggests the random and extraneous correlation of all of the senses, ASMR can only be triggered visually and audibly and always corresponds to a single physical sensation. For example, as synaesthetes perceive “sound as color, or shapes as tastes,”12 experiencers of ASMR perceive light, movement, and sound as one encompassing pleasurable experience. For these reasons, ASMR is a more relatable experience than synaesthesia, since it is easier to conceive of enjoying something one sees or hears beyond practical or social associations than it is to ‘taste a shape’. More importantly, touch and texture (what Sobchack unarguably finds to be the most engaging aspect of

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cinematic experience) becomes the most salient stimuli associated with these triggers, resulting in an increased concentration conducive to immersion.

In order to understand the affects of representations of touch on spectators, ASMR will be considered as a kind of sensitive nerve to the experiences of the average viewer. By investigating theories of tactile representation, cinematic specificity, and the cinematic body, this essay will suggest how representations of texture and touch draw us to the image.

Sobchack argues that representations of touch ignite the same physical reaction in the body, however studies suggest that this type of experience is reserved for a rare form of mirror-touch synaesthesia.13 The average person however experiences visual touch differently, more-so as an illusion of tactility rather than an overt tactile sensation.14 This nevertheless suggests that there is a direct relationship between the mental processes involved in perceiving touch and actually touching. Maria Cristina Cioffi, et al. state this in their studies of mirror-touch: For most of us, observing another person being touched activates neural regions in the somatosensory cortex that are also involved in experiencing touch, however this activation does not lead to overt sensations of the observed event: we typically do not feel any tactile sensation 15 when observing the tactile experience of others.

Although viewing touch does not lead to a mirrored physical experience, it can still be felt in other ways related to mental processes and a shared neural circuitry.16 Perhaps it is this barrier which allows stimulations associated with touch to be experienced in a fuller way, without the distractions of direct physical correspondence and their natural and social functions.

One of Sobchack’s most valuable notions is thus that touch registers in the body not as a linguistic translation, but as a kind of “carnal thought.”17 Even so, one of the major shortcomings of her argument and the use of the synaesthesic metaphor is that it is inherently optical-centric. This is apparent simply in the way Sobchack writes about her experiences of film watching, focusing on the “texture of images,” as opposed to the textures of sounds.

Michel Chion proposes instead that materialized sound can also draw attention to the tactile manifestations of touch, transferring sensual information about the material properties of an object that vision would otherwise miss.18 In sound design at Foley, these properties are routinely heightened beyond realistic comprehension, bestowing the spectator with a kind of hyper-sensitivity of hearing. This accentuation suggests that there is something functional about texture beyond the mere replication of realism. Furthermore, there is also an element of meta-textual substance carried within sounds themselves, especially those produced by a Foley artist, encoding the human element caméra stylo •

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involved in physically creating sound. When we hear the whoosh of a piece of clothing, the sound is not only representative of the materiality of the fabric, but of the literal touch involved in manufacturing the sound by hand in the studio. Hence, even when we hear sounds we cannot place visually, their quality evokes a sense of corporeality that can be both felt sensorially and conceptually understood as having existed in space. Representations of touch in cinema are thus produced both visually and audibly, facilitated through sonic texture and the intentionality of the body.

Since representations of touch produce a consistent stimulation in the brain, we can say that ASMR more fluidly replicates the cerebral and physical experience associated with seeing and hearing through its singularity of affect.

ASMR’s affective response of pleasure, increased attention, and hypnotic physical stupor also lends itself well to the particularities of film viewing.

Bodily stasis and the numbing of senses in favour of vision and hearing is notably important when immersing oneself into a diegesis and a narrative.

During an ASMR experience, this response is not only necessary to fully enjoy the sensation, but automatic. Early names for the phenomenon even focus on the attention-forming nature of the occurrence, such as “Attention Induced Euphoria”19; a hypnotic state that both relaxes the body while also encouraging concentration. Moreover, while stimuli invites a response automatically, ASMR experiencers cannot typically trigger their own ASMR. This is notable because it suggests that pleasure is based on the physical removal of the self, a completely psychological phenomenon associated with identification with a foreign body or object. Ergo, experiencing ASMR actually requires a type of bodily stasis in order to trigger pleasure – much as cinematic experience relies on the ignorance of the body in the theatre. ASMR thus replicates the conditions of viewing particular to modern media, of a purely audiovisual stimulation removed from physical interaction or complete bodily consciousness.

This is why although ASMR can be conceived outside of recorded media, it is often accentuated by its reproduction.20 The surfacing of ASMR as a concept is likely to have been provoked by the popularity of YouTube itself – a cavernous and easily searchable depository of long and often tedious videos.

Recently, ASMR videos have even gained interest within the general public as a form of sleep aid, since its monotonous visuals and textural sounds can evoke feelings of relaxation.21 Typically, ASMRtists (the creators of ASMR videos) go through multiple ASMR triggers, exploring the subtle sounds of objects, combined with casual activities like flipping through a magazine or folding towels.22 While some videos directly acknowledge ASMR, the most popular form of ASMR videos tend to be role plays which conduct a

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mini-narrative, toying with notions of virtual-reality by treating the camera as a character in an everyday scenario, such as going to the doctor or getting a haircut.

The relationship between the ASMR fascination with objects and the superficial involvement of the viewer can in part be explained by a study of perception and touch done by Sjoerd J. H. Ebisch and others, conducted using video stimuli.23 They suggest that a visually-observed touch stimulates neural circuitry, even when something inanimate is being touched. Thus, touch, “... even of an object known to be devoid of any inner life, could be mediated by embodied simulation.”24 This data was gathered when participants were asked to view several videos involving animate and inanimate touch, and a neural circuitry associated with touch was activated in participants when a palm leaf touched the arm of a chair.25 Since neural touch-response is activated even when objects touch objects, it follows that the viewer therefore must identify with one of the objects, as either touching or being touched. Thus, the indistinction between “animate and inanimate” suggests that we are not only able to identify with human touch and being touched, but touching objects and in a sense, becoming objects.

ASMR videos’ obsession with objects suggests the pleasures of both touching and being touched, as if objects stand in for the viewer. In the video, “Assortment of Sounds for Your Slumber (ASMR),” ASMRtist “Heather Feather” circulates through a number of objects, including a lantern, a magnifying glass, clothespins, and a Magic 8 ball – tapping, tracing, and running her hand across their surfaces.26 The video details the unique sounds emanating from the textures of surfaces, presenting the objects visually to the viewer in direct address. While Heather describes in extreme detail the objects she is presenting, her attention sways between looking at the object and addressing the invisible viewer. This is particularly interesting when considering the system of identification created by the video, and Ebisch’s suggestion that third-person touching can create a reaction in the viewer. Here, the “objects” of the gaze are not only the show-and-tell items being caressed, but the camera as well. Thus, while the spectator is addressed as animate, he or she is ultimately “objectified” by their position as camera – unable to interact as a human, but re-animated by the gaze and by touch. Thus, Heather is not only touching the objects she presents, but correspondingly touching the viewer. Sobchack identifies this unique circumstance in her discussion of Jane Campion’s film, The Piano (1993). She argues that when touch occurs, it is always ambiguous, with viewers becoming “... both the subject and the object of tactile desire.”27 For Sobchack, it is this lack of distinction between subject and object (or the freedom of subject) where pleasure is ultimately derived. caméra stylo •

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Germaine Deluc and other experimental theorists of the 1920s and 1930s avant-garde movements also believed that cinema allowed for one to be more conscious of the act of perceiving itself, reducing the spectator’s desire to attach memory or feeling to the images.28 Jean Epstein writes about these pleasures present in narrative cinema in his account of Sessue Hayakawa as a photogenic and aesthetic object, focusing on his idle movements – walking across the room, raising his arm, opening a door.29 Epstein and Louis Delluc’s notion of photogenie exhibits a similar fascination with objects, texture, and form as described in experiencers of ASMR. Delluc and Epstein believed cinema revealed the hidden life of objects and the objectification of living forms through its ability to renew vision. This association with ASMR is clear in the rhetoric of pleasure, with Epstein describing photogenie as a enjoyable piercing sensation, “intermittent paroxysms” like needles to the skin, reminiscent of the tingling-sensation noted by experiencers of ASMR.30 These feelings originate from the close-up, denoting texture, excess, and the limiting and directing of attention.31 The photogenic object is thus associated with the desire to investigate the world to an obscene degree, much like the focused investigation of objects apparent in ASMR sound assortments. For Delluc, magnification becomes a way cinema can reveal photogenie through both abstraction and a heightening of perception. This is clear in Epstein and Delluc’s obsession with the human form, associated with figures like Hayakawa and Charlie Chaplin.32 In 1921, Delluc published “Charlie Chaplin a Paris,” a fake interview with Chaplin where he reflected on Chaplin’s work.33 In it, he discusses a scene from the film, The Pawnshop (1916), where Chaplin investigates a clock, describing it as an unforgettable and hypnotic moment that he returns to frequently in his writings.34 The three and a half minute segment, divided into two long-shots, shows Chaplin in medium close-up as he takes apart a customer’s alarm clock, treating it as though it were both human and machine. Kristiina Hackel argues that this moment can be seen as an allegory of the “dramatization of the photogenic process,” while also remaining a photogenic moment in itself,35 clear from the extent he analyzes the object.

In The Pawnshop, Chaplin examines the alarm clock in a variety of ways: he palpitates it, drills it, taps it, smells it, appraises it, takes its pulse, oils it, and hammers it. In his hands, the alarm clock transforms from human to object and back again, becoming a jewel, a wrist, food, a chest, a mouth, a soup can, and, above all, a mysterious object.36 Hackel highlights how the alarm clock is both human and object – suggesting that we both identify with the object and with Chaplin. Although the scene

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exposes the spectacle of Chaplin’s destructive capabilities, the clock’s slow and attentive destruction poses pleasures associated with close-attention and materiality that seems to exceed the confines of the gag. The comparison between photogenie and ASMR situates representations of touch at the centre of cinematic specificity, almost as old as cinema itself.

What is admittedly missing in discussions of photogenie thus far is sound, however this does not necessitate a disconnect from ASMR. According to Melinda Szaloky, since film images frequently made reference to sound, silent film could cue “mental hearing,” the automatic sensual perception of sound.37 Therefore, when one watches The Pawnshop, you can instinctively “hear” the sound of the clock ticking, the opening of its face with a can-opener, and the tapping on its tin surface. The film further cues sounds through its use of accentuated hearing posited by the stethoscope – one that exceeds the limits of human faculties. It is thus particularly telling that Chaplin investigates the object with the same tools that cinema uses to investigate the world.

The magnifying glass and the stethoscope become ways of understanding life beyond the limits of human vision, and an obscene interest in the world that lies beyond our perception. Thus, like the close-up, the stethoscope is a prosthetic interested in interiority, in abstracting an object in order to understand its true nature. As evidenced in photogenie, cinema therefore inherently entails a perverse probing of the world through the apparatus of the recording device, fuelling the basic pleasures of hyper-vision and hyper-sound.

Charles Stankievech points out that the stethoscope also becomes a way to block out undesired noise, akin to the headphone.38 By transferring sound directly from one space to another, the stethoscope becomes a kind of sonic close-up. Stankievech argues that the binaural stethoscope provides “in-head acoustic imaging,” creating an impossible space for sound located inside the body.39 Headphones take up this same relationship to sound, changing the way we experience film, further enveloping the spectator. Tom Everrett makes a distinction between “in-theatre” and “in-head” sound, suggesting that since sound is not actually traveling around the spectator’s head like in the theatre, it instead appears as though it is emanating from inside the body.40 Headphones thus create sounds which more effectively touch the listener, especially when vibrations are both emanating from, and penetrating through the body.

ASMR videos’ subsequent obsession with headphones and “binaural” sound suggests a desire for immersive capabilities – one that perhaps even questions the image’s centrality. This is evident in Everrett’s suggestion that portable cinema is characterized by “big sounds and little screens,” that headphone sound appears “closer” to the spectator than the image.41

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In ASMR videos, the microphone is consistently placed directly behind the camera to create the illusion of human experience. Termed “dummy head recording,” the microphone is embedded into atomically-correct moldings of the human ear, modelling the functions of the pinnae (the visible part of the ear that shapes sound).42 While conventional stereo recording only makes use of left-right information, binaural dummy head recording uses both left-right panning and frequency-dependent distortions reflective of human hearing.43 This practice is heightened by the treatment of camera as viewer, with ASMRtists literally touching or brushing the microphone directly, or whispering from side to side. This system becomes the standard for the ASMR video, with the title of videos often boasting binaural sound and reminding viewers to wear headphones. The consequential illusion is therefore of a unified spatial relationship between the eyes and the ears, and the creation of a cinematic body representative of the spectator.

In “ASMR Paradise Lab,” Maria (GentleWhispering) conducts a simulated ‘ASMR study’ that further emphasizes the illusory presence of the spectator. In the video, Maria treats the camera as a patient, but also interacts with a simulated body, considered as an extension of the camera’s gaze. With a white cloth representing the spectator’s stomach and legs, Maria animates the object through touch and address – even directly stating this in the description of the video, “...you will be my test objects.” Maria listens to the body with a stethoscope like Chaplin does to the clock, both depicting her own attention and eliciting the same attention in the viewer. The spectator’s connection to this event is both animate and inanimate, but one separated enough from the scenario that the they are allowed to remain a mere dummy – not expected or permitted to participate.

In his book The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro argues that there is an innate pleasure in becoming a “stupid body” when watching films, for it allows the spectator to accept images as opposed to dominating them:44 The body is stupid in the sense that it is overly passive and indifferent, affected by everything but responsive to nothing, so plastically open to every force, every stress, and every stimulus that it is ultimately determined by none.45 Shaviro suggests the cinematic body’s stupidity is extremely pleasurable, creating a passive bliss, “indistinguishable from boredom” that revels in the stillness of an inert body.46 Arising in a discussion of Andy Warhol and his long experimental films where very little happens, Shaviro suggests that the spectator becomes more attentive, since every gesture assumes a heightened weight and significance.47

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Like Maria’s imagined body, we are both present and absent, able to experience a form of reality without the burden of interaction. The effective solicitation of the spectator’s presence in ASMR role plays – as evidenced by Maria’s dummy body – combined with the actual lack of ability to be present, creates a contradiction that compels us towards the image. Thus, through becoming objects or Shaviro’s stupid bodies, pleasure is determined by the inability to touch and be touched, while being as close to these experiences as possible without actually being present.

ASMR thus illuminates the way the specificities of cinematic spectatorship are conducive to an experience of pleasure only available in convincing illusions that represent touch. Unlike actual touch, representations allow for a heightening of our awareness of touch as a purely visual and audible stimulation, located inside the head. ASMR – considered as a heightened form of normal perception – therefore explains the basic pleasures specific to the cinematic medium, of representations of touch and texture through sound and image, and how the physical separation of the self from the screen allows for a fuller appreciation for the nuances of abstraction. Although cinema may not activate all five senses like Sobchack suggests, its accentuation of vision and hearing as primary sources of information and experience allows for the pleasures proposed by virtual sensation. Thus, the “dumbing” of the body allows spectators to re-imagine their physical presence on-screen, not only in human figures, but the objects which surround them.

Although I primarily focus on examples stemming from ASMR, it is easy to apply this theory to cinema at large. Beyond spectacles of excess that appeal to emotional pleasures, cinema is largely made up of banal and tedious moments that use characters’ interaction with objects as a way to immerse the spectator. Think of every conversation involved in revealing narrative-pertinent dialogue, where actors walk around rooms and fiddle with props – objects whose texture and weight are revealed in heightened materialized sound. Even spectacle-driven films can be seen to contain these moments, where texture and touch exceeds functions proposed by the model of classical cinema. Although this is a fledgling and largely undocumented field of research, my intention is that this essay expose these moments as not devoid of pleasure, but representing the most basic pleasures of identification with cinematic objects.

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ENDNOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67.

Synaesthesia is a difficult term to define, as it is used to describe any senses that are “mislinked”.

For example, some synaethetes involuntarily pair colours with numbers or letters, while others may associate sounds with certain smells or tastes.

Ibid, 69.

Ibid, 67, 70.

Ibid, 65.

Ibid, 68.

“Autonomous” refers to the involuntary nature of the experience; an automatic sensory response.

“Meridian” indicates a line that is both imaginary and universal – a sensation or response that proves to be triggered in the same way in all ASMR experiencers.

Harry Cheadle, “ASMR, the Good Feeling No One Can Explain,” Vice (July 31, 2012).

Ibid. The term surfaced online sometime in 2009, although discussion of the “unnamed feeling” likely began a few years prior.

Andrea Seagal, “Act Two: A Tribe Called Rest,” This American Life, NPR, 491 (Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass, 2013).

Seagal begins her story by recalling her early experiences with ASMR, watching her friend go through her shell collection and eventually going to the library just to listen to the sound of pages turning. These types of early experiences are astonishingly consistent and commonly appear in recountings amongst those who experience ASMR. Seagal admits that she never told anyone about her experience for fear that it was some form of ‘perverted miswiring’. Although the ASMR community is very particular about distinguishing ASMR from sexual pleasure, many ASMR experiencers (including Seagal) relate searching for triggers to pornography. This is because trigger-seeking can yield highly specific tastes and eventual immunities. This makes ASMR particularly interesting when considering the type of pleasure theorists like Laura Mulvey argue is heightened by cinematic viewing. Role plays become the most popular genre in ASMR videos, likely because they disavow the viewers’ pleasure.

Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67.

Synaesthesia is a difficult term to define, as it is used to describe any senses that are “mislinked”.

For example, some synaethetes involuntarily pair colours with numbers or letters, while others may associate sounds with certain smells or tastes.

Mirror-touch synaesthesia only accounts for 1.6% of the population. Cioffi, Maria Cristina, James W. Moore, and Michael J. Banissy, “What Can Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia Tell Us About the Sense of Agency?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 256 (8), 2014: 1.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 60.

Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (Columbia University Press: New York, 2009): 244-245.

Ibid.

There is an interesting compilation of movie scenes called “ASMR Movie scene Directory”, created by the website “The Unnamed Feeling”.

Kate Sztabnik, “A Surprising Cure for Insomnia,” Oprah (February 2014).

These types of videos also commonly appear without visuals, instead containing only an audio file

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

– reaffirming the importance and pleasure involved in tactile sounds.

Sjoerd J. H. Ebisch, Mauro G. Perrucci and Antonio Ferretti, et. al. “The Sense of Touch: Embodied Simulation in a Visuotactile Mirroring Mechanism for Observed Animate or Inanimate Touch,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20 (9) (September 2008): 1612.

Ibid.

Ibid, 1613.

Assortment of Sounds for Your Slumber (ASMR), directed by Heather Feather, YouTube (Nov 15, 2012) (Accessed: November 19th, 2014).

Sobschack, 66-67.

Germaine Dulac, “The Avant Garde Cinema,” in The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. by P. Adams Sitney, trans. by Robert Lamerton (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 43-48.

Jean Epstein, “The Senses I (b),” c. 1921, French Film Theory and Film Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907– 1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 243.

Jean Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” translated by Stuart Liebman, October. 3, 4 (1977): 9.

Ibid, 13.

Jean Epstein, “The Senses I (b),” c. 1921, French Film Theory and Film Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907– 1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 243.

I unfortunately cannot access the source myself, as it is located at the Cinematheque Francaise.

However, Kristiina Hackel offers a good description in her dissertation. Kristiina Hackel, “The Face of Others, the Taste of Things: Photogenie and Sensation in Silent Cinema,” University of Southern California, 2003. 57.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Kristiina Hackel, 51.

Melinda Szaloky, “Sounding Images in Silent Film: Visual Acoustics in Murnau’s Sunrise (1927)”, Cinema Journal, 41 (2) Winter 2002: 127.

Charles Stankievech, “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity,” Leonardo Music Journal, 17 (1) (2007): 55.

Ibid, 56.

Tom Everrett, “Big Sounds, Little Screens: Considering Sound and Headphone Use in the Mobile Cinema,” Public, 40 (2012): 134.

Ibid.

Ralf Bülow, “Vor 40 Jahren: Ein Kunstkopf für binaurale Stereophonie,” Heise News (Hannover: Heinz Heise) translated by Google Translate.

Ibid.

Steven Shaviro, “Wharhol’s Bodies,” The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 208.

Ibid, 207-208.

Ibid, 208.

Ibid.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Jennifer and Karissa Burgess. “ASMR Research and Support: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.” www.asmr-research.org (accessed April 1st 2013).

ASMR Paradise Lab. Directed by GentleWhispering. March 26th, 2013. YouTube. (Accessed Nov 20th, 2014).

Assortment of Sounds for Your Slumber (ASMR). Directed by Heather Feather. Nov 15, 2012. YouTube.

(Accessed: November 19th, 2014).

Bülow, Ralf. “Vor 40 Jahren: Ein Kunstkopf für binaurale Stereophonie”. Heise News. (August 32st, 2013) (Accessed 27 July 2014) Translated by Google Translate. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/ meldung/Vor-40-Jahren-Ein-Kunstkopf-fuer-binaurale-Stereophonie-1946286.html Cheadle, Harry. “ASMR, the Good Feeling No One Can Explain.” Vice (July 31, 2012) http://www. vice.com/en_ca/read/asmr-the-good-feeling-no-one-can-explain Chion, Michel. Film, A Sound Art. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. Columbia University Press: New York, 2009.

Cioffi, Maria Cristina, James W. Moore, and Michael J. Banissy. “What Can Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia Tell Us About the Sense of Agency?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 256 (8), 2014: 1-3.

Dulac, Germaine. “The Avant Garde Cinema.” The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Edited by P. Adams Sitney; Translated by Robert Lamerton. New York: New York University Press, 1978: 43-48.

Ebisch, Sjoerd J. H., Mauro G. Perrucci and Antonio Ferretti, et. al. “The Sense of Touch: Embodied Simulation in a Visuotactile Mirroring Mechanism for Observed Animate or Inanimate Touch.”

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20 (9) (September 2008): 1611-1623.

Epstein, Jean. “The Senses I (b).” 1921. French Film Theory and Film Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1939. Ed. Richard Abel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 241–246.

Epstein, Jean. “Magnification and Other Writings.” Translated by Stuart Liebman. October. 3, no. 4 (1977): 9-25 Everrett, Tom. “Big Sounds, Little Screens: Considering Sound and Headphone Use in the Mobile Cinema.” Public, 40 (2012): 132-136.

The Pawnshop. Directed by Charlie Chaplin. 1916. “Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Pawnshop’ in Silent Films” Archive.org: (Accessed: November 14th, 2014).

Seagal, Andrea. “Act Two: A Tribe Called Rest.” This American Life. NPR, 491. (March 29th, 2013) NPR: Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass.

Shaviro, Steven. “Wharhol’s Bodies.” The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 200-238.

Sobchack, Vivian. “What My Fingers Knew.” Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Stankievech, Charles. “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity.”

Leonardo Music Journal, 17 (1) (2007): 55 – 59 Szaloky, Melinda. “Sounding Images in Silent Film: Visual Acoustics in Murnau’s Sunrise (1927)”.

Cinema Journal, 41 (2), Winter 2002: 109-131 DOI: 10.1353/cj.2002.0005 Sztabnik, Kate. “A Surprising Cure for Insomnia.” Oprah (February 2014) http://www.oprah.com/ health/Insomnia-Cure-ASMR-Whisper-Community Wright, Benjamin. “Footsteps with Character: The Art and Craft of Foley.” Screen, 55 (20), July 2014: 204 – 220

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NOLLYWOOD AND THE FIGURINE:

A TRANSNATIONAL EXAMPLE OF CINEMATIC DIGITAL DISRUPTION

ALEXANDRA MCCALLA

Born in Toronto and brought up in London UK, Alexandra is in her final year graduating from a double major in Economics and Cinema studies, she will be starting as a technology strategy consultant across North America following graduation. Within cinema studies, she has a particular interest in racial representation and identity within the black diaspora, currently working on a Black British Film independent study.

The Figurine, directed by Kunle Afolayan displays the recent aesthetic sharpening of Nollywood films under western criteria. Alessandro Jedlowski describes this recent trend in Nigerian cinema as a “new wave,” moving away from defining aspects of the Nollywood 1990s video boom phenomenon— low-budget production, and straight-to-video distribution—to focus on diaspora based narratives.1 The native and diasporic popularity of this “New Nollywood,”2 however, has not exceeded the already popular consumption of the previous video boom. The Figurine, as part of the New Nollywood movement, presents “western” and “formal” acceptance of already accepted forms of Nigerian cinema—formal elements characterized by mainstream, highly controlled and regulated, production and distribution. This type of transnational media expansion—typified by Nollywood’s origins—first builds traction between Third World countries, by means of shadow economies, and through diasporic networks. This formation of specific mediascapes demonstrates the existence of parallel visions of modernity outside singular western conceptions of globalization and the rise of digital media. Nollywood’s socioeconomic conjuncture was, and is, strongly affected by the digital revolution.

Through contextually analyzing The Figurine—a post/neo-colonial film about the negotiations between the popular and the formal, the traditional and the modern—Nollywood reveals the diverse effects of digital disruption on cinematic form.

Nollywood, and its diverse African audiences, suggest that transnational audiences should not be understood as a single body of spectators. After colonial domination ended, there was a struggle to unite Nigeria and other African countries in a discourse of rebuilding and reimagining a new national identity. The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) program, represented in The Figurine, is an example of the Nigerian government’s aim to rebuild and foster nationalism. With Africa’s diverse cultures, ideological conceptions of African-ness may not be singularly pan-African; the discourse on African-ness, however, must include everyone. McCall outlines Nollywood’s role in this debate: “not that Nollywood provides a coherent philosophy or worldview that might be called ‘pan-African’, but that Nollywood is a primary catalyst in an emergent continent-wide popular discourse about what it means to be African.”3 Accordingly, Nigerian cinema acts as a catalyst for discourse in other emerging nations with growing diaspora and digital accessibility. This catalyst model of digital transnationalism illustrates how disruptive cinematic forms function to include people in debate, rather than representing them as a singular body of spectators. McCall explains representation in Nollywood as, “what positions Nollywood as a catalyst for pan-African discourse is precisely that it has no view, no agenda, no ideology; it is a sprawling marketcaméra stylo •

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place of representations.”4 Representation implies a captured identity, whilst cultural studies theory argues that identity is an ongoing process, a state of becoming. Through analyzing The Figurine, and what gave rise to its production, Nollywood’s discursive nature of unfixed representation reveals digital transnationalism.

Nigeria functions as an apt case study of digital disruption because the nation’s socio-economic conditions gave rise to Nigerian video films. These conditions reflect worldwide adoption of the technological developments of the digital revolution—namely, the Internet. Larkin argues that in the late 1970s and early 1980s three elements rapidly pushed Nigeria into the global network of pirated goods: the 1981 suspension of American film distribution in Nigeria by the Motion Picture Association of America, the growth of digital technologies related to film production and exhibition, and the oil-boom economy effect on media product consumption—Larkin labels “this revolution [as] the ‘shock of modernity’.”5 The exploitation of digital technology provided Nigerians with “a vast array of world media at a speed they could never imagine, hooking them up to the accelerated circuit of global media flows.”6 The piracy system and vast adoption of technology (first VCR, then DVD) caused a rapid increase in access and availability of media materials and tools. This surge in technology gave birth to Nigerian video film. The Nigerian video film is, typified by high production rates and an informal distribution network facilitated through a system of marketers and pirates. The name Nollywood—defining this phenomenon comfortably within western frames—was developed in response to Nigerian video films’ rapid growth of attention market share7 within audiences both domestically and abroad through the diaspora.

Nollywood’s movement towards formality, from the video boom era to “New Nollywood” with its mainstream releases, conveys sequential processes of the digital. During the video-boom era of the 1990s, the fierce production and piracy rates not only affected the aesthetics and form of Nollywood films, but also demonstrate the transnational implications of this informal type of cinema. The piracy system, with copies of copies, allowed disaporic viewers, and foreigners around the diaspora access to Nigerian video films.8 This process can be described as a “minor” transnationalism “from below.” 9 It is grounded in practices that are neither self-consciously resistant, nor political in character, but as Jedlowski highlights, this form of transnationalism “equally tends to be charged with oppositional potentialities.”10 This implicit resistance “is the expression of a survival strategy more than the manifestation of an explicit political choice.”11 Nevertheless, in being unconscious, the form of transnationalism present in Nigerian cinema reveals true street level

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negotiations of the people, hence defending Lobato’s rejection of formality’s epistemological authority within cinematic distribution.12 Internet piracy sites offering free streaming of Nigerian video films have long existed, but in western scholarship on digital cinema practices, Nollywood’s online presence is only first recognized with AfricaFilms, the first legal movie download site on the continent, launched in 2010.1314 After the 1990s video-boom era, there has been a trend toward more mainstream releases of Nigerian films since the mid-2000s. This progression in Nigerian cinema parallels, for example, the use of the internet across many countries; what is searched, viewed, clicked on, and shared is often without political consciousness; however, the patterns of employing this new and seemingly limitless technology reveal true changes in social dynamics that in turn influence the political implications of cinema.

Therefore, as institutions try to formalize, commodify, and monetize these dynamics, further negotiations between convention and modernity transpire— this stage of attempted formalization is where New Nollywood, the film The Figurine, and director Kunle Afolayan, are situated. 15 The critiques of Nollywood as a popular form highlight its wholly Nigerian negotiation with formality and informality. Most African auteurs, focused on rebuilding and reimagining Africa, believe that Nollywood’s commercial focus negatively results in apolitical melodramas. Haynes outlines this major critique as: “one of the most common charges against video producers and distributors is that they are motivated entirely by the desire for profit, with a consequent strong preference for sticking to known subjects and formulae, which does not include political matters.”16 McCall agrees with Haynes against these critiques, and highlights the neocolonialist relations of the “art-house” films—foreign-schooled auteurs, working with European vetted scripts under dominant European distribution networks. Nollywood presents a negotiation between the popular - arguably melodramatic and apolitical - and the formal. Nevertheless, the commercial drive for profit within an informal distribution network—using an informal filmmaking education that contrasts the celluloid auteurs—is a thoroughly Nigerian process, instigated by Nigerians, and rooted in Nigeria. Nollywood’s digital production and distribution methods reveal the agency that digital technology provides; Nollywood’s critiques, therefore, reveal popular art’s representative ability in the digital age.

The Figurine reflects this negotiation between the popular and the formal through its specific use of language and vernacular, which reveal the mobility of representation in popular arts. Dialogue is particularly important in Nigerian cinema; Ajibade explains, “unlike Western films that rely mainly on the visual narrative of the camera, the dialogue is far more important in caméra stylo •

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Nigerian videos. Therefore, it is paramount for an audience to listen and hear rather than to sit and see.”17 The Figurine codifies implicit methods of communication by mixing accents and languages—English, Yoruba, and Urhobo for example. The film depicts popular Nigerian vernacular as an informal mix of languages. Informal vernacular is shown through a contrast to formal language seen in the scenes of Femi and his investors in a “business” setting.

The film calls attention to languages when little Junior comes into his parents’ room in the morning and jumps on his father, Sola, endearingly. Junior then says “Good morning mum and dad,” to which his mother Mona responds, “is that how Nigerian men show respect?” After this the little boy proceeds to kneel down and say a greeting in Yoruba, and then after being asked “How do you say it in mummy’s language?” he says a greeting in Urhobo. Consequently, Mona teaches her son what it means to be a Nigerian man through language. The typical western viewer, who does not know when certain dialects are being spoken, is only allowed to access the information presented and created through spoken language through subtitles stating that Junior is speaking in Yoruba then Urhobo. This scene hints towards informal shadow communication, which parallels the informal shadow economies of Nigerian video film distribution—shadow communication is the distribution across “subterranean networks”18 of a message and meaning rather than a commodity. Lobato’s concept of shadow economies of film distribution apply to this shadow communication—“distribution plays a crucial role in film culture – it determines what films we see, and when and how we see them; and it also determines that films we do not see.”19 The same can be said for transnational communication and exchange. The western viewer is invited to this indigenous, closed use of language, but is not presented with the whole picture. The flexible meanings and connotations of vernacular allow for potential discourse and multiple representations.

Furthermore, this negotiation of formal indigenization in the popular sphere is also seen in The Figurine’s style and editing. The film employs western continuity codes with over the shoulder shots, and shot reverse shots during two person conversations. Long static takes, however, display a more Nigerian popular art influence. The repeated angle of Sola’s study, where the Araromire figurine stands, is mainly presented through long takes with static camera placement, and long/medium-long shot framing. During these long takes, and facilitated by the framing, the actors act out across a plane as if on stage. This style is characteristic of older Nollywood films made by the Yoruba travelling theatre artists who brought theatrical influences to video film. The film’s use of language and shooting styles, therefore, display how “modern popular arts have the capacity to transcend geographical, ethnic, and even

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national boundaries. Located in the cities the centres both of technological change and of the rapidly growing twentieth century transport networks, they are endowed with an unprecedented mobility.”20 The film presents mobility to change languages, meanings, and levels of formality through style, which is analogous to the potential for mobility that digital disruption presents.

The Figurine uses mysticism and the upper class to display the political nature of popular arts. Barber suggests that syncretism is an essential feature of the popular arts. Hence, The Figurine is an amalgamation of the colonisation, corruption, poverty, underdevelopment, and industrialisation before it.

After the core cast is back in Lagos “seven years later,” development is highlighted through sweeping shots of the industrial landscape with signal towers, traffic jammed bridges, and planes flying overhead. These formal elements convey the emerging nature of a once oppressed nation. During the cocktail party sequence, shortly after returning to the film’s present, the Nigerian upper classes are glamourized. They are glamourized through melodramatic conversations, love “set ups,” and a bourgeois atmosphere created by the mise-en-scene. This glamorization inadvertently hints towards the politically problematic construction of this Nigerian “elite.” Haynes explanation displays how this cocktail party scene is political: Because Nigerian melodramas usually practice the inflation and glamorization of lifestyle normal in commercial cinema and soap operas the world over, and because the number of Nigerians who actually live in such a manner is tiny and is in effect limited to those with close relations to the patrimonial state, many Nigerian films have wandered into the political realm even if no political implications were intended.21 This quote conveys that by using this upper class setting, the film seemingly comments on the disillusionment and resentment of the tiny, so-called elite in Africa. This awareness, on-going acceptance, and complicit ignorance, is also seen when Sola says to his wife, “Why would hooking up with Linda be good for Femi when he’s still in love with you?” The film is aware of the ridiculousness of the elites. Melodrama does not display ordinary people in Nigeria; mysticism in The Figurine, therefore, is not only a narrative tool but also an allegory for the imagined prevalence of the spotlighted African elite22 that is in fact minute and unrepresentative.

In addition, the film uses language, coupled with style, to politically reveal the colonial past in Nigeria’s cinema. Nigerian creative spirit is “realised through the historical process of interaction with other cultures,”23 one of these interactions being with Britain while under colonial rule. In this cocktail party scene, Femi, after having returned from working overseas in the West, is dressed sharply in a western suit. Femi talks to his sister in their caméra stylo •

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native tribal tongue, but adopts a posh British accent when speaking with Linda. The actors use this posh voice when betraying a “civilized” event, revealing learnt British mannerisms. Linda and Mona’s use of the term “the gist” is another example of vernacular from indigenised English. Mixing English and African dialects in conversation can be viewed positively; “in the ‘postcolonial’ theory being developed principally in the West, cultural hybridity and transnational networks are celebrated as positive values.”24 In retrospect, however, Femi’s native tongue conversation with his sister may have been to hide his evil plan to get Mona—Femi is revealed as deceptively evil only after returning from the West. The text, therefore, is inherently political commenting on the postcolonial and neo-colonial state of Nigeria. Haynes explains that Nigeria’s history supports this politicization because, “much of the population has been exposed to at least some Western-style education, it is impossible to draw any clear line between this form of consciousness and popular culture.”25 The role of the professor and academia in facilitating the narrative, support the significance of education outlined by Haynes. The Figurine reveals that post/neo-colonial influences run through all Nigerian and African film, even when seemingly “popular” and apolitical.

Negotiating tradition and modernity is a key theme in Nollywood films; it is a process of negotiating cultural identity in relation to the rest of world.

Cultural identity is a by-product of the imagined community. As Appadurai explains, this form of imagination is work, and a “negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.”26 The film presents multiple elements of this negotiation; for example, during the NYSC orientation, the spectator is shown the hidden mystical deity Araromire, as well as a scene where the youth dance and sing traditional songs around a fire. These tribal traditions contrast with the state enforced NYSC program. Furthermore, photography inspired freeze frames after the wedding, Femi’s involvement in finance and equity, and the instruction “spider man would not be scared” to guide Junior, all show modernity in relation to western conscripted ideas of modernity. The plot reveals Nigerian anxieties towards tradition and modernity—the power of the goddess Araromire and her figurine represent the fear of disregarding, or not believing in tradition.

Jedlowski explains why this plot construction correlates to the film’s success: “the success of the Nigerian video phenomenon has in fact been based on its capacity to interpret the dreams, fears, and expectations of is local popular audience.”27 This fear is constructed through dark lighting, suspenseful music, and small, unexplained, occult occurrences throughout the film. The anxiety of this tradition, and the folklore of Araromire, haunts the film as somewhat

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of a subplot until the end. Anxiety is a broad theme within Nigerian films; Haynes confirms that, “conditions in Nigeria are such that practically every dimension of life, from the spiritual to the domestic, is saturated with anxiety, and this anxiety underlies and animates nearly the entire thematic and generic gamut of the videos.”28 The end of the film deconstructs this anxiety by disregarding tradition; Femi’s discloses that he, as part of a plot to get Mona, orchestrated all of the strange occurrences. The distinct intertitle at the end, however, asks the question “what do you believe?” suggesting that even in the face of logical explanation there is still anxiety. This anxiety displays Nigeria’s uncertain cultural position between tradition and modernity.

The film implies that Nollywood does not only negotiate tradition and modernity in comparison to the west, but also globally. The issues raised in the film are not only pan-African, but also pan-colonial, exemplified by Nollywood’s popularity in the Caribbean. Larkin discusses the popularity of Indian films in the Nigeria, especially in amongst the Northern Nigeria Islamic Hausa people who produced a separate category of Nigerian video films in the 1990s.29 Larkin explains that “the widespread popularity of Indian films in Nigeria necessitates a revision of conceptions of global cultural flows that privilege the centrality of the West and refuse to recognise the common historical process of centres and peripheries engaged in contemporary cultural production.”30 Here Larkin generates the idea of parallel modernities – relative representation found in non-western exchanges and influences. Scenes and shots are repeated and paralleled throughout The Figurine; each parallel allows the viewer to learn more about the previous scene or image. The film parallels an un-colonised state with the current neo-colonialist state when the actress that plays Mona in seen in the re-enactment of the tribal Araromire village in the past. In addition, the film parallels native mannerisms with that of the returned diaspora. When Femi and Linda are at dinner, similar shots edited back to back, show Linda eating with her hands, and Femi using a knife and fork. Having experienced different ideas of modernity—Femi having been away in the west—the two characters still parallel each other with a rooted experience of tradition. The digital revolution has allowed for networks to become decentralised from the west; the film explores concepts of development that speak to other emerging countries that have parallel negotiations between tradition and modernity.

Digital technology has allowed parallel nations and diasporas to connect with imagined communities and sustain networks among different groups of people. In the film the pervasiveness of community relationships is illustrated through a narrative that relies upon all the main characters knowing each oth-

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er without explication to the audience. Furthermore, there is no single main character; instead, there is ensemble cast, which is typical of Nigerian video films. The original construction of the video film industry was, and is still, relationship based, explained as a “generalized system of reciprocal favours.”31 Nollywood’s informality, taking full advantage of the efficiencies of street-level trade,32 displays digital transnational networks.

The final sequence of the film summarizes the cyclical nature of the negotiations outlined above. The cyclical narrative, the figurine going away and coming back again, is brought full circle through a return to the setting at the beginning of the film. Sola and Femi go back to the beginning, into the wilderness, to find the hut they visited seven years ago. This return is emphasised by a long take where the camera circles Femi, Sola, and three men who live in the forest, as they get directions. This return is also demonstrative of Femi’s character construction having been away and come back as a different person.

Femi has been part of the diaspora and now manipulates tradition (folklore and patriarchy) for his own agenda—Femi says his sister “will do what she is told because she is” his sister. Even when explaining his plan to Linda at the end, he makes circular gestures with his hand to illustrate the Araromire statue continually coming back. This circulation parallels the Nigerian and digital mediascape. Jedlowski explains how pirated digital media forms eventually reach their audience through a seemingly random chain of events in which, “each stage of the circulation process, in fact, implies a partial reinvention or rebranding of the product, cutting the connection with its original producer.”33 The film establishes copying and rebranding of transnationalism as a reaction to digital power.

The above political discontinuities, advertently and inadvertently raised in The Figurine, display Nigerian specificity that is still widely applicable.

This supports not essentializing the individuality of nations, especially within the digital era. The digital construction of Nollywood’s industry parallels its popular narrative and aesthetic conventions. Nollywood reveals the problematic, and often critiqued, nature of popular art forms, while also revealing the importance of on going cultural discourse, especially in this digitally mediated globalization. Nollywood, as an example of digital disruption, makes a case against cultural imperialism across current and future digital transnational networks—mediascapes of imagined diasporic communities in fact augment nascence, countering western cultural imperialism. Appadurai states that cultural flows are multidirectional and un-centralized; this Nigerian case study challenges comprehensions of western centred globalization, and further, Hollywood’s global cinematic dominance. The Figurine is an example of New Nollywood with more mainstream distribution. This New Nollywood

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text presents negotiations—popular and formal, traditional and modern— that indicate disruptive popular arts’ potential for political commentary.

Nollywood was formed after the rapid adoption of digital technology, causing a cinematic disruption in reaction to the “shock of modernity.” The Figurine, and the cinematic phenomenon it belongs to, convey that globalization, and further digitization, must be understood separately as the digital revolution extends across the world.

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ENDNOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Alessandro Jedlowski, “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry,” in Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 37.

Jonathan Haynes, “New Nollywood”: Kunle Afolayan,” Black Camera 5, no. 2 (2014).

John C. McCall, “The Pan-Africanism We Have: Nollywood’s Invention of Africa,” Film International 5, no. 4 (2007): 94.

Ibid, 96.

Brian Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 67, no. 3 (1997): 408.

Brian Larkin, “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy,” Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 297.

Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006).

Babson Ajibade, “Nigerian Videos and Their Imagined Western Audiences: The Limits of Nollywood’s Transnationality,” in Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 264-86.

Moradewum Adejunmobi, “Nigerian Video Film as Minor Transnational Practice,” Postcolonial Text 3, no. 2 (2007).

Alessandro Jedlowski, “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry,” in Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 34.

Ibid Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave Macmillan BFI, 2012), 5, 55.

Stuart Cunningham and Jon Silver, Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 37.

Dina Iordanova, “Digital Disruption: Technological Innovation and Global Film Cirulation,” Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line, ed. Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham (St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 197-203.

Jonathan Haynes, “New Nollywood”: Kunle Afolayan,” Black Camera 5, no. 2 (2014).

Jonathan Haynes, “Political Critique in Nigerian Video Films,” African Affairs 105, no. 421 (2006): 513.

Babson Ajibade, “Nigerian Videos and Their Imagined Western Audiences: The Limits of Nollywood’s Transnationality,” in Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 272.

Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave Macmillan BFI, 2012), 1.

Ibid, 2.

Karin Barber, “Popular Arts in Africa,” African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (1987): 15.

Jonathan Haynes, “Political Critique in Nigerian Video Films,” African Affairs 105, no. 421 (2006): 522.

Karin Barber, “Popular Arts in Africa,” African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (1987): 3.

Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, “Evolving Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films,” in Nigerian Video Films, ed. Jonathan Haynes (Jos: Nigerian Film, 1997), 35.

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24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

Ibid.

Jonathan Haynes, “Political Critique in Nigerian Video Films,” African Affairs 105, no. 421 (2006): 517.

Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), 31.

Alessandro Jedlowski, “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry,” in Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 40.

Jonathan Haynes, “Political Critique in Nigerian Video Films,” African Affairs 105, no. 421 (2006): 514.

Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, “Evolving Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films,” in Nigerian Video Films, ed. Jonathan Haynes (Jos: Nigerian Film, 1997), 31.

Brian Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 67, no. 3 (1997): 403 Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome, “Evolving Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films,” in Nigerian Video Films, ed. Jonathan Haynes (Jos: Nigerian Film, 1997), 25.

Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave Macmillan BFI, 2012), 5.

Alessandro Jedlowski, “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Nigerian Video Film Industry,” in Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry, ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), 33.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adejunmobi, Moradewum. “Nigerian Video Film as Minor Transnational Practice.” Postcolonial Text 3, no. 2 (2007). Web. Ajibade, Babson. “Nigerian Videos and Their Imagined Western Audiences: The Limits of Nollywood’s Transnationality.” Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film In dustry. Ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013.

264-86. Print.

Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. 27-47. Print.

Barber, Karin. “Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (1987): 1-78. African Studies Association. Web. Cunningham, Stuart, and Jon Silver. Introduction. Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 1-12. Print.

The Figurine: Araromire. Directed by Kunle Afolayan. Lagos, Nigeria: Golden Effects Pictures. 2007.

DVD. Haynes, Jonathan. ““New Nollywood”: Kunle Afolayan.” Black Camera 5, no. 2 (2014): 53-73. Indiana University Press. Web. Haynes, Jonathan. “Political Critique in Nigerian Video Films.” African Affairs 105, no .421 (2006): 511-33. Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. Web. Haynes, Jonathan, and Onookome Okome. “Evolving Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films.” Nigerian Video Films. Ed. Jonathan Haynes. Jos: Nigerian Film, 1997. 21-44. Print.

Iordanova, Dina. “Digital Disruption: Technological Innovation and Global Film Cirulation.” Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line. Ed. Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. 1-33, 189-208. Print.

Jedlowski, Alessandro. “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of Transnationalization in the Ni gerian Video Film Industry.” Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Ed. Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013. 25-45. Print.

Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print.

Larkin, Brian. “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy.”

Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 289-314. Duke University Press. Web. Larkin, Brian. “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities.”

Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 67, no. 3 (1997): 406-40. Edinburgh Universi ty Press. Web. Lobato, Ramon. Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. London: Palgrave Macmillan BFI, 2012. Print.

McCall, John C. “The Pan-Africanism We Have: Nollywood’s Invention of Africa.” Film International 5, no. 4 (2007): 92-97. Web.

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WHEN MUSIC ASKED IMAGE TO

DANCE

JULIA BENEY

is a fourth year student at the University of Toronto with a Specialist in Cinema Studies, and a Minor in English. Julia’s primary interest include: genres (specifically science-fiction), animation, and film music. In addition to an academic life dedicated to the study of cinema, Julia also makes short films, with the intention of becoming a director.

John Williams is a Hollywood composer who wrote some of the most unforgettable film scores, including Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978) – scores that are arguably better, or more memorable, than the films themselves. John Williams is known for his romantic, melodic music, with themes and motifs that are iconic and have become part of contemporary popular culture. Emilio Audissino, in his book John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style, argues that Williams is a “neo-classical” composer, meaning, Williams’ music has the same style, functions, and approach as the classical Hollywood composers of the studio era.1 This categorization is problematic because it reduces Williams to his simplest traits and ignores the elements of Williams’ music that greatly differ from studio era scores. One such element is Williams’ partnership with Steven Spielberg, a partnership that not only shapes both artists’ work, but one that complicates how – if at all – Williams can be categorized as a neo-classical composer. This paper will analyze Williams’ scores within the films of Steven Spielberg, analyzing Williams’ approach and style, and the function of his music within Spielberg’s films. This essay will also identify how this partnership raises Williams’ music up from a subordinate position to the filmic image. Thus, this paper will address, and problematize, Williams as a neo-classical composer in order to better understand how composers like Williams – who maintain a strong partnership with a director – can be categorized, and attempt to illustrate a new “model” in which director and composer relationships can be understood.

• The Classical Score In order to understand Williams’ music in relation to the music of the classical studio era, it is crucial to first understand what embodies a classical Hollywood score. To clarify, when I use the term “classical” I refer not to the classical era of music (Mozart and Beethoven, for instance) but to the classical era of film, also known as the studio era, roughly 1920 – 1960. In the classical studio era, music is subordinate to the image, serving only to support the narrative. As such, music is just one element aiding in the transmission of narrative information.2 The classical score is not meant to stand out on its own, but rather to assist in guiding the spectator through the film in a manner that produces the appropriate responses, at particular times, within the narrative. Thus, the classical score can be identified through specific traits, which, according to Kathryn Kalinak, are: unified, romantic, and symphonic, including the frequent use of the leitmotiv,3 which I will return to later.

Based on the provided rough description of the classical studio era score, it is evident that the principles of composing and editing music for film have caméra stylo •

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not changed entirely. John Williams’ music can, arguably, be described as based in the traditions of the classical score: his music is symphonic, often romantic, aids the narrative by triggering specific emotions at specific times, and swells with spectacle or action. Nevertheless, John Williams’ music is not subordinate to the narrative – it is the narrative’s partner. That being said, the films of Williams and Spielberg still strive toward intelligibility, and thus, dialogue is privileged, but Williams’ scores rarely go unnoticed. As a matter of fact, Williams steps around Claudia Gorbman’s “invisibility” and “inaudibility,”4 so the spectator is almost always aware of his music, and if not, the spectator can feel the pull of his music. Williams’ scores do not trail behind the narrative, they carry the narrative and it is this effect of Williams’ scores that makes Spielberg’s films memorable, and makes Williams and Spielberg’s partnership unique.

• Musical Partners In order to better understand the success of Williams and Spielberg’s partnership, it is first important to understand Spielberg’s relationship to music and Williams’ attitude toward directors. Williams has made 25 films with Steven Spielberg, from The Sugarland Express in 1974, to Lincoln in 2012,5 all of which embody an important relationship between music and image. According to Williams, “the best directors, for me, are people who are also musical, I think it’s part of the art of – of what they do.”6 Interestingly, Spielberg comes from a fairly musical background – his mother used to play the piano with, and for, Spielberg throughout his youth.7 Additionally, Spielberg has been credited saying: “If I weren’t a filmmaker I’d probably be in music. I’d play piano or I’d compose.”8 Thus, Williams’ appreciation for musical directors is embodied in Steven Spielberg, who thinks musically – an aspect that comes out in his films and affects the manner in which Williams approaches his films.

• The Williams Approach According to John Williams, Spielberg “has a wonderful sense of rhythm in his films,” and as a result, when Williams composes for Spielberg he is “trying to find out just exactly how fast is it or how slow is it, because the film is telling [Williams] what the tempo is.”9 Interestingly, Williams goes on to note that Spielberg’s films have “phrases” – meaning, certain scenes or sequences of Spielberg’s films have a particular feel and rhythm – to which Spielberg replies, “that’s because I make my pictures with Johnny in mind.”10 Consequently, an interesting dynamic is created since Williams is not just responding to the films provided to him – like a classical studio era composer –

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but Spielberg is actually tailoring his films for the music. This back and forth relationship breaks away from the classical model as Williams’ music, rather than being subordinate to Spielberg’s work, is more on an equal plane – they are partners.

In their process, Williams and Spielberg discuss the thematic material and, once that is decided, begin to look at the rhythm of the film – whether it’s speeding up or slowing down, or swelling into something larger.11 Furthermore, the discussions generally revolve around musical accents on certain cuts, or the lack of accents on cuts, which allows Williams to prepare for a significant musical accent, or piece, later on.12 The effects of this particular approach can be seen in E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982) when Elliot takes E.T. into the woods on Halloween night to attempt to phone (E.T.’s) home.

Williams refrains from placing a musical accent on the change of scenery from the sunset bathed street to the dim light of the forest; instead, he uses long musical phrases to tie the two scenes together. These musical phrases resume – steadily increasing in intensity – as Elliot bikes through the woods, continuing to refrain from accenting action in the image, most noticeable when Elliot stops and E.T. makes his bike jerk forward, an action which has no musical accent. Williams refrains from the use of accents so that when E.T. drives Elliot’s bike off the cliff, the long phrases of the music, which has been leading up to this point, swells into a significant musical moment.

Williams cues the next big swell when Elliot laughs in excitement in the air, which then goes into a segment of the main theme of the film, with the final accent holding off until Elliot lands and falls, which is mimicked by the music. Based on the short analysis of cueing in this scene, it can be said that Williams scores this flight in a very classical manner, his music cued by narrative moments, supporting the action of the scene and compensating for the visual spectacle.

• The Style of Williams Whether or not John Williams can be considered a neo-classical composer is increasingly debatable when looking at his style. According to Audissino, Williams’ use of a symphony orchestra, specifically one that is larger than that used in the studio era, is another trait that makes Williams neo-classical.13 Although this is accurate, as many classical era composers used symphony orchestras,14 it is the manner in which Williams utilizes this symphonic orchestra that complicates the categorization. Williams will often use very romantic music and make it larger than life, to the point where, like in E.T., the music almost stands on equal grounds with the image, if it does not surpass the image. This grandiosity and musical embodiment of wonder is illustrated in caméra stylo •

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Jurassic Park (1993) when Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm first see a brachiosaurus at the park. The music starts out low and ebbing, drawing on the terror of the film’s narrative, as Allan looks out the car window at something unknown, creating suspense. Then, once the music begins to lead into a more melodic phrase, the film follows with the image (and call) of the brachiosaurus. The music at this point is romantic and grand, enhancing the sense of wonder created from the sight of a live dinosaur. Williams adds accents into the score, building up to the main section of the phrase when the brachiosaurus stands, timed so that the height of the phrase cues the brachiosaurus’ landing. Then, the film and music work together to create a sense of wonder – a grand musical moment – when Hammond says “Welcome to Jurassic Park”15 and the music is brought up to full volume, enhancing the spectacle and drawing the spectator into the film. Thus, the music is larger than life, it is grand, romantic, and melodic – a musical metaphor for these wondrous creatures – but the music does not hide behind the image, in fact it appears, in this scene, to lead the image, to pull the narrative out of suspense and into a realm of wonder – the music takes the spectacle of the image, and the narrative, one step further.

Moreover, Williams uses specific orchestral techniques in his scores to create certain effects within a film and these techniques can be traced back to the classical model. One such technique is the pandiatonicism, which frees chords from fixed functions on the diatonic scale, enabling instant key changes, unexpected inflections, and frequent changes within a musical phrase.16 This technique is used in Jurassic Park, especially in the scene described above, as the music goes from a low ebbing and then quickly jumps into a melodic phrase that increases in intensity until it is at full volume with a sense of epic grandeur, before ducking back down again to a more staccato, rhythmic, musical phrase as the group make their way to the Visitor’s Center. Audissino describes this technique as a “powerful attention catcher” or a “sudden color change” that can stress “noteworthy twists in the narrative or events in the visuals.”17 Additionally, Williams’ music is just as much a storyteller as Spielberg’s images – the two work together to present a particular story in a particular way, as seen in a Williams’ technique Audissino calls “gradual disclosure of the main theme.”18 This “gradual disclosure” occurs when a theme develops over the course of a film, coming into its entirety only at a climax in the narrative, or at a point where its presence is strategic.19 This is effectively employed in E.T., where the music develops from something rather ominous in the beginning, to something familial by the end of the film.20 The film begins with the first seven notes of the main theme repeated and varied over the course of the opening musical track. When Elliot leads E.T. up stairs,

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the same seven notes appear, but they morph into something less ominous and more mystical. The music transforms even more as Elliot befriends E.T., slowly developing into the final theme. The theme is almost at its complete stage when Elliot and E.T. go for their first bike ride on Halloween – the first time in which the various melodies are weaved together into a grand melody. However, the theme does not come into its entirety until the final scene – beginning when Elliot and the boys escape with E.T., to when E.T. says goodbye and goes home. According to Williams, this technique allows the music to develop with the film, so when it appears in its entirety, the theme is “vaguely familiar”, something “you feel comfortable with.”21 Aside form a grand narrative theme, Williams also frequently uses leitmotivs.22 • The Leitmotiv Leitmotivs are common across Williams’ work and are a trait of classical studio era scoring. Notably, a theme, a motif and a leitmotiv are not the same thing (to an extent). A theme is a musical element that is repeated and varied throughout the course of a film and becomes associated with narrative aspects or meanings – not all to the same level of intensity or effect.23 A motif, on the other hand, is a repeated musical element that has a more direct link to a character, locale, or situation.24 Thus, the E.T. theme is a theme because it is repeated and varied throughout the film without being directly tied to a specific character – they are associated with feelings and moments. Relatively speaking, the theme for Indiana Jones (1981) is actually a motif, as the “theme” is directly associated with the character Indiana Jones. Likewise, in Catch Me If You Can (2002) the main protagonist – Frank – is directly associated with a specific piece of music – his motif. The leitmotiv stems from the motif, as it is a repeated musical element directly associated with a character, but it also develops narratively.25 For instance, in Catch Me If You Can Frank’s motif surfaces whenever he gets a new idea, a new scheme, and the music triggers a new escapade26 – it moves and transforms with him throughout the film. Thus, Frank’s motif is a leitmotiv because not only does it specifically relate to Frank’s character, but the motif functions as part of the narrative and character development.

Even though the use of the leitmotiv further connects Williams to the classical studio era model, Williams pushes the boundaries of the leitmotiv by enabling it to create characters. For instance, the shark in Jaws (1975) is signified by a few notes, which is a leitmotiv, but this leitmotiv stands in for the shark for a majority of the film – the leitmotiv becomes the character, changing pace and tone as the shark’s character develops. Williams also side steps the classical model in The Adventures of Tintin (2011) as he uses music, caméra stylo •

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specifically the leitmotiv, to meld the past and the present, using one character’s leitmotiv to plant a suggestion in another characters head. For instance, in Tintin in moments when Haddock is recalling the past, or embodying the energy of his ancestor Sir Francis, Sir Francis’ leitmotiv is heard while Haddock’s image is presented, drawing a connection across time and between the characters’ energies and motives. Thus, Williams uses the leitmotiv to not just support what is shown in the image, and signal a character’s presence, but he uses the leitmotiv to stand in for a character – to become a character – or to create a history and deep connection between characters that cannot be shown visually.

• Not So Classical Williams’ scores can vary from the classical model in different ways, from the rather experimental score of Close Encounters (1977), to the minimal use of a score in Saving Private Ryan (1998), to the use of jazz in Catch Me If You Can and Tintin. Close Encounters’ score is a combination, or juxtaposition, of romantic music and chaotic, or non-tonal, music.27 For instance, in the scene in which the little boy is abducted, the music is not melodic, but harsh and disconnected, echoing the terror and chaos of the scene, while the final scene of the film is romantic and melodic, emulating the beauty and wonder of the aliens. Although the use of specific techniques to support specific scenes is common in the classical score, Williams’ experimental use of two drastically different modes of symphonic music, within a single film, complicates Williams as a neo-classical composer. On the other hand, in Saving Private Ryan, Williams refrains from using music in most of the film, which is not a common trait of his work. Whereas classical scores have music follow through the entirety – or almost the entirety – of a film, but remain fairly unnoticed, the minimal use of a score in Saving Private Ryan draws attention to when the score is present – emotional, quiet, intimate moments. Thus, Saving Private Ryan is not classical because its literal inaudibility is visible, so to speak, and its musical audibility is more effective and noticeable.

Further, Williams comments that throughout his partnership with Spielberg they have traversed various styles of films and music, and Spielberg, rather than classifying Williams as a composer for a specific type of film, gives Williams a new opportunity or challenge to explore different styles of music.28 For instance, in Catch Me If You Can, Williams utilizes a style different from any of his other films with Spielberg, one that is in contrast to the traditional classical film score – jazz. According to Williams, since the film takes place in the 60s, he uses jazz to encapsulate “a kind of 60s swagger.”29

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Similarly, with Tintin, Williams and Spielberg went with a similar approach – using a 1920s, early 30s, European styled jazz in its animated opening credits sequence.30 The jazz music, as Williams describes, choreographs Tintin’s movements, creating – like with Catch Me If You Can – a parallel use of music and images.31 • Taking The Forefront In the classical studio era model, music is subservient to the narrative and the image. If music comes to the forefront, it is only ever to compensate for spectacle or maintain continuity in action sequences. However, Spielberg is credited saying: “Most of John’s scores are characters in films.”32 Williams’ music is so iconic it can stand on its own, separate from the image and narrative, to the point where when it is placed within the narrative, it still makes its presence known. Williams and Spielberg are, thus, more like two artists putting their forces together on equal grounds. As seen in Williams’ approach and style, and how he works with Spielberg rather than for Spielberg, music in the partnership is in a constant state of flux – the image and music work with each other to weave together a engaging story. Williams states, “I think there’s something about Steven’s movies that require, almost, that the music be a partner in the narrative, and that it either follows the story, or leads the story, or describes the story – probably all three functions, you know, as we go through the film.”33 This is seen the most clearly in E.T. and Tintin, both of which provide excellent examples of Spielberg tailoring his film to Williams’ music.

Music plays a predominant role in the final chase scene of E.T., which is a lengthy sequence beginning with the boys’ initial escape, and ending with E.T.’s ship flying away. The track in question – “Escape/Chase/Saying Goodbye” – is a beautiful, and elaborate, piece of music and another example of pandiatonicism as it shifts in tone and changes frequently with the image – or more accurately, the image shifts, and changes pace and rhythm with the music. Initially, Williams attempted to orchestrate this fifteen minute piece of music to the image, “all of it planned to catch all of these sync points, [and] these points of accent”, such as when the bicycles start to fly, the emotional section when they say goodbye to E.T., and the fanfare for the ship’s ascension, and Williams was, in his words “having a very difficult time with the orchestra.”34 According to Williams, they would get the first five sync points, miss the next few, and vice versa.35 Thus, Spielberg who, as said before, attends most recording sessions, went up to the podium and took the image off the screen, telling Williams to “just play the music with the orchestra

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with the natural phrasing, the way it ebbs and flows in its own way” and then when Williams got the performance with the most “lift” Spielberg “laid the music track against the film and made the editorial adjustments to conform to the music.”36 This moment in movie music history would never have happened in the classical model, nor would it be something a neo-classical composer would do because the image lets the music take precedence. This instance privileges music over the film text – the music here leads the image, it directs where the sync points will be, and cues the image to certain moments of emotional weight or lift. Rightly so, Williams later states that “part of the reason the end of the film has such a kind of operatic sense of completion, a real emotional satisfaction […] may be partly the result of this wedding of the musical accents with Steven’s film editing.”37 The music in the final scene is constant and fluid, a product of Williams’ ability to compose without the hand of the image invading his rhythm. Correspondingly, the editing of the film flows with the music, each cue hitting its mark – the image rises and falls with the music. The ending of E.T. proves that allowing music to lead the image does not take the viewer out of the film, but raises the grandeur and emotional weight of the film – it makes the scene memorable.

Similarly, Tintin breaks classical studio era principles by allowing the music to lead the image. Tintin is an interesting case for Spielberg and Williams as it is animation, something neither artist has done before, besides the opening of Catch Me If You Can. What makes Tintin more intriguing, however, is that Williams began scoring the film before it was even completed.38 William states: “what I actually hoped to try to do was – in some of the actions sequences – to create, maybe, what is an old Disney technique: of doing the music first and then have the animators animate to the silhouette of what the music is doing.”39 Williams scored some of the pirate music and the Thomson/Thompson music, among others, “before [he] had anything more than a few little sketches.”40 With the pirate battle scenes, for instance, the music flows constantly and fluidly, the action in the image perfectly timed to certain musical cues – such as when Sir Francis cuts his boat loose of Red Ragan’s boat, and when Red Ragan first appears; likewise, when Red Ragan and Sir Francis fight, their movements are timed to the inflections within the music. Thus, like in E.T., the musical arrangement not only guides the viewer through the narrative, it guides the narrative itself – the music leads and the image follows.

• Dance Partners Williams is a skillful composer, weaving scores that are not only extreme-

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ly memorable, but also make Spielberg’s movies what they are – Spielberg isn’t Spielberg without Williams. While Williams uses a symphonic orchestra, creating music that is romantic, melodic, and littered with various themes, motifs and leitmotivs, it would be reductive to call Williams neo-classical. The use of the term neo-classical in relation to Williams’ work implies that Williams is, in a manner of speaking, the same as a classical composer in terms of style, approach, and how his music functions in the films he scores. However, as the previous sections have shown, Williams’ partnership with Spielberg problematizes this categorization. There is no denying that Williams’ scores have elements of classical film scores, in as much as Spielberg’s films have elements of classical Hollywood films. What makes Williams distinct is that his music is not subordinate to the films. Though music does at times take a step back and push the story from behind, Williams’ music often runs beside Spielberg’s visual imagery, and sometimes ahead.

Accordingly, Williams and Spielberg work in a partnership where music is important – not something tacked on at the end for emotional depth – a crucial point of distinction for the pair. Further, Williams’ music can stand out from the image, as a spectacle in itself, and can vary in style from the traditional symphonic orchestra, to jazz, to a rather experimental score (Close Encounters). His music makes characters memorable, and can become a character in itself. Williams’ music can also lead the film, as in E.T.’s final scene and Tintin. This brief summary proves that Williams cannot simply be labeled as neo-classical, when his music is a prominent element in the creation of these narratives – an aspect that stems directly from his partnership with Spielberg. As a musical director, Spielberg gives Williams more freedom with his scores and how they work within his films than normally was given to a classical studio era composer. Thus, a new categorization is required, one that does not limit Williams as a composer to the classical model, nor one that situates him in the contemporary – largely synthesized – model. Thus, I propose a partnership model, one that categorizes a composer based on their relationship to their director. This “model” is limited to director-composer pairings, but this limitation enables the pair to be seen as a whole rather than separate entities – the music and image work together, rather than music being subordinate to the image. In order to properly flesh out this proposed model, a critical analysis of other director-composer pairings is required. For the purposes of this paper, the partnership model allows Williams’ work to be seen, not as “neo-classical”, but as a fluid movement between styles and approaches, where image and music don’t march sequentially, but weave together in a sort of dance. caméra stylo •

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ENDNOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 5,6.

Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 30.

Ibid, 79.

Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1987), 73.

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 229232.

PICTURESHO, “Steven Spielberg & John Williams Talk Music” (Recorded October 02 2013: YouTube), Web. Sue Vander Hook, Steven Spielberg: Groundbreaking Director. (Minnesota: ABDO Publishing, 2010), 15.

Ibid.

PICTURESHO, “Steven Spielberg & John Williams Talk Music” (Recorded October 02 2013: YouTube), Web. Ibid.

John Williams, “The Music of E.T.: A Discussion with John Williams.” E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, DVD, directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment 2012).

Ibid.

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 127.

Ibid.

Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, 1993). Film.

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 123.

Ibid.

Ibid, 126.

Ibid.

John Williams, “Scoring: Catch Me If You Can.” Catch Me If You Can, DVD, directed by Steven Spielberg (Glendale, CA: Dreamworks SKG 2012).

Ibid.

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 124.

Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1987), 17, 27.

Ibid.

Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 34.

John Williams, “Scoring: Catch Me If You Can.” Catch Me If You Can, DVD, directed by Steven Spielberg(Glendale, CA: Dreamworks SKG 2012).

John Williams & Steven Spielberg, “The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Directed by Steven Spielberg (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures Corporation 2007). DVD John Williams, “Scoring: Catch Me If You Can.” Catch Me If You Can, DVD, directed by Steven Spielberg (Glendale, CA: Dreamworks SKG 2012).

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

Ibid.

John Williams, “Tintin: The Score.” The Adventures Of Tintin, DVD, directed by Steven Spielberg (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures and Amblin Entertainment 2012).

Ibid.

John Williams & Steven Spielberg, “The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind, DVD, directed by Steven Spieberg (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures Corporation 2007).

Ibid.

John Williams, “The Music of E.T.: A Discussion with John Williams.” E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, DVD, directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment 2012).

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

John Williams, “Tintin: The Score.” The Adventures Of Tintin, DVD, directed by Steven Spielberg (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures and Amblin Entertainment 2012).

Ibid.

Ibid.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY The Adventures of Tintin. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Culver City, CA; Columbia Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, 2011. Film.

Audissino, Emilio. John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

Catch Me If You Can. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Glendale, CA: Dreamworks SKG, 2002. Film.

Close Encounters. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1977. Film.

E.T: The Extra Terrestrial. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, 1982. Film.

Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Hollywood, CA: Para mount Pictures and Lucasfilm, 1981. Film.

Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal City, CA: Zanuck/Brown Productions and Universal Pictures, 1975. Film.

Jurassic Park. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures and Amblin Enter tainment, 1993. Film.

Kalinak, Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

PICTURESHO. “Steven Spielberg & John Williams Talk Music” Recorded October 02 2013. YouTube October 02 2013. Web. The Poseidon Adventure. Directed by Ronald Neame. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1972. Film.

Saving Private Ryan. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Composer. Glendale, CA: DreamWorks SKG, Para mount Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, 1998. Film.

Scheurer, Timothy E. “John Williams and Film Music since 1971.” Popular Music and Society. no. 1 (1997): 59-72.

Star Wars. Directed by George Lucas. Hollywood, CA: Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century Fox Film Cor poration, 1977. Film.

Superman. Directed by Richard Donner. San Francisco, CA: Dovemead Films, 1978. Film.

The Towering Inferno. Directed by John Guillermin. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1974. Film.

Vander Hook, Sue. Steven Spielberg: Groundbreaking Director. Minnesota: ABDO Publishing, 2010.

Willams, John. “Escape/Chase/Saying Goodbye.” E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial: Music from the Original Soundtrack. MCA 2002. compact disc.

Willams, John. “The Raiders March (a.k.a. The Indiana Jones Theme).” Raiders of the Lost Ark Soundtrack. PolyGram 1981. compact disc.

Willams, John. “Welcome to Jurassic Park.” Jurassic Park: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. MCA 1993. compact disc.

Willams, John, & Spielberg , Steven. “The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Columbia Pictures Corporation 2007. DVD. Willams, John, & Spielberg , Steven. “Music of Indiana Jones.” Indina Jones: The Complete Adventures. Paramount Pictures and Lucasfilm 2012. DVD. Willams, John. John Williams and Star Wars. The Hollywood Film Music Reader. Edited by Mervyn Cooke. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Willams, John. “Music and Sound.” Saving Private Ryan. Paramount Pictures 2010. DVD. Willams, John. “The Music of E.T.: A Discussion with John Williams.” E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial.

Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment 2012. DVD.

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Willams, John. “Scoring: Catch Me If You Can.” Catch Me If You Can. Dreamworks SKG 2012.

DVD. Willams, John. “Return to Jurassic Park: The Next Step in Evolution.” Jurassic Park Ultimate Trilogy.

Universal Studios 2011. DVD. Willams, John, & Spielberg , Steven. “Editing & Scoring.” War Horse. Universal Studios 2012. DVD. Willams, John. “Tintin: The Score.” The Adventures Of Tintin. Columbia Pictures and Amblin Entertainment 2012. DVD.

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THE BEAT-BEAT GOES ON

NAVIGATING THE DUALITY WITHIN THE NFB’S GDP:

MEASURING THE HUMAN SIDE OF THE CANADIAN ECONOMIC CRISIS (2009)

LAUREN ASH

is a graduating University of Toronto student holding a double major in Cinema Studies and Human Geography, with a minor in Psychology. She is the co-founder of Doc Out, Films for Social Justice Action (2012-present), has worked as a research assistant on the National Film Board of Canada/U of T interactive documentaryproduction Highrise (2011), and has directed/produced the documentary shorts The Little Portugal Project interactive documentary (2014) & Street Meat- Dissecting Toronto’s Vending Policy, Final Cut (2011).

The 2008 global financial crisis triggered a series of cascading negative effects into Canada’s already precarious resource economy and manufacturing sectors, halting the flows of commodities and services and much like a heart attack, left its people gasping for air. Though somewhat resuscitated by a strong federal regulatory history, Canada continues its shift towards a global outsource market, a changing landscape for how big labour and industry conduct business. Yet 2008’s abrupt collapse also left many private and public institutions suddenly vulnerable, causing many citizens to begin fighting to salvage their employment security and meet their personal responsibilities.

Historically rooted within national cinema and social and political documentary, many contemporary National Film Board of Canada productions have focused on the convergence between documentary and new media, an emerging remediated genre, which broadcasts online interactive web documentaries or iDocumentaries. This trend towards using Internet platforms for distribution and exhibition offers filmmakers digital tools to enhance the ways documentary can represent reality.

The ambitious bilingual categorical web documentary, GDP – Measuring the Human Side of the Canadian Economic Crisis (2009-2010) captures various Canadians following the recent economic crisis. Unlike traditional linear documentaries, which have attempted to unpack this unprecedented global recession through the economic cause and effect institutions of Wall Street and macro governmental perspectives, GDP invites users to explore the human side of this crisis by focusing on a series of diverse micro narratives. The result becomes a polyvocal, pan-Canadian web based database, of individuals, their families, and the participants who follow them. The stories, presented through a mosaic structure of approximately four minute vignettes (totalling 14 hours of viewable content) track a subset of chosen Canadians during this time and outline a poignant portrayal of our socioeconomic diversity through examples of hardship, resilience, and transformation. Launched by the National Film Board’s Directors General of English and French Programs, Cindy Witten and Monique Simard, GDP is coordinated and directed by the documentary filmmaker Helen Choquette and demonstrates a strong preliminary push by the NFB to fund projects that transgress traditional platforms by using large scale new media content that allow for reflexive participation and complex narrative structure.

In total, the project spans a 17 webisode series, 53 stand-alone photo essays, and 134 blog posts. Each item is separately produced and uploaded monthly or bimonthly over a one year period, by an equally varied group of a eight field directors and eight photojournalists located “coast to coast to coast.”1 In so doing, the magnitude and cross-country scale make this project caméra stylo •

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one of the first of its kind.

Though documentary scholar Bill Nichols has long provided an influential framework taxonomy for differentiating traditional documentary style modes,2 documentary as a whole struggles to define the genre. So too, the scholarship of interactive web documentary remains as modern as the cutting edge technology itself; accordingly, projects defined as web documentaries are often dissimilar from one another and such texts change rapidly over time.

Theorist Kate Nash loosely defines the term web doc as a “documentary work, distributed via the Internet that is both multi-media and interactive.”3 However, this definition can be applied to any number of texts and the limits between the web doc and other forms of new media is precipitous, particularly when defining what interactivity means and how it can be qualified.

Recently, Arnau Gifreu Castells expanded this complex discourse to comment on web documentary, proposing a series of properties that help distinguish online texts from traditional audio visual linear modes of address.

Specifically, Castells unpacks the format’s differences embedded within the web documentary interface along with its particular capacity for interactivity. In turn, these contrasts enunciate changes in how the documentary genre delivers content and entertainment to the spectator, or in this case, the user.

As understood within the virtual worlds of digital gaming and hypertexts, interactive documentary fundamentally rests on the users’ physical engagement with the interface and active cognition and contribution in a non-fictional storytelling experience. This may derive from a multiplicity of corporeal actions, including choice driven clicking on, streaming and unlocking various multimedia combinations, all provided within the film’s website graphical user interface. Castells distinguishes such evolution of web based programming from traditional modes of linearity and limits the influences of authorship and discourse control,4 while Sandra Gaudenzi speaks to the noteworthy chasm between the discursive formation of net art and how contemporary new media artists identify versus their traditional documentary counterparts within filmmaking vernacular, though over time, elements of new media have established its own set of filmmaking storytelling conventions.5,6 This essay will look at GDP as a case study for analyzing the iDoc structure and it subsequent level of interactivity, with particular attention to how the project’s selection of web documentary footage and database content, irrespective of material sequencing, remains entrenched in overall author subjectivity. This essay will argue that web based interactive documentaries exist in two parallel spheres; one during the iDoc’s active period of heightened activity, the second, when the iDoc becomes a closed text of the experience already produced. This essay will comment on the various stages of a

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web doc’s digital life and by extension, how its final representation maintains or diverges from traditional narrative documentary influence. Specifically, GDP’s closed narrative systems rely on peripheral (in)activity within its largest context, places it at odds with even more advanced and comprehensive interactive digital filmmaking experiences of today Additionally, although GDP succeeds in attempting to bridge the linguistic divide by showcasing bilingualism as the merging of provincial and regional universalism, the multi-platform project also produces significant questions with regards to where this web documentary fits within the overall interactive and organizational paradigm. Accordingly, this paper will argue web projects such as GDP promote illusory interactive experiences and thus reconstitute the preliminary theoretical meaning behind iDoc classification.

Therefore, this essay will also challenge whether the aspects of GDP that fall under a realm of closed production linearity, with its requisite navigational tools that outlive its interactive experience, make it, as Castells describes, a suitable “living organism” and an example of universal representation, identification, information, and entertainment.7 Furthermore, using Kate Nash’s modes of interactivity for web doc analysis as a foundational starting point, this paper will also address how GDP navigates author control versus user interactivity with the text. In so doing, it will examine how restrictive commentary input systems problematizes the project’s desire for actual active, democratic participation. Finally, this paper will question how GDP functions in relation to Castells’ principles of web doc form – and question if a weak interactive experience produces a misleading iDoc product by posing a sequence of structural questions. How does temporality affect iDocs and GDP as a whole? In the years post-production, has the passage of time, and, correspondingly has the national financial and digital economy changed the user’s overall experience? Where does GDP, with its ground breaking dynamic experiment and now, more static and unchanging site stand against the institution’s Challenge For Change social documentary program and legacy?

Lastly, does GDP’s categorical narrative structure and mosaic ‘ordering of the real’ alter or promote subjective, regional and thematic bias?

A key device in any documentary, traditional or web documentary, is its capacity to offer the public “observations and thoughts about culture, politics, ideologies and people.”8 The introductory interface on GDP’s platform establishes just that, as a digital lifeline is drawn across a topographic outline of Canada, and is followed by a series of up and down waves, where peaks are paused to uncover audiovisual segments from the various internal photo essays and webisodes. Consequently, this design invokes emotional immediacy and pulls the viewer into its observational fold. By engaging with snapshots caméra stylo •

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from various storylines, the user is inherently primed into choosing which ones peak interest and which ones ask for further engagement. Whether passively waiting out the entire length of the opening sequence, or actively choosing to skip the introduction the user is eventually led to the site’s mainframe. Here is where the “new stories every week” lands GDP into a closed context: its by-line is passé and denotes a timestamp from September 2010.

This site is now regarded as a whole text, no longer a work in progress, and the end of an evolving collaboration.

Historically, traditional linear documentaries are often filmed while events unfold, but there is often a significant delay between production and exhibition. Often times, the text’s climax has come to pass, giving the filmmakers enough time to edit their sequences according to a traditional narrative, into a three act structure, all while having the insight into how the story ends. Though traditional documentaries are subject to constant change throughout production, they cease changing once final editing takes place.

In contrast, through user activity, interactive documentaries are in constant states of flux, their processes of adaptive and systematic alteration unending.9 GDP blurs this construct by connecting linear and organized, self-contained, and non-malleable content into the web documentary model but, at least during 2009-2010, the webisodes were in a state of ongoing production, and were amenable to the main character’s real life changes, and changes in the project’s reception through user feedback. According to GDP’s producers, users of these webisodes had indirect participation in the protagonists’ stories through one-sided online commentary that contributed to a larger national dialogue and often facilitated in advancing the narrative (NFB 2009). Thus, GDP’s autonomous authorship is challenged, though subtly when compared to more recent iDoc modes, where direct narrative change can be written instantaneously into the code. In addition, the top filmic stories, photo essays, and basic interactive map buttons permit full user control over the more passive consumption of media segments, and the comprehensive media content listings are viewable in any particularly order aside from the pre-curated “best of ” and “most popular” segments, depicted within a featured scrollable carrousel located at the top of the webpage. A predetermined chronological ordering of the webisodes is also used, as is the site’s foregrounding of most recent uploads. The capacity to search via open-ended keywords and thematic scrolls suggests an active, linkable, and interconnected hypertext network between the media, the user, and the preloaded descriptive tags; however, once the media begins to play, many of the aesthetic and formal elements of each storyline are linear and hermetic, and cannot be amended. One suspects the site operated as a quasi playlist while active, with habitual users tuning in

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every week to discover (either through trial and error, or by RSS feed notifications) what new content had been made available. Currently, this web doc appears to remain the same each time it is accessed. The interface reads similarly to any other contemporary website, albeit one that also happens to store a large archive of playable media; in other words, it feels less like an web doc and more like the NFB’s main page. Searching content via the graphic Canada-wide map interface allows for a more visual geographic reference point, and coloured circles code each of the films, photo essays, and user generated comments with red, yellow, and green colours respectively. As expected, the frequency of red and yellow circles appears in Canada’s largest and densest regions, and surprisingly, none are located within Manitoba and only one can be found in Saskatchewan. Additionally, there is no looping ambient soundtrack aside from the indexical lifeline crisis beeps and music found in the webdoc’s introduction, nor are there any guidelines, motivational cues, informational pop-ups, or instructive prompts that could relay or point towards the web doc’s objectives. It is unclear if this is a stylistic choice or is the consequence of a mechanism inherent to a government funded archival site constrained by the socioeconomics of high bandwidth costs.

With regards to barriers in physical engagement, some of the navigational aspects appear cumbersome and ill conceived. The search bar seems out dated and unable to provide accurate, detailed search results. Eventually, through engagement with large amounts of content, users can locate characters and storylines with narratives that are engaging and familiar to their own lived experiences. The photo essay section, promoted as a stand-alone series, was a deliberate creative and logistic decision to document the impact of the crisis in remote areas and offers collections from less accessible northern regions. The photo essays serve as a demographic equalizer by giving voices to various minority communities that are culturally underrepresented or misrepresented in mainstream narratives. This section also serves as an especially useful pedagogical instrument for learning about smaller towns where the economy depends on a single industry, such as mining or lumber.

GDP’s status as an iDoc remains uncertain. Castells invokes Sandra Gaudenzi’s research on interactive media when looking at open systems that are active and adaptable to the environment and usership. As such, living systems are in “constant relation with [their] environment.”10 While clicking and scrolling continues to be a main feature of all interactive texts, one may be reticent to label the 2015 version of GDP as an “aupoietic entity” (Castells 9) simply because the user can decide the sequential ordering of a playlist, but rather side with Xavier Berenguer’s primary interactive narrative construct where “physical, rather than cognitive activity is used to navigate live within caméra stylo •

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the existing material [video or film].”11 Irrespective of user action, GDP’s site no longer requires sustainable cognitive collaboration, and in every other participatory account, remains closed. While educational lessons can be gleaned through its hours of viewable footage, the formal communication between the material and the user has ceased.

Since Castells uses both Gaudenzi and Berenguer to measure interactive strength (strong, medium and weak) relevant to this physical interactive process,12 we can designate GDP’s interactive capacity label as “weak” in its interactive relationships with the user and broadcast ecology. Kate Nash continues this argument by expanding upon the complexities that inform interactivity strength, by understanding the user as a basic navigator, commentator, or content creator.13 By incorporating its non-fiction media inside a map, GDP situates itself as a computer-mediated model with content derived from classic social and political investigative journalistic documentaries.14 However, it is the degree and duality of interactivity that has dramatically shifted over time that complicates GDP’s interactive position.

As such, new media theorists may consider evaluating the level of user interaction throughout the project’s evolution. Thus, interactive experiences would themselves be subject to both the internal and external temporal progress, and limit the constraints of evaluating the iDoc’s ever-shifting user experience. Under this modality, a web doc such as GDP can be analyzed depending on point and time of access. Furthermore, it can track users’ differing experiences throughout the web doc’s life during creation and its subsequent static, digital life, encapsulating its launch, its live online presence, and later, its position as object of an archival database.

This is especially true for GDP’s attempt at user participation. The producers of the web documentary claim the capacity to engage with the documentary via online commentary contributed to a substantial interactive experience, as “you, the public, are at the heart of the project” and “are part of the evolution of this documentary.”15 Nonetheless, all interactions are subject to context and in GDP’s case, each comment was subject to an internal review process conducted by the production’s editorial team. While the producers ought to maintain a level of quality control over thematic content along with a discrimination free site with an ethical code, it would be impossible for the team to monitor an entire national discourse. The team deliberately encouraged participants to “be imaginative and punchy” thereby acknowledging a certain kind of commentary would be more acceptable, worthy, and admissible for publication. This holds true for the companion blog, where any number of GDP’s contributing freelancers carry out internal messaging.

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In short, this level of participation remains undemocratic by preferring those with educated, cogent content. Similarly, by monitoring participant literacy skill, the web doc may unintentionally discriminate against individuals with language barriers, consequently limiting a discursive user experience of writing the public memory.16 Furthermore, this system promotes unrealistic expectations the user will have any impact at all - for example, the producers showcase a scenario where a user followed a farming couple through the websisode series and then was able to volunteer on the farm, thereby incorporating a real-life user experience into their interactive fold. However, as it should be for privacy reasons, all protagonists’ information is kept confidential. Locating any of the characters outside the site experience would be akin to privately searching for any other reality TV star and asking to take part in his or her life. While an outpouring of supportive messages appears to have lifted the spirits of the protagonists who are in the midst of a negative ordeal, an onslaught of public recognition or attempts at contact and fandom serve to exploit the project’s narrative and may even go against the spirit of the text’s ambition to represent ordinary Canadians. As a result, users of GDP both in its antecedence and today are more likely to be consumers of this form of interactivity, rather than processing or generating17 a dialectical debate.

As suggested, user control in GDP is limited by its predominantly closed content structure and shift from weak cognitive interactivity to using only physical interactive methods. Correspondingly, this scenario foregrounds Aaron Smutz’s position that interactive pathways alone do not speak to narrative coherence, as this would then include all user enabled media, such as scene selection capabilities accessible through offline DVDs. Correspondingly, these narrative and format debates amongst new media theorists emerge surrounding whether authorial story expression and user position are affected by what documentary filmmaker Debra Beattie describes as the audience’s “ordering of the real.”18 In GDP, the narrative structure does not rest upon each user viewing any one essay or series, but instead results in “memory-moments”19 that affirm the overarching textual message. En masse, the ordering of the content is irrelevant, but as micro sequential units it remains essential.

This structural dichotomy affirms the notion that GDP presents more as a categorical computer mediated anthology with interactive temporality between its elements. Much like Bill Nichols’ mosaic structure, where micro narratives formulate a filmic whole, opposed to forming a macro narrative dependent on editing and temporal relationships, the connections and associations generated are relatively open and “serve as an epistemological function since it assumes that social events have multiple causes and must be analyzed

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as a web of interconnecting influences or patterns.”20 The lives of the individual people featured in GDP are reflective of difference, but are also united by a common critical thread. Users can understand these stories as relationships to a whole, or can narrow the scope down to a few individuals. Still, the degree of ‘universalism’ GDP projects is burdened by the text’s simplicity.

The subjects featured are not identical in region, class, or culture. Likewise, the subjects’ lived experiences in relation to the 2008 financial crisis are not uniform and do trigger certain aspects of prejudice and bias. The latter point is not meant as a critique, but exemplifies subtle nuances between self versus other, identification versus disidentification, and empathy versus sympathy that this project inherently elicits.

When the NFB began its participatory film and video Challenge for Change program in 1967, the goal was to make visible the needs of those struggling within the nation. What it did not account for was the ethical ramifications of personal exploitation. Through interactive web documentaries, the NFB’s oeuvre has evolved into more self-aware entities that seek to place participation back into the hands of its subjects. GDP held the weight of attempting to produce a national dialogue regarding an event that devastated many lives. Its ambition and strengths grew from its collaboration with many filmmakers and artists and the text’s capacity to document the natural rhythms and lives of a cross section of Canadians for one year following the economic collapse in 2008. Unfortunately, this drive to reflect a participatory experience was obfuscated at its launch and was later abandoned altogether. GDP remains within the traditional documentary filmmaking mode and subject to hierarchical authorship and representational styles. Similarly, as with all interactive documentaries, the desire to create an experience where users can learn through immersion, while providing content that can readily accessed in its natural state continues to be immeasurable. Likewise, as with other interactive texts and technological convergence formats, the future of interactive documentary continues to evolve. Following production and release, many iDocumentaries outlive their original launch and exist within the outer boundaries of the digital archive, whose static formats are subject to expanded cinema’s experiential discursive breakdown. If the interactivity of GDP was to mirror a living system, it would be more like a cell membrane, permeable to some, impermeable to others. Nonetheless, the enrichment of this experiment, and web documentaries that have come after, makes GDP a project worth the NFB’s and user’s investment.

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ENDNOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

GDP: Measuring the Human Side of the Canadian Economic Crisis, directed by Helene Choquette (Toronto, CA: NFB, 2010), webdoc.

Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 33.

Kate Nash, “Modes of interactivity: analyzing the webdoc,” Media, Culture & Society 34, no. 2 (2012):197.

Arnau Gifreu Castells, “The Interactive Documentary. Definition Proposal and Basic Features of the New Emerging Genre” (2012), 2.

Ibid, 8.

Sandra Gaudenzi, “Modes of Interactive Documentary: from representing reality to co-creating reality” (doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths University of London, 2013), 6.

Arnau Gifreu Castells, “The Interactive Documentary. Definition Proposal and Basic Features of the New Emerging Genre” (2012), 9.

Ibid, 2.

Ibid, 3.

Ibid, 9.

Ibid, 4.

Ibid, 9.

Kate Nash, “Modes of interactivity: analyzing the webdoc,” Media, Culture & Society 34, no. 2 (2012):201.

Ibid, 198.

GDP: Measuring the Human Side of the Canadian Economic Crisis, directed by Helene Choquette (Toronto, CA: NFB, 2010), webdoc.

Kate Nash, “Modes of interactivity: analyzing the webdoc,” Media, Culture & Society 34, no. 2 (2012):199.

Ibid, 199.

Ibid.

Ibid, 203.

Ibid, 205.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Castells, Arnau Gifreu. “The Interactive Documentary. Definition Proposal and Basic Features of the New Emerging Genre.” 2012.

Choquette, Helene. (2010) GDP: Measuring the Human side of the Canadian Economic Crisis, webdoc, National Film Board of Canada. Accessed March 1, 2014.

Gaudenzi, Sandra. “Digital interactive documentary: from representing reality to co-creating reality”, Doctoral Thesis, Goldsmiths University of London, 2013.

Nash, Kate. “Modes of interactivity: analyzing the webdoc.” Media, Culture & Society 34, no. 2 (2012):195-210.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010.

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“BENDING” THE DIASPORA:

SEXUALITY AND NATIONALITY IN BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

MEI MEI XIAO

has finished her final semester at the University of Toronto where she specialised in Cinema Studies and minored in Women and Gender Studies. Her research interests include questions of intimacy, kinship and diasporic identity in popular media. She will be pursuing a masters in cultural studies in the fall of 2015.

Bend it Like Beckham meditates on and reimagines what constitutes a contemporary “British identity” by centering the experience of its protagonist, Jess, a second-generation Sikh female, and an aspiring footballer, in urban West London. While the film’s diasporic and gendered representations problematize the dominant narrative of “Britishness,” its pronounced silence around the question of queer sexuality operates as a source of anxiety, both limiting and complicating the film’s concern for diverse representation. In its commonly unnoticed exclusion of embodied and substantive queer bodies of “the diaspora,” Bend It Like Beckham becomes an important site to critique the heteronormative, albeit diasporic, idea of Britishness.

Prior to analysis it is necessary to qualify the utilization of the terms “British” and “Indian-British” identity. This paper employs the term “British identity” to reflect a heterogeneous and ambiguous cultural identity, while it uses “British-Indian identity” to refer to the film’s South Asian community, namely the Sikh diaspora in West London that the protagonist Jess and her family belong to. The term “queer” on the other hand, becomes central in this reading to the invisibility of non-heteronormative experiences in the film. These understandings of the British communities and subjects of colour invite a broader critique of the film’s intersection (or lack thereof ) of race and sexual orientation.

In order to contextualize Bend it Like Beckham’s ability to challenge typical representations of Britishness, while continually subscribing to conventional understandings of queer British identity, it is necessary to situate the film culture that the text emanates from and film cultures that is in conversation with. Bend it Like Beckham derives from a loose movement in British cinema that started in the 1980s, led by filmmakers of colour, in their attempts to capture the multi-cultural and sociopolitical conditions of Thatcher and post-Thatcher Britain – a period, by and large defined by the expansion of identity politics. In its transition from a fully state sanctioned welfare system, to the adoption of more neoliberal social policies, Thatcher’s England saw mass unemployment, poverty and deprivation, that especially affected communities of colour. As a cultural moment, this period was marked by the escalation of white supremacist politics against incoming and previously existing immigrant communities in the United Kingdom. What followed this sense of social unease and violence, was a period of increased visibility and interest in the emerging work of filmmakers of colour, including individuals such as John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, and Hanif Kureishi, to name a few. Films from this movement drew on these filmmakers’ second-generation, racialized experiences, and are hence in conversation with the Heritage film movement, which Stuart Hall succinctly describes as producing a “culturalcaméra stylo •

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ly homogenous and unified”1 British identity, one that often centers white British bodies and their relevance to the grandeur and dominance historically associated with England.2 Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham stands in opposition to the Heritage film simply by offering divergent and varied visuals and narratives that attempt to challenge the stability of British identity as a monolithic and static concept.3 This becomes evident, at first, in the film’s treatment of David Beckham as a symbol of Britishness. By appropriating the symbol of Beckham, Jess is able negotiate her own football fantasies and thereby construct new meanings and connotations for Beckham as a symbol. The text frames Jess’ admiration of a popular white male football star to suggest affinity as opposed to the possible suggestion that Jess has a delusional sense of self in her appreciation of an individual who - besides national identity - holds otherwise polar opposite identity markers. While Beckham here evokes as a widely recognized representation of Britishness, it is generative to consider how the text frames Jess’ father, Mr. Bhamra, who works at Heathrow International Airport. Similar to Beckham, Mr. Bhamra - who is a middle-aged, Punjabi Sikh man in a turban- is also representative of Britain. As an employee of the airport, a highly guarded and contested liminal space, a site of borders, Mr. Bhamra’s visage becomes one of the many faces that represent Britain to those that enter into it. The film, by juxtaposing the popular image of Beckham alongside the usually underrepresented, racialized image of Mr. Bhamra, poses the idea that representations of Britishness are varied, and often interlinked.

Hall argues that the mere representation of people of colour is not sufficient as these portrayals tend to highlight exceedingly “positive” depictions, and are often constructed on shallow stereotypes.4,5 In effect, simplistic depictions perform their own injustices through the ability to minimize the complexities and contradictions of non-white experiences by feeding schematic notions of difference.6 Therefore, it is not only Chada’s mere representation of brown bodies in Bend It Like Beckham, but rather her ability to illustrate the generational and relational nuances and divisions that operate within Jess’ immediate family and the larger British Indian community that surrounds her, that complicate the narrative of positive diasporic representation.

Chadha explores the complexity of British Indian identity by tackling the disparate ways in which Jess’s family and broader Punjabi community performs femininity, as depicted by Pinky (Jess’ sister) and Jess’ mother. In both these representations, the text situates femininity as a performance informed by patriarchal cultural influences and generational subjectivity. Pinky craves a traditional Indian wedding and family life, while also expressing values and

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behaviours that are removed from stereotypical “Indian” mores; she is sexually active and lies to her parents on occasion – behaviours that stand in opposition with traditional Indian-British values. Jess’ mother, similarly, embodies stereotypical components of Indian-British femininity; she is adamant that Jess learn to cook Punjabi cuisine and dress modestly. Her portrayal shares commonalities with Jess’s friend Jules’ white mother who appears, at least superficially, to be her polar opposite. Both women attempt and fail to police their daughters’ gender. In this context, the simultaneously divergent, familiar, and shared representations of femininity, that Pinky and Mrs. Bharma’s characters offer, cannot be neatly categorized by equating values as solely reflective of one source of influence. Components such as age and perceptions of gender are critical to each character’s performances and are shown to offer new ways of representing British and British-Indian femininity.

It is evident that Bend it Like Beckham offers interruptions to characteristic representations of Britishness through Jess’s experience of navigating what it means to be British-Indian. These diverse representations, however, do not entirely challenge the hegemonic narrative of identity; one way of understanding how the text constitutes British and British-Indian identity is through its negotiation of its queer anxiety.

In the film, Jess– unlike other female members of her family, in all her social awkwardness and disinterest in domesticity– adopts a gendered identity that is less traditionally feminine, thereby offering another representation of the multiplicity of British-Indian female identity. She has ambitions of playing football, and she, for the majority of the text, does not show obvious romantic or sexual interest in anyone. Jules, Jess’ white friend, adopts, in many ways, a similarly gendered presentation; however, Jules’ mother is suspicious of Jules’ sexuality throughout the entirety of the film. At one point, Jules’ mother,mistakenly believes she has confirmed her suspicion of her daughter’s lesbian identity, and responds with laughable devastation and hesitant tolerance. In Jules’ case, a lesbian identity, although undesirable, is nonetheless recognized as legitimate. Jess’ sexuality, on the other hand, never receives any serious speculation from her family. Even when she is publicly and mistakenly ‘outed’ by Jules’ mother, no one in Jess’ family even entertains the thought that Jess might be a lesbian. As Chadha establishes from parallels between Jess and Jules, only Jules is read by others as sexually ‘different’ or even considered ‘sexual’ at all, for that matter. Jess’ possible queerness, on the other hand, is an impossibility that somehow becomes associated with her British-Indian-ness.

Aside from borrowing the trope of parental and societal suspicions imposed on queer bodies, the only genuine representation of queer sexuality is Tony, Jess’ best friend, who is British-Indian as well. It is in Tony’s represencaméra stylo •

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tation as a self-identified queer male and Jess’ inevitably ‘taken-for-granted’ heterosexuality, wherein a dialectic on the intersection of queer and ethnic difference operates as a site of disjuncture to the diasporic and national imaginary. In fact, Jess even verbalizes the “impossibility” of being both queer and Indian; as Tony reveals that he is sexually attracted to men, her response is an immediate, “You can’t, you’re Indian,” thereby both reproducing and troubling a narrative of British Indian identity.7 The impossibility of queer British-Indian identity is highlighted during the “confessional” scene; Chadha offers contrasting portrayals of how Jess and Tony are able to express themselves to their community. In the sequence, Tony announces that he and Jess will marry, to ensure that she will have the opportunity to go to the United States, where she has received a scholarship to play football. Jess reveals the ruse and confesses her aspirations and plans to play football to her parents, and the larger community of friends and family; Jess, in some way, “comes out” as an aspiring footballer. Prior to this sequence, the arguable climax of the text, Jess receives support from her peers, Jules and Tony, as well as her sister; moreover, Joe, her white male coach and romantic interest, reminds her repeatedly that she must value her sense of independence and personal freedom by being honest with herself, and by extension her parents, while Pinky, conversely, suggests that communicating with their parents would sever ties and hurt the sisters’ freedoms as young women. Chadha thus interweaves the importance of concepts such as independence, freedom, and honesty by identifying that these qualities are crucial to Jess’ ability to define herself and experience happiness across her networks of support.

Chadha’s emphasis on the ideological role of independence, freedom and honesty in Bend It Like Beckham provides an insightful reading in light of the ‘ideoscape,’ an idea Arjun Appadurai examines in his seminal text “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Appadurai identifies the ‘ideoscape’ as a fluid theoretical construct to analyze how the state incorporates concepts– those largely associated with, and stemming from, the Enlightenment– and “[has] organized [its] political cultures around different key words.”8 Appadurai argues that within different sociopolitical and cultural contexts, ideas such as “freedom” take on contested meanings, thereby revealing the fragility and constructed nature of such terms.9 In effect, these concepts perform a critical role in establishing a defined, albeit performed and fragile, set of ideologies through which nations can establish a sense of identity.10 Utilizing this framework, it becomes generative to consider how Jess is encouraged and supported by her community to reveal that notions of freedom, honesty, and independence go beyond simply reflecting the

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interpersonal dynamics and coming-of-age qualities of the narrative, in part examining the ideological issues motivating Jess’s confession.

Keeping this in mind, it is critical to interrogate how the same ‘confessional’ sequence frames Tony, as opposed to its treatment of Jess. While Jess performs as an active agent in accessing her happiness by prioritizing her sense of freedom and independence, Tony is portrayed as silent and passive.

Unlike Jess, Tony does not speak honestly; moreover, by proposing the sham marriage, Tony demonstrates his need for dependence on Jess because their engagement would potentially function as a form of security for him. This is not to suggest that “closeted” queer identity is a less legitimate form of queer identity, or that by engaging in heteronormative actions Tony has thereby relinquished his sexual identity. Instead, Tony’s identity is only rendered illegitimate through the film’s pressing emphasis on notions of individual freedom and independence, as concepts that inadvertently speak to what constitutes Britishness. Jules, Joe, and Tony, all characters operating outside Jess’s domestic space, encourage her ambitions with these very ideas of freedom and self-liberation. When she is finally able to honour and perform these values through the confessional sequence, she is rewarded by being accepted by those around her. Furthermore, Jess is able to envision a future, albeit in the United States, that she has created for herself. Chadha represents Tony, on the other hand, as – arguably – dependent and disingenuous formations of identity in comparison to Jess’s honest and moral personal journey. Jess is able to reveal her “secret” and the sequence thereby succeeds in highlighting her sense of personal maturity and ambition. Tony stands in stark contrast, as his presentation of identity is one that the text does not interpret within the framework of normativity, or morally upright Britishness.

One could argue that while the text does offer divergent portrayals of identity that challenge stable and homogenous notions of Britishness, Tony and Jess’ respective performances of the same, spill out of these trappings of acceptable representation. Jess is able to perform a version of British-Indian femininity that “defies stereotypes” or complicates the binary of “positive” versus “negative” representation. In effect, Jess also “bends” expectations: she displays an atypical gendered representation of British Indian femaleness and further challenges representations of static notions of national identity by pursuing her ambitions outside of the political and physical borders of Britain, instead in the United States. Tony, on the other hand, cannot perform his queer identity in a manner that prioritizes the desired ideology surrounding independence, individuality, and freedom. Consequently, he represents a point of disjuncture to the national imaginary, and reveals the formulated and exclusionary construction of Indian Britishness. Although the text does not caméra stylo •

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centrally focus on sexuality, it, perhaps subconsciously, reflects the critical role of sexuality and heteronormativity in articulating how British Indians can be recognized within the national imaginary. By interrogating how Jules, Jess, and Tony’s respective identities are constructed, Bend it like Beckham offers a nuanced approach to how inclusion into the national imaginary is always complicated by the intersections of ethnic, gendered, and sexual identity.

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ENDNOTES 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Stuart Hall, “Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “The Heritage”, Re-Imagining the Post-Nation,” in Third Text 49, no. 13 (1999), 5.

Andrew Higson, “Representing a National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester D. Friedman. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 109-129.

Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (London: Routledge, 1996), 441-449.

Ibid, 441-449.

Stuart Hall, “Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “The Heritage,” Re-Imagining the Post-Nation,” in Third Text 49, no. 13 (1999), 3-13.

Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (London: Routledge, 1996), 444.

Bend It Like Beckham, Directed by Gurinder Chadha ( Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment) 2002.

Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy.” In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 36.

Ibid, 36.

Ibid, 36.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy.” In Modernity at Large: Cultur al Dimensions of Globalization, 27-47. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Bend It Like Beckham. Directed by Gurinder Chadha. 2002. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley, 441-449. London: Routledge, 1996.

Hall, Stuart. “Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “The Heritage”, Re-Imagining the Post-Nation.” In Third Text 49, no. 13 (1999): 3-13. doi: 10.1080/09528829908576818.

Higson, Andrew. “Representing a National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film.” In Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, edited by Lester D. Friedman, 109-129. Minneapo lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

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