The Chutry Experiment

In case you missed it elsewhere, I have a new post on the Antenna Blog, “Accessing the Cinematic Cloud,” which responds to John August’s comparison of digital movie delivery with ATMs. August draws some interesting connections between early problems with ATMs and similar problems that confront consumers of digital cinema. My main response is to raise some questions about how these issues will be resolved and whether these new formats will really fulfill the promises of access, choice, and diversity. I’d very much enjoy hearing your thoughts.

With Andrea out of town for the weekend, I’ve spent much of my time attending and participating in Duke University’s Marxism and New Media Conference. While my own work seemingly places much more emphasis on the category “new media” than “Marxist,” I deeply enjoyed and benefitted from testing the limits of current conversations in media studies about the practices of production, and in my own essay on social check-in services, about the creation of value in an attention economy. I’m not going to try to read today’s links completely through the lens of the conference, but I think it has sharpened my thinking on a couple of key points:

• One quick bit of news: Star Wars Uncut, a fan film I discussed in the edited collection, Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation: Across the Screens, has been released on YouTube in a director’s cut, one that includes more seamless video and sound editing. I discussed SWU as a paradigmatic example of a crowdsourced adaptation and still remain fascinated by it, though I have to admit that I still have some fondness for the original patchwork version that was auto-generated based on people’s votes.
• Speaking of fan responses, I’ve been interested in the Vertigo meme, in which fans, responding to Kim Novak’s complaints about the use of the Vertigo theme in The Artist (which she referred to as a “violation”),  have been adding the music to a wide range of other texts. For one of the more thoughtful discussions of this project check out Jason Mittell’s discussion of how he Vertigoed The Wire and Kevin Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz’s announcement of the contest at Press Play.  Scroll down for one of my favorite examples, in which The Big Lebowski gets the Vertigo treatment. Moments like these renew my faith in remix culture.
• This story is a few days old, but given my focus on digital cinema, I think it’s worth noting that Eastman Kodak has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• I’m intrigued by the discussion of this screening of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, in which the pre-show advertising automatically turned on during the movie, leading to overlapping images showing Ben Kingsley talking over ads warning us to silence our cell phones, animated candy bars, and other advertising ephemera. It’s a bizarre mashup and a horrifying depiction of the automation of theatrical projection in the era of digital cinema.
• On a related note, Anthony Kaufman discusses some of the challenges for indie and art house theaters in the era of digital projection.
• Worth noting, many of the videos I’ve mentioned today would be at risk of being pulled (and their websites would also be threatened with legal action) if SOPA and/or PIPA had been passed. Henry Jenkins links to a detailed discussion of some of the creative activism that has been inspired by the anti-SOPA movement. On a related note, New Tee Vee has an article that explores some of the possible motivations for piracy, specifically the lack of available premium content via digital platforms.
• Curiously, given this complaint, however Janko Roettgers, also of New Tee Vee, argues that we are in a “golden age of content.” Roettgers uses the announcement that  both Hulu and Netfix are producing original series (rather than merely serving as a portal to access content produced by others) to argue that we have far more choices for watching than ever before. Videonuze also has a discussion of “online originals.”
• On a related note, Aymar Jean Christian has announced the launch of a new academic blog dedicated to the study of the future of video and television, Hacktivision.
• This has been around for a while, but via the cinetrix, I just learned about the promo video for a planned adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer from 1986.
• Joe Swanberg has a new film out called Marriage Material. Richard Brody reviews the film favorably and notes that it will be available to watch online for free for two weeks.

The Big V from Will Woolf on Vimeo.

So far, the 2012 Republican primaries have offered a dispiriting display candidates who seem ill-prepared to run a political campaign (Perry’s brain lapses, candidates failing to get on the Virginia ballot), much less a country, even while those same candidates are sustained by the so-called SuperPACs that allow them to raise virtually unlimited funds. It’s dismaying to watch, for sure, which gives me an even greater appreciation for the work that Steven Colbert has been doing in satirizing the excesses of this process, in part through his own SuperPAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, as well as his appearance on a Sunday morning talk show, in which Colbert–in character–continued to play coy with his exploratory plans to run for President in South Carolina.

Part of Colbert’s political theater has involved handing over the reigns of his SuperPAC to Jon Stewart, his Comedy Central fake news colleague, with the two of them almost giddily displaying the absurdity of the idea that campaigns and SuperPACs are not coordinated. Now Colbert is using gaps in campaign finance law that allow him to broadcast advertisements in the days leading up to a presidential primary. The result is Colbert’s “Mitt the Ripper” ad in which Colbert simultaneously mocks campaign financing, Romney’s corporatism, and attack ads themselves, effectively turning Romney’s comments that “corporations are people” on its head.

It’s worth noting that anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry has been exploiting the same loophole, airing an advertisement that depicts aborted fetuses as he wages a non-serious campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. I’m not entirely sure what the solution is when it comes to producing more democratic elections, but few people have been more effective than Colbert at diagnosing the problems.

Although I have been quick to reinforce the perception that most current 3D films are gimmicks (see for example, my complaints about the latest Spy Kids), I have been intrigued by the somewhat more innovative uses of the technique by Martin Scorsese in Hugo, and more recently, by Steven Spielberg in his adaptation of the Belgian comic by Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin. It’s tempting to read Spielberg’s film as a lightweight, kiddie-oriented rehashing of his Indiana Jones films, but I think this interpretation misses out on how the film is subtly navigating some of the questions raised by adaptation.

Even though I had some awareness of the popularity of Tintin in France and Belgium, I was somewhat unaware of the extent of that popularity until a Twitter conversation this afternoon (thanks to some of my comics-loving and Francophone tweeps) and a quick review of the box office numbers for the film, which has made almost as much money in France as it has in the United States. In fact, the announcement of two planned sequels seems to be built upon the film’s overseas success, even though the film has struggled here in the U.S.  As a result, many U.S. critics seemed unprepared for the movie’s engagement with the original, often reading the film primarily as an auteurist product tied to Spielberg’s preoccupations with childhood and B-movie adventurism (even relatively favorable reviews emphasize the connection to Indiana Jones).

I’m still in the process of researching the comic, but I think it’s important to consider how the film functions as an adaptation and how that relates more directly to Spielberg’s status as a filmaker.  It’s worth noting that the film’s official website both resembles the pages of a comic and provides quite a bit of backstory about the comic, including a detailed discussion of The Secret of the Unicorn, the adventure that provides the basis for the first film. We are also given quite a bit of information about the history of the Tintin character, including how to draw him and how Hergé developed the character. In essence, the website establishes Tintin as an auteurist project, one that was a crafted narrative.

In turn, Spielberg’s film contains a number of these elements, seeking to remind us that even in the age of 3D and performance capture, movies are not merely industrial objects. Instead, Spielberg hopes to show that they are works of art. This artistic signature comes across in part via some of the more inspired effects, especially a long sequence in which Tintin and his embattled crew move from a burning lifeboat to an airplane that crash lands in the Sahara Desert to a chase through a Moroccan city, all in the space of a single shot.

Dana Stevens’ review in Slate also touches upon one of the other challenges of the film–depicting realistic characters via the animation technique of performance capture. Stevens makes reference to the idea of the “uncanny valley,” the idea that when human replicas (whether robotic or animated) look “almost” human, they inspire repulsion in audiences or observers. That didn’t seem like a particular concern for me here, in part because the characters, especially the Thompsons and Tintin himself, seemed so clearly taken from the comic book page. For Maryann Johanson, however, the artificiality seemed to work against her appreciation of the film, in part because the use of CGI helped to reinforce the perception that Tintin and his crew were never in any serious danger. As she put it, “Raiders of the Lost Ark had soul….That sort of organicness is utterly missing from Tintin. There’s only so much organicness that can be faked via CGI that beautifully replicates grass or stone or skin or whatever.”

I’m still exploring my response to the film, in part because it may be something I will work into a couple of ongoing writing projects on 3D. The question for me isn’t whether the film is “good,” at least not in any traditional sense. Instead, I’m interested in exploring how the film engages with the politics and practices of adaptation and how those issues are navigated through the use of digital effects, especially 3D. I’ll admit that the 3D looked “better” in Tintin than it has in most other 3D films I’ve seen, but as I was watching, I felt myself thinking about how Spielberg, like Scorsese in Hugo, seemed to be trying to figure out how to tell stories using the new visual tools available to him.

This is just a quick update to point interested readers to the blog/website I’ve created for my English 518, Technology in the Language Arts Classroom course. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions and advice about the course.

Links to the readings should go live by midnight, January 11, but I wanted to make sure interested readers would be able to see the course as it stands right now.

Just a quick pointer to a couple of articles discussing some of the changes in the “windows” determining when and how DVDs will be available for rental via Netflix:

• First, Warner has further stretched the so-called retail window for Netflix and Redbox from 4 weeks to 8. Because Netflix and Redbox have been seen as cannibalizing DVD sales, Warner required them to wait four weeks after a film was available for purchase to make it available to rent. Ryan Lawler at New Tee Vee seems to think this will have little impact on any of the major rental services.
• Second, (in a related story) HBO has announced that they will no longer be selling DVDs directly to Netflix. This decision further illustrates the principle that HBO now sees the streaming and DVD service as a direct competitor, a reasonable argument given that HBO is increasingly focusing on delivering mobile content, while Netflix has been setting its sights on creating quality programming through its production of Lilyhammer and House of Cards, as well as new episodes of Arrested Development. Worth adding, Netflix, by one measurement, would rank as the 15th most watched TV channel. Netflix will still be able to buy HBO DVDs at retail and “rent” them through its DVD-by-mail service, but that will be far more costly, of course.

Following up on yesterday’s post, I have a couple f other quick thoughts about how we read trends in the movie industry. First, The Los Angeles Times lists the ten most-frequently rented movies in Redbox kiosks, both nationally and in the Los Angeles area. And in both cases, the film rented most often was the Adam Sandler vehicle, Just Go with It. Many of the other top choices–No Strings Attached, Due Date, and Despicable Me–were also comedies, while a number of popular films, such as The Tourist and Green Hornet, were considered to be box office duds. I’m a little reluctant to identify any kind of causal relationship here, though, because as the Times points out, the number of rentals over one calendar year can depend on any number of other factors, including the time of year when the film was released, as well as whether the studio released the film for purchase and rental on the same day. That being said, many of these rentals seem to be examples of convenience rentals (I’m tossing around the term “cinema of convenience” to describe these forms of access), movies that consumers watch when they just want to watch something, rather than the kinds of movies that people might go out of their way to see. That’s just an impression, but it leads into some other questions I’ve been thinking about.

On a related note, I found David Poland’s “reading” of his Best Buy experience to be a little more telling, albeit problematic on a couple of levels. I do think that it makes sense for journalists (and film scholars) to use ethnographic approaches to try to get some grasp on “everyday” uses of home video. I tried to do something like that with my Redbox article (which should be out very soon), and I think it’s incredibly easy to get swept up in some of the more utopian proclamations about digital delivery.

I suspect that Poland is right about two aspects of his trip to Best Buy. 3D TV is not yet ready for primetime (as signified by the lack of retail space and programming devoted to it), while internet-ready TV seems like something that offers additional value to viewers. As Poland notes, most of the TV sets on display emphasized the different kinds of  internet access (Netflix, etc) available. He’s probably also right that DVD retail (in whatever format) is probably in some peril. I don’t think users are ready to abandon physical media, given the continued popularity of Redbox and Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service.  But I think Poland oversteps when he argues that studios are ready for users to abandon physical media for a hodgepodge of streaming video, electronic sell-through, and DVD copies.

As a number of commenters noted, the process of making a digital copy is a time-consuming one, and although faster processors may make this easier, it may not be as convenient as it appears. Certainly having objects delivered to your home (via Amazon or whatever) is easier than driving to stores, but for bigger purchases–TV’s, laptops, etc.–there are a number of incentives for testing a product in-store, but it’s probably too early to suggest that streaming and other forms of digital delivery are necessarily more convenient or desirable than other options. Although Poland is probably right to suggest that Best Buy’s retail model will likely evolve, I think it’s also worth complicating how we define convenience, especially when it comes to the habits of movie consumers, many of whom are seeking easy or simplified choices. Redbox makes this easier by offering a limited range of top hits. Internet-enabled TVs make it easier to access a menu of movie and TV options directly through the TV set. I’m not so sure that “digital copy” approaches offer anything that makes it easier to pick out and watch a movie on a Friday night after work.

As the end of the year approaches, we are greeted with countless articles and lists that try to make sense of the past and, in some cases, seek to predict what will happen next. We see lists of the best films or TV shows, articles identifying the most important media innovations, and in some cases lists of predictions for where the media industries are heading. Video Nuze, for example, has a long-running series featuring predictions by various new media pundits and entrepreneurs about where we’re going in 2012. These lists are inviting, in part, because they seem to offer some control over unpredictable change. Our video rental and purchasing habits seem to have changed dramatically, while theaters are devoted to 3D movies, and so we see reporting that tries to break down box office numbers and other forms of data.

But, as David Poland points out, much of this reporting and predicting is based on a very selective reading of box office data, reproducing misleading assumptions and identifying change where there is actually quite a bit of continuity. In fact, as Poland observes, trend pieces about the movie industry are complicated by the many different streams where movies can be accessed. Further, despite claims of a box office slump, Poland points out that two of the six major studios were actually up this year, for example. But I’m less interested in questions about whether the industry is profitable than I am in considering the explanations being offered to account for the box office slump.

As Poland observes, we’re continuing to hear some of the same explanations–more competition from other media, internet piracy, and so on. An AP article on the “slump” even suggests that a struggling economy and a “backlash” against sequels might be factors, even though the very same article acknowledges that “big franchises” (Harry Potter, etc) continue to do well. These explanations were offered the last time there was widespread discussion of a box office slump.

Similarly, David Carr’s New York Times article overstates some of the changes that are taking place. Carr, for example, seems to reinforce the “platform agnosticism” argument, the idea that consumers don’t care where they watch content. Some of the other changes Carr identifies are also hardly new. Carr claims that “the multiplatform and infinite-channel universe can manufacture its own celebrities,” but this type of claim ignores the ways in which conglomerates are involved in the process of manufacturing celebrity.

Tech Crunch offers a more precise approach by placing some of the more common claims about media change under greater scrutiny. They identify 12 things that “won’t happen” in 2012, challenging assumptions about mobile technologies, cord-cutting, tablets, and the death of television. I’m writing in a state of distraction, so I don’t know that I can wrap this entry as effectively a I would like, but I think the main point is to suggest that we need a more adept understanding not only of how box office numbers work but also better explanations of media change.

I’m in the process of rethinking my “Technology in the Language Arts Classroom” graduate course that I last taught (as far as I can tell) in spring 2010. The course is a required class for the M.A. in teaching here at Fayetteville State and is designed primarily for high school teachers (although I have taught some middle school teachers, too). Tweaking this course demand quite a bit of reflection, not only about the pedagogical demands of the high school classroom but also about my own considerations of how “technology” factors into education. In the next few days, I will post a revision of my syllabus, but for now, I’m interested in raising a couple of questions about what has changed for me since I last taught the course.

Many of these changes are based on observing my wife and children as they engage in different kinds of classroom experiences. I’ve always included blogging requirements in my classes, but thanks to one of my wife’s children, I’ve learned more about Glogster, a tool that seems targeted towards high school students. In teaching Glogster, I won’t necessarily be endorsing it, but I’d like my students to get a better understanding of how different blogging platforms might encourage different kinds of expression.

Further, as I have become more comfortable with PowerPoint, I’d like to spend a little more time discussing various uses of presentation software. My wife was required to produce a narrated PowerPoint as an assignment for a course she was taking, and I think it could be a useful tool, but one that ended up being way more complicated than either of us expected, so while I am thinking about requiring that students produce a narrated PowerPoint, I am dong so with the expectation that they might struggle with making one (and if they struggle, I hope to turn that into a learning experience, not something that will be a source of frustration).

I’m also trying to rethink how I will tweak the wiki requirements. In some versions of the course, I had ambitions that students taking the class would create a wiki, usually about topics related to the course, but the assignment always seemed too ambitious and, in some ways, redundant, especially given that most of the terms they could have defined were already on Wikipedia. But several of my students recognized that the storage space on wikis could be useful for their course materials, so I would like to find some way of encouraging them to play with a wiki, probably Wikispaces.

Both of my wife’s children have had assignments that invited them to create movies using iMovie (other options were available, so this wasn’t required), so I am considering a more detailed discussion of that as well. But one problem I have encountered–and it’s related to the iMovie assignment, which asks students to interpret a popular staple of modern American literature–is that the web allows assignments to circulate a little more visibly. This kind of sharing can help teachers looking for a creative way to get students to produce interesting work, but it also (quite obviously) makes it easy for students to find those assignments, whether they copy them directly or simply consult them.

Probably the main shift that has taken place, though, has to do with my own attitudes toward social media. I’m still somewhat active on some social media sites, although I’m often torn between more personal interactions on Facebook (and fun distractions like Scrabble) and the professional connections that I usually find on Twitter. I’m blogging less frequently due to time constraints, but all of these social media tools now feel like a part of our social fabric rather than an innovative curricular change. Even if students or teachers don’t blog, they are likely aware that blogs exist. I’ve heard about assignments that require students to create Facebook or MySpace pages for characters in novels or plays. There’s nothing wrong with such an assignment, but I wonder what kind of pedagogical purpose it actually serves.

I’d welcome any suggestions, observations, or experiences regarding these issues, but I will likely post a revised syllabus later this week. Here is a draft version of my Spring 2010 syllabus, if you’re interested.

I’ve got another post brewing about one of my other spring courses, a reprise of my graduate-level Technology in the Language Arts Classroom, but for now I’d like to try to get back in the habit of tracking some of the links I’ve been following:

• The finalists for the most recent Amazon Studios contest have been announced. Winners receive prizes ranging from $1,000 for best actor to $100,000 for the best movie.
• Aymar Jean Christian has two outstanding posts reviewing the year in digital video delivery. The first covers some of the changes in industry practices and the second looks at the potential of YouTube as a substitute for TV. So far, most of my online TV viewing has consisted of shared Daily Show, Colbert, and SNL segments. That could simply be a product of my taste cultures, but I wonder how viable it is for longer form and narrative shows.
• Netflix inks a deal to distribute some BBC content in time for their launch in the United Kingdom and Ireland early next year. Worth noting: Love Film, the British streaming service owned by Amazon currently does not have a deal with the BBC.
• More good news for Netflix: the tide of people leaving the service seems to have slowed down. That being said, satisfaction with the service has also declined considerably.
• New Tee Vee offers some interesting viewer numbers for the music video service, Vevo.

It’s now safe to officially announce some very exciting news. Max Dawson (Northwestern University) and I have been invited to join a team of researchers as part of the Connected Viewing Initiative (CVI), sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As the CVI website reports, the project is designed “to imagine the future of modern media, while also turning a critical lens on the often inflated speculation about the social and commercial promise of new technology.” With the changes in media distribution–streaming video, electronic sell-through, and cloud storage–we are at a pivotal moment, one that raises any number of questions.

The particular project that Max and I proposed, Streaming U: College Students and Connected Viewing, looks at the ways in which college students are navigating the volatile video distribution market. Our research will focus on the connected viewing behaviors of students enrolled at two different universities, in part to gauge some of the arguments that have been made about today’s so-called “digital natives.” I’m flattered to be included in such an outstanding group of scholars and excited to be working on what I think will be a truly engaging research project.

For the first time in several years, I will be teaching Fayetteville State University’s senior seminar in the spring. The course fell into my lap late in the semester, so I haven’t had the time to prep that I would normally want, but I’m excited to have the opportunity to explore a set of research questions in detail with my students. The last time I taught this course–way back in 2007 (!)–I focused on the theme of “Documenting Injustice,” a phrasing that I hoped would encompass a wide range of activist, narrative, non-fiction texts in a wide range of media. Because the course is taught in a fairly traditional English department, I wanted not only to include a focus on literary texts but also to respect approaches based in textual analysis. Thus, while I’d enjoy teaching a course on the political economy of digital cinema (say), I don’t think my students would receive the “capstone” experience this course is supposed to represent.

That being said, the students who have signed up for the course know that I am the “film guy” in our department and know a little about my interests. So, with that in mind, I have decided to do an updated version of that course, which I am tentatively calling “Reframing the Documentary,” in part to entertain some slightly different questions about various forms of non-fiction. For the previous course, I sought to discuss a wide range of media forms–written non-fiction, photography, and film–and I’ll maintain that cross-media focus this time. Once again, I will require my students to read Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives and Agee and Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, texts that explore different aspects of documentary and observation with the goal of some sort of social change. But unlike last time, I am going to add David Eggars’ category-defying narrative, Zeitoun, in which he tells the story of a Syrian-born Katrina survivor, writing from Zeitoun’s voice.

In addition, I want to introduce some significant case studies on photography, such as the Dorothea Lange “Migrant Mother” photographs, Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier,” and others. I’m planning to avoid directly studying most of the recent controversial photographs (especially the Abu Ghraib photos), although I may teach at Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure. Instead, I’d like to look at some of Morris’s essays on older photographs, possibly including this essay on whether photographs lie (new to me: Morris’s New York Times essays on photography have been anthologized in a book). Or, more likely, that I will be teaching The Thin Blue Line, Morris’s blog posts on documentary re-enactments. I’ll supplement this discussion of Morris with screenings of either Strange Culture or Road to Guantanamo (or both).

From there, I ams till trying to decide how to engage with some of the “limits” of documentary. By that, I mean definitional limits, rather than where documentary itself is limited. I will likely include the animated Israeli documentary, Waltz with Bashir, and I’m thinking about doing a couple of mock documentaries, most likely Confederate States of America, and, thanks to some recent research by a former student, the boundary-defying film, The Watermelon Woman. One other area of emphasis will likely be autobiography, and I’m leaning towards Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, if only because I am familiar with it and because its production history is pretty catchy.

Finally, given some of my own recent work on “transmedia documentary,” I will likely finish with a couple of recent documentaries that used online media to expand the limits of what counts as a documentary, including The Age of Stupid. Following up on this idea of “transmedia documentary,” I’d very much appreciate any suggestions about online videos, photography series, or articles that depict aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement. One “text” that I would certainly like to discuss would be the “We are the 99%” tumblr blog, but I may also set up a discussion of how iconic images of #OWS, such as the macing incident at UC Davis, have been remixed or repurposed.

I recognize that this post is all over the map–and mostly consists of a list of possible texts–but I am still brainstorming to some extent, trying to decide how, exactly, I want to frame this course. I am looking forward to doing an in-depth study of documentary, activism, and narrative, but I’d welcome any reminders about texts that I’ve neglected, including short essays, short stories, or other explorations of how we document our lives and how we use non-fiction images, sounds, and narratives to represent significant social and political events. Feedback (on Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments) is welcome.

I’ve been away from the blog for a while. There are countless reasons for that. Many of the items that might have served as quick commentary posts have appeared instead on Facebook or, less frequently, Twitter. I’ve been frantically trying to finish a draft of my new book manscript by the end of the semester (I mailed it off on Saturday, standing in line at the post office for an hour). Teaching has produced the usual demands of grading and prepping and advising, among the usual activities that come with being a professor, but teaching has generally been pretty exciting this semester. I’ve also been doing some other writing that I can discuss in further detail in the next few days, hopefully.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time helping my stepson and my exchange-student daughter navigate the college sports recruiting process. I won’t go into specifics, but it’s a far more complicated process than most people realize, especially for sports that don’t generate a lot of revenue. In fact, getting recruited to many of these sports may actually be a reflection of qualities that have less to do with performance on the field or court (although obviously those skills matter a great deal). Getting recruited is certainly tied to networks, but you also have to have quite a bit of tenacity and skill at self-promotion and quite a bit of savvy about how the process works. This isn’t a complaint as much as it is an observation.

But as the year comes to an end (and especially with a draft of a book manuscript reaching completion), I’ve been finding myself reflecting on the future direction not only of this blog but also of my direction as a scholar and/or writer. To some extent, I’ve been trying to think how I can use the tools available to me–blogs, social media, academic conferences, etc–in order to continue doing work that is rewarding to write (and hopefully to read).

For that reason, I’ve been mulling Steven Berlin Johnson’s recent blog post, in which he discusses “the anatomy of an idea.”  Some of his conclusions aren’t that unexpected. Research (or “the discovery process,” to use Johnson’s phrase) is social. To a great extent, this has always been true. Writers and editors read and share drafts. Colleagues discuss ideas at cocktail parties. But I think that Johnson is probably right to emphasize the importance of the diverse forms of social activity that can foster inquiry. I certainly benefitted from a wide range of suggestions and advice when writing my first book, and while I have been less public about the process for my current book, I continue to learn from my fellow bloggers. As a result, I’m hoping to make a greater effort in the coming months to re-immerse myself in the network, not necessarily in the closed playground of Facebook (although I must continue to satisfy my Scrabble addition) but on Twitter, which tends to foster open-ended, public conversations much more effectively, and in the blogosphere.

I don’t want to commit to specific goals or to writing specific kinds of posts, though I miss writing both the essayistic posts where I took the time to develop ideas in detail and the movie review posts where I sought to  bring some of my own idiosyncratic concerns to reading contemporary films. Time demands have made writing film reviews a bit more difficult, but I’ve genuinely missed the opportunity to use this space to reflect about some of the ideas that matter to me.

Waking up from a very long blogging slumber to point out the completely geeky but utterly hilarious Film Studies Ryan Gosling tumblr blog.

Via Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, I learned about Andy Baio’s archive of “supercut” videos, which Kelly defines as “a video montage cut and sequenced from existing movies and TV and commercials. It creates a rapid-fire medley of shots representing a theme of some sort.” As Kelly notes, these videos are often used to depict movie or TV show cliches, or repeated elements, such as Kramer’s entrances on Seinfeld or every mention of the word, “dude,” in The Big Lebowski. I’ve discussed some of these videos in Reinventing Cinema and in passing in an article I co-wrote with Richard Edwards on political videos, but I wish I’d had the term “supercut” available to me when I was writing these pieces.

As Kelly notes, the archive is a great resource, and the video Kelly cites–a compilation of shots of Palin breathing–is positively creepy, but one of the highlights for me was a short essay on the history and formal aspects of supercut videos. Baio astutely links the practice to avant-gare filmmakers such as Bruce Conner and Christian Marclay (Telephones, 1995), but he also has analyzed the  structure of supercut videos tracking the average number of cuts (around 82, with 5% of videos consisting of at least 300 cuts) and the common rhetorical effects of these films (supercuts as criticism, etc). It’s a good  overview, one that I think will be helpful for fans and scholars of online video.