Journal articles: 'Trailer, film, film promotion, film distribution' – Grafiati (2025)

Abstract:

This paper discusses creativity of ideas, production processes, post production and idiological value initiated by Salman Film community. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method by using approach of hierarchy. The results of this study show that (1) Creativity idea of ​​packing the concept of film by Salman Film community is based on Islamic teachings with packaging that does not patronize the audience. (2) The production of the film has fulfilled the standard of good film production which includes sound system, artistic, shooting, directing and shooting process. (3) Post-Production Process is done through promotion and distribution conventionally by billboards, social campaign media. Then advert on TV and also do an interview on TV when the movie is big screen. (4) Idiology of production film salman community of this film is the Islamic concept of rahmatan lil alamin. Tulisan ini membahas kreativitas ide, proses produksi, pasca produksi dan nilai idiologis yang digagas oleh komunitas Salman Film. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode deskriptif kualitatif dengan menggunakan pendekatan hirarki. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa (1) kreativitas ide pengemasan konsep film yang dilakukan komunitas Salman Film ini berasarkan ajaran Islam dengan pengemasan yang tidak menggurui penonton, (2) Produksi film yang dilakukan telah memenuhi standar produksi film yang baik yaitu meliputi tata suara, tata artistik, pengambilan gambar, penyutradaraan dan proses shooting, (3) Proses Pasca Produksi yang dilakukan adalah promosi dan distribusi secara konvensional melalui, billboard, kampanye di sosial media. Kemudian iklan di Tv dan juga melakukan wawancara di Tv apabila film layar lebar, dan (4) Idiologi produksi fil Komunitas Salman Film ini adalah konsep Islam rahmatan lil alamin.

Abstract:

One of the features of films compared to other cultural products is the possibility of their use for advertising and information activities and influence on the formation of needs and audience preferences, as well as different patterns of consumer behavior. The urgency of this scientific problem is that the sale of cinema products today is impossible without a marketing system. The application of different marketing strategies depending on the specific tasks allows a differentiated approach to each project and achieve the goals both from the standpoint of contribution to the development of culture and in terms of obtaining economic effects from the film industry. The main purpose of the study is to substantiate and determine the features of the use of marketing tools in the film industry. The study of marketing services for film production was carried out in accordance with the logical structure of the concept of “7P” (product, promotion, location, price, staff, physical environment, and the process of providing services). Recommendations for the marketing of services in the film industry: first, the choice of methods for watching movies depends on the type of media environment (traditional, digital), secondly, the choice of ways to obtain movies depending on their genre and subject, thirdly, in order to effective promotion of content and perception of the film identified the basic requirements for its trailer. The article proves that the marketing of services in the film industry is aimed not only at meeting the socio-cultural needs of the population but also at the commercialization of the industry, ensuring audience access to films, as well as creating market conditions for its sustainable development. The research materials are the basis for further research on current issues of modern film practice, integration of film production and film consumption. Keywords: movie consumption, service marketing, consumer behavior, cultural marketing.

Abstract:

One of the features of films compared to other cultural products is the possibility of their use for advertising and information activities and influence on the formation of needs and audience preferences, as well as different patterns of consumer behavior. The urgency of this scientific problem is that the sale of cinema products today is impossible without a marketing system. The applications of different marketing strategies depending on the specific tasks allows a differentiated approach to each project and achieve the goals both from the standpoint of contribution to the development of culture, and in terms of obtaining economic effects from the film industry. The main purpose of the study is to substantiate and determine the features of the use of marketing tools in the film industry. The study of marketing services for film production was carried out in accordance with the logical structure of the concept of "7P" (product, promotion, location, price, staff, physical environment and the process of providing services). Recommendations for the marketing of services in the film industry: first, the choice of methods for watching movies depends on the type of media environment (traditional, digital), secondly, the choice of ways to obtain movies depending on their genre and subject, thirdly, in order to effective promotion of content and perception of the film identified the basic requirements for its trailer. The article proves that the marketing of services in the film industry is aimed not only at meeting the socio-cultural needs of the population, but also at the commercialization of the industry, ensuring audience access to films, as well as creating market conditions for its sustainable development. The research materials are the basis for further research on current issues of modern film practice, integration of film production and film consumption.

Abstract:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to posit a methodology for exploring promotional trailers in the public domain and a critical discussion of the findings therein. Design/methodology/approach – The approach utilises third part press as a mechanism to limit videosharing website results and allows for a varied corpus of data. Findings – The paper posits that the term “trailer” has shifted significantly since its original use in the film industry and now applies to a certain type of experiential promotion. Originality/value – This is the first time a methodology has been discussed that considers trailers as a shared vernacular term, rather than subject of historical archive.

Abstract:

This article will analyse the distribution and promotion strategies of Matteo Garrone’s Dogman (2018) in the United States. It will reconstruct the singularity of this case study in a comparative perspective, considering both the international circulation trends of European national cinemas and the distribution of contemporary Italian films in the United States. An integrated methodology will be adopted, combining film and media industry studies, cultural studies, and the field of art and culture economics. After an analysis of the tendencies of the distribution of Italian contemporary arthouse cinema in the United States, the specific distribution strategies adopted for Dogman will be considered against the background of the financing system within which the production model of the film is embedded. Further, the role of Magnolia Pictures, the North American distributor of Garrone’s film, will be inspected through the discussion of some interviews with professionals directly involved in the promotion and distribution of the film.

Abstract:

The article deals with the so called “French Period” in the Russian cinema of the late 1800s and early 1900s and analyses the process of forming the national institute of distributors and theatre owners. It also pays attention to the problems of repertoire policy and promotion and accounts for the success of Russian pre-revolutionary cinema.

Abstract:

The film market of China has been growing rapidly and is now the world’s second largest film market. Hollywood studios have been sending transnational films to China to receive additional revenues. This research investigates the three channels (i.e., flat-rate buyouts, co-productions, and revenue-sharing titles) through which Hollywood studios can enter their films in China’s film market and reviews the China-focused localization efforts that Hollywood studios have made to appeal to China. The review findings show that exporting Hollywood films to China as revenue-sharing titles has become the favorite approach for major Hollywood studios to gain additional revenues. To improve revenue-sharing films’ box-office performance, localization efforts of Hollywood studios are executed throughout a film’s theatrical life cycle, from a film’s planning and production stages to its distribution, promotion, and exhibition stages. Implications and suggestions as to how Hollywood studios can further utilize film localization efforts to enhance box-office success in China are also discussed in the present study.

Abstract:

Abstract In this article, I analyse the soundtrack of the green band trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012), combining quantitative methods to analyse the soundtrack with formal analysis. I show that, even though Sinister is a narrative about a demon who lives in images, the horror in the soundtrack of this trailer is articulated through the sound design. I describe the structure of the soundtrack and analyse the distribution and organisation of dialogue, the use of different types of sound effects to create a connection between the viewer and the characters onscreen, as well as the use of specific localised sound events to organise attention and to frighten the viewer. I identify two features not previously discussed in relation to quantitative analysis of film soundtracks: an affective event based on reactions to a stimulus and the presence of nonlinear features in the sound envelopes of localised affective events. The sound design of this trailer is consistent with the principles of contemporary sound design in horror cinema, but also demonstrates some variation in its use of sound as a paratext to its parent film.

Abstract:

The article deals with process of the reconstruction of Russian film industry after the Revolution. Special attention is paid to the problems of the repertoire policy under the near absence of domestic film production. The author also examines alternative forms of film distribution and exhibition (propaganda trains, steamboats, etc.), the principles of promotion the nascent Soviet cinema throughout the country.

Abstract:

The objective of paper is to study the progression of the Colombian film industry and the birth of its film policy. By analyzing the new laws and the distribution of funds around the Proimágenes Program of the Ministry of Culture we identify that the creation of the Ministry of Culture (1997) and the Mixed Fund for Film Promotion-Proimágenes is the first milestone, followed and complemented by the Film Law (2003) that institutes the Film Development Fund (FDC) and the Film Law (2012), which attracts foreign companies and approves the Colombia Film Fund (FFC).

Abstract:

In the period of “thaw” (mid 1950s – mid 1960s), there is a sharp qualitative and quantitative growth of Soviet cinema. If in 1951 in the USSR was filmed just nine films which didn’t represent a high artistic value in the creative attitude, already in 1956–57, Soviet cinema shocked the whole world. In 1958 they released 66 new Soviet film, but by 1960 our film industry overcame the milestone of 100 films and continued to steadily increase the production. The growth of the film industry contributed to the cinema spreading and film distribution. In the years of “thaw” in the USSR cinema attendance exceeded 3 billion, compared to 1.5 billion in 1953. The Gross fundraising from screenings at state cinema chains increased to 5.5 million rubles in 1957, and throughout the hole cinema chain – up to 7.5 million rubles. On the 1st January 1958, the chain consisted of 80 thousand cinemas, including more than 50 thousand in rural areas. By this time, they had mastered new technical possibilities of cinema (wide-screen, panoramic, wide angle, circular panorama). They fully mastered color film. However, in the field of cinema there were still a lot of unresolved issues. Revenues from films increased annually in largely through the construction and commissioning of new cinemas, and due to the tightening operation mode of already active cinemas, contrary to their real capabilities. But cinema rigidly centralized administrative-command system which had been formed in the 1930s continued to operate until the perestroika in the Soviet. They sold films to the distributors as a “product” based on the amount of the estimated cost of the film. The Studio was lcompletely disinterested in the outcome of the promotion of the film, its success with the audience. Thus, they did not have a major driver in the fight for the quality of films. Numerous attempts of the Filmmakers ‘ Union, established in 1957, to change the existing system didn’t have the results. The only application of far-reaching ideas of the Union became an Experimental creative Studio.

Abstract:

The article considers approaches to the state regulation of digital film distribution, evaluates them. The paper generalizes them in the form of proposals for anti-piracy regulation, promotion of original content of online cinemas in international markets, as well as for effective interaction of online cinemas with the Ministry of Culture and the Cinema Foundation. This will resolve the issue of serious competition to traditional cinemas, since the viewer has the opportunity to watch their favorite films without leaving home, and also related to the start of work on their own exclusive content of a large number of digital platforms. The state obliges digital platforms to provide information about the number of views of their content in a single automated information system. This information helps to assess the effectiveness of budget support for cinema, since there are examples of films that did not collect a large box office at the box office but were able to gain more than one million views on the Internet.

Abstract:

Scholars generally have studied the emergence of American film stars in one of two ways: as an aesthetic, cultural phenomenon or as part of the larger story of corporate consolidation in the film industry. This article combines these approaches, arguing that the early film star played two overlapping roles. Within the new long feature films, stars served as focal points for continuity across complex narratives; within the new vertically integrated film corporations, they became focal points for the coordination of production, distribution, and promotion. The article concludes by suggesting that the interconnections between aesthetic practice and industrial organization bear further examination.

Abstract:

Cinenova was relaunched in 1991 from the pre-existing womens distributor, Circles, which had operated throughout the 1980s. In keeping with their founders feminist politics, both Circles and Cinenova were run via a non-hierarchical management structure and focused on the distribution, promotion and exhibition of films and videos made by, for and about women. As the funding and economic climate became harsher during the 1990s this organisational model was severely tested, as Cinenova‘s workers were forced to try and survive on a more commercially viable basis. This article uses Cinenova‘s management committee meeting minutes of 1991–97 to explore how its management practices impacted on its operation and effectiveness.

Abstract:

Owing to China’s austere censorship regulations on film media, directors of films and documentaries engaging with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes have struggled to bring their work to domestic attention. Working outside of the state-funded Chinese film industry has become necessary for these directors to commit their narratives to film, but without approval of China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, these artists have had little chance of achieving widespread domestic distribution of their work. However, advancements in new media technology and Web 2.0, ranging from digital video formats to Internet-based distribution via social media networks and video-hosting platforms, provide opportunities for Chinese audiences to access films and documentaries dealing with LGBT themes. This empirical study assesses how production, promotion and consumption of queer documentary films are influenced by the development of social media within Chinese cyberspace. Through close readings of microblogs from SinaWeibo, this study combines analysis of contemporary research with digital social rights activism to illustrate contemporary discourse regarding film-based LGBT representation in China. Finally, the study comments on the role that documentary filmmaking plays in China’s gay rights movement, and discusses the rewards (and challenges) associated with increased levels of visibility within society.

Abstract:

Between 1890 and 1940, motion pictures changed from technological novelties into heavily branded consumer products. The high sunk costs and short “shelf-life” of movies led film producers to borrow branding techniques from other consumer goods industries. They tried to build audience loyalty around a number of characteristics, but eventually learned that stars and stories were the most effective “promotion machines,” able swiftly to generate massive brand-awareness and to persuade consumers to see a new film. Data from the United States, Britain, and France showing the disproportionate distribution of income and fame among stars confirm their role as persuaders. Ultimately, film producers extended the life of their products by licensing their instant, tradable brands to other consumer goods industries.

Abstract:

Integrated marketing communication planning in film marketing activities is implemented as a sales solution and promotes a film title to the public in a variety of effective and interactive ways in which the message in the film can touch the appropriate target audience. PT. Creative Motion Pictures is a film company that uses an integrated marketing communication planning formula to meet the needs of its audience. PT. Creative Motion Pictures formulas when planning marketing communication. The influence of symbolic interaction has a major contribution in the marketing communication planning of PT. Creative Motion Pictures. This research uses a qualitative methodology with a case study method. Data collection was done by participant observation, in-depth interviews with PT. Creative Motion Pictures. The conclusion of this research is that it has 4 stages of integrated marketing communication planning namely Film Products, Target Market, Promotion, Distribution. At all stages there are symbolic interactions such as language selection, organizational regulations, and company vision.Perencanaan komunikasi pemasaran terpadu dalam kegiatan pemasaran film diterapkan sebagai solusi penjualan dan mempromosikan sebuah judul film kepada masyarakat dengan berbagai cara yang efektif dan interaktif dimana pesan dalam film bisa menyentuh target audience yang sesuai. PT. Creative Motion Pictures merupakan perusahaan film yang menggunakan formula perencanaan komunikasi pemasaran terpadu untuk memenuhi kebutuhan penontonnya. PT. Creative Motion Pictures formula-formula yang ketika melakukan perancanaan komunikasi pemasaran. Pengaruh Interaksi simbolik memiliki kontribusi yang besar dalam perencanaan komunikasi pemasaran PT. Creative Motion Pictures. Penelitian ini menggunakan metodologi kualitatif dengan metode studi kasus. Pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan observasi partisipan, wawancara yang mendalam dengan tim PT. Creative Motion Pictures. Kesimpulan dari penelitian ini yakni memiliki 4 tahapan perencanaan komunikasi pemasaran terpadu yaitu Produk Film, Target Pasar, Promosi,Pendistribusian. Pada semua tahapan tersebut terdapat interaksi lambing-lambang seperti, pemilihan bahasa,peraturan organisasi, sampai visi perusahaan.

Abstract:

In contrast to the canonical history of cinema and film theory, often dominated by academic texts and Western and/or male voices, this article presents a casual conversation held in 1961 between four of the most influential women in the post-war Japanese film industry: Kawakita Kashiko,,Yamamoto Kyōko, Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko. As they openly discuss their gendered experience in production, promotion, distribution and criticism, their thoughts shed light on the wide range of opportunities available to women in filmmaking, but also on the professional constraints,and concerns which they felt came along with their gender. Their conversation reveals how they measured themselves and their national industry in relation to the West; at times unaware of their pioneer role in world cinema. This piece of self-reflexive criticism contributes to existing research on both womens filmmaking and the industry of Japanese cinema, and invites us to reconsider non-hegemonic film thinking practices and voices.

Abstract:

With the development of science and technology, social networking and digital media technology are also constantly developing. Handheld mobile smart terminals have been continuously promoted and popularized. The promotion and popularization of network and digital media technology bring convenience to people’s life and work. People can use their leisure time to shop online and watch related videos. The advent of the Internet era has promoted the development of China’s industry. The era of big data is coming. Big data analysis brings enormous value to all occupations. At the same time, it has brought new developments to Chinese animation films, realizing the marketing and development design of animated films. At the same time, big data has also brought opportunities for the development of the Chinese animation film industry. The application of big data brings a foundation for China’s animation film industry. From investment and financing, topic development and design, marketing promotion, and distribution and development of derivative products, big data brings huge value to the entire industry chain. However, big data is not omnipotent, and there are certain problems in the use of big data in Chinese animation films. At present, the application of big data in China’s animation film industry also has limitations and practical difficulties. Based on this, this paper focuses on discussing and analyzing the historical status of China’s animation industry. Moreover, it analyzes the future development prospects of the animation industry and other related contents. It is hoped that the brief analysis in this article provides some reference and inspiration for relevant practitioners.

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the influence of economic, social, communicative and marketing factors on the audience and gives a cross-cultural analysis of consuming entertainment services including cinema attendance. Dwelling on the development of such film market segments as on-line cinemas, paid movie streaming, downloading films, games, music, etc.. which broaden the consumers choice and demonstrate the power of theatrical distribution competitors, the authors justify the use of marketing techniques (social network promotion, branding and co-branding programs, etc.) for enhancing the audiences commitment and loyalty.

Abstract:

ABSTRACTObservations of the night-sky brightness were organized at 106 places in Japan by a promotion of the Environmental Agency with the help of many local governments. Two kinds of measurements were carried out: 1) Number of stars were counted in a region of triangle formed by Alpha Lyr, Epsilon Lyr, and Zeta Lyr by at least 10 contributors at each point. 2) Photographs of a star field at the zenith at each point were taken with the same type of camera and film. These results gave us a good idea on distribution of night-sky brightness in Japan.

Abstract:

Asphalt binder behaves as a viscoelastic material and its inherit performance is dominated by rheological and chemical properties. Aging of asphalt binder is a prominent distress for long-term in-service asphalt pavement. In this work, the effect of aging on base asphalt modified by polyphosphoric acid (PPA) has been investigated. For the objective, virgin asphalt binder was modified by various dosages of PPA, styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS), and PPA/SBS compound modification. The short- and long-term aging processes were simulated by Rolling Thin-Film Oven Test (RTFOT) and Pressure Aging Vessel (PAV) procedure. Rheological property of five aged modified binders was evaluated by the Dynamic Shear Rheometer (DSR). Meanwhile, gel permeation chromatography (GPC) was conducted to measure the molecular weight distribution and dispersion coefficient during the aging process. The high-temperature stiffness of PPA polymer binders is slightly higher than that of SBS and PPA/SBS compound modified asphalts. The aging ratio and molecular weight analysis verify the lower thermal-oxidative susceptibility of PPA/SBS compound modified asphalts. This study offers an understanding for the promotion and application of PPA modifier.

Abstract:

The complex terminology of cinematography, where French and foreign terms meet and compete, reflects the nature of this domain, which is the area of international cooperation, of the exchange of thoughts and expression. In order to avoid the compulsory usage of foreign nomenclature, the creation and distribution of French equivalents have become the assignment of institutions such as the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française and l’Académie française. Despite the development of indigenous terminology in the field of cinema, which is strongly associated with the international film industry, especially the American one, the circulation of Anglicisms remains significant. The objective of this article is to study English terms in the aforementioned domain. Therefore, firstly, the official recommendations of the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française and l’Académie française for the employment of French terms in the field of cinema are presented. The second part constitute the analysis of the presence of English terms from the corpus, such as casting, flashback, steadicam, trailer, in contemporary French dictionaries, in relation to the official recommendations of the aforementioned institutions. Finally, we focus on the presence of Anglicisms and their French equivalents in French journalistic discourse on the example of the common press, in order to study the circulation of loans words and to examine whether they are actually substituted by notions of French terminology.

Abstract:

The relevance of sensor response to NO2 with the nanostructure of the sensing body was investigated for thick-film devices using ZnO(WO3) nanocomposites. When the nanocomposites was prepared from constituent oxides by milling in a high energy ball mill for various spans of time (1–21 h), the sensor response to 100 ppm NO2, defined as the ratio of the electrical resistance in air to that in the sample gas, was found to reach a maximum as large as about 80 at 21 h of high energy ball-milling (HEBM). XRD and SEM observations of the granular state and pore size distribution analyses indicated that increasing HEBM time gave rise especially to an increase in the volume of pores in the pore size range of 20–35 nm. It is suggested that such a change in nanostructure is responsible for the marked promotion of the response to NO2. For comparison, the response to NO2 of ZnO or WO3 nanoparticles prepared by an HEBM method was also presented. In this case, the response to NO2 can be 10 times larger at HEBM for 21 h.

Abstract:

Much of the present debate about content on the internet revolves around how to control the distribution of different sorts of harmful or undesirable material. Yet there are considerable issues about whether sufficient sorts of desired cultural content will be available, such as ‘national’, ‘Australian’ content. In traditional broadcasting, regulation has been devised to encourage or mandate different types of content, where it is believed that the market will not do so by itself. At present, such regulatory arrangements are under threat in television, as the Productivity Commission Broadcasting Inquiry final report has noted. But what of the future for certain types of content on the internet? Do we need specific regulation and policy to promote the availability of content on the internet? Or is such a project simply irrelevant in the context of gradual but inexorable media convergence? Is regulating for content just as quixotic and fraught with peril as regulating of content from a censorship perspective often appears to be? In this article, we consider the case of Australian content for broadband technologies, especially in relation to film and video, and make some preliminary observations on the promotion and regulation of internet content.

Abstract:

Using Ar-induced promotion of microcrystallization to the Si:H network, P-doped μc-Si:H films were prepared at a deposition rate of 50 Å/min. However, a large fraction of an amorphous component was identified, and a definite structural inhomogeneity was evident in the Si:H matrix. Efficient defect elimination, structural reorientation, and grain growth were performed, and an improved microcrystalline network with enhanced dopability was attained by introducing H2 to the Ar-assisted SiH4 plasma and by using their individual advantages to facilitate the microcrystallization process. A high conductivity of approximately 2 × 101 S cm−1 and a homogeneous distribution of micrograins of average diameter approximately 80 Å, contributing to a crystalline volume fraction of 67% in the matrix, were obtained. A significant achievement was to maintain microcrystallinity at a very low thickness of the bulk layer. The n-type μc-Si:H film of dark conductivity approximately 100 S cm−1 was realized at a thickness of approximately 350 Å with a deposition rate of 24 Å/min. Using this material at the tunnel junction as well as at the bottom layer of a double-junction a-Si solar cell, a conversion efficiency of 11.7% was attained without compromising the other parameters.

Abstract:

One of the main trends in the development of the Russian animation industry is the intensification of international cooperation and promotion on international media markets. Russian animators are developing different forms of international cooperation and co-production in the context of the economic crisis, financing problems, lack of second-tier personnel and production capacities, as well as national distribution problems. In the situation of a weakening relationship with European partners, there is an increase in cooperation with Asian companies. The leading role is given to cooperation with China, due to the policies pursued by the two countries and close cultural interaction supported at the intergovernmental level. Russian companies are moving from outsourcing in film production to other forms of interaction, such as co-financing of projects and co-production. The essay analyzes the co-production experience of such leaders of the Russian animation industry as Riki, KinoAtis and Wizart Animation. Co-production with foreign companies involves a number of problems caused by cultural, mental, legal and organizational differences. Still, it combines financial efforts and consolidates technical capabilities, raising the quality of films to the world level. Co-production also stimulates international distribution and reduces financial risks, opens up opportunities to conquer new markets and overcome the systems of quotes that exist in some countries. In the Russian animation industry, the number of co-produced films demonstrates a tendency to increase. The development of various forms of interaction between the Russian animation business and foreign partners and the presentation of coproduced films on international media markets contributes to the formation of Russias positive image and promotes its national interests, lifestyle and culture, affirming animations long-standing status of a soft power asset.

Abstract:

Experimental and numerical investigations on the interaction of a planar shock wave with two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) light gas cylinders are performed. The effects of initial interface curvature on flow morphology, wave pattern, vorticity distribution and interface movement are emphasized. In experiments, a wire-restriction method based on the soap film technique is employed to generate N$_{2}$ cylinders surrounded by SF$_{6}$ with well-characterized shapes, including a convex cylinder, a concave cylinder with a minimum-surface feature and a 2-D cylinder. The high-speed schlieren pictures demonstrate that fewer disturbance waves exist in the flow field and the evolving interfaces develop in a more symmetrical way relative to previous studies. By combining the high-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory construction with the double-flux scheme, numerical simulation is conducted to explore the detailed 3-D flow structures. It is indicated that the shape and the size of 3-D gas cylinders in different planes along the vertical direction change gradually due to the existence of both horizontal and vertical velocities of the flow. At very early stages, pressure oscillations in the vicinity of evolving interfaces induced by complex waves contribute much to the deformation of the 3-D gas cylinders. As time proceeds, the development of the shocked volume would be dominated by the baroclinic vorticity deposited on the interface. In comparison with the 2-D case, the oppositely (or identically) signed principal curvatures of the concave (or convex) SF$_{6}$/N$_{2}$ boundary cause complex high pressure zones and additional vorticity deposition, and the upstream interface from the symmetric slice of the concave (or convex) N$_{2}$ cylinder moves with an inhibition (or a promotion). Finally, a generalized 3-D theoretical model is proposed for predicting the upstream interface movements of different gas cylinders and the present experimental and numerical findings are well predicted.

Abstract:

The objective of the paper is to develop PR-tools for popularization of “Korolivske” Gospel – the unique manuscript dated by 1401, the original of which is preserved in the funds of the Transcarpathian Local Lore Museum. The manuscript with expressive features of the Old Ukrainian language, created in the westernmost region of the modern Ukraine, needs immediate restoration. Thus, development and application of tools for its popularization will promote wider awareness of the public of Transcarpathian region and Ukraine in general about its importance and can accelerate solution to the issue of its restoration and, consequently, preservation of an important part of the Ukrainian cultural heritage. The PR-tools include the following: creation of a story-legend, which might be the basis for various video works (from short informative videos targeted at different categories of persons to popular science film with researchers’ scientific comments about the manuscript); sharing them on social networks, as well as on the official pages of relevant ministries (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, Ministry of Culture of Ukraine), the websites of institutions of higher education, other educational institutions, on television; creation and use of sound advertising in public transport (cities, regions), print advertising in bookstores and at book exhibitions, etc., banner on billboards and lightboxes, on tourist portals with high attendance; an offer to take a picture opposite the decorations or original installations related to the cultural manuscript, with special hashtags with their further distribution on social networks and blogs; active cooperation with the media; active involvement of young people in manuscript promotion. The events conducted to disseminate information on various modern platforms, including online ones and using a number of PR-tools might expedite solution to the issue to restore the manuscript, as well as to popularize it qualitatively. The study used the cultural-historical method (to characterize the significance of “Korolivske” Gospel for Ukrainian culture), the descriptive method (to determine the methods and tools for popularization of the manuscript) and the method of generalization used to summarize the study.

Abstract:

IntroductionRecut trailers typically mix footage from one or more films to create a preview for a feature that will never exist. Challenging the trailer’s assumed function as existing merely to gain an audience for a main attraction, the recut trailer suggests that the trailer can exist separately from a film. This paper will ask if recut trailers are evidence of fan enthusiasm and question precisely where this enthusiasm is directed. Do recut trailers demonstrate there are fans for the feature film that is recut, or does this enthusiasm extend beyond an appreciation and anticipation for a feature film? It will be ascertained if the recut trailer – as a site for homage, parody and fandom – transcends the advertising imperatives of box office success. This paper will demonstrate how fan-made trailers are symptomatic of the need for a new critical approach to trailers, one that does not situate the trailer as the low advertisement to the high cultural text of the film. It will be proposed that trailers form a network, of which the feature films and other trailers that are invoked form only a part.Recut trailers, while challenging the norms of what is considered an advertisement, function within a strict frame of reference: in their length, use of credits, text, voiceover in direct address to the audience, and editing techniques. Consequently, the recut trailer parodies and challenges the tools of promotion by utilising the very methods that sell to a prospective audience, to create an advertisement that is stripped of its traditional function by promoting a film that cannot exist and cannot be consumed. The promotion seems to end at the site of the advertisement, while still calling upon a complex series of interconnected references and collective knowledge in order for the parody to be effective. This paper will examine the network of Brokeback Mountain parodies, which were created before, during and after the feature film’s release, suggesting that the temporal imperative usually present in trailers is irrelevant for their appreciation. A playlist of the trailers discussed is available here.The Shift from Public to PrivateThe limited scholarship available situates the trailer as a promotional tool and a “brief film text” (Kernan 1), which is a “limited sample of the product” of the feature film (Kerr and Flynn 103), one that directly markets to demographics in order to draw an audience to see the feature. The traditional distribution methods for the trailer – as pre-packaged coming attractions in a cinema, and as television advertisements – work by building a desire to see a film in the future. For the trailer to be commercially successful within this framework, there is an imperative to differentiate itself from other trailers through creating an appeal to stars, genre or narrative (Kernan 14), or to be recognised as a trailer in amongst the stream of other advertisements on television. As new media forms have emerged, the trailer’s spatial and temporal bounds have shifted: the trailer is now included as a special feature on DVD packages, is sent to mobile devices on demand, and is viewed on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. In this move from the communal, collective and directed consumption of the trailer in the public sphere to the individualised, domesticated and on-demand consumption in the private sphere – the trailer has shown itself to be a successful “cross-media text” (Johnston 145). While choosing to watch a trailer – potentially long after the theatrical release of the film it promotes – suggests a growing “interactive relationship between film studio and audience” (Johnston 145), it also marks the beginning of increasing interactivity between the trailer and the audience, a relationship that has altered the function and purpose of the trailer beyond the studio’s control. Yet, the form of the trailer as it was traditionally distributed has been retained for recut trailers in order to parody and strip the trailer of its original meaning and purpose, and removes any commercial capital attached to it. Rather than simply being released at the control of a studio, the trailer is now actively shared, appropriated and altered. Demand for the trailer has not diminished since the introduction of new media, suggesting that there is an enthusiasm not only for coming feature films, but also for the act of watching, producing and altering trailers that may not translate into box office takings. This calls into question the role of the trailer in new media sites, in which the recut trailers form a significant part by embodying the larger changes to the consumption and distribution of trailers.TrailerTubeThis study analyses recut trailers released on YouTube only. This is, arguably, the most common way that these trailers are watched and newly created trailers are shared and interacted with, with some clips reaching several million views. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the network that is created surrounding the recut trailer through addressing its specific qualities. YouTube is the only site consulted in this study for the release for fan-made trailers as YouTube forms a formidable part of the network of recut trailers and studio released trailers, and currently, serves as a common way for Internet users to search for videos.YouTube was launched in December 2005, and in the following 1-2 years, the majority of popular recut trailers emerged. The correlation between these two dates is not arbitrary; the technology and culture promoted and fostered by the unique specificities of YouTube has in turn developed the recut trailer as “one of the most popular forms of fan subversion in the age of digital video” (Hilderband 52). It is also the role of audiences and producers that has ensured that the trailer has moved beyond its original spatial and temporal bounds – to be consumed in the home or on mobile devices, and at any stage past any promotional urgency. The Brokeback Mountain parodies, to be later discussed, surfaced mainly in 2006, demonstrative of an early acceptance of the possibilities that YouTube and mass broadcasting presented, and the possibilities that the trailer could offer to YouTube’s “clip” culture (Hilderbrand 49).The specificities of YouTube as a channel for dissemination have allowed for fan-made trailers to exist alongside trailers released by studios. Rather than the trailer being consumed and then becoming irretrievable, perpetually tied to the feature film it promotes, the online distribution and storing of trailers allows a constant revisiting of the advertisement – this act alone demonstrating an enthusiasm for the form of the trailer. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube “offers[s] new and remediating relationships to texts that indicate changes and acceleration of spectatorial consumption” (49). Specifically, Hilderbrand proposes that YouTube functions as a collection of memories, which in turn present a “portal of cultural memory” (54) – amplified by the ability to create playlists and channels. The tagging of trailers to the films from which they drive, the official trailers released for a film referenced, or other recut trailers ensures that there is a physical trace of the network the trailer creates. Recut trailers demand for knowledge and capital to be shared amongst viewers, the technical attributes of YouTube allow for much of this knowledge to be available on demand, and to be hyperlinked or suggested to the viewer. In order for the parody present in recut trailers to function at the level intended, the films that are drawn upon would presumably need to be identified and some basic elements of the plot understood in order for the capital imbued in the trailer to be completely realised. If the user is unaware of the film, however, clips of the film or the original trailer can be reached either through the “related videos” menu which populates according to the didactic information for the clip watched, or by searching. As the majority of recut trailers seek to displace the original genre of the film parodied – such as, for example, Ten Things I Hate about Commandments which presents the story of The Ten Commandments as a teen film in which Moses will both part the sea and get the girl – the original genre of the film must be known by the viewer in order to acknowledge the site for parody in the fan-made trailer. Further to this, the network deployed suggests that there must be some knowledge of the conventions of the genre that is being applied to the original film’s promotional qualities. The parody functions by effectively sharing the knowledge between two genres, in conjunction with an awareness of the role and capital of the trailer. Tagging, playlists and channels facilitate the sharing of knowledge and dispersing of capital. As the recut trailer tends to derive from more than one source, the network alters the viewer’s relationship to the original feature film and cultivates a series of clips and knowledge. However, this also indicates that intimate fan knowledge can be bypassed – which places this particular relationship to the trailer and the invoked films as existing outside the realms of the archetypal cult fan. This challenges prior conceptions of fan culture by resisting a prolonged engagement normally attributed to cultivating fan status (Hills), as typically only one trailer will be made, rather than exhibiting a concentrated adulation of one text. The recut trailer is placed as the nexus in a series of links, in which the studio system is subverted while also being directly engaged with and utilised. The tools that have traditionally been used to sell to an audience through pre-packaged coming attractions are now used to promote a film that cannot be consumed that holds no commercial significance for film studios. These tools also work to reinforce the aesthetic and cinematic norms in the trailer, which provide a contract of audience expectations – such as the use of the approval by the American Motion Picture Association screen and classification at the beginning of the majority of recut trailers. The recut trailer assimilates to the nature of video sharing on YouTube in which the trailer is part of a network of narratives all of which are accessible on demand, can be fast-forwarded, replayed, and embedded on numerous social networking sites for further dissemination and accompanying editorial comment. The trailer thus becomes a social text that involves a community and is wide-reaching in its aims and consumption, despite being physically consumed in the private sphere. The feature which enables the user to “favourite” a video, add it to their playlist and embed it in another site, demonstrates that the trailer is considered as its own cohesive form, subject to scrutiny and favoured or dismissed. Constant statistics reflecting its popularity reinforce the success of a recut trailer, and popularity will generally lead to the trailer becoming more accessible. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube has nutured a “new temporality of immediate gratification for audiences” which has in turn contributed to the “culture of the clip” (49), which the trailer seems to exemplify – and in the absence of feature films being legally readily accessible on sites such as YouTube, the trailer seeks to fill the void for immediate gratification.Brokeback MountainsWhile fan-made trailers can generate enthusiasm about the release of an upcoming film they may be linked to – as was recently the case with fan-made trailers for teen vampire film, Twilight – there is also a general enthusiasm to play with the form of the trailer and all that it signifies, while in the process, stripping the trailer of its traditional function. Following the release of the trailer for feature film Brokeback Mountain, numerous recut trailers emerged on YouTube which took the romantic and sexual relationship of the two male leads in the film, and applied this narrative to films depicting two male leads in a non-romantic friendship. In effect, new films were created that used the basis of Brokeback Mountain to shift plots in existing films, creating a new narrative in the process. The many Brokeback… parodies vary in popularity, and have been uploaded to YouTube continuously since 2006. The titles include Brokeback to the Future, Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style, Brokeback of the Ring, The Brokeback Redemption, Broke Trek, Harry Potter and Brokeback Goblet and Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. The trailers use footage from a variety of film and television sources that show a friendship between two men and introduce it to the “style” of Brokeback Mountain. There are several techniques which are used uniformly across all of the trailers in order to convey this new plot: the original score used in the Brokeback Mountain trailer begins each recut trailer; the use of typically white text on a black screen based on the original trailer’s text, or a slight variant of it which is specific to the film which is being recut; and the pace of shots altered to focus on lingering looks, or to splice scenes together in order to imply sexual contact. Consequently, there is a consciousness of the effects used in the original trailer to sell a particular narrative to the audience as something that an audience would want to view. The narrative is constructed as being universal, as any story with two men as the leads and their friendship can be altered to show an underlying homoerotic story, and the form of the trailer allows these storylines to be promoted and shared. The insider knowledge of the fan that has noticed these interactions is able to make their knowledge communal. Hills argues that “fans participate in communal activities” (ix), which here takes the form of creating a network of collective stories which form Brokeback – it is a story extended to several sites, and a story which is promoted and sold. Through the use of tagging, playlists and suggested videos, once one recut trailer is viewed, several others are made instantly available. The availability of the original Brokeback Mountain trailer then serves to reinforce the authenticity and professionalism of the clips, by providing a template in which existing footage from other films is moulded to fit within.The instant identifier of a Brokeback… trailer is the music that was used in the original trailer. This signals that the trailer for Brokeback Mountain was itself so iconic that the use of its soundtrack would be instantly recognisable, and the re-use of music and text suggests that the recut trailers reinforce this iconography and its capital by visually reinforcing what signifies Brokeback Mountain. The network these trailers create includes the film Brokeback Mountain itself, but the recut trailer begins to open a new trajectory for the narrative to mould and shift, identifiable by techniques present in the trailer but not the feature film itself. The fan appreciation is evident in several ways: namely, there is an enthusiasm to conflate a feature film into Brokeback Mountain’s general narrative; that there has been enough of an engagement with a feature in order to retrieve clips to be edited into a new montage, and consequently, a condensed narrative with a direct mode of address; and also the eagerness to see a feature film in trailer form, employing trailer-specific cinematic techniques to enhance parody and displacement. Recut trailers are also subject to commenting, which generally reflect on either the insider fan knowledge of the text that is being initiated to the world of Brokeback Mountain, or take the place of comments that reflect on the success of the editing. In this respect, critique is a part of the communal fan interaction with the creator and uploader in the recut trailer’s network. As such, there is a focus on quality for the creator of the fan video, and rating occurs in order to rank the recut trailers. This focus on quality and professionalism elevates the creator of the recut trailer to the status of a director, despite not having filmed the scenes themselves. Demonstrating the enthusiasm for the role of the trailer, the internal promotion on YouTube of the most successful trailers – designated as such by the YouTube community – signals an active engagement with the role of the trailer, and its social properties, even though it is consumed individually.ConclusionWhile the recut trailer extends the fan gaze toward one object or more, it is typically presented as a parody, and consequently, could also be seen as rejecting elements of a genre or feature film. However, the parody typically occurs at the site of displacement: such as the relationship between the two male leads in Brokeback to the Future having a romantic relationship whilst coming to terms with time-travel; the burning bush in Ten Things I Hate about Commandments being played by Samuel L. Jackson as “Principal Firebush”, complete with audio from Pulp Fiction; or recutting romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle to become a horror film. The parody relies on knowledge that can be found easily, aided by YouTube’s features, while requiring the creator to intimately engage with a feature film. The role of the trailer in this network is to provide the tools and the boundaries for the new narrative to exist within, and create a system of referents for the fan to identify, through parodies of star appeal, genre, or narrative, as Kernan proposes are the three ways in which a trailer often relies upon to sell itself to an audience (14).As this paper has argued toward, the recut trailer can also be released from the feature films it invokes by being considered as its own coherent form, which draws upon numerous sites of knowledge and capital in order to form a network. While traditionally trailers have worked to gain an audience for an impending feature release, the recut trailer only seeks to create an audience for itself. Through the use of cult texts or a particularly successful form of parody, as demonstrated in Scary Mary Poppins, the recut trailer is widely consumed and shared across multiple avenues. The recut trailer then seeks to promote only itself through providing a condensed narrative, speaking directly to audiences, and cleverly engaging with the use of editing to leave traces of authorship. Fan culture may be seen as the adoration of one creator to the film they recut, but the network that the recut trailer creates demonstrates that there is an enthusiasm in both creators and viewers for the form of the trailer itself, to exist beyond the feature film and advertising imperatives.ReferencesBrokeback of the Ring. 27 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgt-BiFiBek›.Brokeback to the Future. 1 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY›.Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2005. The Brokeback Redemption Trailer. 28 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtRi42DEdTE›.Broke Trek – A Star Trek Brokeback Mountain Parody. 27 May 2007. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSOuLky3n0›.Harry Potter and the Brokeback Goblet. 8 March 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9D0veHTxh0›. Hilderbrand, Lucas. "Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61 (2007): 48-57. Hills, Matthew. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Johnston, Keith M. "'The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World': Trailers in the Digital Age." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (2008): 145-60. Kernan, Lisa. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004. Kerr, Aphra, and Roddy Flynn. "Rethinking Globalisation through the Movie and Games Industries." Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 9 (2003): 91-113. The Original Scary ‘Mary Poppins’ Recut Trailer. 8 Oct. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic›.Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style. 4 April 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHLr5AYl5f4›.Sleepless in Seattle. Dir. Nora Ephron. Film. Tristar Pictures, 1993. Sleepless in Seattle: Recut as a Horror Movie. 30 Jan. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUPnZMxr08›.Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. 14 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omB18oRsBYg›.The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Ten Things I Hate about Commandments. 14 May 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs›.

Abstract:

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Engagement in any capacity with mainstream media since mid-2001 has meant immersion in the cross-platform, multimedia phenomenon of Harry Potter: Muggle outcast; boy wizard; corporate franchise. Consumers even casually perusing contemporary popular culture could be forgiven for suspecting they have entered a MÃbius loop in which Harry Potter-related media products and merchandise are ubiquitous: books; magazine cover stories; newspaper articles; websites; television specials; hastily assembled author biographies; advertisements on broadcast and pay television; children's merchandising; and theme park attractions. Each of these media commodities has been anchored in and cross-promoted by America Online-Time Warner's (AOL-TW) first instalment in a projected seven-film sequence—Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.1 The marketing campaign has gradually escalated in the three years elapsing between AOL-TW subsidiary Warner Bros' purchase from J.K. Rowling of the film and merchandising rights to the first two Harry Potter books, and the November 2001 world premiere of the film (Sherber 55). As current AOL-TW CEO Richard Parsons accurately forecast, "You're not going to be able to go anywhere without knowing about it. This could be a bigger franchise than Star Wars" (Auletta 50). Yet, AOL-TW's promotional strategy did not limit itself to creating mere awareness of the film's release. Rather, its tactic was to create an all-encompassing environment structured around the immense value of the Harry Potter brand—a "brand cocoon" which consumers do not so much enter and exit as choose to exist within (Klein 2002). In twenty-first-century mass marketing, the art is to target affluent consumers willing to direct their informational, entertainment, and consumption practices increasingly within the "walled garden" of a single conglomerate's content offerings (Auletta 55). Such an idealised modern consumer avidly samples the diversified product range of the parent conglomerate, but does so specifically by consuming multiple products derived from essentially the same content reservoir. Provided a match between consumer desire and brand can be achieved with sufficient accuracy and demographic breadth, the commercial returns are obvious: branded consumers pay multiple times for only marginally differentiated products. The Brand-Conglomerate Nexus Recyclable content has always been embraced by media industries, as cultural commodities such as early films of stage variety acts, Hollywood studio-era literary adaptations, and movie soundtrack LPs attest. For much of the twentieth century, the governing dynamic of content recycling was sequential, in that a content package (be it a novel, stage production or film) would succeed in its home medium and then, depending upon its success and potential for translation across formats, could be repackaged in a subsequent medium. Successful content repackaging may re-energise demand for earlier formatting of the same content (as film adaptations of literary bestsellers reliably increase sales of the originating novel). Yet the cultural industries providing risk capital to back content repackaging formerly required solid evidence that content had achieved immense success in its first medium before contemplating reformulations into new media. The cultural industries radically restructured in the last decades of the twentieth century to produce the multi-format phenomenon of which Harry Potter is the current apotheosis: multiple product lines in numerous corporate divisions are promoted simultaneously, the synchronicity of product release being crucial to the success of the franchise as a whole. The release of individual products may be staggered, but the goal is for products to be available simultaneously so that they work in aggregate to drive consumer awareness of the umbrella brand. Such streaming of content across parallel media formats is in many ways the logical culmination of broader late-twentieth-century developments. Digital technology has functionally integrated what were once discrete media operating platforms, and major media conglomerates have acquired subsidiaries in virtually all media formats on a global scale. Nevertheless, it remains true that the commercial risks inherent in producing, distributing and promoting a cross-format media phenomenon are vastly greater than the formerly dominant sequential approach, massively escalating financial losses should the elusive consumer-brand fit fail to materialise. A key to media corporations' seemingly quixotic willingness to expose themselves to such risk is perhaps best provided by Michael Harkavy, Warner Bros' vice-president of worldwide licensing, in his comments on Warner Music Group's soundtrack for the first Harry Potter film: It will be music for the child in us all, something we hope to take around the world that will take us to the next level of synergy between consumer products, the [AOL-TW cable channel] Cartoon Network, our music, film, and home video groups—building a longtime franchise for Harry as a team effort. (Traiman 51) The relationship between AOL-TW and the superbrand Harry Potter is essentially symbiotic. AOL-TW, as the world's largest media conglomerate, has the resources to exploit fully economies of scale in production and distribution of products in the vast Harry Potter franchise. Similarly, AOL-TW is pre-eminently placed to exploit the economies of scope afforded by its substantial holdings in every form of content delivery, allowing cross-subsidisation of the various divisions and, crucially, cross-promotion of the Harry Potter brand in an endless web of corporate self-referentiality. Yet it is less frequently acknowledged that AOL-TW needs the Harry Potter brand as much as the global commercialisation of Harry Potter requires AOL-TW. The conglomerate seeks a commercially protean megabrand capable of streaming across all its media formats to drive operating synergies between what have historically been distinct commercial divisions ("Welcome"; Pulley; Auletta 55). In light of AOL-TW's record US$54.2b losses in the first quarter of 2002, the long-term viability of the Harry Potter franchise is, if anything, still more crucial to the conglomerate's health than was envisaged at the time of its dot.com-fuelled January 2000 merger (Goldberg 23; "AOL" 35). AOL-TW's Richard Parsons conceptualises Harry Potter specifically as an asset "driving synergy both ways", neatly encapsulating the symbiotic interdependence between AOL-TW and its star franchise: "we use the different platforms to drive the movie, and the movie to drive business across the platforms" ("Harry Potter" 61). Characteristics of the Harry Potter Brand AOL-TW's enthusiasm to mesh its corporate identity with the Harry Potter brand stems in the first instance from demonstrated consumer loyalty to the Harry Potter character: J.K. Rowling's four books have sold in excess of 100m copies in 47 countries and have been translated into 47 languages.2 In addition, the brand has shown a promising tendency towards demographic bracket-creep, attracting loyal adult readers in sufficient numbers to prompt UK publisher Bloomsbury to diversify into adult-targeted editions. As alluring for AOL-TW as this synchronic brand growth is, the real goldmine inheres in the brand's potential for diachronic growth. From her first outlines of the concept, Rowling conceived of the Potter story as a seven-part series, which from a marketing perspective ensures the broadscale re-promotion of the Harry Potter brand on an almost annual basis throughout the current decade. This moreover assists re-release of the first film on an approximately five-year basis to new audiences previously too young to fall within its demographic catchment—the exact strategy of "classic" rebranding which has underwritten rival studio Disney's fortunes.3 Complementing this brand extension is the potential to grow child consumers through the brand as Harry Potter sequels are produced. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone director Chris Columbus spruiks enthusiastically that "the beauty of making these books into films is that with each one, Harry is a year older, so [child actor] Daniel [Radcliffe] can remain Harry as long as we keep making them" (Manelis 111). Such comments suggest the benefits of luring child consumers through the brand as they mature, harnessing their intense loyalty to the child cast and, through the cast, to the brand itself. The over-riding need to be everything to everyone—exciting to new consumers entering the brand for the first time, comfortingly familiar to already seasoned consumers returning for a repeat hit—helps explain the retro-futuristic feel of the first film's production design. Part 1950s suburban Hitchcock, Part Dickensian London, part Cluny-tapestry medievalism, part public school high-Victorianism, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone strives for a commercially serviceable timelessness, in so doing reinforcing just how very twenty-first-century its conception actually is. In franchise terms, this conscious drive towards retro-futurism fuels Harry Potter's "toyetic potential" (Siegel, "Toys" 19). The ease with which the books' complex plots and mise-en-scene lend themselves to subsidiary rights sales and licensed merchandising in part explains Harry Potter's appeal to commercial media. AOL-TW executives in their public comments have consistently stayed on-message in emphasising "magic" as the brand's key aspirational characteristic, and certainly scenes such as the arrival at Hogwarts, the Quidditch match, the hatching of Hagrid's dragon and the final hunt through the school's dungeons serve as brilliant advertisements for AOL-TW's visual effects divisions. Yet the film exploits many of these "magic" scenes to introduce key tropes of its merchandising programme—Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, chocolate frogs, Hogwarts house colours, the sorting hat, Scabbers the rat, Hedwig, the Remembrall—such that it resembles a series of home shopping advertisements with unusually high production values. It is this railroading of the film's narrative into opportunities for consumerist display which leads film critic Cynthia Fuchs to dub the Diagon Alley shopping scene "the film's cagiest moment, at once a familiar activity for school kid viewers and an apt metaphor for what this movie is all about—consumption, of everything in sight." More telling than the normalising of shopping as filmic activity in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the eclipse of the book's checks on commodity fetishism: its very British sensitivity to class snubs for the large and impecunious Weasley family; the puzzled contempt Hogwarts initiates display for Muggle money; the gentle ribbing at children's obsession with branded sports goods. The casual browser in the Warner Bros store confronted with a plastic, light-up version of the Nimbus 2000 Quidditch broomstick understands that even the most avid authorial commitment to delimiting spin-off merchandise can try the media conglomerate's hand only so far. Constructing the Harry Potter Franchise The film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone constitutes the indispensable brand anchor for AOL-TW's intricate publicity and sales strategy around Harry Potter. Because content recycling within global media conglomerates is increasingly lead by film studio divisions, the opening weekend box office taking for a brand-anchoring film is crucial to the success of the broader franchise and, by extension, to the corporation as a whole. Critic Thomas Schatz's observation that the film's opening serves as "the "launch site" for its franchise development, establishing its value in all other media markets" (83) highlights the precariousness of such multi-party financial investment all hinging upon first weekend takings. The fact that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone broke (then standing) box office records with its 16 November 2001 three-day weekend openings in the US and the UK, garnering US$93.2m and GBP16m respectively, constituted the crucial first stage in AOL-TW's brand strategy (Collins 9; Fierman and Jensen 26). But it formed only an initial phase, as subsequent content recycling and cross-promotion was then structured to radiate outwards from this commercial epicentre. Three categories of recycled AOL-TW Harry Potter content are discernible, although they are frequently overlapping and not necessarily sequential. The first category, most closely tied to the film itself, are instances of reused digital content, specifically in the advance publicity trailer viewable on the official website, and downloads of movie clips, film stills and music samples from the film and its soundtrack.4 Secondly, at one remove from the film itself, is AOL-TW's licensing of film "characters, names and related indicia" to secondary manufacturers, creating tie-in merchandise designed to cross-promote the Harry Potter brand and stoke consumer investment (both emotional and financial) in the phenomenon.5 This campaign phase was itself tactically designed with two waves of merchandising release: a September 2000 launch of book-related merchandise (with no use of film-related Harry Potter indicia permitted); and a second, better selling February 2001 release of ancillary products sporting Harry Potter film logos and visual branding which coincided with and reinforced the marketing push specifically around the film's forthcoming release (Sherber 55; Siegel, "From Hype" 24; Lyman and Barnes C1; Martin 5). Finally, and most crucial to the long-term strategy of the parent conglomerate, Harry Potter branding was used to drive consumer take up of AOL-TW products not generally associated with the Harry Potter brand, as a means of luring consumers out of their established technological or informational comfort zones. Hence, the official Harry Potter website is laced with far from accidental offers to trial Internet service provider AOL; TimeWarner magazines Entertainment Weekly, People, and Time ran extensive taster stories about the film and its loyal fan culture (Jensen 56-57; Fierman and Jensen 26-28; "Magic Kingdom" 132-36; Corliss 136; Dickinson 115); AOL-TW's Moviefone bookings service advertised pre-release Harry Potter tickets on its website; and Warner Bros Movie World theme park on the Gold Coast in Australia heavily promoted its Harry Potter Movie Magic Experience. Investment in a content brand on the scale of AOL-TW's outlay of US$1.4m for Harry Potter must not only drive substantial business across every platform of the converged media conglomerate by providing premium content (Grover 66). It must, crucially for the long run, also drive take up and on-going subscriptions to the delivery services owned by the parent corporation. Energising such all-encompassing strategising is the corporate nirvana of seamless synergy: between content and distribution; between the Harry Potter and AOL-TW brands; between conglomerate and consumer. Notes 1. The film, like the first of J.K. Rowling's books, is titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the "metaphysics-averse" US ("Harry Potter" 61). 2. Publishing statistics sourced from Horn and Jones (59), Manelis (110) and Bloomsbury Publishing's Harry Potter website: http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harryp.... 3. Interestingly, Disney tangentially acknowledged the extent to which AOL-TW has appropriated Disney's own content recycling strategies. In a film trailer for the Pixar/Disney animated collaboration Monsters, Inc. which screened in Australia and the US before Harry Potter sessions, two monsters play a game of charades to which the answer is transparently "Harry Potter." In the way of such homages from one media giant to another, it nevertheless subtly directs the audience to the Disney product screening in an adjacent cinema. 4. The official Harry Potter film website is http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com. The official site for the soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone is: http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com. 5. J.K. Rowling." A page and a half of non-negotiable "Harry Potter Terms of Use" further spells out prohibitions on use or modification of site content without the explicit (and unlikely) consent of AOL-TW (refer: http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/te...). References "AOL losses 'sort of a deep disappointment'." Weekend Australian 18-19 May 2002: 35. Auletta, Ken. "Leviathan." New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001: 50-56, 58-61. Collins, Luke. "Harry Potter's Magical $178m Opening." Australian Financial Review 20 Nov. 2001: 9. Corliss, Richard. "Wizardry without Magic." Time 19 Nov. 2001: 136. Dickinson, Amy. "Why Movies make Readers." Time 10 Dec. 2001: 115. Fierman, Daniel, and Jeff Jensen. "Potter of Gold: J.K. Rowling's Beloved Wiz Kid hits Screensand Breaks Records." Entertainment Weekly 30 Nov. 2001: 26-28. Fuchs, Cynthia. "The Harry Hype." PopPolitics.com 19 Nov. 2001: n.pag. Online. Internet. 8 Mar. 2002. Available <http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml>. Goldberg, Andy. "Time Will Tell." Sydney Morning Herald 27-28 Apr. 2002: 23. Grover, Ronald. "Harry Potter and the Marketer's Millstone." Business Week 15 Oct. 2001: 66. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Dir. Chris Columbus. Screenplay by Steve Kloves. Warner Bros, 2001. "Harry Potter and the Synergy Test." Economist 10 Nov. 2001: 61-62. Herman, Edward S., and Robert W. McChesney. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell, 1997. Horn, John, and Malcolm Jones. "The Bubble with Harry." The Bulletin/Newsweek 13 Nov. 2001: 58-59. Jensen, Jeff. "Holiday Movie Preview: Potter's Field." Entertainment Weekly 16 Nov. 2001: 56-57. Klein, Naomi. "Naomi KleinNo Logo." The Media Report. ABC Radio National webtranscript. Broadcast in Sydney, 17 Jan. 2002. Online. Internet. 19 Feb. 2002. Available <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm>. Lyman, Rick, and Julian E. Barnes. "The Toy War for Holiday Movies is a Battle Among 3 Heavyweights." New York Times 12 Nov. 2001: C1. "Magic Kingdom." People Weekly 14 Jan. 2002: 132-36. Manelis, Michele. "Potter Gold." Bulletin 27 Nov. 2001: 110-11. Martin, Peter. "Rowling Stock." Weekend Australian 24-25 Nov. 2001: Review, 1, 4-5. Pulley, Brett. "Morning After." Forbes 7 Feb. 2000: 54-56. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Schatz, Thomas. "The Return of the Hollywood Studio System." Conglomerates and the Media. Erik Barnouw et al. New York: New Press, 1997. 73-106. Sherber, Anne. "Licensing 2000 Showcases Harry Potter, Rudolph for Kids." Billboard 8 Jul. 2000: 55. Siegel, Seth M. "Toys & Movies: Always? Never? Sometimes!" Brandweek 12 Feb. 2001: 19. ---. "From Hype to Hope." Brandweek 11 Jun. 2001: 24. Traiman, Steve. "Harry Potter, Powerpuff Girls on A-list at Licensing 2000." Billboard 1 Jul. 2000: 51, 53. "Welcome to the 21st Century." Business Week 24 Jan. 2000: 32-34, 36-38. Links http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harrypotter/muggles http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/terms.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Murray, Simone. "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php>. Chicago Style Murray, Simone, "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Murray, Simone. (2002) Harry Potter, Inc.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

The article discusses the functioning of the Film Council during its activity in Telewizja Polska in 2014–2015. In less than two years the Council consisting of over a dozen members from several TVP’s departments recommended almost forty coproductions for feature films, regulated procedures for the endorsement of coproduction agreements and aimed to develop TVP’s influence in the process of film promotion and distribution. According to Polish film law, the Council’s job was to stimulate the development of the Polish cinema.

Abstract:

The relevance of the topic is conditioned by the need for scientific understanding of media analytics and a qualitative understanding of its methods as promotion tools, as well as for the introduction of the research stage of media consumption into the film production process to popularize and further promote domestic film products among the Russian audience. In the Russian film industry, this experience is especially necessary within modern economic conditions. The need to ensure the financial success of Russian film products, which are subsidized by the state, has led to the interest in finding new approaches promoting and increasing the loyalty of the cinema audience, which is especially important at a time when only 1 out of 10 domestic films pays for their film production during the distribution period.

Abstract:

In Mexico, the cases in which an increase in commercial activities for tourism following a film production have been recorded and evidenced are scarce, despite the fact that cinematographic productions (considering their multiple processes of advertising, recording and news) are a forum for the configuration of tourist areas and part an industry of distribution of cultural contents in growth ideal for the promotion of destinations. The different locations in Mexico in which Bandidas (2006) and Spectre (2015) were filmed, have made different use of the attraction of a film production and show a different tourism service planning. The methodology adopted was a combination of techniques (Arias Alpízar, 2009) (Hernández Sampieri, Fernández Collado, & Baptista Lucio, 2003). The quantitative part made use of the characterization of the area, review of the catalogs of tourist services in the regions, historical comparison of the evolution of tourist services related to the filming of films (Ander, 1989). On the other hand, as a qualitative part, the interview was used (Hernández Sampieri, Fernández Collado, & Baptista Lucio, 2003) so that those involved in these services could express their opinions on the subject. Likewise, a digital newspaper review was carried out (Ander, 1989) to know the advertising promotion of the regions using as an attribute the filming of the cinematographic productions in the area.

Abstract:

Abstract: The main purpose of this document is to give statement of the importance that the innovative ideas of the Mexican commercial films organizations have, so they can create attractive movies for the spectators in the United States market and increase the film business. Also, we discuss the need that the organizations have to create production plans that allow them to reduce the costs, as much as possible, during the production. This will be the beginning to develop an appropriate commercializing into the United States by the Mexican organizations that will allow us to obtain an attractive revenue,always looking towards the United State customers´ satisfaction. Finally, we analyze the critical factors of success or failure in the Mexican commercial film productions, taking into account the financial aspects, like the production investment, government supports and the return over the investment; theinternational marketing, that includes the film promotion and the distribution and exhibition; and the artistic aspect composed by the human talent and the movie story.Key Words: Causal factors of success, film commerce, film production enterprise, human resources, innovative ideas, production planning, revenueResumen: El presente documento tiene como finalidad plasmar la importancia que tienen las ideas innovadoras de las organizaciones de producciones cinematográficas en México para que puedan crear películas atractivas para los espectadores en el mercado estadounidense y aumentar la comercialización de las mismas. También, se comenta la necesidad que tienen dichas organizacionesde crear planes de producción que les permitan reducir los costos, lo más posible, durante la filmación. Lo anterior será el inicio para desarrollar una comercialización adecuada a los Estados Unidos por parte de las organizaciones mexicanas, que les permitirá obtener atractivos rendimientos, buscando siempre la satisfacción del consumidor estadounidense. Por último, se analizan los factores críticos de éxito o fracaso en las producciones cinematográficas comerciales mexicanas, mencionando los aspectos financieros, como lo son la inversión en la producción, los apoyos gubernamentales y el retorno sobre la inversión; el marketing internacional, que incluye la promoción de películas y su distribución y exhibición; y el aspecto artístico comprendido por el talento humano y la historia que se cuenta en la película.Palabras Clave: Comercialización de películas, factores causales de éxito, ideas innovadoras, organización de producción cinematográfica, planeación de la producción, recursos humanos, rendimientos

Abstract:

Introduction Documentary film has grown significantly in the past decade, with high profile films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, and An Inconvenient Truth garnering increased attention both at the box office and in the news media. In addition, the rising prominence of web-based media has provided new opportunities for documentary to create social impact. Films are now typically released with websites, Facebook pages, twitter feeds, and web videos to increase both reach and impact. This combination of technology and broader audience appeal has given rise to a current landscape in which documentary films are imbedded within coordinated multi-media campaigns. New media have not only opened up new avenues for communicating with audiences, they have also created new opportunities for data collection and analysis of film impacts. A recent report by McKinsey and Company highlighted this potential, introducing and discussing the implications of increasing consumer information being recorded on the Internet as well as through networked sensors in the physical world. As they found: "Big data—large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every sector and function of the global economy" (Manyika et al. iv). This data can be mined to learn a great deal about both individual and cultural response to documentary films and the issues they represent. Although film has a rich history in humanities research, this new set of tools enables an empirical approach grounded in the social sciences. However, several researchers across disciplines have noted that limited investigation has been conducted in this area. Although there has always been an emphasis on social impact in film and many filmmakers and scholars have made legitimate (and possibly illegitimate) claims of impact, few have attempted to empirically justify these claims. Over fifteen years ago, noted film scholar Brian Winston commented that "the underlying assumption of most social documentaries—that they shall act as agents of reform and change—is almost never demonstrated" (236). A decade later, Political Scientist David Whiteman repeated this sentiment, arguing that, "despite widespread speculation about the impact of documentaries, the topic has received relatively little systematic attention" ("Evolving"). And earlier this year, the introduction to a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on documentary film stated, "documentary film, despite its growing influence and many impacts, has mostly been overlooked by social scientists studying the media and communication" (Nisbet and Aufderheide 451). Film has been studied extensively as entertainment, as narrative, and as cultural event, but the study of film as an agent of social change is still in its infancy. This paper introduces a systematic approach to measuring the social impact of documentary film aiming to: (1) discuss the context of documentary film and its potential impact; and (2) argue for a social science approach, discussing key issues about conducting such research. Changes in Documentary Practice Documentary film has been used as a tool for promoting social change throughout its history. John Grierson, who coined the term "documentary" in 1926, believed it could be used to influence the ideas and actions of people in ways once reserved for church and school. He presented his thoughts on this emerging genre in his 1932 essay, First Principles of Documentary, saying, "We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form" (97). Richard Barsam further specified the definition of documentary, distinguishing it from non-fiction film, such that all documentaries are non-fiction films but not all non-fiction films are documentaries. He distinguishes documentary from other forms of non-fiction film (i.e. travel films, educational films, newsreels) by its purpose; it is a film with an opinion and a specific message that aims to persuade or influence the audience. And Bill Nichols writes that the definition of documentary may even expand beyond the film itself, defining it as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" (12). Documentary film has undergone many significant changes since its inception, from the heavily staged romanticism movement of the 1920s to the propagandist tradition of governments using film to persuade individuals to support national agendas to the introduction of cinéma vérité in the 1960s and historical documentary in the 1980s (cf. Barnouw). However, the recent upsurge in popularity of documentary media, combined with technological advances of internet and computers have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for film to serve as both art and agent for social change. One such opportunity is in the creation of film-based social action campaigns. Over the past decade, filmmakers have taken a more active role in promoting social change by coordinating film releases with action campaigns. Companies such as Participant Media (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., etc.) now create "specific social action campaigns for each film and documentary designed to give a voice to issues that resonate in the films" (Participant Media). In addition, a new sector of "social media" consultants are now offering services, including "consultation, strategic planning for alternative distribution, website and social media development, and complete campaign management services to filmmakers to ensure the content of nonfiction media truly meets the intention for change" (Working Films). The emergence of new forms of media and technology are changing our conceptions of both documentary film and social action. Technologies such as podcasts, video blogs, internet radio, social media and network applications, and collaborative web editing "both unsettle and extend concepts and assumptions at the heart of 'documentary' as a practice and as an idea" (Ellsworth). In the past decade, we have seen new forms of documentary creation, distribution, marketing, and engagement. Likewise, film campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage audience members, including "action kits, screening programs, educational curriculums and classes, house parties, seminars, panels" that often turn into "ongoing 'legacy' programs that are updated and revised to continue beyond the film's domestic and international theatrical, DVD and television windows" (Participant Media). This move towards multi-media documentary film is becoming not only commonplace, but expected as a part of filmmaking. NYU film professor and documentary film pioneer George Stoney recently noted, "50 percent of the documentary filmmaker's job is making the movie, and 50 percent is figuring out what its impact can be and how it can move audiences to action" (qtd. in Nisbet, "Gasland"). In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, coined the term "transmedia storytelling", which he later defined as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience" ("Transmedia"). When applied to documentary film, it is the elements of the "issue" raised by the film that get dispersed across these channels, coordinating, not just an entertainment experience, but a social action campaign. Dimensions of Evaluation It is not unreasonable to assume that such film campaigns, just like any policy or program, have the possibility to influence viewers' knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Measuring this impact has become increasingly important, as funders of documentary and issue-based films want look to understand the "return on investment" of films in terms of social impact so that they can compare them with other projects, including non-media, direct service projects. Although we "feel" like films make a difference to the individuals who also see them in the broader cultures in which they are embedded, measurement and empirical analysis of this impact are vitally important for both providing feedback to filmmakers and funders as well as informing future efforts attempting to leverage film for social change. This type of systematic assessment, or program evaluation, is often discussed in terms of two primary goals—formative (or process) and summative (or impact) evaluation (cf. Muraskin; Trochim and Donnelly). Formative evaluation studies program materials and activities to strengthen a program, and summative evaluation examines program outcomes. In terms of documentary film, these two goals can be described as follows: Formative Evaluation: Informing the Process As programs (broadly defined as an intentional set of activities with the aim of having some specific impact), the people who interact with them, and the cultures they are situated in are constantly changing, program development and evaluation is an ongoing learning cycle. Film campaigns, which are an intentional set of activities with the aim of impacting individual viewers and broader cultures, fit squarely within this purview. Without formulating hypotheses about the relationships between program activities and goals and then collecting and analyzing data during implementation to test them, it is difficult to learn ways to improve programs (or continue doing what works best in the most efficient manner). Attention to this process enables those involved to learn more about, not only what works, but how and why it works and even gain insights about how program outcomes may be affected by changes to resource availability, potential audiences, or infrastructure. Filmmakers are constantly learning and honing their craft and realizing the impact of their practice can help the artistic process. Often faced with tight budgets and timelines, they are forced to confront tradeoffs all the time, in the writing, production and post-production process. Understanding where they are having impact can improve their decision-making, which can help both the individual project and the overall field. Summative Evaluation: Quantifying Impacts Evaluation is used in many different fields to determine whether programs are achieving their intended goals and objectives. It became popular in the 1960s as a way of understanding the impact of the Great Society programs and has continued to grow since that time (Madaus and Stufflebeam). A recent White House memo stated that "rigorous, independent program evaluations can be a key resource in determining whether government programs are achieving their intended outcomes as well as possible and at the lowest possible cost" and the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) launched an initiative to increase the practice of "impact evaluations, or evaluations aimed at determining the causal effects of programs" (Orszag 1). Documentary films, like government programs, generally target a national audience, aim to serve a social purpose, and often do not provide a return on their investment. Participant Media, the most visible and arguably most successful documentary production company in the film industry, made recent headlines for its difficulty in making a profit during its seven-year history (Cieply). Owner and founder Jeff Skoll reported investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company and CEO James Berk added that the company sometimes measures success, not by profit, but by "whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically" (Cieply). Because of this, documentary projects often rely on grant funding, and are starting to approach funders beyond traditional arts and media sources. "Filmmakers are finding new fiscal and non-fiscal partners, in constituencies that would not traditionally be considered—or consider themselves—media funders or partners" (BRITDOC 6). And funders increasingly expect tangible data about their return on investment. Says Luis Ubiñas, president of Ford Foundation, which recently launched the Just Films Initiative: In these times of global economic uncertainty, with increasing demand for limited philanthropic dollars, assessing our effectiveness is more important than ever. Today, staying on the frontlines of social change means gauging, with thoughtfulness and rigor, the immediate and distant outcomes of our funding. Establishing the need for evaluation is not enough—attention to methodology is also critical. Valid research methodology is a critical component of understanding around the role entertainment can play in impacting social and environmental issues. The following issues are vital to measuring impact. Defining the Project Though this may seem like an obvious step, it is essential to determine the nature of the project so one can create research questions and hypotheses based on a complete understanding of the "treatment". One organization that provides a great example of the integration of documentary film imbedded into a larger campaign or movement is Invisible Children. Founded in 2005, Invisible Children is both a media-based organization as well as an economic development NGO with the goal of raising awareness and meeting the needs of child soldiers and other youth suffering as a result of the ongoing war in northern Uganda. Although Invisible Children began as a documentary film, it has grown into a large non-profit organization with an operating budget of over $8 million and a staff of over a hundred employees and interns throughout the year as well as volunteers in all 50 states and several countries. Invisible Children programming includes films, events, fundraising campaigns, contests, social media platforms, blogs, videos, two national "tours" per year, merchandise, and even a 650-person three-day youth summit in August 2011 called The Fourth Estate. Individually, each of these components might lead to specific outcomes; collectively, they might lead to others. In order to properly assess impacts of the film "project", it is important to take all of these components into consideration and think about who they may impact and how. This informs the research questions, hypotheses, and methods used in evaluation. Film campaigns may even include partnerships with existing social movements and non-profit organizations targeting social change. The American University Center for Social Media concluded in a case study of three issue-based documentary film campaigns: Digital technologies do not replace, but are closely entwined with, longstanding on-the-ground activities of stakeholders and citizens working for social change. Projects like these forge new tools, pipelines, and circuits of circulation in a multiplatform media environment. They help to create sustainable network infrastructures for participatory public media that extend from local communities to transnational circuits and from grassroots communities to policy makers. (Abrash) Expanding the Focus of Impact beyond the Individual A recent focus has shifted the dialogue on film impact. Whiteman ("Theaters") argues that traditional metrics of film "success" tend to focus on studio economic indicators that are far more relevant to large budget films. Current efforts focused on box office receipts and audience size, the author claims, are really measures of successful film marketing or promotion, missing the mark when it comes to understanding social impact. He instead stresses the importance of developing a more comprehensive model. His "coalition model" broadens the range and types of impact of film beyond traditional metrics to include the entire filmmaking process, from production to distribution. Whiteman (“Theaters”) argues that a narrow focus on the size of the audience for a film, its box office receipts, and viewers' attitudes does not incorporate the potential reach of a documentary film. Impacts within the coalition model include both individual and policy levels. Individual impacts (with an emphasis on activist groups) include educating members, mobilizing for action, and raising group status; policy includes altering both agenda for and the substance of policy deliberations. The Fledgling Fund (Barrett and Leddy) expanded on this concept and identified five distinct impacts of documentary film campaigns. These potential impacts expand from individual viewers to groups, movements, and eventually to what they call the "ultimate goal" of social change. Each is introduced briefly below. Quality Film. The film itself can be presented as a quality film or media project, creating enjoyment or evoking emotion in the part of audiences. "By this we mean a film that has a compelling narrative that draws viewers in and can engage them in the issue and illustrate complex problems in ways that statistics cannot" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Awareness. Film can increase public awareness by bringing light to issues and stories that may have otherwise been unknown or not often thought about. This is the level of impact that has received the most attention, as films are often discussed in terms of their "educational" value. "A project's ability to raise awareness around a particular issue, since awareness is a critical building block for both individual change and broader social change" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Engagement. Impact, however, need not stop at simply raising public awareness. Engagement "indicates a shift from simply being aware of an issue to acting on this awareness. Were a film and its outreach campaign able to provide an answer to the question 'What can I do?' and more importantly mobilize that individual to act?" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This is where an associated film campaign becomes increasingly important, as transmedia outlets such as Facebook, websites, blogs, etc. can build off the interest and awareness developed through watching a film and provide outlets for viewers channel their constructive efforts. Social Movement. In addition to impacts on individuals, films can also serve to mobilize groups focused on a particular problem. The filmmaker can create a campaign around the film to promote its goals and/or work with existing groups focused on a particular issue, so that the film can be used as a tool for mobilization and collaboration. "Moving beyond measures of impact as they relate to individual awareness and engagement, we look at the project's impact as it relates to the broader social movement … if a project can strengthen the work of key advocacy organizations that have strong commitment to the issues raised in the film" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). Social Change. The final level of impact and "ultimate goal" of an issue-based film is long-term and systemic social change. "While we understand that realizing social change is often a long and complex process, we do believe it is possible and that for some projects and issues there are key indicators of success" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This can take the form of policy or legislative change, passed through film-based lobbying efforts, or shifts in public dialogue and behavior. Legislative change typically takes place beyond the social movement stage, when there is enough support to pressure legislators to change or create policy. Film-inspired activism has been seen in issues ranging from environmental causes such as agriculture (Food Inc.) and toxic products (Blue Vinyl) to social causes such as foreign conflict (Invisible Children) and education (Waiting for Superman). Documentary films can also have a strong influence as media agenda-setters, as films provide dramatic "news pegs" for journalists seeking to either sustain or generation new coverage of an issue (Nisbet "Introduction" 5), such as the media coverage of climate change in conjunction with An Inconvenient Truth. Barrett and Leddy, however, note that not all films target all five impacts and that different films may lead to different impacts. "In some cases we could look to key legislative or policy changes that were driven by, or at least supported by the project... In other cases, we can point to shifts in public dialogue and how issues are framed and discussed" (7). It is possible that specific film and/or campaign characteristics may lead to different impacts; this is a nascent area for research and one with great promise for both practical and theoretical utility. Innovations in Tools and Methods Finally, the selection of tools is a vital component for assessing impact and the new media landscape is enabling innovations in the methods and strategies for program evaluation. Whereas the traditional domain of film impact measurement included box office statistics, focus groups, and exit surveys, innovations in data collection and analysis have expanded the reach of what questions we can ask and how we are able to answer them. For example, press coverage can assist in understanding and measuring the increase in awareness about an issue post-release. Looking directly at web-traffic changes "enables the creation of an information-seeking curve that can define the parameters of a teachable moment" (Hart and Leiserowitz 360). Audience reception can be measured, not only via interviews and focus groups, but also through content and sentiment analysis of web content and online analytics. "Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden" (Manyika et al. 5). These new tools are significantly changing evaluation, expanding what we can learn about the social impacts of film through triangulation of self-report data with measurement of actual behavior in virtual environments. Conclusion The changing media landscape both allows and impels evaluation of film impacts on individual viewers and the broader culture in which they are imbedded. Although such analysis may have previously been limited to box office numbers, critics' reviews, and theater exit surveys, the rise of new media provides both the ability to connect filmmakers, activists, and viewers in new ways and the data in which to study the process. This capability, combined with significant growth in the documentary landscape, suggests a great potential for documentary film to contribute to some of our most pressing social and environmental needs. A social scientific approach, that combines empirical analysis with theory applied from basic science, ensures that impact can be measured and leveraged in a way that is useful for both filmmakers as well as funders. In the end, this attention to impact ensures a continued thriving marketplace for issue-based documentary films in our social landscape. References Abrash, Barbara. "Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement." American University Center for Social Media 21 Apr. 2010. 26 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/›. Aufderheide, Patricia. "The Changing Documentary Marketplace." Cineaste 30.3 (2005): 24-28. Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Barrett, Diana and Sheila Leddy. "Assessing Creative Media's Social Impact." The Fledgling Fund, Dec. 2008. 15 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.thefledglingfund.org/media/research.html›. Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1992. BRITDOC Foundation. The End of the Line: A Social Impact Evaluation. London: Channel 4, 2011. 12 Oct. 2011 ‹http://britdoc.org/news_details/the_social_impact_of_the_end_of_the_line/›. Cieply, Michael. "Uneven Growth for Film Studio with a Message." New York Times 5 Jun. 2011: B1. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Emerging Media and Documentary Practice." The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs. Aug. 2008. 22 Sep. 2011. ‹http://www.gpia.info/node/911›. Grierson, John. "First Principles of Documentary (1932)." Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. Eds. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 97-102. Hart, Philip Solomon and Anthony Leiserowitz. "Finding the Teachable Moment: An Analysis of Information-Seeking Behavior on Global Warming Related Websites during the Release of The Day After Tomorrow." Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3.3 (2009): 355-66. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. ———. "Transmedia Storytelling 101." Confessions of an Aca-Fan. The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 Mar. 2007. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html›. Madaus, George, and Daniel Stufflebeam. "Program Evaluation: A Historical Overview." Evaluation in Education and Human Services 49.1 (2002): 3-18. Manyika, James, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Brad Brown, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, and Angela Hung Byers. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. May 2011 ‹http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/›. Muraskin, Lana. Understanding Evaluation: The Way to Better Prevention Programs. Washington: U.S. Department of Education, 1993. 8 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www2.ed.gov/PDFDocs/handbook.pdf›. Nichols, Bill. "Foreword." Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997. 11-13. Nisbet, Matthew. "Gasland and Dirty Business: Documentary Films Shape Debate on Energy Policy." Big Think, 9 May 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://bigthink.com/ideas/38345›. ———. "Introduction: Understanding the Social Impact of a Documentary Film." Documentaries on a Mission: How Nonprofits Are Making Movies for Public Engagement. Ed. Karen Hirsch, Center for Social Media. Mar. 2007. 10 Sep. 2011 ‹http://aladinrc.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/4634/1/docs_on_a_mission.pdf›. Nisbet, Matthew, and Patricia Aufderheide. "Documentary Film: Towards a Research Agenda on Forms, Functions, and Impacts." Mass Communication and Society 12.4 (2011): 450-56. Orszag, Peter. Increased Emphasis on Program Evaluation. Washington: Office of Management and Budget. 7 Oct. 2009. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-01.pdf›. Participant Media. "Our Mission." 2011. 2 Apr. 2011 ‹http://www.participantmedia.com/company/about_us.php.›. Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Trochim, William, and James Donnelly. Research Methods Knowledge Base. 3rd ed. Mason: Atomic Dogs, 2007. Ubiñas, Luis. "President's Message." 2009 Annual Report. Ford Foundation, Sep. 2010. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.fordfoundation.org/about-us/2009-annual-report/presidents-message›. Vladica, Florin, and Charles Davis. "Business Innovation and New Media Practices in Documentary Film Production and Distribution: Conceptual Framework and Review of Evidence." The Media as a Driver of the Information Society. Eds. Ed Albarran, Paulo Faustino, and R. Santos. Lisbon, Portugal: Media XXI / Formal, 2009. 299-319. Whiteman, David. "Out of the Theaters and into the Streets: A Coalition Model of the Political Impact of Documentary Film and Video." Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 51-69. ———. "The Evolving Impact of Documentary Film: Sacrifice and the Rise of Issue-Centered Outreach." Post Script 22 Jun. 2007. 10 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/5517496-1.html›. Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute, 1995. Working Films. "Nonprofits: Working Films." Foundation Source Access 31 May 2011. 5 Oct. 2011 ‹http://access.foundationsource.com/nonprofit/working-films/›.

Abstract:

“What if we were to go into culture tongue-first to see how things taste?” (Jenkins 5) Released in June of 2005, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has all the ingredients of a blockbuster success; a well known story-line, a target youth demographic, a nostalgic adult audience and a multi-million dollar synergy between media giants AOL Time Warner and transnational food corporation Nestlé. Yet, when it comes to discussing the affect-oriented components of the marketing campaign behind this film, much contemporary academic scholarship falls short of offering a substantial framework for theoretical analysis. Defined broadly as a subjective, felt experience, the notion of affect has traditionally fought an uphill battle for scholarly recognition within media studies. Against a backdrop of objective rationality and quantitative analysis, the touching, smelling and tasting components of media consumption have been systematically disregarded in favour of the audio-visual pleasures of the filmic medium. However, as the recent cross-promotional strategies underpinning Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reveal, the tactile, olfactory and gustatory components of moviegoing are often central to global media consumption practices. The synergised marketing initiatives between AOL/Time-Warner and Nestlé confectionary exemplify the significance of affect within globalised media consumption. Drawing on Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s classic of the same name, the recent revamping of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory explicitly utilises Nestlé confectionary as a nexus between the seemingly incommensurate realms of transnational media distribution/commerce and the consuming, sentient bodies of actual movie-goers. In direct contrast to Stuart’s 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which offered audiences an audio-visual representation of hedonistic indulgence, the Warner/Nestlé agreement effectively ensures an edible cinematic adventure, in which audiences are enticed to consume “actual” (Nestlé) Wonka bars as part of the movie experience. The following enticement from a recent Nestlé press release is explicit in this regard: “You dreamt of them in the book, you will yearn for them in the film and now you can finally taste scrumptiously sumptuous Wonka Bars” (Drew 1). In keeping with this cross-promotion, the majority of Wonka products seen in Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have identical wrappings to the merchandise currently being promoted in retail outlets across the United States, Canada, Europe and Australasia. In thus establishing distinct syntagmatic relationships between the film’s diegisis and its “real world” marketing campaign Warner and Nestlé have ensured a form of media consumption that moves beyond ocularcentric understandings of “spectatorship” and into the uncharted realms of the emotional and the visceral. Nestlé’s use of the enigmatic character Wonka and his extraordinary confectionary provides another palpable demonstration of this politics of affect: Willy Wonka, the world’s most eminent chocolatier, has created a scrumdiddlyumptious selection of delectable treats to choose from. The enticing Wonka Bars tempt you in three tantalisingly tasty flavours: Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, Nutty Crunch Surprise (the surprise is that it contains no nuts!) and Triple Dazzle Caramel (Drew 1). In terms of media affect, the implications of this phenomenon are significant. Far from being confined to the audio-visual specificities of the filmic medium, contemporary audiences are being lured into an entertainment experience that can not only be seen and heard, but also smelled, touched and tasted. These sense-oriented marketing strategies are indicative of what John Hannigan has identified as “eatertainment”, an affective synapse of consumer activity “in which the former boundaries between eating and play are collapsed and recast into something new” (93). In offering audiences an edible cinematic experience, the Nestlé -Warner cross-promotion not only ensures a potentially novel trip to the cinemas, but also a repeat purchase scenario, whereby Wonka-themed confectionary is able to be purchased several times after just one viewing of Burton’s film. The notion of eatertainment is certainly paying off for Nestlé. With a product placement deal in excess of nine million U.S. dollars, Nestlé’s Wonka confectionery range is given optimum exposure throughout the film. According to The Atlanta Journal, the preparation for this placement required Nestlé to produce and wrap over 110,000 fake chocolate bars; most of which were used in the scene in Mr Salt’s factory where hundreds of his employees are seen ripping open Wonka bars in the hope of finding a golden ticket for Mr. Salt’s infamous daughter Veruca (Bookman 8). In tandem with this placement, Nestlé UK also launched a £1.5m television advertising campaign replete with a “golden ticket” promotion, which promised several ‘lucky consumers’ the chance to win a golden ticket: Everybody has a chance of finding one of the most sought after tickets underneath their Wonka Bar wrapper, as featured in the film. The lucky golden ticket winners will be treated to a trip of a lifetime to visit a chocolate factory and Warner Bros Studios in America (Drew 1). The Nestlé/Wonka connection was forged in 1999 after Nestlé purchased Rowntree confectionary. Taking its incentive from both the novel and the subsequent 1971 film, Nestlé re-launched Rowntree’s relatively underdeveloped Wonka range and transformed it into a major brand which now has an annual income of over $121 million U.S (Jardine 8). To date, there are over two dozen products in the Wonka range and all of them manage to tie in with Roald Dahl’s earlier discourses of mischief, eccentricity and gustatory bliss. Included amongst the Wonka range are products such as Laffy Taffy, Nerds, Oompahs, and Wonka Bars, with nearly all of the existing products carrying the tag-line; “Wonka, what will he think of next?”. Discussing the evolution of the Wonka brand, Frank Arthofer, CEO of Nestlé chocolate and confections, noted that “the tag-line is intended to capture the innovation and unpredictability of the brand and further the image of Willy Wonka as an inventor” (Thompson 14). In fortifying this agenda, Nestlé also hosts a Wonka Website in which children are encouraged to play interactive Wonka games such as ‘Oompahs Outrageous Rush’ and ‘Gobstopper Gobbler”. Of course, this is not the first time that media giants have aggressively marketed food as an integral component to the cinematic experience. In 1996, Disney and McDonalds collaborated on a $US four billion cross-promotional exercise (Howard 2). Since then, McDonalds and Disney have launched numerous “McDisney” packages, many of which have included film-specific foods such as banana-flavoured sundaes and “jungle burgers” to tie in with Disney’s 1999 animated film Tarzan. However, unlike the McDonalds/Disney agreement, in which the food operates as an indexical signifier of the film (and not vice-versa), the Nestlé /Warner promotion takes the politics of affect one step further and encourages a mutually beneficial process of signification whereby the food signifies the film and the film signifies the food. It’s a scenario that blatantly ensures a form of visceral connectivity between the audience, the film and the tangible product. To this end, an analysis of the synergised marketing campaign behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reveals a persistent and efficient politics of affect in which the neo-liberal agendas of both Nestlé and Time-Warner are affectively absorbed into the sensual and desiring bodies of media audiences. Such initiatives signal a significant departure from traditional audio-visual marketing campaigns in as much as audiences are now being expected to literally swallow the saccharine-tinged marketing agendas of not one, but two, multinational corporations. While prevailing theoretical analysis of media consumption struggles against the traditional confines of rational objectivity, transnational media networks are productively utilising the audiences’ desire to be affectively engaged in the cinematic experience. As the cross-promotional tie-in deals behind Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory clearly reveal, the contemporary media-scape is one which deliberately lures audiences on the basis of their sensuous, emotional and subjective capacities. References Bookman, Julie. “News for Kids.” The Atlanta Journal 18 July 2005: B8. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Directed by Tim Burton. 2005. Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. London: Penguin, 1964. Drew, Cathy. “The Marvellously Mouth-Watering Wonka Bars.” Nestlé UK Wonka Press Release 26 July 2005. 24 Aug. 2005 http://www.nestle.co.uk/PressOffice/MediaKit/PressReleases/ ConfectioneryNews/Mouth-wateringWonkaBars.htm>. Howard, Thomas. “Disney Alliance Shows Brute Force.” Nations Restaurant News: The Weekly Newspaper of the Food Industry 2 Dec. 1996. Jardine, Alice. “Nestlé Plans Wonka Push in the UK.” Marketing 29 Apr. 1999: 8. Jenkins, Emily. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture. New York: Virago Press, 1998. Tarzan. Directed by C. Buck. 1999. Thompson, Stephanie. “Nestlé Works to Build Wonka Brand.” Advertising Age 15 Nov. 1999: 14. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Directed by M. Stuart. 1971. Wonka Website. http://www.wonka.com>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Downing, Leanne. "Media Synergies and the Politics of Affect in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/11-downing.php>. APA Style Downing, L. (Dec. 2005) "Media Synergies and the Politics of Affect in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/11-downing.php>.

Abstract:

Phillip Noyce is one of Australia’s most prominent film makers—a successful feature film director with both iconic Australian narratives and many a Hollywood blockbuster under his belt. Still, his beginnings were quite humble and far from his role today when he grew up in the midst of the counterculture of the late sixties. Millions of young people his age joined the various ‘movements’ of the day after experiences that changed their lives—mostly music but also drugs or fashion. The counterculture was a turbulent time in Sydney artistic circles as elsewhere. Everything looked possible, you simply had to “Do It!”—and Noyce did. He dived head-on into these times and with a voracious appetite for its many aspects—film, theatre, rallies, music, art and politics in general. In fact he often was the driving force behind such activities. Noyce described his personal epiphany occurring in 1968: A few months before I was due to graduate from high school, […] I saw a poster on a telegraph pole advertising American 'underground' movies. There was a mesmerising, beautiful blue-coloured drawing on the poster that I later discovered had been designed by an Australian filmmaker called David Perry. The word 'underground' conjured up all sorts of delights to an eighteen-year-old in the late Sixties: in an era of censorship it promised erotica, perhaps; in an era of drug-taking it promised some clandestine place where marijuana, or even something stronger, might be consumed; in an era of confrontation between conservative parents and their affluent post-war baby-boomer children, it promised a place where one could get together with other like-minded youth and plan to undermine the establishment, which at that time seemed to be the aim of just about everyone aged under 30. (Petzke 8) What the poster referred to was a new, highly different type of film. In the US these films were usually called “underground”. This term originates from film critic Manny Farber who used it in his 1957 essay Underground Films. Farber used the label for films whose directors today would be associated with independent and art house feature films. More directly, film historian Lewis Jacobs referred to experimental films when he used the words “film which for most of its life has led an underground existence” (8). The term is used interchangeably with New American Cinema. It was based on a New York group—the Film-Makers’ Co-operative—that started in 1960 with mostly low-budget filmmakers under the guidance of Jonas Mekas. When in 1962 the group was formally organised as a means for new, improved ways of distributing their works, experimental filmmakers were the dominant faction. They were filmmakers working in a more artistic vein, slightly influenced by the European Avant-garde of the 1920s and by attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In film history, this era is also known as the Third Avant-garde. In their First Statement of the New American Cinema Group, the group drew connections to both the British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague. They also claimed that contemporary cinema was “morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring” (80). An all-encompassing definition of Underground Film never was available. Sheldon Renan lists some of the problems: There are underground films in which there is no movement and films in which there is nothing but movement. There are films about people and films about light. There are short, short underground films and long, long underground films. There are some that have been banned, and there is one that was nominated for an Academy Award. There are sexy films and sexless films, political films and poetical films, film epigrams and film epics … underground film is nothing less than an explosion of cinematic styles, forms and directions. (Renan 17) No wonder that propelled by frequent serious articles in the press—notably Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice—and regular screenings at other venues like the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque and the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, these films proved increasingly popular in the United States and almost immediately spread like bush fires around the world. So in early September 1968 Noyce joined a sold-out crowd at the Union Theatre in Sydney, watching 17 shorts assembled by Ubu Films, the premier experimental and underground film collective in 1960s Australia (Milesago). And on that night his whole attitude to art, his whole attitude to movies—in fact, his whole life—changed. He remembered: I left the cinema that night thinking, "I’m gonna make movies like that. I can do it." Here was a style of cinema that seemed to speak to me. It was immediate, it was direct, it was personal, and it wasn’t industrial. It was executed for personal expression, not for profit; it was individual as opposed to corporate, it was stylistically free; it seemed to require very little expenditure, innovation being the key note. It was a completely un-Hollywood-like aesthetic; it was operating on a visceral level that was often non-linear and was akin to the psychedelic images that were in vogue at the time—whether it was in music, in art or just in the patterns on your multi-coloured shirt. These movies spoke to me. (Petzke 9) Generally speaking, therefore, these films were the equivalent of counterculture in the area of film. Theodore Roszak railed against “technocracy” and underground films were just the opposite, often almost do-it-yourself in production and distribution. They were objecting to middle-class culture and values. And like counterculture they aimed at doing away with repression and to depict a utopian lifestyle feeling at ease with each imaginable form of liberality (Doggett 469). Underground films transgressed any Hollywood rule and convention in content, form and technique. Mobile hand-held cameras, narrow-gauge or outright home movies, shaky and wobbly, rapid cutting, out of focus, non-narrative, disparate continuity—you name it. This type of experimental film was used to express the individual consciousness of the “maker”—no longer calling themselves directors—a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Just as in modern visual art, both the material and the process of making became part of these artworks. Music often was a dominant factor, particularly Eastern influences or the new Beat Music that was virtually non-existent in feature films. Drug experiences were reflected in imagery and structure. Some of the first comings-out of gay men can be found as well as films that were shown at the appropriately named “Wet Dreams Festival” in Amsterdam. Noyce commented: I worked out that the leading lights in this Ubu Films seemed to be three guys — Aggy Read, Albie Thoms and David Perry […They] all had beards and […] seemed to come from the basement of a terrace house in Redfern. Watching those movies that night, picking up all this information, I was immediately seized by three great ambitions. First of all, I wanted to grow a beard; secondly, I wanted to live in a terrace house in the inner city; and thirdly, I wanted to be a filmmaker. (Ubu Films) Noyce soon discovered there were a lot of people like him who wanted to make short films for personal expression, but also as a form of nationalism. They wanted to make Australian movies. Noyce remembered: “Aggy, Albie and David encouraged everyone to go and make a film for themselves” (Petzke 11). This was easy enough to do as these films—not only in Australia—were often made for next to nothing and did not require any prior education or training. And the target audience group existed in a subculture of people willing to pay money even for extreme entertainment as long as it was advertised in an appealing way—which meant: in the way of the rampaging Zeitgeist. Noyce—smitten by the virus—would from then on regularly attend the weekly meetings organised by the young filmmakers. And in line with Jerry Rubin’s contemporary adage “Do it!” he would immediately embark on a string of films with enthusiasm and determination—qualities soon to become his trademark. All his films were experimental in nature, shot on 16mm and were so well received that Albie Thoms was convinced that Noyce had a great career ahead of him as an experimental filmmaker. Truly alternative was Noyce’s way to finally finance Better to Reign in Hell, his first film, made at age 18 and with a total budget of $600. Noyce said on reflection: I had approached some friends and told them that if they invested in my film, they could have an acting role. Unfortunately, the guy whose dad had the most money — he was a doctor’s son — was also maybe the worst actor that was ever put in front of a camera. But he had invested four hundred dollars, so I had to give him the lead. (Petzke 13) The title was taken from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”). It was a film very much inspired by the images, montage and narrative techniques of the underground movies watched at Ubu. Essentially the film is about a young man’s obsession with a woman he sees repeatedly in advertising and the hallucinogenic dreams he has about her. Despite its later reputation, the film was relatively mundane. Being shot in black and white, it lacks the typical psychedelic ingredients of the time and is more reminiscent of the surrealistic precursors to underground film. Some contempt for the prevailing consumer society is thrown in for good measure. In the film, “A youth is persecuted by the haunting reappearance of a girl’s image in various commercial outlets. He finds escape from this commercial brainwashing only in his own confused sexual hallucinations” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). But despite this advertising, so convincingly capturing the “hint! hint!” mood of the time, Noyce’s first film isn’t really outstanding even in terms of experimental film. Noyce continued to make short experimental films. There was not even the pretence of a story in any of them. He was just experimenting with his gear and finding his own way to use the techniques of the underground cinema. Megan was made at Sydney University Law School to be projected as part of the law students’ revue. It was a three-minute silent film that featured a woman called Megan, who he had a crush on. Intersection was 2 minutes 44 seconds in length and shot in the middle of a five-way or four-way intersection in North Sydney. The camera was walked into the intersection and spun around in a continuous circle from the beginning of the roll of film to the end. It was an experiment with disorientation and possibly a comment about urban development. Memories was a seven-minute short in colour about childhood and the bush, accompanied by a smell-track created in the cinema by burning eucalyptus leaves. Sun lasted 90 seconds in colour and examined the pulsating winter sun by way of 100 single frame shots. And finally, Home was a one-and-a-half-minute single frame camera exploration of the filmmaker’s home, inside and out, including its inhabitants and pets. As a true experimental filmmaker, Noyce had a deep interest in technical aspects. It was recommended that Sun “be projected through a special five image lens”, Memories and Intersection with “an anamorphic lens” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). The double projection for Better to Reign in Hell and the two screens required for Good Afternoon, as well as the addition of the smell of burning leaves in Memories, were inroads into the subgenre of so-called Expanded Cinema. As filmmaking in those days was not an isolated enterprise but an integral part of the all-encompassing Counterculture, Noyce followed suit and became more and more involved and politiced. He started becoming a driving force of the movement. Besides selling Ubu News, he organised film screenings. He also wrote film articles for both Honi Soit and National U, the Sydney University and Canberra University newspapers—articles more opinionated than sophisticated. He was also involved in Ubu’s Underground Festival held in August and in other activities of the time, particularly anti-war protests. When Ubu Films went out of business after the lack of audience interest in Thoms’s long Marinetti film in 1969, Aggy Read suggested that Ubu be reinvented as a co-operative for tax reasons and because they might benefit from their stock of 250 Australian and foreign films. On 28 May 1970 the reinvention began at the first general meeting of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative where Noyce volunteered and was elected their part-time manager. He transferred the 250 prints to his parents’ home in Wahroonga where he was still living he said he “used to sit there day after day just screening those movies for myself” (Petzke 18). The Sydney University Film Society screened feature films to students at lunchtime. Noyce soon discovered they had money nobody was spending and equipment no one was using, which seemed to be made especially for him. In the university cinema he would often screen his own and other shorts from the Co-op’s library. The entry fee was 50 cents. He remembered: “If I handed out the leaflets in the morning, particularly concentrating on the fact that these films were uncensored and a little risqué, then usually there would be 600 people in the cinema […] One or two screenings per semester would usually give me all the pocket money I needed to live” (Petzke 19). Libertine and risqué films were obviously popular as they were hard to come by. Noyce said: We suffered the worst censorship of almost any Western country in the world, even worse than South Africa. Books would be seized by customs officers at the airports and when ships docked. Customs would be looking for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We were very censored in literature and films and plays, and my film [Better to Reign in Hell] was banned from export. I tried to send it to a film festival in Holland and it was denied an export permit, but because it had been shot in Australia, until someone in the audience complained it could still be screened locally. (Castaway's Choice) No wonder clashes with the law happened frequently and were worn like medals of honour in those days of fighting the system, proving that one was fighting in the front line against the conservative values of law and order. Noyce encountered three brushes with the law. The first occurred when selling Ubu Films’ alternative culture newspaper Ubu News, Australia’s first underground newspaper (Milesago). One of the issues contained an advertisement—a small drawing—for Levi’s jeans, showing a guy trying to put his Levis on his head, so that his penis was showing. That was judged by the police to be obscene. Noyce was found guilty and given a suspended sentence for publishing an indecent publication. There had been another incident including Phil’s Pill, his own publication of six or eight issues. After one day reprinting some erotic poems from The Penguin Collection of Erotic Poetry he was found guilty and released on a good behaviour bond without a conviction being recorded. For the sake of historical truth it should be remembered, though, that provocation was a genuine part of the game. How else could one seriously advertise Better to Reign in Hell as “a sex-fantasy film which includes a daring rape scene”—and be surprised when the police came in after screening this “pornographic film” (Stratton 202) at the Newcastle Law Students Ball? The Newcastle incident also throws light on the fact that Noyce organised screenings wherever possible, constantly driving prints and projectors around in his Mini Minor. Likewise, he is remembered as having been extremely helpful in trying to encourage other people with their own ideas—anyone could make films and could make them about anything they liked. He helped Jan Chapman, a fellow student who became his (first) wife in December 1971, to shoot and edit Just a Little Note, a documentary about a moratorium march and a guerrilla theatre group run by their friend George Shevtsov. Noyce also helped on I Happened to Be a Girl, a documentary about four women, friends of Chapman. There is no denying that being a filmmaker was a hobby, a full-time job and an obsessive religion for Noyce. He was on the organising committee of the First Australian Filmmakers’ Festival in August 1971. He performed in the agit-prop acting troupe run by George Shevtsov (later depicted in Renegades) that featured prominently at one of Sydney’s rock festival that year. In the latter part of 1971 and early 1972 he worked on Good Afternoon, a documentary about the Combined Universities’ Aquarius Arts Festival in Canberra, which arguably was the first major manifestation of counterculture in Australia. For this the Aquarius Foundation—the cultural arm of the Australian Union of Students—had contracted him. This became a two-screen movie à la Woodstock. Together with Thoms, Read and Ian Stocks, in 1972 he participated in cataloguing the complete set of films in distribution by the Co-op (see Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative). As can be seen, Noyce was at home in many manifestations of the Sydney counterculture. His own films had slowly become more politicised and bent towards documentary. He even started a newsreel that he used to screen at the Filmmakers’ Cooperative Cinema with a live commentary. One in 1971, Springboks Protest, was about the demonstrations at the Sydney Cricket Ground against the South African rugby tour. There were more but Noyce doesn’t remember them and no prints seem to have survived. Renegades was a diary film; a combination of poetic images and reportage on the street demonstrations. Noyce’s experimental films had been met with interest in the—limited—audience and among publications. His more political films and particularly Good Afternoon, however, reached out to a much wider audience, now including even the undogmatic left and hard-core documentarists of the times. In exchange, and for the first time, there were opposing reactions—but as always a great discussion at the Filmmakers’ Cinema, the main venue for independent productions. This cinema began with those initial screenings at Sydney University in the union room next to the Union Theatre. But once the Experimental Film Fund started operating in 1970, more and more films were submitted for the screenings and consequently a new venue was needed. Albie Thoms started a forum in the Yellow House in Kings Cross in May 1970. Next came—at least briefly—a restaurant in Glebe before the Co-op took over a space on the top floor of the socialist Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street that was a firetrap. Bob Gould, the owner, was convinced that by first passing through his bookshop the audience would buy his books on the way upstairs. Sundays for him were otherwise dead from a commercial point of view. Noyce recollected that: The audience at this Filmmakers’ Cinema were mightily enthusiastic about seeing themselves up on the screen. And there was always a great discussion. So, generally the screenings were a huge success, with many full houses. The screenings grew from once a week, to three times on Sunday, to all weekend, and then seven days a week at several locations. One program could play in three different illegal cinemas around the city. (Petzke 26) A filmmakers’ cinema also started in Melbourne and the groups of filmmakers would visit each other and screen their respective films. But especially after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 there was a shift in interest from risqué underground films to the concept of Australian Cinema. The audience started coming now for a dose of Australian culture. Funding of all kind was soon freely available and with such a fund the film co-op was able to set up a really good licensed cinema in St. Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, running seven days a week. But, Noyce said, “the move to St. Peters Lane was sort of the end of an era, because initially the cinema was self-funded, but once it became government sponsored everything changed” (Petzke 29). With money now readily available, egotism set in and the prevailing “we”-feeling rather quickly dissipated. But by the time of this move and the resulting developments, everything for Noyce had already changed again. He had been accepted into the first intake of the Interim Australian Film & TV School, another one of the nation-awareness-building projects of the Whitlam government. He was on his “long march through the institutions”—as this was frequently called throughout Europe—that would bring him to documentaries, TV and eventually even Hollywood (and return). Noyce didn’t linger once the alternative scene started fading away. Everything those few, wild years in the counterculture had taught him also put him right on track to become one of the major players in Hollywood. He never looked back—but he remembers fondly…References Castaway’s Choice. Radio broadcast by KCRW. 1990. Doggett, Peter. There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Farber, Manny. “Underground Films.” Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. Ed. Manny Farber. New York: Da Capo, 1998. 12–24. Jacobs, Lewis. “Morning for the Experimental Film”. Film Culture 19 (1959): 6–9. Milesago. “Ubu Films”. n.d. 26 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.milesago.com/visual/ubu.htm›. New American Cinema Group. “First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970. 73–75. Petzke, Ingo. Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood. Sydney: Pan McMillan, 2004. Renan, Sheldon. The Underground Film: An Introduction to Its Development in America. London: Studio Vista, 1968. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Stratton, David. The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative. Film Catalogue. Sydney: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, 1972. Ubu Films. Unreleased five-minute video for the promotion of Mudie, Peter. Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies 1965-1970. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1997.

Abstract:

Today, most European destinations consider the event tourism organization as a tool for socio-economic development. The tourism industry development contributes to the income sources diversification in the territories budget, which in combination with other sources can be a factor in shaping the socio-economic development of a particular territory. The event tourism development should be developed as a soft tourism form that is well adapted to local diversity. The purpose of the article is to study the event tourism development in Ukraine and its impact on the territory promotion. The article uses general scientific methods and content analysis. Despite the significant scientific achievements on this issue, in the Ukrainian tourism discourse, event tourism has not become the object of due attention. This fully applies to the significant reputational event tourism potential, its ability to act as a factor in shaping the tourist attractiveness of the territory. The structure of event tourism development in Ukraine by events types is investigated in the article. It is determined that the largest share is made up of music festivals and competitions. There are also a significant number of gastronomic festivals, national holidays and festivals, film and theater festivals and theatrical shows, which also attract a large number of visitors. According to the territorial distribution results of events by regions of Ukraine, the largest number of events takes place in the largest cities and regions of Ukraine – Kyiv and Kyiv region, Lviv region, Odessa region and Kharkiv region. The paper proposes the concept use of event marketing in tourism, which is due to the fact that in modern conditions it is becoming increasingly difficult to capture the attention of tourists; and as old marketing tools lose their effectiveness over time, destinations are forced to invent new concepts that fully meet the requirements of today's target audience. One of the tools that allows you to retain and attract visitors and investors is event marketing. Event marketing in tourism is the event use to promote a certain area and attract consumers who do not find a tourist destination attractive enough to visit it for no reason.

Abstract:

In today’s creative documentary, a director often decides to simultaneously assume the role of producer. This new situation has its own advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it gives the director/producer more freedom in story development and in leading a project. In addition, he or she is able to work more flexibly with the film budget and has a chance to change the direction of the project while following the storyline without fear that a producer will refuse such ideas. This position gives the director/producer room to work with smaller budgets and to claim the entire profit in the end. On the other hand, he or she must be prepared to work within a high-risk situation and assume complete responsibility.The new digital economy has opened opportunities to identify the most innovative ways to integrate digital platforms into the phases of story development, direction, promotion, and distribution of documentaries, thus allowing filmmakers to identify their niche audiences, build new value with it and find the right ways for monetization and revenue increase. Article received: December 30, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Preliminary report – Short Communications How to cite this article: Mirković, Željko: "Creative Documentary Today: Challenges and Opportunities for Directors and Producers." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.240

Abstract:

No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. London: Routledge, 2004 (1979). 29-35.Dawkins, Marcia Alesan. “Close to the Edge: Representational Tactics of Eminem.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.3 (2010): 463-85.De Kosnik, Abigail. “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling.” How to Watch Television. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 355-63.Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Journal of Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial.” Screening the Past 11 (2011). 20 May 2014.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1973.Hagedorn, Roger “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.” Wide Angle 10. 4 (1988): 4-12.Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.Heinrich, Nathalie. “Personne, Personnage, Personalité: L'acteur a L'ère De Sa Reproductibilité Technique.” Personne/Personnage. Eds. Thierry Lenain and Aline Wiame. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2011. 77-101.Jauss, Hans Robert, and Paul De Man. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Brighton: Harvester, 1982.Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.Jung, C. G., et al. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.Kracauer, Siegfried. “Remarks on the Actor.” Movie Acting, the Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1960). 19-27.Leonard Nimoy & Pharrell Williams: Star Trek & Creating Spock. Ep. 12. Reserve Channel. December 2013. Lenain, Thierry, and Aline Wiame (eds.). Personne/Personnage. Librairie Philosophiques J. VRIN, 2011.Lotz, Amanda D. “House: Narrative Complexity.” How to Watch TV. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 22-29.Marshall, P. David. “The Cate Blanchett Persona and the Allure of the Oscar.” The Conversation (2014). 4 April 2014.Marshall, P. David “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-70.Marshall, P. David. “Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-71.Marshall, P. David. “The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media.” Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 35-48.Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. 2nd Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.Mayer, R. “Image Power: Seriality, Iconicity and the Mask of Fu Manchu.” Screen 53.4 (2012): 398-417.Nayar, Pramod K. Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society, and Celebrity Culture. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2009.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Not Spock. Milbrae, California: Celestial Arts, 1975.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Spock. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995.Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.Stanislavski, Constantin. Creating a Role. New York: Routledge, 1989 (1961).Thompson, John O. “Screen Acting and the Commutation Test.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1978). 37-48.Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.Vineberg, Steve. Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style. New York; Toronto: Schirmer Books, 1991.Wills, Garry. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.Wojcik, Pamela Robertson. “Typecasting.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004. 169-89.

Abstract:

Find your black holes and white walls, know them … it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacle”, the practice of “parkour” or “free running” constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hour”, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceurs”), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space. “Rush Hour” was among the first media representations of parkour, and it had a significant role in introducing and popularizing the practice in Britain. Parkour has subsequently been widely disseminated via news reports, Nike and Toyota ads, the documentaries Jump London (2003) and Jump Britain (2005), and feature films, including Luc Besson’s Yamakasi – Les Samouraïs des Temps Modernes (2001) and Banlieu 13 (2004; just released in the U.S. as District B13), starring David Belle as Leto and Cyril Raffaelli as Damien. Sébastien Foucan will appear in the upcoming James Bond film Casino Royale as Mollaka, a terrorist who is chased (parkour-style) and then killed by Bond. (Foucan can also be seen in the film’s trailer, currently available at both SonyPictures.com and AOL.com; the film itself is scheduled for release in November 2006). Madonna’s current “Confessions” tour features an extended parkour sequence (accompanying the song “Jump”), albeit one limited to the confines of a scaffold erected over the stage. Perhaps most important in the rapid development of parkour into a world-wide youth movement, however, has been the proliferation of parkour websites featuring amateur videos, photos, tutorials, and blogs. The word “parkour” is derived from the French “parcours” (as the sport is known in France): a line, course, circuit, road, way or route, and the verb “parcourir”: to travel through, to run over or through, to traverse. As a physical discipline, parkour might be said to have a “poetics” — first, in general, in the Aristotelian sense of constructing through its various techniques (tekhnē) the drama of each parkour event. Secondly, one can consider parkour following Aristotle’s model of four-cause analysis as regards its specific materials (the body and the city), form or “vocabulary” of movements (drawn primarily from gymnastics, the martial arts, and modern dance), genre (as against, say, gymnastics), and purpose, including its effects upon its audience and the traceurs themselves. The existing literature on parkour (at this point, mostly news reports or websites) tends to emphasize the elements of form or movement, such as parkour’s various climbs, leaps, vaults, and drops, and the question of genre, particularly the ongoing, heated disputes among traceurs as to what is or is not true parkour. By contrast, my argument in this essay will focus principally on the materials and purpose of parkour: on the nature of the city and the body as they relate to parkour, and on the ways in which parkour can be seen to “remap” urban space and to demonstrate a resistance to its disciplinary functions, particularly as manifest in the urban street “grid.” The institution of the street “grid” (or variations upon it such as Haussmann’s Parisian star-configuration) facilitates both the intelligibility — in terms of both navigation and surveillance — and control of space in the city. It situates people in urban spaces in determinate ways and channels the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The “grid” thus carries a number of normalizing and disciplinary functions, creating in effect what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a “striation” of urban space. This striation constitutes “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.” within a field of determinate spatial coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari 386). It establishes “fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects” (Deleuze and Guattari 386). Many of these aspects of striation can be seen in the ways urban space is depicted in the “Rush Hour” video: in the gridlocked traffic, the flashing tail-lights, the “STOP” light and “WAIT” sign, the sign indicating the proper directional flow of traffic, and the grim, bundled-up pedestrians trudging home en masse along the congested streets. Against these images of conformity, regulation, and confinement, the video presents the parkour ethos of originality, “reach,” escape, and freedom. Belle’s (shirtless) aerial traversal of the urban space between his office and his flat — a swift, improvisational flow across the open rooftops (and the voids between them), off walls, and finally down the sloping roof into his apartment window — cuts across the striated space of the streets below and positions him, for that time, beyond the constrictions of the social realm and its “concrete” manifestations. Though parkour necessarily involves obstacles that must be “overcome,” the goal of parkour is to do this as smoothly and efficiently as possible, or, in the language of its practitioners, for the movement to be “fluid like water.” The experience of parkour might, then, be said to transform the urban landscape into “smooth space,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of “a field without conduits or channels” (371), and thus into a space of uninhibited movement, at least in certain ideal moments. Parkour seems to trace a path of desire (even if the desire is simply to avoid the crowds and get home in time to watch BBC One) that moves along a Deleuzean “line of flight,” a potential avenue of escape from the forces of striation and repression. Here the body is propelled over or through (most parkour movement actually takes place at ground level) the strata of urban space, perhaps with the hope that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections” (15). In the process, parkour becomes “an art of displacement,” appropriating urban space in ways that temporarily disrupt their controlling logics and even imply the possibility of a smooth space of desire. One might see parkour as an overcoming of social space (and its various constrictions and inhibitions of desire, its “stop” and “wait” signs) through the interplay of body and material barriers. The body becomes an instrument of freedom. This, again, is graphically conveyed in “Rush Hour” through the opening scene in which Belle strips off his business suit and through the subsequent repeated contrasts of his limber, revealed body to the rigid, swathed figures of the pedestrians below. In part an effect of the various camera angles from which it is shot, there is also an element of the “heroic” in this depiction of the body. This aspect of the representation appears to be knowingly acknowledged in the video’s opening sequence. The first frame is a close-up, tightly focused on a model of a ninja-like figure with a Japanese sword who first appears to be contemplating a building (with an out-of-focus Belle in the background contemplating it from the opposite direction), but then, in the next, full shot, is revealed to be scaling it — in the manner of superheroes and King Kong. The model remains in the frame as Belle undresses (inevitably evoking images of Clark Kent stripping down to his Superman costume) and, in the final shot of that sequence, the figure mirrors Belle’s as he climbs through the window and ascends the building wall outside. In the next sequence, Belle executes a breath-taking handstand on a guard railing on the edge of the roof with the panorama of the city behind him, his upper body spanning the space from the street to the edge of the city skyline, his lower body set against the darkening sky. Through the practice of parkour, the relation between body and space is made dynamic, two reality principles in concert, interacting amid a suspension of the social strata. One might even say that the urban space is re-embodied — its rigid strata effectively “liquified.” In Jump London, the traceur Jerome Ben Aoues speaks of a Zen-like “harmony between you and the obstacle,” an idealization of what is sometimes described as a state of “flow,” a seemingly effortless immersion in an activity with a concomitant loss of self-consciousness. It suggests a different way of knowing the city, a knowledge of experience as opposed to abstract knowledge: parkour is, Jaclyn Law argues, “about curiosity and seeing possibilities — looking at a lamppost or bus shelter as an extension of the sidewalk” (np.). “You just have to look,” Sébastien Foucan insists in Jump London, “you just have to think like children….” Parkour effectively remaps urban space, creating a parallel, “ludic” city, a city of movement and free play within and against the city of obstacles and inhibitions. It reminds us that, in the words of the philosopher of urban space Henri Lefebvre, “the space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space” (172). Parkour tells us that in order to enter this space of play, we only need to make the leap. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Jump London (2003). Mike Christie, director. Mike Smith, producer. Featuring Jerome Ben Aoues, Sébastien Foucan, and Johann Vigroux. Law, Jaclyn. “PK and Fly.” This Magazine May/June 2005 http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/05/>. Lefebvre, Henri. “Perspective or Prospective?” Writings on Cities. Trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Rush Hour (2002). BBC One promotion trailer. Tom Carty, dir. Edel Erickson, pro. Produced by BBC Broadcast. See also: Wikipedia on parkour: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour> Parkour Worldwide Association: http://www.pawa.fr/> Parkour Net (multilingual): http://parkour.net/> NYParkour: http://www.nyparkour.com/> PKLondon.com: http://www.pklondon.com/> Nike’s “The Angry Chicken” (featuring Sébastien Foucan): http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=-6571575392378784144&q=nike+chicken> There is an extensive collection of parkour videos available at YouTube A rehearsal clip featuring Sébastien Foucan coaching the dancers for Madonna’s Confessions tour can be seen at YouTube Citation reference for this article MLA Style Geyh, Paula. "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>. APA Style Geyh, P. (Jul. 2006) "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>.

Abstract:

Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes. In doing so we ask, what is the relationship between traumatic forms of automediation and the affective impact on and response of the audience? We argue that, while on the one hand there are promising avenues for valuable individual and social engagements with traumatic forms of automediation, there is an overwhelming predominance of suffering as a theme in such virtual depictions, comingled with uncritically asserted promises of empathy, which are problematic as the technology assumes greater mainstream uptake.As Smith and Watson note, embodiment is always a “translation” where the body is “dematerialized” in virtual representation (“Virtually” 78). Past scholarship has analysed the capacity of immersive realms, such as Second Life or online games, to highlight how users can modify their avatars in often spectacular, non-human forms. Critics of this mode of automediality note that users can adopt virtually any persona they like (racial, religious, gendered and sexual, human, animal or hybrid, and of any age), behaving as “identity tourists” while occupying virtual space or inhabiting online communities (Nakamura). Furthermore, recent work by Jaron Lanier, a key figure from the 1980s period of early Virtual Reality (VR) technology, has also explored so-called “homuncular flexibility” which describes the capacity for humans to seemingly adapt automatically to the control mechanisms of an avatar with multiple legs, other non-human appendages, or for two users to work in tandem to control a single avatar (Won et. al.). But this article is concerned less with these single or multi-player online environments and the associated concerns over modifying interactive identities. We are principally interested in other automedial modes where the “auto” of autobiography is automated via Artificial Intelligences (AIs) to convincingly mimic human discourse as narrated life-histories.We draw from case studies promoted by the 2017 season of ABC television’s flagship science program, Catalyst, which opened with semi-regular host and biological engineer Dr Jordan Nguyen, proclaiming in earnest, almost religious fervour: “I want to do something that has long been a dream. I want to create a copy of a human. An avatar. And it will have a life of its own in virtual reality.” As the camera followed Nguyen’s rapid pacing across real space he extolled: “Virtual reality, virtual human, they push the limits of the imagination and help us explore the impossible […] I want to create a virtual copy of a person. A digital addition to the family, using technology we have now.”The troubling implications of such rhetoric were stark and the next third of the program did little to allay such techno-scientific misgivings. Directed and produced by David Symonds, with Nguyen credited as co-developer and presenter, the episode “Meet the Avatars” immediately introduced scenarios where “volunteers” entered a pop-up inner city virtual lab, to experience VR for the first time. The volunteers were shown on screen subjected to a range of experimental VR environments designed to elicit fear and/or adverse and disorienting responses such as vertigo, while the presenter and researchers from Sydney University constantly smirked and laughed at their participants’ discomfort. We can only wonder what the ethics process was for both the ABC and university researchers involved in these broadcast experiments. There is little doubt that the participant/s experienced discomfort, if not distress, and that was televised to a national audience. Presenter Nguyen was also shown misleading volunteers on their way to the VR lab, when one asked “You’re not going to chuck us out of a virtual plane are you?” to which Nguyen replied “I don't know what we’re going to do yet,” when it was next shown that they immediately underwent pre-programmed VR exposure scenarios, including a fear of falling exercise from atop a city skyscraper.The sweat-inducing and heart rate-racing exposures to virtual plank walks high above a cityscape, or seeing subjects haptically viewing spiders crawl across their outstretched virtual hands, all elicited predictable responses, showcased as carnivalesque entertainment for the viewing audience. As we will see, this kind of trivialising of a virtual environment’s capacity for immersion belies the serious use of the technology in a range of treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (see Rizzo and Koenig; Rothbaum, Rizzo and Difede).Figure 1: Nguyen and researchers enjoying themselves as their volunteers undergo VR exposure Defining AutomedialityIn their pioneering 2008 work, Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser coined the term “automediality” to problematise the production, application and distribution of autobiographic modes across various media and genres—from literary texts to audiovisual media and from traditional expression to inter/transmedia and remediated formats. The concept of automediality was deployed to counter the conventional critical exclusion of analysis of the materiality/technology used for an autobiographical purpose (Gernalzick). Dünne and Moser proffered a concept of automediality that rejects the binary division of (a) self-expression determining the mediated form or (b) (self)subjectivity being solely produced through the mediating technology. Hence, automediality has been traditionally applied to literary constructs such as autobiography and life-writing, but is now expanding into the digital domain and other “paratextual sites” (Maguire).As Nadja Gernalzick suggests, automediality should “encourage and demand not only a systematics and taxonomy of the constitution of the self in respectively genre-specific ways, but particularly also in medium-specific ways” (227). Emma Maguire has offered a succinct working definition that builds on this requirement to signal the automedial universally, noting it operates asa way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to automediality as a methodology, and in doing so emphasize how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told autobiographically. They state “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a preexisting, essential self […] Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (Smith and Watson “Virtually Me” 77).This distinction is vital for understanding how automediality might be applied to self-expression in virtual domains, including the holographic avatar dreams of Nguyen throughout Catalyst. Although addressing this distinction in relation to online websites, following P. David Marshall’s description of “the proliferation of the public self”, Maguire notes:The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies […] has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities.For Maguire, these automedial works operate textually “to construct the authorial self or persona”.An extension to this digital, authorial construction is apparent in the exponential uptake of screen mediated prosumer generated content, whether online or theatrical (Miller). According to Gernalzick, unlike fictional drama films, screen autobiographies more directly enable “experiential temporalities”. Based on Mary Anne Doane’s promotion of the “indexicality” of film/screen representations to connote the real, Gernalzick suggests that despite semiotic theories of the index problematising realism as an index as representation, the film medium is still commonly comprehended as the “imprint of time itself”:Film and the spectator of film are said to be in a continuous present. Because the viewer is aware, however, that the images experienced in or even as presence have been made in the past, the temporality of the so-called filmic present is always ambiguous” (230).When expressed as indexical, automedial works, the intrinsic audio-visual capacities of film and video (as media) far surpass the temporal limitations of print and writing (Gernalzick, 228). One extreme example can be found in an emergent trend of “performance crime” murder and torture videos live-streamed or broadcast after the fact using mobile phone cameras and FaceBook (Bender). In essence, the political economy of the automedial ecology is important to understand in the overall context of self expression and the governance of content exhibition, access, distribution and—where relevant—interaction.So what are the implications for automedial works that employ virtual interfaces and how does this evolving medium inform both the expressive autobiographical mode and audiences subjectivities?Case StudyThe Catalyst program described above strove to shed new light on the potential for emerging technology to capture and create virtual avatars from living participants who (self-)generate autobiographical narratives interactively. Once past the initial gee-wiz journalistic evangelism of VR, the episode turned towards host Nguyen’s stated goal—using contemporary technology to create an autonomous virtual human clone. Nguyen laments that if he could create only one such avatar, his primary choice would be that of his grandfather who died when Nguyen was two years old—a desire rendered impossible. The awkward humour of the plank walk scenario sequence soon gives way as the enthusiastic Nguyen is surprised by his family’s discomfort with the idea of digitally recreating his grandfather.Nguyen next visits a Southern California digital media lab to experience the process by which 3D virtual human avatars are created. Inside a domed array of lights and cameras, in less than one second a life-size 3D avatar is recorded via 6,000 LEDs illuminating his face in 20 different combinations, with eight cameras capturing the exposures from multiple angles, all in ultra high definition. Called the Light Stage (Debevec), it is the same technology used to create a life size, virtual holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter (Ziv).We see Nguyen encountering a life-size, high-resolution 2D screen version of Gutter’s avatar. Standing before a microphone, Nguyen asks a series of questions about Gutter’s wartime experiences and life in the concentration camps. The responses are naturalistic and authentic, as are the pauses between questions. The high definition 4K screen is photo-realist but much more convincing in-situ (as an artifact of the Catalyst video camera recording, in some close-ups horizontal lines of transmission appear). According to the project’s curator, David Traum, the real Pinchas Gutter was recorded in 3D as a virtual holograph. He spent 25 hours providing 1,600 responses to a broad range of questions that the curator maintained covered “a lot of what people want to say” (Catalyst).Figure 2: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan presented an installation of New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter and Eva SchlossIt is here that the intersection between VR and auto/biography hybridise in complex and potentially difficult ways. It is where the concept of automediality may offer insight into this rapidly emerging phenomenon of creating interactive, hyperreal versions of our selves using VR. These hyperreal VR personae can be questioned and respond in real-time, where interrogators interact either as casual conversers or determined interrogators.The impact on visitors is sobering and palpable. As Nguyen relates at the end of his session, “I just want to give him a hug”. The demonstrable capacity for this avatar to engender a high degree of empathy from its automedial testimony is clear, although as we indicate below, it could simply indicate increased levels of emotion.Regardless, an ongoing concern amongst witnesses, scholars and cultural curators of memorials and museums dedicated to preserving the history of mass violence, and its associated trauma, is that once the lived experience and testimony of survivors passes with that generation the impact of the testimony diminishes (Broderick). New media modes of preserving and promulgating such knowledge in perpetuity are certainly worthy of embracing. As Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation suggests, the technology could extendto people who have survived cancer or catastrophic hurricanes […] from the experiences of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or survivors of sexual abuse, to those of presidents or great teachers. Imagine if a slave could have told her story to her grandchildren? (Ziv)Yet questions remain as to the veracity of these recorded personae. The avatars are created according to a specific agenda and the autobiographical content controlled for explicit editorial purposes. It is unclear what and why material has been excluded. If, for example, during the recorded questioning, the virtual holocaust survivor became mute at recollecting a traumatic memory, cried or sobbed uncontrollably—all natural, understandable and authentic responses given the nature of the testimony—should these genuine and spontaneous emotions be included along with various behavioural ticks such as scratching, shifting about in the seat and other naturalistic movements, to engender a more profound realism?The generation of the photorealist, mimetic avatar—remaining as an interactive persona long after the corporeal, authorial being is gone—reinforces Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, where a clone exists devoid of its original entity and unable to challenge its automedial discourse. And what if some unscrupulous hacker managed to corrupt and subvert Gutter’s AI so that it responded antithetically to its purpose, by denying the holocaust ever happened? The ethical dilemmas of such a paradigm were explored in the dystopian 2013 film, The Congress, where Robyn Wright plays herself (and her avatar), as an out of work actor who sells off the rights to her digital self. A movie studio exploits her screen persona in perpetuity, enabling audiences to “become” and inhabit her avatar in virtual space while she is limited in the real world from undertaking certain actions due to copyright infringement. The inability of Wright to control her mimetic avatar’s discourse or action means the assumed automedial agency of her virtual self as an immortal, interactive being remains ontologically perplexing.Figure 3: Robyn Wright undergoing a full body photogrammetry to create her VR avatar in The Congress (2013)The various virtual exposures/experiences paraded throughout Catalyst’s “Meet the Avatars” paradoxically recorded and broadcast a range of troubling emotional responses to such immersion. Many participant responses suggest great caution and sensitivity be undertaken before plunging headlong into the new gold rush mentality of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI affordances. Catalyst depicted their program subjects often responding in discomfort and distress, with some visibly overwhelmed by their encounters and left crying. There is some irony that presenter Ngyuen was himself relying on the conventions of 2D linear television journalism throughout, adopting face-to-camera address in (unconscious) automedial style to excitedly promote the assumed socio-cultural boon such automedial VR avatars will generate.Challenging AuthenticityThere are numerous ethical considerations surrounding the potential for AIs to expand beyond automedial (self-)expression towards photorealist avatars interacting outside of their pre-recorded content. When such systems evolve it may be neigh impossible to discern on screen whether the person you are conversing with is authentic or an indistinguishable, virtual doppelganger. In the future, a variant on the Turning Test may be needed to challenge and identify such hyperreal simulacra. We may be witnessing the precursor to such a dilemma playing out in the arena of audio-only podcasts, with some public intellectuals such as Sam Harris already discussing the legal and ethical problems from technology that can create audio from typed text that convincingly replicate the actual voice of a person by sampling approximately 30 minutes of their original speech (Harris). Such audio manipulation technology will soon be available to anybody with the motivation and relatively minor level of technological ability in order to assume an identity and masquerade as automediated dialogue. However, for the moment, the ability to convincingly alter a real-time computer generated video image of a person remains at the level of scientific innovation.Also of significance is the extent to which the audience reactions to such automediated expressions are indeed empathetic or simply part of the broader range of affective responses that also include direct sympathy as well as emotions such as admiration, surprise, pity, disgust and contempt (see Plantinga). There remains much rhetorical hype surrounding VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk). Yet the current use of the term “empathy” in VR, AI and automedial forms of communication seems to be principally focused on the capacity for the user-viewer to ameliorate negatively perceived emotions and experiences, whether traumatic or phobic.When considering comments about authenticity here, it is important to be aware of the occasional slippage of technological terminology into the mainstream. For example, the psychological literature does emphasise that patients respond strongly to virtual scenarios, events, and details that appear to be “authentic” (Pertaub, Slater, and Barker). Authentic in this instance implies a resemblance to a corresponding scenario/activity in the real world. This is not simply another word for photorealism, but rather it describes for instance the experimental design of one study in which virtual (AI) audience members in a virtual seminar room designed to treat public speaking anxiety were designed to exhibit “random autonomous behaviours in real-time, such as twitches, blinks, and nods, designed to encourage the illusion of life” (Kwon, Powell and Chalmers 980). The virtual humans in this study are regarded as having greater authenticity than an earlier project on social anxiety (North, North, and Coble) which did not have much visual complexity but did incorporate researcher-triggered audio clips of audience members “laughing, making comments, encouraging the speaker to speak louder or more clearly” (Kwon, Powell, and Chalmers 980). The small movements, randomly cued rather than according to a recognisable pattern, are described by the researchers as creating a sense of authenticity in the VR environment as they seem to correspond to the sorts of random minor movements that actual human audiences in a seminar can be expected to make.Nonetheless, nobody should regard an interaction with these AIs, or the avatar of Gutter, as in any way an encounter with a real person. Rather, the characteristics above function to create a disarming effect and enable the real person-viewer to willingly suspend their disbelief and enter into a pseudo-relationship with the AI; not as if it is an actual relationship, but as if it is a simulation of an actual relationship (USC). Lucy Suchman and colleagues invoke these ideas in an analysis of a YouTube video of some apparently humiliating human interactions with the MIT created AI-robot Mertz. Their analysis contends that, while it may appear on first glance that the humans’ mocking exchange with Mertz are mean-spirited, there is clearly a playfulness and willingness to engage with a form of AI that is essentially continuous with “long-standing assumptions about communication as information processing, and in the robot’s performance evidence for the limits to the mechanical reproduction of interaction as we know it through computational processes” (Suchman, Roberts, and Hird).Thus, it will be important for future work in the area of automediated testimony to consider the extent to which audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and treat the recounted traumatic experience with appropriate gravitas. These questions deserve attention, and not the kind of hype displayed by the current iteration of techno-evangelism. Indeed, some of this resurgent hype has come under scrutiny. From the perspective of VR-based tourism, Janna Thompson has recently argued that “it will never be a substitute for encounters with the real thing” (Thompson). Alyssa K. Loh, for instance, also argues that many of the negatively themed virtual experiences—such as those that drop the viewer into a scene of domestic violence or the location of a terrorist bomb attack—function not to put you in the position of the actual victim but in the position of the general category of domestic violence victim, or bomb attack victim, thus “deindividuating trauma” (Loh).Future work in this area should consider actual audience responses and rely upon mixed-methods research approaches to audience analysis. In an era of alt.truth and Cambridge Analytics personality profiling from social media interaction, automediated communication in the virtual guise of AIs demands further study.ReferencesAnon. “New Dimensions in Testimony.” Museum of Jewish Heritage. 15 Dec. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/new-dimensions-in-testimony/>.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Meet The Avatars.” Catalyst, 15 Aug. 2017.Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-184.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Broderick, Mick. “Topographies of Trauma, Dark Tourism and World Heritage: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome.” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. 24 Apr. 2010. 14 Apr. 2018 <http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/broderick.htm>.Debevec, Paul. “The Light Stages and Their Applications to Photoreal Digital Actors.” SIGGRAPH Asia. 2012.Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. “Allgemeine Einleitung: Automedialität”. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien. Eds. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008. 7-16.Harris, Sam. “Waking Up with Sam Harris #64 – Ask Me Anything.” YouTube, 16 Feb. 2017. 16 Mar. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMTuquaAC4w>.Kwon, Joung Huem, John Powell, and Alan Chalmers. “How Level of Realism Influences Anxiety in Virtual Reality Environments for a Job Interview.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 71.10 (2013): 978-87.Loh, Alyssa K. "I Feel You." Artforum, Nov. 2017. 10 Apr. 2018 <https://www.artforum.com/print/201709/alyssa-k-loh-on-virtual-reality-and-empathy-71781>.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170.Mathews, Karen. “Exhibit Allows Virtual ‘Interviews’ with Holocaust Survivors.” Phys.org Science X Network, 15 Dec. 2017. 18 Apr. 2018 <https://phys.org/news/2017-09-virtual-holocaust-survivors.html>.Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website” M/C Journal 17.9 (2014).Miller, Ken. More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Evolution of Screen Performance. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Murdoch University. 2009.Milk, Chris. “Ted: How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine.” TED Conferences, LLC. 16 Mar. 2015. <https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine>.Nakamura, Lisa. “Cyberrace.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 42-54.North, Max M., Sarah M. North, and Joseph R Coble. "Effectiveness of Virtual Environment Desensitization in the Treatment of Agoraphobia." International Journal of Virtual Reality 1.2 (1995): 25-34.Pertaub, David-Paul, Mel Slater, and Chris Barker. “An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to Three Different Types of Virtual Audience.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 11.1 (2002): 68-78.Plantinga, Carl. "Emotion and Affect." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga. New York: Routledge, 2009. 86-96.Rizzo, A.A., and Sebastian Koenig. “Is Clinical Virtual Reality Ready for Primetime?” Neuropsychology 31.8 (2017): 877-99.Rothbaum, Barbara O., Albert “Skip” Rizzo, and JoAnne Difede. "Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1208.1 (2010): 126-32.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Suchman, Lucy, Celia Roberts, and Myra J. Hird. "Subject Objects." Feminist Theory 12.2 (2011): 119-45.Thompson, Janna. "Why Virtual Reality Cannot Match the Real Thing." The Conversation, 14 Mar. 2018. 10 Apr. 2018 <http://theconversation.com/why-virtual-reality-cannot-match-the-real-thing-92035>.USC. "Skip Rizzo on Medical Virtual Reality: USC Global Conference 2014." YouTube, 28 Oct. 2014. 2 Apr. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFge2XgDa8>.Won, Andrea Stevenson, Jeremy Bailenson, Jimmy Lee, and Jaron Lanier. "Homuncular Flexibility in Virtual Reality." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20.3 (2015): 241-59.Ziv, Stan. “How Technology Is Keeping Holocaust Survivor Stories Alive Forever”. Newsweek, 18 Oct. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://www.newsweek.com/2017/10/27/how-technology-keeping-holocaust-survivor-stories-alive-forever-687946.html>.

Abstract:

A common criticism of the rhythm video games genre — including series like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, is that playing musical simulation games is a waste of time when you could be playing an actual guitar and learning a real skill. A more serious criticism of games cultures draws attention to the degree of e-waste they produce. E-waste or electronic waste includes mobiles phones, computers, televisions and other electronic devices, containing toxic chemicals and metals whose landfill, recycling and salvaging all produce distinct environmental and social problems. The e-waste produced by games like Guitar Hero is obvious in the regular flow of merchandise transforming computer and video games stores into simulation music stores, filled with replica guitars, drum kits, microphones and other products whose half-lives are short and whose obsolescence is anticipated in the annual cycles of consumption and disposal. This paper explores the connection between e-waste and obsolescence in the games industry, and argues for the further consideration of consumers as part of the solution to the problem of e-waste. It uses a case study of the PC digital distribution software platform, Steam, to suggest that the digital distribution of games may offer an alternative model to market driven software and hardware obsolescence, and more generally, that such software platforms might be a place to support cultures of consumption that delay rather than promote hardware obsolescence and its inevitability as e-waste. The question is whether there exists a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities (its current 'green' benefit), but also for supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. The games industry relies on a rapid production and innovation cycle, one that actively enforces hardware obsolescence. Current video game consoles, including the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, are the seventh generation of home gaming consoles to appear within forty years, and each generation is accompanied by an immense international transportation of games hardware, software (in various storage formats) and peripherals. Obsolescence also occurs at the software or content level and is significant because the games industry as a creative industry is dependent on the extensive management of multiple intellectual properties. The computing and video games software industry operates a close partnership with the hardware industry, and as such, software obsolescence directly contributes to hardware obsolescence. The obsolescence of content and the redundancy of the methods of policing its scarcity in the marketplace has been accelerated and altered by the processes of disintermediation with a range of outcomes (Flew). The music industry is perhaps the most advanced in terms of disintermediation with digital distribution at the center of the conflict between the legitimate and unauthorised access to intellectual property. This points to one issue with the hypothesis that digital distribution can lead to a reduction in hardware obsolescence, as the marketplace leader and key online distributor of music, Apple, is also the major producer of new media technologies and devices that are the paragon of stylistic obsolescence. Stylistic obsolescence, in which fashion changes products across seasons of consumption, has long been observed as the dominant form of scaled industrial innovation (Slade). Stylistic obsolescence is differentiated from mechanical or technological obsolescence as the deliberate supersedence of products by more advanced designs, better production techniques and other minor innovations. The line between the stylistic and technological obsolescence is not always clear, especially as reduced durability has become a powerful market strategy (Fitzpatrick). This occurs where the design of technologies is subsumed within the discourses of manufacturing, consumption and the logic of planned obsolescence in which the product or parts are intended to fail, degrade or under perform over time. It is especially the case with signature new media technologies such as laptop computers, mobile phones and portable games devices. Gamers are as guilty as other consumer groups in contributing to e-waste as participants in the industry's cycles of planned obsolescence, but some of them complicate discussions over the future of obsolescence and e-waste. Many gamers actively work to forestall the obsolescence of their games: they invest time in the play of older games (“retrogaming”) they donate labor and creative energy to the production of user-generated content as a means of sustaining involvement in gaming communities; and they produce entirely new game experiences for other users, based on existing software and hardware modifications known as 'mods'. With Guitar Hero and other 'rhythm' games it would be easy to argue that the hardware components of this genre have only one future: as waste. Alternatively, we could consider the actual lifespan of these objects (including their impact as e-waste) and the roles they play in the performances and practices of communities of gamers. For example, the Elmo Guitar Hero controller mod, the Tesla coil Guitar Hero controller interface, the Rock Band Speak n' Spellbinder mashup, the multiple and almost sacrilegious Fender guitar hero mods, the Guitar Hero Portable Turntable Mod and MAKE magazine's Trumpet Hero all indicate a significant diversity of user innovation, community formation and individual investment in the post-retail life of computer and video game hardware. Obsolescence is not just a problem for the games industry but for the computing and electronics industries more broadly as direct contributors to the social and environmental cost of electrical waste and obsolete electrical equipment. Planned obsolescence has long been the experience of gamers and computer users, as the basis of a utopian mythology of upgrades (Dovey and Kennedy). For PC users the upgrade pathway is traversed by the consumption of further hardware and software post initial purchase in a cycle of endless consumption, acquisition and waste (as older parts are replaced and eventually discarded). The accumulation and disposal of these cultural artefacts does not devalue or accrue in space or time at the same rate (Straw) and many users will persist for years, gradually upgrading and delaying obsolescence and even perpetuate the circulation of older cultural commodities. Flea markets and secondhand fairs are popular sites for the purchase of new, recent, old, and recycled computer hardware, and peripherals. Such practices and parallel markets support the strategies of 'making do' described by De Certeau, but they also continue the cycle of upgrade and obsolescence, and they are still consumed as part of the promise of the 'new', and the desire of a purchase that will finally 'fix' the users' computer in a state of completion (29). The planned obsolescence of new media technologies is common, but its success is mixed; for example, support for Microsoft's operating system Windows XP was officially withdrawn in April 2009 (Robinson), but due to the popularity in low cost PC 'netbooks' outfitted with an optimised XP operating system and a less than enthusiastic response to the 'next generation' Windows Vista, XP continues to be popular. Digital Distribution: A Solution? Gamers may be able to reduce the accumulation of e-waste by supporting the disintermediation of the games retail sector by means of online distribution. Disintermediation is the establishment of a direct relationship between the creators of content and their consumers through products and services offered by content producers (Flew 201). The move to digital distribution has already begun to reduce the need to physically handle commodities, but this currently signals only further support of planned, stylistic and technological obsolescence, increasing the rate at which the commodities for recording, storing, distributing and exhibiting digital content become e-waste. Digital distribution is sometimes overlooked as a potential means for promoting communities of user practice dedicated to e-waste reduction, at the same time it is actively employed to reduce the potential for the unregulated appropriation of content and restrict post-purchase sales through Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Distributors like Amazon.com continue to pursue commercial opportunities in linking the user to digital distribution of content via exclusive hardware and software technologies. The Amazon e-book reader, the Kindle, operates via a proprietary mobile network using a commercially run version of the wireless 3G protocols. The e-book reader is heavily encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and exclusive digital book formats designed to enforce current copyright restrictions and eliminate second-hand sales, lending, and further post-purchase distribution. The success of this mode of distribution is connected to Amazon's ability to tap both the mainstream market and the consumer demand for the less-than-popular; those books, movies, music and television series that may not have been 'hits' at the time of release. The desire to revisit forgotten niches, such as B-sides, comics, books, and older video games, suggests Chris Anderson, linked with so-called “long tail” economics. Recently Webb has queried the economic impact of the Long Tail as a business strategy, but does not deny the underlying dynamics, which suggest that content does not obsolesce in any straightforward way. Niche markets for older content are nourished by participatory cultures and Web 2.0 style online services. A good example of the Long Tail phenomenon is the recent case of the 1971 book A Lion Called Christian, by Anthony Burke and John Rendall, republished after the author's film of a visit to a resettled Christian in Africa was popularised on YouTube in 2008. Anderson's Long Tail theory suggests that over time a large number of items, each with unique rather than mass histories, will be subsumed as part of a larger community of consumers, including fans, collectors and everyday users with a long term interest in their use and preservation. If digital distribution platforms can reduce e-waste, they can perhaps be fostered by to ensuring digital consumers have access to morally and ethically aware consumer decisions, but also that they enjoy traditional consumer freedoms, such as the right to sell on and change or modify their property. For it is not only the fixation on the 'next generation' that contributes to obsolescence, but also technologies like DRM systems that discourage second hand sales and restrict modification. The legislative upgrades, patches and amendments to copyright law that have attempted to maintain the law's effectiveness in competing with peer-to-peer networks have supported DRM and other intellectual property enforcement technologies, despite the difficulties that owners of intellectual property have encountered with the effectiveness of DRM systems (Moore, Creative). The games industry continues to experiment with DRM, however, this industry also stands out as one of the few to have significantly incorporated the user within the official modes of production (Moore, Commonising). Is the games industry capable (or willing) of supporting a digital delivery system that attempts to minimise or even reverse software and hardware obsolescence? We can try to answer this question by looking in detail at the biggest digital distributor of PC games, Steam. Steam Figure 1: The Steam Application user interface retail section Steam is a digital distribution system designed for the Microsoft Windows operating system and operated by American video game development company and publisher, Valve Corporation. Steam combines online games retail, DRM technologies and internet-based distribution services with social networking and multiplayer features (in-game voice and text chat, user profiles, etc) and direct support for major games publishers, independent producers, and communities of user-contributors (modders). Steam, like the iTunes games store, Xbox Live and other digital distributors, provides consumers with direct digital downloads of new, recent and classic titles that can be accessed remotely by the user from any (internet equipped) location. Steam was first packaged with the physical distribution of Half Life 2 in 2004, and the platform's eventual popularity is tied to the success of that game franchise. Steam was not an optional component of the game's installation and many gamers protested in various online forums, while the platform was treated with suspicion by the global PC games press. It did not help that Steam was at launch everything that gamers take objection to: a persistent and initially 'buggy' piece of software that sits in the PC's operating system and occupies limited memory resources at the cost of hardware performance. Regular updates to the Steam software platform introduced social network features just as mainstream sites like MySpace and Facebook were emerging, and its popularity has undergone rapid subsequent growth. Steam now eclipses competitors with more than 20 million user accounts (Leahy) and Valve Corporation makes it publicly known that Steam collects large amounts of data about its users. This information is available via the public player profile in the community section of the Steam application. It includes the average number of hours the user plays per week, and can even indicate the difficulty the user has in navigating game obstacles. Valve reports on the number of users on Steam every two hours via its web site, with a population on average between one and two million simultaneous users (Valve, Steam). We know these users’ hardware profiles because Valve Corporation makes the results of its surveillance public knowledge via the Steam Hardware Survey. Valve’s hardware survey itself conceptualises obsolescence in two ways. First, it uses the results to define the 'cutting edge' of PC technologies and publishing the standards of its own high end production hardware on the companies blog. Second, the effect of the Survey is to subsequently define obsolescent hardware: for example, in the Survey results for April 2009, we can see that the slight majority of users maintain computers with two central processing units while a significant proportion (almost one third) of users still maintained much older PCs with a single CPU. Both effects of the Survey appear to be well understood by Valve: the Steam Hardware Survey automatically collects information about the community's computer hardware configurations and presents an aggregate picture of the stats on our web site. The survey helps us make better engineering and gameplay decisions, because it makes sure we're targeting machines our customers actually use, rather than measuring only against the hardware we've got in the office. We often get asked about the configuration of the machines we build around the office to do both game and Steam development. We also tend to turn over machines in the office pretty rapidly, at roughly every 18 months. (Valve, Team Fortress) Valve’s support of older hardware might counter perceptions that older PCs have no use and begins to reverse decades of opinion regarding planned and stylistic obsolescence in the PC hardware and software industries. Equally significant to the extension of the lives of older PCs is Steam's support for mods and its promotion of user generated content. By providing software for mod creation and distribution, Steam maximises what Postigo calls the development potential of fan-programmers. One of the 'payoffs' in the information/access exchange for the user with Steam is the degree to which Valve's End-User Licence Agreement (EULA) permits individuals and communities of 'modders' to appropriate its proprietary game content for use in the creation of new games and games materials for redistribution via Steam. These mods extend the play of the older games, by requiring their purchase via Steam in order for the individual user to participate in the modded experience. If Steam is able to encourage this kind of appropriation and community support for older content, then the potential exists for it to support cultures of consumption and practice of use that collaboratively maintain, extend, and prolong the life and use of games. Further, Steam incorporates the insights of “long tail” economics in a purely digital distribution model, in which the obsolescence of 'non-hit' game titles can be dramatically overturned. Published in November 2007, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) by Epic Games, was unappreciated in a market saturated with games in the first-person shooter genre. Epic republished UT3 on Steam 18 months later, making the game available to play for free for one weekend, followed by discounted access to new content. The 2000 per cent increase in players over the game's 'free' trial weekend, has translated into enough sales of the game for Epic to no longer consider the release a commercial failure: It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam...Something that silently updates a purchase with patches and extra content automatically, so you don’t have to make the decision to seek out some exciting new feature: it’s just there anyway. Something that, if you don’t already own it, advertises that game to you at an agreeably reduced price whenever it loads. Something that enjoys a vast community who are in turn plugged into a sea of smaller relevant communities. It’s incredibly sinister. It’s also incredibly exciting... (Meer) Clearly concerns exist about Steam's user privacy policy, but this also invites us to the think about the economic relationship between gamers and games companies as it is reconfigured through the private contractual relationship established by the EULA which accompanies the digital distribution model. The games industry has established contractual and licensing arrangements with its consumer base in order to support and reincorporate emerging trends in user generated cultures and other cultural formations within its official modes of production (Moore, "Commonising"). When we consider that Valve gets to tax sales of its virtual goods and can further sell the information farmed from its users to hardware manufacturers, it is reasonable to consider the relationship between the corporation and its gamers as exploitative. Gabe Newell, the Valve co-founder and managing director, conversely believes that people are willing to give up personal information if they feel it is being used to get better services (Leahy). If that sentiment is correct then consumers may be willing to further trade for services that can reduce obsolescence and begin to address the problems of e-waste from the ground up. Conclusion Clearly, there is a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities but also supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. For an industry where only a small proportion of the games made break even, the successful relaunch of older games content indicates Steam's capacity to ameliorate software obsolescence. Digital distribution extends the use of commercially released games by providing disintermediated access to older and user-generated content. For Valve, this occurs within a network of exchange as access to user-generated content, social networking services, and support for the organisation and coordination of communities of gamers is traded for user-information and repeat business. Evidence for whether this will actively translate to an equivalent decrease in the obsolescence of game hardware might be observed with indicators like the Steam Hardware Survey in the future. The degree of potential offered by digital distribution is disrupted by a range of technical, commercial and legal hurdles, primary of which is the deployment of DRM, as part of a range of techniques designed to limit consumer behaviour post purchase. While intervention in the form of legislation and radical change to the insidious nature of electronics production is crucial in order to achieve long term reduction in e-waste, the user is currently considered only in terms of 'ethical' consumption and ultimately divested of responsibility through participation in corporate, state and civil recycling and e-waste management operations. The message is either 'careful what you purchase' or 'careful how you throw it away' and, like DRM, ignores the connections between product, producer and user and the consumer support for environmentally, ethically and socially positive production, distribrution, disposal and recycling. This article, has adopted a different strategy, one that sees digital distribution platforms like Steam, as capable, if not currently active, in supporting community practices that should be seriously considered in conjunction with a range of approaches to the challenge of obsolescence and e-waste. References Anderson, Chris. "The Long Tail." Wired Magazine 12. 10 (2004). 20 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html›. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Dovey, Jon, and Helen Kennedy. Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. London: Open University Press,2006. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2008. Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2008. Leahy, Brian. "Live Blog: DICE 2009 Keynote - Gabe Newell, Valve Software." The Feed. G4TV 18 Feb. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009-Keynote-–-Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html›. Meer, Alec. "Unreal Tournament 3 and the New Lazarus Effect." Rock, Paper, Shotgun 16 Mar. 2009. 24 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/16/unreal-tournament-3-and-the-new-lazarus-effect/›.Moore, Christopher. "Commonising the Enclosure: Online Games and Reforming Intellectual Property Regimes." Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3. 2, (2005). 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.swin.edu.au/sbs/ajets/journal/issue5-V3N2/abstract_moore.htm›. Moore, Christopher. "Creative Choices: Changes to Australian Copyright Law and the Future of the Public Domain." Media International Australia 114 (Feb. 2005): 71–83. Postigo, Hector. "Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modification." Games and Culture 2 (2007): 300-13. Robinson, Daniel. "Windows XP Support Runs Out Next Week." PC Business Authority 8 Apr. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/142013,windows-xp-support-runs-out-next-week.aspx›. Straw, Will. "Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music." Canadian Journal of Communication 25.1 (2000): 175. Slade, Giles. Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Valve. "Steam and Game Stats." 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://store.steampowered.com/stats/›. Valve. "Team Fortress 2: The Scout Update." Steam Marketing Message 20 Feb. 2009. 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://storefront.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/message/2269/›. Webb, Richard. "Online Shopping and the Harry Potter Effect." New Scientist 2687 (2008): 52-55. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026873.300-online-shopping-and-the-harry-potter-effect.html?page=2›. With thanks to Dr Nicola Evans and Dr Frances Steel for their feedback and comments on drafts of this paper.

Abstract:

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

Abstract:

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

Abstract:

Transmedia storytelling, as defined by Henry Jenkins in 2006 in his book Convergence Culture, highlights a production strategy that aims to augment the narration of a cultural work by scattering it across several media platforms—digital or non-digital. The term is certainly quite recent, but the practices are not new and allow us to understand the evolution of the cultural industries and the creation of a new media ecosystem. As Matthew Freeman states, transmedia storytelling always relies on industrial changes, the narration adapting itself to new media synergies and novelties to create engaging and coherent storyworlds.Producers of American TV shows, showrunners, and networks are more and more eager to develop narrative universes on other media platforms in order to target new audiences and to give food for thought to fans, as well as reward them for their intellectual and emotional investment. Ancillary content and tie-ins sometimes take the form of novelisations or comic books, highlighting the fact that strategies of transmedia storytelling can be deployed on non-digital platforms and still enhance the narrative aspects of the show. For example, Twin Peaks (1990) developed The Diary of Laura Palmer (1990), a journal written by the character Laura Palmer who gave insights on her life and details about her relationships with other characters before she was murdered at the beginning of the series. How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) published The BroCode (2008), first seen on episode “The Goat” (season 3 episode 17), and The Playbook (2012), first seen in an episode entitled “The Playbook” (season 5 episode 8). They are bibles written by character Barney Stinson that contain rules or advice for picking up women. For instance, The BroCode contains 150 articles, a glossary of terms, a definition of “a bro,” history of the code, amendments, violations, and approved punishments, all invented by Barney; some of these components were talked about on the show, while others were original additions for the book.Another way to create transmedia storytelling around TV shows is by developing comic books. This article will explore this specific media form in relation to transmedia strategies and will try to underline how comic books can make a narrative richer by focusing on parts of the plot, characters, times, or locations. First, I will focus on the importance of seriality from a historical perspective, because seriality appears to be one of the main principles of transmedia storytelling. Yet, is this narrative continuity always coherent and always canon when it comes to the publication of comic books? I will then propose a typology of the narratives comic books exploit to augment the storytelling of a show. I will give examples to illustrate how comic books can enrich the narrative universe of a given show and how characters can smoothly move from one platform to the other.A Transmedia World: Television and Comic Books Hand in HandSeriality is one of the main pillars of transmedia storytelling, and, according to Jenkins, “it is about breaking things down into chapters which are satisfying on their own terms, but which motivate us to come back for more” (“Transmedia”). These characteristics are already present in the way TV series are written, produced, and broadcast, and in the way comic books are created. They rely on episodes for TV shows and on issues for comic books that usually end with suspense and a suspension in the narrative continuity, commonly known as a cliff-hanger. For comic books, this narrative continuity took root in the early comic strips of the 18th and 19th century (Maigret and Stefanelli), which played a huge part in what we now know as comic books. As Pagello explains:The extensive practice of narrative serialisation played a major role in this context: the creative process, the industrial production and distribution, the editorial practices and, finally, the experience of comics readers all underwent dramatic changes when comics started to develop an identity distinguished from satirical cartoons, illustrated books and the various forms of children’s picture stories.According to Derek Johnson, these evolutions, in terms of production and reception, are closely linked to the widespread use of the franchise model in media industries. Johnson explains thatcomic books, video games, and other markets once considered ancillary now play increasingly significant and recentered roles in the production and consumption of everyday film and television properties such as Heroes, Transformers, and the re-envisioned Star Trek in ways that only very few innovators (such as George Lucas and his carefully elaborated and expanded Star Wars empire) had previously conceived in the twentieth century.The creation of transmedia strategies that capitalize on narrative continuity and seriality call for some synergies between media and for a “gatekeeper” of the stories who will ensure that all is coherent in the storyworld. Thus, “in 2006, the management of Heroes, for example, became a job for a professional ‘Transmedia Team’ charged with implementing creative coordination across television, comics, and the Internet” (Johnson).Another principle of transmedia storytelling, closely linked to seriality and the essence of the definition, is the creation of a narrative universe, that is “world-building,” in which plots and characters develop, and which will lay the foundations for the story. These foundations will be written in what is called a Bible, a document containing all the narrative elements in order to ensure coherence. In the notion of world-building, a matrix of possibilities is deployed, since stories can potentially become threads to weave, and re-weave. This rhizomatic world can be extended to infinity in a canonical way (by the official production) and in a non-canonical one (by the creations of fans). For Mark Wolf, these narrative worlds work like dynamic entities, and are transformative, transmedial, and transauthorial, which are similar to the notions and possibilities of transmedia storytelling, and media and cultural convergence. Stories that cannot be contained within the “real” of a single medium will be expended and developed on another or several other ones, creating a rich storyworlds. Comic books can be one of these tie-in media.New Term, Old Creations: An Historical OverviewMatthew Freeman wrote in his latest book Historicising Transmedia Storytelling that these transmedia practices do have a past and existed long before the introduction of the term due to new technologies, production strategies, and reception tactics. Comic books were often an option to enrich storylines and further develop the characters. For example, L. Frank Baum created a storyworld around The Wizard of Oz made of mock newspapers, conferences, billboards, novels, musicals, and comic strips in order to “appeal to a migratory audience” (Jenkins, “I Have”) and to deepen the characters, introduce new ones, and discover the land of Oz as if it were a real location. The author used techniques of advertising to promote and above all to expand his storyworld. As newspaper comic strips were quite popular at the time, Baum created several tie-in extensions in the newspapers and in a novel format. As Jason Scott underlines, “serial narratology enhances the possibilities of advertising and exploitation through the established market for the second and subsequent instalment” (14). The series of comic strips entitled Queer Visitor from the Marvellous Land of Oz (1904-1905) picked up, in terms of narration, just after the end of the book, offering a new temporality and life for the characters. As Freeman notes, this choice follows an economic logic:The era’s newspaper comic strips and their institutional tendency to prioritize recurring characters as successful advertising mechanisms (as witnessed in the cross-media dispersion of Buster Brown) had in fact influenced Baum to return to the series’ more familiar faces of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman (2371).Here, the beloved characters are moving from one medium to the next, giving new insights on their life after the end of the book, and enhancing their stories beyond its pages.A Typology of Comic Books and Tie-in Extensions of TV SeriesBefore diving into a tentative typology, I want to look at the definition of canon in a transmedia storyworld. There is a strong debate in academic discussions around the issues of canonicity, and here I understand canonicity as the production of official texts around a given cultural content. That is because of precisely what is qualified as an official text or an official extension, and what is not. In the book I co-edited with Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa), we respond by coining the term “transtexts,” which includes officially produced texts and fantexts in the same narrative universe. The dichotomy between both kinds of texts is thus diminished. Nonetheless, in production and transmedia strategies, canonicity is hard to evaluate because “few television series have attempted to create transmedia extensions that offer such a (high level of) canonic integration, with interwoven story events that must be consumed across media for full comprehension” (Mittell 298). He follows by proposing a typology of two possible transmedia extensions based on a canon perspective versus a non-canon one: “what is extensions” extend the storyworld canonically and in a coherent way, whereas “what if extensions” “pose(s) hypothetical possibilities rather than canonical certainties, inviting viewers to imagine alternate stories and approaches to storytelling that are distinctly not to be treated as potential canon” (Mittell 298). Mark Wolf refers to the term growth to qualify canonical materials which are going to expand a given storyworld and which nourish the stories. As argued by Gabriel et al., “Wolf’s definition of ‘growth’ makes it clear that, for him, a transmedial product can only be considered to contribute to a world’s growth if it adds new ‘canonical’ material, i.e. material that presents new pieces of information that are “true” for the fictional world” (Gabriel et al. 169). This notion of “truth” to the diegesis can be opposed in this context to the notion of alternate stories and alternate versions of the characters.My attempted typology lays its foundation upon this opposition between what is seen as an official extension and what is seen as an unofficial extension, but offers alternate perspectives to expand the storyworld using new characters, locations, or universes. The first category will look at canonical extensions and how they can deepen characters’ development and temporalities. The second category will deal with “canon divergent” (to use fans’ language) extensions and how they can offer new entries into the stories by creating new characters or presenting new locations.Canonical Extensions: CharactersTie-in extensions in the form of comic books help to deepen the characters, especially supporting characters, by delving into their motivations and psychology, or by giving them backstories and origin stories. According to Paolo Bertetti, “the transmedia character is a fictional hero whose adventures are told on several media platforms, each providing details about the character's life” (2344). Actually, motivated characters are the quintessential element of the narration of the classic Hollywood era, which was then reused in the narration of TV series, which were then penned into comic books. In her definition of transmedia superstructures, Marsha Kinder based her analysis on how characters moved from one medium to the next, making them the centre of the narrative universe and the element audiences would follow.For example, Fringe (2008), in a deal with DC comics, extended its stories and its characters in comic books, which were an integral part of the storyworld, and which included canon materials by offering Easter Eggs to fans and rewarding them for their investment in the narrative universe. Each issue of the second series dealt with a major or recurring character from the show, deepening them by giving them backgrounds. That way, audiences can discover the backstories of Agent Broyles, Nina Sharp, the CEO of Massive Dynamic, or even Gene, Walter’s cow, all of which are featured in the series but not well developed.Written by actor Tim Rozon (who plays Doc Holliday on the show) and author Beau Smith, Wynonna Earp Season Zero (2017) focuses on the past of main character Wynonna Earp when she was an outlaw and before she comes back to her hometown, Purgatory. The past comes to life on the pages, while it was only hinted at in the show. It is a good introduction to the main character before the show, since Wynonna comes back to Purgatory by bus at the beginning of the very first episode and there are no flashback episode relating her story earlier. Because the two authors of this comic book are part of the creative crew of the show, an actor and a writer, they ensure a sense of coherence in the extensions they write.In collaboration with Dynamite Entertainment, an American comic book company, NBC Universal launched a series of comic book issues entitled Origins (2008) as an ancillary text to Battlestar Galactica (2004). “Origin stories” are a specific genre related to superhero franchises. M.J. Clarke underlines that,the use of Origins Stories is influenced by the economic structure of the comic book industry, which continues to produce stories over years and decades. ... By remaining faithful to the Origins (which are frequently modified in their consistency), readers can discover a story without having to navigate in more than 400 numbers of commix. (54)The goal of these comic books is to create a "past" for the human characters that appeared in the series. The collection of comic books thus focuses on five main characters in 11 issues, spread out over a year: William Adama, Zarek, Gaius Baltar, Kara "Starbuck” Thrace, and Karl "Helo" Agathon. These issues are collected in an eponymous Omnibus. Likewise, Orphan Black (2011) also offered backstories for its “clone club” without disrupting the pace of the show. The stories, tied to the events of the series, focus on the opportunity to better understand the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that exemplify the characters of the show.It is interesting to note that the authors of these comic book extensions were in close contact with Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, showrunners of the Battlestar Galactica series, which guaranteed coherence and canonicity to the newly created material. In a personal interview, Robert Napton, writer of Origins, explained the creative process:so every week we would watch episodes and make sure our stories matched as closely as possible to what the television series was doing …we tried to make it feel like it was very much part of the series, so they were untold adventures and we tried to fit it into the continuity of the series as much as possible.Brandon Jerwa, writer for Battlestar Galactica comic book series Season Zero and Ghosts (2009), confirmed that, “It is my understanding that the comics were passed through Mr. Moore’s office, and they were certainly vetted by Syfy and Universal.” Jerwa also added an interesting input on perception of canonicity versus non-canonicity by fans who can be picky about the ancillary contents and added materials that extend a storyworld:Most comic tie-ins have a hard time being considered a legitimate part of the canon, and that is simply beyond the control of the creative team. I worked very hard to make sure that I was writing material that adhered to the continuity of the show as closely as humanly possible. I don’t believe in writing a licensed property in such a way as to put forward ‘my vision’ of the universe; I believe very firmly that it is my responsibility to serve the source material above all else.Canonical Extensions: TemporalitiesComic books as a licensed product can expand the temporalities of the show and tell stories before the beginning of the series and after it ended, as well as fill time voids and ellipses. For example, now in its 11th season in comic books, Joss Whedon managed to keep Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) alive and to attract new fans without alienating its original fanbase. Blogger and web entrepreneur Keith McDuffee felt that reading Buffy as a comic book after seeing it on television for seven years was strange, but the new format was a good sign because: “the medium lets creativity go completely wild without budget worries.” The comic books focus on the famous characters and created a life for them after the end of the show, making them jump from the screen onto the pages. Sometimes, the comic books told original stories that might seem out-of-character, like the issue in which Buffy sleeps with a woman. That kind of storyline wasn’t explored in the TV show, and comics offer one way to go deeper into the characters’ backgrounds and psychology. Sometimes, the tie-ins do not strictly follow the continuity and become non-canon regarding the stories of the TV shows. For example, DC/Wildstorm presented comic book issues around The X-Files (1993-) that were set in continuity of the show but failed to refer to main plot events (for example, Scully’s pregnancy). “Rather than offering ‘additive comprehension’ to a pre-existing television and film narrative, Spotnitz chose to write licensed comics on their own terms” (Pillai 112).DC is familiar with offering new adventures for its superhero characters in the form of comic books (which are first published online), going back to the basics. Of course, in this case, the relationship between the comic book medium and the television medium is more intricate, as the TV series are based on comic book characters whose stories are then extended again in comic books, which are created specifically to extend the TV shows’ storyworlds. The creation of the comic book series The Flash Season Zero (2015) set the stories between the episodes of the first season of The Flash and focus on the struggles of Barry Allen as he juggles between his job as a CSI, his love for Iris West, his childhood sweetheart, and his new identity as a vigilante with superpowers. This allows viewers to better understand a part of Barry Allen’s life that was not well developed in the show, adding temporal layers to the stories. The Adventures of Supergirl vol. 1 (2016) also depict the battles of the girl of steel between episodes, as well as her life with her sister, Alex (who is also a new addition in the comic book), and her co-workers at the DEO. For Arrow,the digital tie-ins offer producers [opportunities] to explore side stories they are unable to cover on screen. In the case of Season 2.5, the 22-chapter comic enabled the producers to fill in the blanks in between the seasons, thus offering more opportunities to explore the dynamics of fan-favorite characters such as Felicity and Diggle. (Bourdaa and Chin 183)These DC comic books are examples of giving life to a TV show beyond the TV screen, enhancing the timeframe of the stories and providing new content. The characters pass through the screen to live new adventures in comic books. In some cases, the involvement of the series' actor and writer in comic book scripting confirms the desire for consistency in the extensions of the series, whatever the medium used and whatever the objectives.Canon Divergent Extensions or the Real PossibilitiesFinally, comic books can deploy stories that will display a new point of view on the canon: a “multiplicity” (Jenkins, “La Licorne”) or a “what-if story” (Mittell), which will explore new possibilities and new characters.The second series of Orphan Black comic book tie-ins entitled Helsinki (2016) dealt with clones in the capital of Finland. The readers discover the lives of other clones, how they deal with the discovery of their “condition,” and that they have a caretaker. The comics are written by John Fawcett, who is also a showrunner for the series. The narrative universe is stretched into new possibilities, seen with new eyes, and shown from the perspective of new clones. The introduction of new characters gives opportunities to tell new stories and diverge from the canonical content, especially in terms of the characters’ development and depth.Battlestar Galactica, after the show ended, partnered once again with Dynamite Entertainment, to publish a new set of comic books entitled BSG: Ghosts (2009), which tells the story of new characters surviving the Cylon genocide. Writer Brandon Jerwa asks in BSG: Ghosts: "And if a squadron of secret agents had also survived Cylon Attack?" For him, comic books are a good opportunity to relaunch the narrative universe by introducing new characters in a well-known storyworld.The comic books will definitely have to evolve in order to survive because at some point we will end up exhausting the interest of the readers on the narrative continuity. Projects like Ghosts are definitely a good way to test public reaction to new ideas in a familiar environment. (Jerwa)Conclusion: From One Medium to the Next, From Narrative Extensions to MarketingThis article offers an overview of how comic books are used as tie-in products to extend TV series’ narrative universe. The ambition was not to give an exhaustive panorama but to propose a typology with some examples. I showed that characters’ development, temporalities, and new points of view are narrative angles exploited in comic books to give depth to a storyworld. Of course, this raises issues of labour, authorship, and canon content, which are already discussed elsewhere (see, for example: Clarke, Pillai, Scott). Yet, comic books are an integral part of transmedia storytelling and capitalise on notions of seriality, offering readers new stories, continuity, depth, and character motivations in order to enrich storylines and make them live beyond the screen. However, Robert Napton, in our interview, underlines an interesting opposition between licensing and marketing: “Frankly, comic books are considered licensing and marketing, not official canon. The only TV comic that is canon is Buffy Season 8 and 9 because Joss Whedon says they are, but that is not the normal situation.” He clearly draws a line between what he considers to be a licensed product, in this article what I describe as canonical content, and a marketing product, which could be understood in this article as a canon divergent tie-in. The debate here is clearly on, since understandings of transmedia vary between the perspectives of production companies, which are trying to gain profit by providing new content, the perspectives of fans, who know the storyworlds and the characters extensively and could be very possessive of them, and the perspectives of extension authors, who “have very strict story guidelines” (Jerwa) and have to make their stories fit within the narrative universe as it is told onscreen.ReferencesBertetti, Paolo. “Towards a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2344-2361.Boni, Marta. World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “Transmedia Storytelling: Entre Narration Augmentée et Logiques Immersives.” InaGlobal (2012). 16 December 2017 <http://www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/le-transmedia-entre-narration-augmentee-et-logiques-immersives>.Bourdaa, Mélanie, and Bertha Chin. “World and Fandom Building: Extending the Universe of Arrow in Arrow 2.5.” Arrow and Superhero Television: Essays on Themes and Characters of the Series. Eds. James F. Iaccino, Cory Barker, and Myc Wiatrowski. Jefferson: MacFarland, 2017.Clarke, M.J. Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production. New York: Continuum Publishing, 2013.Derhy Kurtz, WL Benjamin, and Mélanie Bourdaa. The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities. London: Routledge, 2016.Freeman, Matthew. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London: Routledge, 2017.Gabriel, Nicole, Bogna Kazur, and Kai Matuszkiewicz. “Reconsidering Transmedia(l) Worlds.” Convergence Culture Reconsidered: Media—Participation—Environments. Eds. Claudia Georgi and Brigitte Johanna Glaser. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2015.Gillan, Jennifer. Television and New Media: Must-Click TV. New York: Routledge, 2010.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.Jenkins, Henry. “I Have Seen the Future of Entertainment… And It Works.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2008. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2008/10/i_have_seen_the_futures_of_ent.html>.Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Education: The 7 Principles Revisited.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2010. <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2010/06/transmedia_education_the_7_pri.html>.Jenkins, Henry. “La Licorne Origami Contre-attaque: Réflexions Plus Poussées sur le transmedia storytelling.” Terminal 10-11 (2013): 11-28. <http://journals.openedition.org/terminal/455>.Jerwa, Brandon. Personal Correspondence. 2013.Johnson, Derek. “A History of Transmedia Entertainment.” Spreadable Media: Web Exclusive Essays. <http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.Wo6g24IiGgQ>.Maigret, Eric, and Matteo Stefanelli. La Bande Dessinée: Une Médiaculture. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012.McDuffee, Keith. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, Part 1. Season premiere. 2007. <http://www.aoltv.com/2007/03/16/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-the-long-way-home-season-premiere/.>.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015.Napton, Robert. Personal Correspondence. 2013.Pagello, Federico. “Before the Comics: On Seriality of Graphic Narratives during the Nineteenth Century.” Belphégor 14 (2016). <http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/810>.Pillai, Nicolas. “What Am I Looking at Mulder?: Licensed Comics and Freedoms of Transmedia Storytelling.” Science Fiction and Television 6.1 (2013): 101-117.Scott, Jason. “The Character-Orientated Franchise: Promotion and Exploitation of Pre-Sold Characters in American Film, 1913–1950.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (2009): 10–28.

Abstract:

There are many ways to construct, shape and frame a history of popular music. From a focus on performers to a stress on cities, from theories of modernity to reveling in ‘the post,’ innovative music has been matched by evocative writing about it. One arc of analysis in popular music studies focuses on the record label. Much has been written about Sun, Motown, Factory and Apple, but there are many labels that have not reached this level of notoriety and fame but offer much to our contemporary understanding of music, identity and capitalism. The aim of this article is to capture an underwritten history of 21st century music, capturing and tracking moments of collaboration, movement and contact. Through investigating a specific record label, we explore the interconnectiveness of electronica and city-based creative industries’ initiatives. While urban dance culture is still pathologised through drug scares and law and order concerns, clubbing studies and emerging theories of sonic media and auditory cultures offer a significant trigger and frame for this current research. The focus on Off World Sounds (OWS) traces a meta-independent label that summons, critiques, reinscribes and provokes the conventional narratives of capitalism in music. We show how OWS has remade and remixed the collaborations of punk to forge innovative ways of thinking about creativity, policy and popular culture. While commencing with a review of the origin, ideology and intent of OWS, the final part of the paper shows where the experiment went wrong and what can be learnt from this sonic label laboratory. Moving Off World Popular cultural studies evoke and explore discursive formations and texts that activate dissent, conflict and struggle. This strategy is particularly potent when exploring how immigration narratives fray the borders of the nation state. At its most direct, this analysis provides a case study to assess and answer some of Nabeel Zuberi’s questions about sonic topography that he raises in Sounds English. I’m concerned less with music as a reflection of national history and geography than how the practices of popular music culture themselves construct the spaces of the local, national, and transnational. How does the music imagine the past and place? How does it function as a memory-machine, a technology for the production of subjective and collective versions of location and identity? How do the techniques of sounds, images, and activities centered on popular music create landscapes with figures? (3) Dance music is mashed between creativity, consumerism and capitalism. Picking up on Zuberi’s challenge, the story of OWS is also a history of what happens to English migrants who travel to Australia, and how they negotiate the boundaries of the Australian nation. Immigration is important to any understanding of contemporary music. The two proprietors of OWS are Pete Carroll and, one of the two writers of this current article, Stephen Mallinder. Both English proprietors immigrated to Perth in Australia. They used their contacts to sign electronica performers from beyond this single city. They encouraged the tracks to move freely through lymphatic digital networks for remixing—‘lymphatic’ signalling a secondary pathway for commerce and creativity where new musical relationships were being formed outside the influence of major record companies. Performers signed to OWS form independent networks with other performers. This mobility of sound has operated in parallel with the immigration policies of the Howard government that have encouraged insularity and xenophobia. In other eras of racial inequality and discrimination, the independent record label has been not only an integral part of the music industry, but a springboard for political dissent. The histories of jazz and rhythm and blues capture a pivotal moment of independent entrepreneurialism that transformed new and strange sounds/noises into popular music. In monitoring and researching this complex process of musical movement and translation, the independent label has remained the home of the peripheral, the misunderstood, and the uncompromising. Soul music in the United States of America is an example of a sonic form that sustained independence while corporate labels made a profit. Labels like Atlantic Records became synonymous with the success of black vocal music in the 1960s and 1970s, while the smaller independent labels like Chess and Invicta constructed a brand identity. While the division between the majors and the independents increasingly dissolves, particularly at the level of distribution, the independent label remains significant as innovator and instigator. It retains its status and pedagogic function in teaching an audience about new sounds and developing aural literacies. OWS inked its well from an idealistic and collaborative period of label evolution. The punk aesthetic of the late 1970s not only triggered wide-ranging implications for youth culture, but also opened spaces for alternative record labels and label identity. Rough Trade was instrumental in imbuing a spirit of cooperation and a benign mode of competition. A shift in the distribution of records and associated merchandizing to strengthen product association—such as magazines, fanzines and T-Shirts—enabled Rough Trade to deal directly with pivotal stores and outlets and then later establish cartels with stores to provide market security and a workable infrastructure. Links were built with ancillary agents such as concert promoters, press, booking agents, record producers and sleeve designers, to create a national, then European and international, network to produce an (under the counter) culture. Such methods can also be traced in the history of Postcard Records from Edinburgh, Zoo Records from Liverpool, Warp in Sheffield, Pork Recordings in Hull, Hospital Records in London, and both Grand Central and Factory in Manchester. From the ashes of the post-1976 punk blitzkrieg, independent labels bloomed with varying impact, effect and success, but they held an economic and political agenda. The desire was to create a strong brand identity by forming a tight collaboration between artists and distributors. Perceptions of a label’s size and significance was enhanced and enlarged through this collaborative relationship. OWS acknowledged and rewrote this history of the independent label. There was a desire to fuse the branding of the label with the artists signed, released and distributed. No long term obligations on behalf of the artists were required. A 50/50 split after costs was shared. While such an ‘agreement’ appeared anachronistic, it was also a respectful nod to the initial label/artist split offered by Rough Trade. Collaboration with artists throughout the process offered clear statements of intent, with idealism undercut by pragmatism. From track selection, sleeve design, promotion strategy and interview schedule, the level of communication created a sense of joint ownership and dialogue between label and artist. This reinscription of independent record history is complex because OWS’ stable of performers and producers is an amalgamation of dub, trance, hip hop, soul and house genres. Much of trans-localism of OWS was encouraged by its base in Perth. Metaphorically ‘off world’, Perth is a pad for international music to land, be remixed, recut and re-released. Just as Wellington is the capital of Tolkien’s Middle Earth as well as New Zealand, Perth is a remix capital for Paris or New York-based performers. The brand name ‘Off World Sounds’ was designed to emphasise isolation: to capture the negativity of isolation but rewrite separation and distinctiveness with a positive inflection. The title was poached from Ridley Scott’s 1980s film Bladerunner, which was in turn based on Philip K. Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Affirming this isolation summoned an ironic commentary on Perth’s geographical location, while also mocking the 1980s discourses of modernity and the near future. The key was to align punk’s history of collaboration with this narrative of isolation and independence, to explore mobility, collaboration, and immigration. Spaces in the Music Discussions of place dictate a particular methodology to researching music. Dreams of escape and, concurrently, intense desires for home pepper the history of popular music. What makes OWS important to theories of musical collaboration is that not only was there a global spread of musicians, producers and designers, but they worked together in a series of strategic trans-localisms. There were precedents for disconnecting place and label, although not of the scale instigated by OWS. Fast Products, although based in Glasgow, signed The Human League from Sheffield and Gang of Four from Leeds. OWS was unique in signing artists disconnected on a global scale, with the goal of building collaborations in remixing and design. Gripper, from the north east of England, Little Egypt from New York, The Bone Idle from Vienna, Hull and Los Angeles, Looped for Pleasure from Sheffield, Barney Mullhouse from Australia and the United Kingdom, Ooblo from Manchester, Attache from Adelaide, Crackpot from Melbourne and DB Chills from Sydney are also joined by artists resident in Perth, such as Soundlab, the Ku-Ling Bros and Blue Jay. Compact Disc mastering is completed in Sydney, London, and Perth. The artwork for vinyl and CD sleeves, alongside flyers, press advertising and posters, is derived from Manchester, England. These movements in the music flattened geographical hierarchies, where European and American tracks were implicitly valued over Australian-derived material. Through pop music history, the primary music markets of the United Kingdom and United States made success for Australian artists difficult. Off World emphasised that the product was not licensed. It was previously unreleased material specifically recorded for the label and an exclusive Australian first territory release. Importantly, this licensing agreement also broadened definitions and interpretations of ‘Australian music’. Such a critique and initiative was important. For example, Paul Bodlovich, Director of the West Australian Music Industry (WAM), believed he was extending the brief of his organisation during his tenure. Once more though, rock was the framework, structure and genre of interest. Explaining the difference from his predecessor, he stated that: [James Nagy] very much saw the music industry as being only bands who were playing all original music—to him they were the only people who actually constituted the music industry. I have a much broader view on that, that all those other people who are around the band—the manager, the promoters, the labels, the audio guys, the whole shebang—that they are part of the music industry too. (33) Much was absent from his ‘whole shebang,’ including the fans who actually buy the music and attend the pubs and clubs. A diversity of genres was also not acknowledged. If hip hop, and urban music generally, is added to his list of new interests, then clubs, graf galleries, dance instructors and fashion and jewelry designers could extend the network of musical collaborations. A parody of corporate culture and a pastiche of the post-punk aesthetic, OWS networked and franchised itself into existence. It was a cottage industry superimposed onto a corporate infrastructure. Attempting to make inroads into an insular Perth arts community and build creative industries’ networks without state government policy support, Off World offered an optimistic perspective on the city’s status and value in a national and global electronic market. Yet in commercial terms, OWS failed. What OWS captures through its failures conveys more about music policy in Australia than any success. The label has been able to catalogue the lack of changes to Perth’s music policy. The proprietors, performers and designers were not approached in 2002 by the Western Australian Contemporary Music Taskforce to offer comment. Yet Matthew Benson and Poppy Wise, researchers for that report, stated that “the solution lies in the industry becoming more outwardly focused, and to do this, it must seek the input of successful professionals who have proven track records in the marketing of music nationally and globally” (9). The resultant document argued that the industry needed to the look to Sydney and Melbourne for knowledge of “international” markets. Yet Paul Bodlovich, the Director of WAM, singled out the insularity of ‘England,’ not Britain, and ‘America’ in comparison to the ‘outward’ Perth music industry: To us, they’re all centre of the universe, but they don’t look past their walls, they don’t have a clue what goes in other parts of the world … All they see say in England is English TV, or in America it’s American TV. Whereas we sit in a very isolated part of the world and we absorb culture from everywhere because we think we have to just to be on an equal arc with everyone else. We think we have to absorb stuff from other cultures because unless we do then we really are isolated … It’s a similar belief to the ongoing issue of women in the workplace, where there’s a belief that to be seen on equal footing you have to be better. (33) This knight’s move affiliation of Perth’s musicians with women in the workplace is bizarre and inappropriate. This unfortunate connection is made worse when recognizing that Perth’s music institutions and organisations, such as WAM, are dominated by white, Australian-born men. To promote the outwardness of Perth culture while not mentioning the role and function of immigration is not addressing how mobility, creativity and commerce is activated. To unify ‘England’ and ‘America,’ without recognizing the crucial differences between Manchester and Bristol, New York and New Orleans, is conservative, arrogant, and wrong. National models of music, administered by Australian-born white men and funded through grants-oriented peer review models rather than creative industries’ infrastructural initiatives, still punctuate Western Australian music. Off World Sounds has been caught in non-collaborative, nationalist models for organising culture and economics. It is always easy to affirm the specialness and difference of a city’s sound or music. While affirming the nation and rock, outsiders appear threatening to the social order. When pondering cities and electronica, collaboration, movement and meaning dance through the margins. References Benson, Matthew, and Poppy Wise. A Study into the Current State of the Western Australian Contemporary Music Industry and Its Potential for Economic Growth. Department of Culture and the Arts, Government of Western Australia, December 2002. Bodlovich, Paul. “Director’s Report.” X-Press 940 (17 Feb. 2005): 33. Zuberi, Nabeel. Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara, and Stephen Mallinder. "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T., and S. Mallinder. (May 2006) "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php>.

Abstract:

IntroductionThis article is about the transformation of coffee, from having no place in the everyday lives of the people of Bangladesh, to a new position as a harbinger of liberal values and Western culture. The context is a group of Australian photojournalism students who embarked on a month-long residency in Bangladesh; the content is a Nescafé advertisement encouraging the young, middle-class Bangladesh audience to consume coffee, in a marketing campaign that promotes “my first cup.” For the Australian students, the marketing positioning of this advertising campaign transformed instant coffee into a strange and unfamiliar commodity. At the same time, the historic association between Bangladesh and tea prompted one of the photographers to undertake her own journey to explore the hidden side of that other Western staple. This paper explores the tradition of tea culture in Bangladesh and the marketing campaign for instant coffee within this culture, combining the authors’ experiences and perspectives. The outline of the Photomedia unit in the Bachelor of Creative Industries degree that the students were working towards at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia states that:students will engage with practices, issues and practicalities of working as a photojournalist in an international, cross cultural context. Students will work in collaboration with students of Pathshala: South Asian Institute of Photography, Dhaka Bangladesh in the research, production and presentation of stories related to Bangladeshi society and culture for distribution to international audiences (ECU). The sixteen students from Perth, living and working in Bangladesh between 5 January and 7 February 2012, exhibited a diverse range of cultures, contexts, and motivations. Young Australians, along with a number of ECU’s international students, including some from Norway, China and Sweden, were required to learn first-hand about life in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries. Danielle Fusco and ECU lecturer Duncan Barnes collaborated with staff and students of Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute (Pathshala). Their recollections and observations on tea production and the location are central to this article but it is the questions asked by the group about the marketing of instant coffee into this culture that provides its tensions. Fusco completed a week-long induction and then travelled in Bangladesh for a fortnight to research and photograph individual stories on rural and urban life. Barnes here sets the scene for the project, describing the expectations and what actually happened: When we travel to countries that are vastly different to our own it is often to seek out that difference; to go in search of the romanticised ideals that have been portrayed as paradise in films, books and photographs. “The West” has long been fascinated with “The East” (Said) and for the past half century, since the hippie treks to Marrakesh and Afghanistan, people have journeyed overland to the Indian sub-continent, both from Europe and from Australia, yearning for a cultural experience they cannot find at home. Living in Perth, Western Australia, sometimes called the most isolated capital city in the world, that pull to something “different” is like a magnet. Upon arrival in Dhaka, you find yourself deliciously overwhelmed by the heavy traffic, the crowded markets, the spicy foods and the milky lassie drinks. It only takes a few stomach upsets to make your Western appetite start kicking in and you begin craving things you have at home but that are hard to find in Bangladesh. Take coffee for example. I recently completed a month-long visit to Bangladesh, which, like India, is a nation of tea drinkers. Getting any kind of good coffee requires that you be in what expatriates call “the Golden Triangle” of Dhaka city—within the area contained by Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara. Here you find the embassies and a sizeable expatriate community that constitutes a Western bubble unrepresentative of Bangladesh beyond these districts. Coffee World is an example of a Western-style café chain that, as the name suggests, serves coffee beverages. It has trouble making a quality flat white. The baristas are poorly trained, the service is painfully slow, yet the prices are comparable to those in the West. Even with these disadvantages, it is frequented by Westerners who also make use of the free WiFi. In contrast, tea is available at every road junction for around 5 cents Australian. It’s ready in seconds: the kettle is always hot due to a constant turnover of local customers. It was the history of tea growing in Bangladesh, and a desire to know more about a commodity that people in the West take for granted, that most attracted Fusco’s interest. She chose to focus on Bangladesh’s oldest commercial tea garden (plantation) Sylhet, which has been in production since 1857 (Tea Board). As is the case with many tea farms in the Indian sub-continent, the workers at Sylhet are part of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Fusco left Dhaka and travelled into the rural areas to investigate tea production: Venturing into these estates from the city is like entering an entirely different world. They are isolated places, and although they are close in distance, they are completely separate from the main city. Spending time in the Khadim tea estate amongst the plantations and the workers’ compounds made me very aware of the strong relationship that exists between them. The Hindu teaching of Samsara refers to the continuous cycle of repeated birth, life, death and rebirth [Hinduism], which became a metaphor for me, for this relationship I was experiencing. It is clear that neither farm [where the tea is grown] nor village [which houses the people] could live without each other. The success and maintenance of the tea farm relies on the workers just as much as the workers rely on the tea gardens for their livelihood and sustenance. Their life cycles are intertwined and in synch. There are many problems in the compounds. The people are extremely poor. Their education opportunities are limited, and they work incredibly hard for very little money for their entire lives. They are bound to stay and work here and as those generations before them, were born, worked and died here, living their whole lives in the community of the tea farm. By documenting the lives of the people, I realised I was documenting the process of the lives of the tea trees at the same time. This is how I met Lolita.Figure 1. Bangladeshi tea worker, Lolita, stands in a small section of the Khadim tea plantation in the early morning. Sylhet, Bangladesh (Danielle Fusco, Jan. 2012). This woman emulated everything I was seeing and feeling about the village and the garden. She spoke about the reliance on the trees, especially because of the money and, therefore, the food, they provide for her and her husband. I became aware of the injustice of this system because the workers are paid so little while this industry is booming. It was obvious that life here is far from perfect, but as Lolita explains, they make do. She has worked on the tea estate for decades. As her husband is no longer working, she is the primary income earner. They are able, however, to live in relative comfort now their children have all married and left and it is just the two of them. Lolita describes that money lies within these trees. Money for her means that she can eat that day. Money for the managers means industrial success. Either way, whether it is in the eyes of the individual or the industry, tea always comes down to Taka [the currency of Bangladesh]. Marketing Coffee in a Culture of Tea and Betel Nut With such a strong culture of tea production and consumption and a coffee culture just existing on the fringe, a campaign by Nescafé to encourage Bangladeshi consumers to have “my first cup” of Nescafé instant coffee at the time of this study captured the imagination of the students. How effective can the marketing of Nescafé instant coffee be in a society that is historically a producer and consumer of tea, and which also still embraces the generations-old use of the betel nut as an everyday stimulant? Although it only employs some 150,000 (Islam et al.) in a nation of 150 million people, tea makes an important contribution to the Bangladesh economy. Shortly after the 1971 civil war, in which East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) became independent from West Pakistan (now Pakistan), the then-Chairman of the Bangladesh Tea Board, writing in World Development, commented:In the highly competitive marketing environment of today it is extremely necessary for the tea industry of Bangladesh to increase production by raising the per acre yield, improve quality by adoption of finer plucking standards and modernization of factories and reduce per unit cost of production so as to be able to sell more of our teas to foreign markets and thereby earn higher amounts of much needed foreign exchange for the country as well as generate additional resources within the industry for ploughing back for further development (Ali 55). In Bangladesh, tea is a cash crop that, even in the 1970s following vicious conflicts, is more than capable of meeting local demand and producing an export dividend. Coffee is imported commodity that, historically, has had little place in Bangladeshi life or culture. However important tea is, it is not the traditional Bangladesh stimulant. Instead, over the years, when people in the West would have had a cup of tea or coffee and/or a cigarette, most Bangladeshis have turned to the betel nut. A 2005 study of 100 citizens from Araihazar, Bangladesh, conducted by researchers from Columbia University, found that coffee consumption is “very low in this population” (Hafeman et al. 567). The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of betel quids (the wad of masticated nut) and the chewing of betel nuts, upon tremor. For this reason, it was important to record the consumption of stimulants in the 98 participants who progressed to the next stage of the study and took a freehand spiral-drawing test. While “26 (27%) participants had chewed betel quids, 23 (23%) had smoked one or more cigarettes, [and] 14 (14%) drank tea; on that day, only 1 (1%) drank caffeinated soda, and none (0%) drank coffee” (Hafeman et al. 568). Given its addictive and carcinogenic properties (Sharma), the people who chewed betel quids were more likely to exhibit tremor in their spiral drawings than the people who did not. As this (albeit small) study suggests, the preferred Bangladeshi stimulant is more likely to be betel or tobacco rather than a beverage. Insofar as hot drinks are consumed, Bangladesh citizens drink tea. This poses a significant challenge for multinational advertisers who seek to promote the consumption of instant coffee as a means of growing the global market for Nescafé. Marketing Nescafé to Bangladesh In Dhaka, in January 2012, the television campaign slogan for Nescafé is “My first cup”, with the tagline, “Time you started.” This Nescafé television commercial (NTC) impressed itself upon the Australian visitors, both in terms of its frequency of broadcast and in its referencing of Western culture and values. (The advertisement can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8mFX43oAM). The NTC’s three stars, Vir Das, Purab Kohli, and leading Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, are highly-recognisable to young Bangladeshi audiences and the storyline is part of a developing series of advertisements which together form a mini-soap opera, like that used so successfully to advertise the Nescafé Gold Blend brand of instant coffee in the West in the 1980s to 1990s (O’Donohoe 242; Beale). The action takes place in Kohli’s affluent, Western-style apartment. The drama starts with Das challenging Kohli regarding whether he has successfully developed a relationship with his attractive neighbour, Padukone. Using a combination of local language with English words and sub-titles, the first sequence is captioned: “Any progress with Deepika, or are you still mixing coffee?” Suggesting incredulity, and that he could do better, Das asks Kohli, according to the next subtitle, “What are you doing dude?” The use of the word “dude” clearly refers to American youth culture, familiar in such movies as Dude, where’s my car? This is underlined by the immediate transition to the English words of “bikes … biceps … chest … explosion.” Of these four words only “chest” is pronounced in the local tongue, although all four words are included as captions in English. Kohli appears less and less impressed as Das becomes increasingly insistent, with Das going on to express frustration with Kohli through the exclamation “u don’t even have a plan.” The use of the text-speak English “u” here can be constructed as another way of persuading young Bangladeshi viewers that this advertisement is directed at them: the “u” in place of “you” is likely to annoy their English-speaking elders. Das continues speaking in his mother tongue, with the subtitle “Deepika padukone [sic] is your neighbour and you are only drinking coffee,” with the subsequent subtitle emphasising: “Deepika and only coffee.” At this point, Padukone enters the apartment through the open door without knocking and confidently says “Hi.” Kohli explains the situation by responding (in English, and subtitled) “my school friend, Das”. Padukone, in turn, responds in a friendly way to both men (in English, and subtitled) “You guys want to have coffee?” Instead of responding directly to this invitation, Das models to Kohli what it is to take the initiative in this situation: what it is to have a plan. “Hello” (he says, in English and subtitled) “I don’t have coffee but I have a plan. You and me, my bike, right now, hit the town, party!” Kohli looks down at the floor, embarrassed, while Padukone looks quizzically at him over Das’s shoulder. Kohli smiles, and points to himself and Padukone, clearly excluding Das: “I will have coffee” (in English, and subtitle). “Better plan”, exclaims Padukone, “You and me, my place, right now, coffee.” She looks challengingly at Das: “Right?,” a statement rather than a request, and exits, with Kohli following and Das left behind in the apartment. Cue voice-over (not a subtitle, but in-screen speech bubble) “[It’s] time you started” (spoken) “the new Nescafé” (shot change) “My first cup” (with an in-screen price promotion). This commercial associates coffee drinking with Western values of social and personal autonomy. For young women in the traditional Muslim culture of Bangladesh, it suggests a world in which they are at liberty to spend time with the suitors they choose, ignoring those whom they find pushy or inappropriate, and free to invite a man back to “my place, right now” for coffee. The scene setting in this advertisement and the use of English in both the spoken and written text suggests its target is the educated middle class, and indicates that sophisticated, affluent, trend-setters drink coffee as a part of getting to know their neighbours. In line with this, the still which ends the commercial promotes the Facebook page “Know your neighbours.” The flirtatious nature of the actors in the advertisement, the emphasis on each of the male characters spending time alone with the female character, and the female character having both power and choice in this situation is likely to be highly unacceptable to traditional Bangladeshi parental values and, therefore, proportionately more exciting to the target audience. The underlying suggestion of “my first cup” and “time you started” is that the social consumption of that first cup of coffee is the “first step” to becoming more Western. The statement also has overtones of sexual initiation. The advertisement aligns itself with the world portrayed in the Western media consumed in Bangladesh, and the implication is that—even if Western liberal values are not currently a possible choice for all—it is at least feasible to start on the journey towards these values through drinking that first cup of coffee. Unbeknownst to the Bangladesh audience, this Nescafé marketing strategy echoes, in almost all material particulars, the same approach that was so successful in persuading Australians to embrace instant coffee. Khamis, in her essay on Australia and the convenience of instant coffee, argues that, while in 1928 Australia had the highest per capita consumption of tea in the world, this had begun to change by the 1950s. The transformation in the market positioning of coffee was partly achieved through an association between tea and old-fashioned ‘Britishness’ and coffee and the United States: this discovery [of coffee] spoke to changes in Australia’s lifestyle options: the tea habit was tied to Australia’s development as a far-flung colonial outpost, a daily reminder that many still looked to London as the nation’s cultural capital: the growing appeal of instant coffee reflected a widening and more nuanced cultural palate. This was not just ‘another’ example of the United States postwar juggernaut; it marks the transitional phase in Australia’s history, as its cultural identity was informed less by the staid conservativism of Britain than the heady flux of New World glamour (219). Coffee was associated with the USA not simply through advertising but also through cultural exposure. By 1943, notes Khamis, there were 120,000 American service personnel stationed in Australia and she quotes Symons (168) as saying that “when an American got on a friendly footing with an Australian family he was usually found in the kitchen, teaching the Mrs how to make coffee, or washing the dishes” (168, cited in Khamis 220). The chances were that “the Mrs”—the Australian housewife—felt she needed the tuition: an Australian survey conducted by Gallup in March 1950 indicated that 55 per cent of respondents at that time had never tried coffee, while a further 24 per cent said they “seldom” consumed it (Walker and Roberts 133, cited in Khamis 222). In a newspaper article titled, “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”, Munro describes the impact of exposure to the first American troops based in Australia during this time, with a then seven year old recalling: “They were foreign, quite a different culture from us. They spoke more loudly than us. They had strange accents, cute expressions, they were really very exotic.” The American troops caused consternation for Australian fathers and boyfriends. Dulcie Wood was 18 when she was dating an American serviceman: They had more money to spend (than Australian troops). They seemed to have plenty of supplies, they were always bringing you presents—stockings and cartons of cigarettes […] Their uniforms were better. They took you to more places. They were quite good dancers, some of them. They always brought you flowers. They were more polite to women. They charmed the mums because they were very polite. Some dads were a bit more sceptical of them. They weren’t sure if all that charm was genuine (quoted in Munro). Darian-Smith argues that, at that time, Australian understanding of Americans was based on Hollywood films, which led to an impression of American technological superiority and cultural sophistication (215-16, 232). “Against the American-style combination of smart advertising, consumerism, self-expression and popular democracy, the British class system and its buttoned-up royals appeared dull and dour” writes Khamis (226, citing Grant 15)—almost as dull and dour as 1950s tea compared with the postwar sophistication of Nescafé instant coffee. Conclusion The approach Nestlé is using in Bangladesh to market instant coffee is tried and tested: coffee is associated with the new, radical cultural influence while tea and other traditional stimulants are relegated to the choice of an older, more staid generation. Younger consumers are targeted with a romantic story about the love of coffee, reflected in a mini-soap opera about two people becoming a couple over a cup of Nescafé. Hopefully, the Pathshala-Edith Cowan University collaboration is at least as strong. Some of the overseas visitors return to Bangladesh on a regular basis—the student presentations in 2012 were, for instance, attended by two visiting graduates from the 2008 program who were working in Bangladesh. For the Australian participants, the association with Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, and Drik Photo Agency brings recognition, credibility and opportunity. It also offers a totally new perspective on what to order in the coffee queue once they are home again in Australia. Postscript The final week of the residency in Bangladesh was taken up with presentations and a public exhibition of the students’ work at Drik Picture Agency, Dhaka, 3–7 February 2012. 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