I
wrote the following in 2009 with the intention of developing it into something
more substantial (obviously that never happened). I print it here as a mournful
response to recent proclamations that “DVD is dead” (see here,
for example). Additionally, my DVD player has just died, so I'm lamenting. Here is the take-away for anyone already thinking ‘TL:DR’: don’t
throw away your DVDs yet.
As an avid consumer of horror, I am regularly
faced with a (probably familiar) problem. Having purchased, rented or borrowed
a DVD, I am confronted by the disappointment of a dull movie, founded on a
clichéd, predictable plot. Distributors frequently cash-in on established or
previously successful movies, or make promises in advertising material that are
so lurid that the film in question cannot live up to the hype. Such are the
perils of investing time into a particular genre. After all, in order to be
identified as belonging to a genre, films have to be at least in some sense
generic.
When faced with such efforts in the age of the
VHS, one had three options; 1) sit through the offending film, 2) turn it off,
or 3) watch it at double-speed. My personal favourite was the latter: if a film
is boring, increase the frequency of apparent action by speeding it up, and
slow down for the “interesting” bits. Such viewer interventions are
significant, at least inasmuch as they are an important part of how viewers
engage with films.
In the home-viewing context, audiences are not
passive recipients who attentively watch films from start to finish in one
sitting. While Klinger notes that ‘non-theatrical exhibition is little explored
in the field of Film Studies’ (Klinger, 2008: 20) it is in this environment
that I spend most of my time engaging with film. While VHS offered home viewers a degree of editorial control (Michelson,
1999: 22) – much to the dismay of BBFC director James Ferman (see his interview
comments in Ban the Sadist Videos! Part 2
(2006)) – the DVD is a more flexible and durable medium than VHS. That
is, DVD provided viewers with greater ability to manipulate films while
watching them. It also provided film scholars with a host of new tools, which
can deepen our understanding of
narrative and form. They can also enhance the pleasures we gain from film. My
concern here is not so much about the philosophic implications or stilling
images out of time (as I have discussed elsewhere [click for PDF]),
but with viewing strategies; specifically the ability to partially “reinvent” a
given film ad-hoc. Our remote controls give us more options than
fast-forwarding, slow-motion viewing and pausing, and those options can have a
radical impact on a film’s tone.
I discovered the delights of my remote control
while watching the A Nightmare on Elm
Street (USA, 1984, Wes Craven) knock-off Sleepstalker (USA, 1995, dir. Turi Meyer). After persisting for
over thirty minutes of meandering wooden dialogue, I became restless and
decided to play around with some of the options I had yet to explore on my
remote control. Admittedly, turning my attention to a lump of plastic is itself
a damning evaluation of Sleepstalker.
Yet, I want to make it clear that I am not a film snob; I am not asserting that
I am “above” the b-movie, or that I am only intellectually stimulated by French
New Wave cinema, for instance. One aspect of Sleepstalker that attracted me to it is that it took the plot
device of my favourite piece of cinema; the aforementioned A Nightmare on Elm Street. Unfortunately, on this occasion, Sleepstalker simply failed to engage me.
On pressing the ‘zoom’ function on my remote
however, the film became much more intriguing. My zoom function is not as
sophisticated as some available on the market. It simply enlarges the centre of
the screen by a different percentage each time the button is depressed. Yet, doing
so made the image grainier, and altered the framing. Most figures onscreen
became obscured, commonly having their faces removed from the shot. The effect
was astounding. Sleepstalker had almost
sent me to sleep (on reflection, maybe this was the meta-function of the text).
After zooming, Sleepstalker suddenly became fascinating and downright creepy. The now
faceless characters were hard to connect to. The film’s world-view became
notably solipsistic and alienating. Moreover, the grainy picture and what would
now be considered inadequate framing according to standard film-making
conventions (excluding the faces of central protagonists from shot, for example)
meant that the film seemed as if it were shot on hidden camera: it was
reminiscent of undercover investigative journalism footage. This verite
aesthetic was at odds with the laboured, unnatural and scarcely believable
acting. With one button press, Sleepstalker
had become a film about distrust, paranoia and suspicion, where all the
characters appeared to be compulsive liars claiming to be plagued by a
supernatural killer, all caught on surveillance camera. Sure, this may require
some suspension of disbelief, but no more than Sleepstalker’s unaltered narrative or all supernaturally-themed
found-footage films require.
I pursued this avenue of enquiry to what else my
amateur improvised editing methodology could offer in increasing my
spectatorial pleasure. In the case of hackneyed slasher My Bloody Valentine 3D (USA, 2009, dir. Patrick Lussier), pressing
the “shuffle” function meant that what would have been a narrative hinging on
an insultingly obvious ‘whodunit’ plot-twist and a series of unoriginal
set-pieces became a kind of fun horror variant on Last Year in Marienbad (France, 1961, dir. Alain Resnais). By
re-ordering the DVD chapters, the film became an imbricated web of disrupted
temporalities, repeated moments, flashbacks and unexpected cut-aways. What is
more, the shuffle, being randomised, means that any given repeat-viewing of the
film offers a unique experience; the twist may be revealed in the opening
scene, the end credits may roll twenty minutes into the film, and so forth. The
function’s unpredictability works particularly well with horror films, which
commonly build narratives on elements of suspense and surprise, tension and
release. By disrupting the intended ebb and flow of the narrative, moments that
would otherwise function as downtime in-between scares are often accidentally
amplified, while climatic moments of trauma take on new meanings.
The result of the experiment was a
disorientating, but I believe valuable one; and I mean that more than just in
terms of entertaining people (such as myself) who have short attention spans or
have invested in a genre to the point that they have little time to waste on
what they individually consider
inadequate. In saying this, I do not wish to belittle the work of intentionally
experimental film-makers. My use of the DVD shuffle function is not meant to
suggest that a formally experimental narrative such as Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (France, 2002) should be
considered the work of a filmmaker who wishes to obscure his inability to make
an interesting film by randomly adopting the type of formal technique I am
discussing here. I also do not wish to overlook the narrative experimentation
undertaken by artists such as Margi Spzerling, whose Uncompressed (2004) encourages the viewer to move between the
multiple perspectives via which narrative events are portrayed. Spzerling’s
agenda in fact is similar to my own; she declares that ‘[t]he public needs to come to an
understanding of what is possible with their media...to learn the capabilities
of non-linear language’ (Filmmaker,
2001). I am primarily interested in what we
might learn from employing such viewing strategies, by interacting with what is
presented as finished, ordered and final.
The idea to play with form came from watching
two horror films, and I want to acknowledge my debt to those films before discussing
the implications of using one’s remote to gain control over the text. The first
was Cheerleader Massacre (USA, 2003,
dir. Jim Wynorski) which is a profoundly unoriginal horror sequel (see my
review here).
In fact, Wynorski’s willingness to present old-as-new gives rise to the most intriguing elements of the film. Cheerleader Massacre is shot on digital
camera, yet it contains inserts from other film sources: an extract from Slumber Party Massacre (USA, 1982, dir.
Amy Holden Jones) is inserted as a flashback, while an explosion is culled from
stock footage (which has apparently also been used in Humanoids from the Deep (USA, 1980, dir. Barbara Peters)). In both
instances, the shift to film-stock is
jarring, and draws attention to how cold and cheap the digital footage looks in
comparison. In this sense, Cheerleader
Massacre’s visual hybridity underscores how digital filmmaking and
distribution have impacted upon the genre. What may have been considered cheap
or independent in previous decades (the earlier Massacre films) now seems to be somewhat aesthetically and
economically lavish in the context of the new digital situ (Cheerleader Massacre). The former (flashback)
sequence can be explained by its narrative position; framed as a memory within Cheerleader Massacre, it is apposite
that the footage from Slumber Party
Massacre is marked as visually “different” from the narrative present. In
fact, the use of film footage here may be read as a comment on how ‘cinematic’ imaginations
of the past can be (see Bulkeley, 1999: 101). In both cases, the motivation for
using shot-on-film footage is clear; the first instance ties Cheerleader Massacre into an existing
franchise, and the second avoids the cost of blowing up a building. However, the
film’s willingness to remix existing elements in such a manner highlights the product’s
inadequacies and Wynorski’s lack of confidence in Cheerleader Massacre as a standalone movie. The trailer for Cheerleader Massacre continues this
logic, containing a plethora of shots and sequences that are nowhere to be
found in the film it allegedly advertises, and placing a great deal of weight
on making the connection between the standalone title Cheerleader Massacre and preceding Slumber Party Massacre and Sorority
House Massacre films.
With this spirit of remixing in mind, the
second film that motivated the present article is Death Screams (USA, 1982, dir. David Nelson), a standard Friday the 13th (USA, 1980, dir. Sean
Cunningham) influenced “teens in the woods” slasher affair. The teens in
question are introduced through their interactions at a summer carnival, then they
party in the woods at night, and then a masked maniac begins to kill the teens.
So far, so familiar. Yet, as soon as Sheila and Walker are killed there is a
sudden jump; we see the teens in the afternoon organising their trip into the
woods. ‘How clever’, I thought: ‘having set the murder-spree in motion, we are
going to see flashbacks of the teens earlier in the day, and this will help us
to work out who the killer is, what their motivations are and so forth. What an
interesting embellishment’. While I was busy musing over the filmmaker’s
commentary about viewers privileging violence “as” meaning and murder
set-pieces as points of sadistic pleasure (when viewers should really be paying
attention to character’s interactions so as to increase empathy for the
victims), the film suddenly jumped straight back into the throes of murder. By
the time the film reached its conclusion, I was reasonably certain that the
jump was not evidence that the author was intentionally bucking genre
conventions. Instead, I was pretty sure that the film had been transferred to
DVD in the wrong order: the second and third reels had been swapped, and because
the film was considered to be so poor, no-one had noticed before releasing it.
I am unaware if this problem affects all versions of Death Screams, but it made my Vipco edition (released 2004) much
more entertaining than it otherwise would have been.
Moreover, the odd (albeit accidental) narrative construction
accentuated underlying problems with the plot. Throughout Death Screams, a bumbling sheriff remains many steps behind the
killer (and the action); he spends the majority of the film eating, being
generally sleazy, blaming Ramona for the death of his son (which is never expanded
upon), and entering empty houses. When the killer and his motivations are
revealed (SPOILER: it has something to do with his mother being a prostitute…
or at least this is what I assume from the three brief shots that constitute
the backstory), the sheriff is nowhere to be seen. The killer falls out of a
window, and the sheriff arrives to shoot him. But wait…we know who did it and why (just about), but the sheriff could not:
he did not even discover any of the dead bodies, such was his obsession with vacant
cabins and reading Hustler magazine.
Not only is Death Screams’ sheriff
inept, he is in the habit of turning up when someone has fallen out of a
window, only to shoot them in the face. This dubious morality is underlined by
the involuntary reorganisation of the narrative that returns the viewer to the
plot build (reel two) instead of letting the viewer forget such details by
sweeping the viewer along in escalating violence (reels three and four).
What both examples highlighted for me was how
Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ may be usefully employed in the contemporary
viewing context to improve our engagements with film. I am not suggesting that scholars
should entirely forsake a mode of film analysis that attends to narrative
structure: indeed, were each viewer to only watch a film using the shuffle
function, it would lead to numerous incompatible and incomprehensible analyses.
Yet remixing a given film may valuable in terms of enhancing viewing pleasure, and
also in highlighting visual and thematic connections across the text that might
not otherwise be apparent. In the case of Death
Screams, the haphazardly reordered text led me ruminate on character
motivations and the pleasures of violent spectacle in a manner that I would not
have considered if the film had played out according to the author’s
objectives. Purposely imposing such accidents via the DVD remote control frees
the viewer from authorial intention in a liberating, Barthesian fashion.
The interactive aspect of DVD was one of its
most appealing commercial features: as Taylor (2001: 3) observes, ‘DVD has many
tricks to woo the weary couch potato and the multi-media junkie alike’.
However, far from being sales gimmicks, I contend that we stand to benefit from
taking these interactive ‘tricks’ seriously, and acknowledge the potential these
interactive abilities affords for film analysis. Even though Taylor recognises
that DVD does not close ‘the door on beginning-to-end storytelling, only that
it opens new doors for different approaches’, when he does mention creative
control he refers to producers, not participatory viewers (Taylor: 2001: 4 and
161-2). Laidler’s vision of the ‘independence and power for the consumer’
presented by video is more optimistic, focusing on the viewer’s ‘power over
time’, and a ‘freedom of use which was
previously only available in print’ (Laidler, 1998: 51). My stance is somewhere
in-between these two. I am cautious about the radical potentials of interactivity
inasmuch as I am not proposing that established roles (creator and interpreter)
should be abandoned altogether. However, I am interested in investigating the
push-and-pull of that relationship. For instance, why is it typical to watch a
film in the linear sequence that it is presented, when technology so easily provides
alternatives? Partially, this is due to cinematic history: habits and
established routines of watching films from beginning to end, following the path
set by the author (see Williams, 2000: 363).
Those conventions are bolstered by a host of commercial
pressures that implicitly ask us to think of the sequential, presented order as
the “correct” one. Some of these are programmed into DVDs. For example, the 2002
Universal Pictures Region 2 release of Mulholland
Drive (USA, 2001. Dir. David Lynch) contains no chapter breaks, thus
hindering the viewer’s ability to skip through
the film. Even when a host of options such as audio commentaries and ‘making
of’ featurettes are included as part of the DVD, these arguably add to the
overall sense that the creator/producers’ designs are paramount. Catherine
Grant argues that the DVD functions in this sense as a means of bolstering the
auteurist paradigm, which is ‘interrelated film production, marketing, and
reception practices and discourses which are all underpinned by a shared belief
in the specific capability of an individual agent – the director – to marshal
and synthesize the multiple, and usually collective, elements of filmmaking for
the purposes of individual expression’ (Grant, 2008: 101).
While Grant
recognizes that ephemeral material explicitly allows viewers to interact with
the materials supplied, she is primarily interested in how those materials
shape our reception of film texts as cultural objects. Similarly, Klinger asserts that DVD acts as an
‘ambassador of context, entering the home complete with its own armada of
discourses meant to influence reception’ (Klinger, 2008: 21). Both Grant and Klinger
identify ways in which these interactive features support conventional
attitudes towards authorial control. In turn, that implicit pressure occludes
the disruptive potentials DVD offers. Yet while the message of DVD “special
features” might be that the author has control, it is notable that in order to
access such materials viewers must navigate the DVD’s geography. The content
may bolster preconceptions about authorial control, but accessing those
messages first requires viewer agency: (inter)action is primary. The interactive possibilities offered by DVD fly
in the face of the medium’s expected use.
Viewers are rarely permitted absolute control over
the DVD content, however. Interactivity is limited at the point of design in
the interests of commercial control. Jim Taylor observes that region locking
and copy protection are built in to DVD technology to provide production
companies with a means of limiting the product’s distributional flow (Taylor,
2001: 157). Supported by copyright law, such restrictions seek to impede a viewer’s
ability to consume DVDs from other commercial regions. These systems also ensure
that viewers cannot readily or legally use mainstream video editing software to
deconstruct and reconstitute film texts contained on DVDs. Moreover, DVD design
is such that ‘[a]lmost every button on the remote control can be blocked at any
point on the disc’ (Taylor, 2001: 164), meaning that production companies can
easily restrict the viewer’s ability to disturb the intended usage. Most
commonly, this means viewers cannot easily skip past copyright notices and trailers.
Pace the autuerist paradigm, these same commercial
and industrial pressures undercut the notion that filmmakers have complete
control over their narratives. While Benjamin (2000: 59) unfairly characterised
commercial cinema as ‘films devoid of the slightest interest – when they are
not, frankly, odious and stupid – films that skilfully and purposefully set out
to anaesthetize the public’, he also noted that ‘the scriptwriter and
director…always come up against capital’. Those commercial considerations limit
creative freedom. Production studios place filmmakers under (implicit and
explicit) pressure to make films that fit into intelligible commercial categories,
and genre categorisation also limits the shape and tone of a given narrative. Genre
pictures make a return on investment by playing on audiences’ familiarity with
convention. Genre is an integral aspect of pre-selling the narrative to an
interested audience. However, conformity to genre conventions can also dissatisfy
a audiences who crave innovation while also not wanting a film to be so new as to become unrecognizable as
part of a genre. This is an extraordinarily fine line, and thus studios and
filmmakers are required to second-guess their target-audiences micro-preferences.
Audiences should thus take some responsibility for their own entertainment. If
a film’s adherence to genre tropes is limiting (if the film is deemed boring),
viewers have various options – including those I outlined in my response to Sleepstalker – to increase their
enjoyment. It might not always work, by experimenting with one’s DVD remote is
surely more satisfying than whining on IMDB.com?
Despite the medium’s more general aims (which emphasise
authorial intent), DVD provides viewers with various ways to collaborate in the
organisation, meanings and textual pleasures of film, even if those are limited
at present. Although I advocate increased flexibility (the ability to insert randomised
chapter markers, to recolour sequences, to play in reverse slow-motion with
sound and so forth), some are incredulous about viewers’ desire for such
facilities. Taylor suggests that even though ‘DVD
brings a new level of personal control to video programs...it is not apparent
just how much control the average couch potato is interested in having’
(Taylor, 2001: 163). Yet, this deferment to authorial control stems from the
conventions and pressures outlined above. Were viewers primed and given
opportunity to take greater creative control and responsibility, the ‘average
couch potato’ (as Taylor envisages them) may make greater use of their remote
to augment the pleasures on offer. Viewers already use their remotes to make
editorial choices such as fast-forwarding through dull sequences, pausing on
the best parts, stopping films for toilet breaks, and (r)ejecting films they
consider to be unworthy of attention. These are not trivial interventions: they
are core aspects of film viewing in the home context. Since these behaviours
directly impact on how viewers interpret films and their meanings, they ought
to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as habitual or trite.
Part of what DVD achieves is to match the way
in which other digital technologies
have placed ‘more and more control over viewing in the hands of the viewer’
(Barlow, 2005: 18). Yet, some critics have expressed doubt over the potentials
of such interaction in allowing audiences to resist established, fixed or
intended meanings (see Notaro, 2006: 95). That is not to say that creative
responses to interactive ability cannot augment viewer-pleasure. In that sense,
I concur with Klinger that ‘DVD has not revolutionised so much as reawakened,
dramatically enhanced and/or broadly disseminated ways of watching and taking
pleasure in movies’, especially ‘films that do not have wide distribution in
the mainstream’ (Klinger, 2008: 21 and 27). Viewers may still be limited in
various ways, but this does not mean that any attempt to use available options
should be forsaken. Limitations can facilitate glorious accidents and present challenges
to work around.
References:
Barlow, Aaron (2005) The DVD
Revolution: Movies, Culture and Technology. Westport: Praeger.
Benjamin, Peret (2000) “Against Commercial Cinema”, in Paul
Hammond (ed.) The Shadow and its Shadow.
London: BFI.
Bulkeley, Kelly (1999) “Touring the Dream Factory”. Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of
Dreams, 9:1.
Flint, David (1999) Babylon
Blue. London: Creation Books.
Grant, Catherine (2008) “Auteur Machines? Auteurism and the DVD”,
in James Bennett and Tom Brown (eds.) Film
and Television After DVD. London: Taylor and Francis.
Kerekes, David and Slater, David (2001) See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy. Surrey: FAB Press.
Klinger, Barbara (2008) “Viewing Heritages and Home Film
cultures”, in James Bennett and Tom Brown (eds.) Film and Television after DVD. London: Taylor and Francis.
Laidler, Mark (1998) “Zapping Freddy Krueger: Children’s Use of
Disapproved Video Texts”, in Sue Howrad (ed.) Wired Up: Young People and the Electronic Media. London: UCL Press.
Michelson, Annette (1990) “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of
Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System”, October, 52, pp. 16-39.
Notaro, Anna (2006) “Technology in Search of an Artist: Questions of Auteurism/Authorship and
the Contemporary Cinematic Experience”, The Velvet Light Trap, 57.
Taylor,
Jim (2001) DVD Demystified. Second
edition. London: McGraw Hill.
Thompson, David (2007) Black
and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR.
Toronto: ECW Press.
Williams, Linda (2000) “Discipline and Fun” in Christine Gledhilll
and Linda Williams (eds) Reinventing Film
Studies. London: Arnold.
Ban the Sadist
Videos! Part 2. USA, 2006. Dir. David Gregory.
The collection Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (edited by Neil Jackson, Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker, & Tom Watson) is due for publication by Bloomsbury at the end of January next year.
