viz. - Visual Rhetoric - Visual Culture - Pedagogy

“Rueful Reluctance:” An Unwitting Cat Owner’s Search for Meaning Among Memes

james.wiedner — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 03:12:19 +0000

Image Credit: "Nyan Cat-Pop Tart Cat," by Chris Torres

Last week, my neighbor stopped by to tell me that he was moving, and that pets were not allowed at his new residence. With all due histrionics, he lamented the fact that he was going to take her to the shelter, and that “unless anybody here wants to adopt her, [insert overly dramatic sigh] I guess she’ll probably be put down.”

My manipulative neighbor was playing me like a fiddle. He knew I had a soft spot for that cat; hell, I was the one to feed her on multiple occasions when her deadbeat dad couldn't be bothered to do so. The cat liked me, too. Whenever she’d enter my apartment, she’d survey her surroundings and then proceed to scratch the side of my couch like it was her job. I’d tell her to knock it off, and she would, but not without looking at me with what I swear was a bit of amusement.

When I realized that Violet had already moved my (generally) rational thinking into the land of the Pathetic Fallacy, I tried to take solace in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one. And while I can’t fathom ever creating cat memes myself, it would be foolish to underestimate the power that felines have had over the human photographer since there were photos to take. Aside from the comedic or cuteness factors, publishing cat memes has always been a lucrative endeavor.

Around 1900, author Osgood Grover sold millions of books, one of which was 1911’s “Kittens and Cats: A Book of Tales (hyperlink below)” The image below is just one example of the many pictures of costumed cats. Many of these pictures are even replete with “quotes” of the internal monologue of the pictured cat, just as we see in the typical meme of the digital age.

Image Credit: Dan Bloom http://dailymail.co.uk

Over 100 years later, cat books are still where the money is at. In his New York Times Op-Talk interview last month (“Confessions of A Cat Guy”), author and illustrator Peter Catapano described what is known in the publishing industry as “going cat book.” Catapano says that brilliant authors that tire of having brilliant books overlooked can get rich from publishing an identical book, except with pictures of cats throughout it, “because people will buy literally anything with a cat on it.”

So, it would appear as the cat meme was here decades before us, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t be as popular as ever after we all shuffle off this mortal coil, perhaps it’s time to do away with what Catapano calls the “rueful resignation” that accompanies “becom[ing] the sort of person you had always ridiculed- in this case, a Cat Guy?” it seems high time that even those who don’t count themselves among the “Cat People” finally accept- and even learn from- what these cats and their people are trying to tell us.

Bringing "Rip Van Winkle to Life," Part III

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 17:59:37 +0000

Image credit: Joseph Jefferson as Rip harryhoudinicircumstantialevidence.com

Just as there are as many interpretations of a text as there are readers, every new adaptation of a text weaves and builds a new story. Given technological constraints, the film version of "Rip Van Winkle" is necessarily short. As such, it’s important to consider the executive decisions made in paring out a new interpretation from the bones of Washington Irving’s 1819 tale. It’s also important to note that the film version was not an adaptation of Irving’s short story alone. The film was most likely created in part because of the popularity of the Jefferson stage play. The play was co-written by Joseph Jefferson and Dion Boucicault, the same Joseph Jefferson who starred in the film and worked with Laurie Dickson and American Mutoscope and Biograph Company to help to create the film.

In order to understand the shape of the film, it’s important to understand the more fleshed out version of the tale found in the play. The original play version^{^[1]} shows a number of changes to fit with melodramatic conventions of the day. In the play, the story is altered so that it is about betrayal, loss, and love. Interestingly, these themes are explored through a narrative that is mostly about property rights:

In the play version, Rip used to own most of the town where the story is set, but the villain (a new character for the play), a money-lender and landlord Derrick, nefariously takes over during Rip’s sleep. When Rip awakes he finds that Derrick owns all except for Rip and his Wife Gretchen’s tiny cottage.
But there’s hope: It comes to Derrick’s attention that despite his efforts to trick Rip by keeping him drunk all of the time, documents which Rip signed years ago were mortgages and not loans. Because the property has become so valuable with Derrick’s developments, were Rip to merely sell a fraction of that land he would pay of all of his loans and more.
Scheming to trick the illiterate Rip, Derrick draws up a deed. The innkeeper’s son, who intends to marry Rip’s daughter is learning to read in school and translates the document to Rip, who, without a word avoids signing throughout the night’s drunken festivities.
A storm descends and Rip comes home drunk. His wife and he fight and he leaves despondent. Meanwhile the children speculate that tonight is the night that Hedrick Hudson and the ghosts go bowling.
Up in the mountains Rip meets Hedrick with whom he communicates via pantomime. He carries his barrel of drink to the other ghostly and also mute dwarfs where he delivers a monologue, partakes in the beverage and faints.
When Rip returns he finds that Gretchen, succumbing to financial ruin, has married Derrick for support. Rip’s daughter Meenie, who wanted to marry the innkeeper’s son Hedrick, is told that he has been lost at sea and will marry Cockles, Derrick’s nephew, instead. (18)
Hendrick reappears, having survived shipwreck. Though no one believes that Rip is who he says he is, he is able to produce a deed proving that the land is in fact his. Derrick and his nephew Cockles are chased off of their property, Rip and Gretchen are reunited, Meenie marries Hendrick and Rip toasts to everyone’s health.

When Dickson and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company worked with Jefferson to make the film version, this is the play that they were working from. When we read the film, it might help to see it as informed by the popularity of the play, Irving’s story, and the novel medium of cinema. The first change viewers of the film will notice is that all of this very suspenseful drama is ditched. Perhaps because it is sentimental (the double love triangles! The swindle!) and film was cutting edge – a new medium which saw itself above the drawn out, outright clichés of the play. The drasticaly shortened story line was divided into eight scenes which are as follows:^{^[2]}

1) Rip’s Toast

2) Rip Meeting the Dwarf

3) Exit of Rip and the Dwarf

4) Rip meeting Hudson and Crew

5) Rip’s Toast to Hudson and Crew

6) Rip’s Twenty Years Sleep

7) Rip’s Awakening

8) Rip’s Passing Over the Mountain

As readers can see, what does remain from the original story is a preoccupation with altered states of consciousness, and an emphasis on the miracle of change over time. Because "Rip Van Winkle" is a story about change, and was in many ways forward thinking in its own time, the film might be, in some ways, a more faithful adaptation to the themes presented in Irving’s story than the melodramatic play.

[1] From Johnson’s paraphrasing and quoting of the original Jefferson script.

[2] Loughney

What's Haunting Dove's Real Beauty Campaign?

clsloan — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 13:57:29 +0000

Image Credit: People's Lab

Every image is haunted by the excluded. Every social movement is haunted by flaws. After reading Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and Nivedita Menon's Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law, I became a bit haunted by the possibility of subversion. These two texts tell us that ghosts, in various forms, are absolutely everywhere, and after ruminating on their content and methodologies, I started to see ghosts, too.

Gordon's book criticizes canonical sociology being far too focused on the present, the physical and the empirical, and for failing to account for “missing” and the “disappeared” subject positions. These absent presences, the ghosts that haunt our supposedly complete accounts of societies and histories, need to be accounted for. The ghost, for Gordon, is “the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (8). In other words, what societies exclude, keep out and make abject are, paradoxically, at the very heart of cultural meaning.

At first glance, Menon's study seems pretty far removed from Gorrdon's subject matter. While Gordon's book makes itself tantalizingly fantastic by splaying references to ghosts and hauntings all over its cover page, Menon's text looks pretty down-to-earth. Weighty, serious terms like “politics” and “the law” indicate no-nonsense subject matter. Imagine my surprise when I realized that Gordon and Menon's projects actually share a lot of crucial points. Menon, like Gordon, suggests that cultural movements are haunted by unintended subject positions. Menon emphasizes the overwhelming power of discourse and demonstrates that even apparently revolutionary action can backfire if it's energized by problematic reasoning. Menon gives the general example of abortion “rights” early in her book: pro-choice discourse that claims abortion as a “private right” for women who deserve to make their own decisions about their own bodies necessarily forecloses on the possibility that abortion could be a public concern that requires, for example, insurance coverage or even subsidies. Menon focuses on legal discourse, but we can infer that all social movements and campaigns are bound by the rules of intelligibility: what can be said is limited by what makes sense given the current cultural climate. Because of this intrinsic problem with discourse, that only culturally available ideas are, well, available for mobilization, revolutionary discourse becomes haunted by counter-revolutionary possibilities, the ghosts of future oppression.

When it comes to the difficulties of emancipatory discourse, people craving equality for various gender and sexuality subject positions have certainly struggled with some double-edged swords. The highly volatile, highly relevant, intensely current debate on gay marriage springs to mind. By appropriating the universalizing discourse of the normalcy of monogamous marriage, many gay couples strive to secure valuable legal rights and cultural intelligibility. On the other hand, does this appropriation simply re-affirm the value of monogamy, the desirability of a capitalism-driven “normalcy”, and/or erase the multiplicity of queer experience in favor of the bourgeois “loyalty, romance and procreation” model of sexual relationships in mainstream culture?

Another interesting movement, a supposedly all-inclusive self-esteem builder for women, has been picked up by the Dove soap company. Their “Real Beauty” campaign strives to differentiate Dove from other hygiene or clothing product companies that rely on exclusive, unattainable ideals of attractiveness to sell their merchandise. This advertising scheme (which can, perhaps, double as a social statement) implies that our current standards of beauty unfairly exclude women who are too old, too fat, too ethnic, too “physically flawed.” Instead, Dove's visual ads argue that our concept of beauty needs to expand so that we see all women as beautiful. Of course, there are some problems here. The image of “beautiful” women of diverse races and body types is haunted by a few obvious exclusions: women with blemished skin, women with disabilities, women who might not be immediately recognizable as women, women who aren't sparkling and clean who, perhaps, can't afford Dove soap. Isn't it unfair, though, to criticize a soap company for not suggesting that dirty women can also be beautiful? I can hear some of my practical friends asking. Not when their ad campaign focuses on beauty as an all-inclusive category, I can hear myself snidely responding. Like “universally recognized rights,” “universally recognized beauty” seems like a completely unattainable dream.

And even if it weren't, even if we could exorcize the ghosts from this image and convince the world that beauty is, indeed, about confidence and personal pride, are there any discourse-related problems we should be thinking about? About a week ago I came across a public-service campaign. There were several signs taped up on stall doors and beside mirrors in a public women's restroom. Drawn in marker on colorful construction paper, they assured the reader, “You are beautiful!” and that “Beauty has no rank order.” Even as I recognized that the campaigners certainly meant the absolute best and were doubtless motivated by great intentions, I was immediately prompted to wonder: so I deserve to be encouraged about my beauty but not my happiness, my intelligence, or my ability to help others? The signs, even in kindness, even in the suggestion that all women were beautiful, relied on the discourse of attractiveness to empower. Self-worth is still couched in terms of physical appearance, even if we're getting a bit more generous with the required criteria.

Reaction Shots and Reader Response at the Purple Wedding

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 21:37:54 +0000

Image Credit: Cyndicyanide

[Note: Spoilers below the cut.]

As a Game of Thrones fan, I was pretty excited to watch this last week’s episode. It’d been a while since I’d watched, and the wedding of Joffrey Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell gathered together many of the show’s beloved characters.

More importantly, it also meant the end of the show’s most-hated character, Joffrey, whose poisoning ended the episode. What intrigues me today, however, is the fan reaction to his death, recorded in GIFs, fan art, and videos. What does it mean to celebrate Joffrey’s death? What value does the reaction video have for audiences? and how does visual communication change the idea of reader-response?

Readers have long found ways to record their reactions to texts, whether in letters to friends or in the books themselves. Marginalia, as described by H. J. Jackson in her book Marginalia, reflects the visual structures of the book itself: “A tour of the annotated book from front to back, whether we consider conventional use or idiosyncratic variations, reveals that our customs and expectations, constant over time, are based on the conventional format of the book itself. In more ways than one, marginalia mirror the texts they supplement" (41). Thus, as footnotes go at the page's bottom, so does supplemental marginalia. For example, a recent reader found the following marginalia in a 1528 manuscript:

Image Credit: Superlinguo, via io9

Whether or not the reader was commenting on the abbot’s sexual practices or expressing disgust at the text, the reader leaving the marginalia communicates his reaction to others long after his death. During my own dissertation research at Harvard’s Houghton Library, I found some interesting marginalia in this copy of the 1765 edition of the satirical poet Charles Churchill’s Works:

Image Credit: Rachel Schneider / Houghton Library

As one reader responds indignantly to Churchill’s “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” another mocks and subverts that reaction. We readers following them can not only enjoy the text but their mutual exchange. Readers today need not limit their reactions to the page’s margin, however, but can spread them over places like Twitter and YouTube, where websites like Buzzfeed and io9 curate them for other fans to read and enjoy:

Image Credit: Screenshot from io9

These responders use humor to comment on the show, responding not just to the details of one scene but the whole episode and series at large. Also, their writing participates and relies on other internet memes to be intelligible, as when Ol’ Qwerty Bastard adapt the Kanye West meme to apply to Game of Thrones. Just as book-readers use marginal comments in a similar fashion to print commentary, these reaction tweets are written for an Internet-literate audience and partake of its themes.

Image Credit: brienneoftarth

H/T: Brianna Hyslop

Likewise, GIFs and LOLCAT-like images are created to comment on the character and react to him based on the popular perception. For example, if one Tweeter compares the spoiled King Joffrey to the popstar Justin Bieber, one fan makes a Tumblr remixing images of both to write the comparison visually. Another fan comments on Joffrey’s cruelty by presenting Out-of-Context Joffrey, taking a line used to mock his uncle Tyrion and presenting it as a self-affirming bromide. These visuals don’t create new readings, but instead rely on an understood reading of Joffrey as terrible to make a joke. We can imagine Joffrey’s biological father Jaime running thus towards his dying son, but towards the wedding pie. Other fans will reblog GIFs of Joffrey dying alongside celebratory GIFs to represent their reactions.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Still others record their reactions on video rather than through remediated pictures or text. The reaction video is a genre which shows people watching some sort of media event (from Auburn’s surprising kick return against Alabama or the 2 Girls 1 Cup video) and responding to it. Fans of Game of Thrones have recorded their reactions to major events like the Red Wedding, in which several members of the Stark family are killed by Lannister agents, and this week’s Purple Wedding. Some of the reactions are NSFW, so at least put on your headphones first:

The viewers’ visible excitement contrasts oddly with the Joffrey’s audible choking and his mother’s raging grief, but these videos provide solidarity between the audience within and without the screen. There is a tension in some of the videos about how aware the person in the video is of being filmed: sometimes the video’s subject acknowledges the camera, sometimes they just react. We as an audience can also be cognizant of the person doing the filming, who understands what’s coming and wants to record it. Whereas marginalia is a semi-private act—one person reading alone and recording that reading—these reactions are performed for their viewing companions and the room and the wider YouTube audience. A whole bar breaking into applause at the critical moment shares solidarity in their reaction, and the viewer joins them in their joy. Yet the viewers’ enthusiasm—like the man who responds to Oleanna Tyrell saying “Help the poor boy!” with “No!”—seems not to be in doubt, as he stares at the TV and not the camera filming him. There’s a sense in which we are engaging with individuals in an unguarded moment, framed so by the knowing person holding the camera. The emotional exposure creates intimacy, even if it is highly mediated.

Image Credit: The Independent

I’d like to consider here how these videos also replicate the common film technique of the reaction shot, where within a movie the camera will scan other characters within the scene to see what they make of what’s happening. The Purple Wedding itself features many reactions, like Joffrey and the actors responding to Tyrion’s speech, or the people reacting to Joffrey’s death itself. The goal of a reaction shot is to reveal or obscure something about the character, depending whether or not their reaction appears onscreen. In a show where subterfuge and outright scheming are required—“when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die”—no characters are allowed to react visibly with strong emotion. Only Cersei does so. That very tension may be why the reaction videos are so popular—they supply the place of what must be hidden, what cannot be expressed in Westeros. The film medium thus produces both reactions, and the means for viewers to react.

Developing Austin for the Future

Jay Voss — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 04:24:00 +0000

(Image Credit: austinchronicle.com)

This is most likely my last post of the semester, and I thought I spend it writing about development trends in Austin. Anyone who has lived here for more than a few years should be keenly aware of just how quickly this city is changing. Even my landlord is complaining. Well, he’s not technically complaining, but as soon as he has a vacancy to fill, it’s taken, and I think part of the game has been lost for him. But I digress. One of the things about expansive growth in Austin is that it tends to not coincide with urban planning, as I noted in a previous post about the Texas Capital Building. This lack of planning can be frustrating to locals because, well…it’s not Paris. But there’s charm in the city’s architectural idiosyncrasies, and these things do give the city a sense of character. Austin’s a lot like the grimy sci-fi of the original Terminator film, especially when compared to the forensic cleanliness of Star Trek’s sci-fi. So, anyway, there’s a weird thing happening throughout Austin’s current growth spurt, in which planned communities are popping up in the middle of old non-planned neighborhoods. Two questions come to mind: Does it really matter that these communities are planned given the irregular historical zoning beauty that surrounds them? And, secondly, what’s the appeal of these antiseptic neighborhoods, when Austinites could have…well, Austin?

(Image Credit: www.buryinc.com)

Two of these neighborhoods immediately come to mind. “The Domain” shopping area, east of Mopac and north of 183, and “The Triangle,” which is located where Lamar and Guadalupe merge. Anyone reading this who frequents Austin’s hipper areas is probably rolling their eyes at this point – The Domain and The Triangle are not really places where people hang out (no offense). They’re places you go to if you want to visit Office Max or Louis Vuitton. (I didn’t even know how to spell “Vuitton” when I started writing this post.) In a nutshell, each of these planned neighborhoods offers retail space at street level, and apartments or condos above. Rhetorically, it’s quite obvious that these neighborhoods are trying to approximate the European high street. However, in my mind there are two very deep differences between what you find in Europe and what’s popping up in Austin. In most these European urban spaces it’s easy to walk out from where you live and purchase the necessities. In these new Austin neighborhoods, the idea is that you walk out from where you live and purchase luxuries. The second rather obvious difference is that in Austin, these planned urban spaces are suburban. They’re for away from the center of town. So once your mind breaks through the nictitating haze of superfluous consumption, it’s really quite hard to figure out what the appeal of living in these areas is.

(Image Credit: austintowers.net)

To be fair, housing is at such a premium in Austin at the moment, that you can’t really blame anyone for living anywhere. And I guess, really, Office Max and Louis Vitton – I mean “Vuitton” – wouldn’t be putting shops in these places if there weren’t consumers ready and waiting to pounce.

Processing Extraordinary Tragedy in Ordinary Days

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Fresno Beehive

[Spoiler alert: if you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity of attending Ordinary Days, know that the following describes much of the play’s ending.]

Manalive, the novel by G.K. Chesterton, opens with miraculous gust of wind, a meterological phenomenon described as “the good wind that blows nobody harm.” I always found something particularly memorable about that image of a moment of impossible happiness, and it gusted into my mind once more when I attended the recent Austin production of the chamber musical, Ordinary Days.

Ordinary Days offers more than a miraculous gust of wind. Instead, its climax brings all four of the play’s cast members into contact by a single, bizarre spectacle. The image is explicitly identified not with nature, however, but with one of the greatest recent tragedies of our nation: the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11. I’m not sure that the play’s treatment of 9/11 is necessarily its most brilliant moment—but it does offer an interesting example of one artist’s attempt to use visual and narrative imagination to recontextualize the image that has driven so much of America’s foreign and domestic policy over the last ten years.

The play starts off, it seems, as about as unpolitical as a story could. Jason is moving in with his girlfriend Claire, wondering whether he can find a place for himself in her apartment and heart. Meanwhile, cheerfully optimistic (if profoundly unambitious) artist Warren finds the dissertation notes of neurotic grad-student (but I repeat myself) Deb, starting a delightful odd-couple friendship. Everyone, naturally, has his or her own problem. Claire struggles to clean out the clutter of her past in order to make room for Jason. Deb is still running away from her childhood in “like, a suburb of a suburb,” but finding that the overwhelming anonymity of New York (not to mention the inflexibility of her dissertation advisor) don’t live up to her big-town imagination. The male characters are simpler: Jason yearns to move forward in his relationship with Claire, while Warren finds a simple pleasure in trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to hand out flyers covered with motivational sayings.

Warren and Deb. Ahh, what delicious awkwardness. Image credit: Kimberly Mead

The events on 9/11 are evoked near the end of the musical, after Claire rejected Jason’s marriage proposal. Deb and Warren are contemplating the city from a friend’s high-rise apartment, contemplating their insignificance, the fact that they will “never stand as tall as these buildings.” On a whim, Warren decides to cast his flyers to the street below. Reeling from a disastrous meeting with her dissertation advisor, Deb adds pages from her dissertation to the impromptu confetti. New Yorkers gather, with quite understandable anxiety to see their day disrupted by a sight no one could have predicted. Walking beneath the paper explosion, Claire sees “this storm cloud of papers fall down from the sky,” triggering her (and the audience) to re-live her own traumatic memories. Claire calls Jason and, in perhaps the show’s most powerful number, recounts her whirlwind romance with her first husband. This love story ended, as so many stories did, on September 11, 2001.

Image credit: Kimberly Mead

The reaction to 9/11 involved many responses: anger, fear, the sort of “quiet, unyielding anger” that I shared with George W. Bush and that lead us to two perhaps ill-advised wars, unimaginable abridgment of our civil liberties, and a drone program where Americans and foreigners are systematically killed with very little in the way of due process or civilian oversight. But Ordinary Days, for a moment, brought out other memories of the day: the sense of helplessness, the sense that everything has changed, the sense of horrified vertigo of looking up, and feeling like the bottom of my life had dropped out.

There is something appropriate, then, to seeing two characters throw their obsessions out the window of a skyscraper. If Ordinary Days is, as Warren puts it, “an almost, not-quite, New York sort of fairy-tale,” the scene functions as a through-the-looking-glass echo of the disaster that inspired it. Yes, Deb and Warren see their plans, their imagined careers, and much of their identities swirl away. Yet watching words drift to the ground like shards of glass and steel, Claire hallucinates her previous husband’s voice: “hey, you’re allowed to move on. It’s okay.” That is all the permission she needs to accept Jason’s proposal, and accept the hopeful ending we want from our musicals. But maybe, just perhaps, Ordinary Days offers a way of simultaneously recognizing the events of our recent history, and developing a healthier reaction to the tragedy. Maybe then we can cross, as Jason sings in the play’s third song, “all this space between / the moment we’re in and what’s lying ahead.”

Bringing "Rip Van Winkle" to Life, Part II

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 23:17:19 +0000

Joseph Jefferson as Young Rip Van Winkle Image Source: Wikipedia

In my last post, I began telling the story of how “Rip Van Winkle” came to be converted to film. The story is fraught with all of the workplace drama and power plays that one might expect from a nascent Hollywood industry. It’s a tale of stolen ideas, patents, and lawsuits, that led to an eventual motion picture industry monopoly. As I mentioned in my last post, most scholars credit Thomas Edison’s assistant, Laurie Dickson, with the creation of the Kinetoscope, an invention very similar to the Mutoscope on which audiences would have viewed Rip Van Winkle. The invention was essentially a peephole in a tall rectangular box with film running between two spools. Around the time of the invention’s 1892 patent, however, the relationship became rocky.

Although Mutoscopes and Kinetoscopes were very profitable, a projector which could play to a large audience would bring in higher revenue. In 1895, inventor Woodville Latham, with his sons, had created a projector called the Eidoloscope. Edison’s main assistant, Dickson, out of a seemingly genuine interest and earnest love of inventing, wittingly or unwittingly broke his contract by helping the Latham family in inventing this new projection device. Displeased that Dickson had shared his great ideas, leading to the benefit of his competitors, Edison fired him. Dickson ended up staying with the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company – the group which is credited with the making of Rip Van Winkle.[1]Curiously, or perhaps understandably, the film is often listed as a product of the more popular Edison Company, and this is because of a monopoly that Edison forced into being.

In spite of Dickson’s perceived mutiny, Edison found ways for his company to prosper. At this time, many films were “duped” or copied from other films, and so Edison Studios began to trademark their original actuality films. This, however, led to Edison constantly suing other movie studios (Lubin, Vitagraph, Essanay) over patent infringements. To try to put a stop to these costly lawsuits, the Edison Company formed the Edison Association of Licensees in 1908 which set down grounds rules over film release dates for companies. Biograph studios (the group which Stephen Johnson, Patrick Loughney and Kenneth McGowan cite as the producer of Rip Van Winkle) retaliated and formed their own group. Eventually both groups merged into the Motion Pictures Patents Company in 1908. This eventually became known as “the Trust” – a motion picture monopoly. Hence, Rip Van Winkle is probably credited to Edison studios because that was the largest company, but not necessarily the studio which produced it, even if Edison may have owned the rights to it.

The Film

The actor we see in the Mutoscope film, Rip Van Winkle, is Joseph Jefferson. Jefferson’s career is an interesting one for understanding the contiguous flow of drama to cinema at this time. He actually first produced a version of “Rip Van Winkle” for the stage which was co-written with British melodrama writer Dion Boucicault. Together they changed the plot of the short story almost entirely (which I’ll discuss more in my next post). After the opening of the play in London, audiences were clearly enamored. It was, in fact, so popular that Jefferson toured with it in the U.S. for the rest of his life (Johnson 4)[2]

Further capitalizing on his success, towards the end of his career, in 1895, Jefferson published a book version of the play which contained “stage directions, complete dialogue, plus photographic and other illustrations documenting costume, make-up, scenery and other production elements” (Loughney 279). Perhaps ever thinking of new ways he could self-promote, Jefferson had been an early investor in the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (Loughney 278). It’s easy to see how an actor of the stage would want to invest, and perhaps get his foot in the door to be involved, in the nascent medium of film. For Laurie Dickson, who had a lifelong goal of making a film based off of an “entire play” his partnership with AM & B and their connection to Jefferson must have seemed serendipitous.

Dickson finally arranged with Jefferson to have the play turned into a short film by Mutoscope ‘on location’ near Jefferson’s rural country home. As critics like Stephen Johnson have pointed out, the film is valuable because “It provides us with insight into Jefferson’s unique style of acting.” While scholars can read stage directions and reviews, or examine photos, so much more is revealed through observing the living motions of the actor.

Adding to confusion over who produced the film, Johnson adds that “Jefferson’s production was popular enough that, in addition to the film, he was asked to recite selections for Edison’s sound-recording cylinders.” Though the Youtube video is labeled ‘Edison,’ all sources consulted say AM & B produced Rip Van Winkle. Moreover, the Library of Congress’ site doesn’t have Rip listed among their films, though their list is not perfect either. Perhaps Johnson is referring to Edison cylinders as a brand, more than to name a company affiliation (11).

While the points of origin for the film are somewhat tenuous to track down, the content of the play itself is not. Stay tuned for my next post in which I’ll offer my own analysis of how these changes relate to the play version of the story; how the play varied from the film; how these scene selections altered the storyline; and a suggestion that “Rip Van Winkle” is a story particularly well-suited for film.

[1] Edison eventually bought the rights from an inventor to a projector which he named the Projecting Kinetoscope.

[2] Johnson, Stephen. “Joseph Jefferson's ‘Rip Van Winkle’”The Drama Review. 26.1, Historical Performance Issue (Spring, 1982): 3-20. Web. Feb 9, 2013.

In Your (Type)Face: Part I

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:16:23 +0000

Image via Parimal Parmar, Bēhance.net

I'm in the midst of the (long) process of building a digital magazine called Covered with Fur for Austin small press A Strange Object. This week I'm choosing typefaces, which, as one editor puts it, is a "vertigo-inducing" prospect, especially on the web. As I research and test various webfonts, I'm struck by a) how many exist, b) how many ugly and/or illegible fonts there are, and c) how little I know about type design and type designers in the digital age. I mean, I watched Helvetica, just like everyone else, but I don't put nearly enough thought into the people who design the typefaces I use regularly (which include, of late, Times, Helvetica Neue, occationally Didot, if I'm feeling fancy; I used to be strictly Garamond, but I grew out of that, thank God).

My first question: what typefaces, if any—old or new—are designed by women?

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Here's what I've found out. Several of the fonts in your word processor were likely designed in the 1990s by Carol Twombly, who created Trajan, Myriad, and Adobe Calson while working for Adobe Systems. The omnipresent Mrs Eaves, a "sensitive revival" of Baskerville for the screen, and Filosofia, a web version of Bodoni, were designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. And perhaps most recognizably, Kris Holmes co-designed the Lucida system with Charles Bigelow. Today there are some extremely awesome lady type designers working on new fonts that often have a vintage appeal, like Veronika Burian and Laura Meseguer (whose kickass Magasin is pictured below).

If you're interested, you can read a great interview in which Yale School of Art's Director of Graphic Design (and first tenured female professor o_0) offers an answer to the question at the heart of my inquiry: "What does it mean to be a female designer in a mostly male institutional history and culture?" This question (plus my follow-up: "What does it mean that most typefaces, print and digital, that we read and type have been created by male type designers?") will guide my viz. series on contemporary typography.

Image via Laura Meseguer's artist portfolio

Though typography might seem fairly innocuous, the overlap between the age of advertising and the rise of digital media—plus the increasing amount of time spent in front of screens covered in type—means that how words and numbers look has huge implications. As Walter Ong has it, "Typography...made the word into a commodity." Making language visual and standardized (for most of print history, this process involved casting the letters themselves in lead, i.e. movable type, though today it means drawing them on graphic design software) makes it concrete—or concrete-seeming—and makes it harder to think of language as a fluid, dynamic, creative process wrought by use.

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.

If you're like me and you're just diving into the wide world of typeface design, here's an animated video primer that may be of use.

*Shoutout to Jake Cowan for having Ong ready to hand.

Erasing Wyldstyle: Heteronormativity in the LEGO Movie

clsloan — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 13:43:33 +0000

Artist Jason Freeny's LEGO Anatomy Model

Image Credit: hiconsumption.com

In my last post, I laid out the theoretical groundwork of biopolitics for a critique of the subversive potential of the LEGO movie. Biopolitics, or the epistemological and sociopolitical forces that determine how individuals understand bodies and “life,” lets us examine both the LEGO movie's own critique of social constructivism and comment on the movie's failure to adequately separate itself from static models of gender and sexuality.

The movie looks most promising in its progressive depiction of the positive biopower of the multitude. First of all, the revolutionary potential of the LEGO Movie is distinctly global in scope. Individuals from radically different worlds comprise the heterogeneous, but unified, community of Master Builders. This representation suggests that big business and corrupt politics can be overcome only by spanning various ways of life and drawing energy from multiple cultures. Hardt and Negri argue that despite Empire's dominating, international reach, the negative impact of globalization might be countered by a new, post-proletariat class, the multitude. These laborers are linked together through their mutual exploitation under the power of Empire, but these very powers that exploit them facilitate community formation. In the LEGO Move, of course, Lord Business attempts to segregate the worlds. His oppressive power in each realm, however, inspires Master Builders to come together despite the borders between their worlds.

The Master Builders

Image Credit: Yahoo! Movies

Secondly, the very structure of this universe serves as a perfectly apt metaphor for the subversive potential of the multitude. Lord Business builds his Empire out of LEGOs, constructing what appear to be stable landscapes, buildings, and, less concretely, paradigms and daily routines for his citizens. These backdrops, however, can be dissassembled by Master Builders, individuals with the amazing capacity to create structures without instructions, the imaginative heroes of the movie. Lord Business's ultimate act of villainy involves his plan to freeze the LEGO worlds in place using “the Kragle,” a secret super weapon (super glue, in fact) that will destroy the dynamism that makes the LEGO universe so promising.

Finally, the LEGO movie makes a truly sophisticated theoretical move (not to mention a savvy business move) in its counter-radical support of revolution from within the system. Hardt and Negri argue that multitude derives its energy from Empire, and can cause reform, even structural collapse, only from inside Empire itself. If Emmett learns about the joys of thinking outside the instruction manual, the initial political radicalism of the Master Builders gets sharply reined in. Essentially, Emmett proves to this group of visionaries that an individual following social codes has just as much creativity and imagination as the most talented Master Builder. In Wyldstyle's moving speech to the multitude, broadcast to all LEGO worlds from Lord Business's own communications system, she admits that institutions constructed by Empire have generated a truly creative, powerful populace. She says that Emmett was

a face in the crowd, following the same instructions as you. He was so good at fitting in no one ever saw him. I owe you an apology cuz I used to look down on people like that. I used to think they were followers with no ideas or vision. Because it turns out Emmett had great ideas. Even though they seemed weird and kind of pointless, they actually came closer than anyone else to saving the universe. And now we have to finish what he started by making whatever weird thing pops into our heads. All of you have the ability inside you to be a groundbreaker, and I mean literally. Break the ground! Peal up the pieces, tear apart the walls! Build things only you can build. To defend ourselves, we need to fight back against President Business's plans to freeze us!

I can change just about everything except my own name!

Image Credit: Lego.com

Unfortunately, this film fails to demonstrate that gender roles and sexuality are just as ripe for imaginative deconstruction as everything else in the LEGO universe. If part of the central message is that everyone, including “average” folks that revolutionary radicals might accuse of being brainwashed, is special, Emmett himself only aspires to greatness because of his attraction to Wyldstyle. In a conversation with her, he admits, “when you said I was talented and important, it made me want to do everything I could to be the guy you were talking about.” Even when Emmett meets Wyldstyle, the movie subtly highlights the liberatory potential of romance. Emmett first sees her digging around after hours at the construction site. He consults his instruction manual and reads aloud, “If you see anything weird, report it immediately. Well, I guess I'm gonna have to report y....” He break off because at this point Wyldstyle throws back the hood of her jacket and tosses her lovely LEGO hair. Emmett, completely arrested in his action by her beauty, watches her in awe. Sexual attraction, in this case, causes Emmett to unintentionally deviate from “the instructions.” Biopolitical critics like Foucault have pointed out that painting sexual fulfillment and romance as “subversive” only reaffirms the importance of sexuality and gender, a strategy that ultimately fails to imagine new possibilities since capitalist societies rely so heavily on the heterosexual family structure.

In addition, the movie ultimately breaks Wyldstyle down into Lucy, her “original” identity, a move I found just as inexplicable as it was disappointing. Emmett initially points out that “Wyldstyle” isn't quite a normal name, and this joke is played for laughs at multiple points. When Wyldstyle takes Emmett to Vitruvius, the prophetic Master Builder who originally predicted the rise of “the Special,” adds another, decidedly less humorous, angle to her name. When she identifies herself as Wyldstyle, he asks, “Are you a student I used to have who was so insecure she kept changing her name?” Watching this exchange, I became immediately flummoxed. This is the only point in the film where change is figured as a result of “insecurity” instead of creativity. Wyldstyle, a Master Builder, can take apart alleys to make motorcycles, but apparently she cannot take those sorts of deconstructive liberties with her own identity. Instead, she must admit that her name is “Lucy,” and, eventually, both Emmett and Batman (her brooding boyfriend) address her by this much tamer appellation. In a LEGO movie about the joys of breaking things apart, the satisfaction of putting them back together “incorrectly,” the glee involved with sticking dragons on luxury condo buildings, the female protagonist's primary arc involves rediscovering her “real” identity.

WHY, LEGO Movie? Just...Why?

Image Credit: examiner.com

I haven't had space this post to talk about the meta-level of the LEGO movie. All of the lovable main characters, in their fight against oppressive sociopolitcal and economic systems, are actually being controlled by humans, you know, playing with LEGOs. There's a lot more to say about this metafictional structure (does it completely undermine their rebellion?), but I'll only mention one irksome point. We never actually see any “female” players. The standard, white, middle-class family referenced here is comprised of “Dad,” the Lord Business-style bad guy, “the son,” the creative mind behind Emmett's rebellion against order, “Mom,” a voice upstairs upstairs whose only line involves calling Dad and Son up to dinner, and “the daughter,” a young girl who also obtains the right to play with Dad's LEGOs thanks to her brother's imagination and heart. The very safe heterosexual family here seemed so much like a cop out in a movie about reconfiguration, creative possibility, and the jouissance of chaos almost ruined this otherwise highly intelligent movie for me. Until I listened to “Everything is Awesome!” again. A quick fix for any disillusionment.

State-Craft or The Art of Leadership in George W. Bush's Paintings

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:17:13 +0000

Image Credit: Kim Leeson / George W. Bush Presidential Center

Last year, an adventurous hacker found and leaked pictures of paintings made by former President George W. Bush, including two revealing self-portraits from the shower. Now, the private hobby has been made public by President Bush himself. The George W. Bush Presidential Library, up the road in Dallas, has just opened an exhibit, The Art of Leadership: A President's Personal Diplomacy, which features portraits Bush painted of the world leaders he once encountered as President, paired alongside mementos from his travels and his musings about statecraft. However, what makes these paintings remarkable for viewers?

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

It’s not their particular styling, for one. Look at the portrait of Tony Blair above: the pose (facing forward, including head and shoulders) is fairly standard. His formal outfit—blue jacket, blue shirt, red tie—belongs in a professional headshot. If his artistic intention was, as he told his daughter in a Today interview, to capture “the unique personalities with whom he served,” his art perhaps fails to rise to this level. The art itself is fairly generic. These portraits are something like outsider art, as painted by the ultimate insider.

Rather, here, the interest comes not from the art, but the artist. If, as hinted in the exhibit’s copy, “this exhibit tells the story of his relationships with these leaders,” it comes from Bush’s presentation of his work. The exhibit frames the art as the result of personal diplomacy in practice; displayed above various gifts he received from these officials, the portraits become another kind of tribute. His interview with his daughter Jenna Bush Hager focuses significantly on his intentionality—what he felt as he painted the works and what he feels about the individuals.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

For example, Bush and his daughter discuss at length his portrait of Vladimir Putin. Bush recounts a story about when Putin “dissed” the Bush family dog Barney, and explains that “Vladimir is a person who views the US as an enemy. I felt that he viewed the world as US benefits and Russia loses, or vice versa.” This binaristic attitude might well be reflected in what Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post described as Putin’s “creepy scabs of eyebrows” and “the murky mud-mask of the rest of the face.” But any personality the viewer might find in the portrait might come more from the viewer than the art. Because we know about President Bush, because this art might reflect his own insight, we can read into the art some meaning. Even if the craft is not high, the art is there, in the viewer’s mind.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

These portraits, like outsider art more generally, raise interesting questions about interpretation. What can we read into such work? What attention should we pay to the artist’s intentions? If this gallery seeks to instruct its viewers in the art of leadership, that art is one that is difficult to visualize. But these self-expressions on Bush’s part might in fact suggest legitimate insights about statecraft: the tenuousness of personal connections, the struggle to engage, to produce real intimacy, to turn it to public good. Portraiture is often judged based on the likeness—does this portrait of President G.H.W. Bush, done by his son, capture him? What it does preserve, however unskilled, is the son’s engagement with his own father’s legacy, and presents it for the public view. At least there’s some interesting vulnerability there to enjoy. I for one can’t wait for Barack Obama’s post-presidential poetry chapbook.