“I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary but I can break rules.”
(Spivak)
There is no such thing as
wrong screening room and that’s a good thing, too.
(After Stanley Fish, who later attacked Alan Sokal’s intellectual trap
on interdisciplinarity in humanities)
In Don
DeLillo’s Americana, David Bell, “the child of Godard and Coca-Cola,”
(DeLillo, 269) a young TV network executive, takes his 16mm Canon Scoopic
camera and decides to explore the very heart of
America. As he starts shooting, people in front of the lens start to open
up, and David succeeds in revealing something innermost, something hidden, a
kernel that for him defines America. This lies behind the power of the image
of America – but curiously, the film stock will never make it to the screen.
[source:
http://www.canon.com/camera-museum/camera/cine/data/1970_ds8.html]
David Bell’s
camera nonetheless captured the image that may be comprehended as the
“cultural idiom” expressed through imagery, more precisely, through the
cinema. This way, the cinema becomes a kind of screen for the subject to
access cultural definitions, cultural information, more precisely, it
becomes an interface.
Today the
interfaces that help retrieve and use information, above all cultural
information, are predominantly visual: photography, cinema, VCR, DVD, and
the computer, which has come to dominate the visual landscape in this sense,
acting as the par excellence interface among interfaces. Lev Manovich
defines the technological apparati that enable the user (who is no longer a
mere spectator or an observer, but an interactive agent engaged not only in
the production of meaning but of the work of art as such) to access and work
with cultural information as cultural interfaces (Manovich, 68).
Although Manovich insists on the primacy of the computer and the
human-computer interface acting as the example of cultural interface,
arguing for the active use of imagery and real-time response, I wish to
broaden the scope, since the older cultural forms, such as the cinema, did
not only contribute to the development of such interfaces, as he claims, but
also they have become such cultural interfaces as more and more techniques
have been feeding back into their mechanism. Just to mention one example: it
is true that filmic techniques had enormous influence on the form and
content of computer games, but it is equally true that specific computer
game formulas and visual techniques revolutionized the cinema in turn. In
other words, computer-based data processing in terms of cultural information
has come really close to the way the cinema is used as such an interface
today.
To pursue this
idea further, let me turn to perhaps the most “delicious” definition of the
cinema by Rick Altman. Contrary to the usual way of defining cinema
as a text, utilized by traditional film studies, where the strata playing
roles in the production of meaning circulate without any apparent
interaction – culture thus floats without influencing the reception,
reception does not have any effect on production, and production is seen as
detached from the produced film text - Altman understands cinema as an
event.
[image based on Altman's diagram, Altman, 2]
The
consequences of this shift are liberating. First of all, cinema becomes an
interactive event, not a one-way information retrieving act, since the
separation of the dimension of cinematic meaning production is in Altman’s
view channeled into an endless process of interaction. Second, the spectator
is not simply “pulled” into the event, but partakes of it, actively engaged
with the cultural information available via the cultural interface of the
screen, becoming a user of information instead of a passive receptacle. This
also means that the user produces responses triggered by the cultural
information that feeds back into the circulation. This endless circle of
production and perception finds its visual model in Altman (3) in the form
of the doughnut:
[image based on Altman's diagram, Altman, 3]
The context in
which the doughnut exists is culture, of course, and one may proceed in the
model from the top, i.e. the site of production through the central hole
(the individual film) towards the other side, the site of reception,
broadening out into the context of culture itself, and – on the same
surface, like in a Moebius strip – the interaction reaches the point where
it began. What this model calls attention to is that no cultural product
accessed via a cultural interface can be seen as a one-way model,
occasionally transmitting cultural information without being reacted to
immediately in an interactive manner by the users of that information with
their separate and particular cultural context and situated knowledge.
Let us see how
this works. Our example here is Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)
directed by Kevin Smith [trailer
|
features], since this funny movie quite explicitly sheds light
on the way the doughnut model operates. The Lawrence-Hardy figures of Jay
and Silent Bob are first (in the previous films of Smith) models for comic
strips. As the popularity of the comics rises, Hollywood soon tries to take
financial advantage of the phenomenon, and plans to make a movie based on
the Jay and Silent Bob stories. However, the two protagonists learn that on
the Internet there already is a huge debate whether the stories should be
turned into film or they are just trash and not worth a dime. Still in the
production phase, Jay and Silent Bob traverse the US to get to Hollywood and
take over the production of the film about the figures they are the primary
models of. They arrive at Miramax studio, which is actually the studio
producing the very film(s) in which they appear, and try to get involved in
the making of their own movie.
So far it
should be clear that the production is, paradoxically enough, already
preceded by the reception, which thus has an influence on the film text that
is planned to reach the audience. Moreover, when Jay and Silent Bob hit the
studio (almost literally taking it by storm), a very elaborate and eloquent
intertextual and interactive cultural game begins, as they meet their own
cameos (played by James van der Beek from the hit teen TV series Dawson’s
Creek and Jason Biggs, star of the American Pie films) and engage
in a fight with Mark Hamill, alias Luke Skywalker, but before that they
occasionally meet a nun played by Carrie Fisher, a.k.a. Princess Leia... Clearly, the title of the film, then, i.e. Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back is already playing on the cultural
knowledge of the spectator-user, and invites him/her to engage in a complex
intertextual game that can be only effective and amusing if the cultural
interface is activated by the user.
What happens
to the cultural idiom then? If the cultural idiom is transmitted through a
cultural interface as, par excellence, an image, then it obviously has to go
through this interactive model, reproduced – today primarily – digitally,
electronically and visually. Interestingly and importantly, this
reproduction involves the user as a co-author, which is an obvious change of
the situation described by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” It is at this juncture where the
study of the US and the Americas becomes intriguing especially from our
Szeged point-of-view, since our engagement with cultural information from
and about America is predominantly visual and retrieved via cultural
interfaces.
Walter Benjamin prefigured
the potential of the cinematic medium when he stated that “[film as]
immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology” (Benjamin,
235). This “orchid” has been the most popular among other species of
technological organisms insofar, apart from TV and Internet. André Glucksman
(who was often quoted by Susan Sontag) was the first to claim publicly that
“wars are won or lost on TV” in our world of mediated reality and pictorial
turns, of images and image-makers. W.J.T. Mitchell called this current
obsession the tyranny of the visual. Paul Virilio, in turn, remarked that in
the age of electronic reproduction when success depends ultimately on
“the conquest of image,” it is viewing and screening that replaces real
existence. “Rewind, Play and Fast Forward,” Virilio notes, have replaced our
“Past, Present and Future.” In an interview Norman Mailer gave to The
American Conservative in December 2002, after the interviewer stressed
the cinematic facet of the amateur videos that filmed the 9/11 event in NYC,
the writer responded: “ […] we were watching the same action movie we had
been looking at for years. That may be at the core of the immense impact
9/11 had on America. Our movies came off the screen and chased us down the
canyons of the city” (Chan, 2003). These examples recount the power of the
image (and the technological apparatus behind it) in building and contesting
a given cultural reality.
The study of the U.S. has greatly employed―as if under the aegis of Gene
Wise’s “ritual rhetoric of newness”―current technologies, as “immediate
realities” to work in favor of a more internationalized study of America.
The multimedia world of the international CNN-effects, of America on-line,
the discursive world of techno-fundamentalism and electronic ‘colonization’
have not only complemented the luxury world of disciplinary
anachronisms―that seem to function more and more as a kind of theme park (or
rather ironically as South Park) within the ever expanding field of
American Studies of the third millenium―but opened new critical [G]ates and
‘[W]indows’ to the world as yet another (Macintosh) ‘[A]pple’ from the tree
of cultural knowledge.
[source:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/downloads/images ]
American Studies through film, as American Studies in general, are saturated
with building and contesting theories and methods regarding the field. The
film as immediate reality is one of the best playgrounds for these contests.
As Sol Cohen remarks, contemporary film studies depict a “boundless,
undisciplined discipline.” By deconstructing the epistemological boundary
between fiction and non-fiction, a fiction film becomes its own documentary,
Sam Girgus claims, because the film is the cultural witness of the age when
it was produced. Think of the more or less humorous example in Galaxy
Quest (1999, directed by Dean Parisot) where a group of aliens take for
granted the (mocked) Star Trek film series as a real, historical
documentary of American culture.
[source:
http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/1999_Galaxy_Quest_photo.html ]
They kidnap the scared actors―themselves ironic remakes of the Star Trek
real actors, who are doing promotional work to improve movie sales―in order
to save their extraterrestrial civilization on the basis of an American
filmic experience thought real and thus useful by the alien 'others'. The
paradox is that the visual innuendo of the aliens proves useful in their war
against their enemies, and thus establishes the ‘watched’ film as the
culturally equivalent genre for ‘doing history.’
[source:
http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/1999_Galaxy_Quest_photo.html ]
Under the guiding tenet of films being at the same time their own
documentaries, fiction films about America have become, outside the country,
and even inside it, cultural recordings of a given time and place. The
American cinema, in this context, is a multiple cultural space that
represents a special type of interpretation; it exposes multiple systems and
views of American experience and meaning production to another interpretive
community. Film is a medium through which a culture can present itself to
other cultures while keeping a variable mirror to itself. American film
industry, with special regard to Hollywood, is one of the best image-makers
of the country. It is the universality of image and film language that plays
the role of common denominator in presenting, translating, commenting,
understanding and contesting a culture. The American film is the medium that
presents the area studies of the United States in the form of the cultural
contour. It is an interpretative context that presents to the world multiple
iconic movements of what America seems to be. From center(s) or
margin(s), whatever angle the issue was joined from moviemakers to viewers,
America remained “a point of reference.” (Kroes, 75) Perhaps more than any
commodified form of American culture, the American film has heavily been,
especially in the past decades, subject to intense international commentary
and gained special emphasis in the academic curricula about the study of the
United States.
On the level of U.S. symposia, similar to a permanently increasing number of
American and non-American scholars (Paul Lauter, Alice Kessler Harris, Emory
Elliott and many others) Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez argued in
1996 in “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism” for a
concerted effort in American Studies to evolve toward a more intensified
internationalization of the study of United States by more fully involving
non-U.S. scholars in the production of cultural texts about the U.S. in a
creative critical interface between domestic and international perspectives.
More recently, John Carlos Rowe advocated a “new internationalism that will
take seriously the different social, political, and educational purposes
American Studies serves in its different situations around the globe” (Rowe,
27, 31) and called for a post-nationalist thinking in the study the United
States. Donald E. Pease, Robyn Wiegman and the New Americanists urge for a
permanent dialogism between the multiple “futures” of the discipline,
ranging from the “comparatist” to “posthegemonic,” “differentialist” and
“counterhegemonic” studies (Pease and Wiegman, 1-42). On the level of non-U.S.
based American Studies conference in 2003, at the opening speeches of the
American Study Days in Szeged,
Hungary, Bálint Rozsnyai the chair of the American Studies Department of
Szeged University and Jonathan Veitch, dean of Eugene Lang College, New York
stressed the imminent importance of multimedia employed interdisciplinary
teaching, study, research and understanding of the U.S. in the context of
New American studies. Among the current modes of U.S. studies in the global
context, film as a paradigm of critical internationalism has taken its most
pragmatic role at our Institute of English and American Studies, too. The
American film has become in the past years at the Department of American
Studies (that this year celebrates it 20th anniversary) not as
much as an option but rather an imperative. The American film and the
American visual culture, here and now, are viable analytical spaces of
cultural and intercultural understanding. Our Institute and especially the
Department of American Studies host an increasing number of optional courses
on American film, film adaptation, film semiotics, and a survey course on
film theory. As a result, a mounting number of major papers and MA papers
are currently written in the field of film studies and visual culture. The
study of America through film, in this context, is at its best when it
serves―as Siegfied Kracauer, Erwin Panofsky or Stanley Cavell have shown―an
“external reality.” The America of outside America is similar to the space
bases of the Deep Space 9, Voyager, Babylon 5 that work as cultural
intertexts that promote the study of a culture from outside the entity that
is considered to be The Country.
[sources:
In tandem with this internationalizing function the logo of the
Department of American
Studies in Szeged depicts an astronaut
signifying the non-US based scholar in its quest for understanding US from
outside its geographical limits. (Cf. also Bálint Rozsnyai’s response to the
issue of Internationalizing American Studies at
http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/interroads/rozsnyai.html.)
Among the new technologies employed in the study of American culture in the
age of electronic reproduction the Internet with all its .org, .net, .gov,
.com sites has taken its pragmatic role. Internet provides dynamically
interactive syllabi such as the American Studies Crossroads project
,
while American films (TV, video, CD-ROM/DVD) usually function as primary
texts (similar in function to the literary texts) in the curricula. The
Internet and film introduce, as Alan B. Howard argued, three dimensions to
the enterprise of the study of America (Howard 1999). First of all, these
new databases are more democratic tools for interrogating cultural ‘dogmas,’
canonized or marginalized paradigms through URLs, listservs, blogs,
discussion rooms and lists, mailing lists, etc. These allow the
incorporation of enormous quantities of information from all over the globe
and permit much subtler kinds of analysis from the polyphonic hyperspace.
This might be one very popular approach in the so-called post-hegemonic
global American studies. Secondly, the multimedia as ‘technicalia,’ permit
the organic inclusion and a more widespread academic use of ‘unconventional
histories’ of the non-canonized cultural pradigms that have been treated as
“naive or amateur” images, objects, sounds, events, etc. within the
institutionalized frame of the American Studies (Cf. Roy Rozenzweig’s CD ROM
Who Built America?
http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/WBAcd-roms.html and
http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/WIP1.html This project started in the 1990s as
a collection of memoirs, family photos and oral interviews and is now one of
the canonized, frequently referred hypertext databases in U.S. studies.)
Because of its interactive character multimedia enhances the existence of a
live interface, conceived as a “technologically mediated collaborative work”
(Howard 1999) between academics, between teachers and students, among
students, between academics and non-academics. This is the third and perhaps
most complex dimension in the study of American in the current age. In other
words, the employment of new technologies inaugurates a multifold modeling
for New Americanists by presenting “multiple perspective solutions to single
problems usually posed within the walls of a classroom” or conference
building. According to Alan B. Howard, the new technologies adapted to the
study of the U.S. tend to “subvert existing modes of thought” and “the
social and institutional structures that support them.” At the same time
these encourage “the proliferation of competing organizations” and schools,
and enhance the existence of various kinds of cultural texts that work
outside “traditional and established centers of authority” whatever they are
in given regional contexts. This process is an open-ended project―with all
its advantages and disadvantages―because, as Howard further states, it
allows “almost anyone to do American Studies with the authority the
technology itself confers, and to do it without the traditional internal and
external markers of legitimacy and reliability.” The ‘power’ points these
new technologies present within American Studies are the question of the
boundaries of the traditional discipline, the questionable notion of
expertise, and professional arenas capable of hosting and producing
“distinctive American Studies ventures” (Howard, 1999).
American Studies is today, more than ever, a dynamic process of cultural and
technological dissemination that has long left the building of the
Humanities and does not even think of asking, as the Donkey in Shrek:
“are we there yet?”
We, as multiple users of the curricular and extracurricular multimedia
society should be more aware of the fact that the most important factors
behind the technological apparatus and, at the same time, the most
underutilized resource in any university, especially in the context of
our regional New American Studies in the digital age, are the students
themselves. In the light of W. Benjamin’s idea expressed above in this e-text, it seems that it is these electronically
socialized students who are our most “immediate reality” in the age of
electronic reproduction. Students are surfing with complex purposes among
our distinctive regional American Studies venture(s), and they are primarily
encouraged, as regional new Americanists, to inhabit the digital microcosm
of the present
Americana webpage. Together with the department staff (that
provides courses, publications, academic performance, etc. inside or outside
the university), our students can help building our department’s image,
because they are part of the critical interface our department, institute
and university present on an international, interdisciplinary terrain. Our
students bring their technologized knowledge when practicing their craft
inside but mostly “outside university” (Howard 1999) in a “transnational and
translational” (Bhabha) world of intercultural exchanges dominated by images
and representations.
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