Final Paper for History of Animation - Richard Williams

Star Wars Uncut and effects of Conversion on the Fan Film

Fans have been making their own video re-interpretations of the original Star Wars texts since their release. (An early example can be seen here). Ever since recording technology has been affordable enough to get into the hands of fans, this has been a type of media. 

The appeal of re-enacting an existing media artifact seems to function as a fulfillment of the “ago-old desire to live out a fantasy aroused by a fictional world…intensified by a participatory, immersive medium that promises to satisfy it more completely than has ever before been possible.” (Murray[1])  Though it seems in many cases these fans are acting out the double fantasies of the fictional world portrayed in the original text and the additional fiction of participating in the creation of that original text.  In the case of Star Wars, fan remakes allow fans to enjoy both the fantasy of Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, AND the fantasy of George Lucas directing a cast of actors in the creation of an artifact that the fan is deeply invested in. 

So long as the technology used to create these fan texts remained relatively cumbersome, most shared fan-made recreations of the text were straightforward and not intentionally self-reflexive. However, as technology has made the creation and distribution of these fan texts easier, and as an actual audience for fan art has formed online, the nature of fan-art “the thing itself” has matured to encompass a range of postmodern and poststructuralist possibilities.  Jenkins[2] might point out that video fan art as a medium has existed for almost 50 years, and that only technologies through which that medium is captured and distributed have changed.  It would be difficult, though, to argue against a very real evolution in what fan art is as it has changed from being something created for the “artists” own enjoyment to being something created for a broad and engaged audience.  The conversation has, in many cases become wittier and more intertextual, though as Jenkins points out, “When people take media into their own hands, the results can be wonderfully creative; they can also be bad news for all involved.”  The concept of an audience seems to bring out the best and the worst across a strata of creators.

 

Star Wars Uncut comes along as an interesting vehicle for fan art, both because of it’s collaborative nature, and because of its ability to show a broad scope of the realm of fan-films in a relatively condensed way. 

The idea of a feature-length collaborative creative endeavor organized entirely online through a fan forum is a strong illustration of Convergence as described by Jenkins.  “Convergence doesn’t just involve commercially produced materials and services traveling along well-regulated and predictable circuits.  It doesn’t just involve the mobile companies getting together with the film companies to decide when and where we watch a newly released film.  It also occurs when people take media in their own hands.  Entertainment content isn’t the only thing that flows across multiple media platforms.” 

Convergence of content flow inherently empowers audience voice, and (again according to Jenkins) “Audience work becomes more vocal and public.”  (Audience work referring, presumably, to the idea introduced by Dallas Smythe[3].) According to Jenkins, as technology changes the nature of spectatorship, “Convergence requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about what it means to consume media, assumptions that shape both programming and marketing decisions.  If old consumers were assumed to be passive, the new consumers are active.  If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them to stay, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media.  If old consumers were isolated individuals, the new consumers are more socially connected.  If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, the new consumers are now noisy and public.”

Star Wars Uncut seems to actually illustrate a spectrum of old-consumer relationships with the original text and new-consumer engagement with it.  Old-consumer style could refer to the “straight” segments, striving for maximum verisimilitude with the original text and it’s diegetic world.  A new-consumer end of the spectrum would be those segments that totally reinterpreted the text to create something new, either by reinterpreting the written dialogue (such as CP3O’s offer to assist Master Luke) or by reinterpreting the setting (usually involving heavy intertextuality, such as the Yellow Submarine sequence) , or by abandoning verisimilitude altogether to create something intensely self-reflexive. 

Across the 500+ 15-second-segments that made up Star Wars Uncut’s version of Star Wars, A New Hope, there was illustrated a breadth of engagement with the original text that created an audio-visual aid illustrating the broad possibilities for a single viewer’s experience encountering the primary text.  This reinforces Radway’s[4] insistence that a critic’s singular view of a text’s meaning is problematic.  “The behavioral explanations and sociological theories [critics] advance to account for [a] genre’s popularity have been produced, then, by a process that is hermetically sealed off from the very people they aim to understand.”  Radway proceeded to engage with a group of consumers who engaged with their texts in manners very similar to one another, how much more true is her emphasis on the role of reader/viewers in creating meaning when considering a group with disparate ways of engaging with a text? 

The appeal of the Star Wars Uncut project for its participants seems likely to have been diverse, however the appeal of such a participatory medium is well articulated by Murray in that “the enchantment of the computer (by which this film project was initiated, distributed, and in many instances produced) creates for us a public space that also feels very private and intimate. Computers are liminal objects, located on the threshold between external reality and our own minds.”  While not all participants interpreted participation in the same way, the 15 second limit functioned as a “mechanism of participation” that limited the ability of any particular clip to stray too far from the original text to render the narrative unfollowable.  This functioned in some ways like the “explicit mechanism of participation” (In LARP/Live Action Role Play) that serve to “sustain the illusion of a fictional world.”

The downside of this mechanism, is that 15 second intervals are painfully frequent for a viewer of the finished text.  The continual alienation of the audience, having to re-orient themselves within the frame of the narrative as settings, actors, costumes, styles and tones constantly change, makes me think that this is only a stop along the road of increased audience participation in media convergence.  I expect that platforms allowing audiences and fans to participate in the creation of more fluid and sophisticated fan fictions are in the near future.

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[1] Murray, Janet Horowitz. "Immersion." Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. 97-125. Print.

[2] Jenkins, Henry. "Introduction: "Worship at the Altar of Convergence"; A New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change." Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. 1-24. Print.

[3] Smythe, Dallas Walker. "On the Audience Commodity and Its Work." Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub., 1981. 22-51. Print.

[4] Radway, Janice A. "Introduction." Introduction. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984. 1-18. Print.

How Green Was My Valley; How much of Ford?

If, as Sarris stated, the Auteur Theory is in a “pattern of constant flux,” [1] then it seems rather problematic to use any defined parameters of what constitutes an Auteur to prove the Auteurism of any given director, writer or other film artist or technician.

 Yet the inclusion of certain names in any theoretician’s pantheon of Auteurs also brings into question what the use of the name of that director implies.  Foucault indicated “unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts – separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence.”[2]  It is possible then, that the reason the films of John Ford are strung together for contextual analysis as one “work” is primarily because they are all brandished with his name, and that the trends and value binaries that are prevalent in his work are as much reflective of the cultures in which he functioned as of his unique personality or influence.  If it is true, as Barthes argued, that “The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture,”[3] then it might become impossible to separate the influence of Ford on the film from the influence of the contemporary culture and fashionable practices on the film from the influence of the contemporary culture and fashionable practices on Ford. 

While on the one hand, a practitioner like Sarris would likely look for similarities amongst Ford’s work to constitute a signature, Wollen would attempt to “reveal [an] author where none had been seen before”[4] by employing a deep textual analysis to identify “defining characteristics of an author’s work [that] are not necessarily those which are most readily apparent,” and while Wollen’s approach is more likely to effectively trace shifts over time in the more complex textual themes of Ford’s work, they still default to identifying these shifts with Ford as an author or defining influence, rather than more overarching cultural tensions, or even the effect of these tensions on Ford himself.

We know that over the course of John Ford’s prolific career, his personal political inclinations shifted significantly, and it is possible that this is reflected in the darkening and maturation of his work.  It’s certainly possible to attribute this shift as a catalyst for his revisionist Westerns.  Though, Foucault might point out there was also a World War and a number of weighty paradigm shifts happening world wide throughout that shift.  Whether Ford’s shift from portraying the “mythology of the American West to portraying the American West as a myth”[5] can be attributed to his personal disillusionment, to the disillusionment of the culture for which he created, to the increasingly complicated and benevolent relationship he had with the Navajo tribe he repeatedly used to portray “Indians” for good or ill in his films, or to the maturity of aging, is impossible to dissect and compartmentalize. 

How Green Was My Valley (was certainly steeped in visual and thematic stylizations that a Sarris-level Auteur definition would expect and that are fairly consistent throughout the films that Ford directed.  There was ample screen space afforded to ritual and routine, a plethora of purposely framed symbolic shots, (Mr. Gruffydd framed in a cemetery after Angharad’s wedding) an implied worldview within the performed text that women exist only in relation to men (evidenced by every spoken line by a woman, and reaffirmed by the text ending with the loss of the last adult male) , and a healthy dose of tension between archetypically opposing forces.  (Tradition vs. Modernity, Poverty vs. Dignity) It is certain that both Sarris and Wollen were able to find ample instances to analyze this film as a piece authored by Ford. 

But interestingly, Ford was brought into this project rather last second.  It was initially adapted from the Richard Llewellyn novel by Philip Dunne to be directed by William Wyler as a 4-hour-long epic.  The script was whittled down to include only Huw’s childhood while it was still under Wyler’s hand, and Ford made no notable changes to that script.  The only recorded changes he made to the existing plan were to re-cast Bronwyn and Angharad with 2 of his favorite actresses, and to bring on Arthur Miller as the director of photography.  This potentially complicates the application of the Auteur theory, but possible strengthens Sarris’ incorporeal argument that the temperature of the director on set, or the “élan of his soul” becomes manifest in the completed work.  Beyond his signature applications of mise-en-scene, few of the other tensions and themes consistent with his other work can be directly traced to his post-pre-production work, and if present, must then be attributed to his presence on the set, directing and conversing with the actors and crew.

If, in a film like How Green Was My Valley, the Auterism of John Ford managed to be manifest, it is possibly a testament to the more cinematic and less explicable features of the Auteur theory, proving that “ the structure is associated with a single director… not because he has played the role of the artist, expressing himself or his own vision in the film, but because it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual involved.” (Wollen)

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[1] Sarris, Andrew. Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962

[2] Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell University Press, 1977.  Essay: “What is an Author?”

[3] Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Ubu Web Papers. 1967

[4] Wollen, Peter. From “Signs and Meanings in the Cinema.” The Auteur Theory. British Film Institute, 1997.

[5] http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2010janmar/ford.html