screenaesthetics.com

Generally speaking when we look at an artwork it is as a discrete unit. For sure there are the vast webs of connections (say, with culture, tradition, other instances in the same oeuvre, genre and so and so on) that mean no artwork is a cultural island. But in practical everyday terms we tend to talk about this or that work which is more or less strictly bounded: here is my opinion on Volver, say, or Mahler’s Third Symphony; here is my thinking about this or that aspect of Psycho. Leaving aside for a moment whether even this approach is sensible, things get extremely complicated with artworks that are part of a series, that come, as it were, in parts. A lot of television is like that and I spend a lot of time puzzling over what difference it makes to say that I’m working on, for example, The Sopranos rather than Goodfellas. An immediate difficulty is the vastness of the difference in creative input – many writers, directors for one, only few for the latter; then there is the sheer difference in scale in terms of running time.

Stanley Cavell considered such matters a long while ago in an essay called, ‘The Fact of Television’ (one that has had little impact on the field of television studies) where he thinks through some of the differences between assessing television and film:

To say that masterpieces among movies reveal the medium of film is to say that this revelation is the business of individual works, and that these works have the status analogous to traditional works of art: they last beyond their immediate occasions; their rewards bear up under repeated viewings; they lend themselves to the same pitch of critical scrutiny as do any of the works we care about most seriously. This seems not to be true of individual works of television. What is memorable, treasurable, criticisable, is not primarily the individual work, but the program, the format, not this or that day of “I Love Lucy,” but the program as such. (Themes Out of School, 239)

Now I know a number of readers are immediately thinking about episodes and editions of television shows that they could draw on to refute Cavell. (I immediately think of Darin Morgan’s X-Files episode ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose’, but as if there weren’t enough problems in terms of critical approach I’ve granted creative ownership to the writer rather than director, producer or the actors.) And there are ‘individual works’ that remain outstanding such as Stephen Poliakoff’s 1980 TV ‘play’ Caught on a Train. But, if the consequences of thinking of television as art is at least vaguely problematic in the way Cavell suggests, thinking about videogames in such terms adds a further puzzling dimension.

Earlier this month the games company Valve released the second episode of its Half-Life 2 series. That is, the second episode of a game that was already a sequel to the 1998 first person shooter Half-Life. The idea of calling the extension of a gameworld’s narrative scope an ‘episode’ is something quite new – most of the time such extensions are designated ‘expansions’ because what they do is expand the narrative and gameplay of already familiar gameworlds. Valve’s decision to badge their expansions as episodes (which began with the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 1 last year) is a signal that the narrative promise of their games – the plot, revelations about character, etc. -  is sufficiently attractive to warrant a designation that evokes the developing narratives of the serial form. It also allows each episode to incorporate technical improvements (such as enhancements to game design and graphics) that keep pace with the ever expanding  processing power of consoles and personal computers. It remains to be seen whether Valve’s approach will be adopted by others, but in the meantime this is one of the issues that I hope will stimulate further debate on this site.

Tarantino’s latest creation has been a box-office disappointment and I must admit, after not really being sure what to make of it myself, I did become addicted to wading through discussion forums to gauge other viewer’s responses. Originally made to be screened as part of a double feature collaboration by Tarantino and Rodriguez called Grindhouse (2007), Death Proof is Tarantino’s half of this homage to the seventies b-movie. In short it’s about a badass stuntman (Kurt Russell) who stalks attractive women to kill using his ‘death proof’ muscle car. Sound cheesy? That’s just the problem – it’s supposed to be, raising the question as to how a film like this is valued.  The arguments for and against Death Proof are various, though the discussion board forum itself becomes tiresome as too often what starts as an interesting avenue for debate very quickly degenerates into name calling which goes nowhere. I did manage however, (before fear of my head imploding) to gather some of the common viewer responses so far.  Perhaps the most common problem detractors find with the film is its dialogue centered story – all talk and no play makes the viewer bored especially after they’ve been primed for the pleasures of a mindless b-grade exploitation flick. For a long time we’re watching a bunch of girls talking inconsequential matters (reminiscent of the guys in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, only less funny for its lack of irony.) Supporters praise the dialogue for its realism, these girls are indeed ordinary people – not gangsters. Listening to the dialogue in these scenes, there is however, credence to be given to the argument that these women are not ordinary but QT’s fantasy girlfriends (think Alabama in True Romance), or on a more disturbing note, QT in disguise, leading to the claim that Death Proof is self-indulgent.Genre-wise the film seems a bit confused, another issue for viewers. For some Death Proof has an identity crisis, not sure whether it’s a slasher, a chick’s coming of age road movie or a revenge flick. But then who says a film has to conform to these structures?

                                                                                                           -Ali

One of my favourite pieces by Victor Perkins has to be his account of the book-tearing scene in Dead Poets Society. (As far as I know this has not been published but Victor has presented it to various audiences, for example at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2005 conference under the title, ‘Badness – An Issue in the Aesthetics of Film’) Without going into detail about Perkins’s objections to that scene (since I’m entertaining hopes that I might host a version of his paper on this site…), one of the crucial points he makes is that our judgments about a movie, or any artwork, are not enforceable like those made in a court of law. Our judgments are a contribution to a discussion or conversation about the mattering of movies to us. However, we cannot help but notice that there are judges who indeed do work in a court of law and whose judgments about film actually matters on a practical level (say if it involves enforcing the banning or censoring something on screen). High court judge Michael Burton’s recent ruling on Nobel laureate Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth means that it will now be sent out to British schools with a package of guidelines that teachers have to read out to pupils, presumably before the DVD screening.

There are a couple of bizarre things about this. First, one has to wonder why the British government is forcing teachers to screen what seems to me to be the cinematic equivalent of the old ‘The End is Nigh’ sandwich-boards. But even worse we have a situation where a judge is effectively controlling the context of the screening. Imagine a situation where one’s screening of Vertigo had to include warnings that the manipulation of a woman’s appearance to gratify one’s desires was not in line with the cultural consensus on femininity. The fact is that discovering and thinking through one’s own responses to a movie is part of the pleasure of watching it in the first place. The attraction of John Keating, the teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets, is that he wants to shake up the official, stuffy and tradition forms of teaching enforced in the elite school where he works. As Perkins points out, the film has a problem articulating this effectively; Keating tells the students to destroy a piece of writing he doesn’t agree with, and the film encourages the audience to enjoy this act of vandalism.  But given a set of guidelines to read out from the British courts and a movie that seems to revel in the prospect of human destruction, Keating might have a point after all.

Serendipity: as it turns out the first day I start posting here the esteemed British journal, Screen publishes a debate about judgment and television. The issue is here but you’ll need some kind of subscription to access it: the relevant articles are by John Corner and Karen Lury, and they are fascinating.

The idea for this site has been a long time coming ( 3 years) and was only retarded by my total lack of experience with web publishing. Here are some peeps to thank for making it happen when it did: Barry Saunders who actually made the web stuff work; Jason Wilson who had the insight to realise that I needed to make it work sooner rather than later; Ali Taylor who will be running this show and showing me how to run; and Tallimare, my web equivalent of Top Gear’s The Stig, who will be racing with a bunch of stuff he doesn’t yet know about. So Oscar-thanks over, next post has some news.

This site is about making judgments about stuff on screen. Film, television, games, internet - if it is on a screen then it is eligible for attention and comment. In the coming weeks I’ll be figuring out how we’re going to run it so that we can have regular judgments and evaluations posted here and available for comment. In the meantime I’ll be posting a bunch of my own writing that will be indicative of the sort of stuff we’re interested in.