This is the second paper in a series of studies on Remix Culture, which applies the theoretical background of understanding remix and mashup to Roberto Voorbij's short film One Minute Silence in terms of its formal and ideological strategies.
The main focus of this paper will be on the ideological and political dimension of critical remix practices. It will focus on appropriation as the ideological strategy of certain remix practices. A working definition of appropriation will be derived from one of the most influential publications on the topic by Julie Sanders. This understanding of appropriation will then be contextualized in the field of remix studies.
Acknowledgements
The following paper is the result of a collective oral presentation held at the Student Conference on Remix Culture at the University ofHamburg in collaboration withthe University ofBraunschweig on 2nd July, 2016 as part of the Master's course on Remix Culture supervised by M.P.. In our presentation, M. J. has introduced the concept ofappropriation as defined by Julie Sanders, and T. E. has identified the specific techniques of One Minute Silence. I am deeply grateful to M.and T.for allowing meto include their observations in this paper.Thepaneldiscussion which followed our presentation as well as the in-class discussion on political mashup/remix have also offered useful insights which were, to some extent, taken up in this paper. I would like to thank the courseparticipantsfor their fruitful contributions which have surely enriched the argument of this paper.Also, I would like to thank Roberto Voorbij, who allowed us to work with his short-film, and who has kindly provided a list of the original source material he used in his remix short-film One Minute Silence.
1 Introduction
The analysis of this paper builds on the previous seminar paper, which has developed specific criteria for approaching media products in the context of Remix studies. Many of the guiding questions will be taken up: What is the relation between the remixed version and the original source? What is the means of reference and to what extend is the original still recognizable? What is the effect of the new version and does this effect depend upon being able to recognize the original? Does the remix support or challenge the original? What is the role of the respective product for the overall discourse of Remix? While these points will be covered, the main focus of this paper will be on the ideological and political dimension of critical remix practices. The first paper already identified sampling as the fundamental formal and aesthetic principal of remix in general. This second paper will now focus on appropriation as the ideological strategy of certain remix practices. A working definition of appropriation will be derived from one of the most influential publications on the topic by Julie Sanders. This understanding of appropriation will then be contextualized in the field of remix studies.
The established concept and guiding questions will be used for a concrete analysis of the short-film One Minute Silence by the Dutch artist Roberto Voorbij, which has only recently been screened at the Short-Film Festival in Hamburg in May 2016. The techniques of cutting and editing will be related to the film's ideological strategy of appropriation, and the interpretation of the film's major themes will identify One Minute Silence as an effective example of critical remix.
2 Understanding Appropriation
As a first step, an understanding of the relevant terminology will have to be developed.
Appropriation is commonly defined as “the making of a thing [...] one's own; taking as one's own or to one's own use” (www.oed.com). While the term often has rather negative connotations, the current online Oxford English Dictionary lists a 2001 draft addition, which introduces appropriation as a valid cultural practice:
Art (orig. U.S.). The practice or technique of reworking the images or styles contained in earlier works of art, esp. (in later use) in order to provoke critical reevaluation of well-known pieces by presenting them in new contexts. (ibid.)
Although this definition of appropriation as a critical practice in art has not yet made it into a full OED entry, it is verily this notion of the term that this paper will follow up more concretely.
Julie Sanders, in Adaptation and Appropriation, contrasts the practice of appropriation with adaptation in terms of an author's or director's motivations and their respective relation to mainstream and the canon: Adaptations in film, theatre or literature usually rely on canonical works. By invoking the original source texts, they themselves consolidate the work within its cultural framework and thus perpetuate the canon. (Sanders 8-9) Adaptation has therefore been characterized as "inherently conservative" (ibid. 9). An artist creatively re- usually interprets the original source text by shifting from one medium to another, or from the original time period to modern times. Adaptations re-use and interpret the source material to produce a particular version which only to a limited extend strives for originality (ibid. 42)1.
Appropriations of a source text, in contrast, may or may not change to a different medium. In any case, they shift to a “new cultural product and domain” primarily through the intellectual critique of the original source and its related framework (ibid.). Appropriations tend to strive for autonomy and require the artist's fundamental “political and ethical commitment” (ibid. 2). The piece of art responds to the original by subverting, undermining, or quite openly attacking not only the source text itself but, what is perhaps even more relevant, its related discursive practices.
Julie Sanders mentions groups of authors who have used appropriation as their strategy to challenge dominant hierarchies, such as women writers or African-American writers (ibid. 911). Such creative practices need to be understood as a counter-movement against a preceding appropriation by a dominant culture over “a weaker culture that has no control over its representations and products” (Ashley and Plesch 3). Postcolonial studies, for example, have identified such dynamics of hegemony and resistance, and appropriation has become one of the key concepts of the field (cf. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 15-17).
The struggle against existing gender hierarchies or (neo-)colonial power relation surely remains relevant. Yet, a major concern of critical remix practices today is the Western media landscape itself. Political remix/mashups have increasingly set out to deconstruct the assumptions, propositions, codes, and conventions wrapped up in the mainstream media to which we are all exposed on a daily basis. [...] Corporate and government power structures and their manufactured media identities created through advertising, official statements, and the cooption of news media by the powerful are frequent targets. (Russell 220)
This means that a remix of literature, visual arts or music needs to be distinguished from the appropriation of mainstream media content from social networks, politics, or the news. The former may reclaim access to an “integrated part of the cultural context in which we all exist and therefore have rights to” (ibid. 218); the latter challenges mainstream media practices as a whole and exposes its underlying hierarchies. Such creative bottom-up practices may respond to a top-down selection and representation of information and dominant images in mainstream media. As will be shown in the next section of this paper, the short-film One Minute Silence by Roberto Voorbij offers a most relevant example of such critical remix practices.
3 Sampling and Appropriation in Roberto Voorbij's One Minute Silence
3.1 Formal Aspects: Sampling, Cutting, and Editing
One Minute Silence remixes CNN news live footages of tragic events. It exclusively selects moments when the news anchors and reporters do not speak. The artist captures the otherwise hidden moments when the journalists emotionally react to breaking news. Such personal gestures contrast the seemingly objective news format. Renita Coleman and H. Denis Wu, in their study of nonverbal cues in crisis coverage, have pointed out that journalists are expected to control their emotional responses to tragic events. Such displays, however, are rather difficult to avoid (1-2). Facial expressions invariably provide information about the person's affective state (Burgoon, Birk, and Pfau qtd. in ibid. 1) and even invoke a similar reaction in the viewer (Englis qtd. in ibid. 2).
One Minute Silence quite effectively makes use of these phenomena. It features the news anchors and reporters as they silently look directly in the camera. This invokes a face-to-face interaction between the viewers and the journalists. Such speechless but yet profoundly humane dialogues between audience and presenters challenge conventional modes of representation. These interactions are marked by a shared failure to come to terms with the impact of the information revealed:
[The] time to think is also a time to feel. The task of cognitively processing what has happened and making sense of it occurs at the same time as their emotional processing begins; the two types of processing together are simply overwhelming. (ibid. 13)
The “overwhelming” gesture of the short film One Minute Silence is also achieved by its editing technique: The 60 seconds short-film contains no less than 42 samples (see Appendix of this paper). The beginning features extremely short sequences and very fast cuts, and the number of frames gradually increases in the course of the clip with increasingly longer samples towards the end. The viewer at the beginning has too little time to decipher the information of the written captions, and the longer samples towards the end mostly lack the respective information about the event. The original function of news, thus, is entirely subverted. As a result, the remix offers a moment to critically reflect on dominant media practices.
Byron Russell calls critical remix a “metagenre” (217). This holds true for One Minute Silence as a commentary on the news format. Sampling and editing mimic selection and representation, which have been identified as the fundamental mechanisms that “produce culture” (Hall 1). One Minute Silence both imitates and reverses the “signifying practices” of mainstream media (ibid.). As outlined above, the remix carefully cuts and pastes the gaps between information and combines these samples to an alternative representation of the original. By transferring the footages into the domain of art, the film takes a reflective distance to mainstream media. Although it exclusively uses pre-recorded media content, the short film is fundamentally creative and original. While it may change into another genre, the new remixed version does not shift to an entirely different medium. One Minute Silence thus takes a unique position to critically reflect on the original shared medium on a meta-level.
It has been shown that the technical aspects of sampling, cutting and editing are already related to certain ideologies. The next subsection aims at applying the above outlined understanding of appropriation to One Minute Silence more concretely in order to understand the political potential of remix.
[...]
1 To fully theorize the broad phenomenon of adaptation is beyond the scope of this paper. The primary aim is to understand appropriation in the context of remix studies, where sampling is established as the transmedial aesthetic principle. For an interesting approach to adaptation, see Linda Hutcheon's Theory of Adaptation.
- Quote paper
- Rüdiger Thomsen (Author), 2016, Sampling and Appropriation as Formal and Ideological Strategies. Roberto Voorbij's Short-Film "One Minute Silence", Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1158116
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