140 #RIPVINE#TIFpic.twitter.com/p8bAgUmi4s
— Thinking in Vines (@ThinkinginVines) March 8, 2018
Vine reading 140 character tweet
280 #RIPVINE #TIF pic.twitter.com/YwtT9O5nkc
— Thinking in Vines (@ThinkinginVines) March 8, 2018
Vine reading 280 character tweet
https://vine.co/v/e3l6Qe7nYZH
This is a Vine. A Vine is a 6.5 second looping square video hosted on the social networking service of the same name. Vine was launched in 2013 and — through various peaks and troughs — died in 2017, dissolved into the world of increasingly-longer pockets of video content: your Snapchats and Snapchat stories, your Instagram videos. At a time when our attention spans were at their shortest, Vine packed up and shipped out. The limitations of its format became too restricting in a social media world of ten second stories, caption-able text, the proliferation of images. We’ll miss it.
At its peak, Vine created and harboured ecologies/economies of creators. From its consumer base we got absurdist comedy stars the likes of Nick Colletti, Gabriel Gundacker, Josh Ovalle: all who’ve since relocated their followings to Instagram; some who’ve maintained their comedy careers long enough to be playing shows in parts of the US. Vine presented a very real opportunity for a select few people — but how did they get there? How did we get here?
When originally pitched to Twitter, Vine was all but a microblogging tool, a way for people to capture small moments from their daily life and pop them up into the network in some great archive of fleeting happenings; passing cars shot from an upstairs window, great masses of people going on with their daily routines captured in a choppy, almost stop-motion-looking frame rate. And Twitter saw value in it as, as The Verge aptly describes it, a “near-perfect video analog to its flagship app’s short-form text posts”. Short text translates into short video, right?
There are many things that make a Vine a Vine; inherent parts and processes that, while being absorbed by short-video formats that followed, were popularised and maintained by the service. For starters: Vine is first and foremost a smartphone app, build against the integral functions of a smartphone. You need a phone with a touchscreen (to initiate recording), a camera and a microphone, at its most basic. Just like Instagram, you can only upload content to the service directly from the application.
Taken out of context, a single Vine can appear like gibberish. The Vine embedded above will likely make no sense removed from important contexts that govern the service. It taps into a certain kind of niche internet humor that was central to many communities on the service — now that the Vine network has been taken offline and transformed into a grotesque, digitally-manufactured Museum of the Moving Image in its own way, that Vine has lost some of its power, subject to loop its eternal life away in an enclosed room on some wasting URL. Archive status hurts.
A Vine is a Vine because of its length and its looping functionality. When originally designing the service, Vine’s creators struggled to settle on the perfect length for their micro-stimulation: long enough to be able to actually do something, short enough that you’d would watch the entire thing. This is the most fundamental function — think of all the Facebook and Instagram videos you’ve given up on after catching a glimpse of their length, all the Snapchat stories where someone at a gig is determined to show you the entire thing. “You don’t just skip a six-second video, so you watch it. And when you like it … you appear to watch it three, four, five, six times in a row”, attests the president of a Vine-using marketing company Armstrong, Pierre Laromiguiere.
The key to Vine was its length, and the constraints this length then posed. In cinema, you’ve got ~2 hour and a thousand hours of footage that can be cut in an infinite number of ways. In Vine, you don’t have such luxury. In the world of emerging online screen media projects — from web series to interactive documentaries — making use of, and interrogating, the intrinsic elements of these things is, well … the aim of the studio. It’s a way of making for the new, in response to the new. It’s all very exciting!
For this project we decided to look at the ‘unregulated length’ of these mediums, which, in the case of Vine, we’ve flipped to ‘regulated length’. How does Vine work as this video analog to Twitter’s short-form text posts? How has Twitter’s decision to up the character count from 140 to 280 affected this? We’re living in a post-Vine world, folks. 6.5 seconds is no longer the norm.
This semester—the best semester I’ve had at uni so far—has improved my critical voice infinitely. From the list of studios, with choices ranging from the usual bunch of news comedy and abstract video art selections, this one seemed the most appealing. I’d been through the motions with filmmaking, working out the kinks of genre and learning just how to operate a big boy Sony camera—but came out more enthralled with the complementary writing aspect of it. Making films is cool, but it’s also hard, and although everyone I knew thought I was going to uni to learn ‘filmmaking’, it quickly proved to be against my best interests.
I followed my first studio with something more abstract. I’d tried to get into the studio with the same teacher whom I’d grow fond of, but the higher-ups clearly want some diversity in the course, so I got assigned my second choice. That semester was fine, and I learned a lot about myself and my position in the world, but again: not really what I wanted to do.
When I came across the title ‘Everyone’s A Critic’, I was intimidated. Having been writing shitty little capsule reviews with no regards for structure or audience or clarity on Letterboxd for a few years as a thing my friends and I just started doing, ‘critic’ was a term that frightened me. Critics are those big people with the pens and the notepads and the followers and they exist in a realm far above me, right? Critics get given passes to cover festivals and are effortless in their writing and always have something cool to say about things that I struggle to wrap my head around, right?
What I’ve learned this semester is that it’s okay if you can’t power out a fully polished piece of writing in 45 minutes, or always have something interesting to say about everything. These are things that people have worked towards for a long time, and if you can’t even bring yourself to reading past the headline in your feed then of course you’re not going to be operating at their level. And that’s fine. You just need to practice, to consolidate your ideas, your words, your confidence in your own thoughts. You need to keep writing, and never stop, keep the cogs in your brain churning along and in and out of the things you consume. The more you write, the better you get, the more you have to say, the easier the words come out, the more you have to learn. You can’t improve your writing if you’re not writing.
Nor can you improve your writing if you’re not reading. Daunted by trying to write even this after spending an entire week stuck in this chair smashing out an overdue essay or polishing the final touches on your 3000-word piece on Frank Ocean, I took a break, and read a chapter of Brodie Lancaster’s No Way! Okay, Fine, a book that found its way to me in a roundabout way (I recommend!) after networking with fellow critics-turned-friends (friends-turned-critics?) this semester. Taking a break, stretching your legs and absorbing the fluency of other writer’s work is totally beneficial, a brain-sparking practice. The homeliness that Lancaster conveys in her memoir also taught me another thing: critics aren’t these untouchable entities that exist beyond your reach.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned this semester is that just because someone has a platform to say a bunch of things—and can probably say them in a way that sounds convincing—doesn’t mean they’re always right or free from criticism, not in some big conspiracy theory kind of way, not an aggressive denial type deal. I’ve just learned to curb my impressionable self and take a stand on my opinion.
Meeting with professional, celebrated critics and chatting to them informally certainly helped dissolve this façade. They’re people, just like me, who have problems, just like me, and struggle through the same bouts of writer’s block, just like me. To be able to obtain personal pointers from these people certainly helped boost my confidence, push to me take these kinds of risks and learn to have confidence in the arguments I’m making.
A couple of weeks with award-winning critic and friend of the studio Alex Heller-Nicholas helped articulate the dynamic role of the critic. Understanding and acknowledging where we stand as critics, the privileges we carry in being able to even have the time to write, and always returning the question: “who am I to be giving my opinion on this?” are the most important parts of practising criticism. Don’t be that 40-year-old guy going on a tangent about Minions. The film is clearly not for you (though, I’ve found it is deserving of, y’know…. a lot of criticism). Prove your authority, do your research, be conscientious. Acknowledge your privilege (gender/race/class/ego) through all this. Know your audience. Understand your biases.
The role of the critic isn’t dying. It’s just disseminating. Siskel and Ebert are gone, and with them, the single stage that they preached from. Of course, these big outlets still exist, but no longer do they rule the climate. Smaller platforms increasingly emerge, focus on a certain niche, and welcome more voices and more authority on different parts of film or music or whatever you want to write about. Do your best, find your voice, find your people. It’ll all come together.
Stray observations:
Funnily enough, the first time I saw Snowpiercer was on a US Blu-ray that I bought from amazon.com, either too impatient to wait for its Australian release (in retrospect, the wait time between the two is somehow shorter than I remembered) or too taken up by the idea that it could be imported that I didn’t stop to think that, including shipping, it would come to the same price. Of course, this purchase further complicates the multicultural, transnational production that Snowpiercer is.
With its source material French; the body of its crew South Korean; primary shooting taking place in the Czech Republic; its special effects produced by a German-formed company; and a cast ranging from the most American of Americans, to a handful of South Korean talents, to big and bold British stars, Snowpiercer is a puzzle box of cultural diversity. Where one national influence ends and another starts is surely near impossible to distinguish, a hailstorm of ethnicities culminating in a damn fine global blockbuster.
Brandon Taylor writes in “The Ideological Train to Globalization” that “Snowpiercer is utterly saturated with the cultural residue of American cinema”, and argues that Bong uses these American blockbuster tropes to subvert, rather than emulate, the filmic language of Hollywood in the creation of a “transnational film vocabulary” (2016). The film is, in turn, a hybrid of Korean and American styles; neither one nor the other, but operating somewhere in a “transnational discourse” that makes it “culturally illegible” to both Korean and American audiences (2016); an open identity.
Typically, transnational film productions are achieved for reasons mostly capital, taking advantage of a lucrative element and sending it widespread. As with the first Hong Kong/US co-production, Robert Clouse’s Enter The Dragon (1973) exploited America’s newfound fascination with kung-fu, the fluent body of Bruce Lee. This would continue with the erratic work of (our beloved) John Woo being accepted and ultimately replicated in the Hollywood mainstream.
Snowpiercer of course differs from these kinds of productions—the US not the dominant force in capitalising on the film’s many profitable elements. Ironically, a creative conflict between Bong and Harvey Weinstein (curse his name) unfolded, resulting in a botched release that saw the distribution rights for the film eventually handled to Radius-TWC, a division of The Weinstein Company that specialise in niche and independent films. Under their control, Snowpiercer received the wide release that it deserved, surely a welcome addition to the pockets of the TWC higher-ups.
The film’s fluidity—its cultural illegibility—then relies on the conventions of the American blockbuster to “apprehend and signify meaning” for transnational audiences (2016). Its structure, character archetypes, pacing, plotting and all the rest rely on the conventions of the dominant mode of blockbuster that have continued to permeate the world for years on end. Where it gets interesting is explored towards the end of Taylor’s paper; has the American blockbuster “manifested its own demise by creating a shared filmic language that is transferable to a global discourse”? Or does it have another trick up its sleeve?
References
Taylor, Brandon. (2016) The Ideological Train to Globalization: Bong Joon-ho’s The Host and Snowpiercer. Cineaction; 2016; 98; ProQuest
If you’ve been to the cinemas lately, scrolled through the Action catalogue on Netflix looking for a guilty pleasure, or seen that video of Keanu Reeves in gun training for John Wick 2, you’ve more than likely been exposed to some form of Hong Kong action cinema; either in its purest form (Jackie Chan has been very prevalent in Netflix’s recent additions), or through some form of cultural transposition (Kill Bill, Kingsman and its ilk). Though originally popular through its roots in the kung-fu films of the 70s, Hong Kong action cinema has prevailed in the Hollywood system via its influential triad films: a modern reworking of the punches and kicks thrown by Bruce Lee into a hail of gunfire discharged by Chow Yun-fat, often dubbed “gun-fu”. These Hong Kong crime films—typically investing themselves in the lives of triads—were popularised in the 80s by John Woo and his breakout film, A Better Tomorrow, which paved the way for a long line of highly stylised, crime-centric action films. That Woo and Yun-fat would later move into Hollywood cinema (Woo successfully with Hard Target in 1993, Yun-fat less successfully with The Replacement Killers in 1998), the idea that the choreography and stylisation that made Hong Kong’s action cinema so popular would later be transposed comes as no surprise.
The dynamic between good and evil—manifesting in the dichotomy between the police and the triads—that Woo’s Hong Kong work had become renowned for would find its epitome in his 1997 Hollywood feature, Face/Off. The bodies that usually danced between the light and the dark would become literal in their swapping of identity (Travolta as Cage, Cage as Travolta), and this Hollywoodised take on embodying the split dynamic that popularised Woo’s work would prove influential back at home with Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs in 2002.
The notion of high-concept that the plot of Woo’s Face/Off functions as finds itself prevalent in Infernal Affairs‘ narrative. Two guys: one a cop, one a triad; both working undercover in the environment of the other—surely the perfect elevator pitch. It’s no wonder then that Brad Pitt’s production company picked up the rights in January of 2002 for a Western interpretation of the source material. Scorsese’s The Departed acts a glowing example of the increasingly globalised notion of cinema, where influences are traded mutually, making the distinction between national cinemas only harder and harder to distinguish. Keanu Reeves practically owes his career to John Woo, and the two have never worked together—who would’ve thought?
Week 8 made me realise how much I need two classes a week to keep me and my writing active and progressive. Monday’s class felt really good; the practical, time-limited writing activity held by Alex Heller-Nicholas helped push me out of my anxious, I-hope-nobody-reads-this stage and forced me to get something down. Oddly enough I felt OK about what I wrote and managed to find an angle with which to tackle the short that lent itself well to my writing style. Cool cool cool. Attached.
“In a marriage of the high concept and the colloquial, Lucas Testro crafts a comedy caper around the possibilities and inherent problems of time travel with I’m You, Dickhead. Signposting the film’s ridiculousness in the opening fade, the quotes of French philosopher Blaise Pascal (“Man’s greatness lies in the power of thought”) and American actor Jeff Goldblum (“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”) sit frame by frame, a clear-cut warning of the farcical nature of the premise: “a man jumps back in time to force his 10-year-old self to learn guitar so that he can get more ladies in the present day”. The paradoxes of time travel and the spacetime continuum and all the brain-scratching conundrums that come with them are not simulated for clarity or some existential mapping out of science, but played (and replayed) for laughs. Where this film finds its quality is in the casual, Australian-ness of its humour, as if concocted in the playground by a bunch of blokes who once heard about black holes from their stoner mate, or watched Back to the Future while a little tipsy and wondered what would happen if Marty really had followed it through with his mother — “This isn’t about music, Richard. It’s about tits”, one of the time-travelling versions of Richard tells his younger self. Small things like the hilarity of thin moustaches and the comical image of egg chairs are just few of the things wrung for humour: while travelling back to the 80s, we are treated to a montage of the fads of the time; rubiks cubes and fairy bread are treated as if they are icons of worship; Transformers’ names are butchered; and the ability to give the kid who stole your crush the finger as an older, more cynical version of yourself is cherished. When Richard appears as a bushier-moustached version of himself and gives the BttF reference a good shot, we understand where the absurdity of it all—the male desire for sex, even if it destroys the spacetime continuum—will eventuate as it reaches its climax. The predictability here doesn’t matter: the film is more focused on filling in the cracks between the big spacetime puzzle with as many laughs as possible. Bodyguards trusted with removing the copy of yourself left in the travelled-to timeline are deadpan heroes, and with a conversation in the time-travel waiting room bookending the film and documenting how futile the jumps back in time become, the film delivers its kicker: man will jump back in time to fix anything.”
Not having a Wednesday class left me in a slump and I felt like everything I wrote this week just went around in circles. David Lynch’s Absurda was interesting though. Good to have him back in my weekly schedule.
Shoutsout to the MIFF week for giving me the courage to venture out and feel confident enough in myself to try and get my work published: yeehaw! In a moment of grand excitement about the new Gang of Youths album I nurtured an idea in my mind about a possible (personal) angle that I could approach it with and I like to think it turned out pretty well (they even replied to me on twitter!! Shoutsout again to the MIFF week for rustling my feathers enough about the platform that I jumped back into it (not that I ever really used it to begin with) and I am now severely addicted). Saw them at Festival Hall on Wednesday night in which they directly addressed their previous show – “3 years ago we played here with Vampire Weekend and nobody gave a shit! So thanks for giving a shit.” They also played an enormous 2-hour long set that covered their entire new album (every song is totally worthy of being performed!) and then some, so shoutsout to their incredible stamina, and for the energy that they doled out.
In other news, beloved Twin Peaks is over so I guess my blog-related pics are in their final days. What a finale!!!
In other other news, this grammar stuff in class is definitely interesting (and worthy of discussion). Half of it is, to me, part of some weird, somehow-already-known-but-unspoken rules in my brain that I understand implicitly but probably couldn’t articulate, so it’s good to get a feel for the whole idea of them and truly figure out what’s what. Excited to get into some live writing next week.
With Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), we find a director drawn to the successes of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Where Lee’s film was a commercial and critical success in the West, Yimou sought to replicate this, diverging from his arthouse modus operandi after observing the need to make a popular film that could not only “compete against the Hollywood product” (given China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and the relaxation of restrictions on imported foreign films), but “earn the respect of government authorities” in the process of legitimising the arthouse film industry in the future (Levitin, 2006). However, where Yimou goes wrong—according to Jacqueline Levitin in “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of the Flying Daggers: Interpreting Gender Thematics in the Contemporary Swordplay Film — A View From the West”—is in his misreading of the reasons that made Lee’s film such a hit: its embrace of “all aspects of women’s contradictory lives” in ancient China, namely through Zhang Ziyi’s Jiao, whose tale is ultimately the most tragic. Where the narrative of Crouching saw its female characters (Jiao Long, Jade Fox, Yu Shu Lien) fighting against, or used as an examination of, the patriarchal boundaries of their time, the women in Yimou’s blockbuster films no longer strive to break out of or confront some oppression “in a struggle against injustice” as in his previous, female-focused films (Levitin, 2006). Hero, then, is more concerned with replicating the fantastical elements of wuxia films popularised in the West by Lee’s film, or in Yimou’s continued exploration of father figures than his exploration of the tragic lives of women in China’s then-feudal, patriarchal society (Xihe, 2004)—thus deeming the film “firmly in the camp of patriarchy” (Levitin, 2006), a departure from the director’s previous, culturally critical works.
Comparatively, Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006) offers a continued exploration of women in contemporary Iran. Panahi, working under the influence of another, arguably more successful director Abbas Kiarostami—much like how Yimou drew inspiration from the popularity of Lee—creates a cinema that is devout in its examination and scrutiny of the boundaries constructed by Iran’s social and political structures. Offside, perhaps more apt in its comparisons to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon than Hero, places women at the centre and examines the structures that keep them disadvantaged. Panahi emphasises this through the claustrophobic use of his camera, the frame as a literal and metaphorical container for the central female characters and their limited perspective (Danks, 2007). Moments of cinematic freedom are restricted to short bursts as the camera is often fixed to one location, be it the cage that the women are forced to reside in for the majority of the narrative, or the buses that take these characters to and ultimately from the stadium. Through this framing we are given a sense of the frustration these women feel; neither we, nor them, with the exception of a few small moments of freedom—which even then are presented only when the camera follows a male character—get to see the field in which the entire film is based around. Our understanding of the game is limited to sound; the sonic elements of the cheering crowd, or the commentary by one of the guards. Panahi’s utilisation of these fundamentally cinematic aspects gives us minor insight into a fraction of the larger injustices that women continue to face day-to-day in contemporary Iran, and beyond. Where Crouching ultimately proves tragic for its female characters, still trapped within the confides of their society, Offside, in its powerful final moments, gives its characters a moment of pure liberation: a national celebration of soccer that—if only for a brief moment—tears down the country’s rigid boundaries and replaces them with something less tangible; a sliver of optimism gliding through the crowd.
References:
Chen Xihe. ” On the Father Figures in Zhang Yimou’s Films: From Red Sorghum to Hero” Asian Cinema. Vol. 15, No 2 (Fall/ Winter 2004) pp. 133-140
Additional Reading: Jacqueline Levitin. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers: Interpreting Gender Thematics in the Contemporary Swordplay Film.” Asian Cinema 17.1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 166-82
Adrian Danks. “The Rules of the Game: Jafar Panahi’s Offside.” Directors Suite: Jafar Panahi – Offside [4,000 word DVD booklet]. Melbourne: Madman Entertainment, 2007.
Monday we spoke about curationism: the role of the curator in popular culture. The weirdest part about reading the articles was that the name “Hans-Ulrich Obrist” stood out to me as if I’d heard its Swiss enunciation before – and as a matter of fact I had. Turns out I follow the bloke on Instagram (@hansulrichobrist), and have for many years, one of those random follows back in the early Insta days that I have come oddly sentimental about unfollowing (through my many unfollowing sprees – hey I’m a curator too!). Every now and then I scroll past one of his photos in my feed and wonder who the hell this guy with the frameless glasses that posts seemingly random works of art is, before scrolling through his profile and accepting once again that whatever he posts is cool, and he can’t be cut this time. Passive curation. I think that curationism is important in contemporary society given the endless blasts of content that we are subject to nowadays. Plugging into the feeds you find important or funny or engaging or interesting (whether you agree or disagree with whatever they’re posting about this time) is really the only way to comprehend the noise that is coming, and never stops coming. Like tuning a radio or something.
Wednesday was an engaging change, and while not as confident in my ability as last week, being given an activity and having to report back to the class at large is a sure fire way to get the brain cogs oiled up, even if not enough to throw me straight into writing mode. Master of None + time: a genuinely interesting writing concept if not too on the nose or easy to strain a piece around. I can see myself putting words to paper in the future on something to do with this – in relation to a) Netflix? (binge-watching, notion of time across episodes/seasons), b) relationships central to the show (season 1 and/or season 2), or c) something else (leave ideas in comments ty).
This blog post is technically late (post-episode 16) but the Twin Peaks x class postponement thread is still alive and well. Pls Alexia I crave the unhealthy validation of being first to watch or listen to something……………..
MIFF final week — final results are in and not at all how I thought they’d look. On one hand, I’m glad it’s over (free time!) but on the other, I miss it already (keeping occupied!). It’s the best time of the year, mingling with likeminded people.
The constant moving gave me some weird aura of confidence so sharing work in class on Wednesday didn’t feel nearly as frightening as it previously had — my expanded sentence was a lot more descriptive than others, who focused more on plot progression (just a note! I guess I like meandering on minor things).
Monday was quite the experience — that Yossi spoke for 3 hours and made it feel like half an hour was impressive, and he spoke with such thoughtfulness, almost a rehearsed mode of speech, crafting every point he made into a recollection of one story or another. His interview with Marco Pierre White in Bread Wine & Thou is a great read — I’d like to be able to write with such prowess one day. Another great week. Haven’t missed a class yet, and don’t plan to (given Alexia reschedules week 7’s Monday class to compensate for Twin Peaks‘ double episode finale).
