DVD Technology and the Cinema Experience

Over at the Film Freak Central Blog, Alex Jackson recently posed the question of how DVD technology has amplified and potentially surpassed the traditional “cinema” experience. He offers Capturing the Friedmans and the special edition DVD of Platoon as examples of the ways in which the text of the films themselves become problematized, clarified, expanded upon, and, in somewhat of a counterintuitive manner, completed by the supplemental materials available on DVDs.

The question is one worth pondering, and his post seems to take a debate that has been running in literary critical and media theory for the past half of a century in a curious direction. At least since Roland Barthes proclaimed the critical shift from "work" to "text" (and perhaps even long before then), our critical rhetoric has frequently extolled the value of "opening up" texts, by examining how they operate within their own margins. It’s a theory that paved the way for major scholars today (see Henry Jenkins’s blog, for instance) to discuss fan culture, as one example, as a practice of consumer freedom, reworking “source” materials through our constantly expanding convergence technologies to make a “text” limitless, ever expansive in a way that allows for different kinds of political engagement with cultural objects like film. In this way, much recent cultural criticism has shifted away from the study of "objects" because they are too intimately bound up in the kinds of limitations that avoid inter- and extra-textuality.

Which, perhaps, brings us back to the original proposition. Because Jackson seems to be suggesting that, rather than the limitlessness that has been something of the norm in academic accounts of convergence technologies, it is precisely the limits which such technologies impose that allow a more important political insight into the way texts relate to viewers (it’s no accident, after all, that a punk critic fan of the avant-garde would choose such politically-loaded films as examples here). The idea of a limitless freedom has never really appealed to me: it is much more pragmatic to understand that fashioning a political identity (even a viewing identity) relies on a specific grammar, a code that closes off possibilities and opens up possibilities for intervention. In this sense, Jackson’s proposition is a nice corrective to some of the unchecked idealism going around in media and fan studies today, precisely because it opens up the possibility for a more pragmatic way to construct ideals about what film and other media technology actually do to us as we watch/interact with it.

An example to complement Alex’s own: the special edition DVD of Tim Blake Nelson’s O is fascinating as a cultural object. The film is extremely underappreciated, especially because it’s so up-front about its own adaptation from Shakespearean source material (but the question of adaptation is really a different issue altogether). But the DVD makes it even better. The publicity materials are alright, and the director’s commentary is appropriately reverential and humble about the social work it’s trying to do. But the real treat is the entire hour-long silent feature of Othello starring Emil Jannings. The film predictably focuses the action in a baroque court setting, while the white actor does his best black-face routine. The entire feature encourages the viewer to stare slack-jawed with the understanding of the kinds of representations Nelson was working against, what he had to subtract from our culture’s understanding of the Shakespeare play, even as the other materials explicitly inform us of what he was trying to add.

In this sense, the move toward seeing a film as an object, even as a different kind of object than we normally see it as, can allow us to better understand the kinds of connections it makes in its circulation across time. Hopefully we'll be able to practice this kind of criticism more consciously here at F-Bomb.