Tag: film

Be Kind Rewind

/ Derek Mueller

Ph. and I took in Be Kind Rewind last weekend.
It’s a fun, quirky flick about the desperate, inventive measures by video rental store
workers to recover after all of the tapes are erased. They even have a
trailer:

Catchiest for me was the premise of
Sweding–home-grown, bricolage
film-making (grab a VHS camera, some magic markers, tin foil, etc.). The movie
gets a lot of mileage out of the idea, and in the escalating scramble to re-make
the erased movies, all sorts of mishaps come about: copyright infringement,
battles over microfame, VHS/DVD format tensions, and arguments over store-shelf
economics. But Sweding as an art stance, as a geek-hack aesthetic method:
even if you already knew what make-do composition was, the movie gives the idea
a nudge, renews some of the pleasure and spark in the spirit of carefree
re-makes–enough of a bump that we’re sure to see more

YouTubic transmedia, like this Sweded version of The Shining:

Eesh. Might be creepier than the original, if a bit less drawn out in its suspense.

Bolter, “Theory and Practice of New Media Studies”

/ Derek Mueller

Bolter, Jay David.
"Theory and Practice of New Media Studies." Eds. Gunnar Liestøl,, Andrew Morrison and Terje Rasmussen. Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital Domains. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 15-34.

Continue reading →

Barthes – The Third Meaning (1970)

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

Barthes’s essay, "The Third Meaning: Research notes on some

Eisenstein Stills," approaches a third order of meaning, an inarticulable
beyond, extant to the first-order obvious and the second-order symbolic but not
wholly divorced from them.  The third meaning takes its shape from a
"theoretical individuality" (55) (close associate to the punctum/sting,
no doubt).  And it is, of course, difficult to name
because, as Barthes puts it, the third meaning or obtuse meaning "is a signifier
without a signified" (61).  Barthes’s essay-notes proceed through a kind of
awkward profundity; piling through an array of near-descriptors, as near as one
can get without reducing the third meaning into something it is not. 

Continue reading →