Be Kind Rewind

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”

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.

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Barthes – The Third Meaning (1970)

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. 

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