Mad Men Links

Mad Men's first season has just been released on DVD and the show returns to AMC for a second season July 27th. I have a longest-blog-post-ever appreciation in the works, which I have been writing sporadically since last summer. In the meantime, links:

-The NYT mag cover story has lots of Matthew Weiner E! True Hwd Story deets.

-Alan Sepinwall reviews the new discs.

-Michael Beirut at Design Observer gushes, esp over the show's representation of pitching at clients.

-Basket of Kisses, an unofficial Mad Men blog, delightfully obsesses, and pretty smartly. Their celphone photos of the NYC subway car promotional campaign are nice, which is to say I stared at them for a whole afternoon.

-Ad Age has a special 16-page Mad Men section, a 1960 pastiche featuring Sterling Cooper, which is reproduced online (the image above came from it, via Pop Candy).

-This video of Don Draper pitching Kodak's new slide projector, the Carousel, seems to be a favorite clip of the show online:



-But I think this devastatingly satiric, expository Joan-and-Peggy scene from the first episode sells the show even better:

Helvetica

Gary Hustwit's 2007 documentary about the midcentury sans-serif typeface Helvetica seems at first blush like it might turn out to be of parochial interest only. We expect documentaries to tackle weighty and substantial topics like labor disputes (Harlan County, USA), genocide (Night and Fog), corporate villainy (Roger & Me), and environmental degradation (An Inconvenient Truth), or at least expansive ones, like a day in the life of a city (Man With a Movie Camera), or emotionally moving ones, like the everyday struggles of an Inuit family in the arctic (Nanook of the North). The range of topics available to non-fiction filmmakers is virtually infinite, and yet to find an audience and a topic worth spending large sums of money and long stretches of time on, filmmakers need to seize on matters of clear public interest, whether because of their storytelling appeal or their importance to civic culture. The triumph of Hustwit's film is that, surprisingly, Helvetica rises to this level so effectively and convinces even the design-naïve viewer of the huge significance of typography--a significance that increases as ordinary people become more involved in the production of visual media.

Helvetica manages to accomplish this in several ways. The standard interview format of talking heads and cut-aways sells the message of a perfect, neutral, modern typeface, the culmination of a stylistic progression toward simpler and more universal forms which in the 1960s became the visual identity of numerous corporations. Among the corporate identities surveyed in the film, we see the names American Airlines, Crate & Barrel, National (rental cars), Toyota, Target, and Panasonic, all spelled in Helvetica. We see Helvetica in ads for Coca-Cola, on the billboards in Times Square, on office buildings and taxis and subway cars. It always looks at once official and unremarkable. One of the voices in the film compares Helvetica to air: it's everywhere you go, essential and easy to ignore.

The casting of designers and writers who appear in the film's interviews gives special focus to those who speak with extraordinary passion and articulacy. The profession of designer would appear to demand flawless presentation in all aspects of a person's outward appearance, and the talking heads in this movie, like Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Michael Beirut, Rick Poynor, Stefan Sagmeister, and Massimo Vignelli, speak and look the role. The sense of their investment in surface appearance, in its significance for the ways meaning is communicated, helps sell the film's message. These bright, genial, careful design folk all seem quite convinced that type matters a ton, and one cannot help but find sympathy with well-spoken figures who look and sound so appealing. (That some of them despise Helvetica for being inexpressive or for being an excessively corporate style adds interest and demands even more careful consideration of the film's topic.)

But what makes the film especially effective is its presentation of type within ecological contexts, i.e., in the places one finds it in real life: on signage, on consumer products, on apparel, on posters, on vehicles, especially in the street, where many of Helvetica's best shots were taken.



The film's meaning is anchored by the words spoken in its interviews, but the argument is really made in the images seen in cut-away shots accompanying voice-over sound. The principal effect here is noticing: in particular, noticing details of the lived environment that had previously eluded notice. If one function of art is to train our perception of the world and make us more sensitive to its textures and forms, watching Helvetica is a kind therapy for living a more attentive life.

I often wonder why creative people who are interested in exploring non-fictional topics choose to make documentaries rather than to write articles or books. My prejudice as a verbal sort of person is for writing over moving images. One can make a better argument in writing; writing demands more ideas and words and tends to be more rigorous intellectually. If this were not so, perhaps academics would typically make documentaries instead of writing prose. I think I generally learn more from reading a good New Yorker article than I do from watching a documentary (for instance, check out this one from the current issue about itching), and the interview style that dominates documentaries today often subsumes the voice of the filmmakers under the voices of the subjects. Of course there are brilliant documentary artists like Errol Morris who do things only movies can do, and motion pictures tell us an infinite number of things that can never be described in words. I prefer documentaries that don't rely too much on their talking heads, that exploit the power of audiovisual representation.

Helvetica succeeds by using the techniques of visual media to its advantage. I could as easily learn about designer's attitudes toward Helvetica from reading a good article about the typeface. But the movie really does exploit the moving image; it uses visual forms to reveal the ubiquity of Helvetica, and to encourage the audience to appreciate this ubiquity. In the early minutes of the film, we see many dense images of public spaces in which our task as viewers is to find the important detail.





When we watch ordinary films and TV, we tend to know where in the frame to look: at eyes, at narratively significant details. There are habits of viewing that develop over a lifetime of spectatorship. In many segments of this film, rather than human forms or narrative details, the eye scans for letters and numbers, and when it finds them the mind must judge if they're Helvetica or not. In the shot of the American Apparel billboard, we need to realize that we're being asked to consider the font in which "American Apparel" is printed rather than the model's figure, her strange attire, or the bubble on her face. Each shot's duration functions like a ticking clock, encouraging us to get the right answer before time is up. This technique forces the viewer to become sensitive to details of the environment that were not previously a focus of attention. Indeed part of the film's point is that Helvetica blends in so well, it is such a default kind of typeface, made not to be noticed.

The film also gets tricky on us. We see images with more than one typeface and have to determine which is the type we are looking for.



Or we are invited to compare not only one font with another, but designed type with handwritten (or spray-painted) letters.



Then occasionally there is a shot without any Helvetica! And we mark its absence and its difference from other typefaces.



In some cut-aways we see images without Helvetica and wonder why we are looking at this shot at all, only to have the type revealed somehow. In one shot, customers entering a Crate & Barrel store obscure the signage in the door and only after some of them have passed do we see the type.



In my favorite shot in the film, we see an overhead view of a New York street shot from several stories above. Nothing in the frame seems to include any easily discernible type (there is the UPS truck but its text is barely legible). And then, a city bus enters the frame from the right, and as it does we see that the bus's number painted on the roof is in Helvetica.





This film not only asks us to notice the number painted on top of a city bus, a view we don't typically see, but also to appreciate the choice of Helvetica as the typeface. And the point of this is not merely to serve as a device along the way of making some other point; it is to appreciate the form of Helvetica. I smiled when I saw that.

It doesn't surprise me that the film was received well by designers. They're an easy sell for a documentary inviting the rest of the world to appreciate their often obscure craft. But Helvetica also has the potential to help the rest of us negotiate a new world in which everyday people, i.e., non-designers, increasingly make choices about design which were previously unavailable to us. Take this blog for example. When I set it up I chose a theme, fonts (including size and weight), colors, layout, widgets, etc. Yes, many people choose to leave the default setting intact, but this is also a choice. Making choices like these doesn't make us designers. Few non-professionals are inventing new fonts or anything remotely like that (there are tools for this if you want to give it a try, as this NYT article describes.). But DIY tools like blog templates (and myspace pages, which the film references, and so many other graphic components of web 2.0 apps) are still opportunities for creative expression; they function to fashion identity and project it outward into the world. Learning a bit about how designers think, where they pay attention and how they judge, what criteria they apply and when and why, can help us figure all this out.

***

Since seeing Helvetica, I can't stop noticing type. The film has made me see the world differently, to notice things I hadn't cared about before, to put myself in the mind of the person who chose the font and wonder why they picked the one they did. I see Arial, a clone of Helvetica (which you are reading right now), and feel disappointed. I see Helvetica and get excited, even just by my ability to recognize it.

I took this photo in an airport the other day. There is more going on in it than the type, but when I look at it that's mainly what I see. I would like to think it could pass for a still from the movie.

Advice Column

I am trying to work on a book and find myself drawn away from it by a number of things, especially the constantly changing, updating, world-improving, timesucking, doesn't-love-you-back internet. It's a challenge to avoid its call. Some strategies I have been trying...

1. Don't use a computer. This doesn't do it for me unless I'm reading a book.

2. Go work somewhere that doesn't have internet. I like the Alterra coffee shop on Prospect Ave., which charges for WiFi after 12:00 pm. I get a lot done there. Downside: it takes 10 minutes to drive each way, which wastes time and gas. Also, they sell really good, high-calorie baked goods. Yet another downside: sometimes I have my camera with me and I start taking pictures when I should be doing something else, e.g.,



And another: there's an Urban Outfitters down the street and I always browse in there when I have the chance.

3. Use WriteRoom, the word processor that blacks out everything but your words (screenshot). This is good for writing a first draft but if you need to use footnotes or formatting or to work with your research online, it's a drag.

4. If you use gmail, enable the "take a break" option (from the gmail labs menu under settings). When you click "take a break," it deprives you of access to your email for 15 minutes. Along the same lines, if you're logged into gmail, choose "go invisible" in that chat window so that no one will start IM'ing with you just when you have begun to be productive.

5. Disable any email alert sounds. I did this years ago.

6. Remove Facebook from your bookmarks. This doesn't work for me because it's not that hard to type "facebook" into the address bar.

7. Don't blog. Sometimes I write something for this blog just to "get myself writing." Does Not Work.

"That cat who lives in a garbage can should be out demonstrating and turning over every institution, even Sesame Street..."

Here are a few fragments of the historical reception of Sesame Street that I came across in some research I have been doing on the history of the concept of the "attention span" as it relates to moving-image media. (The research is for a talk I am giving this weekend at the conference of the Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image in Madison).

Brief background: Sesame Street was begun as an effort to bring pre-school education to disadvantaged children, especially black kids in the poorest neighborhoods of America's cities. The people at the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), lead by Joan Ganz Cooney, hoped that by reaching these kids through the television, students might arrive at first grade more ready to learn how to read and add and subtract and, more generally, to succeed in school and life. Kids were already watching a ton of television, so why not teach them where they already are? Thus the multi-ethnic cast and the urban setting, and the focus on teaching the most basic concepts like letters and numbers. By adopting the progressive agenda of late 1960s liberalism, the show aimed to create a more diverse and egalitarian society.

The character of Oscar the Grouch, who was orange before he was green, was supposed to teach young viewers that the world is "not made up of sweetness and light" according to the CTW, and that kids "had better start getting used to that." (Francke) He would afford an opportunity for children to encounter and experience negative emotions . As everyone knows, Oscar lives in a trash can by a front stoop and complains nonstop. Jim Henson apparently found the inspiration for Oscar in an extremely rude waiter. Carol Spinney, the puppeteer who also plays Big Bird, modeled his Oscar voice after a New York City cab driver.



When Sesame Street debuted in 1969 it was greeted by almost universal acclaim and great excitement about the possibility of finding a noble purpose in a medium which, at the time, was considered moronic and perhaps also dangerous. But within a couple of years it had begun to receive some negative, critical notices as well, by educators who objected to its teaching style and its adoption of formats of commercial television, including advertising ("brought to you by the letter Y and the number 2") and the "magazine style" of variety comedy shows like Laugh-In, with many brief segments mixing live action shot on location or in the studio, animation, and puppetry.

A New York magazine article in 1971 added another dimension to the show's criticism: the author, Linda Francke, interviewed a number of African-American viewers in NYC and found that many were hostile to what they perceived as the show's middle-class values. They found fault with the show for failing to represent the reality of life in poor neighborhoods. These lines of thought didn't surprise me very much when I read them yesterday because the same thoughts have occurred to me before. But the stuff about offense taken in particular to Oscar the Grouch was more novel; it had not occurred to me that anyone would ever find anything but delight in him.

Francke claimed that the African-American community was unified by its hostility to this character: "There wasn't a black I talked with who did not single out Oscar as one of the things they found so painfully wrong about Sesame Street." It continues:

Grace Richmond, director of education at the West 80th Street Day Care Center, got right into Oscar. "I react to the garbage-can character because that to me is the inner-city character. He's the one who's bottled up, and who compensates for it by saying he likes to live in a garbage can. That's really like saying it's all right to live in a dump. I don't agree with that. And the kids call it phony."

Dorothy Pitman Hughes, director of the West 80th Street Day Care Center, agreed. "That cat who lives in the garbage can," she said, "should be out demonstrating and turning over every institution, even Sesame Street, to get out of it."

A black minister, who didn't want his name used, said, "Sesame Street is telling a black kid that it's perfectly normal for you to live in a garbage can if you keep it clean. The Man is perpetrating the idea that that's where you're going to live and you out to be happy living there."

Francke clearly thought that these criticisms would sting the CTW folks, so eager to improve the lot of those who reacted so negatively to their work. The article continues:

I mentioned these reactions to Mrs. Cooney, and for a moment, she was speechless. Then she said, "It hurts me to hear that blacks think that. It tells me so much about the damage that 300 years have done that they think they're Oscar. We don't think they are Oscar. I don't understand that. Why would Oscar be them? Lord, I wouldn't dream of identifying with Oscar the Grouch. I'd be embarrassed as a human being. I mean...why...they're saying that they must feel that way. That they feel they're Oscar. Well, that's a whole different issue because that means anyone you could show, any grubby creature, anything, they'd say, 'That's me and I wish you'd take him off the air.'" That didn't seem to be the point, I said. It was the fact that Oscar wasn't trying to get out of his garbage can. "Well," she said with relief, smiling, "there's no evidence that the little black kids identify with Oscar any more than they identify with anybody else. Ernie has emerged much more as the character they identify with. That tells you a lot about the health of kids rather than the mental ill health of adults!"

One thing especially worth noting here is that Francke quotes adults rather than children, but that Cooney gives herself the authority to speak for the children in her audience. This underscores the extent to which adults mediate children's culture for them, framing media texts and giving them context, choosing what children will experience and how they will experience it. At the same time, adults who presume to speak for children's reception are liable to impose their interests on kids, to see what they want to see rather than what children actually see.

Oscar was not the only muppet singled out for criticism over the years; a bright but trouble-making, "jive-talking" African-American character, Roosevelt Franklin, was eventually dropped from the show because of concerns that he was a negative racial stereotype and a bad example for children.



A certain affinity between Oscar and African-Americans seems to have persisted over the years, despite my inability to find much in the way of formal criticism since the New York article in 1971. The most recent instances I have seen occur in online remix culture, where the muppets, as a touchstone of several generations' youth, frequently appear. For instance, I have previously here linked to this video mashing up the muppets and Pulp Fiction. More recently on Fraktastic I posted this video mashing up the muppets and Woody Allen's Manhattan. The supreme oddity of Bert is Evil is well known to memesters and students of convergence culture.

A number of remix videos have taken audio from a David Chapelle standup bit about Sesame Street and a segment on Chapelle's Show ("Kneehigh Park", a parody of SS) and combined them with video from Sesame Street. Chapelle's Oscar riff from his 2000 TV special Killing Them Softly makes clear that he sees him as more urban than other muppet characters (transcript as follows from Wikiquote):

Have you ever watched like a cartoon that you used to watch when you were little, as an adult? I was sittin there with my nephew. I turned it on Sesame Street. And I was like Oh good. Sesame Street. Now he'll learn how to count and spell. But now I'm watching it as an adult and I realize that Sesame Street teaches kids other things. It teaches kids how to judge people and label people, thats right. They got this one character named Oscar. They treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right to his face. 'Oscar you are so mean. Isn't he kids?' 'Yeah Oscar, you're a grouch!' He's like 'Bitch I live in a fucking trash can! I'm the poorest mother fucker on Sesame Street. Nobody's helpin me.' Now you wonder why your kids grow up and step over homeless people, like 'Get it together, grouch. Get a job, grouch'

The line "Bitch I live in a fucking trash can!" is one especially ripe for remixing. One video I have seen (YouTube has taken it down) strings together a bunch of innocuous Sesame Street scenes of Oscar talking to human beings, inserting "Bitch..." for Oscar's dialogue.

In this very foul clip, a segment from "Kneehigh Park," the whole joke is that Oscar is from the 'hood.

Ghetto Oscar

This gets remixed/mashed up in this vid of Oscar cussing out the Teletubbies, with the Grouch portrayed through the audio-track as black and the Teletubbies as white, despite the fact that neither Oscar nor the Tubbies have conventional markers of ethnic or racial identity.



Indeed, one of the things I have always found especially endearing and distinctive about the Muppets is the way they confound or confuse identity categories like child and adult, white and non-white, human and non-human, etc. (For instance, who exactly are Ernie and Bert?) I remember being a bit surprised to learn that the puppeteer who performs Elmo, Kevin Clash, is black--surprised more than anything by my own reaction, catching myself in the assumption that an adorable red furry monster would have or lack any particular ethnic or racial markers.



This point of this discussion obviously is not to point out that Oscar (or Elmo) is coded black (or not), that he is a racist representation, or that there is something offensive about how the CTW characterized him. I don't buy any of these ideas, though I respect the fact that others might. What I think is worth taking away from these bits of reception and interpretation and appropriation of one piece of the enormous Sesame Street text is the distance between the way the show has always represented a progressive ideal of community (Jennifer Mandel calls it "beloved community") and the way that the minority community that the show's creators aimed to reach found its own meanings in it, a product of their own contexts of experience.

References:

Linda Francke, "The Games People Play on Sesame Street" New York (April 5, 1971).

Jennifer Mandel, "The Production of a Beloved Community: Sesame Street's Answers to America's Inequalities" The Journal of American Culture 29.1 (2006), 3-11.

Lessons From the Class Blog

Now that my semester is ending I am leaving teaching behind for a few months of writing, but I wanted to blog here about something I have been doing in the classroom. When I began having my students contribute to a group blog in a Principles of Media Studies class in September, 2006, I thought of it as an experiment. I didn’t know what the students would be like or whether they would be invested in the assignment, and I didn’t know how blogging would fit within the course. After four semesters now, I have collected some ideas about how a class blog works and doesn’t work that I thought would be worth sharing.

When I began the class blog it was my first semester teaching the course and the topic, but I was by then an experienced blogger. Although Zigzigger began only in December of 2006, I had previously blogged without using my full name on topics largely unrelated to my scholarly interests (I’m not going to link to that blog from here, but it’s not hard to find if you have Google). I knew the appeals and affordances of blogging (quick, personal response to ongoing events; membership in a community of bloggers) and thought they would add a lot to a class that would often be concerned with recent media and current events.

The purpose of my class blog is for the students to keep a public media consumption diary. This is supposed to make them more aware of the media in their lives and to prompt them to reflect on their significance. I tell the class at the beginning of the semester that it doesn’t matter if they write well in the blog or if they have a point to make. The students get credit for each entry regardless of content, as long as it’s 150 words long and media related. The assignment is to blog ten times during the semester for a total of 10% of their final grade, and they can post no more than once a week. (Each week begins and ends on Friday at noon, which means that most weeks the largest number of entries are posted on Thursday afternoon and evening and Friday morning.) Comments are encouraged but not required; the same goes for hyperlinks, photos, and videos. The class usually has about 25 students, which is a manageable size for a group blog. A much bigger or smaller class would not work as well.

I have read about other people’s class blogs, and it seems everyone prefers to do it slightly differently. Some people have each student create his or her own blog. Some require comments in addition to posts. Some give students topics to blog about or encourage them to respond to one another’s entries or insist on links or bullet-point lists or embedded video. I think a group blog works best because it makes the students more likely to read each other’s posts, and it makes the blog into a communal space like the classroom. I don’t like the idea of requiring comments because it makes it harder for me to track their participation and because I think voluntary comments have more value than mandated ones. (I got this sense from flickr groups where you post a photo to the pool and have to leave a comment on someone else’s; the comments on these photos tend to be pretty superficial.)

There have been some semesters when students did not blog as much as I hoped. I thought that giving them ten free points for writing anything at all was being really generous and making it easier for them to succeed in the class, but some students would just forget about blogging or not care enough to do it. This really frustrated me when students who could have gotten better grades by blogging regularly ended up with worse grades because they didn’t blog enough. I have wondered whether access to computers is an issue here. Students who do not have a computer at home (there are some in every class) are at a disadvantage. So are students who are less familiar with the participatory internet. (The idea that anyone born since the mid-1980s is a “digital native” is way overstated.) I learned early on that I would need to spend time at the beginning of the semester walking the class through every step of blogging, including where to type the content of a post, how to insert a link or photo or embed a video, how to publish a post, and how to comment on someone else’s. Any student who had not successfully blogged the first week would have to come to my office for a one-on-one session at my computer. Many things that are obvious to me about blogging, things that seem simple and intuitive, are not so to people unfamiliar with the format of the blog. I have found that some newcomers to the participatory web need special care and attention at the beginning of the semester if they are to become comfortable with these new experiences. Even taking these steps, however, is no guarantee that everyone will blog like you want them to. I still don't know how to solve the problem of the student with limited computer access blogging less than the student who has broadband and a laptop. My sense is that this is often a class (and race) issue, which is to say it's the product of a larger structure of inequality that makes it harder for some students to succeed in school.

A class blog really works only if there is an incentive greater than a grade to contribute to it. If you are going to have the class blog, the most important thing is to integrate the blog into the class. This motivates contributions, and good ones. The blog must not be merely supplemental. This is a challenge because the content of the blog comes from the students, and you as the teacher have little control over what they do on it. Indeed, the point is that this part of the class is pretty much their domain. It works better this way. How do you integrate the blog into class? I do it by setting aside time, usually at the beginning of class, to talk about one or two recent entries. I make a special point of doing one of these “something from the blog” discussions on the second day of class. By then usually a handful of eager students have posted their first entry, and I choose one to read to the class (I paste entries into a word document so that I’m not reading off a screen). When I do this, I am careful to appear impressed by the student’s writing, and I praise the entry for both its form and content. I say things like: “I like the way you raise a provocative question” or “It really works that you are responding in a personal way to something you find interesting in the media.” I overdo it a little with the positive reinforcement, but at the beginning of the semester this sets the kind of tone I like in the classroom. The point of this exercise is to give the students the idea of what a good blog entry looks like. (I am especially effusive with praise for properly inserted links and embedded videos.) More importantly, it makes students aware that someone is reading their writing. It gives them an incentive to write good blog posts: I might choose theirs to bring into class and single it out for praise.

As the semester goes along, I try to do something from the blog at least once every third class (Principles of Media Studies meets twice a week for 75 minutes). I try to spread the love around, so that by the end of the semester just about everyone’s writing will have been considered by the group. I sometimes don’t read the entries word for word, but instead just refer to them and ask the student to talk about what they have written. I always give the student who wrote the post we are discussing the first opportunity to talk about it. Sometimes I disagree with students’ points or question them in a gently challenging way. Then I open up the discussion to others. Sometimes these sessions take five minutes, and sometimes it’s more like fifteen or twenty. If a student posts a video, we might watch it.

A couple of times a semester, I also like to give the students the opportunity to talk about blogging, about the blog as a medium and a component of the course. I like to get their feedback about the blog as an assignment to know if they consider it a nuisance, to see if they read each other's entries, to get a sense of their idea of what blogging is and what it can be. Usually there are some skeptics and some enthusiasts. I have yet to hear anyone say that I should stop having students blog at all, but maybe that's something you wouldn't say even if you felt that way. When we talk about participatory media like fan videos and Wikipedia, having the class blog gives us an opportunity to use blogging as another example of "user-generated content" that everyone is very familiar with. The comments I most appreciate in these discussions are those that point out how having to blog regularly affects your experience of the world. Many students over these four semesters have said that blogging has made them pay attention to things they might not have otherwise (to get ideas of things to write about). It has made them more aware of the pervasiveness of media in their lives and of the significance of this. I would like to think that it has encouraged them to think analytically about their experiences. And that being in the habit of writing for an audience has made them better at expressing themselves in a style of writing which, while pretty casual, is still more formal than texting, IM, and Facebook wall posts.

Depending on the course’s topic in a given week, the blog entries might actually relate to the material we are covering. I don’t always try to get the blog discussion to relate to our class’s topics, but often there is a connection I can make. I can talk about an idea anticipating something we are going to discuss in a few weeks, or recalling a topic considered previously. Sometimes students get ideas for a blog post from class. For instance, after a class in which we talked about children’s television and read about and watched Blue’s Clues, a student posted some clips of Yo Gabba Gabba, which gave us the opportunity to compare the two shows and revisit and reinforce a couple of key points from the previous day. I like to think that this kind of repetition with variation often helps people learn better.

Integrating the blog discussion into the class does a number of things. It gives the students an incentive to blog and blog well. It encourages the class to see itself as a group of people with common interests having a conversation rather than as individuals listening to me and writing down what I say. It acquaints students with one another in a way that isn’t possible in the classroom setting, and gives me a window into their experiences which helps me understand them better. Many students share things in the blog that they would not in the classroom. They feel that their contributions to the blog are lower-pressure than their contributions to class discussions. Some students who are reluctant to speak in class say that the blog offers them an opportunity to participate. (I hope they don’t see it as a kind of alibi for keeping quiet in class, though.)

There’s one more thing I like about having a group blog in a media studies class, and it might seem obvious but I think it’s worth stating: I learn from the blog. I get links to viral videos and news about celebrities and condemnations of sensationalist local news. My students write recaps or little reviews of television shows I’m not watching or videogames I'm not playing or movies I’m not seeing or websites I'm not reading. Even when they write about media I do know, my students articulate perspectives that are different from those I might encounter otherwise. Having access to these experiences and perspectives helps me teach my students better by giving me more of a sense of who they are and what they’re like. This is partly, then, a selfish benefit. I like to know about cool new stuff. But it’s also a benefit to students when the teacher speaks their language, and a class works best (in my experience) when its participants feel that they know one another and are engaging in the pursuit of a common purpose. When integrated well into a course, a blog can afford this kind of feeling.

The Hills Is Too Real

Everyone who watches it knows on some level that The Hills is both real and fake, authentic and inauthentic, true and false, fictional and actual, honest and flimflam. People call this its fauxreality. Whatever its producers's intentions, an appreciation of these contradictions is a central appeal of the show. It exploits them in a way that is original and exciting, that makes the show into an object of intense fascination and wonder. I have blogged about this before and it's not news either to readers of Dr. T and Songs About Buildings and Food. In some ways, the balance has been skewing more toward artifice and contrivance and away from believability as the show was become more popular and its characters more savvy about how they function as agents of storytelling. At the same time, it is only because the characters are not actually fictional characters but real people that this kind of artifice is possible in the first place.

Among the fakeries typical of The Hills, perhaps the most audacious is the rigorous omission of any mention that the characters are in a show on MTV. Not only do we have no sense of the existence of a crew, which is usually true as well of Survivor and Project Runway and more or less every reality show, but we also never hear any reference to the show in dialogue. If you can imagine watching the show without knowing anything about the context of its production and reception (this is an impossible thought experiment), you would never know that the characters are famous, and that the very show we are watching is the cause of their fame. Contrast this with American Idol, for instance, which is all about nobodies being transformed into stars. Contrast this with other competitions like Dancing With the Stars, in which contestants regularly credit the show with providing an opportunity for personal growth and self-improvement. If Lauren or Heidi ever mentioned the existence of a program on television on which they regularly appear, the effect would be like a rupture in the space-time continuum. The first rule of The Hills is, you do not talk about The Hills.

In choosing to represent the narrative world in this way, The Hills departs from a convention of the reality genre: the confessional "on-the-fly" interviews that producers use to shape and craft storytelling and anchor meanings for otherwise ambiguous events. The confessional interview typically includes an address to the camera, a technique that aligns reality TV with the tradition of documentary film and television and with journalism. Some shows, like Big Brother, also have segments with an interviewer present to get the characters talking about their experiences. In BB's case, this person is even a journalist (Julie Chen, aka the Chenbot). Most forms of fictional cinema and television, by contrast, prohibit actors from acknowledging the camera, a convention often observed in the breach, as in comedies when the comedian appeals directly to us, breaking the "fourth wall". Godard and Woody Allen do this pretty effectively, and it always makes an impression because we are so unused to seeing this violation of stylistic orthodoxy in a dramatic fiction film. Mockumentaries get away with interviews and direct address because they make clear their terms of address as pseudo-reality.

The combination of avoiding all mention of The Hills and also of avoiding the direct address technique of the interview (aural and visual) has made The Hills (and before it Laguna Beach) distinctive all along. What has changed is not the textual approach, but the context in which the show is experienced. Now the show is a megahit, a pop culture phenomenon. Its characters appear on talk shows and in paparazzi photos and on the cover of Rolling Stone. John McCain and Barack Obama have mentioned Lauren and Heidi and people who would otherwise never watch MTV or reality TV know them by name and face. And now, much of the story is being told extratextually. In a sense, the US cover a few weeks ago spoiled the final episodes of season 3, alerting us to the growing rift between Audrina and Lauren. Their appearances on TV shows like Live with Regis and Kelly showed us that Heidi and Spencer were still a couple even as they seemed on the show to have split up. The lag in time between the appearance of Hills items in the news and the appearance of these same events on the show requires that we keep a story order straight in our minds even as the plot is presented through these different sources of narrative which we encounter temporally out of sequence. Thus we are constantly aware of the multiplicity of sources for narrative info and of their relative importance.

This tail-wagging-the-dog dynamic might have begun two years ago, when Lauren and Jason's breakup happened offscreen but was reported in the tabloid media. This was duplicated a year ago with the sex tape episode between seasons two and three (more on which in a moment). The crucial events in these narrative developments are the reality out of which the show crafts its drama, and the exposure the characters get in the extratexts functions not as publicity and promotion (well, not just) but as narration across platforms. These events set our expectations of getting our story about the show from sources other than the show. Amidst all the talk of fakery, the fact that The Hills can keep telling its story through these other means is evidence of its reality--of the real relationships and identities at the core of the show's narrative.

I propose that we can understand the significance of all this by looking to film and narrative theory, and in particular two concepts: reflexivity and diegesis. In classical cinema--movies that follow conventional Hollywood formats of storytelling and cinematic technique--reflexivity is generally avoided in favor of a kind of realism (in the 70s it was called "classic realism") that makes no reference to its own fictional and textual status. The literary analog of this is the 19th century realist novel. Diegesis, often defined as "story world", is a term that captures the sense the viewer has of a reality represented onscreen in three dimensions plus time, fully formed and internally coherent, like the real world. Of course this diegesis is a construct of cinematic (or media) production. Devices like synchronized sound and continuity editing stitch together a diegesis that seems seamless, and offer viewers an experience of this fictional space which they can believe exists when they lose themselves in the story. This is why the classical style has often been called "transparent" whether in literature or cinema: it never seems like the fiction is being presented or represented; it just is. I'm not going to get into the way this style was understood in 1970s film theory to function ideologically by positioning the spectator as subject who masters the space of the diegesis, misrecognizing himself (it's a male subject position) as the origin of the image before him. This is not a position many film scholars tend to buy these days. The point is to recognize the usefulness of the concept of a diegesis to capture the experience of a movie or TV show that represents a seamless, transparent world. Reflexive and diegetic are on some level opposed concepts, as devices of reflexivity threaten the coherence of the diegesis as self-enclosed and realistic.

The Hills as a television series aims for classic realism, working toward a diegetic effect while minimizing reflexivity. In avoiding mention of the characters' status as celebs and the techniques of reality TV, the show prefers instead to present itself as classically cinematic (the producers say they're after the look and feel of a film), using many traditional techniques including continuity editing and scene dissection (beginning with establishing shots, then cutting in closer for shot/reverse-shot sequences), clear scene transitions, and redundant dialogue to remind us of earlier actions and future plans. The reflexive techniques of documentary and political modernist cinema and of many non-fictional television genres are totally missing from the style of the show, a sort of "structuring absence" that is especially significant for being avoided.

And yet the sense the producers seem to be trying too hard to achieve of realism and diegesis is constantly undone by the show's success. Because of this, the characters are celebs, and their stories are told in the tabs and talk shows as much as on the show. They offer commentaries on events, and occasionally even criticize their representation by the producers (e.g., Lo complaining during last nite's season finale aftershow about being made into a villain--did she go off message?). It is totally unbelievable that they don't talk about the show and their celebrity, and we might reasonably assume that when the cameras aren't on, they talk about little else.

Our knowledge of Spencer and Heidi's self-fashioning as entrepreneurial Hollywood stars (fauxbiz!) and Spencer's self-casting as villain constantly distract us from the coherence of their characterization in the show, which seems several degrees more bogus than the way Lauren and her crew are represented. The artifice of the setup of Audrina and Whitney and now She-Pratt as friends for Lauren make us more aware of the authenticity of her friendship with Lo. Articles in the LA Times and Rolling Stone and US Weekly fill in details we would never learn from the MTV broadcast. The diegesis is constantly being constructed contextually as incomplete and insufficient, and because the characters are real people, it is possible for their characterization to continue through multiple media and more or less perpetually.

The relative authenticity or inauthenticity of these people on the show is made irrelevant by all of these contextual discourses, all of which presuppose that the characters on the show are continuous with the people in the magazines and on the talk shows who share their identities. Even the more fakey-fake contextual moments like Spencer and Heidi's insistence that the sex tape really existed remind us that the characters on The Hills are also persons of flesh and blood and feelings. Even if they're lying (of course they are!) Spencer and Heidi are acting out real motivations---of pursuing fame and wealth and success in entertainment. Even the rumor that Lauren and Lo's house is actually a set and not their actual place of residence presupposes that the same Lauren and Lo who are characters on the show also live somewhere in Los Angeles. The extension of these characters and relationships beyond the diegesis forces us to question the coherence and stability of the text as narrative, reminding us of the reality that cannot be contained in the weekly 22 minutes of TV time. Thus the realism attempted by The Hills is constantly undermined by the underlying reality from which it draws the materials of its representation.

It's my sense that the sex tape is what really forced us into this terrain of instability, caught between the appeal of the show's diegesis and our excess of knowledge about the reality that it fashions into drama. The sex tape and the actions surrounding its ambiguous existence constituted an event or non-event between seasons, whether real or imagined or merely rumored, which directed the narrative into one of intense passion and drama--a real soap opera. The fact that no one can say if it exists makes the sex tape into the perfect emblem for The Hills as text and object of intense cultural significance--it is at once too real and not real enough. Presumably, if it exists, the sex tape is the mediated representation that could never be questioned in terms of its authenticity--it would be the true evidence of people's intimate lives. A sex tape, an amateur porn recording of Lauren having sex with Jason, made by them and not by MTV, not by paparazzi, not by TMZ, would promise to be more real than anything we have seen on MTV or in magazines or on Letterman. We can only imagine it, of course, and like Spencer we might think we prefer not to. Let's imagine that it's underexposed, unedited, framed so you can't quite see some things you might like to, that there are fragments of speech that don't easily make sense. Let's imagine it has those amateur qualities that guarantee authenticity. These characteristics, only hinted at or assumed or projected onto it as products of fantasy, are those of a true document of desire, untainted by dramatic performance and slick cinematography and editing and the pop hits of the next five minutes and the whole bag of tricks that MTV uses to make us at once so wowed by the magic of moving images and so suspicious of their manipulative powers.

Or maybe it was part of an aspiring famewhore's quest to be another Paris Hilton...

Muxtape

I put these songs on my muxtape cuz I love them all and want to listen over and over again. Here are a few thoughts one by one.

1. Mira Billotte - As I Went Out One Morning. I heard this today in Anthropologie and loved it from the first second. Later at home I figured out that it was on the soundtrack of I'm Not There. So I had heard it before. And I know the Dylan original very well. I usually love familiar songs covered by singers of the wrong gender (e.g., Cake's version of "I Will Survive").

2. Duran Duran - Save a Prayer. Reminds me of the gorgeous colonialist travelogue music video, my fave of all of Duran Duran's. The line "some people call it a one-night stand but we can call it paradise" might have been my introduction to the phrase "one-night stand". This song probably gave me the impression that you don't want anyone else to think you're looking for one, but that you might be anyway.

3. Lily Allen - LDN. I always wonder how much of her talent is really her producer, Mark Ronson's. It's tricky, because the very specifically young, female voice is essential to this track. (Updated: see the comments; I'm a little wrong about this.) I hate the faux naïeveté of "I believe it is called al fresco", which is to say I love it.

4. Rihanna - Please Don't Stop the Music. Rihanna is the best pop of the moment for sure. This song samples "Wanna Be Starting Something"!

5. Vampire Weekend - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa. My absolute favoritest song of today. I want to see them, check this out. The chorus is the same as the verse, only an octave higher. The guitar lick is as good as anything on Graceland, and I can't get enough of the revival of this style.

6. She & Him - I Should Have Known Better. I would never have heard of She & Him if Zooey Deschanel weren't the singer-songwriter, and I don't care. It pleases me to imagine Zooey Deschanel singing in a print sundress (the kind I saw today at Anthropologie!) as I listen to her sing. Another gender-reversed cover of a sixties classic.

7. Belle & Sebastian - Asleep on a Sunbeam. This is the most-played track in my iTunes library. On the choruses the male vocal comes in, and then it takes the third verse, with a variation on the melody line, joined again after the first few lines by the female vocal. Beautiful. A perfectly crafted 3.5 minute pop song about escape and dreaming.

8. The Guess Who - She's Come Undone. In Canada this song is on the rock radio stations every ten or fifteen minutes and you can't help yourself. The last "she's come un....doooooone!" is so passionate. I'm mad that that Wally Lamb novel has the same title, though. (I haven't read it, but now the song reminds me of the cover of the book and I would rather not.)

9. Miley Cyrus - East Northumberland High. "You're my type of guy, I guess, if I were stuck in East Northumberland High for the rest of my life, but people change thank god I did." Now she's singing as Miley, not Hannah, and making an identity for herself. Totally constructed, of course, just like the rest of us.

10. Billy Joel - Don't Ask Me Why. The Latin-ish number thrown in between more guitar and synth-driven songs on Glass Houses, the most aggressively rock (i.e., least credible) of Billy's good records. He's a much better singer in his self-searching ballad voice, free from posturing and affectation.

11. Leonard Cohen - Democracy. Everything Leonard Cohen writes or says or sings is profound. This is the best kind of political song: not preachy, simplifying, or accusatory, just critical and passionate.

12. Joni Mitchell - Carey. I wish Joni Mitchell would invite me down to the Mermaid Cafe for a bottle of wine. In the verse, the jump up an octave comes as a surprise the first time ("oh you know it--octave--sure is hard...") and a delightful reminder every subsequent one of what a fantastic song this is.

(PS 5/14: muxtapes are subject to change...out with Rihanna today, in with Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now"...it's pretty smart to limit the muxtape to 12 tracks so you have a reason to keep updating and revising and getting the songs that you just have to have today...)

Trouble for the Milwaukee International Film Festival?

10/9/08: Maybe you got to the page searching for Milwaukee International Film Festival 2008. Sorry to say, there isn't one. Next year, we hope, the new organization called Milwaukee Film will stage an international film festival here. Here's an MJS story about its new director.

My local film festival, MIFF, began five years ago as an effort launched by the publisher and film critic of our alt-weekly, the Shepherd Express (known as Express Milwaukee on the webs). Film fests are rarely money-making ventures; as I have been writing in my book on indie cinema, their noncommercial institutional identity lends them artistic legitimacy as arts organizations like museums and symphony orchestras and in contrast to for-profit multiplexes and art houses. Apparently the Milwaukee International Film Festival, although successful as a cultural event, now faces financial problems that threaten its future. These stem from the relation of the non-profit fest to the for-profit alt-weekly, from which it has been buying ads over the years with money in part raised from philanthropic foundations. When the festival claimed an outstanding debt to the alt-weekly, the foundations who have kept it afloat decided to cut off its funding. The story as such is in Bruce Murphy's online column at Milwaukee Magazine. The Shepherd Express disputes some of Murphy's facts and the implication that the festival's future is in question.

The economic and institutional underpinnings of alternative cinema are topics for much further analysis. Items in Murphy's comments and in the Express reply make clear that the public rationale for having film festivals is largely cultural rather than economic. High-profile arts events like a film festival give us a sense of our city's importance and vitality. The identity of Milwaukeeans seems to hang in the balance: having a film festival, like having a major league baseball team, makes us feel better about where we live. To the extent that festival films are better or different from the films we can see in other venues, the event promises edifying and educational opportunities that we don't otherwise get. This is presumed to be an unambiguous cultural good, like farmers markets and public parks.

But despite the prevalence of the cultural logic in asserting the significance of film fests, there is also an economic one. The film festival here, like in so many other places, is meant to spur growth in the local media production biz, and in local retail and service sectors. A film fest is a way of attracting and keeping "creative class" types, whose presence is deemed essential for the future of any city's economy. And of course, local media like the Shepherd Express benefit greatly from having high-profile cultural events. It gives them material to cover and provides opportunities for boosts in circulation and ad revenue. The idea, then, that a film fest is merely a cultural good is naïve. Film festivals depend on donations from corporations and individuals and on state support of various kinds, many of which are given in part in hopes of economic, not just cultural, benefits. Whether the dealings of MIFF's leaders have been truly shady or not, this episode reveals the complex web of interests that produces a film festival, and the fact that bringing great cinema to a city and making a city a good place to live are only part of the agenda.

[where: 53201]

Ze Frank and the Poetics of Web Video

Last year I wrote an essay on The Show With Ze Frank and the art of the videoblog, and it has just been published in First Monday as "Ze Frank and the Poetics of Web Video". I'm thrilled that this work is appearing online, in an open access, peer-reviewed journal, with hyperlinks and color illustrations and a Creative Commons license. I wish there were more venues like First Monday for publishing on the whole range of topics I might want to write about (First Monday is a journal about the internet).

Abstract:

This article initiates a poetics of Web video by considering the central features of one kind of video on the Web, the amateur videoblog, in terms of its functions, which include various affordances of use, and constraints, which include economics, technology, and viewing conditions. It takes as its central example an American videoblog called The Show With Ze Frank, which ran from 2006-2007, and which drew a passionate community of fans into collaborating in its creation. This article considers amateur Web video as a potentially democratic space for media production, offering an alternative to commercial media that involves ordinary citizens as participants and champions their creativity.

Previously:

Web Videos of 2006, this blog's first post, a nice little time capsule of my enthusiasm for this new art form.

Notes on Web Video Form, the blog rough draft of what became the First Monday article, with a bunch of links to videos of the moment, many of which I had forgotten about.

The Show With Ze Frank, 2006-2007, my reflection on the show's ending.

Shape Shifting, Addendum + Anticipating Console-ing Passions

I have had a chance now to compare the 4:3 and 16:9 versions of first-season ER and this confirmed my speculation about how the show was shot in the mid-90s. In shooting the show, the camera framed a common topline for different aspects ratios. In preparing the 16:9 transfer, the producers cropped a sliver of the bottom of the 4:3 frame, but added extra space on the sides of the image. Here are a couple of comparisons from the episode "Love's Labor Lost," originally aired 3/9/95.






If you look at the bottoms of the images, you can see that the 4:3 version has a slightly lower frameline. Perhaps not quite as low as the diagram I made to illustrate my earlier post, but still lower. Not sure this rises to a level of enormous significance (maybe this is the sort of thing derided as "merely academic"), but there is a certain pleasure just in knowing things.

***

Looking forward to seeing some of you later this week at CP in Santa Barbara. I've been reading about the Experience Music Project conference in blogs (for instance, at Zoilus) and was struck by this description at Dial "M" for Muscicology:

Everybody wants to hate on the EMP pop conference, because everyone hates and fears critics, professors, hipsters, and academic conferences. Getting a bunch of hipster critics and professors together for an academic conference just seems unnatural and wrong, an affront to all that's decent. Just as soon as I came to town I read a piece in the Seattle's alterna-weekly The Stranger that offers an excuse: it's just a bunch of harmless nerds getting up and geeking out about their favorite music, like fifteen-year-old kids playing each other their favorite records in the basement or, for that matter, like Star Wars obsessives showing off their action figures. Which I thought was probably bullshit, because it sounds so self-serving. We don't judge! We love! We're cute and brainy and don't even notice our cultural authority! But actually, it was kind of true. This was maybe my favorite conference ever, partly because the papers were generally so good and partly because there was a vibe of total geeked-out unironic love and enthusiasm that just doesn't come naturally to academic gatherings.

No comment here, just a link and a quote and something to think about.

Shape Shifting (TV opens W I D E)

4:3 4Evah (t-shirts to follow)


_{Widescreen DVD version (2004) of the pilot episode of ER (1994)}

Widescreen moving image processes are old but widescreen images on a television set are pretty new. I remember my first letterbox experience watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan on PBS in the early 90s. I didn’t know what the stripes were for but I could tell they must be important. Apparently the letterbox was already more common in Europe than North America, but I was not aware of the term before my adult years and my discovery of cinephilia. Friends and I would watch VHS dubs of letterboxed films off of laserdiscs. The very word, “letterbox,” sounded so distinguished and luxurious, the home video equivalent of “extra virgin” or “high thread count.” I remember moving my chair closer to the 13-inch television set I inherited from a cousin when I moved to Madison in 1997. It was on that diminutive set, with staticky sound that could only be too loud or too soft, that I watched dozens of classic films, many widescreen, so pleased to be seeing them in all their glory even as the images were tiny. Did I really see those films?

A consciousness of aspect ratios seems like a product of the DVD and HDTV age, but there must be something generational to it, as well. Anyone who was of cinema-going age in the 1950s would remember Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO, etc. They would remember movie screens going wide. But Gen X’ers like me have no memory of movie screens ever changing shape. The movie theaters of my youth were a mix of picture palaces converted to duplexes and triplexes (often the balcony and orchestra were made into separate auditoriums, with a steep slope upstairs and a flatter grade downstairs) and shopping mall shoeboxes like Cineplex’s original multiplex at the Eaton Centre in Toronto. The old theaters had bigger screens and more comfortable seats. I was aware of IMAX and 70mm but these to me were merely bigger and better, not wider. I don’t think I was conscious of a difference in shape between movie and television images before my introduction to cinephile culture. I certainly was not aware that movies “formatted to fit your screen” had been cropped and radically reshaped, sometimes losing half the frame in the process. I was not aware that full-frame videos sometimes introduced edits or camera movements that weren’t in the theatrical version (“pan-and-scan”).

The millennials now coming of age cannot be as innocent as I was. Since 1997, DVD technology has been educating the public that there are versions of movies, wide and full. HDTVs distinguish themselves from their predecessors by being differently shaped, and everyone can see that—it’s more obvious even than the improvement in picture quality. Around 1999-2000, television programs started to letterbox their broadcasts even to 4:3 sets, and by this time many MTV videos and commercials had adopted a letterbox image, usually trying to look “cinematic.” ER was NBC’s first show to go widescreen in November, 2000, and many network shows soon followed. At this point, the general public was newly aware that not all moving images are the same shape. Everyone who cares as much about movies and TV as I do (and you too, I’m sure) had the experience around this time of trying to explain the black bands to a skeptical civilian. It might look to you like less, but actually it’s more! (As always, The Onion nailed it with its story, “Non-Widescreen Version of DVD Received as Hanukkah Gift.”)

Movies since the late 50s are generally shot in a wider aspect ratio than 4:3. Filmmakers have lots of reasons why they prefer widescreen ratios but distinguishing films from TV is a big one. Perhaps some even want to make films that will play badly on a small screen. Films shot in very wide ratios like 2.35:1 are mutilated when cropped down to 4:3. Films shot in today’s most common ratio for Hollywood movies, 1.85:1, sometimes also look terrible in 4:3, but not always. There are several reasons why a film exhibited at 1.85:1 might look fine in a fullscreen version. The filmmakers might be shooting in Super 35mm with two overlapping frames in mind, one wide for the theater, and the other more squarish for the small screen. The movie version is missing some of the top and bottom of the frame, and the video version is missing some of the sides. You probably aren’t missing anything crucial to understanding the story or appreciating the visuals watching the fullscreen version of a movie shot this way (e.g., Titanic).

(NTSC was established at a 4:3 aspect ratio in 1941 because that matched the standard cinematic frame of the time, which had been established a decade earlier as the "Academy ratio" of 1.37:1. The move to 16:9 TV may be seen as a more belated effort to keep television matching the movies' shape, especially important when the TV set is the most common way movies are seen. For more see Schubin in the references below.)

Cinephiles, technophiles and, more generally, snobs like to say that they prefer the version that best reproduces the artist’s intentions. This is the most commonly heard defense for preferring widescreen video. It sounds nice, but there are problems. Enough to make a list.

1. The artist’s intentions might not include watching a movie on a TV at all.

2. The artist’s intentions often cannot be known, and even if they tell you their intentions they might be wrong.

3. The artist is actually many people, not one. In a collaborative medium, different artists often have their own intentions. Whose do you follow? (The studio releasing a video is the “author” for legal purposes, and it is often the studio’s intentions for videos to fill the 4:3 screen.)

4. The artist’s intentions at the time of production might be different from those of the time of a video release.

5. The artist may have multiple intentions, and these might run up against one another. For instance, let’s say filmmakers intend for small details in the frame to be visible. Let’s say they also intend for the whole 1.85:1 frame to be preserved. When I watch their movie letterboxed on a 4:3 television, some of the details they intended me to see are not visible because the image is quite small. When I watch the same movie in a fullscreen version and the image is bigger, the details become noticeable and I recognize what I had missed, but now I can’t see the sides of the frame and the compositions seem weaker. Neither option follows all of the artists’ intentions; each one is the result of a tradeoff. Those who favor widescreen in every instance should keep this in mind.

Cinematographers often say that you cannot frame effectively for more than one ratio, but they typically “shoot-and-protect” for 4:3 because they know that many viewers will see a 4:3 crop. This means that the sides of the frame, which are visible only in the theater and in a letterbox video, are treated as less significant than the center. Filmmakers call the areas that won’t show up on a 4:3 TV screen “fluff.” Even if they intend for the widescreen version to be the better option, it would be wrong to say they don’t intend for their work to be seen in 4:3.

Since the mid-1990s, some television programs, like many movies, have been shooting for multiple aspect ratios. This began in anticipation of HDTV sets with their 16:9 (1.78:1) frames. Television producers knew that their shows would be seen in syndication or on video in the future, and that the televisions of the future would be widescreen. (16:9 was established as the aspect ratio for HDTV in 1983, though filmmakers would have preferred if a wider standard had been adopted.) The X-Files was among the early examples of a show to frame in widescreen in anticipation of the future. By 2000, when ER began to letterbox its images for the 4:3 broadcast, DVDs had introduced viewers to the variability of aspect ratios and the “cinematic” connotations of this look were well established in the general public. Within a couple of years, television programs were letterboxing all over the schedule, on major networks and boutique cable outlets and netlets like the WB. Critics often greeted the widescreen ratio as an obvious improvement on the boxy traditional television frame. Tom Shales, for instance, wrote that widescreen more accurately reproduces natural human vision. Networks were apparently wary of taking this step, worrying about alienating the average viewer and anyone with a small set. So the shows that got letterboxed were much more likely to be upscale, quality shows like The Sopranos and ER. John Wells, ER's showrunner, explained the move to letterboxing as a strategy for distinguishing his show as a "classy project."

When TV on DVD became such a huge phenomenon, episodes of programs that had originally aired fullscreen became available in a different format. For instance, the first season of ER is on DVD only in 16:9 widescreen although it was not seen that way originally. Perhaps the creators of ER always hoped to be able to show the widescreen version but I doubt it. This is speculation (I haven't found a description of the gauge and framing of ER in its early years yet), but I’m educated-guessing the way ER was shot was on Super 35mm film (a standard gauge in TV production in the 90s) framing principally for 4:3 and protecting for 16:9. The “common top” aperture below means that both the 4:3 and 16:9 framing have the same frame top, but that the (green) 4:3 frame is slightly longer vertically and the (red) 16:9 frame includes the fluff on the sides.



The shots below from the pilot episode seem to have extraneous lateral space, and at the same time, the bottom often seems unfortunately truncated. In medium shots, often a pair of hands is near the bottom frame line. If I'm correct about the way ER was shot in the beginning, more of these hands would have been onscreen in the original broadcast. Regardless, on the 16:9 DVD image, they're not well framed. In all three of the scenes here, a doctor-patient encounter is unfolding in which the doctor's hands are working, caring for or comforting. The hands are important to the way the scene's story is being told. In the middle scene with Dr. Lewis (Sherry Stringfield), she has just told the patient that he has cancer and will probably not survive. Composed for 4:3, the figures would fill the frame more and there would be more balance between two areas of interest--their eyes and hands. We might focus more of our attention on the framing of the patient against the hot light illuminating the X-ray of his diseased lung. So why was this show released on DVD in a widescreen version? Maybe the artists intended it that way.





I imagine these shots the way they were seen originally looking something like this:



I imagine that the red-tinted portion was on my 4:3 screen in 1994, including that thin strip on the bottom that I imagine has been lost in the new transfer. The non-red areas on the sides were certainly not seen originally. If I had access to the original broadcast image, of course, I would do a comparison but I'm not even sure that the fullscreen image is the one being seen in repeats, and I don't know when to expect this episode to air again. (As far as I can tell, only TNT has repeats in my area, and right now they're on 2005 episodes. If I'm wrong, then the bottom frame line wasn't cropped from the original transfer, and the difference is just that the sides have been added.) The easy availability of the DVD version and the difficulty of accessing the 1994 broadcast version mean that the 16:9 image will endure as the one most people see for as long as DVD and 16:9 are standard formats. It will be the way the show is most available to scholars and fans alike. Yet my desire to recapture lost time (among other things) tells me that this new version is not improved.

As a case for comparison, consider another quality drama trying to look cinematic, but one which began after the 16:9 frame had emerged as a consumer option and aesthetic standard. Lost debuted in 2004, the same year as the ER season one DVD was released. It is shot on 3-perf Super 35mm film, which is standard Super 35 film but with a frame three instead of four perforations high. This is a format ideal for shooting film to be seen on HDTV because its aspect ratio is precisely 16:9. (Super 35mm exposes a wider frame than regular 35 because it doesn't save space for an optical soundtrack. Since TV has no need of this, Super 35 is a standard format for TV shot on film.) The widescreen image suffers no vertical cropping when converting 3-perf from film to widescreen video. But in airing the show on its standard def broadcast, ABC prefers full frame, which means we lose the portion of the image on the sides if we don't have HDTV. In considering these frames from the first episode of Lost, it's obvious that the production was very careful to keep significant information in the 4:3 frame. It's hard to say which is the primary aspect ratio and which they're "protecting" for. The characters who are the subjects of a shot are never framed against the edges. Everything you need to see is in the safe zone. Which aspect ratio you prefer might be dictated by the shape of your television. It's hard to say what the 16:9 adds aside from that cinematic feeling and the satisfaction that every pixel in your expensive new set is being put to work. I suppose seeing more of the space of a scene adds something, but more isn't necessarily more.







There are no inherently good or bad aspect ratios. Beautiful and horrid pictures can be composed in any shape. But the shifts in conventions of picture shape over time are fascinating evidence of the way social, aesthetic, and technological developments intersect and influence each other. New media technologies make different ratios into viable options for producers, but these technologies are products of social and aesthetic forces and in turn influence the culture of image-making and reception. ER won praise in the 90s for being unconventional, for being more cinematic than the typical TV show. Its steadicam shooting by Thomas Del Ruth certainly influenced many movies and TV shows. It did this working in the 4:3 shape. Retransferring it at 16:9 is supposed to add aesthetic value, but this only works if you buy into the aesthetic and technological superiority of one ratio over another, willy-nilly. The choice to release the video in this format may have as much to do with a sense of audience demand for images to fill their new 16:9 TVs--16:9 to better reproduce a cinematic frame--as with an aesthetic consideration about the value of one framing or another absent external constraints. It may be the product of a preference for one shape over another for reasons that probably have less to do with the possibilities of expressivity in widescreen than with the prestige and legitimacy that have been attached to cinema ever since television replaced it as the dominant mass medium.

References (that aren't links):

John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992).

John Calhoun, "Treachery in the Tropics," American Cinematographer (February 2005), 44-48. (re Lost)

Chris Probst, "Darkness Descends on The X-Files," American Cinematographer (June 1995), 28-32.

Mark Schubin, "Searching for the Perfect Aspect Ratio," SMPTE Journal (August 1996), 460-478.

Tom Shales, "Vital Signs: 'ER' Still Full of Life" Washington Post (16 November 2000).