Francesca Coppa

She put me there! Freely available online, with an extra supplement of vids so you can see what she’s talking about. The origin of the project was her encounter with guys talking about the amazing thing they’d invented in the 1990s, machinima (which does have a history of its own but was “invented” the same way you and I invented fan fiction in our childhood bedrooms, which is to say reinvented). Coppa takes us on a tour of how vids are made and make meaning to preserve the specific history of live media vidding, particularly as a history of art made by “women and those who caucus with women,” with its incredibly technically complex origins first in slideshows then in VCR vids then in computer vids. I loved the descriptions of VCR vidding, where each machine had tricks you had to learn to synchronize the audio, and you could only do that at the end—the video had to be completely in place first, done sequentially instead of with a timeline you could work on bit by bit, so if your synch failed that was it. Vidding, with its focus on concentrated emotion, has similarities with poetry (as well as with music video). It puts big emotion back into modern narratives that often end “hours, days, or even years of ever-intensifying drama … with an ironic smile and a slap on the back.” While “denial of catharsis is an economic stratagem” to extend the series, it refuses what fans want. This is also connected to the feminization of emotion in modern Western culture; “what emotions male characters do have often come literally at the expense of women and children, which is particularly hard for the female spectator.” So, “[i]nstead of the textual violence and misogyny that result in canonical man tears, vidders create feelings and emotions using the techniques of poetry in the Aristotelian sense, which includes music, drama, rhythm, and movement as well as language.”

A vid is situated by the video source, not the music; the music then “serves as the vid’s blueprint, its road map, its code and key….The vidder uses all the information in a song—lyrics, melody, beat, tempo, instrumentation—as scaffolding upon which to build a montage that reveals (which is to say, creates) aesthetic and narrative patterns in the footage. In a vid, the ear tells the eye what to see.” Then, the spectator’s job is to perform a close reading: to understand how they come together. This is like poetry, as is the fact that “vids have a rhythm that is not separate or extricable from its narrative meaning.” And “just as students can be frustrated by poetry’s frequent allusions to nightingales, larks, and Grecian urns, vid watchers are expected to recognize densely packed signifiers both within the visual source material and, increasingly, to the history of vidding itself.” Vidding is an embodied critical art, designed to affect the body and create feeling, not separate from but part of the pleasure of analysis. If traditional film “creates a culture in which men are tested and women are investigated,” vidding reverses this: it’s men “who are strange and oh so mysterious, in need of intense collaborative scrutiny” and women who (in the editing chair and otherwise) are tested.

The relationship between the vidder and her technology “gives subtext to many fan vids about cars, planes, spaceships,” etc. And vidders made gendered use of technology, often deliberately hiding their works from the mainstream, often to avoid being laughed at or (they feared) sued. Because they weren’t made for the market, vids could focus on different things, and this non/anti-market status was connected to gender both directly and indirectly: “It was far more likely for a male science fiction fan to end up a science fiction magazine writer than it was for a female media fan to end up being a Hollywood screenwriter or director. The scale of the industry was totally different.”

Today, with the rise of YouTube, “vidding is now a tiny subculture lost in an enormous sea.” Content ID controls what can be seen, and the algorithm favors vids that “have a very mainstream sensibility” and people who release content on a rapid and regular basis, which is difficult for many vidders. “YouTube might follow up a Sherlock vid with an interview with Benedict Cumberbatch or a panel about Doctor Strange,” whereas “the algorithm downgrades you if someone stops watching YouTube after one of your videos.” “YouTube fan vids tend to be flashy and fast cut; they tend to feature textures, overlays, distortions, and speed changes, sometimes to the point of parody. These are all things that will help the vid survive, even if an individual vidder doesn’t realize the technological implications of these choices.” This is also enabled by modern software, which is simultaneously affecting the aesthetics of mainstream entertainment. Plus, the ability to make GIFs is also drawing people who might otherwise vid to “isolate, emphasize, and fetishize particular filmic moments, like a significant look or the touch of a hand.” This brings us “back to where we started: with the pause button, the single frame, the stilled image as a way of disrupting the propulsive force of narratives and shifting power relations.”

I loved it, and not just because I’m in it!… (más)

There’s nothing I don’t love about this book, including its reliance on fair use. The cover shows popular characters as modern archetypes—the Demon Hunter, the Billionaire, the Rock Star, the FBI Agent—and I love that we can recognize Mulder’s mouth and Dean Winchester’s jawline and Tony Stark’s jawline along with John Boyega and Benedict Cumberbach’s faces. Coppa provides introductory essays and further reading for each of the stories, which are chosen to illustrate specific types of fan fiction, tropes, and themes in responses to popular culture. The stories are both accessible and really good, which can be a hard trick to pull off. Among my favorites, Rheanna’s Lunch and Other Obscenities (ST:Reboot); Koi’s Three Fairy Tales of Smallville (SV); Astolat’s Queen of Spades (Bond), and Glockgal’s Supernatural, aka the Boys in Arizona (SPN). But those are just my favorites because of my own personal connections; even without that, the essays are illuminating and the stories powerful.… (más)