Film Adaptation: A Form of Remix?

During my visit to the movie theatre over the weekend, I was presented, as per usual, with a series of trailers for upcoming films. One of which, entitled ‘Red Riding Hood’ I found to be quite interesting as it was a remake of the traditional children’s story "Little Red Riding Hood". This particular adaptation was not an exact replication of the original, however borrowed a number of recognizable themes and characters. Although primarily based around a love triangle between a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) and two men, the film also incorporates the traditional character of the wolf, and the several key props (red cape and picnic basket) that anybody who read the story would be instantly familiar with. I started to think about this concept of ‘borrowing’, and concluded that this, as well all other film adaptations, could be considered remixes. Whether the director chooses to stay true to the original text (original text meaning a story, a poem, another film, a real life event etc.), or use the general idea as a platform for a new concept entirely (for example ‘Red Riding Hood’), he/she is creating a remix of someone else’s work.

Just as any other remix (whether it be a song, a fan fiction video, etc.), the viewer walks into the film adaptation with preconceived ideas and judgments based on their opinion of the original work. For example, if someone had never seen the story prior to watching ‘Red Riding Hood’, they would interpret it much differently than someone who had childhood memories of reading Little Red Riding Hood. Despite these differing opinions, the director of the film adaptation is creating a NEW meaning from an old text. Rather than sticking with the original ‘girl walks to grandma’s house and encounters a wolf’ storyline, the director recreates meaning by incorporating a love story, by giving the setting a historical context, and also by creating new themes and characters entirely. The debate over which one is better – an original or its ‘remix’ – is up to the individual viewer.

Here is a link to the trailer for those of you that are interested in watching! Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8V3cHdSC4

Film Adaptation: Form of Remix?

During my visit to the movie theatre over the weekend, I was presented, as per usual, with a series of trailers for upcoming films. One of which, entitled ‘Red Riding Hood’ I found to be quite interesting as it was a remake of the traditional children’s story. This particular adaptation was not an exact replication of the original, however borrowed a number of recognizable themes and characters. Although primarily based around a love triangle between a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) and two men, the film also incorporates the traditional character of the wolf, and the several key props (red cape and picnic basket) that anybody who read the story would be instantly familiar with. I started to think about this concept of ‘borrowing’, and concluded that this, as well all other film adaptations, could be considered remixes. Whether the director chooses to stay true to the original text (original text meaning a story, a poem, another film, a real life event etc.), or use the general idea as a platform for a new concept entirely (for example ‘Red Riding Hood’), he/she is creating a remix of someone else’s work.

Just as any other remix (whether it be a song, a fan fiction video, etc.), the viewer walks into the film adaptation with preconceived ideas and judgments based on their opinion of the original work. For example, if someone had never seen the story prior to watching ‘Red Riding Hood’, they would interpret it much differently than someone who had childhood memories of reading Little Red Riding Hood. Despite these differing opinions, the director of the film adaptation is creating a NEW meaning from an old text. Rather than sticking with the original ‘girl walks to grandma’s house and encounters a wolf’ storyline, the director recreates meaning by incorporating a love story, by giving the setting a historical context, and also by creating new themes and characters entirely. The debate over which one is better – an original or its ‘remix’ – is up to the individual viewer.

Here is a link to the trailer for those of you that are interested in watching! Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8V3cHdSC4

Movie trailers - premature, determinist remixes?

(SPOILER ALERT: In this post, I discuss the movie 127 Hours, involving some revelation of key moments of the film. Moreover, as I'll get to, I found the second linked trailer to be an offensive spoiler of the film itself, so, with this in mind, navigate this post with caution) :)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how the process of watching movie trailers can really affect the process of watching a movie itself, and the case of the fantastic 127 Hours, which I watched yesterday, proves a definitive example.

The film was marketed by two very different trailers, one which I saw countless times before watching the movie, and one which I (thankfully) saw after having already watched the film itself.

Here’s the first one, officially referred to as the ‘teaser’.

This, to me, proved the perfect example of a trailer setting up the audience for the experience of watching the film while ultimately divulging little in terms of content or plot – the bulk of the film starts right when the trailer ends - thus serving to pique interest without excessively slanting expectations.

In contrast, here’s the second trailer.

As you can see, the second trailer focuses extensively on the process of Ralston’s actually being trapped by the rock, and the eventual ‘testament to the human spirit’ interpretation of the film. This shift in focus of the trailer was likely reactionary to early controversy of audience members fainting due to the graphic content of the film, with Fox attempting to stress it as a tale of human perseverance rather than an exploitative story of entrapment and torment.

Nonetheless, this second, more ideologically guided trailer irritated me for not only spoiling what I found to be the best part of the film (Ralston’s on camera ‘confessional’) but also shaping the interpretation of the film for viewers too overtly. The joy and emotional impact of the film for me lay in experiencing Ralston’s stream of consciousness ‘journey’ alongside him and arriving at the interpretation boasted by the trailer as a process, rather than coming in with such a preconceived agenda in mind.

I found this to be relevant to the blog because we’ve talked extensively about the process of remix as something done after the fact: taking texts that are understood as ALREADY KNOWN by audiences and, through juxtaposition and editing, ascribing new meanings or interpretations to them. That said, a movie trailer is, by definition, a remix of the film itself, but in the case of the latter 127 Hours trailer, it seemed almost as if that process of recontextualizing meanings was being done in advance rather than after the fact.

I don’t presume to take a hard and fast position on the ethics of remix and its reprocessing of meanings and readings of texts, but I did think it would be worth speculating on premature textual remix, and whether it almost defeats the purpose of reworking the ‘message’ of a text when it is done before consumers have had the chance to experience the original text itself. I know this might not be the best example necessarily because 20^th Century Fox assembled the trailer in the hopes of luring in larger audiences, but I did find it worth speculating on how intrinsic being retrospective is for remix.

Similarly, to momentarily cite Walter Benjamin, I started to wonder whether remixing past texts might jeopardize the intended ‘aura’ or meaning for those who aren’t already familiar with it as a text in the same way that I would have found 127 Hours entirely ruined for me had I watched the latter trailer before seeing it. Should there be some kind of 'spoiler alert' in remix practices to suggest acquiring awareness of the source text first, thus maximizing how the new textual messages were coded through differentiating from the initial ones?

Now, a “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” remix of 127 Hours? THAT I’d love to see.

Race Remixed

There was a great article that I read this morning in the New York Times that I think goes along great with the Gilroy reading for this week regarding race. The article in the Times entitled "Race Remixed" discusses new senses of identity and how the United States is currently in the middle of a demographic shift. Within the first portion of the article, it is said that "many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity" which relates to what we discussed today in lecture. The modern world is considered to be western and white, so often our understanding has lead to a certain counterculture that I think is very interesting to study. It is said that most Americans consider themselves to be a single race, and even President Obama considers himself black, even though his mother was white. With the growing number of mixed-race Americans, more and more people are checking more than one box on forms such as the racial census and its causing quite a debate. You can click here to check out the article in its entirety, and is accompanied by a video along with some images and other multimedia. Enjoy!

White Panda

White Panda is a group of two individuals, Tom Evans (Procrast) and Dan Griffith (aka DJ Griffi) who have become famous for creating remixes from old and new songs alike. The group is based out of Chicago and Los Angeles. White Panda formed in early 2009 and has released a series of musical remixes that usually feature an American Top 40 song that has been remixed with another artist and/or an older song.

An example of this is their remix called Drake and Diane, which you can access here. This song mixes Drake's song "Over" with John Mellencamp's song "Jack and Diane" to create a mashup that showcases both the hip-hop/rap music Drake creates with the American pop-rock image that Mellencamp endorses.

White Panda, like many other remix artists, brings into question issues of ownership and authorship. It can be questioned whether the material White Panda is creating can actually be called their own. The sense of belonging that is created with an original work is now questioned, as is the concept of the original work itself. Do the remixes that White Panda is making constitute what it means to be original? Or are the remixes White Panda is creating simply just an act of repetition and recombination of old forms? These are some of the questions that can be asked of Remix Culture.

A friend of mine attended the White Panda concert in London, ON this past weekend and noted that the audience that was in attendance at the concert was different than she had expected. Does this mean Remix Culture is reaching out to a different group of people than what the original music was capable of? The groups that listen to Drake and John Mellencamp can be said to be very different but when the two types of music are combined, does a new audience and consumer group form?

To listen to more of White Panda's music, their whole discography can be downloaded (for free!) here. It's great to see that remix artists such as White Panda seem to be more about sharing their talent and getting their voice and their creations heard rather than purely publishing their content for monetary and economic value. As danah boyd states in her article "Blogging Out Loud: Shifts in Public Voice," remix is a bi-product of cultural consumption and one that expresses identity development. By allowing the public to download their music for free, White Panda is able to experience the reactions of the public and from these reactions, they are able to figure out where they sit in the realm of cultural consumption and how to remix themselves into popular culture in a more meaningful way and at a more successful level.

Dance Remix

I was recently going through some old e-mails and I found a couple neat youtube videos from years ago. Both consist of remixes and both have the common theme of dance.

I'm sure many of you have experienced the first video, "The Evolution of Dance", which you can watch here. The video consists of a mashup of 20+ songs, starting with Elvis and in consecutive order, ends with Jay-Z. The dancer on stage, Judson Laipply, demonstrates the most relevant and recognizable dance that can be associated with the song and the era communicated through each song. Because this one mashup samples songs in a timely fashion, it tells a sort of story of not only the music that was popular throughout the years, but also of the way popular dance has evolved over time. Laipply does a fantastic job of demonstrating these dances, and what makes it so entertaining for us to watch (even though we did not live through the years in which most of the dances were popular), is that through repetition, we are able to recognize and identify with most of the dances. This particular mashup of song and dance acts as a quick look-back and we can gather a general idea of the musical changes that have happened over time.

The other remix I discovered is one with a similar theme. It it is a series of dance scenes from movies, complied together to one single song, 'Footloose'. You can watch the video here. This video is a compilation of scenes from films from the 1940's with Fred Astaire tapping, to Mary Poppins, to Sandy and Danny dancing in Grease, to Jessica Alba hip-hoppin' in the 2003 movie Honey. What is so interesting about it is that even though all of these scenes are from such different eras and are in such different styles of dance, they all work together to go with the very catchy song. The overall social commentary of this video is more about the last 80 years of dance coming together and successfully working together to create something very entertaining.

I thought that you would all enjoy these videos and that they could be a good basis for topic of discussion regarding remix and dance.

An Online Life

I, like, 98 percent of the rest of Canada's population (this may be a slight statistical exagerration) spend a significant portion of their day online for various reasons. 1) Because I am a student, a lot of my readings are online, as well as a lot of research material 2) it connects me to my friends and family--e-mail, facebook, blogger, tumblr, etc. 3) it entertains me (hello youtube!). While I truly believe that the internet is an amazing thing, and do not want to give it up any time soon, I have started noticing some things which are, for lack of a better phrase, scaring the crap out of me.

Whenever I feed my facebook addiction and log on (my other browser is loading facebook as I type) I notice that the ads on the side of my homepage all pertain to things that I frequently look up. Ads for obscure movies I want to see, upcoming book releases from my favourite authors, discount jewlery--it's all there, begging for me to click on it and spend. It's weird, and a little freaky. I started thinking about why my facebook would be sending me ads that appear to be catered specifically to me. And then it came to me: I never, ever, ever read the terms of agreement for anything that I sign up for. I know its bad, but I feel confident saying that most people are in the same boat as I am. Who really wants to read dozens of pages of absolute boring rambling? Not many. Well, maybe I should.

I always knew the internet was not the most secure of places to share personal information, and we've all heard the horror stories of viruses, hacked e-mails, and credit card theft. So, I've always been careful about my personal info on the net. But these cassy-specific ads are tangible proof that it is just so easy to give away bits of personal business online and not even realize it. Facebook knows what kinds of ads to give me, because I gave it permission in the terms of agreement to follow my facebook activities--what pages do I like? What groups do I search for? It's creepy, weird, kind of genius, and completely my own fault.

But despite all of this, to facebook I will go as soon as I click "publish post".