I Screen Studies

A trailer for the new Michel Gondry film Be Kind Rewind has been posted to Yahoo! Movies. After the disappointment of The Science of Sleep (website better than film?) this looks promising.

Not least because it plays right into the zeitgeist – user generated content, mashups and participatory culture – and more importantly for me because it offers a new angle on proteurism.

What do I mean by proteurism and the proteur? In essence, the creation or representation of ‘amateur’ content by professional producers in fiction – from lonelygirl15 to the use of ’surveillance camera footage’ in films such as Red Road, Snatch (opening titles), Clubland, Sliver, from ‘home video’ in films such as the forthcoming Australian flick Lake Mungo (shot by current AFTRS MA cinematography student John Brawley) to ‘community tv’ in films like Wayne’s World. Conceivably this could also include politicians’ forays onto YouTube or MySpace, and fake police interview footage in films like Buttefly Kiss or the Australian television series Dangerous.

My thoughts on this began from this article in Webvideouniverse entitled ‘4 tips for getting the user-generated look’.

This is a developing research interest, and an extension of my interest in the diegetic screen – where films or television programs incorporate scenes in which characters watch television, or go to the movies – which has its own roots in the ’story within a story’, mise en abyme or frame story. As well as literally being a (television, cinema, computer) screen within the diegesis, the diegetic screen can also sometimes be a window, sometimes a mirror.

Whichever, the diegetic screen may have a commentary function, or counterpoint narrative action, or simply be a neat way to solve practical issues like the staging of conversations (where one character is reflected in a mirror so that it appears that both characters are looking at or towards the camera), or provide an opportunity for characters to watch the performance of significant action (my most immediate reference point here for windows in particular, and to a lesser extent mirrors, is the first series of Deadwood which I’ve just finished watching. I was struck by how much of the show is taken up with characters watching from windows or balconies – particularly Swearengen and Tolliver, but also Alma Garrett). The diegetic screen also has origins, I would suggest, in the intent of much early cinema to act as a form of ‘moral instruction’, for example DW Griffith’s film The Drunkard’s Reformation (1909) in which the drunkard of the title goes with his daughter to see a dramatisation of Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Dive) which ends with a drunkard’s death. I came across this reference through Tom Gunning’s article ‘From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality: Moral Discourse and the Film Process in Early American Cinema’, (in Lee Grieveson and Peter Kraemer (eds) The Silent Cinema Reader London: Routledge, 2004, pp.145-54). Gunning writes:

The husband is overwhelmed by the play and, returning home, vows never to drink again. The last shot of the film shows his family, now united in love and temperance, basking in the light of the parlour hearth.

While there is a huge amount of scholarly work which takes as its focus the terrain of the produser (to boost Axel Bruns’ sitemeter again), there seems relatively little attention given yet to the way in which professional producers are using the amateur aesthetic. In part this relates to the ‘documentary look’ which so much contemporary television seeks to cultivate, and as in the case of Dangerous where documentary production processes and practices (ie. much smaller crews) have become common in drama production.

What is the earliest film example of characters watching a film?

Are there other types of diegetic screen?

Working towards a typology of proteurism.