Master Hands, A Video Mashup Round Table

Great, great project. I'm flattered to be asked to comment.

These videos did what a good mix or mashup should: tease out and make explicit some of the tacit, multivalent subtexts of the original text. So Bonnie, for example, in about a minute, distilled the original clip down to its homosocial core -- "MASTER," with hot flaming things going into holes, all to a T. Rex cock-rock soundtrack. Or Anthony showed us this relentless engine, hands on the clock approaching midnight, and tall buildings dwarfing humanity, all to equally relentless, nauseatingly sinister doom-music.

Let me also add that the initial 'Master Hands" clip was to me so sadly depressing -- this past of men in charge, working like ants in a colony to make things, being lauded heroically, and the 'thing' they're making being this car culture that has ruined humanity and the planet. It's a good thing you didn't ask me for a video contribution, as mine would have just been all the flame footage from the original clip, along with all the clips of car crashes I could find, real Warhol Disaster Series stuff, very high morbidity factor.

I am, then, much less sanguine about the ability to re-figure, re-cast the master narrative of technology, which is something I'm getting, in part, from Richard's video when he reads art -- Eminem, Willy Wonka, the kid conducting the virtual symphony, even the Stooges (yes!) -- into the narrative, trying to make imagination and aesthetics predominant, blurring imagination into reality. Or Jeff, with the gesture I so want to believe in: turning the whole thing into a guild sort of economy based on craft. Jeff's video reminded me of all those wonderful Mr. Rogers' segments when he would take his neighbors watching at home to see how factories made candy or crayons or something, trying to put a human face on the industrial/capital machine, trying to gentle technology and the economic empire.

Jody offers an interesting alternative: a kind of Benjaminian wholesale substitution of a bunch of small, found little narratives, rescued from the trash or thrift-shops, in place of the official master-plot. (But Jody, I can't get out of my head the idea of watching a bunch of other people's home movies being like the main character in Cheever's story 'The Enormous Radio,' who sits in her apartment all day listening to her radio, which magically lets her tune in to all of the other apartments in her building, and which ultimately depresses the hell out of her, listening to their sad lives. But I guess home movies are more upbeat?)

Oh, there's one more thing I'd have cut into my mashup, the scenes from Kubrick's 2001 where we're revealed as just violent apes using the bones of the dead for our tools.

All,

Thank you so much for the opportunity to be involved with this project!

I was able to watch all five of the videos on Sunday night and was immediately struck by the idea that I wanted my first response to be in video as well: having walked up and listened for a while, I wanted to join the symbolic action in this audio-visual, Burkeian parlor. And so I contacted Jim Brown, who welcomed me to do so. Thanks, Jim!

It is probably important to recognize immediately that my mashup was articulated under much different terms from those to which it responds. First, I was informed by each of these other wonderful mashups, which were each created by authors who could not look over each other's shoulders in the same way. Second, mine was conceived and created within a self-imposed 24-hour time limit.

I'll have plenty more to say about each of my peer's mashups; however, for the moment, I'll let my mashup do the talking.

For now. :)

And so, here is my response.

http://enculturation.net/files/Halbritter-MachineryOfProduction.ogv

Cheers!
bump

Another thing I've been mulling over concerning this project, which goes to the very heart of the project itself and systemically spreads from there, is the phenomenon of the use of a certain kind of found footage: that old 'official' footage concerning technology. Can't tell you how many films I've seen, done by folks in the field, which draw on old clips of typewriters or early computers or old TV's or any traces of tech-past.

It's become such a received gesture now as to be a trope. I'm not in any way judging here; just curious to get your thoughts on the persistence of this strategy, which seems endemic to how academics do film.

One of the things I have learned to appreciate--and loathe--over the past decade is that I tend to watch movies as a movie maker. Of course, this decade is simply layered onto the previous 25 years of being a song writer and the marvels--and damage--that did to my appreciation of music.

My first instinct upon reviewing these 5 videos was to have at the raw material as well. I really get to know a movie when I take it apart, mess with it, take some bits, throw others back, and put it back together again in some fashion or other. It's during this process that I find things that are useful, question authorial choices in the original work, and find bits that I learned from documentary maker Ken Burns to call "little darlings": eye- and ear-candy, shiny things, stuff you really want to use even if it's not terribly relevant to your own use.

And so, having had my way with Master Hands, I thought it may be useful now for me to go back and see how my peers used the bits that I've come to know more intimately, and in this portion of my response to look for the writerly moves and decisions that I can begin to read into the five wonderful--and wonderfully unique--videos crafted by Richard, bonnie, Jeff, Jody, & Anthony. Along the way, I'll try to track their influence on my video response. This exercise has created its own little dialect of a genre--one emerging from this isolated group of symbolic actors. Patricia Bizzell has talked about the "grapholects" of writing. What we see emerging, I think, are any number of audio-visual grapholects that are inscribed by at least 1) the viewing and auditing habits, 2) the writing histories, and 3) the imaginations of the individual audio-visual writers who use these a-v grapholoects. Furthermore, these grapholects, since they are realized in concrete texts, seem to be tied as firmly to genre as they do forms of communication.

The five texts offered here are representative of five voices within the a-v grapholect of this very cool mashup experiment. Having now watched each of them, stolen ideas from them, and then carefully inventoried their assets, I'll talk about the writerly moves I see in each and put those in relation to writerly choices I routinely make--or not--expressed, always, with the envy I have for folks who either see/hear the world differently from the way I tend to or who express how they see/hear the world differently from how I tend to, even though we seem to share a base-line perspective. Or both.

Richard Marback:

Richard's writing strategy seems to be guided predominantly by juxtaposition: by moving from one sort of presentation to another. We move from Quest for Fire to Master Hands interspersed with old steel engravings of ranges of motion and gestures of the arms and hands. Then the section of the Flint Plant sit-down--and the jubilant song & dance of the striking workers--is juxtaposed w/ the Three Stooges' goof on sit-down rebellion. All of these political and filmic gestures are then juxtaposed against scenes of metal stamping in Master Hands which segue seamlessly to nearly identical shots recreated in Eight Mile (2002). We then move to the video advertisement for Master Hands DJ gloves--likely the nexus of the gestural theme of the work. We then juxtapose to a new era of Detroit--scenes and music from one of the recent Chrysler ads that promote automobiles imported from Detroit.

Throughout, the edits are hard, in that there are few visual cross fades and there are few places where we see or hear any sorts of blending of scenes or audio-visual assets. There are a few exceptions: in the intro, the 1936 Master Hands music plays behind the Quest for Fire clip. In the middle of the work the MH music blends with the Eight Mile music; however the visual track maintains hard cuts. And in the final minutes, we have quick juxtapositions between both visual and musical works. However, this editing strategy seems to be more summative than synthetic--as though the work is accounting for its moves rather than attempting to make new meaning from this new tempo of juxtaposition.

Overall, the work seems to have been motivated by the film Master Hands--or possibly the Master Hands product ad--as all of the other decisions, including the opening and closing quotations that refer to "gestures," seem to go through the scenes and themes of the Master Hands film: workers, work conditions, automobiles, machines of production, and fire.

I find it telling that Richard includes only film credits--no music credits for his work. The music throughout is directly tied to the clips, which at times presents quite hard aural transitions when the aural and visual boundaries of the clips co-occur.

I stole the theme of worker disquiet from Richard's movie in my mashup response. I also stole the dance of the assembly-line that Richard uses toward the end of his work--but then again, this footage shows up in several mashups. How can it not? It is total eye candy. I also am sure that I was influenced by Richard's term "gesture" as a way of entitling Master Hands' illustrations of skilled craft--a moniker that seems to say something special about the individuals, but only as organs within the industrial body. When the factory dies, so die the organs. So, thank you, Richard.

The authorial style of this work and the wide range of audio-visual assets makes me imagine that Richard would do well on Jeopardy.

bonnie kyburz:

Music. Bonnie's work, for me, is defined by her three primary musical selections, which seem to run the show--evident by the 30 seconds of Dandy Warhols that run beyond the final credits and also evident in the 25 seconds of black screen that accompany the introduction of NIN's "Terrible Lie" and the final 60 seconds of mostly black screen that precede the end credits. Each of the three, recognizable songs move through cycles of completion--they fade out at the ends of song sections (choruses, verses, bridges).

I am struck by how many portions of bonnie's visual track are eye candy: flames, sparkles, and the spinning wheels that we all seem to have ripped into our mashups. The one piece of total eye candy that only bonnie uses is the turning of the white-hot, metal coils at @ 2:50 in her mashup. Brilliant!

Both bonnie and Richard use pieces of media for which they do not have express permission to use and publish. I am glad they do. And yet, I am not quite so brave to make these authorial choices for my own works. I hope their works are not subject to corporate bullying and/or objection from individual copyright holders. Bonnie uses substantially long portions of music that record companies, song writers, artists, and/or heirs of Marc Bolan may decide to question, should they learn of this use. I would hate to see bonnie's or Richard's works pulled while they argue for their fair uses.

I stole Bonnie's music-video approach to this assignment; however, I used only one piece of music--one that mirrors her central musical work, the industrial track, "Terrible Lie," by NiN. Master Hands screams industrial to me, so that's the term I used to search CC Mixter for a piece of music that I knew I could use and publish without first seeking permission. I also, specifically, didn't want recognizable music in my mashup. I wanted the genre association, but not specific personal memories that would be attached to pieces of known music.

I also wonder, why bonnie has chosen to list her music out of order in her credits.

The authorial style of this work makes me want to have access to bonnie's record collection!

Jeff Rice:

Beer. Jeff and Jody both seem to me to have made movies that have lives of their own outside of this exercise and outside of the influence of the Master Hands footage. I wonder where Jeff got the idea for his film, but am left to assume that he was working on a movie about beer that was shaped by the assembly process--by the various technologies of craft beer production. Jeff's subtitle, "Mashed," (and his Facebook posts!) makes me think he was well on his way with this idea before he ever considered a moment of video stock. That said, there are clear analogs between the movie Jeff offers and Master Hands. However, the black and white Master Hands footage from 1936 seems to be in support of the otherwise 21st-Century beer production footage.

Jeff's music choices seem to guide his video editing in a way that is unique in this group of movie makers. The seemingly schizophrenic editing of footage that includes shots of beer barrels on the brew floor surfaces as the visual equivalent of the musical loops present in the accompanying music by The Apples. I love this idea and want to try it myself. Very cool.

Unlike the previous mashups, Jeff's has a title: "Craft Hands."

I stole a lot of Master Hands footage from Jeff's work: the guy who looks into the eye pieces, the big spinning wheels, the old guy watching his boring machine, the one set of female hands that I recall from Master Hands.

I also stole some of Jeff's story-telling approach; however, rather than use my own words, as I assume Jeff has done, that appear in text slides, I chose to steal language from both Master Hands and from other films to tell my story. This authorial choice also argues, for me, that Jeff has his own idea about what this film is trying to be. As such, I think this gives me the best clue into the authorial confusion that Jeff expresses at the end of the movie: "a project in progress." This work is not done. And I am happy to follow Donald Murray's advice to "glory in its unfinishedness." The rules of this exercise seem to have given birth to an really great idea for a movie. However, the rules of the exercise mandated that Jeff retain "the little darlings" of the exercise--footage from Master Hands. I will be surprised to see that footage in future versions of this movie as the project progresses. And I most certainly hope it does.

I've offered an awful lot of guesses in response to Jeff's work--mostly because his credits don't tell me much--in fact, nothing beyond the titles for the two musical works by The Apples. So I am left to assume that Jeff shot all of this video--even though some of it seems to come from advertisements for craft beer and a video made expressly for Russian River Brewing Company. I haven't searched for any of this footage, but wouldn't be surprised to stumble upon some of it on YouTube.

The authorial style of this work makes me want to follow Jeff on a pub crawl!

Jody Shipka:

Jody's work, like Jeff's, seems to turn to Master Hands as garnish. Conceptually, artistically, rhetorically, this work could lose each and every second of footage from Master Hands and not be compromised. That is not to say that Jody's use of Master Hands doesn't fit or work--it most certainly does. It just means that Jody's work, like Jeff's, seems to live well outside of this exercise--it serves another master, so to speak. And that's a claim that is pretty easy to back up. The star of Jody's show is her house of treasures--not the treasures of MH--and Jody's remarkable photographic genius and visual design ingenuity.

Also like Jeff's offering, Jody's has a title: "other people's lives: a projection." And though it does not mention the word in its title, as does Jeff's, "craft" defines Jody's work. Each and every frame of this movie is crafted. Jody's still photography becomes the home to video action, which is always subordinate to the still photo--contained within it--assigned a territory within its dominant boundaries. As such, Jody brings still photography and design to life in a way that rivals Ken Burns' effect of moving within still photographs. Only Jody's effect doesn't morph still photography into video action; it locates action within a static, visual field. And I love it. Worse: I envy it. Completely.

I could write a book on this piece, but I won't--at least not here. This work is a treasure trove of authorial choices. I'll just say here that I also love how Jody's work pushes at the boundaries of mashup and its reliance on/value for "found" assets. I love that the timbre of Jody's authorial voice is characterized by media she has appropriated in the form of abandoned and sold authored works--photographs, home movies, and machines of production whose time to shine has moved on. Jody finds her voice in and through these assets. They are both her muse and her musings.

And let me say this: I can't imagine how many hours went into this production. If we see a film clip, it likely has been found at a yard sale, re-found in a box of stuff, fitted into a movie projector that was also found at a yard sale--and brought back to life, projected onto a screen that has been otherwise set into a visual scene, and then videotaped within this new visual design. And that's just one 15 second clip in this 10 minute movie!

Oy.

OK, so let's move on to all of the stuff I stole from Jody. I stole, wholesale, Jody's appropriation of the massive industrial gears and wheels from MH as the visual analog of film reels. Beautiful. Brilliant. Valuable. Stolen. I also stole Jody's use of audio from other films--some that we never see--that forward her argument. Even though we hear Jody's speaking voice narrate in the beginning, we mostly hear her authorial voice as articulated in found narration.

Most likely inspired by Jody's mannequins, I used robots to narrate my movie--machines that replaced the skilled narrators of yesteryear. Even as Jody re-situates video within still photography, I let my robots narrate the opening text slides of Master Hands and then let them have their/my way with that language to mashup those words to create new, counter meanings. I stole this mashup approach from Jody. Thank you, Jody.

Even Jody's credits are part of her audio-visual design.

The authorial style of this work makes me want to quit my day job and do nothing but make movies.

Anthony Stagliano:

Collage. If Richard's work is a model of juxtaposition, Anthony's is a model of collage. Most frames of Anthony's nearly six-minute movie feature layered information in both the visual and the audio tracks. Where others cut between shots, Anthony blends them. We often see three or four visual tracks simultaneously even as we hear some blend of all of their associated audio. In fact in his credits, Anthony indicates only video assets: seven of them. As such, I feel as though his work, like that of bonnie & Richard, emerges from the Master Hands footage. This film is the center of the work.

Anthony's pacing is really unique among his peers. It . . . is . . . slow. Deliberately so. Often we see layers that simultaneously show clips in regular speed and clips in dramatically slowed speed. Combined with the quiet, low register, droning of one of the musical layers, the pacing of Anthony's mashup evokes Stanley Kubrick--especially in the slowed motion of the spinning wheels of production (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey). Anthony also relies on footage of clocks and an increasing sense of spinning throughout his movie.

I stole a lot of clips from Anthony's movie. I also stole his use of the opening text slides--the one's I had the robots narrate. Anthony uses some of these words from MH as his title: "Master Hands command the great machinery of production." And because Anthony's work reminds me of Kubrick--and specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey--it likely influenced me to use robot narrators who would eventually start talking for themselves. Of course, Richard Marback's use of the female robot from Metropolis probably nudged me in that direction as well.

The authorial style of this work makes me want to experiment with layering translucent video tracks--something I've never played with in this way.

In all:

The most interesting thing that I notice across these movies is the eye candy that gets the most play and the conspicuous irregularity of the credits. As we grow into this new (to us) way of writing and of doing our business, we will need to come to some consensus about how to give credit to those from whom we have stolen: a form of honor among thieves that will greatly aid in the efficient operation of scholarship--itself a machine of production.

To close, for now, I want to thank these fine folks for all they have given me to steal.

Jeff, you pick the beers. The first round's on me!

Cheers!

There's this moment in bonnie's vid that I find really compelling. It's the minute between 3:18 and 4:18 where there is just this blinking light. I like it because it exposes and, um, capitalizes on, the kind of glitchy aesthetic of web video. It's blurry and pixelated, but it's flashing to be beat of the music. One gets the idea that the larger and louder you played it, the better it wold get. And we just have to sit there and wonder is something wrong, here? Is it a light? Is it molten steel? It is getting closer? Is the video playing correctly? Then, what does it mean? Also, it's, like, 1/5 of the entire vid. I think of it as a rhetorical glitch, not in the sense that it's an unwanted or accidental moment. It seems very clearly constructed. But I think of it as a rhetorical glitch because it seems to want to be read as an intentional representation of a temporary breakdown of a self-correcting system. The VO says "The evolution will not all be peaceful. It can't be." And in this moment, we could apply those words to the auto factory, the auto industry as a whole, the original video, the mashingup of the original video, the moment in our own profession(s), or the evolution of our species. We're not sure what's going to happen after that minute...there's an elliptical 4-5 seconds of darkness and silence. Then the mood totally changes "Get Off" by the Dandy Warhols kicks in, but the flashing light comes back. We're just going to have to live with the glitch for a little while longer. I'm cool with that.