Internet Archive
Once again the Internet Archive delivers the goods. Check out this amazing documentary by June Steel about Edward Kienholz's retrospective exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1966. I first discovered Kienholz thirty years later in LA at this 1996 retrospective of Kienholz’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This exhibit blew me away, and may very well be the most powerful exhibit I have visited to date.
Image from Roxy's Installation
Kienholz’s (and this refers to both Edward and his wife and long-time collaborator Nancy Reddin Kienholz) sharp social critique, crude yet affectionate vision of humanity, accompanied with an insanely detailed and textured attention to things, to stuff, makes viewing his assemblage and installations a kind of being. A being similar to occupying the darkest, most hidden spaces of our culture. It is almost as if you are sneaking into a crime scene or stumbling upon the long abandoned movie set of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Their mix of everyday, found materials and horrific human mutations within the most realistic of spaces makes him the perfect b-movie artist in my mind, yet he is far more than that. I kind of think of him as the contemporary of folks like George Romero and Tobe Hooper.
And I haven’t even gotten to the documentary by June Steel yet, which is an absolute ball to watch. She does an excellent job of capturing the opening of this show at the LACMA which was surround by controversy, particularly given the graphic nature of Kienholz’s most famous works which the documentary takes you brilliantly, including Roxy’s (1961-62) (an installation of a brothel –a masterpiece of the highest order in my mind), Back Seat Dodge ‘38 (1962) (a truly sensuous and disturbing piece), The Illegal Operation (1964) (an early artistic critique of backroom abortions), and The Birthday (1964). Be sure to check out the part of the documentary where the film crew gets the different reactions from the white and black patrons responses to Roxy’s (the Brothel installation) , it is a brilliant moment in film more generally.
I have to say it, this is a must see!
Ours is by no means a monopoly on dark times. I came across this audio of Bertolt Brecht being “interviewed” at the House for Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings on October 30th, 1947 on this awesome Internet Archive blog post. The questioning by the committee is frightening, and while Brecht’s answers may at times seem comical (as they did to the audience of the hearing), I can’t begin to imagine how frightening this interrogation must have been after what he saw happen to his own country on the National Socialist party.
Yet, the fact that Brecht testified at all in from of this committee was controversial:
Initially, Brecht was one of 19 witnesses who declared that they would refuse to testify about their political affiliations. Eleven members of this group were actually questioned on this point but, as Brecht later explained, he did not want to delay a planned trip to Europe, so he followed the advice of attorneys and broke with his earlier avowal. On 30 October 1947, he appeared before the committee and testified that he had never actually held party membership.[55]
He never returned to theUS after that “trip” to Europe, and was blacklisted from Hollywood. He seems to have made an interesting figure at the hearings nonetheless:
During his appearance before the committee, Brecht wore overalls and smoked an acrid cigar that made some of the committee members feel slightly ill. He made wry jokes throughout the proceedings, punctuating his inability to speak English well with continuous references to the translators present, who transformed his German statements into English ones unintelligible to himself.
The Internet Archive delivers yet again. Enjoy a grim piece of American political history and satirical drama:
Download An excerpt from Brecht and the HUAC
Well, I have been sucked into the UMW Blogs vortex. The first week or so just thrills me to no end, people start coming out of the woodwork, and I have fun commenting, reading, and getting a sense of what’s in store. it also makes me marvel just how much cool stuff is happening all around campus, and the syndication framework really bring that into sharp focus (but more on this in technical detail in my next post).
So, I have met with almost twenty faculty during the first week of classes alone about UMW Blogs, and this project seems to really be generating some serious interest and excitement. The utility and imaginative power of such a framework is becoming more and more apparent, or at least I think it is (but don’t trust me). I spoke with five different classes about the system this week, and had four workshops on UMW Blogs for faculty—all of which had very healthy attendance.
So, this post is not so much about the consumerism behind RSS feeds and UMW Blogs, but rather one particular class I talked with this week. American Studies professor Krystyn Moon is teaching a course on Consumerism this semester, and she had a brilliant idea for using blogs for their studies: have the students collaborate on a shopping blog, not unlike Gizmodo or Cool Hunting or Uncrate, wherein they can examine and inhabit a contemporary form like blogs for mediating consumption. So, I gave them an overview of UMW Blogs on Wednesday, but started the discussion talking about the Internet Archive, and all the amazing resources that lay in wait for them. As I tried to navigate to archive.org to give them a quick sampling, the network began to choke on campus (and choked it did for most of the first week). So, I thought my moment to get them hooked came and went.
But, but, but, but, this weekend I figured why do I need to be there to show them what’s there? They all have blogs now, and they all feed into professor Moon’s class blog, so why not just post the quick possibilities of the Internet Archive on the course blog? That would be easy enough, and it provides me the possibility of sharing resources centrally for any specific class without being their necessarily. Blogging for classes as a form of support/presentation? I love that!
Anyway, here is my post to the class on Industrial films dealing with Consumerism at the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archive:
As I mentioned on Wednesday, the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archive may prove a really rich source for you over the semester.
Check out the videos under the consumerism tag on the Prelinger Archive tag cloud.
Note: The videos may take a minute or so to load.
There is “In the Suburbs,” a 1957 advertising sales promo film extolling 1950s suburbanites as citizens and consumers.
Download In the Suburbs
Here is a reel of classic 50s and 60s television commercials.
Download Television Commercials 1950s-1960s
Or the two part series “Consumers Want to Know” from 1960.
Download Consumers Want to Know, Part 1
Or even the strangely bizarre and gendered “Consuming Women” (1967).
Download Consuming Women
Or this 1955 gem “A Word to the Wives” about two women who trick their husbands into buying a new kitchen.
Download A Word to the Wives
Anyway, enjoy the Archive.
Jim
How much to you love it that the Prelinger Archive has a tag cloud now?
I thought this was pretty cool, the Internet Archive blog has a recent post on the process they follow to digitize vinyl. And they share this information all in the name of preserving and distributing ephemeral culture. Nothing like an organization that preserves some of the coolest stuff on the net throwing people a quick guide for digitizing their own records. Talk about sharing the love. I don’t know, maybe its just me, but the Internet Archive is really something special.
Well, Antonella Dalla Torre’s Italian 202 class had its first annual La Mattina degli Oscar (The Morning of the Oscars), and it was quite a special event. Good food, everyone well-dressed, and the culture was first rate, now that’s Italian! The occasion was a celebration of the recent work this class put into creating a series of pretty impressive Italian Mashups for their final projects.
The rules of the game were pretty simple:
- Each group had to use freely available, public domain clips from the Internet Archive to create a narrative.
- They had to write the script in Italian and get it approved.
- They were expected to perform the dialogs with passion.
- Finally, they needed to subtitle the entire film in Italian (most of which range from 2 to 3 minutes long)
The project seemed like a really fun experiment from what I could tell of the classes overall reaction this morning. There was a lot of laughter and kidding once the films were finally screened. Which is a good thing given the tight deadlines and intense collaborative work forced upon the students over a two week span at the end of the semester. I have to hand it to the class as a whole, they met the challenge with gusto. And I particularly have to hand it to Antonella for following and engaging so many of the conversations in regards to teaching and learning in our current moment (some of which happen in her dining room!) and framing out an impressive, pointed, and very powerful example of coalescing various media, languages, and cultures to give rise to some extremely fun and challenging projects. Bravo!
Below are scanned versions of the official “Oscar cards” for each of the five major categories which are followed by the actual mashups: 1) Best Film, 2) Best dialog, 3) Most creative, 4) Best Special Effects, and 5) Best soundtrack/music
You can also see higher-quality versions on the class project blog “Il Mashup.”
Alien Pizza (Best Italian Film)
Maria! Maria! (Best dialog)
Libidine e disonesta (Most creative film)
La specie femmina (Best Special Effects)
La storia di Giovanna (Best use of music)
Finally, the last and mashed installation of my Dawn of the Dead (1978) series which took far more technical and creative energy than I originally imagined. The idea behind this experiment was simple: create three different videos that present a critical examination of the social/political commentary about consumer culture embedded within Dawn of the Dead using three different video-based approaches. Oh yeah, one more thing, all of this was to be completed in three days.
The first take was a simple, edited argument in which I juxtaposed clips from Romero’s classic horror film. The second take simply added my own running audio commentary on these selected clips from the movie. Two days, two clips, no problem.
This take, the third take, the mashup, threw a bit of a wrench in my work flow (that’s for you, Andy 
). I labored over this version far longer than I anticipated, which in the end says something to me about some of the formal elements and challenges of video more generally, but the demands of imagining and executing a mashup more specifically. For the other two takes I had the argument in my head from having seen the film so many times, and analyzed it in my usual way, i.e., informally, idiosyncratically and questionably.
Yet, the mashup was far more demanding. I wanted to take the mall footage from Dawn of the Dead and mash it up with some of the public domain resources available on the Internet Archive. I found two good marketing films for shopping centers (Shopping Can be Fun (1957) and In the Suburbs (1957)) and was planning on using both, but here is where the difficulties began. After watching all three movies a number of times to find moments that might work, deciding on clips, and then editing them down, I found that the most important element for framing my own commentary in this mashup was going to be a consistent narrator and background music. This ultimately led to me to limit the “straight” narrator and documentary footage to just Shopping Can be Fun. A choice which meant I had to abandon some amazing commentary and narration from In the Suburbs.
I think this is illustrative of the mashup process, it is all about framing a narrative, making editorial choices, and, in my case, working creatively within the very specific limitations of new media. I’m not sure if limitations necessarily lead to interesting creative side effects (my mashup’s a case in point ), yet the technical, time, and found material limitations meant that I wouldn’t be able to do whatever I want (the death of Hollywood in my mind). I was forced to recognize the restraints, compromise, and produce.
For example, my limited understand of effectively editing and manipulating audio led my to simplify the sources, and helped me recognize immediately what I need to do to create a better mashup next time (and there will be a next time!). I am fully aware that the version as it stands now is mediocre at best—this is a “b” blog after all—but I really enjoyed the creative stimulation, despite the fact that I need to work a lot harder to hone my technical and formal approaches to what should be understood as a new way of framing an argument using the archives of our culture as the creative canvas.
More than that, however, the idea that I might be able to galvanize an idea or reaction by re-working these cultural artifacts is pretty cool. Mashups might be understood as the imaginative re-orchestration of culture through sounds, images, and that depend upon, as much as they diverge from, the history of narrative. A perfect medium for the future given the multi-modal internets we inhabit on an ever increasing regular basis.
I just came across this beautiful, nutty video mashup on Sean Comerford’s blog titled “Alien Pizza.” Sean was in Carole Garmon’s Video Art seminar last semester and did some pretty amazing videos. This semester he is taking Italian 202 with the ever wonderful Antonella Dalla Torre who has introduced a final assignment that asks the class to take videos from the Internet Archive and mash them up into a two to three minute clip that creates a narrative featuring Italian dialogs they perform and record separately then dub onto the movies. Each of the mashups will also be subtitled with those dialogs in Italian so that the project incorporates both the oral and the written elements of the language.
They just started the project on Monday, and from my brief time in the class today, they all seemed very excited about the possibilities afforded by the fusion of the Internet Archive and their unbounded imaginations. Sean is working with two others on the project, and I think “Alien Pizza” is just a mashup test run they threw together without the dubbed dialogs and/or voice over. I’m not sure if Sean is the sole author of this video, but I’ll try and clarify that shortly.
In the meantime, however, be sure to check out the thrilling results —I personally find them astounding. What I find so remarkable is that a mashup project like this demands focused attention not only to the details of the particular linguistic components of the assignment (oral, written, grammatical, etc.), but also to a more abstracted creativity, playful collage, and a strong command of both musical and visual narrative to achieve the desired effect. Integrating all these elements together seamlessly looks far easier than it really is, and making it look easy is often the tell tale sign of a carefully crafted narrative. Alien Pizza hits the mark on all these points, and must have been as fun to make as it is for me to watch. Enjoy a far out slice!
Download Alien Pizza
I couldn’t resist this one, but more seriously I find myself constantly coming back to the Internet Archive, and constantly being blown away by what I find. Now, maybe I am biased towards video, and obsess over all things film history. I have been registering several people’s interest in mashups from various angles, Doug Symington was wondering about the curricular possibilities here and Tony Hirst imagines through the process of finding resources here. I believe some of the more immediate brewing interest comes in the wake of Brian’ Lamb’s masterful presentation at the NMC Mashups Symposium (or as Samuel Beckett might say, in the wake of the Wake). A presentation that both Alan Levine and Chris Lott do an excellent job of framing here and here. More recently (as in this morning 
) I discovered randy Thornton’s post about “The Adventures of Bollywood Blackboardwala,” a great series of short videos that use subtitling to turn these Bollywood clips into a hilarious narrative about BlackBoard’s draconian business practices. Very fun stuff.
So, with mashups in the air, I do what I always do, return to the Internet Archive and find resources I want to mashup, but never get around to —but this will change! The other night while thinking through a project I will be working on with a forward thinking Italian professor, I came across over 100 classic film trailers on the Internet Archives in the SabuCat Movie Trailers Collection. And, I had a ball, I found the original, hi-resolution version of the High School Hell Cats trailer (a version of which is linked to above on YouTube). There was also the Babes in Toyland (1934) trailer — a Laurel and Hardy classic for the ages which I always knew by the title March of the Wooden Soldiers. And then there’s Attack of the 50 ft. Woman (1958), Double Indemnity (1944), Invasion U.S.A. (1952), the Harryhausen classic Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and a truly bizarre trailer for a film I never saw (but I am dying to now) titled Baby Doll (1956), check out this trailer (and fair warning it is offensive on numerous levels).
So, given this list you might figure I’d said enough, and by all counts you would be right, ‘cept my own. After watching a bunch of these trailers, I followed a link to the SabuCat Collection which promised over 60,000 film trailers. When I got there I realized that they were a business that offered high-resolution transfers from 35mm prints of thousands of movie trailers. I was a bit disappointed, figuring I had just hit the online movie trailer El Dorado.
Yet, all was not lost, for there was some interesting information I found on the site that made the trip out of the Internet Archive a bit less distressful to my psyche. Namely the following copyright information regarding movie trailers that I was unaware of:
Can I use Trailers without being concerned over Copyright? Within certain limits, yes. Here’s the story…
Trailers for movies released before 1964 are in the Public Domain because they were never separately copyrighted. The law at the time granted the owner 28 years to file a copyright registration.
1963 + 28 = 1991
Clearly, time has run out to register this material. Some might argue that since the trailers frequently contain the same material that’s in the movie, and the movie is presumably copyrighted, that this would cover the trailer as well. However, the trailer is published (run in a theater) before the movie itself is published. Thus, the trailer requires a separate copyright, and the scenes contained in the trailer are in Public Domain.
Note that all trailers, regardless of year, until the late 80’s, are O.K. to use if they contain no copyright notice. This does occur, although infrequently. For example, the trailer for “The Shootist” (John Wayne, 1976) contains no notice. It is therefore O.K. to use.
According to the couple that runs SabuCat, a majority of the trailers for movies made before 1964 are in the public domain. That’s a lot of film footage free to be mashedup by the people. Moreover, if a film up and until the late 1980s doesn’t have a copyright notice it is free to use, I wonder if anyone has done the research to find out which films since 1964 have the copyright notice, and which one’s don’t.
So, it seems like there is a tremendous amount of footage out there pre-1964 9and otherwise) that is free for the mashing up. Now that’s Open Education!
Now it’s time to work on a presentation for Faculty Academy 2008 (inspired by DJ Lamb) that tries to imagine how faculty might use these resources, which means I get to play and have fun —thanks go to Brian for the inspiration and Martha for the license!
Figured I’d start the week off right and play with some public domain video from the Internet Archive. I set a couple of clips (Babies on Parade and Television Commercials: Telephone) to the mellifluous sounds of one of my favorite bands from the early 90s: Slug (not to be confused with the West Coast rapper). Slug was an experimental noise band that did some awesome loops, re-mixes, and just downright good noise. Enjoy the discord!
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