Cinema Babel: translation, subtitles, dubbing

Due to a variety of reasons interior and exterior to film, foreign film viewership increased dramatically in the North American market during the three decades after the second world war. Despite the fact that Hollywood enjoyed hegemonic control of the market, foreign films increasingly found North American audiences over the course of the twentieth century. On a fundamental level, film has always been about spectacle and visual tourism. The audience bears witness to the previously unseen, the voyeuristic, and the fantastic, and every image is always-already presented in a manner which makes it exotic. It should be little surprise that viewership of foreign films is informed by numerous market concerns which have come to define what is visible as foreign, as well as the development of a critical and production discourse of national cinema as a commercial export item. Cinema production became a more widely accessible means of cultural expression as the development of increasingly affordable camera technology has allowed film cultures to develop within economically marginalised groups and countries. This process has spawned fertile cinemas representing and advocating for the liminal and transgressive spaces within the dominant Western culture which self-identify as necessarily political – African-American cinema, queer cinema, feminist cinema, the numerous diasporic cinemas, punk and DIY cinema, etc – as well as the emergence of domestic film production in developing nations. Each of these marginal cinemas enjoys a similarly exotic relationship to mainstream cinema audiences as do foreign films. Furthermore, each of them renders their subjects into an object of resistence to the oppressive gestures of identity interpellation contingent with mainstream culture. The development of affordable production equipment allowed the proliferation of these cinematic voices while the development of affordable home viewing systems fertilised a market for their consumption, which would not have been possible when film viewing was limited to theatrical exhibition. Regardless of the means of dissemination, the drive for representational authenticity remains fundamental for audiences and critics of foreign films. Much of the critical discourse concerns the process of authentically presenting a foreign film to a domestic audience, and issues of language translation and distribution tend to be understood within a framework of market influences and institutional power structures.

Several critics highlight the fact that there is no standard manner of translation for the importation of foreign films, and there is ultimately no critical consensus as to which method produces the best results. If film as a visual medium is itself a language, how does the process of subtitling or dubbing a film alter its reception? Technological processes for translation, with the result of either subtitling or dubbing the film, further complicate syntactic and aesthetic difficulties inherent to language translation. The dubbing of a film is typically a process as technologically and logistically complicated as the initial sound recording. In addition to a script translation, voice actors and directors are required to interpret the script within the visual framework of another actor’s performance. If executed properly, a dubbed film can retain the narrative coherence and performative nuance of the original while allowing for a larger viewing audience. Of course, due to the expense and level of production value required to achieve a good dub, most distributors of foreign films produce dubs of markedly lesser quality. Indeed, English-language dubs of foreign films were often of such poor (and laughable) quality that many critics prefer foreign-language films to be subtitled rather than dubbed. Subtitling a film is relatively easy and inexpensive to accomplish, but the process did present its own technological challenges. With a few notable exceptions, such as anime and arthouse audiences, most theatrical film markets demonstrate a preference for films which have been dubbed. Contingent with the ‘tourist’ conception of foreign film consumption which I outline above, these exceptions suggest that part of the pleasure of experiencing subtitled foreign films comes from the exclusivity attached to viewing the ‘correct’ version of the film.

A further element which rendered foreign films as ‘attractions’ for the marketplace was the fact that many of them were scandalously received, typically due to a controversy of representation.[1] When judged against their Hollywood counterparts, films from some foreign (principally continental European) cinemas presented controversial images and themes with a greater degree of naturalism and complexity. Foreign films were produced outside of the production codes which censored Hollywood efforts, and were often marketed for their sensational elements. The conception of foreign cinema as an agent which transgresses puritanical local moralities was perhaps most visible in films involving sexual themes and images, which by their nature inherently tend toward the spectacular in visual representation. Their consumption also represents the expression of an increasing cosmopolitan sophistication on the part of the well-educated and upwardly-mobile urban dwellers who were the typical customers of such exoticism.[2] As a result, the popular reception of most foreign films which were not easily sensationalised was largely limited to the arthouse market. For perhaps obvious reasons, the distribution system imported certain films which could be financial successful and excluded others which presented greater financial risk. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that the financial inputs required to distribute foreign-language films served as an agent which cultivated a particular conception of ‘foreign’ in domestic film audiences.

We should not attribute a negative evaluative gesture to the fact that, at a reductive level, foreign films are interesting to many audiences for their depiction of locations, actors, and cultures which are themselves exotic and thus pleasurably experienced as a spectacle. Certainly, the degree to which Otherness has itself been theorised within the rubric of pleasure has been well documented in many critical literatures.[3] Indeed, in this respect Abé Mark Nornes argues in Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema that the pleasure of experiencing Otherness is akin to “the ‘attractions’ of the early cinema” (22). Viewing pleasures associated with voyeurism and cultural tourism were certainly at play in bringing audiences to foreign film exhibitions. The exotic could be viewed from a safe distance and with a uniquely objective cleanliness which packaged certain national and cultural characteristics while excising others. However, we must put this rendering of the exotic into a historical perspective which allowed European film to dominate North American experiences with foreign film. Other national cinemas would only hesitantly be received by North American viewers, and remain in limited distribution largely through diasporic immigrant communities situated in large urban centres. The discursive project of the politics of identity are indeed allowing an increasing number of marginalised cinemas to become visible, and at least within specific interpretive communities the Otherness of the foreign is being mediated. Importantly, however, the ideation of Otherness is not itself without issue. As Bhaskar Sarkar points out in Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives, the danger inherent to such discursive models in relation to cinema is that they can often present Hollywood codes of production and reception as the normative mean against which all other cinematic practises are adjudicated and calibrated.  Indeed, national difference itself has been rendered into a product for export, as “national or regional cinemas are being globalised, not just in terms of financing and distribution, but also through the performance ... of national distinction as exotic otherness for a global audience” (136). A field of cinematic national stereotypes is continually ritualised and presented as cultural artefacts and character tropes.[4] Sarkar demonstrates that at times such stereotypes enter into the critical discourse as some critics are not able to see beyond their Eurocentrism. He calls for a discursive context for film studies in which cross-cultural analysis becomes truly relative and self-critical, and warns that “as long as the anxious discourse about cross-cultural analysis is predicated on the self/other dichotomy, film studies cannot hope to move beyond its implicit orientalism” (132). Film studies should indeed be self-conscious about its voyeuristic and ‘tourist’ tendencies by challenging the conception of a modernity which has already excluded and circumscribed the identities of non-Western subjects.

Thus in Sarkar, as well as in the work of many other critics of national cinemas, we can locate a desire to bear witness to the authentic. At the critical level, if not perhaps also at the level of the viewing public for foreign films, Sarkar implicitly rejects as inauthentic the process by which cinematic subjects are objectified and made into a viewing spectacle. It is the conceptual task of film studies to rationalise the ideation of film as spectacle with the fact that the process of rendering human subjects as spectacles is somewhat antithetical to the representational challenges forwarded by critics of identity politics. Rey Chow’s argument in A Phantom Discipline that cinema produces humans as phantom objects allows some degree of compromise in this matter. She argues that “the visual is no longer a means of verifying certainty of facts pertaining to an objective, external world and truths about this world conveyed linguistically” (1391). It is impossible for film to avoid its tendency for spectacle, and film studies must therefore examine the ontology of representation for the discipline to properly legitimise itself as a critical school and not simply be marginalised as a pedagogical or demonstration tool for other disciplines. The turn to identity politics in film studies is politically retrogressive, for “by insisting that artificial images somehow correspond to the lives and histories of cultural groups, identity politics implicitly reinvests such images with an anthropomorphic realism” (1393). One should not read into Chow’s iconoclasm a return to a position of ethical relativism which would allow racist or stereotypical representations of cultural difference to proliferate. Rather, her point that film images are always-already artificial and that human subjects depicted on film are phantom objects rather than real people is important in that it highlights an ontological legitimacy for film studies that was lessened by the fact that film had often been instrumentalised to service other critical projects.

In order for foreign films to be viewed, they must be imported. This process involves securing the legal rights for distribution and a financial investment in order to translate the film into the local language. Translation presents several conceptual difficulties to the critic. Most prominent is the fact that any translation, even an exceptionally accurate one, is a violence against the original text. The violence enacted is one of circumscription and alteration, as the semiotic play inherent to the original language is lost in translation. I wish presently to leave the methodological arguments about language translation aside and focus on one ideation of the violence of subtitling as stressed by Nornes in Cinema Babel. The fundamental project of his book is to suggest a translation process which plays with language in a manner akin to the original and for a translation to exist not instead of the other, original film but “in the other’s place” (178). Nornes suggests that the idea of an objective and accurate translation is a critical misrepresentation which feigns “completeness in [its] own violent world” (156). Fundamentally, translation is a negational enterprise, as the subtexts, inferences, and semantic games at play in a language are often excised to favour a clear, and often literal, interpretation of the text. Nornes uses examples from Japanese translations of American films to demonstrate that some translations ignore the political dynamics inherent to speech, while others focus on narrative movement at the expense of character development or thematic issues. We must however separate the violence of inadvertent meaning which precipitates from lesser translations from the premeditated violence which comes from attempts to render controversial films culturally acceptable. Nornes argues that many translations of English-language films censor content from the original film in order to render them more palatable to different markets. As was the case with many Hollywood films produced after the 1970s, it was “the whole flowery range of human speech” (216) which most often bore the mark of censorship. Fundamentally, Nornes posits that translation is a corrupting force, largely due to market forces which compel most producers to achieve less-than-optimal results. He favours subtitling over dubbing, implicitly due to the fact that the lesser production expense of the subtitling process allows more resources to be deployed to produce an acceptable textual translation of the script. His argument that dubbing is distracting due to the fact that it renders actors into ventriloquist dummies has merit, even though it avoids the support of an obvious critical parallel. In addition to its often comic effect, dubbing signifies an ontological difference with the original film. The ventriloquist act of replacing one voice for another renders the actor onscreen into a parody of the real. The viewer is placed into an abject and uncanny relationship with the cinematic human subject, who continually reminds the viewer of the illusory nature of the medium. The dubbed actor exists in a transitional space between human and non-human, life and death, subject and object.

Nornes’s suggestion that when properly produced the dubbing process can avoid this aesthetic weakness may be valid.[5] However, he fails to account for the use of dubbing as a sound production technique regularly deployed in domestic cinema, often to ‘punch in’ other non-synchronous acting takes or when the action depicted onscreen precluded a ‘clean’ recording of dialogue.[6] Highlighting the entirely negative qualities that result from an audience being distanced from dubbed actors does not allow for the fact that some poorly dubbed films enjoyed a great deal of popular success, although Nornes does point out that the massive popular success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is partially predicated on the fact that an English dub of the film was distributed as widely as was the subtitled version. Additionally, some films purposefully utilise sound dubbing to distance the viewer from the actor[7] or for comedic effect.[8] The pleasure experienced by devotees to certain genres such as the various Italian horror subgenres, Japanese monster films, and Asian martial arts films can partially be interpreted as a self-reflexive one. As these genres represent cinemas which have largely been provincialised as direct-to-video releases catering to niche interests outside of the dominant film and video distribution channels, many such films were hastily or poorly translated (usually dubbed). It is possible to suggest that a certain amount of viewing pleasure comes from the reception of these films in what Nornes would describe as a corrupt state. Indeed, part of the sense of exclusivity which serves to define fan allegiance to many cult subgenres involves the discovery of a transgressive pleasure hidden from or occluded by mainstream tastes. Many of the films in the subgenres listed above have lower-than-average production values, so a mediocre dub might not detract from a film but rather add a gloss of kitsch to it. Audience reception of a film might in this capacity be inadvertently improved by a poor translation rather than by an accurate rendition of the original script. In this context, a critical extension of Ien Ang’s suggestion in Living Room Wars that “communicative practices do not necessarily have to arrive at common meanings at all” (167) would allow the pleasure experienced by experiencing certain films by means of poor translations to be adequately conceptualised. It is therefore possible to require that part of Nornes’s critical project account for the taint of translation not solely within a negative evaluation as a compared to an authentic original, but also within a rubric which allows the taint itself to positively contribute to meaningful interpretation.

The international popularity of film dubbing, which more thoroughly damns Nornes’s claim that dubbing must by its nature render actors as ventriloquist dummies to the detriment of the film, is implied by Ravi Vasudevan’s analysis of Indian cinema in National Pasts and Futures: Indian Cinema.[9] Domestic distribution of Indian cinema presents a unique difficulty in that there is not a single unifying language in the country. Indian films undergo a translation process even before they are exported to other national markets. Vasudevan posits that dubbing is commonplace in India and allows films to be popularly disseminated across linguistic boundaries. Until the Indian film consumer, along with those of every other national and cultural context, is interrogated as to whether or not they view dubbing as a negative or inauthentic process, we must ultimately reserve subscribing to the universalising idea that dubbing inherently lessens a film. If, for example, we are to forward a criticism which accounts for the acceptance of subtitles and film dubs in certain film markets and not others, is it possible to locate preference for either along class divisions?[10] If dubbing is allowed within parody as well as within certain genres and film practices, should not its origination but rather its deployment be the chief concern for theorists of film translation? As a final critique of his work, Nornes fails to account for the fact that his arguments against dubbing remain valid only for live-action films. International viewers do not interpret dubbing to be an issue for animated films, attested to by the global popularity of certain animated characters[11] and animation companies such as Disney. It is possible that as computer animation becomes increasingly used in (especially non-action) films, audiences will come to normalise and accept film dubs.

To its credit, the point of Cinema Babel is not to deny the mantle of authenticity from films which are translated by being dubbed. Rather, Nornes wishes to promote the idea of a subversive practise of subtitling which seeks to dislocate itself from the conveyance of simple narrative information. Extrapolating from his argument about market compulsions, unique anomalies, such as Life is Beautiful, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Amélie, which achieve financial success in North America despite retaining the language track of their original production, signify for their audience a fashionable interest in a ‘more authentic’ form of another culture rendered exotic rather than a structural change in the consumption of foreign films, and that a conception of authenticity was of importance for the success of these particular films and not for a dubbed film such as Ong-Bak. Nornes’s analysis of the subculture of anime fan translations points to a utopia where translation, when developed outside of market compulsions, can achieve a pure hybridisation with the original. The basis for this logic is sound, but one must question why this democratic, ‘open-source’ process – which would ultimately free film producers and distributors from the labour and expense of translation and simultaneously allow the viewing of foreign films not yet subject to the market for translated films – is not more widely visible in cinema appreciation. Nornes’s argument does indeed have merit, but it must be interpreted within the limitations of its scope. Translation can often involve more than just audio cues and dialogue interpretation. While not within the scope of this present review, it should be noted in conclusion that more overt forms of censorship do indeed take place to render a film acceptable to a given market. Typically, scenes depicting acts of violence or sex deemed to transgress local obscenity laws are excised or altered.[12] Other forms of implicit censorship abound in productions which seek an international audience, and often take the form of removing or changing traces of locality such as distinct accents, geography, or architecture. It is likely that all of these elements in addition to linguistic translation serve equally to render films palatable to different markets, and they should therefore be included in a critical discourse of the conceptual interplay between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’.

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[1]         Regarding representation, I do not wish to suggest an ontological controversy but rather a moral one.  A comprehensive listing of the numerous transgressions made by foreign films would indeed be long, so the                    reduction of the field of controversy to scenes of nudity and the depiction of sex and violence will have to                    suffice. A short list of films which were notoriously received in North America include I Am Curious                           (Yellow), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Romance, and In the Realm of the Senses.

[2]         One can see a parallel between the popularity of many sexually-themed and visually titillating foreign films of the 1970s with the acceptance of pornography into the mainstream during the same period.

[3]         See, for example, Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge.

[4]         Witness, for example, the long cinematic history of coupling American action heros – brash and      charismatic individualists who persevere through physical effort – with reserved and intellectual British ‘sidekicks’, who often play professionals (often professors or doctors) or elders. Such Apollo and Dionysus figurations are common in adventure and fantasy films produced in America and Britain in the decades following the second world war.

[5]         For Julia Kristeva, the abject is situated outside of the symbolic order. Viewer anxieties elicited by                                       poorly dubbed films signal the trauma experienced by bearing witness to the violent removal of                                                 subjectivity from the actor rendered as object by the loss of his or her own voice. Thus, an effective dub                                 might allow a viewer to overcome this problem by returning to the viewer the illusion of the actor’s subjectivity.

[6]         A further example highly related to the theme of this present survey involves the importation into          Hollywood of foreign-language actors who are not fluent in English. Actors such as Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jet Li, and Arnold Schwarzenegger often redubbed their dialogue in studio with the help of vocal coaches and phonetically-written scripts.

[7]         See, for example, Felini’s Satyricon, which dubbed all of the dialogue and effectively alienated the viewer from the actors onscreen and thus problematised the representation of historical subjects.

[8]         Usually, these films are parodies of foreign film genres, such as Kung Fu Hustle.

[9]         I wish to invoke this article despite exorcising a reservation about the author’s ideation of “a woman’s                        film” (121) as an essentialised interpretive category.

[10]       This question is contingent with a reversal of class expectation, wherein the audience for subtitled films which tends to come from urban middle-class intellectuals and professionals demands a far less capital-                        intensive process of translation than the populist and more expensive dub. 

[11]       The popular American sitcom The Simpsons has been translated and exported to many global audiences, including a version of the show whose content is localised for the Québécois market.

[12]       Notable examples include the censored North American releases of Eyes Wide Shut in 1999 and Breaking the Waves in 1997.

Film Studies and Critical Disciplinarity

Film studies has proven itself to be a fully established member of the contemporary academic community. However, it is folly to assume that the legitimacy, present fecundity, or general institutional security of the discipline was in any way historically guaranteed. Unlike the objects of study in many other disciplines in the humanities and fine arts, film developed long after the establishment of the modern university. Film lacked parallels in classical and early modern scholarship and education. There was no immediate consensus on pedagogical approaches for the medium or the purpose of educating students in film studies. As a newly and continuously forming medium, there was no demonstrable sequence or progression from convention to transgression or from mundane to masterpiece. Indeed, for the first decades of its existence it was questionable whether film would be considered as a lasting addition to human cultural expression or would become marginalised as an interesting but intellectually irrelevant public diversion not truly worthy of scholarly attention for the articulation of its merits. For some critics, the evolution of film studies as a discipline parallels developments in the university and more broadly within society. Articles by Dana Polan, Haidee Wasson, and Michael Zryd examine the institutional development of film studies both within and exterior to the university. Polan and Zryd examine the institutionalisation of the discipline within the academic context, while Wasson elaborates on the success of the Museum of Modern Art in establishing itself as a film archive, distribution, and exhibition centre. For the purposes of this present review and to limit itself to the scope of the articles under examination, the maturation of film studies within America will be isolated from a wider narrative of film studies in other national contexts. Furthermore, this review will extrapolate from the above articles in order to tersely articulate a conception of the ‘object’ of disciplinary study, namely the archive or canon from which institutionalised critical practise can define itself.

The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.

As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.

The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.

Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment.

        Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.

A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system.  Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema.  Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).

To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.

Film Studies and Critical Disciplinarity (Notes)

Film studies has proven itself to be a fully established member of the contemporary academic community. However, it is folly to assume that the legitimacy, present fecundity, or general institutional security of the discipline was in any way historically guaranteed. Unlike the objects of study in many other disciplines in the humanities and fine arts, film developed long after the establishment of the modern university. Film lacked parallels in classical and early modern scholarship and education. There was no immediate consensus on pedagogical approaches for the medium or the purpose of educating students in film studies. As a newly and continuously forming medium, there was no demonstrable sequence or progression from convention to transgression or from mundane to masterpiece. Indeed, for the first decades of its existence it was questionable whether film would be considered as a lasting addition to human cultural expression or would become marginalised as an interesting but intellectually irrelevant public diversion not truly worthy of scholarly attention for the articulation of its merits. For some critics, the evolution of film studies as a discipline parallels developments in the university and more broadly within society. Articles by Dana Polan, Haidee Wasson, and Michael Zryd examine the institutional development of film studies both within and exterior to the university. Polan and Zryd examine the institutionalisation of the discipline within the academic context, while Wasson elaborates on the success of the Museum of Modern Art in establishing itself as a film archive, distribution, and exhibition centre. For the purposes of this present review and to limit itself to the scope of the articles under examination, the maturation of film studies within America will be isolated from a wider narrative of film studies in other national contexts. Furthermore, this review will extrapolate from the above articles in order to tersely articulate a conception of the ‘object’ of disciplinary study, namely the archive or canon from which institutionalised critical practise can define itself.

The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.

As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.

The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.

Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment. Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.

A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system.  Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema.  Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).

To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.

Notes

1.  Wasson discusses an unsuccessful attempt by the Museum of Modern Art to establish a travelling theatre      to counter this issue.

2.  “The shift to synchronized sound during the late 1920s further spurred the recycling industry, which                flourished in the wake of the uncountable silent films deemed more valuable for their silver content than          for their stories, styles, or stars” (127).

3.  “The HSB could maintain its image as a training ground for cool-headed professionalism while accruing          an important veneer of cultural sophistication” (111). See also Zryd, p. 187.

4.  Of course, one must remain conscious of the fact that music, literature, and the visual arts are also                  commodities with such emotionally resonant qualities.

5.  As an example, Frances Trollope published Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) as a                    travelogue of her negative experiences with American audiences. Her description of theatrical audiences        is informative: “The noises...were perpetual, and of the most unpleasant kind.... The spitting was                    incessant; and not one in ten of the male part of the illustrious legislative audience sat according to the            usual custom of human beings”.

6.   Some critics highlight that many of the technologies and communication practises which developed                 simultaneous to film established, in combination, a mode of public decorum predicated on the notion that       one’s private space was no longer rooted to a specific domestic location, but rather was portable and           could merge and cross-fertilise with public spaces. For example, see Raymond Williams’s Television:           Technology and Cultural Form, wherein he terms this process ‘mobile privatisation’.

7.  The MOMA audience was known to engage “in shouting matches punctuated periodically by objects             thrown in the auditorium” (126).

8. It is possible to hypothesize that many of these academics sought the excitement, the professional novelty,     and the intellectual freedom of working establishing and working within an emerging discipline.

9.  Zryd outlines the manner in which film graduates were being excluded from the industry due to market            contraction and union stipulations; see pp. 188-90.

10.  See, for example, Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.

The state of academic freedom in Canada

"The state of academic freedom in Canada" from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


Denis Rancourt, former University of Ottawa professor recently fired for refusing to grade his students, whose struggle has received national media coverage and whose firing is being investigated by the Canadian Association of University Teachers

September 18, 2009; McMaster University student centre

Electroluminescent @ New Harbours

Electroluminescent -- New Harbours Music Series Vol. 2 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


Christ's Church Cathedral, May 8, 2009

last-second-idea improvised dolly camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Electroluminescent, qzh, Throwaway Digital

today and the other one

The professors were dancing and it was a party that I didn’t like: the usual story. An old flame walks into the bar and conversation stops, at least toward me. They know us both, I thought. Everyone else was making noise with each other and some were dancing. I complained to my friends not in the room through my phone, and we all typed for over an hour. Steve and Michael and Mel and me. I typed that my own confrontational psychology was at fault. I wondered why some of the people dancing in the room with me talk about art but are offended by the life processes which often create it. Steve typed, you are beginning to ask the big questions of life because you have a qwerty keyboard on your phone now and are a Mr. because of it. Me phone no smart. Take long type stuff. I typed that it was research into being one of those fucks with a mobile. That was definitely your duck with a noble face, Steve typed. Ha :) that is predictive text for “fuck with a mobile face”.

In the room full of dancing professors, I began to laugh. I typed to everyone who wasn't with me, is my friend my phone or is my phone my friend? I don’t know, Mel typed. I typed, it’s really only myself that I don’t like, so I put everyone else in a bag. I’m so bored. I look at people having fun around me. They barely know how to entertain themselves let alone others. Mel typed that academics are as I describe, but I knew I was lying and really just being mean to myself again. Other people happily moved in circles and were smiling. Jesus, Mel typed. Come home. I want to buy a bike.

I found a conversation after putting my drink on the bar. Alyson was a nice girl, but in a photograph I made later some people would confuse her with a television and become mad at me. I went to the washroom and when I got back the bartender had stolen my drink. You’ll have to buy another, he said and I waved my hand once in his face from down to up and left.

I’m back in Hamilton and it’s raining. Mel phoned while I showered and I missed it. She had typed as well. Her message was black on white. Cadillac cruising style bike. Good for me? Please advise as per VM I just left. I called her and she said that she had a bike ready for her. She was part of a business trading community. Businesses trading services and sometimes goods to each other using the internet and no money. A restaurant wanted photographs of their food, and Mel quoted high. She had not found anything to buy with her credits until this bike. I don’t know what it is though, she said. You’re the bike guy, so I want you to come see it.

Mel and Noel came in their big black truck, and with me in the back we drove down James North. We stopped on Canon and parked at Pho. Across the street was the bike shop. We entered and Mel fell in love with a Dutch bike. The bike store guy said that all of the machinery was contained, so she could wear anything and ride it around. Just go to work in your work clothes, he said. Or you could ride to meet friends and have a drink without special clothes. Mel liked that she could wear a dress and the shoes that she was wearing with a potential for heels. It’s so hot, she said slowly. I’m fingering it in the ass. It’s my bike and I want it. Noel said that we should go look at the other barter bike, because Mel still had credits and we should see if it would be worth selling. I said that we should see if Bike store guy would trade it in. I like Bike store guy, Mel said. He’ll take it. We left the store saying that we would be getting a new bike for the bike store guy.

When we got east, we stopped at a Tim Horton’s and bought the usual. They gave us three coffees instead of the two Mel and Noel wanted. Mel had already paid with her card, so I sold the extra double double to a guy in the line behind us. He gave Mel one dollar fifty, so she earned five cents for the deal. I said that I worked for Tim Horton’s for four years and lived on my tips. The trader was in a strip mall surrounded by offices. On the second floor, no one was inside and two of the barter bikes were against the wall. They were a matching pair of Cadillacs. I said we could just ride these bikes away out of here and why is there no security at the barter. A minute later a woman came from a room and said hi. Mel told her that she would take the barter bike for girls.

I lifted the barter bike into the bed of Noel’s truck after he placed blankets against the metal. We drove back to the bike store guy and came smiling with the barter bike. I told you we would come back, Mel said. Now how do I turn this bike into that bike? Bike store guy laughed and looked on the internet. My friend Matt came from downstairs with grease on his hands. We talked and I went down into the repair floor of the shop behind him. Get your hands dirty, he said and handed me a derailer.

Mel came down the stairs wearing a new tshirt. I’m shopping, she said, and I need bags. She went back upstairs and picked out a saddle bag for the new Dutch bike. Matt said he thought the internet trading idea was a good one. Bike store guy unlocked the bikes in front of his store so that Mel and Noel could try them out. I went next door to Mixed Media to see Dave. We talked and he gave me some money for a CD of mine which had sold. Sweet, I'm up to 26, I said and watched a kid on a new bike fly past the window. I thought that he had grabbed a bike from next door as Noel was out riding, so I chased him down the street. He stopped when I said that he dropped something. I asked about the bike and he said that the bike was his so I took a picture and went back to see the bike store guy. He said it's not mine and went back to the internet.

Noel came back in the store after riding a black Dutch bike. I like the men’s bike, he said. I was sceptical of the Dutch, but now I’m sold. Look at the seat. It’s like a cloud. Hey, I hear you did some crimefighting there. Mel came into the store with the Dutch and said that she didn’t fit the bike, but that they could get one in her size by Monday. The bike store guy said that he would try to sell the Cadillac. Three fifty for the old new and a thousand for the new new. Mel was really happy and we went back to her place.

Noel offered me his bong and smoke which had come from a field. He threw chicken on the barbecue and cut up a pineapple for me. Everything burned as it should and was soaked in tequila. Noel insisted that I smell the food. Mel’s sister Rebecca came over and got dressed. She rehearsed her lines for the stand-up that she was going to perform that night. They were printed on paper like a movie script. Mel told me that it was funny the other night when she ran through her Q’s, including one who knew everybody and Robert De Niro. She called that Q on her phone and thought it was me. She told Q and not me to come over for a smoke. It took her ten minutes before she realized that she had called the wrong Q, but she was too embarrassed about using one Q for another to not bring him over. The part of the story that I already knew was when she called me. I came late and had to leave early. Q didn’t smoke pot, but had come early and stayed late. Mel was annoyed and wanted my Q to be above his Q in her phone so that she would not make that mistake again.

Rebecca was eating some of the cooked pineapple and spilled it on the counter. We laughed and she took some of the chicken. I can’t cook, she said. Do I have chicken in my lipstick? You don’t want me for a housewife. I don’t want a house wife, I said. I don’t like houses. She repeated the joke to her sister and I was ta-da but didn’t smile. It was almost nine. They called for a car and I had to go home. We said goodbye see you on the weekend, and I walked in the rain as they were driven to comedy.

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

New Harbours Music Series 2.2 - Electroluminescent

Ryan Ferguson has been performing as Electroluminescent for nearly a decade. His music draws upon a variety of influences including Krautrock, American minimalism, and the Osaka noise and improv scenes. Ferguson has spent much of 2009 on tour in support of his recently released album Measures (Black Mountain Music), which spent several months on the Canadian college charts.

Asked what he intends for the New Harbours performance, Ryan is adamant that Friday’s performance will be a unique one. “The cathedral sounds amazing. I’m interested in the way that sound moves around it. If you can get the sound up into the arch of the ceiling, it spills down the walls. I have wanted to play in the space since I heard about [New Harbours]. But I didn’t want to do my usual set in there. It’s going to be an all-synthesizer set. Sort of an ambient set. It’s a composed piece and not an improvisation. It will be specific to this night.” Ryan cites the building’s acoustics as being of particular interest to him. “I’m adding to the traditional PA rental for the church. I’m going to be running two stereo mixes around the cathedral and I’m going to add a sub as well, right in the centre. The bass frequencies are going to be at the very heart of the cathedral. I found that when Gasoline Gathers hands played there and they pointed their amps up to the ceiling, their sound fell down the walls and I found that really interesting. I want to see how I can get the sound to move around a little differently.”

The New Harbours Music Series has consciously sought to examine the acoustic properties of the many different instruments used by the performers. For Friday’s performance, Ferguson will focus on vintage synthesizer technology. “All my old stuff is coming. I’ve actually been drawing a diagram, where pieces are going to fit and where things are going to be inserted into the signal chain and stuff. I’m going to be using to Korg MS-10 and the Moog that I always use. And I’ll be using my Yamaha CS20, which is a dual-oscillator monosynth. Still no polysynths though. The other day, I say a Korg polysynth for about $500. Which is not a good deal, it’s about what you should pay for one. I was really close to buying that just so I could have a polysynth for this show. But I decided not to. The other synth that I’m going to use is the Roland MC-202, which is actually a sequencer, but it has a synthesizer section built into it. I have a Jupiter 6 that I was thinking of bringing, but it’s really heavy and cumbersome, and there are a lot of knobs and switches to figure out. I already have enough knobs and switches to figure out!”

New Harbours welcomes Ryan Ferguson as Electroluminescent along with Atlas of the Universe to Christ’s Church Cathedral this Friday, May 8, 2009 at 8pm, as part of the Art Crawl. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $5.

electroluminescent
atlas of the universe

Canadian ISPs begin to shake down their users during economic downturn

After reading Steve Arnold’s article concerning Cogeco’s new fees [Hamilton Spectator, April 2009], I cannot help but come to the conclusion that Mr. Arnold is either naive in his research or was hoodwinked by Cogeco’s PR efforts. Not only are several factual problems evident, but the tone of Mr. Arnold’s article suggests a degree of contempt for any Cogeco customer who voices dissent over the new fees.

First, some corrections are in order. Movie downloads are not 4GB each (except for some pirated DVDs). Standard definition films are typically 700MB. He is correct that many hi-def films are around 10GB in size. Importantly, I have to challenge Mr. Arnold’s suggestion that the only “heavy” internet users are those who download films for two reasons. There are many other net usage profiles that use similar bandwidth. I cannot help but wonder whether movies were singled out as the media continues to debate film “piracy”.

As an instructor at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, I have a degree of access to digital trends and usage profiles. Mr. Arnold claims that most customers are using less than the 60GB cap contingent with Cogeco’s average data plan, as it is sufficient to view “1.25 million web pages or ... 6 million emails.” There are indeed some users who use the internet of 2009 just as they did in 2000, when video hosting and telephony were relatively non-existent and file sizes were smaller. Yet, many webpages in 2009 contain streaming video content; for example, the average bandwidth for YouTube is roughly 150MB per hour. Furthermore, one can easily purchase more than 60GB per month in video and audio files from services such as iTunes. If a user wishes to upload video or photographs to an online hosting service such as flickr or vimeo, they will instantly become what Mr. Arnold calls a “heavy user”; I know of one artist who uploads at least 100GB of photographs from her home every month. Finally, education is rapidly deploying online through protocols such as WebCT. I can speak from experience that my students exchange many GBs of data for school projects.

The internet in 2009 is used for a great deal of legal software distribution, and file sizes rise nearly equal to the exponential rate of Moore’s law. It is not uncommon for modern software to be many GBs in size. The Windows OS downloads many MBs of updates every week. If I chose to purchase Adobe CS4, the download is over 10GB. Computer and console games are rapidly moving from a retail purchase model to an online distribution model, and most games are between 2 - 15GB in size. Finally, many computer users know that sometimes computers crash and software must be reinstalled. In the online distribution model, reinstalling means re-downloading. Frankly, I cannot believe that a family with two or more children online will ever be able to remain under the 60GB limit.

I am fully aware that there is no such thing as unlimited internet. Some software, especially bittorrent, does need to be shaped so that overall net traffic can flow smoothly. However, I am offended by Cogeco’s subtle association of net usage with environmental responsibility, as evidenced by Marie Carrier’s suggestion that the new fees will “make the customer responsible for their usage.” In a time when responsible usage of electricity and natural resources such as gasoline have entered into the public discourse, the “responsible usage of the internet” is a cynical and damaging marketing ploy.

The reason that the Canadian Internet experience is beginning to slow down is not that more people are downloading. The problem is that companies like Bell and Cogeco have used their monopolies to increase their profitability by limiting investment in new technologies. It is for this reason that Canada has slipped from the top three to the bottom twenty in terms of international ranking of broadband speed and service. I wonder how happy Cogeco customers will be with their 60GB cap if they were to learn that customers of other cable ISPs get much higher caps. Comcast in the States, for example, has recently imposed a 250GB cap, which is infinitely more reasonable than 60GB. Japanese customers get to use their internet for ten times cheaper per MB than Cogeco customers. If Cogeco faced competition, then we would have a higher download limit in Canada.

There is no technological reason for the discrepancy. For example, in 2000 I routinely used 100-300GB per month and Cogeco never complained. Now they say that they must limit downloads so that the net doesn’t slow down for “average users”. If my downloading 300GB per month ten years ago didn’t slow down the net, why is it a problem after ten years of computer hardware developments? The reason is that as broadband access multiplied and more Canadians switched to broadband, companies like Cogeco banked the profits and didn’t invest in expanding their infrastructure. Where, for example, is the fibre optic network promised years ago?

this is not creative writing

i came to a slight realization on the bus this afternoon.

some biographical detail is required for this self-indulgence.

when i was really young, i used to write for pleasure. usually the writing occurred when sitting alone in the hallway outside of a classroom, after i had been kicked out by the teacher for disrupting my friends after having finished my work. in every subject except handwriting, i finished class assignments exceptionally fast and then became an exceptional nuisance to the teacher. one morning in the fourth grade, my notebook was taken from me after the teacher found it full of stories about monsters and daemons, knights and astronauts, and other mythologies about the past and the future. at first i thought that she was mad about the violence and gore which i frequently included, and perhaps even highlighted -- this was, after all, the era of the Reagan Star Wars laser defence shield and high-body-count television and action films. my parents were called in to the school for a meeting, and i found out that the teacher didn't like all of the swear words which i had used. my father told her that to keep me from acting up in class and getting kicked out into the hall, she should let me write down the words which kept me occupied. i remember his words from that afternoon very well: "any damn word he pleases".

and so from that day i kept writing for pleasure. for the transmutation of an afternoon into a semi-tangible vision. for the loss of ego into imagination. for the fruits of productive isolation. for the way that some of my words seemed to have been worthy enough to have been printed and read by others, who then generated more words in response. for the spaces and patterns made by the writing if you looked at the whole page and unfocused your eyes. for the way that after i produced and dot-matrix-printed a series of newspapers for myself, i felt like i was part of the media which captivated me from birth. for the simple control of the ink as it left my pen and tainted the paper. for the pleasure of both failure and success. for looking to the earth and the sky and reaching through time. for something to read.

words were fun because of their appearance and sound as well as their meaning. in this sense, the joy received by writing is precisely the joy of writing experiencing itself. pleasure in this context is a derivative of subjectivity. by the age of ten or eleven, i had come to appreciate the difference between the writing which gave me pleasure and that which was deemed "good" by virtue of adherence to function or evaluative protocol. while it may sound obvious, i really liked the pleasure, the pleasure as a pleasure. the functions or evaluation of my words provided no real feedback to me. so what if i received a perfect grade for something which i had written, when i knew that the writing had given me little harbour and as such was an essentially misrepresentative process? -- as an aside, the school projects from my youth which i have come to cherish most highly do not come from my representations of truth, but rather from fictions which i was able to pass off as truths: an en-francais book report and improvised oral presentation of a translation of James and the Giant Peach involved an elaborate inter-species taxi, cake delivery, and dating service; a history paper written in high school involved an invented civilization from the Eurasian steppes which was feared throughout the western part of the roman empire for their mounted female fire archers and which had been conquered through the religious practises of an equally non-existent but territorially-aggressive group of midget barbarians; an eighth-grade science report for an invented species of reptile involved several photomicrographs of tissue samples taken from my father's "cancer collection" along with an audio recording of its mating call which i had created using a two-litre pop bottle half-filled with used motor oil; a grade thirteen kinesiology paper which examined a fake west asian sport whose history and rules were inspired by the menu of a vegetarian all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. often, i would invent extended and cross-indexed bibliographies, and on one occasion i even forged the Dewey decimal cards which kept stock of the inventory at my high school library to prove the existence of several of the non-existent books referenced in a ten-page term paper to a teacher. all of this work received top marks from ostensibly qualified instructors at ostensibly well-regarded schools.

and i kept writing. on the back of a transfer, waiting for a bus. on a napkin, waiting for a friend to return from a restaurant bathroom. in the margins of a newspaper, waiting for my mother to return from a store. on the sides of packing boxes, waiting between lines of customers at work. on the sides of buildings, waiting for my city of Hamilton to return to life. the joy seemed to be that i could fill the time otherwise spent waiting for things to happen by elaborating the happenings of my own invention.

then university happened, and i lost my attention to the joys which free writing provided to me. for some reason my writing began to tailor itself to function more than to the self-reflexive/self-excessive process of writing. i began to write only when given either an academic or a financial opportunity. remuneration, that's what writing had become. more to the point, it seems as though i now only write when i feel that i have a purpose to do so. to relay information. to invite. to make a cultural sell. the joy of purposeless writing from my youth has departed from me. until i realized that i play with words all of the time. i can, in fact, not help but play with words whenever i am given the slightest opportunity.

sitting on the bus today, waiting for my laptop to boot while the snow-covered fields of industry rolled past my window, i came to understand the illusory fiction of purpose. society provides to us a definition of purpose as a geography inhabited by adults who must guide children and the irresponsible away from the random vectors of their instincts. purpose requires a judge, an evaluative agent which can dispense truth and due consequence within the bounds of reason created by the system of evaluation itself. "purpose" is the forced conscription of innocence and creative association into the armed guilt against pleasure which many in society define as reasonable and responsible function. "purpose" is a means of looking beyond oneself to view subjectivity solely within the circumscription of ecstasis: what can you do for others with your words and how will they use them? "purpose" burns off the body, rejecting corporeality as an impurity which detempers the truth of representation. it is a means of working for others for the purpose of instrumentality: I am my words, my words are the truth; you can trust me and here is what you need to know. to be subsumed to function is to engage in a self-inflicted form of wage slavery.

writing is a geography of play. woe to thee, land whose king is no longer a child.

Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie -- Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton

Art Gallery of Hamilton
January 24 to May 18, 2009

Christie Sealey is well-known for her intimate and expressive portraiture work. Since she and collaborator Richard Oddie have been residents of Hamilton their entire lives, it was only a matter of time before the city itself became her principle subject. Her new exhibition at the AGH examines the city as a constellation of subjectivities. She juxtaposes the intimacies of a moment, usually with another person but also with the environment of the city itself, with a sense of alienation and introspection. Her depiction of the 401 highway as it frames Cootes Paradise is particularly noteworthy, as is a portrait of a young woman seen reflected in the small mirror of a dilapidated washroom. Through her work, Sealey suggests the question am I really all of the things that are outside of me?

In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes audio work that Sealey constructed with Richard Oddie. Interviews with many of the city's residents are layered with location recordings from around the city to produce an audio program that invites narrative supposition.

For more information, please refer to the Art Gallery of Hamilton webpage.

Sun Circle @ New Harbours Music Series vol. 2

Sun Circle, New Harbours Music Series vol. 2

stationary camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Sun Circle, qzh, Throwaway Digital

Deerhunter @ Lee's Palace

Deerhunter at Lee's Palace in Toronto, Nov. 12, 2008

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting, some shyness

sorry about the sound, as the side of the stage was rather loud and my microphone couldn't help itself from being overdriven

P + C = Deerhunter, qzh, Throwaway Digital

New Harbours Music Series 2008 "Trailer"

New Harbours Music Series Trailer from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


A summation of the musical performances featured at the Spring 2008 New Harbours Music Series.

Performers include Orphx, Polmo Polpo, Michael Snow + Matthew Boughner, Slither.

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting


P + C = Orphx, Polmo Polpo, Michael Snow, Matthew Boughner, Slither, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)

A nicer version of this video is available from Vimeo.