Student Agency and New Media Scholarship

This module’s readings have challenged me to articulate how a new media project in which I’m taking part with two other grad students will also serve as a pedagogical tool. As a part of an independent study project, I’m participating in the development of a web series that will feature faculty in conversation with graduate students, who will interview them about their work. Each episode will run for about ten minutes and depict an inciting incident that will lead into a more formal interview. As the series is titled Why It Matters: Humanities in Action, the final moments will depict how the professors’ research is put in action. Beyond planning the episodes, which necessitates conversations with faculty beforehand, as well as scripting framing devices and interview questions, this project requires the students involved to become even more familiar with the research going on in their own (English) department as well as the university more generally. Our goal is to create a series that demonstrates the value (for lack of a better word) of research taking place in the Humanities, especially in the context of the instrumentalist narratives surrounding the importance of STEM fields. As such, our goal is to focus on humanities fields exclusively with the hope that we can still put them into occasional conversation with STEM.

 

Although the goal of this web series is to allow graduate students to talk to professors about their research, I’ve also been thinking about its pedagogical implications. Reading James Paul Gee’s article “Good Video Games and Good Learning” has pushed me to think a bit further about the potential of the web series and new media in the classroom. While our aim is to showcase why we (graduate students) think professors’ research matters outside of the narrow confines of the academy, undergraduates will also have a role as the project goes on. Indeed, one of the things that shaped the development of the web series was the initial input of undergraduates based on a survey that sent to English majors during the early stages of project development. Additionally, we are working with three undergraduate interns who are interested in film and new media scholarship. One goal we have is for this project and the course/internship that surrounds it is to be able to look beyond the immediate present. I’m thinking, here, about how this project can keep pushing students’ exploration of ways to engage with scholarship and knowledge production. So, I’m using Gee’s article to consider how the web series is already working as a pedagogical tool to get a better sense of how it can continue to work as one. Because my colleagues and I are not new media experts in any sense, I know that my explanation of what is being taught is rather vague. However, I’m hoping that thinking about how a project like this can be more engaging for participants and viewers will allow me to implement these goals in the web series and my teaching in the classroom going forward.

 

The thing that stands out to me is the way that a project like this allows students to feel that they have more agency in their own education.  I’m aware that student “agency” is a term I throw around a good deal when talking about my own pedagogy, and sometimes it seems to have lost some of its meaning. However, the multi-modal elements (writing scripts, conducting video and in-person interviews, and filming episodes) and choices this project presents to students when they’re developing and producing episodes make me think that this could go a long way to encouraging this sort of agency. While they are currently a small group, the undergraduates who are working as interns are active participants in the shaping of the series. Though pandemic shutdown has thwarted our original goal to record live interviews with faculty during the spring semester, interns continue to work on developing episodes. This process includes researching faculty whose ideas interest them and crafting proposals to pitch. So, before students learn about methods of interview and production, they’re being asked to pursue topics that spark their interest. Next, they work on crafting preliminary interview questions and scripting their episode’s inciting incident, the moment that sets them off on their “quest” for answers. The stage between the preliminary and the formal, on-camera interview presents students with new challenges. They’ve begun with a sense of the direction in which they’d like to take the episode, but in most cases, their preliminary interview will redirect this (at least slightly). They’ll have to adjust their interview questions accordingly and, perhaps, even the inciting incident. Additionally, before the formal interview can take place, they’ll need to run their script and questions by faculty, working with them to create something of which each is proud. Because we haven’t reached the filming portion of the project, I’m not able to comment on that; however, I will include any filming-related elements that are on my mind in my brainstorming below.

  1. Identity: Gee argues that “[n]o deep learning takes place unless learners make an extended commitment of self” (34).
    • The goal of the quest structure is to ask the viewer to identify with the student-figure onscreen going in search of answers from faculty. Since most viewers select what to watch based on their own interests, we hope they’ll feel a kinship with the questions driving the episode. Additionally, for students who are writing, producing, and starring in the episode, this quest will be their own. Beyond merely producing “content,” we hope that this will allow them to explore and write about subjects that fascinate them.
    • Another goal of the web series is to address the so-called “crisis” in the humanities. As many of our viewers will likely be students in the humanities, we hope that they will identify with the ongoing conversations that we will structure the series more broadly.
  2. Interaction: “Games do talk back. In fact, nothing happens until a player acts and makes decisions. . . so, too, in school, texts and textbooks need to be put in contexts of interaction where the world and other people talk back” (34).
    • Interaction is an aspect of the web series that will probably be more static. However, at a departmental level, hopefully SBU’s English students will feel like they’re a bit more in conversation with instructors, even the ones from whom they’re not taking classes, as this will give them another way of accessing their professors’ ideas outside of the classroom. Since the course of the series is being driven, in part, by student survey results, we also hope that students will see their interests represented in the episodes that we produce. Finally, platforms like YouTube allow for conversations to occur in comments sections and, while not always ideal for scholarly discussion, this would allow another forum for us to welcome and address student concerns and ideas.
  3. Production: “Players are producers, not just consumers; they are “writers,” not just “readers.” Even at the simplest level, players co-design games by the actions that they take and the decisions that they make.” (34)
    • Student interns who develop and star in episodes will have most of the production riding on their ideas. Therefore, this presents an opportunity to think about how their research and rhetorical decisions matter when they’re addressing an audience that is broader than their instructor or classmates.
  4. Risk Taking: “Players are thereby encouraged to take risks, explore, and try new things” (35)
    • Talking to faculty about their research is nerve-wracking enough for graduate students. Many undergraduates will be dipping their toes into uncharted waters when it comes to having a one-on-one conversation like this. Each of the interns has set lofty goals for themselves, which requires them to explore subjects that are new to them and to think about research in a way that is, perhaps, a bit more specialized than they’re used to. It’s been encouraging to see that they’re all doing a phenomenal job.
  5. Customization: “Customized curricula in school should not just be about self-pacing, but about real intersections between the curriculum and the learner’s interests, desires, and styles” (35)
    • Again, we hope that the choice we offer to viewers will help them retain some of the information covered in each episode. On a smaller scale, my goal with a similar but scaled-down project in the classroom would be to give students enough choice to spark their interest, but not so much as to overwhelm them. Students who are working on the current web series are guided almost entirely by their own interests as long as they remember to address the question “why does this subject matter?”

 

Again, I’m presenting this as general brainstorming to lay out some guidelines that I hope the web series will stick to. While we have excellent faculty mentorship for the project (Professors Susan Scheckel and Elyse Graham), they’ve given us a great deal of freedom in how we want to proceed with the web series as well as what we’re asking of the interns. Much of this is trial and error as we plot out our own episodes and then ask the interns to do the same, so I have a feeling that some of what I’ve articulated here might change. However, I think that a project like this has given us a good sense of how to engage students and give them more of a feeling of agency in their own scholarship.

This week’s module on cyberfeminism gave me another chance to spend time looking at the films and narratives available on the National Film Board of Canada’s website (https://www.nfb.ca/). I chose to look at the short film Woman Dress (https://www.nfb.ca/film/woman-dress/) by Cree filmmaker Thirza Cuthand. Here, Cuthand interviews a woman she identifies as “Auntie,” most likely the person credited as Beth Cuthand, and they talk about “Woman Dress,” a story told by Beth’s father and Thirza’s grandfather, Stan. The NFB page provides a succinct description:

Pre-contact, a Two Spirit[1] person named Woman Dress travels the Plains, gathering and sharing stories. Featuring archival images and dramatized re-enactments, this film shares a Cuthand family oral story, honouring and respecting Woman Dress without imposing colonial binaries on them.

This film is short but it provides a good opportunity to talk about Alexandra Hidalgo’s “Principles of Feminist Filmmaking” from her video book Camara Retorica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition. While the film doesn’t always align with these goals as neatly as Hidalgo outlines them in her chapter, considering these principles in conjunction with the piece helped me to unpack a lot of what I saw in it and think about why Cuthand’s depiction of Woman Dress is so moving:

  1. Foster Diversity in Front of and Behind the Camera:
  2. Engage in an Ethics of Interdependence with Crewmembers
  3. Engage in an Ethics of Interdependence with Documentary Participants
  • These first three principles  are difficult to discuss since I’m not sure about how Cuthand made her film. Woman Dress features three indigenous women. Kiley May, who plays the Two-Spirit youth, Woman Dress, is transgender. Based on the credits, it appears that Cuthand’s crew was made up of around 50% women and 50% men, though of course this is going based on names alone, and it’s unclear how each individual identifies their gender. The only thing that really surprised me was how Beth Cuthand was credited only as featured. Meanwhile, Thirza takes full credit as the writer, even though her aunt’s recollections form the bulk of the narrative. Additionally, towards the end of the film, Thirza references her aunt’s former desire to “do something” with the story, and I wished that more would have been said about what this might have looked like. It would be easy to say that this doesn’t quite fit into Hidalgo’s vision of “interdependence with documentary participants”; however, because so much of the behind-the-scenes and familial relationship between the two Cuthands is unclear, it’s difficult to say and not my place to judge how the filmmaker should have handled this. What seems to be the most important is the fact that this is a conversation taking place between two women of different generations as they tell and comment on a story that highlights the importance of storytelling as a legacy and form of cultural transmission.
  1. Practice Mentorship
  • Cuthand doesn’t really talk about mentorship in terms of filmmaking here, but it still plays a prominent role in her work. She meditates more generally on the importance of storytelling and the transmission of those stories, which is apparent in the film’s emphasis on orality. The Cuthands narrate the story of Woman Dress and talk about the story’s place in their family over footage of the wandering youth superimposed on backdrop of changing natural landscapes. This technique allows us to visualize the travels of Woman Dress without drawing our attention away from the voice recounting the narrative. The content of the film also emphasizes the oral transmission of the story: Beth Cuthand says that she first heard the story form her father, who would have heard it from “people who hunted the buffalo who were still alive and still telling the stories (4:31-35). In a film about how storytelling takes place, the means by which these stories circulate is significant, and Beth’s comment (“still alive…still telling”) demonstrates the extent to which colonization imperils the oral transmission of histories and culture. So, while Thirza Cuthand tells stories through film, “Woman Dress” implies that her circle of mentors encompasses more than just filmmakers. Similarly, in committing the story to film she participates in its transmission (beyond her family and the Little Pine First Nation) as well as, potentially, mentoring other indigenous filmmakers.
  1. Practice Strategic Contemplation
  • Again, this is an instance where I’m applying Hidalgo’s concept loosely, since I can’t speak to the extent that Cuthand spent time contemplating her relation to the subjects she’s representing (though, she does have a longer documentary, Homelands, in which she discusses her identity and relationship to her family and heritage). Nevertheless, her film seems to represent strategic contemplation visually. Her self-conscious portrayal of herself as a storyteller extends beyond her conversation with Beth to the visual narrative in the film’s final moments. The moment she asks her aunt what she thinks Woman Dress would be doing if they were living in the present, scenes of contemporary Toronto appear; first Woman Dress, then Thirza are superimposed over them. As Beth asserts “as long as we keep telling [the stories] they’ll live,” Thirza and Woman Dress look each other in the eye, grasp hands, and embrace (Woman Dress 5:13-24). In doing this, Thirza acts out the strategic contemplation that Hidalgo advocates. Her literal embrace of the storyteller, Woman Dress, and the film’s emphasis on keeping stories alive signals the thought and care that have gone into depicting her subjects. The final image of the film, Toronto vanishing to reveal Thirza and Woman Dress embracing on the prairie, underscores this point. Women Dress, the story, and storytellers are our focus, and it is the job of filmmakers like Thirza to tell them. At the same time, Thirza-the-storyteller becomes her own subject and demonstrates a kinship with Woman Dress. That she attains this role through first listening to and then recounting the narrative (through film) reminds viewers that they too can play a role in keeping stories alive.
  1. Address Social Justice
  • Cuthand’s own identity as a queer indigenous woman is the subject of many of her films, and she talks about the difficulty of pinning this down in her longer documentary, Homelands. Unsure of how to identify herself in response to queries about “what” she is, she tries multiple titles:  “a human? A mixed-up boy-girl? A butch lesbian? A Scots-Cree half breed? Treaty but probably unable to pass my rights on to my kid should I have one? . . .” (Homelands 2:16-27). Her symbolic identification with the wandering Two-Spirit storyteller in the final scene of Woman Dress depicts the way that her identity straddles different communities. To further this point, she and her aunt begin the film by explaining that the distinction between masculine and feminine pronouns doesn’t exist in the Cree language, so Beth Cuthand tells the story as she heard it from her father, alternating between the two pronouns. The notion of a Two-Spirit person in Cree and other North American indigenous communities speaks to the complicated ways that gender exists outside of a strict binary, and language (for the purposes of the film) seems to support this. Additionally, Beth Cuthand reminds us of the legacy of Colonial oppression suffered by many indigenous people in Canada and the Americas when she ties the story’s circulation to conceptions of gender. While she had wanted her father to talk more about the story of Women Dress, she explains that he was reluctant: “I think he was king of embarrassed to talk openly about a Two-Spirited person, like Woman Dress. I think it was the influence of Christianity” (Woman Dress 4:44-54). Cuthand doesn’t say more beyond this, but her ascription of blame to Christianity certainly brings to mind the role played by churches and schools in the separation of indigenous children from their families and their subsequent “reeducation.” Whether this is exactly what happened to her father isn’t clear from this film. However, it seems deliberate that Thirza Cuthand has placed this piece of narration immediately after another statement in which her aunt recounts how leaders in the story of Woman Dress agree that “we should honor story tellers like Woman Dress . . . let’s agree that we won’t kill the story tellers” (3:57-4:15). The freedom and community engendered by Woman Dress’s stories appear in stark contrast with the oppressive expectations that may have made Stan Cuthand reluctant to talk about the character. In placing blame on Christianity, the film’s narrative highlights the stories and people colonialism has killed as well as the fact that it almost killed this one. Thirza Cuthand and Woman Dress show why the transmission of these narratives is so important for pushing against oppressive colonial narratives of gender. I’ve not been able to find out whether “feminist” is one of the labels that Cuthand would apply to herself, but it seems clear that her filmmaking aligns with many of the goals laid out by Hidalgo’s principles and, perhaps, even expands the way we might think about them.

 

Works Cited

Cuthand, Thirza. Homelands. Thirza Cuthand. 2010. https://www.thirzacuthand.com/videos/.

—. Woman Dress. National Film Board of Canada. 2019. https://www.nfb.ca/film/woman-dress/.

Hidalgo, Alexandra. “The Principles of Feminist Filmmaking.” Camara Retorica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition. Computers and Composition Digital Press. 2016. https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/camara/chaptertwo.html.

Re:searching for LGBTQ2S+ health. “Two-Spirit Community.” Re:searching for LGBTQ2S+ Health. 2020. https://lgbtqhealth.ca/community/two-spirit.php.

 

[1] According to lgbtqhealth.ca, “‘Two-spirit’ refers to a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. As an umbrella term it may encompass same-sex attraction and a wide variety of gender variance, including people who might be described in Western culture as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, gender queer, cross-dressers or who have multiple gender identities.”

The World’s Worst Intriguee

Perhaps, because I’d already read Daniel Punday’s article, “Narration, Intrigue, and Reader Positioning in Electronic Narratives,” I was already primed (and perhaps too aware) of myself as an audience upon my visit to Welcome to Pine Point. As somebody who has only a passing familiarity with computer games, interactive stories always make me wonder if I’m missing a hidden clue or means of moving the narrative forward. Sure enough, I messed it up. I first saw the list of lexia (I hope I’m using that term correctly) at the lower left hand corner of the “Intro” screen. I assumed this screen was something akin to a DVD menu and thought that hitting “GO” would make the narrative “play” like a movie, failing to realize that this was all part of the introduction. Instead, maybe due to being too much in my own head, I assumed that the list of lexia were an index of various pieces of background information that would familiarize me with the narrative. Believing that I would return to “GO” having familiarized myself with—what I believed to be—pieces of background information, I jumped in at the “Town” section and moved through the narrative this way. In doing so, I skipped an incredibly important piece of context, the seven different pages of introductory material.

I certainly feel silly about this mistake but am comforted (somewhat) by Punday’s assertion that “we must understand how a particular hypertext narrative works before we will know how to follow its links” (29). I highlight this experience because it made me very aware of my role as intriguee and gave me a sense of how that was different from the roles of narratee or implied reader. In the actual introduction of Welcome to Pine Point, the narrator talks about nostalgia and memory formation by recounting his own first-hand experiences, his discovery of Pine Point’s fate, and the rediscovery and recognition that comes from viewing a photo album. The implied reader seems to be one who is able to understand the nostalgic value associated with place (even if they can’t necessarily understand the attachment of many Pine Pointers) and material objects, like the magnetic photo albums that the narrative seems, at times, to remediate. The intriguee, however, seems to be a person who can follow simple commands. The narrative is laid out in a linear manner; clicking “GO” will launch it, then the reader can toggle forward and back by using the “NEXT” and “PREV.” tabs onscreen. Whereas the narrator of “Intro” seems intent on highlighting those themes having to do with memory, the intrigant demonstrates the way that the rest of the narrative will unfold. That is, in a manner similar to a book. The reader could navigate the lexia out of order, but this would result in confusion, since the narrative relies on linearity to make sense.

On one hand, this gestures to, as Punday says, “[translating] the demands that intrigue makes on the reader into those made by acts of narration and [blurring] the role of intriguee and narratee” (39). In following the narrative as it progresses linearly, we’re asked to go on a journey that might be similar to the experience of the authors as they collected the stories of Pine Pointers: listening to recounted memories, following along as people explain what’s happening in a given photograph, watching a home movie. Taking part in other peoples’ memories often asks us to follow narratives that unfold at a pace we can’t control, as speakers forget, embellish, double back, or pause to remember. The narrator’s words, written on strips across the background of moving or still images, often jockey for attention with the audio of the speakers. Because there was no scrubbing button and starting the audio over requires re-loading the page, I quickly learned to listen to the speaker first and then read the words of the narrator.[1] Whereas the town of Pine Point lacked, as the narrator says, “the organic growth of most towns, where things morph to fit trends and tides of people,” the narrative is the opposite. The time it took to listen to each speaker, watch each clip, comb through the “material” artifacts that are available, reminded me that the diffuse experiences of the individuals whose memories the narrative relates are what drive it forward. In this regard, it reminds me of a scrapbook or photo album. Often, it’s collections of events that define the organization and shape of these pages’ grid-like spaces rather than the exigencies of a single, unified narrative.

Nevertheless, the relationship between intrigue and narration in Welcome to Pine Point, a move taken from Punday, makes me wonder about the implications of discussing narrative and intrigue as distinct aspects of a text. For example, Punday offers a thematic analysis of the texts he’s looking at as well as a description of their intrigues. In the case of his final example, the collaborative text Outrances, he states that

In Outrances narration and intrigue are connected thematically: both are concerned with finding order in chaos, with losing oneself in art, and with the process of connecting to and differentiating oneself from crowds. Here narration and intrigue are independent but thematically complementary textual systems” (43)

Of course, multiple interpretations of any text are possible, but I wonder about the extent to which we can analyze intrigue separately from narration: how, for example, has the poem’s manifest and latent content impacted Punday’s analysis of its intrigue? Moreover, what about the broad categories of narration and intrigue themselves? What about the context of a narrative’s creation or its genre? Punday certainly talks about the implications of the text as digital, but what about other things? I’m trying to think about my own reading of Welcome to Pine Point in this regard, but am having difficulty separating (what I understand to be) the design of the intrigue from (what I interpreted as) the goals of the narrative and its relationship to the history that it’s trying to recount.

It’s entirely possible that much of this question could be attributed to the gaps in my knowledge of narratology. I wonder, though, whether my question highlights some of the criticisms of the discipline, mainly its tendency to, in the words of Michael McKeon “[cut] across the chronological and disciplinary divides of historical practice” (McKeon xiv). Might separating narration from intrigue in this way risk creating a new category of analysis that could be criticized as ahistorical or too static? My intention here isn’t to criticize Punday, I’m just curious about what this means for the ongoing conversation about the ways that narratology negotiates things like genre and history.  It’s clear that I need to do more research about how digital narratives like Welcome to Pine Point are being studied and discussed.

Finally, I didn’t get a chance to talk about it here, but Evie Ruddy’s narrative Un/tied (https://www.untied.shoes/) is also available on the National Film Board of Canada website. It’s a really great piece and one that I’d recommend!

 

McKeon, Michael. “Introduction.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael Mckeon. Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. xiii-xviii.

Punday, Daniel. “Narration, Intrigue, and Reader Positioning in Electronic Narratives.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies. 4, 2012, 25-47.

[1] I’m reminded here of Professor Davidson’s question about interpellation that my last blog post discussed. Members of wilde Cunningham may have had their bodies interpellated by the Second Life experience, but in the context of the reading experience (broadly) readers are “hailed” and told whom the implied author needs them to be–I’ve never thought about this before! Intrigue takes this interpellation a step further and hails intriguees, asking them to become a certain type of game player. Whether these two instances of interpellation are distinct, though, I can’t say.

Interpellation Gone wilde

How are the bodies of the members of wilde in Au’s “The Nine Souls of wilde Cunningham” interpellated by the virtual affordances  of the Second Life interface?

At first glance, this question drew my attention to the fact that in the article, the bodies of the members of wilde Cunningham occasionally seem to be defined in opposition to the “freedoms” provided by the Second Life interface. While they highlight the “level playing field” created by the virtual world, this seems to throw the expectations of an ableist society into sharper relief.

However, to take into account only those expectations ignores the aspect of recognition, which plays an important part of the process of interpellation. Indeed, the members of the wilde group appear to recognize themselves in their avatar, wilde, as well as in the world of the game. This is, perhaps, most apparent in the way that their experience seems to push against Horkeimer and Adorno’s argument that people “submit to ideologies that interpellate them as passive, and thus comply with their own domination.” Indeed, Second Life seems to be an opportunity for the members of Wilde and opportunity to subvert ableist society’s attempts to interpellate them. John’s notecard, for example, alludes to this by identifying society’s “misconceptions” about people with cerebral palsey, which we can read as an attempt to hail, and then arguing that those misconceptions are wrong:

that they are not intelligent
that they are happy to be ignored
that they lack humor
that they don’t mind the total dependency
that their common sense, humor, insights don’t surpass yours at times

In very direct terms, John tells his reader that attempts to interpellate his body (and those of others with cerebral palsy) in a specific way are incorrect: this seems to be an instance in which hailing has failed. While Lilone explains to Hamlet that John “can’t speak as such,” Second Life allows him a voice to define (self-interpellate?) himself. In re-framing the terms in which he can be addressed, John nevertheless participates in a form of ideology; I’m not arguing that there is a way to step outside of our nature as “always-already subjects.” Like all instances of interpellation, this example is historically conditioned and, in this case, defined, subtended by the medium, the very virtual affordances that enable it. John’s note card, however, is an example of the ways that ideology is historically contingent and can shift.

The article also highlights how the active nature of the virtual world challenges the notion that media position subjects as passive viewers of entertainment. Indeed, the members of the wilde collective must actively make decisions about their role in the world, not simply consume a predictable and gratifying narrative. Moreover, participation in-world requires the members of wilde to be in constant negotiation with one another and also takes a degree of physical effort:

It takes 15 minutes to set up to play, with all the chairs and such [around the computer]…And then the group play is a more times taking endeavor than playing alone. So we get about 45 minutes of playing time per session. We are full of desires of things to do, but all in good time.

The management of time, space, expectations and desires all indicate that this type of play is anything but passive. Similarly, the subject whom David Gauntlett posits, one who experiences media through “uncritical consumption,” does not appear to apply here, since the Wilde group seems rarely to forget about their own bodies. While, for example, most in the group agree that walking around is nice because “it’s nice to be able to do what others can do,” they also point out the distance that they experience from it, saying “it’s still a little removed from us, as we watch it instead of do it.” While the goal of virtual reality simulations might be to make viewers/players feel a degree of immersion, Second Life is still unable to provide that for the players of wilde Cunningham. This raises a question that I’ve not been able to answer and wish that the writer could have revisited later: if hardware becomes capable of providing more immediacy (bigger screens, better controls, faster internet access), how would the group’s experience change? Would it shift the way they thought about their own bodies? Would it impact the extent to which they felt able to embody certain elements of the game?

Curtains!

Professor Davidson’s mention of the 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh commercial in her blog post made me think about the ways that design and architecture impact the way that we consume media. I initially thought about the design of theaters as external to the medium of film itself, but the extent to which movie theaters still feature curtains around the screen made me wonder about why this was such an important part of cinema design. Beyond dampening sound, this seems like a purely decorative holdover; the actual opening of a curtain has been a part of my movie-going experience only a handful of times (and these were all years ago). Additionally, most of the theaters where I grew up were built during or after the 1990s and simply have a horizontal drape running along the top of the screen and two panels hanging down the sides to imitate curtains open on a stage with a proscenium arch. Movie theaters seem to be remediating an aspect of theater design that is no longer a necessary component the medium they’re meant to showcase, but why? I realize that the connections between theater and stage design and media might be tenuous ones, but I’m hoping that my sketch of similarities and differences between these two different types of theaters can say something productive.

Wikimedia Commons

My assumption is that theater curtains help to create the sense of immediacy, the sense that we are looking into a “real” world when watching a play. Depending on the production, the proscenium arch and curtains often end up demarcating where the play’s action takes place on the stage, which (I argue) means that it becomes a part of the medium whether we think about it that way or not. It offers hypermediacy in the way that it reminds us that what we’re watching should be immediate. It’s a “window” into something real, but we’re very aware of the artifice of that boundary. While an individual audience member may not experience the play like virtual reality, that is from a first-person point of view in which their standpoint is the “visual center of that world” (Bolter and Grusin 316), the production usually does direct their “play” towards them.  Phrases like “pulling back” or “opening” the curtain signal that we are witnessing something real, often because we imagine it would be hidden if the theatrical experience hadn’t given us access at that immediate moment. This makes me think, also, of performances/rites in religious settings. I’ll use the example from my own upbringing in Christian churches whose services include the use (performance) of a fairly involved liturgy or order of service. The celebrant is often separated from the congregation by some form of horizontal boundary, usually a rail or steps—during the medieval period this would have often been a literal screen. What the congregation sees of these rites and what is prepared away from them (and out of sight) is carefully managed. I don’t think that proscenia have roots in Christian religious celebrations, so this is more of an affinity than a strict genealogy; however, I think the comparison is a striking one since both of these practices of separation highlight an assembled group of people’s immediate perception of a type of reality. In the case of believers, this usually involves the corporeal manifestation of a deity. For an audience in a proscenium theater, the curtain rising often marks the spatial and temporal limits of the world of a play, a world which they choose to believe in. While audiences may want to believe in the immediacy of that staged world, it is (depending on the production) immediacy is often dependent on the hypermediacy of the window created by proscenium and curtains.

Wikimedia Commons

My initial assumption was that movie theaters (movie “palaces” in their heyday) simply appropriated curtains because films were shown in theaters meant for stage productions, or because theater operators wanted to mimic the familiar experience of going to staged plays. After some brief (and rather inconclusive) research, I’ve learned that the use of the front curtain in movie theaters often had a bit more of an active role in an audience member’s movie-going experience than I’d assumed. In the same way that the closing of curtains often signaled the break between acts or scenes for a staged show (allowing time for scenery to shift, etc.), curtains would often be opened and closed between newsreels, shorts, and main features. One commenter, responding to a piece in the Chicago Reader on the decreased use of curtains in movie theaters argues for their benefit by noting that:

Projectionists in the old days were trained never to let the audience see the white screen. You dimmed the lights, started the projector, opened the dowser and then opened the curtains on the first images to hit them. Some theatre owners and projectionists preferred opening after the studio logo faded out. Same thing when the movie ended, curtain closing timed to end with final fade out, again no white screen visible to your audience!

This irritation at seeing a blank screen hints at a sort of horror vacui. If the architecture of movie theaters originally remediated that of a live theater through the use of a proscenium arch and curtains, this abhorrence of the blank space of the screen makes sense. Many audience members at these types of live theaters would rarely, if ever, have seen the cavernous empty backstage space behind scrims and set pieces. Similarly, Ben Sachs, the author of the same Chicago Reader piece laments that “cinemas would forgo this age-old amenity, which has the effect of rendering the big screen separate from (one might even say more mysterious than) the world outside the theater” (Sachs). Sachs’s desire for a separation between the world of the screen and the outside speaks to a wish to lose oneself in the former. While film’s remediation of certain elements of the stage may promise a more immediate experience, it is the hypermediated action of drawing back the curtain that (for him) facilitates that immediacy. We want to believe that we are looking through a window into a different world. As Sachs asks, “How can a theater create anticipation for a movie when it seems as though the projectionist has arrived at it by changing the channel on a giant TV?” (Sachs). This comment makes it clear that curtains are an unnecessary aspect of watching a film. However, the framing function that they perform, while a construct, appears to make the experience of film more real.

I realize that we consume film very differently these days, so this example may not make as much sense as I’m hoping. Similarly, a proscenium is only one type of stage, and immersive theater productions like Sleep No More certainly don’t fit in with this analysis (though I wonder if we could think productively about the ways that they remediate virtual reality experiences).  Indeed, I’m still concerned that theater doesn’t really work as an example at all. At the very least, however, thinking about the ways that theater curtains create a “window” onto an scene that is meant to feel immediate has given me a helpful way to think about that experience along with hypermediacy.

Thanks for reading!

Introduction

Welcome to my blog! My name is Brian Eberle, and I’m a 2nd year PhD student in the English department. In spite of being a member of what somebody once termed the “look at me” generation, talking about myself has always felt like an onerous task—especially online. However, the opportunity to improve the way that I communicate through writing in online settings like blog and discussion posts is one of the reasons that I’m excited about taking this class. So, here goes!

I’m originally from California where I got my BA from Chapman University and my MA from California State University, Long Beach. I moved to New York in 2017 and started at Stony Brook in the Fall of 2019. Before my move, I taught English classes at community colleges in Southern California, which brings me to another reason that I’m excited to take WRT 614: I’m hoping to get a better understanding of how digital spaces shape students’ writing habits. Although the courses I taught relied on certain digital tools like email, Blackboard-type sites, and the occasional use of YouTube, I was reluctant to stray too far from many of the models of writing instruction that I’d seen my teachers using. So, for the sake of my future students, I’m looking forward to gaining more familiarity with multimodal rhetoric here.

Additionally, I’m interested in digital literacy from a research perspective. I study British modernism and am particularly interested in how changing conceptions of urban space impacted the narrative styles we see in modernist novels. Although this period is typically thought of as having taken place between 1890 and 1945 in Europe and the US, scholars are reevaluating locating the movement in such a narrow time-frame and space. Instead some, like Susan Stanford Friedman, see modernism as the aesthetic reaction to modernity more generally: different modernisms occur during different periods in different places. Because of this argument, I’ve begun to give more credence to the idea that we’ve applied “post” in postmodern a bit prematurely and that many writers and artists are still engaging with the world in ways that might appropriately be described as modernist. Additionally, I would argue that both the excitement and anxiety over contemporary technical advances, as Werner Herzog depicts in Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, parallel the reactions of many modernist writers to the shifts that took place during their own lives. While Herzog doesn’t touch on many artistic or literary responses to our (over)reliance on the internet, I think that it’s worth considering how we might think of those responses in terms of modernism and modernity. To better understand this, I’m hoping to increase my own digital literacy.

Thanks for reading! I’m excited to interact with all of you in the coming weeks!

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