English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

There are still a few annotations missing, since I didn't get the books until today. This will be updated as I read over break.

“Fanvid-Recs.” 8 March 2007. http://www.fanvid-rec.com.

This site hosts downloadable fanvids from about two dozen fandoms. All videos are recommended by other “vidders” who provide comments in blog form as to why the video is worthy of being posted. Because the videos must be recommended and available for download, they are likely to be of the highest quality—vids available only on YouTube are considered transient and not as “professional” by many fans.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
In Jenkins’s latest book, he attempts to describe “the relationship between three concepts—media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence” (2) by “document[ing] conflicting perspectives on media change” (13). Each chapter highlights a different aspect of participatory culture: fanfiction, amateur videos, media convergence in films, and even a chapter on politics. Most useful are the comments from real fans Jenkins has interviewed; these quotes capture current sentiments in the fan community.

---. “How to Watch a Fan-Vid.” Confessions of an ACA/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. [blog]. 18 Sept 2006. 8 March 2007 http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html .

Jenkins’s blog chronicles and documents current events in fandom, providing his analysis alongside theoretical and historical content. This entry from September provides some history of fanvids (or, fan-vids) taken from Jenkins’s own personal experience as a fan and his published books. More importantly, Jenkins explains how the music video-based fanvids have changed in the last fifteen years: “As these fans have embraced new digital tools, the overall pace of fan made videos has quickened. This, and the emergence of a younger generation of fans with taste for alternative music, has broadened the choice of songs.” According to Jenkins, “more hard-edged songs” are appearing, replacing the sappy, romantic music in earlier vids; this indicates a genre shift is taking place. Jenkins also points to the “recurring images” that appear when one watches enough fanvids—fans seem to instinctively select the same scenes and shots to make their videos. This is linked to the use of fanvids to make arguments for slash relationships: “One reason that so many of these shots reappear is that they evoke a particular interpretation of the original material. Keep in mind that in many cases, these videos are watched by people who are also reading fan fiction.” Patterns should thus be visible within a given fandom.

“Lex and Lana—Fanvideos.” Devotedfansnetwork. 8 March 2007. http://www.devotedfansnetwork.com/forums/archive/index.php/f-270.html

This fan community for promoting the relationship between Smallville’s Lex and Lana features extensive links and discussion on fanvid creation. Features include hardware and software help, tips on music and clip selection, and advice on creating an implied relationship between characters through strategic cuts.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14-26.

Mulvey’s oft-cited essay “takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, social established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle” (14). Specifically, Mulvey takes a psychoanalytic approach to cinema, naming the screen as a place for fantasy, to allow scopophilia and narcissistic identification with the image to take place in an acceptable setting (18). Women, in this construction, are the object on which men gaze (scopophilia) and the hero whose gaze is also held by the woman on screen is a subject of identification for male viewers. In order for this identification to seamlessly take place, camera technology must “blur the limits of screen space” (20). Without this blurring, the audience would be aware of the three separate gazes taking place: That of the camera, that of the characters, and that of the audience (25). Instead, cinema works to collapse these into one gaze, that of the male character gazing upon the female form.

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Deery, June. “TV.com: Participatory Viewing on the Web.” Journal of Popular Culture 37.2: 161-183.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York : Routledge, 1992.

Murray, Janet Horowitz Hamlet on the holodeck : the future of narrative in cyberspace Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1998.

(Multiple essays) Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. Ed Henry Jenkins. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Silverman, Kaja. “The Subject of Semiotics.” Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism. Eds Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.