So here you are, reading these words. Who knows what brought you here, or why you came. We hope you won’t be disappointed.
Bill Morrison’s 2002 cinematic symphony, Decasia, vividly depicts what might read as an allegory for the death of the film medium. Decasia splices together decomposing film stock from the silent era featuring images of coal miners seemingly being crushed by mold pressing down from the top of the film frame and shots of a boxer in the ring fighting against an empty void within the frame. As J. Hoberman observes, the film “is founded on the tension between the hard fact of film's stained, eroded, unstable surface and the fragile nature of that which was once photographically represented.” Decasia is impossible to watch without some awareness of the inherent fragility of the film medium and the knowledge that much of our collective film history has already been lost or is in danger of degrading, but it also serves as a reminder that the ways in which we make and watch movies are changing irrevocably as well. Morrison’s film transforms these eroding images into an elegy for modern cinema, turning Decasia into the ultimate documentary of the death of cinema.
This is a work that awkwardly begins to actualise a cinematic hypertextual academic documentary form. I think of it as a preliminary sketch towards a yet to be. It is also an analysis of the relation of videoblogging to television via Deleuze's concept of the 'any-instant-whatever' and the pose;
I am opposed to the current vogue of naturalism in the American independent film movement because at this cultural moment, naturalism is beside the point, having been appropriated so thoroughly and preposterously by Reality TV. The fallacy of naturalness is nowhere more evident than in television shows which allege to be presenting what “just happens” in front of the camera (in fact, as I write this, Reality TV “writers” are lobbying to be recognized by the writers’ union).
The spectacle of the everyday, the intimate view of private life, has always been a force in Hollywood spectatorship. What is different about videoblogs (or vlogs) is the spectacle of the un-commodified everyday. One of the myths that fuels personal media production is the idea of taking back from “big media” what belongs to “the folk.” But unlike the radical, disruptive strategies of the avant-garde, most vlogs have a more measured approach to “big media” aesthetics, preferring a cinematic and televisual shorthand of the everyday. Recurring online debates over the definition of vlogging, stimulated in part by Rocketboom’s auctioning off ad space, shows that the tension between personal and commercial is not over aesthetic values, but over authenticity. Should a definition of vlogging include commercial forms? Michael Verdi’s vlog post about the dangers of corporate involvement in personal media elicited a variety of responses that point out the grey areas. Sadly, definitions and manifestos will not protect vlogging from the onslaught of slick advertising and big media. But, in some sense, RSS feeds, video compression codecs, and tagging systems are just digital extensions of traditional distribution and marketing. Videobloggers try to make their work accessible to the public, increase their subscription numbers, optimize their status in search engines, show-up in articles and participate in conference panels - they are not immune to the economics of fame. But it cannot be denied that, in the current world of personal media, something new has been added to cinematic value: a social context that is not explicitly market-driven. Rather than compete for attention in the marketplace, most vloggers look to their peers for feedback and conversation. For perhaps the first time, we have a somewhat organized public arena for a cinema without show business.
I have chosen to open with the above quote for the manner in which it so succinctly illustrates a certain problematic assumption implicit in the work of Nicholas Rombes, an assumption about the supposedly isomorphic relationship between the various aesthetic and ideological positions implied by self-theorising media objects and those expressed in the discourses of the authors who create them. Our media objects theorise themselves; ergo, we are theorists. Likewise, we are theorists; ergo, our works are illustrative of our theories. While these two, interpenetrative theses contain certain occasional elements of truth, which I hope to extract and qualify to some extent here, against Rombes's assumption, I would also like to argue that a form that thinks, to put it in Godardian terms, is just as likely to be a form that thinks for itself, throwing privileged authorial discourse into doubt and Rombes's resurrected author along with it. Drawing on both the practical and rhetorico-theoretical output of the vlogosphere, I would like to argue that, in actual fact, self-theorising media objects and their creators can be—and often are—secretly at loggerheads with one another, the form of a work and its author's expressed intentions coexisting only in uneasy tension. I would also like to suggest that this tension is such that it opens up a breach—a critical gap—in which a certain type of critic or theorist—no longer the redundant and dispossessed figure of Rombes's work—can busy herself, discoursing on the discord, enabling comprehension. In other words, by attempting to challenge Rombes's assumption and think through the ramifications of doing so, I ultimately hope to offer a tentative solution to the problem that so much of his work is concerned with—namely, the problem of the theory and its place in the contemporary mediascape.