Producer’s Note: This week is a double blog post on “Sound” and “Mediaphiles.” Kris and I were caught up in MIGC over the last week, so we figured we would collapse the posts into one for our own sanity.
During our February 18th week on Sound, Kris and I ended up referring to an number of different songs and audio tracks. As you read, we encourage you to listen to the following playlist that was culled from our discussion.
Our discussion on sound began with the idea of the ambiance of the movie theater. For us this includes the whispered anticipation of the crowd, the milling in front of the concessions stand, and (if you’re lucky enough) the comforting clicks of the projector. Kris mentioned how he recalled going to a screening of The Avengers where the crowd was yelling, cheering, and participating in the film experience. After that screening, other viewings of The Avengers both in the theater and at home felt flat and lacking. Sound became more than just a question of fidelity or textual experience – we found it to be empowering and interactive in these situations, positioning films as events rather than texts.
In the shift from theater to home-based viewing, one form of sound that seems more subdued is that of the discussion afterwards. As media students, we usually enjoy the post-viewing discussion with our peers – even after watching a film whose qualities might be lacking *cough*Avatar*cough*. Although we lamented the loss of speaking about films after going to the cinema, we did touch on the ways we do actually “talk” with the cinema. One is in the experience of being terrified while watching horror films or the sound of other audience member sniffing during sadder scenes.
However, there’s the non-diegetic soundthat surrounds the genre of “love-to-hate” films like Twilight and – more of late – 50 Shades of Grey. While most films with an advertised distribution generate some form of “buzz,” these pulp films generate a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth by those of us who assume that the film will be garbage. Sure, this helps us secure our position as “experts” (right?), this white noise might work to activate even more attention to the film’s release. We gain a lot of emotional satisfaction about complaining about a film, which seems to us producers a self-indulgent tendency.
From there we moved sound into the discussion of video games. Allain discussed how sound was often connected to video games in his mind due to the nostalgia and memory associated with the texts. In particular, the PC port of Final Fantasy VIII was brought up for its poor sound fidelity in relation to the original PS1 release. We considered this strange for a series so strongly predicated on complex sound design. Theophany’s Time’s End was also brought up as an illustration of how remixing video game soundtracks is a rich area of production, one that seems very close to the ideas of participation and nostalgia circling around these discussions.
Nostalgia linked us to this week’s discussion on “mediaphiles” with guest Eddie Danecki, a Plan H graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The term mediaphile is one that Eddie adopted from Susan Sontag’s definition of a “cinephile”: one who loves the cinema. As television, music, games, and other forms of screen entertainment become increasingly accessible from personal screens (or a networked series of screens that really just interface for a cloudy database of media storage and access), the way we ‘love’ our media, and what media we love, changes. Eddie argued that media is frequently framed in terms of eating or consumption, and that the idea of “binge eating” suggests a need to consume a volume of media rather than selectively. We speculated that the Personal Library was becoming the site of performative love. We also found that this linked nicely into the death/irrelevance of film studies, as the purpose of the critic was to inform people about media they could not access or provide a sense of whether the film was worth watching or not. The metaphor of love in mediaphilia bears more questioning; it relies on a strongly romantic framing of affection and desire. Is it really mediaphilia if you are selective and particular about the moments when you love it? Is it the text we love, or the act of loving?
Of course, this discussion wouldn’t be complete without bringing up piracy. The ability to acquire vast amounts of data has prompted a ravenous appetite for music, movies, and film. Despite the potential for stoking media gluttony, filesharing has also provided access to media that might be unavailable.
In a rare moment, we turned to television to consider how a single screen in the home enabled its own kind of cinephilic traditions of the family gathering around the television. This could often result in exposure to media you wouldn’t normally encounter or engage with: Eddie confessed to watching Gilmore Girls and Allain is reasonably sure that he’s seen every single episode of Friends. Setting aside the important questions of normative family viewing patterns and economic access (which strikes us as a question that needs answering and research), the increasing presence of individual screens ensures that Kris doesn’t need to find out if he really loves Downton Abbey.
discussing screens 