Poster by Daniel Chávez

Abstract

Films have been rapidly changing over the last quarter of a century, even more so over the last decade in the advent of digital technologies. But perhaps more than the films themselves, the challenged materiality of the medium has changed the way we consume and experience cinema, not only in different spaces (e.g. airplanes) but also through a growing number of interfaces (e.g. mobile phones).

From the perspective of Film Studies this ontological crisis prompts new challenges even in the analysis of objects –like film posters, whose materiality apparently remained unchallenged by the digital onslaught. This is the case of fan-made film posters, images that are increasingly available through the Internet and suggest a shift in our experience of cinema.

Through this presentation I want to posit two theoretical notions from which to explore these posters: the “distribumer” and “the new-old”.

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Content of the poster

The multiple crises of cinema

From the second half of the twentieth century, but most significantly over the last three decades, cinema has changed dramatically. The films have undergone significant changes, many of which have been linked to the advent of digital technologies, in the form of production practices (digital filmmaking) or CGI imagery (in the form of visual effects).

However significant and intense have these changes been, they are to be understood in conjunction with other transformation processes, for as Christian Keathly notes: “The way in which both cinephiles and ordinary viewers consume films have been transformed more radically, and more conspicuously, than have the movies themselves.”

Thus the crisis lies not only in the decay of celluloid —the material reality of film. But it can also be observed in both, mutated consumption practices (e.g. video-on-demand) and structural mutations of the production of films (e.g. crowd-funding).

Theory Mutations

From the perspective of film studies, the collapse or disjuncture of its object of study has prompted debates of a challenged ontology of cinema; What can be said to be specific about cinema? What objects can and/or should be studied by film studies?

Theory too is mutating in order to address these issues, new tensions are being drawn out that suggest possible centripetal forces of coherence. It is thus not surprising to see a shift in focus from the filmic artifact to the cinematic experience, a shift echoed, significantly, in the adjacent field of aesthetics.

The overall claim being that in spite of the ontological fracture, there still is a central, specific discursive thread in the way we experience films, in our relationship to cinema.

The “distribumer”

Under the aforementioned considerations there are film posters. Somewhat ignored by film theory (they are not films) but undoubtedly part of cinema experience, film posters have endured the digital onslaught. Not only have they remained an essential item of traditional promotion, posters have also undergone metamorphoses in their own right, an example of which is the fan-made film poster or to explicitly inscribe it within this event: the remixed poster.

I have tracked down these posters from two overlapping online communities: graphic designers and cinephiles. In most cases what I found surprising was the active engagement of cinephiles and designers as well as their conscious intellectual investment into the posters; much in the fashion of film bloggers vis-à-vis traditional film critics or scholars, but through a sort of visual rather than verbal contact surface.

Here I want to summon Alvin Toffler’s concept of “prosumer” (producer-consumer) in order to posit a category for theorizing the practice of fan-made posters through its practitioners: the “distribumer” or distributor-consumer. Such category in turn suggests a framework that brings closer together and eventually comprises two sub-areas of film studies: film industries and film audiences.

Jamais Vu and the film-historical imaginary

On another level, the proliferation of alternative film posters has been substantially enabled by the Internet; as I have mentioned, most of these images originate and circulate in niche online-communities before finding their way out into seemingly analogous off-line circles such as cine-clubs or collectors societies.

The pervasive availability of alternative, unofficial imagery about films therefore suggests an involution of what Marijke de Valck calls “the film-historical imaginary”. In the form of the “multiplicity of pasts” but also and most perplexingly in the concept of jamais vu: experiencing something as if it was for the first time despite having actually experienced it before.

Here I propose a second category for theoretically undertaking these posters: the aesthetics of recombination. Different from pastiche insofar as a different modality of aesthetic response is encouraged; the “new-old” instead of the hodgepodge.

These move implies a framework that yokes what Zimmerman and Hudson call radical historicism with aesthetics and psychology.

Author

Daniel Chávez Heras, Student, King’s College London (UK).

References

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment.” In Cinephilia Movies, Love and Memory, edited by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 27-43. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005.

Keathly, Christian “The Twenty-First-Century Cinephile.” In Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, edited by Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb, 1-4. London: Wallflower Pr, 2009.

Hudson, D., and P. R. Zimmermann. “Cinephilia, Technophilia and Collaborative Remix Zones.” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 135-46.

Martin, Adrian, and James Naremore. “The Future of Academic Film Study.” In Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, edited by J Rosenbaum and A Martin. London: British Film Institute, 2003.

Marquez, Laz. http://lazmarquez.squarespace.com/ Accessed 7 of January 2011.

Moss, Olly. http://www.ollymoss.com/ Accessed 7 of January 2011.

Sperb, Jason. “Déjà Vu for Something That Hasn’t Happened yet/Time, Repetition and Jamais Vu within a Cinephilia of Anticipation ” In Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, edited by Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb, 140-57. London: Wallflower Pr, 2009.

Toffler, Alvin. The third wave. New York: Morrow, 1980.