Tech <--> Culture II

[robotech_master]

bruceb pointed out an interesting article by a drama critic, Terry Teachout, that speculates on the effects that the introduction of the VCR has had on our appreciation of movies as items of art. I think there's certainly something to what he said. It also got me to thinking, and to articulating something in an email to Mr. Teachout that I've thought for some time but never actually put down in words. I'm going to reproduce it here, with minor changes.

I think there's another great shift that's coming about aside from the one Terry Teachout talked about, how now everybody takes movies seriously. That one was brought on by the arrival of the VCR, and the ability of people to watch movies in their own homes.

This other one, you could describe as "we're all becoming film students." It was, or is being, brought on by the arrival of the DVD, and all the extra space it provides for things like director and cast and crew and composer and film critic commentaries, featurettes, documentaries, storyboards, scripts, art galleries, text info slides, DVD-ROM extras like script-to-film and storyboard-to-film comparison, and so on. (The impending The Truth About Charlie DVD set even goes so far as to include the first-ever anamorphic transfer of the Cary Grant movie, Charade, that it remade.) Not everyone will care to explore these extras, of course...but now those who would like to be able to learn more about how films are made have an unparallelled access to everything they need to do just that.

Take the 4-disc Lord of the Rings box sets, for instance...there's a greater education about the hows and whys of making a movie crammed into just the first set, Fellowship of the Ring, than I got in an entire semester (maybe even two) of media courses at the university (I have a BS in Mass Media from SMSU...I've subsequently found that "BS" is all it's good for, but that's neither here nor there). This is stuff that it used to be you just couldn't get for love or money. (Well, money perhaps...laserdiscs are where the practice of commentary tracks originated, but they cost $50-$100 or more a pop, and even they paled next to the bounty of extras now available on DVD.)

In years to come, I suspect we may see a much larger crop of independent filmmakers as folks who learn the craft mostly or entirely from a DVD-based education grab some cheap digital cameras (of the type lately used and recommended by Robert Rodriguez) and start experimenting. It's not going to be as necessary to go to film school or get a massive budget to learn to make movies anymore. (Of course, in some respects it never was—as there have always been success stories of self-taught directors and low-budget films like The Evil Dead—but it has never been so easy as it is now.)

We're already seeing a growth of roll-your-own critics and commentators—for example, there's the site DVDTracks.com. Based on an idea by Roger Ebert, the theory behind the site is that we can record our own commentaries to movies—by setting up a recorder and talking into it while we watch the show—and then upload the commentaries as MP3s...and other people can download them and play them back while they watch the show. (I actually have a commentary of my own hosted there, for the anime movie Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro.) While its existence is attributable more to the Internet than to the DVD, it's the DVDs that have given people the education and impetus to make the tracks. I wonder how this will grow and change as time goes by?

Comments

[point5b.livejournal.com]

That's a fascinating idea.