WEEK 08: The People's (Re-)Appropriation/FAN CUlTURE

This class is meant to make you more conscious as both a producer/remixer and as a consumer of culture.

The first half of the course was focused on the human dimensions of creative appropriation, and on encouraging sensitivity and understanding toward previous creators. I discussed issues of cultural appropriation, commodification, postmodern decontextualization, performance abduction, and identity appropriation, all of which I asked you to consider as sometimes negative practices with human impacts. The first half of the course was also more focused on music and the past.

The second half of the course is more about how you can re-appropriate the elements of manufactured consumer culture, and I am more ready to invite you to have your way with these commodities foisted on us through big media. It will also be more focused on images and video, and on the present and future. But of course with some reference to past culture and theories about culture that have been around for awhile.

After having gone to such pains to try to make you think twice before (mis)using something created by someone else, it may strike you as odd that I am now going to focus on how and why non-professionals repurpose the elements of mainstream culture for different ends, and that often seems positive to me.

Some of the reasons I'm more willing to have you mess with contemporary mainstream culture less respectfully include the following:

• You probably do fully understand the context of things from mainstream contemporary culture most of the time (unlike, say, Renaissance art)
• Mainstream media is typically made by committee, not by a single artist pouring out their soul
• It's typically made for money
  
• It frequently panders to privilege and often has served to reinforce it
  
• It's often made to manipulate us
  
• It's part of our world whether we want it to be or not; it's shoved in our faces day in and day out

I often also simply say this: manufactured mass culture is too much FAKE FOR MONEY. I don't like fake for money.

Why do I seem to have such a hate on for mainstream culture? After all, it's full of great music, comedy, drama, artistry, and special effects. I'll come back to this shortly.

Participatory Culture

Participatory culture is culture in which the "audience" or "consumer" actively participates in the creation of the culture. Through much of human history, culture has been largely a participatory thing. For instance, people sang and danced together as part of religious observances. Blues singers traded around ideas and made music for themselves to express their feelings of sorrow and longing. Before there were phonograph records, someone in the family might play the piano or a guitar while the rest of the family sang songs or took turns. People entertainied themselves. They helped create culture, instead of spectating and consuming it as we mostly do today. With the rise of broadcast media and mass culture, people in the Western world largely became consumers of culture created and curated for them by corporations and media outlets. Culture changed; we became passive consumers.

Consider four common types of culture that have been prominent in the Western world starting in the Middle Ages: folk culture, high culture, mass culture, and digital culture. The first and last of these (the earliest and the latest) tend toward participation. The ones in the middle, most prominent in the last couple of hundred years, tend not to be participatory. Someone does the creating and everyone else does the "consuming." Each of these cultures typically has a different attitude toward appropriation as well.

Folk Culture

Folk culture has probably existed from the beginning of human history. Much of it is connected to religious and other communal practices, for instance ceremonial dancing, chanting, etc. The blues and other jes' grew forms of grassroots creativity fall under this category.

Folk culture is often very participatory. Members of the community take part in and help create the cultural "products." They may all act as carvers, dancers, singers, musicians, play actors, etc. Culture is a meaningful part of communal social life, or creation may be spontaneous, organic and not planned in a commercial or self-promoting way (not a commodity; "jes' grew"). Much of what is created as culture in traditional societies is created or engaged in by "ordinary people."

In many folk cultures there is little to no concept of intellectual property. Appropriation tends to be natural and organic - creation is collaborative and anonymous and individual ownership is comparatively rare and insignificant: “jes’ grew” is the essence of creativity.

High Culture

This kind of culture arises during the secularization of European society from the Renaissance on (1500s – present). It is generally non-participatory.

High culture is created by professionals with exceptional talents and training, and largely created for wealthy and powerful patrons (aristocrats, the Church). For instance, Beethoven was supported by patronage from three aristocrats: Count Ferdinand Ernst Gabriel von Waldstein, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, and Prince Karl Lichnowsky. He wrote some of his works to please them or for use in their courts and he would dedicate works to them. In turn, they provided him with money and other forms of protection or support. Later on, Classical composers mostly drift away from patronage to look to the rising wealthy middle class for support, in the form of concert tickets and sheet music sales. The culture is one in which professionals create works for audiences to spectate or - as we would say today - "consume." So we have extraordinary artists creating, on the one hand, and privileged audiences consuming on the other.

In this priveleged sphere, appropriation tends to be frowned upon - individual genius and originality are considered important, and appropriation is relegated to comparatively mild forms: emulation, allusion, adaptation, edition, and so forth.

Mass Culture

Mass culture comes of age in the 19th century with magazines and books and popular theater productions like the Minstrel Shows and Music Hall, and it really takes off in the 20th century with the invention of broadcast culture (radio and tv) and motion pictures. Mass culture has largely been non-participatory. The paradigm would be passive consumers watching whatever is on tv.

Like high culture, mass culture tends to be created by professionals, but now it is for “the general public,” and ultimately for the sake of making money for investors, impressarios, and eventually corporations. Mass culture gradually replaces folk culture for ordinary people; it becomes a shared, artificially manufactured “popular culture.” The people become the audience and consumers; professionals do the creating and producing.

Appropriation is normal in mass culture, but because culture is now a capitalist commodity rather than a communal holding, appropriation is expected to be licensed, paid for. In most mass culture, whatever “works” (makes money) is recycled for profit. Knock-off is very common. Creation tends to be collaborative (but by small groups of professionals) and ownership eventually becomes corporate.

Digital Culture

In the 21st century a new form of participatory culture has emerged: digital culture. With the rise of social media and the creation of ever more computer-based tools for creating media, consumers can become producers of culture once again, if they want to.

Digital culture is created by and for anyone. This "prosumer" culture seems to be gradually starting to compete with, repurpose, and replace manufactured mass consumer culture as a new, more democratic, more inclusive version of popular culture, created by and for us.

So far at least, appropriation is quite rampant in digital culture. For one thing, it is just so easy: copy and paste. The repurposing of other people's media on the Internet and in digital culture in general is usually not strictly legal, but it is also difficult to police. In many cases, it is not made for money, but for the joy of creating (and remixing) and sharing (see Craft Media below). The works that appropriate mass culture media are frequently critical of the material appropriated (see Détournement next week) or recast it with emphases different from the original (see Fan Culture below). Ownership and control are hardly possible with something as free-wheeling and decentralized as the Internet.

Mass culture appropriation

Most of the appropriation that is interesting in digital culture so far repurposes the products of mass manufactured culture (Hollywood movies, television, commercials and ads, big-media music, video games, and so forth). It may seem like this is unfair to the creators of consumer entertainment media, who are trying to profit from their hard work and talent and sometimes even have something important they want to say; but it's important to understand how appropriation itself has typically worked in that commodified capitalist sphere of production. Apart from the fact that corporate creators pay for the stuff they appropriate, their appropriations may be very insensitive to their own original creators and audiences.

Some of the more common appropriation practices in the mainstream manufactured cultures of film and television include adaptations, remakes, sequels and prequels, and reboots.

Adaptations transfer stories from one medium to another. For instance, a movie may be based on a book or a comic book.

Remakes are typical in film and have started to happen with television series. An earlier movie is made again in an updated style and with actors who are popular with audiences now.

Perhaps the most adapted or remade story of Western culture is the novella by Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. It has been adapted for stage, screen, radio, television, comics, puppet shows etc literally dozens and dozens of times since it was published in 1843. Another highly remade English author is Shakespeare. In the case of a movie not based on a book, the film A Star is Born (1937) has been remade three times, most recently with Lady Gaga. Other adaptations that have been remade several times include Dracula, King Kong, The Jungle Book, and so forth.

Sequels and prequels help build a franchise around a successful original. By continuing the story beyond the end of the original product, producers can create more media with characters, storylines, and fictional worlds that consumers have responded positively to. Think Fast and Furious 9.

A franchise is a corporate media asset that features a variety of products in different media and format centered around a fictional story or world. For instance, Marvel Comics, or Star Wars. Franchises make entertainment products and merchandise that may include books, movies, television shows, audio plays, animated movies, comic books, video games, toys, t-shirts, accessories, and so on. An original creative work, for instance the first Harry Potter book, is appropriated to become a manufactured product line worth billions.

Reboots are appropriations of sucessful series (films or television) that basically ignore the previous adaptations, storylines, and actors to reimagine the whole thing from scratch. A series is started over, discarding continuity with the previous established storylines, actors, etc. Obvious examples include the various reboots of Batman and Spiderman that have happened over the last 30 years or so.

Corporate appropriation is obviously firmly focused on making money. The idea is to give audiences more of what they like and to capitalize on this. Much great creative work happens in the media produced this way, but it is still all very much tied to making money from appropriating and repurposing earlier creative work.

What's wrong with our mass media?

To the extent that mass media franchises may constitute the closest thing to shared cultural myths in the world today, there have been many things to criticize about them, however much we may have loved them. The culture of mainstream manufactured media that I grew up with and that is still incredibly influential today has had some notable aspects that many of us find worthy of criticism.

• It is generally produced as a commodity and often is attempting to sell us other commodities. It’s too focused on money and exploiting consumers.
  
• It is too often unoriginal. It reproduces itself at the expense of other kinds of creativity and other voices that are more original; it keeps us in certain grooves as a society.
  
• It panders to what it perceives to be our tastes, whether they are positive or regressive. It often promotes ideals and lifestyles that are as shallow and morally vapid as they are unrealistic. It will give us whatever it thinks we want, regardless of whether that is good for us or not (it can be very much like junk food).
  
• It (wrongly) suggests that celebrities – icons of wealth, power, sex appeal, and narcissism – are the most important and interesting creators.
  
• It has some tendency to dumb things down, simplify, and avoid radical ideas because it wants to appeal to the widest possible audience (lowest common denominator) – or because it is made by those in power who want to promote self-serving ideologies, often unprogressive ones.
  
• Until recently, it has mostly focused on the lives, interests, problems, and concerns of straight white men and a few hot young white chicks – it often panders to and reproduces privilege and stereotypes.
  
• It is a self-perpertuating Spectacle that offers itself as a replacement for living our lives and being creative ourselves (more about The Society of the Spectacle next week!).
  

Postmodern decontextualization in manufactured media

Manufactured media in its focus on producing commodities is often very insensitive in how it appropriates. I showed examples of postmodern decontextualization in the last lesson on identity appropriation - for instance Audrey Hepburn's dance taken out of 1950s movie and used to sell Gap pants in the 2000s. In 2018 two dramatic examples of how this kind of decontextualized formalist reuse of media could be hurtful to real people occurred when two separate Netflix series used "stock" footage of the real life Lac-Mégantic rail disaster that happened in Québec in 2013 as background footage in fictional SF entertainment videos. The real footage stood in for a London nuclear explosion in Travellers (2018) and then for mysterious "mass psychotic behaviour" in the series Bird Box (also 2018).

Citizens in the Lac-Mégantic region and relatives of victims and survivors watching these entertainment products unsuspectingly were suddenly re-traumatized when they saw the events they had experienced and perhaps lost loved ones to stuck into a fictional storyline and used without awareness that people who had experienced these real traumas might also see these fictionalized samplings of them.

Three criticisms of the repetitiveness of mass culture

In addition to these questionable aspects of capitalist consumer culture, one can deplore the lack of original vision that leads to the phenomenon I call Retromania: the recycling of the products of popular culture created since the advent of television over and over and over again. The much repeated tropes in popular culture products take the place of myths and religious stories in our world and they have some of the same anti-progressive effects as other forms of control by the past, though it always seems to be presented as an updated and cutting edge now in them. They become a sort of closed system of reference for us, and given people's lack of understanding of history they can seem natural and eternal, rather than really just the culture of the last 70 years or so.

The Culture Industry

All the way back in 1947, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a scathing critique of American consumer culture in an essay called "The Culture Industry." This was written before television had even become common, but the critique they came up with was particularly fitting for the American tv culture of the 1950s. As they saw it, all the mass media that is purportedly created for consumers as an escape from their work lives actually perpetuates the world views and values of those work lives. It is thus propaganda made by other corporate leaders to keep people firmly embedded in the cycle of capitalist work and consumerism that all corporate interests want to keep people locked into, for their profit. Thus, soap operas are not just interrupted by ads for products, and made because they can sell ads for products; they are also "ads" themselves for life under capitalist consumer culture: "To impress the omnipotence of capital on the hearts of expropriated job candidates as the power of their true master is the purpose of all films, regardless of the plot selected by the production" (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947).

For Horkheimer and Adorno, the manufactured media of modern America is just one more consumer product, contributing to the perpectuation of a society rooted in capitalist exploitation and consumer "escapism" that is no real escape at all:

Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time, however, mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself.

There is no escape in mass culture from the capitalist machine in which we all live.

Retromania

This is an idea popularized by Simon Reynolds, in his very rich and interesting book of the same name (2011). Reynolds makes a series of arguments about how pop culture (meaning the media that has been created since the 1950s, on the American models of Hollywood, television, and American top-40s pop music) recycles previous versions of itself without reference outside of that closed era, roughly 1950-the present. As used in this class, this term refers to tendency to "bring back the 70s" (for example) - in fashion, tv, music, etc. This really started after the 1960s - a period of profoundly countercultural upheaval and resistance to the capitalist Culture Industry - but it "keeps coming back," like some Freudian Return of the Repressed. In the mid-1970s they started "bringing back the 50s" (movies like American Graffiti, musicals like Grease, tv shows like Happy Days); this was clearly also to satisfy a nostalgia some people had for a time when "America was great" (before the hippies, Feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and so on, which had been deeply critical of America). The era that is least likely to be revived is the 1960s, when the culture industry was ideologically at its weakest, and there has been a particular tendency to revive the 70s and 80s more than once already.

In a sense, this keeps our mass culture in a closed system based on the 1950s as the "beginning of history" and with a sense that everything of importance happened in those 70s years, and that this period of human history "is reality" or is the best time humans have ever had. Meanwhile, the prosperity of the 1950s has waned, and we now see that even this period of history is not an eternal closed system of endless syndication and re-runs. We need a planet for tvs to run on.

The period of mass consumer electronic media - essentially television - coincides, not coincidentally most critics would argue, with the era of neoliberal capitalism as the model for everyone on the planet: the religion of neoliberal capitalism, if you will. Neoliberal capitalism involves certain basic assumption: there is no viable alternative to capitalist system, the market should be as free and unregulated as possible - and this means a decrease in the power that governments have, America is the model the rest of the world should follow, globalization will lead to a better life for all, trickle-down economics will ensure that everyone just gets richer as long as the economy continues to grow. Some of these have now proven not to be valid, and we have been forced to recognize that unhindered economic growth is not sustainable. In any case, it seems to be leading to a collapse of our eco-system.

Hauntology

The final critique of the repetitiveness of mass culture - and perhaps also of all remix culture - is called hauntology. The word is a pun on "ontology" - the branch of philosophy that deals with what it means to "be," what existence is. Hauntology has become particularly associated with Mark Fisher, a very sensitive British critic of culture and a colleague of Simon Reynolds. I can't really summarize this complex concept here, but it is based around the idea that contemporary culture (or at least the culture Fisher was writing about in the 2000s and 2100s) is heavily nostalgic for earlier times in the retromania cycle, when there still seemed to be hope for the future and where there were still alternatives to neoliberal capitalsim. After the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1989, conservative leader Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "There is no alternative" (to the system of neoliberal capitalism) seemed to be proven true.

Fisher, however, grew up in a version of Britain before Thatcher that was closer to a Socialist Democracy. The BBC was heavily subsidized by the government and allowed to make adventurous programming even if relatively few people would watch it (the majority preferred the more American shows produced by the commercial alternative, ITV). He finds - found, actually, since he committed suicide in 2017 - that a lot of early 21st century music and filmmaking is nostalgic for those times before 1980, just as there are also those who seem to be nostalgic for the 80s (think Vaporwave) because the future still seemed cool and futuristic then. We now know that the future was not exactly cool like we had imagined it, and some people - like Reynolds and Fisher - largely feel like "the future was cancelled" to make way for a falsely eternal neoliberal present, which we have been living within since the 80s. As young people took to watching Friends not so long ago, through a kind of nostalgia for a time before they were born (and before the Internet, the Climate Crisis, and Black Lives Matter as well!), and people play retro video games out of nostalgia for a time when technology and interacting with it seemed futuristic and fun, so music is haunted by the musics of resistance from times when resistence still seemed real and possible.

If you'd like to see what theoretical writing on hauntology looks like, you can dip into this essay by Mark Fisher, What is Hauntology?

The Internet and the re-emergence of Participatory Culture

In the days when manufactured media was the centre of cultural life (as it still is for many people), to create a more participatory culture was hard work and was often looked down upon because it didn't make people rich or famous.

Fandoms, which we'll look at in a moment, were one of the places where consumers began to reappropriate the products they were expected to consume and do their own thing with them.

When I was younger, there were relatively few outlets for non-corporate creativity. People might "publish" (xerox) Zines and comics, for instance. People might make mixtapes for friends or lovers. Nerds might engage in fan appropriation of various kinds (see below).

Compared to that world of the late 20th century, today there are many more creative alternatives to mass culture, thanks to computers and the Internet. One might mention such collaborative, often non-profit or low-return, "prosumer," and open phenomena as

• Wikis
• Blogs
• TikTok and YouTube videos
• Opensource software
• Social media (Photo, audio, video, and artwork sharing sites)
• Culture Jamming
• Mashups
• Fanedits
• Machinima
• Etc

I'll talk more about the last of these in particular, but even something like Instagram is a form of participatory culture in a way that television was not.

Personally, I am excited by the new participatoriness of culture. It seems more inclusive, more democratic, and frankly more intelligent and creative than the manufactured culture I grew up with. The Internet “jes’ grew” and this is largely true of
Internet culture as well. As early hip hop was a kind of urban folk culture, so the Internet in its present form makes available a kind of Digital Folk Culture, that you will find on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, Soundcloud, etc etc. These platforms, though they are run for profit by corporations, are powered by ordinary people who have something they want to say and express. They are often more entertaining and almost always more informative than the traditional broadcast media and motion picture industries.

Craft media®

I don't consume a lot of pop culture any more. I rarely watch television or streaming series; I watch only a few mainstream movies; I don't listen to much pop music. When I'm on my own at night and want some entertainment, I generally turn to YouTube (for you, maybe it's Tik Tok but I have a longer attention span ;-). There I can find tons of original and rediscovered content that interests me more than mainstream products. I call this new type of user-provided "content" craft media.

Craft media is often nerdy and counter-cultural - at least the stuff thrown up by my algorithm is! YouTube has come to know me well, and I can find "programming" there that is much more interesting to me than whatever the latest Netflix phenomenon is. Videos explaining music theory, silent movies from the 1920s, obscure Turkish jazz-rock albums from the 1970s, leftist, black, and trans social commentary by deep thinkers. Dog and cat memes. Compilations of Japanese commercials. Bollywood music videos from the 1960s. Historical costume designers showing you how to make Edwardian dresses and then modelling them (!). The humour is funnier and less safe than anyone is creating in Burbank. The music is more adventurous and less predictable than the Billboard Top 100. The range is far more diverse, inclusive, and progressive than even the most complete of cable and streaming services.

The content is often made by individuals who care deeply about what they are making and have near-complete creative control. This is what I call craft media. It is part of the ecstasy of the Internet that it may be hard to appreciate if you grew up with it. The Internet is so much better than television. It is as much a work of self-expression, love, and personal care as the finest artisanal craftmanship. As awful as many things on the Internet are (child porn, trolls, bullies, white supermacists, etc), I find it mostly a beautiful expression of our true creative humanity.

Participatory culture is the idea that all of us can make the culture for each other, rather than leaving it in the hands of corporate entities we pay to entertain us. Behind this phenomenon is the recognition that culture creates reality, and that we are all poets making the world we want, rather than consuming a world that has been made for us to consume. No doubt this is a "romantic" and privileged view of human beings, but it is one that is more and more possible in the Late Capitalist world of North America right now. The 19th century French poet Lautréamont once wrote "La poésie doit être faite par tous. Non par un." ("Poetry should be made by everybody. Not just one person.") I would also recall the words of Glenn Gould that I quoted in the lesson on Producer Music: "In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. … The audience would be the artist and their life would be art."

Fan culture appropriation

Long before the Internet, fans of various imaginative works that had become media franchises began to re-appropriate the creations of the corporations. Fans who wanted more Star Trek or Tolkien began making art based on those worlds, writing stories or creating cartoons that continued the sagas or created side stories. As a kind of adult continuation of the sort of play-acting children often do (I had a Robin costume when I was a kid), fans went to conventions, engaged in cosplay, studied the made-up worlds as though they were real (I remember learning to write Tolkien's tengwar Elvish alphabet as a teenager and drawing my own maps of Middle Earth locations).

Fan appropriations were often very creative as they began to express aspects of the appropriators' personalities and interests that were not present in the original works. Fan appropriation is most interesting when it concentrates on something that was marginalized in the original franchise or not present there at all. The black communications officer Lieutenant Uhura from the original Star Trek, for instance, or a gay relationship between two characters who are straight in the franchise. In the examples I'll be looking at below, you will how fans see things in the original that the typical passive audience may not notice; there is a kind of attention to detail in many fandoms that leads to fascinating remixes of franchise motifs and materials by fans.

Fan art

Fan art is original artwork made by fans of a particular franchise, such as Batman, Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic Universe, etc. The art may be in any number of media: drawing, cartoons, painting, sculture, collage and photomontage, digital remix, etc.

Fan art often focuses on a particular character or motif with which the fan is obsessed or preoccupied, for instance Captain Kirk or Draco Malfoy. Much of it explores the characters or plotlines in an unusual medium or style, remote from the original. For example, Darth Vader might find himself in an impressionist garden; Princess Leia might be dressed as a hula dancer. Iron Man might be bent over a beer in a charcoal portrait of despair. Harry Potter might be kissing Draco.

If you google “Star Wars fan art” (or "your franchise here fan art") you will get some sense of the range of changes fan artists ring on the mainstream versions of the media. Some of them will be consistent with the vision of the original books, films or graphic novels; others will be as far afield as combining characters with indigenous motifs, Bollywood style, etc.

Like other fan media, fan art sometimes eroticizes characters and situations in interesting and unexpected ways. Queering straight characters is very common, as in Slash (see below). Some artists are interested in mixing characters or motifs from one franchise with those of another franchise, for instance having Kermit the Frog from The Muppets sit and fish with Yoda from Star Wars, or Princess Leia (from Star Wars) kiss Captain Kirk (from Star Trek).

 

Fan fiction

Fan fiction involves original stories about characters from mainstream commercial franchises written by fans. Often these take the premises of the original commercial franchise and bend them in startling new directions. For instance, there are thousands of examples of fiction written by fans of Harry Potter who want more or different stories about the characters and world created by J. K. Rowling.

If you've never explored fan fiction before, trigger warning. "Darkfic" is often used to refer to new stories that drastically far from the often fairly innocent worlds of popular franchises. For instance, you might encounter torture, BDSM sex, sexual abuse, suicide or other much more real-life scenarios in the stories, even if Harry Potter or Aragorn or Katniss Everdeen have never been near a hint of any of those things in the franchise itself.

Much of fan fiction is not of very high quality, but there are lots of extremely well written fan fictions; some are very popular with fans of the official franchise. As with fanvids, fan art, and other fan appropriation genres, the results are often more inclusive or at least less mainstream than the plots and characters in the official media. Some fan fiction has even been published as books or eBooks and can be bought on Amazon. Most of it is traded around on fan sites, as part of subculture that shares and expands on the official franchise materials.

Fan fiction goes back at least to the 1960s, when fans began writing new stories about the characters and world of Star Trek and other franchises. The multimillion dollar bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction before E. L. James revised it and self-published it to massive acclaim. (For whatever reason ,-)

Fan video appropriation genres

You will need to distinguish between three distinct types of fan-made video creations: fan movies vs fan edits vs fanvids. Each of these has a different approach to appropriation, a different goal, and probably a different kind of audience.

Fan movies

Fan movies are re-performed and filmed or animated versions of movies or scenes from movies. The fans act out the movies or create animated or stop-motion versions of the movies.

The first full-length shot-for-shot fan movie remake seems to have been Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation (1989). The film was made over seven years by three boys who were 11 years old when they began working on it.

An intriguing form of fan movie involves multiple fans re-creating individual scenes to produce the entire movie in a series of discreet stylistic fragments. Perhaps the first and certainly the most famous example is Star Wars Uncut. The original 1977 Star Wars movie (now referred to as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) was divided into 473 fifteen-second segments and various fans claimed segments. Casey Pugh, the producer, then spliced them all together to create the full-length feature, which replays the movie but with the style and interpretation changing every 15 seconds. Other examples include Shrek Retold (200 unique contributors) and Our Robocop Remake (about 50 contributors).

Fan edits

Fan edits or fanedits are movies that have been recut, rescored, remastered, or “remixed” by amateur editors, using computer software. They are like alternative “director’s cuts” of movies and tv shows, but made by unknown, illicit, hacker directors.

Fan editors generally take advantage of the dvd releases of films, including extras, which they rip and then re-edit in video editing programs on their computers. They may may bring in material from the dvd extras, external footage, audio from other sources, etc.

Famous examples of fan edits include the numerous attempts by Star Wars fans to re-edit Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – a film that many die-hard SW fans hated – to make it a movie they would like better. Typical in these examples was the removal or minimalization of the character Jar Jar Binks, for example, sometimes the removal of reference to “midochlorians,” and general attempts to streamline the narrative and make it more adult and exciting. Some examples of these fan edits are discussed and excerpted in the fascinating fan culture documentary The People vs George Lucas (dir. Alexandre O. Philippe, 2010), which I used to show in this course and of which two excerpts are shown in the synchronous session.

Another illustrative example is Titanic: the Jack Edit (2007) by CBB. The fan editor took James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and made it into a movie he was happier with. This involved focusing the narrative more clearly around Leonardo di Caprio’s character, Jack, and reducing the aspects of the movie more focused on Rose. On fanedit.org one can read about the editor’s motivations and changes:

Editing Details:
This fanedit is supposed to change the perspective of the movie and it does so by focusing on Jack, the courageous young man, who won a ticket on the Titanic as a 3rd class passenger, only to find the love of his life, which he was willing to risk everything for. To change perspective we took out all references to old Rose, all her voice overs, all the treasure hunting for the necklace and most of all: all that happens to Rose until Jack and her are a couple. Since our edit focuses solely on Jack, there also isn’t much about the Titanic. No machine room, no captain’s discussions, no crew talk. All of these are great scenes, but they just didn’t fit to our movie. We included 9 of the deleted scenes, which add more character to Jack and also some more adventurous events. Now this is a dramatic love story about a true hero on the Titianic, about his struggle to survive. Nothing more and nothing less. It is a completely different watching experience and we really tried to take care, so nothing important is missing.
Cuts and Additions:
– 9 of the deleted scenes were reintegrated. Among these are:
– Rose visits 3rd class.
– Rose and Jack after the party.
– kissing in the machine room.
– hunted by Lovejoy.
– surviving in the icy water.

– Old Rose was completely removed. This version is about Jack.
– The treasure hunt for the necklace was completely removed. Without old Rose this was not needed.
– All Rose scenes from the beginning were removed, where Jack is not present. Later on, when they get closer, Rose gets scenes alone.
– All scenes from inside of the Titanic, where Jack isn’t present are removed, as well as all scenes of other passengers, including their tragic demise, when the Titanic sinks. This was done because of perspective reasons. This edit stays true to Jack. So there are not even the deaths or destinies of rather close people shown (Fabrizio, Tommy, Cal, Ruth, Molly, The Captain)
– At several different occasions music from Harry Gregson Williams’ soundtrack “Chronicles of Narnia” is added. It fits perfectly.

Fan edits are generally assumed to be illegal (though they are not generally done for profit, and I'm not aware of any lawsuits related to them). As a consequence, they can be hard to find except through torrent sites and occasionally posted on YouTube.

You can start exploring fanedits here: http://fanedit.org and you used to be able to get to many of the fanedit videos themselves through this site: fanedit.info (dark-web instructions for finding the actual videos).

Fanvids

Vidding involves creating a music video from footage from one or more video sources, generally mainstream franchise movies or tv shows, to explore material from the source in a different way from how it was presented by the creators. The vidder may explore a single character across different films, promote a minor character or motif to become the main subject of the music video, create a new or different erotic pairing between characters, criticize or celebrate the original text, or point out an aspect of the TV show or film that they find under-appreciated. In remixing the original, the video is often stylized, distorted, rotoscoped, or otherwise changed visually, as well as in terms of narrative and context.

Although fanvids can be seen as a sub-class of the unofficial music video genre, there are specific things that usually make it a special category, and fanvids are themselves actually among the earliest examples of music videos, pre-dating MTV and the 80s emergence of the music video as a common practice.

The majority of vidders are women. Vidding goes back to the 1970’s and the VCR. Female fans would “dub” back and forth between two VCRS to create new footage and then finally replace the soundtrack with a song. The first attempts at this were actually slideshows with musical accompaniment, when it was still impossible to get tv shows or most movies on videotape for home use. In 1975, Kandy Fong synced Star Trek stills she had gotten hold of on a slide projector with music from a cassette player and showed this at a fan convention. Later Fong started videotaping her live performances with the slideshows and this led to other fans making music videos with primitive videotape editing using more than one VCR.

The practice continued into the digital age and has a wide fan following of its own. These people are less concerned with particular fandoms and more interested in the process of making these re-imaginings using the existing media.

In Summer 2009, an issue of the scholarly publication Cinema Journal featured an “In Focus” section of articles on the subject of “Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production.” This provided a fascinating, theoretically informed, and politicized look at the phenomenon of vidding. One pair of articles, for instance, discussed the specifically feminine nature of vidding, and argued for and against whether vidding should remain part of an alternative “gift” economy, where women share their re-imaginings of male-created stories among each other as a non-commercial creative act, or whether women should be trying to monetize and cash in on their creativity as men have traditionally done.

“Vogue” is one famous, respected and viral example of female vidding from 2012, by one of the most celebrated practioners of our time, luminosity.

In this re-cut of footage from the dramatic action movie 300, the underlying eroticism and choreography of the visceral battle sequences and the more explicit homoeroticism from the movie are forefronted in a music video set to the 1990 LGBTQ+ anthem of Madonna’s “Vogue.” This video arguably re-edits the movie for a straight female (and queer) sensibility, showing the aspects of the film that spoke most to luminosity.

More explicit forms of this kind of “queering” are found throughout the remix work of Slash subculture (see below).

The final article in the journal talks about another famous fanvid, “Us” by Lim. “Us” artfully stylizes and recombines footage from the Star Trek franchise, Batman Begins, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean and V for Vendetta to create an accompaniment to Regina Spektor’s beautiful song of the same name. This is a fanvid that is about vidding and fan culture itself, and also about the new power of consumers, particularly women who have traditionally played a far smaller role in the authoring and control of mainstream culture, to redesign the products of that culture to their own tastes and interests, using remix.

Viewed within Lim’s beautiful vid, Spektor’s song with its references to all of us “living in a den of thieves” seems to comment on how mainstream culture steals our realities, dreams, and humanity to make its slick consumer products to sell back to us; but stealing like this is “contagious,”  and we consumers have now learned the joy of stealing back the elements of those mainstream products to tell our own stories with them.

If you would like to know more about the early history of fanvids, see A History of Vidding.

Slash

Slash, named for the punctuation mark in k/s (Kirk/Spock) is a subculture that began in the 1970s. It involves re-writing and re-editing franchise scenarios to propose a homesexual relationship between characters who, in the original, do not have this connection. The original and classic pairing is Captain Kirk and Mr Spock from Star Trek.

Like vidding, the Slash subculture goes back to the 1970s, and interestingly, in this culture too the large majority of slash writers and artists, like the largest proportion of all fan artists, are straight women.

Vids and fan fiction, especially as written by women, suggest the liberatory potential of fan culture as a remix culture.

In the 21st century if big media isn’t telling the story you want to hear – if instead it still inundates you with the same stories of straight white males coming of age, killing rivals, getting the girl, etc – fans can rework or extend the stories to make them reflect what they want to hear about, and ultimately, perhaps, their own stories.

This lesson has largely been about the relationship between ordinary consumers and their culture, and how fan culture is a way consumers have used to re-appropriate the creations of the mass culture and turn them to new and exciting uses.