Seminar Presentation Handout

Below is the handout I distributed for my section of my seminar presentation on Bolter and Grusin's Remediation.

THST 2450 Presentation: Remediation & Film
Presented by Andrew Pritchard

Animated Film
In keeping with the theme of the old vs. the new, the animated film is slightly complicated.
“Animated films remediate computer graphics by suggesting that the traditional film can survive and prosper through the incorporation of digital visual technology” (Bolter and Grusin 147)
Consider the howitshouldhaveended.com example – these shorts are simple to make now vs. difficult before because animated film remediates computer technology and lives on
The short also refashions a literary/film classic and satirizes it

Transparency in Film
“Avant-garde film has always been hypermediated, in the sense that it has always made the user conscious of itself as a medium.” (Bolter and Grusin 154)
Sin City (2005) is a prime example of this – consider how the director makes the audience conscious of film as art, a return to Black and White cinema, computer graphics and editing to give the film the feel of a graphic novel, the use of colour as symbolism (the woman in the red dress at the beginning, her blue eyes, the yellow bastard)
In Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), the director employs the use of a hand held camera to follow the drug dealer out of his house and onto the lawn during Mia Wallace’s overdose fiasco. This is a prime example of transparency in film because the handheld camera gives the audience the sense that they are actually there following behind the drug dealer, Tarantino does not want the audience to be aware of the medium during this scene
Cloverfield (2008) is also a good example of transparency in film – even though the director makes audiences aware of the medium, the way in which the film is shot entirely in handheld with no music allows the audience to engage more with the film because it seems much more transparent than other films
Transparency in film means placing the audience in the film without an awareness of the medium – they must feel like a bird flying into a window

Remediation & Film
Our classics – how many times can we remake films based on Jane Austen novels (more importantly WHY?) Rocky, Rambo, superhero films being remade
Rotoscoping – creating a matte (combining multiple images into one) for live action films. This technique has been used recently in Richard Linklater films (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), however it isn’t new – it was also used in the 1978 Lord of the Rings, therefore it has been remediated
The Matrix (1999) remediated special effects for the time, but more importantly it remediated and compacted sci-fi theory of the past 25 years – see my blog for further details

Works Cited
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.