As in: Media

For a month or two now, I've been greedily eyeing an ad for One Man Star Wars which I placed on my fridge. When I read Clancy's post about Point Break LIVE!, it reminded me of this play I will not be able to see. I'm fascinated by the remediation of cinema to the stage. We've seen it a lot in the last few years--The Producers and The Graduate both spring to mind as recent adaptations.

For we film scholars, it's particularly interesting given film's early history of being the tagalong to theater's cool older brother. Or, as Bazin put it in "Theater and Cinema—Part One":

The heresy of filmed theater is rooted in an ambivalent complex that cinema has about the theater. It is an inferiority complex in the presence of an older and more literary art, for which the cinema proceeds to overcompensate by the "superiority" of its technique--which in turn is mistaken for an aesthetic superiority. (What is Cinema? Vol 1 87)

Now the ship has turned. Given cinema's huge box office revenues, can we explain theater's turn to cinema as merely monetary? Or could it be that remediation is in full swing? Perhaps the cynic might say that we bread-and-circuses public (close your mouth, dear reader—I embrace the silliness of someone quoting Bazin putting himself in that category) just like seeing stories we already know in new forms?

This post also reminds me of the current relationship between cinema and video games. Despite the early Atari E.T. debacle, video games have been adapting movies for 25 years or so. At present, both media are feeding on one another—successful games might yield a movie, and any action or children's movie with a large budget will certainly yield a spinoff game. Then there are games like Half-Life 2, which work almost like a movie you play.

How can we start to use these remediations? We've seen MOO adaptations of textual spaces, but what else can we do--Flash games? Websites? (Assignment: make a web site adaptation of a favorite movie as a way to motivate a critical conversation about an issue in your community. Use the reader's nostalgia and knowledge of the text to pull them in and discuss the issue.)

One last thing: you may be wondering why I have not seen One Man Star Wars. I spent my theater money for the last few months on tickets to Spamalot!

Posted by briley at January 19, 2005 5:14 AM