Selected Video Essays, 2004-16
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Selected Video Essays, 2004-16 Paul Edwards Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 13.1 (2017) ISSN: 1557-2935 Paul Edwards Selected Video Essays, 2004-16 CONTENTS ii 1. INTRODUCTION 1 Whether or not to bother reading this 3 Works Cited and Consulted 6 2. THE VIDEO ESSAY: PERFORMING BEYOND LIVENESS (49 minutes) 7 Commonplace Book 7 Section 1, “Hello”: Boasting versus Clowning 9 The boast 9 (Un)willingly to school 14 Shakespeare’s Henriad as early-modern boasting 18 Intermission 21 Boasting versus clowning, round one 22 Metalinguistics 25 Boasting versus clowning, round two 31 The boast at the dividing line of history 37 My second career 41 “You’re not actually going to show that, are you?” 45 Notes 47 Works Cited and Consulted 50 Section 2, “Performing beyond Liveness”: Rethinking Interpretation 54 Works Cited and Consulted 57 Section 3, “Legal: A Counterhistory of Turning Twenty-One”: Reflections upon Turf Wars 58 Works Cited and Consulted 66 Section 4, “Report of the Task Force on Heritage”: The Place of Digital Video in the History and Study of Live Performance 68 Oppositional performance: the example of The Living Theatre 68 A necessarily incomplete review 88 Staking the body 98 Works Cited and Consulted 105 Section 5, “Coda”: The Velocity of Change 108 Works Cited and Consulted 111 3. THE WINTER BARREL (17 minutes) 112 Works Cited and Consulted 124 4. WORD AND TONE (30 minutes) 125 Opera, not opus 125 Mystory 132 ii Paul Edwards Selected Video Essays, 2004-16 Et alii 138 Envoi 139 Works Cited and Consulted 140 5. UP THE RIVER: A VIDEO MYSTORY IN THREE PARTS (1 hour, 6 minutes) 142 Con man 143 Part Three, “’Up the River: A Counterfictional,’ as Not Shown in New Orleans in New Orleans in 2011” 148 Part Two, “’Apology from Paul Edwards to the National Communication Association,’ as Shown in New Orleans in November 2011” 161 Part One, “Marlon Brando and Me: A Short History of America in the Late Twentieth Century” 164 The consolations of awful 165 Works Cited and Consulted 168 6. FOOTNOTE: JULIAN BECK, NEAR THE END OF HIS LIFE, TAKES A ROLE ON A COP SHOW (52 minutes) 172 Works Cited and Consulted 173 Author note 174 iii Paul Edwards Selected Video Essays, 2004-16 1. Introduction Just after his arrival at Louisiana State University, to begin a new faculty position in Performance Studies, David Terry reopened with me a conversation that had begun years earlier with Michael LeVan, editor of the online journal Liminalities. For two years, Michael, David, and I had participated in a group of scholar-artist-teachers who developed video art—either as free-standing pieces or as video designed to interact with live performers—for presentation at meetings of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). In November 2010, the NCA met in San Francisco. Here we presented original video work that engaged in dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo—as famous for its San Francisco locations as for its obsessive, twisted “detective story.” When the NCA met in New Orleans a year later, the group arrived with video responses to Elia Kazan’s 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire— an iconically “New Orleans” film that nevertheless shows only a handful of brief glimpses of the actual city. For whatever reasons, the energy driving the group dissipated, although this energy has re-emerged with altered casts of characters (notably at the NCA convention in Las Vegas in 2015, in a panel devoted to parodying and “swede- ing” Vegas-identified feature films). But Michael, David, and I have continued to exchange ideas about the nature of the video essay. We talk about both the expressive range and the communicative potential unique to the medium (through its various delivery systems) and the unusual perspective that “performance studies” brings to both creating and viewing such work. My recent communications with David, however, had a second focus. In the late summer of 2019, I will complete my fortieth year of teaching at Northwestern, and celebrate as well the fiftieth anniversary of my first setting foot on Northwestern’s campus as a prospective undergraduate transfer student. Prior to the beginning of the 2019-20 academic year, I plan to make the transition to “emeritus” status, with full library privileges. The time had arrived (as David and I agreed) to assemble some kind of collection of my work in the medium of the video essay, which relatively few people have had the opportunity to see. As I explore in one of the video essays: I developed my earliest video work at the beginning of the 1990s for use as classroom teaching modules. Feeding multiple audio and video players into an old-school “a-roll/b-roll” editor 1 Paul Edwards Selected Video Essays, 2004-16 (expensive and sophisticated at the time, although primitive and clumsy in retrospect) I made videos that often mixed appropriated content (clips and stills from Hollywood movies, for example) with my own voice-overs. By the closing years of the twentieth century, I had made the transition to digital non-linear editing. I cut my teeth on Adobe Premiere, and then moved to successive versions of Apple’s Final Cut program. At NCA, I began to present video essays in 2004 with Word and Tone. At David’s recommendation, I pulled together the following selection of video essays. This is not everything I have presented in classrooms and other academic settings, by any means, but it constitutes the work that I feel least embarrassed to revisit in the company of both the raised eyebrows of friends and the kindness of strangers. The Video Essay: Performing Beyond Liveness (2005, 2007, 2010, 2014; 49 minutes) 1. “Hello” (to 2 minutes, 50 seconds) 2. “Performing beyond Liveness” (to 18 minutes, 25 seconds) 3. “Legal,” including introductory comments (to 37 minutes, 2 seconds) 4. “Report of the Task Force on Heritage,” including introductory comments (to 48 minutes, 3 seconds) 5. “Coda” (to 48 minutes, 56 seconds) The Winter Barrel (2009, 2010; 17 minutes) 1. “Introducing The Winter Barrel” (to 6 minutes, 46 seconds) 2. “Chicago: 1966/1968” (to 16 minutes, 50 seconds) Word And Tone (2004, 2010; 30 minutes) 1. “Introducing ‘Word and Tone’” (to 3 minutes, 11 seconds) 2. “Word and Tone, or, Talking over Opera” (to 29 minutes, 56 seconds) Up The River: A Video Mystory In Three Parts (2011, 2016; 1 hour, 6 minutes) 1. Part One, “Marlon Brando and Me: A Short History of America in the Late Twentieth Century” (to 23 minutes, 33 seconds) 2. Part Two, “’Apology from Paul Edwards to the National Communication Association,’ as Shown in New Orleans in November 2011” (to 36 minutes, 45 seconds) 3. Part Three, “’Up the River: A Counterfictional,’ as Not Shown in New Orleans in November 2011.” (to 1 hour, 5 minutes, 53 seconds) Footnote: Julian Beck, Near The End Of His Life, Takes A Role On A Cop Show (2016; 52 minutes) All of this material was created for presentation in academic settings, and has been viewed almost exclusively by faculty and students at Northwestern University and a few other campuses, as well as by members of the National 2 Paul Edwards Selected Video Essays, 2004-16 Communication Association who attended convention panels at which the work was shown. In the following annotations (which, years ago, Michael LeVan first urged me to compile) I have attempted to document the principal sources of appro- priated content, including content for which I did not pursue permission from copyright holders. In only a few places, however, do I document the sources of still images scanned from print sources or, when necessary, copied from the internet. I do so selectively, when such documentation helps to establish the research context of an idea explored in a video essay. As I will explore below (in notes to section 5, “Coda,” of The Video Essay): I never created this work for personal financial profit, and have never made any financial profit from it. Quite the reverse: the software and hardware required are expensive, and require regular upgrades, repairs, and replacements. Only a percentage of this software and hardware is deductible as a business expense, and little of the specialized gear is supplied or reimbursed by my workplace. Prior to the current discussions with David Terry and Michael LeVan about how this work might be presented in Liminalities, I have used video essays and shorter video modules exclusively in connection with teaching and research, and have not attempted to show this work publically outside an academic setting (such as a classroom or a scholarly conference). Insofar as this work creates original fictional narratives, it is derivative, and does not attempt to reproduce someone else’s work under my own name. Insofar as this work creates video essays, the appropriated content is intended to function as quotation from other people’s work, much as a print essay might quote from a copyrighted novel or play (sometimes extensively, as in the case of an entire book about, let’s say, Joyce’s Ulysses). In my incorporation of appropriated content, I have been guided by the reinterpretation of title 17 of the United States Code that appears in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, as well as subsequent clarifications of and revisions to that act—notably the 2010 rulemaking that spelled out the extension of DVD anti-circumvention exemptions to “college and university professors and … college and university film and media studies students” who must remove content scrambling (CSS) from commercial DVDs when grabbing vidcaps and clips for educational uses.