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Unruly Media This page intentionally left blank Unruly Media YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema C A R O L V E R N A L L I S 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitt ed by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vernallis, Carol. Unruly media : YouTube, music video, and the new digital cinema / Carol Vernallis. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-976699-4 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-19-976700-7 (alk. paper) 1. Music videos—History and criticism. 2. Digital media—Technological innovations. I. Title. PN1992.8.M87.V48 2013 302.231—dc23 2013000191 Th is volume is published with the generous support of the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my husband, Charles Kronengold This page intentionally left blank C O N T E N T S Acknowledgments ix I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 PART I NEW DIGITAL CINEMA CHAPTER 1. Th e New Cut-Up Cinema 33 CHAPTER 2. Th e Audiovisual Turn and Post-Classical Cinema 42 CHAPTER 3. Music Video into Post-Classical Cinema 69 CHAPTER 4. Moulin Rouge! : Delirious Cinema 76 CHAPTER 5. Music Video, Songs, Sound: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 94 CHAPTER 6. Reciprocity, Bollywood, and Music Video: Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se and Yuva 116 PART II YOUTUBE CHAPTER 7. YouTube Aesthetics 127 CHAPTER 8. Audiovisual Change: Viral Web Media and the Obama Campaign 155 CHAPTER 9. R e c o n fi guring Music Video: Beyoncé’s “Video Phone” 181 PART III MUSIC VIDEO CHAPTER 10. Music Video’s Second Aesthetic? 207 CHAPTER 11. Digital Style: Francis Lawrence and D a v e M e y e r s 234 CHAPTER 12. A Music Video Canon? 262 Aft erword : Accelerated Aesthetics: A New Lexicon of Time, Space, and Rhythm 277 Notes 289 I n d e x 335 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to thank most my husband, Charles Kronengold. Th oughtful, witt y, caring, and equanimous, he’s bett er than I could’ve ever hoped for as a partner and fellow academic. I’d also like to thank three who have, over the years, been consistent and close readers of my work, and central to my imagination of what criticism can be—Les Brill, Alan Cameron, and George Toles. I’d also like to thank my dear co-editor Amy Herzog, as well as Claudia Gorbman and John Richardson. Together, we embarked on an endeavor—which sometimes felt daunting—of bringing 83 scholars to press in Th e Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics and Th e Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media . Th at project ran alongside this one. And I’d like to thank our authors who contributed to these volumes: by being in close dialogue with their work, I came to new understandings of what thinking and writing can be, and my book is greatly enriched by this experience. My students, too, were oft en assigned chapters, and patiently read the work; and, with alarmed expressions, they let me know I had left out an important band, or spelled it incorrectly, or helped me with the crux of an argument. I’d also like to thank the directors who generously granted interviews to me. I tried out many of my theories on them, and they answered, sometimes with bemusement, but more oft en with great depth of feeling. I hope to bring their work to print in a book called Trans- media Directors: Mavericks of Music Video, Commercials, and Film . Th ank you Jonas Åkerlund, Abteen Bagheri, Timur Bekmambetov, Jesse Dylan, Alan Ferguson, Francis Lawrence, David Fincher, Lorin Finkelstein, Charles Bigelow, Kevin Kerslake, Arev Manoukian, Melina Matsoukas, Dave Meyers, Chris Milk, Vincent Morisset, Marcus Nispel, Mark Pellington, and Floria Sigismondi. I’d also like to thank many friends and fellow grapplers with text. Th ose listed read a chapter or infl uenced one. While I’m sure I’ve left people out, I’d like to include: Mark Applebaum, Caetlin Benson-Allott , Jonathan Berger, ix x Acknowledgments Talya Berger, David Bordwell, Joseph Borrell, Ximena Briceno, Leslie Brill, Warren Buckland, Jim Buhler, Lori Burns, Lee Anne Callahan, Allan Cam- eron, Th eo Cateforis, Dale Chapman, Will Cheng, Norma Coates, Lisa Coulthard, Georgia Cowart, Sean Cubitt , Daphna Davidson, Annett e Davi- son, Kay Dickinson, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Kevin Donnelly, Nina Eidsheim, Marc Evans, Stephanie Ferneyhough, Alan Finke, Jonathan Flatley, Caryl Flinn, Joan Friedman, Simon Frith, Charles Hiroshi Garrett , Daniel Gold- mark, Claudia Gorbman, Tom Grey, Dan Hallin, Heather Hendershot, Amy Herzog, Ken Hillis, Héctor Hoyos, Tim Hughes, Anthony Kaes, Ann Kaplan, Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, Selmin Kara, Henry Keazor, Mark Kerins, Bernard Kobes, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Richard Leppert, George Lewis, George Lipsitz, Jean Ma, Saikat Majumdar, Laura Marks, Richard Mook, Alan Moore, Anna Morcom, Mitchell Morris, Paul Morris, Tony Newcomb, Mark Nye, Jann Pasler, Megan Parry, Carole Piechota, John Richardson, Jesse Rodin, Ron Sadoff , Anna Schultz, Steve Shaviro, Jacob Smith, Jeff Smith, Katherine Spring, Sianne Ngai, Jason Stanyek, Garrett Stewart, Will Straw, Mathew Sumera, Philip Tagg, George Toles, Hannah Ueno, Blakey Vermeule, Margaret Vernallis, Marguerite Waller, and Aylish Wood. And I’d like to thank my editor, Norm Hirschy. Many years ago he took me to lunch at a Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference and told me he wanted to publish my next book. No editor matches Norm. Other authors will concur! Responsible, fast, and graceful. A good fortune in my life. Th is beautiful book comes from the contribution of many: Marc Schneider, my production editor, Kay Kodner, my copyeditor, and Robert Swanson, my indexer. A special thank you, too, to Ian Bailey, Chuck Bigelow, Lee Anne Callahan, Yvett e Noel-Schure, Niko Pfund, and Suzanne Ryan. Unruly Media This page intentionally left blank I n t r o d u c t i o n UNRULY MEDIA: YOUTUBE, MUSIC VIDEO, AND THE NEW DIGITAL CINEMA I love the media swirl: its accelerating aesthetics. mingled media, and memes that cross to and fro. For a young person today, this swirl, I imagine, suggests never being bored. It all seems new—the ever-present buzzing, switching, and staccato thinking, the horizons that open onto friendship networks. Much has changed too, for labor, global fl ows of capital, and forms of power and leisure. Unruly Media takes seriously the ways moving media shape our experience. Many of us traverse from the videogame “Angry Birds” on a cell phone, to a YouTube clip, to a feature fi lm in a big theater or on a desktop computer, to Facebook, and then a music video. It’s all scrambled. But we might try to grasp this condition while we still have the chance. What is a YouTube clip? What’s a music video, or a post-classical fi lm? We might think about the media swirl in several ways. One is to focus on genre. For each form I’m considering—YouTube, music video, and digital post-classical cinema—I’d claim we have a concept of what the primary stylis- tic features are and the purest example can be. YouTube provides a whoopee- cushion eff ect; music video conveys a brief state of suspended bliss; and post-classical cinema creates a continuous sense of traversal but also bewilder- ment, as if much has transpired too quickly or too opaquely. Where were we again? Th ese fi lms can make you feel like you’ve been pummeled or blindly led. A defi nitive YouTube example might be “Th e Sneezing Baby Panda”; for music video it might be Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi”; a quintessential post-classical fi lm might be Bourne Ultimatum . But today each genre’s infl uences ripple out mad- deningly, creating interference, blendings, loosenings of boundaries in ways we’ve never seen. Beyoncé’s music video “Countdown” looks like a clip on You- Tube, as does Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” Segments from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World , Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales , and Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe could be placed on YouTube and inadvertently experienced 3 4 Unruly Media as music videos, prosumers’ mashups, art students’ class-projects, or trailers.