This essay tackles ‘fan vidding’, a grassroots practice of remix, a form of video production where fans cut clips from mainstream audio-visual sources (films and television series) and re-edit them, often on a pop music song. After calling into question some of the current typologies and classifications, and partly drawing on the categories that Gerard Genette outlined in Palimpsests, I propose three main criteria – relation to the source, mood, and logic – through which it is possible to analyse fan-produced videos: relation points to the difference between transformation and imitation; mood has to do with audience’s attitudes towards the source (celebratory, playful, critical); logic, finally, has to do with editing styles. Generally speaking, there are two fundamental logics at play in fan vidding: a narrative, syntagmatic logic, where the fan video tells a story in the form of digest, or focusing on some single episode, although not necessarily in a linear, chronological form; an anti-narrative, associative, paradigmatic logic, where the fan video remixes audiovisual materials according to the laws of similarity, analogy, fetishism squared, the loop, and where the fragment is cut from its original narrative chain to be associated with other fragments of the same kind in an often obsessive repetition. My analysis especially focuses on this last mentioned phenomenon, (currently defined “supercut”), as an example of how digital media and database as ‘symbolic form’ (Manovich) can represent a treat to the narrative hegemony which has characterized the last decades, promoting instead a kind of “scrap ecology” alongside with fragmented forms of apprehension, perception, knowledge which are more and more available and fruited on the web.
Meneghelli, D. (2017). Just Another Kiss: Narrative and Database in Fan Vidding 2.0. GLOBAL MEDIA JOURNAL, 11(1), 1-14.
Just Another Kiss: Narrative and Database in Fan Vidding 2.0
MENEGHELLI, DONATA
2017
Abstract
This essay tackles ‘fan vidding’, a grassroots practice of remix, a form of video production where fans cut clips from mainstream audio-visual sources (films and television series) and re-edit them, often on a pop music song. After calling into question some of the current typologies and classifications, and partly drawing on the categories that Gerard Genette outlined in Palimpsests, I propose three main criteria – relation to the source, mood, and logic – through which it is possible to analyse fan-produced videos: relation points to the difference between transformation and imitation; mood has to do with audience’s attitudes towards the source (celebratory, playful, critical); logic, finally, has to do with editing styles. Generally speaking, there are two fundamental logics at play in fan vidding: a narrative, syntagmatic logic, where the fan video tells a story in the form of digest, or focusing on some single episode, although not necessarily in a linear, chronological form; an anti-narrative, associative, paradigmatic logic, where the fan video remixes audiovisual materials according to the laws of similarity, analogy, fetishism squared, the loop, and where the fragment is cut from its original narrative chain to be associated with other fragments of the same kind in an often obsessive repetition. My analysis especially focuses on this last mentioned phenomenon, (currently defined “supercut”), as an example of how digital media and database as ‘symbolic form’ (Manovich) can represent a treat to the narrative hegemony which has characterized the last decades, promoting instead a kind of “scrap ecology” alongside with fragmented forms of apprehension, perception, knowledge which are more and more available and fruited on the web.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.