{"id":2187,"date":"2014-04-16T03:38:47","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T03:38:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=2187"},"modified":"2014-04-16T03:44:03","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T03:44:03","slug":"my-media-related-research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=2187","title":{"rendered":"Panel Presentation at Yale on February 24, 2010: My Media-Related Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0We were asked to share our media-related research on 24 February 2010.\u00a0 This was primarily for fellow graduate student.\u00a0 I came across some three years later as I was cleaning up my office.\u00a0 So why not post it?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

My Media-Related Research<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let me start off somewhat biographically and then focus on the specifics of my most immediate project\u2014the current working title of which is actually somewhat indebted to our previous meeting.\u00a0 From Media Moments<\/i>, I am now calling it Media Shifts<\/i> for I am using four presidential elections looks at the shifts in audio visual media: the 1892\/1896\u00a0 and 2004\/2008 elections.<\/p>\n

My media related research really goes back to two things\u2014my work in the film industry from 1972 to 1986, during which I made a couple of my own documentaries and worked on a variety of projects\u2014initially medical films, an independent feature entitled Groove Tub<\/i>e and porn.\u00a0 For today\u2019s purposes the most pertinent was a two-year stint on Peter Davis\u2019s Oscar winning documentary Hearts and Minds<\/i> (1974).\u00a0 After that I returned here to finish my BA and then became a part time graduate student.\u00a0 I was working primarily as a film editor and became interested in how film editing began.\u00a0 What was the first cut?\u00a0 Well the question turned out to be a na\u00efve one that produced some interesting insights.\u00a0 In the 1890s and before, post-production was in the hands of the exhibitor and it was only around the turn of the century that editorial control rapidly shifted to the production company so that production and post-production was centralized and a radical reorganization of the mode of production took place.\u00a0 This formulation is pretty obviously indebted to a Marxist approach to work and I tended to still think of myself as a dialectical materialist.<\/p>\n

Let me also note that early cinema was not a pure media form in that most exhibitions before 1903 combined lantern slides\u2014still photographs or at least title slides\u2014and film.\u00a0 So early cinema effectively involved multiple media at various steps along the way, up to the actual process of exhibition.\u00a0 Anyway, I was interested in writing or rewriting the history of the first 15 to 25 years of filmmaking and film exhibition, which resulted in a number of books.\u00a0 The issue of what Andre Gaudreault calls Intermediality was increasingly important.<\/p>\n

As this task reached a certain culmination I have increasingly returned to my original interest in documentary and have been working on a book entitled Truth and Documentary in the Age of George W. Bush<\/i>.\u00a0 This study covers the period from January 2000 to January 2009, during which the latest new media phenomenon was impossible to avoid.\u00a0 One way I research and write is to find an occasion to work up a paper and then turn it into an article that might form the basis for a chapter in the book.\u00a0 So for a conference organized by Francesco Casetti I wrote a paper that allowed me to focus on documentary\u2014or rather its apparent absence\u2014during the 2008 election.\u00a0 It became a way to focus on and understand what was going on with YouTube among other internet phenomena.\u00a0 It did this comparatively and became the basis for Media Shifts.<\/p>\n

So some preliminary insights.\u00a0 First, I am interested in the stereopticon as a kind of failed new media form in the 1860s\u2014the stereopticon combined the magic lantern with photography.\u00a0 The new media was the photographic glass slide, but in fact the lantern was, I would argue, one of the important platforms of the 19th<\/sup> century\u2013\u2013not unlike the newspaper and so was always accessible to other media such as lithographs and hand-drawn cartoons.\u00a0 In the course of my research I discovered that during the 1892 election, the Republican Party organized a number of speakers to give illustrated lectures\u2014what we might call documentary programs–on the glories of the tariff and protectionism.\u00a0 There was no reason why such efforts should all but cease in 1896\u2014in fact, one might have predicted an increase\u2014but after losing the 1892 election, the Republicans looked for other uses of the lantern or stereopticon and worked with the Biograph Company to present McKinley at Home<\/i> in New York music halls\u2014a key swing state\u2014in the month prior to the election. McKinley at Home<\/i> was a one shot film and was organized in a highly charged program that effectively presented McKinley as a figure of modernity and even \u201chope.\u201d\u00a0 It was the most high profile use of cinema during the 1896 election but not the only one.\u00a0 William Randolph Hearst first used cinema on election night\u2014and quite extensively.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Traditional media surveys like the PEW Research Center for People and the Press don\u2019t even mention motion pictures or cinema as a source of campaign news in the 2000-2008 period but clearly they missed something.\u00a0 Documentaries\u2014in particular Michael Moore\u2019s Fahrenheit 9\/11<\/i>, Errol Morris\u2019s The Fog of War <\/i>and Robert Greenwald\u2019s Uncovered: The truth About the War in Iraq<\/i>\u2014were widely seen and influential during the 2004 election.\u00a0 It might seem that their success should lead to further expansion long these lines in 2008 but this did not happen\u2014perhaps because Kerry lost the election.\u00a0 Rather, much of this kind of activity shifted to the internet. Greenwald produced numerous short, issue-oriented pieces on his Brave New Films channel on YouTube, and there were many other similar examples.\u00a0 These included Obama\u2019s YouTube campaign site which was much more developed than Hilary Clinton\u2019s or John McCain\u2019s.\u00a0 I am also very interested in so-called user generated content and stumbled across the site of a New Yorker named Russ, who had been posting short videos of his favorite drag queen performer, Kiki.\u00a0 Then he suddenly discovered Obama and started to produce some very interesting pro-Obama campaign films.\u00a0 Fortunately I downloaded a lot of these since they were subsequently removed from YouTube\u2014and his site or channel finally shut down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the 2004-2008 period we are not only dealing with shifting media but shifting platforms even as there remains a great deal of fluidity.\u00a0 There is a general though hardly universal move from film shown theatrically and videos\/dvds seen on television to the use of computers as platforms using video streaming.\u00a0 But perhaps as interesting or important as any of the above, I became fascinated by the 1000 plus Obama songs\u2014as varied as hit videos such as Got a Crush On Obama<\/i>\u00a0 with the Obama Girl and Will I Am\u2019s Yes We Can<\/i> to a Youtube video of a young Swedish woman from Finland, living in England, performing into her amateur video camera in the early hours of some morning with a song celebrating Obama \u2013and viewed slightly more than 100 times.\u00a0 It was these music videos that embodied Obama\u2019s message of Hope, which may have won him the campaign\u2014not just the general election but perhaps even more the Democratic primary, which were so close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0We were asked to share our media-related research on 24 February 2010.\u00a0 This was primarily for fellow graduate student.\u00a0 I came across some three years later as I was cleaning up my office.\u00a0 So why not post it? My Media-Related Research Let me start off somewhat biographically and then focus on the specifics of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2187"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2187"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2193,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2187\/revisions\/2193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}