WILLIAM URICCHIO

Googles Ngram can find letter and

word combinations within its
digitized collection of 5.2 million
books printed between 1500 and
2008, offering both a graphic
indication of frequency and direct
links to the texts. Google books
Ngram viewer, <http://books.
google.com/ngrams> accessed 13
December 2013.

The recent increase in the deployment of the term apophany in the

humanities probably says something about the current state of things. One
might credit this interest in finding meaningful patterns within random data
or something like pattern recognition to the ever more frequent shifts in
theoretical framing and reference, to the dramatic increase in access to ideas
both scholarly and not, and to the non-stop process of reorientation required
in a 24/7 networked culture where ideas and responses trade at
unprecedented speed. If you try plugging the term (or your theorist or jargon
of choice) into Googles Ngram, a set of patterns will appear in graphic
form, tracked along a timeline.1 Ngram also serves as a reminder of why, in
the early days of big data and data mining, patterns abound.
As theoretical stances find themselves on ever-faster cycles of boom
and bust, they appear, when viewed from a distance (or through the zigzagged graphs of Ngram), like a stubborn twitch in human behaviour a
compulsion to impose form and coherence onto dynamic data sets. At a
more meso-level, we might see the patterned and accelerating rise and fall of
theoretical frames as a response to the escalating institutional demands of
universities that they provide the building blocks of reputation, offer
publication opportunities, and serve as instantiations of larger resonances
that loosely connect and render coherent the intellectual project of the
humanities. Less lock-step than frame of reference, these discursive turns
offer their participants reinforcement if not a fleeting sense of consensus,
just as much as they offer targets against which to react and rally. Up close

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History and its shadow: thinking about

the contours of absence in the
construction of media history

research note
2

One can obviously taxonomize the

varieties of history in many ways;
this comes from David Bordwell,
Doing film history, David
Bordwells Website on Cinema,
September 2008, <http://www.
davidbordwell.net/essays/doing.
php> accessed 13 December 2013.

VCR penetration rates for US

households were 1.1% in 1980 and
68.6% by 1990, according to TVB
Local Media Marketing Solutions,
A report on the growth and scope of
television (2012).

One might look at the sixty or so years that cinema studies has been within
the academy and consider the efforts that have been made to write the history
of the film medium a patterning exercise if ever there was one. The terrain
is marked by accreted layers of histories biographical, economic, aesthetic,
technological and social/cultural, further clustered into national, regional
and transnational variants.2 Terms like layering and clustering suggest
order, and were one to trace the broad historiographic contours of the field
one would find a greater frequency of social/cultural histories being
produced in the 1980s and 1990s, say, than biographical or aesthetic
histories, reflecting something of a particular intellectual Zeitgeist. The
dialogic nature of the academy encourages these patterns, of course, and
writers of history generally take pains to situate their work within them. And
for this reason, among others, many of our film histories tend to be
historiographically self-aware.
If, however, one were to look for awareness among film historians of
shaping influences outside the world of letters, the results would be less
impressive. Of course most historians address the limits (or excesses) of
their particular data sets: the availability of archive materials, the versions of
film prints consulted, the gaps in the record, and so on. But only rarely do
historians consider the broader conditions that shape their questions or
define their corpus. The field of cinema studies from the late 1970s to the
1990s, for example, was subject to an important series of environmental
changes, thanks to cable and satellite deregulation in television (with a
dramatic shift in programme offerings) and the fast-growing domestic
penetration of the videocassette recorder.3 Coincident with cinema studies
boom years in (at least) US universities, the impact of VCRs (together with
the expanded film repertoire on television) on broadening the range of films
available for study has been largely underappreciated. Until this
development, archival collections (for those with funding and access) and
16mm collections at universities and rental houses formed the default basis

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and on an everyday level, we need not so much to look at them as a set of

behaviours as to take them on their terms, and press them for their meanings,
insights and implications.
Patterns can be endlessly expansive but they are ultimately bound by the
contours and limits of the data sets upon which they are based. In what
follows I would like to reflect on these limits. The twists and turns of the new
media scene challenge some of our established ways of thinking about data
about the nature of different media, our access to and preservation of them.
And, if my premiss is correct, this will have implications for the histories that
we construct for these media forms. I call upon the examples of DVDs and
interactive documentaries in this essay, but the challenge is a more general
one, and enables us to take the long view of our disciplinary history and
consider some of the agencies (and our responses to them) that have given
form to our field. My focus is the new, but I would like to begin with an
example from the old.

A number of recent studies have

explored the interactions between
film scholarship and the archive,
including Bregt Lameris, Opnieuw
belicht de pas de deux tussen de
filmmuseale praktijk en
filmhistorische debatten (PhD
dissertation: Utrecht University,
2007), and Giovanna Fossati, From
Pixel to Grain: the Archival Life of
Film in Translation (Amsterdam:
University of Amsterdam Press,
2009).

David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson

and Janet Staiger, The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of Production to 1960
(New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1985).

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for the field. A look at nontheatrical 16mm film distribution catalogues from
the early 1980s one of the periods main sources for classroom screenings
helps to explain the shape and persistence of the canon. It also underscores
just how important was the pioneering work that took place outside that
framework: the social histories of the medium offered by scholars such as
Robert Sklar and Garth Jowett in the mid 1970s; Jay Leydas work on
Griffith and the Chinese cinema; P. Adams Sitney and Annette Michelson
on the avant garde. It points to the transformational effect that conferences
and festivals would have on the field, a move perhaps most dramatically
marked by the thirty-fourth annual FIAF conference in Brighton in 1978.4
The projects of the scholar and the archivist found much common ground, to
the benefit of both constituencies, as evidenced in such important works as
David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staigers The Classical
Hollywood Cinema.5 These studies contextualized the canon by going far
beyond it, and by considering quotidian productions long outside the view
of most academics except collectorscholars such as William K. Everson.
But these transformational elements within the academy, crucial as they
were for setting the fields agenda for a coming generation, also benefited
immeasurably from the radical shift in the availability of films enabled by
the VCR, and from the shift in mentality regarding accessibility that it
represented. This part of the story has not been as well explored; it neither
fits the reigning historical narrative nor benefits from obvious repositories
of relevant data regarding film titles availability on videocassettes,
television film programming or, most importantly, the scale of user
numbers and frequency.
The digital turn, including DVDs and online archives, magnified the
environmental shifts introduced by televisions film programming and
VCRs. The move from scarcity to plenty now escalated to a virtually
unlimited set of possibilities. Not only were more films available from a
greater array of cultural settings, but their content was easier to manipulate
whether doing the work of an earlier generation of analytic film projectors
(frame-by-frame analysis, for example) or enabling the kinds of excerpts,
compilations and mashups only previously possible with tape and a lot of
effort. But the really interesting conceptual shifts took a different form. The
internet enabled new voices to be heard and initiatives to be created. Fans of
particular films or actors or esoterica could post their thoughts, build sites
and create communities. Information could be quickly gathered, thanks to
the steady digitization of newspaper archives, trade papers, municipal
archives and even some specialized film documentation collections. The
break from site-specific collections of papers and microfilms was
accompanied by computer-assisted searches and, ultimately, tools such as
Ngram, enabling the kind of searches that took many months (and much
funding) in the 1980s to be completed in a fraction of a second by the end of
the millennium. Even better, research findings could accrete in far more
flexible ways than those afforded through traditional academic publishing,
with scholars trading information, blogging first impressions and
exchanging tips on newly digitized collections in near real time.

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Just as importantly, the object at the centre of study film was

recontextualized. Course titles, book and article topics, and conference
papers had once all pointed to the fields default understanding of film as
industrial/dramatic/narrative productions, with the important exceptions of
early or avant-garde cinema and a select few documentary subgenres. But
the use of digital networks helped to change that. Initiatives such as Rick
Prelingers internet-based archive (the Prelinger Archive) and YouTube
opened the way for a vastly expanded range of moving images not only to vie
for scholarly attention but to reposition the default corpus of dramatic
narratives, canonic or not. Both in terms of titles produced and, in
YouTubes case, numbers of viewers served, a significant counter to the
usual domain of motion pictures quickly emerged. Of course many film
scholars have long worked outside this tradition Greg Waller and main
street, Dan Streible and orphans, Patricia Zimmerman and home movies,
Mats Bjrkin and industrials, Lisa Kernan and trailers, the many scholars of
early cinema, and so on but their important work did little to challenge the
assumed centrality of the feature film. Just as the introduction of the VCR
helped to reposition and contextualize the canon, the online availability of
vast stores of printed archival material and newspapers, as well as usergenerated, sponsored, educational and ephemeral films, is poised to
reposition and contextualize the feature. And just as the VCRs impact has
not featured prominently in the fields own sense of its development, neither
have these new elements. We all know about them and their potentials, of
course, but few of us have researched their impact on the shape and dynamic
of the field.
Precision is important, and I have not been terribly precise about the
media forms under discussion. Television, VCRs, DVDs and internet
repositories of moving images are not home to 35mm celluloid assets to
films. And depending upon the kinds of questions a researcher has, this
could very much limit the utility of the various copies of films and the
experiences they afford available in these formats. As production and
exhibition cultures gradually shift towards digital media, this will be less
problematic for a growing number of viewers; but for some researchers and
some questions, the materiality of the medium will remain core. For the
moment, however, we inhabit a transition period in which we are running
something like a double economy, and that can pose problems for the unity
of the realm. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the affordances of
digital platforms can challenge some of our most basic notions of how texts
work. These affordances like those of the VCR have implications for the
field and the writing of its history implications as much for our media
heritage as for the moving images yet to be produced.
Consider, for example, DVDs of existing commercial feature films. Most
DVDs consist of more than just a digital copy of the film whose name
appears on the box: they also contain chapters, alternative endings,
directors cuts, additional footage, directors voiceovers, advertisements,
trailers, reviews, commentaries, multiple-language tracks, and so on.
Textual environments rather than merely linear films, these settings enable

Gerard Genette, Paratexts:

Thresholds of Interpretation
(London: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).

William Uricchio, The future of

television?, in Pelle Snickars and
Patrick Vonderau (eds), The
YouTube Reader (London:
Wallflower, 2009), pp. 2439
(emphasis added).

interviews with filmmakers from around the world and clips of the films
that brought them to Sundance. If youre looking for coverage on the
ground from premieres to parties and more you can check out the
Live@Sundance segments. And to hear what some of the film industrys
leading thinkers had to say about the state of the business today.7
In the case of the DVD we have more than clips we have the film; but its
situation matters and its viewers have the choice of enabling many different
textual combinations, potentially destabilizing the assumed position and
integrity of the Urtext. No text enters the world unencumbered, and once in
the world, texts are often summarized, marketed, translated, commented
upon, and even edited or revised. But the commercial film DVD goes one
step farther, bringing many of these elements together on a simple, easily
navigable platform, and like YouTubes Sundance Channel it promises an
experiential array in which the unadorned film is but one of many elements
that constitute a larger experience.
A different disruption of the fixed text appears in the documentary
category that is provisionally termed interactive but includes multipathed, multi-authored and sometimes improvizational and unstable texts
that offer nonlinear access to character, space and event. Disruptive is
perhaps a less appropriate term than productive, since the user must make
choices in order for the textual experience to unfold. Since the early twentyfirst century, this sector has grown quickly within the world of major

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significant user interaction and complicate textual integrity, narrative

sequence, coherence, closure and certainty. Although there might be an
Urtext (the film) and a preferred approach to it (first view the film, then
explore the various options), most interfaces present these options as
equivalent, and editions of DVDs are promoted on the basis of the
environments they provide, not simply the presence of the original text. This
promotional strategy, coupled with the discourse of aficionados, suggests
that the text formerly known as the film is, thanks to the DVD, inscribed
within a fabric of related textual forms, all of which bear on the original
films meaning and together constitute a metatext. Gerard Genette, of
course, wonderfully problematized the limits of the literary text in studies
such as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, but the question is whether
or not this perspective (which arguably goes beyond his epitext or directly
related critical comments) and the practices that have made use of it require
us to think through additional and quite different parameters to those
addressed by Genette, and in so doing to consider textual environments
rather than individual texts.6
One might go so far as to call this an example of transmedia storytelling, if
by the story one takes a meta-stance regarding the production, marketing
and critical reception of a particular sub-story (that is, the feature film). This
environmental narrative recalls YouTubes approach to festivals, evident
on its Sundance Channel, where the trappings of the festival (but not the
films themselves) constitute the main event and are covered in their full
glory, with YouTube promising

See, for example: NFB/interactive,

<http://www.nfb.ca/interactive>;

<http://www.sundance.org/festival/
festival-program/new-frontier/> all
accessed 13 December 2013.

See <http://beta.18daysinegypt.
com/#/explore> and <http://
www.onedayonearth.org/> both
accessed 13 December 2013.

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research note

IDFA coclab, <http://www.doclab.

org/>; Sundance Film Festival 2014,

producers, such as the National Film Board of Canada, and has achieved
prominence at festivals including Sundance, Tribeca and the International
Documentary Festival Amsterdam.8 As an emergent practice nearing the
point of becoming an institutional discourse, it has yet to be tamed. The
challenges and opportunities offered by this new direction to notions of
narrative and authorship, among other issues are accordingly rich and
provocative.
One of the most striking features of this new form appears in the range of
approaches to organizing information. Some projects, such as Miquel
Dewever-Plana and Isabelle Fougres Alma: a Tale of Violence (2012),
look like traditional films in the sense that they are largely linear and limit the
options for interactivity. In Almas case, there are two linear image
sequences (one, a talking-head interview; the other, accompanying
illustrations) between which the viewer can move. Within the limited
parameters of moving between two linear choices (effectively, an A-roll
and a B-roll), the viewer can edit her own version of the film, in the
process shaping the projects narrative and dramatic fabric. Designed for
use on the tablet, the project exploits the haptic requirements of the touch
screen for its effect, with the potential for interactivity rendering even the
most linear viewing of the project as an active choice; and enabling unique
textual experiences should the viewer choose to interact. At the other end of
the spectrum, projects organized around databases (rather than linear
sequences) essentially offer a body of (potentially multi-authored) shots or
short segments that the user can explore, and in so doing organize into an
experience. Projects such as Jigar Mehta and Yasmin Elayats 18 Days in
Egypt or Kyle Ruddicks One Day on Earth distinguish themselves from
other video databases such as YouTube on the basis of their conceptual
framing (an event-based framing, such as the uprising in Cairos Tahrir
Square or a thematic framing, such as One Days cross-section of human
activities) of dozens to hundreds of textual elements.9 The conceptual frame
is usually sufficient to define the terms of inclusion and broadly shape and
lend coherence to the users experience. However, besides this frame (and
sometimes shots tagged with markers such as location, time or maker), there
is often little from the familiar narrative world to compel the user to go from
one clip to another or, more importantly, from one clip to a particular
successor clip. In contrast to projects like Alma, which limit interactivity and
offer maximum dramatic and narrative prestructuring, some forms of
database documentary require far greater investment from the viewer, both
in making navigational choices and in making sense. Whereas the former
presents a world in terms familiar from the film medium, the latter requires
considerable user assembly and enables considerable navigational
freedom. It does best when the contours of the world and its dramatic logics
are clearly defined. Database documentaries often draw on familiar
navigational strategies such as map interfaces to enable coherence,
organizing the clips spatially, enabling the user to wander from point to
point; or through character or thematic interfaces, enabling them to select
clips on the basis of person or ideas. Although we have seen these

index.php/conversation> and
<http://dziga.perrybard.net/>
both accessed 13 December 2013.

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10 See <http://questionbridge.com/

approaches before in film documentaries (such as Walter Ruttmanns

Berlin: die Sinfonie der Grosstadt/Berlin: Symphony of a Great City [1927]
and Joris Ivenss Regen [1929]), the twist here is that the user must actively
decide where to go, presumably addressing the questions of why? and
with what implication? Passivity is not an option.
Beyond navigation, another means of textual construction can be found
with remixing, where the principle serves both as a rhetorical device (Chris
Johnsons Question Bridge enables users to put various answers to the same
difficult questions) and as a production logic (Perry Bards The Man With A
Movie Camera: Global Remake is literally a remix, composed of everchanging crowd-sourced shots that evoke some aspect of Vertovs
originals).10 Recombinatory techniques recall Lev Kuleshovs montage
experiments (and Sergei Eisensteins explication of their effects), which
demonstrated that meaning can be generated on the basis of shot-to-shot
relationships rather than relying on the decoding of image content.
Johnsons work makes good use of this potential, teasing out the complexity
of his topic (African American masculinity) through nuanced shifts in
meaning with each new shot combination. The Man With a Movie Camera:
Global Remake, like 18 Days and One Day on Earth, also draws on the
participatory turn noted earlier, since its text is entirely built by usersubmitted clips. In an era of near ubiquitous networked cameras, it is little
wonder that the participatory dimension of the new documentary is its
richest attribute. The notion of textual coproduction implicit in navigation
and remixing in this case takes an additional turn, closing the circle between
writing and reading but in a socially enabled and traceable manner. In a
number of productions we can share the reading strategies, links and data
that others have generated, even to the point of seeing the roads oft taken
and those not.
The provocations raised by the reading practices of media forms such as
feature-rich DVDs and particularly interactive documentaries are multiple.
As environments or databases, they challenge fundamentally the stability
of the text that we grew accustomed to in the era of the book and film
(although in truth, stability was more assumed than actual, particularly in
the case of film, where subtle variations in print and exhibition conditions
abound). They challenge established notions of authorship, since the users
navigation of various possibilities constructs the texts form as well as the
textual experience, encouraging us to understand authorship either as the
construction of an environment or as a collaboration between the creators of
environments and those who navigate them. They challenge our ideas of
narrative, particularly as a structure of the text and as recounted events,
offering instead a notion of narrative as experiential, as users organize their
own stories on the fly. And they challenge our attempts to write and
document familiar notions of history, as much for reasons to do with
archival problematics (what to save the environment and interface?
patterns of user-behaviours?) as for the complications of the historical
building blocks of authorship, text and narrative. These are vast domains,
and I can but indicate the challenges, although scholars in interactive

11 See, for example, Marie-Laure

Ryan, Avatars of Story
Minnesota Press, 2006).

12 Benedetto Croce, History: its Theory

and Practice (New York, NY:
Harcourt, Brace, 1921), p. 20.

13 Keith Johnston, Coming Soon: Film

Trailers and the Selling of
Hollywood Technology (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2009).

If history has any use value, it is in generating insight and understanding

and presumably helping us not to repeat the mistakes of the past. And if
Benedetto Croce is right, and history is about the present,12 how might we
make productive use of the historiographic problems we face and
particularly the challenges posed to archives by a new generation of unruly
objects in ways that will offer future historians something richer than we
were left with? We can doubtless count on the futures apophanic reflex to
hold them in good stead, finding meaningful patterns in the available data.
The question, as we have seen through the examples above, turns on what
data is available. In some cases, our collective decisions to include or
exclude certain things as data can be every bit as determining as the more
familiar gaps in the paper or film record that traditionally plague historians.
We need to keep an eye out for the shaping mechanisms by which historical
regimes prove themselves, by informing archival policy and distinguishing
between that which is kept and not kept, in the process stacking the evidence
for the dominant paradigm. Like most institutions, archives have limited
resources and must make hard choices, but future historians of our era will
have to spend a good bit of time seeking out, for example, copies of the most
frequently seen films in our cinema: the trailers and pre-feature
advertisements.13 Ephemeral in status, they fall outside the fields current
domain of interest and are thus not an archival priority, running the risk of
being unavailable to future historians. A similar situation faces the sequence
of advertisements and trailers, that is, the contemporary cinema

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research note

(Minneapolis, MN: University of

literature and game studies such as Marie-Laure Ryan have begun to

develop the narratological implications in greater depth.11 One can make a
similar case regarding the availability of massive digital stores of printed
data newspapers, archival records, letters, and so on and the tools to make
use of them. Having access to an ever growing body of historical records,
both public and private; to algorithmic-based analysis systems offering
instant pattern recognition; and being part of communities of interest
capable of offering rapid feedback, tips and insights all greatly accelerate
the kinds of work that took researchers much longer, if they could even
achieve it, only two decades ago. But while we can point to something like
digital progress vis-a-vis the sometimes stubborn physicalities of the past, as
with the media just discussed, other conditions have emerged as well. Near
instant access to wide-ranging sources can greatly complicate a researchers
narrative, introducing both complexity and contradiction in degrees
unfamiliar to an earlier generation of scholarship. Authorship, too, is
rendered unstable in a networked age, in which algorithms increasingly
define the limits of the findable and interactions with a global community
of researchers make clearer than ever the interdependencies and
collaborative nature of scholarship. And, of course, there is the issue of
patterns, of data as a massive Rorschach test, in which we as scholars do our
best to convince our peers that our readings provide the final interpretive
word on a topic.

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programme; while of interest to some historians such as Nico de Klerk,

contemporary practices, so far as I know, are more poorly documented than
those of the past (which already leave a lot to be desired). These behaviours,
inadvertent or not, will delimit the contours of the future fields ability to
construct its histories. And if one thing is certain, the historians of the future
will share the same instincts as those of the present day, finding the border
zones of evidence the most interesting spaces to explore.
The examples of DVDs, digitized collections of papers and archival
records, the internet and interactive documentaries, like the repositioning of
films centrality through transmedia strategies, demonstrate the significant
challenges facing the current archival regime beyond the familiar concerns
over changing formats and unstable carriers of digital code. On one hand,
what might broadly be called reading practices are not typically archived
(or not deemed archivable, for technical as well as legal reasons though
the USAs National Security Agency seems an exception to the rule); on the
other, until the recent digital turn their traces have not been physically
accessible outside of ethnographic observation and self-reporting. But in a
setting where the very notion of the actualized text rests on those practices,
on what people actually do as they wend their way through interactive
environments, we need to invent new approaches and to archive new data.
What traces of this transitional moment will we save for future historians?
We will doubtless save the databases, the interfaces and their enabling
programs; but would walk-throughs by their designers be of interest? Or
the aggregated data-trails left behind by myriad anonymous users? Or their
comments and discussions? The choices we make will, to a large extent,
shape the contours of the sayable. As scholars of early film know better than
most, a paucity of data, particularly before media practices stabilize, can
pose a fundamental challenge to historical understanding. Sensitized as we
are to the problem, this nevertheless raises the question of whether we are we
doomed to repeat it, this time as historical subjects rather than historian
interlocutors? Pattern recognition only works to the extent that there are
materials from which to make patterns. And while patterns drawn from
absence can say something, they tend not to be nearly as eloquent as patterns
derived from the presence of data.