Ephemeral Media

Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube

Paul Grainge, Paul Grainge

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Ephemeral Media explores the practices, strategies and textual forms helping producers negotiate a fast-paced mediascape. Examining dynamics of brevity and evanescence in the television and new media environment, this book provides a new perspective on the transitory, and transitional, nature of screen culture in the early twenty-first century.

PART 1 MEDIA TRANSITION AND TRANSITORY MEDIA

1	The Recurrent, the Recombinatory and the Ephemeral

William Uricchio

Although America’s film critics had mixed reviews of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), many agreed in their assessment of the film’s editing, singling out the rapid cutting pace and using terms such as ‘frenetic’, ‘radical’, even ‘hallucinatory’. Some argued that the film stood as proof of the corrosive impact of television advertising and video-clip culture, evidence that their formal strategies were leaching into the cinematic mainstream. It sounded very promising indeed! At the time of the film’s American premiere, I was in the Netherlands, carefully tracking the reviews and counting the weeks until the Dutch release of the film. The big day arrived, and I vividly recall sitting through the usual block of product advertisements, previews and instructional messages, only to find the opening salvo of Stone’s film a bit, well … plodding. In fact, with a few glorious exceptions, the pace of the entire film failed to evoke the descriptions issuing forth from American reviewers. The reason for the discrepancy was clear: most reviewers saw their films in special press screenings, free from the distractions of the popcorn-eating crowd, and cut loose from the larger enveloping context of previews and ancillary material (pre-film advertisements were in any case not yet common in US cinemas). By contrast, my viewing of the film in Utrecht was preceded by fifteen minutes of visual material (including some ads also run on television) dominated by bursts of shots lasting one and two seconds. Stone’s film was certainly more quickly paced than those of his Hollywood contemporaries, but compared to the ads and previews that prefaced my viewing, it felt much closer to standard cinematic fare.

Cinema advertisements, previews and instructionals certainly deserve more serious critical attention than they have received. As cinematic texts, they are, after all, viewed significantly more often than the features they accompany. The same short-form films often accompany multiple features; and while we tend towards a single viewing of feature films, we might view the same ads or instructionals every time we go to the cinema over a three-month period. One form of ephemeral cinema, these texts deserve scrutiny as such. But my interest is less with the textual specificities of these short and frequently re-viewed films than with their contextual potentials. Rather, I am interested in the ephemeral as a textual condition, and specifically in the metatextual implications of ephemeral texts. In time-based media such as film, radio and television, where the flow of texts both ephemeral and privileged is constructed by its exhibitors and experienced by its audiences, how might we account for the frisson produced by placing one text next to another, and by the excess of meaning that might be generated? Gérard Genette (2001) has explored this space more thoroughly than most, focusing on the domain of the literary (the book) rather than on time-based media. This has yielded many sharp insights regarding the role of textual positioning (paratexts, for example) in shaping the meaning and import of the central text, but it has also left certain issues hanging precariously on the margins. Sergei Eisenstein also considered the role of textual positioning primarily through his theories of montage. His contributions (and those of the generation of film-makers who studied with Lev Kuleshov) focused on the micro-level of shot-to-shot relations and their implications for the decentring of the shot as a unit of meaning, shifting attention instead to the interaction of shots, the shot sequence, as the site of meaning. His insights, like Genette’s, bear on the discussion to follow. This essay will attempt to situate and briefly develop some of these insights as they relate in particular to the role of ephemeral texts in existing commercial television regimes, and in the emerging practices within participatory television forms such as YouTube.

The ephemeral

The word ‘ephemeral’ carries with it a curious tale. Among the clusters of available definitions, the Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition (Simpson and Weiner, 1989) offers the following:

Ephemera, n. 1. An insect that (in its imago or winged form) lives only for a day. In mod. entomology the name of a genus of pseudo-neuropterous insects belonging to the group Ephemeridæ (Day-flies, May-flies).

2. transf. and fig. One who or something which has a transitory existence.

The mayfly literalised the ancients’ understanding of the transitory, granting it an iridescent form and fleeting yet pristine beauty that lingers on as an object lesson in our language. But to our contemporary ears, this definition of the ephemeral-as-transitory generally skews differently, evoking Baudelaire’s notion of modernity as the ‘transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ (Baudelaire, 1964 [1864], p. 13). An affect or stance that speaks to the myriad sensations that constitute our present, to impressions more evocative than substantive, this sense of the transitory and ephemeral arises from such late-nineteenth-century conditions as overstimulation, from mechanically enhanced tempos, and from new cacophonies anything but natural in their order. And they are manifest in time-based media in at least three ways.

First, both recorded and transmitted image and sound – the telephone, television, radio, gramophone and film – are experienced in a perpetual present. We engage in an always fleeting but nevertheless persistent embrace of the images and sounds in the fullness of their ‘nowness’. The images (or sounds) that we have already seen (or heard) function as a just-witnessed (and now remembered) past, fundamental to our experience and sense-making, but fundamentally different in possibility, their potentials always-already realised. As viewers, we are poised on the cusp of the known and the unknown, and witness there the unfolding actualisation of near-infinite possibility into concrete images and sounds … and meanings. This present, in which we ‘watch’ a film or television programme or ‘listen’ to radio, is at odds with our notion of media as a physical product (a reel of tape), or as a referenced or advertised text or programe entity, or as a copyrighted legal entity. These conceptions are outside of time’s flow; but not the experience of listening or viewing, which are very much part of it.

A second sense of the ephemeral that seems intrinsic to media draws upon the melancholia lurking in Baudelaire’s notion of modernity, and concerns the vulnerable state of its materiality. Although celluloid, magnetic tape and vinyl disks have not yet been put to the test of time that stone, paper and the pigments of antiquity have survived, it seems clear from archival authorities that contemporary media are transitory. Far fewer than one hundred years have been sufficient to demonstrate the instability of celluloid nitrate; fewer than fifty for the pink colour in Eastman Color; and fewer than twenty for the oxidation of magnetic tape. The ‘ideal’ lifespans suggested by archivists for the supporting media for digital information are nearly as short as the life of the ever-changing formats into which that data is encoded. Our media, as physical objects subject to wear, tear, reformatting and ultimately decay, are fleeting in ways that we are only now beginning to realise.

A third sense in which the ephemeral is endemic to media can be found in the ways that we study it. Historically, before the era of consumer-grade tape recorders, film and television scholars had to rely on what was broadcast or screened (or could be found at the archive). The very contours of a culture’s productivity were subject to shape-shifting and change thanks to the happenstance of preservation, the legal and market opportunities of distribution, the state of the larger media environment and, of course, one’s location within it. Beyond the aleatory (or, alternatively, canonical) availability of texts, their very mode of survival and storage also revealed limits. Consider, for example, the nature of what is deemed worth saving. Every medium has its challenges, but the archive’s radical decontextualisation of television, in which programmes are plucked from their local setting and textual mix, from the flow that Raymond Williams did so much to excavate, stands as an example of the medium’s ephemeral status. We only have access to certain aspects of programming, the larger textual logics of programme flow, of advertising, programme idents and bumpers having long since vanished without a trace. And this has shaped the ways that we study, for example, television, attending to the feature texts that survive and are accessible, and removing them from their flow.

The OED reminds us that the fleeting temporal qualities of the term ephemeral have, over time, taken on other meanings as well. The Additions Series (Simpson and Weiner, 1993) offers this definition:

ephemeron, n. pl. ephemera. Printed matter of no lasting value except to collectors, as tickets, posters, greetings cards, etc. 1938 Proc. Special Libraries Assoc. I. 55 (heading) Pamphlets and ephemera. 1943 Gloss. Libr. Terms (Amer. Libr. Assoc.) 53 Ephemera. 1. Current material, usually pamphlets and clippings, of temporary interest and value. 2. Similar material of the past which has acquired literary or historical significance. 1956 Library Sept. 8 (Advt.), Catalogues offering rare and interesting books, pamphlets and ephemera post free. 1973 M. Amis Rachel Papers 126 Faddy ephemera covered its walls: posters of Jimi Hendrix, Auden and Isherwood, Rasputin …

A reminder of why the OED is such an interesting read, the undulating and accreting definitions and uses of the term reveal evidence of its cultural dynamics (Hendrix, Isherwood, Rasputin?). The combination of ‘material of the past which has acquired literary or historical significance’ with ‘printed matter of no lasting value’ to describe the same term speaks to its uneasy dynamics, at once both valuable and valueless, and very much dependent on the eye of the beholder. The category of objects enumerated – tickets, greeting cards – also suggests that the temporary value of the ephemeral is related to multiplicity. Objects of this sort are created in such abundance that they are rarely valued beyond their initial use; they are among the first bits of material culture to find their way to the dustbin of history. Not surprisingly, this sense is more recent (as the OED quotes demonstrate), reflecting the modern as a moment of mass reproduction. In a sense, it is one of the unspoken critiques behind the lament for the auratic taken on by Benjamin. The point here is that the notion of abundance through multiplicity renders the status of any one particular instance insignificant – at least until such time as scarcity restores its importance.

The lurking implication of multiplicity’s relationship to the ephemeral plays out in a particular way with time-based media, namely as repetition. The more frequently repeated, the more multiple, the more the value of any one instance might be considered fleeting, ephemeral. This is the domain excavated by Williams in his meso- and micro-level analyses of televisual flow, a domain absent from the newspaper listings of the evening’s programming, absent in the archiving of the primary programme text … but perhaps not completely absent from our experience.

The recombinatory

VI [Channel 7 news desk] (Announcer 2)

A mayor in Alameda County is working for a proposition to ban further apartment construction in his city. But his wife and six daughters are working for the other side. Reporter (film of street in city; cars and houses): The proposition is being voted on tomorrow. The issue is legal and environmental. Further development, it is said, will reduce open spaces and lead to extra traffic pollution.

VII Woman (film: hand-spraying from can; table dusted): Liquid Gold furniture polish; brings new sparkle to your furniture; it’s like meeting an old friend again.

VIII Man (film clip): The 6:30 movie is Annie Get Your Gun. Betty Hutton as the sharpest-shooting gal the Wild West ever saw. (Williams, 1992, p. 95)

This excerpt from Raymond Williams’ ‘medium range’ analysis of a broadcast sequence from San Francisco’s Channel 7 on 12 March 1973 (5:42 p.m.) traces a series of shifts in time, space, voice and mode of address.¹ From a live news desk, to a presumably recently filmed location report, to an ‘evergreen’ studio-shot advertisement, to a clip from George Sidney’s 1950 film with a recent voice overlay, a few seconds of television time yields quite an experiential range. While read as ‘disruptive’ to a cultural outsider like Williams, the sequence flows along quite well for native viewers. Williams’ close-range analysis goes a step further, demonstrating the art of segue so important in the broadcast era. While not discussed by Williams, who was more interested in perceived temporal continuities, the repetition and recycling of these elements further complicates the story. Texts, as cultural artifacts, carry associations, so how might we think about the repositioning of those elements (texts and their associations) into new contexts? The 1973 broadcast of a 1950 film might come inscribed with particular meanings for a viewer who first saw it at the cinema twenty-three years earlier; or, repositioned in a broadcast environment where the promo for Annie Get Your Gun follows a report of a shooting by a woman, it might take on a whole new meaning. The advertisement for Liquid Gold might normalise domestic divisions of labour in 1973, or, shown in a different era, might be appreciated for documenting early 1970s lifestyles or critiqued as an instrument for maintaining gender inequality. While hypothetical examples, they point to the role of sequence, context and association in the construction of meaning, and the tensions inherent in ordering and reordering the bits of time, space and event that they constitute.

This recombinatory practice, built on an ever-changing sequence of programme units many of which are ephemeral in the sense of being both fleeting and repeated, is difficult to recover from newspaper listings or television archives. And yet, it reflects the logics of most western television systems, while also relating to the idea of montage. The durational assemblage of divergent materials, montage relies upon sequence and ever-changing context for its effect. In cinematic terms, the principles of montage found early articulation through Lev Kuleshov, briefly the teacher of Eisenstein and a great influence on Pudovkin, Vertov and other Soviet film-makers. Just after the Russian Revolution, at a time of minimal film imports and poor production resources, Kuleshov experimented with the recombinatory effect of film editing, recutting found footage to construct new meanings. By intercutting footage of an actor’s face with a bowl of soup, a coffin and a girl, he was able to construct a nuanced performance for audiences, who read identical images of the actor’s face as expressing hunger, loss and quiet joy. The ‘Kuleshov effect’, as the results of this and other experiments became known, demonstrated that shot sequence and context were far more determining than expected, and that the meaning of a particular shot, long considered self-evident and relatively stable within th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Ephemeral Media
• Part 1: Media Transition and Transitory Media
• Part 2: Between: Interstitials and Idents
• Part 3: Beyond: Online TV and Web Drama
• Part 4: Below: Worker- and User-Generated Content
• Index
• eCopyright