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Author: Joshua M. Greenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026226076X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
How the VCR was transformed from a machine that records television into a medium for movies. The first video cassette recorders were promoted in the 1970s as an extension of broadcast television technology—a time-shifting device, a way to tape TV shows. Early advertising for Sony's Betamax told potential purchasers “You don't have to miss Kojak because you're watching Columbo.” But within a few years, the VCR had been transformed from a machine that recorded television into an extension of the movie theater into the home. This was less a physical transformation than a change in perception, but one that relied on the very tangible construction of a network of social institutions to support this new marketplace for movies. In From Betamax to Blockbuster, Joshua Greenberg explains how the combination of neighborhood video stores and the VCR created a world in which movies became tangible consumer goods. Greenberg charts a trajectory from early “videophile” communities to the rise of the video store—complete with theater marquee lights, movie posters, popcorn, and clerks who offered expert advice on which movies to rent. The result was more than a new industry; by placing movies on cassette in the hands (and control) of consumers, video rental and sale led to a renegotiation of the boundary between medium and message, and ultimately a new relationship between audiences and movies. Eventually, Blockbuster's top-down franchise store model crowded local video stores out of the market, but the recent rise of Netflix, iTunes, and other technologies have reopened old questions about what a movie is and how (and where) it ought to be watched. By focusing on the “spaces in between” manufacturers and consumers, Greenberg's account offers a fresh perspective on consumer technology, illustrating how the initial transformation of movies from experience into commodity began not from the top down or the bottom up, but from the middle of the burgeoning industry out.
Author: Joshua M. Greenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026226076X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Get Book Here
Book Description
How the VCR was transformed from a machine that records television into a medium for movies. The first video cassette recorders were promoted in the 1970s as an extension of broadcast television technology—a time-shifting device, a way to tape TV shows. Early advertising for Sony's Betamax told potential purchasers “You don't have to miss Kojak because you're watching Columbo.” But within a few years, the VCR had been transformed from a machine that recorded television into an extension of the movie theater into the home. This was less a physical transformation than a change in perception, but one that relied on the very tangible construction of a network of social institutions to support this new marketplace for movies. In From Betamax to Blockbuster, Joshua Greenberg explains how the combination of neighborhood video stores and the VCR created a world in which movies became tangible consumer goods. Greenberg charts a trajectory from early “videophile” communities to the rise of the video store—complete with theater marquee lights, movie posters, popcorn, and clerks who offered expert advice on which movies to rent. The result was more than a new industry; by placing movies on cassette in the hands (and control) of consumers, video rental and sale led to a renegotiation of the boundary between medium and message, and ultimately a new relationship between audiences and movies. Eventually, Blockbuster's top-down franchise store model crowded local video stores out of the market, but the recent rise of Netflix, iTunes, and other technologies have reopened old questions about what a movie is and how (and where) it ought to be watched. By focusing on the “spaces in between” manufacturers and consumers, Greenberg's account offers a fresh perspective on consumer technology, illustrating how the initial transformation of movies from experience into commodity began not from the top down or the bottom up, but from the middle of the burgeoning industry out.
Author: Joshua M. Greenberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Video recordings
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Author: Daniel Herbert
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958020
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Videoland offers a comprehensive view of the "tangible phase" of consumer video, when Americans largely accessed movies as material commodities at video rental stores. Video stores served as a vital locus of movie culture from the early 1980s until the early 2000s, changing the way Americans socialized around movies and collectively made movies meaningful. When films became tangible as magnetic tapes and plastic discs, movie culture flowed out from the theater and the living room, entered the public retail space, and became conflated with shopping and salesmanship. In this process, video stores served as a crucial embodiment of movie culture’s historical move toward increased flexibility, adaptability, and customization. In addition to charting the historical rise and fall of the rental industry, Herbert explores the architectural design of video stores, the social dynamics of retail encounters, the video distribution industry, the proliferation of video recommendation guides, and the often surprising persistence of the video store as an adaptable social space of consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, cultural geography, and archival research, Videoland provides a wide-ranging exploration of the pivotal role video stores played in the history of motion pictures, and is a must-read for students and scholars of media history.
Author: Kevin Chabot
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228023114
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Book Description
The appearance of ghosts in art and popular culture has transformed throughout history. From the undead corpse of the medieval tradition to the transparent forms of photographic film, to the infrared and thermal images that now populate reality television, the paranormal has literally changed shape over the centuries. In Poetics of the Paranormal Kevin Chabot articulates the idea of spectrality, demonstrating how the paranormal is far from a stable, metaphysical category: it is a dynamic and historically contingent discourse, the contours of which shift over time. Specific media, Chabot argues, present the ghost in distinct ways that emphasize the ghostly qualities of the medium and, conversely, the technological qualities of the ghost. Through detailed analyses of nineteenth-century spirit photography, horror films, ghost-hunting reality television, and the viral internet phenomenon Slender Man, Chabot shows how the paranormal both shapes and is shaped by media. Exploring key historical shifts in contemporary media while providing a rich and novel theoretical framework, Poetics of the Paranormal addresses with renewed rigour the relationships between media, perception, temporality, and the elusive concept of the evidential.
Author: Michael Z. Newman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537751
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
Since the days of early television, video has been an indispensable part of culture, society, and moving-image media industries. Over the decades, it has been an avant-garde artistic medium, a high-tech consumer gadget, a format for watching movies at home, a force for democracy, and the ultimate, ubiquitous means of documenting reality. In the twenty-first century, video is the name we give all kinds of moving images. We know it as an adaptable medium that bridges analog and digital, amateur and professional, broadcasting and recording, television and cinema, art and commercial culture, and old media and new digital networks. In this history, Michael Z. Newman casts video as a medium of shifting value and legitimacy in relation to other media and technologies, particularly film and television. Video has been imagined as more or less authentic or artistic than movies or television, as more or less democratic and participatory, as more or less capable of capturing the real. Techno-utopian rhetoric has repeatedly represented video as a revolutionary medium, promising to solve the problems of the past and the present—often the very problems associated with television and the society shaped by it—and to deliver a better future. Video has also been seen more negatively, particularly as a threat to movies and their culture. This study considers video as an object of these hopes and fears and builds an approach to thinking about the concept of the medium in terms of cultural status.
Author: Tom Mes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000855287
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
This book explores the phenomenon of V-Cinema, founded in Japan in 1989 as a distribution system for direct-to-video movies which film companies began making having failed to recoup their investment in big budget films. It examines how studios and directors worked quickly to capitalize on niche markets or upcoming and current trends, and how as a result this period of history in Japanese cinema was an exceptionally diverse and vibrant film scene. It highlights how, although the V-Cinema industry declined from around 1995, the explosion in quantity and variety of such movies established and cemented many specific genres of Japanese film. Importantly the book argues that film scholars who have long looked down on video as a substandard medium without scholarly interest have been wrong to do so, and that V-Cinema challenges accepted notions of cultural value, providing insight into the formation of cinematic canons and inviting us to rethink what is meant by "Japanese cinema".
Author: Jonathan Rozenkrantz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501362402
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
In 1957, A Face in the Crowd incorporated live video images to warn about the future of broadcast TV. In 2015, Kung Fury was infused with analogue noise to evoke the nostalgic feeling of watching an old VHS tape. Between the two films, numerous ones would incorporate video images to imagine the implications of video practices. Drawing on media archaeology, Videographic Cinema shows how such images and imaginaries have emerged, changed and remained over time according to their shifting technical, historical and institutional conditions. Rediscovering forgotten films like Anti-Clock (1979) and reassessing ones like Lost Highway (1997), Jonathan Rozenkrantz charts neglected chapters of video history, including self-confrontation techniques in psychiatry, their complex relation with surveillance, and the invention/discovery of the “videographic psyche” by artists, therapists and filmmakers. Spanning six decades, Videographic Cinema discovers an epistemic shift from prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control conditioned on video as a medium for live transmission, to retrospective ones concerned with videotape as a recording memory. It ends by considering videographic filmmaking itself as a form of archaeology in the age of analogue obsolescence.
Author: Lucas Hilderbrand
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392194
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users’ right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy. Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an “aesthetics of access” most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand examines four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular website YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. It is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.
Author: Barbara Klinger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520296451
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Casablanca is one of the most celebrated Hollywood films of all time, its iconic romance enshrined in collective memory across generations. Drawing from archival materials, industry trade journals, and cultural commentary, Barbara Klinger explores the history of Casablanca's circulation in the United States from the early 1940s to the present by examining its exhibition via radio, repertory houses, television, and video. By resituating the film in the dynamically changing industrial, technological, and cultural circumstances that have defined its journey over eight decades, Klinger challenges our understanding of its meaning and reputation as both a Hollywood classic and a cult film. Through this single-film survey, Immortal Films proposes a new approach to the study of film history and aesthetics and, more broadly, to cinema itself as a medium in constant interface with other media as a necessary condition of its own public existence and endurance.
Author: Blake Atwood
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
How Iranians forged a vibrant, informal video distribution infrastructure when their government banned all home video technology in 1983. In 1983, the Iranian government banned the personal use of home video technology. In Underground, Blake Atwood recounts how in response to the ban, technology enthusiasts, cinephiles, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens forged an illegal but complex underground system for video distribution. Atwood draws on archival sources including trade publications, newspapers, memoirs, films, and laws, but at the heart of the book lies a corpus of oral history interviews conducted with participants in the underground. He argues that videocassettes helped to institutionalize the broader underground within the Islamic Republic. As Atwood shows, the videocassette underground reveals a great deal about how people construct vibrant cultures beneath repressive institutions. It was not just that Iranians gained access to banned movies, but rather that they established routes, acquired technical knowledge, broke the law, and created rituals by passing and trading plastic videocassettes. As material objects, the videocassettes were a means of negotiating the power of the state and the agency of its citizens. By the time the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance lifted the ban in 1994, millions of videocassettes were circulating efficiently and widely throughout the country. The very presence of a video underground signaled the failure of state policy to regulate media. Embedded in the informal infrastructure--even in the videocassettes themselves--was the triumph of everyday people over the state.
