“I am Kino-Eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, who I’ve created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just now when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls shot by me in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of walls and details, I’ve managed to arrange them in an order that is pleasing and to construct with intervals, correctly, a film-phase which is the room.”
(Dziga Vertov, Kynoks: A Revolution, 1923)*
Zoe Bell – Hollywood stunt coordinator and sometimes actress – grew restless during her self- isolation and brought together her celebrity friends (Halle Berry, Drew Barrymore, Zoe Saldana, Juliette Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Thandie Newton, among them) to stage a slobberknocker of a video, where each self-isolated participant kicks, punches, headbutts, tickles, or hurles stuff at the person in the next segment, who receives the blow and then passes it along as a challenge to the next creative person to respond. Think of it as the action movie equivalent of the old surrealist game, exquisite corpse. Soviet montage theorist and filmmaker Dziga Vertov would have recognized the principals that enable Instagram audiences to construct a continuous chain of action across these fragments, each shot at different times and different locations, but all seeming to unfold before our eyes as continuous action.
Vertov talks above about constructing a room – an imagined space built from elements of twelve rooms. I feel like I’ve spent the past three months in that room, no longer brought together under the control of the man with the movie camera, algorithmic rather than cinematic. We all live in that imagined space today as we shuttle between zoom meetings, as we construct reality across the borders of our neighbor’s spaces, and as we stage ourselves against backdrops appropriated from the world’s greatest art or the best Hollywood movies. The Soviet montage artists created new perspectives through juxtapositions across shots (montage) and juxtapositions within layered images (superimposition) and so do we. We form relationships where the shots join; we express identity through our ability to reshape our backgrounds, and I have been in some Zoom meetings, where increasingly restless participants start to form patterns by coordinating their backdrops.
In such a world-weary time, juxtaposition itself becomes entertainment, much as motion was in the early cinema. Last weekend, I spent five hours watching a game, Sequester, modelled partially on Survivor, partially on Big Brother, and being staged on
Twitch. In this case, the game is played with former Survivor contestants but more often, it’s teams of hardcore fans of those same programs. The players, logging in from their own home and in their own screen, negotiate with each other, inside five virtual “rooms” and vote someone out of the game every twenty minutes or so. The contestants move fluidly between imaginary “rooms,” though part of the game mechanic limits how many players can be “in” a room at any given time. And spectators can watch across any of the five streams or play them all at once. And if this is not enough, there’s another room full of color commentaries sharing what they saw and what they think will happen next. And fans on various social media channels are offering their own commentary, responding to surveys, and otherwise, playing along. All of this pushes against the limits of our capacities for attention (mine certainly) and against the constraints of contemporary technological infrastructure as images freeze or sputter. Too many viewers, too much going on.
How does this relate to the confrontation of old and new media, mass commercial media and participatory culture, which I mapped in Convergence Culture (2007)? The movie theaters are locked and no blockbusters are being released for at least another month or more. Television networks are running out of new content and for the moment, the sound stages are empty. Some television series are producing episodes from the cast’s homes, playing scenes, even singing Stephen Sondheim songs, together, from hastily constructed sets or simply in their own kitchens, dens, or bedrooms. And some performers (see the fight scene mentioned above) are making home movies and sharing them with the world, much as many ordinary people are. They do so with greater resources. They are able to push to the front of the cue and demand more public attention yet these amateur videos by media professionals are only one element in a churn of content which tugs at our sleeves for attention in the midst of the pandemic. Videos shot with cellphone cameras of people without masks in shops confronting harried Walmart clerks or being escorted out by other masked patrons. Live streams of protestors demanding to reopen the economy. Home videos of families re-staging Disneyland attractions. Influencers doing public service announcements or modelling new hair-dos. Political figures tweeting increasingly rancid messages. Zoom sessions of university classes. Religious ceremonies performed across fragmented spaces. Final desperate messages to the bedside of dying relatives. It’s all taking place in the same room.
Any piece of this mediated “content” can be amplified by television and surface on our newsfeed. It is not that distinctions between old and new media, commercial and grassroots producers, no longer exist, but they matter less and less right now. Once we thought social media was isolating, cutting us off from the people around us. Now, it seems the only connection we have left as we stare with increasing boredom at the walls of our own apartments, not able to go out, barely able to stand staying inside. Our media takes us where we ourselves cannot go. We live on the interstices.
I know this is too simple – that we should be worrying about who owns the data from all those Zoom calls and what’s being done with it, that we should acknowledge that most of us most of the time are still watching what’s on Netflix and Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime. But for the moment, in this kind of fever dream, I am fascinated by the blurring boundaries between different modes of media production.
This is convergence culture in the age of Covid-19.
* In Michelson, Annette, and Kevin O’Brien (eds). Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2008: 17.
Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. Among his books are Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Participatory Culture, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists, and most recently, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff. He blogs regularly at henryjenkins.org and cohosts the podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?
