The horror, Piglet, the horror: found footage, mash-ups, AMVs, the avant-garde, and the strange case of Apocalypse Pooh.The greatest moment in Tigger's screen career is in T. Graham's presumably illegal short Apocalypse Pooh. soundtrack excerpts from Apocalypse Now are laid over brilliantly edited excerpts from Disney's Pooh films, and Tigger's bouncing first entrance is cut to the dialogue from the 'it's a fuckin' tiger' scene from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam epic. Sadly, nothing in this belated series entry [...] comes up to that mark. (1) --Kim Newman, review of The Tigger Movie (2000), Sight & Sound In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a sea change was underway in avant-garde and experimental cinema. While many 'old-guard' critics lamented the death of the avant-garde as a meaningful force (Fred Camper's essay "The End of Avant-Garde Film" in the twentieth anniversary issue of the Millennium Film Journal comes to mind as a salient example) (2), a new generation of experimental and avant-garde filmmakers were re-imagining what the avant-garde could and should become. The arrival of feminist, queer and ideological critiques in regards to both avant-garde theory and practice, along with a newfound concern with popular culture and politics, lead to a radical re-imagining of the avant-garde. Perhaps most (in)famously, this at times Oedipal oed·i·pal or Oed·i·pal adj. Of or characteristic of the Oedipus complex. battle played itself out at the "Experimental Film Congress" held in Toronto in 1989, where the new and old guards vied for control over the direction of experimental and avant-garde film. (3) One of the key reasons that the avant-garde was seen by 'old boys' (or, less generously, 'almost-dead white men') as being embalmed and buried had quite a bit to do with these newfound political and popular concerns, and a concurrent move away from high-Modernist preoccupations with film's formal elements to the exclusion of all else. One of the key ways this shift was articulated was in the rise and relative popularity of found footage films. (4) William C. Wees offers an insightful and succinct definition of avant-garde found footage filmmaking: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
While the makers of documentary compilation films draw principally
upon the resources of archives and stock shot libraries, avant-garde
found footage filmmakers range much farther afield to find their raw
material in the bargain bins of camera shops, thrift shops, flea
markets, and yard sales; in piles of films discarded by film
libraries and other institutions; in dumpsters behind film
production houses, labs, and television studios. As artist-
archeologists of the film world, found footage filmmakers sift
through the accumulated audio-visual detritus of modern culture in
search of artifacts that will reveal more about their origins and
uses than their original makers consciously intended. Then they
bring their findings together in image-sound relationships that
offer both aesthetic pleasure and the opportunity to interpret and
evaluate old material in new ways. (5)
While found footage films can be traced back through the history of the cinema--with works such as Esther Schub's The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Romanov dynasty Rulers of Russia from 1613 to 1917. The name derived from Roman Yurev (d. 1543), whose daughter Anastasiya Romanovna was the first wife of Ivan IV the Terrible. (1927) and Charles Ridley's Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1941)--their emergence as one of the dominant forms of avant-garde filmmaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s points to the fact that the texts and images that inspired this new generation of experimental filmmakers were strikingly divergent from those of their predecessors. Indeed, part of the disdain evinced by commentators like Camper speaks to the move away from the avant-garde auteur auteur (ōtör`), in film criticism, a director who so dominates the film-making process that it is appropriate to call the director the auteur, or author, of the motion picture. as a solitary visionary and a move towards the filmmaker as a cultural worker and critic who is deeply influenced by and engages with popular and mainstream culture. And indeed, this feeling of disdain between the old and the new was mutual. Abigail Child, one of the new generation of avant-garde filmmakers, and who has made found footage films, writes of her first experiences with 'old school' avant-garde filmmaking while in college:
I first saw Brakhage's film work in college, sophomore year: Dog
Star Man shown along with Len Lye's Trade Tattoo and Arthur
Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice. For me as a college student, the
Brakhage film was the least favorite. For one thing, there was no
humor; for another, what did I have to do with a bearded great man
with a dog in the snow trying to climb a slope? Surely I was struck
with the mythological dimensions of the effort, but put off
simultaneously by the maleness, the overwhelming narcissism, or
should I say, solipsism, of the work. This aspect, in particular,
made a negative impression in contrast to the critical, and the
light and deep irony of Lipsett's and Lye's work, their ironic
worldliness, if you will. (6)
While Child eventually came to admire Brakhage's work, her early experience speaks to the break between past and present taking place in the avant-garde film world. Indeed, one of the many liberating aspects of found footage film was that the means of production Means Of Production is a compilation of Aim's early 12" and EP releases, recorded between 1995 and 1998. Track listing
OCAD Otis College of Art and Design OCAD O'Connor Architectural Design (Ireland) (Ontario College of Art and Design) student in the 1980s. One of the true 'underground' films (it has never had any sort of official release), Graham reedited cartoons from Walt Disney's Winnie the Pooh series of featurettes, released between 1966 and 1977, drawing his detourned images mostly from the first film in the series, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (Wolfgang Reitherman Wolfgang Reitherman (June 26, 1909 - May 22, 1985), also known and sometimes credited as Woolie Reitherman, was a famed Disney animator and one of Disney's Nine Old Men. Born in Munich, Germany, Reitherman's family moved to America when he was a child. , 1966) and the Academy Award winning second short, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery blus·ter v. blus·tered, blus·ter·ing, blus·ters v.intr. 1. To blow in loud, violent gusts, as the wind during a storm. 2. a. To speak in a loudly arrogant or bullying manner. Day (Reitherman, 1968). He also drew on the liveaction framing sequence from the film that was made for the compilation film bringing together the three featurettes: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Reitherman and John Lounsbery John Lounsbery (March 9, 1911 - February 13, 1976) was an American animator who worked for The Walt Disney Company. He is best known as one of Disney's Nine Old Men. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and raised in Colorado. , 1977). Graham then dialectically juxtaposed jux·ta·pose tr.v. jux·ta·posed, jux·ta·pos·ing, jux·ta·pos·es To place side by side, especially for comparison or contrast. these images with the soundtrack--along with a few live-action images--from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). At key moments, Graham reversed these detourned juxtapositions, deploying images from Coppola's film, and sounds from Reitherman's animated featurettes. Graham's choice of Apocalypse Now as the source material for his detournement is an interesting one, as the image of Coppola as a visionary, high-Modernist auteur positions him, in many ways, as the Brakhage of New Hollywood New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood refers to the brief time between roughly 1967 (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) and 1982 (One from the Heart ; the solitary iconoclast iconoclast Surgery A surgical instrument used for blunt dissection, which may be used below the galea aponeurotica in preparation for scalp reduction-browlift in hair restoration. See Hair replacement. on a quest for Verb 1. quest for - go in search of or hunt for; "pursue a hobby" quest after, go after, pursue look for, search, seek - try to locate or discover, or try to establish the existence of; "The police are searching for clues"; "They are searching for the cinematic purity. This isn't the only possible connection one can find between Coppola and experimental cinema; for instance, one of the avant-garde movements that manifests itself throughout Coppola's work is surrealism. In a vast majority of the film reviews of Apocalypse Now, the vision proffered by Coppola is described as war as hallucination hallucination, false perception characterized by a distortion of real sensory stimuli. Common types of hallucination are auditory, i.e., hearing voices or noises and visual, i.e., seeing people that are not actually present. ; indeed, more generally, the genre of Vietnam war Vietnam War, conflict in Southeast Asia, primarily fought in South Vietnam between government forces aided by the United States and guerrilla forces aided by North Vietnam. films themselves are described as such. For instance, Peter Rainer writes: "The Vietnam movie has often been a species of the horror film horror film n → película de terror or miedo horror film horror n → film m d'épouvante horror film horror n [...]. Stylistically, no other genre of war film in the history of movies has been so frenzied, so hallucinatory hal·lu·ci·na·to·ry adj. 1. Of or characterized by hallucination. 2. Inducing or causing hallucination. ." (7) It therefore stands to reason that 'detourned animation', a potent synthesis of the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s with character animation--Hollywood cinema at its most surreal and uncanny--is a ideal mode through which to reconsider representations of Vietnam, its horror and its allure as it came to be represented in mainstream cinema. The Strange Tale of Apocalypse Pooh As an 'underground' film, Apocalypse Pooh had two, unrelated audiences in the pre-Internet era, before its envelopment en·vel·op tr.v. en·vel·oped, en·vel·op·ing, en·vel·ops 1. To enclose or encase completely with or as if with a covering: "Accompanying the darkness, a stillness envelops the city" by the digital world: on the one hand, Graham's film played in some 'underground' and contemporary art forums such as Toronto's Pleasure Dome collective and the Whitney Museum in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of ; on the other hand, Apocalypse Pooh also had a sizeable fan following derived from screenings at comic book comic book Bound collection of comic strips, usually in chronological sequence, typically telling a single story or a series of different stories. The first true comic books were marketed in 1933 as giveaway advertising premiums. conventions. (8) In the days before the Internet, Apocalypse Pooh was widely bootlegged, passed around and traded on VHS (Video Home System) A half-inch, analog videocassette recorder (VCR) format introduced by JVC in 1976 to compete with Sony's Betamax, introduced a year earlier. (other films, such as Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Life of Karen Carpenter Karen Anne Carpenter (March 2, 1950 – February 4, 1983) was a highly successful American singer and drummer. She and her brother, Richard, formed the popular duo The Carpenters. [1987] or John Greyson's The Making of 'Monsters' [1991], had similar modes of distribution, but in the first instance were screened at festivals, and only later went 'underground' as legal issues ensued). One could see Graham's film as an instantiation (programming) instantiation - Producing a more defined version of some object by replacing variables with values (or other variables). 1. In object-oriented programming, producing a particular object from its class template. of comic geek A technically oriented person. It has typically implied a "nerdy" or "weird" personality, someone with limited social skills who likes to tinker with scientific or high-tech projects. The origin of the term dates back to the late 1800s. , Situationist samizdat samizdat System whereby literature suppressed by the Soviet government was clandestinely written, printed, and distributed; also, the literature itself. Samizdat began appearing in the 1950s, first in Moscow and Leningrad, then throughout the Soviet Union. . Yet the film also spoke to a very different audience. Apocalypse Pooh was made at a time where the potential convergence of various imaging technologies was seen as opening radical new possibilities for critical representational strategies in the purported age of postmodernism. As Dot Tuer and Michael Balser wrote in their program notes for the Pleasure Dome 'High Tech/Low Tech: Bodies in Space, An Open Forum on Film and Video Aesthetics' program, at which Apocalypse Pooh was screened in 1992:
Does video have a conceptual affinity to cyberspace? Does film
reproduce a dream state? How do the structural and historical
trajectories of these two time-based mediums respond to the mutating
consciousness of McLuhan's information age? Is there purity to form,
a specificity of medium, a difference in community formation? These
are some of the questions that have arisen in our conversations. The
flickering illusions of cinematic space, the cool simulcast
immediacy of telecommunications, the relationship of body to place;
these are some of the themes that the work touches upon, some of the
ideas we would like to engage in presenting this program. (9)
Here, one can again see the schism between the old guard and vanguard avant-gardes in detail. While much of the 'visionary film' school of experimental cinema was profoundly concerned with purity of form, new avant-garde films and filmmakers examined with a critical glee the interstitial nature of moving image technologies. Barriers between media were seen to be disintegrating and therefore the epistemological issues surrounding images shifted from philosophical questions as to the nature of the 'real' (be it material, psychological or spiritual) to larger questions about the nature of moving images themselves and their intertextuality Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. and interconnectedness. But how did this 'underground' film reconfigure one's understanding of Apocalypse Now and become the godparent god·par·ent n. A godfather or a godmother. godparent Noun a person who promises at a person's baptism to look after his or her religious upbringing Noun 1. of today's mash-ups and AMVs? One reason could be that it is expansive in its scope. In its eight minutes, Apocalypse Pooh successfully condenses the entire, allegorical, mythological and grandiose narrative of Coppola's film and provides a critical meta-commentary on both Apocalypse Now and the Winnie the Pooh featurettes. Therefore, before considering Apocalypse Pooh in detail, perhaps some attention should be paid to the films in the Pooh trilogy upon which Graham draws. Disney freely adapted from A. A. Milne's two Pooh books, Winnie the Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) into three featurettes: the aforementioned Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (John Lounsbery, 1974). While there are a plethora of other Pooh films in the Disney catalogue (most of which are television episodes and straight-to-video releases), these three films are the ones closest to Milne's work, in terms of both narrative and style, and together comprise the 'canonized' version of cinematic Pooh. To better understand the nature of the critique undertaken by Graham, a fairly detailed analysis of Apocalypse Pooh is in order. After opening with images of a Vietnamese village being napalmed from Apocalypse Now (with the sound accompaniment of the Winnie the Pooh theme and the sound of Pooh's cuckoo clock), we see Winnie the Pooh dragging a popgun behind him, looking tired. In voice-over we hear: "Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon." Cut to an image of Pooh poking his paw into the side of his head, trying to think. What is Pooh thinking?: "I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer." Cut to Pooh sleeping, his dreams fraught with thoughts of: "Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger." Pooh exercises in the mirror, as The Doors play their schizoid schizoid /schiz·oid/ (skit´soid) 1. denoting the traits that characterize the schizoid personality. 2. anthem "The End" in the background. Cut to Pooh with his head stuck in a honey jar, floating down a river. He realizes things are dire, as he thinks: "I was going to the worst place in the world and didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable and plugged straight into Kurtz." Here, Graham returns to live-action footage, and cuts to the image of a reel-to-reel tape recorder tape recorder, device for recording information on strips of plastic tape (usually polyester) that are coated with fine particles of a magnetic substance, usually an oxide of iron, cobalt, or chromium. The coating is normally held on the tape with a special binder. playing the voice of Kurtz to Willard. And then, returning to the world of animation, the rest of the cast is introduced: We see Rabbit scared in the woods, and the voice-over of Pooh/Willard saying: "The machinist, the one they called Chef, was from New Orleans New Orleans (ôr`lēənz –lənz, ôrlēnz`), city (2006 pop. 187,525), coextensive with Orleans parish, SE La., between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, 107 mi (172 km) by water from the river mouth; founded . He was wrapped too tight for Vietnam, probably wrapped too tight for New Orleans For New Orleans: A Benefit For The Musicians' Village Habitat For Humanity is an American benefit double-disc CD, with tracks from Minnesota artists, and national artists. ." Cut to an uber-young, boyish, innocent Christopher Robin sitting under a tree: "Lance on the forward 50s was a famous surfer from the beaches of South L.A. You look at him and you wouldn't believe he ever fired a weapon in his whole life." Then, cut to Roo, the baby boy kangaroo, happily bouncing on a fence: "Clean, Mr. Clean Mr. Clean n. Slang A man, especially a public figure, who adheres to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct. [From Mr. Clean, trademark used for a cleaning product.] , was from some South Bronx shithole. Light and space of Vietnam really put a zap on his head." Cut back to a shot of Pooh upside-down in the honey jar, drifting down the river; Owl lands on him, and Pooh/Willard continues: "Then there was Phillips, the Chief. It might have been my mission, but it sure as shit was the Chief's boat." Cut to Pooh, being pulled as if by a kite (he's actually being pulled by Piglet adrift in the air) through the Hundred Acre Forest, to the tune of The Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (in Coppola's film, it's the water-skiing scene, which is about as plausible as Piglet flying through the air). Pooh's descent (ascent?) to Hell continues, as he floats up into the air on a balloon, Richard Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries" is heard, along with the ominous sound of approaching choppers. Cut to Gopher coming out of his hole (in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Gopher is the token American character, and does not appear in the original books). Out of his buck-toothed mouth comes the infamous line: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." In voice-over we hear Willard/Pooh, describing Gopher/Kilgore: "He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't gonna get so much as a scratch here" (perhaps this is because Gopher lives underground). Cut to Pooh stuck in Rabbit's hole, with Gopher standing on him. There's the rising sound of rock music in the background, and then we cut to Pooh floating up the river, head still stuck in a honey jar. In voice-over he says: "Oh man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it." Yes, Pooh is having a bad day, but it is about to get worse. Graham cuts to Pooh in his house, in his night-coat, with his popgun. In the background, there are jungle noises. Then a quick, Eisensteinian montage of Rabbit petrified pet·ri·fy v. pet·ri·fied, pet·ri·fy·ing, pet·ri·fies v.tr. 1. To convert (wood or other organic matter) into a stony replica by petrifaction. 2. , and Tigger bouncing into Pooh's house. When Tigger "attacks", screams of "Fucking tiger, Fucking tiger!" fill the void. Cut back again to Pooh stuck in a hole. In voice-over, Pooh/Willard is told: "You're in the asshole of the world, captain!" Then, we cut to Piglet, embodying the unnamed photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper (Hopper's characters seem to lend themselves to this kind of detournement, as he is also featured in Graham's follow-up film Blue Peanuts, where his character Frank, yelling for Pabst's Blue Ribbon blue ribbon denotes highest honor. [Western Folklore: Brewer Dictionary, 127] See : Prize in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1987), turns into Snoopy Snoopy world’s most famous beagle. [Comics: “Peanuts” in Horn, 542] See : Dogs Snoopy imaginative dog. [Comics: “Peanuts” in Horn, 542–543] See : Illusion chugging beer by a player piano player piano, an upright piano incorporating a mechanical system that automatically plays the encoded contents of a paper strip. This strip, perforated with holes whose position and length determine pitch and duration, is drawn over a pneumatic device that shoots ) who begins with the salutation: "I'm an American! Yeah, American civilian. Hi Yanks." There is then an extended montage of Piglet sweeping up leaves outside his house, and speaking to himself. He muses: "What are they going to say about him? What, are they going to say, he was a kind man, he was a wise man, he had plans, he had wisdom? Bullshit, man! Am I going to be the one that's going to set them straight? Look at me: wrong!" He continues to speak, as the leaves blow him around:
He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean, sometimes he'll,
uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right
by you, and he won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you,
and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say do you know that if
is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about
you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust
yourself when all men doubt you--I mean I'm no, I can't--I'm a
little man, I'm a little man, he's, he's a great man. I should have
been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas--
I mean--don't go without me, OK?
Piglet doesn't get the last word, however. Graham returns to live action and cut to images of Marlon Brando Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3 1924 – July 1 2004) was an Academy Award-winning American actor whose body of work spanned over half a century. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential actors of all time. as Captain Kurtz, rubbing his bald skull, but from his mouth emerges the depressive bleating bleat n. 1. a. The characteristic cry of a goat or sheep. b. A sound similar to this cry. 2. A whining, feeble complaint. v. bleat·ed, bleat·ing, bleats v. of Eeyore, the donkey, saying, "Thanks for nothing" (to be fair, Eeyore makes far more sense than Kurtz in Coppola's film). Further usurping Brando's dialogue is the replacement of Kurtz/Brando's infamous line "The horror, the horror" with Pooh's "Oh, bother; oh, bother", repeated as Graham cuts to an image of Willard's head emerging camouflaged in the river. Then, he cuts to a final live-action image of a stuffed Pooh bear (taken from the conclusion of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh), superimposed su·per·im·pose tr.v. su·per·im·posed, su·per·im·pos·ing, su·per·im·pos·es 1. To lay or place (something) on or over something else. 2. with the title "The End." Not only is this surrealist vision an entirely appropriate encapsulation (1) In object technology, the creation of self-contained modules that contain both the data and the processing. See object-oriented programming. (2) The transmission of one network protocol within another. of Apocalypse Now, it is also one of the best Pooh films ever made, if not the best, as the detourned characters reveal not only the Ur-text to Coppola's film, but also of their own animated images. Furthermore, Apocalypse Pooh invites one to revisit the Pooh films, which most viewers probably haven't considered since childhood (after all, they are not a staple of 'Introduction to Film' courses), and read them against the grain, through the glass of colonialism, Coppola and Conrad. This project can lead to strange, yet interesting, results: In Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, we are introduced to Pooh and follow him on his (dark) quest for honey, which leads to him expressing his rather colonialist attitude towards bees (he says: "The only reason for bees to make honey is so that I can eat it"). To get this elusive gold substance, he rolls in the mud to camouflage himself as a rain cloud (looking much like Willard in the river at the conclusion of Apocalypse Now), then takes a balloon and rises up to the bees' nest to feed off the fruit of their labour. Eventually, the bees organize, revolt, fight back and send Pooh flying through the sky on his rapidly deflating balloon, none the wiser as to why his exploitative ways are wrong (he says: "You never know with bees"). His gluttony Gluttony See also Greed. Belch, Sir Toby gluttonous and lascivious fop. [Br. Lit.: Twelfth Night] Biggers, Jack one of the best known “feeders” of eighteenth-century England. [Br. Hist. then leads to him getting wedged in Rabbit's hole, having to slim down Verb 1. slim down - take off weight lose weight, melt off, slim, slenderize, thin, reduce sweat off - lose weight by sweating; "I sweated off 3 pounds in the sauna" before he can exit, without learning any discernable lesson from his rapacious over-consumption of natural resources. In Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, Pooh first encounters Tigger in a mock military manner as he patrols his home with his popgun. Before seeing Tigger himself, he hears him prowling prowl v. prowled, prowl·ing, prowls v.tr. To roam through stealthily, as in search of prey or plunder: prowled the alleys of the city after dark. v.intr. in the (dark) forest; Pooh panics as the unknown 'other' overtakes his imagination. Later, as a storm passing through the Hundred Acre Forest picks up, Pooh is blown through the woods, pulled by Piglet, whose scarf has become a kite-string. Pooh and Piglet are then plastered against Owl's house, which then leads to a pastiche pastiche (păstēsh`, pä–), work of art that combines themes and styles from various sources in such a way as to appear obviously derivative. of the cabin scene in Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925)--another film about capitalist greed and the quest for golden substances. Once Owl's house is destroyed, the storm really picks up, and Pooh and Piglet are swept down the swelling river, only to be saved at the last moment. Eeyore finds a new home for Owl, which turns out to be Piglet's flooded house, so Piglet graciously gives up his house and moves in with Pooh (Piglet being the socialist of the lot). Another quasi-military party, replete with marching band Noun 1. marching band - a band that marches (as in a parade) and plays music at the same time band - instrumentalists not including string players , ensues. While my (re-) readings of these two films are somewhat tongue in cheek, I shall examine later on how unveiling the Urtext ur·text n. The original text, as of a musical score or a literary work. [German : ur-, original; see Ursprache + Text, text of popular culture artifacts artifacts see specimen artifacts. is no longer solely the domain of avant-gardists Situationists and academics, but that this DIY DIY abbr. do-it-yourself DIY or d.i.y. Brit, Austral & NZ do-it-yourself DIY abbr DIY do it yourself a DIY shop/job. aesthetic is now practiced by video jockeys, mash-ups artists and the producers of AMVs in the (quasi-) mainstream digital forum of cyberspace. (10) Detournement and the Nature of 'Stars' One of the things that Apocalypse Pooh draws into relief is the iconic status of A.A. Milne's characters. While much of the humour generated by Apocalypse Pooh comes from the detournement of Coppola's film, this Situationist process also foregrounds the fact that the Pooh characters have a star status similar to iconic figures such as Marilyn Monroe or John Wayne (or, for that matter, Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper). It does not matter that viewers may not know or recall the narrative of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, instead the film foregrounds the way in which Pooh, Piglet, Christopher Robin, Tigger and the other Milne characters are understood as larger than the roles played in the films themselves. As Richard Dyer notes:
Because stars have an existence in the world independent of their
screen/'fiction' appearances, it is possible to believe (with for
instance ideas about the close-up revealing the soul, etc.) that as
people they are more real than characters in stories. This means
that that they serve to disguise the fact that they are just as much
produced images, constructed personalities as 'characters' are. Thus
the value embodied by the star is as it were harder to reject as
'impossible' or 'false', because the star's existence guarantees the
existence of the value he or she embodies. (11)
Animated characters who, in essence, only exist as screen stars and not as real individuals) raise salient questions about what spectators believe stars to embody, and what they project into them, in an often unreflective popular culture. Certainly, despite the fact that Pooh and his cohorts are lines on paper, they have an existence outside of the animated world. As director Chuck Jones
Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones (September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002) was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated notes about the animated 'star' Daffy Duck Daffy Duck is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. Daffy was the first of the new breed of "screwball" characters that emerged in the 1930s to supplant traditional everyman characters, such as in relation to his classic deconstruction of the character in his film Duck Amuck Duck Amuck is a surreal 1951 animated cartoon produced by Warner Bros. and released in 1953 as part of the Merrie Melodies series. It stars Daffy Duck, who is tormented by a sadistic, unseen animator who constantly changes Daffy's location, clothing, voice, physical (1953): "[...] Daffy can live and struggle on an empty screen, without setting and without sound, just as well as with a lot of arbitrary props. He remains Daffy Duck." (12) Animated characters exist in the imagination of viewers and in these imaginings imaginings Noun, pl speculative thoughts about what might be the case or what might happen; fantasies: lurid imaginings have personalities and ideological positions that extend beyond the diegesis Di`e`ge´sis n. 1. A narrative or history; a recital or relation. of the text. Indeed, the plethora of marketing campaigns that employ animated 'stars' points to their existence as 'personalities' outside of the narratives of their film appearances. Indeed, it is this very excess that makes Apocalypse Pooh a humorous film. One is not simply listening to, say, Martin Sheen's voice-over as if spoken by Winnie the Pooh; one is also watching the incongruity in·con·gru·i·ty n. pl. in·con·gru·i·ties 1. Lack of congruence. 2. The state or quality of being incongruous. 3. Something incongruous. Noun 1. of Pooh thinking, "Shit, I'm still in Saigon." Furthermore, while one needs to be familiar with the narrative of Apocalypse Now for the film to make sense, one does not have to be a cinephile cin·e·phile n. A film or movie enthusiast. [French cinéphile : ciné, cinema; see cineaste + -phile, -phile.] on the scale of Godard for the film to work. Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day may not be 'quoted' in Histoire(s) du cinema (1987-97); this isn't necessary for the viewer to understand the detournement that is taking place. One only needs to be familiar with the 'stars' that populate the Hundred Acre Forest; indeed, Graham's film foregrounds the fact that our knowledge of the characters is greater than our knowledge of the films from which they come. It's this knowledge that allows for us to understand the detournement of both Apocalypse Now and Winnie the Pooh; it's Graham's ability to make the familiar unfamiliar through humorous dialectical juxtapositions, or as Wees put it, to "reveal more about their [the images] origins and uses than their original makers consciously intended" that uncovers the underlying truths of both films and the way they function in culture in their 'naturalized' forms. Mash-ups, AMVs and the avant-garde What is also of interest about Apocalypse Pooh is the way in which it blurs the boundaries between the analog and the digital. Which raises the question: To what degree can Apocalypse Pooh be seen as the Ur-text or progenitor pro·gen·i·tor n. 1. A direct ancestor. 2. An originator of a line of descent. progenitor ancestor, including parent. progenitor cell stem cells. of today's ubiquitous mash-ups (such as trailer mash-ups, where a film is re-cut into a new trailer, which typically dramatically changes the genre of the film) and AMVs (Anime Music Videos, where animated footage, most often from Japanese Anime films, is re-cut to a new soundtrack)? While mash-ups and AMVs are now ubiquitous on-line, and made all the easier with the advent of iMovie, Moviemaker mov·ie·mak·er n. One that makes movies, especially professionally. mov  ie·mak ,
Final Cut Pro and Avid, Apocalypse Pooh has taken on the status as the
genus of these forms. Indeed, Apocalypse Pooh has gained a second life
on-line, looked upon as both the progenitor and primitive form of
mashups and AMVs. In the digital realm, the 'breakthrough'
success of trailer mash-ups as viral videos (videos that spread wide and
rapidly through the Internet) can be traced to the 2005 mash-up of
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Here, video jockey Robert
Ryang recuts recuts Surgical pathology Glass slides–GSs from paraffin-embedded tissue, obtained in addition to the original GSs, to either confirm the presence of a lesion identified on the first GSs or obtained for a second opinion, requested by the Pt or referring the Kubrick film into a trailer for a feelgood, family
film, where Jack Nicholson John Joseph Nicholson (born April 22 1937), known as Jack Nicholson, is a three time Academy Award winning American actor internationally renowned for his often dark-themed portrayals of neurotic characters. is softened and finds a kind of happiness
through meeting a young boy, as Peter Gabriel's 'Salisbury
Hill' plays in the background. The detournement of the Kubrick film
foregrounds the re-narrativization that most often takes place in
trailers, and in so doing, also calls into question the ways in which
moving images signify and the tenuous relationship between images and
the way they are anchored by the soundtrack. Trailer re-mixes and
mash-ups also bring to light the fact that film trailers have always
been, to a certain extent, found footage films. On sites such as ifilm,
there are now a plethora of such trailer mash-ups and re-mixes, such as:
2007's When Harry Stalked Sally (When Harry Met Sally re-cut as
Fatal Attraction Fatal Attraction is a 1987 thriller about a married man who has a weekend affair with a woman who refuses to allow it to end and who becomes obsessed with him. It stars Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and Anne Archer. It was directed by Adrian Lyne. ); Joe Sabia's 2007 mash-up Good Will Hunted (Good
Will Hunting re-cut as a thriller); Chris Rule's 2006 film Scary
Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins as a horror film); Dennis Lyall-Wison's
2006 trailer mash-up Scary in Seattle (Sleepless in Seattle as, yet
again, Fatal Attraction); and Chocolate Cake City's 2006 Brokeback
to the Future (the Back to the Future series re-mixed as a queer
romance). AMVs have taken the found footage ethos into a DIY,
competitive form, with practices such as 'AMV Iron Chef'
competitions, where two video jockeys are given the same source material
to re-edit or detourne in a fixed amount of time. The transmogrification
of avant-garde found footage films into popular forms, such as mash-ups,
trailer re-mixes and AMVs is in no way a new development; an
interstitial relationship between the avant-garde and the mainstream has
existed since the cinema's inception (Chaplin's appropriation
by the avant-garde is a key example; Apocalypse Pooh itself is another).
Much the way the works of Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Conner Bruce Conner (born November 18, 1933) is an American artist (film, assemblage, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines). Early life and
Bruce Baillie can be seen as key stylistic forbearers to the aesthetic
of the music video and MTV MTVin full Music Television U.S. cable television network, established in 1980 to present videos of musicians and singers performing new rock music. MTV won a wide following among rock-music fans worldwide and greatly affected the popular-music business. , Graham's work, and that of found footage filmmakers such as Keith Sanborn, Craig Baldwin, Peggy Awesh and Matthias Muller--amongst many others--can be seen as the avant-garde precursors to the DIY emergence of found footage mash-ups and AMVs on-line (indeed, in tracing these various Ur-histories, one could also argue that the concluding twenty minutes of Coppola's The Godfather, Part III (1990) is a mash-up of the first two Godfather films and Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) is an opera in one act by Pietro Mascagni to an Italian libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, adapted from a short story by Giovanni Verga. ). (13) And, like many found footage films produced by the avant-garde, mash-ups and video jockeys are developing a self-reflexive, participatory, critical and political edge. In a recent article in The Guardian on mash-ups and video jockeying Danny Bradbury notes:
Kent Bye, a Maine-based engineer and filmmaker, is preparing an
Alpha-version of a collaborative on-line editing system for the
Echochamber Project, a video documentary analyzing media coverage of
the run up to the Iraq war. Bye will make the audio of 45 hours of
raw footage available on-line. Volunteers are transcribing and
tagging the audio with their own descriptions. "Citizen editors"
will then be able to resequence the audio to create their own
remixes of interviews, which Bye hopes to use as a guide during the
final video-editing process. He is also considering Flash-based
online editing tools to make video mashups possible. "What I'm
really interested in is how you can use a distributed set of people
to put that kind of research into a collaborative film-making
approach," he says. (14)
Instead of arguing that the avant-garde is being appropriated, tamed, denaturalized or otherwise corrupted by its incorporation into the mainstream, perhaps one should instead celebrate the fact that, like the appropriations made by found footage filmmakers of popular culture, the avant-garde practices undertaken by DIY video jockeys, mash-up artists and AMV AMV Anime Music Video AMV Avian Myeloblastosis Virus AMV Alfalfa Mosaic Virus AMV Army Motor Vehicle AMV Assisted Mechanical Ventilation AMV Armored Maintenance Vehicle AMV Accredited Meter Verifier AMV Annulus Master Valve producers speak not to a dilution of radical art and aesthetics, but its termite-like function as a means of critique within the quasi-mainstream. If something as honey-sweet as Winnie the Pooh can be detourned and then celebrated by the avant-garde, comic geeks and on-line artists, then perhaps there are still points of resistance against the ideological conformity triumphed as 'realist' in most mainstream image-making. Furthermore, the process of unpacking a text, or re-working it and showing its ideological underbelly becomes the goal of radical cultural production, instead of simply accepting the images rampant in culture, and consuming them like so much honey. And of course, the ever-ubiquitous Pooh has been used to explore these kinds of issues before; Benjamin Hoff writes in his book The Tao of Pooh.
The honey doesn't taste so good once it has been eaten; the goal
doesn't mean so much once it has been reached; the reward is not so
rewarding once it has been given. If we add up all the rewards in
our lives, we won't have very much. But if we add up all the spaces
between the rewards, we'll come up with quite a bit.[...] Each time
a goal is reached, it becomes Not So Much Fun, and we're off to
reach the next one, then the next one, then the next. That doesn't
mean the goal doesn't count. They do, mostly because the cause us to
go through the process, and it's the process that makes us wise,
happy, whatever.[...] What could we call the moment before we eat
the honey? Some call it anticipation, but I think it's more than
that. We could call it awareness. It is when we become happy and
realize it, if only for an instant. By Enjoying the Process, we can
stretch that awareness out so it's no longer only a moment, but
covers the whole thing. Then we can have a lot of fun. Just like
Pooh. (15)
Or, one could add, the journey of Willard. Indeed, the above reading of Pooh encapsulates the narrative of both Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Pooh, the philosophical issues raised by both films, the critique of dominant culture sallied forth by the avant-garde in its myriad of analog and digital forms. Scott MacKenzie is Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Media at York University York University, at North York, Ont., Canada; nondenominational; coeducational; founded 1959 as an affiliate of the Univ. of Toronto, became independent 1965. . He is co-editor of Cinema and Nation (2000) and Purity and Provocation: Dogme '95 (2003) and author of Screening Quebec: Quebecois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere The public sphere is a concept in continental philosophy and critical theory that contrasts with the private sphere, and is the part of life in which one is interacting with others and with society at large. (2004). Notes 1 Kim Newman, "The Tigger Movie," Sight & Sound, June 2000. 2 Fred Camper, "The End of Avant-Garde Film," Millennium Film Journal 17/18/19 (1986-87): 99-125. 3 For a survey of the debates surrounding the Toronto Experimental Film Congress and the manifesto written as a riposte ri·poste n. 1. Sports A quick thrust given after parrying an opponent's lunge in fencing. 2. A retaliatory action, maneuver, or retort. intr.v. to it, see William C. Wees, "'Let's Set the Record Straight': The International Experimental Film Congress, Toronto 1989," Canadian Journal of Film Studies 9.1 (2000): 101-116. For an overview of the goals of the Congress, see International Experimental Film Congress (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is an art museum on the eastern edge of Toronto's downtown Chinatown district, on Dundas Street West between McCaul Street and Beverley Street. , 1989). 4 While the literature on found footage films keeps growing in its own rhyzomatic way, some key texts on the subject are: Jay Leyda, Films Beget be·get tr.v. be·got , be·got·ten or be·got, be·get·ting, be·gets 1. To father; sire. 2. To cause to exist or occur; produce: Violence begets more violence. Films: A Study of the Compilation Film (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964); Sharon Sandusky, "The Archeology of Redemption: Towards Archival Films," Millennium Film Journal 26 (1993): 3-25; William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993); Scott MacKenzie, "Flowers in the Dustbin: Termite termite or white ant, common name for a soft-bodied social insect of the order Isoptera. Termites are easily distinguished from ants by comparison of the base of the abdomen, which is broadly joined to the thorax in termites; in ants, there is Culture and Detritus detritus /de·tri·tus/ (de-tri´tus) particulate matter produced by or remaining after the wearing away or disintegration of a substance or tissue. de·tri·tus n. pl. Cinema," CineAction 47 (1998): 24-29; Michael Zryd, "Found Footage Film as Metahistory: Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99," The Moving Image 3.2 (2003): 40-61 and Adrian Danks, "The Global Art of Found Footage Cinema" in Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and Steven Jay, eds. Traditions in World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh University Press is a university publisher that is part of the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. External links
5 William C. Wees, "From Compilation to Collage: The Found Footage Films of Arthur Lipsett," Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16.2 (2007). 6 Abigail Child, "Notes on Sincerity and Irony," in David E. James, Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005): 196. 7 Peter Rainer, "Vietnam Hot Damn" in Rainer, ed. Love and Hisses (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992): 470. 8 Daniel Clowes, a leading alternative comix com·ix pl.n. Comic books and comic strips, especially of the underground press: "the countercultural . . . comix of the sixties and early seventies, with their explicit criticism of American society" artist, documents this popularity in the letter column of his comic Eightball (the basis of the Terry Zwigoff film Ghost World), published by Fantagraphics. 9 Dot Tuer and Michael Balser, Program Notes for "High Tech/Low Tech: Bodies in Space, An Open Forum on Film and Video Aesthetics" Pleasure Dome, Toronto, Ontario, July 17, 1992. 10 For a more 'traditional' encapsulation of the plots of these films, see Christopher Finch, Disney's Winnie the Pooh (New York: Disney Books, 2002). 11 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI BFI - brute force and ignorance , 1979): 22. 12 Cited in Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, rev. ed. (New York: NAL NAL National Agricultural Library (Agricultural Research Service; US Department of Agriculture) NAL New American Library NAL National Accelerator Laboratory NAL National Aerospace Laboratory (Japan) , 1987): 263. 13 For more on the interweaving of these two narratives, see Scott MacKenzie, "Closing Arias: Operatic Montage in the Closing Sequences of the Trilogies of Coppola and Leone," p.o.v.: A Danish Journal of Film Studies 16 (1998): 109-124. 14 Danny Bradbury, "Jockeying for Attention" The Guardian 20 April 2006. 15 Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh (London: Penguin, 1982): 111-112 |
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