1. Introduction
‘History returns forever – as film,’ voiced Anton Kaes.[1] However, film in turn returns as history. Cinema is a culture we can refer to and use to encode our experiences, to analyse the past with, and to observe as markers of time and of trends. This common relationship with film is revealed in the autobiographies and memoirs shaped around movie-going experiences, which are about forming both social histories and personal identities through cinema (such as Patrick E. Horrigan’s Widescreen Dreams [1999]). Of course, the movies also mold and mesh with the wider cultural ideologies at work, as Robert Burgoyne observed in his critical investigation of the Hollywood historical film, and help to define and determine idealised cultural identities too: how we view a nation’s past. Yet consumers’ memories are very much a socialised human economy.
This means that nostalgia and such elusive human factors as community spirit become part of the equation – the cultural apparatus – in how film can be perceived as history. Be Kind Rewind (USA 2008), written and directed by the innovative Michel Gondry, is about the return of popular movies as shared, celluloid history, as well as the facets of human nature that perhaps invite this. Paradoxically, memories – especially when aggregated – are often flawed, incomplete, imperfect, or even inaccurate. However, instead of being considered detrimental, this ‘human error’ is implemental to social memory, as indeed it privileges the common bonds between people and their pasts.
Self-reflexively, Gondry’s film is about these memories, in-and-of film, compounded by making a post-modern movie about an ad hoc community of amateur filmmakers. The socialised concepts that are being dramatised in Be Kind Rewind are also close to (and interrelated with) what Shaffer identifies as ‘public culture’.[2] This is the type of display usually reserved for a social group centred around a particular place, and with an underlying civic engagement or public action (which is precisely what replacing the movies becomes conflated with in the film). More importantly the second-rate remakes are all about a sense of place, of remapping the memorised movies onto the streets where this unlikely collection of amateur filmmakers live. They generate real locations to correspond with the fictional films they are remembering in this way. At the same time, it re-makes the history of their public places as fictional, through film.
2. Tapping into the copying culture
Be Kind Rewind is just one of a flurry of new films about such social memories (and mimicries) of the movies, reflecting a burgeoning modern interest in fan remakes, in transformative works, and in what Andrew Keen scathingly dubs the ‘cult of the amateur’ (referring to its online equivalents).[3] Garth Jennings’s Son of Rambow (USA, 2007)[4] is another concurrent example of this preoccupation with the movies from the past, and with amateur re-enactments of their cultural referents. In the same year, the fan-made Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation (1989) reached a big screen release at Mann’s Chinese.[5] Most recently, the risqué comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno (USA 2009) offers a post-modern reprocessing of Star Wars (USA 1977), unofficially recreated by an ensemble of fans with erotic (even ‘slash’ – see Jenkins)[6] alterations. Similar to Be Kind Rewind, the sort of poaching depicted is surprisingly social-minded.
Clearly the offbeat idea of communal ‘mimicking-from-memory’ has taken root. This has likely been inspired by modern interpretative communities: the increasingly active and involved audiences who can blog about their reactions, rant on boards, and (most significantly) upload their parodies, remakes and ‘sequels’ on YouTube and the like. Technology makes filming easier and increasingly less centralised, leading to a prolific outpouring of amateur, homemade footage. In theory, all this user-generated content could easily reach as many (or perhaps more) people online as cinema does.
The phenomenon has been shrewdly embraced and romanticised by Hollywood, as shown above by this spate of new movies. Of these, Be Kind Rewind has been singled out in this analysis for several reasons. It is the new work of a noteworthy auteur, and while Gondry’s is not the first film to comment upon social memories in-and-of film (there are many earlier intertextual films about cinematic memories, such as Kiss of the Spider Woman [USA/Brazil 1985], Cinema Paradiso [Italy/France 1988] and El espíritu dela colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive Spain 1973])[7] Be Kind Rewind offers an especially complex, complete and creative approach to this phenomenon in the present day. It also more expressly situations it within – and as analogous to – those notions of ‘space’ so vital to the modern concepts of socially-held historical memory.
[3. Why Be Kind Rewind is germane to history and film]
A rereading – so soon – of a 2008 film might seem somewhat precipitous, but at the time, Be Kind Rewind received mixed reviews and was critically undervalued, as part of Gondry’s decline in popularity since 2004 (falling on Rotten Tomatoes from a near perfect rating of 94% to a mediocre 64%, which represents the percentage of positive reviews from a full spectrum of sources).[8] Compared to Gondry’s much touted feats (like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (USA 2004), andLa Science des rêves (The Science of Sleep France 2006) Be Kind Rewind slipped under the radar (perhaps due to critical perceptions of funny-man Jack Black, although similar stigma around Jim Carrey did not hinder Eternal Sunshine from being taken seriously). In any case, this oversight begs to be critically redressed. Gondry has crafted a film worthy of his oeuvre, and suffused with his characteristically perceptive and philosophical insights, which this time reflect upon the notions of film culture itself, and how we recollect it.
Given that this re-reading admittedly hinges (cheerfully!) on cultural populism, it is useful to clarify the angle being taken on film history, both in Gondry’s film and in this article. For neither is about history as observed or documented through film, but in how films themselves are inherently historical – how they become artefacts. The film and this analysis refer to social mnemonics: the informal histories, the cultural meanings that are made through the social relations of popular audiences. This is the truncated, contracted, rapid-fire, fast-forwarding of historicity: an acceleration of culture (rather than the grand narratives of modernity). It is about how film culture is consumed and processed for prosperity. Fiction film – as marker of popular culture – comes to function as historical document, even when it is as fallible as a real record.
This falls under what Carlton Jackson called ‘one of the great academic quarrels of our time… the legitimacy or non-legitimacy of ‘Popular Culture’ [in history]’[9] (a schism, it should be noted, in which Jackson is avidly in favour of the former). This current author, however, is not blazoning either one side or the other; merely (and reflexively) suggesting that this is the best way to approach Gondry’s film, as well as being the approach to history that his film is about. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that online streaming video sites (such as YouTube) have recently given rise to a prevalent electronic community of ‘the clip’ and informal, more fluid ways to access movies and footage of historical moments, hinting that (for better or worse) the future may lie in what Lucas Hilderbrand describes as ‘potential for democratisation of media memories’[10] – and an adjustment of what history means now.
Analysing a recent comedy about the modern means of making amateur remakes may seem an unlikely choice for the subject of film and history. However, while all of Gondry’s works to date have been set in the modern day, his whimsical, wistful urban fantasies (like Eternal Sunshine and The Science of Sleep) are intrinsically all about history and the past, particularly about memories evaporating and being reconstructed, through reminiscence and illusion.[11] As an auteur, his themes may be characterised by a recurring notion of people who are trying to cling onto their memories of shared pasts (a recurring ontological plight that enters some of his movies) and how erasing records of said pasts can place the present into a state of flux and abandonment.
In Be Kind Rewind this theme becomes the central conceit of an entire video rental library in New Jersey being wiped by accident. These blank tapes then effectively leave behind an erased history of the last forty-odd years of cinema, from which the young clerk and his friends (played by Mos Def, Jack Black and Melonie Diaz) must start over. Added to the dilemmas of amnesia and ‘slipping away’, the struggling shop (which has resisted changing over to DVD as their low-income clients cannot afford to buy the new players) is scheduled to be bulldozed by developers.[12]
4. Remaking movies into memories
Deciding to replace the tapes with homemade remakes, the clerks rely solely on their sometimes fallible memories of the deleted texts, re-enacting modern and popular classics in culturally-condensed, twenty-minute long ‘how-we-remember-them’ versions. These remakes are shot on the run, using shoestring budgets and tinfoil special effects. This predicament allows Gondry (as director) the opportunity to make a cavalcade of very idiosyncratic, visually innovative transformations of memorable movies.[13] It also permits him to make an artistic statement on how film history from the late twentieth century can be enabled through social memories of popular culture.
Failing to pass the illicit re-enactments off as the authentic articles, the quick-thinking clerks instead begin to make them in cahoots with their customers, now relying on a collective, socialised knowledge to put things back to how they are remembered, to ‘rebuild’ film. To achieve this, they transform the community into a collaborative and active audience, literally putting them in the picture. For example, the eccentric and elderly Miss Falewicz (played by Mia Farrow) now gets to not only re-watch, but to literally re-live her favourite film Driving Miss Daisy (USA 1989). Thus these videos (made from people’s shared recollections) become absorbed into their memorable life experiences. This transforms the function of the rental videos into being not just about storing what one views, but participating in the profilmic event, even possessing it, as personal history, as an autobiographical memory of an experience shared with others.
Therefore – through these amateur remakes – cinematic and personal histories are consciously bound up in the other. It becomes vastly self-referential, as these ersatz videos actually further threaten or destabilise the veracity of the very films they are designed to rerecord (or re-record, n.) while reinforcing the – quite literally – socially constructed memories of the same. They remember them differently because of this personal involvement. As Jack Black’s character existentially ponders at one point: “Maybe I was in Ghostbusters.” The community comes to identify themselves with the moviemakers, and to stake a material claim on that vibe of vicarious ownership that has always been part of the public response (and embracement) of popular films.
5: Remapping film culture as/onto public property
By externalising this idea (onto the neighbourhood lot’s very own ‘backlot’) the re-enactments make popular culture into space: public space, and discursive space. In a sense, this process of rebuilding – which tears down cinematic edifices (only to start on construction again from their fundamental foundations) – is analogous to a city’s architecture: changing, being modernised, or made into heritage listings. They shoot outdoors, in libraries and junkyards, all of which are predominantly public locations.
The connections between pop culture and architecture are long-celebrated,[14] and here are apt, given how the film’s plot dovetails with demolition and urban redevelopment. As French philosopher Paul Virilio argued, the abundance of visual media in Western culture – the excess of moving images in every corner of life – determines how ‘the screen abruptly became the city square, the crossroads of all mass media’.[15] The folk in Be Kind Rewind make concrete those indelible movie moments that are part of our cultural consciousness, turning them into something that is civic and commemorated.
But this process of ‘rebuilding’ applies to history as well, as it is profilmic events that are being mapped out again; in a sense as historical re-enactments for the camera (but of film itself). These are profilmic events, occurring for a second time. This brings to mind the shot-by-shot remake of Psycho (USA 1995), and in contradistinction, Peter Jackson’s contrastingly fantastical retelling of King Kong (USA 2006) (both remakes of well-known movies, and handled completely differently regarding historic fidelity to the originals). In Be Kind Rewind the remapping that occurs, and the fictional space that the performers inhabit, is perhaps a (paradoxically) physical version of how they envision their social memories, more than it is a straight re-enactment of the films.[16] It traces out and resembles the memory practices that are at work, in profilmic terms.
6. Stylised approaches to prior-profilmic events
Thus, in a sense these kooky remakes are cinema verité records of collective mindsets (not unlike the inner worlds of Eternal Sunshine and Science of Sleep), which explains how they can be so immanently recognisable but at once surreal; set in quirky mental landscapes that have been cobbled together on the street, in an ‘Oz-like’ reprocessing of the familiar. The events they map out require a conscious effort of the imagination; a lenient, kindly suspension of disbelief.[17] Rather than being verbatim replacements of the missing videos, they are more like displacements: supplanting ‘the real thing’ with more socially interpretative and subjective records. In fact, much of Gondry’s style is to pass one thing off as another, occluding what lies beneath; to get between. This is particularly salient when their street is made to look as it might have appeared in the past by overlaying it with cardboard cut-out facades (and two-dimensional motorcars). Stylised ‘memory’ is superimposed onto these past events, sliding in-between the original artefacts and the audience, like it is a prism or kaleidoscope.
This overlaying of the profilmic with the subjective and personal pervades Gondry’s film elsewhere. In a memorable moment, Jerry (Jack Black) interposes himself and a ladder against a security fence by wearing a fantastic disguise painted to approximate the details behind, which expressly demonstrates this type of visually squeezing in-between. This symbolic and jarring scene (it seems oddly out of place, which actually adds to its significance) makes manifest what is happening in the remakes, and what will later spread to the street itself. The amateurs are putting themselves in the images, but in doing so – in mapping it out again – they are making their memories physical: a reconstituted time and place. They are putting themselves between the second-hand profilmic event and the camera (in another scene, a fan and strings are used to give an old fashioned flicker to the footage, again stressing this approach to ‘sliding in front’).
The ladder sequence directly quotes the work of Dutch photographer Desiree Palmen. She takes innovative, urban ‘camouflage’ shots in which figures are painted to match their surroundings (interestingly, her work is inspired by unease with the amount of surveillance cameras in public spaces, similar to Virilio’s observation). The photos look almost right, but a little bit wrong, and put people in the way (see ‘Tram Shelter’, 2002, in which a hooded figure stands before a map). The eye is always drawn to the spatchcocked presence of these men and women. In Be Kind Rewind this same affected occlusion helps to stress the screen, and how the past is mediated by human practices.
7. ‘Swedeing’ and the significance of place
Looking back on the catalogue of movies covered in Be Kind Rewind is definitely more a commentary on how people memorise film than it is on the texts themselves. In the movie, the store dubs its method ‘swedeing’ (as in Sweden), and the films that receive this affectionate treatment range from the sublime to the ridiculous, spanning a variety of tastes in an egalitarian manner: by the people, for the people. The entire process is decidedly social and democratic, emphasising ideal politics of real places – à la Lucas Hilderbrand’s aforementioned ‘democratisation of media memories’ through video sharing (interestingly, Sweden has previously had a controversial stance on file sharing as constituting a form of free speech, although this is rapidly changing).[18]
The movies ‘sweded’ cover hits like Ghostbusters (USA 1984) and Back to the Future (USA 1985), masterpieces like 2001: A Space Odyssey (USA 1968), perennials like King Kong (various versions, USA 1933, 1976 & 2005), mass movies like The Lion King (USA 1994), foreign classics like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg(Umbrellas of Cherbourg France 1964) sexual films like Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris Italy, France 1973) and Boogie Nights (USA 1997), and innumerable popular culture touchstones such as Carrie (USA 1976),RoboCop (USA 1987) and many others.
Importantly, the first movie they capture (Ghostbusters) is about capturing ‘ghosts’, which self-reflexively can be seen as constituting remnants and revenants of the past. All of these well-known films are distilled into movies-within-the-movie; effectively being reduced to their most distinctive, memorable components, overhauled from their parts into recognisable (although completely reconstituted) new wholes that best reflect how we – the audience – remember those films and the lasting cultural impact they had. This is the centre of Gondry’s compassionate thesis in Be Kind Rewind: that both film and history can be public, and immanently personalised.
Remaking the lost library becomes a process of collective cultural recall, much like the patchwork nature of social memories about community histories. Film history is remapped through the collective knowledge found in social memory, the community, much like a mosaic. Indeed, a public mural painted in an underpass plays a prominent part in the film. This mural is of Fats Waller (the historical subject of their final – and original – movie), and is painted using a grid of numbered squares, like a map. But it is riddled with inaccuracies. It also later becomes a palimpsest, covered with graffiti. This can be seen as a metaphor for the type of memory work that the folk undertake, through their manqué moviemaking. Importantly it is mapped out onto the street, as a shared history, and reminiscent of that ‘town square’ of images proposed by Virilio.
8. Re-screening history; remapping the past
Popular film history is effectively being remapped through their social memory; that is, communal accounts of local histories and events. Self-reflexively, this turns full-circle and becomes a feedback loop of memories, because the interactive amateur remakes are being experienced firsthand, and incorporated into their own histories. Indeed, remaking the movies becomes conflated – and thematically inseparable – from the climatic thrust to save the street from the bulldozers. The residents rally together to revise their local history through a homemade mockumentary (perhaps reminiscent of New Zealand’s own audacious historical hoax Forgotten Silver (NZ 1995)), in which they now communally remake their little corner of Passaic, New Jersey as the birthplace of the legendary and much loved jazz musician, Fats Waller.
This tall tale, their kindly conspiracy, is a last-ditch attempt to have the street corner listed as a historical landmark. Ironically, this is in order save it from developers who are likewise planning to fabricate its antique charm, but significantly for financial profit (reminding us again of an external, civic memory that occupies a place, while reinforcing the main comparison between public spaces and the shared memories of movies). The neighbourhood’s unified effort to fight this exploitation involves all the resident oddballs, thugs and curmudgeons, while also self-consciously evoking old fashioned feel-good movies like It’s a Wonderful Life(USA 1946) all under the banner of shared experiences of movie-going: a citizenship in the public culture of cinema.
So although contemporary, Be Kind Rewind is relevant to film and history as it brings together popular culture and social memory, a vibrant sociological and historical field (and which could be amalgamated more often with film, especially with how history is mediated via film – often our first point of contact with events). Social memories concern an ongoing process of informal, decentralised beliefs about history, about ‘what happened’. This applies interestingly to the putting-back-together of the video library in Be Kind Rewind, which turns into a combined, hoi polloi attempt to combat cultural amnesia, centralised ownerships and hieratical modes of authenticity.
9. Social memory on the street
While associated indelibly with stories from the Second World War,[19] the idea of social memory has since taken on wider, more general meanings in sociology as a mnemonic cultural practice. This fits Gondry’s theme of striving against amnesia and forgetting. It involves an informal exchange of information in social interaction, and is thus seen as dynamic and continuously reinvented. The field is itself somewhat disorganised; at once interdisciplinary and contested.[20] Functionally, social memory contributes to the construction of an ongoing identity held by a community. This is very much the charge that runs through Be Kind Rewind, first uniting the people, and then becoming conflated with their reinventing of their history through amateur film.
Be Kind Rewind highlights that social memory ought to incorporate movies as well, as they are cultural touchstones: artefacts that generations of filmgoers have in common, a colloquial link. In Gondry’s film, swedeing the street itself is used to point out this connection. Essentially, local history is being treated in the same way as the tapes are, equating the one with the other, and making them interchangeable. In fact their fates become so entwined that all the videos actually get steamrollered by court bailiffs to dispose of them (as intended for the building) while the aghast community looks on.
Gondry’s argument, then, is that the social memories of film culture can be equally as historic as those of places. It may seem strange to uphold modern cult-films as being historical, but post-modern pop culture is paradoxically immersed in the past. For example, in the early 1980s, influential movie reviewer Stanley Kauffman observed that: “the future is the past… nostalgia used to be characteristic of older people; now there are probably more youthful nostalgia addicts than ever before in history.”[21]
10. Nostalgia and the mass media system
This sentimental focus on the past in Be Kind Rewind is seen from the get-go in the title, taken from a sticker that many remember fondly from when we had to rewind tapes before returning them, as well as its connotations that to rewind is inherently kind: and as if the best is behind us. The emphasis on the past is seen in the elliptical nature of the plot (which starts at the end, with the finished mockumentary, and works backwards)[22] as well as in the posters put up around the store of Blast from the Past (USA 1991) and Frequency (USA 2000), which are movies about ‘rewinding’ time.
Kauffman’s observation on this trend in popular movies has perhaps only become increasingly true. Culturally, ‘everything old is new again’, and many recent fads are ‘retro’. This becomes self-referential in movies about movie culture, which in a sense are historical precisely because they are nostalgic. They organise and commemorate a cinematic past as – and through – film. This is further compounded by videotape and its later descendants. As will be discussed, videos usurped the primacy of movies, and helped to make film ‘popularly historical’; transferring film into a cinematic past that could be readily – and regularly – revisited by mass audiences.
As Anton Kaes wrote:
The sheer mass of historical images transmitted by today’s [1980s] media weakens the link between public memory and personal experience. The past is in danger [maybe this has since transpired?] of becoming a rapidly expanding collection of images, easily retrievable [my italics] but isolated by time and space, available in an eternal present by pressing a button [such as ‘rewind’?] on the remote control.
That recent releases like Rush Hour 2 (USA 2001) are also shown in Be Kind Rewind as being reprocessed through social memory indicates how even modern offerings can be significant to film history (perhaps coincidentally connoted by that film’s title in its emphasis on ‘rush’ and units of time). This is partly due to an acceleration of pop culture (and a compression of history) in an industry that is constantly churning out the next ‘new thing’.[23] Even when it is nostalgic, popular culture is in the ever-present now; what is new today is a memory tomorrow. Gondry even prepared a sweded version of Be Kind Rewind before its release, and used it to promote the film.
11. Memory and the mass media system
Arguably, social memory is necessary to the functioning of the mass media system, in how capitalistic media is received, embraced and remembered. Our modern cultural memories generally involve the mass media; from the moon-landing to The Matrix (USA, Australia 1999). But this dependence is fast becoming vice versa as well. Commercial media is not only more-and-more what we remember, but is also incrementally indispensable to how social mnemonics work. As Patricia Leavy, author of Iconic Events: Media, Politics, and Power in Retelling History puts it:
In the age of mass media, memory-work centers on the reproduction, distribution and consumption of mass-media representations. Memory-work thus involves… commercial culture. [24]
Effectively, movies become cultural recall, reprocessing the past for us through our accumulated viewing experiences. Instead of just talking about the movies that we remember, we have metatextual movies that are about the memories about seeing movies, like the snippets of An Affair to Remember (USA 1957) seen in Sleepless in Seattle (USA 1993), or the clips from Hello Dolly (USA 1969) in the newest Pixar film WALL·E (USA 2008).[25] They do our reminiscence for us, our memory-work.
Sociologist Niklas Luhmann proposes in The Reality of Mass Media: Cultural Memoryin the Present that nowadays modern mass media in fact is cultural memory; retrospectively reconstructing our social reality through these systematic operations of repetition and imitation.[26] While I do not concur completely (as this overlooks some of their other functions and properties), the mass media does help to make popular culture more archive-able, and enhances the social ‘give-and-take’ of information essential to this collective consciousness. In Gondry’s film, the video rental store is representative of this shared memory bank, and its place in our culture.
12. ‘Remember when…?’ The rise of video
Video has been implemental to this memory work, with its emphasis on replaying what we watch. The internet has since become a collective ‘memory’ for the recent cultural past, and an online discursive space (due in no small part to the sharing of video footage). The internet however is decidedly not covered in Gondry’s film, as part of his preference for paraphernalia from the past. Moreover, this very sense of personally ‘owning’ movies dates back to the video age: the compulsion to have a copy to watch over, and to help you remember the movie. Be Kind Rewind turns the clock back to where this contemporary obsession with retro started – the video shop.
There are several reasons why tapes are so significant to the thesis Gondry is making in Be Kind Rewind (not the least being Gondry’s habit of crafting treasures out of what others throw away)[27] . Videos are thematically consistent with his claims for memory and nostalgia. The process of video rental is implemental to the sentiment of social distribution as well, and the feeling of somehow owning a ‘part of the movies’, a share in film (notwithstanding the FBI warnings at the very beginning of the tapes).
Indeed, the defunct format is a perfectly self-contained symbol for Gondry to employ. Whilst giving an impression of fixed and dependable ‘materiality’, tapes actually are (like social memory) neither infallible nor entirely accurate. Videotapes can be played over and rewound, but also wiped over and replaced (as depicted in the movie). Most (given pan-and-scan) are even ‘doctored’, and do not fully represent what audiences saw previously on the big screen. They have been significantly altered to begin with.
Videos are also quite literally a physical compression of motion pictures – part of the aforementioned miniaturisation, the acceleration, of popular film culture (culminating in the online video sharing of snippets). Tapes also historically bestow a new level of control, of personal privilege, over how movies were viewed. For the first time we could stop, start, pause, rewind, and most importantly, watch movies again and again at whim.[28] Films became, through video, more geared to the people over vendors. What we watched became our property – our favourite movies remembered for us.
Gondry’s movie also coincided with a watershed moment in video history, as the last standalone JVC VHS unit was manufactured in the same year. Accordingly, tapes are ephemera themselves now, and are considered a product of the eighties, which is also perhaps the moment in time where the modern surge in pop culture is rooted (coeval with ‘Generation X’). Admittedly, tape predates that time, but it was the video war in the eighties that cemented VHS.[29] Also, in 1984, a landmark Supreme Court ruling approved the video recorder, ushering in the practice of ‘substantial non-infringing use’, i.e. recording television for home viewing.[30] Video tapes became a legal trans-human extension of people’s memories for what they had already watched (on TV).
13. Video and social memories of film
In some ways, this newfound interactivity bucked the established Hollywood studio system (and of course copyrights could also be abused). Ordinary people could exert more power over their means of consuming film culture. All in all, video encouraged a sort of ‘mass sub-culture’. Video was seen as being adaptable, and as having innate idiosyncratic and avant-garde potential. As an exhaustive international study (by the United Nations) of social aspects of world-wide video usage described it at the time:
The extraordinary explosion of video…. is fundamentally individualistic, anarchic even, almost beyond any institutional organisation, save by entrepreneurs… It is a medium profoundly worrying to many governments as it dances with ease around their efforts to control… It has become a medium for sexual liberation… a political medium… with here and there…. something very different evolving as indigenous culture is carried by cassette.[31]
This sentiment suits Gondry remarkably well. Much of Be Kind Rewind is about people versus control (as befits the non-institutional notions of social memory). As the above survey also concludes, tapes did not actually represent a ‘threat’ to film cultures or to movie-going communities – quite the opposite in fact – as videos served to strengthen people’s ‘commitment to audio-visual culture’.[32] Suggestions that video ‘damaged’ the shared experience of films, or were reclusive, are in fact a misapprehension. They did not make movie-watching any less of a ‘venue experience’ – instead, video shops and private collections meant it spread and extruded throughout the city and homes.
No matter how insular and solipsistic its viewing methods might appear, videos still stressed a social aspect – that one was part of something larger, a community from the bottom up. This applied especially to rental libraries (in that people were members of a club) and the illusion of transitory ownership; a certain right to the movie, for a little while. There were others ‘out there’ sharing the same physical record. Furthermore (in the importance of videos to social memories of film) it was one of the first mass ways that movies were propagated to people personally, giving them over to regular people.
14. Social memory as social gathering in Be Kind Rewind
Be Kind Rewind is surely not the first film to comment upon this phenomenon of social memories of shared cinematic experiences, but it is one of the most expressive. The condensation of film history and social history into one and the same thing, centred around the video library, is seen most saliently in the final scene when the completed mockumentary – entitled Fats Waller Was Born Here – is screened onto a bed sheet, and unintentionally right through the front window of the condemned building, quite literally projected out into the streets. The entire storefront resembles a giant glowing television shared by everyone outside, while the image is simultaneously reminiscent of how people congregated outside store windows to see early TVs in the first place.
This picture concretises the idea of screens as social gatherings. Social memories are how folktales were conveyed, and Be Kind Rewind does have that fairytale quality to it, a heart-warming sense of make-believe. Significantly, Gondry does not tell us what happens after this final public scene: the film is not tarnished with either a Hollywood ending or a realistic one. It is open ended, but not inconclusive. Rather, when the film stops, it encourages you, the viewer, to come up with your own ending. Gondry hands control over to his audience. In the end we can, if we wish, rewind to happier times.
Of course, the Fats Waller documentary is bogus. But as Mia Farrow’s character brightly justifies: “Our past belongs to us. We can change it if we want.” Nostalgia – even senility – is implemental to this embroidering of social memory, the human need to reminisce with others, and to sometimes get it wrong (perhaps this is why the movie rejects the ‘cold storage’ of digital media and unalterable binary facts). Their questionable mockumentary is intimate and personalised, like the tapes they made.
15. Confluence of place, film and history in Be Kind Rewind
Emotionally, this differs from the developer’s destructive plans to fake a historical ambience through redesigning the neighbourhood. The critical distinction is mirrored in the videos, and their issues of dubbed and dubious ownerships. Gondry makes the videos, the street, and the faking of history all and the same. As Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover) the shop owner confesses, the neighbourhood is aware that what they have done is technically wrong – but he does not specify whether this refers to squatting in the building, their unauthorised video remakes, or their fabrication of a grand local history. They are essentially made tripartite: three interchangeable parts of the same thematic argument about memory, place, film culture – and the forgery of all three.
Social memory is very much ‘of the people’, constructed from the bottom-up, and not imposed from the top-down. This accords with their collective amateur filmmaking, and their exaggerated local history. The folk reclaim the movies, the mass, capitalistic media, in the same way as their history, and assert their own ownership. Thus, Gondry provides an interesting analogy between common memory and film culture, and how popular culture is archived fluidly through audiences and their shared recollections.
16. ‘Thanks for the (stolen) memories’
The unauthorised remakes are obviously illegal. This is especially so because they have recorded over the original tapes and their copyright warnings. However, as in some real life cases of amateur remakes that have been excused kindly by filmmakers (such as the aforementioned fan-made Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg allowed) all proceeds of the sweded movies go to charity. The titular video store runs at a loss as a library for locals who cannot afford to upgrade to DVD players. The source of their troubles – the magnetising force that wiped the tapes – is from a power station, which Jack Black’s character attempts to sabotage as he feels it controls minds and makes people forgetful. Symbolically, this is a centralised power and a fixed authority (like the developers). The people are clearly (if also saccharinely) presented as the underdogs.
What the amateur filmmakers are doing is first and foremost compassionate (at least locally, and certainly in the mockumentary). Swedeing is not like denialist revisions of global history, but personal versions of the past, an embellishing, a decentralised rewinding of the facts. These are kindly crimes, and arguably any narrative film about the past is at best a well-intended distortion of the historical truth: a re-enactment for the cameras.[33] As Orson Welles said of the medium in Vérités et mensonges (F is for Fake, France 1974) “Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.” So, by the same token, are the amateur remakes really black-market knockoffs of movies? Poorly executed pirate-versions of pre-existing films? Or alternatively, are they new and creative texts: original works of idiosyncratic appropriation art? To what extent do they constitute the artistic recreation of previous profilmic events?
17. Conclusion
Self-consciously, Be Kind Rewind leans towards the latter hypothesis, as obviously the sweded films are part of Gondry’s own work. More importantly, these are not mere duplicates of the originals. But they are presented as genuine memories of the same. The implications of amateur remakes, as informal historical records, are vast. They are re-enacted for the camera – like historical reconstructions – but not shot-by-shot. Instead, they use the modular nature of pop culture, the connectible units, those bits and pieces that we remember, to construct them, in a way that – like social memory – is neither official, nor exact. It documents the public involvement in popular culture.
Rather than being accurate copies of movies, what Gondry’s swedeing represents is a greater truth about our present-day film-going culture. Their transformations of a popular history of film functions as a record of responses to those films; their location in social memory. The creative forgery involved of course is significant to copyright issues, and whether or not something can really be regulated once it has become part of the lexicon, and thoroughly permeated popular culture. Certainly Michel Gondry is not dismissing the intellectual copyright of movies (which is the industry’s backbone). But our memories of them are collectively our own, and cannot be audited. They are ours, and they connect us historically through film.
Endnotes
[1] Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 198.
[2] Marguerite S. Shaffer, Public culture: diversity, democracy, and community in the United States, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
[3] Andrew Keen, The cult of the amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture, New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007.
[4] Which was about fanatical schoolchildren acting out the Rambo movie, First Blood (USA 1982).
[5] “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation Fan Film To Play Mann’s Chinese In L.A. On Wednesday!”,http://fancinematoday.com/2008/05/08/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-the-adaptation-fan-film-to-play-manns-chinese-in-la-on-wednesday/ (Accessed 01/03/2009). There is also a biopic in the works about those real-life teenagers who raided Raiders of the Lost Ark (USA, 1981) to make said shot-for-shot amateur remake.
[6] Henry Jenkins, Textual poachers: television fans & participatory culture, New York: Routledge, 1992.
[7] However, importantly none of these involve the implications of video and its follow-ups, nor the amateur adaptation of pre-existing texts by the communities that consume them – that is, audiences screening their own memories right back into film (which is what Be Kind Rewind presents us with).
[8] “Michel Gondry – Rotten Tomatoes”, http://au.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/michel_gondry/, (Accessed 02/02/2009).
[9] Carlton Jackson, “History and popular culture,” in Symbiosis: Popular culture and other fields, eds. R. B. Browne & M. W. Fishwick, Ohio, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988, pp. 57-58.
[10] Lucas Hilderbrand, “YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 61, Issue 1 (2007): 48-57. PDF available at http://caliber.ucpress.net/toc/fq/61/1.
[11] Eternal Sunshine concerns a couple who have their mutual memories erased in a moment of anger; the signature shot is of them lying on a frozen river, riddled with cracks and the threat of breaking ice.
[12] The video store is itself a ‘dinosaur’ now that VHS is a defunct format; no major films have appeared on video since A History of Violence (USA 2005). This makes rerecording the videos the only recourse to replacing the treasured library, as tapes can no longer be repurchased. In some ways then, they are acting as unofficial archivists (although the illegality of their actions is not lost, and secures their fate).
[13] These excerpts will be discussed in the context of Be Kind Rewind as ‘amateur’ remakes, although of course they are devised by Gondry. However, his playful style and his love of bricolage – even while it is intensive and affected – is consistent and suited to the type of ‘DIY’ filmmaking he means to depict.
[14] See for some examples, “Pop architecture: a sophisticated interpretation of popular culture?” in Architectural Design, Vol. 62 (1992) and also the chapter by Dennis Alan Mann, “Where Architecture and Popular Culture Diverge,” in Symbiosis: Popular Culture and other Fields, pp. 177-193.
[15] Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City” in The Lost Dimension (trans. D. Moshenberg), New York, Semiotexte, 1991, pp. 25-27.
[16] A perfect example would be Jack Black’s character’s attempt to reinterpret Jessica Tandy’s role in Driving Miss Daisy, whom he erroneously remembers as being a comically irate and racist harridan.
[17] Interestingly, these scenes being remade are fictional in the first place. They do constitute historical re-enactments of what had happened in front of the camera, but the original films are not non-fiction.
[18] Mick Masnick, “Sweden Considering Law To Allow Police To Go After File Sharers”http://techdirt.com/articles/20090120/1338513463.shtml (Accessed 02/02/2009).
[19] Daniel Levy, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002): 87-106.
[20] See Jeffery K. Olick & Joyce Robbins, “Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices”, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 24 (1998): 105-140.
[21] Stanley Kauffmann, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (review) New Republic (New York), 4–11 July 1981.
[22] Their mockumentary – Fats was born here – likewise starts at the end, with Waller’s death. This is in a self-conscious quotation of the detective-story-in-reverse plotline of Citizen Kane (USA 1941).
[23] As an example of this sped-up attitude towards popular culture, Sony Television offers condensed (by 90%) episodes of older TV shows, which they dub ‘minisodes’. Entire seasons can be watched in a couple of hours. Minisodes speak to the acceleration and nostalgia of pop culture, while also satisfying new multi-channel, snippet-obsessed viewing habits. See the article: Bill Carter, “Coming Online Soon: The Five-Minute ‘Charlie’s Angels”, New York Times Online, 30/04/2007,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30sony.html? (Accessed 02/02/2009).
[24] Patricia Leavy, “Memory-Work”, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0111/Leavy.php (Accessed 26/06/08).
[25] The emotional centre of this CGI film hinges on a video tape found by a lonely robot in amongst apocalyptic detritus. Later, clinging onto his prosthetic memory of this tape (of Hello Dolly) helps the robotic protagonist survive a total shutdown, and to retain his emergent personality and link to human culture. Again, videos are being portrayed in modern culture as a common bond; the ‘tapes that bind’.
[26] Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
[27] Gondry is famous for his attraction to outmoded and discarded materials (and his very hands-on approach filmmaking) which is perhaps the defining stylistic tendency of him as an auteur.
[28] For a history and a full discussion of the implications of VHS on film culture, see Eugene Marlow and Eugene Secunda, Shifting Time and Space: The Story of the Videotape, New York: Praeger, 1991.
[29] ‘The great format war of the early 1980s’, Total Rewind, http://www.totalrewind.org/fmt_war.htm(Accessed 07/03/09).
[30] Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984).
[31] Manuel Alvardo, Video World-Wide: An International Study, Paris, France: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 1998, p. ix.
[32] ibid (p. 325).
[33]As Eileen McGarry points out, even the reality that ‘exists and happens in front of the camera’ in a documentary is already altered and coded ‘within the context of the technology of cinema’. Eileen McGarry, “Documentary Realism and Women’s Cinema,” Women and Film 2:7 (1975), p. 50.
Created on: Wednesday, 22 April 2009