1. DVDDVD culture

2. learning outcomes Outline the history of film consumption within the domestic sphere. Discuss the issues and debates surrounding the presentation of film on DVD. Analyse contemporary DVD culture through identifying elements of contemporary DVDs and describing DVD-viewing practices in relation to the broader concepts of media convergence and fandom.

3. introintro Media convergence Film being experienced in a plenitude of ways Remediation? New media forms? Example: Film on DVD “as the twentieth century drew to a close, we were increasingly likely to encounter cinema through other media – on television, home video, DVD or the internet” (Cartwright: 2002:417). Remediation - “old media is recycled, reformatted and delivered through a different channel” (Atkinson: 2007: 23). “What is new about new media comes from the ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenge of new media” (Bolter and Grusin, 1999:15). ‘”…the ways of presenting the DVD are changing the ways movies are viewed at home, increasing viewer options and, ultimately, viewer knowledge of the movies’” (Barlow: 2005:108) As part of the contemporary era of media convergence, film, according to Lisa Cartwright, has “disintegrating into – or integrating with – other media” (2002: 417)

4. film in the domestic sphere 18961940s 1950s1970s 2000s In 1896, just two years after Edison’s Kinetoscope was launched, manufactures began to produce projectors for off-theatre locations (Klinger: 2006: 6). According to Tino Balio, the number of television sets in use in the United States increased from 14000 to 172000 between the years 1947 and 1948, and by the end of the 1950s, 90 per cent of households in the United States had a television set (1985: 401). This was considered to be one of the contributing factors in the drop in box office receipts (others included the Paramount decree and people moving to the suburbs). Between 1946 and 1956, box office receipts dropped from $1.692 billion to $1.298 billion (Balio, 1985: 401). The UK depicted a similar trend. During the 1950s the film industry saw a range of technological innovations including 3D, Technicolor, widescreen and so on. The film industry also made moves to make television an ancillary market (see Balio 1990). 1975 – Sony launches betamax 1976 – JVC launches VHS “A film could be recorded and re-watched in one’s living room, but also bought in a shop in video format. What consequently emerge are, on the one hand, new forms of access to filmic experience and, on the other, new surroundings in which this experience might take place” (Casetti: 2009: 62). 1980s 1980s – Studios saw lucrativeness of the market (see Klinger, 2006: 89) The US home video market (VHS and DVD) currently supersedes the US box office. 2010 - home video supersedes box by 2.5 timesBUT The home video market is in decline! Rentals in the US in the first quarter of 2010 dropped by 14% and sell- through numbers by 11% (see Caranicas, 2010, internet).

5. discussion point As one industry insider argued “Saving Private Ryan” suffers on [video]cassette. If you see it at home, you are by no means as impressed with it as you were in the movie theatre. And ‘Shakespeare in Love’ is a more intimate picture, it plays well on cassette. It may actually be enhanced by watching it at home”. In response, Dreamworks’ marketing chief, Terry Press, countered: “That goes to a larger issue. You’re a member of the Motion Pictures Academy, not the television video academy. These movies are meant to be seen in movie theatres, all of them. They are not meant to be stopped and started and paused when the phone rings or to feed the dog”. (see Klinger, 2006:2)

6. DVD Extras ‘Extras’ on a DVD can include directors/cast/crew audio commentaries, deleted/extra scenes, interviews with cast and crew, trailers, the director’s cut, and behind-the-scenes documentaries. Some DVDs (generally ‘special edition’ ones) contain ‘Easter Eggs’. Websites have been made that are basically databases of DVDs that has ‘Easter Eggs’ and instructions as to how they can be located – is this ‘collective intelligence’ at work? These special features and Easter Eggs renegotiate the world of and discourse surrounding the film. As Gray explains, a film is “but one part of the text, the text always being the entity, either in the process of forming and transforming or vulnerable to further information or transformation” (2009: 7). contemporary DVD culture Multimedia Homes With competition from other home entertainment technologies film is currently competing and converging with other media forms. Reflecting the 1950s approach to ‘dealing’ with new ‘competing’ technologies - Emphasis on technology Other medium as ancillary markets Transforming the film viewing experience Film viewing in the domestic sphere (or in fact anywhere outside of the cinema) provides an alternative viewing experience to that of watching films at the cinema. This has brought about ‘the process of transformation of the experience of film [which]… occurs not only because of the pressure of the technological revolution…but also because there is a new cultural scenario with which cinema must engage’ (Casetti: 2009: 63). The functions on DVDs suggest that film has been ‘remediated’ for the domestic sphere. Modern Day Cinephiles “cinephilia in an era of DVDs is associated with ownership in the home space, rather than with spectatorship in the theatrical space” (Hudson and Zimmermann: 2009: 138). This film connoisseur, according to Klinger, is being ‘positioned by the industry as privileged subject’ (Klinger: 2006, 85). The “DVD-enabled film” “requires or repays multiple viewings; that rewards the attentive viewer with special or hidden clues that is constructed as a spiral or loop that benefits from back- stories (bonuses) or paratextual information; that can sustain a-chronological organisation which responds to the conditions of distribution, reception, consumption, cinephilia, connoisseurship, and spectatorship appropriate for the multi-platform film, which can seduce a theatre-going public with its special effects and spectacle values, engage the volatile fan-communities on the internet by becoming a sort of “node” for the exchange of information and the trade in trivia and esoteric in social networking situations, as well as “work” as a DVD and possibly even as a game” (Elsaesser: 2009: 38).

7. references Atkinson, Sarah (2007) ‘The Versatility of Visualization: Delivering Interactive Feature Film Content on DVD’ in Nebula, Volume 3, Number 2, pp 21-39. Cartwright, Lisa, (2002) ‘Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film Studies in the era of convergence’, Visual Culture Reader, Ed, N. Mirzoeff, Great Britain: Routledge, pp417 – 432. Bolter, D.J and Grusin, R (1999) Remediation: understanding new media, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, Klinger, Barbara (2006) Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema New Technologies and the Home, California: University of California Press.

8. references Balio, Tino, (1985) ‘Retrenchment, Reappraisal, and Reorganisation, The American Film Industry, Ed. Tino Balio, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp 401-422. Balio, Tino (1990) ‘Introduction to Part II’, Hollywood in the Age of Television, Ed. Tino Balio, London: Unwin Hyman, pp259-296. Caranicas, Peter ‘Studios hit with homevideo slump’ in Variety, 1st May 2010,, accessed 29/12/10. Casetti, Francesco (2009), ‘Filmic experience’ in Screen, Volume 50, Number 1, 2009: 56 – 66.

9. references Elsaesser, Thomas (2009) ‘The Mind-Game Film’, Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, Ed. Warren Buckland, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009: 13 – 41. Gray, Jonathon, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, New York: New York University Press, 2009. Hudson, Dale and Patricia Zimmerman “(2009) ‘Cinephilia, Technophilia, and Collaborative Remix Zones’ in Screen, Spring, 50:1,pp135-146.