Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use 9789048537105

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Fanvids

Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, with a strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptional edited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term ‘media convergence’ relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while ‘participatory culture’ refers to the changing relationship between media producers and their audiences. Interdisciplinary by its very definition, the series will provide a publishing platform for international scholars doing new and critical research in relevant fields. While the main focus will be on contemporary media culture, the series is also open to research that focuses on the historical forebears of digital convergence culture, including histories of fandom, cross- and transmedia franchises, reception studies and audience ethnographies, and critical approaches to the culture industry and commodity culture. Series Editors Dan Hassler-Forest, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom Editorial Board Mark Bould, University of West of England, United Kingdom Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, United States Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California, United States Julia Knight, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia Roberta Pearson, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom John Storey, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside, United States Eckart Voigts, Braunschweig Institute of Technology, Germany

Fanvids Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use

E. Charlotte Stevens

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Alexandra Mazurina, dribbble.com/sundrystudio Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 586 5 e-isbn 978 90 4853 710 5 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462985865 nur 670 © E. Charlotte Stevens / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

7

Introduction Brief Introduction to Media Fandom and a History of Vids Structure and Aims Fannish Genres and the Vid Conclusion

9 11 14 17 22

1 Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid Scholarly Views of Vids and Vidding Gender, ‘Quality’ Television, and Digital Technology Televisual Flow, Segmentation, and Technologies of Control

27 28 32 35

2 Approach: How to Study a Vid Corpus Selection Canon Formation in a Marginal Practice How to Study a Vid Conclusion

49 52 54 56 60

3 Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter: Music Video and Experimental Tradition Music Video Found Footage, Collage, and the Experimental Tradition Vids in Gallery Spaces: Cut Up and MashUp Distributing, Exhibiting, and Curating Vids Titanium and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman – Same Source, Different Conclusion Conclusion 4 Textures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacular Historiography Collection and Archive Creating a Path Through Star Trek Looking Archival Vids from the Archive The Archival Aesthetic of Vids Conclusion

65 66 69 74 78 86 92 97 101 105 108 112 120 130

5 Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle: Multifandom Vids Multifandom Vids Genre Pleasures Erotic and Bodily Spectacle Pleasures of Transmedia Consumption Fascinating People Conclusion

137 138 143 152 160 166 172

6 Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy Overview of Battlestar Galactica God Is A DJ (2006) Popular Music and Television Cuz I Can (2007) I’m Not Dead (2009) Conclusion

179 183 189 195 203 209 213

Conclusion Vids as Vids and the Afterlife of Television Thinking About Music Future Work Final Thoughts

219 219 224 226 229

References Fanvids Cited Other Audio-Visual Works Cited Songs Cited

233 256 262 268

Index

271

Acknowledgements Thank you to Birmingham City University and to the rich and supportive community at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research for the time and space to turn my thesis into a monograph. At a time when early-career academics work in increasingly precarious circumstances, you’ve given me stability, fellowship, and many chances to grow. Thank you to my BCU colleagues Nick Gebhardt and especially Nick Webber for reading paragraphs and chapter drafts and helping me figure out what I meant to say. Thank you to Dan Hassler-Forest and Matt Hills, editors of this book series, for guidance and support. My thanks as well to Maryse Elliott and everyone at Amsterdam University Press for your patience, and to Alexandra Mazurina for creating a fantastic cover illustration. Thank you to the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, where this project had its start. I am indebted to my PhD supervisor Helen Wheatley and to the friends and colleagues that I found there. Thank you as well to my MA supervisor Jennifer Brayton, then of Ryerson University in Toronto, for lending me your fandom studies books and showing me that this path was possible. Thank you most of all to everyone I’ve met through VividCon and VidUKon for making such compelling vids and for welcoming a non-vidder vidfan like me. I offer you endless kudos. Thank you in particular to M. for starting me off with a copy of your vid collection and to T. for showing me my first vids. A final thank you goes to my parents, Wendy and Jack, for your support and encouragement over the years. Dad, I’m sorry you’re not still here to read this. Mum, this book is for you.

Introduction Abstract How can we take vids seriously as works in their own right? The introduction chapter of Fanvids covers a brief history of media fandom, which I understand as the productive home media audiences who adopt domestic technology as tools for remix and recombination to create interventions into their own media landscape. This chapter contains an overview of the structure and aims of the monograph. This chapter also describes the different genres and categorizations of vids, each of which illuminate a different facet of a vid’s argument or the kinds of transformation enacted in the vid. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, vidding genres

What is a vid? Also known as a fanvid, it has its origins in videotape-related practices of media fandom and was known as a fan music video or songtape. Today, vids are one variety of fan-made short videos made from the segmentation and re-editing of existing audio-visual sources with a popular song as soundtrack. There is a developing consensus among scholars about the definition of a vid. Francesca Coppa characterizes it as ‘a visual essay’ (2008: 1.1) designed ‘to make an argument or tell a story’ (2009: 108) or, as Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson describe it, ‘to analyze a particular character’ (2006: 12). Anne Kustritz calls it ‘a form of remix video collage’ (2014: 225), one that according to Tisha Turk ‘integrat[es] repurposed media images with repurposed music’ (2011: 84). Turk goes on to note that ‘one of the most interesting things about vidding is that it involves both interpreting commercial texts and producing new texts for an audience of fellow fans’ (2015: 164, emphasis in original). A vid is typically (though not exclusively) made of film and television but is not film or television itself, though it intersects with histories of media circulation and spectatorship practices. Accordingly, this book’s chapters are organized around themes of collecting and archiving media, of the visual pleasures of film and television as presented through the

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_intro

10 Fanvids

vid, and of the adaptation and transformation of narrative within the vid. Vids are a textual expression of fannish interpretation, and their production has been enabled by the development of home media technologies from the VCR through to the personal computer. I have written Fanvids: Television, Media, and Home Media Re-Use at a time when an awareness of transmedia storytelling is a constant background to discussions of popular culture. The safe economic bet of a further instalment of a franchise or an adaptation of a story successful in one medium to another (not to mention direct remakes) has provided a swell of ‘sequels, prequels, adaptations, transpositions, or modifications’ (Ryan and Thon 2014: 1) to familiar storyworlds. For the fan communities that follow the novels, films, video games, and television series that engender these storyworlds and who do the work of engaging with characters and scenarios across their different iterations (Scolari, Bertetti, and Feeman 2014), these provide a bounty of potentially complex storyworlds. Indeed, the way media fandom approaches its creative fanworks—with an ethos of repetition, variation, and the pleasure of the iteration—is echoed by these official productions. In this book, I do not analyse narrative strategies in which a unified storyworld is presented across multiple platforms, nor do I examine technologies employed to invite sustained audience engagement (see Evans 2011; Stein 2015; Kohnen 2018). Instead, I take vids as paratexts (Gray 2010) that are part of an ‘interdependent, dynamic transmedia system’ (Stein 2015: 6), where the vid is a fan-led extension of the source material. I follow a ‘looser definition of transmedia’ that allows for ‘audiences as well as official authors [to] co-construct transmedia narratives, storyworlds, and frames for engagement’ (Stein and Busse 2012: 14). The critical and creative work done by fans through their fanworks is part of the cross-platform narration that extends storyworlds past the bounds of official production. As with contemporary English-language Western popular culture more broadly, the transmedia context is a constant undercurrent through this work. In this book, I aim to take vids seriously as texts in their own right and as texts that can withstand critical and aesthetic analysis. In doing so, I am adopting and extending an argument put forth by Jason Jacobs in relation to using textual analysis for the study of television: ‘that while some programmes are designed as pleasant casual distraction […] many will be able to withstand the kinds of critical pressure that we normally apply to other artworks’ (2001: 431). This volume reconsiders the boundaries of television and of television studies while exploring how to approach texts like vids which are most often made of television but are not on television. One boundary is that of medium specificity: the distinction between film

Introduc tion

11

and television as separate media is eliminated in vids, as both were treated as different forms of video before media convergence in the 2010s made it reasonable to consider (as does Newman 2014) all kinds of moving image to be digital video.

Brief Introduction to Media Fandom and a History of Vids The vid is a product of media fandom. As a subset of media audiences, fan audiences are ‘distinguishable from the general audience in their emotional connection to their specialized interest’ (Brayton 2006: 138) and the way they self-identify as members of a subculture. Fan studies as an interdisciplinary field and the many current acceptable ways of ‘being a fan’ lead to competing and nuanced definitions of how one distinguishes ‘fans’ from ‘audiences’ (Click and Scott 2018: 2). For my purposes here, I focus on media fandom and on works produced within the ‘established and insular’ vidding community (Russo 2016: 448) that grew out of the organization of mostly female audiences of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-1968) and Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969) and whose interest in these series was expressed in part through critical and creative responses. Media fandom continues to have a strong interest in television, though often in connection to other media. Therefore, this study examines vids made out of and in relation to television on the whole; however, as will be demonstrated throughout, the re-use of home media in the vid suggests a minimal difference between the home use of film and television. Fanworks represent a diverse array of engagement with films, television series, and other media. These creative practices include critical and artistic work across all media and occur both online and off. Alongside vid-making (vidding), fans write fan fiction (fanfic, or fic), which is prose fiction of many different lengths and styles (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992; Jamison 2013; Hellekson and Busse 2014). Podfic is an audio performance of fic, sometimes including elaborate audio design (De Kosnik 2016; Kustritz 2017). Fan art can include the visual arts and handicrafts, such as knitting, quilting, jewellery making, stained glass, and woodworking (Hills 2014; Persky 2015; Busse 2015; Phillips and Freund 2016). Outside these specific creative practices, fans may also attend, organize, and/or contribute programming for fan conventions (Amesley 1989; Jenkins 1992; Stevens 2017a; Gilbert 2018), where it is common to see cosplay, that is, attending in costume (Lamerichs 2011; Kirkpatrick 2015; Scott 2015). The most common fanworks are critical commentaries on media texts through mailing lists (as paper zines and online), online

12 Fanvids

message boards, blogging communities, in conversation, and other social media (Cumberland 2000; Verba 2003; Bury 2017). Vids exist between these creative and critical responses. This book is concerned with vids in the tradition of works first shared at media fandom conventions such as Escapade and Media West in the United States in the 1980s. VividCon is a multi-day vid-specific convention that met annually from 2002-2018; its European counterpart, VidUKon, has been running since 2008. Other fan conventions include vids in their programming. The first vids in this tradition were made on videotape and were themselves inspired by a series of slide shows presented at American Star Trek fan conventions in the 1970s. The first of these was Kandy Fong’s What Do You Do With a Drunken Vulcan? (1975).1 This performance showed slides—made from film left over from editing Star Trek episodes—in time to a fan-recorded cassette soundtrack (Coppa 2008: 3.1-3.3). The videotape works that followed were inspired by Fong’s work but lacked her privileged access to offcuts. Instead, domestic VCRs were used to edit off-air recordings with a similar creative and critical purpose.2 In this way, vids tell part of the story of audiences’ re-use of media; this is explored further in the discussion in Chapter 4 of audiences who maintain personal archives of media. Media fans Kendra Hunter and Diane Barbour made Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979) vids on videotape ‘as early as 1980’ (Coppa 2008: 4.1), but identifying the first vid ever made is not possible—and truly, establishing precedence is beside the point. As the form was shared at conventions—luring new potential vidders to try their hand after stumbling across a vidshow in progress (Coppa 2011), for example—vidding turned the living room (or other domestic space) into a site of media production for an overwhelmingly female audience. Videotape compilations of vids were shared with other fans at conventions and were traded through the mail, which required personal contact with other fans. In order to learn about this form, interested fans would attend workshops at conventions or join a videotape collective (Penley 1991; Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Coppa 2011). As early as 1992 (Coppa 2006: 53), online resources enabled a transformation of this body of knowledge, as the internet broadened the accessibility of fandom. Vidding was aided and enabled by related fan practices of tape-sharing and collecting, 1 Vids are short videos that are self-contained and released as individual works. Accordingly, I format vid titles and use an in-text citation style that follows the convention for complete works (italicized) rather than for segments of longer works (in quotation marks). 2 A complementary trajectory towards the vid occurred within Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-2001) fandom, which ‘evolved without direct roots to the traditional vidding community’ (laurashapiro 2007).

Introduc tion

13

and this circulation of media has been accelerated by digital file-sharing and the increased power of personal computers and reach of broadband internet (see De Kosnik 2016 for a discussion of fan spaces online). Today, there are innumerable websites, communities, blogs, and discussion forums that share information about the vidding process. The critical consensus is that women are an unambiguous majority in media fandom despite occasional fandoms attracting different genders and identities, a position that has not changed since the first wave of fan studies work. Constance Penley (1991) and Camille Bacon-Smith (1992) write from the position that media fandom is a female subculture.3 Jenkins describes his experience of fan spaces and practices as ‘largely female, largely white, largely middle-class, though it welcomes into its ranks many who would not fit this description’ (1992: 1). This presumption of whiteness has persisted (Pande 2016; Pande 2018), and the implicit monolingual and monocultural nature of the field may well be ‘a holdover from the earliest days of English-language fan studies’ (Morimoto and Chin 2017: 177). This project does not take great steps to challenge these presumptions, as it is grounded in the analysis of fan re-workings of (mainly) Anglo-American source material, circulated among fans who frequent spaces associated with fan conventions in Britain and the United States, in dialogue with critical literature developed in similar contexts. However, and while recognizing that an individual’s experience of gender is complex, I understand vidding as arising from a space that has historically been composed of ‘primarily female fans’ (Busse 2009: 106), where vids are made ‘overwhelmingly by women’ (Coppa 2009: 107). As a member of the community—though not as a vidder myself—I write from a position of experiencing vidding as a spectator and not a practitioner, in the same way that I might ask a television studies or film studies class to discuss a piece of television or a film with an awareness of production contexts without necessarily having empirical knowledge of those industries. In addition to gender, the pseudonymity of fan creators is an understood part of the presentation of fanworks. Accordingly, I credit vidders using the names under which they release their work. Indeed, the fluctuating permissibility of format-shifting and legal re-uses of media for artistic and/ or critical purposes is a further reason to maintain the pseudonymous vid credit. Sharon Marie Ross (2008) reports that her respondents were 3 I acknowledge that conflating biological sex and performative gender in a binary is reductive and not uniformly accurate. However, for brevity’s sake, I use ‘woman’ and ‘female’ interchangeably and include trans* identities as an opposition to the cisgendered male positionality.

14 Fanvids

appreciative of online anonymity. This freedom to explore one’s private interests without fear of discovery is signif icant, as outing oneself as a fan is still potentially a source of shame (Larsen and Zubernis 2012), and ‘work and personal relationships’ can be ‘negatively affected by an outing’ (Busse and Hellekson 2012: 39; see also Lothian 2012). While the vidders whose work I cite do often use ambiguously gendered pseudonyms, the evidence provided by the above accounts of gender in media fandom leads to the creditable assumption that vids are, on the whole, made by (and for) women.

Structure and Aims This study seeks to analyse how meaning is constructed in vids: as dialogues between the clips as edited and the use of the chosen song, and between the expectations for narrative and/or character development as constructed by the source material and the argument put forth by the vid itself. Vids remake narratives for a deeply attentive fan audience that is watching with an extensive knowledge of the source text or with sufficient familiarity of the vid form’s codes and conventions. My examples are mainly vids of live-action narrative fiction because this reflects the majority of vids in media fandom as I understand it and covers technological changes in television from VCRs and the rise of the home video to digital viewership. This definition leaves out AMVs (anime music videos; see Roberts 2012), machinima (Lowood and Nitsche 2011), and other recent digital remix video forms (e.g. supercuts, faux trailers), which are related practices but are not part of this particular tradition. Indeed, by gathering together a selection of vids for this book, I am effectively arguing that the rich history of fans’ media re-use means that vidding can stand on its own. The organizing question for this study asks what a vid is and, by extension, what vids are to television and film. The vid form’s dense textuality, its use of evolving media technologies, and its correspondence with non-institutional archives suggest congruence with the extra-textual life of television: if television is re-edited outside of television’s flow or combined with excerpts from film, does it stop being television? How does television exist outside of television? Ultimately, vids are not television; however, their form, content, and context are derived from television and therefore deserve to be part of a more comprehensive contemporary history of home viewing and recording. Exploring the boundaries of television does not automatically indicate an interdisciplinary project, as the hybridity and expansion of television studies

Introduc tion

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(cf. Brunsdon 1998) follow the movement of television audiences’ use of the medium and its products. This book is structured into six chapters: the first two discuss the context and approach for this research, and this is followed by four chapters with case studies that each take a complementary view of vids and vidding. The first chapter, ‘Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid’, explores what a television scholar can learn from the story of vids and vidding. This chapter considers the vid form and vidding practice in relation to the academic histories of television and television audiences. It covers the history of productive (female) home media audiences who have adopted domestic technology as tools for remixing and recombining to create radical interventions into their own media landscape. Indeed, vidding is possible technologically because televisual flow can be interrupted, excerpted, and returned to. The second chapter, ‘Approach: How to Study a Vid’, discusses my approach to textual analysis and what can be learned from studying vids as texts unto themselves. This chapter also explores canon formation in television/media studies and how this can apply to studying a marginal form. The third chapter, ‘Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter: Music Video and Experimental Tradition’, works through specific academic framings of similar forms such as found footage films in the experimental tradition and music video; it also discusses how vids have been incorporated into recent gallery exhibitions. The remaining three case study chapters each focus on a different aspect of how the vid form relates to television, exploring how attention to vids—as a method of sharing paths through media texts—can nuance an understanding of the possible ways to relate to television and other media. The first of these, Chapter 4, ‘Textures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacular Historiography’, asks what the analysis of vids can reveal about histories, memories, and practices of watching television. This chapter compares contrasting theoretical understandings of collections and archives to contextualize the archival work done by vidders. Videotape vids bear traces of their archival origins, as the selective use of clips and the wear evident on the copies strongly indicate a viewer’s favourite moments, telling a historical story about practices of re-viewing, interpretation, and memorialization of texts. Given the gendered reality of vid production, these women’s histories of viewing and practices of spectatorship are immanent in the vid text as textural/aesthetic qualities. In this chapter, I argue that the home media collection has created conditions for media fans’ creative expression and critical analysis. These archival traces are visible on the vids themselves, which chronicle, for example, the unofficial distribution

16 Fanvids

networks of videotape and the practice of returning to favourite scenes that cause wear on the tape itself. These personal historiographies are presented in the content and texture of a vid. I focus on vids from the 1980s and 1990s that were made on videotape and conclude with a discussion of the archival look of certain Star Trek vids in relation to bootleg textures: the aesthetic traces of analogue and digital video. Chapter 5, ‘Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle: Multifandom Vids’, asks how we can account for vids that combine multiple source texts into one work. This chapter focuses specif ically on multifandom vids, a genre of vidding that draws together video clips from several sources and that demonstrate ways of watching broadly across media texts. It expands on the premise of the previous chapter to discuss the vid form as detailing a mode of spectatorship that works across a genre (e.g. science fiction) or other set of related texts (e.g. Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in a transmedia romance across f ilms, animated and live-action television series, and comic book pages). In this, vids are the record of more than the interpretation of a single text: they construct ‘paths’ through genres, transmedia narratives, or even actors’ careers and therefore raise issues of stardom and performance. Alongside critical work on found footage films, this chapter analyses the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship with audience fascinations of erotics, of spectacle, and of the pleasures offered by various genres. Finally, the sixth chapter, ‘Adapting Kara Thrace: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy’, asks what it means for a series or film to be adapted to a vid. Vids draw out and remake texts and can potentially address faults in the source text, correct them through pointed exclusions, and even supersede the source text in its fulfilment of promises of progressive representation. This final case study chapter is an analysis of three Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009) vids, designed to examine both the vid’s relationship with adaptation and genre and the central role that songs play in making meaning in vids. While vids rely heavily on their soundtrack to structure meaning within the work, they are not abstract illustrations of songs. Instead, the clichés and idioms of the chosen song’s instrumentation are vital in completing the vid’s reinterpretation of its source text. In this case, the music, voice, and star image of the recording artist Pink are instrumental in appraising the character development of Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace in this vid trilogy. These three vids were made at different points while the series was still in production, and each work reflects the development of the character and memorializes the potential for, and perhaps desire for, a particular kind of feminist representation.

Introduc tion

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Fannish Genres and the Vid Throughout this book, I use the terminology of fandom instead of adopting categorization associated with found footage film, remix video, or other proximate forms. Just as film and television broadly conform to genres, each with their own tendencies and characteristics, so too can vids be grouped into recognizable genres. In any discussion of films or television programmes, it is generally accepted that the critic or scholar will have a wide viewing experience and general knowledge of similar texts in order to inform analysis. However, as I am aware that the vid form still is marginal and can often be mistaken for similar forms, I offer the following explanations developed during the course of my research and long personal involvement with fandom. Vids can be difficult to interpret for those who may know the source material but not fandom norms, but the captioning effect and structuring created by vids’ soundtracks make vids generally accessible to non-fannish viewers. It is common in vids to address character psychology, proposing a voice for characters’ inner thoughts and feelings. As Jonathan Gray argues, this probing of ‘a character’s psyche leads to many of the form’s better offerings’ (2010: 157). Indeed, fanworks have long been a place to expand upon characterization in a context where the episodic structure of television runs counter to character development. As with fanfiction, vids may be classed as gen, het, and slash, indicating whether the work includes romantic pairings. Gen typically refers to a general work, one that does not focus on sexual relationships. Het involves a heterosexual pairing of characters in a relationship either present in the original material or created in the work. Slash works create a narrative space that elaborates a ‘perceived homoerotic subtext’ (Busse and Hellekson 2006: 10) in the primary work. The term refers to the typographical mark separating the characters being ‘slashed’ (i.e. ‘Kirk/Spock’ is the pairing of Kirk and Spock), which indicates that a fanwork will ‘concern a same-sex relationship between the two men’ (Penley 1991: 137). In pre-internet zine fandom, ‘K&S’ would indicate that the work contains the two characters but is gen, not slash. 4 Scholarly attention to media fandom has sought to explain the appeal of slash, with explanations ranging from an idealization 4 The intermediary stage of this terminology can be seen in 1980s fanzines; for example, contributions to S&H Letterzine #36 (October 1982), refer to ‘“/” f iction’. In digital fandom, a forward slash (/) is an essential part of a URL, and as such can disrupt hashtags on sites such as Tumblr and Instagram. This has led to single-word portmanteau ‘ship names’ derived from the characters’ names: ‘drarry’ replaces ‘Draco/Harry’ or ‘Harry/Draco’ or ‘H/D’.

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of romance without gender hierarchies (Penley 1991; Busse and Hellekson 2006) to ‘a way of doubling the number of objects of erotic consideration’ on offer (Kaveney 2010: 245). As Julie Levin Russo (2018) points out, slash on its own tends to indicate a male/male relationship, with the all-female variant requiring a separate term: femslash, or femmeslash. Slash fandom is arguably where vidding began. There are countless slash vids, and I will use talitha78’s vid Fever (2010) as an illustrative example. It pairs an Adam Lambert song about explicit sexual attraction with the many clips from Guy Ritchie’s 2009 Sherlock Holmes film in which Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) share the frame, exchanging a variety of fond and exasperated glances. The song amplifies (or constructs, depending on one’s perspective) a desiring subtext underlying each glance, with the repeated lyric ‘Would you be mine?’ giving voice to an unspoken mutual attraction. These do not necessarily need to be limited to a duo: Parachute (thingswithwings, 2014) is a Leverage (TNT, 2008-2012) vid articulating the bond between three central characters, and in addition to appropriately romantic lyrics, the song’s polyphony in the final repetitions of the chorus underscores its argument about the multiple directions of affection in this triad. Such ship vids (once styled ’ship, short for ‘relationship’) can act as explicit declarations of romantic desire or friendship beyond the relationships that are demonstrated in the text. Some vids can be friendshippy and imply a close but not necessarily sexual bond between characters. Kryptonite (Seah and Margie, 2002), for example, is an Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002) vid about the show’s two main characters highlighting their friendship, mutual respect, and willingness to sacrifice themselves for their partner. It uses the song ‘Kryptonite’ by 3 Doors Down as its soundtrack. The close bond between the characters could be read as platonic or romantic, though not explicitly desiring or erotic as with Fever. Vid genres are also defined by the nature of the transformation enacted within the work rather than by their ship. These include (but are not limited to) character study, constructed reality, multifandom, meta, and recruiter vids. These genres have fluid boundaries, can be hybridized, and may be known by different names in different fandom communities. I use terminology drawn from my experiences attending and participating in vidding conventions in the US and the UK,5 with reference to convention programme books and to the fan-written wiki site fanlore.org. While this is not an exhaustive list of vid genres, it indicates the form’s possible variations and uses. 5

Including contributing programming to VidUKon (see Stevens 2017a).

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Character study vids are focused on examining a single character’s motivation and development with a minimal degree of transformation of the source narrative. In Thousand Eyes (thuvia ptarth, 2018), the 54 episodes of Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜, Shandong Film & TV Production/Daylight Entertainment, 2015) are condensed to explore the emotional journey of the protagonist Lin Shu (Hu Ge, 胡歌), also known as Mei Changsu, as he enacts a complex political scheme. The plot of Nirvana in Fire is not transformed, and essential character elements are drawn out for a viewer familiar with the series as a whole. Character study vids are particularly effective in promoting secondary characters to a leading role within the bounds of the vid. For example, The Adventure (greensilver, 2012) uses clips of the Harry Potter film series (2001-2011) that feature supporting character Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis). Narrative economy limits the amount of diegetic introspection a supporting character can have, but character study vids are a way to devote a concentration of screen time to the feelings, experiences, and motivations of characters beyond the main few. For the duration of the vid, Neville is the hero: as his small acts of courage through the film series are collected and displayed, the vidder argues that Neville has been just as vital as Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) himself in defeating Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). What is more, the extended production cycle of the Harry Potter series—eight films released over a ten-year span—means the vid captures Lewis-asNeville growing up on screen. When used to treat secondary characters, character study vids have a pleasurable tinge of righteous justification, as underdogs are given a heroic space or villains are granted the illicit allure of an anti-hero. Constructed reality vids use clips to construct a new narrative, sometimes including clips beyond the single source to build a cohesive story. As with all vids, constructed reality vids rely on editing and song choice to create these alternate storylines. For example, Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money) (Killa and Carol S., c. 2001), cuts together clips from Highlander: The Series (Gaumont Télévision, 1992-1998) with the Pet Shop Boys song ‘Opportunities’ to make it appear as if the subjects have decided on a ‘life of crime’ (as described in the vid’s opening credits). The original source contains all the elements which could then be recombined into a new narrative with radically different meanings. While a slash vid may appear to be constructing a reality for its subjects, slash vids amplify subtext, using clips as evidence of desire or affection and not to construct a new narrative. The fandom being vidded does not necessarily need to have a visual source. Fans of comedy/horror podcast series Welcome to Night Vale (Commonplace Books, 2012-present) have used the principles of constructed reality

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to create vids of this audio-only source. One particularly well-executed and effective example is Bloody Shirt (unfinishedidea, 2014), which gathers clips from eighteen film and television sources to construct a visual reality for the podcast. Bloody Shirt does not create visuals to illustrate any particular episode or narrative arc but instead creates an abstract and atmospheric space that draws on the same narrative conventions and tropes that are used in Night Vale itself. While the vid does use multiple sources, it is not a multifandom vid because the clips are adopted as representations of Night Vale, its residents, and the history of its community radio station rather than being used as individual examples in a vid that compares and contrasts multiple fandoms. Vidders have also composed vids based on novels by Octavia Butler, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Ben Aaronovich by way of the same kind of creative analogy. Multifandom vids, discussed at length in Chapter 5, use multiple television series and/or films as their source material—that is, they draw from multiple fandoms—to mount a comparison or demonstrate contrasts between the various sources, enacting a kind of audio-visual genre study. For example, Around the Bend (Danegen, 2010) collects clips and still images of women operating cars, motorcycles, and aircraft to celebrate the representation of a female presence in activities traditionally dominated by men. These include not only selections from cult film and television sources but also historical/ archival footage, examples of world cinema, and commercial music videos. As is typical for multifandom vids, there is no particular narrative. Instead, it uses The Asteroids Galaxy Tour’s jubilant song ‘Around the Bend’ to construct a diegetic space dominated by happy and confident women in charge of these powerful machines. The organizing logic of the vid groups each mode of transportation, which allows the viewer to evaluate and appreciate the repetition and variation across the many examples included in the vid. Meta vids make a comment about an issue or situation beyond the narrative in the vid itself. These may often be multifandom vids, as they use clips from multiple sources to compare and contrast issues of representation. For example, Laura Shapiro’s unsettling Stay Awake (2010) matches congruent storylines from series such as Farscape (Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 19992003), Battlestar Galactica, and The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002) to highlight the problematic representation of the pregnant female body in science fiction television. Other meta vids take vidding itself as their subject, including clips from other vids to comment on the form’s potential and successes, such as Us (lim, 2007) and Destiny Calling (counteragent, 2008). Finally, the recruiter vid is intended to convince a viewer to watch the vid’s source text. These can adhere to any of the main genres (gen, het,

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or slash) and will highlight aesthetic or thematic elements that make the series appear compelling. For example, Jayne L.’s Fireworks (2010) was made to solicit new viewers for the television series Power Play (CTV, 1998-2000), a lesser-known Canadian series about a fictional hockey team. Vids do not have to be made as recruiter vids to be used as such, though there is a distinction drawn in fandom between a vid made explicitly to grow a fandom and vids addressing an existing audience. As a personal aside, my first experience of watching vids (after years of following discussions about vids on the alt.tv.x-files.creative newsgroup without seeing any myself) was part of a friend’s efforts to introduce me to Farscape: we did not watch a full episode but rather started with Farscape vids. These served as trailers or teasers for the show but also shared their creators’ arguments about what made the series compelling. (For the record, this approach was successful, and I was duly recruited.) As Jonathan Gray argues, successful vids ‘have something interesting, substantive, and/or revelatory to say about the show’ or other source material (2010: 159). Vid genres are significant in part because they offer different frameworks against which to re-present their sources. These genres are all linked through the role of music in vids, particularly in constructing subjectivity in character study or relationship vids, but song choice is relevant to all vid genres. In Textual Poachers, Jenkins argued that, when watching vids, ‘viewers are often totally disinterested in the identity of the original singer(s) but are prepared to see the musical performance as an expression of the thoughts, feelings, desires, and fantasies of the fictional character(s)’ (1992: 235). To argue that ‘nondiagetic [sic] performers play little or no role within fan videos’ (Jenkins 1992: 235) is to suggest that a song’s lyrics take precedence over its other aural connotations. While the individual performer may be irrelevant to the vid’s immediate construction, the song’s instrumentation and the performer’s voice are fundamental to how vids are understood. Nondiegetic performers may have little or no role, but their performances are vital. In a vid, musical performance is used to express a character’s interiority, and the accompaniment to those lyrics is just as influential and theoretically complex as screen music more generally. The study of the vid form requires recognizing the importance of musical genre, instrumentation, and performance in providing context for re-used clips beyond lyrical signification. Just as one’s tone of voice can greatly alter meaning when speaking, the genre of song and performance do much of the ‘heavy lifting’ in conveying and directing meaning in a vid. While other vid genres rely on images to tell their story or present their analyses, multifandom vids are more abstract and rely on the signification of the image as an image.

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Whereas slash vids work well with love songs (as one would expect) and character study vids tend to need lyrics that describe a person and/or their motivations, multifandom vids can be very effective with dance music, featuring short verses and long repeating choruses or nonsensical lyrics. These provide a structure for the vid but put the burden of meaning-making on the clips themselves and the performances in the song. Indeed, as it is possible to make successful vids using instrumental songs, lyrics are not always necessary.

Conclusion This book engages with the vid as a form intimately related to television, as a product of a kind of spectatorship, and as a way of interacting with media that took full advantage of developments in home video technology. Throughout, I draw on related literature within fan studies, television and film studies, and screen studies more broadly to undertake a sustained exploration of the ways in which vids carry with them traces of production and interpretation. The vid, as a complex technological cultural artifact, is worthy of as much critical academic attention as other forms of fan activity such as fan fiction, and yet vids have only relatively recently been the subject of scholarship. The vid is a form of cultural production that represents a unique relationship to technology and media: it is a product of a decades-long, organized, parallel industry in which material and immaterial production is linked to practitioners’ knowledge as both technically skilled digital and active and critical audience members. The vid form strongly suggests an audience that is competent in the deep reading and careful viewing of mainstream and cult television and film and that keeps archives of media with which they engage both critically and creatively. Vids are made by women in media fandom and are their responses to tendencies in mainstream media and cult texts that marginalize women’s stories and experiences, reframing narratives that exclude them. This book also highlights the importance of stardom and performance to television audiences, and the pleasures and attractions of television and film that are made visible and concentrated in vids argues for an audience whose spectatorship is based on more than a concern about narratives unfolding. Fundamentally, this study argues that the vid form demonstrates that television’s active audiences are active media audiences, watching broadly across various screen media. This takes into account the importance of

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the songs used in vids because instrumentation, vocal performance, and lyrics all caption a vid’s moving images. The interplay between sound and image in vids is where meaning is derived; the vid form is therefore about more than simply viewing.

List of Works Cited Amesley, Cassandra, ‘How to watch Star Trek,’ Cultural Studies, 3.3 (1989), 323-339 Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) Brayton, Jennifer, ‘Fic Frodo Slash Frodo: Fandoms and The Lord of the Rings’, in From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, ed. by Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance (New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 137-154 Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘What is the Television of Television Studies?’, in The Television Studies Book ed. by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 95-113 Bury, Rhiannon, Television 2.0: Viewer and Fan Engagement with Digital TV (New York: Peter Lang, 2017) Busse, Kristina, ‘Introduction’, in Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production (In Focus), Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 104-107 — ‘Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love’, Cinema Journal, 54.3 (2015), 110-115 Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson, ‘Introduction: Work in Progress’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 5-33 — ‘Identity, Ethics, and Fan Privacy’, in Fan Culture: Theory/Practice, ed. by Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), pp. 38-56 Click, Melissa A., and Suzanne Scott, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-5 Coppa, Francesca, ‘A Brief History of Media Fandom’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 44-60 — ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 1 (2008), no page. — ‘A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 107-113

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— ‘Interview with Sandy and Rache (‘The Clucking Belles’), in ‘Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, ed by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 6 (2011), no page. Cumberland, Sharon, ‘Private Uses of Cyberspace: Women, Desire, and Fan Culture’, MIT Communications Forum (2000). [accessed 3 October 2013] De Kosnik, Abigail, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016) Gilbert, Anne, ‘Conspicuous Convention: Industry Interpellation and Fan Consumption at San Diego Comic-Con’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 319-328 Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010) Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse, eds. The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014) Hills, Matt, ‘From Dalek half balls to Daft Punk helmets: Mimetic fandom and the crafting of replicas’, in ‘Materiality and Object-Oriented Fandom’, ed. by Bob Rehak, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 16 (2014), no page. Jacobs, Jason, ‘Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.4 (2001), 427-447 Jamison, Anne, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas, TX: Smart Pop/BenBella Books, Inc., 2013) Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) Kaveney, Roz, ‘Gen, Slash, OT3s, and Crossover – The Varieties of Fan Fiction’, in The Cult TV Book, ed. by Stacey Abbott (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 243-247 Kirkpatrick, Ellen, ‘Toward New Horizons: Cosplay (Re)imagined through the Superhero Genre, Authenticity, and Transformation,’ in ‘Performance and Performativity in Fandom,’ ed. by Lucy Bennett and Paul J. Booth, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 18 (2015), no page. Kohnen, Melanie E.S., ‘Fannish Affect, “Quality” Fandom, and Transmedia Storytelling Campaigns’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 337-346

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Kustritz, Anne, ‘Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids’, TV/Series, 6 (2014), 225-261 — ‘Gay on the Page, Lesbian in the Ear: Podfic and the Queer Eros of Voice’, paper delivered at ‘The NECS 2017 Conference’ (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 29 June-1 July 2017) Lamerichs, Nicolle, ‘Stranger than Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay,’ Transformative Works and Cultures, 7 (2011), no page. Larsen, Katherine, and Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) Lothian, Alexis, ‘Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16.6 (2012), 541-556 Lowood, Henry and Michael Nitsche, eds. The Machinima Reader (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011) Morimoto, Lori Hitchcock, and Bertha Chin, ‘Reimagining the Imagined Community: Online Media Fandoms in the Age of Global Convergence’, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 2nd edn (New York: New York University Press, 2017), pp. 174-188 Newman, Michael Z., Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) Pande, Rukmimi, ‘Squee from the Margins: Racial/Cultural/Ethnic Identity in Global Media Fandom’, in Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture, ed. by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 209-220 — Squee From the Margins: Fandom and Race (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018) Penley, Constance, ‘Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology’, in Technoculture, ed. by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 135-161 Persky, Anna Stolley, ‘Spinning the Fans’, APA Journal 101 (2015), 17-18. Phillips, Jennifer, and Katharina Freund, ‘Engaging with “Herself”: Fandom and Authorship in the Age of Tumblr’, in Adoring Outlander: Essays on Fandom, Genre and the Female Audience, ed. by Valerie Estelle Frankel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2016), pp. 23-43 Roberts, Ian, ‘Genesis of the digital anime music video scene, 1990-2001’, in ‘Fan/ Remix Video’, ed. by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue,

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Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. Ross, Sharon Marie, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Russo, Julie Levin, ‘Many Copies: Cylon Television and Hybrid Video’, in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 150-60 — ‘The Queer Politics of Femslash’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 155-164 Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, ‘Storyworlds across Media: Introduction’, in Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, ed. by Marie-Laure Ryan, and Jan-Noël Thon (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), pp. 1-21 Scolari, Carlos, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Scott, Suzanne, ‘“Cosplay Is Serious Business”: Gendering Material Fan Labor on Heroes of Cosplay’, Cinema Journal, 54.4 (2015), 146-154 Stein, Louisa Ellen, Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015) Stein, Louisa Ellen, and Kristina Busse, ‘Introduction: The Literary, Televisual and Digital Adventures of the Beloved Detective’, in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, ed. by Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012) Stevens, E. Charlotte, ‘Curating a Fan History of Vampires: “What We Vid in the Shadows” at VidUKon 2016’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 10.3 (2017a), 263-275 Turk, Tisha, ‘Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction’, in Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. by Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2011), pp. 83-103 — ‘Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 9.2 (2015), 163-76 Verba, Joan Marie, Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987, 2nd edn (Minnetonka, Minnesota: FTL Publications, 2003) VidUKon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] VividCon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015]

1

Critical Contexts: Television Studies, Fandom Studies, and the Vid Abstract What can television scholars and historians learn from vids and vidding? This chapter considers the vid form and vidding practice in existing scholarship. The bulk of academic engagement with vids and vidding is in the loosely defined field of fan studies rather than in television studies. However, vids are possible because of the changing form and shape of television, from home videocassette recording through to digital video. Audience control over watching television, theorized as ways of controlling that flow, also provides the technological tools for making vids. The vid form is textual proof of fans using the tools at their disposal to intervene, respond, and create in a context wherein they have no official role. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, vidding, television studies, quality television

Vids are made about—and made out of—a vast range of source material. One of the exciting parts of studying vids is seeing how vidders iterate the form: for example, beyond television, vids are also used to comment on the pleasures and frustrations of films and video games in order to draw the web of paratexts and intertexts that inform contemporary (transmedia) fan experience. However, vidding’s origins in television fandoms of the 1980s, continually enabled by the affordances of domestic media technologies (e.g. home video, both videotape and digitally), means that the vid form deserves to be explored through television. Indeed, in the first years of the American vidding convention VividCon, up to ninety percent of vids shown each year were made from television sources. Though this proportion dropped off to around half in the convention’s later years, vids remain a supremely televisual form. Television studies offers a complex and hybrid set of ways to think about television technology, texts, and audiences and therefore

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch01

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those of the vid. Therefore, this chapter focuses on vidding’s relationship with television through fandom studies’ approaches to television audiences, and through television studies. The subsequent case study chapters adopt a range of frames, in line with my overall purpose to explore the vid form through a range of theoretical approaches. In this chapter, I discuss the relatively understated place of the vid form in current television scholarship and fan studies literature. I continue with the critical writing on the control of, access to, and uses of television to contextualize the perception of television form and content in order to then explore the form and content of vids. A discussion of television’s inherent segmentation is followed by an examination of the gendering of television access and the recent masculinized valorization of so-called ‘quality’ narrative fiction formats. I conclude with an overview of the devices and practices that allowed television audiences to intercept, store, and manipulate these segments and thereby make vids.

Scholarly Views of Vids and Vidding To date, the bulk of academic engagement with vids and vidding is in the loosely defined field of fan studies, not in television studies. In television studies literature, the appearance of fans has been oblique—for example, through hints of an ‘engaged viewer’ who then joins an ‘interpretive community’ and may produce ‘semi-professional videos’ (Meehan 2007: 167). However, the recent ‘mainstreaming of both fan culture and fan studies’ (Click and Scott 2018: 1) means that the language of fan practices and fan studies have become seemingly more acceptable in other fields’ scholarship, and thus such euphemisms are no longer required. I use ‘vids’ and ‘vidding’ throughout this book to emphasize the continuity of the current works and practices, which are grounded in earlier videotape-based fanworks (Coppa 2006, 2008). While vidding has undergone a technological shift from videotape to digital video, early descriptions of the form, purpose, and reception of these fan-made music videos are recognizable as antecedents of the more recent works. Early academic accounts of fanworks refer to vids as ‘songtapes’ and ‘song videos’ (Penley 1991; Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992), which follows their naming in the fanzines from the 1980s that I have read in the course of my research. However, the March 1993 issue of the vidding-focused zine Rainbow Noise refers to ‘song videos’ and ‘vids’ interchangeably. While it may be anachronistic to use a blanket term to effectively rename material from the first decade of

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vidding, by today vids have been called ‘vids’ longer than they have been called anything else. In the canonical foundational writing on Western media fandom (Penley 1991; Bacon-Smith 1992; Fiske 1992; Jenkins 1992), vidding is generally understood to be symptomatic of fandom’s particular approaches to television, ‘depending for its significance upon the careful welding of words and images to comment on the series narrative’ (Jenkins 1992: 225). Of course, clips could be chosen for erotic or iconic signification as well as narrative references; see, for example, The Boy Can’t Help It (Kendra Hunter and Diane Barbour, c. 1980-1985), a Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979) vid that starts with a clip of Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) topless and finishes with no fewer than 10 repetitions of a clip showing Glaser wiggling his hips with his back to the camera in a shot that emphasizes his denim-clad behind.6 Suggesting that a piece like this is a careful comment on narrative elides the pleasurable, silly, and erotic potential of vidding that has been part of the form since its earliest days. Vids are a textual expression of spectatorship that is potentially concerned as much with a fascination with bodies—though these may be considered more accidentally than intentionally erotic (Wheatley 2016; Collie 2017)—and genre tropes as with narrative. For Jenkins, vidding is central for theorizing the aesthetic basis of ‘poached’ culture, where ‘borrowing and recombination’ are just as important as ‘original creation and artistic innovation’ (1992: 224). I take issue with the implication that in vids (and in fanworks more generally), something has been ‘poached’ and has therefore been removed: vidding is about duplication, multiplication, and proliferation (of clips and of meanings) and does not take the original source out of circulation. Pre-empting Jenkins, Constance Penley notes that vidshows she attended were ‘often the high point of a slash convention, going on for an immensely raucous and pleasurable three or four hours’ (1991: 145). Writing in the same period, Camille Bacon-Smith is emphatic that vidding is fandom’s ‘own art form’ (1992: 175). Across this early work on vidding there is a consensus, largely drawn from the fan communities being observed and interviewed, of the variations possible across the vid form and the ways in which vids functioned within ongoing fan discourses and practices. But after this point, there appears to be a gap in attention paid to vids in scholarship. Scholarship on fans and fandom after 1992 largely focused on fandom’s written outputs—fanfic and commentary—as Eve Ng (2008) points out 6 The Bonnie Raitt song used as the vid’s soundtrack is quite clear about the appeal of the titular ‘boy’, e.g. ‘he’s got himself a figure that’s just made to squeeze’.

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in her essay on femslash vids about characters in All My Children (ABC, 1970-2011). Vids are mentioned in a list of other fanworks, with minimal (if any) context or description (see Busse and Hellekson 2006; Derecho 2006; Karpovich 2006; Richards 2010; Robinson 2010; Kaveney 2010; De Kosnik 2013, 2016; Booth 2017). Academic attention on vids has increased since 2008, sparked in part by misinterpretations of vids that were circulated beyond media fandom without context (Coppa 2008; Russo 2009). Francesca Coppa, a key figure in this second wave of writing on vids, offers that a vid is ‘a visual essay’ (2008: 1.1) designed ‘to make an argument or tell a story’ (2009: 108). Along with Jonathan Gray (2010) and others, I accept this critical/creative purpose in vidding as a basic tenet. The analytical and critical work of the vid is demonstrated through the meanings made in juxtaposing re-used moving images with the song soundtrack. However, while these ‘essays’ can appear without context, for example on visible streaming platforms such as YouTube, they are part of a subculture, and a critical understanding of them can be enhanced by knowing where and how they are made and for what audience. The visibility of vids beyond their specific subcultural contexts makes them a familiar part of a contemporary digital experience of television beyond the mere consumption of programmes themselves. The (relative) mainstreaming of vids means the form appears in texts focusing on specific vids’ source material. For example, Paul McEwan counts fic and vids as forms of adaptation (2011: 41-45) in a discussion of the Canadian cult film Hard Core Logo (Bruce McDonald, 1996).7 Chris Louttit (2013) discusses vids and other fan-made video work when accounting for period novel adaptations. Elsewhere, Stephen O’Neill accounts for vids of Shakespeare adaptations on YouTube as digital paratexts (2014: 50-54). Beyond adaptation, Louisa Ellen Stein (2015), who has written extensively about fan practices as well as television, integrates a discussion of vids into larger arguments about contemporary fans’ engagement with television texts, normalizing fannish and scholarly engagement with the form. Current scholarship on vids tends to single out exemplary works to analyse their meanings within a particular fandom or fan context; for example, in terms of fetishistic scopophilia (Coppa 2009), theology (Stein 2010), conflict (Freund 2010), critical perversity (S.F. Winters 2012), or shame (Larsen and Zubernis 2012). Scholarship on vids also includes analyses of vids that compensate for a lack of representation in mainstream media (Ng 2008; 7 The film Hard Core Logo is itself an adaptation of Michael Turner’s poetry collection (1993) of the same name.

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Villarejo 2014; Nadkarni 2017), interviews with vidders (Coppa 2011, 2014; Counteragent 2012; Booth and Bennett 2016), and reflections on curating a vidshow (Stevens 2017a). Working more broadly, Tisha Turk and Joshua Johnson (2012) have called for an increase of scholarly attention on the ‘ecology’ of fan production to discover how the specific fannish contexts of a vid become shared knowledge within fandom. Recently, Turk (2015) has explored the form of vidding as a kind of expression in its own right, theorizing vids’ formal properties, including the function of music. For this monograph, I am interested in exploring vids in and around their core contexts as media texts that are indicative of a particular way of understanding and interacting with television and other media. I thus engage with vids as texts in their own right, drawing on a sustained understanding of fanworks as evidence of interventions (resistant or otherwise) with television and other media. Early scholarship on media fandom (Fiske 1987, 1992; Jenkins 1988, 1992; Penley 1991; Bacon-Smith 1992), in the first wave of fan studies (per Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2017; Click and Scott 2018), was concerned with fan practices and defined these practices as resistance to capitalism. Examples of this resistance were found in what John Fiske termed fans’ ‘textual productivity’ (1992: 39). However, this approach assumes that fan ‘productivity’ elevates those fans from the lesser status of mere ‘consumer’ (Hills 2002), and is complicated by fan activity carried out in digital spaces (Hills 2013). In Fiske’s analysis of the different kinds of fan activity (1992: 36-39), fanworks are made to be shared within a community that shares an understanding of the codes, conventions, and tropes at play in that fanwork. However, as Hills (2002) argues, Fiske’s approach reduces all fan activity to ‘productivity’, in which all interactions with media engender some form of production. If the absence of production is gauged in capitalist terms, work that explores the marginalization or decentralization of female-focused fan approaches in industry-sanctioned transmedia spaces (Jenkins et al. 2013: 151; Russo 2016) takes on new resonance. Indeed, ‘participatory culture’ presumes that every individual who has access to production technologies will produce their own content, leading producers of ‘official culture’ (Fiske 1992: 33) to exploit this apparent willingness to engage (Ross 2008; Russo 2009), often in (gendered) transmedia contexts (Scott 2013; Jenkins et al. 2013; Stein 2015; Kohnen 2018). In the case of the vid, producers’ control largely ends once an episode is broadcast or released on DVD, as fans can take over its circulation, interpretation, and reconstruction. Questions of textual productivity—of making—are still relevant in discussions of vidding in the constructing of queer or feminist representations

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and in the practices of media consumption and distribution that vids make visible. It is not just that fans have adopted characters and scenarios from their objects of fandom to create their own works: they have re-made these objects of fandom into new works. Vidders shape and re-make an experience of visual media; indeed, to leave aside the visible labour involved in making a vid—something that Alexis Lothian argues is among ‘the most feminized and least mainstreamed kinds of fan labor’ (2015: 141)—is to discount the practice entirely.8 The latest wave of fan studies is becoming comfortable with recognizing that, contrary to earlier formulations of media fandom as resistance, fan spaces replicate social hierarchies (MacDonald 1998; Sandvoss 2005) and elide racial differences (Pande 2016; Morimoto and Chin 2017; Pande 2018) even as they provide a space for making and remaking in cultural and technological spaces not dominated by cultural elites. Vids are constructed mainly by women in non-professional contexts, and women continue to have a marginal role in the production of culture in industrial capitalism. Therefore, looking at vids reveals the traces of a tradition of individual counter-readings of texts, performed by an engaged audience who are skilled users of home video technology. The demographics of media fandom intersect with the gendering of television and with how television is accessed in a post-broadcast context.

Gender, ‘Quality’ Television, and Digital Technology As suggested by the title of this book, an awareness of gender underpins this work. Drawing on previous scholarship about media fandom, I work under the assumption that vidding is predominantly practiced by women for a predominantly female audience, and I present textual evidence of these fans’ counter-readings of existing texts that can be read through a gendered frame. There is a minority of non-binary individuals, trans folk, and cisgendered men who are active in vidding, and I do not wish to claim this as a uniquely and exclusively female space. That said, it is a critical orthodoxy that media fandom is ‘predominantly’ (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995: 197) or even ‘overwhelmingly’ (Coppa 2009: 107; Mittell 2010: 377) ‘female-dominated’ (Lothian 2009: 131); that is, fanworks are highly likely to have been made by women. The technical competence of women in fandom—and particularly of vidders—provides an exception to a recurring presumption of masculine 8

For work on fan labour, see: De Kosnik (2013); Turk (2014); Busse (2015).

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competence in relation to media technologies as seen in interactions with VCRs (Gray 1992; Dinsmore 1998), computers in general (Seiter 1999), and file-sharing networks and platforms (Newman 2012) that vidding fans can use to distribute their work. This technical competence is apparent when watching vids, from videotape editing to the sophisticated use of digital effects, and in negotiating source material originally produced with many different aspect ratios. Perhaps more significantly, and as discussed in Chapter 5, vids provide textual evidence of a gendered point of view on media texts. The presumption that computer users are male means that downloading episodes can be seen as a ‘sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and masculinized form of television consumption’ where ‘the culture of filesharing is part of a wider development in which TV is shifting its location on the cultural hierarchy from low and disreputable to a more legitimated level’ (Newman 2012: 465). It is ‘sophisticated and cosmopolitan’ because of the time and effort needed to learn about these file-sharing networks as well as the confidence and competence to successfully navigate them. This is contrary to perspectives on television that observe a ‘feminine mode of viewing which is distracted and lacking in concentration’ (Gray 1992: 126) but indeed is closer to Gauntlett and Hill’s later findings that girls and women of all ages were comfortable in using time-shifted and pre-recorded tapes to shape their entertainment needs to their individual schedules (1999). The masculinization of television access through peer-to-peer file sharing has occurred concurrently with the rise of so-called ‘quality’ television, typified by long-form serial narratives spearheaded by HBO’s original drama productions (Newman and Levine 2012). Indeed, television shared over peer-to-peer networks ‘tends to be the most highly valued and aestheticized, scripted prime-time comedies and dramas addressed to younger, more affluent, and masculine audiences’ (Newman 2012: 466). These ‘quality’ programmes are typically lauded for ‘challenging’ experimentations in narrative and form (Caldwell 2005: 91), intensifying a form of drama that ‘rewards discrimination, style consciousness, and viewer loyalty’ (Caldwell 1995: 26). Vids offer textual traces of this loyal, intense viewing. Shawn Shimpach argues that these ‘Stylistically exhibitionist, characterdriven narrative television programs have taken on a new sort of value’ both culturally and critically (2010: 29). Charlotte Brunsdon points out that once film scholars began to pay attention to ‘quality’ television, there has been ‘often a stress on the way in which television has become more cinematic, or at least, less televisual’ (2010: 65), where critical acclaim is levied ‘via metaphors to other media’, with the implication that these comparisons are

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flattering to television (Mittell 2010: 369). This characterization of ‘good’ programmes as not ‘television’—typified by HBO’s slogan ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO’ (Nelson 2007)—is particularly troubling when, as Brunsdon argues elsewhere, the rest of television is implicitly characterized as lesser, bad (e.g. non-quality), and above all feminine: ‘The technologies may develop, but the gendered metaphors through which they are thought persist’ (2008: 128). Previously, ‘quality’ had been used to assess whether a programme had succeeded in relation to ‘technical and craft production values, delivery of schedules in line with stated company policy, and responsiveness to demands of those audiences indicated in the public or commercial remit of the channel’ (Corner 1999: 106). In the post-HBO era, ‘quality’ has been used as a label to elevate and defeminize an entire medium. Despite the gendered implications of ‘quality’, which has regularly presumed a default male television viewer, the textual evidence provided by fanworks suggests that women in media fandom actively engage with these programmes. Battlestar Galactica, which is the focus of the vids discussed in my final chapter, is an example of this kind of ‘quality’ programme: a long-form serial narrative that is characterized by a genre hybridity and style of narration well-suited to ‘undistracted viewing (e.g. via DVD, DVR, or on-demand)’ in which many time-shifted episodes can be watched in a single sitting (Shimpach 2010: 48). This format eliminates the need for extended exposition sequences every episode, meaning this leaves narrative space for character development and complex narratives.9 This practice of sustained viewing was also a part of VCR viewership in media fandom (Bacon-Smith 1992). What is novel in ‘quality’ programmes is the development of serial narratives that seem to encourage an existing practice. Returning to technology, DVD releases reinforce a hierarchy of ‘quality’ and also cult programmes over ‘ordinary’ television that has not been released on home video (Hills 2007). This leads to questions of archival practice in which DVD releases create a false sense of a complete archive, one that reinforces the idea that only ‘the out-of-the-ordinary, the critically acclaimed, and the internationally significant’ television is worthy of preservation, leaving fare such as programmes for daytime viewing by women without much record (Moseley and Wheatley 2008: 156). Bjarkman argues that through tape-sharing, ‘Fans and collectors build countercanons to rival the “classic” television canon, often conferring great value on failed series that were denied a chance to develop or find an audience’ (2004: 226), a practice 9 Glen Creeber has called this tendency ‘the “soap operaisation” of long-form television drama’ (2004: 13).

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that has broadened beyond specialized tape collectors with digitization enabling a more mainstream ‘curation’ of television (Robinson 2017). These forgotten programmes can find a new life through fannish attention. For example, vids made from digital transfers of off-air videotape recordings increase the visibility of such a series. Vids of this sort also advertise the existence of digital versions of episodes that might be shared, either ripped by a vidder from DVD or DVR or obtained through other methods including downloading.10 While Denzell Richards notes the value of file-sharing and DVD releases, such that ‘new works such as fan videos can be created from the digital archive of already existing materials’ (2010: 186), the existence of a digital archive is not treated as unusual, and the implications of the vid as archivally derived are not explored. Similarly, in Abigail De Kosnik’s Rogue Archives (2016), vids are mentioned as examples of works that fans have archived, not that fans use their archives to make vids in the first place. As Jason Mittell argues, digital technologies give viewers ‘even more immediate power to replay and redistribute images’ (2010: 6). Where VCRs and digital recorders permit the skipping of advertising breaks and DVD box sets present a sequence of episodes in an ad-free sequence, users who share digital files of television episodes through peer-to-peer networks have access to television via a method that is beyond the authorization of broadcasters or producers.11 Vidders who distribute their works online as digital files, uploading their vids to video streaming sites and using other digital distribution methods, represent another use of file-sharing. As with vidders’ VCR use (explored more in Chapters 3 and 4), this is not a majority practice but is important to note for how it intersects with narratives of online norms.

Televisual Flow, Segmentation, and Technologies of Control Vidding is evidence of one way that control over watching television can be extended into imagining a use for recorded television beyond viewing or re-viewing episodes. At its core, the experience of watching television is about encountering a sequence of segments in a ‘flow’, be that a programme 10 For work on downloading television, see: Strangelove (2005, 2015); May (2007); Lewis (2007); Fisher and Harlow (2006); Leaver (2008); Newman (2012); Hamari, Sjöklint, and Ukkonen (2016); Bisoni (2016); Crisp (2017); and Bury (2017). 11 For work on legal matters relating to fanworks, see: Murray (2004); Tushnet (2007); and Lothian (2009).

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punctuated by ads and bracketed with station idents or a single episode watched with an understanding of ongoing narrative and character arcs. File-sharing of television episodes by-passes this flow and values the individual episode above the experience of ‘ordinary’ television but also potentially perpetuates a persistent scepticism about television’s value. Yet vids are possible because of the changing form and shape of television, from home videocassette recording through to digital video. Audience control over watching television, theorized as ways of controlling that flow, also provides the technological tools for making vids, from off-air recording onto VCRs or digital video ripped from DVD/DVR (or downloaded) to be edited on a computer or tablet. The attentive fannish mode of watching television identifies individual moments of significance due to their narrative relevance, aesthetic appeal, and actors’ gestures and body language. Even when vids are made from films or videogames, their logic is governed by a mode associated with watching television: identifying and segmenting meaningful moments from the source material. Vids fragment the linear presentation of television segments; their re-assembly presents these fragments in an intensified sequence, guided by the linear temporality of the vid’s pop song soundtrack. What I want to draw out here is that televisual flow, however it is encountered, is about compiling segments of televisual material. Raymond Williams (1974) proposed ‘flow’ as a metaphor for the experience of watching television during the network era, and it has endured as the central scholarly metaphor for theorizing how we watch television despite changes in industry and technology. For example, DVD box sets (see Kompare 2006) and streaming services (Perks 2015; Jenner 2017) are discussed in terms of how they alter broadcast flow, that is, how they alter the experience of watching television. Although Williams argued that flow describes the ‘discrete units’ (1974: 88) of programming promised by a broadcast schedule that are instead delivered with unannounced interruptions such as advertising breaks, later writers felt this compromised neither programme coherence (as experienced as ‘segments’; Ellis 1982) nor viewers’ ability to ‘construct meaningful relations between the disparate elements’ (Gripsrud 1998: 27). Similarly, the coherence of vids rests on their audience making connections between the fragmented segments of the video source. Changes to network-era programming that occurred as multichannel broadcasting took hold in the 1980s came about alongside technological developments—remote control, VCR, tapes, etc.— that made viewer activity ‘highly mobile and unpredictable’ (Uricchio 2004: 171) in a context where a fragmenting programming flow was superseded by ‘audience/user “flows”’ (Caldwell 2003: 136). Helen Wood develops the

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concept of ‘user flows’, noting that developments in television technology make it more possible to ‘rupture’ television’s linear flow, offering audiences the potential to experience television as ‘navigable space’ (2007: 489).12 Vids provide textual traces of vidders’ navigation—literal and semiotic— through their source video, as each clip has been carefully selected for its narrative and/or aesthetic significance. Borrowing David Bordwell’s concept of ‘intensified continuity’ (2002), developed to characterize post-classical Hollywood films that maintain yet intensify the classical era’s established codes and conventions, I propose that vids are a form of intensified television. Vidders take the segmented fragmentation of television to the extreme through the agency that they have been given through industry practices, including technologies of control. While vids are now made digitally—DVDs and digital files provide source material and distribution methods—the form’s origins are in videotape. Taking videotape as an antecedent to digital time-shifting, and mindful of vidders’ use of these devices, the development of the vid text reveals a continuity of the experience and use of television. The VCR is the tool by which audiences first achieved personal control over programme units, and its digital successors have not significantly changed these practices. By the mid-1970s, while Williams was theorizing the experience of watching broadcast television, domestic VCRs meant audiences could record programmes to watch later (time-shifting) or elsewhere (‘place-shifting’; Bjarkman 2004), or they could rent/buy pre-recorded videocassettes. This portability of segments of broadcast flow also allowed the viewer to construct a composite sequence out of their recordings for ‘compressed multipleepisode viewing’ (Bacon-Smith 1992: 130), a practice that was given ‘the somatic metaphor of “bingeing”’ after the advent of DVD box sets (Brunsdon 2010: 64-65).13 Sony’s Betamax was marketed as a subversion of television schedules ‘that would take control away from programmers and give it back to the consumers’ (Wasser 2001: 83), though these consumers would not have had control over what was broadcast. However, the technologies of recording and playback that enable this control—videorecorders, DVDs, personal computers—also provided the means for making vids, as they also enable creation, which I will discuss later. 12 This echoes Newcomb and Hirsch’s description of audiences’ navigation of television schedules in which ‘the viewer selects, examines, acknowledges, and makes texts of his or her own’ (1983/2000: 570). 13 The popularity of Netflix and other on-demand internet streaming services, which have supplanted the DVD in recent years, has led to critical reflections on binge-watching (Perks 2015; Mikos 2016; Jenner 2018); though it should be noted that watching television in this way began with videotape (Stevens 2020).

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Digital television and digital viewership call for an update of the concepts of flow, broadcasting, and other metaphors. Two digital metaphors used to describe newer ways of accessing televisual texts are ‘streaming’ (a linear branching-off from a main channel) and ‘downloading’ (a spatial figuring of the unit of programming as a discrete entity). James Bennett (2008) argued that the ‘database’ potential of BBC’s then-new iPlayer platform fundamentally disrupts television’s flow and turns the television ‘viewer’ into a ‘user’. However, the same ‘viewers into users’ shift has also been claimed for the advent of videotape by Lucas Hilderbrand (2009: 18). Where ‘database’ implies the administration of information about television as a catalogue of titles (and/or airdates, ratings, content summaries, genres, etc.), in Chapter 4 I work with the term ‘archive’. The selection process of material to include in one’s archive, the varying degrees of permanence—off-air recordings, streamed episodes, downloads with or without an expiry date, purchases of pre-recorded media—and the idiosyncratic manifestation and arrangement of the objects themselves require terminology that can bridge the material and the immaterial to include videotape and discs with digitally recorded media. The VCR and the devices that followed continue to alter the experience of watching television and raise questions surrounding the amateur archiving and preservation of television content. Vitally, time-shifting creates copies of programmes that the viewer then can control and manipulate and thereby obtain the raw material for vid-making. In a classic study of British women’s use of VCRs in the 1980s, Ann Gray found that short-term time-shifting was normal but that longer-term archiving was much less common. This was partially due to a lack of time to re-watch programmes but also because responses indicated that once a story ‘is known, there seems little point in re-engaging with the text’ (1992: 216). Wood notes that this tendency to watch-and-delete persists when assessing the digital videorecorder as a potential archive (2007: 499). However, the appeal of keeping up with a series as it is broadcast/released is only one of the pleasures of television. As discussed throughout this book, vidding suggests a sustained engagement with texts’ visual pleasures and demonstrates the pleasures of re-working televisual narratives. Vids are evidence of an alternative and attentive use of this domestic technology by a largely female audience. Vids should be better recognized as a part of home video history. An essential context for vids is the increased opportunities for audiences to assert control over their experience of television. The vid form represents an extreme, intensified version of this control and is its textual evidence: vids’ critical analyses are enabled by, and leave traces of, the engagement allowed by evolving television and home video technologies. Jonathan

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Gray describes fanworks’ non-linear re-presentation of their source texts as ‘plotting a course through a narrative and leaving tracks for others to follow’ (2010: 154): in other words, vids are a way of reading a text outside of flow. If, as Helen Wood (2007) argues, television has become ‘navigable’, vids construct a map detailing points of interest such as ‘specific characters and relationships’ (Gray 2010: 154) but also, through multifandom vids, tropes and trends in representation more broadly. Vidding tends to be a marginal practice even within fandom, in part due to the economic barriers to obtaining and updating video-editing equipment and to building the related skills and confidence. In vidding’s early days, Constance Penley (1991) observed that it was far easier for a fan to access print technologies than video equipment, as the former might be used clandestinely in one’s workplace but the latter would require a personal investment and space within one’s home. For some fans, the solution was to make vids collaboratively, sharing the economic burden and presumably the pleasure of working with like-minded friends.14 The vid Pressure (Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, 1990) humorously details the laborious process involved in making a Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993) vid. Pressure contains self-shot footage of the vidders and their ‘rudimentary’ (Stein 2006: 249) tools such as stacked videotapes, snaking cables, and audio- and video-cassette players, making this work a ‘unique record […] of the specific technological difficulties of VCR vidding’ (Coppa 2008: 4.4). It is a clear performance of the vidders’ technological competence and has been shown at conventions even decades later as a curiosity and as a testament to how fannish women once used their domestic video technologies. While John T. Caldwell argues that flow is a reminder that ‘television is […] about the experience of viewing extended, composite sequences comprised of a succession of texts’ (2004: 63-64), this is an experience that vidders subvert to obtain their source material. Vidders engage with single programmes, and vids are evidence of this engagement outside of flow. The isolation of the episode is performed not only cognitively but also practically and materially, when the episode itself is fully extracted from the flow (for storage, sale, rental, or ad-free digital access). In summary, the idea of televisual flow as a sequence of segments and the resulting need to account for programmes within this context are important 14 Several vids I screened during my research were produced collaboratively, including Who Can It Be Now? (Kathleen Reynolds and Mary E. Overstreet, c. 1981-1985), A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005) and On the Prowl (sisabet and sweetestdrain, 2010). Tisha Turk (2010) examines collaborative processes in vidding.

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for understanding what exactly vids are made from. Vids were developed through the re-use of television material, and uses of home video technology in relation to broadcast television first enabled the practice. While this has broadened to include other media, the vid form can best be understood through television and domestic media technologies. Audiences’ use of videotape as an archival medium is part of their continually changing relationship with the texts of television broadcasting. The vid form is textual proof of fans using the tools at their disposal to intervene, respond, and create in a context wherein they have no official role. This began with fans using the home video technology at their disposal: VCRs dramatically affected the audience relationship with both films and television programmes, signalling the ability to manipulate and create personalized flows. This book is grounded in television studies; it also draws on and is contextualized by work from fandom studies and other fields in its approach to the vid form’s relationship with archives, visual pleasure, and adaptation.

List of Works Cited Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) Bennett, James, ‘Television Studies Goes Digital’, Cinema Journal, 47.3 (2008), 158-165 Bisoni, Claudio, ‘The TV Recap: Knowledge, Memory, and Complex Narrative Orientation’, in The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media: Permanence and Obsolescence in Paratexts, ed. by Sara Pesce and Paolo Noto (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 198-212 Bjarkman, Kim, ‘To Have and to Hold: The Video Collector’s Relationship with an Ethereal Medium’, Television & New Media, 5.4 (2004), 217-246 Booth, Paul, Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies, 2nd edn (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2010) —, and Lucy Bennett, ‘Interview with Luminosity, Fan and Vidder’, in Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture, ed. by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 181-184 Bordwell, David, ‘Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’, Film Quarterly, 55.3 (2002), 16-28 Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘Is Television Studies History?’, Cinema Journal, 47.3 (2008), 127-137 — ‘Bingeing on Box-Sets: The National and the Digital in Television Crime Drama’, in Relocating Television: Television in the Digital Context, ed. by Jostein Gripsrud (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 63-75

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Bury, Rhiannon, Television 2.0: Viewer and Fan Engagement with Digital TV (New York: Peter Lang, 2017) Busse, Kristina, ‘Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love’, Cinema Journal, 54.3 (2015), 110-115 Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson, ‘Introduction: Work in Progress’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 5-33 Caldwell, John T., Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995) — ‘Second-Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity, and User Flows’, in New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, ed. by Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 127-144 — ‘Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration’, in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. by Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 41-74 — ‘Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television)’, Cinema Journal, 45.1 (Fall 2005), 90-97 Click, Melissa A., and Suzanne Scott, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-5 Collie, Hazel, ‘“I’ve been having fantasies about Regan and Carter three times a week”: television, women and desire’, in Television for Women: New Directions, ed. by Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley, Helen Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 223-240 Coppa, Francesca, ‘A Brief History of Media Fandom’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 44-60 — ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 1 (2008), no page. — ‘A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 107-113 — ‘Interview with Sandy and Rache (‘The Clucking Belles’), in ‘Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, ed by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 6 (2011), no page. — ‘Interview with Kandy Fong’, in ‘Materiality and Object-Oriented Fandom’, ed. by Bob Rehak, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 16 (2014),

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no page. Corner, John, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) Counteragent, ‘Documenting the vidders: A conversation with Bradcpu’, in ‘Fan/ Remix Video’, ed. by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. Creeber, Glen, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI Publishing, 2004) Crisp, Virginia, ‘Pirates and Proprietary Rights: Perceptions of “Ownership” and Media Objects Within Filesharing Communities’, in Cult Media: Re-packaged, Re-released and Restored, ed. by Jonathan Wroot and Andy Willis (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), pp. 125-141 De Kosnik, Abigail, ‘Fandom as Free Labor’, in Digital Labour: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. by Trebor Scholz (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 98-111 — Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016) Derecho, Abigail, ‘Archontic Literature: A Def inition, A History and Several Definitions of Fan Fiction’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 61-78 Dinsmore, Uma, ‘Chaos, Order and Plastic Boxes: The Significance of Videotapes for the People who Collect Them’, in The Television Studies Book, ed. by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 315-326 Ellis, John, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) Fisher, William, and Jacqueline Harlow, ‘Film and Media Studies and the Law of the DVD’, Cinema Journal, 45.3 (2006), 118-124 Fiske, John, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987) — ‘The Cultural Economy of Fandom’, in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. by Lisa A. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 30-49 Freund, Katharina, ‘“I’m Glad We Got Burned, Think of All the Things We Learned”: Fandom Conflict and Context in Counteragent’s “Still Alive”’, in ‘Saving People, Hunting Things,’ ed. by Catherine Tosenberger, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 4 (2010), no page. Gauntlett, David, and Annette Hill, TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1999) Gray, Ann, Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology (London: Routledge, 1992)

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Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010) —, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, ‘Introduction: Why Still Study Fans?’, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 2nd edn (New York: New York University Press, 2017), pp. 1-26 Gripsrud, Jostein, ‘Television, Broadcasting, Flow: Key Metaphors in TV Theory’, in The Television Studies Book, ed. by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 17-32 Hamari, Juho, Mimmi Sjöklint, and Antti Ukkonen, ‘The Sharing Economy: Why People Participate in Collaborative Consumption’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67.9 (2016), 2047-2059 Hilderbrand, Lucas, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) Hills, Matt, Fan Cultures (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002) — ‘From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: ‘TVIII’ and the Cultural/ Textual Valorisations of DVD’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5 (2007), 41-60 — ‘Fiske’s “textual productivity’ and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 10.1 (2013), 130-153 Jenkins, Henry, ‘Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5.2 (1988), 85-107 — Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value in a Networked Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013) Jenner, Mareike, ‘Binge-watching: Video-on-demand, quality TV and mainstreaming fandom’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 20.3 (2017), 304-320 — Netflix and the Re-invention of Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Karpovich, Angelina I., ‘The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities,’ in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 170-188 Kaveney, Roz, ‘Gen, Slash, OT3s, and Crossover – The Varieties of Fan Fiction’, in The Cult TV Book, ed. by Stacey Abbott (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 243-247 Kohnen, Melanie E.S., ‘Fannish Affect, “Quality” Fandom, and Transmedia Storytelling Campaigns’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 337-346

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Kompare, Derek, ‘Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television’, Television & New Media, 7 (2006), 335-360 Larsen, Katherine, and Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) Leaver, Tama, ‘Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance’, Media International Australia, 126 (2008), 145-154 Lewis, Jon, ‘“If You Can’t Protect What You Own, You Don’t Own Anything”: Piracy, Privacy, and Public Relations in 21st Century Hollywood’, Cinema Journal, 46.2 (2007), 145-150 Lothian, Alexis, ‘A Different Kind of Love Song: Vidding Fandom’s Undercommons’, Cinema Journal, 54.3 (2015), 138-145. — ‘Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 130-136 Louttit, Chris, ‘Remixing Period Drama: The Fan Video and the Classic Novel Adaptation’, Adaptation, 6.2 (2013), 172-186 MacDonald, Andrea, ‘Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom & Computer Mediated Communication’, in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, ed. by Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1998), pp. 131-152 May, Christopher, Digital Rights Management: The Problem of Expanding Ownership Rights (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2007) McEwan, Paul, Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) Meehan, Eileen, ‘Understanding How the Popular Becomes Popular: The Role of Political Economy in the Study of Popular Communication’, Popular Communication, 5.3 (2007), 161-170 Mikos, Lothar, ‘Digital Media Platforms and the Use of TV Content: Binge Watching and Video-on-Demand in Germany’, Media and Communication, 4.3 (2016), 154-161 Mittell, Jason, Television and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Morimoto, Lori Hitchcock, and Bertha Chin, ‘Reimagining the Imagined Community: Online Media Fandoms in the Age of Global Convergence’, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 2nd edn (New York: New York University Press, 2017), pp. 174-188 Moseley, Rachel, and Helen Wheatley, ‘Is Archiving a Feminist Issue? Historical Research and the Past, Present, and Future of Television Studies’, Cinema Journal, 47.3 (2008), 152-158

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Murray, Simone, ‘“Celebrating the Story the Way It Is”: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media, and the Contested Utility of Fandom’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 18.1 (2004), 7-25 Nadkarni, Samira, ‘Front and Center: Examining Black Widow Fanvids’, in Marvel’s Black Widow from Spy to Superhero: Essays on an Avenger with a Very Specific Skill Set, ed. by Sherry Ginn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017), pp. 38-51 Nelson, Robin, ‘HBO PREMIUM’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5.1 (2007), 25-40 Newcomb, Horace, and Paul M. Hirsch, ‘Television as a Cultural Forum’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies (1983). Reprinted in Television: The Critical View, ed. by Horace Newcomb, 6th edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 561-573 Newman, Michael Z., ‘Free TV: File-Sharing and the Value of Television’, Television and New Media 13.6 (2012), 463-479 Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (London: Routledge, 2012) Ng, Eve, ‘Reading the Romance of Fan Cultural Production: Music Videos of a Television Lesbian Couple’, Popular Communication, 6.2 (2008), 103-121 O’Neill, Stephen, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (New York and London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014) Pande, Rukmimi, ‘Squee from the Margins: Racial/Cultural/Ethnic Identity in Global Media Fandom’, in Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture, ed. by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 209-220 — Squee From the Margins: Fandom and Race (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018) Penley, Constance, ‘Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology’, in Technoculture, ed. by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 135-161 Perks, Lisa Glebatis, Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015) ‘Pressure’, Fanlore, last updated 16 January 2018. [accessed 23 March 2018] Rainbow Noise (song tape/vidding letterzine), ed. by Tashery Shannon, 1 (March 1993). Digital copy provided courtesy of the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University, USA Richards, Denzell, ‘Cult TV and New Media’, in The Cult TV Book, ed. by Stacey Abbott (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 179-188 Robinson, Hillary, ‘Television and the Cult Audience: A Primer’, The Cult TV Book, ed. by Stacey Abbott (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 209-220

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Robinson, M.J., Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017) Ross, Sharon Marie, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Russo, Julie Levin, ‘User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 125-130 — ‘Many Copies: Cylon Television and Hybrid Video’, in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 150-60 Sandvoss, Cornel, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005) Scott, Suzanne, ‘Battlestar Galactica: Fans and Ancillary Content’, in How To Watch Television, ed. by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 320-329 Seiter, Ellen, Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) Shimpach, Shawn, Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) Stein, Louisa Ellen, ‘“This Dratted Thing”: Fannish Storytelling Through New Media’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 245-260 — ‘“What You Don’t Know”: “Supernatural” Fan Vids and Millennial Theology’, in ‘Saving People, Hunting Things,’ ed. by Catherine Tosenberger, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 4 (2010), no page. — Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015) Stevens, E. Charlotte, ‘Curating a Fan History of Vampires: “What We Vid in the Shadows” at VidUKon 2016’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 10.3 (2017a), 263-275 — ‘Historical Binge-Watching: Marathon Viewing and Convention Screening Practices’, in Binge-Watching and Contemporary Television Research, ed. by Mareike Jenner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. TBC. Strangelove, Michael, The Empire Of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) — Post-TV: Piracy, Cord-Cutting, and the Future of Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015) Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Their Fans (London: Routledge, 1995)

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Turk, Tisha, ‘“Your Own Imagination”: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative Interpretation’, Film and Film Culture, 5 (2010), 88-110 — ‘Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy’, in ‘Fandom and/as labor’, guest edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 15 (2014), no page. — ‘Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 9.2 (2015), 163-76 Turk, Tisha, and Joshua Johnson, ‘Toward an Ecology of Vidding’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed. by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. Turner, Michael, Hard Core Logo (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993) Tushnet, Rebecca, ‘Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author’, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), pp. 60-71 Uricchio, William, ‘Television’s Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/ Flow’, in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. by Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 163-182 Villarejo, Amy, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) Wasser, Frederick, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001) Wheatley, Helen, Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016) Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974) Winters, Sarah Fiona, ‘Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in “Closer” and “On the Prowl”’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed. by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. Wood, Helen, ‘Television is Happening: Methodological Considerations for Capturing Digital Television Reception’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10 (2007), 485-506

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Approach: How to Study a Vid Abstract A vid offers more than just access to the specific interpretive work of the person who created it. The vid is a robust and complete form that is capable of withstanding analysis independent of detailed knowledge of either the source material or the vidder’s own interpretive motives/ beliefs. This chapter discusses the approach to textual analysis taken in Fanvids and reveals what can be learned from studying vids as texts unto themselves. This chapter also explores canon formation in television/ media studies and how this can apply to studying a marginal form. This chapter finishes with a discussion of the canons of vids that are formed through fan convention programming. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, methodology

The goal of this book is to take the vid seriously as a form in its own right, with its own formal history and aesthetic strategies. Accordingly, I have approached vids primarily through textual analysis, as is conventional for a study largely grounded in television studies. I began my research by viewing vids of all genres and made out of diverse source material: from television, film, and other visual sources. To this end, I accessed digital files streamed online, my personal collection of vid files, vidshows (screenings) at vidding-focused fan conventions, and DVD compilations of vids included in convention memberships and sold by individual vidders. I estimate that I have watched at least 2,000 unique vids in the course of my research. I did not undertake formal structured interviews, nor did I circulate surveys or otherwise attempt a comprehensive audience study. Instead, I attended these events as a fan and as a researcher, freely disclosing my academic purposes and participating in convention panel discussions to share my work. I acknowledge the limitations of this approach, which gives preference to the media form. I also acknowledge the limitations of the study in terms of geography and race. My experience of fanworks and fan spaces (both online

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch02

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and offline) as well as the critical work on fans and fandoms that informs this research is Anglo-American, predominantly white, female-dominated, and exclusively focused on the English language. Television studies is an appropriate frame for studying the vid form, as the discipline offers ways of thinking about mode of address, sequential narratives, and the textuality of video forms. Derived from television and film sources, vids are neither television episodes nor films. Vids rely on songs to create and structure meaning but are not abstract illustrations of songs. Vids remake narratives for an attentive audience with a deep knowledge of the source text or of the conventions of vidding, or both. While vids are presently created digitally and are distributed online and at fan conventions, the pre-digital antecedents of the form were made through media fans’ use of media as an extension of their experience of television. However, this book was not meant to be a deep examination of the practice of making vids as much as an exploration of the vid form itself. As vids are neither film nor television, I was compelled to adapt some of the standard approaches to the close study of moving images to perform this analysis and occasionally to develop a novel approach to pursue my questions about this form. Academic engagement with vids has tended to position these fanworks as examples of feminist and/or queer re-textualization (Coppa 2008; Ng 2008) or as an entry point to a discussion of the works’ context in a particular fandom (Lothian 2009; Stein 2010; Freund 2010; Nadkarni 2017), but it is less common to approach vids as works of art/culture in and of themselves. Much of this work comes from within fandom studies, which is a field historically more interested in fanfiction than in vidding, perhaps due to disciplinary biases and the less prominent place of vidding within fandom. Using textual analysis enables me to attend to the vids themselves and to understand them as: a) works of historiography that construct textual histories of ongoing televisual and filmic narratives; b) works of art and culture that expose and distil the forms of pleasure and fascination that viewers may find in the media text; and c) works of criticism that construct a coherent argument about a text, genre, or film/programme-making practice. As a scholar who is also a fan of vids and vidding, this approach resonates with my personal experience of vidding in which the form is understood within fandom as a kind of audio-visual play, critique, and resistance. Of course, my academic grounding in television and f ilm studies offers a complementary suite of skills: an understanding of semiotics as a set of tools with which to approach visual media; a perspective on media texts that frames them as works of art and culture that operate on ‘ideological machinery’ (Gray and Lotz 2012: 38); and the significance of audiences and

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production contexts (Casey et al. 2008) in understanding the complexities of media texts. My purpose is not to provide a definitive historical overview of vidding fandom or to contribute a meaningful ethnographic account centred on this form of fanwork but to spend time with vids themselves. My use of textual analysis is a turn that has also recently been taken in the analysis of television, in addition to sociological or cultural studies methods to the medium (see Caldwell 1995; Jacobs 2001; Creeber 2004; Wheatley 2006; Shimpach 2010; Cardwell 2013; Jacobs and Peacock 2013). Similarly, Steve Bailey proposes that textual analysis is an appropriate method for studying fanworks, arguing that fanworks ‘offer particular access to the interpretive work central to the fan experience’ (2005: 50). However, the access offered by textual analysis is not just to the specific interpretive work of the individual who created a particular vid but to the meanings that are drawn out through analysis. As such, to borrow a phrase from Helen Wheatley’s discussion of textual analysis in television studies, I employ this method to ‘dwell […] on illuminating moments’ (2006: 21) in vids to show how these meanings are created and how they may be read. This approach to vids is found in Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately (2010: 153-161). Discussing three vids, Gray describes how in each example the clip choice with song lyrics guides the viewer’s interpretation of the vid—akin to how marginalia guides a reader through a printed text, ‘leaving tracks for others to follow’ (2010: 154)—which allows the viewer time and space to reflect on character development in excess of what the source text provided. Significantly, Gray’s analysis of the vids precedes his discussion of vidders’ reflection on their practices. By first presenting vids as texts in their own right, Gray takes these works seriously as critical objects for analysis. A textual analysis of television implicitly includes ‘an awareness’ of audiences and contexts (Casey et al. 2008: 289) if not always a deep study of those audiences themselves. Close readings of texts will not lead to conclusions about the subculture itself; however, the specific production context of vids and what their existence reveals about conceptions of active audiences do lead to a more nuanced understanding of a vid’s mode of address which itself assumes an attentive, engaged viewer. A textual analysis of media, as developed in relation to the study of films (which in turn has its origins in the study of literature) and later applied to television and other media, is fundamentally grounded in the scholar’s understanding of the text in question and its cultural context. V.F. Perkins argued in the foundational text Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (1972) that his approach is intended ‘to redirect attention to the movie as it is seen, by shifting the emphasis back from creation to perception’,

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where scholarly description is used to present and analyse the work ‘as it exists for the spectator’ (1972: 27). Perkins writes that the interpretation of films is done ‘in two ways, on the basis of its form and on the basis of our experience’ (1972: 174). These bases together are the indivisible essence of the approach, and the person of the critic/scholar is therefore very much a part of the process. Indeed, he argues that ‘A descriptive analysis will need at least to make claims about the distribution of the film’s emphasis; and emphasis is as subjectively perceived, relies as much on a personal response, as judgement’ (Perkins 1972: 191). Though Perkins does not unpack these concepts of experience and subjective perception, the notion that personal response will be informed by the context and experience of the critic/ scholar is therefore an understood and expected part of this approach. Within the disciplines of film and television studies, this point often goes unstated. Therefore, let me be clear: my experiences and perceptions of vids have been informed by my experiences in fandom just as much as my academic training. In the particular case of vids, as media fandom is not as mainstream as ‘watching television’ or ‘going to the cinema’, I discuss the potential for using concepts drawn from auto-ethnography to inform a more classic textual analysis later in this chapter. What Perkins argues for f ilm is also implicitly part of the strand of television studies that focuses on televisual aesthetics (such as Zettl 1978; Caldwell 1995; Cardwell 2006; Jacobs 2006; Creeber 2013; Jacobs and Peacock 2013), which relies on textual analysis as a methodology and which is also grounded in a subject position (cf. Davies and Harré 1990) conscious of the intimacy of critical perception. This work is part of an ongoing assertion that television is ‘worthy of the kind of study that closely examines aspects of style’ (Cardwell 2013: 23). Perkins’s work is part of that same process in which film gained a similar status (as art worthy of aesthetic analysis). I claim for vids a similar distinction: though derived from existing media, the vid form is no less capable of withstanding similarly rigorous scholarship.

Corpus Selection As mentioned earlier, I have watched hundreds of vids over the course of my research. At vidding conventions, which I started attending in 2010, it was common to watch 200 vids in a weekend. Given this bounty of potential examples, a comprehensive survey of all vids was beyond the scope of a study aimed at critically engaging with the form’s potential. Ultimately, this book discusses approximately (only) 75 vids. Selecting a manageable

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corpus involved deciding how to present and share these texts for an academic audience unfamiliar with their existence, history, or potential pleasures. In relation to television studies, Jonathan Bignell points out that choosing to write about a particular series means that it ‘becomes an example representing a larger context and history’ (2005: 16). Vids’ context and history are not as immediately apparent as are those of other media forms, contingent as they are on some degree of (sub)cultural familiarity. Instead of attempting a systematic sampling, I chose examples that were typical of broader tropes and genres of vidding. When discussing films or television programmes, it is generally accepted that the critic or scholar will have a wide viewing experience and general knowledge of similar texts in order to determine exemplarity, and the contextual viewing which informs these selections is accepted without the need for further explication. However, as vids exist at the fringes of a subculture, I will now discuss the scale of vid production. Vidders currently offer their works for download and/or as streamed files; I make a habit of downloading vids to an external hard drive as assurance against the loss of web hosting and to allow for off-line research. This is complemented by a DVD collection comprising vidders’ own releases as well as DVD sets from a number of fan conventions including the vid-specific conventions VividCon and VidUKon. Conventions are significant sites for encountering new (‘premiering’) vids, with VividCon at its height premiering an average of 100 vids each year. However, there are multiple starting points of vid circulation, including the annual Festivids vid exchange and the recently established Equinox exchange as well as vidders posting new works as they are completed independent of an event release.15 In the initial phase of this study, I attended six vidding-focused conventions: VividCon 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014 and VidUKon 2013 and 2014.16 I did not attend these events purely as a researcher, though I was open about my academic work and affiliations. From my prior experience in fandom, I 15 Festivids is an anonymous exchange that has run annually since 2009, modelled on similar exchanges of other forms of fanworks, based on a Secret Santa format. Participants offer a list of fandoms that they would be happy to use as source material, indicating the kinds of vids they would like to receive in return. The number of vids produced in each exchange has regularly exceeded 150; in 2013, there were 205 vids created for this event. Equinox, running biannually (in the spring and fall), began in fall 2017. Unlike Festivids, which focuses on ‘rare’ fandoms, each Equinox event is based on a theme that allows for work made out of more popular source. 16 As listed in the convention programme books, the total number of vids (new and already existing) screened during each convention was as follows: VividCon 2010: 291 vids; VividCon 2011: 293 vids; VividCon 2012: 290 vids; VividCon 2014: 262 vids; VidUKon 2013: 169 vids; VidUKon 2014: 185 vids.

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knew these events would be my best chance of seeing a substantial number of new vids and of experiencing them as part of an engaged audience. I have continued to attend VidUKon annually, and I have updated my corpus for this project as warranted by its evolving focus. Through the course of this cumulative viewing, key themes emerged around questions of historiography, fascination, and critical adaptations. It is neither possible nor necessary to view every vid ever made in order to produce a critical analysis of the vid form, just as it is impossible and unnecessary to view every film ever made in order to write about film. Nonetheless, extensive viewing can reveal key thematic trends. Out of this research, I selected a relatively modest number of vids to use as representative examples.

Canon Formation in a Marginal Practice One particular challenge of the academic study of marginal forms is being aware of what is at stake in selecting a few (or a few dozen) exemplary works and the risk of mis-representing a long history of iterative fan practice. Additionally, to borrow a positioning disclaimer from Anne Kustritz’s study of fanworks, I focus on the transformative works made by a group that organizes and understands itself as a community, while acknowledging these practices may well be present in adjacent communities beyond the scope of this study (see Kustritz 2014: 226n1). One important context of fanworks of this type is the assumption, supported by empirical research produced over several decades, that the producers and audiences of vids are very likely to be women; therefore, it is reasonable to understand vids as originating in a context of female authorship and spectatorship. The canon of vids I have constructed in this project is a by-product of the selections necessary to present a pointed—not comprehensive—overview of vids. The examples enable me to explore particularly interesting and critically significant aspects of the vid as text (as outlined in each chapter/ case study) rather than trying to offer an exhaustive analysis of the vid as textual or cultural form. Through the process of extensive viewing, these critical themes emerged as the most pressing and important. Ultimately, the limitations of viewing some vids and not others have determined these critical foci. As Bignell (2005) notes, access to texts does determine one’s choice of examples, which can imply comprehensive evaluation and judgement beyond the samples available. I screened the VCR vids analysed in my first chapter from DVD compilations of older works made available at

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VividCon by Kandy Fong, but these represent only a portion of the vid form’s textual history; for example, more work must be done in exploring archival records of fan conventions. While I tend to discuss vids as individual works (which is how fans talk about vids), the convention vidshow and the DVD offer individual vids to viewers as part of curated sequences. However, much as a television scholar will often isolate programme segments from its flow (broadcast or otherwise) in order to discuss that one programme, I extract my vid examples from their initial distribution while acknowledging here the many routes a vid may have to its audience. Vids discussed in existing literature form the beginnings of an academic canon. John Ellis’s definition of criteria for inclusion in a canon—‘that a text should be amenable to use beyond the confines of the historical context in which it was generated’ (2007: 25)—in relation to the vid form suggests that ‘historical context’ could be not just a temporal periodization but also a way of addressing the comprehensibility of vids for audiences who might not know the source material. For example, God Is A DJ (Dualbunny, 2006) as a text has fans distinct from fans of its source material. It was shown during VidUKon 2011, with the VJ’s note in the programme saying of the vid’s central character ‘I like her even though I’ve never seen the show’. This is also a useful reminder that the form of textual analysis common to film and television studies includes a critical awareness of a work’s context. While the majority of vids discussed at length in this volume have not been addressed in scholarship, I do return to some works—Closer, A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness, and On the Prowl—that already have an academic presence, thereby affirming their canonical nature. For example, On the Prowl offers a female narrative voice in its soundtrack that textually reframes its sequence of male bodies in pain to one explicitly seen through a female gaze. One might make sense of this in reference to the fannish concept-cum-genre-cum-trope of ‘hurt/comfort’ (cf. Larsen and Zubernis 2012; S.F. Winters 2012), but the vid itself is also a coherent work that intensifies a form of spectatorship and spectatorial pleasure. Perhaps the emerging canonical texts in vid scholarship are, like the fannish slash genre, those that require some further explanation to those unfamiliar with the norms and conventions of fanworks, in order to unpack their sociological import (or to place the examples within a subcultural framework). Once that initial work is done, it becomes possible to take a step back and evaluate the vid form as texts on their own with something to offer in and of themselves. A less significant criterion for academic canon formation is the popularity of a text, which affects its visibility as a potential research subject. The number of scholarly studies of The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008), for example,

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suggests that critical acclaim and strong personal feeling are not unrelated to the formation of an academic canon of media texts. According to the VividCon database Vividcon.info, the vid A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness was its most-shown vid, having been shown ten times; God Is A DJ was shown nine times. This frequency is not the reason I chose these particular vids, nor did popularity determine which vids I decided to use as my examples. However, convention programmers choosing to include these particular vids year after year does indicate something of these works’ clarity of authorial intent and the effectiveness of their emotional appeals. In this case, the academic canon and fannish canon overlap.

How to Study a Vid In practice, the textual analysis of vids is similar to other qualitative approaches. Qualitative methods allow for a rich analysis that can draw out a vid’s textual density, whereas content analysis would break apart a vid to count its constituent parts, and would consequently break down the juxtapositions that are the core of a vid’s meanings. The method of textual analysis laid out by Perkins, described earlier, enables an approach that is involved, interested, and passionate. I have also largely limited my study to vids themselves. Vids can be released with written commentary, detailing vidders’ process and intention, with the conversation continuing in comments. While these authorial statements and other forms of critical commentary can affect how a vid is understood by its audience, it can never be guaranteed that even a fannish viewer will have access to this contextualizing documentation. Indeed, as my purpose is to view vids as works of art and culture that speak for themselves, I do not analyze this material, which one might call the vids’ own paratexts. With vidding, when commentary is presented with a vid, it is in the manner of an artist’s statement or technical notes, not as a marketing tool or matrix of assorted cultural information that leads up to one’s consumption of a specific film or television series (per Gray 2010). If a vid could have its own paratexts rather than merely being a paratext for its source material, a vid’s paratext could arguably be an interest in the source, the song, and/or the vidder. For my purposes, I take a vid as a self-contained object of study, albeit one enmeshed in a web of contextualizing, intertextual information. This web of information contributes to vids’ semiotic density. Vids are read on several layers simultaneously: as a complete object based on recognition of the context of the source clips both within a narrative and

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in wider cultural conversations but also structured by the song’s lyrics. Coppa argues that a vid’s song functions as ‘an interpretive lens’ (2008: 1.1) that explicates a vid’s purpose. Inspired by foundational work from Roland Barthes (1964) and John Berger (1972) exploring how text is used to direct and limit the possible interpretations of a still image, I approach a vid’s song as a caption that focuses the viewer’s interpretation and understanding. The layers of meaning created in vids are accomplished through this aural captioning. For example, in the multifandom vid A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Skud, 2010), we are shown female characters from eighteenth/ nineteenth-century set media behaving in an unladylike fashion, without concern for social convention. The vid’s use of Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation’ captions these unruly women to give a collective voice to their defiance (‘I don’t give a damn’) and not to condemn them. Amongst a range of other contextual clues that suggest this vid is affirming a feminist position, the song offers a narrowing to focus that interpretive lens on a particular range of signification. While a more detailed exploration of the use of music in vids is part of my final chapter, this captioning is at the core of how every vid makes its meaning. My use of textual analysis also mirrors my understanding of vids as fundamentally the result of fans’ own close textual analyses of media texts. I take this mode of viewing and creative practice as fandom’s own evidence in support of contemporary television studies scholarship that ‘refutes previous claims that television is a medium which defies intense analysis, and which is subject to a distracted glance, rather than a more concentrated gaze’ (Wheatley 2006: 21). Vids intensify that concentrated gaze: indeed, they are textual evidence of it. Further, Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel (2008) note that the ability to re-watch television texts on video (and now digitally) was fundamental to the development of feminist textual analysis of television and that the same domestic VCR technology is also what first enabled vidding (see also Chapter 1). They conclude that ‘In this sense, textual analysis is not just a critical mode but is also related to the production of art and the cultures surrounding women’s investments in television series more generally’ (Brunsdon and Spigel 2008: 8), making textual analysis an apt methodology to explicate the mechanics of this dense form. Jason Mittell similarly observed that recent ‘complex’ television encourages concentrated viewing beyond scholarship and fandom, ‘convert[ing] many viewers to amateur narratologists’ (2006: 38). The heterogeneity of television requires a method that pays close attention to the specifics of a text through close reading, and a similar range of vid genres, vidders, presumed audiences, and distribution/exhibition contexts requires the same consideration.

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However, as Bailey (2005) notes, textual analysis can be effective in the study of fandoms when complemented by other methods. In contrast to previous work on vids that use their examples to inform ethnographic analyses, I include occasional observations where appropriate to help frame the production and cultural context of the vid. These are not based on structured interviews but on my experiences as a long-time participant in media fandom. Whereas textual analysis implicitly allows the scholar’s selection of texts to be guided, as Perkins (1972) argues, by individual taste and judgement, the reflexive methodology of auto-ethnography could enable a more explicitly personal voice throughout a project. Therefore, a small reflection on auto-ethnography is warranted, as it is impossible to determine the relative degree to which the systems of value and taste that inform my critical perspective on vids have been formed by my scholastic experience and my experience in fandom. Auto-ethnography is a form of narrative inquiry that draws out lived experiences through a variety of approaches and strategies, in which self-narration enables analysis and/ or interpretation of one’s own culture (Ellis and Bochner 1996; Denzin and Lincoln 2000; Chang 2008). An auto-ethnographic approach might lend certain insights into the culture of vidding from my subject position as a vidfan and not someone who makes vids herself. However, I intended an investigation of the vid as a textual form within a disciplinary framework in which the scholar’s subject position is already a part. A potential critique of Perkins’s version of academic film criticism—which presumes an uncomplicated congruence between the theoretical spectator and Perkins himself—is that his experience and therefore his judgements are less applicable to those who occupy different subjectivities. As I am a white cisgendered woman active in media fandom, I present interpretations of vids for a theoretical spectator who is congruent with my experience. However, I am aware that my focus on vids as texts in their own right allows me to ‘“default” to the norm [of fandom studies], which remains white, middle class, cisgender, and American’ (Pande 2016: 210), as my study has engaged with the production or reception of vids with a level of detail that would help me complicate that default. By acknowledging this bias, I mean to offer my reader an analysis of vids that is consciously informed by that experience. I work from a mode of viewing that I perceive to be typical but not (as with Perkins) presumptively universal. Ultimately, my purpose is not to record how vidding operates within fandom but to situate these works within a broader textual context while recognizing their particular production and distribution context (just as one would do with any text under study). This involved finding ways to

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articulate the pleasures and insights of vids within an academic frame and to evaluate points of scholarly interest and not attempting to recreate each vid in written form. Reading vids as a scholar and a fan has meant balancing the vid’s affective emotional appeals with a critical analysis of the texts. This also means I decided to emphasize vids—the form, through selected examples—as opposed to vidding, the practice in its (sub-)cultural context. The process of performing a textual analysis of a vid poses its own challenge. Vids are such dense works that to slow down a vid for analysis—rather than experiencing the work in its usual impressionistic rush of image and sound—distorts it even as it is rendered a more visible object of study. In the course of my research, I attempted a range of approaches to determine a suitable process for closely reading vids. I first tried to alter the vids’ playback speed in order to consider the connections made through editing; I found myself regularly pausing playback to take notes, replaying short sections, and muting the volume to minimize the distraction caused by slowing the audio. In some instances, I found it helpful to take hundreds of screen captures per vid and create comprehensive ‘contact sheets’ for each work to enable close analysis of a sequence. This method enabled me to take the time to evaluate a vid’s complex structure and to move non-linearly through the vid. The contact sheet also acted as viewing notes, as a visual account of each vid’s content. Depending on the rate of screen capture, this could operate like a storyboard, offering a representation of camera movement or clip duration. More usually, this aided in the identification and analysis of clips themselves. By creating contact sheets for the vids under analysis, I could clearly see that in the vid’s opening sequence, both the beginning and (near) end of the series is represented. For example, in looking at my contact sheet for I’m Not Dead (Dualbunny, 2009), it became easy to see where clips from the initial miniseries and the final season of Battlestar Galactica were placed against each other in the opening of the vid. A final consequence of using contact sheets is that its creation of print-based research material enabled me to work away from computer or television screen. After working with contact sheets, which helped me to see a vid’s composition, when I returned to re-watch the vid in its entirety, my focus would then shift to the soundtrack, and I could attend more fully to its tight juxtapositions of image and sound. Apart from this intensive analysis, I watched many vids in a more casual fashion, including on DVD, streamed online, as digital files, and at conventions. At vid-focused conventions I have attended, vidshows are screened in darkened hotel meeting rooms, with the attendees seated in rows of chairs facing a large screen at one end of the room. This arrangement of space

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mimics the physical relationship of audience to screen in a cinema. Indeed, the present viewing culture at vid-focused conventions asks the audience to remain seated and silent during screenings, recalling the focus and intensity of Christian Metz’s traditional model of ‘silent, motionless’ cinema spectatorship (1986: 96).17 While discussion during the vidshow is discouraged, applause is expected between vids and laughter (or other affective utterances) encouraged. Attentiveness to the mood in a room and discussion after a vidshow was part of how I learned to read vids. The exception was VividCon’s Club Vivid vidshow, an evening event in which the furniture in the convention screening room is moved to allow dancing and conversation, accompanied by a three-hour programme of vids with up-tempo soundtracks. While at conventions, I also watched vids in the convention hotel room. These semi-public spaces were used for informal convention programming where the vidshows’ strict viewing rules are relaxed, sharing vids on laptop, DVD, or via output cable to the room’s television. A vidder can use this space to share works in progress; the convention attendees can dip into the convention’s own vid library; and it can also be the location for a vid-focused room party. In such events, attention to the vids would wane as discussion arose around the series and characters represented, with vids in this case almost resembling a traditional understanding of television as casual and domestic, ‘watched without great intensity or continuity of attention’ (Ellis 1982: 146), though striking moments in a vid would refocus our attention on the screen. I have found that this informal middle ground acts as a space to perform and affirm interpretive norms, such as commenting on unusual pairings or source material, drawing attention to effective editing and song choice, and noting effective or otherwise pleasurable vids. These different scales of viewing, with different audiences and degrees of distraction, provided contrasting environments and contexts through which to analyse the vid’s form and content.

Conclusion Therefore, my approach to the vid form is grounded in textual analysis, with the goal of taking the vid form seriously as a text. Through an extensive 17 This code of behaviour has evolved from earlier vid screening practices, which reportedly revealed a tension between experiencing the vid as a creative work on its own and the use of a vid to prompt discussion: ‘They can’t take the complex ones in a large group. They get hyper. They aren’t concentrating that deeply. They want to all laugh together or they want to share their feelings’ (MVD, qtd. in Jenkins 1992: 239).

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programme of viewing, I developed central research questions about historiography, fascination, and adaptations and selected key examples to develop arguments to answer those questions. As a member of the media fandom subculture and a long-time vid-watcher, I bring to this project an awareness of the context of vids; this subject position informs my corpus selection and analysis in the same manner as any scholar in the humanities is similarly grounded in and shaped by comparable personal experiences. As argued earlier in this chapter, a vid offers more than just access to the specific interpretive work of the person who created it. Vids are comprehensible beyond the limits of one’s foreknowledge of a vid’s source material. The vid is therefore a robust and complete form, akin to film or television, which is capable of withstanding analysis independent of detailed knowledge of either the source material or the vidder’s own interpretive motives/beliefs. Indeed, the use of songs to guide meaning in vids helps to nail down the ambiguities that would arise in interpreting a vid made outside its context, because the limitation of different potential meanings makes the work more durable.

List of Works Cited Bailey, Steve, Media Audiences and Identity: Self Construction in the Fan Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Barthes, Roland, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, Communications, 4 (1964), 40-51 Berger, John, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books Ltd, 1972) Bignell, Jonathan, ‘Exemplarity, Pedagogy and Television History’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 3.1 (2005), 15-32 Brunsdon, Charlotte, and Lynn Spigel, ‘Introduction’, in Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, 2nd edn (Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2008), pp. 1-20 Caldwell, John T., Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995) Cardwell, Sarah, ‘Television Aesthetics’, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 1.1 (2006), 72-80 — ‘Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond’, Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. by Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 23-44 Casey, Bernadette, Neil Casey, Ben Calvert, John Leam French, and Justin Lewis, Television Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)

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Chang, Heewon, Autoethnography as Method (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2008) Coppa, Francesca, ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 1 (2008), no page. Creeber, Glen, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI Publishing, 2004) — Small Screen Aesthetics (London: Palgrave MacMillan/BFI, 2013) Davies, Bronwyn, and Rom Harré, ‘Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20.1 (1990), 43-63 Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 2000) Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner, ‘Introduction: Talking Over Ethnography’, Composing Ethnography: Alternate Forms of Qualitative Writing, ed. by Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), pp. 13-45 Ellis, John, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) — ‘Is It Possible to Construct a Canon of Television Programmes? Immanent Reading Versus Textual-Historicism’, in Re-Viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed. by Helen Wheatley (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007) Festivids, no date. [accessed 9 May 2014] ‘Festivids: Frequently Asked Questions.’ Festivids: Fannish Vidding Exchange, no date. [accessed 19 February 2018] Freund, Katharina, ‘“I’m Glad We Got Burned, Think of All the Things We Learned”: Fandom Conflict and Context in Counteragent’s “Still Alive”’, in ‘Saving People, Hunting Things,’ ed. by Catherine Tosenberger, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 4 (2010), no page. Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010) —, and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012) Jacobs, Jason, ‘Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.4 (2001), 427-447 — ‘Television Aesthetics: An Infantile Disorder’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3.1 (2006), 19-33 —, and Steven Peacock, ‘Introduction’, in Television Aesthetics and Style (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 1-20 Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992)

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Kustritz, Anne, ‘Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids’, TV/Series, 6 (2014), 225-261 Larsen, Katherine, and Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) Lothian, Alexis, ‘Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 130-136 Metz, Christian, ‘Story/Discourse (A Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism)’, in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 91-98 Mittell, Jason, ‘Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television’, Velvet Light Trap, 58 (2006), 29-40 Nadkarni, Samira, ‘Front and Center: Examining Black Widow Fanvids’, in Marvel’s Black Widow from Spy to Superhero: Essays on an Avenger with a Very Specific Skill Set, ed. by Sherry Ginn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017), pp. 38-51 Ng, Eve, ‘Reading the Romance of Fan Cultural Production: Music Videos of a Television Lesbian Couple’, Popular Communication, 6.2 (2008), 103-121 Pande, Rukmimi, ‘Squee from the Margins: Racial/Cultural/Ethnic Identity in Global Media Fandom’, in Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture, ed. by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 209-220 Perkins, V. F., Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Pelican, 1972; London: Penguin, 1991) Shimpach, Shawn, Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) Stein, Louisa Ellen, ‘“What You Don’t Know”: “Supernatural” Fan Vids and Millennial Theology’, in ‘Saving People, Hunting Things,’ ed. by Catherine Tosenberger, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 4 (2010), no page. VidUKon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] VividCon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] Wheatley, Helen, Gothic Television (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006) Winters, Sarah Fiona, ‘Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in “Closer” and “On the Prowl”’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed. by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. Zettl, Herbert, ‘The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics’, Journal of the University Film Association, 30.2 (1978), 3-8

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Proximate Forms and Sites of Encounter: Music Video and Experimental Tradition Abstract Vids resemble music videos and found footage films. They have the form and appearance of a music video, and they re-use existing moving images in a way that appears to meet the definition of found footage work or remix video art. This chapter establishes some parameters within which the vid can be viewed in relation to proximate forms. This chapter works through specific academic framings of similar forms such as found footage films in the experimental tradition and music video before discussing canons of vids that are formed through recent gallery contexts. These additional lenses—beyond fan studies and television studies—offer further reference points through which to understand vids. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, found footage film, Wonder Woman

Vids can be seen as both music videos and found footage f ilms. They have the form and appearance of a music video, and they re-use existing moving images in a way that appears to meet the def inition of found footage work or remix video art.18 Of course, as a form of fanwork, the vid form does not arise from commercial interests, and likewise it is not aligned with traditions of experimental moving image art practice. Vids are in dialogue with both as well as with other, newer forms of internet video expression as found through YouTube (for example, see Burgess and Green 2009; Grainge 2011; Vernallis 2013) and with a growing academic/ 18 I am holding these distinct from found footage horror films, which take the ‘discovery’ of existing film or video as an aesthetic and narrative framing device.

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch03

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pedagogical interest in videographic criticism and video essays (led by the work of Catherine Grant; see also McWhirter 2015). However, despite being short videos with music, vids are not music videos; despite being critically grounded experiments in recombining moving images, they are arguably not experimental films or video works (in a traditional sense). Vidding has resonances with these proximate forms, and there is, therefore, value in exploring music video and experimental art alongside the vid in building a more complete story of the re-use of existing media. This chapter establishes some parameters within which the vid can be viewed in relation to related instances of video and film work; these additional lenses—beyond fan studies and television studies—offer further reference points through which to understand vids. Starting with an overview of critical perspectives on commercial music video, I recount and examine how found footage and compilation film forms have been understood. The chapter continues with a discussion of the exhibitions Cut Up (Museum of the Moving Image, 2013) and MashUp (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016), which included vids alongside experimental video and film forms. I then move to a discussion of the ways in which vids are distributed, exhibited, and curated by fans themselves. Finally, the chapter concludes with a comparison of two responses to Wonder Woman (ABC, 1975-1977; CBS, 1977-1979)—the video art piece Technology/ Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978) and the vid Titanium (Gianduja Kiss, 2012)—in which the contrasting aims, outcomes, exhibition contexts, and conflicting interpretations of contested representations reveal something of what makes vidding a form unto itself, distinct from other forms of video art. My aim with this chapter is to discuss the vid form in a general sense through some established theorizations of certain proximate forms and to use these to explore how vids have been screened and shared by their audiences. In Chapter 5, I return to specific examples of found footage film and video art pieces to explore how multifandom vids demonstrate viewing practices grounded in broad and enthusiastic consumption.

Music Video The commercial music video is an important proximate form to the vid. Like vids, the duration of a commercial music video is largely determined by the pop song that is its soundtrack. In addition, both vids and music videos tend towards rapid editing and experimental narrative styles. However, as

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Francesca Coppa (2008) argues, vids are not motivated by the song—a vid is primarily the manipulation of the visual source rather than an illustration of a song—and as such, the similarities between music videos and vids can be found in their appearance but not in their purpose. This similarity is not accidental. In the videotape era, vidders explicitly drew on music video for aesthetic inspiration (Bacon-Smith 1992: 175)—with experienced vidders offering guidance such as ‘Watch MTV or VH1 and just see what they do’ to those interested in taking up vidding (quoted in Penley 1991: 145-6)—and positioning commercial music video as a way to understand how to edit moving images to music. However, as Henry Jenkins argues regarding the difference between the two forms, the uses and meanings of clips in vids ‘are shorthand for much longer segments of the program narrative’ and therefore part of the vidder’s critical work, in contrast to music video’s use of moving images as ‘free-floating signifiers’ (1992: 234). From the early days of vidding, therefore, fans and fan studies scholars have agreed that these two forms were proximate but differed in key ways in terms of the means by which moving images were being employed. In Jenkins’ formulation, the work of vidders appears to be in a more valued category than music videos, as there is a critical and narrative purpose to clip choices that are always in reference to the fans’ interpretive systems of the vids’ source material, in contrast to music videos’ sometimes more casual association between moving image and song. However, Tisha Turk cautions against seeing vids’ clips only as shorthand for the narratives from which they are taken, because ‘treating vids primarily as media criticism positions vidders as interpreters rather than producers’ (2015: 164). She convincingly argues that the role of music in vids is more complex and fundamental to understanding the critical and creative work of vids: it is ‘integral to vidders’ creative processes and central to vids’ rhetorical and emotional effects on their audience’ (ibid.). I agree: the transformative interplay between song and moving image is at the core of how vidding works, and I direct readers to Turk’s vital essay on the topic. However, I wish to remain for the moment with the idea of the music video and to explore some of what has been written about music videos as a way to lay out some of the similarities and differences between these two similar forms. Despite the prominence of music videos in the late twentieth century through to the present day, Carol Vernallis argues that ‘Music video history remains uncharted’, in no small part due to the volume and variety of music video examples in existence (2013: 262). There has been productive academic work recently through dedicated case studies, such as in the

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collection Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (Arnold et al., 2017), that reflect the idiosyncrasies and complexities of the form’s relationship to commercial imperatives, the artistic aims of individual directors, and the unique needs of each music artist’s evolving star image. The focus of the music video is the song and the artist, even if the music artists themselves do not appear in the clip. Accordingly, all but one of Joe Gow’s categories of music video ‘formulas’ concern performance: he lists special-effects extravaganza, anti-performance, pseudo-reflexive performance, song and dance number, performance documentary, and enhanced performance (1992: 56-66). While enumerating kinds of performances is a start to understanding the ‘richness’ of music video (Gow 1992: 43), Diane Railton and Paul Watson suggest approaching music videos with the more flexible concept of genre, offering pseudo-documentary, art, narrative, and staged performance (2011: 41-65). In between these generic classifications—which tend to be based on the moving images—is the question of authorial voice and particularly ‘the disjunction between a verbal narration which is first-person and the specularization of that narrator within a particular fictional space’ (Straw 1993: 9). With vids, the narrator is dislocated and becomes multiple: it is an authorial voice of the vidder who has constructed this space and whose role is understood in constructing a space for the song’s narration to become congruent with a spectacularized subject drawn from the vid’s video source material. Music videos are not, in themselves, films or programmes and therefore do not have an easy disciplinary home. Vernallis writes that the music video ‘belongs somewhere among music, film, television studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and communication studies, as well as philosophy, theater and dance’ (2004: ix). Therefore, they may be read as commercial advertisements for the recording artist, as artistically or aesthetically compelling works of art, as dense semi-narrative texts with rapidly developing codes and norms, and as key artifacts in discursive (sub-)cultural practices. Much the same can be argued about vids. Michel Chion notes that ‘Cinephiles especially attack music videos as eye-assaulting’, countering that the music video is ‘altogether different’ to cinema ‘since it does not involve dramatic time’ (1994: 166). Instead, the narrative of a music video—if there is one—can offer narrative compression and interlacing of flashback with staged performances. Picking up on K.J. Donnelly’s argument that video mash-ups of all varieties found online mean that ‘unofficial pop promos have lost the requirement to act as an advertisement for a piece of music’ (2007: 178), it can be argued that vids have long been engaged in advertising vidders’ interpretations

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of the source material. While vids resemble the form of a music video, the latter sells a song or artist (to promote record sales but also to perform a legitimating social function for the artist, selling the artist as well as the record) whereas the vid ‘sells’ a narrative or an analysis. Arguably, slash vids sell a reading of a particular relationship, multifandom vids sell a way of broadly viewing film and television texts, and character study vids sell a way to view a specific character. Despite formal similarities, I am concerned with the transformation/adaptation of a narrative and the representation of fascination and desire rather than an exploration of editing. The music video is a proximate form to the vid and one to which the vid bears more than a superficial resemblance.

Found Footage, Collage, and the Experimental Tradition Vids are an audio-visual form that re-uses existing moving images, and the re-use of moving images has a considerable history within experimental and mainstream traditions. Found footage and compilation films have been a part of cinema history since the earliest days of the medium, and television programmes regularly re-use existing material for a variety of purposes (see Holdsworth 2011). The digital age enables access to and dissemination of all manner of remix practices (see McIntosh 2012; Vernallis 2013). While vidders may not link their practice to experimental film traditions, and indeed vidding directs itself to a very different audience, the effect (if not the motive) of vidding will have resonances with a well-documented canon of experimental film and video forms. The proximate forms of found footage, collage/compilation, and remix video all work with existing moving images (regardless of medium—film, video, or digital forms) in ways that recover, re-encounter, and re-present media histories. Later in this chapter, I will return to specific examples of experimental film/video texts that re-use moving images. For the moment, I am interested in working through some of the ways these other methods of re-using moving images have been theorized in order to give context to the analysis of vids and vidding that follows through the rest of this monograph. Using film clips ‘at variance with the original producer’s purpose’ (Leyda 1964: 13-14) occurred as early as 1898—a mere three years after the first film screenings in 1895—when an enterprising Lumière projectionist illustrated the 1894 Alfred Dreyfus scandal by constructing an untitled faux ‘actuality’ film using existing footage of military demonstrations and state buildings to satisfy a demand for film representation of an event that pre-dated the

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existence of appropriate recording technology. Despite the existence of precedents such as this and of the compilation film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Esfir Shub, 1927), Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) is regularly credited as ‘an isolated early example of the found footage film’ (Barefoot 2011: 166). These early examples each created new, coherent texts using images that had been constructed with a different purpose in mind. The Dreyfus scandal had unfolded prior to the first Lumière exhibitions, but the untitled 1898 sequence of later martial/institutional footage satisfied audience demand for access to an indexical representation of those events through this new medium. Following two months of archival research, Shub compiled clips from Romanov home movies, newsreel footage, and newly shot material to create a film that argued for the inevitability of the usurped regime’s decline (Malitsky 2013: 164). Cornell’s film is the most intimate of these examples, as he explores his fascination with Hobart by condensing one of her film performances into a much shorter text. Vids can encompass each of these positions: as Francesca Coppa notes, vids create a new work ‘to make an argument or tell a story’ (2009: 108) using pieces of existing media. Vids fragment their source text(s) to facilitate new layers of meaning. Like found footage films, vids can be a ‘self-reflexive exposé of how meaning is read’ (Desjardins 1995: 26), though in many cases that reflexivity is not the purpose of the vid: it is the mechanism through which the vidder’s purpose is expressed. William Wees argues that found footage films exhibit ‘an analytical and critical attitude toward its images and their institutional sources’ (1992: 53). While vids demonstrate the same reflexive qualities, the transformative aspect of the vid form is essential to this process. In the same way that Soviet montage saw editing as the instrument of meaning-creation in film—one shot followed by another shot created a third meaning—vidding is about re-using moving images to create new meanings. I employ the phrase ‘moving image re-use’ to describe a range of approaches to practices and works that have elsewhere been called foundfootage film, archive film, experimental video, appropriation, film collage, remix, montage, compilation, recycled images, and other terms that refer to specific media, production contexts, and methodologies. Digital copies of films and transfers of videotape sources may be combined in the same vid, troubling the medium specificity of ‘found footage film’ and making it inadmissible as a description of vids. Video montage and scratch video (Meigh-Andrews 2006; Rees 2011) are respectively too vague and too precisely tied to a specific movement to be of use. If pressed, I would argue that vids are closer to archive films (Noordegraaf 2009) or Shub’s compilation/collage films in which the editor returns to and re-presents existing material without

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substantially altering the frames themselves, and in which the new ordering of clips (and context of exhibition) creates the work’s argument.19 While Bruce Conner, known particularly for found footage films A Movie (1958) and Cosmic Ray (1961), can claim to have worked through ‘hundred-foot reels from the sale bin’, discovering ‘less illustrious sources’ for his work than prints of Hollywood films (Hatch 2012: 119), a vid is an outcome of careful viewing, not rummaging through the garbage. Although Kandy Fong’s pre-vid works were indeed made from discarded film stills, vids made from off-air recordings, format-shifted DVDs, or digital downloads blur the bounds of terminology linked to medium specificity. Therefore, ‘moving image re-use’ seems to most accurately represent the act of finding secondary purposes for pre-existing film and video, regardless of differences in intention, purpose, or medium. Beyond the image, there is a resonance between the way vids and other forms of moving image re-use work with pop music. Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray (1961) was the first short film to use a pop song as its soundtrack over silenced clips; this and other work have led Conner to (reluctantly) be known as ‘the father of music video’ (Rogers 2017: 196). Conner’s use of pop music in his works ‘stemmed from a desire to comment on, and undo, the conventions of pop culture’ (Rogers 2017: 196), which is akin to what Sebastian F.K. Svegaard (2015) has identified as critical vids (i.e. vids that set out to make an argument) and to scholarly appraisals of vids in general. In discussing the work of Conner and similar artists, Vernallis (2017) proposes a range of approaches to working with pop songs amongst experimental artists who incorporate pre-existing music into their works. The first of these, ‘Whole Pop Songs, Added at a Late Stage of the Film’s Production’ (Vernallis 2017: 261), is the most like how vids are composed, as the moving images are already extant and the ‘whole pop song’ is used largely without alteration in the new work. She notes that this approach was most prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s when the available technology did not allow a fine synchronization between image and sound; it is interesting to reflect on how the same technical limitations shaped and then were largely crystallized in the way vids have developed since. (Newer vidders disseminating their work on 19 Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) includes footage of servants waiting to clear a count’s table. Bill Nichols notes the count’s purpose in staging the sequence was ‘to document his estate life’ and therefore his wealth and power; when the clips appear in Romanov Dynasty, ‘the document’s moral value is reversed: it stands as a condemnation of what it once celebrated’ (2001: 76). Unlike fan fiction, which is limited only by the fan-writer’s imagination, vids are limited by what source texts actually exist, re-presenting them in a context that layers in additional (sometimes retrospective) meanings.

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YouTube are far more likely to incorporate diegetic sound, in part to defeat Content ID trackers that can lead to takedowns.) However, beyond the use of music and the objective of broadly commenting on popular culture, vids approach their subject matter with a very different ethos. Kevin Hatch writes that Conner’s found footage f ilms ‘offer the viewer an apparent intimacy and abundance, only to snap that viewer’s attention back to the inescapable void at the heart of the cinematic experience’ (2012: 116). That cinema has an ‘inescapable void’ at its heart is, of course, problematic and debatable and devalues the pleasures it offers to its audiences.20 Cinema is not alone in being judged as somehow empty: as John Corner argues, television has been the victim of ‘a long tradition of seeing the medium as an agency of the culturally trite or even of cultural debasement’ (1999: 93). These perspectives inform artists’ responses to these media. For example, Dara Birnbaum’s video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978), discussed at the end of this chapter, is explicitly critical of the TV series Wonder Woman and was intended to educate its viewers on the failings of the series and its representational politics (though without a sense of fondness that accompanies some vids critical of their source). As I will argue, vidding enables a method of evaluating historical television texts and engaging with the pleasures of visual media more broadly through enacting critical and pleasurable modes of spectatorship. William Wees distinguishes between critically pointed collage and vacuous appropriation. The former, ‘exemplified’ by the ‘avant-garde film’ (Wees 1992: 39), involves ‘conscious, creative, and critical viewing of cinematic representations’, whereas the latter, exemplified by music videos, ‘lacks the deconstructive strategies and critical point of view’ (ibid.: 45). Wees proposes three methods of using found footage: compilation (signifying ‘reality’, used for documentary purposes), collage (signifying modernist ‘image’, used in avant-garde film), and appropriation (signifying ‘simulacrum’ and exemplified by postmodern music video), each with a different ‘aesthetic bias’ (ibid.: 39). Where vids might lie depends on whether one is convinced that a vid, like a collage, can offer ‘an analytical and critical attitude toward its images and their institutional sources’ (ibid.: 53). While Wees is careful to clarify that these distinctions are dependent on context, there are implications for the role of pleasure in such works that are inherent in dividing the conscious, creative, and critical aims of experimental forms from the non-critical commercial iterations. 20 Cinema’s relationship to death (cf. Mulvey 2006) is another matter entirely.

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In evaluating works that re-edit moving images of stars—namely Rose Hobart, Meeting of Two Queens (Cecilia Barriga, 1991), Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992), etc.—Wees argues that such films ‘betray their makers’ fascination with the source of their images’ and lose their power to challenge those sources (2002: 4). The notion that an artist is at risk of losing their critical faculties in the wake of overwhelming visual pleasure is an insistence that evidence of fascination is a betrayal of the potential in the re-use of moving images for enacting critical oppositions. In contrast to these divisions between pleasurable and critical reactions, the vid argues for a richness of meaning and pleasure, both in the visual pleasures of film and television and through the deeper critical competence at play in reading across texts. Henry Jenkins argues that videotape-era vidders were ‘making the series [source] represent subtexts it normally represses’ as ‘the pleasure of the form centres on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings’ (1992: 227-28). The violence (and therapeutic function) described here is valid if one accepts that a slash subtext is not already present; however, currently vids are more likely to be emphasizing or enhancing textually present meanings, not breaking a semiotic link back to the clips’ original context. Coppa argues that the pleasure of viewing vids ‘is explicitly the fun of watching’ (2009: 113): vids allow vidders and vidfans to affirm their interest in media texts. Instead of exposing the failings of film or television or failing themselves to overcome the lure of their images, within fandom the success of a vid is judged (sometimes explicitly, as in VividCon’s ‘Vid Review’ panel) on its ability to communicate its point, to amuse, and to entertain. Michael Zryd argues that the context of moving images is just as vital in determining meaning as the images themselves, noting that the meaning and significance of film footage is ‘extraordinarily malleable’ (2003: 47-48). He notes that experimental films that re-use moving images ‘mark a specific mode of film montage that hyperbolizes this malleability, recontextualizing footage to foreground and critique the discourses behind the image’ (ibid.). In the case of multifandom vids, the discourses that are foregrounded and critiqued are articulated through sequences of montage that gather similar clips from different film and television sources to note the similarities and differences in the various iterations of representational tropes. The pleasure in foregrounding and critiquing these representations comes from a place of abundance (cf. Coppa 2009 on multifandom vids) instead of an approach akin to Conner’s weary ‘commentaries on a world saturated with media imagery’ (Hatch 2012: 117). The critical work of vids often also invites the

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viewer to take pleasure from the analysis offered. With an example such as Starships! (bironic, 2012), discussed at length in Chapter 5, the commentary is not about saturation as much as a plenitude that offers a viewer multiple points for engagement, both with the vid itself and with the genre writ large. Therefore, the qualities of found footage films and other forms of compilation art help us to see vids in ways beyond a series of acts of textual productivity undertaken by a particularly engaged audience. The history of moving image re-use reaches back to the very late nineteenth century. There are many media, contexts, and methodologies that are part of more than a hundred years of artistic, commercial, and political activity finding new uses and purposes for film and video clips. Vids offer another set of ways of thinking through moving image re-use that sometimes parallels and sometimes diverges from more established narratives of these practices.

Vids in Gallery Spaces: Cut Up and MashUp Two recent exhibitions, one at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in New York City and another at the Vancouver Art Gallery, presented a selection of vids in exhibitions of collage and remix art. In both cases, the vids were included as part of a larger curatorial engagement with collage and appropriation. The MOMI exhibition Cut Up (29 June to 14 October 2013) focused on newer digital forms, whereas the Vancouver Art Gallery’s MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture (20 February to 12 June 2016) was described in a press release as the ‘most ambitious exhibition in the history of the Gallery’ and covered all four storeys of the Gallery, exhibiting over a century of creative work (‘Groundbreaking Exhibition on Mashup Culture’, 2016). I do not draw a distinction between museum and gallery as different kinds of public spaces. Instead, I take both as sites where vidding has been given a framing of cultural legitimacy outside of its typical exhibition sites. Interestingly, in neither case was vidding presented as an edgy, contemporary digital practice but rather as one with a deeper history that has weathered a few technological shifts. These exhibitions have also disseminated specific vids beyond their usual distribution networks. Cut Up gathered different kinds of re-edited moving images and highlighted the unique context of vids’ distribution and exhibition. According to the exhibition’s web page, the videos selected for the exhibition were chosen because they had been made by ‘self-taught editors and emerging artists’, not established video art practitioners. Cut Up gathered fifty-four examples of video pieces mostly produced in the digital era but included

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six produced before 2000 as precedents of the digital-era pieces. Three of these historical examples are vids, which puts vids in an interesting historical position in relation to the other works. In an interview with Moze Halperin (2013), curator Jason Eppink stated that since ‘Vidding is difficult for the uninitiated to understand’, the vids in the exhibition were presented last, positioned as ‘the historical precedent for everything [visitors] just watched’ (no page). The oldest vid, Kandy Fong’s Both Sides Now (1980), is a filmed slide show that is generally claimed as a direct antecedent to current vidding practices (see Coppa 2008).21 The rest of the vids—Temper of Revenge (MVD and Caren Parnes, 1984), Data’s Dream (GF & Tashery, 1994), A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Hot Hot Hot) (Clucking Belles, 2005), I Put You There (Laura Shapiro and LithiumDoll, 2006), and Vogue (Luminosity, 2007)—are from the American convention vidding tradition (via Escapade, MediaWest, WisCon, and VividCon) and collectively represent the history of vidding as it is currently understood.22 The inclusion of these vids alongside other more contemporary examples of moving-image re-use such as trailer mash-ups, long-form re-edits of feature films (supercuts), explicitly political video pieces, and variations based on popular music is an example of the museum as a public context for presenting and viewing works produced within a subcultural community. 21 The oldest work listed in the exhibition—the British wartime propaganda film The Lambeth Walk (Nazi Style) (Charles A. Ridley, 1942)—re-cuts Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) to music from the pre-war Lambeth Walk dance craze, such that it appears the ranks of troops are dancing along. The MOMI exhibition website links to a video titled ‘Gen. Adolph Takes Over, 1942/01/07 (1942)’; . However, copies of a short film titled Lambeth Walk – Nazi Style (1941) may be found online. 1941 is also the date given by Jonathan McIntosh (2012); the website Public Domain Review lists it as 1942, whereas the IMDb.com trivia page for Triumph of the Will mentions a similar-sounding film titled Germany Calling (1941). Chris Meigh-Andrews (2006: 84) lists a film titled The Panzer Ballet (Charles Ridley, 1940), which is probably the same work; in his notes, Meigh-Andrews cautions against confusing it with Swinging the Lambeth Walk (Len Lye, 1939). This is likely a response to Jay Leyda (1964: 55) where the Lye film is given the description of Ridley’s work and a 1940 date. It is unlikely that Lye produced political found-footage f ilms, as his work was mainly hand-painted abstract colour animation (Le Grice 1977; Rees 2011; Pillai 2017). However, Scott MacKenzie (2007) cites a Swinging the Lambeth Walk (Charles Ridley, 1941) using the Lye title but describing the live-action piece. The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam website covers all bases in listing a Germany Calling/Lambeth Walk/Panzer Ballet (Charles Ridley, 1941) that was screened at its 1990 and 2005 Festivals. This footnote is what happens when you want to quickly check that you have a film’s name correct. 22 This is not accidental: as part of the events supporting the exhibition, Francesca Coppa gave a presentation titled ‘Remix Before YouTube’ (9 August 2013), leaving some traces of scholarly input into how vidding history is being framed in museum and gallery spaces.

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The exhibition’s name, Cut Up, returns to the persistent issue of what to call video and film works that are made from other, pre-existing film and video sources. The exhibition does not propose a general re-naming (homogenizing all works included as ‘remix’ or similar); choosing ‘cut’ preserves the implicit violence of video editing but recognizes that collaged images still remain recognizable even in their fractured state. The iconicity of the images resists such generalization. There is some overlap between other forms of moving image re-use online and the vid form: vids are not music videos but are similar to them; they are not typically about politicians but can communicate a political stance. Multifandom vids may combine highlights from mainstream or cult sources similar to a supercut but do so with much more rapid editing and with a focus on gestures. Vids are concerned with creating novel sequences of moving images, not auto-tuning political speeches into songs; vidding is much more about presenting an emotional response to popular culture than creating an ironic distance from it. These works—vids and other video pieces alike—are evidence of ways of seeing that are no less critical, intense, or actively engaged in media than those of recognized artists creating experimental works that re-use moving images. The Cut Up exhibition relocates the majority of its examples from domestic spaces and small convention audiences to the more public context of a museum exhibition. The exhibition’s website states that Cut Up is about online video and its precedents. By definition, online video is accessed through individual devices: while total views for a single clip may be in the millions, the physical space around a computer screen limits the size of the audience who can view together to significantly fewer than a cinema audience. Indeed, the number of people capable of gathering around a single computer screen is approximately the same number who could comfortably gather in a living room to watch a television broadcast. This is unlike vids, which have a history of being projected onto large screens at conventions as well as distributed online; as it happens, each vid in Cut Up was shown at least once at VividCon.23 Many of the non-vids in the exhibition are from a tradition that is based on viral-style link-sharing 23 Both Sides Now was shown in 2005; Temper of Revenge was shown f irst in 2003 and then again in two subsequent years; Data’s Dream was shown four times in its original form and twice as a ‘remaster’; Fannish Taxonomy premiered in 2005 (in the Club Vivid vidshow, which is a video dance party and not a traditional vidshow) and was shown in six subsequent years; I Put You There was part of the Premieres vidshow in 2006; and finally, Vogue premiered in the Club Vivid Show in 2007 and was subsequently seen in six later vidshows (per the vividcon.info database).

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online and therefore have a different assumption of who their audience will be. Cut Up collapsed museum/gallery space and domestic spaces by including links on its website to all but two of the exhibited works, allowing a version of the exhibition to exist in a facsimile of its original decentralized computer-based context. Interestingly, vidding proves elusive; the non-vids in the collection are available on YouTube and Vimeo, while of the vids, it is only Vogue (2007) that directs to YouTube. This reinforces the vid as parallel to, but not an equal part of, other forms of contemporary moving image re-use. Operating on a much larger scale than the MOMI exhibition, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2016 exhibition MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture was curated by Daina Augaitis, Bruce Grenville, and Stephanie Rebick, and the seven vids (including two of Kandy Fong’s slide shows) were critically framed in the exhibition catalogue by Francesca Coppa, a key scholar of vidding history. The exhibition was arranged around three ‘ages’: the ‘Age of Mass Media’ (here defined as quotation/collage), the ‘Age of Appropriation’ (street art), and the ‘Age of Post-Production’ (hacking/ remix). Much like with Cut Up, the vids were not positioned as contemporary digital art and were included in the section of the exhibition titled ‘Early 20th Century: Collage, Montage and Readymade at The Birth of Modern Culture’. Along with Both Sides Now and Data’s Dream (here given a date of 1993 and credited to Shadow Songs), which were both included in the Cut Up exhibition, MashUp also showed Something To Talk About (Kandy Fong, c. 1990s), The Test (here’s luck, 2010), Starships! (bironic, 2012), The Lightning Strike (obsessive24, 2012), and Flow (lim, 2013). Again, as with Cut Up, the four most recent vids have all been shown at the VividCon convention as well as having been circulated online. They are all by vidders whose work is well-regarded and popular, and they all show vidding in its most sophisticated light. MashUp shows vidding’s kinship to a wider and pervasive cultural practice spanning well over a century in which curious individuals use pieces of their mediated world to create new works that interrogate and explore their realities. Paraphrasing P. Adams Sitney and Akira Lippit, Carol Vernallis argues that ‘avant-gardists aim to reveal a system (formal or institutional) and critique it’ (2017: 258). By placing vids alongside works such as Rose Hobart and other films by Cornell, Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, and works from Bruce Conner—not to mention heavy hitters such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso—the exhibition brings vidding’s vernacular practice into a frame of reference that sees it as a unique contribution to the wider story of avant-garde art practice

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across many media forms.24 In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, Coppa emphasizes how vidding is not like other forms of moving image re-use in art or music video, arguing that emotion is at vidding’s core in terms of how vids ‘subvert the typical genres of film and television by emphasizing the expressive, the interior, and the felt over the exteriorized and distanced spectacle so typical of mass media’ (2016: 150). Through this intervention, Coppa offers a framing for vids and vidding to the gallery audience that examines how vids, which appear familiar to anyone conversant in collage/ compilation moving image work, have a history and lineage apart from other contemporary video mashups found online. Together, these exhibitions raise questions about the visibility of vids and vidding, not just as discoverable works on YouTube or viral video shared without context but in spaces—and for audiences—outside their usual distribution networks and subcultural exhibition spaces. The particular vids chosen and the aesthetic congruence between them also raises questions of how much more recent forms of vidding, such as YouTube-based communities that incorporate more diegetic sound from the source texts, will be historicized alongside the more traditional vidding approaches.

Distributing, Exhibiting, and Curating Vids The gallery and museum spaces of MashUp and Cut Up are not vids’ usual sites for distribution and exhibition. These legitimizing framings, which carefully situate a subcultural form of outsider video art for a broader public view, do not resemble the ways vids have been circulated by vidders and vidfans. What follows is largely a description of historical practices that have shifted since I began this research. Just as vidding fan conventions and LiveJournal blogs supplanted videotape distribution, in recent years, newer social media sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Vimeo have been taken up as platforms to market and stream vids. At the time of writing, I am only just starting to understand something of how the newest generation of YouTube-based vidders use tags and channel subscriptions to build and 24 Rose Hobart was initially made for gallery exhibition; at its premiere in a surrealist programme, Jodi Hauptman (1999) notes that films by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray were also screened alongside cartoons and newsreels. Salvador Dalí was present, and he reportedly ‘screamed that Cornell had stolen his ideas right out of his head’ (Hauptman 1999: 95) after seeing Cornell’s film. Rose Hobart’s premiere in a programme of other short films somewhat resembles a convention vidshow, which has persisted as a key distribution context for vids from the videotape-based conventions through to the present day.

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maintain their networks. Despite this latest platform shift and the end of the long-running VividCon convention in 2018, there is value in sketching out the particular spaces and contexts for vid-watching. Unlike more traditional television or film scholarship, where a living room and cinema are such normal sites of encounter for these forms as to not require explanation, I cannot assume that the contexts or locations of vids’ distribution and exhibition are generally familiar to a wider audience. Therefore, I draw here on my own experiences of watching and collecting vids in order to frame the analysis that follows in this book. My aim is not to attempt to produce an ethnographic study of vidding practice, but it is necessary to sketch these practices in order to provide a context in which to situate my later argument about the archival qualities of vids that emerge from a textual analysis of vid texts. To take vids seriously as texts in their own right, the aesthetic and textual qualities of the form may also be complemented by contextual information. I do acknowledge that my own experiences of vidding fandom have been an essential part of my research—primarily but not exclusively as a way of obtaining and viewing the texts I proposed to study. The observations that underpin my analyses in this section are based on my experiences with the circulation of vids online and offline, and I have relied upon tacit knowledge gained during my 15+ years of vid-watching (and as a consumer of other online and viral video) to be able to understand the norms and conventions of vid distribution and exhibition. This section also relies on assumptions and extrapolations made in light of my knowledge and understanding of the functions and capacities of videocassette recorders and personal computers as an interested and technologically literate individual. Anticipating the exploration in Chapter 4 of archives and collections, I examine the various material and experiential practices that surround the circulation of vids and demonstrate how these contexts enable the experience of shared fannish readings of texts based on ‘shared reference points’ and a ‘sense of a common past’ (Dayan and Katz 2011: 363) prompted by a vid’s use of recognizable clips. Here, the idea of ‘archive’ has a double meaning, addressing both a physical archive of videotape and hard drives and a metaphorical archive from which media fandom derives its ‘interpretive conventions’ and shared readings (Jenkins 1992: 239) in what has been labelled ‘memory-based digital making’ reliant on ‘actual and virtual archives’ (De Kosnik 2016: 8). In vids, the physical archive is used to write a history of the source films or television series but does so in reference to the communally constituted codes and conventions that guide fannish interpretation.

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To give context to Chapter 4’s consideration of the physical archive, this section discusses contemporary and past distribution networks that can mimic the distribution of official media. Fans have accomplished this, Constance Penley has argued, by ‘enthusiastically mimicking the technologies of mass-market cultural production’ (1991: 140). In the current digital context, there are several ways in which vids may be screened, shared, and stored. The exhibition and distribution of vids echo the distribution of television and film. The process of curating and commissioning vids for a convention screening programme slot (vidshow) at fan conventions resembles the curation of film festivals, with new vids submitted by their creators for a Premieres vidshow. Vids are distributed via compilation tapes, DVDs, and USB drives as well as via downloads; they are screened at conventions in programmes of older works and brand-new vids. DVD sets of vids premiering at conventions can sit alongside commercial home video and television box sets on a vidfan’s shelf. Currently, vids are typically watched either on a fan’s computer (desktop, laptop, or mobile device—typically in a living room or other domestic spaces) or at conventions (in vidshows, in informal groups gathered around laptops, or in hotel rooms). In playback, videotape compilations of vids were limited to a single possible sequence of vids, in contrast to the potential of on-the-fly playlist creation with digital files. However, compiling vids in a fixed sequence is not merely a relic of the videotape era, as vidder’s own DVD releases have a similar flow. On these vid releases, this sequence can often be determined by production order: in the course of my research, I have seen vids listed in chronological and reverse-chronological order. On vidders’ blogs, where a ‘round-up’ post containing links to all vids can be provided, vidders may choose to group their works by fandom. A similar curatorial strategy can be seen in vidders’ YouTube channels where playlists are used to group and direct a viewer’s interaction with the material on offer. While convention programming includes a mix of never-before-seen vids and existing works, the VividCon and VidUKon Premieres vidshows are a concentration of new works. At its height, VividCon premieres shows screened approximately 30 new vids; VidUKon has historically operated on a smaller scale. An analysis of VividCon’s convention programme books reveals that a vidshow typically has between 12-15 vids, of which one or two can be premieres. Conventions’ premiere lists, programme books, and online databases can act as a distribution catalogue, which is useful to the fan and researcher in the absence of a comprehensive database of vids. The VividCon and VidUKon conventions have maintained a library of previous vidshow discs, preserving the vidshow’s sequence of vids, and these were

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made available to attendees during the convention. Other conventions, such as Wiscon, post their vid track playlists online. Vid DVDs with the highest production values are typically those produced by conventions and vid-making collectives, though in recent years, vidders have started distributing their work on USB drives. The cover art on the DVD set produced by VividCon each year features the convention’s llama mascot ‘in costume’ as a different character, and the choice of character follows whatever has been a popular property that year: a Buffy-like vampire slayer, Captain Kirk, a Cylon, and so forth. In 2011, the cover art featured many different llamas to celebrate the convention’s tenth anniversary by referencing popular past fandoms. VidUKon has a similar strategy for its DVD cover art, using a bunny mascot. Both conventions’ DVD sets carry this homage-branding over to the discs themselves. Penley’s argument about fan productions’ mimicry of the media industry is particularly notable in relation to the custom-printed disc art for the VividCon 2010 DVD set, as these borrow the branding of Doctor Who (both the new series and the classic serials). This displays an affection for Doctor Who but is also a playful acknowledgement of the relationship between fanworks and the source material from which they are derived. Currently, however, most vids are distributed online through streaming sites for user-generated content; this practice mimics the networks’ ondemand services like iPlayer (BBC) and 4oD (Channel 4) as well as streaming subscription services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Vids are also available as direct downloads, mimicking the distribution of film and television in official capacities (such as, in limited markets, through Apple’s iTunes) and in bootleg contexts via peer-to-peer networks or digital lockers. Streamed vids may be ‘saved’ through bookmarking, though for reasons to be explored later, this is not a stable way to build a collection. Downloading copies of vids raises the issue of labelling (renaming) and sorting files so they may be easily retrieved. Penley characterizes creative fan practices as a vertically integrated industry with ‘control over every aspect of production, distribution, and consumption’ (1991: 140). Just as fan writers also act as editors, publishers, and publicists (cf. Penley 1991), vidders must similarly plan (locate the source video and audio), edit (having gained mastery over their editing apparatus or software), and release a vid (for exhibition and distribution). Penley’s argument regarding productive fans’ ‘relation, as women, to those technologies, through both the way they make decisions about how to use the technological resources available to them and the way they rewrite bodies and technologies in their utopian romances’ (1991: 140) is compelling and

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well-argued and need not be replicated here. With regards to distribution, the concept of a vid collection (an archive of vids) mirrors other practices associated with home video more generally—bootleg tape-sharing, DVD production, digital downloads—with familiar concerns of indexing, storage, and curatorial practice (cf. Gray 1992; Dinsmore 1998; Bjarkman 2004; Hilderbrand 2009). While the distribution of vids mimics the distribution of film and of television equally, it slightly favours film over television in certain specialized contexts. Special-event releases—such as premiering a vid at a convention—borrow more from a film festival premiere (a single screening to an exclusive audience, followed by a wider release) than a television series’ pilot episode (available broadly). The majority of aesthetic conventions developed by videotape vidders are still relevant to the discussion of vids in a digital context, as earlier and later iterations of the vid form ‘share an aesthetic tradition and an analytical impulse’ (Coppa 2008: 1.4) that bridge technological change. I am less concerned with the technical aspects of vid-making than with how the movement of vids as objects often follows the same paths as official media releases or of bootleg distribution. In this, vids are both a subsidiary form of film and of television and an alternative audio-visual medium (i.e. that which is not quite film or television but not sufficiently anything else). Two pieces of domestic technology are central to the distribution and archiving of vids: the videocassette recorder and its successor, the personal computer. Both the VCR and the computer are tools functioning as apparatuses that enable a fan’s own exploration and exploitation of their archive. As Penley describes it, the VCR became the site of the creation, distribution, and exhibition of the objects of fandom. Computers are complemented by optical disc (Blu-ray, DVD) players and digital video recorders (DVRs) in playback, but the computer is so far the only apparatus that allows for playback as well as the VCR’s particular interventions, such as duplicating episodes for redistribution, creating a backup for personal use, and acting as the basic technology for vidding.25 Penley notes that the VCR: along with the zine publishing apparatus, is the lifeblood of the fandom. The ubiquitous VCR allows fans to copy episodes for swapping or for closer examination of their slash possibilities, and provides the basic technology for producing songtapes [vids]. Fans are deeply invested in 25 At the time of writing, tablet computers are becoming viable vidding tools, due to increases in processing power and storage space, alongside the availability of mobile video editing apps.

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VCR technology because it is cheap, widely available, easy to use, and provides both escape and a chance to criticize the sexual status quo. As one beautifully embroidered sampler at a fan art auction put it, “The more I see of men, the more I love my VCR”. (1991: 146)

Within fandom, computers are as ubiquitous today as VCRs once were, as the stack of videotapes required for gathering and cuing clips has been replaced by high-capacity hard drives. The physical visibility of a vidding fan’s collection or archive is obscured by digital technology and not enumerated through material accumulation of videotape; however, the multifandom vid genre (explored in Chapter 4) makes the extensiveness of this collection visible in a different manner. Writing in the early 1990s, Penley notes that vidding was a less active practice than fan writing and zine publication owing in part to ‘the greater difficulty of access to video equipment, than to desktop publishing and photocopying technologies, which are often available in the fan’s own workplace and can be used even while on the job’ (1991: 145). As a more time-consuming and technically daunting form of fanwork, producing a vid requires a significant commitment of time (to learn the technology and to create the work itself) and money (to purchase the technology). However, the distribution of vids only requires the technology and patience necessary for basic duplication. When videotape predominated, any time-shifting television viewer with access to a second VCR—her own or borrowed from friends or family—could distribute videotape vids with as much ease as bootlegging home video. Today, it is the computer-using fan who accesses digital home video and vids alike. Beyond a direct industrial mimicry of the success and persistence of the official media’s home video releases, DVD/USB releases maintain vids’ connection to physical objects that can be collected and archived. There is an affective pleasure in handling a physical object. Digital storage media bears an extra burden of being the tangible manifestation (of sorts) of its less-tangible contents. A DVD can also alter how a vid is watched, moving the vidfan away from the choice offered by folders full of vids saved as digital files to the disc’s flow. The DVD’s sequence recalls the videotape-era compilations of several vids on a single tape (rather than a single tape for each separate vid, allowing for ease of storage and distribution). In the videotape era, fans would collect vids regardless of familiarity with the source material, ‘assuming that one day they may have a meaningful context’ for the works (Bacon-Smith 1992: 179). This practice also reveals the instability of vid supply. There is also a degree of familiarity and an archival

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confidence in the illusion of a more fixed version of the vids: a DVD is not vulnerable to hard drive failure but can be the victim of physical damage and technological obsolescence. Indeed, web links only show where a vid once could be found, recalling the experience of a historian whose archival work is frustrated by a ‘returned call-slip’ that confesses a desired file is long lost, ‘“destroyed by enemy action during the Second World War”’ (Steedman 2001: 68). Vidders do use streaming sites and digital lockers as distribution facilities, but vids distributed through these means can be subject to deletion because of inactivity (too long between downloads) or claims of infringement.26 Private server space for hosting digital video is one solution but is often dependent on the vidder’s own interest in maintaining this service. All too often, one might navigate to a personal website or a blog post only to find an inactive download link where once there had been a vid file. While the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) has since 2009 maintained member-owned servers in a bid ‘for a more secure relationship to digital space’ (Lothian 2012: 547), at the time of writing the OTW’s Archive of Our Own does not host video or audio directly and instead directs users to a list of ‘whitelisted’ external sites (2019). In Eve Ng’s experience, even the promise held by a request on a message board to re-post a vid was not usable, as ‘some of the download sites were no longer active by the time that [she] visited them’ (2008: 110). I have had similar (bad) luck in the course of my research, leading me to maintain a personal archive. As Jenkins argues, the accessibility of home video as a format allows for the same unobstructed circulation of vids as the videotape from which they are made (1992: 248). He notes that this circulation could lead to a lack of proper attribution of authorship, though he was wrong to state that vidders ‘lack the technology to generate their own credits’ (ibid.). Credit sequences are generated by filming hand-written notes, as with the Starsky and Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979) vid The Boy Can’t Help It (Kendra Hunter and Diane Barbour, c. 1980-1985), or added—potentially some years after the vid was first made—through early computer graphics, such as with the Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971) vid titled Who Can It Be Now? (Kathleen Reynolds and Mary E. Overstreet, c. 1981-1985). The three shots that open Who Can It Be Now? announce the names of the vidders, the song and the artist used, and a shot taken from the credits from Dark Shadows itself. 26 Vids are vulnerable to takedown orders. Some jurisdictions protect artistic transformations of copyrighted material, others expressly ban format-shifting, but enforcement of these laws are typically left to corporate policy relating to each platform.

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The Boy Can’t Help It also credits ‘PMG’, likely meaning actor Paul Michael Glaser. Crediting the key actor featured in a vid is not usual in more recent vids, which presume a different level of contextualization (through vidders’ notes and description or paratexts such as convention programmes) but has the benefit of introducing the character and actor that are the focus of this work. Early vidders were evidently not naïve about the circulation of their work; credits provide some assurance of continued attribution as fellow fans added these pieces to their own collections. Currently, vids may be distributed without appropriate attribution (credits, dedication, disclaimers) and may potentially be re-posted—for example, from a private host to a third-party YouTube account.27 Vids can be produced with watermarks unique to a vidder so that pilfered sequences can be identified, or they can be provided through streaming sites with a password-protection facility in order to (somewhat) regulate access to the work, or they can be uploaded in a compressed file format that requires a password, and so on. None of these methods will prevent unauthorized mirroring or re-attribution, but they do act as gatekeepers of sorts. In all these cases, credits sequences and watermarks affirm vids as authored texts rather than orphaned or anonymous works. Credits provide a way of cataloguing a vid collection constructed in compilation tapes; however, these identifying marks are a further way in which the vid text contains within itself textual traces of its authored, archival state. File-sharing increases the potential number of participants in this expression of fandom, as it allows for a more anonymous and geographically dispersed way of interacting with these works that does not require in-person interaction with other fans. This is a benefit to geographically dispersed fans and to lurkers. A vid can be downloaded with only page counts or stream views as traces, for example, whereas sharing a videotape would require face-to-face interaction or the use of mailing addresses connected to what fans sometimes refer to as one’s ‘wallet name’ (as opposed to a fannish pseudonym). The exhibition and circulation of vids as outlined here relates to the concept of the archive because the history of vids is knowable through individual vidders and vidfans and through institutions such as fan conventions, each maintaining their own collections of vids. This means new generations of vidders and vidfans can, if they so choose, access the history of the form through dedicated efforts of history-minded fans. The circulation of vids is 27 For example, Closer (T. Jonesy and Killa, 2003) has been removed from the vidders’ websites but is still available online due to re-posting by other users.

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important because sharing vids means sharing the analytical readings—the ‘discourses’ (cf. Bailey 2005)—of the contexts and individuals at play in creating the work. This discursive participation does not need to mean that every vid saved demands its own unique exegesis from every person who saves it, but publicizing a work—by recommending it in some way or sharing a collection with a friend—is a public recognition of a discursive position and a contribution to a history of the form and the source material.

Titanium and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman – Same Source, Different Conclusion I finish this chapter by bringing together vidding and avant-garde art practice in a comparison of two different responses to Wonder Woman (Warner Bros. Television, 1975-1979): one coming from the avant-garde world and the other a vid. These are two forms of moving image re-use, each of which comments on the source text. These have had different exhibition and distribution routes and demonstrate how vids have different aims and objectives to gallery-focused compilation/collage art. Vidding allows (or perhaps creates) space to reclaim representations that have previously been condemned. Dara Birnbaum’s video art piece Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978) is an attempt to demonstrate the patriarchal structure inherent in Wonder Woman by ‘unlocking some of the assumptions behind the programme’s message by highlighting and exaggerating its absurdity’ in particular in its special effects sequences (Meigh-Andrews 2006: 195). In contrast, the vid Titanium (Gianduja Kiss, 2012) takes the same clips that Birnbaum argued were symptomatic of women’s oppression in Wonder Woman and re-presents them with additional material from the series as an affirmation of independent female agency.28 Birnbaum’s piece has arguably lost its critical edge over the years, meaning that it fails to convey its analysis: contemporary audiences of the video piece see Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Linda Carter) but not her representational systems of oppression (Demos 2010). The fascination of the image endures, not the anti-television criticism. What emerges is a possible way to successfully return to the Wonder Woman series without problematic narratives undermining what an image alone could be made to represent (as per Penley’s comment about subtext in slash fiction). The vid does not 28 Some material in this section previously appeared in print as ‘To Watch Wonder Woman’ (Stevens 2015).

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attempt to excuse or explain contradictory elements of the character’s representation, but it takes the pleasurable images—a beautiful woman with superpowers at the centre of her own narrative—and responds to the fascination such representations still hold for an audience. There are many vids that focus on the presentation of attractive male bodies, but the vid form is not limited to a simple inversion of women watching men: many other vids present female bodies for the vidfan’s viewing pleasure. However, as many of these feature women in action and science fiction genres and focus on movement and motion as well as narrative/ generic contexts, they arguably reveal these vidding fans’ evident pleasure in watching attractive women in active roles. Underlying these issues is the question of what it means for a female spectator to watch women on screen. I will return to this issue in Chapter 5, but for the moment I will quickly draw attention to Jackie Stacey’s non-psychoanalytic response (1988) to Laura Mulvey’s foundational essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) to discuss the overlap of desire and identification in film and television texts, which suggests that the pleasures of such spectatorship is not essentially masochistic. According to T.J. Demos, Mulvey’s essay was the ‘signal text’ (2010: 50) guiding Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. This piece is an attempt to demonstrate the patriarchal structure inherent in the Wonder Woman television series as indicative of the media’s unconscious tendency to offer oppressive representations of women. Demos (2010: 2) cites this video as ‘prefiguring’ current forms of moving image re-use, but its 1978-79 production date places it between Kandy Fong’s first proto-vid slide show in 1975 and the first VCR vids of the early 1980s. Birnbaum relied on friends with access to professional video recorders (ibid.: 4). Although consumer video recorders were available ‘as early as 1975’, these had only reached 25 percent of US households a decade later (Hilderbrand 2009: 36). Interestingly, by 1985 Birnbaum had abandoned her critiques of television because ‘the proliferation of home video equipment has enabled almost anyone to create his or her own deconstructions’ (Reidy 1985: 61). Birnbaum’s video work in this era is described by Robin Reidy as ‘dense video and aural collages that examined as well as undermined television’ (1985: 61). The back cover of the Vancouver Art Gallery MashUp exhibition catalogue is a photo of the piece in one of its exhibition contexts: as an installation, presented for public view in the window of a New York hair salon. However, Birnbaum’s piece has lost its critical edge over the years, meaning that it fails to convey its condemnatory analysis of Wonder Woman as a series. This is an issue with the contradictory signification of Wonder Woman herself, who was created as a female Superman, an ‘attempt to join

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feminine strength and power with allure and beauty’, leaving her a contested figure ‘either as a feminist icon, celebrated for her superior abilities, physical power and independence, or as a sex object, denigrated as a crass product of commercial exploitation’ (Demos 2010: 19). The ‘rapid fire editing’ of Birnbaum’s piece ‘entirely eliminates the narrative from the original TV series, leaving only the fantasy element’ and results in a visual spectacle of special effects disconnected from purpose or context (Meigh-Andrews 2006: 172). Unlike a vid, Birnbaum manipulated the audio source as well as the video, looping pieces of the Wonder Woman theme song to achieve the same aural effect as the video’s focus on sequences of Diana spinning. Demos refutes Birnbaum’s assertion that Technology/Transformation is a resounding blow against the sexualized representation of women, arguing that this interpretation is perhaps guilty of ‘overestimating the masochistic nature of women’s identifying with the forces of sexual objectification and commodification, or in dismissing the transformative energy that Birnbaum’s video contains and unleashes as part of a tradition of oppositional and emancipatory image-making’ (2010: 73-74). Perhaps one difficulty with using this iteration of psychoanalysis to read works that re-use moving images is signalled in the title of Mulvey’s essay: neither Birnbaum’s work nor vids are the ‘narrative cinema’ of Hitchcock’s Hollywood. The removal of narrative from image evacuates the original subject position, though Demos (ibid.: 20) notes Birnbaum’s consternation that women and children would uncritically enjoy the (to her) obvious sexual objectification of Diana as/and Wonder Woman and not see the structures of patriarchal oppression. This creates a problem of ambiguity/ambivalence in its ‘affirmative collusion with its object of critique’ (ibid.: 6); the final work shows only the image of Wonder Woman, not the series Wonder Woman, that is, the narrative structures from which the character was taken. Demos adds the caveat that Birnbaum’s work is ‘not a simple attack [since] an element of fascination remains evident’ (ibid.: 49). The video is a success of feminist video art not because it critiques an oppressive representation but because it accidentally releases that representation from its structures of oppression. Michael Pigott, in discussing the found footage films of Joseph Cornell and Ken Jacobs, notes that a ‘key characteristic’ of that work is the ‘removal of structures in order to reveal or release something contained, or latent, within the footage’ (2013: 10). In this context, it is arguable that Birnbaum unintentionally released Wonder Woman herself, or at least the notion of gendered representation, by removing the structures of narrative. The vid Titanium communicates the positive, affirmative aspects of the series because it does not attempt to constrain the representation. The vid presents

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the series in a more positive light than Birnbaum’s work, with impassioned vocal performance (from Sia, in a song by DJ David Guetta) and lyrical affirmation of emotional strength—‘I’m criticized, but all your bullets ricochet | You shoot me down, but I won’t fall | I am titanium’—matched with clips of Diana blocking bullets with her bracelets and other super-powered feats of physical strength. These take the song’s metaphor literally, allowing this image of Wonder Woman to overcome the limitations of the series to create a version of the character who is aware of her physical abilities and ability to overcome doubts and criticism levelled at her. The work of the vid is in negotiating the fascination and draw that these images have for a specific fannish audience, and this is used to tactically engage with media to find positive representations in texts generally assumed to be made for other audiences.29 As stated earlier, this vid responds to—and amplifies—the potential pleasures of viewing and understanding Diana’s role in the narrative and the value her representation can hold for a willing audience. Technology/Transformation ‘eliminates the TV show’s storyline and instead draws on the imagery for its own deconstructive, analytical purpose’ (Demos 2010: 48), using clips from the television series as well as the opening credits song, manipulating both image and sound. According to Chris MeighAndrews, Technology/Transformation ‘was one of the earliest video art tapes to appropriate broadcast television material as part of a critical strategy’ (2006: 170). The repetition of clips in this work is apparently ‘a simple multiple repeat-edit strategy to critique and deconstruct the fantasy TV programme, unlocking some of the assumptions behind the programme’s message by highlighting and exaggerating its absurdity’ (ibid.: 171). Meigh-Andrews does not expand on these ‘assumptions’; one assumption in episodic television, taking John Ellis’s work (1982) into consideration, is that an established scenario will repeat in the subsequent episodes. Ellis writes that the ‘characteristic mode’ of television narrative ‘is not one of final closure or totalising vision; rather, it offers a continuous refiguration of events’ (1982: 147). Birnbaum’s response to Wonder Woman’s structure as an episodic series strives to emphasize the cumulative impact of ‘oppressive’ special effects; the vidder Gianduja Kiss finds in the repetition an accumulation of Wonder Woman’s good works, using the narrative repetition in episodes of the series as evidence of her constant use of superpowers to help others and thwart evil. 29 Titanium shows Diana’s interaction with femininity (in clothing stores, rejecting men’s advances) as something she overcomes to be herself. The vid’s criticism is levelled at a broader cultural context rather than the specific series or medium. However, this critique operates in tension with the vid’s otherwise uncomplicated presentation of the Wonder Woman costume.

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In neither work does the act of transformation refer to a specific narrative; instead, both address the issue of representation. Demos argues that Birnbaum’s purpose in using the spinning sequences is to expose the betrayal of the television series’ feminist possibilities: Diana spins in isolation and achieves nothing, in an illusion of emancipatory female power (2010: 21). In Titanium, three different transformation clips are used and are placed at the start of sequences that show Diana using her powers to deflect bullets, stop moving vehicles with seemingly minimal effort, and perform other feats of strength. As with Birnbaum’s work, the narrative context for the action is removed and the clips are given a different purpose; however, unlike Birnbaum, Gianduja Kiss presents these clips in a causal sequence that justifies this action. Diana spins in order to transform her costume, she transforms in order to use her powers, and then uses her powers to help people. The sequences are structured such that her spin begins at the end of the chorus, just as the word ‘titanium’ is heard, thereby captioning this motion (and subsequent transformation) as the moment where Diana is at her strongest or most resilient. There is a forward motion and purpose to her actions: she is not trapped alone and struggling in an endless cycle of exploitation created by ‘the manipulative spectacle of special effects’ (Demos 2010: 21). Titanium also benefits from its temporal distance from the Wonder Woman series, as Carter’s sometimes stiff and awkward performance in the role has its own appeal; also, special effects that may once have seemed invasive or dishonest now appear harmless and primitive. However, this does not account for the (retrospective) pleasure of watching bodies in action. As the special effects (as reproduced in Technology/Transformation and Titanium alike) seem to be mostly practical effects and some postproduced flashes of light, there is an authenticity (or perhaps fidelity) that can be read into a version of the character that is an embodied rather than computer-generated performance. Titanium ends with an extended sequence that commences at the climax of the song, showing Diana recruiting, training with, and being rescued by various other women. One way to read this trajectory in the vid is that women within the series, upon meeting Wonder Woman, are inspired to fight alongside her; another possible (simultaneous) reading is that women watching the vid can similarly be included in Wonder Woman’s feminist project. Significantly, the shot that immediately precedes this sequence is another clip of a spinning transformation. Again, Diana is not shown ‘continually spinning around in circles but getting nowhere’ (Demos 2010: 21) but immediately after the costume transformation is shown running alongside Wonder Girl and other Amazons.

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In this sequence, the many different female characters shown with Wonder Woman creates an invitation for the viewer to be her companion in her quest for justice. In this, her costume takes on a different meaning: in the many clips, none of which repeat and therefore have the effect of being individual examples, the costume is only one element in a sequence that emphasizes her interaction with the other female characters on screen. When taken in the context of her actions, the low-cut top, short skirts, and skin-tight briefs do more than present the character as a sexualized spectacle/fetish: her interaction with other women within the frame (themselves in similar costumes) destabilizes the singularity and limitation of her presentation as mere fetishized subject of a male gaze. Finally, to situate Titanium in terms of distribution and exhibition, this vid was made for the wintertime Festivids vid exchange. Festivids is a ‘Secret Santa’ style exchange modelled on the Yuletide fanfiction event in which ‘gifts’ of vids (or, in the case of Yuletide, stories) are given anonymously, with vidder and recipient having been matched based on their nominated fandoms for which there are not a significant number of extant fanworks. For a period of a few weeks, the vids are available in an ‘unsigned’ format, with exchange participants and non-participating fans responding to the works without knowing the identity of the vidder. The vidders’ identities are subsequently revealed. Titanium was made as a gift in this exchange and therefore was first distributed online. However, as a vid that resonated with a wide audience, it was picked up by VJs programming vidshows for fan conventions. It was shown at VidUKon 2013 in a vidshow collecting the highlights from the most recent Festivids, and it was shown four times at VividCon, three times at the Club Vivid dance party vidshow (in 2013, 2015, and 2016), and in 2017’s ‘Inspiration’ vidshow. The vid’s primary audience was arguably the individual Festivids viewers at home on their computers, but its exhibition sites have included both traditional vidshows, where audiences sit in silence to watch the VJ’s curated programme, and Club Vivid, during which it is expected that convention-goers will sing and dance along with the vids. The vid’s multiple forms of exhibition enable different kinds of engagement with the text, from a close and careful re-viewing of the text to a kinaesthetic experience on a different scale. Titanium and Technology/Transformation take the same images and offer two different kinds of resistant readings, each of which make sense to the editor and immediate audience. As Coppa argues, the subversive or critical work of vids is not found at the level of ‘distanced spectacle’ but in ‘appealing strongly to the emotions’ and working with interiority (2016: 150). The emotional intimacy possible in vids allows for re-constructing potentially problematic source material in ways that emphasize positive readings of

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the text. This is not to say the vid eliminates these less favourable readings, but it offers a version of the text that holds the conflicting representations in tension and demonstrates a way of watching Wonder Woman that finds and displays the pleasurable and empowering aspects of the series.

Conclusion This chapter has addressed the political implications of different kinds of moving image re-use and ways of understanding these media forms, which help us to see vids in ways beyond that which is offered by the previous chapter’s framing of vids and vidding within television studies and fan studies. Vids have been circulated and exhibited in fan screening spaces that bear a closer resemblance to film or gallery exhibitions as well as in living rooms and other domestic contexts. This chapter has discussed the vid form in dialogue with some established theorizations of proximate forms to the vid in order to demonstrate the unique focus of vids and the ways in which vids’ construction and sites of encounter overlap with commercial and gallery forms of moving image re-use. Primarily, the descriptions and experiences of experimental works tend to position visual pleasure or fascination as parts of media that are negative, seductive, or part of an oppressive structure of representation and therefore must be deconstructed. Vids may include such criticisms, but they also ‘show off’ images that are themselves sources of pleasure and use clips to create pleasurable critical analyses of film and television texts. In Chapter 4, I return to specific examples of found footage film and video art pieces to explore how vids demonstrate viewing practices grounded in broad and enthusiastic consumption. However, an understanding of the vid form’s approach to images outlined in this chapter—separated from narrative context and recombined to create pleasurable and/or critical texts—will continue to inform the analysis of vids throughout the rest of this book.

List of Works Cited Archive of Our Own, ‘What sites can I use for hosting multimedia files? | Posting and Editing FAQ’. Archive of Our Own. No date. [accessed 1 February 2019] Arnold, Gina, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard, eds., Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

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Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) Barefoot, Guy, ‘Recycled Images: Rose Hobart, East of Borneo, and The Perils of Pauline’, Adaptation, 5.2 (2011), 152-168 Bjarkman, Kim, ‘To Have and to Hold: The Video Collector’s Relationship with an Ethereal Medium’, Television & New Media, 5.4 (2004), 217-246 Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009) Chion, Michel, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) Coppa, Francesca, ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 1 (2008), no page. — ‘A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 107-113 — ‘Vidding: The Art of Flow,’ in MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture, ed. by Daina Augaitis, Bruce Grenville, and Stephanie Rebick (Black Dog Publishing, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016), pp. 150-153 Corner, John, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 1-9, 211-13. Excerpted in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered VinitzkySeroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 361-364 De Kosnik, Abigail, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016) Demos, T.J., Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (London, UK: Afterall Books, 2010) Desjardins, Mary, ‘“Meeting Two Queens”: Feminist Film-Making, Identity Politics, and the Melodramatic Fantasy’, Film Quarterly, 48.3 (1995), 26-33 Dinsmore, Uma, ‘Chaos, Order and Plastic Boxes: The Significance of Videotapes for the People who Collect Them’, in The Television Studies Book, ed. by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 315-326 Donnelly, K.J., ‘Experimental Music Video and Television,’ in Experimental British Television, ed. by Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 166-179 Ellis, John, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) ‘Exhibition: Cut Up’, Museum of the Moving Image, no date. [accessed 19 May 2014] Festivids, no date. [accessed 9 May 2014]

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‘Festivids: Frequently Asked Questions.’ Festivids: Fannish Vidding Exchange, no date. [accessed 19 February 2018] ‘Germany Calling/Lambeth Walk/Panzer Ballet’, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, no date. [accessed 21 March 2018] Gow, Joe, ‘Music Video as Communication: Popular Formulas and Emerging Genres’, Journal of Popular Culture, 26.2 (1992), 41-70 Grainge, Paul, ed., Ephemeral Media (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2011) Gray, Ann, Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology (London: Routledge, 1992) ‘Groudbreaking Exhibition on Mashup Culture to Occupy Entire Vancouver Art Gallery,’ Vancouver Art Gallery: Media Room, 22 January 2016. [accessed 21 March 2018] Halperin, Moze, ‘The Mother Of All Supercuts: “Cut Up” Brings The Best of YouTube To The Museum,’ VICE: Creators, 16 July 2013. [accessed 21 March 2018] Hatch, Kevin, Looking for Bruce Conner (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012) Hauptman, Jodi, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999) Hilderbrand, Lucas, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) Holdsworth, Amy, Television, Memory and Nostalgia (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) Le Grice, Malcolm, Abstract Film and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1977) Leyda, Jay, Films Beget Films: A Study of Compilation Film (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) Lothian, Alexis, ‘Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16.6 (2012), 541-556 MacKenzie, Scott, ‘The Horror, Piglet, The Horror’, Cineaction, 72 (2007), 8-15 Malitsky, Joshua, Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) McIntosh, Jonathan, ‘A History of Subversive Remix Video before YouTube: Thirty Political Video Mashups Made between World War II and 2005’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed. by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special

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issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. McWhirter, Andrew, ‘Film criticism, film scholarship and the video essay,’ Screen, 56.3 (2015), pp. 369-377 Meigh-Andrews, Chris, A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006) Mulvey, Laura, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006) Museum of the Moving Image, ‘Museum of the Moving Image – Visit – Calendar – Remix Before YouTube: A Presentation by Francesca Coppa,’ no date. [accessed 21 March 2018] Ng, Eve, ‘Reading the Romance of Fan Cultural Production: Music Videos of a Television Lesbian Couple’, Popular Communication, 6.2 (2008), 103-121 Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) Noordegraaf, Julia, ‘Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan’, in Technologies of Memory in the Arts, ed. by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 172-187 Penley, Constance, ‘Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology’, in Technoculture, ed. by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 135-161 Pigott, Michael, Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) Pillai, Nicholas, Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017) Railton, Diane, and Paul Watson, Music Video and the Politics of Representation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) Rees, A.L., A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2011) Reidy, Robin, ‘Pop-Pop Video’, American Film (January-February 1985), 61-62 Rogers, Holly, ‘Audiovisual Dissonance in Found-Footage Film,’ in The Music and Sound of Experimental Film, ed. by Holly Rogers and Jeremy Barham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 185-204 Stacey, Jackie, ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’, in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. by Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London, UK: The Woman’s Press, 1988), pp. 112-129 Steedman, Carolyn, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) Stevens, E. Charlotte, ‘To Watch Wonder Woman’, Feminist Media Studies, 15.5 (2015), 900-903

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Straw, Will, ‘Pop Music and Postmodernism in the 1980s’, in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3-21 Svegaard, Sebastian F.K., ‘Critical Vidders: Fandom, Critical Theory and Media’, Akademisk Kvarter, 11 (2015), 104-114 Turk, Tisha, ‘Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 9.2 (2015), 163-76 Vernallis, Carol, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) — Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) — ‘Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music,’ in The Music and Sound of Experimental Film, ed. by Holly Rogers and Jeremy Barham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 257-281 VidUKon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] VividCon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] ‘Vividcon Vid Database | Videos Shown at 2017 Inspiration’, no date. [accessed 31 March 2018] Wees, William C., ‘Found Footage and Questions of Representation’, in Found Footage Film, ed. by Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele (Luzern: VIPER/ zyklop, 1992), pp. 37-53 — ‘The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in Avant-Garde Found-Footage Films’, Cinema Journal, 41.2 (2002), 3-18 ‘Yuletide’, While We Tell of Yuletide Treasure: The Obscure Fandom Fiction Exchange Project, no date. [accessed 9 May 2014] Zryd, Michael, ‘Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99’, The Moving Image, 3.2 (2003), 40-61

4

Textures of Fascination: Archives, Vids, and Vernacular Historiography Abstract What does the analysis of vids reveal about histories, memories, and practices of watching television? This chapter compares contrasting theoretical understandings of collections and archives to contextualize the archival work done by vidders and watched by vids’ audiences. Videotape-era vids (then called ‘songtapes’) bear traces of their archival origins as selective use of clips, and the wear evident on the copies strongly indicate a viewer’s favourite moments, telling a story of practices of re-viewing, interpretation, and memorialization of texts. These archival traces are visible on the vids themselves and chronicle the unofficial distribution networks of videotape and the returning to favourite scenes that cause wear on the tape itself. These personal historiographies are presented in the content and texture of a vid. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, archives, videotape, Star Trek

This chapter is concerned with the practical and material dimensions of vids.30 Central to this are the following assertions: vids originate in personal archives; they describe a history of home video; and they themselves act as an archive in collating, organizing, and memorializing a body of work. My concern is the vid’s place within the context of changing home video technology, specifically the creation and maintenance of home video collections that provide vidders with their raw material. The materiality of the vid form exists beyond the transformation that occurs when video clips are re-edited into new works. This chapter explores the traces of that materiality. Throughout this book, I use home video to encompass television episodes recorded off broadcast television (onto videotape, DVD, or hard drive), films obtained in the same manner, as well as film and television sold in 30 Some material in this chapter previously appeared in print as ‘On Vidding’ (Stevens 2017b).

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch04

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pre-recorded formats, obtained directly or duplicated from existing recordings. This duplication may be through tape-to-tape dubbing, format-shifting, or downloading a copy of a file. Home video collections will often include recordings of both television and film, and there is no useful reason to separate film from television in instances when their distribution and storage is so similar. Vids are made from both film and television sources—often separately, but vids will mix media—and therefore vids embody this technical parity. What matters is the availability (and quality) of clips necessary to make vids. As will be shown in this chapter’s Star Trek examples, to make vids of a franchise with narrative continuity across television and film will require the use of both kinds of source material. A vid is made by an individual who uses their personal media collections—music and home video alike—selecting and editing together songs and clips from recorded media in their possession. These collections have a dual presence comprised of physical videotapes, DVDs, and/or other digital storage formats and the media content contained therein. This tension between housing and content highlights the differences between a collection of home video and other kinds of collections: home video is reproducible, and the intangible contents—recordings on magnetic tape, digital files—are not fixed to (or determined by) their physical form. As is explored below, wide-scale consumer access to the means of creating one’s home video collection began with the videocassette recorder. Consequently, videotape as an object and embodying an aesthetic is an important part of this chapter. The CDs, DVDs, and hard drives on which digital video is stored are all physical objects that require shelf space. Since these collections are built from time-shifted broadcast sources or format-shifted media, it follows that vids made out of these collections carry traces of that transformation. The obvious dislocation of clips from the broadcast flow carries with it a bootleg aesthetic (Hilderbrand 2009) that lends an archival textuality to vidding as the borrowing of clips from a collection—borrowed, not excised, because the original clip is not destroyed (and was not in fact the original to begin with)—and leads the vid’s viewer back to its source material. This chapter focuses on Star Trek (NBC, 1966-9) vids as a model for thinking about film and television spectatorship based on home media.31 31 Star Trek was not the only series used as source for videotape vids. In my research, I viewed vids made from videotape recordings of The Man From UNCLE (NBC, 1964-68), I Spy (NBC, 1965-68), Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-71), Alias Smith and Jones (ABC, 1971-73), Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-79), The Professionals (ITV, 1977-83), Blake’s 7 (BBC1, 1978-81), Riptide (NBC, 1983-86), and Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-93).

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Significantly, Star Trek vids that use clips from both the original series and the films point to an erasure of medium specificity in a home media context. Obtaining copies of Star Trek episodes enables the collector to re-visit these moments; if episodes are subsequently edited into a vid, the clips chosen will have a similar function for the vid’s audience in constructing a path through the show (see Gray 2010). The move from videotape to digital vidding has enabled more rapid editing. However, despite an increased pace and potential for complexity in digital vids, descriptions of how songtapes (videotape vids) were made, distributed, screened, and understood are similar to the present digital form. The close textual analysis of videotape vids, therefore, reveals a process of fan/vernacular historiography in which the clips’ aesthetics show the source material’s history in home media collections. Vids are made out of the history of film and television, and this is sometimes very recent history in the case of a series just aired or a film just released. To consider vids as archival, in relation to the broader ‘archival turn’ in the humanities, is to illuminate specific forms and practices of the vid and, to a lesser extent, of vidders and vidfans. As technologies for home viewing erase the material difference between film and television sources, histories of television, in particular, must recognize the breadth of home video—which includes, for example, off-air broadcast recordings of films alongside television episodes. Vids are the direct result of these technological and material changes; the devices that have historically complicated theories of broadcasting (for example, time-shifting and downloading) are the same devices on which vids are made. Vidding can thus be seen as a variety of amateur film and television historiography: vids are constructed to communicate a reading of a historical source product and to represent a critical perspective on that source. This chapter will also consider the purpose of an archive and what distinguishes a collection from an archive in relation to a way of thinking about vidding as a form of vernacular historiography. In Chapters 5 and 6, I discuss the visual and narrative pleasures contained in vids, but in this chapter I analyse vids as audio-visual documents that present an interpretation of the experience and collective memory of fandom, constructed when personal media collections are used archivally. This is not to say that being an archivist, curator, or historian (professional or not) precludes a personal relationship with archives. A collection, however, is most commonly the work of an individual for his or her own reasons and edification and in response to discourses of taste (Clifford 1988; Pearce 1995; Geraghty 2014). An archive emerges from a different scale of individual participation, built

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over many years and by many people, to capture documents and artifacts for future study. Drawing these distinctions into the muddiness of fandom as it is practiced shows these categories to be fluid: I might collect vids for my own personal enjoyment, but if I tap into that collection to curate a vidshow, surely that collection has now become an archive. When a vidshow list from a convention is posted online with links to the vids shown, the ‘private’/ticketed con space is opened to public view. However, where I f ind this collection/archive disctinction interesting and useful is in how vids get made in the first place: television episodes, films, and other media used for vids are not typically made to be put to further use in creative works. This chapter is divided into four parts. First, I will discuss what is at stake in thinking of an object as collectable or archival and the implications (in purpose and value) of gathering objects together. Thinking of home video objects in terms of archives and collections helps to understand how these concepts relate to the vid form. The personal collection becomes archival when it is put to use. Second, this chapter details how vids themselves have been collected and/or archived. This will include a discussion of contemporary and past distribution networks and will support Constance Penley’s observation that fan practices mimic the production, distribution, and exhibition cycle of official media (1991: 140). Indeed, the methods of accessing vids mimic the distribution life of the television and film sources of those very vids. Vids are parallel to, and are a product of, the distribution and exhibition of film and television. The third section is an analysis of the aesthetic of vids made out of the personal collections of individual fans, in relation to the bootleg qualities of home video. This section is indebted to Lucas Hilderbrand’s work on the erotics of videotape and the freedoms of bootlegging and will demonstrate vidders’ use of a private collection to create a public work, showing evidence of how fan audiences watched a text, and most importantly, how that watching leaves its own archival traces. Finally, this chapter concludes with a closer look at three Star Trek vids made in the last decade to illustrate how vids can evoke their archival origins. This will build on the idea of the ‘archive’ established in the first section and elaborated through subsequent sections’ demonstrations of how vids can look and feel archival, how they can be ‘textually archival’ and in their form reflect an archival aesthetic. A further concern is with the representation of memory, as these works interact with Star Trek by constructing a kind of historiography based on an imagined shared experience of a media text, and with the formal representation of memory in film and television.

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Collection and Archive Vids are made out of personal home media collections and reveal home media as a potentially rich archival source. This chapter compares contrasting theoretical understandings of collections and archives to contextualize the archival practices of vidders and the resulting vids themselves. A fruitful distinction can be made between a collection and an archive insofar as each relates to the use/utility of home media objects. Videotape vids bear traces of their archival origins in the selective use of clips, and the wear evident on the copies strongly indicate a viewer’s favourite moments, telling a historical story about practices of re-viewing and interpreting texts. The home media collection has therefore created conditions for media fans’ creative expression and critical analysis. Recalling Jonathan Gray’s argument that vids offer a look at a fan’s ‘path through a text’ similar to marginalia, I suggest that vids provide textual evidence of a kind of spectatorship—and relationship with home video formats—that is largely unaccounted for in media studies. Vids have an intimate relationship with the history of media in the home: vids are made out of time-shifted television and film sources, and the development of the form occurred as domestic media technologies became more sophisticated and enabled more control. In discussions of cult media, syndication has been offered as an accidental but significant condition for the production of cult audiences: by enabling a return to a text through repeat broadcast, goes the argument, scheduling allows an individual to intensify her involvement with a text (see Reeves, Rodgers, and Epstein 1996). However, the ability to record, save, and revisit programmes and films is characteristic of the last several decades of media consumption (see Klinger 2011). Time-shifting—recording for later playback—enabled audiences to keep and collect bits of broadcast television, constructing their own potential archive of media. This has been complemented by pre-recorded videotapes and subsequent formats. Indeed, Lincoln Geraghty (2014) notes that the return of beloved past television series on DVD is part of the contemporary experience of being a fan of cult media. Within television studies, audiences’ use of videotape as an archival medium has been understood as part of their changing relationship with television broadcasting. This practice has been characterized as gendered: Ann Gray’s description of domestic videotape use notes a ‘predominantly male’ adherence to ‘the assumption that there will be more than one viewing of the product’ (1992: 216). However, given the predominance of women in media fandom (as discussed in Chapter 1), the existence of videotape vids indicates a different kind of women’s viewing beyond a delayed experience

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of broadcast television and the fact that these tapes were not immediately re-used for more time-shifting. Constance Penley (1991) notes that syndication and time-shifting of Star Trek enabled the emergence of slash fiction based on that series in the 1970s. This occurred ‘as fans recognized, through seeing the episodes countless times in syndication and on their own taped copies, that there was an erotic homosexual subtext there, or at least one that could easily be made to be there’ (Penley 1991: 137, emphasis in original). The communities established by these attentive and productive fans supported the production of fan fiction of all genres as well as other forms of fanwork—including vids. Importantly, it is videotape technology that enables repeat fannish viewing and subsequent analysis. Videotape’s archival potential is also part of the audience’s changing relationship with film, as home video led to a ‘domestication’ of cinema (Dinsmore 1998: 315). Television is persistently considered a domestic medium; however, through videotape and home video technologies, both media can be experienced on an equal footing. In her work on videotape-sharing communities, Kim Bjarkman describes a group of ‘avid fan-collectors’ for whom the VCR’s ability for time-shifting becomes, as she argues, ‘a tool for place-shifting’ (2004: 219, emphasis in original). International tape-sharing communities (now supplemented by digital file-sharing) allow these collectors to build multiple collections containing duplicate artifacts; the movement of tapes is not the relocation of objects but rather their reproduction. Bjarkman argues that these ‘self-styled media historians’ are engaged in ‘resisting the impermanence of television and of memory by preserving physical records of cherished television moments’ (2004: 239). Hilderbrand argues that Bjarkman’s ‘research subjects—and Bjarkman herself—act as curators’ of television (2009: 64). This collection must be accessible to the potential vidder in a format that allows for its manipulation and duplication and in a context where these materials are available beyond broadcast flow and in excess of official home video releases. The distinction between a collection and an archive—as two ways to think about grouping material objects—prompts two questions central to this chapter: what is a home media collection, and how may it be used archivally? I assert that a vid is made out of a personal collection that through the practice of vidding is being treated as an archive. The difference between a collection and an archive rests not on intrinsic properties of the objects archived or collected but in the imagined potential use of the objects themselves. The idea of an archive promises something public, something to do with governance, something related to official sources, or—through historians’ efforts—something that has the potential to become

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part of an official record or history. These connotations persist despite many archives being accessible only to ‘professional’ researchers—academics, historiographers, and others granted access by archives’ gatekeepers—and therefore only available to a select few members of the public. To return this to a fan context, ticketed events such as conventions are not open to a broader public, but publication of vidshow screening lists, convention programmes, and other outward-facing activity (liveblogging a panel; writing up a con report) make these activities ‘public’. Fans’ efforts to archive, be that in a structured way (Einwächter 2015; De Kosnik 2016) or unofficially (O’Neill 2015), are typically directed towards fellow fans interested in engaging with fannish pasts in a variety of forms. In contrast to the orderly connotations of an archive’s formation as potentially indiscriminate but ultimately useful, a ‘collection’ often implies a gathering together of objects for the gratification of the collector alone. The objects of a collection can be intensely significant to the collector: Susan Pearce argues that they offer ‘an enclosed and private world, where collections mirror and extend [the collectors’] bodies and souls’ (1995: 21). As a starting place to think about how home media collections may be used archivally and therefore creatively, these value-laden connotations offer implications for the access and use of, and the public/private split between, these objects. Where a collection is understood as something personal and self-directed—see, for example, collecting merchandise and memorabilia ‘to connect with the histories of [fans’] favourite media texts’ (Geraghty 2014: 2)—an archive has active potential as something that can be put to use. I will confess that my interest in this distinction arose in part from not wanting to see ‘collecting’ and ‘archiving’ used as synonyms. I believe there is value in thinking through the different ontologies of a piece of media. This is not about whether a particular group of objects is definitively ‘collected’ or ‘archived’ but rather how videotapes, DVDs, and video files can occupy both positions: how what might otherwise be thought of as a mere collection is presented and used as an archive. In the videotape era, fans could share and augment their archives by duplicating videocassettes, sometimes trading tapes internationally (Dinsmore 1998; Gauntlett and Hill 1999; Bjarkman 2004). Presently, it is possible for personal digital archives to be transported and transferred via external hard drive. As I have observed in my involvement with fan communities, a culture of fan-to-fan sharing persists outside of official networks, placing both these collections and the resulting works in the realm of the amateur. The private media collection can be used to produce amateur historiography using the vid form, which muddies the distinction between the public and private, the professional

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and the amateur. Vids are made out of ‘private collections’ of home video (Penley 1991: 145) and, once circulated amongst fans, can become a part of others’ collections. However, the work of vids is more public insofar as they are made for circulation to fellow fans (and are discoverable in fannish circulation): they communicate and document an analysis of source material as part of a discursive community. In this way, vidders could be seen to be mediating these multiple ontologies in how they gather and use segments of televisual flow to trace histories of interpretation. Two further definitions are useful in unpicking this distinction. In his 1931 essay on book collecting, Walter Benjamin writes passionately about the books in his collection: not of the (emotional/financial) value of each volume but of ‘the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection’ (1992: 61) in a ‘relationship to objects which does not emphasize […] their usefulness’ (ibid.: 62). This is a functionally inert group of objects, albeit an emotionally active one. Theorists of collecting argue that collectors collect to express individual identity, demonstrate knowledge and mastery over a subject area, and assert their preference for unique objects (Baudrillard 1994; Windsor 1994; Pearce 1995). Collecting, notes Pearce, is characterized by its ‘subjective nature’ (1995: 16); writing in 1968, Jean Baudrillard similarly argued that ‘although the collection may speak to other people, it is always first and foremost a discourse directed toward oneself’ (1994: 22). Indeed, Benjamin argues that his ‘non-reading of books’ is not unusual; rather, it is ‘characteristic of collectors’ (1992: 63-64). This will certainly be familiar to anyone who has bought DVDs that go unwatched. The value of these objects comes not from their content or utility but rather from the collector’s memory of their acquisition, pride of possession, and in their ability to help the collector demonstrate taste and discrimination (see Clifford 1988). Unlike a collector’s self-directed discourse in acquiring objects, the historian uses that discovery in a work that can communicate the value, meaning, and context of the objects. In contrast, Dust (2001), Carolyn Steedman’s exploration of archives and archival practice, reveals the emotional investment in ‘those quietly folded and filed documents’ (6) whose examination promises to fulfil a ‘desire to find, or locate, or possess’ (3) clues on which to base the writing of history (29). Vid-making corresponds to both positions: while a fan may possess copies of films and television series, they do not personally hold the copyright to this source material. However, until the historian’s intervention, objects in the archive lack the same fundamental utility as objects in a collection: ‘as stuff, it just sits there until it is read, and used, and narrativized’ (ibid.: 68).

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It is the reading, use, and narrativization that suggests differences between a collection and an archive and therefore the potential of vids as archival/historiographical objects. Both a collection and an archive will have been formed through accumulation; however, where a collection has private meaning to the collector, archives are for something more than the pleasure of a collector. When a collection is opened up to curators or researchers, the objects become accessible—to be used—and are open to narrativization, with meanings re-inscribed in analytical projects. The use of an archive can also be artistic, as in Fiona Tan’s gallery-based examinations of Dutch colonial film archives (per Noordegraaf 2009) or Grayson Perry’s 2011 exhibition ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’, which addressed the British Museum’s holdings. If we were to transpose these ideas to the vid, when a viewer uses a technological apparatus to intervene in intangible moving images by time-shifting, fragments of film and television can be relocated from ephemeral flow to a fixed form able to communicate critical or analytical commentary. Steedman’s description of the passions and frustrations of archival work is very similar to the process of selecting clips to make a vid: the formal structure and content of a vid is evidence not just of an interpretive act but of a search for clips to create a work ‘that pull[s] together scenes and moments from across the [films and/or] series’ (Gray 2010: 58). This search may require re-visiting hours of home video to create a vid’s interpretation of narrative and character. This is compounded in the multifandom vid genre, which includes clips from multiple series or films. In this respect, perhaps the vidder is performing the job of the collector, the archivist, and the historian: gathering artifacts and then using them to write a story. I do not mean to argue that vidders need elevation to the level of a collector or historian. Instead, I suggest that the vid’s historiographical potential is a contrast to the insular connotations of collecting. With personal media archives, especially of the sort that end up providing a vidder with their source material, there is a definite overlap: archival qualities (or rather, archival potential) exist in a collection, and the collector’s use of home video is manifested in vids’ archival approach.

Creating a Path Through Star Trek To illustrate how a home video collection of is used archivally in constructing vids, I will first analyse the Star Trek vid It’s All Coming Back to Me Now (Kandy Fong, 1997). This vid uses Céline Dion’s song of the same name as

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its soundtrack and was made on the cusp of digital home video’s emergence—1997 saw the f irst DVDs—meaning this vid was made from at least second-generation videotape.32 All Coming Back uses video recordings of Star Trek television series and films as archive footage and as source material from which to write a history of one character. In this case, the Star Trek home archive is tapped for evidence in interpreting the history of the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock (Leonard Nimoy) as he is at the start of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986) during his recovery from resurrection-induced amnesia. The collection of videotaped Star Trek films and TV episodes that this vid was made from (and therefore the collection that is represented in the vid) has thus been used as an archive from which a historiographical work has been produced. All Coming Back begins with a clip from The Voyage Home. The sequence cuts between a close-up of Spock’s face and a computer monitor and finishes with a freeze frame of a question displayed on the computer: ‘How do you feel?’. It is a significant question for Spock at this point in the narrative because, as stated above, he is recovering from amnesia. After we see the computer’s question, the vid includes Spock’s puzzled reaction. While the film continues from this point with Spock discussing this question with his mother, the vid instead cuts to a clip from the television series. This effectively proposes an answer to the question with evidence from the vidder’s archive, drawing on her own knowledge of the Star Trek franchise to construct connections between images and lyrics that are meaningful to an audience that shares her experience of this series. This includes knowing that Spock is a touch telepath capable of communicating ‘mind-to-mind’ through his hands. By selectively matching clips to appropriate lyrics, the vid argues that the only way ‘it’ can ‘all come back’ to Spock is through (as the lyrics state) being ‘touch[ed…] like this’. Spock’s amnesia was shown to be redressed through touch at the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Leonard Nimoy, 1984), but the vid suggests that further touch—specifically, from Kirk (William Shatner)—is needed to help him remember. Unlike fan f iction, which tends to create new scenarios for existing characters, vids are made from what amounts to archival evidence. While the lyrics imply a rush of returning memory inspired by a lover’s embrace, the vid is constructed to suggest that when he is touched, Spock will recall—as the song says—‘moments of gold’ (we see Kirk in his gold uniform) and 32 That is, a copy-of-a-copy. The DVD transfer of this vid that I screened for my research preserves the flaws and glitches of the videotape source, which are limited to slight discolouration and some tearing along the bottom edge of the frame.

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‘flashes of light’ (that is, on the USS Enterprise viewscreen). The version of Star Trek history written in this vid emphasizes a homoerotic (slash) reading of Spock and Kirk’s relationship based on reading single gestures culled from across the series in a wider (inter)textual context. For example, a clip from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979) showing Spock and Kirk clasping hands is captioned with ‘if I kiss you like this’. The clip’s place in the vid’s structure (at the start of a chorus), together with its lyrical captioning, emphasizes this moment’s significance. However, the equation of handclasp and kiss is more than a meaning made for the vid: it demonstrates a careful reading of the gesture in reference to at least three intertextual frames, each relating to the importance of Spock’s hands. First, as Chris Gregory notes, ‘Spock’s “devices” such as the Vulcan hand signal, the “neck pinch” and the “mind meld”’ are widely recognized (2000: 37); the latter two are accomplished by touch, and all three are gestures/ actions that involve the hands. Second, in the episode ‘Journey to Babel’ (tx. 17 November 1967), touching fingers is narratively presented as a gesture of intimacy and affection for Vulcans, establishing a further diegetic Vulcan touch to the ‘neck pinch’ and ‘mind meld’: in this case, one similar to a kiss. Vulcan hands are therefore established as a potential site for erotic contact. Penley notes that Spock’s alien physiology is elaborated upon in fan fiction, for example, in order to give Spock ‘extra erogenous zones’ (1991: 158). A fan focus on his hands is therefore unsurprising. Finally, the handclasp scene in The Motion Picture can itself be read as important in the history of Kirk and Spock’s interactions. Isla J. Bick evocatively describes the scene: the pair ‘wordlessly express their feelings for one another, engage in an intense few minutes of mutually affirming looks, and then profess [the central importance of] the touch of their hands, this “simple feeling”’ (1996: 56). Bick notes that the significance of this moment derives in part from the fact that this is only the second time in the franchise where the two men ‘touch in quite this way’ (ibid.), so ‘that homoerotic elements can be consciously expressed’ (ibid.: 55). Therefore, the historiographical account of Star Trek offered in this vid re-writes the bond between Kirk and Spock as attraction, as it re-captions a touch shared after a near-fatal mission as a passionate lovers’ embrace, within a broader context of intertextual readings of the franchise. Also at work in this vid is a temporal flattening, as a contemporary song is used to discuss clips first broadcast in the 1960s, as reflected in the lyrics ‘so long ago/but it’s all coming back to me’. Nearly twenty years separate the ‘how do you feel’ sequence (1986) and the clip that follows it (from c. 1968). Another decade after that (1997) is the vid’s release date. All Coming Back moves with ease through these many decades of fan discourse surrounding

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the series and incorporates key moments from its history. The mix of film and television sources denotes the length of Spock’s relationship with Kirk but is also a way for the vidder and viewers to recall their own relationships with the series over as many years.

Looking Archival When studying videotape vids, one feature that is strikingly common to all surviving examples of the form is the worn-out appearance of the video itself. Hilderbrand (2009: 13) contrasts home video recordings, which become part of a ‘bootleg collection’, with an imagined perfect—‘archivally pristine’—master copy that is perfectly preserved. Leaving aside the lack of comprehensive television and audiovisual archives, the messiness of a home media collection is in truth closer to the messiness found in archival work, which Steedman names ‘the grubby trade’ (2001: 18), where one handles crumbling documents, breathing in the dust of the past. Benjamin describes how his collection was built through his own efforts, time, and resources. Consequently, every object in the collection has its own aura: each mass-produced book (even a rare edition) takes on the status of a unique object. The material specificity of a collection, with the intensely personal aura of one’s own copy of a mass-produced object, can be translated to a digital context. Beyond the unique quirks and imperfections of videotape, creating a duplicate digital file of analogue media will reproduce exactly the flaws of the original file. With videotape, the bootleg aesthetic connotes a freedom from strict controls: even though ‘everyday recordings of copyrighted material quickly seemed to lack any transgressive edge’ (Hilderbrand 2009: 19), it still is material evidence of the tape’s prior use. Videotape’s use creates its aesthetic texture. Indeed, as Jonathan Price (1977) notes, this degradation is an essential part of the experience: The fuzziness makes it hard to see, and your natural impulse to stare is heightened by the difficulty of figuring out exactly what is going on up there. The effect is like a striptease: Now you see it, now you don’t. And your imagination will inflame you more than a realistic picture could. (quoted in Hilderbrand 2009: 66)

Though Hilderbrand’s examples are of rented pornographic videos, and the wear comes from repeated pausing or rewinding around particular

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sequences, the effect is similar to marked and worn archival documents. However, the repetition of and focus on particular sequences is the basis not only of meaning-making in vids but also of the fannish close (re-)reading of episodes and characters. Vids that survive from this era show all the marks Hilderbrand expects to f ind on worn videotape. For example, the Star Trek slash vid Wind Beneath My Wings (3 sisters, c. 1983-5) has been made from clips of dramatically varying video quality, indicated by factors such as inconsistent colour saturation. The textuality of these works is conf irmation of the bootleg origin of the source material and vid alike. In the learn-to-vid workshop that Penley attended, she recalls that participants could use clips ‘taken from fans’ private collections of the 78 (plus the pilot) Star Trek episodes, and also the f ive Star Trek f ilms, which [were] also on tape, copied from video store rentals’ (1991: 145). What makes this private collection public is its use, but here it is not just the narratives that are worked over (as with fan fiction) but copies of the episodes themselves. The episodes and clips have had a role in a vidders’ collection before they became vidding fodder. Camille Bacon-Smith observed a tendency in media fandom to interpret as erotic ‘glances, gestures, and postures that signal a focus on an equally engaged second figure’ (1992: 184). Wind Beneath My Wings uses clips where Kirk is looking at Spock; the vid collects moments of this focused attention and captions them via the song’s lyrics as evidence of Kirk’s attraction. The lyrics of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ are about looking back and honouring the contributions of another person; this is done in an explicitly romantic context and therefore characterizes Kirk’s professional regard for Spock as being coupled with more intimate feelings. The vid has Kirk declare his recognition of Spock’s importance to him and, by extension, to the narrative of the series. Following Coppa’s analysis of fandom’s regard for Spock (2008), this articulates a position already held by fans. Like All Coming Back, Wind Beneath My Wings functions as the vidders’ demonstration of their reading of the characters’ relationship. The captioning work of the lyrics is bolstered by the version of the song recorded by Gary Morris (not Bette Midler’s later cover), thereby tightly aligning the male voice and first-person address of the lyrics with Kirk’s proposed inner monologue. An analysis of many early vids reveals the variation in image quality between clips, even within the same vid, as seen in Wind Beneath My Wings. This indicates that the source video is not all from the same recording and has received different amounts of wear from clip to clip, suggesting a collection of tapes built up over time or of certain tapes getting more wear

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than others and therefore degrading at different rates. The very nature of time-shifting broadcast television means the episodes from which the vids’ clips are extracted will have been recorded at different times. While time-shifting must have occurred for it to be possible to make vids, vidding is not necessarily the initial intended outcome of building a home video collection. As Price (1977) and Hilderbrand (2009) suggest, there are moments of wear preserved in vids made from this source material, moments that signal scenes of particular interest. A vid such as It’s All Coming Back to Me Now (Kandy Fong, 1997) takes video recordings of the television series and films as archive footage to use as a source from which to write a particular history of one character as seen by the vidder: formally, the vid’s montage structure—one that is characteristic of the vid form—resembles a televisual strategy of representing memory as a flashback collage in order ‘to effectively conjure that sense of what remembering feels like’ (Holdsworth 2011: 44). In this case, as argued above, the Star Trek archive is used to write Spock’s history as at the start of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The vid is concerned with re-enacting an imagined representation of the amnesiac Spock’s memory through archival evidence and also represents a personal memory of the series, accumulated over many hours of programming and performed through the assemblage of clips. The collection of videotaped Star Trek episodes and films that this vid was made from (and therefore, the collection that is represented in the vid) has thus been used as an archive from which a historiographical work has been produced. Hilderbrand notes that bootlegging is a way to fill market gaps where barriers of time and space block access to home video. The objects themselves are in a format that can be used to create archives, as Hilderbrand states, and to create new works that populate fannish discourses. The fan audience is an example of what Hilderbrand calls ‘semi-institutionalized networks’ that circulate bootlegged media (2009: 63): episodes (in whole and in part) are shared by interested amateurs, who also share information about past television.33 These circulations dislocate certain historiographical practices and they also undercut the connotation of idiosyncrasy and lack of utility in ‘collection’ because the collectors who participate in these networks 33 In the UK, for example, groups like TV ARK and link-heavy sites like The Classic TV Archive supplement work done by academic or commercial organizations such as the BFI, and networks and production companies themselves (in some cases, the amateur sites are much more publicly accessible than private corporate archives). The delightful Moving History site lists detailed information about the UK’s public sector archives.

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interact with private home video collections that are duplicated and shared. As Hilderbrand notes, ‘VCRs made television viewers into users, and videotapes introduced new uses of television’ (2007: 18, emphasis in original). Again, vids are possible because videotape technology makes television into something reproducible, not just transmittable—vidding is one of these ‘new uses’ of television in its reproducible state. Critically, this ability to use the collection is possible because copying a videotape, optical disc, or digital file will not immediately destroy the original (despite perceptible wear on dubbed videotape). Public and private are not absolute categories. Videotape collecting’s relative public and private aspects rely on an individual’s movement from outsider to insider: access to tapes and thus the opportunity to build one’s personal collection are determined by participation in semi-underground networks. These collections are not private in the sense of being individual; they are still oriented towards a public and addressed in ads in zines, mailing list dicussions, and message board posts, for example. Fandom has moved online, with visibility outside fandom moderated in several ways (Busse and Hellekson 2006; Coppa 2006; De Kosnik 2016). Access to vids is similarly restricted to individuals with insider knowledge: while vids are currently openly available on the internet, as is information about vid-centred conventions, knowing where to look for vids comes with participation in the fandom community.34 Vids posted on user-populated video streaming sites (YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, the now-defunct imeem, etc.) can appear in search results when a user’s search terms were intended only to find an official music video. Sites such as Vimeo allow for password-protected files, restricting access to only insiders; however, measures taken to protect against discovery by copyright-holders also diminishes newcomer participation. These measures can include using acronyms in tags or metadata, or ‘delisting’ a posted video so that it can only be accessed through a direct link and not through search functions. Sites such as these are not meant to be used as a broadcaster of anything but original content, but they can and have in practice become a compelling—if unstable—update of the temporary time-shifting found in frequently used videotape. No matter how extensive they appear, home video archives—like all archives—ultimately contain dislocated fragments, as they are comprised of films and television episodes that have been removed from their initial

34 As discussed in Chapter 2, in order to conduct a textual analysis of vids, I drew on my understanding of fandom as a participant in order to locate my corpus.

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context.35 Indeed, similar to clip shows that re-present historical television footage, ‘what is central to the textual re-encounters with past television is not the recovery of the original broadcast or viewing experience but its positioning within new frames and contexts’ (Holdsworth 2011: 98). As the vid relates to collections, a vid emerges from a collector’s ownership of and control over private home video. Although collections are sometimes made public, they are conceived of initially as private, and vids are part of a personal relationship with media products and home video. As historiography, vidding involves searching through existing media and making something of it (which perhaps echoes Steedman’s description of archival research). As the source material of the vid, home video exists in a space between the collection and the archive, though ultimately ‘archive’ is more accurate in describing the use of these accumulations, as fans and vidders use them in a project of historiography.

Vids from the Archive This section is structured around an analysis of videotape-based vids from the 1980s and 1990s, made from personal archives constructed by television fans. The section concludes with an overview of some digital equivalents. The collections generated by audiences through time-shifting television programmes become archival in their use as a source for vids. In a contemporary digital context, ‘the powerful archiving force of the institution’ (Garde-Hansen 2009: 147) is being ‘challenged by the personal archiving power of increasingly popular and easy-to-use digital media’ (ibid.: 148). Nevertheless, the existence of videotape vids points to a predigital precedent for the construction of personal media archives. Of interest here is less an individual connection to one’s own collection of videotape (and digital equivalents) and more the texts produced from that relationship. This is the historiography of a vid, akin to the historian’s ‘grubby trade’, accomplished by working through videotape of potentially poor quality. On their surface, storage media do not appear to be subject to the same intense material decay as fragile paper or vellum archival documents. Indeed, Holdsworth, in discussing objects held by the National Media Museum in Bradford, notes ‘a definite absence of dust that might 35 Bjarkman notes the potential significance of this context for videotape collectors, as amateur off-air recordings ‘complete with original commercials, [are seen] as somehow more authentic’ (2004: 234).

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have previously characterized the archive’ (2008: 141). However, in the case of videotape, this dust is invisible until one plays the tape itself and sees what it contains. The media archive has a parallel existence, at least when one considers the material objects (storage media) and the content contained (‘stored’) therein. This allows for an individual videotape or hard drive to be a form of archive—in much the same way an individual building holding material files can be similarly recognized. The circulation of videotape, and of videotape’s successor digital files, is just as important in thinking of vids and of the constitution of personal archives as are the representations (the shows, films, songs) contained therein.36 This repetitive consumption is registered textually in that the wear on tapes—for example, ‘white noise, the jittery image, the unnatural colours, the grain, the momentary loss of signal that triggers the blank blue TV screen or the flash of tracking’ (Hilderbrand 2009: 65)—as seen in vids is a visible record of the literal consumption of the text. Wear is the mark of the consumption of that raw material. Digital duplication avoids this, with industrial opposition to file-sharing presuming a different (e.g. monetary) loss. A segment of degraded videotape hints at how a historical audience watched a text, augmenting contemporary reports of that viewing context. Hilderbrand writes that the materiality of videotape allows for the curious quality of being able to read the previous views in the tape insofar as the uneven degradation of the tape itself indicates its previous use. He argues that the act of making a bootleg duplicate leads to the ‘distortion of the image and sound tracks, [which will] materially record and reveal this process of creation and history of circulation’ (ibid.: 61-62). The wear on old videotape can be part of the format’s pleasure: as Hilderbrand notes, for texts like cult films that do not have slick production values, ‘the addition of bootleg video aesthetics—whether from sketchy distributors or personal copying—may well enrich the text and add to the experience’ of viewing them (ibid.: 65). This aesthetic enrichment is familiar in media fandom: Penley argues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, slash zines were ‘not as slick as they could be’, a situation that ‘may arise from an impulse to keep them looking slightly tacky to give them that illegitimate pornographic cast’ (1991: 141, emphasis in original). For these zines, the ‘slightly tacky’ aesthetic is a deliberate 36 The notion of vidding from an archive raises issues of bootlegging and copyright and therefore of access. As videotape objects, vids ‘offer lessons in progressive media policy and remain essential tools of media access, even in the era of their apparent obsolescence or irrelevance’ (Hilderbrand 2009: 20). These implications are beyond the scope of this study.

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decision that mimics accidental degradation for the same effect. For the surviving videotape vids, poor image quality is an unavoidable side-effect of well-worn and well-used tape. In her discussion of appropriate and appropriated technologies, Penley highlights a tension between the appearance of professionalism in zines and vids and the fact that the concept of amateur, or bootleg, is tied to an aesthetic and a material realization of these objects.37 However, in the videotape era, making a vid look too much like a music video was less probable than publishing a zine that too closely resembled a literary magazine. The rougher look and feel of vids is most likely a result of technical limitations guiding the form’s overall aesthetic, which is a point that Penley does not highlight in her description. At that time, given the available source material for making a vid—off-air recordings and copies taped ‘from video store rentals’ (ibid.: 145)—and production equipment of limited sophistication, an aesthetic ‘commitment to amateurism’ (ibid.: 144) had few alternatives. The vid Who Can It Be Now? mentioned earlier uses clips from the Gothic series Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971) that feature the character Willie Loomis (John Karlen). Dark Shadows ‘mingled tales of vampires, werewolves, time travel and parallel universes with the more traditional family saga of the daytime soap opera’ (Wheatley 2006: 146). As the unwilling servant to the vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), Loomis must answer the front door of his master’s house. The vid’s soundtrack is the Men at Work song ‘Who Can it be Now?’ in which the song’s narrator knows he has a caller but wishes to be left alone.38 By pairing these lyrics with clips of Loomis’s repeated trips to the front door, this vid works as a character study focusing on Loomis’s feelings about his servitude. The vid collates multiple examples of this, a result of the vidders having recognized this motif and then curated these collected moments into a vid (intercut with other clips of the character). In the vid, as in the series, Loomis is condemned to answer the door; as a work of narrative analysis and character study, this vid gives voice to his resentment using the clips from the archive to respond with a mixture of humour and pathos to the character’s role within the narrative. The quality of the clips in this vid is well below broadcast standard, and the effect of VCR-to-VCR dubbing is clearly visible in the blurred and discoloured image. Importantly, the poor quality of the images 37 In subsequent decades, online publishing has largely supplanted print zines, but technologies for self-publishing are available in the home as well as workplaces. 38 With lyrics, ‘Who can it be knocking at my door? | Go ‘way, don’t come ‘round here no more.’

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indicates the probable frequency of the source videotapes’ use before being excerpted in a vid, and indeed of the use of the videotape on which the vid itself was recorded and shared. Camille Bacon-Smith claims the majority of fannish American viewers of the UK series The Professionals (ITV, 1977-1983) in the 1980s had watched episodes that were severely degraded as a result of being many generations removed from their initial off-air recording (1992: 124). In some cases, group screenings of episodes on degraded videotape included interlocutors who would describe the action and actors’ expressions. Indeed, Bacon-Smith reports that one American fan convention in 1984 invited actors from the British series to attend as special guests because ‘Fans wanted to see what the actors really looked like’ (ibid.). A British buddy cop show ‘in the vein of US police series Starsky and Hutch’ (Oldham 2017: 58), The Professionals was popular with slash fans, who focused on the relationship between the protagonists Bodie (Lewis Collins) and Doyle (Martin Shaw). This generational degradation is clearly seen in You Can’t Hurry Love (Tolbran, 1994), which was produced using videotape copies that are profoundly worn. As with Wind Beneath My Wings, this vid shows the discolouration, tracking tears, and grain (cf. Hilderbrand 2009: 65) that loudly announce the motley origin and use of the vid’s source tapes. While the precise genealogy of tapes used to create You Can’t Hurry Love is obscure, it is an entirely credible assumption that this vid was made from tapes that could trace their origins to sets that Bacon-Smith observed in her research: copies that were ‘derive[d] from one set recorded in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 1981-82 and distributed via torturous channels throughout the country’ (1992: 123-124). These copies therefore were, at moments, nearly indecipherable from the resulting generations between initial taping and duplication. In the case of The Professionals, recording clean copies was not possible through much of the 1980s and 1990s, as the series was not available in syndication due to a contract dispute (Hunt 2001). As Price (1977) and Hilderbrand (2009) suggest, there are moments of wear preserved in vids made from this source material that signal scenes of particular interest. One particularly striking example in You Can’t Hurry Love is the near-decapitation of a discoloured Bodie. This glance is a significant clip, as Bodie is meant to be gazing at his partner Doyle. Throughout the vid, similar clips are captioned with lyrics that guide the viewer’s interpretation of this as a slash vid and Bodie’s glances as longing; he does not ‘hurry’ love but instead waits and watches. The vid’s use of the Phil Collins cover of ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ rather than the Supremes version further establishes the vid’s point of view as originating with Bodie: these longing glances are

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accompanied by a male vocal performance and grounded with a male aural subjectivity. (It does, however, replace the voices of black women with that of a white man, which should not pass without mention.) If we presume an engaged television audience of the sort Bacon-Smith (1992) observed watching together at conventions and pausing at significant moments for explanation and discussion, we have a credible explanation for why this gesture or that glance becomes more worn out on the videotape: there is material stress on the source tape as a significant moment is identified, paused, rewound, and re-viewed. The clips containing glances and gestures upon which fans build their slash readings can therefore, understandably, be the most affected clips in a vid. This affectionate degradation is seen throughout You Can’t Hurry Love, which is in the main a carefully curated catalogue of significant looks and glances across many episodes. Interestingly, while The Professionals has a reputation as ‘a show so absurdly and hysterically macho that it inadvertently queers the whole genre’ (Hunt 2001: 128), the moments collected in the vid tend to emphasize the connection between Bodie and Doyle. For example, in the vid’s final sequence, the two men look out of a window, smile at each other, and then move to either side of a nearby bed while they remove their jackets. In the narrative of the vid, this sequence is a climax: the love that can’t be hurried, referred to in the title of the song, is in the process of reaching its consummation. Through the wear on the tape used as a source for this clip, we know this moment was subject to attention by fans revisiting a notable sequence. But unlike the pornographic tapes described by Price (1977), this video striptease does not hide nudity. Rather, it reveals a potential fan reading of this moment as significant in describing a slash narrative for these characters. In the context of the vid, this expression of comradeship (eye contact, smiling) in a scene with moderate undressing is sufficient to signify the narrative extension of this scene into a culmination of homoerotic attraction. The evidence in the video image of its tape’s heavy use matches the descriptions in Penley (1991) and Bacon-Smith (1992) of the VCR’s use to closely watch and review scenes of significance. That this wear has been preserved in a vid built out of these moments is a lasting record of these readings and viewing practices. Throughout the vid, the clips most affected by wear are the clips of the gestures and glances upon which a slash reading is based; speaking practically, they are also the clips used to make a slash vid. Bacon-Smith does not evoke the archive to frame her experiences of watching episodes on tape at fan conventions in the United States. However, her descriptions of the close readings (pause-and-rewind) and the ‘common’

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practice of the ‘marathon viewing weekend’ (1992: 121)39 resemble Carolyn Steedman’s account of archival research in Dust, particularly Steedman’s statement that ‘You know you will not finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed’ (2001: 18). Both authors write of the frantic compressed timeframe in which to watch (or read, or photograph) key moments of a series (or a document, or an eighteenth-century account book) and, temporally speaking, to get the most out of one’s limited exposure to the texts. What videotape’s reproducibility offers, and what digital file-sharing carries forth, is a duplicate archive. Preserved within a vid may be these traces of invested viewing with the potential to ‘perform in mnemonic ways […] to project the multiple, multiplying layers of complex connections between people, places, pasts and possibilities’ (Garde-Hansen 2011: 42-43). The frantic consumption before even more of the artifacts are consumed by wear and time can now be somewhat delayed by digital duplication, be it a digital transfer of videotape or digital photograph of a document. The limited use that must occur in order for these copies to be made is unfortunate—as it contributes to the accumulation of wear on the tape—but necessary. Jenkins notes that at the time of his writing, vidders ‘increasingly rely upon laserdiscs for their masters to allow more flexibility and sharper images’ (1992: 244). In his chapter on vids (what he calls ‘fan music video’), the question of image quality is mentioned only once more as part of his concluding comments on the lack of control that videotape vidders had over their work. Jenkins notes that, ‘Having worked so hard to overcome “rainbow lines” and other glitches’, vidders report being ‘concerned about the quality of these multiple-generation copies and are worried that people often see their videos only in technically flawed prints’ (ibid.: 284), though he is silent on the aesthetic or material consequences of using bootleg tape. Francesca Coppa (2008) similarly comments on the challenge of making videotape-era vids such as Pressure (Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, 1990)—which is itself a vid about vidding’s technical complexity—but does not draw attention to the wear and discolouration apparent in the stills she provides. While Penley notes ‘the high level of everyday technological skills’ of fans in fandom (1991: 141), the quality of taped source material limited the visual sophistication of the resulting works. If the vidder purchased consumer-grade home editing devices, more control over the editing of clips was possible and could limit some of the negative effects (the ‘jittering’ 39 Bacon-Smith describes watching ‘taped episodes of Blake’s 7 for sixteen hours [in one] weekend’ (1992: 121) and reports that one of her contacts had watched ‘at least seven hours of The Professionals’ the night before a group interview (1992: 123).

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and ‘rainbow lines’) of tape-to-tape transfer but could not restore source videotape that was already degraded. The degradation that is so central to the experience of watching videotape for Bacon-Smith and Hilderbrand is missing from Jenkins’ description of videotape vids. Hilderbrand seems genuinely excited about the aesthetic and affective sides of tape degradation. Bacon-Smith takes this as an unavoidable condition of the form, plainly stating that in addition to the audio source, the video source, and the audio/visual sync, a vidder ‘also needs as much source material as possible, in as clear copy as possible’ (1992: 175), which alludes to the existence of copies that are not clear. While she notes that vidders are ‘sensitive to the technology of videotape’ and knowledgeable about the potential for laserdisc and Betamax to provide higher-quality images, ‘few community members are able or willing to devote the financial resources necessary for the use of multiple technologies’ (ibid.: 176). The wear evident in vids made using videotape source material, as indicated by degraded image quality, is evidence of an engaged audience’s repeat viewings of significant moments. It is interesting that Jenkins presents the problem of video quality as arising in the editing process rather than the image itself, given that in Who Can It Be Now, the ‘rainbow lines’ appear at the start and end of clips, at the edit points. Perhaps this is because variations in image quality in individual clips are so integral to the medium that it was beyond comment, despite being part of the experience of watching a vid or of the visual texture of vids. Part of the goal for this chapter is to demonstrate how flaws in videotape images are markers of the vid’s particular historiography. Despite Busse and Hellekson’s assertion that ‘VCR tapes of fan vids have given way to sophisticated, perfectly synched, high-quality electronic files’ (2006: 16), the textual traces that would betray the bootleg history of a vid’s source video are not limited to videotape. Nor, indeed, is the potential for a bootleg thrill absent; instead, these traces are shifted onto a different register of signification. In digital vids, there are three common ways to make a vid with source material that has not been ripped from an official DVD release and therefore shows traces of digital bootlegging. These also represent three different contemporary origin points for media in one’s personal home video archive. First, a vid could be a contemporary re-working of archived videotape that has been format-shifted from videotape: a digital rip of analogue time-shifted footage. The aforementioned vid Fireworks (Jayne L., 2010) is made from the Canadian television series Power Play (1998-2000), which focused on the management of a fictional professional ice hockey team. This series has not been released on DVD, but its modest fan base shares the VHS rips of the series,

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keeping it in circulation long after its cancellation. The quality of the footage will vary depending on the age of the videotapes before they were ripped and the quality of the conversion. A slightly overlapping category is vids made from digitally time-shifted television episodes (i.e. digitally recorded). For example, the Supernatural vid Alone Now (hay1ock, 2007) includes clips from Canadian and American broadcasts of the series, as indicated by watermarking preserved in the vid (from channels CityTV and The CW, respectively). Like the first group, these can include station-specific broadcast watermarks that reveal a series’ international market, the global stretch of fandom, and the digital equivalent of cross-border videotape sharing. Finally, vidders may also use copies of films (openly available online and of poor image quality) that have been recorded in a cinema or duplicated from a screening copy. 40 The first cycle of Marvel Studios superhero films have frequently been vidded from this ‘cam’ source material as fans seek to participate in fannish discourse using their preferred form of fanwork in the months between the theatrical release of a popular film and its DVD release date. Vids using clips from Iron Man (John Favreau, 2008), Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011), and Avengers Assemble (Joss Whedon, 2012)—and, for a different franchise, Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)—were circulated and were shown at conventions before a ‘cleaner’ copy of the film was available to use for clips, sometimes within a few weeks of the films’ release. Where fans who write fiction or who create fan art have the capacity for immediate response to a series or film, a vidder can seek out bootleg copies of these objects to participate in the initial rush of fannish enthusiasm. In each of these examples, the source video is easily recognizable as a digital bootleg; the difference is clearly seen when compared to a DVD rip of the same footage. The viewer’s ability to read the image quality adds a thrill of illegitimacy, though I would dispute that these vids are made to showcase the flaws in the video quality. Rather, as with Wind Beneath My Wings and You Can’t Hurry Love, the clips are used despite their flaws, as part of the passionate thrill of finding evidence to communicate different interpretations of the films in the franchise. The notes in the vidder’s blog post announcing the release of the Iron Man vid Freedom Hangs Like Heaven bemoan the cinema audience member who appears in the frame, marring the shot (quigonejinn 2008). This draws attention to the imperfection of the source material, excusing its poor image quality while simultaneously emphasizing the timeliness of the vid. 40 For work on user-led digital distribution, see Strangelove (2005); May (2007); Lewis (2007); Lobato (2012); and Newman (2012).

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This does not mean that vids made with poor-quality footage are immutable. Thor was released on home video four months after Set Fire to the Rain (talitha78, 2011) was made; the vidder isagel took this opportunity to produce a shot-for-shot remake (known as a ‘remaster’) of talitha78s’s vid using the newly available DVD rip footage. This potential to revise and update vids raises a question of what a vid is for and how that purpose may change: using cam footage is about the vidders’ immediate response to a film, but remaking a cam footage vid with a better quality source suggests that aesthetics and visual pleasure are just as important in vids as is timely participation in fannish discourse (or contributing to the canonization of a particular media event, cf. Dayan and Katz 2011). A vid constructs a way to revisit the interpretive, narrative, and visual pleasures of the source material. For example, the remastered Set Fire to the Rain reveals certain visual pleasures of Thor that are obscured when bootleg source material is used. For vidders engaged in the interpretation of films such as the Marvel Studios film franchise, using low-quality source material is a reasonable option in the absence of better footage in order to contribute to the creation of fannish interpretations of these popular texts. Hilderbrand’s assumption that the existence of bootleg home video indicates ‘their source copies were probably actively sought’ (2009: 61) is interesting when thinking about the audiences of home video. This is not merely watching films or television by channel-surfing or by turning down pages in TV Guide or Radio Times (i.e. waiting to see what is on); this is seeking out that which has already been televized or exhibited in order to watch closely and make use of the media. A personal home video archive, built over time, allows access to present and past film and television. As Aleida Assmann argues, ‘The archive is the basis of what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become the past’ (2011: 335). Home video is therefore more than a collection: it has the potential to be archival and carries with it traces of its archive.

The Archival Aesthetic of Vids Returning to a selection of Star Trek vids, this section discusses vids that are not only made from fans’ personal archives but that also directly invoke the idea of the archive and an archive’s relationship with personal and collective memory. These vids look and feel archival; they are textually archival in their form, as they reflect an archival aesthetic. The vidders’ access to source material of varying quality or the decision to use worn videotape (or in one

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case, film) is a sign of and reference to the vids’ source material as coming from a larger repository of work. As detailed earlier, this section will focus on three re-uses of Star Trek through the original television series and the spin-off films though not the four subsequent television series. 41 Beyond the textual traces of archival origin, a vid can be a way for audiences to sustain their interaction with cult media past and present. In the case of Star Trek, this interaction can challenge assumptions surrounding such a well-known franchise. The (digital) vid Star Trek: Tik Tok (MissSheenie, 2010) remakes the voyage of discovery undertaken by the USS Enterprise into a frivolous pleasure cruise. In contrast, The Test (here’s luck, 2010) works explicitly with the importance of memory (and, by extension, self-knowledge) of a specific character. This vid also represents a technological progression to digital production and online streaming from the videotape practices that began with home VCR technology. Steedman’s ‘prosaic definition’ of an archive is useful here: ‘archive’ is ‘a name for the many places in which the past ([…] which cannot be retrieved, but which may be represented) has deposited some traces and fragments’ (2001: 69). The clips used in these works are taken from the vidders’ archives of Star Trek episodes and films; they are ‘traces and fragments’ of past television series and films broadcast and released. The experience of watching Star Trek—of viewing the series, of the discursive interaction in fandom—cannot be retrieved, but the vid’s re-use of clips can communicate the interpretation/analysis of narrative moments, thereby representing a version of its history. The act of recognizing the close friendship or romance between Kirk and Spock will have initially happened once for a viewer, but the representation of that recognition can be narrativized and held in a vid. The non-linear sequencing of clips in vids allows a vidder to represent a connection (thematic, narrative, formal) between different parts of a series and to collect those isolated moments of significance into a suggestive whole. Vids represent where those deposited traces and fragments of home video’s past come to represent certain slices of that history. The clips become significant objects containing the representation of actors in character performing gestures, glances, and movements that turn a collection of episodes into an archive out of which viewers and vidders can build narratives. Vids as individual works may write a history of their 41 Cam footage (discussed earlier) is not represented in this section; however, examples do exist: Don’t Stop Believing (arefadedaway, 2009) and I’m On A Boat (kiki_miserychic, 2009) were both made within one month of the theatrical release of Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009), and therefore were made well in advance of the film’s home video release.

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source material, but to do so they reflect the memory and imaginative work of fans in recalling and experiencing their fandom. This is the interplay of archive, memory, and history in vids. I do not intend to make a claim about the inner lives of fans but rather to examine what may be at stake when the vid form carries with it textual traces of its archival origins. Joanne Garde-Hansen proposes a double articulation of the past as written (history) or recollected (memory); significantly, while ‘History (authoritative) and memory (private) appear to be at odds with each other,’ media ‘negotiate both history and memory’ (2011: 6) and the vid form acts as a site of reciprocation between written and recollected versions of a film or series. The vid form appears to provide a variation on Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, ‘which emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past’ (e.g. through a film, museum exhibition, etc.) wherein ‘an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history’ (2004: 2). Instead of offering viewers ‘memories of places and experiences through which they have not lived’ (Garde-Hansen 2011: 62), the vid-asprosthetic-memory potentially offers access to historical fan discourses, mediated through a vidder-created context. Individually, a vid’s clips ‘are shorthand for much longer segments of the program narrative’ (Jenkins 1992: 234), but the vid as a whole can arguably be read as shorthand for much more extensive relationships between a text; how it may be interpreted personally and collectively; and how it may be articulated, re-framed, and memorialized in a vid. It is Steedman’s assertion that the desire to interact with an archive is ‘expressive of the more general fever to know and to have the past’ (2001: 75). The parodic and playful Tik Tok uses Kesha’s ‘Tik Tok’ as audio source to suggest life on the Enterprise is a non-stop party, gathering clips where the crew is shown drinking, dancing, or affected by alien influences. A key pleasure of this vid is in recognizing the difference between the received notion of Star Trek’s staid image as a venerable cult television text and the vid’s exaggeration of its camp mise-en-scène. In Tik Tok, the series is re-written as a carefree and consequence-free world, populated by a crew revelling in their excesses as they careen around the universe. This is at odds with the earnest and family-friendly popular perception of the series, which has a reputation for being ‘inflexibly “moralistic” in presenting the “American ideal”’ (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995: 167). The vid activates an association with female-led pop music as trivial/disposable, using a mismatch between what many Star Trek fans see as a future-utopian ‘model for how the USA can be changed for the better’ (Geraghty 2015: 73) and a young woman singing

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about partying as a way to undercut the show’s serious reputation. Kesha’s music helps to reveal this less staid version of Star Trek, but the comparison potentially relies on an implicit cultural hierarchy in which Star Trek is ‘brought down’ to Kesha’s level. Aesthetically, Tik Tok’s vivid colour suggests that the vidder used restored and remastered DVD releases as source footage, not ageing videotapes. There is a crisp authority implied in the restoration’s clarity that aids in the vid’s joking pretence to being a definitive view of Star Trek. The digital compression of the vid on YouTube restores some of the fan-dance tease of the archival aesthetic found in degraded videotape; however, its use of simple cuts and split-screen manipulation rather than dissolves or fades to construct its montage enacts a visual ‘texture of memory’ (Holdsworth 2011: 45) that is authoritative and matter-of-fact, and not one in which the past is ‘forgotten, misremembered, repressed’ (Kuhn 2000: 184). The vid’s purpose is not to re-write particular storylines but to use the evidence found in the clips to momentarily shift the overall tone of the series. A crucial moment in the vid is therefore the opening sequence, as quick edits and literal matches between song lyric and visual content establish the vid’s comic premise. The lyrics that begin the song are matched with corresponding action in the frame: waking up (close-up on Shatner’s face, as he rises from a bed) firmly aligns the song’s narrative to the actions as (re-)presented and establishes a less metaphorical application of song to image. The next line, ‘grab my glasses, I’m out the door’ is paired with two quick shots of Kirk and Spock in garish protective eyewear; this continues to establish the vid’s joke, as the glasses shown in the clips are transformed to the height of extreme fashion. From there, the vidder locates commensurate clips and builds the alternate version of the series out of disconnected moments in the available archive of moving images. Textually, there is no narrative beyond that which is provided by the song, which also makes the vid accessible to viewers with casual knowledge of Star Trek. Tik Tok emphasizes broad gestures rather than subtle glances, where motion within the frame is matched to the song’s rhythm as it highlights many of the series’ flamboyant visual moments. As both an adaptation of and an argument about Star Trek, we are made to look at the series rather than to read (interpret) its arguments about the series’ themes of compassion and tolerance. As the vid’s purpose is to construct a joke from the playful juxtaposition of classic science fiction television with a party song, the force of the song’s narrative overwhelms the specific connection between the clips’ original context. Holdsworth argues that ‘moments of return’ in television narratives—moments that recall previous events and

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thereby reward a committed viewer—are ‘best characterised by the brevity of these momentary appearances’ (2011: 64). In Tik Tok, the clips chosen represent brief moments of another sort, which in their re-presentation are foregrounded. Even if there were only single scenes with an alien celebration or consumption of alcohol every several episodes, the concentration of these clips provides evidence to support the vid’s argument about the Enterprise as a party boat.42 The resulting group of moving images ends up functioning as the vidder’s archive of the camp and colourful visual style of Star Trek: this is a history of the show’s visual style and not a presentation of its (real or imagined) narrative history or cultural significance. This vid is a deliberate misreading of archival traces that exploits the potential of Star Trek as an open text. In material terms, the vid also exploits the existence of Star Trek as a text that potentially exists in one’s personal archive. In contrast, the (in)famous vid Closer (T. Jonesy and Killa, 2004) is a dark take on the original series, using the Nine Inch Nails song ‘Closer’ to propose a different version of the episode ‘Amok Time’ (tx. 15 September 1967). In the episode, Spock’s behaviour becomes erratic; his alien physiology means he must return to his home planet to take a mate or face death. The situation is resolved through a convoluted scheme involving ceremonial combat in which Spock believes he has killed Kirk. In the vid, the episode is re-cut (with some additional external footage) to suggest that Spock’s compromised state and superhuman strength result in his sexual assault of Kirk, thereby constructing a ‘disturbing story about rape’ (Russo 2009: 126). The vid uses shots in which Spock appears menacing and in which Kirk appears fearful in order to build a narrative of mental and physical violation. Closer constructs the possibility of a volatile world under the surface of this utopian military setting through the combination of violent and sexually explicit lyrics with shot choices. The distressed, sepia-toned digital effect used in the vid as well as the frequent use of jump cuts mimic the aesthetic of the song’s commercial music video but are also ‘used to provide new meaning to the source footage’ (Coppa 2008: 1.3). Manipulation of the contrast levels and the addition of various filters create a digital mimicry of decomposing and/or unevenly processed nitrate film stock and therefore makes a knowing reference to the moving image as found in the archive. There is an added sense of urgency from the digital effect. Paolo Cherchi Usai notes that as cellulose nitrate stock disintegrates, ‘the image tends to disappear and the base 42 While several clips are from ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’ (tx. 29 December 1967), the use of clips from several other episodes makes it more than an interpretation of one sequence.

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takes on a brownish colour’ (1994: 20). Closer alludes to this disappearance with effects such as a digital ‘tear’ in the pseudo film stock and off-centre framing. The manipulated images pretend, therefore, to be only a few steps away from being lost forever, disappearing into ‘an indistinct mass covered by a brownish crust’ and eventually ‘reduced to a whitish object or even to powder’ (ibid.). Therefore, the vidders’ visual quotation of the heavily stylized original Nine Inch Nails video becomes a reminder of the fate of footage lost in the archives, with its ‘discovery’ bringing with it the appeal of the exotic, that is, the rare and nearly lost. (The jump cuts are created by removing short sections of footage; these gaps could be read as footage that had already been lost.) This put-on uniqueness—though this vid is digital and exists in many copies—allows for the pretence that this is a singular object and that it therefore must be witnessed before it is completely destroyed. In addition to the alteration to the original narrative, the degraded visual aesthetic of the vid also connotes the disintegration of Spock’s self-control. Like Tik Tok, underneath the digital manipulation, the source material for Closer appears to be free from the kind of videotape degradation as seen in Wind Beneath My Wings or All Coming Back. What differs is the digital processing of Closer, which evokes a rhetorical position regarding what the vid pretends is the origin of its footage and what that aesthetic decision could suggest about the performance of that archive. To begin with, there is a suggestion of authenticity-through-age in the imperfection of the images. The sepia tone, light bleed effects, and desaturation of some areas of the image create an aesthetic of obscurity, of a distrust that restored footage might tidy up vital elements. By using this effect, the vid evokes some hidden truth that has been uncovered and archivally substantiated. This responds to the indexical power of a photograph or moving image, or more precisely a trust in what Arild Fetveit calls ‘the evidential credibility of photographic images’ (2004: 543). The evidence presented in this vid is blatantly at odds with what happens in the episode ‘Amok Time’, and yet the indexical proof offered by the images—that the bodies captured on film did move through these locations—can be so easily made to serve another version of that history, another writing-up of the traces discovered in the archive. The sonic dimension also follows this line of obscurity, as the bass rhythm that begins the song itself is a two-beat (like a heartbeat), with a bass drum hit followed by a burst of static/steam sound on the off-beat. This aural element helps colour the soundscape of the vid in a similar manner as the faux-distressed film effect: the mechanical failures implied in the degraded video and distorted audio work together to create this aesthetic performance of a crumbling, uncertain archival object. In these respects, Closer presents

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itself as the last look at a hidden record that may not be restored and saved from being eaten away through improper preservation. There is always the possibility that archival research will reveal a dirty secret or other unpleasant truth; this is a concept of the archive as a place where the historian’s task in writing up the fragments and traces becomes a problem of balanced narration. As a textual performance of the idea of archival evidence and the state of objects in archives, the pretence offered in Closer plays with an idea of what truths can be derived from the archive, becoming a kind of play with perceptions of reality. Closer is especially compelling because its source narrative, the episode ‘Amok Time’, has become central to several decades of fan attention (S.F. Winters 2012). Where Tik Tok can be enjoyed solely through the context of the song, Closer perhaps requires an awareness of the original episodes for complete effect; this ‘feral’ Spock is not the vid’s invention but a narrative element taken from the series. Indeed, Sarah Fiona Winters argues that being able to recognize the vid as a reference to this specific episode ‘allows the viewer to identify both men as victims of a lack of control’ (2012: 2.1) by recalling the episode’s context for the characters’ actions. The comprehensibility and analytic power of a vid is in the addition of a subsequent narrative and layer of textual meaning and not the replacement of the original meanings.43 This is an individual sense of archive, where an audience’s memory of a series—constructed in part thanks to television’s ‘provision of a public sphere, a shared experience and a communal space’ (Holdsworth 2011: 125)—can be substantiated through a personal collection of episodes. Finally, The Test (here’s luck, 2010) blends the film Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009) with clips from the previous films and the original television series. It works as a performance of memory, performing an understanding/reading of references (intentional or unintentional) to the original franchise in the reboot film. This creates an explicit continuity across the franchise for the fan who is either aware of these connections or would benefit from having those connections made clear. Like All Coming Back, the vid’s representation of ‘what remembering feels like’ (Holdsworth 2011: 44) for its central character is also a performance of fan memory and intertextual knowledge. This is especially significant, as the concept of a ‘reboot’, borrowed from comic book publishing, ‘has become a popular way to promote films and other media forms that revisit familiar narratives with an altered origin story, 43 The process is similar to watching an adaptation (Chapter 6 expands on this point), where an audience familiar with the work being adapted will ‘inevitably fill in the gaps in the adaptation with information from the adapted text’ (Hutcheon 2013: 121).

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narrative approach, or artistic aesthetic’ (Scahill 2016: 317). In the case of Star Trek (2009) and its sequels, this has meant resetting or erasing the familiar actors, art direction, and tone of the Shatner/Nimoy years. The only original cast member to appear in the 2009 film is Leonard Nimoy, but the other actors are made to appear in the vid and—for the vid’s audience—become a proper part of the reboot’s alternate diegesis, re-introducing the history of the franchise that the reboot seeks to supersede. A key sequence in the vid (and the film) takes place in an ice cave where the old Spock telepathically gives the new Kirk (Chris Pine) a flashback exposition sequence to explain the reboot film as an alternate timeline. The vid replaces this exposition with a rapid sequence of clips featuring Kirk and Spock from the original series, captioned by the lyrics ‘Devil came by this morning | Said he had something to show me | […] Pictures and things that I’ve done before | Circling around me’. After the flashback sequence, Kirk’s reaction elicits Spock’s apology for ‘emotional transference’, which can be read as Spock’s apologizing for burdening Kirk with Spock’s own guilt and shame for having caused the destruction of two planets, or of Spock’s emotion of seeing his old (dead) friend again. The vidder here’s luck composites partial frames from the original franchise, constructing a visual representation of memory through what looks like a digitally added static/ tear effect reminicient of worn or degraded videotape. The left-hand side of the frame shows a close-up of Kirk’s face, and the right-hand side of the frame contains added, digitally clipped footage of Spock’s memory as experienced by Kirk (and, therefore, by the audience as well). Like Holdsworth’s description of the BBC TV series Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007), in which episodes were preceded by ‘the 1970s test card and colour bars flickering onto the screen’ so that ‘Television appeared to be breaking down or rewinding to a different time’ (2011: 111), The Test takes on a specific visual signifier to indicate an ‘aesthetic shift in time’ (ibid.). What we see in the vid is the result of Spock’s emotional transference: we see this new Kirk’s artificial memories of a life not his but that he now remembers. Unlike the relative clarity of Tik Tok’s editing, the digital mimicry of analogue degradation is used as a textual representation of Kirk’s imperfect recall even as the comparison of images performs the vidder’s critical comparison of the reboot with the original cast’s films and episodes. The Test intervenes in the narrative of the reboot film using clips from Star Trek’s previous incarnations. Where All Coming Back performs a fan’s memory of the franchise as represented through archival clips of that franchise to ‘rebuild’ Spock’s own memory, The Test argues that this new Kirk has gained access to that same historical information through the original

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Spock. In both Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Star Trek (2009), Spock arrives on the bridge of the Enterprise to publicly request Kirk’s permission to re-join the Enterprise crew. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), this takes place partway through the film, whereas in Star Trek (2009), the scene is the dénouement. Shifting this reunion to the end of the film fulfils the narrative promise of a reboot; the vid constructs a diegesis in which Kirk expects to see Spock because of his foreknowledge of a similar moment from his alternate’s past. This expectation is shared by the audience, who share the same memory of the previous incarnation. The 2009 film visually quotes its predecessor, as in both films Spock enters through a door on the right side of the frame, pauses, and then moves right to left through the shot; the vid’s complex invocation of memory and archive occur through digitally compositing the two scenes. The overlay of the 1979 Spock (Leonard Nimoy) on the 2009 Spock (Zachary Quinto) appears intentionally rough, clearly positioning the older footage as a memory (or hallucination) that intrudes on Kirk’s view of his current crew member. The vid does more than point out a similarity in framing and blocking: it asks its audience to read the new film in a deeper historical context, which is achieved by a ‘textual re-encounter’ (Holdsworth 2011: 98) with these older texts. As a film, Star Trek (2009) is more concerned with Kirk as an agent of science fiction action than in permitting moments of reflection or introspection. Therefore, The Test works to fill in Kirk’s intensely personal journey to establish self-worth and value in the eyes of Spock (who has power over him as lecturer, as superior officer on the ship, and then as his captain), even as he blows up alien spaceships and flees monsters. It does so by suggesting that Kirks own past and his knowledge of the alternate timeline are constantly present in his mind, in his recent memory. In a continuation of the sequence detailing Spock’s return to duty described above, new Kirk’s memory of old Spock’s happiness at seeing Kirk alive and well (at the end of ‘Amok Time’) is suggested through juxtaposing a clip from the original series episode with a clip of similar composition from the film (a two-shot from behind Kirk’s head and showing Spock’s face) and context (Spock and Kirk seeing each other after a period apart). Vitally, the vid pairs both narrative context and also formal elements: the video effect and cross-cutting is placed so that Kirk’s memory of a different timeline bleeds through in the middle of a reverse shot. The film’s echo of the episode’s framing is recognizable as being from different source material: while the aspect ratios of both are the same due to the compositing, the television source appears slightly cropped and the film is differentiated by a lens flare effect and detailed set decoration. The videotape distortion links this ‘memory’ with the new Spock’s more reserved response.

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Unlike All Coming Back and Closer, which both make Spock the main character, The Test retains Kirk as the main character. It positions Spock as watching Kirk, who himself is aware of being watched and judged (as established through dissolves/fades) by Spocks from two universes/timelines. The question asked in the chorus (‘Did I pass | The acid test’) is made into Kirk’s search for approval from Spock, who in this timeline is not his friend (or lover). As with All Coming Back and Closer, there is a voyeuristic quality to the more intimate tone of The Test that sets it apart from the inclusive narrative of Tik Tok. Tik Tok contains a very public world, whereas the introspection of The Test and the torment of Closer are invitations to view the characters’ deeply personal moments which are exposed for the pleasure of the audience. This performance of memory is shared by the vid’s audience: we are led through a historiographical exercise constructed in archival clips, as a refresher (or f irst experience) of the franchise. Indeed, as they are framed in The Test, these moments of significance may also be read as a performance of the history of Kirk/Spock vids. The visual quotations and narrative parallels in the reboot film take on extra significance as they are called out by the vidder and integrated into a story of Kirk making sense of his world and experiences. In these vids, and particularly in The Test, certain moments—the handclasp from the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 3D chess, Spock appearing at the bridge—come to act as shorthand for larger character and narrative arcs. Clips repeated in vids are moments that Kirk and Spock would f ind meaningful if they were emotionally complex people given to self-reflection, rather than being characters formed ‘without the illusion of rounded personality’, as Lynne Joyrich argues (1996: 73). Therefore, clips from the original series act as the characters’ memories and as the vidders’ performance of their own readings of the franchise. Therefore, the vids in this section suggest three different ways of watching Star Trek, three different archival ‘discoveries’, and three different representations of the franchise. The Test deals explicitly with a character’s recovery of memory, where Tik Tok and Closer suggest reinterpretations of the original narrative and, by extension, of the way a series can be used as an archive for fanworks that play on the expectations of an audience. Also, to make sense of each clip and its place in the vid, the vid watcher must recall the overarching narrative; therefore, vids demand a dense and active reading predicated on one’s memory of a series or of similar works, codes, and conventions. For Closer and The Test, the aesthetic of memory—how memory is represented in these vids—is achieved through digital effects

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replicating degraded film or video. In Tik Tok, unaltered footage evokes a different role for the archive: it does not attempt to replicate the ‘look’ of an archival artifact but instead demonstrates what stories may be told through the mastery or command of an archive. Therefore, vids help to variously constitute, recall, and demonstrate knowledge and understanding of a series. The vid form permits a diverse range of expression and comment by vidders, who invite their audiences to share in their interpretations. Vitally, the form’s inherent reflexivity demands that the vid be viewed and read alongside the viewer’s memory and understanding of its source series as a whole. Vidding’s historiographical role moderates the tension between the destruction of the series’ grand narrative (by being pulled apart and having small sections removed) and its maintenance in vids (as the master referent without which the vid is not comprehensible).

Conclusion This chapter’s discussion of the differences between archiving and collecting and between archives and collections shows how vids demonstrate vidders’ use of their personal media collections as archives to create works that both constitute and respond to the shared experiences of media fandom. This defies the logic of ‘disposable television’, as clip choices made in vids will often highlight the personal meanings attached to texts and show evidence of extensive re-watching over time. The experience of watching a vid can become part of a shared history of watching a series or film, particularly in convention vidshows. Vids have an intimate relationship with the history of media in the home in that vids are made out of a time-shifted collection or archive. The home video archive is something that has the potential to be continually reworked. Digital platforms permit a historical flattening, where the contents of a DVD shelf or hard drives can permit this manner of interaction across several decades. Experientially, the catalogues of on-demand streaming services place titles in a similar proximity. What digital provides is not the ability to create these kinds of works but more numerous and much more accessible material with which to play. Therefore, vids describe the close relationship between personal archives, individual and collective memory, and the way memory and history are represented. Raymond Williams’ hallucinatory account of watching American commercial television in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) implies a mode of interacting with television—a central source disseminated to

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receiver boxes with very limited intervention possible from the (human) receiver—that can no longer be assumed when conceiving of the audience who watches a programme (let alone the audience who watches the advertising breaks, etc.). Vids, as objects of film and television and made from home video, provide one way of considering a subset of film and television audiences. Multiple sites of watching and methods of access as well as temporal and spatial dislocation from an initial broadcast complicate the question of what television this television audience is watching. The pictures showing on a box in a living room might come from many sources, so it becomes easier to think of television programmes as archived materials accessed by curators/collectors and historians, or at least the metaphor might prove fruitful when considering how vids come to be, both technically (in terms of their technical heritage/genesis) and conceptually (the frameworks, contexts, practices, and modes of watching). The relative stability of a personal archive is an attractive grounding point in the middle of so many points of access—syndication, box-set releases, home media releases of any variety—where the ability to self-generate these archives via taping things off the air or copying tapes (from friends, from video rental stores, or from public libraries) removes the point of access from a rigorously linear frame. The unique aura of one’s own copy persists even when versions can be found online. YouTube is a false archive: copyright disputes or the whim of the uploader can remove content, break links, and gut playlists. In many senses, YouTube reaffirms Benjamin’s criteria for a personal library (or in this case, a clip library): with VHS, discs, or digital files, the collector’s own copies are in the collector’s control, whereas a streaming or digital locker link marks only where something once was and not that it still exists. The relationship between collections and archives therefore suggests complementary framings of the vid form, which together help inform an understanding of vids as discourse and as a kind of history and an object of historiography.

List of Works Cited Assmann, Aleida, ‘From “Canon and Archive”’, in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 97-107. Excerpted in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 334-337 Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)

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Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The System of Collecting’, Excerpt of Le Système des objets (Paris, 1968), trans. by Roger Cardinal, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 7-24 Benjamin, Walter, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’, trans. by Harry Zohn (1968), in Illuminations, 9th edn (London: Fontana Press/HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 61-69 Bick, Ilsa J., ‘Boys in Space: “Star Trek,” Latency, and the Neverending Story’, Cinema Journal, 35.2 (1996), 43-60 Bjarkman, Kim, ‘To Have and to Hold: The Video Collector’s Relationship with an Ethereal Medium’, Television & New Media, 5.4 (2004), 217-246 Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson, ‘Introduction: Work in Progress’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 5-33 Cherchi Usai, Paolo, Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1994) Classic TV Archive, CTVA – The Classic TV Archive Homepage, no date. [accessed 19 May 2014] Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Extracts reprinted as ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. by Simon During, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 57-76 ‘Closer (Star Trek vid)’, Fanlore, last updated 21 April 2019. [accessed 18 October 2019] Coppa, Francesca, ‘A Brief History of Media Fandom’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 44-60 — ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 1 (2008), no page. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 1-9, 211-13. Excerpted in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 361-364 De Kosnik, Abigail, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016) Dinsmore, Uma, ‘Chaos, Order and Plastic Boxes: The Significance of Videotapes for the People who Collect Them’, in The Television Studies Book, ed. by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 315-326

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Einwächter, Sophie G., ‘Preserving the Marginal. Or: The Fan as Archivist’, in At the Borders of (Film) History: Temporality, Archaeology, Theories, ed. by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea Mariani (Udine: Forum, 2015) pp. 359-369 Fetveit, Arild, ‘Reality TV in the Digital Era: A Paradox in Visual Culture?’ Media, Culture and Society 21.6 (1999), 787-804. Revised version reprinted in The Television Studies Reader, ed. by Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 543-556 Garde-Hansen, Joanne, ‘MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook’, in Save as…: Digital Memories, ed. by Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 135-150 — Media and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) Gauntlett, David, and Annette Hill, TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1999) Geraghty, Lincoln, Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) — ‘“A Reason to Live”: Utopia and Social Change in Star Trek Fan Letters’, in Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, ed. by Lincoln Geraghty (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 73-87 Gray, Ann, Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology (London: Routledge, 1992) Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010) Gregory, Chris, Star Trek: Parallel Narratives (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) Hilderbrand, Lucas, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) Holdsworth, Amy, ‘“Television Resurrections”: Television and Memory’, Cinema Journal, 47.3 (2008), 137-144 — Television, Memory and Nostalgia (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Hunt, Leon, ‘“Drop Everything… Including Your Pants!”: The Professionals and “Hard” Action TV’, in Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, ed. by Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 127-141 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn, with Siobhan O’Flynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) Joyrich, Lynne, ‘Feminist Enterprise? “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and the Occupation of Femininity’, Cinema Journal, 35.2 (1996), 61-84

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Klinger, Barbara, ‘Re-enactment: Fans Performing Movie Scenes from the Stage to YouTube’, in Ephemeral Media: Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube, ed. by Paul Grainge (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2011), pp. 195-213 Kuhn, Annette, ‘A Journey Through Memory’, in Memory and Methodology, ed. by Susannah Radstone (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), pp. 179-196 Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) Lewis, Jon, ‘“If You Can’t Protect What You Own, You Don’t Own Anything”: Piracy, Privacy, and Public Relations in 21st Century Hollywood’, Cinema Journal, 46.2 (2007), 145-150 Lobato, Ramon, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2012) May, Christopher, Digital Rights Management: The Problem of Expanding Ownership Rights (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2007) Moving History, Films from the Home Front, no date. [accessed 19 May 2014] Newman, Michael Z., ‘Free TV: File-Sharing and the Value of Television’, Television and New Media 13.6 (2012), 463-479 Noordegraaf, Julia, ‘Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan’, in Technologies of Memory in the Arts, ed. by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 172-187 O’Neill, Michael, ‘“We Put the Media in (Anti)social Media”: Channel 4’s Youth Audiences, Unofficial Archives and the Promotion of Second-Screen Viewing’, in Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, ed. by Lincoln Geraghty (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 17-38 Oldham, Joseph, Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State in British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Pearce, Susan, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995) Penley, Constance, ‘Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology’, in Technoculture, ed. by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 135-161 Price, Jonathan, Video-Visions: A Medium Discovers Itself (New York: Plume, 1977) quigonejinn, ‘Freedom Hangs Like Heaven’, 26 May 2008. LiveJournal post. [accessed 27 May 2011] Reeves, Jimmie L., Mark C. Rodgers, and Michael Epstein, ‘Rewriting Popularity: The Cult Files,’ in Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files, ed. by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 22-35

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Scahill, Andrew, ‘Serialized Killers: Prebooting Horror in Bates Motel and Hannibal’, in Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, ed. by Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016), pp. 316-334 Steedman, Carolyn, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) Strangelove, Michael, The Empire Of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Their Fans (London: Routledge, 1995) TVARK: The Online Television Museum, no date. [accessed 19 May 2014] Wheatley, Helen, Gothic Television (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006) Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974) Windsor, John, ‘Identity Parades’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 49-67 Winters, Sarah Fiona, ‘Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in “Closer” and “On the Prowl”’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page.

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Critical Spectatorship and Spectacle: Multifandom Vids Abstract If a vid is a vidder’s path through a text, how do we account for vids that combine multiple source texts into one work? This chapter focuses on multifandom vids, a genre that draws together video clips from several sources and that demonstrates ways of watching broadly across media texts. In this, multifandom vids are the record of more than the interpretation of a single text: they construct a fannish spectator’s ‘paths’ through genres, transmedia narratives, and even actors’ careers. Alongside critical work on found footage films, this chapter analyses the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship with audience fascinations of erotics, of spectacle, and of the pleasures offered by various genres. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, transmedia, spectacle, found footage films

If a vid is a vidder’s path through a text, how do we account for vids that combine multiple source texts into one work? This chapter focuses on multifandom vids, a genre of vidding that draws together video clips from several sources and that demonstrates ways of watching broadly across media texts. It expands on the premise of the previous chapter to discuss the vid form as detailing a mode of spectatorship that works across a genre (e.g. science fiction) or other set of related texts (e.g. Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in a transmedia romance across films, animated and live-action television series, and comic book pages). In this, vids are the record of more than the interpretation of a single text: they construct ‘paths’ through genres, transmedia narratives, or even actors’ careers. Looking once again at critical work on particular found footage films as close proximate forms to vids, this chapter analyses the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship with

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch05

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audience fascinations of erotics, of spectacle, and of the pleasures offered by closely watching genres. This chapter positions vids as works that describe the act of critical engagement as a form of fascination. As Jenkins (1992: 24) has pointed out, in media fandom this fascination can often be tinged with frustration of the ‘unrealized possibilities’ in the objects of their fandom. In this chapter I sort these fascinations into somewhat different categories to Helen Wheatley’s discussion of recent television programming in which she explores fascination with medicalized and abject televized bodies and fascination in relation to the erotics of desiring and desired bodies (2016). Vids are arguably about excess: excesses of emotion, spectacle, and of eroticism. Each of these forms of excess are grounded in intense fascination with the image and with what the image can signify in terms of narrative, character development, or other representational paradigms. The works that are created out of this fascination have their own intensity, and this fascination is seen most intensely in multifandom vids. As described in my Introduction, those who make and watch vids are members of a predominantly female subculture; therefore, I restate the academically substantiated assumption that women are very likely to be the creators and viewers of vids and that, broadly speaking, vids offer textual evidence of a gendered mode of media spectatorship beyond passively watching. 44

Multifandom Vids Where other vid genres use a single series, film, or franchise as their source material, multifandom vids use multiple sources in their construction. Where a series, film, book, or franchise is known as a ‘fandom’, multifandom vids are so called because they are made using clips from different media texts, or ‘multiple fandoms’. There is no agreed-upon limit on the number of fandoms that can be used in a multifandom vid, and any potential subcategorizations relating to the number of sources used would need to be weighed against the purpose (as stated by a vidder or discernible through reasonable analysis) of the vid. Since a multifandom vid uses clips from multiple fandoms to make a single work that compares several sources, the resulting vids do not generally offer detailed arguments about singular 44 I acknowledge following the problematic orthodoxy of much of fan studies here, which as Rukmini Pande notes, defaults to a demographic ‘norm [of] white, middle class, cisgender, and American’ (2016: 210).

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characters or pairings, as with character study, ‘ship’ (relationship), or recruiter vid genres. Instead, by spending less of their focus on a single source or fandom, multifandom vids illustrate a comparison between different film and television texts, allowing the vidder to comment on popular media trends and tendencies. When these comments relate to a single genre, the resulting vid is comparable to a scholarly genre study, since the identifiable markers/icons of genre are isolated and presented for comparison in the final work, such as the many spaceships seen in Starships! (bironic, 2012). Other multifandom vids that have a different focus—beyond genre—will enable other forms of analysis. For example, Around the Bend (Danegen, 2010) collects clips and stills of female characters and real-life women driving and/or posing with all manner of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, aircraft, spacecraft, tanks). One possible reading of this vid is that it refutes a gendered perception that only men can have mastery of these objects and thus can explore the themes of freedom and agency that are associated with their use in fiction and in broader cultural narratives. Other multifandom vids, such as Boulevard of Broken Songs (Destina and Barkley, 2007), perform a more pointed analysis of a limited number of texts towards a particular point: in this case, looking at four television series that feature sad heroes who, as per the lyrics, ‘walk alone’. In this vid the song that is used is a mash-up, which itself combines a number of songs, each of which is identified with a different character. As the aural layering increases, the vid’s cross-cutting intensifies, as does the comparison between the four characters. Many of the vids I use as examples in this chapter ask their audience to identify the clips’ content in a seemingly superficial manner: do you recognize this actor, this series, that character, or these visual signifiers of those tropes? As sequences of images, these types of vids do not have the time to make detailed comments on specific nuances in a story but instead draw attention to more basic rapid identification of clips. It is possible to watch a multifandom vid and not recognize a portion of the clips, particularly when they draw on dozens of disparate sources, as with Around the Bend, or a vid such as Long Live (Llin, 2014), which collects and connects dozens of characters from across the various Star Trek iterations. Multifandom vids are comprehensible not because every clip is immediately known: when enough clips are familiar and the vid’s concept is apparent, the unknown clips are not disruptive. Indeed, unfamiliar clips in a multifandom vid can be akin to receiving a recommendation for a film or series. However, this is not to say the clips are suddenly made anonymous when they are removed from their context; their link to the source narrative is not broken, but

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multifandom vids will often use clips for their iconicity as well as to recall specific moments of plot or character development. A vid’s segmentation and reconstruction of whole narratives into parts (clips) can be read as indicative of the way this kind of audience watches media, consumes narratives, and configures desire. Vids provide textual evidence of an experience of film and television that is governed by fascination and attentive spectatorship. As Francesca Coppa writes, regarding the multifandom vid A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005), the vid’s segmentation of many different television series ‘is staging a way of watching television familiar to most female fans and to all fan vidders: a selective seeing’ (2009: 109). A vid’s clips are, by definition, parts of films and television series that have been selectively noticed by fans and deemed noteworthy for inclusion because of the clips’ significance or aesthetic appeal. The intense fragmentation of vids, particularly of the kind demonstrated in multifandom vids, reveals the fascinations of television and film texts beyond narrative concerns. This purposeful fragmentation and then re-use of clips means that though they are dislocated from their source narratives, clips in a vid maintain a connection to their source material. This connection results from the clips’ recognizability, either through the audience’s familiarity with the source material or through generic clues in mise-en-scène or form. In the gallery/video art world, found footage films or remix video (of whichever labels) have a different relationship to recognizability of clips (Wees 1992; Desjardins 1995; Zryd 2003; Demos 2010; Hatch 2012). In some, the specific context and location of clips become less important than the bravura re-editing of the artist, for example in the work of Bruce Conner or Craig Baldwin’s science fiction spectacle Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) or the critical re-appraisal of media representation in Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978), discussed earlier. While images predominate, these are not anonymous or critically distanced images. Multifandom vids do not automatically ask a vid’s audience to reconsider the finer details of a specific story or to examine character development or relationships. Anne Friedberg’s analysis of montage and audience interventions into television’s broadcast flow is relevant here. She writes that the remote control has changed the nature of montage; every viewer is a ready-made montagiste, cutting and pasting images from a wide repertoire or sources at the push of a button. Montage, once an analogy to dialectical thought or the shock value of the surreal, now also signifies a form of consumer choice with the controls in the hands of a new virtual shoppe. (1993: 141-142)

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Conceptualizing the action of changing channels as montage follows the 1983 description by Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch (2000) of the ‘viewing strip’ as a text created out of the experience of changing channels to move between different unrelated items. Both theorizations refocus the agency of viewership back to the audience rather than the anonymous ‘author’ of the channel’s scheduling team. This practice of viewership that is critically understood in television studies to be a kind of authorship is arguably simulated and formalized/textualized in a vid’s editing. A multifandom vid mimics the behaviour of a television audience—which is not specific to vid fandom—and makes an enduring record of it. Multifandom vids are certainly easier to make when using digital source files, but the comparative/analytical possibilities of the vid form are found in much earlier videotape vids, such as That’s What Friends Are For (3 Sisters, 1985). This vid begins with title cards of Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-1968), Riptide (NBC, 1983-1986), I Spy (NBC, 1965-1968), and Alias Smith and Jones (ABC, 1971-1973), making it clear to the viewer which fandoms are included. It continues with clips from each series that demonstrate the vid’s exhibition of friendship between male protagonists on these television series. As the clips span decades, this vid can be read as documenting the recurrence or persistence of buddy cop tropes across spy, crime, and western genres. It also documents a practical dimension of audience engagement with television series: only Riptide was contemporary to the vid, with the other clips likely only available through repeats, meaning That’s What Friends Are For captures both an evolving scheduling practice (syndication) and the new home video-recording technology. The vid can also be read as a catalogue of ‘slashable’ shows: that is, television series that have homoerotic subtext and that have inspired fan responses. It clearly shows bonds of friendship between the featured characters by using clips that feature gestures and glances—laughing together, offering physical support, sharing potentially meaningful looks with each other. 45 Coppa argues that clips in the multifandom vid A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness, as ‘parts—tropes, movements, frames’ are ‘reappropriate[d]’ by vidders who then ‘turn them into sites of pleasure and surplus’ (2009: 110). These televisual segments (Ellis 1982; see also Chapter 1) are a vid’s building 45 The vid uses Dionne Warwick’s cover of ‘That’s What Friends Are For’, from her album Friends (1985), for its soundtrack and not Rod Stewart’s earlier recording. The song features Gladys Knight, Elton John, and Stevie Wonder, thereby constructing a further (inter-)textual reference to friendship through the different performance styles of the singers, marking each as distinct and yet part of a whole.

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blocks. This potential for abundance means multifandom vids are therefore well-placed to offer critical responses based on widely spanning comparisons of many film and television texts. However, these critical comparisons are not made without emotion. While Coppa defines the fannish tendency to describe a vid’s thematic alignment as ‘a visual essay that stages an argument’ (2008: 1.1), using the term ‘argument’ potentially connotes a reserved, pedagogical, or didactic mode of address, which disavows their emotional intensity and their visual pleasures. It is perhaps reasonable to suggest that vids make their particular form of argument through emotional appeals. That’s What Friends Are For arguably asserts that, despite the different genres and ages of its source series, they share a common way of representing male friendship. The many sources of a multifandom vid evoke a sense of plenty, excess, and fascinated celebration of the many pleasures of television viewership. Therefore, the vid form relates to the pleasures of watching broadly across many texts. Indeed, the act of recognizing and identifying the many different sources in a massively multifandom vid is a real pleasure of the genre. The vid form enacts an intense fannish spectatorship that is characterized by fascination. This critical looking as a form of fascination is a forthright statement about desire/pleasure and is textual evidence of how media fans can watch for more than the plot. The effect of muting the clips—removing diegetic and non-diegetic sound—leads to an enhanced focus on camera movement and motion within the frame. Improvements in editing technology have meant that vidders’ use of so-called ‘talky face’ clips—static clips in which characters are shown speaking significant elements of dialogue that was a hallmark of videotape-era vidding—has dropped away as it became possible to have finer editing, shorter clips, and a stronger sense of motion. This allows the clips’ utility as image to predominate: a removal of dialogue and an emphasis on gestures, glances, and movement both within the frame and of the camera emphasizes the visual, the spectatorial, and the representational aspects of a vid’s video source material. This is why the vid song is so vital: it captions (narrates) the vid’s images in order to suggest a range of meanings in which to read each clip’s inclusion. This chapter examines a range of pleasurable fascination addressed in multifandom vids: pleasures of genre, in bodies, of mastering a transmedia storyworld, and through the lives of (subcultural) celebrities. If we can understand a vid as a record of a viewer’s path through a text, multifandom vids textualize a path through a set of texts, offering an interpretation grounded in an invitation to play with recognition and comparison beyond a single fandom or media text. This chapter is arranged around the four

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pleasures mentioned above—genre, bodies, transmedia, and celebrity—in which a channel-flipping perception of abundance is brought to the fore. As discussed earlier, the artistic purpose in re-using moving images is generally held to be some sort of critical evisceration of media culture, intended to ‘question and critique traditional history and institutions’ (Yeo 2004: 25), but the vid is a comfortably ambiguous form that mediates the conflict between a textual distancing and the fascination and pleasures offered by film and television. The vid form’s approach to images—separated from their narrative context and recombined to create pleasurable and/or critical texts—is the focus of this chapter.

Genre Pleasures The first form of fascination with images discussed in this chapter relates to the pleasures offered by genres. The critical engagement of this kind of multifandom vid is based on the intense spectatorship of a given genre and therefore creates a form of visual critical genre study. Vids that focus on genres create a kind of urtext that selects and amplifies iconic elements by collecting and presenting the fragmented pieces into a new flow, where cross-cutting between the various sources makes an argument about similarity and comparison. Science fiction is a recurring (and favourite) subject for media fandom, so there are many examples of vids that draw from this genre. Data’s Dream (GF & Tashery, 1994; remastered by Morgan Dawn, 2004) is a canonical early vid that addresses specific science fiction tropes. Shown regularly at fan conventions and set to Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ which has a repeated lyric of ‘sail away, sail away’, it uses clips of the Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount/syndication, 1987-1994) character Data (Brent Spiner) to frame an extended montage of multifandom instances of sailing and flight, with more than 30 sources used in the original and nearly twice that number in the remaster. 46 The vid constructs a fantasy composed of exploration sequences for the character ranging from film to television (and including live-action and animation), with the likelihood that the audience would recognize much of the material. 46 Such as The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Blake’s 7 (BBC1, 1978-1981), Babylon 5 (PTEN/TNT, 1994-1998), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985), and Superman (Richard Donner, 1978). For a full list, see: the listing on the Fanlore wiki for the vid .

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A less reverent early example of a multifandom vid that plays with genre is I Think I’m A Clone Now (Z Team, 1992; not to be confused with rhoboat’s 2008 vid of the same name), which uses the ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic parody/cover of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, which had recently been a hit for the singer Tiffany. The vid begins with an extended series of clips from an episode of Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969) in which Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is duplicated 47 and continuing with clips from other film and television sources where time travel or other circumstances mean characters meet (or have to avoid meeting) themselves. This vid is clearly meant to be fun, creating a dialogue between the (venerated, celebrated) Star Trek clips and more contemporary uses of the trope. While it begins as if it is a Star Trek vid, it is interrupted at the start of the first chorus with a cut to a clip from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989) of Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) jumping into the frame to meet their past selves. Once the interruption takes place, other instances of the trope from other films and series are introduced. 48 The song is used to tie the clips together and provide a shared internal narration for each set of characters who are presented to us as having found themselves in this same situation. In both Clone Now and Data’s Dream, the vidders’ deep knowledge of a range of genre texts is employed to construct sequences of images where the iconic or symbolic content of the clips can be read in isolation from the narrative context from which they have been taken. Indeed, it is the whole source film or series that is being represented, not precise story elements or moments of character development. This is shifted somewhat in multifandom vids that focus on a single actor through various roles. However, since the actor is primary by virtue of being the subject of the vid—and therefore their presence in the vid does not need to be further decoded—the ‘game’ of a multifandom vid about an actor is identifying the specific series/episodes and films rather than the actors themselves. 47 ‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’, tx. 20 October 1966. 48 Including mainly Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989), The Muppet Movie (James Frawlry, 1979), Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989), Tiny Toon Adventures (NBC/FOX, 1990-1992), and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The ‘List of Star Trek Early Songvids’ entry on the Fanlore wiki does not indicate that this is a multifandom vid. It also states that it was made by either California Crew or Z Team and gives a production date of 1989. I have based my analysis on a DVD compilation of vids shown at the Escapade convention and have used that attribution/dating here, in part because syndication and home video release dates make a 1989 date unlikely. It is possible that Z Team remastered California Crew’s original vid, but I have not been able to verify this.

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Working with clips from similar genres is not unique to multifandom vids; precedents in found footage, compilation/collage, and video art pieces offer structurally similar returns to sets of texts. Luckhurst credits artist Bruce Conner with discovering ‘that the coherence of spliced collages could be held together by the instant recognition of genre iconography and narrative formulae’ (2008: 195). Matthias Müller’s short film Home Stories (1990) is similar to a multifandom vid in how it compares distinct texts related by genre by editing together many similar scenes found in Hollywood films from the 1950s and 1960s. 49 Home Stories creates an intense space of six minutes’ duration where many separate films are made to echo each other with gestures, camera movements, and mise-en-scène alike, creating a unitary—if fragmented—archetypal melodrama out of contemporaneous films. Müller’s piece has been subject to different interpretations, categorized as an example of New Queer Cinema (Hallas 2003) and as ‘a revealing and amusing moment of meta-film noir’ (MacDonald 2005: 29). Akira Lippit describes how, in Home Stories: Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren, Kim Novak, Lana Turner, among many others, appear to repeat virtually identical gestures in a compulsive and mechanical manner: falling onto a bed, shutting a door, listening at a shut door, turning on and off lights, peering out of windows, being frightened by noises, running to and from rooms in a house. (2008: 119)

Müller replaces the audio of the individual clips with a score composed for his film, including subtle sound effects, which creates a continuous aural space in which to situate the disparate clips. A similar effect is accomplished in multifandom vids. Home Stories compares similar scenes, costuming, performances, mise-en-scène—not making a new story but suggesting a way to read any individual source used in the work as an example of a wider genre. In noticing the repetition of similar gestures and art direction, Home Stories as well as massively multifandom vids demonstrate a fascination with—or pleasure in—the search for these genre markers, showing off both the visual pleasures shared by these works’ audiences and the investment of 49 Including All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956), Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957), Madame X (David Lowell Rich, 1966), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956), The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), and possibly also Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963). This list was compiled with thanks to Patrick Pilkington.

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time necessary to construct these works. Müller’s blend of Sirk and Hitchcock draws out the more mundane domestic spaces of Hitchcock’s thrillers and adds a thread of horror to Sirk’s melodramas. With Home Stories, Müller constructs sequences of gestures performed by individual women alone in the frame that mimic or mirror their immediate predecessors, for example, turning on a lamp or wall light switch. The fluidity of motion through these shots constructs a sense of a shared diegesis. Multifandom vids likewise demonstrate a comparison between similar texts, the idea being that the vid watcher can appreciate the connections and will look for comparable connections in future viewings. If we view multifandom vids as being about textualizing an experience of pleasurable abundance, genre-focused multifandom vids present engagements with film and television genres based on the pleasures of viewership. One key example, Starships! (bironic, 2012), is an affectionate, upbeat, and emotional view of science fiction based around central images of the genre. It was one of a handful of vids included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s MashUp exhibition. Writing in the MashUp catalogue, Coppa argues that this vid ‘is clearly a descendant of Data’s Dream [and is] not just about spaceships, but about our feelings about spaceships’ (2016: 152, emphasis in original). This appeal to emotion and the wide range of sources used are likely to be the reason this vid quickly went viral and found an audience beyond its initial convention audience. Starships! includes clips from a large number of sources; by the vidder’s own count, it contains approximately 257 clips covering dozens of individual source texts (bironic, 2013). This type of vid suggests that one of the pleasures of media viewership is the identification and comparison of different films and series in both narrative and aesthetic terms. There is an echo here of the ‘archival cinephilia’ that Catherine Russell identifies as driving Christian Marclay’s 24-hour collage piece The Clock (2010) that presents a film archive where the history of film is ‘reduced to more basic units’ (much as a vid reduces television to segments) and then employs ‘a larger vocabulary of images that are deeply familiar, readable and recognizable’ (2013: 255) to address its audience. In both multifandom vids and in Marclay’s work, this is as much about watching broadly—recognizing narrative and aesthetic/ visual tropes across media—as it is about the interpretation of specific narratives or the appreciation of individual performances. The Clock is relatively straightforward in its conceit: it gathers images of clocks and watches as well as dialogue mentioning specific times to make a work about clocks that may also function as a clock. Massively multifandom vids are no less driven by meticulous research but also, as Coppa has suggested, engage with

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an emotional framing of the vid’s core idea. While The Clock has repeatedly been described as ‘playful’ (Russell 2013; Beugnet 2013; Levinson 2015) for its breadth and its editing style, it is not asking its audience to reflect on their deep love of timekeeping. Massively multifandom vids also display a knowledge of a genre, trope, or subject area and indulge in the pleasure of seeing that genre instantiated outside of usual fannish sources. The fan wiki site Fanlore.org defines massively multifandom vids of this sort—which include many sources and tend to use clips for their iconicity rather than to perform an analysis of related narratives—as ‘garbage can vids’ or ‘kitchen sink vids’, noting that these works can use source material that ‘may not necessarily be fannish in nature’. A vid that includes more than cult or fan-favourite sources makes an implicit statement about the vid’s sophistication (and by extension that of the vidder), as the work is not limited to niche texts. Recognizing that multifandom vids can often include non-fannish clips is important in describing the complexity of a specific genre. Starships! includes the expected cult/fannish science fiction films and series such as Star Trek, Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), and the reboot Battlestar Galactica. However, and in a similar vein to The Clock’s ‘non-hierarchical’ (Russell 2013: 255) ethos that reaches across auteurist and more mundane sources, Starships! also includes parodies such as Spaceballs (Mel Brooks, 1987) and clips from a ‘Pigs in Space’ sketch from The Muppet Show (ATV/Henson, 1976-1981) alongside more high-brow (and possibly, therefore, less fannish) films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007). These inclusions also demonstrate the overlap between fannish texts, cult texts, and genre-adjacent texts; in this way, Starships! is about a basic setting of science fiction—the spaceship—and the many different stories and kinds of stories told using this setting. It makes an implicit argument that while a media fandom audience might elevate a few key texts, those ‘feelings about spaceships’ (Coppa 2016) can be applied much more broadly. Due to this range of source material, massively multifandom vids can therefore be considered tours de force in recognition of the sheer labour needed to locate, create, and sequence the clips. The clips are not presented chronologically in a way that suggests that an experience with the genre over time is a journey toward maturation (of the individual or of science fiction), with children’s media giving way to more ‘serious’ programmes. Instead, the non-linear and, more importantly, non-hierarchical sequencing of clips reflects much more the broad span of fannish fascination with genre and the longevity of fannish memory rather than a linear historiography of the genre. The breadth of sources presented can remind the viewer of forgotten

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texts and characters; the vids therefore possess a hint of archival discovery in their presentation of unanticipated inclusions. Indeed, while conducting research for this project, I experienced first-hand how multifandom vids can be well-suited to convention viewing, where an audience can react together in a performance of group nostalgia. Multifandom vids can also demonstrate why certain tropes seem familiar or natural: by compiling a catalogue of examples, a vid shows where we have seen these tropes before. Vids can compile a catalogue of actions and settings that form the basis for genre-based expectations for particular narrative conventions or representational norms. Most importantly, as the soundtrack and dialogue of the clips are removed, the markers of genre that remain are visual: mise-en-scène, lighting, camera movement, and framing. The actors’ movements are, of course, also present; however, the clothes they wear and the spaces they move through speak just as loudly in a vid (as it were) as their gestures and glances. This is the visual representation of genre, showing the repetition and variation of tropes performed through—and made meaningful by—the organizing logic provided by the vid song. The soundtrack of Starships!, Nicki Minaj’s pop/rap single ‘Starships’, is a departure from the typical aural soundscapes of space-based science fiction film and television scores (see Whittington 2007). The song itself is arguably not about spaceships as much as it is about spending all one’s money on a series of great parties (see lyrics such as ‘Have a drink, clink, found the bud light’ and ‘Dance all ya life there’s no end in sight’). However, the song’s ebullience is made to transfer over to our feelings about spaceships, as Coppa says, both represented directly in the vid—pictures of spaceships—and indirectly through clips of science fiction characters who seem to be having a great time. Minaj’s voice signifies a female framing to the joys of science fiction that complements the vid’s (presumed-to-be fannishly female) gaze at male characters and advanced technology. Indeed, its upbeat tone means that it suits the vid’s more joyful presentation of spacecraft and the pleasure derived from watching narratives of space exploration.50 This makes a clip of the title character of the Pixar film Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) reaching up to the wave of golden space particles intensely emotional, as the inhuman avatar experiences motion and joy. In this way, the vid can be read as a 50 It does, however, elide Minaj’s music video for this song, which shows a kaleidoscopic, psychedelic beach party that can be easily read in terms of the history of black women’s selfrepresentation in Afrofuturism. (In contrast, the vid does not contain many representations of non-white characters, though this arguably stems from the genre’s issues with representational diversity.)

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reaction against ‘edgy’ recent ‘reimaginings’ of generic tropes, where the gritty realism of reboots and sequels replaces the genre’s escapist pleasures. The song lyrics argue that ‘starships are meant to fly’, and as such the vid makes an establishing shot of a spaceship or other craft into a joyful fulfilment of purpose—it is meant to be there. Early in the vid there is a montage in which a number of different spacecrafts are launched, take off, or are seen in mid-flight. Disconnected from their narrative framings, these clips show off the model work, computer graphics, and other special effects necessary to accomplish these shots. This sequence evokes the joy of flight and helps to establish this vid’s argument about the centrality of science fiction’s blend of utopian narrative and excitement of frontier exploration by showing this in action. More than flipping channels, the vid offers many ways of imagining space flight, particularly in montages at points when the song’s tempo picks up for an instrumental break and the pace of editing increases, enabling more clips and therefore more references. As much as the images of many different spaceships constitute/connote ‘science fiction’, this vid is about more than machinery: it is about the emotional dimension of watching science fiction and about finding points of identification with characters. If starships are meant to fly, then one of the pleasures of science fiction is the possibility of identification with the characters (or, indeed, the ships themselves51) who make this happen. The vid’s sequence of pilots shows actors of various races and genders engaged in piloting and gunnery. This sequence constructs a shared diegesis in which piloting a spacecraft is not motivated by narrative necessity but by the joy of the act itself. The vid’s work of cataloguing the tropes that contribute to a genre extends to parody. During an instrumental break that features what sound like siren effects, the vid gathers clips of space battles and other dramatic moments, punctuated by shots of alert/alarm messages. The sequence is full of motion and quick cuts, building a sense of excitement. The warning messages, with their similar text and red-and-black colouring—such as an ‘Alert: Condition Red’ Star Trek screen and a ‘Master Alarm’ console button in Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995)—are intercut with close-ups of console dials being manipulated, constructing a hybrid diegesis of the vid in which these many spaceships are being pushed together to their limits. This section finishes with clips from the original Star Trek series featuring a swinging camera and actors pretending to be jolted by external weapons fire, intercut with a shot from Spaceballs of a futuristic speedometer reading ‘Ludicrous 51 My thanks to my reviewer for reminding me that we might also identify with the spaceships, especially sentient ones such as the Leviathans in Farscape.

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Speed’, tying together the supposed seriousness (or perhaps, the gravity) of the earlier series with a later parodic response. While ‘highlighting’ a path (cf. Gray 2010) through these different science fiction texts, the vidder points out the repetition and variation at play across the genre. Starships! is not about any specific film or series but works as a shorthand for all iterations of the genre and plays into the audience’s enjoyment of recognizing these tropes. The sequence that concludes Starships! is composed of a dozen clips, each showing a different kind of ‘space tunnel’ or related representation of movement through space and of movement beyond the back of the frame towards something unseen. This continues the sense of forward motion throughout the rest of the vid, but at the same time it also demonstrates the variations between these different visually pleasing representations. Establishing shots of outer space or of spacecraft are a repeating feature throughout films, television series, and across space-based science fiction. This sequence collects spectacularly pleasurable repetitions that demonstrate the enjoyment taken in visual tropes as well as narrative ones. The vid articulates this process of recognition and makes the connections seem obvious, natural, and even comical once pointed out, as with a montage of ‘speed’/’battle damage’ acting. It does not make a critical argument about the evolution of the genre over time. The vid is a demonstration of a form of spectatorship grounded in recognizing and sharing the scope of pleasures associated with watching broadly across a range of media texts. As a contrast, Space Girl (Charmax, 2011) is a multifandom vid that looks at science fiction in a much more ambiguous way. Unlike Starships!, this vid’s song—‘Space Girl’ by The Imagined Village—is explicitly about science fiction, insofar as the lyrics take the perspective of a woman who has disregarded her mother’s warnings to not go into space (‘but I did, I did’). Gathering clips of many female characters in (Anglo-American) science fiction, it is organized in broadly chronological sequence, with black-andwhite sources giving way to colour, moving forward in time with every verse and chorus. In its early sequences, it articulates the historical frustration felt by women who were fans of science ficiton but did not see themselves represented in these genres except as objects of a male gaze. For example, in the second verse, following a sequence of 1960s space-miniskirts and futuristic semi-nudity, lyrics about meeting ‘a bug-eyed monster’ are used to caption a longer clip of a male character distracted by (and staring at) a woman who has walked into the frame. In this scene, the bug-eyed monster is the man and the warning about aliens arguably refers to workplace harrassment. However, the vid continues with an instrumental break where the slightly sinister tone of the song continues, but the emotional register

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shifts with a montage of female friendships. In the latter half of the vid, characters from more recent decades are shown to have more agency and are seen to be participating in the wonder of exploration and discovery. The chronological structure of the first half of the vid allows the vidder to make an argument about the genre’s history and its poor record of female representation as well as about the fates of female characters in cult-favourite and canonical science fiction films and series. The deep history represented in the vid—from early Doctor Who through to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, stopping at many points in between—gives it weight as a thoroughly researchered and therefore credible account of a gendered experience of screen-based science fiction through its history. It textualizes a path through the genre inflected with a critical eye, demonstrating how the pleasures of science fiction are moderated by more limited points of identification, reflecting on how narratives that may not be as forgiving to the female characters have given way to more productive and well-rounded representations. With its final shots, cutting from visually similar medium/ close-up shots of Gillian Anderson in The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002) to Jodie Foster in Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) looking at the sky with awe-filled expressions, the vid suggests that the genre has caught up with this half of its audience. There is a further intertextual resonance here as Anderson’s character in The X-Files was partially inspired by Foster’s character Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Cutting between the two clips acknowledges their similar composition and also the link between the actors. The warnings in the lyrics, from mother to daughter, could therefore be read in the final instances as the fears of a previous generation whose fight for equality has given way to modestly improving circumstances. Space Girl and Starships! prompt critical views of their sources based on arguments made through images, but they also level and homogenize insofar as they collect their moving images to show differences and similarities. These are not clips presented out of historical context; the totality of the vid provides the context. In summary, multifandom vids arguably conduct a visual genre study by collecting and presenting a range of related texts that show off the vidder’s depth of genre knowledge and construct a space for the viewer’s reflection on that genre’s tropes and expectations. From here, this chapter moves through three further pleasures covered in multifandom vids: the pleasures of bodily spectacle, the pleasures found in consuming transmedia texts, and the pleasures of sharing affection for celebrities and cult actors. Each of these types of multifandom vid displays vidding’s particular form of fascinated and intense spectatorship.

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Erotic and Bodily Spectacle This section is about the centrality of bodies as spectacle in multifandom vids. A focus on bodies is common to all vids—vids make meaning out of characters’ looks and gestures, and those looks and gestures are performed by actors and their bodies—but this focus is particularly apparent in multifandom vids. This particular regard for performers’ bodies is derived from an intense, scopophilic, and highly engaged form of viewership that Coppa (2009) has argued is typical of fandom. Her example, A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005), is one of several variations of a subgenre of multifandom vids that reflects and creates a spectacle of bodies. The bodies in question here are not always taken from television and film sources that Helen Wheatley (2016) might categorize as ‘intentional’ examples of ‘erotic spectacle’, that is, programmes that foreground sex and desire. Instead, they are closer to ‘accidental’ erotic spectacle (Wheatley 2016, citing Collie 2014), which Wheatley defines as ‘moments where women take visual pleasure in the text which is not anticipated by the programme-maker’ (2016: 221). In the vids, these include action sequences, times when characters are shown gazing off screen, and moments of emotional intensity. This is partially because, as Collie (2017) points out, Wheatley’s corpus was more contemporary and reflects changes in television drama. However, while the vids in my study also draw on older television and film texts, the framing of desirability is fannish rather than conventional. Early examples of vids that focus on displaying bodies for the viewer include the evocatively titled Smut (Mary Van Deusen, c. 1985-1990), the fun of watching actors play their own doppelgangers in I Think I’m A Clone Now, and a roster of cross-dressing male characters in Men in Tights (Perri, 2000). More recently, there have been catalogues of attractive men in Candymen (jagwriter78, 2008), a collection of female characters expressing desire and initiating intimacy with men in Take It Off (greensilver, 2009), an exploration of hurt/comfort in On the Prowl (sisabet and sweetestdrain, 2010), and a subversion of a misogynist song by using it to caption men on display via a vidder’s eye in Pornstar Dancing (Jayne L., 2011). In each example, the framework of desire is signalled by the vids’ titles, and male characters are framed as the object of a desiring female gaze. In multifandom vids that focus on women, such as the aforementioned Around the Bend, Space Girl, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, clips taken from media that were originally produced for a presumed-male audience are repositioned to concentrate the pleasures of representation for a presumed-female vid audience. In these vids—and vids such as Girl 4 All Seasons (foomatic, 2008),

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Hook Shot (Kuwdora, 2012), and Weapon of Choice (shinyjenni, 2015)—the enjoyment for a female viewer is not necessarily limited to a platonic interest in evaluating and appreciating representations of women; they offer an explicitly erotic potential to gaze at women presented for consumption outside of their narrative frame, where the pleasures of viewing bodies in action potentially overlap with viewer motives of desire and identification. Within the world of experimental moving-image re-use, a focus on denarrativized bodies can have a very different motive to the norms of multifandom vidding. One such artist is Martin Arnold, whose work is best known for his slowing and looping of single shots from Hollywood films, particularly in the three related pieces pièce touchée (1989), passage à l’acte (1993), and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998). In these works, Arnold takes these single shots and re-edits the fluid motion of the clip into jagged loops that advance the motion a few frames, only to jump back to near the start, forcing the actors’ gestures and movements to appear stuttering and mechanical. Akira Lippit argues this work creates ‘uncanny’ bodies out of the performances, erasing actor, narrative, and meaning from the source clips, having ‘evacuated [the bodies] of all personhood and inscribed them into an emptied-out cinema space’ (2008: 122). What remains is a resurrection of these cinematic bodies, where only a star image remains. However, while the same could be true of multifandom vids—where the pace and coherence of clips could result only in a sequence of ‘gestures without bodies’ (Lippit 2008: 127)—bodies in vids are reinscribed in a vidderly space that is then stuffed to abundance in a visual feast comprised of a plethora of pleasurable images. Where Arnold’s work slows the pace of movement to a point where the actors are, per Lippit, evacuated from their performances, multifandom vids’ presentation of bodies in rapid succession creates this pleasure of semiotic density. Multifandom vids enact the vidders’ power to collect so many bodies—or examples of genre tropes resulting from critical viewing—together to be at the mercy of the audience’s gaze without the consequence of expressing desire (as women, and for men and women) and within a cultural context that positions intense critical readings of texts as a fundamental pleasure of viewership. Vids’ emphasis on images separated from sound and on bodies separated from speech presents those bodies to the viewer as images primarily to be looked at, to borrow from Laura Mulvey’s influential ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). These are also images separated from narrative. Editing a vid is based on a careful re-watching of a film or series; therefore, a vid arguably preserves certain aspects of the gaze of the vidder and constructs a way of watching for the vid’s audience. Multifandom vids

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preserve that gaze as it moves across different television and film sources. Given the gendering of fandom, the gaze enacted in the transformations is a ‘female gaze’ (Gamman and Marshment 1988) rather than the normative male gaze. As the subjects of this gaze are both men and women, and as the practitioners of the form are not uniformly women, in this context it is perhaps reasonable to speak of a vidding gaze. Mulvey’s argument is that classic Hollywood cinema divides viewing along a male/active – female/passive split where female characters are traditionally ‘simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact’ (1975: 11). In this model of gendered spectatorship, which has been widely used and critiqued (Rodowick 1982; Ellis 1982; Gaines 1986; Gamman and Marshment 1988; White 1999; etc.), women are therefore bereft of agency and entirely subjected to the ‘male gaze’ of narrative cinema, and scopophilia is a fundamental part of audiences’ relationship with moving images. The correction, Mulvey argues, is for ‘radical film-makers’ (1975: 18) and their ilk to take control of the camera and the gaze in the hope that awareness of these structures would expose the illusion of conventional narrative film. However, such a hard-line position arguably means Mulvey’s ‘unacceptably puritanical’ ultimate goal becomes ‘the “destruction” of all the old pleasures associated with Hollywood’ (Gamman 1988: 24). The vid form and other re-uses of moving images work from the source material as it has been shot—working with ‘the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions’ (Mulvey 1975: 18)—in order to subvert them. In erotic multifandom vids, which have a history of situating decontextualized images of men as the subject of a desiring gaze, the pleasures of representational conventions are not destroyed as much as they are repositioned. A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness (Clucking Belles, 2005) is a spectacle of bodies engaged in a variety of actions/poses, all organized under a loose rubric of ‘hotness’. Following the lyrics of the vid’s song, ‘Hot Hot Hot’ (Buster Poindexter), the vid proposes that ‘hotness’ is what the vid’s audience finds attractive, enacting a shared desiring gaze. Instead of seeing the body as a fetish substituting for something lost, Coppa argues that it is a work of ‘surplus and pleasure’ that ‘invites its female spectator to a veritable orgy of scopophilia’ (2009: 107). The opening sequence makes it clear that this vid is about the pleasures that its viewer may find in film and television. The vast majority of the clips feature men; however, the vid’s first few clips are a montage of women dancing in groups. This is followed by a trio of clips starting with a male stripper (the first man in the vid), followed by a performance clip of a boy band and cutting directly to a reaction shot of

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a young woman whose pleased diegetic gaze means she functions as an avatar for the vid’s audience, replicating their expressions as they watch the vid. This is, potentially, how they had originally watched the clips in their original context. This sequence establishes that the men shown in the vid after this moment are performing for their female audience, just as the male stripper and boy band perform for female audiences. The rest of the vid is organized into sequences of ‘hotness’ tropes, each flowing into the next. For example, a clip of a swordfighter tipping his hat connects a sequence of sword fights with a sequence of men tipping their hats. These displays of physical competence and chivalric actions are ‘hot’, but the vidders’ labour in identifying and then collecting the suite of examples demonstrates a mode of engaged spectatorship across a wide range of texts. Common to both forms of erotic spectacle outlined at the start of this section—one constructed to be desirable, the other read as such by the viewer—is that both are ‘bodies that the viewer pauses to erotically contemplate’ (Wheatley 2016: 190). If vids can tell us something about a fannish or vidderly way of watching television and other media, multifandom vids are about literally segmenting and drawing out these pauses to dwell on moments of ‘accidental’ erotic spectacle for additional (and repeat) contemplation. However, for a fannish viewer, one typified by the imagined spectator of Fannish Taxonomy, the moments in multifandom vids about bodies do not represent unexpected or accidental moments of visual pleasure. Insofar as the specific eroticism of the bodies on screen needs to be decoded through a fannish context, it could be reasonable to say that the clips connote wider fannish discourses about what is erotic in a way that is almost metonymic rather than intentional or accidental. Coppa’s argument about Fannish Taxonomy is that, ultimately, the vid ‘isn’t about people; it’s about tropes’ (2009: 108). Enjoyment is taken in recognizing the tropes, watching a staged presentation of familiar tropes as articulated through the selection of these bodies, and feeling a sense of recognition and affinity for them beyond the specific pleasures of seeing certain people on screen. Indeed, in a tidy inversion of the Mulveyan gendering of spectatorship, gender roles in this vid are neatly swapped, as active women (the vidders) collect images of passive men (in the clips) for a female viewer’s visual pleasure. The elements detailed in Fannish Taxonomy refer to conventions and clichés in media fandom ranging from costuming choices to narrative elements.52 In these sequences, the individual identities of the men represented (as actors or their characters) are largely irrelevant, as they 52 Coppa’s essay includes an exhaustive list of these tropes.

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become the avatars of these tropes. For example, in a sequence of muscular men wearing plain black and plain white t-shirts, the focus becomes the torsos and the recognition that this costuming choice can (and has been) fetishized by the female fans of these films and series. There are many multifandom vids that focus on the presentation of attractive male bodies, but the vid form is not limited to a simple inversion of women watching men: many other vids present female bodies for the same gaze. As discussed above, multifandom vids such as Around the Bend, Girl 4 All Seasons, and Hook Shot articulate the pleasures of watching attractive women in active roles. These are just three examples of what has been called the ‘kick-ass ladies’ multifandom mode—vids that take evident pleasure in gathering clips of action heroines and in watching female characters performing stunts, wielding weapons, and otherwise being the focus of a shot beyond being eye candy for a male gaze. In vids full of female bodies, the clips have a dual signification: they focus on both the pleasure of seeing women dominate a media text and the aesthetic pleasure of seeing many thin, athletic, normatively beautiful, often leather-clad women perform. Significantly, the clips chosen by vidders are cut to emphasize physical ability or other forms of agency—these are women to be looked at as they accomplish something, not to be gazed upon as passive objects. Underlying this tension is the question of what it means for a woman to watch other women on screen. Working through the issue of the female spectator and the female gaze, Jackie Stacey writes of the ways in which Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) and All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) ‘tempt the woman spectator with the fictional fulfilment of becoming an ideal feminine other, while denying complete transformation by insisting upon differences between women’ within the narrative (1988: 129). In multifandom vids featuring women, the many different women exist in different universes and are not narratively in conflict with each other. By bringing together so many female characters, vids such as Hook Shot do not insist on differences between women as much as they offer too many to compare, leaving the viewer with a version of media where it is normal for women to predominate. The vid form connects and unites these characters, showing a group of women not narratively compelled to be in opposition for the audience to identify with, feel affection for, and/or be attracted to. As discussed earlier, clips in multifandom vids will maintain their recognizability/iconicity for audiences who know the source material, and they can be used to offer an analysis of similar narratives even as they collect gendered bodies in action. Weapon of Choice (shinyjenni, 2015) focuses

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on fight sequences performed by female characters in science fiction.53 Rather than these being performed purely for spectacle—though the vid does gather many cool stunts—the vid’s structure aligns visually similar moments that will have come from narratively congruent moments. In each source narrative, the characters’ bodies have become weapons; the vid explores how a lack of narrative agency unites characters across these many texts. Multiple characters are shown to be backflipping through laser security grids—all using similar weapons—or striding into a room at the head of a team, not so that we might choose who did it best (because they are not in competition with each other) but so that the similarities can be noted. Weapon of Choice is not unusual in its twin appeals, capturing the fun of seeing these characters in action while critiquing the fact that each character’s strength resulted from overcoming past traumas. Re-editing films and television series to decontextualize the narrative results in a concentration of bodily spectacle. For Dara Birnbaum, whose Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978) was discussed in Chapter 3, this concentration was intended to condemn the spectacular visual presentation of Wonder Woman. In Titanium (2012), a similar concentration is not intended to be about erotics alone but has a more comfortable, more confident approach to the fascination with the resulting sequence of spectacular moving images. Its spectacle is, additionally, one of representational affirmation. The multifandom vids that are primarily about active and desirable bodies enact a confident female gaze to look erotically (and unambiguously) at images of men and women alike. The interpretation of the gaze cast by one woman to another is limited in psychoanalytic theory, which supports the ‘rigid distinction between either desire or identification’ and ‘fails to address the construction of desires which involve a specific interplay of both processes’ (Stacey 1988: 129). The narrative constraints on these characters can be significant, and knowledge of such constraints can add poignancy to seeing these women freed. In the multifandom vid On the Prowl, its explicit eroticism takes the vidded body to an extreme of fetishistic scopophilia that reframes the male presence on screen as the sexual object of the fannish/female gaze. The soundtrack of this vid, ‘On the Prowl’, features Lydia Lunch’s vocals on a track by Blow-Up;54 its lyrics are a clear statement of female erotic desire 53 Sources used include Agent Carter (ABC, 2015-2016), Babylon 5 (PTEN/TNT, 1994-1998), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997-2003), Dark Angel (FOX, 2000-2002), Firefly (FOX, 2002), Fringe (FOX, 2008-2013), Legend of the Seeker (Renaissance Pictures/ABC, 2008-2010), various Marvel films, and Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present). 54 The vid exclusively credits Lydia Lunch, as does S.F. Winters (2012).

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(and intention) as the song begins, ‘I was thinking about picking up some | Young boys…’. Mulvey’s characterization of ‘woman as image; man as bearer of the look’ (1975: 11), which is flipped in vids about bodies, is augmented in On the Prowl with its rapid montage of passive men who begin the vid showing off muscled torsos but who very quickly are shown crying, bleeding, captive, and variously tortured. The hurt/comfort genre of fanworks has a long history in media fandom (Bacon-Smith 1992; Larsen and Zubernis 2012). The ‘hurts’ can be psychological or physiological, with the former represented in the vid by crying and the latter through beatings, mutilation, and blood-stained faces. None of the violence in the vid is explicitly sexual, nor does the vid include clips of pornography. Whereas in fan fiction, ‘hurt’ is typically followed by ‘comfort’—via emotional and/or physical support from another character, often as a prelude to a romantic coupling—On the Prowl frustrates the expectation of comfort, leaving the viewer ‘confronted with its persistent absence’ (S.F. Winters 2012: 3.11). The vid’s final shot, a brief clip of Marion (Karen Allen) kissing an injured Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981), provides a brief moment of comfort, referring at the last to a fulfilment of the trope while denying its potential cathartic effect. On the Prowl takes its examples of ‘hurt’ from over 60 mainstream and cult film and television sources.55 As with other multifandom vids, On the Prowl’s 55 In order of appearance, according to the vidders’ explanatory blog post (sweetestdrain 2010), the clips are from: The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Chris Weitz, 2009), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009), The Salton Sea (D.J. Caruso, 2002), Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979), Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993), American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000), Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present), The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983), Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005-2020), Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991), Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004), Smallville (WB/CW, 2001-2011), Merlin (BBC, 2008-2012), The Matrix: Revolutions (The Wachowski Brothers, 2003), Say Anything… (Cameron Crowe, 1989), The Boondock Saints (Troy Duffy, 1999), Burn Notice (USA Network, 2007-2013), Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006), Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Renaissance/Universal, 1995-1999), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB/UPN, 1997-2003), Farscape (Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 1999-2003), Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987), Bones (FOX, 2005-2017), Heroes (NBC, 2006-2010), The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009), Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), Terminator: Salvation (McG, 2009), The Covenant (Renny Harlin, 2006), The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994), Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009), Due South (CTV/CBS, 1994-1999), Road House (Rowdy Herrington, 1989), Spartacus: Blood and Sand (Starz, 2010), Firefly (FOX, 2002), The Vampire Diaries (CW, 2009-2017), Lost (ABC, 2004-2010), Legend of the Seeker (ABC, 2008-2010), True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014), Torchwood (BBC, 2006-2011), Angel (WB, 1999-2004), Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kirshner, 1980), The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006), Dexter (Showtime, 2006-2013), Wiseguy (CBS, 1987-1990), Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002), The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner,

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numerous examples reveal the breadth of viewing necessary to construct such a work; as such, it constructs an argument about the range of possible examples available to the fan and the vidder. As in Fannish Taxonomy, the montage is grouped in sequences of tropes: for example, crying in the rain, physical restraint, and even a sequence of religious angst. Throughout, male bodies predominate; however, while the vid’s rapid succession of male protagonists ‘command the stage’ in Mulveyan terms, no man in this vid either ‘articulates the look [or] commands the action’. As with all vids, On the Prowl is a montage of silenced bodies, though in this case the silencing is aggressive: mouths opened in (silenced) screams are overridden by Lunch’s breathy moans of ‘And then I wanted more’. These bodies are frequently alone in the frame, but in close-up shots, disembodied hands and arms emerge from beyond the frame to act upon these isolated and passive bodies. An argument could be made that the vid’s unseen torturers are the vidders whose editing work ‘commands the action’. The path that the vid constructs is through the vid’s many source texts, coupling the song’s narrative of female sexual desire with a mode of spectatorship that identifies and fetishizes these moments of male passivity and pain when they appear in a narrative. Among its various effects, On the Prowl is an effective demonstration of the ‘hurting hero’ trope and, as with all multifandom vids, it poses broader questions about representation: in this case, how masculinity is depicted across a broad cross-section of fictional narratives. This vid provokes a review of John Ellis’s assertion that a televisual body is distinct from a cinematic one, as television’s ‘techniques of rapid cutting prevent the access of the gaze at the body being displayed’ (1982: 142). For Ellis, televisual bodies are ‘hidden, made obscure by the heavy emphasis that broadcast TV gives to various kinds of close-up’ (ibid.: 143). The vid, in turn, gathers these glancing looks into an object that promotes a sustained (and desiring) gaze across the whole vid. As in all multifandom vids, filmic and televisual bodies are indistinguishable from each other, with both appearing equally in brief clips in a typical elision of the medium specificity of vids’ source material. On the Prowl begins and ends with film clips—The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Chris Weitz, 2009) and Raiders of the Lost Ark, respectively—and features a near-even split between film and television sources, with 32 of the vid’s 63 1987), Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005-2020), Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009), Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987), China Beach (ABC, 1988-1991), Star Trek: Next Generation (Paramount, 1987-1994), Carnivàle (HBO, 2003-2005), The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2001), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Gavin Hood, 2009), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981).

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sources taken from films. The television sources are drawn from episodic network series as well as high-end ‘quality’ dramas; these televisual bodies are equally able to be the spectacular objects of a fetishizing gaze. There are two separate pleasures at play in On the Prowl: that of identifying the clips and that of fetishistic scopophilia. The work done by the viewer in unpacking the vid’s semiotic density is another way in which the form mediates critical detachment and fascination with images. The interpretation of vids requires an explication of context rather than an examination of subtext. Vids are engaged in a play with subtexts in narrative and performance, grounded in the vidders’ reading of glances and gazes on screen (Russo 2017) and employing their own desiring gaze. Vids take a position on the ‘highly contradictory constructions of femininity in mainstream films’ (Stacey 1988: 127) and television by removing the narrative constraints that would condemn the (female) spectator’s desiring gaze. In watching vids that collect representations of female characters being active, discussed throughout this section, there is not an internal structural or narrative denial that refuses (or complicates) the desire and/or identification, as can be the case in Hollywood films (Stacey 1988). Multifandom vids addressing passive male bodies, as per Coppa’s argument about Fannish Taxonomy, can be about casting a desiring gaze as much as they are about participating in a collective conversation about the pleasurable tropes those bodies instantiate. Vids’ clips are both the images themselves and also the points of orientation that lead back to the source narrative. However, in multifandom vids that dislocate the images of bodies from their narratives, the images can offer up an erotic fascination while implicitly commenting on representational norms. In the next section, I move from discussing moving images removed from their narrative to function as spectacle to examining multifandom vids that are about situating a viewer within a web of transmedia texts. Instead of actors’ bodies being presented as an unabashed erotic spectacle and being displayed for the pleasure of a predominantly female gaze, the vids in the next section engage with a spectacle of narrative. These vids work with narratives that cross many media and many years of production and revel in a broad span of engagement with these transmedia texts.

Pleasures of Transmedia Consumption Tisha Turk argues that ‘Vids reinvent storytelling for transmedia contexts’, offering clues about ‘how and why audiences both respond to and repurpose

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commercial media, including music’ (2015: 174). The excesses and visual spectacle of multifandom vids can be used to show a clear path through a range of multimedia paratexts and transmedia iterations of linked storyworlds. In the case of vids where the ‘fandom’ being vidded is located across a range of film, television, print, and digital media—or across a series of films contributing to the same extensive storyworld—the vids offer responses to commercial media that synthesize narratives which may have taken decades to unfold. Vidders create in a media context where sprawling storyworlds are intensely visible, with abundant remakes and reboots offering different points of entry to a fandom and creating an excess of potential source material even for a single fandom. In this section, I am not using ‘transmedia’ to mean a core text and ancillary marketing strategies that extend the storyworld (Scott 2013; Stein 2013; Kohnen 2018) but rather vids made out of a range of related source material that we recognize as constituting ‘the multiplatform cultural life of a media text’ (Stein 2015: 6) in a transmedia context. This is one in which ‘repetition, replication, sequelization, and rebooting’ (Klein and Palmer 2016: 7) are an ever-present factor in making sense of the current media landscape. All vids are arguably transmedia texts in that they extend the source storyworld into a paratextual iteration. However, vids such as those discussed below demonstrate how vidding fans understand these webs of interconnectedness, given that they work with material from sprawling and cross-platform storyworlds to achieve their aims. As with massively multifandom vids that focus on genre or bodies in motion, vids that textualize encounters with the pleasures of transmedia can be quite labour-intensive and, if nothing else, demonstrate the careful viewing and deep knowledge of a storyworld that is required to make such a work. In this section, I explore vids that work with this contemporary dispersal of storyworlds: Superman, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Trek. Each makes a different argument about its varied source material, and each interacts with excess, transmediality, and spectatorship in their own way. As a classic comics character, Superman (and his human alias Clark Kent) has existed in a transmedia storyworld (comics, newspaper cartoons, live shows, radio serials, etc.) from his earliest appearances (Scholari, Bertetti, and Freeman 2014); however, the record for what Roberta Pearson calls the ‘most portrayed’ (2015) fictional character is reportedly held by Sherlock Holmes. Both are examples of expansive transmedia storyworks with their many adaptations. Star Trek, on the other hand, is an example of a franchise with many sequels and, at the time of writing, a comparatively minimal number of reboots and divergent plotlines. All three offer a puzzle for a viewer in how to navigate

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the volume of related material: the vids I discuss here are examples of navigating these broad storyworlds. The Lex Luthor vid Bad Romance (sisabet, 2010) begins with two long shots: the first is an animated clip of what looks to be Luthor’s mobile base from Challenge of the Super Friends (ABC, 1978) emerging from a swamp, and the second pans across a scanned page from a DC comic in which Superman is seen in proximity to Luthor’s grave, signalling that it will encompass the broader Superman storyworld. However, these are followed by a sequence of clips from Smallville (WB/CW, 2001-2011) featuring a young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) aligning his subjectivity with the first-person lyrics of the song—Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’—and therefore addressing his conflicted feelings (‘I don’t want to be friends’) to Clark Kent (Tom Welling). From there, the vid mainly draws on Smallville but regularly cuts to scanned comics pages and clips from a range of animated and live-action sources to highlight echoes and inversions—characters in similar poses, or the adult Lex Luthor enacting villainous plans—in Smallville or other platforms’ iterations of the characters. These clips could be read as this Lex’s fantasy of all the possible ways he could provoke Clark’s ‘love and revenge’; they equally stand as evidence of a curatorial awareness of the transmedia characters beyond a teen-skewed television series. As Melanie E.S. Kohnen argues, ‘Smallville re-imagines the original Superman canon’ (2008: 211) so that the archrivals are now teenage friends whose relationship is doomed. In this sense, and with full awareness of how these characters fit with their broader storyworld, this Lex cannot (again, in the words of the song) ‘want to be friends’ with this Clark because they are destined to be enemies. However, since the vid textualizes a mode of spectatorship that draws out the ‘homoerotic undercurrent’ of Clark and Lex’s relationship in Smallville (Kohnen 2008: 211), it exploits the full potential of the lyrics to ask what Lex does want, if not to be friends. (The answer seems to be a torrid affair of mutual destruction.) The specific narrative context of many of the clips is irrelevant to the overall argument, which is constructed in no small part through the insistent lyrics and driving tempo of the song: an early sequence of close-ups gathering reaction shots of Lex after Clark walks away from him is captioned ‘I want your love, love, love, love, I want your love’, leaving little room for an alternative explanation for Lex’s disappointed expression. Bad Romance is a slash vid that gathers together different iterations of the characters, extending the undercurrent from one piece of the Superman storyworld. The comics and other storyworld source material make these different media all present for a simultaneous encounter with the intricacy of

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superhero backstories and canon. Rather than playing to a trope of Smallville fanworks that ‘transformed Lex into a redemptive figure’ (Stein 2006: 249), Bad Romance constructs a transmedia identity that encompasses his many misdeeds but suggests that his obsession with Superman has an erotic undercurrent. The vid makes an argument that Smallville fans are not unusual in noticing the potential connection between Clark Kent and Lex Luthor because the alternating friendship and antagonism between the two men is ‘slashable’ in other iterations of the characters. This is all made possible because of the chosen song, which lends a camp aural and lyrical excess of emotion and performance that is pitched at about the same level as the excesses of comic-book super villainy. In another sense, the vid pares down an excessive amount of transmedia source material to present one way of locating meaning amongst a web of interconnected texts. Another example, Whole New Way (Mr E Sundance, 2011), draws together two contemporaneous adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories: Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009) and Sherlock (BBC, 2010-present), which as of 2012 were merely two out of 254 film and television derivations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters (Pearson 2015: 186). This tally does not include the sequel to the Ritchie film, released in late 2011, or the American series, Elementary (CBS, 2012-2019). These many adaptations enable digital fandom, as represented in the vid, to offer novel-seeming ‘avenues of fan devotion and investment’ (Stein and Busse 2012: 9) as well as offering slash fans a whole new set of romantic scenarios in which to place the characters. In Whole New Way, the ‘big screen spectacular’ (Pearson 2015: 189) of the Ritchie film and exportable ‘heritage television’ mode (Steward 2012: 145) of the BBC series are brought together with stills and screenshots from fanfiction and fan art, and also incorporates photographs of text from the original stories and Sidney Paget’s illustrations from the stories’ original publication. The vid gives the song lyrics ‘I found a whole new way to love you’ a clear multiple meaning that recognizes how the adaptations offer new iterations of the characters for fans to love, and just as significantly, whole new Holmeses to love whole new Watsons. Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse have argued that Whole New Way’s multimedia scope ‘exemplifies the wide reach, breadth and multiplicity of Holmes and Watson’ across digital media forms to fans old and new (2012: 9). One cut in particular takes us from Sherlock’s Watson (Martin Freeman) performing a web search for ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to screenshots of fan blogs discussing the stories themselves (including a scan of a Paget illustration), which introduces the breadth of the vid and also argues that if this Watson was truly searching for that name online, he would find a wealth of ready

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reading material. This cut also addresses the ‘acknowledgement and then disavowal of homoeroticisim’ that Lisa Purse (2011: 136) observes throughout the Ritchie film; a similar denial is arguably at play in the BBC series as well (Fathallah 2015; Ng 2017). In Whole New Way, the acknowledgement of fans asserting the viability of Holmes/Watson as a slash pairing is validated by showing examples of that fan commentary, essentially disavowing the disavowals offered in the adaptations themselves. In comparison to other more controlled franchises, ‘whose transmedia narratives generally cohere as part of designed, corporately owned worldbuilding across media platforms,’ Matt Hills writes that ‘the narrative world of Sherlock Holmes is fractured and fragmented across parallel versions’ (2012: 37), with the BBC series’ transmedia extensions competing with other adaptations of the stories. Whole New Way engages in critical spectatorship through close textual analysis, reconciling the two potentially competing texts by showing them as equal to each other and as equally capable of inspiring fanworks. Hierarchies between film and television—which here might be inverted, placing a ‘quality’ television text above a splashy action movie—are levelled, with these different platforms shown to be equally capable of being repurposed for a vid. Beyond the proximity of the clips, the vid matches congruent movements and gestures from both iterations: for example, clips in which the main pair call to each other when one or the other is in danger, using the song’s reference to drug use as a prompt to compare the similar way both film and series represent Holmes’s boredomfuelled cocaine habit, or clips showing both Watsons having been injured in bomb blasts. The vid does not reconcile the fracturing and fragmentation but emphasizes similarities between the texts, demonstrating how the act of critical engagement can be enacted as a form of fascination. Finally, the Star Trek vid Long Live (Llin, 2014) argues that a set of related texts with a greater longevity have a long history of representing respect and mutual support amongst colleagues. Its initial montage focuses on Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney), seemingly aligning the song’s lyrics (‘I remember this moment’) with her until a tracking shot ends with Rand bringing food to Sulu (George Takei). The vid then cuts to a shot of Sulu and Chekov (Walter Koenig) together, then to Chekov with Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), with each cut introducing a new two-shot that moves from the original Star Trek series to The Next Generation (Paramount, 1987-1994) to Deep Space Nine (Paramount, 1993-1999) and finally to Voyager (UPN, 1995-2001) through a series of clips showing conversation, hugs, and other convivial gestures before the cycle ends—three minutes later—with Rand’s appearance in an episode of Voyager. The final section of the vid focuses on moments of

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togetherness and celebration that serves to link the original cast films, the television series Enterprise (UPN, 2001-2005), and the reboot films into the continuities established in the vid’s first half. Aside from its curatorial prowess, Long Live’s accomplishment is that it transforms a critical argument regarding what the franchise should be about to show that (for the duration of the vid) Star Trek is about supporting and acknowledging friends and colleagues as you all move together through the furthest reaches of the universe. Connecting the different properties is handled by using clips of crossover moments, transforming the franchise’s transmedia strategies into moments of affective resonance. The final lyrics of the song—‘One day, we will be remembered’—is almost a comic understatement given the wealth of possible Trek moments to remember for a dedicated fan. While the clips are numerous, a knowledgeable Star Trek fan will be able to identify most of the characters if not all of the episodes. For someone without a deep knowledge of the franchise, the decontextualized images show many dozens of characters united across many decades of production. With the exception of being a vid and therefore not being an industry-approved (e.g. commodifiable; see Kohnen 2018) way of interacting with the franchise, in many ways this vid models the affective response that this density of texts is ‘supposed’ to elicit. This particular path through the transmedia narrative argues for Trek as a franchise that rewards sustained engagement, where each new instalment will fulfil the promise of introducing the viewer to a newfound family. These examples engage in different ways with transmedia franchises, critically and otherwise, and demonstrate vidding fans’ use of the vid form to comment on contemporary ways to consume media. Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer argue that transmedia texts, which they term ‘multiplicities’, ‘invite viewers to appreciate the new in the context of the familiar and already approved, sanctioning readings that crisscross textual borders’ (2016: 1). Bad Romance does not dwell on the context of each version of Clark and Lex beyond Smallville but instead sanctions a slash reading of these other media, allowing the iconic signifiers of the characters to suggest how each iteration fits into a slash reading, where a long history of antagonism arguably masks a fraught sexual attraction. Whole New Way similarly demonstrates how interpretive frameworks already in place—for example, a slash reading or simply an awareness of the Holmes and Watson characters from other adaptations or encounters with the source stories—arguably sanction the digital media fandom practices that have followed the newest iterations. Likewise, Long Live argues that Star Trek has always been, and continues to be, a franchise interested in exploring

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enduring friendships and cross-cultural understandings as much as it is about exploring the unknown. Therefore, this variety of multifandom vid textualizes spectatorship across different branches of a franchise or storyworld, mediates adaptations of well-known texts, and models an affective engagement with these transmedia source texts.

Fascinating People As signalled at the start of this chapter, a fourth form of pleasurable fascination enacted by multifandom vids addresses celebrity. Real person vids are a vidding subgenre that are not quite multifandom vids in the strictest sense but that gather clips from across a range of sources and interact with ideas of fascination, image, and critical interactions with mediated representations. Instead of having a genre, concept, or relationship as the topic of the vid, real person vids look to real people, that is, celebrities. This strand of vidding is related to the real person fiction (RPF) subset of fanfiction, which addresses actors, musicians, and other public figures rather than fictional narratives (Hagen 2015; Fathallah 2018). These can take the form of lighthearted tributes to a regular guest actor in American television, such as One Way or Another (diannelamerc, 2010) which highlights Mark Sheppard’s work, or profoundly moving memorials, such as the Carrie Fisher vid A Better Son/Daughter (eruthros, 2016). In each, the vidder uses clips from performances—sometimes including backstage material, candid clips, interviews, and press appearances alongside fan-made material—to construct an argument about the individual, which is also an argument about the experience of watching that person on screen. The final section of A Better Son/Daughter includes fan art, photos of protest signs featuring Fisher’s image, and other real-world evidence of how much she has mattered to her fans. Real person vids have a very high-profile precedent in the history of moving image re-use in Joseph Cornell’s film Rose Hobart (1936), which provides an interesting starting point for thinking through vids’ textualization of spectatorship focused on an individual. Cornell, who was ‘best known for his surrealist collage art’ (Rees 2011: 72), edited the feature-length adventure film East of Borneo (George Melford, 1931) into a shorter film focusing on its star, Rose Hobart. Cornell altered the footage by tinting it (in some versions blue, in others pink; Pigott 2013: 114 n17) and added a soundtrack of ‘Brazilian samba music’ (Barefoot 2011: 160). The result uses glances off-screen, moving camera shots, and a lack of dialogue to keep its viewer adrift in a formless

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presentation of clips that (we trust) once had meaning. Rose Hobart begins with a shot of a crowd all looking off-screen, not with a shot of Hobart herself; significantly, this shot is not from East of Borneo but is an addition provided by Cornell (Pigott 2013: 16). When cited in discussions of found footage film, Rose Hobart tends to be characterized as a film about Cornell’s fascination with the actress’s star image (Rony 2003). The addition of this opening shot establishes and underscores the film’s concern with looking and its textualization of spectatorship. Hauptman argues that Rose Hobart is a portrait rather than a film, as it does not offer information about the actress so much as it ‘reveals […] much about the desires of every fan’ and ‘how performers in general are constructed and interpreted on-screen’ (Hauptman 1999: 87). Hobart herself remains out of reach, but Cornell’s concerns are apparent in how her image is manipulated. Barefoot writes that Hobart is ‘now known for being forgotten’ (2011: 153); Cornell’s film and his intense regard for Hobart’s star image are why she is remembered at all. East of Borneo was not a financial success, but neither was it a cheap B-movie (Barefoot 2011: 157). Fatimah Tobing Rony argues that Rose Hobart ‘embodies a kind of infatuation, or amour fou (crazy love), on the part of Cornell for Rose Hobart, and its qualities of disruption, disjunction, and the oneiric are still focused on the pursuit of an ideal woman’ (2003: 132). Cornell’s film is notable because it concentrates the star image of a single actress (taken from a single film) into an intense work that betrays what we might read as his excessive engagement with Hobart as well as his familiarity with more general formal film conventions ‘from years of carefully watching films, collecting footage, and cutting up and re-using bits of celluloid’ (Hauptman 1999: 88). Cornell’s fascination with the potential of Hobart’s image was enabled through a different fascination: that of film form, which provided the tools to enact this fixation on a specific star/performer image. This fascination with a single performance from a single actress has a contemporary echo in vids that take a single individual—rather than a series or a film—as their subject. These are technically multifandom vids, as they use clips from many different sources; however, the ‘fandom’ in the vid is for an individual performer’s star image. Richard Dyer proposed that a Hollywood star’s persona is constructed through a variety of media texts, with a real person somewhere at the locus of these mediations (1979). Real person vids are based on a celebrity’s public image and not solely the characters they play, with a greater emphasis on the vids’ subjects as actors or performers rather than as celebrities. They textually represent a fascination with and pleasure in screen appearances and, as Hauptman argues about

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Cornell’s work in making Rose Hobart, rely on an intimate understanding of media enabled by years of engaged spectatorship. As with other multifandom vids, real person vids offer access to reading broadly across texts: in this case, reading across a career rather than a genre or the different constituent parts of a transmedia story. Rather than a path through a text, this vidding subject offers a path through a life on screen. This shift from watching representations (genres, bodies, navigations of texts) to watching performances is not simply a way to collect and display celebrity images. Instead, this is a method through which vidders communicate an analysis of the subject’s star persona, constructed using pieces of that same web of media texts through which the stars are known to their vidders. Real person vids directly address the celebrity image as a construct. Indeed, this form can be used to question aspects of the celebrity’s persona. Unlike the proximate video art pieces Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987) and Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992), real person vids are not made with audio or video elements created by the vidders: the soundtracks provide framing and commentary, and the images are exclusively the star’s media texts. Writing about Superstar, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, and related early-1990s queer-themed pieces focusing on cult figures, Glyn Davis (2008: 102-104) suggests these works function as fan letters to their subjects. Given their fannish origins, vids about real people perform much the same function, and as Davis suggests about this cycle of queer art titles, they are made to ‘contribute to a collective sense of pleasure in a chosen object, text, or individual’ (ibid.). Where character study vids elaborate on a fictional person’s emotional depth and complexity, real person vids use the same codes and structures to suggest that the celebrity—known only through their media texts—possesses similar qualities. In Dyer’s schema, promotion and publicity are the controlled and uncontrolled making of the star image. Britney Spears has spent much of her career experiencing the tension between these two. Her 2007 single ‘Piece of Me’ was released amid well-publicized personal and legal troubles. The single’s official music video is defiant: being a celebrity looks exciting (evading paparazzi with gal-pal decoys), and she looks happy, healthy, and stable as she tears down a fake tabloid spread. In contrast, obsessive24’s vid, also titled Piece of Me (2008), edits clips of actual news/tabloid coverage together with Spears’s own music videos to present a more ambiguous reflection on her relationship with the media. Critically, however, it is also more sympathetic in that it argues for a more vulnerable and complex understanding of Spears than the official video allows. By combining unsympathetic media coverage with her teenage pop videos, the vid effectively

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lays out evidence for its audience to examine its own view of Spears. The song’s lyrics quote a paraphrased version of the criticism levelled against Spears (e.g. ‘that Britney’s shameless’) while the music videos and public life that prompted that criticism are shown, creating a subtler rebuttal to public opinion. This is a demonstration of watching broadly across texts, offering a resistant reading to the truth claims of the official music video, and working with these different representations to suggest an alternate path to understanding Spears. In this vid, the lyrics of the song ‘Piece of Me’ are used provocatively: in using Spears’s own voice to caption an alternate interpretation of her public image, the official music video begins to feel frothy and hollow. The official video finishes with Spears staring directly into the camera: her slight sneer, the commanding close-up, and her flawless hair and makeup are designed to show a sane and strong Spears, with her troubles behind her. In contrast, the vid ends by redeploying an official image of Spears in character as a victim—from the music video for her single ‘Every Time’—in which her hair partially covers her face and she seems vulnerable and isolated, gazing back at the audience over her shoulder. The vid appears to argue that this apparent fragility is more accurate to the ‘real’ Spears than the controlled, official mediation. A growing group of vids focus on cult actors: individuals who are known for their various guest appearances in non-leading roles. These vids make these cult actors stars of their own vids, treating an accumulation of appearances as one ‘text’. As Matt Hills points out, while theorizations of celebrity and stardom presume that these figures are ubiquitous in mass media, certain cult actors ‘are treated as famous only by and for their fan audience’ (2003: 61), where an intensity of recognition is limited to a niche audience. This intense spectatorship textually demonstrated in vids perpetuates the pleasures of watching performances: not by typical red-carpet celebrities, but by actors who will turn up in guest roles or as supporting cast in shortlived genre series. Actor-focused vids are not interested in the interiority of fictional characters but rather in identifying and celebrating actors who are not usually considered to be ‘stars’. Real person vids about ‘subcultural celebrities’ (Hills 2003; Williams 2016) grant these familiar faces a starring role in tributes to their continuing employment. This is more than the close watching of a single text, as with Rose Hobart, but is the result of careful consideration of an array of a star’s appearances across a wide range of media texts. The actor Mark Sheppard is featured in the vid One Way or Another (diannelamerc, 2010), cut to the Blondie song of the same name. A character actor

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best known for guest roles in North American network and cable television series, he tends to play smug antagonists. The vid uses the song’s lyrics—‘One way or another I’m gonna find ya’ at the start, which turns into ‘I’m gonna give you the slip’ by the last verse—to comment on Sheppard’s regular guest role as pursuer/pursued. The vid accordingly gathers clips from many of his roles, which regularly derive from a narrative in which Sheppard’s character appears to hold power over the protagonists but is outfoxed at the last minute. This language of pursuit is playfully echoed in the vid’s textual demonstration of the vidder’s (and audience’s) pursuit of Sheppard through his career. By the vid’s end, he seems poised to escape—not from custody but to his next guest appearance. The song promises ‘I’m gonna get ya’: like Joseph Cornell’s possession of Rose Hobart’s image, Sheppard’s audience can likewise dominate and manipulate copies of his appearances. The ‘real’ Mark Sheppard is not as much a concern in this vid as the pleasures of being reminded of his quiet ubiquity: as a familiar face in other people’s stories. For the audience, Sheppard’s appearance in a guest role brings a particular set of narrative expectations. In this, the individual characters matter less than the trope of his appearance. One Way or Another takes pleasure in recognizing Sheppard’s typecasting and then demonstrating this tendency in operation, using the clips as evidence. Other similar vids—such as Strange Little Girl (Heather, 2007)56 about Jodelle Ferland’s many ‘creepy child’ roles, and Live and Let Die (valoise, 2012) about Peter Wingfield’s British and American careers—encounter and enact these actors’ subcultural celebrity. The next example, Brick House (Gwyneth, 2010), focuses on Gina Torres. As with One Way or Another, the vid includes clips from many different series, and the subject of the work is an appreciation of Torres’s television appearances across cult TV. The Commodores song used in the vid includes lyrics like ‘She’s the one, the only one | who’s built like an Amazon’, helping to construct the vid’s argument about the pleasures associated with the typical Torres role. This navigates some of the same territory as other vids in this chapter 56 I have dated this vid based on the age of the digital file in my collection and its presence in a list of vids nominated for a fan-run award (Buffyann c. 2007). No date on the page is visible, and the overwhelming majority of links are to defunct personal homepages or purged LiveJournal accounts. Few of the vidders’ names are familiar to me as individuals who may still be active in fandom. Based on a small handful of live links that provide dates, and given that each other vid was made in 2007, I presume Strange Little Girl is of a similar age to its fellow nominees. As further datable evidence, Tori Amos covered ‘Strange Little Girl’ in 2001, and the source video—Kingdom Hospital (ABC, 2004), Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006), and an early episode of Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005-present)—make a 2007 date reasonable.

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concerning the issues of representing a woman as attractive and active at the same time and operating with a tension at play in recognizing Torres as being simultaneously beautiful and capable without one quality excluding the other. Through a series of reaction shots from characters—mostly but not exclusively men—in several series casting desiring looks out of the frame, the vid then cuts to Torres as Cleopatra in Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-2001), being partially undressed by attendants. This opening sequence constructs a relationship between Torres as the subject of the vid and the audience actively engaged in watching these many fragments of her career. The sequence continues with three clips of Torres in roles from different series. In each shot she is active, though in different ways: walking towards the frame in front of men in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-1999), ogling a man’s bare torso and then sharing a smile with the woman on her other side in Cleopatra 2525 (Renaissance Pictures, 2000-2001), and wielding a pair of guns in Firefly (FOX, 2002). From then on, clips alternate between images of Torres as a figure of desire and as an agent of action (or sometimes both at the same time). In presenting Torres’s characters as physically active, desiring, and so forth, the clips somewhat moderate her potential objectification (as a thin, ‘exotic’ woman of colour dressed in revealing costumes). The majority of the clips feature Torres confidently in motion, in combat, or engaged in seduction. The lyrics are partially subverted in order to describe empowerment, redirecting lines such as ‘She knows she’s built and knows how to please | Sure enough to knock a strong man to his knees’ into a critical position that equally notices the roles she plays—strong women in control of themselves and, frequently, those around them—and constructs a possible space for identification as well as desire. As a work that responds to the star image of a cult actress, this vid performs the pleasures of noticing representation, giving this woman of colour a starring role in a fan-created overview of her appeal. The cult actors in these examples are presented as actors first, in their various roles, not in their various public performances of ‘themselves’. The intense fascination that fans have for these actors is not always a fascination for their personal lives but rather for the pleasure fans take in following these actors through their careers or in noticing their work across media texts. The performance of this broad viewership is evident when genre is considered: One Way or Another demonstrates that Sheppard’s typecasting has been featured across television genres and includes clips from The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002), The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2001), Firefly (FOX, 2002), Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005-2020), Burn Notice (USA

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Network, 2007-2013), The Middleman (ABC, 2008), and Leverage (TNT, 20082012), among others. The fascination demonstrated in Brick House is with Torres’s physical attributes as much as her acting ability, but the vid takes pleasure in demonstrating that her presence on American television—in roles where the colour of her skin is apparent but is not a vital point of her characterization—has not gone unnoticed. In contrast, Piece of Me and A Better Son/Daughter examine the fissure between a private life and the public commentary arising from visible mental health struggles. These close readings of celebrities’ and actors’ works demonstrate a fascination with star images and performance and with what can be accomplished through the manipulation of media texts. Whereas the intensity of Cornell’s gaze reduces Hobart into a scopophilic object, real person vids are as much about the operation of cult stardom as they are about the intense scrutiny and dedication required to notice and clip all these actors’ guest appearances. Vids about people are about paying close attention to the individuals in question and sharing the pleasures and fascinations of this mode of spectatorship with fellow fans.

Conclusion If a vid is a vidder’s path through a text, how do we account for vids that combine multiple source texts into one work? Multifandom vids provide evidence of interpretive paths through genres, tropes, and transmedia texts as well as how fans make sense of celebrities’ public lives. This is not merely watching broadly across many texts but often with a historical depth. To account for vids solely in terms of narrative transformation denies the other pleasures of the form. Multifandom vids in particular demonstrate a mode of spectatorship that is media-literate and actively analytical, willing to identify and share that which is pleasurable, spectacular, erotic, and fascinating in and about film and television texts. As Coppa (2008) and Brunsdon and Spigel (2008) argue, vidding is about how fannish women watch television, and this careful viewership is enacted through the vid form. The multifandom vids that have been the focus of this chapter demonstrate the qualities of this fannish viewing because of their potential to emphasize genres, bodies, stories, and lives. These clips are re-used to create dense expressions of desire and fascination and in doing so preserve that way of watching. The vidding gaze is directed not only toward images of spectacular bodies or elaborate special effects but also to more abstract attractions represented by the multifandom vid: sharing

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a pleasure in consuming media. Functioning partially as a scrapbook of past and current attractions and partially as a catalogue of sources, the massively multifandom vid offers both the mastery of a subject area and the opportunity to fill in gaps in one’s knowledge. The repetition of this form updates and reinforces the canon of fan attractions. The key difference is that the fannish affection for or fascination with the image-bodies keeps them from being read as empty or void. The star image, the location of a clip within an understanding of genre, or the recognition of fascination and/or pleasurable images is not severed in the clips, even though a nuanced connection to the original narrative is disrupted because the fascination of the image is strong enough to override the violence of the cut. Therefore, decontextualized clips are read as images, not as indicating character or plot in the same way as other vid genres, and not thereby in constant dialogue with the source material. My purpose in offering comparisons to experimental film and video is to provide a level of exposure to these ‘underground’ works and to argue for the ways they have value for those who create and those who watch them. In multifandom vids in particular, the rapid presentation of clips from diverse source material creates a spectacle for the pleasure of the vid’s audience and emphasizes the fascinations of images at play when analysing the visual side of the vid form. As with the vids discussed in the previous chapter, song and soundtrack are the fundamental mechanism by which a vid’s decontextualized images are anchored to a defined range of meanings, ordering these clips into a comprehensible, legible sequence. As I will argue in the next chapter, the interaction of audio and video sources goes beyond simple captioning, as in the connotations of a pop song’s clichés and tropes. However, the vid remains a form about watching and about taking pleasure in watching; therefore, the scopophilic aspect of this form of fanwork should not be forgotten in more literary analyses of lyrical functioning.

List of Works Cited Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) Barefoot, Guy, ‘Recycled Images: Rose Hobart, East of Borneo, and The Perils of Pauline’, Adaptation, 5.2 (2011), 152-168 Beugnet, Martine, ‘Firing at the Clocks: Cinema, Sampling, and the Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Artwork’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 54.2 (2013), 192-207

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bironic, ‘Starships clips & lyrics’, 4 June 2013. LiveJournal post. [accessed 4 April 2018] Brunsdon, Charlotte, and Lynn Spigel, ‘Introduction’, in Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, 2nd edn (Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2008), pp. 1-20 Buffyann, ‘Entries for Round 6’, Path of the Heart Vidding Awards, no date, c. 2007 (dated from context). [accessed 21 January 2018] Collie, Hazel, Television for Women: Generation, Gender and the Everyday (PhD thesis, De Montfort University, 2014) — ‘“I’ve been having fantasies about Regan and Carter three times a week”: television, women and desire’, in Television for Women: New Directions, ed. by Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley, and Helen Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 223-240 Coppa, Francesca, ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 1 (2008), no page. — ‘A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 107-113 — ‘Vidding: The Art of Flow,’ in MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture, ed. by Daina Augaitis, Bruce Grenville, and Stephanie Rebick (Black Dog Publishing, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016), pp. 150-153 ‘Data’s Dream’, Fanlore, last updated 26 June 2017. [accessed 21 January 2018] Davis, Glyn, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2008) Demos, T.J., Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (London, UK: Afterall Books, 2010) Desjardins, Mary, ‘“Meeting Two Queens”: Feminist Film-Making, Identity Politics, and the Melodramatic Fantasy’, Film Quarterly, 48.3 (1995), 26-33 Dyer, Richard, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1979) Ellis, John, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) Fathallah, Judith, ‘Moriarty’s Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of the BBC’s Sherlock’, Television & New Media, 16.5 (2015), 490-500 — ‘Reading real person fiction as digital fiction: An argument for new perspectives’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 24.6 (2018), 568-586 Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993)

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Gaines, Jane, ‘White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory’, Cultural Critique, 4 (1986), 59-79 Gamman, Lorraine, ‘Watching the Detectives: The Enigma of the Female Gaze’, The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. by Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London, UK: The Woman’s Press, 1988), pp. 8-26 — and Margaret Marshment, ‘Introduction’, The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. by Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London, UK: The Woman’s Press, 1988), pp. 1-7 ‘Garbage Can Vid’, Fanlore, last updated 9 December 2011. [accessed 19 May 2014] Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010) Hagen, Ross, ‘“Bandom Ate My Face”: The Collapse of the Fourth Wall in Online Fan Fiction’, Popular Music and Society, 38.1 (2015), 44-58 Hallas, Roger, ‘AIDS and Gay Cinephilia’, Camera Obscura, 18.1 (2003), 85-126 Hatch, Kevin, Looking for Bruce Conner (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012) Hauptman, Jodi, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999) Hills, Matt, ‘Recognition in the Eyes of the Relevant Beholder Representing “Subcultural Celebrity” and Cult TV Fan Cultures’, Mediactive, 2 (2003), 59-73 — ‘Sherlock’s Epistemological Economy and the Value of “Fan” Knowledge: How Producer-Fans Play the (Great) Game of Fandom’, in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, ed. by Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012), pp. 27-40 Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) Klein, Amanda Ann, and R. Barton Palmer, ‘Introduction’, in Cycles, Sequels, SpinOffs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, ed. by Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016), pp. 1-21 Kohnen, Melanie E.S., ‘The Adventures of a Repressed Farm Boy and the Billionaire Who Loves Him: Queer Spectatorship in Smallville Fandom’, in Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, ed. by Sharon Marie Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008), pp. 207-233 — ‘Fannish Affect, “Quality” Fandom, and Transmedia Storytelling Campaigns’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 337-346 Levinson, Julie, ‘Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship in Christian Marclay’s The Clock’, Cinema Journal, 54.3 (2015), 88-109

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Lippit, Akira M., ‘Digesture: Gesture and Inscription in Experimental Cinema’, Migrations of Gesture, ed. by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 113-131 ‘List of Star Trek Early Songvids’, last updated 4 February 2018. [accessed 2 April 2018] Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Found-Footage Science Fiction: Five Films by Craig Baldwin, Jonathan Weiss, Werner Herzog and Patrick Keiller’, Science Fiction Film and Television, 1.2 (2008), 193-214 MacDonald, Scott, ‘Collection/Recollection: An Interview with Matthias Müller’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 46.1 (2005), 29-50 Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6-18 Newcomb, Horace, and Paul M. Hirsch, ‘Television as a Cultural Forum’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies (1983). Reprinted in Television: The Critical View, ed. by Horace Newcomb, 6th edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 561-573 Ng, Eve, ‘Between text, paratext, and context: Queerbaiting and the contemporary media landscape’, in ‘Queer Female Fandom’, ed. by Julie Levin Russo and Eve Ng, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 24 (2017), no page. Pearson, Roberta, ‘Sherlock Holmes, the De Facto Franchise’, in Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, ed. by Lincoln Geraghty (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 186-205 Pigott, Michael, Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) Purse, Lisa, Contemporary Action Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) Rees, A.L., A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2011) Rodowick, D.N., ‘The Difficulty Of Difference: Freud And Film Theory’, Wide Angle: A Quarterly Journal Of Film History Theory Criticism & Practice, 5.1 (1982), 4-15 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, ‘The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: the Turtlelike’, Camera Obscura, 18.1 (2003), 129-155 Russell, Catherine, ‘Archival Cinephilia’ in The Clock,’ Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 54.2 (2013), pp. 243-258 Russo, Julie Levin, ‘Femslash Goggles: Fan Vids with Commentary by Creators’, in ‘Queer Female Fandom’, ed. by Julie Levin Russo and Eve Ng, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 24 (2017), no page. Scolari, Carlos, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

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Scott, Suzanne, ‘Battlestar Galactica: Fans and Ancillary Content’, in How To Watch Television, ed. by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 320-329 Stacey, Jackie, ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’, in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. by Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London, UK: The Woman’s Press, 1988), pp. 112-129 Stein, Louisa Ellen, ‘Gossip Girl: Transmedia Technologies’, in How To Watch Television, ed. by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 338-346 — Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015) — ‘“This Dratted Thing”: Fannish Storytelling Through New Media’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 245-260 —, and Kristina Busse, eds., Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012) Steward, Tom, ‘Holmes in the Small Screen: The Television Contexts of Sherlock’, in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, ed. by Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012), pp. 133-147 sweetestdrain, ‘The Making of “On the Prowl”’, 12 August 2010. Dreamwidth post. [accessed 19 May 2014] Turk, Tisha, ‘Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 9.2 (2015), 163-76 Wees, William C., ‘Found Footage and Questions of Representation’, Found Footage Film, ed. by Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele (Luzern: VIPER/zyklop, 1992), pp. 37-53 Wheatley, Helen, Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016) White, Patricia, unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999) Whittington, William, Sound Design & Science Fiction (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007) Williams, Rebecca, ‘“No Lynch, No Peaks!”: Auteurism, fan/actor campaigns and the challenges of Twin Peaks’ return(s)’, Series: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, 2.2 (2016), 5-19 Yeo, Rob, ‘Cutting through History: Found Footage in Avant-Garde Filmmaking’, in Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, ed. by Stefano Basilico

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(Milwaukee/New York: Milwaukee Art Museum/Distributed Art Publishers, 2004), pp. 13-27 Zryd, Michael, ‘Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99’, The Moving Image, 3.2 (2003), 40-61

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Adapting Starbuck: Dualbunny’s Battlestar Galactica Trilogy Abstract What does it mean for a series or f ilm to be adapted to a vid? The f inal chapter of Fanvids is an analysis of three Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) vids, designed to examine both the vid’s relationship with adaptation and the central role that songs play in making meaning in vids. Vids rely heavily on their soundtrack to structure meaning, with vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation vital in completing the vid’s reinterpretation of its source text. In this case, the music, voice, and star image of the recording artist Pink are used to appraise Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace. Each vid in the trilogy was made at different points during Battlestar’s production; the trilogy reflects the character’s development and memorializes the series’ (frustrated) potential for a particular kind of feminist representation. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, adaptation, Battlestar Galactica, Pink

Moving on from questions of history and of spectatorship, this chapter addresses three key aspects of how vids make meaning: through intertextual conversation with their source texts, by adopting semiotic density from the songs used as soundtrack, and by using established vid genres to guide interpretation. This chapter focuses on a case study of three Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009) character study vids by Dualbunny—God Is A DJ (2006), Cuz I Can (2007), and I’m Not Dead (2009)—to analyse the construction of narrative and argument through the interplay of popular music and moving images in the vid form. In relation to the growing body of literature on the use of popular, pre-existing, pre-recorded music on television, this chapter will investigate the aural aspect of the vid, particularly in relation to how music is key to the vid’s work as an adaptation. The chapter

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_ch06

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begins with an overview of Battlestar Galactica, followed by an analysis of God Is A DJ. It continues with an extended discussion of popular music and television as a way into talking about how vids use music. The chapter rounds off with analyses of the second and third vids of the trilogy, which each account for the central character’s development over the final two seasons of Battlestar. As Julie Levin Russo has pointed out, ‘vidding is not merely visual but also audiovisual, and music is an inextricable component of the form’ (2017: 1.9). Therefore, this chapter is concerned with exploring some of the ways that songs and music are used to add meaning to film and television narratives in a vid. The vids in the case study—chosen from among many Battlestar vids in existence—use the moving image’s relationship with songs to reform and refocus Battlestar Galactica into a trilogy of character-focused vids that foreground the experience of the female fighter pilot, Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace (Katee Sackhoff), each using—and taking as its title—a different song by Pink (Alecia Moore).57 The interaction of Pink’s songs with clips that emphasize Kara creates vids that present a female-centred narrative, adapting the science fiction world of Battlestar in a way that augments the melodramatic aspects of the series’ generic hybridity. The change in focus means the distance between the source material and the vid is critically compelling. In addition to a direct narrative analysis, I will also examine the semiotic implications of adopting Pink’s music and celebrity image in these adaptations. This vid trilogy produces a critical adaptation of Battlestar that analyses its source text. Vids can be explicitly critical texts, as with so-called ‘meta’ vids such as Stay Awake (Laura Shapiro, 2010), which comments on problematic representations of female bodies and human reproduction in science fiction. Laura Shapiro’s multifandom vid uses Suzanne Vega’s a cappella cover of a lullaby from Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) to shape a nightmarish concentration of alien/demonic pregnancy plotlines across many series.58 However, vids made without such pointed criticism may carry implicit critiques of their source texts through their editing choices: this is the analytical work of character study vids. The emotional work of character study vids is in creating a space to imagine the characters’ 57 While some (Kalinak 2010; Burns and Watson 2013) style her name ‘P!nk’, following the typography on the albums, I use ‘Pink’ throughout this volume (following Railton and Watson 2011). 58 She draws from Angel (WB, 1999-2004), Farscape (Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 1999-2003), Stargate SG-1 (Showtime/Sci-Fi Channel, 1997-2007), Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount, 1987-1994), Torchwood (BBC, 2006-2011), as well as Battlestar Galactica.

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interiority. As Tisha Turk points out, because pop songs offer themselves for our identification, when used in vids ‘we allow songs to give shape and voice to the emotions of fictional characters; we make those characters say what we assume or believe they are thinking’ (2015: 171). The interaction between image choice and song lyrics provokes an immediate emotional reaction but draws on codes and conventions of music/image juxtapositions in other media forms. Dualbunny is one of many fans who have vidded Battlestar Galactica. For example, 50+ individual Battlestar vids were shown at VividCon, and these represent a fraction of the total made. Different vid adaptations of Battlestar Galactica demonstrate the various ways a series can be adapted in vid form to focus on different aspects of its narrative, characters, and themes. Borrowing Michel Chion’s evocative metaphor from his description of music videos, each vid ‘turns the prism’ of the source series ‘to show its facets’ (1994: 166). As adaptations of Battlestar, each vid creates an intense focus on one feature of the series’ generic hybridity through prioritizing the experience of a few characters in the ensemble cast or plot points in the multi-strand narrative. In each, there is a re-telling of Battlestar’s story in such a way that emphasizes an interpretation of different plot threads or relationships. The naked emotion of the pieces manipulates the melodramatic plot elements and intensifies their effect. Dualbunny’s three vids about Kara Thrace turn the prism of the series to reveal a facet of Battlestar Galactica that adapts the series into a female-centred melodrama, where Kara becomes the main character and her identity and emotional journey are these works’ sole concern. Deciding to use a particular song in a vid is more than choosing relevant lyrics: the vidder will have made a decision about artist and genre, tempo and timbre, selecting an album track over a radio single or acoustic version (or vice versa), and whether to use a cover version (which might then add a further layer of intertextual complexity). Beyond the bare lyrics, the rest of this information—genre, artist, aural texture—is part of the metaphor used to describe the particular version of the primary (source) work as presented in the vid. This is implicit critique as metaphor because it employs one system of connotations to describe another, but it does so without listing them or plainly stating the various points of comparison. Of course, the vid form has evolved to rely on this kind of metaphor because precise literal matches are frequently impossible. With the Kara/Pink trilogy, Pink’s songs suggest a vast amount of information about how to read the character of Kara even as the lyrics provide and direct explicit meanings within the vid itself. It is useful to understand vids as adaptations (see McEwan 2011; Louttit 2013; O’Neill 2014)—particularly, vids that adapt a single text—as a vidder

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creates a new version of the source material through selecting and extracting clips. In a transmedia industrial context where remakes and adaptations are commonplace and the ‘repetition, replication, sequelization, and rebooting’ (Klein and Palmer 2016: 7) of existing texts is normal, any definition of adaptation quickly becomes expansive. To invoke a straightforward definition, Colin McCabe positions an adaptation as a work ‘that relies for some of its material’ on an already extant text (2011: 3). A vid literally relies on existing media texts, both video and audio, but also relies on already extant traditions of commentary in fandom. Paul McEwan argues that if one accepts adaptation as ‘a legitimate form of art, it becomes impossible to justify any criterion of cultural value that excludes [fannish adaptations]’, and the fanworks ‘that fill the gaps between looks and gestures are all, in their own ways, essays on the original text’ (2011: 45). This fannish workingover of source material to create fanworks does crystalize one appeal of adaptations more generally, that ‘we seem to desire the repetition as much as the change’ with each iteration (Hutcheson 2013: 9). The context of vids’ repetition as adaptations is not merely a relationship between source text and individual vid. Instead, there are intertextual and transmedial relationships at play between the source text, the individual vid, other vids for that fandom, and other forms of fanwork (e.g. fic, meta, commentary via gifset, etc.) that extend and elaborate on that source text. Indeed, an ‘important frame for the “creative” and “interpretive” act [of an adaptation] that is the fan video is the work and commentary of others in the community’ (Louttit 2013: 181). Character study and relationship vids construct a narrative space for characters’ emotional lives as an expression of their imagined subjectivity. This act of adaptation demonstrates (textualizes) the attentive spectatorship of the vidder and of a vid-watching audience that shares in this mode of interacting with a text. Music is the method (or tool) of the vidder’s authorial intervention as adapter, giving the character a ‘voice’ by using the lyrics, instrumentation, and other connotations of the song to animate a sequence of silenced images. In discussing authorship in collaborative adaptations, Linda Hutcheon notes the complexity of film and television’s collaborative ‘model of creation’ and the resulting difficulty in establishing a ‘primary adapter’ beyond the usual candidates of director and screenwriter (2013: 80-81). Hutcheon notes in particular the roles of music directors and editors in shaping a text: they are responsible for ‘the music that reinforces or provokes reactions in the audience and directs our interpretation of different characters’ (ibid.: 81). As music and editing greatly influence how narratives are presented, it is entirely reasonable to view vidders as adapters because their contributions are in a similar line.

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Questions of scope and inclusion are at the core of adaptation, especially when adapting between media forms. As Hutcheon observes, cross-media adaptations—for example, films from novels—may often be ‘reduced in size, and thus, inevitably, complexity’ (2013: 36). However, rather than this reduction acting as a ‘subtraction’ and therefore being detrimental, in fact ‘when plots are condensed and concentrated, they can sometimes become more powerful’ (ibid.). As Turk has argued, the formal and narrative ‘compression’ makes vids ‘often much more dense with meaning than the original materials, and both music itself and music/image synchronicity are key to decoding those meanings’ (2015: 170). In the Battlestar vids discussed in this chapter, the serial narrative is condensed, as is the formal presentation of the character and events, reduced from seventy-five episodes (plus associated miniseries) to the duration of three pop songs. This raises the question of absences in the vid: what is at stake in considering what is left out, and what does a vid’s audience make of what has been left in? The volume of the material that has been cut will always exceed that which is included due to the relative durations of the vid and the source. By viewing vids as critical responses enacted as adaptations, the choices made in condensing and concentrating a vid out of a longer text indicate what the vidders want to say about their source material, how it has been interpreted, and how the vidders want to present their work or their argument. One key change made by the Kara/Pink trilogy is that the vids turn a masculine-coded, ‘quality’ (Caldwell 2005; Shimpach 2010; Mittell 2015) serial drama into a more feminine-coded melodrama by following the emotional life of a single female character. It is through the vid form—in which popular music is made to function in a manner similar to musical montage sequences in television or music video—that this adaptation takes place. Borrowing an argument I have made elsewhere about character study vids (Stevens 2017a), the Kara/Pink trilogy are relatively conservative adaptations insofar as they do not introduce new meanings not already present in the text. The vids intensify a slice of Sci-Fi Channel’s remake of Battlestar Galactica into a trilogy that are each coherent texts in their own right and that chart the development of a character centred by the vids, focusing on her emotions and responses to her story.

Overview of Battlestar Galactica The Battlestar Galactica used as source video for Dualbunny’s vids is the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) version of the original series, led by executive

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producer Ronald D. Moore. The 2003 miniseries became the pilot for a series (2004-2009) that expanded on the Glen A. Larsen original (ABC, 1978-9, 1980). Some commentators use the term ‘re-imagining’ to describe the series rather than remake or reboot (see, for example, Hatch 2006; Liedl 2010; Picarelli 2012; Scott 2013), emphasizing Moore’s auteurship and distancing the serious new work from its somewhat campy antecedent. In both series, a small group of humans have survived an attack by robots (the Cylons) and flee, seeking a mythical planet called ‘Earth’. In the 2003 series, Cylons were built by humans, not an alien race, and have been absent for a generation-long armistice that followed a human/Cylon war. The central tension is between the civilian President of the Colonies and the military commander of the titular spaceship, the Galactica. The 2003 series is generally considered to be an allegory of contemporary American politics and was ‘endlessly dissected on discussion boards by fans and in popular print by critics’ (Nishime 2011: 452). It ‘offers itself as an allegory of the politics of war and terror after 9/11’ (Tranter 2007: 45), including ‘debates about women in the military’ (Sharp 2010: 61), representations of torture (Randell 2011), and organized resistance to military occupation (Herbert 2012). Its focus on policy and governance meant that it was easy for fans, critics, and creators to pretend that Battlestar’s killer robots and spaceships were incidental. Jennifer Stoy suggests that the narrative weakening of Battlestar in its latter seasons was in part due to its disavowal of ‘the science fiction tradition’, for ‘one cannot upend clichés if one has lost a grip on them’ (2010: 25). Indeed, Daniel Herbert argues that Battlestar’s allegorical appeals lack consistency, twisting abstract references to social issues ‘such that the relation between the program and reality is incoherent’ (2012: 195). Herbert suggests that the ‘apparent polysemy’ of the series is derived from the characters’ own inconsistencies (2012: 196), which makes it difficult to identify an unambiguous social or political position taken by the series (see also Dzialo 2008). Unlike Star Trek, in which the main characters are mostly senior officers in a system of rank where meritocracy elides class difference, Battlestar includes very clear stratification between deckhands, pilot-officers, civilian workers, social and political elites, and so forth. However, the vids in this case study are not concerned with the struggle for humanity’s survival or with questions of governance, as in the series, but with the experiences of one character, the fighter pilot Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace. In 1978’s Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck was a male character and was played by Dirk Benedict. In the 2003 series, ‘Starbuck’ is the call-sign of female officer Lt. Kara Thrace, as Anne Kustritz notes, ‘altering the biology of the character without significantly altering the original version’s

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personality or abilities’ (2012: 16). Benedict himself weighed in on the issue, seemingly finding this choice both personally offensive and symptomatic of a feminist corruption of science fiction in particular and of Western civilization in general (Kungl 2008; Johnson 2011). Hutcheon writes that, when experiencing an adaptation ‘as an adaptation’ (2013: 111, emphasis in original), awareness of the adapted text will ‘oscillate in our memories with what we are experiencing’ (ibid.: 121). For what she calls the ‘knowing audience’ (ibid.: 120), both adaptation and adapted text are present in the experience of the adaptation. In the change from Starbuck to Kara, the oscillation between these two characters became a point of controversy in the lead-up to the broadcast of the miniseries, and this affects the way the character is approached in scholarship. Derek Johnson argues that the 2003 series ‘effectively transgendered the familiar Starbuck character, transforming the tough-talking, cigar-chomping, male action hero played by Dirk Benedict in the original series into the tough-talking, cigar-chomping, female action heroine played by Katee Sackhoff in the remake’ (2011: 1089). Johnson’s use of ‘transgendered’ is deeply problematic; this word choice echoes Sharp’s description of the ‘woman fighter pilot Starbuck’ (2010: 57) as ‘gender-bending’ (2010: 58). Under this naming, Starbuck is ‘transgendered’ due to intertextuality because twenty years before, a character with a similar name was a man. These attempts to account for a change from one version of Battlestar to another reveal, amongst other things, the strength of the oscillation of audience memory. This reluctance to accept a female action heroine is not unique to Kara Thrace. Yvonne Tasker, in her analysis of female characters in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), notes the ‘arguments made by some critics that figures like Ripley [(Sigourney Weaver)] are merely men in drag’ (1993: 149); by implication, such heroines are not just unfeminine but inauthentically or insufficiently female. Kara typifies the persistent problem of genres such as action and science fiction where representations of ‘femininity, defined and redefined through the body’ in a military (or other action) context rupture expectations and come to represent a ‘transgression of the kinds of behaviour considered appropriate for women’ (Tasker 1993: 148). As a female character, Kara embodies the problems in representing women in science fiction and action genres. As a long-form serial narrative, Battlestar has space available to address both her profession as military pilot and her private life. Hutcheon writes that a favourable adaptation is ‘successful in its own right… for both knowing and unknowing audiences’ (2013: 121). However, it seems difficult for a female Starbuck to defeat the oscillation of memories of the 1978 series. In contrast, the vid trilogy accepts Kara as

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a female character and examines the contradictions of her representation beyond a dismissive labelling of her as ‘a post-feminist pinup’ (Tranter 2007: 56). Taking this further, understanding the vids as adaptations of the already adapted series relies on that oscillation between the 2003 series and the vids to create narratives that emphasize and naturalize Kara Thrace as a complex female character. In academic takes on the series, Kara is frequently referred to only as Starbuck and not via her given or family name (see Tranter 2007; Kirkland 2008; Rawle 2010; Sharp 2010; Raney and Meagher 2015). Turning Starbuck into Kara Thrace is more than changing the gender of the character; introducing a given and family name was, as Rawle notes, ‘a significant part of the series’ attempt to diminish its obvious basis in fantasy’ and to emphasize its relative realism (2010: 133). However, subsuming Kara under Starbuck aligns her with her male predecessor; other characters in the 2003 series refer to her variously by her given name, call sign, and rank. There is an uncomfortable subtext to referring to the character as only Starbuck, given that re-writing the character as a woman had caused such offense prior to the series’ premiere. Doing so diminishes the reality effect of granting her a more complex potential identity. The 2003 Battlestar Galactica is a textbook example of early-2000s ‘quality’ television characterized by ensemble casts, expensive production, and serialized character development across many seasons (Shimpach 2010; Mittell 2015). Shawn Shimpach argues that the genre hybridity of such series is characterized by their ‘blending of traditional action elements with significant aspects of the televised domestic melodrama’ (2010: 36). In Battlestar, military/governance plots are set against more personal strands of representational politics (Hellstrand 2011) or interracial marriage and adoption (Nishime 2011). Writing more generally, Shimpach argues that melodrama’s focus on domesticity: involves more than these characters simply having love lives. Their narrative worlds are intertwined with complex domestic issues, blurring public and private, domestic and professional. […] The famously mutable, emotionally excitable characters of melodrama meanwhile are the antithesis of stoic, masculine heroism. (2010: 37)

This blurring of public and private narrative worlds occurs regularly in Battlestar. For example, when called upon to train new pilots in the first season, Kara is reluctant to return to her pre-series role as a flight instructor because of lingering guilt over inadvertently causing the death of her

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f iancé, a trainee pilot whom Kara decided to let pass despite knowing his flying was inadequate. Her private life directly relates to her public, professional abilities: her commanding officer on Galactica is her deceased fiancé’s father. The problem of Kara Thrace as a female hero is articulated in Dualbunny’s trilogy: as a woman, she is indeed ‘the antithesis of stoic, masculine heroism’ (Shimpach 2010: 37). As an adaptation, the trilogy imagines a coherent subject position for Kara, working to resolve contradictions in how the character is presented by aligning this with Pink’s own public self-narration. The vids do address Kara’s love life but only as one aspect of the character’s interiority. That is not to say the vids remove references to action and science fiction genres; indeed, the spectacular special effects and Kara’s status as an action heroine are just as important. If, as Shimpach notes, the characters of television melodrama are shown to be ‘motivated by deep and complex syntheses of psychology and biography’ (2010: 49), then the vids construct spaces in which these motivations are brought to the fore. Dualbunny’s vid trilogy concerns Kara’s specific character development across the series; as context, I will provide a brief overview of her place in the narrative. She is introduced before the Cylon attack as a confident and competent fighter pilot who enjoys a father/daughter relationship with her commander, William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and the respect of her fellow officers despite a tendency towards swaggering arrogance. Throughout the first series, she proves her piloting skill and tactical abilities, she successfully trains Galactica’s new pilots, and her religious convictions lead her to accept President Laura Roslin’s (Mary McDonnell) secret solo mission to fulfil vision and prophecy by returning to her abandoned home planet, Caprica, one of the Twelve Colonies (which are each separate planets). At the start of the second season Kara is still on Caprica, separated from the fleet. She falls in love with the leader of the resistance, Samuel Anders (Michael Trucco) but must leave him and his followers on the planet when she returns to the fleet. The surprise appearance of another surviving warship leads to her promotion and reassignment to the other vessel; the responsibilities of the position and guilt over personnel losses increase her reckless and self-destructive behaviour. After fulfilling her promise to return for the humans on Caprica, she marries Anders and leaves the fleet to join a settlement on the newly established colony of New Caprica. In the final episode of the second season, the narrative advances a full year; Cylons arrive and occupy the planet. In the third season, after the humans escape their failed colony and return to space, Kara’s recklessness returns in the wake of her imprisonment

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and torture59 during the period of occupation; she experiences nightmares and starts an affair with Commander Adama’s son, Lee (Jamie Bamber). Her romantic turmoil is mirrored in her decreasing ability to adequately perform her duties as a pilot; a few close calls foreshadow her (apparent) death toward the end of the season. She returns, however, in the season’s final episode, claiming to know the location of Earth. In the final season, she fights general suspicion that she is a Cylon (because of her miraculous re-appearance), struggles to convince the fleet to follow her directions back to Earth (which turns out to be a nuclear wasteland), remains loyal during a mutiny (during which Anders receives severe brain injuries), and finds a more adequate faux-Earth to settle on thanks to elaborate visions featuring her long-absent father. By the end, it is revealed that Kara did indeed die in the third season: what returned was an ‘angel’ whose function was to lead the humans to their new home, and this supernatural Kara disappears into thin air at the end of the series. As one would expect from a serial narrative, Kara’s character changes over time, and her decisions have consequences later in the narrative. The vid trilogy at the heart of this chapter addresses these changes by closely reading the elements that construct the representation of the character and by using Pink’s songs to re-present this fractured representation as a cohesive whole. This works in an interesting tension with what Carla Kungl identifies as one of the problems posed by the character of Kara Thrace: that ‘women in science fiction… operate at a safe distance from the present, mitigating their ability to challenge the status quo’ (2008: 204). If Battlestar is an allegory for early twenty-first-century American foreign policy and society, it may be that the political allegory permeates this genre boundary while representational politics are rendered ineffective. Kara’s pseudo-resurrection could be read as a decision to avoid the issue of identification completely. As Patrick B. Sharp argues, Kara’s ‘subversive potential… is limited by her status as a supernatural creature’ (2010: 58): she is contained by both her safe distance from the present and her non-human state. As a supernatural creature, guided by predestination and stripped of her agency, Kara’s potential to challenge the status quo is diluted by the ongoing narrative of the series. I’m Not Dead, the final vid of the trilogy, presents the supernatural Kara as possessing an interiority as complex as (and in continuity with) her 59 Unlike the ‘waterboarding’ used by humans on Cylon prisoners, Kara’s imprisonment takes the form of house arrest and extended emotional abuse in a domestic setting. Cuz I Can addresses this plotline.

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human predecessor. The vids are adaptations that work to make sense of the character’s experience. Battlestar’s use of complicated personal narratives is amplified in the vid trilogy; the vids eliminate overt discussions of governance and posthuman philosophy and policy to focus on the immediate emotional experience of a single character.

God Is A DJ (2006) God Is A DJ (2006) is the first vid of the trilogy and is based on the eponymous song by PinkIt elevates Kara to a starring role and addresses the character’s representation of non-traditional womanhood in a context of military science fiction. God Is A DJ extracts this one character from the elaborate narrative and adapts that narrative in terms that emphasize her story and turn her into a protagonist. It is constructed out of clips that represent both that which is most important to her and that which is vital in understanding her motivations as the star of this adaptation. John Mercer and Martin Shingler’s overview of melodrama notes that this genre is regularly equated with the ‘woman’s film’ in feminist film scholarship (2004: 27). Insofar as this vid has a female protagonist, uses a female artist’s song to tell its story and make its argument, and is produced for a largely female audience, this vid can be considered a variant of the woman’s film. The vid is not concerned with the series’ political allegories; other characters appear only in relation to Kara. It does not extract only ‘girl-friendly’ parts of Battlestar, but it does reconfigure the character’s representation in relation to its longer source narrative. Nor is it constructing an argument about what modern women should be. Rather, it focuses on how this specific female character can be interpreted in this case. God Is A DJ premiered at VividCon 2006 as part of the Club Vivid vidshow following the end of Battlestar’s second season, and it summarizes these two seasons from Kara’s perspective. The vid begins with Kara’s introduction in the series, where she is shown winning at cards, and the final clip is from the final episode of the second season, as she looks to the sky to see the Cylons flying over the new colony. While the initial clips suggest the vid will be about pleasure and/or leisure, the next (pre-lyrics) sequence of quick clips includes a flashback to her fiancé’s funeral and to her first-season crash onto a desert planet. This shift from scenes showing Kara in control to those revealing her more vulnerable moments, from facing the camera and dominating the frame to having her face alternately obscured and moving out of the shot, establishes that this character has moments of

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strength and weakness and that the vid will address those highs and lows. The vid ultimately constructs a version of Battlestar that argues that Kara’s outlook on life is about making the best of positive and negative moments, largely by seeking pleasure and distraction. In the words of the song, her ability to ‘take what you’re given | it’s all how you use it’ is what helps her to overcome various obstacles. Further, the opening sequence establishes the vid’s balanced blend of personal and professional narratives. As noted earlier, this is typical of long-form serial television drama; the vid preserves these two aspects of the character’s life in its adaptation of the larger series. God Is A DJ does not compare this character with other women in Battlestar nor with more general representational norms: it is interested in (the representation of) Kara herself. As previously noted, Kara’s gender caused issues for those members of the audience who were defeated by their oscillations of memory (per Hutcheon 2013) in reference to the 1978 series. In the 2003 Battlestar, ‘Starbuck’ has always been female. This vid preserves Starbuck’s cigar-smoking, liquor-drinking, card-playing habits and showcases the character’s abilities both in piloting and in hand-to-hand combat; however, her gender is reinforced by Sackhoff’s unambiguously gendered body. God Is A DJ does not argue that to see a woman in a macho military context is a perversion (cf. Tasker 1993, on comic strip heroines); rather, its assertive and persuasive mode of address naturalizes the Kara shown in this vid and does not mark her as transgressive.60 Pink’s song, with its rough and throaty vocals and electric guitars, is the vid’s other model of femininity. The vid does not approach Kara as a problem; it integrates (masculine) military imagery with more typically ‘feminine’ activity, such as wearing a blue satin dress to a formal occasion. The vid naturalizes the female-centred diegesis it creates, thanks in no small part to the confidence in Pink’s song. Instrumentally, the song begins with a plucked acoustic guitar under a subtle synthesized sound; this electronic thread is quickly joined by a simple drum fill and more ambient (though rhythmically structured) synthesized noise. The blend of the acoustic guitar and live drums with electronic sounds connotes a blend of rock sensibility and processed pop to position the song (and therefore the 60 I do not read the vid as purposely representing transgressive behaviour or subjectivity; the predominant pleasure is arguably closer to an aspirational social construction of a diegesis where Kara is not transgressive, rather than the pleasure of watching Kara’s transgressive acts. There is transgression in the vidder’s manipulation of existing texts; however, within vid genres, character study vids are based on a promise of a truthful or authentic (re-)presentation of the character. The Kara in the vid is shown performing actions that are wholly her own and not overtly compared either to male fighter pilots or to Dirk Benedict.

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vid) as adopting the acoustic semiotics of both the authentic self-expression of a singer-songwriter and a more fabricated pop persona (see Whiteley 2000; Frith 2007a; Moy 2015). The core of the instrumentation—the guitar and drums—can connote a direct, honest, and authentic form of musical self-expression. Accordingly, the electronic elements are used as fill and colour to augment that authentic core. Acoustically, then, the song begins with this statement of authenticity, with what Simon Frith might count as an example of ‘performing sincerity’ (2007b: 167)—in this case, borrowing discourses of authenticity from folk music to perform the craft of an individualized emotional appeal. This double claim to a polished exterior (or a public face) and a rougher subjectivity is well-used in the latter half of the vid to undercut the devil-may-care enthusiasm of the vid’s beginning. Before the lyrics begin, Pink is heard humming and laughing over the introduction, with her ‘slightly breathy and raspy voice’ (Burns and Watson 2013: 122) both audible and recognizable before she starts singing. Interestingly, though certainly parenthetically, in Film Music: A Very Short Introduction, Kathryn Kalinak uses Pink’s voice as an example of timbre, suggesting in an aside that ‘most listeners can probably tell the difference between’ her and Mariah Carey (2010: 13). The vid’s opening connotes a woman (both the star persona of Pink and the fictional Kara) who cannot be contained by a strict verse-chorus structure or conventional behaviour in other realms. The vid’s first three clips are taken from the character’s introduction in the series. The quick upward camera movement of the clip between the title cards—following Kara raising and drinking from a shot glass—begins with a tightly framed shot of her cleavage; the sequence establishes Kara as the main character of the vid and also makes a clear statement of this Starbuck’s gender. (It also establishes the character as the subject of a gendered gaze on behalf of the vid’s presumptively non-male audience.) The song’s suggestion of rule-breaking establishes this character as a woman who narratively challenges authority and whose representation also defies simple norms. Even without her voice, Kara’s subjectivity is affirmed through the vid’s frequent use of shots of her face. Significantly, these are not shots of her speaking but of looking, inviting the audience to view the world from her perspective: how she sees them and how she sees herself. Considering the lyrics ‘it’s all how you use it’, her look implies a constant evaluation of her circumstances to figure out how to use what she has. For example, in the final chorus, Kara’s escape from the Cylon breeding experiment in the second-season episode ‘The Farm’ (tx. 12 August 2005) uses her act of stabbing her captor, the Cylon Simon (Rick Worthy) as a message of control and empowerment. Yvonne Tasker’s work on female

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action heroes details the scarcity of such characters: instead, ‘More often female characters are either raped or killed, or both, in order to provide a motivation for the hero’s revenge’ (1993: 16). One of Battlestar’s early successes in trope subversion—of the sort that Stoy (2010) applauds in her overview of the series’ narrative decay—addresses this use of women in action genres. In ‘The Farm’, it is revealed that the Cylons use captured human women as tissue donors and living incubators for the production of hybrid Cylon/human children. Despite her injuries, Kara fights her way out alone—captioned in the vid by the lyrics ‘you get what you’re given | it’s all how you use it’—not waiting for (or expecting) any male characters to rescue her. This medical and sexual violation is therefore not a set-up for acts of heroic revenge but for Kara herself to accomplish her own escape. The vid cuts directly from a clip of Kara falling unconscious to a scene several days later where she stabs the Cylon ‘doctor’ in the neck. Instead of preserving sequences where she appears to be a passive victim, the vid uses a clip full of motion, positioning Kara as actively responding to her circumstances. In one sense, this choice not to include clips of the intervening moments could be seen as an example of ‘narractivity’ or ‘the way that members of a community bring together different elements in different orders to change the narrative of a digital text’ (Booth 2017: 85) if we think of Battlestar as a database or a wiki and the process of making a vid as shuffling that database to produce a single narrative thread. However, this moment of the vid is an elision, not a restructuring of a wiki with which the viewer can immediately interact. A vid is certainly the result of interacting with a text, but the piece itself is not, in this sense, interactive in the same way as Paul Booth (2017) describes shifting how one recounts narrative events. What is useful here is to reflect on how vidders approach their source material as a pool of clips, each connoting the broader context of their original position within a narrative. Aesthetically, the motion within the clip matches the surrounding clips of explosions and science fiction action. This is not about Kara’s knowledge or her investigative skills but rather the actions she takes to rescue herself. As a construction of Kara’s subjectivity, the upbeat tone of the vid suggests an inner life for the character that does not emphasize these moments of powerlessness and draws attention to the feminist potential of Kara as a character able to take her own revenge. Character study vids demonstrate a complexity in the way images can be used to serve a song, as shown in the way the narratives of two seasons of Battlestar are condensed and reshaped in the vid’s adaptation to emphasize Kara’s agency and motivation. The relationship between song and image in a vid exists in a more complex hierarchy—negotiating two pre-existing

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texts rather than a sequence of images created to serve the song—meaning there are different matters at stake in handling the realities of diegesis and the visualization of lyrics. Through the combination of song and re-edited moving images, Kara inhabits Pink’s landscape of LA parties and broken families, just as Pink inhabits Kara’s post-apocalyptic allegorical science fiction. By using a different Pink song for each of the three vids, Dualbunny employs a consistent point of cultural reference, adapting aspects of Pink’s celebrity image (not in the least that these are two young blonde white women) to inform this re-presentation of Kara.61 This persona draws on ‘tough’ (tomboyish, aggressive) connotations more expected in rock genres than in pop music and uses Pink’s work to address (what can be read as) postfeminist concerns. For example, the music video for ‘Stupid Girls’ (2006) ‘deploys parody to critique normative def initions of sexualized female identity, that is to say, a culture which equates idealized femininity with “stupidity”’ (Railton and Watson 2011: 17). In this video, Pink performs parodies of contemporary female celebrities, emphasizing their obsession with normative (‘stupid’) activities. She contrasts this with confident performances of traditionally male activities. While this might seem to reject femininity in favour of feminism, as Railton and Watson (ibid.: 35-36) argue in their analysis of Pink’s celebrity image beyond the single music video, the ‘model of contemporary womanhood’ she provides ‘is one in which it is possible to be intelligent and good-looking, to be politically motivated and work within the popular, to be sexy and respected, to be successful and feminine’. Therefore the ‘Stupid Girls’ video is less a rejection of femininity and more one where a ‘relevant form of postfeminist feminist identity’ can be negotiated (ibid.: 35). This potential for an embodied ‘postfeminist feminism’ is one of the key representational discourses used in the trilogy to analyze Kara’s representation and development. Based on her albums and public performances, Pink’s persona is grounded in a deeply confessional and confrontational style where a ‘conf ident, independent and tough exterior’ (Burns and Watson 2013: 105) operates in dialogue with narratives in her song lyrics that are alternately boastful and confessional. Her notionally autobiographical (albeit co-written) songwriting, has covered an abusive childhood, a failed marriage, and the tension 61 Dualbunny has used Pink songs in other vids. These include: One Foot Wrong (2011), a character study of Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) as she appears in Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992); Missundaztood (2011), a character study of Wickham (Tom Riley) from Lost in Austen (ITV, 2008); and Who Knew? (2010), a Battlestar Kara/Lee relationship vid.

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between revelling in the freedom of a life filled with alcohol and excessive behaviour and reflecting on those destructive aspects. The personal details Pink includes in her lyrics—both confessions and boasts—are made to broadly match elements of Kara’s story; the vids take these existing correspondences and intensify the link between singer and character as they adapt and condense the episodes. If one of the purposes of a music video is to ‘perform some function of legitimation and authentication’ on behalf of the performer (Railton and Watson 2011: 62), in the case of vids, the authenticity of the recording artist is less the issue. If anything, the lyrics need to be ‘read’ more directly so as to not overwhelm the play of recontextualizing images. The burden of authenticity, then, shifts to the relationship between the vid’s source material (and the vid-as-adaptation) and how ‘truthful’ a vid feels: if it has emotional resonance. The character in a vid remains distinct from the singer; the two are not conflated into a singular identity, so the overture to authenticity is made in spite of this distance. Kara Thrace is not an LA party girl, and Pink does not fight robots in space, but the broad strokes of their parallel experiences inform the character study performed in the vids. Hutcheon suggests that adaptations are possessed of a ‘“palimpsestuous” intertextuality’ as texts that are ‘openly and directly connected to recognisable other works’ (2013: 21). Particularly palimpsestuous adaptations occur when previous versions are exceptionally visible in the new work: in vids, this visibility is compulsory. The definitions established in Battlestar and in Pink’s music—of serious, ‘quality’ realist science fiction and of aggressive pop-rock femininity—must both be present and visible in Dualbunny’s three vids in order for the vids to function as complete texts. Hutcheon argues that, regardless of how successful a palimpsestuously intertextual adaptation may be, ‘our intertextual expectations about medium and genre, as well as about this specific work, are brought to the forefront of our attention’ (ibid.: 22). In watching the vids as re-edits of Battlestar and recontextualizations of Pink, the expectations of series and songs inform and direct the vids’ audience. The Kara trilogy therefore draws out and emphasizes one aspect of Battlestar’s hybridity. Dualbunny’s trilogy adapts the series in such a way that it argues for a rich interiority of the female Starbuck. As adaptations, vids remake their source material: the new work (vid) recalls the narrative of the source but presents it differently. Fundamentally, this is more than summary; it is analysis (cf. Mittell 2006; Brunsdon and Spigel 2008). The vid form’s potential for critical analysis is a different kind of work than academic analyses; it is not work that trumps or replaces critical writing but rather one that has a different audience for its particular arguments

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(Russo 2017; Morrissey 2018) and that presents these arguments in a mode recently echoed by explorations in film and television studies of videographic criticism and video essays (McWhirter 2015; Keathley, Mittell, and Grant 2019). As an adaptation, repetition of the original narrative is narrowed and directed and its context augmented by the song choice. Before returning to a detailed discussion of the rest of the vid trilogy, I will take some time to think through how music is used in vids, drawing on literature that addresses music in television.

Popular Music and Television This section situates the use of popular music in vids within a broader discussion of how music is used in film and television. The songs in vidding are the mechanisms through which these adaptations are enacted: song choice directs and shapes the audience’s decoding of the vid, guiding how to read its condensed and re-ordered narrative. The role of music in how vids make meaning deserves sustained academic attention. Indeed, Julie Levin Russo cites Tisha Turk (2010, 2015) on the importance of music in a vid and on its role in providing structure, shape, and ‘affective tone and impact of the vid’ (2017: 1.9). The constraints of the duration and linear progression of lyrics introduced by the song function as aural (and conceptual) captions for the vid’s clips, the instrumentation provides its own affective shaping, and together these elements of the chosen song narrow the range of possible interpretations. The constraints of duration are malleable: vidders will edit out unwanted verses or repetition. However, even if the song is reconstructed, its linearity and temporality still offer a structuring boundary to a vid. Unlike the tradition of experimental found footage filmmaking, a vid’s audio is not typically part of the experiment. In order to work through how vids use music, and following this book’s assertion that vids are fundamentally of television, this section draws on theorizations of how music and songs have been used in television and film. Television’s use of sound and music has many functions that set it apart from film, primarily in how it guides its audience through the fragmentary and layered composition of televisual flow and signals indicating when and to what the audience should pay attention (see Altman 1987; Frith 2002; Hilmes 2008). In vids, songs are used as cues to read juxtapositions in particular ways, functioning as score, as captioning, and as compensation for the silencing of decontextualized moving images. This is in contrast to films where, with the exception of production bumpers, sound is primarily used to

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support the narrative. The vid form exploits a use of music as compensation for film and television’s medium-specific shortcomings. Claudia Gorbman writes that the classical Hollywood film score ‘inflects scenes with emotional or dramatic resonance, suggests character, setting and mood, influences perceptions of narrative time and space, creates formal unity and a sense of continuity’ (1998: 44). Film music thus has a subsidiary role, working behind or under the audience’s attention to create its effects. After the studio era, the use of pre-recorded music has allowed for a postmodern reflexivity in scoring that does not ‘function illustratively and subordinately’ but instead ‘shatter[s] the aesthetic of unobtrusiveness’ of the classical scores (ibid.: 45). The vid form takes full advantage of this kind of reflexivity: if the song choices made by vidders resulted in unobtrusive ‘scores’, vids would not be legible texts. The overall argument of God Is A DJ, discussed above, relies on ‘reading’ the lyrics of Pink’s song against the life and decisions of Kara; as the vid’s score, the song must be obtrusive. Film scores are never neutral, and even if music is not obtrusively reflexive, it still acts upon the narrative and the audience. Even the few vids made to songs without lyrics demand that their audiences notice the music, as the song choice will structure and guide the interpretation of the vid’s recontextualized images. The ‘Let My Lyrics Go!’ vidshow at VividCon 2012 contained eighteen vids without lyrics, such as a Doctor Who vid titled 1969 (beccatoria, 2011) that used Daft Punk’s song ‘Rinzler’ and Danse Macabre (chaila, 2012) that paired Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009) with the Camille Saint-Saëns work. Coincidentally, another vid premiering at the same convention, Mr. Brightside (jarrow, 2012), uses a Vitamin String Quartet cover of the song ‘Mr. Brightside’ by The Killers in a vid of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999). The vid responds to the love triangle narrative of the song’s lyrics, even as the lyrics are not actually heard in the vid, and the classical instrumentation of the cover version arguably better suits the film’s period setting and evocation of European glamour than the original. In the convention programme, the description of the vid is a line from the song (‘How did it end up like this?’), creating an explicit connection to the aural space where lyrics would have been if the original song had been used. While a random allocation of song to image can produce compelling juxtapositions, vids are constructed with much care and deliberation: a vid song choice must ‘fit’ in some way, as the song must be made to stand as a reasonable commentary on the vid’s source material (an argument made through editing choices). This could be either an apparently close textual match—Pink and Kara share a general physical resemblance and

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attitude—or something entirely unrelated that can be made into a coherent metaphor. In working with vids, especially with character study vids, it is tempting to begin and end an analysis with song lyrics—as a function of structure and narrative—without also considering instrumentation, though such an approach leaves a great deal unheard in relation to the way meaning is made through music in the vid. Nick Davis offers the mathematical metaphor of a Klein bottle to describe how music can be both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ narrative space (2012). A Klein bottle ‘has no inside and outside, no recto and verso, but is one continuous surface’ (Davis 2012: 14). In Davis’s analogy, music in film and television is not wholly beyond or below a story but rather part of its fabric, experienced simultaneously as part of and separate from the narrative form and content. A song might be extradiegetic, but it is not extranarrative. Put another way, the composer Igor Stravinsky’s reported dismissal of film music in the 1940s as ‘aural wallpaper’ (Dahl 2010: 275) misses a significant point that a film score ‘may be just as essential as wallpaper (or set design generally) in characterising the feel and emotional content of the space in which the action takes place—but does not narrate said action any more than wallpaper does’ (B. Winters 2012: 5). Instead, rather than music being separate from the narrative, it should be considered one of many elements that combine to create the narrative, even if it is not directly narrating action, much in the same way that the melodramas of Douglas Sirk typify the possibilities of mise-en-scène to express deep meaning. In the vid, it is the interaction between the song and the source video that creates meaning; neither element dominates in creating the vid’s narrative. Kara Thrace, the tough female character, is not overdetermined by Pink, the outspoken female recording artist. Instead, Pink’s song structures an examination of Kara but does not itself completely define that reading. Pre-recorded popular music can therefore be used like a prop: it may remain in the background of a scene or become an essential part of the action. The use of music as a prop or wallpaper is especially apparent in historical television series. For example, as Estella Tincknell (2010) argues, the use of early-1970s rock music in Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007) is a form of aural set-dressing that adopts the loose set of ideas and associations the listener may have with the songs and the historical periods. Sets and costume are constructed to suit the historical period; song choices have a similar ability to ‘dress’ a soundtrack. The use of music from a different time period—contemporary music for a period piece—is a reflexive device that prompts the audience to consider thematic links between the contemporary sentiment and historical narrative. Vids will employ contemporary songs in vids of

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older films or television series; this can have the effect of taking on the vidder’s voice, speaking from the present to evaluate historical texts through deliberately anachronistic aural set-dressing. Kay Dickinson points out that pre-recorded songs used in television and film ‘have already established a set of definitions for themselves’ (2004: 100). Indeed, it is reasonable to argue that pre-recorded popular music can be ‘more powerful than traditional cues’ in connoting specific cultural information (Rodman 2011: 81). Songs have a greater mobility than films or television episodes: individual songs are heard in public and private spaces, incidentally or by choice, and over time, aggregating the listener’s potential associations with a song. These associations are beyond the control of a music director; however, elements such as genre, time period, instrumentation, style of vocal performance, and tempo can be relied upon for their connotation and are duly ‘stitched into’ a sequence. In the context of vids, these formal elements are added to a sequence made from video that already has its own ‘established set of definitions’ (Dickinson 2004: 100). In relation to this chapter’s case study, the arguments about Kara Thrace are constructed by her textual proximity to Pink in each vid through the vidder’s authorial intervention and use of music to create the imagined subject position. A song’s specific connotations are used, as Alexander Binns says, ‘to deepen the narrative for those with the interpretative keys’ (2007: 195). What are the implications for using a referent that requires unlocking? Even if the song in question is unfamiliar, the use of certain instruments, arrangements, or specific ‘musical idioms’ (Dickinson 2004: 106) and ‘referential clichés’ (Binns 2007: 195) goes a long way to provide these interpretive keys. These idioms and clichés can be used ironically or subversively: for example, a rock song can be used as aural wallpaper for a character failing to achieve the spirit of youthful rebellion, suggesting the character is ‘trying too hard’. There is a large amount of cultural information communicated by a song’s idioms and clichés, and much can depend on the audience’s prior knowledge. Lyrics provide more precise and more complex connotations than the more open semiotics of instrumentation; working together, these are used in character study vids to construct a narrative space for subjectivity. Indeed, the audience’s knowledge of a specific song may affect the way the narrative is experienced. What follows are two contrasting examples of recognizable music used non-diegetically to this end. The oscillation of memory that Hutcheon (2013) describes in the experience of adaptations is evocative in illustrating the different yet simultaneous use of songs as wallpaper or as prop. For example, the opening chords of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Last Goodbye’ are used at a key moment in Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe,

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2001). The song’s use is ironic, although the opening lyrics—‘This is our last goodbye’—are not heard. Its use signals the end of a romantic relationship during a sequence that seems to establish the film’s central couple. Its minute-long introduction is easily read as a light pop-rock cue in which the song’s laid-back solo slide guitar augments the couple’s happy and flirtatious parting. The next sequence contains the car crash that separates the pair in reality; their subsequent scenes together take place in a virtualreality dream, meaning therefore that their parting was indeed their last goodbye. The song’s instrumentation creates an immediate emotional effect, but knowledge of its unheard lyrics contradicts this emotion by way of foreshadowing the plot’s central twist. The denotation of the song’s unheard lyrics is at odds with the connotations of its instrumental clichés. ‘Last Goodbye’ functions perfectly well as wallpaper in this sequence, though as a prop its meaning is much more pointed. Music, both pre-existing and specially composed, is used on television in episodic credits sequences. Michelle Hilmes’ description of the form and function of credits (2008: 159) broadly resembles the vid form’s relationship with music. As Hilmes describes it, the music and visuals in a credits sequence offer a thematic overview of the series, set up generic expectations for the episode to follow, and operate outside the episode’s diegesis but not completely externally to the series as a whole. Credits music narrates a summary of the series, but this is ‘musical material that is apparently alien to the programme subject matter’ that is nonetheless ‘assimilated by television’ (Donnelly 2005: 145).62 The so-called recruiter vid—one designed to ‘recruit’ potential fans into the vid’s fandom—is somewhat similar to a credits sequence that uses popular music (see also Gray 2010: 154). This vid genre is very clear in how they communicate points of interest, such as featured cast and key relationships, or representing the source’s use of genre tropes as an enticement to watch the film or series. God Is A DJ can be used as a recruiter vid because its summary of Kara offers a thematic overview of her role in the series and models an emotional response to this character. 62 Related to this use of music in credits is Supernatural’s version of ‘previously on’ sequences, which take a form common to episodic television dramas (in which key clips from prior episodes are compiled and framed with a voice-over or a subtitle that begins ‘Previously on…’) but approach a more vidderly mode (see Cornillon 2015). For example, while it is common for series to create these sequences from clips containing significant lines of dialogue mixed with the series’ musical score, the Supernatural episode ‘Salvation’ (tx. 27 April 2006) made prominent use of the Kansas song ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ in a vid-like summary of the previous episodes, using clips with an emphasis on movement and gesture to start the episode.

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More traditional uses of pre-existing songs in television occur in musical montage sequences; these montage sequences can have different roles to play in the narrative. One frequent use of songs in television narratives is as a non-diegetic accompaniment to a montage sequence within the narrative, where lyrics and instrumentation colour and shape the sequence’s emotional pitch. Musically accompanied and dialogue-less, montages can also be used as codas at the ends of episodes. Julie Brown points out that the musically accompanied montages that are ‘a particular favourite for the play-out’ of Ally McBeal (Fox USA, 1997-2002) episodes serve ‘a dramatic recapitulatory function of helping to draw together the various story-lines of the episode’ (2001: 285). This may also be used for a more general tool for examining character interiority. This is particularly effective in genres such as police procedurals, where using a song (whole or fragmentary) relieves the burden of having the writers find dialogue for the characters during repetitive scenes, all the while trading on the emotional authenticity of the song’s instrumentation. The critical literature on the uses of music in film and television offers two ways of using music to convey character and narrative information without actors performing synchronized speech acts: through silent scores and in programmes that rely on voice-over acting. Michel Chion sees a similarity between silent cinema and music videos in particular, arguing that ‘it is precisely insofar as music does form its basis, and none of the narration is propelled by dialogue, that the music video’s image is fully liberated from the linearity normally imposed by sound’ (1994: 167, emphasis in original). When providing an overview of the history of film music, Gorbman suggests that the ‘semiotic functions’ of silent film scores ‘compensated for the characters’ lack of speech’ before synchronized sound became the norm (1998: 46). K.J. Donnelly, writing about Barry Gray’s scores for Gerry Anderson’s various puppet-based series (such as Thunderbirds [ATV, 1965-1966]), notes that ‘the music to some degree compensates for the limited range of facial expressions, adding a further sense of emotion that was lacking in such “wooden” drama’ (2005: 120). In both cases, music is used to offset an emotional deficit caused by the lack of the simultaneous presence of actors’ bodies and their synchronized voices. (I acknowledge re-recording dialogue in post-production, but for simplicity’s sake I will assume a perceived unity of actor’s body and voice.) In silent films, the actor’s body is present without their voice; in puppet work (and indeed in animation), the actor’s voice is present without their body. Notably, both examples use the word ‘compensation’ to describe the function of music in each kind of production. In one, scores stand in for speech, and in the other,

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musical cues do the work of facial expressions and bodily performance. Not only does this suggest that speech and facial expressions, if missing or drastically limited, leave a gap in performance (and therefore in the potential of the audience’s identification with or enjoyment of the character being performed), it also argues that the common element to fully realize these characters is to augment their performance with music. Gorbman’s aside about silent cinema scores standing in for the emotive voices of actors and Donnelly’s analysis of the role played by music in humanizing the frozen faces of the puppets are therefore important in understanding the function of songs in vids. The parallel between silent cinema and vids is more immediately apparent than with the Thunderbirds example because in vids, the characters are silenced by both the literal removal of the source video’s soundtrack and the development of an aesthetic convention that discourages the use of dialogue-heavy clips in favour of reaction shots, gestures, and glances. Glances and gestures not only become indicators of subtext or a character’s emotions but also provide much more interesting visuals with which to construct a vid. As vidding has developed, these so-called ‘talky face’ moments are increasingly avoided because shots of an actor performing dialogue tend to be framed in close-up from a static position and therefore do not include much action or movement in the frame. A variation is the Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009) vid My Brilliant Idea (lim, 2007), which shows the vid’s ‘narrating’ character delivering an extended monologue—following the rambling, stream-ofconsciousness lyrics of the song (Jason Robert Brown’s ‘I Could Be in Love With Someone Like You’)—punctuated by the actor’s dynamic gesticulation. The amount of motion within the frame and the vid’s mode of address (i.e. from the perspective of this verbose character) demonstrates how careful use of dialogue-heavy clips can augment characterization. The vid also makes heavy use of lim’s own animations to add motion. However, for the most part, contemporary vids tend to contain sequences of clips where characters rarely engage in conversation or have the power of speech. Like Anderson’s marionettes, the version of Kara as seen in God Is A DJ does open and close her mouth but not to speak. Like silent films, the vid form relies on non-diegetic sound and intertitles—and not synchronized sound—for conveying complexities of character information beyond the actors’ bodily performances. The compensation that popular songs offer the vid is the provision of a voice: not directly as dialogue but as a subjective expression of the emotional lives of characters. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that songs used in vids, especially in character studies, can stand in for the character’s internal monologue because the song does not function

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exclusively as an external addition imposed on the semiotic world of the source material. It is an imposition but one that fills in a missing piece and therefore an imposition that sits quite comfortably. In the adaptation of the vid, music compensates for the contextual unmooring of image and sound alike. The idea of compensation and of the presence and absence of embodied vocalizations is demonstrated through a bridging sequence in God Is A DJ. There is a moment of pleasurable subjective disruption in this vid when the singer Pink’s vocalizations are made to match Kara’s head and mouth. After the first chorus but before the second verse, there is a brief transition passage where the majority of the instrumentation drops away, leaving the bass and live drums for a few measures to play under some abstract vocalizations. Unlike the song’s opening, where a similar non-verbal vocalization leads into the first verse, this section disrupts the high-energy chorus as the electric guitars and other instruments drop out, leaving only percussion and subtle ambient synthesizer tones over which is mixed record-scratch noises and a fractured manipulation of the vocal line. In the vid, this scat-like singing is matched with Kara blinking and shaking her head to bring herself to alertness. Here, more than any point yet in the vid, Pink’s voice stands in directly for Kara’s. Further, the noticeable manipulation of the vocal track in the song resonates with the formal disruption of the narrative in the vid’s re-sequencing of clips. This sequence rapidly intercuts a blue-tinted close-up of Kara’s face with a yellow-tinted sequence taken from the Caprica/Arrow of Apollo plot arc that starts the second season. The tinting is present in the original episodes and is not an addition by the vidder. Following the song’s cue, the sequence is a transition between Kara’s life aboard Galactica and her covert return to the planet Caprica. Where the f irst verse and chorus drew from the miniseries and episodes earlier in the season, the second verse and chorus broadly contextualize the end of the first season and the character arc at the start of the second. The blue-tinted head shake is a single gesture broken up between clips of her arrival on the planet. These yellow-tinted scenes take place on either side of a kinetic fight sequence which itself is not shown in the vid until later, during the second chorus. This vid sequence takes the in-between lyrical/instrumental moment and makes it signify a moment of change for the character; the yellow sections are taken from a plot arc that saw her defy her commander, leave the fleet, and meet her future husband. As the voice of Pink is dubbed onto Kara’s movements, it turns the image into a puppet of sorts, aligning the first-person subjectivity of the song with the close-up of Kara by further

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collapsing the distance between Pink and Kara. The loss of Sackhoff’s voice is compensated by Pink’s performance: that is, the plot of Battlestar is lost as the series is ‘condensed and concentrated’ (Hutcheon 2013: 36) in the vid, but the character is reconstituted by the connotations and narrative of the chosen vid song. This editing choice does not arguably break the custom of choosing clips without dialogue, but it does subvert the convention to breach the conceptual segregation between audio and video sources. Gorbman and Donnelly argue that music contributes to how we might read a character, and the way music is used in vids constructs a text that offers a focused and sustained reading of a character’s motivations and interiority. In all three genres—vids, silent films, and puppet work—music is used to convey emotional complexity, doing the work of making characters more ‘real’ or relatable. Indeed, the expression of profilmic excesses associated with melodrama (see Williams 1984, 1998)—as one of the genres that comprise the ‘quality’ serial narrative hybrid—is not limited to performance or dialogue: the combination of music and art direction is actively involved in expressing intense emotions, where ‘the mise-en-scène directly represents the emotions and conflict that the film’s narrative and characters cannot articulate’ (Mercer and Shingler 2004: 23). In an echo of how Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) uses a Rachmaninov concerto and voice-overs to convey a depth of feeling for Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) that is not present in the dialogue (Dyer 1993), vids such as God Is A DJ use music to offer their subjects a space for emotional expression not present in the video source. This is, perhaps, another form of compensation. Drawing on Railton and Watson’s argument that music videos are used to ‘perform some function of legitimation and authentication’ of recording artists’ credibility (2011: 62), I argue that the use of popular music in vids—particularly in character study vids—helps to elide the ruptures inherent in the artificial/collage nature of the vid form in order to construct a space for character analysis that trades on the connotative and denotative aspects of popular music to create works that perform credibly complex characters.

Cuz I Can (2007) Dualbunny’s vid trilogy was produced as the series itself was being aired, making these three vids a unique document of how the character’s development was interpreted as the series progressed. They provide snapshots of the character, using the songs to give Kara a ‘voice’ through which to explain the character’s motivations as she changes. God Is A DJ constructs a version

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of the series and of Kara that can easily be re-visited in its condensed form. In this case, the vid aligns the character with the public persona of Pink through adopting Pink’s voice, words, and music to construct a pleasurably confident and feminist adaptation of Battlestar. Continuing the trilogy, the sequel vids Cuz I Can (2007) and I’m Not Dead (2009)63 respond to the problematic development of the Kara character in the second half of Battlestar. As Jennifer Stoy argues, ‘after the interesting and genre-refuting narratives that the female characters have in the first half of the series, the writers […] lapse back into the same sexist clichés’ (2010: 13). God Is A DJ is a character study that examines a successful balance of personal and public roles, and the two sequel vids compensate for the series’ failings by continuing their female-centred feminist narratives in order to make sense of the source material’s anaemic character development. With their greater focus on domestic emotional and existential questions, the sequel vids rely more on the series’ melodramatic elements. This is particularly true in Cuz I Can, which works through Kara’s experiences with motherhood as a daughter and a potential mother herself, and her dissatisfaction with her choice of spouse. I’m Not Dead concerns the character’s transformation into a supernatural being and addresses that development in continuity with the established character. Where God Is A DJ functions best as a summary of the character and her feminist potential, the next two vids build on that foundation to construct a more pointed self-reflection of the character and a critical analysis of her development. Along with the use of the same font for the vid’s titles, Cuz I Can begins with an intertextual joke cued by the song (Pink asking ‘Missed me?’), acknowledging that this vid is a sequel. The opening shot—Kara sliding down a ladder—signals that the vid is concerned with the character’s emotional descent through Battlestar’s third season, following (among other events) her incarceration in a scenario of enforced domesticity during the Cylon occupation and culminating in her apparent death in action. (She returns some episodes later, in the season finale, having no memory of her explosive demise.) The song itself is more aggressive, defensive, and angry than ‘God is a DJ’, and its confrontational lyrics and heavy drum and bass distinguish it from the lighter sincerity of the song in the first vid. The lyrical repetition of ‘[I] don’t give a damn’ overstates a lack of emotional attachment; however, in the vid, the contrast between reserved reaction 63 ‘Cuz I Can’ follows ‘I’m Not Dead’ on the album I’m Not Dead (2006), but the vids reverse the track order; the reversal creates a narrative where the defence of ‘bad’ behaviour is followed by a confessional account. (‘God is a DJ’ is from Pink’s 2003 album Try This.)

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shots and emphatically disinterested lyrics means the vid’s performance of Kara’s inner monologue is constructed through the disjuncture between Pink’s expressive vocal performance and this subdued Kara. Cuz I Can makes frequent use of the boxing matches in the episode ‘Unfinished Business’ (tx. 1 December 2006), maintaining visual energy and movement within the frame. This display sets up a tension between the action heroine Kara and the Kara experiencing the emotional consequences of her imprisonment, which comprises the vid’s other significant thread. In Battlestar’s third season, Kara’s story takes a domestic direction to include a husband, a faux-daughter, and memories of her mother’s abuse. In the early episodes of the third season, Kara is held by the Cylons in a prison made up like a family home and presented with a child who is supposedly her daughter, courtesy of the previous season’s breeding experiments. This enforced domesticity runs counter to the Kara from the first two seasons, who appeared to pursue sexual partners without any motive of marriage or family. This approach is eloquently captured in God Is A DJ in a sequence where Kara is shown moving away from two potential partners—captioned by the lyrics ‘Lover, hey fuck you’ and intercut with their reaction shots—in favour of launching her Viper (fighter spacecraft). However, in the third season, Kara is isolated from these pursuits. Patrick B. Sharp is explicitly critical of Kara’s incarceration on New Caprica, seeing Leoben’s actions as his ‘attempts to force Starbuck into a conservative and traditional woman’s role […] representing domestic life as captivity’ (2010: 76). As a Cylon, her captor Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie) has access to unlimited clone copies in which to ‘download’ his consciousness: every time Kara kills him, he returns again in a fresh body and the cycle continues. This recalls Yvonne Tasker’s analysis of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), where the representations of a ‘heroine as mother, an image which emphasises her womanhood’ are so contradictory that it can only be reconciled if the character is also mentally ill (1993: 27). For Kara, the apparent reconciliation of her representation as heroine and mother occurs while she is a prisoner in a dark parody of domesticity. The third season’s footage gives Cuz I Can the material to address this family melodrama as an analysis of what these narrative changes mean to Kara’s development, using Pink’s song as the tool for adaptation and analysis. The vid helps explain Kara’s behaviour and choices in this season by using Pink’s words to suggest that Kara suffers from low self-esteem and that she believes she deserves these bad things happening to her. This synthesis of many points in the character’s arc creates a coherent commentary typical of a character study vid. While the ‘no-regrets’ theme of ‘Cuz I Can’ is similar to

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that of ‘God is a DJ’, the vid Cuz I Can pairs the song to images that subvert the lyrics—with a focus on loss and emotional trauma—which aligns with the more desperate vocal performance and aggressive instrumentation to give the vid its more sombre tone. The vid’s examination of Kara’s emotional response to motherhood continues through the subsequent repetition of the lyrics ‘I’m fucked because | I live a life of sin’, where the vid equates physical and emotional defeat by rapidly cutting between clips where she flees her mother’s flat (in flashback), discovers the truth of the child’s origins (a kidnap victim and not related to Kara), and is knocked from her feet in the boxing ring. The interiority imagined by the vid for Kara constructs explicit irony by pairing the lyrics ‘It’s all right | I don’t give a damn’ with Kara’s reaction to the child’s reunion with her real mother. The song lyrics have Kara express indifference to these profound disappointments, but the vid undercuts this reaction by intercutting the boxing fall, positing that the emotional pain Kara feels is as real as physical harm. After the character growth of first rejecting the child and then allowing herself to respond with maternal affection despite her own childhood trauma, this trajectory is undercut when Kara learns the truth. Using Pink’s lyrics, the vid gives Kara an internal monologue that sounds credible for the character in that moment and then exposes that monologue as an exercise in self-deception. The vid’s Kara believes the violence done to her is justified because she deserves it—as payback for her ‘life of sin’—but the vid simultaneously argues that she lies to herself about how much she ‘give[s] a damn’, thereby performing an analysis of the character even as the character’s interiority is explored. The bragging in the lyrics and raw emotion of the vocal performance do not negate Kara’s story but instead explicate her inner conflict. The vid does not step back from the idea of ‘domestic captivity’ to condemn it as a retrograde feminist representation but rather stays with the character’s experience to make sense of it on a more intimate level, as a series of challenges and revelations. Cuz I Can uses the song lyrics to express Kara’s discomfort with being the object of unwanted attention. The verse accompanying the domestic captivity plot begins with the lyrics ‘you think I’m rare | you stop and stare | you think I care | I don’t’ and produces a montage of the male gaze, pairing clips of men who watch Kara—Leoben, Adama, Anders, and Lee—with Pink’s words to imagine a conversation with these characters that does not happen in the series. In its original context, the verse reads as a response to critics of Pink’s celebrity lifestyle, as the verse boasts about her material wealth, with subtext that Pink has earned—through her own hard work—all that she possesses. In the vid, it signals that Kara’s breezy independence in

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the first two seasons of Battlestar, celebrated in God Is A DJ, has been replaced by emotional isolation related to others’ scrutiny and expectations. This can further be read as the vid’s commentary about Kara’s representation in this third season. The lyrics that recall being the passive object of a gaze (as a celebrity) and of accumulating material wealth are used to highlight the perversion of domesticity in the New Caprica captivity plotline. The lyrics where Pink boasts she can ‘fit your home in my swimming pool’ because ‘my whole life’s a fantasy’ are subverted, as the vid uses these references to celebrity excess to work through Kara’s feelings about Leoben and the child. The reference to domesticity (home/pool) and the twist on ‘fantasy’ here do not connote a perfect life but a dark parody of one. As argued earlier, one constraint of the vid form is that lyrics structure the presentation; in this case, without an obvious match between clips and song, the creative adaptation of the vid finds a ‘fit’ that resonates, communicating something about the character through irony. In contrast to the emotional traumas of the maternal melodrama references in this vid, the boxing sequences are used as metaphors for Kara’s combativeness as she attempts to take control of her life. Including boxing scenes also means Kara’s tattoos are visible—notably a large arm piece matching that of her husband, Anders—signifying both the temporal distance from the previous vid and Kara’s marriage itself. The boxing sequences are aggressive, sustaining Kara as an action heroine, but this is balanced with clips from Kara’s romantic entanglements and the problem of motherhood. The vid’s first chorus establishes the vidder’s view of the Lee-Kara-Anders love triangle: the lyrics ‘cash my cheques and place my bets’ are used to suggest that Kara sees her marriage to Anders as a gamble and therefore her dissatisfaction is the result of bad luck, not her own poor decision. While the continuation ‘I hope I always win’ is paired with Kara’s enthusiastic embrace of Anders, on the lyrical caveat ‘even if I don’t’, the vid cuts to Kara with Lee (just before what the knowing audience recognizes as her proposal to Anders). The vid’s sympathies are with Lee, but the vid also explores Kara’s motivation: the gambling connotation of the lyrics is used to suggest that Kara could not make the choice the vidder would have liked to see because such a choice would not have been in character. Romantic complication is absent from God Is A DJ, which clearly states a preference against attachment. In contrast, Cuz I Can questions Battlestar’s softening of the previous seasons’ feminist assurance by showing Kara struggling with self-doubt. The vid finishes by intercutting clips from ‘Unfinished Business’ and ‘Maelstrom’ (tx. 4 March 2007), where the aggressive boxing match that

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ends in Kara and Lee embracing (and, the knowing audience will recall, restarting their affair64) is intercut with Kara’s death (the prelude to which is a series of hallucinations featuring her mother in which Kara’s overtures of sympathy and comfort are not rejected by the other woman on her own deathbed). Given that the vid concludes with her return, the rhythm of the cross-cuts along with the pace of the song create a sense of forward motion, arguing for the narrative inevitability of Kara and Lee’s reconciliation and of the hallucinatory resolution of Kara’s relationship with her mother’s memory. While the fourth season later revealed the Kara who died was not the Kara who returned, at this point in the series it was possible to understand Kara’s dying hallucinations as the character earning peace and closure after the emotional trauma externalized in the boxing sequences. The representation of Kara’s interiority condenses and narrows the scope of the series to her own experience, implicitly arguing that an action heroine can have a complex inner life. As a character study vid, Cuz I Can offers an analysis of Kara’s journey through the series, beginning with her captivity, continuing with the breakdown of her marriage, and ending with her death. It primarily concerns Kara’s various models of family as other concerns of the season—an extended Iraq War allegory in the aftermath of the Cylon occupation of New Caprica (see Herbert 2012: 195)—are not part of the vid, except as providing a broader context to the clips. Kara is shown suffering from specific emotional traumas, not political disillusionment: her reckless behaviour comes about because of jealousy and self-doubt, not the larger political questions that guided the founding of the colony. It is an intensely personal and emotional response to Battlestar’s political allegory. A reviewer of the scholarly collection Cylons in America (2008), published between Battlestar’s second and third seasons, mourned the volume as ‘a victim of its timeliness’ due to its inability to provide a comprehensive critical perspective on the series (Murphy 2011: 128). However, as an adaptation, Cuz I Can is able to critically discuss the character’s progression through the available narrative without the pressure to produce scholarly conclusions. Indeed, as a sequel to God Is A DJ, this vid is a mid-stream analysis of how the character has developed. In itself, Cuz I Can does not seem intended as a definitive overview of the character but instead offers a critical perspective on the story as it developed. It is possible to read Cuz I Can as expressing dissatisfaction with the reduction of the character’s agency and vibrancy 64 Which had been interrupted by Kara’s marriage to Anders and Lee’s marriage to Anastasia Dualla (Kandyse McClure).

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in this third season. The vid uses Pink’s bravado to adapt and rebuild the character’s strength even as it summarizes her failings. While Kara’s apparent death in ‘Maelstrom’ and mysterious return in the season finale leave the character unresolved at the end of the season, Cuz I Can provides its own resolution by intensifying the themes of self-discovery and forgiveness after much pain and doubt.

I’m Not Dead (2009) Dualbunny’s vid trilogy provides three different iterations of self-expression: from conf ident, competent, and playful in God Is A DJ to the def iantly self-destructive response to the melodramatic tropes of a lost child and unhappy marriage in Cuz I Can to a new level of introspection and spirituality in I’m Not Dead. Kara’s transformation in the fourth season from a human woman into an ‘angel’ who guides the fleet to a new home planet before disappearing into thin air in the final episode is disappointing: it ‘dulls the critical edge of any progressive readings’ of a character that had, ‘For most of the series… defied and exceeded traditional gender norms’ (Sharp 2010: 76). As Tracey Raney and Michelle Meagher point out, by having Kara disappear, the series removes a troublesome reminder of non-traditional femininity in its project to establish the New Earth as a paradise in which traditional family structures and gender roles will allow humanity to survive. What is more, as Raney and Meagher argue, ‘the erasure of the Starbuck character suggests to viewers that the masculine female hero resides only in a state of unnatural disorder, outside of which she ceases to exist’ (2015: 53). This state of unnatural disorder is the war-torn remnants of the Twelve Colonies, but this also means that the ‘most obviously transformative, progressive, and even feminist’ (ibid.: 55) parts of Battlestar are disavowed alongside the character of Kara herself as she disappears. However, I’m Not Dead presents a woman struggling to define herself, her relationships, and her place in the world after a series of traumatic events, thereby engaging with the character’s development. While critical frustration with the fourth-season Kara as a ‘traditional hysterical woman’ (Sharp 2010: 76) is entirely justified, as with Cuz I Can, this vid’s project as an adaptation makes sense of the character herself and how she might try to understand her own existential shift from fighter pilot to ‘angel’. The solid and certain embodiment of Kara as a feminist female character from the first two seasons (and God Is A DJ) is replaced by an uncertain and fundamentally insubstantial character. However, I’m Not Dead includes several clips from early seasons to

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bolster this shaky later-season representation. Taken as a trilogy, these vids integrate different forms of female identity in a work that, like Pink’s public image, argues for a ‘model of contemporary womanhood’ that integrates multiple contradictory identities (Railton and Watson 2011: 35).65 It could be argued that the faults in Kara’s development as a character reflect the persistent difficulties in representing these contemporary contradictions. The song ‘I’m Not Dead’ features a quieter, more acoustic instrumentation than the previous two songs, immediately giving this vid a different tone to the previous pair. Its verses and bridge use electric guitars, live drums, back-up vocals, and more typical rock instrumentation, but the choruses pare back this full sound to the single voice, strummed acoustic guitar, and subtle background drum machine fills. This structures the vid’s balance between the more energetic verses that make use of frequent moving-camera shots and clips, which have a significant amount of motion within the frame, and the subdued but earnest choruses, which favour calmer close-up reaction shots. The vid’s opening is a shot of a pyre that tracks left to Kara watching, isolated against a black background. This is Kara’s own body, discovered in her own Viper several episodes after Kara mysteriously returned to the fleet. In burning the body, the living Kara is literally laying her past self to rest, a significantly symbolic moment; and in continuing this trilogy with another Pink song, Dualbunny constructs a continuity of character that bridges this rupture. This opening is tonally opposed to that of the first vid: God is a DJ begins with Kara triumphant, enjoying her victory at cards and in the middle of action, whereas I’m Not Dead begins with Kara directing her own funeral at which she is the only mourner. The title of the song seems an obvious match for the character’s return; however, the vid attempts to propose what the statement ‘I’m not dead’ means to Kara throughout the season, particularly in answering what she is if she is ‘not dead’. Matthew Jones (2010: 175) points out that the end of the series is one of the only times Kara appears totally at ease, and despite critical failings in the way the series constructs her character, I’m Not Dead finds a way to follow her journey to peace. This vid is something of a eulogy that summarizes Kara’s life, with references to happier moments in previous seasons intercut with significant events from the series’ f inal season. The mode of address in the lyrics 65 While beyond the scope of this chapter, it could be fruitful to consider the contradictions and ambiguities of the character’s development and presentation in terms of post-feminism, particularly in relation to Alison Horbury’s argument that academic responses to post-feminist discourses have created an ‘impasse in feminist media criticism’ (2014: 219).

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shifts away from a general life philosophy (God Is A DJ) or exercise in selfjustification (Cuz I Can), as I’m Not Dead works through Kara’s relationship with specific individuals. The vid’s structure is important: the lyrics are focused on an unnamed third party (e.g. ‘you’re my crack of sunlight’), and the vid returns to Kara’s significant relationships. The first section examines Kara’s relationship with her surrogate parents, Adama and Roslin. The middle section looks at her history with Lee, making the argument in favour of Lee as a preferred partner for Kara over her (estranged) husband Anders, who is largely absent from this vid. The vid ends with an extended look at Kara after her reappearance, integrating the complicated series mythology with an overview of the character’s role in the series. It is not an adaptation of the fourth season alone but rather defines Kara in the context of her final development. In the fourth season, Kara becomes a ‘hysterical’ oracle whose insistence that she can lead the fleet to Earth is only reluctantly believed, and the urgency of the song’s verses thematically match Kara’s need to fulfil her mission and reconcile her new mystical tendencies with her more grounded temperament. By including references to previous seasons, the vid works to present the character’s alteration as credible and ‘in character’, which brings the more recent changes to the character in line with the more progressive previous representation. For example, clips representing Kara’s fourth-season failure to convince Roslin and Adama that she has vital intelligence—Roslin pointing a gun at Kara; Adama tackling Kara to the floor—are followed by clips from the previous seasons that show these relationships in more amicable circumstances. To establish that Kara sees Roslin and Adama as surrogate parents, the sequence begins with Kara fleeing her mother’s flat. While this sequence lacks the explicit captioning of a sequence in God Is A DJ in which characters are identified as Kara’s (metaphorical) family members, the lyrics ‘I was never looking for approval from anyone but you’ and the actor’s expressive close-ups are used to suggest Kara’s emotional investment in the judgement of Roslin and Adama. As the third part of a trilogy, knowledge of the previous works guides a reading of this sequence as a reference to the proposal made in God Is A DJ that Kara views this pair as surrogate parents; this maintains a consistent subjective exploration of the character across the trilogy. This structure, with clips from the fourth season followed by earlier clips, allows the vidder to have Kara explain her own actions, using Pink’s voice and words. In this way, Kara reminds Roslin and Adama that Kara once held their trust, both personally and professionally; it constructs Kara’s defence against seeming irrational (the ‘traditional hysterical woman’; Sharp 2010) by conveying it in these terms

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and providing a frame through which to analyse Kara’s relationship with authority figures. As an adaptation, the vid does not judge Kara’s mystical transformation as a betrayal of a feminist character but puts narrative events in the context of long-developing character relationships. The address of the second verse shifts Kara’s attention to Lee and begins with the lyrics ‘You can do the math a thousand ways but you can’t erase the facts | That others come and others go but you always come back’. Under these lines there are clips taken from at least five scenes featuring Kara with Lee—not important plot events but moments where they are working and laughing together over the series—with this handful of scenes intended to stand in for the ‘thousand ways’ Kara’s attractions could be tabulated. The others who come and go in the lyrics are Anders (alone in the frame) and Kara at her fiancé’s funeral (in a clip taken from a flashback shown in a first-season episode), which effectively dismisses Kara’s husband and deceased fiancé in favour of Lee. The verse continues with a kiss between Kara and Lee that occurs late in the season and quickly intercuts the pair fighting side by side later in the episode, implying their professional affinity proves they should not have married other characters. One advantage in an adaptation that condenses the narrative is that the vidder’s disagreement with Kara’s choice of husband, for example, is expressed in a version of the series where Anders barely appears and Lee is central to Kara’s life. The vid does not deviate from the series but carefully chooses clips that present Lee as a steadfast and constant companion. This verse summarizes Kara’s romantic story across the whole series but emphasizes that these men are hers to pursue, continuing the feminist representation of Kara as a character able to choose her partners. At the vid’s climax, rising music and Pink’s scream are accompanied by spectacular science fiction explosions, as the lyrics continue ‘I’m not dead just yet’. While these images of space battles follow a sequence concerning Kara’s body and could be read as drawing a parallel between the fragile integrity of the spaceships and Kara’s fluid mortality and unsettled embodiment, they are more an affirmation of Kara’s professional competence. The activity and energy of Kara in the final sequence—narratively and aesthetically as well as musically through the song’s excess of emotion—give a strong impression of Kara’s continuing vitality as she is shown piloting her Viper. The chorus of ‘I’m not dead | just changing’ becomes Kara’s articulation of her own struggle to accept the ‘destiny’ she must fulfil, most significantly in the second chorus which compiles the visions of her long-absent father that give Kara the clues to her role in leading the fleet to its eventual permanent home. Unlike confrontational boasts in the lyrics of ‘Cuz I Can’ that are

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made into symptoms of inner turmoil, I’m Not Dead turns its lyrics into an expression of acceptance, even as they become the vidder’s attempt to make sense of the character’s retrograde development. When Kara is faced with her own corpse, she must confront her own sense of embodied identity; the vid takes similar stock of Kara as her story is reshuffled to maintain the feminist agency of the character.

Conclusion Dualbunny’s trilogy turns a quality television text into a melodramatic vid that follows the emotional life of a single female character through the series. As is often the case, female characters as the focus of the narrative ‘are a well-known rarity’ in science fiction (Stoy 2010: 3). While academic writing on Kara focuses on the complicated coding of the character as she meets and defies various gender norms and expectations (Peirce 2008; Kirkland 2008; Kungl 2008; Jones 2010; Sharp 2010; Raney and Meagher 2015), the vids seem much more comfortable in setting aside direct commentary on what the character may represent and instead focus on what she feels. Insofar as vids present a view of a series or film, supported by a set of examples (clips), vids make arguments. They can and must be understood as a creative manifestation of the critical work done by the engaged viewer of a complex drama. This trilogy’s argument is that Kara can be imagined with a complex interiority. This approach transposes a longstanding fannish practice of speaking with/for a character while watching episodes with fellow fans, interjecting comments to reflect a character’s ‘projected inner state […] underlining a particular interpretation of a character perception’ (Amesley 1989: 335). Rather than utterances made directly by Dualbunny, it is Pink’s voice and the songs’ lyrics and instrumentation that provide this function through the vid form. As with all character study vids, the trilogy argues in favour of a rich emotional life that augments, but does not supersede, the character as she appears in Battlestar. Through constructing a Kara with complex subjectivity via internal monologues that are articulated by Pink, the vids comment on Kara’s representation. The Kara of God Is A DJ is a confident party girl who has not yet had to face the complex challenges of her later development. Cuz I Can and I’m Not Dead show that character study vids give a character a ‘voice’ that helps explain questionable character development in terms of the imagined inner life of that character. In the vids, Kara is neither stoically masculine-military nor passively (or hysterically)

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feminine; the works augment a complex female character and realize her feminist potential outside of binary stereotypes. While all three songs used in the vid trilogy are from the same artist and fall within the broad generic confines of top-40 pop-rock, differences in lyrics, instrumentation, and tempo provide three iterations of self-expression from a single artist. This chapter has been an opportunity to discuss certain uses of music on television as proximate forms to vids. Additionally, focusing on Dualbunny’s three vids as a trilogy forces sustained awareness of the Pink songs used in these vids. This trilogy works the connotations of Pink’s voice and celebrity against the feminist potential of Battlestar Galactica. Vids, especially character studies, highlight a tension between emotional and critical responses to texts, as lapses in the source material can be ameliorated or explained in an adaptation. While not altering the narrative, the vid form can construct a female-centred narrative out of a political allegory by selectively adapting the source material. Dualbunny’s trilogy describes the way a hybrid-genre ‘quality’ series accomplishes some form of character development over a serial narrative and also proposes how audiences might work to understand and integrate those changes in their view of a specific character. As adaptations that drastically condense their source, character study vids take silenced images and use lyrics, instrumentation, and other connotations of the song to interpret and analyse that character.

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Caldwell, John T., ‘Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television)’, Cinema Journal, 45.1 (Fall 2005), 90-97 Chion, Michel, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) Cornillon, Claire, ‘Previously on Supernatural,’ Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication, 7 (1 October 2015). [accessed 6 July 2016] Dahl, Ingolf, ‘Igor Stravinsky on Film Music’, Musical Digest, 28 (September 1946), 4-5, 35-36. Reprinted in The Hollywood Film Music Reader, ed. by Mervyn Cooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 273-280 Davis, Nick, ‘Inside/Outside the Klein Bottle: Music in Narrative Film, Intrusive and Integral’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 6.1 (2012), 9-19 Dickinson, Kay, ‘“My Generation”: Popular Music, Age and Influence in Teen Drama of the 1990s’, in Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity, ed. by Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson (London: British Film Institute, 2004), pp. 99-111 Donnelly, K.J., The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: BFI Publishing, 2005) Dyer, Richard, Brief Encounter (Film Classics Series. London: BFI Publishing, 1993) Dzialo, Chris, ‘When Balance Goes Bad: How Battlestar Galactica Says Everything and Nothing’, in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, ed. by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 171-184 Frith, Simon, ‘Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television’, Popular Music, 21.3 (2002), 277-290 — ‘The Magic That Can Set You Free’: the Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community’, Popular Music 1 (1981), 159-168. Reprinted in Taking Music Seriously: Selected Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007a), pp. 31-40 — ‘Pop Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. by Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 93-107. Reprinted in Taking Music Seriously: Selected Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007b), pp. 167-182 Gorbman, Claudia, ‘Film Music’, in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 43-50 Gray, Jonathan, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010) Hatch, Richard, ed. So Say We All: An Unauthorized Collection of Thoughts and Opinions on Battlestar Galactica (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Inc., 2006) Hellstrand, Ingvil, ‘The Shape of Things to Come? Politics of Reproduction in the Contemporary Science Fiction Series Battlestar Galactica’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 19.1 (2011), 6-24

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Herbert, Daniel, ‘“It Is What It Is”: The Wire and the Politics of Anti-Allegorical Television Drama’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 29:3 (2012), 191-202 Hilmes, Michele, ‘Television Sound: Why the Silence?’ Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2.2 (2008), 153-161 Horbury, Alison, ‘Post-feminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 28.2 (2014), 213-225 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn, with Siobhan O’Flynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) Johnson, Derek, ‘Devaluing and Revaluing Seriality: The Gendered Discourses of Media’, Media, Culture & Society, 33 (2011), 1077-1093 Jones, Matthew, ‘Butch Girls, Brittle Boys and Sexy, Sexless Cylons: Some Gender Problems in Battlestar Galactica’, in Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel, ed. by Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 154-184 Kalinak, Kathryn, Film Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, 2nd edn (Montreal: Caboose, 2019) Kirkland, Ewan, ‘A Dangerous Place for Women’, in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?, ed. by Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin (Peru, IL: Carus Publishing, 2008), pp. 337-348 Klein, Amanda Ann, and R. Barton Palmer, ‘Introduction’, in Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, ed. by Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016), pp. 1-21 Kungl, Carla, ‘“Long Live Stardoe!”: Can a Female Starbuck Survive?’, in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, ed. by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 198-209 Kustritz, Anne, ‘Breeding Unity: Battlestar Galactica’s Biracial Reproductive Futurity’, Camera Obscura, 27.3 (81) (2012), 1-37 Liedl, Janice, ‘The Battle for History in Battlestar Galactica’, in Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, ed. by David C. Wright, Jr, and Allan W. Austin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010), pp. 189-207 Louttit, Chris, ‘Remixing Period Drama: The Fan Video and the Classic Novel Adaptation’, Adaptation, 6.2 (2013), 172-186 McCabe, Colin, ‘Bazinian Adaptation: The Butcher Boy as Example’, True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed. by Colin McCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3-25 McEwan, Paul, Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011)

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McWhirter, Andrew, ‘Film criticism, film scholarship and the video essay,’ Screen, 56.3 (2015), 369-377 Mercer, John, and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (London and New York: Wallflower, 2004) Mittell, Jason, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015) Morrissey, Katherine E., ‘Vidding as/and Pedagogy’, in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed. by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 55-62 Moy, Ron, Authorship Roles in Popular Music: Issues and Debates (New York and Abingdon: Rutledge, 2015) Murphy, Graham J., ‘Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (review)’, Science Fiction Film and Television, 4.1 (2011), 127-131 Nishime, LeiLani, ‘Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28.5 (2011), 450-465 Peirse, Alison, ‘Uncanny Cylons: Resurrection and Bodies of Horror’, in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, ed. by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 118-130 Picarelli, Enrica, ‘Between Allegory and Seduction: Perceptual Modulation in Battlestar Galactica’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, 22 (2012). [accessed 15 October 2019] Railton, Diane, and Paul Watson, Music Video and the Politics of Representation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) Randell, Karen, ‘“Now the Gloves Come Off”: The Problematic of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” in Battlestar Galactica’, Cinema Journal, 51.1 (2011), 168-173 Raney, Tracey, and Michelle Meagher, ‘Gender in the Aftermath: Starbuck and the Future of Woman in Battlestar Galactica’, in Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. by Barbara Gurr (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 45-57 Rawle, Steven, ‘Real-imagining Terror in Battlestar Galactica: Negotiating Real and Fantasy in Battlestar Galactica’s Political Metaphor’, in Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel, ed. by Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 129-153 Rodman, Ronald, ‘Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (review)’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 5.1 (2011), 79-87 Russo, Julie Levin, ‘Femslash Goggles: Fan Vids with Commentary by Creators’, in ‘Queer Female Fandom’, ed. by Julie Levin Russo and Eve Ng, special issue,

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Transformative Works and Cultures, 24 (2017), no page. Scott, Suzanne, ‘Battlestar Galactica: Fans and Ancillary Content’, in How To Watch Television, ed. by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 320-329 Sharp, Patrick B., ‘Starbuck as “American Amazon”: Captivity Narrative and the Colonial Imagination in Battlestar Galactica’, Science Fiction Film and Television, 3.1 (2010), 57-78 Shimpach, Shawn, Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) Stevens, E. Charlotte, ‘Curating a Fan History of Vampires: “What We Vid in the Shadows” at VidUKon 2016’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 10.3 (2017a), 263-275 Stoy, Jennifer, ‘Of Great Zeitgeist and Bad Faith: An Introduction to Battlestar Galactica’, in Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel, ed. by Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 1-36 Tasker, Yvonne, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Comedia/Routledge, 1993) Tincknell, Estella, ‘A Sunken Dream: Music and the Gendering of Nostalgia in Life on Mars’, in Popular Music and Television in Britain, ed. by Ian Inglis (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), pp. 161-175 Tranter, Kieran, ‘“Frakking Toasters” and Jurisprudences of Technology: The Exception, the Subject and Techné in Battlestar Galactica’, Law and Literature, 19.1 (2007), 45-75 Turk, Tisha, ‘“Your Own Imagination”: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative Interpretation’, Film and Film Culture, 5 (2010), 88-110 — ‘Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 9.2 (2015), 163-76 VividCon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] ‘Vividcon Vid Database | Videos Shown at 2012 Let My Lyrics Go!’, no date. [accessed 19 May 2014] Whiteley, Sheila, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, identity and subjectivity (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) Williams, Linda, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), pp. 83-99 — ‘Melodrama Revised’, Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. by Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 42-88 Winters, Ben, ‘Music and Narrative: An Introduction’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 6.1 (2012), 3-7

Conclusion Abstract The vid form represents a diverse range of expression and comment. The existence of vids relies on the existence of home video technologies—first analogue, now digital—for access to source material. The vid form’s inherent reflexivity demands that vids be read alongside the viewer’s memory and understanding of its source texts as a whole. Vids help constitute an individual’s knowledge and understanding of a series, film, franchise, or broader viewing landscape. A close look at vids and vidding uncovers a hidden ‘afterlife’ of programmes, films, and other visual media. Vids offer fans’ interpretations of media texts, construct histories of viewership and engagement, and demonstrate a mode of productive audience behaviour that has seldom been part of the story of television. Keywords: fanvids, television, fan studies, archives

Vids as Vids and the Afterlife of Television In his book The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture and Technology (2005), Aaron Barlow argued that DVD technology brings new possibilities as a distribution medium and as source material for fanworks, offering the prognostication that, ‘Technological possibilities have progressed to the point where film and video, as well as fiction, can be used to create significant fan art. […] The use of the moving image in fan art, however, is still in its infancy’ (56-57). However, the case of vidding conclusively proves that the use of the moving image by fans pre-dates the DVD by several decades and that it has unquestionably reached its maturity. More charitably, in recent years the visibility offered by digital platforms such as YouTube and cultural platforms such as gallery exhibitions and academic attention has worked to weave the story of vidding into broader understandings of how fans and audiences respond to and make use of changes in moving image technology. It is important to emphasize that the vid does not date

Stevens, E. Charlotte, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462985865_concl

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from the introduction of the DVD or of YouTube, though these are both significant technological developments in its history. The personal media archive—containing film, television, user-captured video, music, photos, and masses of text—is something that has the potential to be continually (and playfully) reworked. In this book, I have sought to describe and analyse the critical and creative output of a keenly attentive fan audience whose method of watching and interpreting television and film has remained largely peripheral and marginal. The history of vidding, as seen through the vids themselves, is a history of a geographically dispersed community’s engagement with television. This is not a mainstream use, but it does demonstrate a sustained and multi-generational response to television. I began this project to answer the question of what vids are, and what vids are to television. I have answered this question via textual analysis in order to approach ‘vids as vids’, to paraphrase V.F. Perkins (1972), taking the vid seriously as a work of art and culture. I have shown that vids are a highly developed form with a history that runs parallel to the history of home video and found footage film. More importantly, an analysis of vids reveals material interventions into television and film that suggests a mode of engaged spectatorship that runs counter to academic histories of media audiences and technologies. The vid is not the only form to creatively and critically re-use moving images; however, the rich range of vids that have survived, despite changes in media, preserves ways of watching television and films that demonstrate a fluid and contingent relationship with narratives and visual images. Clips from Battlestar Galactica are arguably used mnemonically to prompt a viewer’s recall of a scene’s place in the series’ narrative arc and to evaluate its use in the vid; but in massively multifandom vids, clips are used iconically as part of a comparative reflection on generic or meta-narrative patterns, as the pace of editing is too swift to allow for sustained reflection upon Battlestar as a whole. Vids collect and redistribute the visual and narrative pleasures of television series and film while at the same time communicating the vidder’s interpretation of the source material. The vid therefore reveals both critical activity and an articulation of intense textual engagement and fascination. As Constance Penley observed, it was ‘through seeing the episodes countless times in syndication and on their own taped copies’ (1991: 137) that these female television fans began to play (semiotically and materially) with media texts. The afterlife of television, as indicated by the existence and complexity of vids, is based on returning to favoured or compelling texts after their broadcast or cinematic release, at which point it becomes

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possible (using the works themselves) to articulate the texts’ pleasures and to construct critical responses to these works. Structurally, a vid is a montage of extracts from episodes and/or films in a personal archive. Functionally, the ‘exchanged glances, gestures, and expressions [of] actors’ (Jenkins 1992: 228) in each clip are, by their inclusion, positioned as significant moments, often referring to points of character development or narrative moves in the source material. As Amy Holdsworth argues in relation to ‘milestone moments’ in long-running series, recap (and similar) sequences, which are often constructed of archival clips drawn from previously aired episodes, ‘operate as an aide-memoire’ for audiences to recall significant moments relating to ‘character and diegesis’ (2011: 36). Obtaining copies of Star Trek episodes enables the collector to re-visit these moments; if episodes are subsequently edited into a vid, the clips chosen will have a similar aidememoire function for the vid’s audience in constructing a path through the show. While each viewer of the vid will have individual experiences of Star Trek, I borrow from Holdsworth an understanding of the ‘complexity of memory formation with regards to television as both private viewing experience and cultural form’ (2011: 46) to presume that geographically and temporally distinct viewers may nevertheless share memories and experiences of the franchise via the vid. Throughout this book, I have described and analysed a range of vids produced over several decades in order to explore the vid form from a range of related perspectives. I have adopted vidding fandom’s own sense of history and community as a frame through which to understand the form and its works; however, I am emphatic that I am not intending this to have been a comprehensive or definitive history of the form. Vids offer access to spectatorship practices based on the traces (of affection, for television) that they leave which make them noteworthy forms. While vids currently exist in digital spaces, their analogue origins on videotape and the persistence of offline viewing practices through convention vidshows mean they are part of a continuity of interaction with media that cannot be explained solely by YouTube or a rise in digital remix culture. While I claim that I have not wanted to attempt explanations of how specific vids are cyphers for significant fandom activity, the existence of vidding is itself a significant fandom activity, as it exposes a relationship with television and other media tied to the development of distribution technologies. Equally, and perhaps more significantly, a study of vidding reveals—and individual vids preserve—the particular ways in which fans have been able to share with fellow fans something of their emotional and critical responses to cult and mainstream media.

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The decision to write about vids means confronting the problem of how to choose particular vids to use as examples. The relatively long history of vidding and its state as a loosely networked community of practitioners who work independently of each other, releasing new works periodically through the year and across many sites, mean there is a wealth of possible examples but far too many to address each one individually. Therefore, I chose to use examples that resonate as exemplars based on my long experience of fandom. This is similar to how film scholars, as I argued earlier in this book, accept that their analyses are based on a wider understanding of what films are and how they operate within community or cultural norms. My examples are therefore chosen as illustrative examples of what a vid can be, the pleasures they can offer their audience, and the critical avenues they may open up for scholars. Any vid mentioned in this book can be approached from many different angles, and I look forward to all future re-interpretations of the works discussed herein. As discussed in Chapter 2, over the course of my research, I found some of my chosen examples—namely Closer, A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness, and On the Prowl—had drawn the attention of fellow scholars (Coppa 2009; Russo 2009; Larsen and Zubernis 2012; S.F. Winters 2012). To date, and as discussed in Chapter 1, journal articles and parts of books that discuss vids tend to focus on one specific vid or a limited range of examples. Together, we are constructing a canon of noteworthy vids; I will leave it to others to evaluate the suitability of this canon. As media fandom arises from a gendered (female) subculture, I have been conscious of an impulse to over-essentialize the relationship between gender, technology, and the resulting fanworks. This is redoubled as, during the long progress of this project, the wider cultural conversation around gender has shifted to be much more accepting of the possibilities for living beyond a gendered binary. There are non-binary and trans* vidders and vidfans active in vidding fandom, as well as a small number of cisgendered men. However, in surveys that try to capture the demographics of media fandom (De Kosnik 2016; Fansplaining 2019), an overwhelming majority of respondents identify as female. It is therefore reasonable to generalize about media fandom as a whole—and vidding as a subset—as a space predominantly for and by women. In contrast to vidding’s other proximate forms—experimental film, music video, digital remix forms—vidding remains a space where it is not typical for the creators or the audience of these works to be cisgendered men. This book has therefore examined the relationship between a predominantly female subculture and television as a medium that has historically been strongly associated with the female, the domestic, and the ephemeral.

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My overview of television studies at the start of this book argued that the changing ways in which audiences experience and access television is highly significant to the study of vids, as the same technologies and practices that allow time-shifting also create source material for vids (cf. Brunsdon and Spigel 2008). Debates around ‘quality’ television and the rise of digital television platforms describe modes of sustained and attentive viewing, something that can be seen in vids’ careful selection and the use of significant clips, as vids textually enact this form of viewing. However, vids are made from a range of television series and films and pre-date digital change; the impartiality with which vids re-present both film and television also underscores a lack of difference between film and television once both become ‘home video’. Indeed, the present diversity of vid source material suggests that vids preserve counter-canons of media consumption through clip choices. Through an analysis of analogue and digital vids, I argue that vids are documents of a sort—sometimes quite worn-looking documents due to their source material and circulation prior to digital transfer—that preserve interpretations and viewing contexts particular to the vids’ creation. The textures and textualities of the vid’s image—as wear, decay, and interference on videotape and digital images—reveal the origins of its source material. Further, the public uses of these private collections are an archival use of media: vids present selections of clips from videotape, DVD, and digital files in such a way as to represent critical and/or creative interpretations or counter-readings of the series or film source. Particularly with the Star Trek examples, vids document a way of watching and understanding the franchise, and their textual qualities indicate how home video technologies enable the collecting, re-watching, and sharing of television episodes and films beyond traditional broadcasting or cinema distribution. Vids enact histories or evidence of media spectatorship beyond attentive viewership focused on specif ic characters or pairings. With massively multifandom vids, it is clear that this attention ranges beyond individual series or films, engaging with spectacles of stardom, bodies, and genres. Multifandom vids emphasize the decontextualized (non-narrative) presentation of the spectacular and visually pleasurable aspects of television, film, and transmedia texts. Underlying these presentations is a reflexive sensibility that takes pleasure in the images themselves and deals in a pleasurable recognition of the images as being part of genre tropes and conventions of representation. Character study vids offer pleasurable critical analysis and can be easily read as adaptations of their source material, in which the vidder’s intervention is enacted through choices in editing and song selection.

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Thinking About Music The importance of music in vids cannot be overstated. The relationship between image and sound is critical, as the song both structures a vid and makes sense of the fragmented, segmented pieces of television that are reconstructed in these works. While the vid trilogy in Chapter 6 is an exceptional case—a vidder revisiting one character over the life of a series to follow that character’s development is highly unusual—the vids provide a model for addressing character study as a genre and a critical activity. Without altering the source narrative, character study vids convey an interpretation of the character’s interiority, using the song as a key tool for critical analysis alongside perceptive editing. The analyses they produce also reproduce (and intensify) the aesthetic pleasures of the source material. Therefore, a vid is a site of mediation between critical detachment and the fascinations and pleasures of film and television. As discussed previously, Tisha Turk (2015) argues for the need to recognize vids’ songs as central to their meaning making. In writing about the use of music in experimental film, Holly Rogers observes that video works in which ‘new sounds extend across several disjointed clips’ offer the viewer an experience that ‘mobilises a vertical form of deconstruction (between sound and image) [and which] requires a double form of engagement’ (2017: 187). The horizontal deconstruction enacted in vids, e.g. between clips, offers a chance to compare and contrast different moments across a source text or between separate texts entirely. The relationship between sound and image allows the audience to engage equally with the potential of the song to semiotically amplify and transform (per Turk’s work) the images and with the images to shape an interpretation of the song. For example, the Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002) vid Kryptonite (Seah and Margie, 2002) uses the 3 Doors Down song ‘Kryptonite’ as its soundtrack. The song’s softer bridge (a repeat of the chorus but with strippedback instrumentation and quieter vocals) ends with a crescendo and a quick yelled ‘yeah!’ before a full-force return to another chorus. In the vid, two clips in which characters raise their hands over their head in celebration are followed by a longer shot of a background explosion igniting—these are shown at the same time as the end-of-bridge yell. This ties the (silenced) voice of the character to the audible voice of the singer but just as significantly builds a semiotic framework underneath that generic rock yell to give it meaning within a new interpretive context. The yell becomes more than an aural signpost in the song, signifying a shift from quiet to loud: in the vid, it vocalizes an explosive release. (A further layer of significance arises from

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the knowledge that the two characters represented were the fandom’s main slash pairing for the series, meaning that this yell and explosion has a precise metaphorical sexual connotation.) In this, sound and image work together to create a new set of meanings, with neither video nor audio subordinated, as the viewer must engage with both simultaneously. While I discussed the importance of instrumentation and performance in Chapter 6, these factors can apply equally across every vid discussed. Questions of performance and of the relationship between the genders of the recording artist and the vid subject are key to Rogers’ ‘double form of engagement’. For example, the use of Pink’s songs in all three vids of Dualbunny’s trilogy is an essential part of the intertextual logic that connects God Is A DJ with its sequels and constructs the trilogy as a related set of works. Similarly, Skud’s vid Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2010) relies on Joan Jett’s vocal performance and the strength of the electric guitars for its energy and power; an acoustic or more mild-mannered performance would have created a very different effect. The vid’s rapid editing provides its own energy, but the particular timbre of Jett’s voice and her half-screamed, half-sung performance give rise to a growling and defiant sensibility within the vid’s diegesis that unites the many different clips and provides a single point of reference for each separate representation of women in period dramas. Charmax’s Space Girl (2011) absolutely relies on Eliza Carthy’s voice and careful delivery to narrate the vid’s tale of regret, space exploration, and spaces for empowerment and representation in imaginations of the future. In each of these, the woman’s audible voice substitutes for the silenced voices—often over clips where characters are not shown speaking. The question of gender and performance in vid songs touches on covers and of using songs sung by women to caption the experience of male characters (and vice-versa). As discussed in Chapter 4, You Can’t Hurry Love (Tolbran, 1994) uses a Phil Collins cover of the song rather than the original by The Supremes; doing so constructs an exploration of male desire in this slash vid, using a man’s voice. For an ultra-masculine ‘action-adventure program about a civilian antiterrorist squad’ (Bacon-Smith 1992: 116), the connotations of Diana Ross’s voice—and her identity as a black female performer—arguably would have provided a less credible interiority for a white man than is provided by Phil Collins. However, in Bad Romance (sisabet, 2010), discussed in Chapter 5, the use of Lady Gaga means that Lex Luthor’s inner world and his desire for Clark Kent is expressed through a female voice, as the vid makes Lex Luthor express himself through Gaga. She speaks for him and gives her voice to his strong feelings. Indeed, some of the vid’s pleasure is in its use of an aural performance to enact

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an imagination of a man’s desire for another man. Vids offer the characters space to express the inexpressible, both because it would be narratively impossible to do so but also by committing incongruous utterances that are nevertheless made to appear accurate and natural, if only for the duration of the vid.

Future Work As one might expect when engaging with any kind of digital practice, the vidding landscape has changed over the course of my research. In many ways, this book is a snapshot of past activity and describes contexts that are more historical now than when I started writing. When I started this research, the VividCon convention was a central point in vidding fandom. To have a vid premiere at VividCon was to guarantee a dedicated and engaged audience, the opportunity for feedback and critique, and the distribution of your vid to the convention’s wider membership. As its convention tapes and DVDs are being donated to university and library archives, VividCon’s premieres have been granted the potential for longevity (to say nothing of the social life of the convention). However, in announcing that 2018 would be the final year for VividCon, the organizers noted that digital distribution has supplanted a core function of the convention when it began in 2002, which was providing access to great vids and screening them in good-quality copies (renenet 2017). Despite this, and as I have written elsewhere, ‘a key pleasure of convention screenings is in being a member of a live audience’ (Stevens 2017a). The end of VividCon means the collective experience of vids will be decentralized but still found at vidshows (or vid parties) forming one track of programming at more general conventions. The UK’s vidding convention, VidUKon, is poised to continue past 2020; however, in 2017 it shifted its programming to include collaborative vid-making alongside the more traditional programming of vidshows and vid-focused structured panel discussions. Beyond these shifts in the sites and spaces of vidding, the visibility of vidding on YouTube has led to interactions between what has been called ‘traditional vidding’ (laurashapiro, 2007) and an independent community engaged in similar video practices that has established itself on YouTube, undertaking aesthetic innovations and being composed of an anecdotally much younger group of practitioners. These vidders have taken the form in a new direction and have a calendar of collaborative events that produce vids that work with diegetic audio in ways that would

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not have been possible with videotape and that seem designed to prevent these vids from being automatically removed from the platform due to over-active Content ID algorithms.66 Looking to the future of this study, it would be fascinating to conduct an analysis of the commentaries produced by fans when vids are posted online or released on DVD and the short descriptions of vids included in vidding convention notes. The paratext that frequently accompanies a vid’s release would provide insight into the vidders’ intent or process, an analysis of which could form the basis for understanding vidding as an authorial practice. Convention vidshow notes, written by the vidshow’s curator and functioning as taglines or framing that indicate why the vid has been included in the vidshow, could expand a view of the vid form as part of fannish discourse. However, through the course of this research I have become interested in the panel discussions at vidding conventions, and in particular the kinds of training and support offered within this peer group. Conventions include programmed workshops and technical demonstrations, and convention reports online will summarize the discussion for future reference and for the benefit of those who were not able to attend the session. I am particularly keen to pursue archival research to extend my work so far. For example, the Morgan Dawn Collection at the University of Iowa includes many older vids as well as fanzines from the 1980s and 1990s; the vids themselves represent the development of the vid form, and the fanzines may make mention of vids themselves and the process of vidding. Penley (1991) describes attending a vid-making workshop at a convention, and Bacon-Smith cites a brief passage from a zine regarding audio/visual technology (1992: 175). From my own preliminary exploration of Starsky and Hutch letterzines at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Toronto Public Library), the correspondence between fans located in the UK and the US does include convention reports and guidance on how to make one’s own zines alongside more general discussion of the series themselves. For example, one contribution to S&H #36 (October 1982) discusses appropriate spacing in a zine, pointing out that a Selectric makes it possible to leave a half-line space between paragraphs. University archives in the UK, the US and Australia, the Toronto Public Library in Canada, and the National Library of Australia all hold collections of zines and convention ephemera. There is a story here waiting to be told. 66 Thank you to Lim, a ‘traditional’ vidder who kindly offered insights into the norms and practices of YouTube vidders.

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I am interested to see what precedents exist in the collections’ print zines for online vidding tutorials, including information about ripping/trading source material, and for discussions of individual vids and vidshows as they developed. As Jessie Lymn has argued, discussions of print technologies in fan correspondence ‘provide insight and context […] that other historical print publications do not’ (2018: 34-35). I expect to find similar conversations about audio-visual technologies in zines produced toward the end of the 1980s. As fan conventions hosted training for fanvid making (Penley 1991), it is reasonable to anticipate that zines hosted further information about these activities. Histories of vids and vidding may also be found in archival material beyond the zines: some of the works included in Kandy Fong’s DVD transfers of vid compilations from the 1980s are accompanied by a few words of description about the vidders, their practices, and their works. Aside from vidding itself, archives of media fandom material contain descriptions of fan viewing practices (Stevens 2020), which can deepen current academic perspectives on binge-watching activity prior to DVDs and streaming: Bacon-Smith (1992: 121-123) describes a precedent for concentrated (‘marathon’) viewing, which was familiar to my experience as a teenage fan with my stacks of off-air videotape recordings of The X-Files. This archival work would also be of aid in answering questions about an evolution of the vid form from its origins to the present. While conventionbased exhibition is still significant in vidding, there is a question to be asked about the present state of vidding as a specifically digital practice. For those in vidding fandom, vids are conceivably one of the ‘ordinary experiences of being online’ (Garde-Hansen and Gorton 2013: 11). If this is the case, it would be worth investigating whether the vid form as described in this monograph is an old media practice borne out in new media or whether, for example, the digital accessibility of source material elides medium specificity in a manner unique to (or typical of) new/digital media. The digital replication and preservation of documents does not necessarily lead to remote access for researchers; accession of stacks of videotape or hard drives containing video files does not result in the audio-visual material being available to researchers (either academic or otherwise) without making a visit in person. While online spaces preserve fanworks in ‘a series of archives’ (Lothian 2011: 1.1), these earlier activities are obscured by a lack of access. There is a tension between print practices and online spaces in preserving and making accessible offline practices in a world that prefers digital access. This is particularly the case when geographically dispersed communities will not have easy access to physical holdings in distant locations.

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Final Thoughts The vid form represents a diverse range of expression and comment. The existence of vids relies on the existence of home video technologies—first analogue, now digital—for access to source material. The vid form’s inherent reflexivity demands that vids be read alongside the viewer’s memory and understanding of its source texts as a whole. Vids help constitute an individual’s knowledge and understanding of a series, film, franchise, or broader viewing landscape. Kim Bjarkman, writing about videotape collections, offered that ‘While museums turn history into spectacle, video archives turn spectacle into history’ (2004: 235). For video archives that preserve the spectacle of television and film, the archives preserve these media forms in situ. In the case of vids, these fanworks serve as a record of past fannish interpretations. The capture, mediation, and display of cultural artifacts from the past perpetuate access to objects, discourses, and histories (see Baker 2015) with which we maintain a relationship. While older vids are discoverable through traces such as vidshow listings and vid compilations, these listings are not always made with vidding’s heritage in mind, and more work needs to be done to comprehensively account for vidding’s history. Vids are, on the whole, intended to provoke an immediate reaction: to incite the emotions of a spectator (laughter, sorrow, desire) and to operate within a framework of contemporary fannish discourse, offering critical perspectives on ‘hot’ fandoms or critiquing norms of representation. Past this immediate moment, vids take ordinary television, films, ‘quality’ television, and cult texts and textually represent how a character, pairing, series, film, genre, or set of tropes can be interpreted. Ultimately, this book is about how film and television can be watched: the vid form demonstrates complex responses to media in a community that is increasingly visible but also offers a model of how to be an attentive audience.

List of Works Cited Bacon-Smith, Camille, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) Baker, Sarah, ‘Identifying Do-it-Yourself Place of Popular Music Presentation’, in Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together, ed. by Sarah Baker (New York and London: Routledge, 2015) Barlow, Aaron, The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture and Technology (Westport, CT and London: Praeger Publishers, 2005)

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Bjarkman, Kim, ‘To Have and to Hold: The Video Collector’s Relationship with an Ethereal Medium’, Television & New Media, 5.4 (2004), 217-246 Coppa, Francesca, ‘A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness’, Cinema Journal, 48.4 (2009), 107-113 De Kosnik, Abigail, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016) Fansplaining [podcast], ‘Episode 99: The Shipping Answers’, 1 May 2019. [accessed 18 October 2019] Data also posted at ‘The Fansplaining Shipping Survey’, 3 May 2019. [accessed 18 October 2019] Garde-Hansen, Joanne, and Kristyn Gorton, Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2013) Holdsworth, Amy, Television, Memory and Nostalgia (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) Larsen, Katherine, and Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) laurashapiro, ‘Representing Vidding to the Wider World: Suggestions Needed’, 8 April 2007. [accessed 21 April 2018] Lothian, Alexis, ‘An Archive of One’s Own: Subcultural Creativity and the Politics of Conservation’, in ‘Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ ed. Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 6 (2011), no page. Lymn, Jessie, ‘Looking in on a Special Collection: Science Fiction Fanzines at Murdoch University Library’, Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 7.1 (2018), pp. 23-39 Penley, Constance, ‘Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology’, in Technoculture, ed. by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 135-161 Perkins, V. F., Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Pelican, 1972; London: Penguin, 1991) renenet, ‘Major announcement about the future of VividCon – please read!’, 3 June 2017. [accessed 4 June 2017] Rogers, Holly, ‘Audiovisual Dissonance in Found-Footage Film,’ in The Music and Sound of Experimental Film, ed. by Holly Rogers and Jeremy Barham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 185-204

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S&H (Starsky & Hutch letterzine), ed. by Diana Barbour and Kendra Hunter, 36 (October 1982). Print copy viewed at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy, Toronto Public Library, Canada Stevens, E. Charlotte, ‘Curating a Fan History of Vampires: “What We Vid in the Shadows” at VidUKon 2016’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 10.3 (2017a), 263-275 — ‘Historical Binge-Watching: Marathon Viewing and Convention Screening Practices’, in Binge-Watching and Contemporary Television Research, ed. by Mareike Jenner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. TBC Turk, Tisha, ‘Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 9.2 (2015), 163-76 Winters, Sarah Fiona, ‘Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in “Closer” and “On the Prowl”’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page.

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Demos, T.J., Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (London, UK: Afterall Books, 2010) Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 2000) Desjardins, Mary, ‘“Meeting Two Queens”: Feminist Film-Making, Identity Politics, and the Melodramatic Fantasy’, Film Quarterly, 48.3 (1995), 26-33 Derecho, Abigail, ‘Archontic Literature: A Def inition, A History and Several Definitions of Fan Fiction’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), pp. 61-78 Dickinson, Kay, ‘“My Generation”: Popular Music, Age and Influence in Teen Drama of the 1990s’, in Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity, ed. by Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson (London: British Film Institute, 2004), pp. 99-111 Dinsmore, Uma, ‘Chaos, Order and Plastic Boxes: The Significance of Videotapes for the People who Collect Them’, in The Television Studies Book, ed. by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 315-326 Donnelly, K.J., The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: BFI Publishing, 2005) — ‘Experimental Music Video and Television,’ in Experimental British Television, ed. by Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 166-179 Dyer, Richard, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1979) — Brief Encounter (Film Classics Series. London: BFI Publishing, 1993) Dzialo, Chris, ‘When Balance Goes Bad: How Battlestar Galactica Says Everything and Nothing’, in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, ed. by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 171-184 Einwächter, Sophie G., ‘Preserving the Marginal. Or: The Fan as Archivist’, in At the Borders of (Film) History: Temporality, Archaeology, Theories, ed. by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea Mariani (Udine: Forum, 2015) pp. 359-369 Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner, ‘Introduction: Talking Over Ethnography’, Composing Ethnography: Alternate Forms of Qualitative Writing, ed. by Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), pp. 13-45 Ellis, John, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) — ‘Is It Possible to Construct a Canon of Television Programmes? Immanent Reading Versus Textual-Historicism’, in Re-Viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed. by Helen Wheatley (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007)

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Hellstrand, Ingvil, ‘The Shape of Things to Come? Politics of Reproduction in the Contemporary Science Fiction Series Battlestar Galactica’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 19.1 (2011), 6-24 Herbert, Daniel, ‘“It Is What It Is”: The Wire and the Politics of Anti-Allegorical Television Drama’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 29:3 (2012), 191-202 Hilderbrand, Lucas, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) Hills, Matt, Fan Cultures (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002) — ‘Recognition in the Eyes of the Relevant Beholder Representing “Subcultural Celebrity” and Cult TV Fan Cultures’, Mediactive, 2 (2003), 59-73 — ‘From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: ‘TVIII’ and the Cultural/ Textual Valorisations of DVD’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5 (2007), 41-60 — ‘Sherlock’s Epistemological Economy and the Value of “Fan” Knowledge: How Producer-Fans Play the (Great) Game of Fandom’, in Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, ed. by Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012), pp. 27-40 — ‘Fiske’s “textual productivity’ and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 10.1 (2013), 130-153 — ‘From Dalek half balls to Daft Punk helmets: Mimetic fandom and the crafting of replicas’, in ‘Materiality and Object-Oriented Fandom’, ed. by Bob Rehak, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 16 (2014), no page. Hilmes, Michele, ‘Television Sound: Why the Silence?’ Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2.2 (2008), 153-161 Holdsworth, Amy, ‘“Television Resurrections”: Television and Memory’, Cinema Journal, 47.3 (2008), 137-144 — Television, Memory and Nostalgia (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Horbury, Alison, ‘Post-feminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 28.2 (2014), 213-225 Hunt, Leon, ‘“Drop Everything… Including Your Pants!”: The Professionals and “Hard” Action TV’, in Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, ed. by Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 127-141 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn, with Siobhan O’Flynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013)

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Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012), pp. 133-147 Stoy, Jennifer, ‘Of Great Zeitgeist and Bad Faith: An Introduction to Battlestar Galactica’, in Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel, ed. by Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 1-36 Strangelove, Michael, The Empire Of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) — Post-TV: Piracy, Cord-Cutting, and the Future of Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015) Straw, Will, ‘Pop Music and Postmodernism in the 1980s’, in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3-21 sweetestdrain, ‘The Making of “On the Prowl”’, 12 August 2010. Dreamwidth post. [accessed 19 May 2014] Svegaard, Sebastian F.K., ‘Critical Vidders: Fandom, Critical Theory and Media’, Akademisk Kvarter, 11 (2015), 104-114 Tasker, Yvonne, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Comedia/Routledge, 1993) Tincknell, Estella, ‘A Sunken Dream: Music and the Gendering of Nostalgia in Life on Mars’, in Popular Music and Television in Britain, ed. by Ian Inglis (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), pp. 161-175 Tranter, Kieran, ‘“Frakking Toasters” and Jurisprudences of Technology: The Exception, the Subject and Techné in Battlestar Galactica’, Law and Literature, 19.1 (2007), 45-75 Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Their Fans (London: Routledge, 1995) Turk, Tisha, ‘“Your Own Imagination”: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative Interpretation’, Film and Film Culture, 5 (2010), 88-110 — ‘Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction’, in Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. by Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2011), pp. 83-103 — ‘Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy’, in Fandom and/as labor, guest edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 15 (2014), no page. — ‘Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 9.2 (2015), 163-76 Turk, Tisha, and Joshua Johnson, ‘Toward an Ecology of Vidding’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed. by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative

254 Fanvids

Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. Turner, Michael, Hard Core Logo (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993) Tushnet, Rebecca, ‘Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author’, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), pp. 60-71 TVARK: The Online Television Museum, no date. [accessed 19 May 2014] Uricchio, William, ‘Television’s Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/ Flow’, in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. by Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 163-182 Verba, Joan Marie, Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987, 2nd edn (Minnetonka, Minnesota: FTL Publications, 2003) Vernallis, Carol, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) — Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) — ‘Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music,’ in The Music and Sound of Experimental Film, ed. by Holly Rogers and Jeremy Barham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 257-281 VidUKon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] Villarejo, Amy, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) VividCon, no date. [accessed 18 March 2015] ‘Vividcon Vid Database | Videos Shown at 2012 Let My Lyrics Go!’, no date. [accessed 19 May 2014] ‘Vividcon Vid Database | Videos Shown at 2017 Inspiration’, no date. [accessed 31 March 2018] Wasser, Frederick, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001) Wees, William C., ‘Found Footage and Questions of Representation’, Found Footage Film, ed. by Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele (Luzern: VIPER/zyklop, 1992), pp. 37-53 — ‘The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in Avant-Garde Found-Footage Films’, Cinema Journal, 41.2 (2002), 3-18 Wheatley, Helen, Gothic Television (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006)

References

255

— Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016) White, Patricia, unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999) Whiteley, Sheila, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, identity and subjectivity (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) Whittington, William, Sound Design & Science Fiction (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007) Williams, Linda, ‘When the Woman Looks, in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), pp. 83-99 — ‘Melodrama Revised’, Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. by Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 42-88 Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974) Williams, Rebecca, ‘“No Lynch, No Peaks!”: Auteurism, fan/actor campaigns and the challenges of Twin Peaks’ return(s)’, Series: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, 2.2 (2016), 5-19 Windsor, John, ‘Identity Parades’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 49-67 Winters, Ben, ‘Music and Narrative: An Introduction’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 6.1 (2012), 3-7 Winters, Sarah Fiona, ‘Vidding and the perversity of critical pleasure: Sex, violence, and voyeurism in “Closer” and “On the Prowl”’, in ‘Fan/Remix Video’, ed by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 9 (2012), no page. Wood, Helen, ‘Television is Happening: Methodological Considerations for Capturing Digital Television Reception’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10 (2007), 485-506 Yeo, Rob, ‘Cutting through History: Found Footage in Avant-Garde Filmmaking’, in Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, ed. by Stefano Basilico (Milwaukee/New York: Milwaukee Art Museum/Distributed Art Publishers, 2004), pp. 13-27 ‘Yuletide’, While We Tell of Yuletide Treasure: The Obscure Fandom Fiction Exchange Project, no date. [accessed 9 May 2014] Zettl, Herbert, ‘The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics’, Journal of the University Film Association, 30.2 (1978), 3-8 Zryd, Michael, ‘Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99’, The Moving Image, 3.2 (2003), 40-61

256 Fanvids

Fanvids Cited A vid typically shares a title with its song source; I have noted song titles only when they differ from that of the vid. Following the example set by Louisa Ellen Stein (2015: 178) to limit traffic to the ‘intimate yet public’ fan spaces where vids are posted, I have not included links to personal blogs. 1969, vid by beccatoria, 2011. Video: Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present). Audio: Daft Punk, ‘Rinzler.’ Posted at ‘Doctor Who Vid: 1969’, LiveJournal, 9 May 2011 The Adventure, vid by Greensilver [Trelkez], 2012. Video: Harry Potter film series (2001-2011). Audio: Angels and Airwaves. Posted at ‘The Adventure – Neville Longbottom’, 12 August 2012. [accessed 8 April 2014] Alone Now, vid by hay1ock, 2007. Video: Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006; The CW, 2006-2020). Audio: The Click Five, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now.’ Available at ‘Supernatural: Sam And Dean-Alone Now’, 14 April 2007. [accessed 8 April 2014] Around the Bend, vid by Danegen, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. Posted at ‘Vividcon premiere: Around the Bend (multi)’, LiveJournal, 9 August 2010 Bad Romance, vid by sisabet, 2010. Video: Smallville (WB/CW, 2001-2011), Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006), DC animated universe clips, scans of DC comics. Audio: Lady Gaga. Posted at ‘New Vid!! Lex/Clark!!! VVC Club Vivid!!!’, LiveJournal, 9 August 2010 A Better Son/Daughter, vid by eruthros, 2016. Video: various (Carrie Fisher, and her dog Gary). Audio: Rilo Kiley. Posted at ‘Gift for cupidsbow by eruthros (RPF – Carrie Fisher and Gary), 28 January 2017. [accessed 6 April 2018] Bloody Shirt, vid by unfinishedidea, 2014. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: To Kill a King, ‘Bloody Shirt (BASTILLE remix).’ Posted at ‘Vid: Bloody Shirt [Welcome to Night Vale]’, Dreamwidth, 13 April 2014 Both Sides Now, vid by Kandy Fong, c. 1980, taped 1986. Video: stills from Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). Audio: Leonard Nimoy. Posted at ‘Both Sides Now (vid)’, backdated to 1 January 1980. [accessed 8 April 2014] Boulevard of Broken Songs, vid by Destina and Barkley, 2007. Video: Stargate SG-1 (Showtime/Sci-Fi, 1997-2007), Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006; The CW, 20062020), Farscape (Nine/Sci-Fi, 1999-2003), and Firefly (FOX, 2002). Audio: Dean Gray. Posted at ‘New vids: Want (SPN), Boulevard of Broken Dreams (multi)’, LiveJournal, 14 August 2007

References

257

The Boy Can’t Help It, vid by Kendra Hunter and Diane Barbour, c. 1980-1985. Video: Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979). Audio: Bonnie Raitt. Included in the Vidding History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD Brick House, vid by Gwyneth, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources, focus on Gina Torres). Audio: Commodores. Posted at ‘Vids by Gwyneth and L’Abattoir’, no date. [accessed 8 April 2014] Candymen, vid by jagwriter78, 2008. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Christina Aguilera, ‘Candyman’. Posted at ‘Multi-Fandom: Candymen’, 16 August 2008. [accessed 8 April 2014] Closer, vid by T. Jonesy and Killa, 2004. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). Audio: Nine Inch Nails. First screened at Shore Leave, 2004. Available online via third-party upload, ‘Star Trek + Nine Inch Nails = Closer’, 8 September 2006. [accessed 8 April 2014] Cuz I Can, vid by Dualbunny, 2007. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘Cuz I Can – (BSG – Starbuck) – VVC Club Vivid 2007’, LiveJournal, August 2007 Danse Macabre, vid by chaila, 2012. Video: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009). Audio: performer unknown. Posted at ‘Galentine’s Day Vidlet: Danse Macabre [TSCC] [Ensemble]’, Dreamwidth, 13 February 2012 Data’s Dream, vid by GF & Tashery, 1994. Video: multifandom (various sources), framed by Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount/syndication, 1987-1994). Audio: Enya, ‘Orinoco Flow’. Remastered by Morgan Dawn, 2004. Screened in ‘History: Pre-VividCon Favourites’, VividCon 2010. Chicago, IL: 6-8 August 2010 Destiny Calling: A Tribute to Vidding, vid by counteragent, 2008. Video: clips from 40+ previous vids. Audio: James. Posted at ‘More Joy Day – Destiny Calling – A tribute to vidding – Multi-fandom video commentary’, LiveJournal, 10 January 2008 Don’t Stop Believing, vid by arefadedaway, 2009. Video: Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009). Audio: The cast of Glee (FOX, 2009-2015). Screened in ‘Vid Karaoke’, VividCon 2009, 14-16 August 2009 A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness, vid by Clucking Belles, 2005. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Buster Poindexter, ‘Hot Hot Hot’. Posted at ‘Vids by Clucking Belles: Sandy ‘n Rache -- Rache ‘n Sandy’, 2005. [accessed 8 April 2014] Fever, vid by talitha78, 2010. Video: Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009). Audio: Adam Lambert. Posted at ‘REMASTER: “Fever”--Sherlock Holmes (Watson/ Holmes)’, Dreamwidth, 18 January 2010 Fireworks, vid by Jayne L., 2010. Video: Power Play (CTV, 1998-2000). Audio: The Tragically Hip. Posted at ‘VividCon 2010 Premiere Vid: Power Play’, LiveJournal 7 August 2010

258 Fanvids

Flow, vid by lim, 2013. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Paul Hartnoll, ‘Nothing Else Matters’. Posted at ‘Flow | Multifandom’, 18 March 2013. [accessed 27 March 2018] Freedom Hangs Like Heaven, vid by quigonejinn, 2008. Video: Iron Man (John Favreau, 2008). Audio: Iron and Wine. Posted at Fifty-Three Stitches, LiveJournal, 26 May 2008 Girl 4 All Seasons, vid by foomatic, 2008. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Northern State, ‘Girl For All Seasons’. Posted at ‘VVC 2008 Club Vivid Submission – Girl 4 All Seasons, Multifandom’, LiveJournal, 22 August 2008 God Is A DJ, vid by Dualbunny, 2006. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘My 2006 VVC Club Vivid Vid – (God Is A DJ – Starbuck – BSG)’, LiveJournal, 17 August 2006 Hook Shot, vid by kuwdora, 2011. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Wolfgang Gartner. Posted at ‘[riot grrls premiere, VVC 2011]: Hook Shot (multi)’, DreamWidth, 16 August 2011 I’m Not Dead, vid by Dualbunny, 2009. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘I’m Not Dead – (BSG – Starbuck) – VVC Club Vivid 2009’, LiveJournal, 14 August 2009 I’m on a Boat, vid by kiki_miserychic, 2009. Video: Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009). Audio: The Lonely Island feat. T-Pain. Screened in ‘Club Vivid’, VividCon 2009, 14-16 August 2009 I Put You There, vid by Laura Shapiro and LithiumDoll, 2006. Video: (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-2003). Audio: Mary Schmary. [accessed 8 April 2014] I Think I’m A Clone Now, vid by Z Team or California Crew, 1992. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic. Shown at Escapade 1992. Included in Escapade Vid Show Retrospective 1992-2001 compilation DVD, attributed to Z Team. [NB: A 1989 date is given on the Fanlore wiki and lists two possible collective authors. The vid is unlikely to predate 1990, given broadcast and VHS release dates of some source clips.] I Think I’m A Clone Now, vid by rhoboat, 2008. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic. Posted at ‘Multi – I Think I’m a Clone Now’, 22 August 2008. [accessed 12 December 2018] It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, vid by Kandy Fong, 1997. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 19661969), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Leonard Nimoy, 1984). Audio: Celine Dion. Included in Escapade Vid Show Retrospective 1992-2001 compilation DVD, dated 1997. Also posted at ‘Coming Back To Me Now’, backdated to 17 January 1996. [accessed 23 March 2018]

References

259

Kryptonite, vid by Seah and Margie, 2002. Video: The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002). Audio: 3 Doors Down. Posted at ‘Our First Vid! Kryptonite’, LiveJournal, 28 February 2002 The Lightning Strike, vid by obsessive24, 2012. Video: Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004), Merlin (BBC, 2008-2012), Kings (NBC, 2009). Audio: Snow Patrol. Posted at ‘new vid – “The Lightning Strike” – Alexander/Merlin/Kings’, LiveJournal, 12 August 2012 Live and Let Die, vid by valoise, 2012. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Paul McCartney and Wings. Posted at ‘Peter Wingf ield vids’, Dreamwidth, 26 March 2012. Reposted at ‘Vid: Live and Let Die’, 31 May 2015. [accessed 21 January 2018] Long Live, vid by Llin, 2014. Video: Star Trek franchise (various television series and films, approx. 1966-2009). Audio: Taylor Swift. Posted at ‘Vid: Long Live (Star Trek)’, Dreamwidth, 29 June 2014 Men in Tights, vid by Perri, 2000. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: taken from Robin Hood: Men in Tights (Mel Brooks, 1993). Included in Apocalypse West Vidding Collection 2000 to 2005 compilation DVD Missundaztood, vid by Dualbunny, 2010. Video: Lost in Austen (ITV, 2008). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘Vid Post: Missundaztood – (Lost in Austen – Wickham) – Festivids 2010’, LiveJournal, 5 February 2011 Mr Brightside, vid by jarrow 2012. Video: The Talented Mr Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999). Audio: Vitamin String Quartet, covering The Killers. Posted in ‘NEW VID: Mr. Brightside’, LiveJournal, 12 August 2012 My Brilliant Idea, vid by lim, 2007. Video: Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi, 2004-2009). Audio: Jason Robert Brown, ‘I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You.’ Posted at ‘My Brilliant Idea | Stargate Atlantis’, 3 June 2007. [accessed 8 April 2014] On the Prowl, vid by sisabet and sweetestdrain, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Blow-Up, feat. Lydia Lunch. Posted at ‘New Vid!! VVC Challenge: Self Portrait’, LiveJournal, 10 August 2010 One Foot Wrong, vid by Dualbunny, 2011. Video: Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘Vid Post – One Foot Wrong – (Batman Returns – Catwoman) – VVC 2011 Premieres’, LiveJournal, 15 August 2011 One Way or Another, vid by diannelamerc, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources, focus on Mark Sheppard). Audio: Blondie. Posted at ‘Vid Posted: One Way Or Another’, LiveJournal, 25 August 2010 Opportunities: Let’s Make Lots Of Money, vid by Killa and Carol S., c. 2001. Video: (Highlander: The Series. Gaumont Télévision, 1992-1998). Audio: Pet Shop Boys. Posted at ‘Opportunities vid remaster’, LiveJournal, 12 November 2007 Parachute, vid by thingswithwings, 2014. Video: Leverage (TNT, 2008-2012). Audio: Ingrid Michaelson. Posted at ‘Parachute – Alec/Eliot/Parker Fanvid’,

260 Fanvids

3 July 2014. [accessed 16 October 2019] Piece of Me, vid by obsessive24, 2008. Video: Britney Spears (various paratexts). Audio: Britney Spears. Posted at ‘new vid – “Piece of Me” – Britney Spears’, LiveJournal, 17 February 2008 Pornstar Dancing, vid by Jayne L., 2011. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: My Darkest Days feat. Chad Kroeger. Posted at ‘New Vid! Heh. Oh my, yes’, LiveJournal, 18 February 2011 Pressure, vid by Sterling Eidolan and the Odd Woman Out, 1990. Video: original footage, with some visible clips of Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993). Audio: Billy Joel. Screened in ‘History: Pre-VividCon Favourites’, VividCon 2010. Chicago, IL: 6-8 August 2010 Set Fire to the Rain, vid by talitha78, 2011. Video: Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011). Audio: Adele. Posted as ‘New Vid: “Set Fire to the Rain”--Thor (Thor/Loki)’, LiveJournal, May 2011. Remastered by isagel, ‘REMASTERED VID: Set Fire to the Rain by talitha78’, Dreamwidth, 18 September 2011 Seven Nation Army, vid by Charmax, 2009. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Effcee. Posted at ‘Seven Nation Army’, 17 April 2011. [accessed 8 April 2014] Smut, vid by Mary Van Deusen, c. 1985-1990. Included in the Vidding History 1985 to 1990 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD Something To Talk About, vid by Kandy Fong, c. 1990. Screened at MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016 Space Girl, vid by Charmax, 2011. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: The Imagined Village. Posted at ‘Space Girl’, 30 May 2011. [accessed 8 April 2014] Star Trek: Tik Tok, vid by MissSheenie, 2009. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). Audio: Kesha. Posted at ‘Star Trek: Tik Tok’, 17 April 2010. [accessed 8 April 2014] Starships!, vid by bironic, 2012. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Nicki Minaj. Posted at ‘New vid: “Starships!” multifandom SPACE VID YAY’, LiveJournal, 10 August 2012 Stay Awake, vid by Laura Shapiro, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Suzanne Vega, covering Mary Poppins soundtrack. Posted at ‘VVC PREMIERE: STAY AWAKE (MULTI)’, Dreamwidth, 10 August 2010 Strange Little Girl, vid by Heather, c. 2007. Video: Kingdom Hospital (ABC, 2004), Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006), and Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006; The CW, 2006-2020). Audio: Tori Amos. Available at ‘Multifandoms and Crossovers’, No date. [accessed 21 January 2018]

References

261

Take It Off, vid by Greensilver [Trelkez], 2009. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: The Donnas. Posted at ‘Vid: Take It Off (Multi)’, Dreamwidth, 15 August 2009. Reposted with commentary at Vid Farr: A Tumblr About Vidding, Tumblr, 7 September 2012 Temper of Revenge, vid by MVD and Caren Parnes, 1984. Video: Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-1990). Audio: Julia Ecklar. Cited on Museum of the Moving Image Cut Up exhibition website as Tempers of Revenge; listed as Temper of Revenge in the VividCon.info database). [accessed 8 April 2014] The Test, vid by here’s luck, 2010. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979), Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009). Audio: The Chemical Brothers. Posted at ‘[Vid] The Test’, 15 March 2010. [accessed 8 April 2014] That’s What Friends Are For, vid by 3 Sisters, 1985. Video: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-1968), Riptide (NBC, 1983-1986), I Spy (NBC, 1965-1968), Alias Smith and Jones (ABC, 1971-1973). Audio: Dionne Warwick feat. Gladys Knight, Elton John, Stevie Wonder. Included in Vidding History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD Thousand Eyes, vid by thuvia ptarth, 2018. Video: Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜, Shandong Film & TV Production Co., Ltd./Daylight Entertainment (Dongyang) Television Ltd., 2015). Audio: Of Monsters and Men. Posted at ‘[vid] Thousand Eyes’, 17 December 2018. [accessed 16 October 2019] Titanium, vid by Gianduja Kiss, 2012. Video: Wonder Woman (ABC, 1975-1977; CBS, 1977-1979). Audio: David Guetta feat. Sia. Posted at ‘Gift for diannelamerc by Gianduja Kiss (Wonder Woman – 1975)’, 19 January 2013. [accessed 8 April 2014] Us, vid by lim, 2007. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Regina Spektor. Posted at ‘lim: Us, by Regina Spektor. multifandom’, 1 May 2007. [accessed 8 April 2014] A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, vid by Skud, 2010. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Joan Jett. Premiered in ‘Club Vivid’ vidshow, VividCon 2010. Chicago, IL: 6-8 August 2010. Included in VividCon 2010 DVD set. Posted at ‘New vid: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Age of Sail multi-fandom)’, Dreamwidth, 6 August 2010 Vogue, vid by Luminosity, 2007. Video: 300 (Zach Snyder, 2006). Audio: Madonna. Available at ‘Luminosity’s Vids: Vogue (May 2007).’ [accessed 23 March 2018] Weapon of Choice, vid by shinyjenni, 2015. Video: multifandom (various sources). Audio: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Posted at ‘Weapon of Choice [vid]’, 14 June 2015. [accessed 5 April 2018]

262 Fanvids

What Do You Do With A Drunken Vulcan?, vid by Kandy Fong, 1975. Video: stills from Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969). Audio: Fong and friends performing a filk of ‘What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor’. Posted at ‘What Do You Do With A Drunken Vulcan?’ Post backdated to 24 May 1975. [accessed 8 April 2014] Who Can It Be Now, vid by Kathleen Reynolds and Mary E. Overstreet, c. 1981-1985. Video: Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971). Audio: Men at Work. Included in Vidding History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD Who Knew?, vid by Dualbunny, 2010. Video: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009). Audio: Pink. Posted at ‘Vid Post: Who Knew – (BSG – Kara/Lee)’, LiveJournal, 1 December 2010 Whole New Way, vid by Mr E Sundance, 2011. Video: Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009), Sherlock (BBC, 2010-present), ancillary content. Audio: Scissor Sisters. Posted at ‘Whole New Way’, 31 July 2011. [accessed 6 April 2018] Wind Beneath My Wings, vid by 3 Sisters, c. 1983-1985. Video: Star Trek (NBC, 19661969). Audio: Gary Morris. Included in Vidding History 1980-1985 by Kandy Fong compilation DVD You Can’t Hurry Love, vid by Tolbran, 1994. Video: The Professionals (ITV, 1977-1983). Audio: Phil Collins. Included in the Escapade Vid Show Retrospective 1992-2001 compilation DVD, 2011

Other Audio-Visual Works Cited 12 Monkeys, dir. by Terry Gilliam (Universal Pictures, USA, 1995) 300, dir. by Zack Snyder (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2006) 2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. by Stanley Kubrick (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA/UK, 1968) Agent Carter (ABC, 2015-2016) Alexander, dir. by Oliver Stone (Warner Bros. Pictures, Germany/France/Italy/ Netherlands/UK/USA, 2004) Alias Smith and Jones (ABC, 1971-1973) Alien, dir. by Ridley Scott (20th Century Fox, USA, 1979) Aliens, dir. by James Cameron (20th Century Fox, USA, 1986) All About Eve, dir. by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (20th Century Fox, USA, 1950) All My Children (ABC, 1970-2011) All That Heaven Allows, dir. by Douglas Sirk (Universal Pictures, USA, 1955) Ally McBeal (FOX, USA, 1997-2002) Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, dir. by Martin Arnold (Austria, 1998)

References

263

American Psycho, dir. by Mary Harron (Lions Gate Films, USA, 2000) ‘Amok Time’, Star Trek, NBC, 15 September 1967 Angel (The WB, 1999-2004) Apollo 13, dir. by Ron Howard (Universal Pictures, USA, 1995) Avengers Assemble, dir. by Joss Whedon (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, USA, 2012) Babylon 5 (PTEN, 1994-1997; TNT, 1998) Back to the Future Part II, dir. by Robert Zemeckis (Universal Pictures, USA, 1989) Badlands, dir. by Terrence Malick (Warner Bros., USA, 1973) ‘Bastille Day’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 1 November 2004 Batman Returns, dir. by Tim Burton (Warner Bros., USA, 1992) Battlestar Galactica (ABC 1978-9, 1980) Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, 2003-2009) Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, dir. by Stephen Herek (Orion Pictures, USA, 1989) The Birds, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Universal Pictures, USA, 1963) Blade Runner, dir. by Ridley Scott (Warner Bros., USA, 1982) Blake’s 7 (BBC1, 1978-1981) Bones (FOX, 2005-2017) The Boondock Saints, dir. by Troy Duffy (Indican Pictures, USA/Canada, 1999) Brief Encounter, dir. by David Lean (Eagle-Lion Distributors, UK, 1945) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-2003) Burn Notice (USA Network, 2007-2013) Carnivàle (HBO, 2003-2005) Casino Royale, dir. by Martin Campbell (Sony Pictures Releasing, UK/US/Czech Republic/Germany, 2006) Challenge of the Super Friends (ABC, 1978) Charade, dir. by Stanley Donen (Universal Pictures, USA, 1963) China Beach (ABC, 1988-1991) Cleopatra 2525 (Renaissance Pictures, 2000-2001) The Clock, dir. by Christian Marclay (UK, 2010) Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, USA, 1977) Community (NBC, 2009-2015) Constantine, dir. by Francis Lawrence (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/Germany, 2005) Contact, dir. by Robert Zemeckis (Warner Bros., USA, 1997) Cosmic Ray, dir. by Bruce Conner (USA, 1961) The Covenant, dir. by Renny Harlin (Screen Gems, USA, 2006) Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005-2020) The Crow, dir. by Alex Proyas (Miramax Films, USA, 1994) The Da Vinci Code, dir. by Ron Howard (Sony Pictures Releasing, USA, 2006)

264 Fanvids

Dark Angel (FOX, 2000-2002) Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966-1971) Desperately Seeking Susan, dir. by Susan Seidelman (Orion Pictures, USA, 1985) Dexter (Showtime, 2006-2013) Die Hard, dir. by John McTiernan (20th Century Fox, USA, 1988) Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-1989) Doctor Who (BBC, 2005-present) Due South (CTV/CBS, 1994-1999) East of Borneo, dir. by George Melford (Universal Studios, USA, 1931) Elementary (CBS, 2012-2019) The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, dir. by Esfir Shub (USSR, 1927) ‘The Farm’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 12 August 2005 Farscape (Nine Network/Sci-Fi Channel, 1999-2003) Fight Club, dir. by David Fincher (20th Century Fox, USA, 1999) Firefly (FOX, 2002) Fringe (FOX, 2008-2013) Ghostbusters, dir. by Paul Feig (Sony Pictures Releasing, USA/Australia, 2016) Glee (FOX, 2009-2015) Hard Core Logo, dir. by Bruce McDonald (Shadow Shows Incorporated, Canada, 1996) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, dir. by Chris Columbus (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2002) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2010) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2011) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, dir. by Mike Newell (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2005) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2009) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, dir. by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2007) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, dir. by Chris Columbus (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2001) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, dir. by Alfonso Cuarón (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/UK, 2004) Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-1999) Heroes (NBC, 2006-2010) Highlander: The Series (Gaumont Télévision, 1992-1998) Home Stories, dir. by Matthias Muller (Germany, 1990) Hornblower (ITV, 1998-2003)

References

265

I Spy (NBC, 1965-1968) I, Robot, dir. by Alex Proyas (20th Century Fox, USA, 2004) Imitation of Life, dir. by Douglas Sirk (Universal Pictures, USA, 1959) The Invisible Man (Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002) Iron Man, dir. by John Favreau (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2008) ‘Journey to Babel’, Star Trek, NBC, 17 November 1967 Kingdom Hospital (ABC, USA, 2004) Kings (NBC, 2009) Ladyhawke, dir. by Richard Donner (Warner Bros., USA, 1985) The Lambeth Walk (Nazi Style), dir. by Charles A. Ridley (UK, 1942) Legend of the Seeker (Renaissance Pictures/ABC, 2008-2010) Lethal Weapon, dir. by Richard Donner (Warner Bros., USA, 1987) Leverage (TNT, 2008-2012) Life on Mars (BBC, 2006-2007) The Little Mermaid, dir. by Ron Clements and John Musker (Buena Vista Pictures, USA, 1989) Lost (ABC, 2004-2010) Madame X, dir. by David Lowell Rich (Universal Picture, USA, 1966) ‘Maelstrom’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 4 March 2007 Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-1990) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964-1968) Man on Fire, dir. by Tony Scott (20th Century Fox, USA, 2004) The Man Who Knew Too Much, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1956) Mary Poppins, dir. by Robert Stevenson (Buena Vista Distribution, USA, 1964) The Matrix, dir. by The Wachowskis [credited as The Wachowski Brothers] (Warner Bros., USA/Australia, 1999) The Matrix: Revolutions, dir. by The Wachowskis [credited as The Wachowski Brothers] (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA/Australia, 2003) Meeting of Two Queens, dir. by Cecilia Barriga (USA, 1991) Memento, directed/written by Christopher Nolan (Newmarket Films, USA, 2000) Merlin (BBC, 2008-2012) The Middleman (ABC, 2008) A Movie, dir. by Bruce Conner (USA, 1958) The Muppet Movie, dir. by James Frawley (Associated Film Distribution, USA, 1979) The Muppet Show, created by Jim Henson (ITV/syndication, 1976-1981) Near Dark, dir. by Kathryn Bigelow (DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, USA, 1987) Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜, Shandong Film & TV Production Co., Ltd./Daylight Entertainment (Dongyang) Television Ltd., 2015) Ocean’s Eight, dir. by Gary Ross (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2018)

266 Fanvids

The Outsiders, dir. by Francis Ford Coppola (Warner Bros., USA, 1983) passage à l’acte, dir. by Martin Arnold (Austria, 1993) Peyton Place, dir. by Mark Robson (20th Century Fox, USA, 1957) pièce touchée, dir. by Martin Arnold (Austria, 1989) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, dir. by Gore Verbinski (Buena Vista Pictures, USA, 2006) Point Break, dir. by Kathryn Bigelow (20th Century Fox, USA, 1991) Power Play (CTV, 1998-2000) The Princess Bride, dir. by Rob Reiner (20th Century Fox, USA, 1987) The Professionals (ITV, 1977-1983) Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989-1993) Raiders of the Lost Ark, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1981) Rear Window, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1954) Riget [The Kingdom] (Danmarks Radio, 1994-1997) Riptide (NBC, 1984-1986) Road House, dir. by Rowdy Herrington (MGM/UA Communications Co., USA, 1989) Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, dir. by Mark Rappaport (USA, 1992) Robin Hood: Men in Tights, dir. by Mel Brooks (20th Centruy Fox, USA, 1993) Rose Hobart, dir. by Joseph Cornell (USA, 1936) The Salton Sea, dir. by D. J. Caruso (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2002) ‘Salvation’, Supernatural, The WB, 27 April 2006 Say Anything…, dir. by Cameron Crowe (20th Century Fox, USA, 1989) Sherlock (BBC, 2010-present) Sherlock Holmes, dir. by Guy Ritchie (Warner Bros. Pictures, UK/USA/Australia, 2009) The Silence of the Lambs, dir. by Jonathan Demme (Orion Pictures, USA, 1991) Silent Hill, dir. by Christophe Gans (Alliance Atlantic Communications, Canada/ France, 2006) Smallville (The WB, 2001-2006; The CW, 2006-2011) Spaceballs, dir. by Mel Brooks (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA, 1987) Spartacus: Blood and Sand (Starz, 2010) Spider-Man, dir. by Sam Raimi (Sony Pictures Releasing, USA, 2002) Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969) Star Trek, dir. by J. J. Abrams (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2009) Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, dir. by Leonard Nimoy (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1984) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. by Leonard Nimoy (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1986) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Paramount/syndication, 1993-1999) Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access, 2017-present)

References

267

Star Trek: Enterprise (UPN, 2001-2005) Star Trek: The Motion Picture, dir. by Robert Wise (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1979) Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount/syndication, 1987-1994) Star Trek: Voyager (UPN, 1995-2001) Stargate SG-1 (Showtime, 1997-2002; Sci-Fi Channel, 2002-2007) Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi Channel, 2004-2009) Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975-1979) Star Wars, dir. by George Lucas (20th Century Fox, USA, 1977) Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, dir. by Irvin Kirshner (20th Century Fox, USA, 1980) Sunshine, dir. by Danny Boyle (Fox Searchlight Pictures, UK/USA, 2007) Superman, dir. by Richard Donner (Warner Bros., UK/Switzerland/Panama/USA, 1978) Superman Returns, dir. by Bryan Singer (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2006) Supernatural (The WB, 2005-2006; The CW, 2006-2020) Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, dir. by Todd Haynes (USA, 1987) Swinging the Lambeth Walk, dir. by Len Lye (UK, 1939) The Talented Mr. Ripley, dir. by Anthony Minghella (Paramount Pictures/Miramax Films, USA, 1999) Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, dir. by Dara Birnbaum (USA, 1978) The Terminator, dir. by James Cameron (Orion Pictures, USA, 1984) Terminator 2: Judgement Day, dir. by James Cameron (TriStar Pictures, USA, 1991) Terminator: Salvation, dir. by McG (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA, 2009) Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009) Thor, dir. by Kenneth Branagh (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2011) Thunderbirds (ATV, 1965-1966) Tiny Toon Adventures (CBS/FOX/syndication, 1990-1992) Torchwood (BBC, 2006-2011) Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, dir. by Craig Baldwin (USA, 1991) Triumph of the Will, dir. by Leni Riefenstahl (Germany, 1935) ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’, Star Trek, NBC, 29 December 1967 True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014) The Twilight Saga: New Moon, dir. by Chris Weitz (Summit Entertainment, USA, 2009) ‘Unfinished Business’, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi Channel, 1 December 2006 The Vampire Diaries (The CW, 2009-2017) Vanilla Sky, dir. by Cameron Crowe (Paramount Pictures, USA, 2001) Vertigo, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, USA, 1958) Wall-E, dir. by Andrew Stanton (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, USA, 2008) Welcome to Night Vale (Commonplace Books, USA, 2012-present) ‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’, Star Trek, NBC, 20 October 1966

268 Fanvids

Wiseguy (CBS, 1987-1990) Wonder Woman (ABC, 1975-1977; CBS, 1977-1979) Written on the Wind, dir. by Douglas Sirk (Universal International Pictures, USA, 1956) Xena: Warrior Princess (Renaissance Pictures/Universal TV, 1995-2001) The X-Files (FOX, 1993-2002) X-Men Origins: Wolverine, dir. by Gavin Hood (20th Century Fox, USA, 2009)

Songs Cited 3 Doors Down, ‘Kryptonite’, The Better Life (Universal Republic Records, 2000) Adele, ‘Set Fire to the Rain’, 21 (Columbia Records, 2011) Aguilera, Christina, ‘Candyman’, Back to Basics (RCA Records, 2007) Amos, Tori, ‘Strange Little Girl’, Strange Little Girls (Atlantic, 2001). Cover of The Stranglers, ‘Strange Little Girl’, The Collection 1977-1982 (Liberty Records, 1982) Angels and Airwaves, ‘The Adventure’, We Don’t Need to Whisper (Geffen, 2006) The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, ‘Around the Bend’, Fruit (Small Giants, 2009) Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, ‘Weapon of Choice’, Baby 81 (RCA/Island, 2007) Blondie, ‘One Way or Another’, Parallel Lines (Chrysalis Records, 1979) Blow-Up, feat. Lydia Lunch, ‘On the Prowl’, Exploding Plastic Pleasure (Electrovenus, 2003) Brown, Jason Robert, ‘I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You’, Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes (Sh-K-Boom Records/Razor & Tie, 2005) Buckley, Jeff, ‘Last Goodbye’, Grace (Columbia Records, 1994) The Chemical Brothers, feat. Richard Ashcroft, ‘The Test’, Come with Us (Virgin Records/Astralwerks/Ultra Records, 2002) The Click Five, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, Greetings from Imrie House, Japanese edition (Atlantic/Lava, 2005). First released by Tommy James and the Shondells, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, I Think We’re Alone Now (Roulette, 1967) Collins, Phil, ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’, Hello, I Must Be Going (Virgin Records/Atlantic Records, 1982). First released by The Supremes, ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’, The Supremes A’ Go-Go (Motown, 1966) Commodores, ‘Brick House’, Commodores (Motown, 1977) Daft Punk, ‘Rinzler’, Tron: Legacy (Walt Disney Records, 2010) Dion, Céline, ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’, Falling Into You (Epic Records/550 Music, 1996) The Donnas, ‘Take it Off’, Spend the Night (Atlantic, 2002) Ecklar, Julia, ‘Temper of Revenge’ (filk song), The Horse-Tamer’s Daughter (independent release, 1984)

References

269

Effcee, feat. Sly Bastard, ‘Seven Nation Army (Effcee Remix)’, Perfect (Cleopatra/ Hypnotic, 2004). Cover of The White Stripes, ‘Seven Nation Army’, Elephant (XL/V2/Third Man, 2003) Enya, ‘Orinoco Flow’, Watermark (Warner Music/Geffen, 1988) Glee cast, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, Glee: The Music, Volume 1 (Columbia, 2009). Cover of Journey, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’, Escape (Columbia Records, 1981) Guetta, David, feat. Sia, ‘Titanium’, Nothing but the Beat (Virgin Records, 2011) Hartnoll, Paul, feat. Akayzia Parker, ‘Nothing Else Matters’, The Ideal Condition (ACP Recordings, 2007) Imagined Village, The, ‘Space Girl’, Empire & Love (EEC Records, 2010). Cover of Ewan MacColl (feat. Peggy Seeger), ‘Space Girl’s Song’, You’re Only Young Once (Theatre Workshop, 1953). Parody of traditional ballad ‘The Ghost Soldier Song’; recorded as ‘Space Girl’ for The World of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger (Argo Records, 1970) Iron and Wine, ‘Freedom Hangs Like Heaven’, Woman King (Sub Pop, 2005) James, ‘Destiny Calling’, The Best Of (Mercury, 1998) Jett, Joan, ‘Bad Reputation’, Bad Reputation (Boardwalk Records, 1981). Re-issue of Joan Jett (no label/self-release, 1980) Joel, Billy, ‘Pressure’, The Nylon Curtain (Columbia, 1982) Kansas, ‘Carry On Wayward Son’, Leftoverture (Epic Records, 1976) Kesha, feat. P. Diddy, ‘Tik Tok’, Animal (RCA, 2010) Lady Gaga, ‘Bad Romance’, The Fame Monster (Cherrytree/Interscope, 2009) Lambert, Adam, ‘Fever’, For Your Entertainment (RCA/Jive, 2009) The Lonely Island, feat. T-Pain, ‘I’m on a Boat’, Indcredibad (Universal Republic Records, 2009) Madonna, ‘Vogue’, I’m Breathless (Sire/Warner Bros., 1990) McCartney, Paul and Wings, ‘Live and Let Die’, Live and Let Die (Apple Records, 1971) Men at Work, ‘Who Can It Be Now?’, Business As Usual (CBS/Columbia Records, 1981) Michaelson, Ingrid, ‘Parachute,’ no album (standalone single digital release, 2010) Minaj, Nicki (Onika Maraj), ‘Starships’, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (Universal Republic Records, 2012) Morris, Gary, ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, Why Lady Why (Warner Bros. Records, 1983). First released by Roger Whittaker, as ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’, The Wind Beneath My Wings (RCA Records, 1982) My Darkest Days feat. Chad Kroeger, ‘Pornstar Dancing’, My Darkest Days (604 Records, 2010) Nimoy, Leonard, ‘Both Sides Now.’ The Way I Feel (Dot Records, 1968). First released by Judy Collins, Wildflowers (Elektra, 1968) Nine Inch Nails, ‘Closer’, The Downward Spiral (Nothing Records/Interscope Records, 1994)

270 Fanvids

Northern State, ‘Girl for All Seasons’, All City (Columbia Records, 2004) Of Monsters and Men, ‘Thousand Eyes’, Beneath the Skin (Republic, 2015) Party Ben (DJ), ‘Boulevard of Broken Songs’, mash-up of Green Day (‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’), Oasis (‘Wonderwall’), Travis (‘Writing to Reach You’), Aerosmith (‘Dream On’), first released as a digital download, 2004. Later remixed and released on Best Mashups in the World Ever are from San Francisco (Juno Records, 2005) Pet Shop Boys, ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)’, Please (Parlophone, 1986) Pink (Alicia Moore), ‘Cuz I Can’, I’m Not Dead (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006) — ‘God is a DJ’, Try This (Arista Records, 2003) — ‘I’m Not Dead’, I’m Not Dead. LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006 — ‘M!ssundaztood’, Missundaztood (Arista Records, 2001) — ‘One Foot Wrong’, Funhouse (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2008) — ‘Stupid Girls’, I’m Not Dead (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006) — ‘Who Knew’, I’m Not Dead (LaFace Records/Zomba, 2006) Poindexter, Buster, ‘Hot Hot Hot’, Buster Poindexter (RCA Records, 1987) Raitt, Bonnie, ‘The Boy Can’t Help It’, Glow (Warner Bros., 1979) Rilo Kiley, ‘A Better Son/Daughter’, The Execution of All Things (Saddle Creek Records, 2002) Scissor Sisters, ‘Whole New Way’, Night Work (Polydor Records, 2010) Snow Patrol, ‘The Lightning Strike’, A Hundred Million Suns (Fiction/Interscope, 2008) Spears, Britney, ‘Piece of Me’, Blackout (Jive Records, 2007) Spektor, Regina, ‘Us’, Soviet Kitsch (Sire/Transgressive, 2004) Swift, Taylor, ‘Long Live’, Speak Now (Big Machine/Universal, 2012) To Kill A King, ‘Bloody Shirt (BASTILLE remix)’, My Crooked Saint (released via Bandcamp, 2012) The Tragically Hip, ‘Fireworks’, Phantom Power (Universal, 1998) Vega, Suzanne, ‘Stay Awake’, Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films (A&M Records, 1988) Vitamin String Quartet, ‘Mr. Brightside’, The String Quartet Tribute to The Killers (Vitamin Records, 2005). Cover of The Killers, ‘Mr. Brightside’, Hot Fuss (Lizard King Records/Vertigo Records/Island Records, 2004) Warwick, Dionne, feat. Gladys Knight, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, ‘That’s What Friends Are For’, Friends (Arista Records, 1985). First released by Rod Stewart, Night Shift soundtrack (Ladd Company/Warner Bros., 1982) Wolfgang Gartner (Joey Youngman), ‘Hook Shot’, Hook Shot (Ultra Records, 2010) Yankovic, ‘Weird Al’, ‘I Think I’m A Clone Now’, Even Worse (Rock ‘n Roll Records, Scotti Brothers Records, 1988). Based on Tommy James and the Shondells, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, I Think We’re Alone Now (Roulette, 1967)

Index 3 Doors Down 18, 224 1969 (2011) 196 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 147 action heroines 156-157, 185-186, 191-192 adaptations 10, 30, 163-164, 181-183, 185-186, 194 Adventure, The (2012) 19 aesthetic degradation 113-120, 124-125, 127 Alias Smith and Jones (1971-1973) 141 Alien (1979) 185 Aliens (1986) 185 All About Eve (1950) 156 All My Children (1970-2011) 30 Ally McBeal (1997-2002) 200 Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) 153 Alone Now (2007) 119 Anderson, Gerry 200 Anderson, Gillian 151 Apollo 13 (1995) 149 appropriation 72, 74 archives 38, 228-229 archival aesthetic 120-130 distinction from collections 99-105 exhibiting and circulating vids 79-86 looking archival 108-112 Star Trek case study 105-108 videotape-based vids 112-120 Arnold, Martin 153 Around the Bend (2010) 20, 139, 152, 156 Assmann, Aleida 120 Asteroids Galaxy Tour, The 20 attribution of authorship 84-85 audience control 140-141 Augaitis, Daina 77 authorship 84-85, 182 auto-ethnography 58 avant-garde practice 72, 77-78 Avengers Assemble (2012) 119 Bacon-Smith, Camille 13, 29, 109, 115-118, 227-228 Bad Romance (2010) 162, 165, 225 Bailey, Steve 51, 58 Baldwin, Craig 140 Barbour, Diane 12 Barefoot, Guy 167 Barlow, Aaron 219 Barthes, Roland 57 Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) 179-183 and Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 and God Is A DJ (2006) 189-196, 199, 202-205 and I’m Not Dead (2009) 59, 188-189, 204, 209-213 meta vids 20 multifandom vids 147, 151, 220

overview of 183-189 quality television 34 Baudrillard, Jean 104 BBC iPlayer 38, 81 Benedict, Dirk 184-185 Benjamin, Walter 104, 108, 131 Bennett, James 38 Berger, John 57 Betamax 37 Better Son/Daughter, A (2016) 166, 172 Bick, Isla J. 107 Bignell, Jonathan 53-54 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) 144 Binns, Alexander 198 Birnbaum, Dara 72, 77, 86-89, 140, 157 Bjarkman, Kim 34, 102, 229 Bloody Shirt (2014) 20 Blow-Up (band) 157 bodily spectacle 29, 55, 87, 152-160 Booth, Paul 192 bootlegging (of media) 82, 108-111, 113, 118-120 Bordwell, David 37 Both Sides Now (1980) 75, 77 Boulevard of Broken Songs (2007) 139 Boy Can’t Help It, The (1980-1985) 29, 84-85 Brick House (2010) 170, 172 Brief Encounter (1945) 203 Brown, Julie 200 Brundson, Charlotte 33-34, 57, 172 Buckley, Jeff 198 Burn Notice (2007-2013) 171 Busse, Kristina 9, 118, 163 Caldwell, John T. 39 cam footage 119-120 Candymen (2008) 152 canon formation 54-56, 220; see also corpus selection Carthy, Eliza 225 celebrity vids see real person vids Challenge of the Super Friends (1978) 162 channel changing 140-141 character psychology 17 character study vids 19, 179-182 Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 God Is A DJ (2006) 55-56, 189-196, 199, 202-205 I’m Not Dead (2009) 59, 188-189, 204, 209-213 use of music 197, 203 Who Can It Be Now (1981-1985) 114 Cherchi Usai, Paolo 124 Chion, Michel 68, 181, 200 Cleopatra 2525 (2000-2001) 171 Clock, The (2010) 146-147

272 Fanvids Closer (2004) 55, 124-126, 129-130 Club Vivid 60, 91, 189 collage 69-74, 110, 145 collections 100-105 looking archival 108-112 Star Trek case study 105-108 Collie, Hazel 152 Collins, Phil 115, 225 Commodores, The 170 compilations 69-74, 145 compressed narratives 68, 183, 192 Conner, Bruce 71, 73, 77, 140, 145 constructed reality vids 19-20 Contact (1997) 151 contact sheets 59 conventions 12, 53-54 curating vids 80-81 future research 226-227 multifandom vids 148 popular vids 56 viewing culture 59-60 see also VidUKon; VividCon Coppa, Francesca bodily spectacle 152, 155 definition of vids 9, 30, 172 MashUp exhibition 77-78, 146 multifandom vids 141-142, 148 music 57, 67 popularity of Spock 109 re-constructing material 70, 91 segmentation 140 videotapes 117 vids as entertainment 73 Cornell, Joseph 70, 77, 88, 166-167 Corner, John 72 corpus selection 52-54; see also canon formation Cosmic Ray (1961) 71 credit sequences 84-85, 199 critical commentaries 11-12, 29-30, 56 critical readings 30, 153, 180, 194-195 cross-media adaptations 183 cult actors 169-172 cultural contexts 51-52, 58 curating vids 78-86 Cut Up (2013) 66, 74-77 Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 Cylons in America (2008) 208 Daft Punk 196 Danse Macabre (2012) 196 Dark Shadows (1966-1971) 84, 114 Data’s Dream (1994) 75, 77, 143-144, 146 Davis, Glyn 168 Davis, Nick 197 De Kosnik, Abigail 35 Demos, T.J. 87-88, 90 Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) 156 Destiny Calling (2008) 20

dialogue 142, 200-201 Dickinson, Kay 198 digital effects 124-125 digital lockers 84 digital technology 99 archiving 83 bootlegging 118-120 digital transfers 35 distribution of vids 84 televisual flow 38 Dion, Céline 105 Distribution 78-86, 91 Doctor Who (1963-present) 81, 151, 196 Donnelly, K.J. 68, 200-201, 203 downloading 38, 53, 81, 84 Doyle, Arthur Conan 163 Dreyfus, Alfred 69-70 Dualbunny 179, 181, 187 Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 God Is A DJ (2006) 189-195 I’m Not Dead (2009) 209-213 Duchamp, Marcel 77 Dust (2001) 104, 117 DVD 34-35, 53, 81, 83-84, 219 Dyer, Richard 167 East of Borneo (1931) 166-167 editing technology 117-118, 142 Elementary (2012-2019) 163 Ellis, John 55, 89, 159 emotional expression 148, 180-181, 199, 203 Enterprise (2001-2005) 165 Enya 143 Eppink, Jason 75 Equinox 53 erotic spectacle 29, 152-160; see also homoeroticism Escapade 12 ethnography see auto-ethnography excess 138 exhibiting vids 78-86, 91, 228 exhibitions 74-78 experimental film traditions 65-66, 69-74 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The (1927) 70 fan art 11, 163 fan fiction 11, 29-30, 163, 166 fan studies 28-32, 50 Fanlore.org 18, 147 Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness, A (2005) 55-56, 75, 140-141, 152, 154-156 fanvids, introduction to definition 9-11 future work 226-228 genres 17-22 historical background 12-14, 220 media fandom 11-12 structure and aims 14-16 fanzines see zines

Index

Farscape (1999-2003) 20-21 fascination 138, 142 fascinating people 166-172 genre pleasures 143-151 transmedia storytelling 160-166 female audiences 13, 38, 87, 155-156 female gaze 154-157, 160 female representations action heroines 156-157, 185-186, 191-192 Around the Bend (2010) 20, 139 attraction and objectification 87-88 empowerment 171 erotic spectacle 152-153 in science fiction 150-151 Wonder Woman 87-89 see also gender; Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace (fictional character) feminism 57, 88, 189, 193, 204 femslash 18 Ferland, Jodelle 170 Festivids 53, 91 fetishistic scopophilia 30, 157, 160 Fetveit, Arild 125 Fever (2010) 18 file-sharing 33, 35-36, 85 Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (1972) 51-52 film music 195-203 Film Music: A Very Short Introduction (2010) 191 film studies 51-52 Firefly (2002) 171 Fireworks (2010) 21, 118 Fisher, Carrie 166 Fiske, John 31 Flow (2013) 77 Fong, Kandy 12, 55, 71, 75, 228 Foster, Jodie 151 found footage 69-74, 88, 145, 167 fragmentation 36-37, 121, 140 franchises 10, 98, 161-166 Freedom Hangs Like Heaven (2008) 119 Friedberg, Anna 140 friendshippy works 18, 142 Frith, Simon 191 future work 226-228 gallery spaces 74-78 Garde-Hansen, Joanne 122 Gauntlett, David 33 gen (general) fanworks 17 gender digital technology 33 erotic spectacle 152-160 female audiences 13, 38, 87, 155-156 female gaze 154-157, 160 female vidding subculture 13-14, 32-33, 222 performance in vid songs 225 quality television 33-34 in science fiction 150-151

273 VCR and videotapes 38, 101-102 see also female representations; Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace (fictional character) genres 17-22, 139, 143-151 Geraghty, Lincoln 101 Gianduja Kiss 89-90 Girl 4 All Seasons (2008) 152-153, 156 Glaser, Paul Michael 85 God Is A DJ (2006) 55-56, 189-196, 199, 202-205 Gorbman, Claudia 196, 200-201, 203 Gow, Joe 68 Gray, Ann 38, 101 Gray, Barry 200 Gray, Jonathan 17, 21, 30, 38-39, 51, 101 Gregory, Chris 107 Grenville, Bruce 77 Halperin, Moze 75 Hard Core Logo (1996) 30 Harry Potter (2001-2011) 19 Hatch, Kevin 72 Hauptman, Jodi 167-168 HBO 34 Hellekson, Karen 9, 118 Herbert, Daniel 184 Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-1999) 171 het works 17 Highlander: The Series (1992-1998) 19 Hilderbrand, Lucas 38, 100, 102, 108-111, 113, 115, 118, 120 Hill, Annette 33 Hills, Matt 31, 164, 169 Hilmes, Michelle 199 Hirsch, Paul M. 141 history beyond historical context 55 historical narratives 197-198 of home media 14, 38, 101, 130 of moving image re-use 69, 74, 166 new histories of source material 106-107, 110, 121-122, 124, 129 of science fiction 151 of television and film 99, 146 of vidding 12-13, 53, 74-75, 85-86, 220 see also archives Hitchcock, Alfred 146 Holdsworth, Amy 112, 123-124, 127, 221 home media see archives; collections; digital technology; DVD; home video technologies; videotapes Home Stories (1990) 145-146 home video technologies 37-38, 97-99, 101-102, 141; see also digital technology homoeroticism 17-18, 102, 107, 116, 141, 162-164 Hook Shot (2012) 153, 156 Hunter, Kendra 12 hurt/comfort concept 55, 158-159 Hutcheon, Linda 183, 185, 194, 198

274 Fanvids I Put You There (2006) 75 I Spy (1965-1968) 141 I Think I’m A Clone Now (1992) 144, 152 I’m Not Dead (2009) 59, 188-189, 204, 209-213 image quality 109, 113-120 Imagined Village, The 150 intensified television 37 Invisible Man, The (2000-2002) 18, 171, 224 Iron Man (2008) 119 It’s All Coming Back To Me Now (1997) 105-108, 110 Jacobs, Jason 10 Jacobs, Ken 88 Jenkins, Henry 13, 21, 29, 67, 73, 84, 117-118, 138 Jett, Joan 57, 225 Johnson, Derek 185 Johnson, Joshua 31 Jones, Matthew 210 Joyrich, Lynne 129 Kalinak, Kathryn 191 Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace (fictional character) Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) 184-189 Cuz I Can (2007) 203-209 God Is A DJ (2006) 189-195, 202-203 I’m Not Dead (2009) 209-213 Kesha 122-123 Killers, The 196 Klein, Amanda Ann 165 Kohnen, Melanie E.S. 162 Kryptonite (2002) 18, 224-225 Kungl, Carla 188 Kustritz, Anne 9, 54, 184-185 Lady Gaga 162, 225 Lambert, Adam 18 Landsberg, Alison 122 Larsen, Glen A. 184 Last Goodbye (1994) 198-199 Leverage (2008-2012) 18, 172 Life on Mars (2006-2007) 127, 197 Lightning Strike, The (2012) 77 Lippit, Akira 77, 145, 153 Live and Let Die (2012) 170 Long Live (2014) 139, 164-166 Louttit, Chris 30 Luckhurst, Roger 145 Lymn, Jessie 228 male gaze 154 male representations 154-156, 159-160, 225-226; see also homoeroticism Man from U.N.C.L.E., The (1964-1968) 11, 141 Marclay, Christian 146 marginal practice 54-56 Mary Poppins (1964) 180 MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture (2016) 66, 74, 77-78, 87, 146

McCabe, Colin 182 McEwan, Paul 30, 182 Meagher, Michelle 209 media fandom, introduction to 11-12, 31-32, 228 Media West 12 medium specificity 10-11 Meeting of Two Queens (1991) 73 Meigh-Andrews, Chris 89 melodrama 181, 186-187, 189, 204 memory 100, 110, 120-122, 126-130, 221 men see gender Men at Work 114 Men in Tights (2000) 152 Mercer, John 189 Merril Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Toronto Public Library) 227 meta vids 20, 180 Metz, Christian 60 Middleman, The (2008) 172 Minaj, Nicki 148 Mittell, Jason 35, 57 montage 70, 73, 110, 140-141, 158-159, 200 Moore, Ronald D. 184 Morgan Dawn Collection (University of Iowa) 227 Morris, Gary 109 Movie, A (1958) 71 moving image re-use 69-74, 76-77, 153, 166-167 Mr. Brightside (2012) 196 Müller, Matthias 145-146 multifandom vids 20, 69, 138-143 bodily spectacle 152-160 fascinating people 166-172 genre pleasures 143-151 music 21-22 representational tropes 73 and supercuts 76 transmedia storytelling 160-166 Mulvey, Laura 87, 153-154, 158 Muppet Show, The (1976-1981) 147 Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) 74-77 music 224-226 authorial adaptations 182-183 Cuz I Can (2007) 204-207 genre and performance 21 God Is A DJ (2006) 190-194 I’m Not Dead (2009) 210-213 and moving image re-use 71-72 Starships! (2012) 148-149 television, film, and vids 195-203 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A (2010) 57 music videos 65-69, 193, 200 Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (2017) 68 My Brilliant Idea (2007) 201

275

Index

narratives compression of 68, 183, 192 montage sequences 200 multifandom vids 156-157, 160 in music videos 68 music’s role in 180, 197-200 quality television 33-34 reconstruction of 14, 38, 50, 120-122, 129, 140, 192, 194-195 removal of 88, 90, 153-154 see also transmedia storytelling National Library of Australia 227 National Science and Media Museum (UK) 112 New Queer Cinema 145 Newcomb, Horace 141 Ng, Eve 29-30, 84 Nine Inch Nails 124-125 Nirvana in Fire (2015) 19 non-diegetic sound 200-201

pleasure, viewing 72-74, 142 fascinating people 166-172 genre pleasures 143-151 transmedia storytelling 160-166 poached culture 29 podfic 11 political allegory 184, 188 popularity (of texts) 55-56 Pornstar Dancing (2011) 152 postfeminism 193 Power Play (1998-2000) 21, 118-119 Pressure (1990) 39, 117 Price, Jonathan 108, 110, 115 Professionals, The (1977-1983) 115 prosthetic memory 122 pseudonymity 13-14 psychoanalytic theory 88, 157 puppet work 200-201, 203 Purse, Lisa 164

On the Prowl (2010) 55, 152, 157-160 One Way or Another (2010) 166, 169-171 O’Neill, Stephen 30 Opportunities (Let’s Male Lots of Money) (2012) 19 Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) 84

qualitative approaches 56 quality television 33-34, 223 Quantum Leap (1989-1993) 39 queer-themed works 168

Paget, Sidney 163 palimpsestuous adaptations 194 Palmer, R. Barton 165 Parachute (2014) 18 paratexts 56 passage à l’acte (1993) 153 patriarchal oppression 88 Pearce, Susan 103 Pearson, Roberta 161 peer-to-peer file-sharing 33, 35 Penley, Constance aesthetics of zines 113-114 distribution of vids 80-81, 100 female fanworks subculture 220 female representations 13 home video equipment 39, 82-83, 117 Star Trek franchise 102, 107, 109 vid conventions 29, 227 Perkins, V.F. 51-52, 58, 220 Perry, Grayson 105 personal computers 82-83 Pet Shop Boys 19 Picasso, Pablo 77 Piece of Me (2008) 168-169, 172 pièce touchée (1989) 153 Pigott, Michael 88 Pink (Alecia Moore) 180-181, 187-188 Cuz I Can (2007) 204-207 God Is A DJ (2006) 189-191, 193-194, 197, 202-203 I’m Not Dead (2009) 210

race 13, 172 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 158-159 Railton, Diane 68, 203 Rainbow Noise 28 Raney, Tracey 209 Rawle, Steven 186 real person fiction (RPF) 166 real person vids 166-172 Rebick, Stephanie 77 reboots 126-128, 161 recruiter vids 20-21, 199 Reidy, Robin 87 remote controls 140 Richards, Denzell 35 Riptide (1983-1986) 141 Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) 73, 168 Rogers, Holly 224 Rogue Archives (2016) 35 Rony, Fatimah Tobing 167 Rose Hobart (1936) 70, 73, 77, 166-167 Ross, Diana 225 Ross, Sharon Marie 13-14 Russell, Catherine 146 Russo, Julie Levin 18, 180, 195 Sackhoff, Katee 185, 190, 203 Saint-Saëns, Camille 196 scholarly views 28-32, 222 science fiction 143, 147, 157; see also Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009); Star Trek (1966-1969); Starships! (2012) scratch video 70 segmentation (of television) 35-40, 140 semiotic density 153, 160

276 Fanvids Set Fire to the Rain (2011) 120 Shapiro, Laura 20, 180 Sharp, Patrick B. 185, 188, 205 Sheppard, Mark 166, 169-170, 171 Sherlock (2012-present) 163-164 Sherlock Holmes (2009) 18, 163-164 Sherlock Holmes storyworld 161 Sherlock Holmes storyworld 163-164, 165 Shimpach, Shawn 33, 186-187 Shingler, Martin 189 ship (relationship) vids 18, 182 Show Sold Separately (2010) 51 Shub, Esfir 70 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) 151 silent film 200-201, 203 Sirk, Douglas 146, 197 Sitney, P. Adams 77 slash vids 17-19, 69 Bad Romance (2010) 162-163, 165 Star Trek franchise 102, 107 That’s What Friends Are For (1985) 141 Whole New Way (2011) 163-165 You Can’t Hurry Love (1994) 115-116 Smallville (2001-2011) 162-163, 165 Smut (c.1985-1990) 152 social media 78 Something To Talk About (c. 1990s) 77 Space Girl (2011) 150-152, 225 Spaceballs (1987) 147, 149-150 Spears, Britney 168-169 Spigel, Lynn 57, 172 Stacey, Jackie 87, 156 star image 167-169, 172 Star Trek (1966-1969) collections and archives 98-100, 105-110, 121-125 media fandom’s origins 11-12 in multifandom vids 144, 147, 149 Star Trek (2009 film) 126-128 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) 164 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) 106 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) 106, 110 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 107, 128-129 Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) 143, 164 Star Trek: Tik Tok (2010) 121-124, 129-130 Star Trek transmedia storyworlds 161, 164-166 Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) 164 Star Wars (1977) 147 Stargate Atlantis (2004-2009) 201 Starships! (2012) 74, 77, 139, 146-151 Starsky & Hutch (1975-1979) 12, 29, 84, 227 Stravinsky, Igor 197 Stay Awake (2010) 20, 180 Steedman, Carolyn 104-105, 108, 117, 121-122 Stein, Louisa Ellen 30, 163 storyworlds 161-166 Stoy, Jennifer 184, 192, 204

Strange Little Girl (2007) 170 streaming 38, 81, 84 subcultural celebrities 169-172 subcultural contexts 30 subjective perception 52 Sunshine (2007) 147 Superman storyworld 161-163 Supernatural (2005-2020) 119, 171 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) 168 Svegaard, Sebastian F.K. 71 syndication 101-102 Take It Off (2009) 152 Talented Mr. Ripley, The (1999) 196 Tan, Fiona 105 Tasker, Yvonne 205 technology of control 35-40 distribution of vids 82-83 and gender 32-33, 38 home video 37-38, 97-99, 101-102, 141 see also digital technology Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978) 66, 72, 77, 86-89, 91-92, 140, 157 television afterlife of 220-221 and gender 33-34, 101-102 music’s use in 195-203 quality television 33-34 relationship with vids 14-15, 27-28, 223 televisual bodies 159-160 televisual flow 35-40 textual analysis 10-11, 50, 52, 57 viewing choices 140-141 and VCR 111 Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) 130 televisual bodies 159-160 televisual flow 35-40 Temper of Revenge (1984) 75 temporal flattening 107-108 Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) 205 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-2009) 196 Test, The (2010) 77, 121, 126-130 textual analysis 10-11, 50-52, 55-61, 164, 220 Textual Poachers (1992) 21 textual productivity 31-32 That’s What Friends Are For (1985) 141-142 Thor (2011) 119-120 Thousand Eyes (2018) 19 Thunderbirds (1965-1966) 200 time-shifting 38, 101-102, 110, 118-119 Tincknell, Estella 197 Titanium (2012) 66, 86, 88-92, 157 Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, The (2011) 105 Toronto Public Library 227

277

Index

Torres, Gina 170-172 transmedia storytelling 10, 31, 160-166, 182 Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) 140 tropes 148, 155-156; see also genres Turk, Tisha 9, 31, 67, 160-161, 181, 183, 195, 224 Twilight Saga: New Moon, The (2009) 159 Us (2007) 20 USB drives 81, 83 user flows 36-37 Vancouver Art Gallery 74, 77-78, 87, 146 Vanilla Sky (2001) 198-199 VCR 34, 37-38, 82-83, 102, 111 Vernallis, Carol 67-68, 71, 77 vid production 53 videotapes archives and collections 98-99, 101-102, 108-111, 112-118 convention screenings 12 origins of vidding 28, 37 production and distribution 80, 83 vids, introduction to see fanvids, introduction to VidUKon 53-54, 80-81, 91, 226 Vimeo 77-78, 111 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A (2010) 57, 152, 225 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) 87, 153 Vitamin String Quartet 196 VividCon 12, 27 Battlestar Galactica vids 181, 189 Club Vivid 60, 91, 189 curation and distribution 80-81 discontinuation of 79, 226

popular screenings 56, 76, 91 vid music 196 vid premieres 53 Vogue (2007) 75, 77 Wall-E (2008) 148 Warhol, Andy 77 watermarks 85, 119 Watson, Paul 68, 203 Weapon of Choice (2015) 153, 156-157 Wees, William 70, 72-73 Welcome to Night Vale (2012-present) 19-20 What Do You Do With a Drunken Vulcan? (1975) 12 Wheatley, Helen 51, 138, 152 Who Can It Be Now? (1981-1985) 84, 114, 118 Whole New Way (2011) 163-165 Williams, Raymond 36-37, 130-131 Wind Beneath My Wings (1983-1985) 109 Wingfield, Peter 170 Winters, Sarah Fiona 126 Wire, The (2002-2008) 55-56 Wiscon 81 women see female representations; gender Wonder Woman (1977-1979) 66, 72, 86-92 Wood, Helen 36-39 Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) 171 X-Files, The (1993-2002) 20, 151, 171 Yankovic, ‘Weird Al’ 144 You Can’t Hurry Love (1994) 115-116, 225 YouTube 77-78, 80, 131, 219, 226 Yuletide 91 zines 113-114, 227-228 Zyrd, Michael 73