Senses of Cinema and fanvid

There's a useful account of Rose Hobart at the online journal Senses of Cinema. Senses of Cinema is an extraordinarily useful resource for cinephiles and I recommend it to you in any case; Brian Frye's piece on Rose Hobart gives a good sense of Cornell's place in surrealist cinema. You might also find the style of the articles there an interesting model for your own blog entries.

Meanwhile, I want to say a little more about Rose Hobart in relation to fanvideos. Fanvids are generally short "collages" made by fans -- amateurs -- from material drawn from their fandom. For example, fans of the CSI or Law & Order shows will select excerpts from their preferred show and cut them together, often to the accompaniment of a song chosen to orient or skew their fan perspective on the show (these are sometimes called songvid). Romances between otherwise uninvolved characters can be made to "appear" through the work of fanvid. At the end of this post I've embedded one such songvid, featuring Bobby Goren and Alex Eames from Law & Order: Criminal Intent; I chose this couple because they are so decidedly not a romantic couple according to the show that the video demonstrates the kind of inventive work involved in fanvideos.

I'm interested in the way one might see the work of Cornell in Rose Hobart as a similar, earlier labour. Modern technology has liberated audiovisual texts in such a way that such work has become characteristic of our digital times (remember Burgin on this), but if you watch fanvideos across different fandoms you will notice that many of the techniques Cornell pioneered in his erzatz fandom are still present: repetition, slow motion, tints, anti-narrative cuts, asynchronous music.

Anyway, here's "Bring Me To Life," and here's a link to Henry Jenkins' article on How to Watch a Fan-Vid.