Catalog of digital remix video styles

Eli Horwatt’s (York University, Canada) article “A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet,” in Cultural Borrowings makes a stab at cataloging all the different ways that people are using digital remix to make new films. There are several examples in here I wasn’t aware of, and the whole piece is fascinating. I also like the idea that all Horwatt’s citations can be found in a single YouTube playlist.

The pervasive tone of these works demonstrates a deep suspicion of media itself — specifically the authoritative voice of journalism and the persuasive techniques of advertising. Much of political remixing depends on deconstructing how desire is created through images, as evinced in the work of remix collective Wreck and Salvage. In their rapid-fire montage of advertisements that appear between children’s programming, the video Saturday Morning illustrates how gender stereotypes/behaviors and eating habits are reinforced for children. The work, which appropriates both the advertisements and the unrelenting speed in which images appear on television, depicts how commercials shape desire through repetition. Other remixers focus on the repressive and hostile role media can play in acculturating the attitudes of filmgoers towards certain identities. Jaqueline Salloum’s epic film-historical collage Planet of the Arabs does more than just highlight the pervasive portrayal of Arabs as terrorists, but digs through the archive to reveal strategies and tropes which pervade Hollywood cinema in regard to Arab characters. Elsewhere, Diana Chang has compiled a remix looking at racist caricatures in Disney films, the most recent remix to analyze the studio with predecessors looking at gender and the portrayal of masculinity. In 300 Epithets, the film 300 is examined as a work of “rightwing revisionism” and is textually analyzed to highlight the film’s homophobic, racist and conservative agenda.

A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet

(via Beyond the Beyond)