Lucas Hilderbrand

Uses videotape to talk about the materiality of copies and the ideology of copyright. Some nice stuff: Early video sales were tapes that people wanted to watch privately (porn) or repeatedly (workouts), so “the self-consciousness many users would have felt about exercising in public aerobics classes may have paralleled the embarrassment many would have felt in adult theaters; thus body shame may have been central to home video’s early success”; “in considering technological reproduction, we must rethink issues of fidelity and authenticity to move away from conceptions of an original performance that precedes recording. Rather, fidelity and authenticity are a ruse, an ideology to promote newer and more expensive formats. Infidelity is the marker of the analog amateur. Bootleggers are promiscuous and polyamorous.” I really liked his discussion of poor tape quality as a sign of specialness. Unauthorized taping is often the only way to watch programs with their original musical cues, given TV licensing woes, and low quality signifies a certain type of authenticity—“You know this is the stuff you weren’t meant to see simply because the image quality is so bad,” one source says.

There's a useful history of Vanderbilt's Video News Archive and how it fit into debates over media bias and copyright reform. Case studies of Superstar, the film about Karen Carpenter, and of women’s video chain letters are also of interest. cesperanza might particularly appreciate the argument about “the ways in which analog video—in particular its inherent technical flaws—allows for technologically specific representations of female experience,” especially in regards to the California Crew’s Pressure. Sadly, though Hilderbrand cites Henry Jenkins, he only glancingly mentions vidding, in the afterword on internet distribution of clips. He doesn’t seem to fully appreciate the ways in which shared works can help form communities; in introducing one of the video chain letters in which one teenaged female character gives another a mix tape, he writes, “[t]he potential for a tape exchange to initiate interpersonal communication—and even friendship—coincidentally reflects the mission of the Joanie 4 Jackie video chainletter project, through which this short circulated …” (emphasis added). But really, where’s the coincidence?… (mer)