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Le silence littéraire dans Chouga de Darezhan Omirbaev

Chouga, du réalisateur du Kazakhstan Darezhan Omirbaev, développe son approche de la littérature par la construction filmique du temps. Cette très belle réussite d’adaptation littéraire, sans pour autant devenir un livre/texte filmé, est une transposition temporale du roman Anna Karénine de Tolstoï de la Russie des Tsars des ex-colonies soviétiques (le Kazakhstan est devenu indépendant en 1990). Le rapport argent et tradition sociale a autant changé qu’il s’est laissé préserver par une pratique de caste familiale, ce qui aide à donner au film une concrétisation du temps présent sans perdre la construction des situations dramatiques originales du roman. Par contre, ce qui est intéressant dans cette adaptation et qui pour d’autres pourrait devenir un défaut du film, est que l’intrigue romanesque devient toile de fond en soulevant le poids dramatique des personnages du film et en donnant la place à ce passage inexorable et silencieux du temps.

La caméra s’attarde sur des petits gestes des mains, des regards ou le temps que l’on voit passer sur l’horloge. Le temps ainsi se construit lentement dans les plans, surtout par de faux raccords d’une séquence à l’autre. Le montage, bien qu’il suive la chronologie des images, fait des sauts temporels importants en construisant ainsi le film par des tableaux dans lesquels les cultures occidentale et orientale se confondent. Des tableaux qui portent le mouvement des trains, des voitures, des attentes, et des lieux de passages et de transitions, des couloirs, des routes – une belle transposition imagée du parcours de la protagoniste (excelente, Ainur Turgambayeva) entre la passion d’un jeune riche et l’obligation familiale envers son fils et son mari.

Hudson Moura

Chouga (Shuga, France/Kazakhstan, 2007)
Dir.: Darezhan Omirbaev

What the Izumi's 'Heart' craves?

Takahashi Izumi’s stripped-down second feature, What the Heart Craves begins as a subtle comment on the state of modern relationships. After a chance encounter involving an unintentional exchange of house keys, a number of new relationships form, while established ones begin to unravel, and lives become entangled in one another. Though much of the film is absent of major plot events, Izumi showcases simple interactions occurring within these relationships. It is through his ability to convey insight through seemingly trivial events where his strengths lie. The fact that so much is impacted by the mix-up of keys, points to the inconsistency of modern relationships.

As the film progresses, it becomes evident that these trivial events are leading to a sort of climax. This is where the film’s major flaw arises. In a failed attempt to wrap up an abundance of social issues, Izumi transforms an understated film that invites you to draw your own conclusions into a drawn-out web of convoluted monologues that serve to spell out what is already apparent.

Meg Allan
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

What the Heart Craves (Musunde Hiraite, Japan, 2007)
Directed by Takahashi Izumi

Intermedial hyper-absorption in Run Lola Run

Tom Tykwer’s 1999 film, Run Lola Run, confronts its viewers with various levels of human perception and comprehension. What is interesting about the film’s aesthetics are the numerous layers of genres, styles and concepts where the audience is exposed with a basic storyline foreseen by three different series of events and three ultimate results. This hyper-absorption of various elements (animation, pulsating electronica music, stylized shots and so on...) is simply a reflection of our technological adaptation which allows our culture to find stimulation in not only what we are seeing and hearing, but what type of content we are taking in. The cinematic trailers for this film were vague but appealing because of its stimulating ingredients promoting an effective surge of motivation to see this film when little about the plot is revealed. Definitively, the multiple events and outcomes extend the excitement as they are unraveled in rapid and edgy ways to feed our levels of acuity.

Corina Pilay

Youtube: credible source for news?

YouTube proved to be a credible source for news media in Canada this week, as video of political candidates engaged in drug use, surfaced from the site. The videos in question resurfaced after almost a decade, and reveal the evidentiary value connected with a site such as YouTube. As a result of the scandalous footage, the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton, has lost both party candidates Dana Larsen and Kirk Tousaw, who are featured in the videos.

The scandal goes on to reveal the greater political controversies lurking in the background, such as Jack Layton’s association with the B.C. Marijuana Party leader a.k.a. the Prince of Pot, Marc Emery. According to Emery, a long-standing deal existed with Layton: "The deal was Jack Layton and the NDP would continue to advocate decriminalization of marijuana. In exchange, we would bring thousands of new members to the party, which we've done." (CBC, "The National", September 19, 2008). The media continues to scrutinize the secret terms of the deal. A video of Layton from Emery’s Pot-TV (a former Internet TV show) in 2003, refers to his perspective on the marijuana issue and is available on YouTube as well.
Ultimately, the layers of contemporary media have contributed to the perplexing nature of this complex story.

Natalie Panovic

The Palin Parody

The Saturday Night Live skit that spoofed Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton has garnered much discussion since it aired on September 15th, 2008. In fact, it has reworked itself back into the media construct from which it emerged. The current Presidential election has been regarded as the most enduring in recent history, and this is due in large part to the media coverage of the campaign and its key figures. The SNL sketch is effective due to its variety of intertextual references perpetuated by the news and popular media. To begin with, the skit juxtaposes the two most popular female figures associated with the election. This image immediately serves a visual representation of the polarized political ideologies within the US. Furthermore, Sarah Palin has become a recent popular figure within the media and the skit references the phenomena and controversy cultivated around her persona. While the sketch addresses the popular media’s sexualized construct of her, it simultaneously projects the masculinized and non-sexualized image prescribed to Hilary Clinton. It features the infamous ‘lipstick’ comment that sparked a debate with Barack Obama and went on to be the subject of further dispute and mockery. The actress Tina Fey who plays Sarah Palin resembles her tremendously, and an intertextual reference to the actual skit occurs, when the other actress states that Sarah Palin is actually trying to imitate Tina Fey by wearing her trademark glasses. Thus, the parody reinserts itself back into the cyclical media spectacle from which it emerged and scrutinized.

Natalie Panovic

Alternate link to watch full version of SNL's skit.

Highlights of the 27th Vancouver Film Festival 2008

Vancouver International Film Festival is starting today with an amazing selection of films coming from all over the world that will be screened during the next two weeks. Vancouver became one of the most celebrated North American film festivals for East Asian (Dragons & Tigers) and Canadian films. The Festival will be opened by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelle's Blindness, a film based on a novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago.

The closing gala screening will be The Class (France) directed by Laurent Cantet winner of the French prestigious Palme d'Or. Also acclaimed earlier this year at Cannes were Three Monkeys (Turkey), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (best director), Il Divo (Italy), by Paolo Sorrentino, A Christmas Tale (France) by Arnaud Desplechin, Tulpan (Russia/Kazakhstan), by Sergey Dvortsevoy, Cloud 9 (Germany) by Andreas Dresen, Hunger (UK), by Steve McQueen, and Next Floor (Canada), a short by Quebec's Denis Villeneuve, which won top prize for shorts at Cannes. Sundance prize winners include Captain Abu Raed (Jordan/USA), by Amin Matalqa, and Ballast (USA), by Lance Hammer. Winners from the Tribeca Film Festival include Let The Right One In (Sweden), by Tomas Alfredson, My Marlon And Brando (Turkey), by Hüseyin Karabey, and Old Man Bebo (Spain), by Carlos Carcas. Berlin Film Festival winners include The Song Of Sparrows (Iran), by Majid Majidi, Happy-Go-Lucky (UK), by Mike Leigh, I've Loved You So Long (France), by Philippe Claudel, Corridor #8 (Bulgaria), by Boris Despodov, Revanche (Austria), by Götz Spielmann, Be Like Others (Iran/Canada), by Tanaz Eshaghian, and Sita Sings The Blues (USA), by Nina Paley.

Check out below some of VIFF’s highlights this year:

24 City (Er Shi si cheng ji, China, 2008, 107 mins)
Directed By: Zhanke Jia
24 City tells a number of stories about the deep-rooted social revolution going on in China today. It is set in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in a luxury apartment complex called 24 City being built on the site of Factory 420, a former airplane engine plant. Jia's cameras capture the last days of the factory by zeroing in on the people who used to work there and the people who will move into the new apartments. In a series of five strikingly photographed interviews with retired workers from the factory's early days 60 years ago to its present, what unfolds is a series of personally inflected vignettes of China as it moves past the Korean War through the political campaigns of Communist Party rule right up to the full-throated capitalist present. Jia’s film asks what gets us closer to truth: documentary or fiction?

Blindness (Brazil, Canada, Japan, 2008, 118 mins)
Directed By: Fernando Meirelles
What would happen if you woke up one morning and couldn't see anything? This is the premise of Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God), and adapted from Nobel prize-winner José Saramago's masterful novel by Don McKellar. When a mysterious pandemic descends upon an unnamed city (the megalopolis 18 mi people - São Paulo) without warning or reason, the entire population is plunged, not into darkness, but its opposite. The "white sickness" (so-called because its victims see only a milky blankness) institutes a state of virtual martial law. Under armed guard, those afflicted by the pandemic are rounded up and warehoused in bleak concentration camps. When a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) contracts the disease, his wife (Julianne Moore) accompanies him to the internment camp, despite the fact that she’s the only one that still can see.

Adoration (Canada, 2008, 100 mins) Directed By: Atom Egoyan
When a high school student named Simon (Devon Bostick) casts himself as the surviving child of a would-be terrorist in a class assignment, he begins a dizzying journey into his own family's mysterious past. Atom Egoyan's 12th feature employs a fractured chronology that interweaves multiple narratives and characters into a web of connection, as fraught and delicate as the web of a spider. After his French teacher Sabine (played by Arsinée Khanjian) convinces Simon to present his essay as a true story, his decision to continue the deception online creates a virtual firestorm. Soon the clamour of competing voices and opinions has reached near bedlam. Everyone has an opinion, and the need to voice it as loudly as possible. But is this merely democracy (facilitated by the internet) in action, or something more insidious?

C'est pas moi, je le jure! (Canada, 2008, 110 mins)
Directed By: Philippe Falardeau
Philippe Falardeau delivers a highly sophisticated, often hysterically funny work that may also be his most accessible to date. Set in 1968, the film focuses on ten-year-old Léon (Antoine L'Écuyer, in a phenomenal debut), a dedicated hellion whose pastimes include failed suicide attempts, vandalism, theft, running away and breaking and entering. The film is a touching and amusing meditation on changing mores and family structures. Léon's best friend Lea is being raised by her alcoholic uncle, and may be as troubled a child as he is. Like Léon, she is in search of an absent parent.

Café de los Maestros (Argentina, Brazil, USA, 2007, 90 mins)
Directed By: Miguel Kohan
Argentina is undergoing a resurgence in their national music form, the tango. Nowadays it is even "cool" for kids in their late teens and early 20s to spend a night in Buenos Aires' cavernous La Catedral practicing their tango moves instead of dancing to the latest cumbia or hip-hop or electronica styles. In this documentary, director Miguel Kohan and Brazilian producer Walter Salles choose to focus on the other end of the age spectrum – Café de los Maestros chronicles the gathering in Buenos Aires of the greatest living legends of this formidable musical genre. These extraordinary men and women, ranging from 70 to 95 years old, reveal the mysteries and essence of this deliciously melancholy and sexy music.

The Class (Entre les murs, France, 2008, 128 mins) Directed By: Laurent Cantet
Welcome to another year of French class; my name is François, and you are all skanks. Laurent Cantet's latest feature is based on a simple concept: go inside the walls of a tough, racially mixed Parisian high school in the 20th arrondissement, enter one contentious classroom for a year, and watch the fireworks. Based on the novel Entre les murs, a fictionalized version of the life of its author, teacher François Bégaudeau, The Class developed out of months of workshops and rehearsals. Shot on HD without a script, using three cameras at once – like filming a tennis match – this is a docudrama that feels completely real. Palm d’Or at Cannes 2008.

The Desert Within (Desierto adentro, Mexico, 2008, 112 mins) Directed By: Rodrigo Plá
Religious madness and protective love that turns to hatred combine for an intense mixture in Rodrigo Plá's The Desert Within. The film, which nearly swept the awards at the Guadalajara fest [traces] the logical downward spiral of a guilt-ridden father’s attempts to make amends with God. The premise is a parent, tempting fate out of the desire to get his newborn baptized, would conclude that God wants him to take his family deep into the desert to build a church.

Hunger (United Kingdom, 2008, 100 mins) Directed By: Steve McQueen
A film of uncommon power and artistry, Hunger is a staggering look at life in Northern Ireland's infamous Maze Prison, focusing on the six-week-long hunger strike by IRA leader Bobby Sands. In his feature debut – winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes – Turner-prize winning artist Steve McQueen envisions the body as a site of political warfare, casting Sands' last days as a Passion Play starring German actor Michael Fassbender as the perfect Jesus. Though the story of the IRA has been told before, McQueen's version is uniquely personal and completely unforgettable.

Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mommy Is at the Hairdresser, Canada, 2008, 97 mins) Directed By: Léa Pool
In her new feature, a sumptuous 60s period piece, veteran Québec filmmaker Léa Pool (Emporte Moi, The Blue Butterfly) continues to tackle the intricate space in which children start to make sense of people's positions and responsibilities (including their own) within a community. Suffocating and incapable of dealing with her family and her increasingly distanced husband (Laurent Lucas) – whom she suspects is having an affair with another man – a mother (Céline Bonnier) leaves her family to restart her life as a television anchor in London, England. We follow her three children as they try to cope with the abandonment in different ways. Much in this small community remains repressed or unspoken, yet everyone paradoxically puts their noses in everyone else's business.

The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet, France, 2007, 151 mins) Directed By: Abdellatif Kechiche
Winner of the César (the French Oscar) for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Most Promising Actress, Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche’s (L'esquive) multi-layered and hugely absorbing new film also captured the Special Jury Prize and the International Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival. North African immigrants in Sète, a crumbling port town in southern France. Its protagonist is a weary, divorced, impoverished 60-year-old shipyard worker whose fractured family comes together around his dream of opening a floating restaurant based on his former wife's culinary specialty, fish couscous. The film, which explores generational differences and psychological baggage within this extended family of émigrés, is an extraordinarily rich and human ensemble piece filmed in a rough documentary style.

Serbis (France, Philippines, 2008, 94 mins) Directed By: Brillante Mendoza
Brillante Mendoza follows last year’s Foster Child and Slingshot with the story of an epically dysfunctional family inspired, he says, by a real one. The Pineda family operates a decrepit cinema (called “Family”) in a provincial Filipino town, screening tenth-run double bills of softcore sex movies. They also live on the premises. The matriarch Nanay Flor (Gina Pareno, The Bet Collector) is suing her bigamous husband for support and expecting the court’s decision any time now. She’s helped with the running of the cinema by five younger people: her daughter and son-in-law, her adopted daughter, and two nephews, one of whom is shirking his responsibilities to a pregnant girlfriend. Meanwhile the cinema itself attracts few but men looking for male and transvestite hookers, who ply their trade in the lobby and on the stairs.

Suivre Catherine (Canada, 2007, 93 mins) Directed By: Jeanne Crépeau
Who wouldn't like to live in Paris for a whole year? That's the simple plan director Jeanne Crépeau launches at the age of 40, invited by Catherine, a Parisian filmmaker she meets in Montréal. In this witty film diary, Crépeau shares her somehow hilarious walks along the Seine, her astonishment at the maze of red tape, her ill-concealed terror behind the wheel in Paris traffic and her joy at entering a new community. She also undertakes an academic dissertation on the 1996 Jacques Doillon film Ponette and its extraordinary 4-year-old star, Victoire Thivisol, which is a lot more fun than it sounds. Crépeau's travels take her to Normandy, Venice and Lisbon, and in each location she perceives something new about things big and small, imaginary and real.

Perfect window: reversing medium's interactivity

Johnny Lee's work, which eclectically revolves around video and projections, periodically includes altering systems for different uses. He holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction, and currently resides at Carnegie Mellon University. In this YouTube video, Johnny Lee describes how he can use the Nintendo Wii controller to create the illusion of a ‘perfect window’ by reversing its interactive medium. Lee describes the subtly of how this works, where the television and the player exchange ends of its main controlling device in order to triangulate the player in relation to the screen. Though this has no 'art' to reflect upon, it reveals the medium itself as a target board, and as a household medium that breaks the sense of being contained within the screen. This message begins to question the space between the medium and us.

Riley Maruyama

Pop intertextuality: Family Guy’s outrageously hilarious satire on Star Wars

On September 23rd, 2007 over 10.7 million fans tuned in to watch Seth MacFarlane’s premier episode of season six of Family Guy (Nelson Ratings). This was due in large part to the overwhelming excitement that the entire episode would be spoofing George Lucas’ Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The episode itself was entitled Blue Harvest, which was in reference to the fake name that was originally used to disguise the production of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Each of the Family Guy characters undertook a role from the movie: Peter Griffin as Hans Solo, Lois Griffin as Princess Leia, Brian Griffin as Chewbacca, Stewie Griffin as Darth Vader, etc. In a unique twist to the original Star Wars movies, the producers of Family Guy used a couple of different intertextual associations throughout the episode. Intertextuality is exemplified through the notion that to understand all of the jokes and references that are made throughout the episode viewers need to have prior knowledge of not only the Star Wars movies but also the Family Guy series. Furthermore, the episode alludes to other ideas and concepts of pop culture and intercultural textural references. One such example is the scene where Leia struggles to upload her message to Obi-Wan Kenobi to R2-D2. This is of course in reference to our cultures constant struggle to keep up with how to adapt to our rapidly changing technology. The spoof takes the liberty to point out some of the ‘flaws’ of the original, such as the Death Star having a weak point; Vader wonders why in the world a destruction weapon of their magnitude would over looking something as simple as a ‘design flaw’ and demanded to have estimates done for how much it would cost to have it boarded up. Clearly, to only watch Blue Harvest once and maybe even twice would run the risk of missing the more subtle references; to fully appreciate this episode one must not only be conscious of film and animation, but specifically the difference between Star Wars and Family Guy. That is the genius of Family Guy they took the fantasy and suspenseful aspects of Star Wars and replaced it with the sarcasm and toilet bowl humor that viewers have grown accustomed to hearing from the likes of Peter Griffin and other characters on the show. The Family Guy producers uniquely blended these two forms of art to create a hilarious satire of the entire Star Wars franchise, and in the process managed not to alienate Star Wars fans while keeping the integrity of the show intact.

Tara Turley Dean

Mark Amerika

Mark Amerika is a digital artist whose recent work is the project Immobilité (watch Amerika's interview), which is a film shot on a Nokia N95 in diverse locals throughout Cornwall in the UK. Through digitally constructed characters, Amerika deals with the emerging identities in our digital culture. Moreover, his work incorporates his writing, which transcends conventional boundaries and has expanded by way of performative gestures through the various spaces it is expressed. In his, Mobile Phone Video Art Classics (MPVAC), mobile phone video messages function within a DVD installation/PowerPoint/blog performance to include fictionalized characters along with famous personas ranging from Salvador Dali to Madonna. Amerika is also the creator of Grammatron, "a virtual writing machine that translates your experience for you as you experience it." An interactive and communal environment are distinct features of his work, as in the digital hybrid work of Filmtext of which the first version of this work was commissioned by Playstation 2 for Amerika's How to be an internet artist retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Natalie Panovic

Download here mobile film Immobilité

“May not its intertextuality be the symptom of cultural exhaustion, brought on by the failure to meet the avant-gardist challenge of doing something creatively different after the heroic era of experimental modernism?” – Christopher Butler (Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, 2002)

As modernism searched for meaning in the underlying reality of appearances, the late 20th century sought to challenge what became part of bourgeois culture, with postmodernism signifying a culture of kitsch, a rejection of metanarratives, and the collapse of the real consequently igniting the hyperreal. As such a culture heavily criticized for its complacency with pastiche; a style resulting in a kind of parody, devoid of real history and stylistic innovation. The collaborative efforts of Johan Soderberg and Eric Pauser through their film Lucky People Center International (1998), uses postmodern techniques as the piece splices a variety of images, an amalgamation of cultures, conversations and dialogues, to an overlaid pulsating beat. The result is a kind of documentary/music video featuring interviews with people as varied as New Mexico shaman Franklin Bearchild Eriacho, performance artist Toshiji Mikawa, Indian dancer Pragati Sood, and porno queen Annie Sprinkles. The piece has received much criticism yet, could be regarded for having a transformative impact on how we visually view the world, globalization, and the problematic notion of ‘human’ in the postmodern condition.

Natalie Panovic

Noplace: intermedia 'interactive' art

MW2MW is a collaborative project of Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg, along with technological assistance of Jonathan Feinberg, Rory Solomon & Johanna Kindvall. Noplace is a website where one can construct their individual version of utopia. This individualized concept becomes possible through the medium of the internet as a result of its non-hierarchical and democratized structure. One is able to insert sentences and through key words that can act as signifiers within the website, images and sounds are reused from the internet, resulting in a downloadable film for each user. Noplace is inspired by various architecture projects from the 1960’s, such as Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and Constant’s New Babylon. Within the context of a gallery, Noplace, has functioned as a interactive installation, through the use of projectors and touch screens.

Natalie Panovic

Everyone has a concept of a winning ‘endgame’, whether paradise, heaven or a pessimistic distopia. Noplace is a website where, through user input, the artists create a video catalogue for concepts of Paradise. These Paradise types are endgames of ideological constructs such as a vision of a classless society or a scientist’s vision of a sustainable environment.

Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg, 2008

The market is the medium

Contemporary Pop artist, Takashi Murakami, further expanded upon the Andy Warhol model of merging art and commerce, when he collaborated with designer Marc Jacobs for the Louis Vuitton fashion house. Jacobs was interested in Murakami’s animation and wanted him to create characters which would become monograms and iconic images for the brand. As a result of the media and consumer response to the merchandise the merger between artist and designer has endured since 2003. Murakami had as well created the short animated film Superflat Monogram, whose central female character lives in a Louis Vuitton world. The film simultaneously functioned as an art piece when it was showed at New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery and as a commercial for Louis Vuitton on YouTube. Furthermore, Murakami placed a fully operational Louis Vuitton store inside the Brooklyn Gallery (organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles) during an exhibition in 2008. To this regard, Murakami had referenced Marcel Duchamp: “The shop project is not a part of the exhibition; rather it is the heart of the exhibition itself. It holds at once the aspects that fuse, reunite, and then recombine the concept of the readymade. The Louis Vuitton project brings to life a wonderful new world”. Thus, artists such as Takashi Murakami perpetuate the synergy between art and fashion whilst referencing art history, commercialism, elitism, advertising, and mass culture.

Natalie Panovic

Capturing Concepts in performance Art: Is film a useful medium to represent live experience?

Intermediality’s role in clarifying conceptual performance art makes curious observations in Chris Burden’s Documentation of Selected Works (1971-1975). Although we are able to view his spatial choices accurately we are not able to see all the details or responses that are occurring throughout his works. In “220” we have a clear idea of the room they are using and the texture of the wooden ladders. We also know through Burden’s narrative that the water beneath each ladder is electrically charged. What we do not see is the progression or deterioration of each artist. His/her emotions and immediate responses remain mysterious to us. These factors are elements of live experience that film is not able to capture. This may stimulate the imagination leaving it up to the viewers to fill in the performance but in such an extreme style it is important to receive the preciseness of the concept that the artist is working with. Otherwise, the viewer lives in the complication and a message or context never communicates.

Natalie Schneck

Integrating Intermediality in a Theatrical Context

Theatre is an art of the present – audience and actor[s] are together in space and time. Text facilitates transitions between space and time, differentiating space, evolving time. With these three elements theatre is able to define itself without any other technology. How does such an art form survive in a culture that relies primarily on technology and visual images for communication? Theatre does not need to depend on other disciplines for definition; therefore, it can incorporate several different media into one form. For example, Robert Lepage’s The Andersen Project [Photos 1 and 2] incorporates a large projection screen that displays colors, his face and a reflection of the auditorium. These elements add to the theatricality and texture of the show by dramatically shifting scale and perspective as well as creating spectacle. While the show is touching and memorable because of the integration of various media, it is still theatre, actor and audience present together in time and space with text as a guide through the shifting narrative.

Natalie Schneck

Vlog: a new genre in advertising?

The hybrid evolution between video and the Internet has taken an interesting step in informative content with Melanie's vlog, "Transit 101". Melanie, an "inexperienced" Translink user, takes the viewer through a researched trip between Vancouver and Burnaby. As she teaches the viewer standard guidelines/procedures to get through a 2-zone bus ride, Melanie brings her friend along to film the trip with a camera phone - even though the picture quality proves otherwise. This seemingly innovative method of teaching said guidelines provides prospective Translink customers an easier way to learn and/or absorb the procedure while effortlessly buying into the service through the 'authentic' vlog, marketing the company. Through an interplay of genres - mockumentary vs. documentary and reality vs. fiction - the viewers are eased into a coalesced promotional plug delivered by familiar, popular forms of communication: camera phones and the all-knowing World Wide Web.

Corina Pilay

Laurie Anderson's "O Superman"