“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face. Forever.”

The above George Orwell quote accompanies this vid by Lila Futuransky which deals with cinematic depictions of oppression and resistance. She weaves together appropriated footage from three sci-fi films set in a near future London; 28 Days Later, Children of Men and V for Vendetta. These are remixes over the song Rabbit in Your Headlights by the band Unkle. The result is a re-constructed vision of a fear-driven future and also a vision of the resistance.  She particularly challenges the ways in which gender, race and sexuality play out in those futures.

Lila has carefully re-contextualized many of the characters in these films including erasing the male V character (along with his torturing of Evey “for her own good”)  and removes the character of Theo as the white male savor of Kee in shots from Children of Men. The vid also pieces together an inspiring montage of resistance which inserts images of queer relationships in between the shots of street protests and sabotage. For much more detail on the concepts behind the creating of this vid check out lila’s web page for it.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: activism, gender, government, hollywood, military, race, sexuality, vidding, war

UPDATE DEC 5th 2009: You can now view this vid again on Arefadedaway’s LiveJournal page here.

[As of June 30th 2009 Imeem has unilaterally removed all user generated videos including this one. Their reason for decimating 1000s of people’s creative work and the communities around it? “There is no ROI for UGV”. That unbelievable answer makes us nauseous. When this video is available again on another sharing site we will re-post it.]

Continuing our posts highlighting vidding. Arefadedaway has created this multi-fan vid as a contradiction to TV shows and movies that exploit and victimize female characters within their storylines. The source material is an impressive list of 89 different sci-fi, action, drama and comedy fandoms edited to “One Girl Revolution” by Superchick. Featuring 155 female characters, the vid celebrates women as agents, actively using their bodies as subjects rather than objects. Shots of women walking are continuously repeated to illustrate that women are never passively standing still.

Since the entertainment industry has had a large influence in defining and devaluing feminine characters, it is not surprising that depictions of strong women in mass media narratives have been hyper sexualized and fetishized. The character is tough and independent by day and a seductress by night. She is a strong female character but she is merely re-producing a male defined concept of what a strong women should look like. Although some of the heroines (like Tomb Raider) collected in this vid seem to have been created as male fantasies in their original movie roles, Arefadedaway has carefully taken them out of that context and placed them next to other strong female characters in one inspiring vid that celebrates the physical strength of women.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, sexism, sexuality, vidding

Here is another video from the Paul Harvey Oswald collective. The piece remixes both audio and video clips to create a visual list of activities that are advertised and labeled as “feminine“. The result is a comical critique of feminine consumer culture that reveals the ridiculous standards that women are held to.

Category: short film
Topic Tags: advertising, gender, sexism

As of June 30th 2009 Imeem has unilaterally removed all user generated videos including this one. Their reason for decimating 1000s of people’s creative work and the communities around it? “There is no ROI for UGV”. That unbelievable answer makes us nauseous. When this video is available again on another sharing site we will re-post it.

In this slash vid, thingswithwings uses famous slash paring from popular speculative fiction TV shows and movies. She relies on subtext to read between the lines within her source material and imply a romantic relationship between two characters of the same gender. While the source material and its authors may have had no original intention of hinting at their character’s sexual orientation, this vid deliberately slashes the character relationships in Star Trek, BSG: Razor, Babylon 5, Homicide, due South, The West Wing, Buffy, Lost, Stargate Atlantis, Starsky & Hutch, The X-Files, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, Primeval, Angel, Doctor Who, and Xena to reveal what happens when these relationships are reinterpreted by fans.

thingswithwings sites Henry Jenkin’s quote “slash is what happens when you take away the glass”, as the inspiration for this vid. What Jenkins was referring to was the social barriers in traditional masculinity that prevent men from articulating emotions or expressing intimacy.

The discussion in the vidding community regarding slash, its meaning and usage, is ongoing. Check out our previous posting for more on slash. Through the vidding process, fans become participants in media and culture creation by changing or queering story lines and characters, taking ownership over corporate owned media to make it their own. We think this is a very political act.

Read thingswithwings original livejournal entry.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: queer positive, queering culture, sexuality, slash, television, vidding

In this, our second post showcasing the remix form vidding, we present an example of a “slash” vid playfully set to Wouldn’t It Be Nice? by the Beach Boys. It’s an older vid by Laura Shapiro paying homage to some of the most famous fan slash pairings by remixing characters form many popular movies and TV shows. She not only highlights slash and femslash relationships but also celebrates existing on-screen gay and lesbian relationships. Check out Laura’s Blip Channel and website more of her vids.

The term “slash” refers to a same-sex pairing of TV and movie characters placed into sexual or romantic relationships by fans in their own fan fiction, art or vids. The first slash works were created in the 1970s by fans re-imagining a queer relationship between Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock. Typically slash refers to male/male stories, but depending on who you ask it can also mean female/female pairings (which are also called femslash). In the current heteronormative mass media landscape we definitely consider slash vids like these to be queer-positive forms of remix.

Here is a much more detailed description of slash from the FanLore site.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: femslash, hollywood, queer positive, queering culture, sexuality, slash, vidding

This mashup has become hugely popular on Youtube, viewed over a million times. The remixer re-imagines a trailer for the 1980’s blockbuster hit Top Gun creating a new narrative in which the very straight macho fighter jet pilots Maverick and Iceman have a romantic and sexual relationship. We consider this remix “queer-positive” because it subverts the fictional “all heterosexual” world of Top Gun by imposing queer relationships into the story.

By now we are all familiar with this remix phenomenon where creators take heterosexual TV and movie characters and than re-cut the footage to create queer relationships. These videos come in many forms but by far the most popular are the remixed Brokeback trailers, of which there are literally hundreds online. Although this remix is not really classified as a “vid”, in the vidding world this type of sexuality re-framing is called slash or femslash (which we will talk about in more detail in a later post).

We think these works are of political importance because they are critical of and expose how the mass media makes straight characters and relationships the standard social norm while queer relationships and lifestyles are often excluded, marginalization or demonized.

On this site we look critically at these remixes and place them in two camps, queer-positive and queer-negative. We define “queer-negative” remixes as those that encourage the viewer to laugh at the re-framed sexuality frequently by queering oddball, weird or quirky fictional characters (like the Brokeback to the Future mash-up). We don’t often post these because they are often tinged with homophobic humor. In contrast, we define “queer-positive” remixes as those that invite the viewer to identify with, sympathize with or celebrate the newly created queer relationship. Often these works remix the stereotypical and highly gendered roles of straight characters in mass media. Its a very fine line with a lot of gray area and not always clear but we at least use this as our lens for viewing these types of remixes.

So in short, queer-positive remixes attempt to subvert heteronormativity, while queer-negative ones mocks characters that aren’t portrayed as “normal.”

Category: movie trailer
Topic Tags: hollywood, masculinity, queer positive, queering culture, sexuality

This is the first in a series of posts highlighting the remix form called vidding. Vids are created by re-cutting television and movie footage with music in order to comment on the source material. The vidding genre is dominated by women who have been creating their transformative works as a self-conscious community of fan/editors for decades. While not all vids are overtly political in nature we will be showcasing some of our favorites that focus on issues of war, race, gender and sexuality. For a much more indepth description of this art form see this interview with vidder Francesca Coppa.

In this remix vidder Charmax uses source footage solely from the 2004 movie Troy based on Homer’s Iliad. Selected scenes of human grief and suffering from the film are re-cut to the song No Bravery sung by James Blunt. The result is a powerful emotional journey exposing our culture’s glorification of warfare. Rearranging the source footage beautifully, Charmax presents a simple and clear message: there are no heroes in war. While the source material chronicles the historical attack on Troy by the Greeks, the vids message calls to mind our modern day media myths that continue to deny the cruel, destructive and inhuman nature of war.

Be sure to check out Charmax’s website for more vids.

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: hollywood, vidding, violence, war