Conclusion
What is the future of digital cinema? One position sees digital cinema as an extension of avant-garde filmmaking practices, opening a new space for formal experimentation and alternative cultural politics and offering experimental artists access to a broader public than can be attracted to screenings of their works at film festivals, museums, or university classes. Another position, represented by the founders of Pop.com above, sees the digital cinema as a potential new site for commercial developments, an extension of the logic of media convergence, a kind of MTV for the 21st century. In this vision, established filmmakers, such as Steven Spielberg or Tim Burton, can produce shorter and riskier works, emerging talents can develop their production skills, and works may move fluidly back and forth between the Web, television, film, and computer games. Interestingly, both groups want to tap into the hipness of “DIY” culture, promoting their particular vision of the future of digital cinema in terms of democratic participation and amateur self-expression, pinning their hopes, as Coppola suggests, on the prospect that a “little fat girl” from the mid west will become the “Mozart” of digital filmmaking. Both visions have inherent limitations: the “low-res” movement’s appeals to avant-garde aesthetics and its language of manifestos and its focus on film festival screenings may well prove as elitist as the earlier film movements it seeks to supplant, while the new commercial version of the digital cinema may re-inscribe the same cultural gatekeepers who have narrowed the potential diversity of network television or Hollywood cinema.
The Star Wars fan films discussed here represent a potentially important third space between the two. Shaped by the intersection between contemporary trends toward media convergence and participatory culture, these fan films are hybrid by nature — neither fully commercial nor fully alternative, existing as part of a grassroots dialogue with mass culture. We are witnessing the transformation of amateur film culture from a focus on home movies toward a focus on public movies, from a focus on local audiences toward a focus on a potential global audience, from a focus on mastering the technology toward a focus on mastering the mechanisms for publicity and promotion, and from a focus on self-documentation toward a focus on an aesthetic based on appropriation, parody, and the dialogic. Coppola’s “little fat girl” has found a way to talk back to the dominant media culture, to express herself not simply within an ideolect but within a shared language constructed through the powerful images and narratives that constitute contemporary popular culture. She will find ways to tap into the mythology of Star Wars and use it as a resource for the production of her own stories, stories which are broadly accessible to a popular audience and which, in turn, inspire others to create their own works much as Lucas created Star Wars through the clever appropriation and transformation of various popular culture influences (ranging from Laurel and Hardy to Battleship Yomamoto and The Hidden Fortress).
This third space will survive, however, only if we maintain a vigorous and effective defense of the principle of “fair use,” only if we recognize the rights of consumers to participate fully, actively, and creatively within their own culture, and only if we hold in check the desires of the culture industries to tighten their control over their own intellectual property in response to the economic opportunities posed by an era of media convergence. At the moment, we are on a collusion course between a new economic and legal culture which encourages monopoly power over cultural mythologies and new technologies which empower consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media images. The recent legal disputes around Napster represent only skirmish in what is likely to be a decade long war over intellectual property, a war which will determine not simply the future direction of digital cinema but the nature of creative expression in the 21st century.
Jenkins, Henry.
Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.
In David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds., Rethinking Media Change. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
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