Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Kim Knight, Ringu Transmission Project Team

1. Meikle, Dennis.  The Ring Companion.  London: Titan Books, 2005.

Despite the fact that The Ring Companion is intended for a popular audience, the book often takes on the tone of an academic publication through its extensive exploration of the background and contexts of "the ring phenomena."  Meikle's work is at its finest when he is delineating the influences on Koji Suzuki's novel Ringu, which inaugurates the media franchise.  For instance, the reader learns that many of the characters in the original novel are based upon real people.  The psychic researcher Tomokichi Fukurai who published the book Clairvoyance and Thoughtography in 1931 is the basis for Dr. Ikuma, Sadako's father in the novel.  Sadako herself is based upon a medley of Fukurai's subjects, but is named after Sadako Sasaki, the young girl who is memorialized in Hiroshima Peace Park.

Miekle also does a fine job of sketching the history of Asian and American horror cinema, both before and after the film release of Ringu.  The detailed genesis of Godzilla and other Japanese water monsters is just one example that sheds valuable light on the Ring media franchise.  Although it is evident that Miekle conducted quite a bit of research on these topics, the book's lack of scholarly apparatus is incredibly frustrating.  There is only a vague, thin bibliography that is of little help in terms of furthering one's research. 

Aside from context and background information, the book engages in an almost encyclopedic listing of the different film and television versions that stem from Ringu.   The plot of each iteration is carefully detailed and Miekle engages in some comparison across versions.  As a scholar, I found the plot summaries burdensome reading, but was simultaneously pleased to see that there is still so much room left for analysis. Miekle (perhaps justifiably) has a clear bias for the style and tone of the Asian versions, denigrating the two American films at every opportunity.

The back cover of The Ring Companion claims that the book is "the definiitve guide to The Ring in all its incarnations."  Unfortunately, Miekle hardly addresses the subsequent novels and the book of short stories.  In addition, he glosses over the existence of several manga versions and, if memory serves me correctly, entirely fails to make any mention of the video game.  As with the plot summaries above, this was simultaneously disappointing and pleasing.

(Since this annotation reads like a review, I may as well conclude in "review fashion.")  Overall the book was enlightening in several aspects but lacks the scholarly apparatus to make it a truly valuable resource.

2. Benjamin, Walter.  "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.  Trans. Harry Zohn.  Ed. Hannah Arendt.  New York: Shocken Books, 1968.

One of the most commonly referenced ideas in Benjamin's essay is that the value of an artifact is a result of its aura.  He describes this phenomenon variously as "aura," "authenticity," "presence," and "cult value."  However much Benjamin opposes the original with its mechanical reproductions, it is important to note that the aura of a piece is not merely found in the artifact itself.  Rather, aura is the accumulation of an artifact's history, inaccessibility, and ritual function, or use value.

Mechanical reproduction, or technical reproducibility, is the main factor in the modern demise of aura.  When artifacts are mass reproduced, they are devoid of the history of the original artifact.  In addition, they are accessible to the masses and transportable to places and contexts never before possible.  And finally, the use-value of the artifact shifts as the reproductions lack the ritual function of the original.  In the place of use-value and aura, we find exhibition value and commodification.

Two interesting exceptions to this trend are literature and photographic portraiture.  Literature has a history of mass reproduction and has never been subject to the loss of aura that plagues so many other art forms.  The reason for this, according to Benjamin, is that in literature aura is connected to creative achievement and the persona of the author, rather than the artifact itself.  Interestingly, the reproduction of words on a page seemx able to retain creative achievement in a way that reproduction of visual arts cannot.  The one exception to this rule is photographic portraiture.  In the human portrait, aura is bestowed in the subject's face via mechanisms of nostalgia.  The cult value is retained in the "cult of remembrance".

One other mass-produced art from receives particular attention from Benjamin - film.  There are many ways in which film differs from previous art forms.  Unlike painting and the plastic arts, film depends upon sequence - each frame depends upon the frames preceding it for meaning.  The coherence of film as a unified art form is fallacious - rather the seemingly "whole" end product is made up of a series of smaller pieces edited together.  And yet, film allows the audience a new mode of perception - apperception is facilitated in film through the use of extreme close-ups, slow motion, and other mechanisms that grant modes of perception previously unavailable to audiences.  The unfortunate by-product of apperception is that film places the audience in a position to identify with the apparatus, the camera, rather than the actor (as on stage).  Finally, the most crucial quality of film is that it communicates via distraction. Because of the flickering sequences of images, the viewer is prevented from deep immersion into the artifact.  Rather than being absorbed by the work of art, the audience absorbs the work of art.  It is this feature, distraction, which gives film its revolutionary potential. 

The crux of all of this, for Benjamin, is that the aesthetic now enters the political.  Once artworks become designed for reproducibility, exhibition value allows the aesthetic to become secondary to other functions.  Benjamin positions aura, and all of its attendant notions (i.e. genius and creativity) as opening the door for Fascism.  Although he finds its commodification dismaying, Benjamin sees film as the (possible) revolutionary antidote to Fascism and war.

3. White, Michele.  "The Body, the Screen, and Representation: An Introduction to Theories of Internet Spectatorship."  The Body and the Screen.  MIT, 2006.

In "The Body, the Screen, and Representation," the introduction to the book The Body and the Screen, Michelle White outlines a theory of spectatorship that builds upon past theories of Internet subjects.  For White, the term "user," today often referred to as the "prosumer," implies a level of control and coherence that she finds lacking in Internet representation and usage.  Preferring the term "spectator," White wishes to give equal prominence to the passive activities of Internet usage - reading and viewing.  She does not construct spectatorship itself as passive; she merely reminds us that Internet usage includes both passive and active tasks. 

Much of the introduction addresses the role of representation.  Advertising images for computer technologies tend to privilege the white, male figure as the standard-bearer of technology use.  Women and people of color are positioned as secondary and as subject to be gazed upon.  The "hand" icon employed by so many software programs to "grab" and move content reinforces the standard of computer users as predominantly white.  These and other examples are explored through a lens heavily informed by psychoanalytic film theory.  White consciously differs from these theories in two aspects: 1) she is troubled by the tendency in feminist psychoanlaytic film theory to separate the "subject" from "real people," thus eliding historical specificity, and 2) she acknowledges the possibility of cross-identifications and other strategies of resistance. 

She chooses, however, to focus on what she sees as the typical spectator experience - white men are positioned as the normative computer user.  This has implications for the subjectivity of spectatorship as White argues that these representations remain active even once the viewer walks away from the screen.  White cites the avatar as one example of the enduring impact of Internet spectatorship.  A visual image that moves through "space" and acts as both emmissary and double, the avatar suggests "an ongoing identification" with digital representation.

(NB: I had hoped this source would relate to what I am increasingly seeing as the importance of the screen as interface in the various iterations of Ring.  While the essay did not really relate in this fashion, it was a rewarding read for anyone interested in race, gender, embodiment, and technology)

4. Eisenstein, Sergei.  "The Dramaturgy of Film Form."  The Eistenstein Reader.  Ed. Richard Taylor.  London: The British Film Institute, 1998.

In ""The Dramaturgy of Film Form" Sergei Eisenstein explores the role of montage in cinema.  He begins with the premise "art is always conflict" and for Eisenstein, montage itself is a form of conflict.  It should be noted that the term montage here refers to short sequences of film cut together and not to the general practice of editing.  Contrary to theorists of his time, Eisenstein views montage, not as building blocks that cumulatively tell a story, but as "the collision between two shots that are independent of one another" (95). 

In a montage the shots are not meant to be viewed next to one another in some kind of linear sequence, but rather in a manner of layering - the shots are arranged on top of one another.  The resulting effect of this is a superimposition of images that layers a second impression on top of the retained trace of a first impression.  In other words, the montage, when viewed in sequence results in an effect that is greater/different than the mere sum of parts.  Each image evokes an association, and the accumulation of associations achieves emotional depth in a fashion that is uniquely available to film.  Theater, which is purely physiological, is forced to present events directly through linear plot, rather than through association. 

Eisenstein positions montage as the syntax of film, preferring to align the art form with language rather than painting or theater, as had been the tradition in film criticism.  In painting, form is derived from the abstractions of line, color, etc.  Film, on the other hand, is a form based upon concreteness.  Eisenstein locates this concreteness as paralleling language "where the same mechanism exists in words and word complexes" (107).  (This is one of the moments where the datedness of the essay is evident - few postmodern theorists would argue that language is concrete).

The most important aspect of this essay for my work is the idea of the accumulation of a montage sequence's effects being greater than the sum of its parts.  One can certainly see this occurring in Sadako's cursed video.  Re-visiting the essay also raised another interesting question for me: might an entire media franchise, such as the Ring, be viewed through the lens of montage?  While the characteristics of conflict and concreteness may not apply, one might argue for the accumulative cultural effect of novels, films, television mini series, comic books, and video games all based upon the same source material.

5. Paul, Christiane.  "The Database as System and Cultrual Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives."   Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow.  Ed.  Victoria Vesna. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.

Christiane Paul notes that "database aesthetics" is increasingly one of the core concepts of the digital realm.  She defines database aesthetics as aesthetic principles applied when filtering or visualizing data, or when applying database "logic" to any container of information (examples include novels and archives).  Rarely does the term refer to the aesthetics of the actual data structures themselves.  Another definition crucial to the essay is her definition of database, which is expanded to include, not just the data and its structure, but also the hardware, software and users that make the database possible.  In addition, database-driven art consists not just of the database and the interface, but also of the codes and algorithms that move between the two. 

Paul uses these definitions to explore the relationship between database and narrative, challenging Lev Manovich's claim that the two are mutually exclusive.  She uses works like Bradford Paley's TextArc to demonstrate that the when database logics are applied to traditional narratives such as Alice in Wonderland or Moby Dick, meta-narratives about pattern and structure emerge.  For instance, in the TextArc "reading" of Alice, the viewer is able to see that the first half of the story focuses on animals, while the second half focuses on people. 

Similarly, works such as George Legrady's Pocketfull of Memories and McCoys' Every Shot, Every Episode explore cultural narratives according to database logic.  Other pieces such as Natalie Bookchin's The Databank of Everyday Life uses the database to construct narrative.  Perhaps most crucial for Paul are works such as Levin, et al's Secret Life of Numbers which uses the web as a sort of database to construct narratives about cultural tendencies.  She writes, "largely brought about by digital technologies, database aesthetics itself has become an important cultural narrative of our time, constituting a shift toward a relational, networked approach to gathering and creating knowledge about cultural specifics" (108).

Indeed one can see this trend in classes such as ours, where more than one group is employing an approach to literary criticism that in some way refers to or relies upon the database.