March 2008: Bob Rehak

Bob Rehak, Swarthmore College

"Revisiting Apparatus Theory in a Transmedia Age"

Respondent: Chris Cagle, Temple University

Friday, 28 March 2008

5:30-7:00pm

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 420

Directions to TUCC

Apparatus theory of the 1970s emphasized ideological effects of the cinematic "machine," in particular the elision of labor through the concealment of moviemaking's technical base. But in the contemporary world of transmedia franchises and convergence culture, technologies of image manufacture, distribution, and even storytelling itself have become spectacularized and monetized as sources of additional "content," providing an ever-expanding universe of paratextual information and cross-platform branding of entertainment properties. As media texts multiply and every consumer potentially becomes a producer, what happens to ideological critique at the level of the media apparatus? What new forms of invisibility attend transmedia's engines of visualization and behind-the-scenes information? How are we constituted as subjects in and by a sea of seriality, narrative expansion, and other aspects of what Jim Collins has termed the "architecture of excess"? Finally, how might these questions illuminate continuities between classical Hollywood cinema and its digitalized, narrowcast descendents?

Still from The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincent Minelli, 1952).

Bob Rehak is an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, where his teaching and research interests include special effects, videogames, animation, and new media. He has published chapters in The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), Videogame/Player/Text (2007), and the second edition of the Cybercultures Reader (forthcoming). His essays have appeared in the journals Information, Communication, and Society, Film Criticism, and Flow. He is an editorial board member of the new journal Transformative Works and Culture, and he blogs at Graphic Engine (http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu).

Chris Cagle is a Lecturer in film history and theory at Temple University. He is currently working on a book entitled Economics of the Soapbox: Historical Foundations of Hollywood's Social Problem Film. Beyond the history of postwar Hollywood, his research interests include various problems in documentary studies, especially hybrid fiction/nonfiction forms and the social history of documentary across television and cinema.