Aubrey Anable Interview
Aubrey Anable is the instructor of INI465H1S (Winter 2012): Advanced Topics in Social and Cultural Practices: Film and Transmedia Storytelling. We asked her a few questions about her background and interests.
Aubrey Anable
Tell us about your background and research area.
I began studying film as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Initially, I came to the field through cultural studies and feminist and queer theory. I was interested in the politics of popular culture, but dissatisfied with the “popular culture is bad” model I was getting in many of my women’s studies courses, which tended to have a social science bent. Among the many things that I found in film studies was an approach to popular culture that, one, took it seriously as capable of carrying complex meanings, and two, combined with cultural studies and Marxist theory, completely rearranged my understanding of power and how it circulates through culture.
Going to the University of Rochester for graduate school was a pretty natural progression for me. The Visual and Cultural Studies program there was the first graduate program to explicitly combine film studies with art history, anthropology, literature, and history. It was in this rich interdisciplinary context that I became interested in digital media, and, specifically, how digital moving images simultaneously draw from and challenge our notions about older media like cinema and television.
What are 3 of your favourite films, and why?
Oh, this is a dreaded question. I really do not have a list in my head of favourite films, but you need an answer, don’t you? Well, I can say that there are two films that I love because they made me think differently about film form and because they prefigured the forms and intensities of digital media. Looking at Peter Greenaway’s The Falls now—its rule-based structure, mysterious backstory, and made-up languages—it resembles an elaborate alternate reality game or the virtual worlds of massively multi-player online games. What I love about The Falls is that, with a really basic palette of still images, found footage, original material, and voice over, it creates this hilarious and sometimes moving alternate reality that I think contemporary game designers could learn a thing or two from. The other film is Todd Haynes’ Superstar. Besides the obvious appeal of a film made with Barbies in the lead roles, I’m attracted to Superstar because of the brilliant obsession of Haynes’ endeavour, it’s DIY aesthetic, and its tactical sampling and remixing of intellectual property. It was my first experience of a viral video (it was circulated and copied as a bootleg videocassette when I was in college in the 1990s) before such a thing was even possible on the Internet. Something very recent that I find compelling is The Goggles’ (Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons) Welcome to Pine Point. It is not a film per se, but rather a web-based documentary produced by the digital content division of the National Film Board. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of web-based storytelling. It is part film, part book, part photo album, part click-through website, but the sum of all of these things creates a media experience that completely complements its subject to the extent that it becomes impossible to imagine how the same story could have been told as just a film.
Could you describe your course for the winter term?
The course is called Film and Transmedia Storytelling. It takes as its starting point the idea that digital media have extended film narratives across multiple media platforms and that, increasingly, our experience of a film does not begin nor end in the movie theatre. The course readings and screenings will be geared towards investigating how and if this transmedia environment changes film as a social and cultural practice. Film studies conventionally understands films as discreet objects; how does studying films alongside their non-filmic extensions both teach us something about medium specificity and where and how it breaks down? Of course, transmedia storytelling is nothing new, so in order to understand the current digital media environment, the course will also connect the contemporary moment to pre-digital film and media history. As a digital media scholar I am constantly working against the popular assumption that everything “new” emerged in the 1990s. In general, I am interested in a much, much longer history of the new.