Akira Code 7 Alert
Posted: August 27, 2019 Filed under: review | Tags: adaptation, Akira, anime, comics, film, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, manga, video Leave a commentAkira Code 7 Alert is an unofficial animated short film by Richard Nyst that went online on YouTube two weeks ago. I hesitate to call it a ‘fan film’ because it looks so professional. The interesting thing about it is that it focuses on characters from the Akira manga that didn’t make it into the anime: the caretaker robots, also known as ‘Security Balls’, which the military employs for riot control. (They are quite relevant though if one reads Akira as a cyberpunk manga, as I have argued elsewhere.) In animation, they are reminiscent of the Tachikoma in the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime series. Or maybe the other way round: you can see that Masamune Shirow most likely got the inspiration for the Fuchikoma in his Ghost in the Shell manga from Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira manga.
Disclosure: I’m credited as “Japanese script advisor” in the film.
“The Capsule’s Pride (Bikes)”: Bwana remixes Akira soundtrack
Posted: April 7, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: Akira, anime, Bwana, comics, film, manga, music, music video, reception, remakes, video Leave a commentBwana, producer of electronic music from Toronto/Berlin, has released an EP titled The Capsule’s Pride (Bikes) (Comicgate reported last week) for which he had rearranged the Akira anime soundtrack into 9 EDM tracks. This EP is available for free both as audio stream and YouTube video playlist. The latter is more interesting in this context: each video consists of a sparsely animated black-and-white still image from Akira. The funny thing is, the images are taken from the manga, not from the anime.
It’s funny because not only music samples were taken from the anime, but also dialogue samples (from the English dub) that directly refer to the major plot difference between the comic and its adaptation: “there is your messiah…” (in both track 1 and 5). At first I thought, whoever made those videos didn’t know the material well. On the other hand, at least two of the videos fit the titles of the corresponding tracks: the video for the title track “Capsule’s Pride (Bikes)” shows Kaneda on his motorcycle (pictured) – his first one, the one he has when he is still leader of the “Capsule” gang – and the video for “K&K (Lovers in the Light)” shows Kei and Kaneda. Another nice touch is that the Canon decal in the former image has been inconspicuously replaced by one bearing Bwana’s name.
Recent Akira adaptations
Posted: July 31, 2014 Filed under: review | Tags: adaptation, Akira, comics, film, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, manga, music video, reception, remakes, video 1 CommentIn my PhD research I don’t deal with 21st century reception of Akira, but recently I’ve come across some interesting adaptation projects which I wanted to share here, just in case you haven’t heard about them already:
The Akira Project – Live Action Trailer (via Major Spoilers)
A three-minute fan-made “trailer” for a live-action film that doesn’t exist (i.e. not the one that was recently announced to be at the scriptwriting stage).
Player Piano – Akira (via Geek & Sundry)
An elaborate video of a performance of the anime soundtrack.
Bartkira – http://www.bartkira.com/ (via Comicgate)
A faithful panel-by-panel remake of the manga – except all original characters have been replaced by Simpsons characters.
2013: Searching for the music video of the year
Posted: December 21, 2013 Filed under: review | Tags: 2013, chronology, Daft Punk, Get Lucky, music, music video, publishing, reception, record covers, video, year-end review Leave a commentSomething slightly off-topic for the end of the year: this is a translation of a post originally published in German at Perlen der Popgeschichte on December 18.
The historical scholarly disciplines often shy away from judging the immediate past. In contrast to journalism: usually already in December, a lot of magazines publish year-end reviews, e.g. the current issue of Musikexpress (cover-dated January 2014, published on December 12, 2013: “Das war 2013” [“this was 2013”]). Apart from a 29-page chronology and a 12-page list of the “50 records of the year”, it also contains, albeit only on one page, “the songs of the year”.
Which one was the song of the year, actually? In comparison to the previous year, which brought us two all-time hits with “Somebody That I Used to Know” and “Call Me Maybe” (both of which already came out in 2011, but didn’t achieve worldwide fame until 2012), 2013 gives a less clear picture. Possible candidates are, among others, “Thrift Shop” by a rapper named Macklemore (single of the year according to Billboard), “Blurred Lines” by a Robin Thicke (“bestselling single of the year” according to Musikexpress) and “Do I Wanna Know?” by the apparently still existing Arctic Monkeys (ranked 1st in the aforementioned Musikexpress charts).
A lot could be said about those songs and their reception, but there is another song that is maybe still a little bit more entitled to the title “song of the year 2013”: “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk feat. Pharell Williams. “There is no question that Daft Punk have penned the summer hit of the year 2013” (my translation), says Musikexpress and ranks “Get Lucky” 2nd in its year-end charts, after all. For some, that song is timeless, for others (i.e. me) it’s quite an old-fashioned disco funk tune, which nevertheless has somehow proven to be catchy. Perhaps that’s a sign of the times in which errors in taste from the 70s and 80s have almost become acceptable again.
More interesting than the song itself appears to be the accompanying music video. Or is there an official “Get Lucky” video at all? A legitimate question in times of alternative distribution methods. On the one hand, there’s the advertisement clip shown at the Coachella festival for the album Random Access Memories, in which we see, among other things, the two Daft Punk musicians with guest guitarist Nile Rodgers and guest vocalist Pharell Williams, seemingly performing “Get Lucky”. However, this clip only covers 1:40 of the 4 minutes of the song. On the other hand, a 47-second preview for the video of the official remix was published on the YouTube channel of the record label. It shows a crowd dancing in the moonlight and, again, the Daft Punk robots. This means there were several video shootings in the context of “Get Lucky”, although they weren’t used for a regular video clip.
I think such a video clip exists indeed, albeit not always recognised as such and instead referred to as “pseudo video” or even only as “Audio”. Even though this video is a stroke of genius. Similar to a record cover (indeed similar to the cover of the “Get Lucky” single), the silhouettes of the four musicians are set against the evening sun in this video, motionless. (Whether that is actually a reference to George Lucas’s directing debut THX 1138 or not, the similarity can’t be denied.) Only in the second half of the song, at the beginning of the vocoder break, subtle movement is brought into the image, by means of which it can now be clearly identified as a video and not as a still image. Then the figures freeze again, and with this static image (which now exactly matches the single cover) the clip ends.
The ingenuity of this video clip is that it imitates other timely manners of visual accompaniment of music through the appearance of a still image: the displaying of record covers in MP3 player software or streaming services, as well as the usage of static images with audio files illegally uploaded on YouTube. Furthermore, the video runs counter to the notoriously short average attention span of the internet audience, as nothing “happens” in it for two minutes. Thus the “Get Lucky” video plays wittily with the recipients’ expectations – and may well be the music video of the year. At the same time, the question arises how valid the traditional 1:1 relation between single and video clip still is these days.
Raymond Bellour’s fragmented perception – in comics?
Posted: August 16, 2013 Filed under: review | Tags: art history, comics, contemporary art, film, polyvision, Raymond Bellour, reception aesthetics, Subnormality, theory, video, webcomics, Winston Rowntree 1 CommentRaymond Bellour’s essay “Of an other cinema” (PDF) was first published in French as “D’un autre cinéma” in 2000. While parts of it read like merely a review of video installation works at the 1999 Venice Biennial, the article has become an important contribution to the theory of video art. Bellour’s main point is that video installations are a different kind of cinema, and they (often) transform cinema by “dividing and multiplying” the image in several channels. Because of the difficulty to keep track of what’s going on on multiple screens at the same time, Bellour characterises the video art recipient as a “dissolved, fragmented, shaken, intermittent spectator”. Other terms used by Bellour to describe such phenomena are: “aesthetics of confusion”, “expansion of projection”, “segmentation”, “exploded story”, “explosion of perception”, or (after Abel Gance) “polyvision”.
This fragmented perception that Bellour describes is specific to (and characteristic of, maybe even defining for) video installation art. But isn’t there something similar in comics? In a way, such experiences of fragmented perception occur quite often when reading comics of several pages length: as you flip the comic open to start reading it from page 1, you involuntarily glance at another page, say, page 42. You can force yourself to continue reading from page 1, but you cannot forget what you have already seen on 42. It’s as if something is already happening in the story on page 42, at the same time that you’re reading page 1. In this respect, each comic page (or each double page) is like a screen or a channel in a video installation, as only one can be perceived at a time, while on each another segment of the story unfolds simultaneously.
But there are certain comics which are even closer to what Bellour describes. I’m thinking of experimental comics, particularly “choose you own adventure”-style comics with parallel story branches. As an example, I initially wanted to dig up a particular episode of Winston Rowntree’s Subnormality that employed this method, but I discovered that the latest episode, 214: “Accidentally Insulting a Friend”, serves this purpose just as well. Instead of embedding the original image of this webcomic here, I suggest you follow the link to read it.
For the first five panels, this comic is relatively traditional, as we follow the conversation of the two young women in a car. Then, by the sixth panel, things get interesting. Which is the sixth panel, actually? Which is the seventh? The reading order up to this point was left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but that wouldn’t make sense at this point anymore, as the comic is split into a left branch and a right branch, which show what’s going on inside each protagonist’s head (plus the middle branch with the traffic light panels). The branches unite again towards the end of the episode, but in the middle, they unfold in parallel, both spatially and chronologically. You can start by reading the left branch first and then scroll up to continue with the top panel on the right hand side, or vice versa. However, while you’re reading the branch you’ve chosen to start with, you’re missing out on what’s happening at the same time in the other one. Thus, as the story of this comic “explodes”, the perception of it is fragmented, not unlike that of a multi-channel video installation.
Review: Michael Fried’s Four Honest Outlaws
Posted: February 24, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Anri Sala, art history, Charles Ray, contemporary art, Douglas Gordon, Michael Fried, reception aesthetics, sculpture, theory, US, video, Yale University Press 2 Comments
Title: Four Honest Outlaws. Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon
Language: English
Author: Michael Fried
Year: 2011
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages: 245
Price: $45
Website: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300170535
ISBN: 978-0-300-17053-5
I consider some of Michael Fried’s previous writings (especially Art and Objecthood, Absorption and Theatricality, and Why Photography Matters…) to rank among the best works in the field of reception aesthetics, or at any rate to be highly relevant for my own current research. Consequently I thought I’d read his latest book too, in which he applies his theory to individual works of video art and, again, sculpture and painting.
The objective of Four Honest Outlaws is modest: Fried’s “intention from the first was simply to write four essays (originally four lectures) about contemporary artists whose work [Fried] had come to regard as remarkable.” (201) So why were these four lectures collected into a book? Are the four artists covered in them really united by a common trait (apart from the liking that Fried has taken to them)? Fried says, “each of my four artists lives outside the law in that he has found his own unsanctioned path to highly original achievement, and each is honest in that he has done so in part by refusing to succumb to a cultural consensus that has lost almost all sense of artistic quality, philosophical seriousness, and, it sometimes seems, hope for the future.” (204) – hence the title of the book. I say, Fried wanted to publish another book without having to actually write one, and Yale UP let him get away with it.
That being said, each of the four essays is interesting in itself alright. Fried has chosen his artists wisely: their popularity is of such an intermediate degree that the reader might have already seen some, but probably not all of their works discussed in the book. At least that was the case for me. In any case, the book comes with a DVD with examples of the works by the two video artists, Anri Sala and Douglas Gordon, which is not only a helpful, but an essential element of the reading experience. Generally, Yale UP once again did a good job in the design of the book, although some readers might find the “square” page layout (i.e. all four margins are roughly equal) a bit too daring.
What I like most about Four Honest Outlaws are the parts where Fried deals with his own theoretical terms – absorption and theatricality, to-be-seenness, strikingness, facingness, presence and presentness, etc. In fact, he discusses his previous publications in the entire foreword (although I’m not sure if this would be a sufficient substitute for actually reading them). However, for large parts of the book, Fried seems to wear his art critic’s hat. By that I don’t mean his praise of his favourite artists, but his vitriol for others: he makes several ‘offhand’ remarks on artists he apparently doesn’t like (Bill Viola, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage), but he doesn’t say why. He even calls an installation by Sam Taylor-Wood “idiotic” and says the participating performers “should be ashamed”. Maybe they should, but Fried should be ashamed as well for such coarse bashing.
There are other parts of the book in which Fried is surprisingly superficial. I grant Fried that he’s more interested in form than in content, but when he talks about content, he really should do it more thoroughly. For instance, in the chapter on sculptor Charles Ray, Fried ignores any ethical implications. Is Ray’s Oh Charley, Charley, Charley… really a depiction of “group masturbation”, or could it be also seen as homosexual group sex? Why is the four-year-old boy in The New Beetle naked? Why is the nude portrait sculpture of fellow artist Jennifer Proctor titled Aluminium Girl? What became of the chickens which Ray raised in his studio for his work Chicken? It looks like such questions were too uncomfortable for Fried to even raise, let alone answer them (though he does touch upon the subject of animal exploitation when discussing Douglas Gordon).
Still, I can’t deny that Four Honest Outlaws is an interesting read, but I would have expected more from a Michael Fried book.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
The 650-Cent Plague 