Smart Cinema, DVD Add-Ons and New Audience Pleasures

This study examines a broad range of post-1990s indie films, alongside a few mainstream films which break many of the old classic linear narrative and generic rules that have helped to define Hollywood and its alternative ‘art’ cinema. This work will also explore how bonus features attached to smart films are capable of speaking to and affirming a more contemporary branding of identity for new-generational audiences. There is a continuing need for a creative and critical dialogue with new generations of students and audiences to help reinvigorate the study of film. With a growing preoccupation with convergence within new media research,¹ DVD add-ons provide a useful bridge between new media and conventional film study, while assisting in exploring how new-generational cineastes might relate to smart cinema. Nonetheless, this study remains primarily focused on a broadly textual analysis approach to the films under discussion. A further volume is required to provide an empirical analysis of audience pleasures.

The roots of a new smart aesthetic can be traced through the so-called postmodern auteurs of the recent past. Particularly influential are the work of David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh. While Lynch remains the most enigmatic and art-house influenced director, who is surprisingly most dismissive of the uses and benefits of DVD bonus features, at the other end of the spectrum, Tarantino can be read as ultra-commercial and particularly intuitive in connecting with his growing following of digital cineastes. Sundance favourites include Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which has been hugely influential for a whole generation of new directors. Harvey Weinstein, one of the founders of Miramax, which was central to the development of a successful indie industry, observes that American Beauty, with its grainy ‘found art’ videotext and commercial/art cinema hybridity that later characterizes smart cinema, is a direct cinematic descendent of Sex, Lies and Videotape. Many so-called smart films discussed in this study effectively (re)present various forms of postmodern parody by the way they construct their human agents within an often parodic and playful narrative format, augmented, I suggest, by the use of DVD add-ons, which in turn serve to foreground the text’s often very contradictory messages. Furthermore, the new generation of smart directors explored in later chapters continue to draw on the stylistic blueprints of these major talents, who have produced some of their best work in recent times.

This overview will examine a number of contemporary independent filmmakers to help tease out some more salient attributes and contrasting styles within the broad rubric of smart cinema. This chapter will attempt to synthesize some of the broad strands of a nascent smart cinema, focusing specifically on readings, including the add-on features of Linklater’s Waking Life, followed by Nolan’s Memento and Inception; Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind; alongside Jonze’s Being John Malkovich as a random selective sample.

Many scholars have created a number of useful categorizations across new digital films, ranging from database narratives (Manovich), forking path narratives (Bordwell), multiple draft narratives (Branigan and Bordwell), twist films (Wilson, 2006), complex narratives (Staiger, 2005), modular narratives (Cameron, 2008), cult cinema (Hills, 2007), alongside puzzle films (Buckland, 2009), and especially Elsaesser’s mindgame taxonomy. All of these theories help to flesh out this study’s exploration of smart cinema, together with new modes of audience consumption. This chapter will begin by focusing on the revivified notion of cult cinema, followed by ‘mind-games’ to demonstrate how these and other new media protocols, including bonus features, can inform audience reception studies. I will then outline a close reading of smart classics, as suggested and privileged by numerous scholarly studies, namely Donnie Darko (2001), Magnolia (1999) and American Beauty (1999).

Like the British and Irish chapters to follow, this chapter will attempt to capture the breadth of what can be considered European smart cinema and its unique attributes, through an examination of three recent films, sampling different regions while focusing particularly on their DVD bonus features. The films are German feature Run Lola Run (1998), which was influenced by a videogame, French fantasy film Amélie (2001) and Danish, Dogme-inspired religious parable Breaking theWaves (1996). All three films are ostensibly linked together by three highly individualized female protagonists, and are directed by well-established male auteurs at the height of their creative powers.

Irish cinema presents a small but influential national film culture that has of late appropriated a range of smart aesthetics. This chapter contends that new smart media offers more interactive experiences, pleasures and forms of e-education than older media could ever provide and can at the same time be used to interrogate notions of Irish cinema. It is becoming very important from a pedagogic perspective to recognize that new-generational students can begin to construct new grammars of filmmaking and consumption. These must be taken on board by the Film academy, both as a potentially new aesthetic protocol and as part of a cross-platform culture industry, which has a global rather than a purely national reach. The DVD format has most probably affected the consumption and reception of film in Ireland as elsewhere. There are a few interesting add-ons available with classic Irish films, alongside the more contemporary output such as those smart examples discussed in this chapter.¹ As argued throughout this volume, audiences and film students now more than ever have easy access to paratextual and archival material from which they can hone their scholarly skills and help reinvigorate the discipline for the future.

What do we mean when we talk about ‘British cinema’, or ‘Irish cinema’ as discussed in the previous chapter, as a unique entity? Are we referring to a purely commercial industry coded as national, to a particular body of films made in Britain, or more abstractly to a broadly defined style of filmmaking, or can we characterize the phenomenon as simply a set of narrative and thematic conventions that link films together into some national context? This notion of a national cinema is complicated even further when we try to trace its origins and linkages within a global/international, stylistic, and especially a new technological, notion of smart cinema. While accepting the danger of applying a loose catch-all term to address and frame a small slice of British cinema, this prism of new digital media and globalized smart aesthetics, together with the more clearly definable content analysis of DVD addons that frame their reception, can help to provide a useful and fresh textual perspective.

The Pixar studio prides itself on being technologically innovative by creating smart narratives that appeal across a wide demographic, which is far removed from the indie film industry discussed in earlier chapters. Speaking to my preoccupation with eco-cinema, I wonder why, for instance, Wall-E is so smart in its aesthetics and delivery of its ecomessage, while a huge blockbuster like Avatar – which ostensibly remains more explicit in its ecological address – is considered crude in the way that it constructs and implicates its growing audiences.¹ Are such comparisons themselves unhelpful, even irrelevant, or simply lacking in a much-needed appreciation and contextualization of film history and the media’s power to affect audiences? By any measure of commercial endorsement, Avatar has been the most successful film ever in framing audience expectations and knowledge. The comparative power and potency of this populist tent-pole blockbuster, which loosely corresponds with the industrially driven Disney oeuvre, as against the indie smartness that Wall-E encapsulates, remains an interesting backstory for my reading of Pixar’s oeuvre.

This chapter will explore how contemporary science-fiction cinema successfully reflects and connects with new-media pleasures, drawing upon videogames, new forms of interactive media and the visceral excitement of increasingly reflexive and immersive special effects (SFX) spectacles. A reading of Minority Report (2002), AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and War of the Worlds (2005), all under the direction of the ubiquitous Steven Spielberg, will be used as examples of contemporary smart science-fiction cinema, which reflects and comments on newmedia audiences and pleasures. So-called smart films as explicated in this study have helped to break down the old divisions between more radical avant-garde formats and mainstream linear Hollywood cinema. Understanding and appreciating how this new aesthetic helped to promote a new ‘digital logic’ for audiences can be mapped through an analysis of Lev Manovich’s endorsement of the ‘database’ as a new metaphor to help explain the dynamics of new media in particular, alongside other scholars like Marie-Laurie Ryan and her taxonomy of new-media aesthetics.

Mythic expressions of national solidarity in war cinema remain highly controversial, especially from a representational and ideological perspective. Most frequently, Left-leaning critics decode such films by how they naturalize the dominant ideology and forgo critical structural analysis. This process is both exacerbated and at times subverted, depending on how you interpret the final result, by the ironic playfulness of the so-called smart aesthetic. To help tease out some of these attributes as they apply to 9/11 war cinema, this chapter will focus on a number of extremely influential postmodern/smart films beginning with Fight Club (1999) and Forrest Gump (1994), which helped to codify the enigmatic aesthetic form, before carrying out a close reading of Three Kings (1999) and United 93 (2006), which exemplify varying new aesthetics for the war film. Again the study will draw on the proliferation of material on DVD add-ons, which serves to create a direct dialogue between the director and the other creatives and the film audience, alongside other research avenues, to help tease out how these contemporary (war) narratives speak to and for new-generational audiences and can even be read as progressive in various ways.

Smart film as discussed in this volume remains an extremely elastic term and constitutes a very broad church drawing on indie film that specifically addresses new-generational audiences and cineastes. Chapters 1 through to 4 set up the core attributes that define smart indie cinema as it is loosely conceived. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to confirm when smart cinema actually began – as evidenced within long discussions around postmodernism over the years – and so-called smart directors or films became more established and codified as the format developed and was aided, this study argues, by the DVD format.