Future Cinema

Course Site for Future Cinema 1 (and sometimes Future Cinema 2: Applied Theory) at York University, Canada

Question for LAST week’s class

I’m afraid that I was under the weather last week and only managed to catch up with the readings for the 15th over the last week. This post will have my question for that class; the question for this week’s readings are forthcoming. Sorry for the delay!

So… How does transmedia as an industrial practice operate in a transnational, globalized media world? In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins describes the Wachowski’s recruiting efforts for different components of The Matrix story world as a planet-spanning, border-crossing creative collaboration between artists who admire each other’s work. Jenkins even positions the Wachowski’s interest in transmedia storytelling as the end result of a “fascination with what anthropologist Mimi Ito has described as Japan’s ‘media mix’ culture” (Jenkins 112).

Does this description of “collaborative authorship,” initiated by influential Western filmmakers, accurately account for the power dynamics that still exist between American media companies and the Asian artists recruited for The Animatrix? If transmedia is inherently transnational, what does that mean for concepts of cultural appropriation or colonization?

Wed, November 22 2017 » Future Cinema

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