The Anthologizing Impulse

The Anthologizing Impulse

A look at

The Tenth Anniversary Edition

of Reservoir Dogs

Excerpted from “The Anthologizing Impulse”, a chapter in the forthcoming book, Film in the Age of the DVD, by Mark Parker and Deborah Parker forthcoming from Duke University Press

The format of the DVD was largely set by the laserdiscs released by Criterion in the 80s and early 90s, in which several producers developed a durable repertoire of supplemental features. The persistence of this format, even as production has shifted from a company serving a small market of cinephiles to multinational film distributors addressing a mass market, suggests a kind of evolutionary fitness to these features. Even as DVDs have fallen more and more under the sway of marketing, the familiar supplements abide, albeit sometimes in a parodic form. Audio commentaries might lapse into diffuse exchanges of gratitude and congratulation among directors, actors, and producers; “making of” documentaries might become rehashes of the electronic press kits that accompanied the theatrical release of the movie or vanity productions to assuage exalted egos; but even such questionable efforts pay silent tribute to the originals from which they are derived.

This repertoire of features constitutes a kind of tradition in DVD production. One might imagine other features—in fact this repertoire is more enabled by the technology than determined by it—but there is a dominant model, and as such it deserves some critical scrutiny. [1] This chapter argues that supplementary features largely fulfill archival and contextualizing functions, and that they do so in an unexamined but tendentious way. [2] The dominant approach to features scants certain ways of thinking about film, even as it provides the basis for a suggestive reconsideration of how we approach such cultural products. Ultimately, this tradition is not only a choice about how audiences should engage with the films they watch but about the nature of knowledge itself.

The contours of this tradition can best be seen by comparison with what might be termed its opposite, approaches that stress analysis and critical inquiry. Supplements that contextualize film tend to leave much up to the viewer. [3] They provide the raw material for arguments that viewers might make about what they see. They seek to produce what historical thinkers of an earlier time termed “a picture of great detail.” One can imagine, however, supplements that take a more directly critical approach: that address questions such as the nature of the image, the specifics of cinematic representation, the political or social implications of the dramaturgy, or the particular thesis of the film. Such approaches are more analytical than edifying, documentary, or historical. In them, the focus returns to the film itself, not to conditions and circumstances. [4]

It would be, of course, mistaken to push this opposition too far, as it represents tendencies and not exclusive categories. An archival approach cannot be undertaken without a principle of selection, which, in itself, presumes a kind of analysis. Some materials must be preferred, and there must be some logic to such choices. Conversely, no critical argument can be sustained without the benefits of evidence drawn from an archive, without the details and circumstances that give force to the argument’s claims. But the distinction is clear enough for our purposes here.

This opposition brings into focus the role of the DVD producer, who more or less presides over the features that accompany the film. An analytical approach would call on the producer to sustain certain claims about the film; the features, taken as a whole, might present some argument (or arguments) with clear direction. The viewer would then simply follow the process, which, having a specific demonstrative or persuasive end in sight, might be termed closed. An archival or anthologizing approach, however, would be less oriented toward a given conclusion. It would shape a viewer’s encounter with the material, but not with the finality of a critical argument. It would seek to be suggestive and edifying rather than prescriptive, and it would enable viewers to form their own arguments or sustain their own theses about the work and its circumstances. [5] Here a DVD producer would stand as a kind of mediator between a vast archive of related materials and relevant knowledge and the viewer, and not an authority with a particular viewpoint to present. [6] In such a case viewers are called upon to do a certain kind of work, to produce meaning, and not to simply trace another person’s production of knowledge. Such a producer would implicitly preside over a more interactive relation between viewer and material.

We do not argue that this choice was made deliberately. Its survival owes to its fitness, its subtle accord with ideas about film current among both directors and audiences. For instance, the empowerment of viewers implicit in the anthologizing venture resonates with remarks about interpretation commonly made by directors. Consider, for instance, Quentin Tarantino’s remarks on meaning in the audio commentary to Reservoir Dogs:

I don’t like to explain subtextual things in the movie because anything you’ve thought and saw and have come up with yourself I want you to just keep it . . . I do what I do and I know what [how] I felt about it and everything but then it’s all for you now. I like the idea I’m like the opposite of an Oliver Stone concept where he has one idea that if a million people see his movie he wants a million people to come out with that idea . . . a million people see my movie I want everyone to have made a million different slightly different movies in their heads.

Tarantino’s celebration of the open text, with its expansive, democratic faith in the participation of audiences in the creation of meaning, is something of a commonplace among directors and critics. [7] The assertion that audiences “make” a movie of their own is more notable more for its exuberance than its singularity. But such a stance also harmonizes with more diffuse ideologies of consumption, in which participation receives often outsized emphasis in the exchange of goods and services, making it particularly amenable to audiences in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. [8] Put simply, audiences currently prefer being led to being told.

The archivist tendencies in DVD supplementary features run deep. It is worth recalling that the development of The Criterion Collection was bound up with the ventures in educational software undertaken by its sister company Voyager, that both Bob and Aleen Stein had deep commitments to as well as backgrounds in such undertakings, and that many of the first DVD producers worked with Criterion within this early model. The question then becomes what particular producers have made of such a tradition, how their work shapes the interpretation of film and what limitations such a model might pose for the study of film. To this end, we offer three case studies of archival anthologies. The cases are chosen, first of all, to display obvious successes, but also to represent the range of such initiatives.

Reservoir Dogs

The “Tenth Anniversary Special Edition” of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was produced by Mark Rance, who, while working at The Criterion Collection during the early nineties, oversaw several projects with innovative supplemental features. Rance, who studied film at MIT and has directed several documentaries, often gives great prominence to the circumstances of production in his work. In a 2004 interview, he noted that the filmmaking was “one of the least documented art forms in our society” and that DVD editions offer a “rare window of opportunity” for the creation of such materials. [9] One could, in fact, produce something reminiscent of the archives commissioned by the WPA during the depression. For example, Rance’s edition of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia contains a much praised, hour-long documentary, That Moment: Magnolia Diary, in which he followed the director’s work on set, and the audio commentary to his 1993 Criterion edition of Lord of the Flies centers upon the day-to-day details of director Peter Brook’s low-budget, guerilla filmmaking tactics. The 2002, two-disc Artisan edition of Reservoir Dogs is one of the finest examples of intelligent archival work, in which a DVD producer stands between the film and a vast archive of materials, some of which are rapidly vanishing.

Reservoir Dogs had, by the time of this special edition, taken on an iconic status within the so-called independent film movement of the early nineties. Enough time had also passed to give both occasion and perspective for a retrospective look at Tarantino’s spectacular debut as writer/director, and Rance’s production builds this into an overarching theme of the edition. He does this through a deft collection of testimony with different levels of specificity. On the first disc, a feature entitled “Original Interviews” provides several chatty, incidental reminiscences by actors Chris Penn, Kirk Baltz, Michael Masden, Tim Roth, and producer/actor Lawrence Bender that emphasize the antic qualities of the production process. This section concludes with Tarantino himself, who provides a short recapitulation of his unusual path to success as writer/director, in which the caprice and happenstance of the film industry figures largely.

The second disc builds upon this more conversational material. In a section titled “Class of ’92,” Rance aligns Reservoir Dogs with its historical moment (or at least its moment in film history) through interviews with the directors of several films featured with Tarantino’s debut at the Sundance Festival. The presentation, while framed with opening remarks by film reviewer Amy Taubin, is not crudely tendentious; Rance trusts viewers to make connections among this distinguished group of directors, which includes Alex Rockwell (In the Soup), Chris Munch (The Hours and the Times), Katt Shae (Poison Ivy), and Tom Kalin (Swoon), and perhaps to contrast Tarantino with some of the more marginal alumni of this class. The independent movement, if one can call it that, has apparently had a wide variety of destinations for the group, and the conditions that were so favorable to the emergence of Tarantino have, in the eyes of several of these directors, largely vanished.

Rance’s archival predilections also inform features like disc two’s “Tributes and Dedications,” which takes shape from an almost bibliographic impulse. Tarantino’s original script contains a flamboyant list of dedications to a variety of filmmakers, actors, and writers who worked on classically noir material. In Rance’s short, “Dedicated

To . . . ,” Tarantino comments on each figure, identifying them and then remarking on their significance to him at the time. Such a feature briefly but suggestively sets out the coordinates for Reservoir Dogs in terms of film noir, crime literature, currently unfashionable sub-genres of Hollywood film, and youthful but well-informed hero-worship. Moreover, Rance’s editing of the material (clearly taken, like much of the original Tarantino material for the disk, from one interview) emphasizes yet another of the disc’s themes—the film’s reliance on storytelling as a way of knowing the world. Tarantino’s rapid, anecdotal sketch of each figure in the list recalls one of the central pleasures of watching Reservoir Dogs, each character’s creation of a persona through acts of storytelling.

Other features on the disc echo Tarantino’s contextualizing remarks. “The Film Noir Web” fashions original interviews and other footage into an excellent overview of the genre. An introduction in five parts traces its origins and rise, relying on remarks by directors Mike Hodges, John Boorman, and Stephen Frears; writer Donald Westlake; and critics Robert Polito and Woody Haut. This is a formidable collection of contributors, as each director made a movie that clearly defined the genre for its time. Notably, none of their comments addresses Reservoir Dogs directly; Rance again leaves the application of this material largely to the viewer. The format proves crucial to this presentation, as a glance at the menu to this section [see figure: “The Film Noir Web” menu] shows clearly. Viewers might simply chose the “play them all” function, but they also have the freedom to choose the order in which to view the interviews (or not to view them, as the case might be). Moreover, viewers who do choose the “play them all” button would find that the order of play does not match that on the menu presentation. This in itself indicates that the format here has begun to take further advantage of digital form, which allows alternatives to linear presentation. The interviews are not designed for a particular order of use; they form an archive for the viewer to explore in a more interactive fashion.

The last option on this menu exploits the digital form of the DVD further. “The Noir Files” offers another level of interactivity. The menu [see figure: “The Noir Files”] provides access to a series of biographies of directors, writers, actors, and characters. These are addressed both directly and indirectly, as some buttons link to mentions of a character or film within the biographies. The format here approximates a hyper-textual environment, allowing viewers a choice of movement within the archive.

These features demonstrate the value of the archivalist tendency. Rance combines newly developed archival material with more general information presented in new form--essentially addressing the double focus of the archival impulse. On the one hand there are the interviews, valuable primary sources for film scholarship and appreciation, on the other there is abundant evidence of mindfulness about the presentation of material for viewers. Between the raw archival material and the viewer is the producer, whose activities constitute an ongoing deliberation about the ends and the efficacy of supplemental features.

Much the same self-consciousness about presentation appears in the production of other features to this edition of Reservoir Dogs. There is a perfectly competent audio track, one that blends many voices drawn from different interviews into an unusually smooth discussion of the film. But perhaps more interesting to students of film are three commentaries by critics that do not follow the usual protocols. Rance arranged for three critics (Amy Taubin of Film Comment, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, and Emanuel Levy of Screen International) to provide essays on Reservoir Dogs to which he would match clips from the film. Hence unlike the usual head-to-tail audio commentary, in which the image largely determines the direction of the remarks, in these features the critic’s argument dictates the accompanying image. Instead of describing the image, these features allow the image to exemplify the critic’s points. The result is a compact presentation that allows for sustained development of an argument. Taubin’s essay zeroes in on Tim Roth’s performance, which allows her to examine the film’s reflexivity (Roth as English actor who plays an American policeman playing a gangster, the general performance of masculinity in the film). Travers is able to make a fairly complex argument about the role of music in the film that builds to a more general consideration of Tarantino’s use of references to popular culture. And Levy is able to provide a genuine critique of Reservoir Dogs, examining the strengths of the film as well as its weaknesses.

This format, like others that appear on DVDs, is not entirely new. In addition to head-to-tail audio commentaries, some early Criterion laserdiscs offered so-called “visual essays” consisting of words on the screen alternating with film clips (see King Kong). But it runs slightly counter to the more general archiving tendency of this disk as well as that of current DVD supplements. These commentaries emphasize the critical function more than collection or development of archival materials. More importantly, such features imply different presumptions about the role of the viewer, who here is more in the position of being told than provided with contextual material. Rather than facilitators or mediators of archival material, this form presents Levy, Travers, and Taubin in the role of authorities.

This critical spirit, albeit in a playful form, is much in evidence in another of the disc’s features. The first selection of “K-Billy Radio,” appears at first to be an interview with one Samson Beck, a Texas inmate queried by a French magazine about the authenticity of Reservoir Dogs. Of course, no such magazine or inmate exists, and the selection is ultimately (though not immediately) identifiable as parodic. As the interview unwinds, one is amused by the witty and noirish patter of the fictitious prisoner as one is led to ask questions about the status of other archival materials on DVD and the archival function itself. “Boat Drinks,” as the DVD producer credits reveal, is one of director Eric Saks’ bits of “culture jamming,” interventions that force a more reflexive attitude toward technology on audiences.

The Reservoir Dogs Ten Years Special Edition DVD, like the Criterion Collection The Battle of Algiers, shrewdly marshals an array of archival materials, both existing and new. Each uses experts not so much to establish an authoritative interpretation of the film as to engage viewers in the question of significance. Both excel in pointing out the limits of the archival function, The Battle of Algiers edition through the printed Solinas interview, and the Reservoir Dogs edition through the humorous intervention of “Boat Drinks.” But the Reservoir Dogs edition pursues its archival goals with an eye to formal innovation that takes advantage of the digital format. It not only collects archival information; in such supplements as “The Film Noir Web,” “The Noir Files,” and “Critics Commentaries” it begins the process of thinking about how such material might be best presented on a DVD.

[1] Kay Hoffman’s 2004 remarks in a review of a 2001 conference are still apt: “Given the critical mass of educational and intellectual material now available on DVD, it is surprising that only now have academics, film historians, archivists, and people involved in educational media begun to reflect on the social, political, aesthetic, and economic value of DVDS, DVD-ROMs, and the Internet” (162). Aaron Barlow, in an overview of special edition DVDs in The DVD Revolution, notes rightly that while “the range of possibilities for special edition movie presentation on DVD is quite extensive” (108), the capacities of the form have not yet been fully exploited.

[2] Often the special edition or anthology receives welcome but uncritical praise, an in Tim Page’s celebration of Criterion’s offerings: “which might be described as some sort of fantasical combination for motion pictures of the honor roll, the Louvre, the Modern Library, and the Norton Critical Editions.” The shaping power and framing effects of “making of documentaries” have been examined by Craig Hight in “Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions,” Velvet Light Trap 56 (Fall 2005): 4-17. Hight draws upon work done by Robert Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus, “Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View: The Fight Club DVD as Digital Closet,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 19.1 (2002): 21-43.

[3] Patrick Vondereau, building upon Truffaut’s distinction between reading a film and “consulting” a video, defines the DVD thus: “I understand the DVD primarily as a box of materials, a collection of sources and essays about those sources” (127).

[4] Calls for the cinematic equivalent of bookish philological rigor have come from Kurt G˛rtner and Stephan Dolezel. G˛rtner writes: “An electronic edition should be more than an electronic archive of the transmitted documents of an author’s work; desirably, it should also be the product of an (sic) critical analysis of its transmission.” (53). Dolezel takes a slightly different methodological approach: “A modern film edition must naturally follow the history of production and – whenever possible – of reception, and it should embed the film studied in its respective historical and journalistic context” (57). See G˛rtner, “Philological Requirements for Digital Historical-Critical Text Editions and their Application to Critical Editions of Films” and Stephan Dolezel, “Methodological Standards of Historical-Critical Editions of Historical Film Sources held at the IWF.” Both articles appear in Celluloid Goes Digital: Historical-Critical Editions of Films on DVD and the Internet. Proceedings of the Fist International Trier Conference on Film and New Media, October 2002, Martin Loiperdinger, ed., Trier: WVT Wissenshchaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003.

[5] Robert Fischer sketches a similar modality for the DVD in “The Criterion Collection: DVD Editions for Cinephiles,” in Celluloid Goes Digital: Historical-Critical Editions of Films of DVD and the Internet., Loiperdinger, Martin (ed), Trier: WVT Wissenshaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003, pp. 99-108. In a discussion of The Criterion Collection’s edition of Spartacus, he offers the descriptive term “study center,” a phrase that he develops from a passing reference in Cahiers du Cinema.

[6] One need not, of course, exaggerate the DVD producer’s authority to make this argument. Clearly producers do not have complete control of supplementary material. But there is a telling, if limited agency involved in the production of some editions.

[7] Steven Masters, in an engaging letter to the editor of Sight and Sound, articulates these feelings neatly. Praising the “textual democracy of the DVD form,” he asserts that an “interest in DVD need not be reflexive consumerism: it should be a valuable commitment to the future of film form” (64). See “DVD’d We Stand,” Sight and Sound 8.7 (July 1998), p. 64. An editorial response to Masters’ letter in the next issue reaffirms this stance: “Digital technology will never satisfy the purists, but it may now be the only way the riches of the cinema’s history will find a new audience” (3).

[8] Will Brooker, recalling the activism of many fans of Star Wars, notes that “fans have the stubborn determination to resist the revisions they dislike” (38). He also discusses new forms of viewing, in which fans use DVD functions like slow motion to create different and personal engagements with film. See Derek Johnson, “Star Wars Fans, DVD, and Cultural Ownership: An Interview with Will Brooker,” Velvet Light Trap 56 (Fall 2005): 36-44.

[9] Interview with the authors, 6/15/2005, London, England.