Remediating Remediation

One of our assigned readings this week is Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. The central premise remediation theory is generally defined as the ongoing remixing of older media forms by newer ones in a never ending effort to establish perfect immediacy.  Per Bolter and Grusin:

The contemporary entertainment industry calls such borrowing "repurposing": to take a"property" from one medium and re-use it in another. With reuse comes a necessary redefinition, but there may be no conscious interplay between media.  The interplay happens, if at all, only for the reader or viewer who happens to know both versions and can compare them. (17)

For this post I attempted to "remediate" the concept of remediation.  Now you may be asking yourself just how one might accomplish such an undertaking? Well I started with a very old media form: the stage play, and a very old text: Romeo and Juliet. Then I scoured the web for modern day digital re-interpretations of the text. Why Romeo and Juliet? Well the tale itself, at least in it's most popular iteration by Shakespeare, is actually a remediation of ancient Italian folklore.  Per Wikipedia:

Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. Its plot is based on an Italian tale, translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1582. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but, to expand the plot, developed supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris. Believed written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597.

So what does a digital reinterpretation of a medieval reinterpretation of a prior work of prose which remediated an ancient folk tale look like? Let's see:




This first piece could best be described as a hypermediated remediation of the story.  The viewer experiences the story via a vast mix of media, genre's and styles. Seemingly random at first the various clips actually begin to make sense and tell a coherent narrative, particularly if the viewer is familiar with the tale. And who isn't? Interestingly if you look closely enough you can actually see a clip from the Leonardo Dicaprio version of Romeo and Juliet which in itself was a hypermediated remediation of the tale. Here is a clip of that one:



This film adaptation remediated the tale in two ways, first by preseting it via film (though it's hardly the first film adaptation of the tale), and secondly by juxtaposing the original Shakespearean language against a twenty first century post apocolyptic Los Angeles setting. In this film version the warring Capulet and Montegue familes are re-imagined as rival gangs. The score for the film used contemporary pop music to narrate the tale. The costume design is eclectic, at times contemporary and at other times ethereal seemingly borrowed from a bygone era. The conscious mixing of old and new presents a hypermediated remediation of the ancient tale. Interestingly this particular hypermediation though vastly different from the one before it achieves the same effect. However in this version even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the tale the story is greatly aided by the cues from the film's music and settings.



This remediation uses a particularly analog form in a new way. Simple hand drawings presented in meticulous sequence tell the tale via a rather simple but remarkably effective animation. There is hypermediation present here also, though less apparent than in the above samples. Can you guess what it is? The hypermediation here is represented by the appearance of digital captions and subtitles superimposed at times over the paper flip book.

In these examples we witness remediation occurring in both form and content. It could be argued that infinitely greater immediacy is achieved in these samples, (well the first two anyway) but what about perfect immediacy. By manipulating the conventions of style, dialogue, genre and setting, have the respective filmmakers actually achieved the penultimate goal of remediation?  I suppose that would depend upon how successful each iteration is at drawing the viewer into the narrative. What are your thoughts?