Novak Critical Review #10

Novak sets out to examine the effects and motivations behind the remediation and repurposing of Asian media, specifically song and dance from Bollywood film. The first example he looks at is the opening credits of "Ghost World," an American film based on a graphic novel, which features the protagonist Enid dancing along to a Bollywood dance sequence, "Jan Pehechan-Ho." This remediation, so distant from its original source material, sets the stage for themes of cultural disconnect and alienation.

Novak finds this example interesting because it showcases the way media creates a distance from authorship. Enid's copy-of-a-copy videotape of a foreign film is an extreme example of the separation that occurs between creator and created at the moment of creation. Novak's best explanation of what is going occurs in this quote: "And recognizing oneself as a part of this process—whether one is invested in nostalgia or newness— requires de-emphasizing the authority of an original media context in favor of its remediations." The varying degrees of irony, nostalgia, and newness that appear occur because of this deemphasis of authorship and and result in a distinct product, a remediation, which can then be interpreted in different ways.

One example of an interpretation gone wrong was the Heavenly Ten Stems' concert and ensuing protest. The key elements to be considered here were intent and the visibility of intent. The band intended to celebrate this music, but that intent was not entirely clear. Power dynamics is the other key issue; interpretation is inevitably skewed when there are expectations based on historically imbedded power relationships, such as that between the US and Asia.

Overall these examinations of remediations reveal a lot about music and media in general, and provide somewhat extreme cases to use as lenses to look at more subtle interactions between authorship and context elsewhere.