The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Today, I helped edit footage for a documentary on cigarette smuggling in Eastern Europe. I'd already done quite a bit of transcription and translation prep work -- hours of tedious mp3-playing and agonizing over how to dejargonize the elliptical mishmash of Ukrainian/Russian/Sovietese of border guards and customs agents. But today, I actually met with the filmmaker and editor at their cozy home-base overlooking the Charles and got to see the tangible fruits of my labor -- a highlighted print-out script representing the admixture of a few ghostly audio files and the random rare language serendipitously embedded in my brain. And this fruit was ready to be peeled, pared, and made into near-finished-product salad.

My only previous experience with film editing was on a field trip to the Harvard Film Archive, where I got to fiddle with a strip of The Man With the Movie Camera on a real-life Steenbeck. Unfortunately, the Mac-alicious contemporary version of this technology is somewhat anticlimactic. After watching the editor cobble together some frames through the time-honored technique of drag and drop, I realized that, as with Photoshop or html, it was probably something I could teach myself if I ever had the inclination (more on this later) and a weekend to spare. Nonetheless, it was thrilling to witness an undifferentiated lump of footage go through a pixel thresher and emerge as a choppy but utterly coherent storyline -- so thrilling, in fact, that I may have gasped and grinned and otherwise broadcast my delight with such infantile eagerness that the editor was a bit taken aback. "It's just so... cool!" I kept gushing, to which she responded with a resolute, "... is it? I guess." This is what the Lumiere Brothers' first audience must have been like.

I'm beginning to suspect -- and my reaction to Film Editing 101 only serves to confirm the suspicion -- that the singular feature uniting most grad students in the humanities (and literature especially) is a combination of moderate to above-average intelligence and total fucking idiocy. Of course, I mean the latter (mostly) in the Dostoevskian sense: humanities people are the holy fools of the world, the simpleminded Alyoshas who delight in miracles and magic and other increasingly marginalized byproducts of good, sober Protestant-work-ethic capitalism. We don't like real science; we like "evolutionary biology." We don't like real psychology; we like Lacan. And we certainly don't like to realize that the very stuff we study (be it film, literature, or art) is made by human hands, out of earthly matter, and is in many respects the end result of a very un-magical labor process. We may pay lip service to this realization by appending "historical context" and "reception history" to the bulleted list of interests on our CV, but that's not why we get into what we get into. We're in it for the illogical, the irrational, the fantasy cults of Beauty and Genius. Which is why, behind even the nice young professional editor using a perfectly utilitarian software editing program, there lurks the secret hand of the divine.

Which brings me to the corollary of the above suspicion: this is also why most grad students in the humanities (and literature especially!) are totally incapable of creating art. It's not just the old "... those who can't, teach" chestnut. I think it's specifically that, in spite of our extensive knowledge of the craft behind our object of study, we (and admittedly, I'm abstracting from personal experience here) are so enthralled with magical thinking that creation, rather than interpretation or explication, feels unbearably... well, mundane. When reading about various authors' writing habits, for example, I've often found myself marveling: You mean I actually have to write out a draft of a story? And take notes? And then revise? Agony! Why can't the divine hand simply guide my pen through three hundred pages of unimpeachable perfection? Sing to me, O Muse! Et cetera. And sitting at the editing table (well, computer desk) today, I found myself simultaneously enamored with the product and trying to elide the realia of the process; i.e., that the narrative was being created not through some chimerical Kuleshovean theory of montage, but through the simple act of cutting and pasting.

This is where the aforementioned inclination part comes in. I could write a story, or even make a film. I have, I should hope, the intellectual capacity and the creativity to maybe, possibly make something good. What I don't have is any Protestant work ethic, and that, my friends, means one of three options for my kind: PhD, Pizza Hut, or public high school. There is no middle ground.