Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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Audiovisual Literacy and the Ghost of Silent

Cinema in Contemporary YouTube Clips

Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

To cite this article: Mathias Bonde Korsgaard (2019): Audiovisual Literacy and the Ghost
of Silent Cinema in Contemporary YouTube Clips, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, DOI:
10.1080/10509208.2019.1593017

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2019.1593017

Published online: 14 May 2019.

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QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO
https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2019.1593017

Audiovisual Literacy and the Ghost of Silent Cinema in

Contemporary YouTube Clips
Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

Writing about YouTube in 2008, Henry Jenkins notes that, despite

much that is new about YouTube, “there is also much that is old.”1
Jenkins explains how, for example, the “do-it-yourself (DIY) culture sur-
rounding YouTube has clear precedents in other older types of DIY cul-
ture. Obviously, his contention also applies to the content that is found
on YouTube—much of it is indeed old, seeing that it was produced
long before the launch of YouTube in 2005. To name but one example,
you can find some of the earliest ever recorded moving images on
YouTube in the shape of early silent cinema (say, the work of the
Lumi
ere brothers, Georges Meli
es, Thomas Edison, and several others).
Even for material on YouTube that is in fact “new,” you often get the
eerie sense that there is also something “old” about such clips and the
manner in which they are produced. They often share striking formal
similarities with pre-established kinds of film and video. This similarity
even extends to the works of early silent cinema just mentioned—several
contemporary YouTube clips share a surprising affinity with early silent
cinema (Appendix).
If seen through the lens of some of the early foundational work on new
media—like Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation in 2000, Lev Manovich’s The
Language of New Media in 2001, or even Jenkins’ own Convergence Culture
in 2006—this fact is hardly surprising.2 Even as these early key texts on
new media pursue different ideas, they also seem to share the belief that
“What is new about new media is … also old and familiar.”3 Manovich, in
his book The Language of New Media, incidentally turns to silent cinema
as a point of comparison, as he continually returns to Dziga Vertov’s
Soviet silent film Man With a Movie Camera (1929) in order to illustrate
how “many of the allegedly unique principles of new media can already be
found in cinema.”4 Others have also touched upon the specific relation
between YouTube clips and early silent cinema, for example, Teresa Rizzo,
who has linked certain YouTube practices to Tom Gunning’s concept of

Mathias Bonde Korsgaard is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at Aarhus University. His work focuses
on music video, audiovisual studies, and remixing. He has published several pieces in international journals and
anthologies, is the author of Music Video After MTV (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor of the online film jour-
nal 16:9.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 M. B. KORSGAARD

early silent cinema as “a cinema of attractions,”5 calling YouTube a “new

cinema of attractions.”6
Perhaps these peculiar connections between silent cinema and contem-
porary YouTube clips are entirely coincidental. In another regard, it is
tempting to consider the possibility that nothing is coincidental about the
ways in which the language of moving images seems to be—perhaps partly
intuitively—rediscovered in these YouTube clips. Accordingly, this article
will pursue the argument that certain YouTube clips can be taken as an
indication of the fact that more and more people are becoming audiovisu-
ally literate: that is, that they are naturally adept at using cameras, micro-
phones, and software to create their own audiovisual texts. By way of three
different examples—the famous “Charlie Bit My Finger” (actually titled
“Charlie bit my finger—again!”), the clips of internet magician Zach King,
and the phenomenon of recut trailers—it will be demonstrated how the
basic filmic premises upon which these clips rest, harken all the way back
to the days of silent cinema. In this way, it is possible to retrace the evolu-
tion of the language of film as first undertaken by the first film directors
more than a century ago in the uncannily similar audiovisual practices of
the amateur producers of today. Finally, the exploration of these examples
will lead into a definition of what audiovisual literacy more precisely
encompasses—as well as a discussion of whether or not being audiovisually
literate necessarily entails any kind of actual empowerment on part of the
media user.

Silent cinema resurrected

As mentioned in the introduction, I am not the first to note the similarities
between early cinema and YouTube clips. In an article on this connection,
Teresa Rizzo focuses in particular on the re-emergence on YouTube of
train films (harking all the way back to the Lumi
ere brothers’ L’Arrivee
d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat from 1895) and dancing films (a tradition
that evokes some of Edison’s earliest films).7 However, the correspondences
between early cinema and YouTube extend far beyond these phenomena.
As already indicated, it is not necessarily surprising that we can find such
media historical lineages—theories of remediation, remixing, media conver-
gence, and cultural appropriation all rest on the idea that any kind of cul-
tural creation builds upon previous cultural creation. Similarly, the time
leading up to the invention of cinema was a period of intense technological
progress on a number of levels—as can analogously be argued of the path
the innovations in digital technology have taken in the past decades.
Gunning has, for example, proposed that the periods surrounding the
beginning and end of the 20th century seem to mirror each other, not only
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 3

in the sense that they are marked by such major innovations in technology,
but also seeing that both periods arguably privilege an aesthetics
of spectacle.8
Even as there are several kinds of clips on YouTube that of course bear
no such direct resemblance to past traditions, there are still equally many
clips that make us recall past audiovisual modes of expression—sometimes
unwittingly, sometimes not. Take for example a famous early (dare I even
say “classic”?) YouTube clip, “Charlie Bit My Finger.” The fascination that
has brought this clip close to having been watched a billion times is argu-
ably the same fascination that drove the early Lumi
ere film Le Repas de
Bebe from 1895. Apart from presenting similar situations—cute children,
that is—they are also strikingly similar on a formal level. They are both
short, feature no edits whatsoever, and even as “Charlie Bit My Finger”
also features sound, color, and camera movement (contrary to what was
technically possible at the time of Le Repas de Bebe), these differences
appear not so much as conscious choices on part of the father who filmed
the clip, as they are simply the result of technological developments on a
general level. Howard Davies-Carr, the father of the family who filmed the
“Charlie” clip, simply decided to film his children in the same way that the
Lumi
eres in their time would simply film their family and immediate sur-
roundings. Anyone who has children and a camera of any kind will prob-
ably attest to the fact that it is a surprisingly natural impulse to point the
camera in their direction. And anyone who has spent time online will also
know that there is only one other subject that is close to outranking chil-
dren in terms of being cute and likeable and thereby capable of attracting
the attention of cameras: Cats. One of the main manifestations of the
photogenic nature of cats is the phenomenon known as lolcats, that is, pho-
tos or films of cats doing something funny and/or adorable (often even in
the presence of children). The big reveal here is of course that the Lumi
ere
brothers were already there more than 120 years ago, filming some of the
first ever lolcats to put it in anachronistic terms, in both Le Dejeuner du
Chat (1895) and La Petite Fille et son Chat (1899). And even before the
Lumi
ere brothers, Edison’s assistant William Dickson filmed cats in The

Boxing Cats just like Etienne-Jules Marey shot serial photographs of a fall-
ing cat with his pre-cinematic invention, the chronophotographic gun
(both in 1894).
But it is not only this realist strand of early silent cinema that finds an
equivalent on YouTube. The formalism of the Lumi
ere brothers’ contem-
porary fellow countryman Georges Meli
es is also eerily present in the clips
made by the video magician Zach King. His clips were originally made for
Vine, a now defunct short-form video hosting service, where users could
share clips, or so-called Vines, lasting no longer than six seconds. King
4 M. B. KORSGAARD

uses these six seconds to create short visual gags and video magic. While
some of his clips use somewhat advanced digital techniques, many of them
are simply predicated on the trick editing that Meli
es was among the first
to employ. One example of this could be the 2013 clip titled “How to
Impress a Girl,” in which he uses masked jump-cut editing to magically
conjure first flowers, then—again—a cat. Compared to Meli
es, the similar-
ities are obvious. One of Meli
es’ early works like for instance Escamotage
d’une Dame au The^atre Robert-Houdin (1896) already employs the exact
same editing ploy—where Meli
es is able to first make a woman magically
disappear, then reconjuring her as a skeleton before finally bringing her
back from the dead, now alive and well. Even as King manages to partly
wrong-foot us by adding camera motion in postproduction (in contrast to
the static camera of Meli
es), the clips often come off as being nothing
more than updated digital versions of Meli
es’ early movie magic.
As a final example, consider the practice of fanmade recut trailers where
well-known movies are provided with fanedited trailers that most often
present the movies as if they belonged to an altogether different genre. In
the first example of this practice to go viral, Robert Ryang recasts Stanley
Kubrick’s 1980 classic horror movie The Shining as a family comedy drama.
In a sense, what these recut trailers do is indeed very similar to the experi-
ments carried out by the Soviet silent directors of the 1920s in the so-called
Kuleshov workshops. By resequencing footage from the original films, these
reedited trailers demonstrate the reality of the Kuleshov effect in that they
clearly show us how meaning does not necessarily reside in the shot, but
rather in-between the shots—in the editing. Thereby it is possible to trans-
form the image of Jack Nicholson’s character kissing a dead body—a truly
horrifying image in the real movie—into something romantic in the recut
trailer. The underlying principle is the very same as in Kuleshov’s famous
experiment where the same image of an actor changes meaning depending
on the image that follows it. The analogy extends even further, seeing that
the Soviet directors allegedly reedited copies of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film
Intolerance as part of their experiments in order to learn more about how
the meaning of the individual images change when reedited in a different
sequence.9 This change of meaning is without a doubt very similar to what
happens in the fanmade trailers—and in others kinds of audiovisual remix-
ing as well.

Audiovisual literacy
The question remains, of course: Why do these YouTube clips resemble
something made (more than) a century ago? I believe that the answer is
rather simple: because today common people have the means to experiment
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 5

with creating moving images in the same way that a selected elite group of
filmmakers had a century ago. Whether consciously or not, YouTube film-
makers are making many of the same discoveries all anew, approaching
and learning the language of film in the same way that the very first film
directors did back then. In this respect, the question is one of literacy, or
more precisely: Clips such as these can be taken as an indication that
increasingly more people are able to and find it natural to express them-
selves through recorded sounds and moving images.
The concept of literacy has also changed lately, in accordance with gen-
eral media historical changes. Originally the concept of literacy was linked
to the ability to read and write using language (and in terms of techno-
logical development connected to Gutenberg and the invention of the
printing press). In recent times however it has become common to speak
of multiple literacies or literacies in the plural.10 This plurality is not only
to be taken in the sense that there are multiple differing conceptions of
what constitutes being literate, but also in the sense that there are differing
kinds of literacies, ranging from the classical print-, literature- and lan-
guage-based literacy, to an audiovisual literacy associated with film, televi-
sion, and electronic media, to a current digital or general media literacy
associated with digital media.11 In fact, there has even been a tendency for
this concept of digital literacy to encompass all other kinds of literacy
as well.
In relation to these YouTube clips, I find it necessary to return to the
older notion of a specifically audiovisual literacy and to try and disentangle
it from the concept of digital literacy—at least in part. Because while it
may be true that using audiovisual means of expression is an integrated
part of navigating the digital media landscape, these two kinds of literacy
are certainly not the same or reducible to one another. Of course, the view
that we are all now potential creators of audiovisual media and not just
passive recipients is certainly widespread and in no way a new claim—no
matter whether we prefer Jenkins’ concept of “convergence culture,” Axel
Bruns’ concept of produsage with an “s,” Nicholas Bourriaud’s notion of
“postproduction,” Lawrence Lessig’s idea of a shift from a “Read Only-
Culture” to a “Read/Write-Culture,” or the even older notion of the pro-
sumer, first coined by Alvin Toffler.12 In fact, these thoughts date back
even further, seeing that this fusion of consumption and production was
already predicted by Marshall McLuhan in 1964 when he wrote that
“electric automation unites production, consumption, and learning in an
inextricable process.”13
Nonetheless, it is highly likely that we have only even seen the tip of the
iceberg in terms of how profoundly our ways of expressing ourselves will
change—and how common it will become, or indeed has become, to use
6 M. B. KORSGAARD

moving images and recorded sounds as a primary means of communica-

tion. The generations that grow up now are as familiar with video cameras
and editing suites as they are with pen and paper (maybe even more so),
and it is increasingly common to have the tools to produce audiovisual
material readily at hand (also if only even in the shape of “found material”
as opposed to self-produced audiovisual recordings as is the case with the
recut trailers). As Julie Russo and Francesca Coppa put it:
It’s already hard to imagine our culture without ubiquitous access to audiovisual
content from across the amateur-professional spectrum and the ensuing predilection
to share, modify, and spread it. In less than a decade, video has become a media
vernacular in unprecedented ways. 14

Even as the concept of “audiovisual literacy” to which I propose to return

is an old one that first gained traction in the 1980s following the new wave
of home video equipment, having a video camera in your hands as a young
person was still relatively rare then compared with today where many dif-
ferent kinds of technological devices have built in cameras. So perhaps the
audiovisual literacy is only maturing just now.
Historically, this audiovisual literacy has surely been long underway, at
least since the advent of cinema. More than a century of watching and lis-
tening to film (and later on television) has certainly taught many people
how to “read” audiovisually. However, most understandings of what it
means to be (media) literate involve not only the capacity to read but also
to write.15 Although it has indeed long been common for the media user
to be able to decode (or “read”) audiovisual content, it is only fairly
recently that it has become a widespread phenomenon for users to be able
to encode (or “write”) audiovisually. In a sense, reading and writing in fact
become partly entangled in each other. Making a recut trailer, for example,
is predicated first on a careful act of reading the source material—so the
first step towards creation is in this case in fact analysis.
In fact, even our own reading of these recut trailers involves a feeling of
being audiovisually literate: much of the humor of these clips is based
upon the viewer’s familiarity with the audiovisual conventions and genre
codes being subverted—and thus our capacities as audiovisual readers are
brought into play. In order to be in on the joke, we must be familiar with
the conventions of the trailer genre, those of the original film and the hor-
ror genre, as well as those of the family comedy drama that the film is
apparently turned into through creative editing, the addition of a voice-
over and Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” as the underlying soundtrack.
Something similar applies to Zach King’s clips—they invite the viewer to
ponder how they were made. And several of them have encouraged people
not only to try to figure out how King made the clips—but also to recreate
them, thereby again fostering a seamless movement from reading into
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 7

writing. For example, the clip “Ping Pong Balls for Breakfast,” in which
King is seemingly able to transform a ping-pong ball into an egg, has
spawned numerous user-generated remakes and tutorials on how to achieve
the effect of the clip. To return to the above McLuhan quote, people are
indeed learning how to use audiovisual media by turning from consumption
into production—or, as Henry Jenkins has more recently put it, these acts
of appropriation are best understood “as a process by which students learn
by taking culture apart and putting it back together.”16

Varying levels of literacy

In the same passage, Jenkins notes how the “digital remixing of media con-
tent makes visible the degree to which all cultural expression builds on
what has come before it.”17 This point clearly resonates with all three
examples presented in this article, even as the recut trailer is the only actual
remix. However, although the clips may be similar in this respect, they are
of course also dissimilar in many other ways. In terms of their technical
sophistication, King’s clips and the recut trailers far outrank the Charlie
clip (although it of course outranks them in terms of views). There is a
notable difference in the level of literacy between a young, media-savvy
user like Zach King (who also has a Media Studies background) compared
to that of a regular family father like Howard Davies-Carr of the Charlie
family. King’s clips involve elaborate editing and he has estimated that they
often take around a full 24 hours to create, whereas the Charlie clip did
most likely not take any longer to create than the time the clip lasts. It
may be true that more and more people are becoming audiovisually liter-
ate, but they are becoming so to varying degrees and in different ways.
This variable range of audiovisually literacy has also been one of the
main criticisms leveled towards the more celebratory views of the new
user-driven culture: that it is unevenly distributed, for example, in terms of
age, cultural background, and access to equipment and education. Put
otherwise—and somewhat humorously by Robert K. Logan in his book on
McLuhan—older people tend to limit their use of digital audiovisual media
to “online banking, shopping, and booking travel.”18 Or as S. Elizabeth
Bird puts it, “the majority of people … are not produsers.”19 To this point
it should be added that the differences among those who are in fact pro-
dusers are also vast, as a comparison between King and Davies-
Carr confirms.
The early optimism of Jenkins, Bruns, Lessig, and others for whom user-
driven culture was mostly seen as a means of participation, democratiza-
tion, and liberation has since been counterbalanced by more skeptical
approaches—and sometimes even by the authors themselves (for example,
8 M. B. KORSGAARD

Jenkins has acknowledged that “there is nothing about participatory culture

that would inevitably lead to progressive outcomes.”20 Certainly, being able
to express yourself is not the same as having the power to be heard; and
having the power to be heard is not the same as being able to affect actual
change in the world—or even the same as having something worthwhile to
say. Also, it is no rare event that even seemingly innocent and joyful phe-
nomena as “Charlie Bit My Finger” and Zach King become co-opted by
corporate media or somehow commercialized. Today, some of Zach King’s
work has lost most of the amateur charm of being labors of love made by
some guy in his garage, seeing that he has had several sponsorship commit-
ments and has been featured in many commercials. And as for the Charlie-
family, Howard Davies-Carr has estimated that the video has approximately
earned them 1,000,000£ (in a 2017 clip titled “Charlie Bit My Finger 10-
Year Anniversary”). At an earlier point, Davies-Carr also explained that he
did not actually want to profit from a video featuring his children, but
when he discovered that unlicensed merchandise was being sold, he appar-
ently had no choice but to create his own line of merchandise.21
If you subscribe to the belief that money equals power, then of course it
is potentially empowering to be audiovisually literate. But if we are to
believe that literacy also entails “furthering the rights of self-expression and
cultural participation,”22 then the value of these clips is more uncertain.
Some value may be attached to the fact that King’s clips have spawned sev-
eral imitators, thereby enabling a partial spread of audiovisual literacy.
However, as David Buckingham has succinctly pointed out, “activity should
not be confused with agency.”23 In other words, in one view, we may be
approaching a situation in which being audiovisually literate is increasingly
more common—a situation, to rephrase the quote from Bird, in which it
may in fact be the majority of people that are produsers, even if only on a
very small scale.24 In another view, it still remains to be seen to what extent
practices like these are genuinely empowering.

Notes
1. Jenkins, “What Happened Before YouTube?” in Confessions of an ACA-Fan.
2. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media; Manovich, The Language
of New Media; Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
3. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 270.
4. Manovich, Language, p. 11.
5. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions. Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space–Frame–Narrative.
6. Rizzo, YouTube: The New Cinema of Attractions,” in Scan: Journal of Media
Arts Culture.
7. Rizzo, YouTube New Cinema.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 9

8. Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the

Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” in Rethinking
Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, p. 51.
9. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, p. 95.
10. Belshaw, What Is Digital Literacy? A Pragmatic Investigation, p. 17; Cope and
Kalantzis, “From Literacy to ‘Multiliteracies’: Learning to Mean in the New
Communications Environment”, in English Studies in Africa; Lankshear and Knobel,
New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning, p. 32; Livingstone, “Media
Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and Communication Technologies,”
in Communication Review, p. 7.
11. See, for example, Tornero and Varis, Media Literacy and New Humanism, pp. 31–32;
Lin et al., “Understanding New Media Literacy: An Explorative Theoretical
Framework,” in Educational Technology & Society, pp. 161.
12. Jenkins, Convergence Culture; Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From
Production to Produsage; Bourriaud, Postproduction; Lessig, Remix: Making Art and
Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy; Toffler, The Third Wave, p. 282ff).
13. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 304. See also McLuhan and Nevit, Take Today:
The Executive as Dropout, p. 4. For that matter, it is in a sense already suggested in
Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” from the 1930s—see Benjamin, Work of Art, in Illuminations.
14. Russo and Coppa, “Fan/Remix Video (a Remix),” in Transformative Works
and Cultures.
15. Hobbs, “The Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement,” Journal of
Communication, p. 16; Hoechsmann and Poyntz, Media Literacies: A Critical
Introduction, p. 16; Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,
p. 170; Kubey, “What is Media Literacy and Why is it Important?” Television
Quarterly, p. 25.
16. Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the
21st Century, p. 55.
17. Ibid.
18. Logan, Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan, p. 43.
19. Bird, “Are We All Produsers Now?” Cultural Studies, p. 504.
20. Jenkins, “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture,’” in Cultural Studies, p. 285.
21. Masters, “TWO British Brothers Have Made Internet History by Clocking Up 250
MILLION YouTube Hits,” in The Sun.
22. Livingstone, Media Literacy, p. 6.
23. Buckingham, “A Commonplace Art? Understanding Amateur Media Production,” in
Video Cultures, p. 43.
24. Bird, All Produsers Now?

Acknowledgments
This article was submitted in relation to the 4th World Conference on Media & Mass
Communication in Bangkok, Thailand, 2018.

Funding
This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under Grant num-
ber [DFF-4089-00149] (“Audiovisual Literacy and New Audiovisual Short-Forms”).
10 M. B. KORSGAARD

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Moscow: UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education.

Appendix: YouTube Clips

HDCYT. Charlie Bit My Finger—Again! YouTube (2007 May 22). <www.youtube.com/
watch?v¼_OBlgSz8sSM>
King, Zach. How to Impress a Girl–Vine. YouTube (2013 November 10). <www.you-
tube.com/watch?v¼xjKANA4WuL8>
King, Zach. Ping Pong Balls for Breakfast. YouTube (2013 November 15). <www.you-
tube.com/watch?v¼BMVCoafg6X0>
neochosen. The Shining Recut. YouTube (2006 February 7) <www.youtube.com/
watch?v¼KmkVWuP_sO0>
StoryTrender. Charlie Bit My Finger 10 Year Anniversary. YouTube (2017 May 21).
<www.youtube.com/watch?v¼bOuu_3-gAn0>