Supernatural: At the Movies

Vid
Title:	At the Movies
Creator:	Ash48
Date:	Jun 10, 2009
Format:
Length:	4:09 minutes
Music:
Genre:
Fandom:	Supernatural
Footage:
URL:	on youtube; livejournal post
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Supernatural: At the Movies is a Supernatural vid by Ash48.

Reactions and Reviews

...there has always been a subset of vids that purposefully changes the narrative by pulling images from their original context to completely recontextualize them. Such Alternate Universe (AU) vids create narratives by imagining new events, crossing over different shows, or illustrating existing fan fiction. Whereas interpretive vids often use viewers’ knowledge of a given shot’s context in the source text, AU vids tend to radically de- and re-contextualize footage, helped often by voiceovers or text overlays. Other times, the recontextualized meaning is transmitted by shifting the narrative into a different generic register, expecting the viewer to recognize the genre and resituate the images accordingly. Ash48’s “At the Movies” is a collection of fictional movie trailers that clearly use Supernatural as a source yet recontextualize the footage with music and other features like decoloration to invoke specific generic conventions. In the Saw segment, for example, the viewer recognizes Sam yet quickly rereads the given footage within the genre of slasher movies. Supernatural already combines various genres, including teen and horror, yet this vid moves through an even more diverse array of genres. Ranging from spaghetti western and film noir to slasher movie and screwball comedy, “At the Movies” requires only a few seconds to invoke these diverse generic filmic conventions and create a series of AUs.

Thinking about Supernatural AUs always makes me think of the various Dean/Buffy and Dean/Faith crossover vids — which, in light of your post, makes me think of the ways in which genre and context get used in crossovers. Shows of similar genres, such as BtVS and Supernatural, are relatively easy to cross over because so many of the visual conventions are shared. And context can either be played down or played for comedy, depending on the vidder’s focus.

As we speak, I am preparing a vid 101 collection for a class I am teaching: which means I have to select ‘accessible’ texts to avoid stumping all those who are non-fans of this or that series. I think this vid is going to go in my top ten because it nicely bridges fan vids with other genres: even in the unlikely event that students don’t know SPN, they will get the idea of vidding as textual re-imagining, transformation, and bridging. The main objective from non-fans, "lack of originality" is easier to rebut if there is an overt reaching out to non-fan references—such as in this case.

I know Nina picked this piece in part because of its “accessibility,” and I wonder if there’s a sort of inverse relationship at work here. Are AU vids generally more accessible than traditional vids because they rely less on knowledge of canon and conventions and try to create a more self-contained gesture? In this case (in contrast to your other, more narrative examples), it seems there’s something else going on: a crossover with the fake trailer genre, which offers the accessibility of recognizable parody rather than of autonomous storytelling. I think this begs the question of why it’s important that the source is Supernatural. I would read the commentary on Supernatural’s own genre play as more significant than you’re giving it credit for being. Regardless of the relationship to the show, I’d argue that what differentiates this vid from other fake trailers is its contextualization within a Supernatural fan community that regularly experiments with genred AUs. So maybe it’s not so accessible as it appears?

I do think that Constructed Reality vids can be more accessible because they do not require canon knowledge. That’s more the case here and in the J2 example than in the Bones one, for example, because the latter relies heavily on canon nevertheless, more rereading the canon moments under a different premise. But here the stories get completely created out of thin air so to speak, randomly using fitting images. I do think, as you point out, that the genre play IN SPN is important—I actually talk more about that elsewhere. I disagree, however, that it’s the SPN fan community and its genre play as much as it is fandom in general (I think many fandoms experiment with genred AUs, so I wouldn’t see that specific to SPN in any way) and, more importantly, the show’s genre play in particular. I may be misunderstanding you, though. Are you suggesting that SPN unlike other media fandoms specfically plays with genre and that the vid reflects that? Or just that genre shows in general, and the fandoms they create, play with genre???

It's just a wonderful idea and so well put together - basing a Supernatural video on several different movie genres, all of them very different, and it just works so, so well. Go see for yourself, it's brilliant

Seriously fun. So many great scenes from the show edited wonderfully to fit each movie style.