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Abstract
In this paper the series Green Porn, written and directed by Isabella Rossellini and co-directed by Jody Shapiro, is analyzed within the landscape of cinema and new media by means of the hermeneutical method. I will define how this method is shaping the subject and the other way around. My thesis is that the absolute hegemony of the ‘cinematographic immersion’, as we are used to privilege over other forms of watching ‘moving image’, will be coming to an end and will be replaced by other forms of narrative: the mobile, interactive, online narrative which is more about exchanging content like ideas, meanings and designs than creating the ‘cinematographic dream’. The paper is roughly divided in three parts. The first part consists of an introduction to the subject and the hermeneutical method and its divers interpretations are explained. In the second part, the method is applied to the subject and the different related issues are defined. The third part consists of the conclusion of the analysis and of the used method.
‘If you like green porn, watch this!’ are the headlines on the Sundance Channel site . But, you may find yourself wondering, what is green porn and how do I know I like it? If this is your question, just watch, you have not much to loose. Green Porn is a series of eight ‘low-budget’ movies about the sex life of insects with Isabella Rosselini in the lead as –usually- the male bug: the earthworm, dragonfly, bee, firefly, snail, spider, fly, and the praying mantis are represented by Rosselini in tight tights, paper tail, multiple eyes, signal colors and a cut-out penis. Rosselini is also the initiator and the conceptual drive behind this project.
Introduction
Isabella Rosselini, the famous A-film star, just made eight one-minute films on the topic of animal reproduction for the ‘third screen’ in assignment of the Sundance Festival. I was very surprised, when bumping into these shorts: what is the –aging- Isabella Rossellini doing in these small screen low-budget clips? Is she into porn now? What does this mean for her reputation? What does this mean for cinema? Obviously, the third screen (online broadcasting, YouTube, mobile phones, Ipods etc.) is not only discovered by the masses, also respectable filmmakers obviously start to consider it a serious medium next to its older brothers like cinema, television and DVD.
By analyzing Green Porn I want to research how the emerging third screen is influencing the production and the consumption of the moving image: how does it change film-making and film-watching and how is it affecting the filmic landscape. The absolute hegemony of the ‘cinematographic immersion’, as we are used to privilege over other forms of ‘moving image’, seems to have reach its end and will be replaced by other forms of narrative: the mobile, interactive, online narrative which is more about exchanging content like ideas, meanings and designs than creating the ‘cinematographic dream’. Within this conception, Green Porn is used as the example to analyze how high and low culture, are intertwining.
This paper starts with a short explanation of the series and gives an introduction of the used method, hermeneutics. Subsequently the method is applied onto the subject and eventually the analysis is evaluated and I will try to show how the method and the object have shaped each other.
The research material used in order to survey the different sides of this subject will be, besides the Green Porn series, relevant Media Studies literature (see bibliography), lectures from the Moving Movie Industry Conference , several online interviews, newspaper articles, and other online sources like YouTube and the Sundance Channel addressing the series.
Green Porn
Rossellini’s Green Porn shorts do seem to reach back to old-fashioned theater techniques as first applied by Thomas Edison’s in his movie production studio in West Orange, New Jersey called The Black Maria, which is, according to the online Wikipedia, widely referred to as “America’s First Movie Studio”. One side of this ‘black box’ was reserved for the stage and the other side for the camera, and to enable daylight to enter, the rooftop could be removed. Films recorded here resembled the solid theater-play organization, just as Green Porn does. The more or less fixed camera and the film-set are on opposite sides of a black box: a proper mise-en-scene is hardly used. On stage, Rosselini as lead-actress impersonating the –mostly- male bug, and her fellow cardboard and foam build actors, the unicolor backdrops, props made of colored paper and cloth, all remind us of the imagination-system of the theatre. Believability or authenticity of a constructed imaginary world is of little importance, communication of ideas is. The main goal seems to be, to get through the message in a funny and entertaining way. Complicated and subtle character-development is not the issue; neither is, breathtaking cinematography and camera-movements, but rather attention-grabbing absurdist art- direction and bizarre but informative text.
Each film starts with a short introduction by Isabella Rossellini, facing the camera dressed like the particular bug, in which she explains the highlights of his sexual behavior. Accordingly she demonstrates this with one of her cardboard fellow-actors while still talking –and looking- into the camera and explaining what she is doing and how it makes her feel. Close-ups and wide shots are succeeding each other showing the total of the scene or details of the genitals – made out of pink foam material. Although the art-direction of the set does remind of a truly low-budget movie, when checking the credentials, one must suspect that at least 20 seriously paid professionals are at work here.
The way Green Porn looks (its ‘card-board’ art-direction), the way its ‘star’ is portrayed (Isabella Rosselini as the male bug), and the platform they choose (very short shorts for the computer screen), are related elements that sparked my curiosity in many areas. Questions as ‘what does a star as Rosselini in an environment as YouTube with an edu-entertainment sex film and how will this change the media-landscape?’ crossed my mind. In order to survey these diverse but related topics and their correlations and effects, I choose to use the method of the hermeneutics as basis for the research because it would allow me to approach the subject in a profound way from all its angles.
Hermeneutics
When placing a query for hermeneutics in Google, one will find 2.040.000 hits with all sorts of relations like Japanese, Russian, Transformative, philosophical, biblical, etcetera. Therefore, I will start here with providing the working-definition I will be using within this paper. In The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem (Gadamer 1966) Gadamer argues that the imagination is that what is the most decisive function of the scholar. This imagination has a hermeneutical function in order to distinguish ‘the questionable’. Gadamer’s ‘questionable’ can be interpreted best from the angle of the German word: ‘fragwurtig’. The difference between ‘questionable’ and ‘fragwurtig’’ is rather subtle but significant. Where the former has a negative connotation and is mostly related to issues that are ‘under suspicion’, the latter refers to the most open situation possible: a situation that is interesting enough to survey.
Gadamer uses the following story to illustrate the difficulties of asking questions. Socrates is in one of his conversations with the Sophist and drives them to despair with all his questions. In an attempt to escape, they try to reverse the roles by obtaining the position as questioner. But, once arriving at this situation, it appears that they cannot think of any question at all! Gadamer sees this as an example of the importance and difficulty of posing the right questions:
Nothing at all occurs to them that is worth while going into and trying to answer. I draw the following inference from this observation. The real power of hermeneutical consciousness is our ability to see what is questionable. (Gadamer 1966: 113)
How do we reach this position of seeing what is questionable? According to Gadamer, this happens when the artistic tradition and the historical tradition relate to the personal experience, or as he put it ‘in joining the experience of science to our own universal and human experience of life’ (Gadamer 1966: 13). This way, asking questions is interpreted as looking at the subject from several angles and the relations in-between and the relation between science and every-day life should be established. Hermeneutics involves cultivating this ability to understand things from different points of view and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced this outlook. It is the process of applying this understanding in order to give an interpretation to the meaning of written texts and symbolic artifacts (such as film, art, sculpture or architecture), which may be either historic or contemporary.
Staat (2008) interprets Gadamer’s hermeneutics and characterizes three related reconsiderations. The first is a reconsideration of the object, which has to be interpreted in order to wide its scope: secular texts, artworks, human interaction in general can be addressed by hermeneutics. In this case the subject is not just the Rosselini Green Porn series, but also its position within the movie-industry and in the midst of the online community.
The second reconsideration according to Staat concerns the nature of hermeneutics. Whereas in the beginning hermeneutics were concerned with the correct understanding of texts, in the 20th century there is the so-called ontological turn where the ‘understanding as such’ becomes an issue. This makes that hermeneutics is not just an attribute of Humanities but that it also can precede any division of science. In this light, hermeneutics became a tool within other areas as well. I will get back to this in the evaluation-part of the paper.
The third reconsideration according to Staat concerns the hermeneutic circle, which is to be explained in twofold . On the one hand there is the relation between the part and the whole. In order to understand the whole, one has to understand the discrete parts and the other way around (Leezenberg 2001). This is called the first hermeneutic circle. On the other hand effective history now extends this circle and includes the interpreter with his own horizon. This is called the second hermeneutic circle. Here also the history related to the text is taken in consideration with interpretation.
How can we apply these specific qualities of hermeneutics to the topic of Green Porn? By adding on to the concept of Arjun Appadurai to divide society in different overlapping scapes (Appadurai 1996), I have described three scapes in order to categorize the discrete qualities of the subject .
The different angles
Isabella Rosselini, daughter of the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, is known by a rather big audience for her appearances as actress and model. She usually appears in the bigger avant-garde and arthouse productions and is normally casted for the more serious roles. She worked with famous directors like David Lynch, Guy Maddin and Peter Greenaway and during the fourteen years she was the ‘face’ of Lancôme, she worked with photographers like Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton. It took me by surprise to encounter this icon of grace, beauty, and intellectual film within the Johnny-go-lightly – corner of the web i.g. YouTube, with her own edu-tainment production on animal-mating-porn. This Green Porn series can be regarded in two ways. On the one hand it can be simply looked at as a discrete event, as an unusual step made by an unusual woman. But on the other hand, it can also be considered in a broader sense, as a sign that the film industry –and its producers- is changing under the influence of the rise of the internet and the multiplication of small screens. Technical developments are influencing our relationship with image production and consumption. In this sense, the Green Porn series can be seen as ‘cinema in transit’ with on the one side its predecessor, the cinematic image (with the personae of Rosselini as major reference), and on the other hand its future: short interactive online images for the small screen (sketchy animation-like online short). Green Porn can be regarded as somewhere in the middle of this development (both sides –the cinematographic and the interactive- are traceable) and will in the case of this paper be used to pin down some of the issues related to these new developments.
By these references to traditional avant-garde cinema on the one side and the mass-medial online environment on the other side Green Porn places itself at the intersection of different areas with each their own politics and dynamics. I have divided these areas in three different ‘scapes’ in order to get a clear perspective on their bilateral relation: the cinema-scape, the new media-scape and the audience-scape. The distinct areas are partly overlapping en therefore influencing each other and even creating a new area in their midst where the three meet (see image 1.1). This center area is the main topic of research here, and hermeneutics is used to approach it from all its three different areas.
1.1 Image of the connection of the three scapes
I will start with a short tour to explain the different scapes. Firstly, we have the cinema-scape, the domain of the cinematographic image-language that refers to the techniques of the classical film- and (production) design and Hollywood-narrative. Isabella Rosselini, past 50 by now, is an important agent in this scape. Her image bears a strong connotation to classic and avant-garde cinema and to the notion of illusionist immersive screens . The cinema-scape represents immersive screens and narrations, the power and influence of studio’s and funding politics, and the slow and complicated production processes. This cinema-scape is in search for a position in relation to the new emerging screens. They realize that there is a huge audience out-there that has found already different means of entertainment that are beginning to overshadow their own activities. The world of games (with all their artifacts and tail of commercialized gadgets), Internet-related entertainment and activities like virtual worlds, blogs, and YouTube, are increasingly becoming mainstream.
This brings us to the second scape, the new media-scape. The new media-scape is the ‘new kid on the block’ and disrupts old power-relations between audience and producer. It is often being looked at suspiciously, especially from the perspective of the cinema-scape . The rise of the amateur-hour with its cheap and easy production and distribution means – as so much warned for by for example Andrew Keen – is endangering the monopoly of directors, filmmakers and broadcasting networks. The techniques of new media are changing the perception and production of ‘cinema as we know it’. The strict role of the audience as mere spectator has overcome and means of production and distribution are democratized: individual users can make simple films with their mobile telephones, edit it with simple consumer edit-programs and upload in on the internet. And all this, in a lazy Sunday afternoon and if lucky, getting the eyeballs of thousands or millions. These changes have clearly altered the opinion concerning image-quality, the value of professionalism, and the role of the audience.
The audience-scape has been influenced by the cinema-scape and the new-media scape. For one, it is easier for the audience to get beyond a passive ‘laid-back’ consumerist position. They can place text or image comments online where blogs, websites, and multiple 2.0 applications have often possibilities to leave reactions and opinions. This possibility enables a transition from the laid back attitude towards a sit-forward activity. Games for example, are anticipating on this possibility of user-generated content by making it part of the gaming experience: users can design elements of the game and sell these to other players and user communities are born enhancing the commitment to the game.
The possibility of downloading films from the environment of own home instead of buying the DVD, going to the cinema’s or waiting for a broadcaster or festival to program it gives the viewer/user a greater freedom to assemble his or her own perfect cinematic experience. The small screens like the telephone or Ipod has liberated the moving image and has changed the place where the audience is watching their favorite content: from to cinema to the living room, the bedroom, at bus stops, during the break at school, in the train, anywhere. The new audience watches what he wants when he wants where he wants. And, he can let the world knows what he thinks of it. Meanwhile, what he watches, the content, is under the influence of the three different scapes as well. This changing content we can find in the midst of the scapes, where they entangle.
The Midst of the Scapes
The first reason this series attracted my attention was its title, Green Porn. ‘Is this green porn?’ I was wondering. Nowadays, green is usually related with environmental issues in order to create awareness, and porn refers normally to explicit erotic images with the goal to turn on the (male) audience. Well, neither one of these two are actually aimed at. In fact, the most disturbing part was not just the connection between green and porn, but its relation to Isabella Rossellini.
At first sight, Isabella Rossellini is traveling the opposite direction as most filmmakers. For becoming a filmmaker, one usually starts as an enthusiastic young and inspired student with plenty ideas and no budget. Regularly, in the beginning there are short, clumsy, and cheap movies with the hope to end up with big budgets, big screens, and big stars. Rosselini though, was part of this world of arrivées, but decided to take another road, that of the third screen. She started with the bigger screens and decided to move over to the small screens. Why?
Rossellini’s project can be seen as an example where the cinema-scape is influenced by the media scape: The Internet and technological developments are creating new possibilities for filmmakers and for their audience. Rosselini is experimenting with these new possibilities in a playful way. Her shorts are positioning themselves in a different perspective towards the audience-scape: Isabella is no longer high up and untouchable, be she seems closer, one of us. She is talking straight to us, we see her wrinkles, the powder on her face. She makes us feel that we finally meet the ‘real Rossellini’. Richard Dyer argues in Heavenly Bodies how the Eva Arnold’s portrait of Joan Crawford ‘gathers into one image three dimensions of stardom’ (Dyer 2004:1). In the first reflection, the frame-wide mirror, we see Crawford ‘the star’, as the world is supposed to see her. In the second reflection, the smaller hand-mirror we see how this star-image is constructed (powder on here face, sharp lines, the sharp gaze). The third image of Crawford is not a reflection. We just see her non-sharp shoulder from behind, we are looking over her shoulder, seeing more or less what she sees. Dyer is wondering who of these three images reflects the real Crawford:
Which is Joan Crawford, really? We can carry on looking at the Arnold photo like this, and our mind can constantly shift between the three aspects of Crawford; but it is he three of them taken together that make up the phenomenon Joan Crawford, and it is the insistent question of ‘really’ that draws us in, keeping us on the go from one aspect aspect to another. (Dyer 2004:2)
This threefold insight in the ‘real’ Joan Crawford can somehow be compared to the way Green Porn makes us look at Isabella Rosselini. Besides we know Rossellini is the writer and director of the series, it feels that she shows us an authentic part of herself. By talking straight into the camera in a friendly way, as if she is not acting but plain being herself, not hiding the fact that her face and body are growing older, we get the feeling the ‘real’ Rosselini is talking to ‘us’ personally. This intimacy is enhanced by the features of the Internet. I have her here, right in front of me on a small screen. I can save her, copy her, play her when I like, over and over again in the privacy of my living room. I can re-edit, forward, upload her to my own website. I own this image of her –despite my legal rights. This is what is different with this new media scape. At the same time, while watching this ‘authentic and real’ Rosselini, she reminds me of all her films, and even the films of her parents. As in the way we oscillate in the Arnold picture from one Crawford reflection to the other (in search for the real one), the Green Porn makes me oscillate between the different memories and perspectives of Rosselini in search for the real one. As the back of Crawford’s shoulder seems to show us the ‘real’ Crawford because it is less mediated (it is not a reflection in the mirror) and less constructed (non-sharp and not purposely on display) Rossellini’s wrinkles seem to increase her authenticity because in ‘starworld’ they are mostly removed. It makes her feel closer to her audience. The environment of the Internet is enhancing this as well. It is less mediating than the large cinema-screen and big productions. We can see backstage, we can see how the production is designed and see its flaws and stitches. Meanwhile Rossellini is communicating with us through her own story, with her own face, less mediated, it seems.
Online technology is showing her a new way of being in charge of this very personal and playful project . This new technology is influencing the way people are using its products.
The third screen is a small screen and when being watched, people have usually limited time and less concentration than in the classic cinema experience. Possibly other (online) features are screaming for attention like Skype, MSN, or the next YouTube clip with its comments and therefore the online environment dictates new forms: films for the third screen need to be shorter, containing less complicated storylines, brighter designs etc. Green Porn obeys these rules successfully. Its style with the clumsy insect-figures consisting of real-time video without any digital effects and the messy backdrops and graphic colors, is in major contrast to the classic cinematographic style. It appeals to its audience because it looks like it is in their league: ‘hey, I could have made that’. This notion once more diminishes the alleged distance between ‘Rosselini the star’ and ‘you’ the audience, makes Rosselini more real, or you more a star. This last option is off course what the do it yourself culture is about.
The third screen is a major part of what we now call Web 2.0 and here we enter the relation between the audience-scape and the new media-scape. According to Lev Manovich (2008) there are two major themes to distinguish. Firstly we see that the content on the Internet is more and more produced by non-professional users (produsers) instead of professional producers. Secondly the web turns increasingly into a communication medium between users using different forms of expression. So also film in an online environment starts to behave as communicating screens. To speak with the words of Mieke Gerritzen in her announcement for the Moving Movie Conference held in Amsterdam late November: ‘Talking heads are gaining on popularity, never before so much is listened to talking heads on screens. The moving image is increasingly used for communicating and communication between people became communication between screens’ . Manovich is reminding us of the fact that these screens are not just reacting to each other, but also to posted reactions.
Consider another very interesting new communication situation: a conversation around a piece of media – for instance comments added by users below somebody’s Flickr photo or YouTube video which do not only respond to the media object but also to each other. (…) –The object in question can be software, a film, a previous post, and so on. (Manovich 2008: 41)
This way, new content is created that is generated by comments on other content, which can again become a generator for new content.
Web 2.0 is about participation. Even when not every user of the Internet is actively involved with reacting or creating, the content on the web is shaped by this mode of possible interactivity. It is almost impossible to look at a film or an article without taking notice of the comments or clips that are related. This is for example the core functionality of sites like last FM or Amazon.com . Here a peer-based system takes care of suggestions and alternatives.
This responsive system of reactions and comments at online media can be looked at on an individual level but can also be approached at a broader level of techniques and artistic schools, as Manovich did.
(…) modern art can be understood as conversations between different artists or artistic schools. That is, one artist/movement is responding to the work produced earlier by another artist/movement. (…) To use the terms of YouTube, we can say that Godard posts his video responses to one huge clip called ‘ classical narrative cinema’. But the Hollywood studios do not respond – at least not for another 30 years. (Manovich 20o8: 42)
Maybe Godard –as European avant-garde filmmaker- did not get his response from the Hollywood-studios, but today the ‘new independent filmmakers’ i.g the YouTube artists, do not have to wait for the big response. The avant-garde is giving their reaction: Isabella Rossellini has descended from the highbrow towers of the arts to the lowbrow residents of the masses with their common grounds of comments: Green Porn is the avant-garde reaction to produser content. A reaction Godard never got.
Green Porn is an example of the changing of the cinema-scape of her times. In this case, her language is not only about the already mentioned paper props and quickly made spandex costumes but also about a different relation to –female-‘ stardom’.
Rosselini is shown herself not primarily as a classical beauty-at-age, but as a hybrid between an insect, an actress playing a part and daily personality, Isabella, with little trace of vanity. Though some still consider her a classic beauty, in Green Porn she is not always the perfected image as we became used at in the Lancôme commercials. Rosselini came down to earth, to the third screen, among the crowds. And the crowds reacted. The reactions on her Green Porn can be found in the range of very negative and people uttering their disbelieve, disgust and disrespect to extremely enthusiastic and positive reactions. The reactions are not only towards the Rosselini films, but also directed to her personally (or the star she is taken for). And, as Manovich already pointed out, the comments are also reacting to other comments. Viewers are educating each other about what the meaning or intention of these films could be and if it should be considered as art or as science. Poignant is the heady-ness of most of the reactions. Some people are actually quite upset that Rosselini is drifting so far from what they expect from a ‘pretty, respectable woman’. Others on the other hand, see the Green Porn rather as a proof of her intellectual ‘avant-gardist’ state of mind. Either way, it is clear that the third screen for Rosselini means that she also can express herself, just like the other produsers, in a very direct and personal way: without interference of big studio’s, enormous budgets and huge production-teams. We should – by the way – not exaggerate this ‘low-budget’ part since we can see in the making-off video’s that there is still a team of at least 10 expensive professionals like a producer, director, scriptwriter, art-directors etc. surrounding her to make sure her ideas will come through the best way possible. So the clumsy look of the videos are carefully designed and are rather a matter of style than of scarcity of means. But, it does work, this style, and it appeals to the audience as being avant-garde, playful, different, near to them. It is controversial –for someone like Isabella. And not in the least because of its theme: porn.
This aspect is also related to the same online community as Rosselini placed herself in. The new, more free and open relation to pornography, makes it possible for a star like her to approach plain sexuality and erotism in a playful way. Pornographic imagery has entered our daily life: online and offline, it is more visible than ever before. Because of this increasing visibility it is more often subject for cultural debate as well. Pornography has left its dark dungeons and is critiqued and discussed in the public sphere and therefore changing the relation to the human body. Artists and scientists are discussing it as a telling part of our cultural identity and society . This attitude makes Rossellini’s role more socially acceptable, even when we are not shocked by the sex life of insects, but by Isabella Rossellini’s is invitation to identify with related feelings of lust and pain. In a humorous and playful way, she is anticipating and commenting on what is called the ‘pornification’ of society.
The Sundance-channel is making this even easier to accept. On the website you are invited to download green porn bumper-stickers for your blog and you can take the green porn quiz (to find out what kind of green porn star you are) where they ask you funny question like: balls? To the wall or tied and gagged? Or, with whom you like to get busy with? Every Dick, Tom and Harry or just yourself? I turned out to be a bee, by the way.
Rossellini’s style, the cartoon-like art-school clumsiness can be seen as a proof of her ‘coolness’ but it can also be considered as an adaptation of the youth-culture in order to upgrade the narrative film (by downgrading its techniques) and ‘plug them’ into the internet youth culture. Borrowed from Michel de Certeau, Manovich argues that the Web 2.o paradigm represents a reconfiguration of strategies and tactics: De Certeau explains in his The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) that institutions and power structures use strategies and tactics are used by individuals in their everyday life. An individual can adapt a strategy though, and can turn it into a tactic, in order to make the strategy ‘habitable’. An example of this is shown in relation to consumer behavior: while people mostly use mass-produced goods (food, clothes, home-decoration and lifestyle) they also assemble, mix and adapt the individual items in order to personalize them. These individual tactics used to be the ‘unmappable’ forms of subversion against the centralized structure and permanence of strategy. According to Manovich, things have changed drastically in the area of consumer economy since Certeau‘s publication, and strategies and tactics are now often closely linked in an interactive relationship and often their features are reversed.
Since the 1980’s, however, consumer and culture industries have started to systematically turn every subculture (particularly every youth subculture) into a product. In short, the cultural tactics evolved by people were turned into strategies, now sold to them. (Manovich 2008: 38)
And exactly this is how we can read Green Porn as well, as an adaptation to the online youth-culture. Addressing a popular online topic like porn, enhancing its relevance by making it green, and using an image-language ordinary users can relate to: An actress with a not so tiny waist, wrinkles and baggy eyes in spandex and cardboard backdrops. This must draw attention to the –now- presumed ‘hipness’ of the Sundance Channel itself. Rossellini’s Green Porn series is touching various sides of the cinematographic changes we are experiencing right now and therefore an interesting topic to ponder on. Hermeneutics is a useful method in this case to survey these various related sides and is useful to integrate the intrinsic features of Green Porn as a project and as its role as a model for contemporary changes.
Conclusion
Gadamer argued that 20th century hermeneutics, unlike the 19th century notion, is not just concerned with the understanding of something (like a particular text) but with understanding as an ontological whole. As mentioned before, Staat (2008) explains in his introductory article that this makes hermeneutics not just a characteristic attribute of humanities but that philosophical hermeneutics actually precedes any division of science. Therefore, hermeneutics is not just suitable as a method, but also as introductionary research in order to define the subject and to articulate the best questions to ask. But at the same time, Hermeneutics is very useable for surveying a subject from different sides. In this analysis I think both things have happened. A text, a film or another form of representation is never a ‘stand-alone’ subject but always is connected or entangled with other systems of reference. The specific subject cannot be analyzed or researched without acknowledging this related environment. A good subject is like a water drop: it is limited and bordered but it is reflecting the world surrounding it. So the reason to research this particular water drop is not just because the drop itself carries that much importance, but because it also can show an excerpt of the world while converging the different levels in order to create meaning. In this metaphor, hermeneutics can be considered as both the method to walk around the drop and to analyze its different angles but also to interpret this collection of points of view.
Based on my spontaneous amazement when being confronted with Green Porn for the first time, my aim was to describe and analyze its different sides in an attempt to validate this amazement by tracing down its sources. At first it has been my personal horizon, marked by my professional experience as artist, filmmaker and media-scholar, that has been shaping and limiting the area of research. Accordingly I have mapped three different areas that are related to the subject with its different horizons: the cinema-scape, the media-scape and the audience-scape. The overlapping area of the three different scapes appeared to define and limit my subject. On the one hand the method has been shaping my view on the subject because it urged me to concentrate on the different sides of the subject and to be aware of its historical connotations. On the other hand the wirkungsgeschichte directed my attention onto the historical and personal aspects of Isabella Rossellini as being an important agent in the totality of the construction of Green Porn. I came to see that her background as the daughter of a famous cinema-couple and her own past an avant-garde movie star was of major influence of the perception of Green Porn.
Traditionally avant-garde is a cultural style that seems to refer exclusively to marginalized artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is not only opposed to mainstream commercial values, but often has an abrasive social or political edge. Isabella Rossellini has always been a transitional figure in the sense that she combined working with people like David Lynch with being an important face in the commercial world of advertising. With her step to produce the Green Porn series that were bound up to end up in YouTube the actress definitely pared her avant-garde qualities to a main-stream mass media. This can be seen as a typical avant-garde gesture in the sense that it is pushing boundaries of what is accepted as the norm of the status quo (mixing high and low culture) but it can also regarded as sign of time. It seems that the mainstream media are taking over the role of the traditional avant-garde. What is happening within these mass-media environments seems more interesting and boundary pushing than that what happens in the circles of the –sometimes conservative- artistic elite. At the same time, Rossellini makes porn harmless and funny, so even my mother could watch it. And, this is in my opinion as well an avantgardistic thing to do.
In the spirit of Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutics after the ontological turn, where it becomes concerned with understanding as such and can precede any division of science, this analysis also can be looked at as being preliminary to further -quantitative, philosophical or historical- research since many sub-themes came to surface that are certainly worth further attention. It would be interesting for example, to look deeper into the development of stardom, the role of the pornographic in society, and the role and future of the artistic art film in the environment of online mass-media.
For this analysis, my point of departure was New Media Studies with as main-focus the third screen in the environment of the Internet. My personal horizon formed by my experiences as filmmaker, media artist, and media researcher has influenced the way the subject is approached. The used hermeneutic method has formed the subject in his turn as well. Subsequently, the way the subject was defined, has filled in and therefore formed the method as well, and my horizon has been adapted to new insights and knowledge accordingly.
Understanding of a text or a painting is according to Gadamer not just a conscious action but, an experience that shapes the interpreter and the object. He is stressing in his theory that especially classical works are strongly influenced by their wirkungsgeschichte (Leezenberg 2001). This means that texts cannot be interpreted without their history of effects. An understanding of a text cannot exclude the different ways it has been interpreted before. In the Green Porn case we can find another kind of wirkungsgeschichte and this is the presence of the Isabella Rosselini herself. The Rossellini we know as the classic beauty and actress gives a different meaning and interpretation to the Green Porn series. Her famous parents Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rosselini, who we are reminded of in her –bodily – appearance, is a reference to the narrative and immersive cinema. This makes Green Porn even more Fragwurtig. It underlines the alienation of Green Porn on the Internet but it also indicates maybe that the new avant-garde is not hiding out in elitist art-film festivals or galleries, but in the environment of the masses. Green Porn can be considered as avant-garde in its own right. It is an insight in the world-to-come where professionals-and amateurs- will produce more and more films for the third screen. Short, independent films in which not the immersive cinematographic language with its possibility of subtle meaning and sub-texts is central, but the clearness of the message, to be understood in a few inches, with a quick gaze, and in a few minutes. And these films are not made ‘just for watching’. They are statements, awaiting their response, in film, text or otherwise. And filmmakers meanwhile, should investigate their options within this changing landscape of audiences, movies, and comments ‘on the move’ and should try experiment and play with these new visual culture in order to understand its possibilities.
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