Period Drama Men e altri oggetti del desiderio. Fanvidding 2.0

Abstract

The essay tackles one of the most widespread and interesting phenomena within media fandom, that is, fanvidding, and its relation with seriality. Fanvidding is a grassroots practice of remix, a form of video production where fans cut short sequences of mainstream audiovisual sources (films and television series) and reedit them, often on a pop music song. The videos – which are usually uploaded on some videosharing platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo – explore the source(s) in new ways.After a survey aimed at highlighting the structurally serial character of fanvidding, retracing its genesis, and showing its more recent developments, alongside with the transformations which have hit both fandom and digital technologies in the last years, the essay takes as its reference corpus the fanvideos which gravitates around one specific kind of source, period drama. After calling into question some of the current typologies and classifications (fake/fan trailer, redub, supercut…), and partly drawing on the categories that Gerard Genette outlined in Palimpsestes, I propose three main criteria – relation to the source, regime, and logic – through which it is possible to analyse fan-produced videos. Those criteria point to some crucial issues, such as users/producers’ attitudes towards the source, that is, the remixed material, the potential effects of the fanvideos on the source’s reception, the function of the musical commentary in the hybridization of genres, repetition as a fundamental way to express desire and at the same time develop a critical reading of the source, the implications (and contradictions) of what has been called by Kristina Busse «[meta]affective aesthetics».