Multimedia Genre Research Articles

КОНВЕРГЕНТТІ ЖУРНАЛИСТИКАДАҒЫ ЖАНРЛАР ҮДЕРІСІ

In journalism there is the concept of transmedia. In general, transmedia deals with the presentation of information in various media. Unlike multimedia, all media are interconnected. For example, only transmedia technology can allow the plot of a novel to be adapted into a film with minor changes, or the first part of a story to be told through a television show, the second part through a film, and the third part through a television show. In the world at large, there are different ways of disseminating the essential elements of fiction. Transmedia information is an output system. The information it contains is mostly related to history. The narrative structure will be filled with historical data and will include text and audio, video, fonts, images, infographics and more. Each text can create a story itself. Each element contributes to the main story. This is why the effectiveness of transmedia is directly related to the method of storytelling. The purpose and main direction of the scientific article was to study the features of the process of formation of new multimedia genres in online media, to focus on the features of methods of transformation and presentation of existing genres in other forms. The scientific and practical significance of the article lies in the attempt to monitor new terminology genres in the Kazakh-language media, such as longread, construction, short video recording with the mention of new trends in Kazakh journalism. In the course of the study the method of comparative analysis was used. The main result of the analysis was the consideration of characteristics and trends in the dynamics. By analyzing materials published on the sites, such as Malim.kz, Massaget.kz, Balbal.kz, we tried to reveal the nature of the new trend in genres such as storytelling, longread, which meet modern demand. The relevance of the scientific research is determined by the consideration of competitiveness criteria and trends in new formats for presenting general media journalistic materials.

Intimacy and Failed Solidarity in the Teen Girl Film Lollipop Monster (2011)

Abstract: In this article I analyze the 2011 German indie film Lollipop Monster as a contemporary model for what Lauren Berlant calls "intimate publics." This film twists the genre of the teen girl film by portraying female friendship as a catalyst for unleashing suppressed emotions and subverting oppression. Instead of directing their aggression internally as self-harm, the protagonists of Lollipop Monster use violence against others to reinforce their strong social bond. By employing cinematic techniques from the popular multimedia genre of the music video, Lollipop Monster harkens back to the imagined sisterhoods of Riot Grrrl culture. In its nostalgic celebration, the film fails to address the racism of this movement, ultimately remaining focused on whiteness and failing to fully explore possibilities for solidarity between Black and white women. Overall, Lollipop Monster updates Berlant's cautionary theory, illustrating how gendered intimate publics co-create neoliberal landscapes of digital, multimedia music and social media stardom.

Мультимедійність як технологія жанрової дифузії в контексті трансформації медіагалузі

The article is devoted to consideration of transformations and changes of a number of journalistic genres that occur under the influence of multimedia interactive technologies. In particular, the genre diffusion in the media materials on the Internet and the trends of genre transformation under the influence of multimedia technologies are analyzed. The main features of multimedia genres in comparison with traditional ones are tracked and the reasons for combination of some genres are analyzed. The objective of the article is to systematize and to describe the genre transformations under the influence of multimedia technologies. In the article, the traditional approach to selection of genre forms was used as the basis for division into the groups, based on the classic genres in press, on television and radio. The attention is paid to such unique media genres as a blog, a podcast and a multimedia story. Another approach used by us in classification is based on the principle of genre synthesis (“parasitism” of multimedia genre on the traditional characteristics with a partial adaptation to the new environment) and on its uniqueness (absence of analogues in traditional journalism). Separately, we highlight the integration approach, according to which the genres with a minimum number of combined elements (for example, a Twitter report) and the complex multimedia structures (a multimedia talk show or an audio slideshow) are distinguished. A number of scientific methods were used in the work, which made it possible to realize the formulated goal and the tasks. In particular, the monitoring of coverage of the topic of genres diffusion and multimedia technologies in the scientific articles and the monographs was carried out with the help of traditional analysis (analysis of sources). The logic of construction of a theoretical study was formed using a systematic method. The explanation of semantic accents of genres‘ transformation based on the established characteristics and the characteristics which are formed under the influence of multimedia and interactive technologies is carried out within the scope of interpretation. The method of comparison was used to find the common and the distinctive features between traditional and transformed genres, as well as to compare the views of Ukrainian and foreign scientists on the key concepts of the study. The method of extrapolation was used when transferring the basic properties of traditional genres to the modified ones. The methods of classification and systematization are used on the final stage of the research, within of which the results are finally summarized and the systematization is developed.

The Pleasures and Problems of Consuming True Crime as Theatrical Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London

Now a pillar of popular culture, the multi-media genre of ‘true crime’ has roots in nineteenth-century England. Particularly in London, a burgeoning media landscape increasingly catered to public interest in sensational homicides. Like other purveyors of true-crime entertainment, theatre managers at licensed playhouses wished to capitalise on murders making national headlines but encountered considerable – at times insurmountable – obstacles in their path. The likelihood of censorship plus that of public uproar ensured that melodramas inspired by recent slayings seldom showed at licensed playhouses. The rarity of such plays might suggest that theatre contributed little to London's abiding homicide fixation. However, the public interpreted two key spheres of what I call ‘true-crime culture’ through the lens of theatrical production – the administration of justice and the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. Training its attention on the cultural impact of two of Britain's most notorious miscreants, John Thurtell (1794–1824) and Maria Manning (1821–49), this essay shows how theatre-going, in general, and the uniquely controversial dramaturgy of a play based on Thurtell's transgression, The Gamblers (1823), gave rise to a set of affective, aesthetic, and ethical assumptions, which in turn coloured contemporary perceptions of salacious murder trials, public executions, and the Chamber of Horrors.

Прагматический потенциал базовых лексико-грамматических категорий в жанре «политическая email-рассылка»

The article examines basic lexico-grammatical categories of modality, temporality and personality contributing pragmatic functions in political direct email genre. There is the lack of research that has explored the language means forming these categories in the new multimedia genre of political discourse. The study aims to identify common to all genres of political media discourse and specific to political direct email genre lexico-grammatical means of expressing modality, temporality and personality. The data of research are lexical and grammatical units used for representing modality, temporality and personality in the political direct email genre by continuous sampling method. This study is based on the methods of contextual and linguo-pragmatic analysis. The main types of modal meanings in political direct email genre are necessity need, should), obligation (must) and possibility (may). The credibility of the statement is ensured by the derivative modal words really, clearly, truly. In the political direct email genre reference to the present and future tenses is expressed both grammatically (the present and future tenses) and lexically (lexical markers ‒ today, now, still). Other lexical means of conveying temporality are direct temporal nominators (time, year, month, week, hour, by age of …, deadline + date ) and indirect indicators of temporality (once, soon). in political direct email genre. Personal pronouns represent a number of pragmatic purposes: create a positive image, express personal opinion, show the significance of being involved in the events, exclusion of the addressee from the mentioned events, indicate special achievements and institutional identity, express ‘other’ opinion.

Apprenticeship Pedagogy for Teaching Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres

Apprenticeship Pedagogy for Teaching Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres Brenda Vellino (bio) As I am writing this chapter on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory in the Kiji Sibi (Ottawa River) watershed of northern Turtle Island, I am teaching an Indigenous drama course to fifteen students on Zoom. Recent encounters with teachings from Algonquin Anishnaabe educators, scholars, and performance practitioners are rearranging my learning and teaching practices.1 These will indelibly shape how I teach my next offering of a seminar in Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres, the subject of this essay. The teaching story I offer here is thus a continual work in progress, changing even as I teach and write in this semester. I was raised in settler culture without knowing that an ethical existence depends upon respecting the Indigenous territories I was living in. I also passed decades of my life before learning what John Borrows, Aaron Mills, Zoe Todd, and Anna Kanngieser have taught us: that stories arising from these lands and waters teach kinship relations principles and responsibilities for the humans and more-than-human beings dwelling there. Although I was in high school more than forty years ago, this is still true for those settler students present in many of our Indigenous literatures classrooms. Learning more about how to learn beyond the simple fact of a land acknowledgment has rearranged my brain, just as rethinking my address from the point of view of being a citizen of the Kiji Sibi watershed has done.2 An ongoing practice of decolonial land and territories apprenticeship-based learning informs how I encourage diverse student engagement in my Indigenous Popular Literary and Multi-Media Genres course.3 While key discussions of Indigenous literary pedagogy are foundational,4 my thinking draws particularly on multidisciplinary [End Page 163] Indigenous perspectives with pedagogical implications. An Indigenous literatures course can be productively informed by Indigenous-led conversations from performative storywork methodologies, legal studies, and decolonial place-based studies. The confluence of these overlapping areas is an informing matrix for the development of this course. Key emergent contexts for my teaching include storywork priorities as theorized by Jo-Ann Archibald (Stó:lō) and Brunette-Debissage (Mushkego Cree iskwew/French) and Pauline Wakeham for engaging Indigenous literary studies from the perspective of relational respect and responsibility. John Borrows (Chippewas of Nawash) and Aaron Mills (Anishinabe) further emphasize the ways that oral stories carry legal principles governing responsible relations between all elements of the multispecies world. This is augmented by experiential learning practices that pay careful attention to decolonial land and territory positioning where land is not taken up solely as an abstract literary theme, setting, or metaphor (Tuck and McKenzie, 134, 148). To have an inkling of how to engage with relational kinship priorities manifest in the "animacy" of land, plants, trees, and beings in oral, written, and performance texts (Watts; Todd and Kanngieser; Cariou), it is important to have a tangible sense of the lands and waters where one resides and the laws arising from them. Anishinaabe legal scholar Aaron Mills advocates for settlers to "respect and live by" Indigenous laws arising from the territories where one lives: "to understand that you are … always in relationship with everybody there, including all those non-humans who fly, walk, crawl, swim, reach, and rumble" (20–24). His call to "do much more than simply make space for our voices," invites reflection on what it might mean for instructors and students to live in a way that reflects principles of territorial Indigenous laws. What might it mean to read and respond to texts from this perspective? This question can be productively applied to engagement with all forms of literary, visual, and performative storywork, augmented by attention to performance studies priorities for embodied and multi-sensory engagement (Archibald-Barber, Ravensbergen, Lachance). My apprenticeship journey began and continues through experiential learning from diverse Indigenous knowledge holders, educators, and artists at public gatherings like the CACLALS Aboriginal Round Tables (http://caclals.ca/about-us/), community events, lectures, art shows, and performances. Informed by these, I began to teach selected Indigenous [End Page 164] fiction, poetry, and drama as key texts in a Canadian literature survey course, oriented...

Историко-краеведческая тема в интернет-изданиях (на примере материалов "Томского обзора", 2018–2020 гг.)

The article deals with the specifics of the coverage of the historical and local history topic in online publications using the materials of Tomskiy Obzor as an example. The thematic diversity of materials, historical periods covered, genre picture, work with information sources are analyzed. The media are one of the main channels for broadcasting historical knowledge to a mass audience. Historical materials on the federal agenda often take on a journalistic tinge and serve to express a position within the framework of socio-political speeches. In the regions, local history materials are also gaining more and more popularity – many online publications start special sections, and publications covering the historical past often become the most read. The aim of this study is to identify the specifics of the coverage of historical and local history topics in online publications. The material for the study is 178 local history texts of Tomskiy Obzor published in 2018–2020. The work uses methods of genre research, genre analysis, and content analysis. The study concludes that in 2018–2020 Tomskiy Obzor’s local history materials focused mainly on pre-revolutionary history. Despite the prevalence of a neutral position in relation to historical events, the materials created a certain stable and contradictory image of the historical past. The materials of the publication covered both the tourist side of history, characteristic of the media, with architecture, industrial development, enterprises, patrons and merchants, and the secret life of the city, showing robberies, everyday life with pubs, prostitution, and domestic violence. Another conclusion is that local history materials are often full-fledged historical studies with many welldeveloped historical sources, which ensures their exclusivity. It is through the study of a large number of documentary sources that the functions of local history materials are formed: most of the texts are aimed at the audience’s cognitive interest. Despite the prevalence of information journalism genres, a large number of photojournalism genres appear in online publications. There are also analytical and literary journalistic materials on historical and local history topics. The key difference between online publications is the emergence of modern multimedia genre forms, in particular longreads, which are characterized by a deep study of the covered topic, as well as experimental formats.

УКРАЇНСЬКА ВІДЕОПОЕЗІЯ ЯК ЕСТЕТИЧНИЙ ФЕНОМЕН СУЧАСНОГО ЛІТЕРАТУРНОГО ПРОЦЕСУ

The results of the study of video poetry as a genre are presented. The object of analysis is Ukrainian video poetry, created within the projects CYCLOP (Ukraine), "Overcoming Silence" (Ella Yevtushenko, Daryna Gladun, Lesyk Panasyuk, and others), #DigitalShevchenko, "Power of Speech", "Subjective" (Sofia Bezverkha and Marichka Yarmola), "rosdilovi" (Olga Mykhailyuk and Serhiy Zhadan), "By the way" (Natalia Parshchyk, etc.), ZEBRA festival (Germany). Ukrainian video poetry has been developing since the 2000s and was first presented as part of the CYCLOP festival, which became both a venue for a video poetry competition and a platform for theoretical discussions. The significance of poetic intonation and the interaction of reader and author in video poetry is described. Genre features of video poetry are established, and also types of genre transformation are allocated. It has been proved that video poetry is a syncretic multimedia genre, which combines verbal and nonverbal components. The verbal component is the voice of the reader or poet, as well as the melody that complements them. The non-verbal component is based on the development of a visual metaphor or game plot, it also expresses the perception of images, metaphors, etc. poem. The movement of frames in video poetry is based either on the metric-rhythmic identity of the poem (and the melody that accompanies the reading of poetry) and the video sequence, or the dissonance between the verbal and nonverbal components. Genre features of video poetry can be described as a combination of kinetic images, sound, visual metaphors, the voice of the reader, melody, and others. Genre transformations of video poetry are defined through the creation through animation, feature film script, improvisational transformation, and interaction between different arts or the use of digital technology. It is determined that an important aspect of video poetry is the interaction of the author and the recipient. Watching video poetry, on the one hand, actualizes the associations (verbal and nonverbal) in the memory of the recipient, on the other – enhances the aesthetic experience of perception of the work. It gives a powerful aesthetic and emotional effect.

Specialised Languages and Multimedia. Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Issues

This book collects academic works focusing on scientific and technical discourse and on the ways in which this type of discourse appears in or is shaped by multimedia products. The originality of this book is to be seen in the variety of approaches used and of the specialised languages investigated in relation to multimodal and multimedia genres. Contributions will particularly focus on new multimodal or multimedia forms of specialised discourse (in institutional, academic, technical, scientific, social or popular settings), linguistic features of specialised discourse in multimodal or multimedia genres, the popularisation of specialised knowledge in multimodal or multimedia genres, the impact of multimodality and multimediality on the construction of scientific and technical discourse, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of language, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of translation, new multimedia modes of knowledge dissemination, the translation/adaptation of scientific discourse in multimedia products. This volume contributes to the theory and practice of multimodal studies and translation, with a specific focus on specialized discourse.

Classification Of Genres In Multimedia Journalism

Тhe article focuses on multimedia issues that are gaining popularity in journalism. It also includes analysis of increasingly popular multimedia articles online, classification of multimedia genres, and transformation issues. Online format of data journalism, journalistic skills, classification online data materials are also covered in it. The virtual network genres are covered with a basis of extensive examples.

Consider the Oyster Seller: Street Hawkers and Gendered Stereotypes in Early Modern London

Abstract Oyster sellers were ubiquitous on London’s streets and as characters in high and low culture. This article contrasts the varied, sophisticated working life of mostly female hawkers with their sexualized representation in the multimedia genre of Cries. It connects these divergent stories to bigger narratives of socio-economic change in London, gender relations, and changing ways of imagining the emergent metropolis. While previous work focused on hawkers’ marginality and read the Cries uncritically, this article shows how humble food sellers kept the city fed, became symbolic of cultural change, and may have been affected by their representations.

Gra w baśnie. O relacji baśni i gier wideo

The article presents the new-founded relations between the genre of fairytale and its representations in video games. Following the concept of multimedia genres created by Edward Balcerzan, the article demonstrates a holistic view of the term “genre”. It combines it with the media theory by Krzysztof Kozłowski, which emphasizes social connotations of each medium and their ability to represent different genres. On the other hand, each and every genre can manifest itself through various media that enables mutual development. This theory finds its reflection in the analysis of the above-mentioned relations. The author applies the theoretical tools used for the analysis and interpretation of literary fairytales to video games based on the fairytale motifs. Two chosen examples, Trine by the Frozenbyte studio and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons by the Starbreeze studio, represent not only a new way to fulfill the potential of the genre, but also innovative solutions in the evolution of gaming.

‘A General and Distinct View of Nature in Miniature’: Mechanical Explanations of Natural Knowledge c.1760

AbstractThe course of experimental philosophy was an important new genre for the representation of natural knowledge in eighteenth‐century Britain and Europe. It was a complex, multimedia genre with a variety of possible forms, but we know little about its characteristics and affinities with other kinds of representation. This article uses a collection of instruments, books and manuscripts made for George III in the early 1760s to show how contemporary ideas about geometry, rhetoric, poetry and cognition provided a conceptual framework for re‐making natural knowledge in new social contexts.

At the Intersections of Mode, Genre, and Media: A Dossier of Essays on Melodrama

Melodrama has never yet been a term of praise, though its derogatory status has not stopped it from being broadly applied to print and playhouse, across live and film, video, and digitally recorded performances screened at drive-ins, shopping malls, or art-house cinemas, to nondramatic art forms such as novels and paintings, and even to other forms of social or political life susceptible to cultural and rhetorical analysis. We think we know what we mean when we use term to describe exaggerated emotional manipulation, but slight definitional pressure reveals enormous variation. When theater historians tell story of melodrama's emergence in wake of French Revolution, they identify a modern, multimedia genre of drama featuring integration into plays themselves of music, dance, and pantomime-performance elements usually kept discreet-where they serve to amplify and diversify play's expressive capacities. Recent film criticism, by contrast, tends to treat melodrama as a mode that includes silent film and classic woman's film, as well as aspects of westerns, buddy movies, and almost any other kind of narrative film. Apart from a recent suggestion that mode exists below, rather than above, genre-that is to say, that it works closer to scene of human production-little attention has been paid to relations between these categories.1As either mode or genre, however, melodrama has been persistently associated with modernity, whether this is modernity of cinematic technology or that of subjectivity ushered in by French Revolution.2 Lauren Berlant has recently proposed that contemporary films of precarity-those, that is, that dramatize the impact of neo-liberalism on everyday life of formerly protected classes-be understood as postmelodramatic because they explore what comes after coimplication of sentimental and liberalism in fantasy of the good life.3 Berlant treats melodrama less as a mode than as an ideologeme, and, as such, a periodizing tool, though its double status as both historical genre and transhistorical mode of representation makes this use somewhat tricky. We don't need to decide whether our own moment is postmelodramatic to observe that perhaps moonlit contours of melodrama are edging into visibility as sun of modernist aesthetics sets. As one of great disavoweds of modernism, under whose aegis we have been operating and to whose longevity even by now more than twenty-year-old heralds of postmodernism themselves paradoxically attest, melodrama may have something to tell us about status of such categories as media, mode, and genre as they contribute to standards of realism, as well as about modernist aesthetics.The role melodrama has played in modern organization of literary and nonliterary forms and styles has yet to be fully theorized and described, in part because some of most sophisticated work on it has taken place in different disciplines. The essays assembled in this issue of Criticism were written for an interdisciplinary workshop, funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose goals were to study melodrama in its historical emergence, as well as at other moments, including our own as a way to explore terms media, mode, and genre, and their interrelations. Contributors each ruminate on texts of their choice and treat melodrama more or less explicitly as a mode, a genre, and/or a critical tool. To introduce what these essays do, I describe what concept melodrama has been and can be used for. The goal is not to define melodrama for once and for all, nor to police its future uses but rather to see how it functioned as a multimedia genre in its moment of emergence, to identify its contributions as a mode to representation, and to examine its usefulness as a tool to enrich our critical practices.Melo-drame: term was first used to signify dramatic speech accompanied by music but quickly came to signify dramatic performances that included dance and pantomime elements, in addition to musical accompaniment of speech, as well as song, often with spectacular scenery, an exotic setting, and a repertory of plot elements that feature persecuted innocence overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles and a cast of characters that often included mute, lame, blind, deaf, or simple people and sometimes animals. …

In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual literatures, Monolingual States

In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual literatures, Monolingual States

The Pedagogy of Digital Storytelling in the College Classroom

In the fall of 2008, Rachel Raimist and Walter Jacobs collaboratively designed and taught the course “Digital Storytelling in and with Communities of Color” to 18 undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines. Candance Doerr-Stevens audited the class as a graduate student. This article examines the media making processes of the students in the course, asking how participants used digital storytelling to engage with themselves and the media through content creation that both mimicked and critiqued current media messages. In particular, students used the medium of digital storytelling to build and revise identities for purposes of rememory, reinvention, and cultural remixing. We provide a detailed online account of the digital stories and composing processes of the students through the same multimedia genre that the students were asked to use, that of digital storytelling.

Multimedia systems, languages, and infrastructures for interactive television

For this special issue on Multimedia Systems, Languages, and Infrastructures for Interactive Television the four best papers on multimedia systems and infrastructures were invited to extend their conference contribution in the form of a journal paper. These papers cover a wide range of current challenges for multimedia systems: content recommendation, participatory multimedia genres, evaluation of mobile media usage, and digital media narratives.

Engineering Play: Children's software and the cultural politics of edutainment

The late 1980s saw the emergence of a new genre of instructional media, ‘edutainment’, which utilized the capabilities of multimedia personal computers to animate software designed to both educate and entertain young children. This paper describes the production of, marketing of and play with edutainment software as a contemporary example of long-standing tensions between the cultural categories of education and entertainment, play and learning. Like prior efforts to wed learning and play, edutainment was founded on the ideal of broadening access to academic learning. Yet, as it became a mainstream commercial enterprise, it was increasingly targeted towards accelerating the achievement of successful children. After first describing the industry and marketing context of edutainment, this paper describes cases of play with edutainment software in an after-school computer club. The analysis utilizes the concepts of “multimedia genre’ and “participation genre” to read across sites of production, distribution and consumption to examine how genres of entertainment, education and edutainment are constituted through the circulation of and play with media artifacts. As in the case of the industry and marketing context, instances of play with edutainment titles follow certain genre conventions of engagement. Titles that are based on academic content and modes of engagement, even with a wrapper of entertainment style, invite a competitive orientation and interaction focused on fulfilling the minimal conditions for moving ahead and getting credit for completion of a task. Unlike more exploratory or construction-oriented software titles, these genres of software are marketed and keyed to the social demands of middle class achievement.

Film and Video Self-Biographies

Biography is a multimedia genre; it exists in oral, written, and audiovisual forms. Since the late 1960s, a sizable corpus of biographical films and videos has steadily grown, spurred by the popularity of television documentaries about celebrity subjects. The most familiar example of cinematic biography, what I term "traditional," typically celebrates the accomplishments of the subject in a chronological structure using photographic stills, film footage, and accounts of contemporaries or experts, with a narrator providing voice-over bridging commentary. Increasingly, directors are inserting sequences of dramatic reconstructions as well. Subgenres of cinematic biography include the biographical sketch, a brief account of a subject's life, focusing on factors that contributed to the subject's present state; self-biographies, hybrid forms combining traits of biography and autobiography; investigative biographies, works that examine the guilt or innocence of the subject, or attempt to get at the truth of some inquiry; biographical concert performances, a specialized form that captures a star's experiences during a concert tour; ethnographic films and videos, works that seek to document the culture of a specific geographic or cultural region; mixed or hybrid forms, newly evolving formats that combine the characteristics of two or more genres or subgenres, such as autobiography, investigative biography, and self-biography; biographical docudrama, biopics that use performers and recreations to simulate actual people and events; and moc docs, which are "documentary parodies, fake documentaries, and invented biographies and autobiographies" (Muhammad 36). This essay defines the concept of a performing identity, and examines how a subject deploys this public identity in the subgenre of self-biography. I will evaluate the effect of the subject's performance and sense of celebrity on the director and on the final product of the cinematic self-biography. [End Page 176] The director's control of the complexity of the biographical treatment will also be examined. My purpose in scrutinizing both an early example of this subgenre and recent developments in the form is to clarify important features and to call attention to the subgenre's potential to produce very contrived life stories. I have chosen to focus on this subgenre because it raises performance and ethical issues that distinguish cinematic biography from written biography. Written and cinematic biographers confront different challenges, and work by somewhat different standards, because of the nature of the media they employ. Cinematic biographies, for example, are collaborative works, making the question "Whose text is this?" a debatable issue. Moreover, the time limitations of a visual medium preempt the depth of analysis found in a literary biography. Directors of cinematic biographies, therefore, need to resist the temptation to simplify the narrative by resorting to stereotyping for economy of presentation and mass audience appeal. Further, because of the technological naiveté of many non-celebrity subjects, directors may be tempted to objectify the subject, or to violate in other ways the ethical parameters of the genre, to be more competitive in the market place. The Performing Identity If, as Linda Wagner-Martin suggests, written biography can in a certain sense be described as "the enactment of cultural performance" (8), cinematic biography relies on performance to an even greater extent. 1 The presence of a camera in a documentary production sets up a frame, keying a performance. Although cinematic biographies of necessity achieve less in-depth coverage of a subject's life course than is achieved by biographers in written works, this limitation is often offset by the actual participation of the subject. Moreover, in cinematic biography the documentarist often contextualizes the subject--through interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and critics, and through collaborative vérité sequences, such as group discussions. These interviewees are also performing; thus the subject's performance is situated within a web of other performances. In written biography, "the biographer must accept or reject a subject's self-definition" (Wagner-Martin 8). In cinematic biography where the live subject participates in the documentary, his or her self-definition, conveyed through performance, is a key aspect of the documentary. The director evaluates and comments on the subject'...