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Williams Alum Documents the Making of 'Transformers' as Shared Event

By John SevenSpecial to iBerkshires
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Williams College alum Kevin B. Lee has been proclaimed the "King of the Video Essays" by the New York Times, a form that combines edited film footage with commentary.

Lee had been laboring away as a freelance film critic and says he began to make video essays about film topics as a way of understanding certain films better, paying tribute and offering insights in a visual way. In a typical essay, he might provide cover a film like "And God Created Woman" or a wider topic, like Spielberg's use of faces.

But Lee captured the most attention with his video "Transformers: The Premake," which examines the changing circumstance of what a movie actually is anymore, at least in the realm of Hollywood blockbusters. Lee had noticed that the actual films were becoming the weakest link in a chain of interactive entertainment, the final part of a process that involved fan creativity and even tourism.

"When it comes to Hollywood movies like 'Transformers,' people care about the film most before they see it, and then once they see it, the event is over, onto the next thing," he said. "There's no lasting value to a lot of these huge, trillion dollar productions that effectively get treated as disposable entertainment and not as some sort of lasting work of art, or the kind of movie you can go back to and get more out of each time. It's very much the build up, the anticipation, is really where the bulk of the activity around the film happens."

And if the the nature of film is changing, Lee reasoned, his job as a film critic has changed. Reviewing the actual film began to make no sense whatsoever, especially when Lee began to view such films as critic-proof anyhow and, as Lee points out, largely made with the Chinese audience in mind.

"If all the stuff before the movie is what matters," Lee said. "As a film critic, I should pay more attention to that than the movie itself. That's where the action is and that's where the money is. That's where the money's getting made, it's just getting people all hot and bothered and wanting to see the film. The film should be evaluated based on their promotional campaigns, rather than the films themselves."

Lee began fashioning "Transformers: The Premake" as what he calls a "desktop documentary," which means the computer desktop that is central to the work of creating it becomes the stage through which the information is experienced in the video. Most of Lee's video is devoted to the footage of other videographers of varying qualities who sometime scout out filming locations for the Transformers movies, sometimes blunder into them, but who all capture them with their smartphones and upload them for others to see.

Lee began to perceive these efforts not just as fans capturing something they see because they are enthusiastic, but rather a crowdsourcing of marketing labor in service of Hollywood's interest. He even noticed that some people were uploading footage of Transformers being filmed and monetizing the footage to the degree that if someone else used it, they would make copyright claims to have YouTube shut it down.

"It's commodification of everyone's content," Lee said.


It's also a sign that fan culture has become more pervasive in the film industry, which leads to a feeling of ownership of the property, and that coagulates around the making of the film more than the film itself. The preamble to the release becomes a massive parlor game for the fan culture.

"It's all the speculation, the pouring over every detail like some sort of Talmudic document," said Lee. "What's this trailer tell us about this movie? What are the plot details? How much of the movie can we figure out just based on all the little crumbs we get from the marketing and publicity machine? That's when people are most engaged and that's when they are exercising the most creative energy, coming up with all these elaborate interpretations and theories."

It was Lee's goal to get his "premake" out there at least a week before the actual movie was released — to beat Hollywood at its own schedule and perhaps even become part of that fan lead-up of excitement, while also examining it, and noting that fan action had begun to take on a life of its own, far beyond whatever property it organizes itself around.

"In terms of this new normal of personalized media making, all the photos and videos and other media that we can just make with the press of a button on our phones, this is just a radical paradigm shift in the media equation of who the producers are, who the consumers are," Lee said. "And it does tie into the fan fiction thing, in terms of who is generating the content that we care about, in relation to what, in service to what?"

"In the case of Hollywood, it's this tug of war or push and pull between wanting to idolize or adore or worship something, in such a way that you can apply your own energies, but to what extent does that end up exceeding the thing that you are admiring or paying tribute to, and to what extent exist outside of that thing and to what extent does it feed back?

There is some overlap in what Lee does with his video essays and what people shooting footage of Transformers are doing. It's an attempt to make your mark on the movies that mean something to you. For Lee, that means analysis and insight alongside film images. For Transformers fans, that means taking part in one of the biggest crowd-sourced marketing efforts around.

"The whole world is trying to get onscreen," he said. "Whether it's people or cities or countries, everybody wants to be in the movies. And we can now."

Lee will screen some of his essays, including "Transformers: The Premake" at Images Cinema, 50 Spring St., in Williamstown, on Saturday, Feb. 27, at 2 p.m. His videos can be found here.


Tags: images,   movie theater,   Williams College,   

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Williamstown Select Board Awards ARPA Funds to Remedy Hall

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday allocated $20,000 in COVID-19-era relief funds to help a non-profit born of the pandemic era that seeks to provide relief to residents in need.
 
On a unanimous vote, the board voted to grant the American Rescue Plan Act money to support Remedy Hall, a resource center that provides "basic life necessities" and emotional support to "individuals and families experiencing great hardship."
 
The board of the non-profit approached the Select Board with a request for $12,000 in ARPA Funds to help cover some of the relief agency's startup costs, including the purchase of a vehicle to pick up donations and deliver items to clients, storage rental space and insurance.
 
The board estimates that the cost of operating Remedy Hall in its second year — including some one-time expenses — at just north of $31,500. But as board members explained on Monday night, some sources of funding are not available to Remedy Hall now but will be in the future.
 
"With the [Williamstown] Community Chest, you have to be in existence four or five years before you can qualify for funding," Carolyn Greene told the Select Board. "The same goes for state agencies that would typically be the ones to fund social service agencies.
 
"ARPA made sense because [Remedy Hall] is very much post-COVID in terms of the needs of the town becoming more evident."
 
In a seven-page letter to the town requesting the funds, the Remedy Hall board wrote that, "need is ubiquitous and we are unveiling that truth daily."
 
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