Exploring Seriality on Screen

Audiovisual Narratives in Film and Television

Ariane Hudelet, Anne Crémieux, Ariane Hudelet, Anne Crémieux

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000201352
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Negocios y empresa
• Sous-sujet: Industria de medios y comunicaciones

This collective book analyzes seriality as a major phenomenon increasingly connecting audiovisual narratives (cinematic films and television series) in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The book historicizes and contextualizes the notion of seriality, combining narratological, aesthetic, industrial, philosophical, and political perspectives, showing how seriality as a paradigm informs media convergence and resides at the core of cinema and television history. By associating theoretical considerations and close readings of specific works, as well as diachronic and synchronic approaches, this volume offers a complex panorama of issues related to seriality including audience engagement, intertextuality and transmediality, cultural legitimacy, authorship, and medium specificity in remakes, adaptations, sequels, and reboots.

Written by a team of international scholars, this book highlights a diversity of methodologies that will be of interest to scholars and doctoral students across disciplinary areas such as media studies, film studies, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies. It will also interest students attending classes on serial audiovisual narratives and will appeal to fans of the series it addresses, such as Fargo, Twin Peaks, The Hunger Games, Bates Motel, and Sherlock.

Part I

Serial specificities

1.1 Opening gambits

Cross-media self-reflexivity and audience engagement in serial cinema, 1936–2008¹

Ilka Brasch and Felix Brinker

Understood as the practice of re-telling or continuing an already known story in a way that “achieves a dialectic between order and novelty, […] between scheme and innovation” (Eco 2005, 200), narrative serialization has been at work in American film production at least since the days of early cinema and Edison’s unauthorized remakes of Biograph pictures (Forrest and Koos 2002). However, while “cinema has repeated and replayed its own narratives and genres from its very beginnings,” as Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis note, it was only during the last two decades that film scholars have begun to seriously consider serial phenomena (Loock and Verevis 2012, 2). This new interest informs a number of recent publications that engage with varying serialization practices in Hollywood cinema and beyond – including work on remaking, sequelization, and related phenomena like adaptation, franchising, and transmedia storytelling that can similarly be understood in terms of repetition and variation (Loock and Verevis 2012, 2–3; Kelleter and Loock 2017; Loock 2017).² The focus on mainstream contemporary and (post)classical Hollywood cinema has recently been broadened by studies of film serials (see, for example, Barefoot 2011; Higgins 2016; Brasch 2018), a form that has traditionally received less academic attention than other, more self-contained types of narrative film. The recent prominence of research on cinematic serialization furthermore coincides with an increased interest in the topic of popular seriality in general, which is evidenced in a number of studies and collections that examine serial storytelling across multiple media and historical periods (see, for example, Hayward 1997; Kelleter 2012b, 2017; Allen and van den Berg 2014; Mayer 2014; Kelleter and Loock 2017).

In the following, we combine a study of serialized feature films across the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st with a consideration of sound-era film serials to trace approaches to serial storytelling across different filmic forms and over several decades. To parse out continuities but also shifts in cinema’s construction of serial narratives, we examine a number of examples from three decades across the 20th and 21st centuries – namely, the film serials Ace Drummond and Radio Patrol from the 1930s, the 1978 superhero blockbuster Superman, and a number of comic book movies from the first decade of the 21st century (including 2004’s Spider-Man 2 and 2008’s The Incredible Hulk) – and consider how these productions signal their serial character. To do so, we follow David Bordwell’s observation that “the viewer tends to base conclusions about the narrational norm upon the earliest portions of the syuzhet” (1985, 151), the story that unfolds. Hence, we turn to the opening sequences of these examples to examine how they propose a preferred mode of audience engagement. We therefore suggest that the very first moments of installments of our case studies all articulate how the respective examples of serial film want to be consumed. We furthermore argue that all of our examples exist at a nexus of two different but closely related types of narrative serialization and therefore delineate two distinct and separate trajectories for serial engagement.

Writing about early 21st-century television, Ivan Askwith uses the term “engagement” as a shorthand for a “range of possible investments (financial, emotional, psychological, social, intellectual) that a […] [recipient] can make in a media object” (Askwith 2007, 49; Ziegenhagen 2009, 79). Askwith emphasizes that recent television series aim to encourage an active audience behavior beyond the regular viewing of new episodes. To survive and prosper within a competitive media environment, network television dramas like LOST (2004–2010) invite a range of activities that contribute to their commercial success, including conversations and discussions on social media, the consumption of tie-in products and spin-off narratives in other media, as well as the participation in fan culture (see 49–50). While Askwith’s argument is specific to contemporary television, serial narratives of all media and periods have developed means and devices to ensure such an active and ongoing engagement – the most obvious being the cliffhanger ending, which is meant to ensure continued consumption across the “narrative break” that separates installments and invites the audience to speculate about events to come (Hagedorn 1988, 7; see also Lambert 2009). Through such similar devices, serial narratives practice a “politics of engagement,” that is, a particular employment of the serial form (and of the medium in which it appears) that is geared toward pre-structuring and steering consumers’ reception practices (cf. Brinker 2015, 305–308). Engagement in this sense is not a stable category, but one that, like serial forms more generally, is impacted by “varying media and medial formats […]; by the technological, political, and cultural contours of […] media environments, and by the complex and uneven interactions of authors, audiences, and larger institutional configurations,” as Ruth Mayer notes about the principle of popular seriality in general (6). Accordingly, different types of serial cinema aim to solicit multiple forms of audience engagement, which differ considerably from the serial engagement demanded by the television series that Askwith discusses.

On the most basic level, studying engagement means asking for the concrete formal means and devices by which serial narratives alert their audiences to their ongoing nature, that is, to the ways in which these narratives attempt to direct the recipient’s attention toward other parts of the narrative and related opportunities for media consumption. How, in other words, do examples of serial film establish a relationship to earlier iterations of the same story in other media? How do they signal that the film at hand is merely one installment in a larger body of related works? How do films communicate that they want to be watched as part of a series? Answering these questions requires us to go beyond the easy application of seemingly clear-cut labels, and to pay close attention to the formal operations of serial film, as well as to the historically specific media environments in which they operate.

Two types of serial narration

Radio Patrol, Ace Drummond, Superman, and the comic book movies discussed later on are all doubly serial. Firstly, they are themselves serial narratives that tell their stories through segmentation into short chapters (Ace Drummond and Radio Patrol) or as installments of longer film series (Superman, Spider-Man 2, The Incredible Hulk) that unfold a narrative continuity across several films. As such, these productions tell ongoing stories about a core cast of central recurring characters who live through a chain of varying adventures – of which each re-iterates a basic plot schema or conflict that is usually centered around the confrontation between heroes and villains.³ This type of serialization proceeds linearly in so far as it entails the development of one continuous story within the formats of the film serial or the blockbuster series. Secondly, since all four titles adapt ongoing comic narratives to the big screen, they are themselves mere installments of larger, cross-media series that encompass a number of parallel and separate incarnations of the same intellectual properties, central figures, and basic narrative schemata in film, comics, and elsewhere.

Ace Drummond and Radio Patrol, for example, co-exist with ongoing, eponymous series of newspaper comic strips that tell similar detective stories but exist in separate narrative continuities. Similarly, the various cinematic incarnations of Superman, Spider-Man, and The Incredible Hulk co-exist with a plethora of alternate (and, at times, markedly different) versions of their protagonists in other media, including comics, animated television cartoon series, and digital games.⁴ In this respect, our examples are also products of what Shane Denson discusses as a “non-linear […] compounding or cumulative […] seriality” that proceeds opportunistically across formats and platforms, and which results in the creation of various separate, alternate takes on the same characters and properties (Denson 2011, 532). This second, non-linear type of serialization entails the reiteration of known narrative formulae, popular characters, and successful properties in order to translate and export them into new markets and media.⁵

Whereas linear serialization seeks to engage audiences along a singular narrative trajectory, non-linear serialization spreads multiple alternative, “loosely connected” iterations of the same narrative, which relate to each other extra-diegetically rather than diegetically, through the recurrence of iconic features that are repeated and reconfigured for the new medial contexts into which they are translated (Mayer 2014, 9). In what follows, we will demonstrate that the opening sequences of Ace Drummond, Radio Patrol, Superman, and more recent examples of the comic book movie negotiate both types of serialization and make this doubly serial nature explicit. More precisely, we suggest that the very first scenes of our examples position these films in relation to both linear and non-linear serial trajectories and thereby alert viewers to their embeddedness in a larger network of related narratives and media. Significantly, all of our examples do so through representations of other media, most notably the medium of comics.⁶

Film serials

In 1936, at the outset of what is considered the “golden era” of sound serials that lasted until 1944 (Higgins 2016 8, 98), Universal released the aviation serial Ace Drummond. Its 13 two-reel chapters appeared weekly in rural and suburban cinemas across the United States, which usually featured them in Saturday matinees and before the Friday night features. At the time, serials were tailored to a child audience, but they usually also had an adult appeal (Barefoot 2011, 180–183). Golden-era serials particularly harvested the popular action and adventure comic strips that flourished in daily newspapers at the time. Accordingly, Ace Drummond borrows its protagonist hero from the eponymous comic strip, which appeared in the Sunday supplements of W. R. Hearst’s King Features newspaper syndicate, and thereby participates in the growing trend of comics’ adaptations. While it takes up characters from the comic and its aviation theme, the serial does not adapt plotlines from the comic strip.

The serial does, however, employ the aesthetics and narrative mode of comics to introduce viewers to the ongoing plot at the beginning of each installment. From its second chapter onward, the credits of each of Ace Drummond’s chapters are followed by a shot of the hands of an invisible reader opening the pages of a newspapers’ comic supplement. The recognizable headline “Ace Drummond – by Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker” indicates that this is the real double page spread. The following shot then shows a close-up of an individual comics’ panel, which is not from the actual ...