Damaged Art

CW: Self-harm

"Art damage" doesn't mean the same thing as damaged art.  I like the phrase.  Art as a form of damage, fucking with the formula as it were.  I'm more interested in "remastering" as performed by the Cecilia Giménezes of the world.  If you ever want to see some truly awful shit try and find a fan animated reconstruction of a missing Doctor Who episode.  I see enough complaints about the official reconstructions, which are paper doll animations done an an obvious budget and show it, but which I find to be suited to the nature of the material, at least.  They're fundamentally competent, which none of the fan animations I've seen are.  Remix culture and Doctor Who don't really seem to mix.  There is a website for fan edits, and this is a textbook example of this sort of thing.  For every obsessed Garrett Gilchrist devoted to "restoring" a Richard Williams film which was never made, there are apparently thousands of shitty Lord of the Rings edits.

I tried one of the ones from the Hobbit.  My theory was that the film was simply too long, and if you just cut out all the excess one might have a reasonably entertaining movie.  Didn't pan out.  It's not just a matter of length, but of _style_ - Jackson's portentous directorial approach is fundamentally unsuited to the material of "The Hobbit".  No amount of editing can make it good, and it's arguable as to whether editing can even make it _better_.

The fan edit I have taken the most shine to is the so-called "8mm" fan edit of Attack of the Clones.  The transfers of the actual cut-down 8mm versions of the Star Wars films are completely different, lovingly transferred from pristine-as-possible reels so as to preserve as much as possible of these ludicrously cut-down and chopped-up versions of the Star Wars films.  (In the 8mm "Empire Strikes Back", for instance, Darth Vader doesn't get around to telling Luke Skywalker that he's Luke's dad.)  No, this is an attempt to approximate the 8mm reels of our experience and memory, washed out colour, crudely superimposed film grain, crackle and hiss dubbed onto the original soundtrack, image judder, poor contrast, janky edits.

Attack of the Clones... One of the fictitious things I once wrote was a review of this edit of Attack of the Clones written by somebody who saw it once at a sci-fi convention in 1987 and has been called a "fucking liar" by every single person he has ever talked to about the experience.  I am fascinated by what is the transposition of what was clearly a very high budget film (though one which is already, fans complain, technologically obsolete, incapable of existing at a higher resolution than 1080) into a degraded, borderline unwatchable format.

Because, of course, Attack of the Clones was borderline unwatchable in the first place.  It is actually _more_ watchable this way, a riot of incoherent action and terrible acting.  It's this match between form and content, between internal nature and external symptoms, that was how I used to justify cutting myself.  (Sorry, was that dark?)

You don't get this sort of thing with Doctor Who.  You don't get the video mixtape "STAR WARS NOTHING BUT STAR WARS" compiling all the most ludicrous Star Wars-related ephemera they could find.  You don't get ARST ARSW, an edit of every single word of dialogue in the first Star Wars film sorted alphabetically, or the "Star Wars Uncut Director's Cut" (which I believe I downloaded from Vimeo), a remake of the first film cut up into thirty second chunks and crowdsourced out to hundreds of enthusiastic amateurs.  I don't even fucking like Star Wars, but I've seen all this shit, because God, who wouldn't want to?

I don't know what it is.  Maybe it's that there's just so fucking much Doctor Who.  Now that there are more than three films, six films, whatever, it's all gone to shit, hasn't it?  The fans don't really want a new Star Wars film every year, they just want to make their own shit versions of the trilogy, and who can blame them?  The greatest possible betrayal of the Star Wars mythos, clearly, is to make an actual _good film_ set in that mythos.

You can make a piss-take of Doctor Who for three or four minutes.  Super Sentai Doctor Who, say, or Turkish Doctor Who, and it's entertaining enough, but it's not actually any more bizarre than the dinosaur puppets in the Invasion of the Dinosaurs, or the delirious schlock weirdness of Carnival of Monsters, or Tom Baker attempting to have a conversation with a penis for minutes on end.  Doctor Who doesn't need a deuterocanon, because all of the ridiculous and absurd stuff you can imagine has already happened _inside the show_.  Doctor Who's narrative _is_ fan narrative, has been for decades, and the fans, by and large, are queer, nerds, and/or outsiders.  I sometimes suspect that the greatest betrayal the disgruntled nerds feel about Chibnall's take on the show is the way it follows a conventional TV show narrative, is Chibnall's basic ability to make superficially entertaining television.