Exploring the processes of Hypermediation and Remedition in Neill Blomkamp's Sci-Fi mockumentary District 9

2. “Hypermediacy is a unique attribute of the digital age.” Using the history of a digital media form (i.e. cinema, videogames, the windowed operating system, etc), critically discuss this statement with reference to the processes of hypermediacy and remediation.

 District 9's Wikus Van de Merwe (played by Sharlton Copley) as he talks to the camera during the films prominent documentary moments. 

In short, hypermediacy is defined as a media process of “random access” through distinct samplings of, and from, other media platforms (Cotton & Oliver quoted in Bolter & Grusin 31). While, remediation is defined as the “repurposing” of various media forms, which Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin suggest takes a “property” from one media and reuses it in another (Bolter & Grusin 45). Bolter and Grusin outline these processes historically through art in linear perspectives and in the invention of photography, with the awareness that the media could be erased and engage the viewer more effectively, creating immediacy. In a similar sense, Angela Ndalianis connects remediation to seventeenth century Baroque art, also describing it as an important attribute of the contemporary era and further connecting this to our experiences of “amusement park attractions” (Ndalianis 2000).

However, I wish to regard these terms as “practises of specific groups in specific times” (Bolter & Grusin 22), focussing on attributes of the digital postmodern era in cinema. Not in a broad historical sense, but through a case study of the film District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009), which utilizes the processes of hypermediacy and remediation in order to engage the viewer. It is also beneficial to look at the relationship between old and new media that surrounds the use of remediation. This can be highlighted in District 9’s use of TV and newspapers, which makes old media integral to the film’s narrative and the structure of the ‘mock’ documentary.

In computer terminology hyper means the linking of multiple devices, this enables new possibilities through increased information, places, or people (Taylor & Carpenter 1). As Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver suggest, this process is “an entirely new media experience born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies” (Cotton & Oliver quoted in Bolter & Grusin 31) that can be arranged through many media outputs such as sound, image, animation, or visuals. In this sense we can understand hypermediacy as heterogeneous, which enables access to multiple representations of all media (Bolter & Grusin 34).

Bolter and Grusin’s discussion on the process of hypermediacy reveals that it is firstly actuated through immediacy, which is in fact opposite to hypermediacy. Immediacy can be understood as media that conceals or erases the interface, creating for the viewer a perception of immersion within its environment. However, it is also worthy to note that Bolter and Grusin’s suggestion that the two logic's coexist. Even though hypermediacy adopts a “playful or subversive attitude” that draws attention to the media in its representations (Bolter & Grusin 34), our desire for wanting immediacy is evident when seeking realistic representations or environments in new media. Using their example of computer graphics, which can exemplified in film through special effects, these effects create an immediacy that the viewer would not otherwise see as realistic or possible (Bolter & Grusin 34). However, in the case of District 9, the film retains within itself the processes of hypermediacy and remediation appropriate to its narrative.

This playful attitude in hypermediacy described as “random access” which has “no physical beginning, middle or end” (Cotton & Oliver quoted in Bolter & Grusin 31), signposts positions of postmodernism that collectively lacks surface and is ahistorical. As Pamela G. Taylor and B. Stephen Carpenter propose, this type of access does not suggest an “anything goes” apparatus, but instead suggests “anything is possible” (Taylor & Carpenter 1). Meaning, we are not limited to singular experiences but can make new meanings and understandings from other inputs.

Hypermediacy is therefore elevated in the film District 9, namely through its appearance as a ‘mock’ documentary. The film’s background must be firstly explored through director Neill Blomkamp’s short film Alive in Joburg (Blomkamp, 2005) which explored themes such as racism and segregation by interviewing people on the topic of Zimbabwean refugees. Blomkamp then used the same transcripts but replaced the refugees with aliens (called prawns in the film), being the protagonists and victims in District 9. In the film’s political content, the aliens work as a metaphor for the ‘other’. The use of hypermediacy is evident through representations of old media, such as newspaper articles and the TV aesthetics of broadcast news and current affair type programmes. The familiarity of the documentary and old media aesthetics help to strengthen the narrative and political commentary within the film.

One of District 9's trailer's that reasserts the film’s mockumentary style and the political transcripts used to convey the ‘local’ people.

Even though District 9 highlights other media forms, I want to suggest that the film is most effect through remediation. Remediation, as discussed, is a form of “repurposing” or taking “property from one medium and to reuse it in another” (Bolter & Grusin 45). Although Bolter and Grusin believe the process of remediation conceals media in its repurposing and that new media depends upon ,or cannot survive without using, old media forms (Bolter & Grusin 47),  I want to argue that District 9 does not conceal its use of old media, but utilizes it fittingly into its narrative. In this way, I want to bring into context Ndalianis idea of the “baroque spectacle” (Ndalianis 2000), which she believes plays an important part in contemporary films. Ndalianis looks at the socio- historical conditions of the 17th  century baroque painting which offered the viewer an alternate temporal experience of space. Instead of the structure of the “classical attitude to narrative and visual form” (Ndalianis 2000), baroque vision offered an expansive architecture that collapses the frame. We can see the baroque vision in District 9’s use of the documentary narrative that goes beyond this format to provide Sci-fi spectacle and CGI visuals.

This spatial perspective conceptualised in baroque, Ndalianis also links to the aesthetics of the “amusement park attractions”, where she believes “remediates” not only digital effects, but theatrical effects as simple as smoke and fire (Ndalianis 2000).This type of experience is presented in District 9 through the segregation and violence between the prawns and the humans (or the South African government). As discussed, the film embraces the use of old media through TV and documentary aesthetics. The film creates a sense of liveliness through the handheld camera work and shows these events as if they are being virally spread across other media platforms. We also experience this through the “theatrical affects” when the occasional blood splatters on the screen and when the character subversively breaks the fourth wall; presented through the mock documentary. However, this overt repurposing also engages the viewer to embody these events in both a realistic and simulative experience.

Historically, it could be argued that District 9 use of hypermediacy and remediation aesthetics are not new. Hart Cohen uses Lev Manovich theory of new media on the documentary Soviet Union film, Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). Cohen suggests that through the film, a collection of montage imagery with an emphases on progressive transportation machinery of the time, engages audiences on a level of abstraction (Cohen 337). This type of abstraction, Cohen believes, is self reflexivity and draws attention to the processes of film making through the story of a cameraman shooting the film and offers a different experience to the viewer (Cohen 338). Man with a Moving Camera works as a double conundrum, as it allows viewers to engage deeper through the emerging technologies of the time as well as opposing the technologies as societies were divided by the prospects of these changes (Cohen 340).

Cohen’s reflections also work in relation to District 9, through the use of old media the film creates ability for the viewer to further engage with its narrative and the deeper political commentaries within. In a similar sense the films low budget old media documentary style is contrasted to the visuals of CGI Prawns; Blompkamp wanted to make the aliens  appear both human and barbarous in order to contrast with later feelings of empathy. Even though the second half of District 9 focuses on a drama or thriller narrative, which loses the hand held documentary sense of urgency, we can still see the process of hypermediacy and remediation in its participatory levels and use of other media’s that enable us to understand the positions of the ‘other’ as the narrative progresses.

While it is hard to theorise a definitive history on these processes in cinema, through linear perspectives, photography and classical baroque art we can see spatial and temporal changes that point to the processes of hypermediacy and remediation. Ndalianis’s idea of baroque perspectives by way of theme park attractions is different to seeing remediation as simply a process of concealing the other medium or in fact acting as a rival. In much this same way, the processes of hypermediacy in District 9 helps to create a documentary authority through other media to strengthen and offer alternate meanings to the changing contexts of these platforms.

 It only makes sense that film uses “random access” to acknowledge, understand and reflect upon these platforms in order progress. This is of course can be subtle or in the case of District 9 obvious, not so much hiding the different media, but using it effectively through contrasting backdrops and narratives. These repurposing attitudes have become a unique process of the postmodern digital age, where although we have become accustomed to them, we may not always be aware of them.

Filmography

District 9. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Distributed by TriStar Pictures, 2009. DVD.

Bibliography

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. “Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation.” Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge and London.: MIT Press, 2000. 22-50.

Cohen, H. “Database Documentary: From Autorship to Authoring in Remediated/Remixed Documentary.” Culture Unbound.4 (2012): 327-348.

Taylor, P., and B. S Carpenter. “Hypermediated Art Criticism.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 41.3 (2007): 1-24.

Ndalianis, Angela. 2000, “Baroque Perceptual Regimes.” Web. 13 September 2013: http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/5/baroque/