When I was a kid, horror movies horrified me. As a teen, the genre came to thrill and entertain instead. Once again, things changed as I got older. My video instructor predicted this would happen too. He warned us that learning how to edit film would change the way we look at cinema, and claimed it would “ruin the magic of movies.” Although, I don’t agree with the second part, he was right one thing: learning film production does alter the way you perceive movies. If you agree with Benkler argument in his book “The Wealth of Networks” too, that producing culture makes us more sophisticated readers of it (275), then my experience of video editing shouldn’t come as a surprise either.
Learning how films are created changes the way one watches movies. Understanding production and all the “ignored” components renders the culture behind films transparent, and opens up space for critical, self-conscious re-visioning. This is s similar (if not same) logic provided in Benker’s chapter on cultural freedom. Presumably, understanding film is just like understanding “meaning” (or shared assumptions) and getting to know its conventions and practices will, not only, make one more media literate, but also more capable of critically examining the language used, which might alter how one re-articulates it as well.
As a life long movie-watcher, the way i viewed films changed along with my knowledge of cinema. As my comprehension of shared cultural assumptions grew, so did my ability to critically address those assumptions. It is then (through this type of examination) that conventions or “meaning” can be subject to re-articulation. After that, what becomes important is the freedom to make such revision to culture. As a film maker, copyright is something I always have to be thinking about it, and have to agree with Benkler on; it does limit my “understanding” of the world (298.) So much of the culture which surrounds me is not free to be taken and re-contextualized, or remixed in any way. Legally, I cannot change the bulk of cultural texts I encounter and then release it back into the public sphere, so that others may do the same. Not only does this limit the ways in which one can understand the world, but also inhibits those who are subject to it, making critical analysis and reform of copyrighted culture extremely difficult.
