NYFF dispatch: self-performance on YouTube

I'm still piecing my thoughts together from the Views program at the New York Film Festival, but I thought I'd share a bit about one film that showed there, Amie Siegel's My Way 1, which is a compilation of YouTube performances of "Gotta Go My Own Way," from High School Musical 2.

While I found the film interesting for the mixture of performance and earnest expression it reveals on the part of the webcam operators, or the gendered, racial, and national dynamics at play in each video, I was actually most struck by the film's placement within a program of fairly highbrow avant-garde film. The still (which is actually not a still, but a composite) that was chosen to represent the film actually misleads the viewer, imitating the rhetoric of the filmstrip while this piece would be more accurately described as a video. Beyond that generic qualifier of video as the non-celluloid, it's something that is also distinctly identifiable as an autobiographical and I would even say a YouTube-specific genre, the domestic karaoke performance.

As a friend pointed out to me, the piece is also not new -- Oliver Laric, for example, previously created a piece called 50 50, which includes 50 performances of various songs by 50 Cent. The cuts are shorter than Siegel's and, with the soundtrack playing over all the clips, Laric's piece is arguably more about continuity across a range of performances, most of which all demonstrate the same imitative style. In this way 50 50 (which seems a play on 20/20 vision) seems to explicitly engage the ways in which music videos contribute to a culture of sameness, and thereby critiques the supposed openness and difference promoted in a space like YouTube.

Siegel's film, on the other hand, takes this question of individuality more seriously, and includes performances that do not include the original soundtrack, versions sung in different languages and in transposed keys. She chooses a wider range of performers in race, class, and to a lesser extent, age and gender.

It's a little strange, then, that My Way 1 (which is part of the My Way series; another film includes, as you would expect, Sinatra's classic) goes the way of the film, at least by the standards of the New York Film Festival. Unlike Laric's piece, it's not even available to view as a YouTube video. Ontologically --and perhaps this is a matter of the critical position it takes up-- it is identified with a cinematic practice, while its subject matter is about Internet self-performance. I wonder to what extent different media are invested with certain critical functions, and what difference is registered when speaking outside, as in Siegel's case, or from within (at least partially so; the piece was exhibited in museums and written up by Artforum as well), as with Laric.