Product Placement
From the Website for the SF Indie film festival, a report of a new film by the IP activist group
Negativland:
Steve Seid, Video Curator for Pacific Film Archive and Peter Conheim of Negativland present a finely tuned montage of egregious product placement shots, drawing on 70 films—removing the gratuitous and unnecessary plots and leaving behind just the exhilarating core of consumerism.
Commercial cinema is becoming just that, a commercial—ninety minutes of seamless advertising, corralling all artistry within the comfy confines of the saleable. In years past, the propmaster, like Wile E. Coyote, had a pantry filled with generic products: Acme beer, Acme cereal, or Acme explosives. Later, product placement infiltrated the Dream Factory with an array of lovely goods and foodstuffs—sneaky salutations to the merchandised environment. Now Product Placements surface in forms more numerous than flavors at a Baskin-Robbins: insinuated into dialogue, thrown front and center like loss leaders, even engulfing entire features until they become little more than cross-promotions for toy manufacturers. That most forward-thinking of films, Minority Report, heightened the practice with its talking Armani billboards and customer-friendly Gap, raking in a cool twenty-five million in the process. Value-Added Cinema offers up the stuff dreams are made of.
[quote apparently from the Chicago Underground Film Festival]
The important question is, if film-goers are willing to sell their attention in exchange for entertainment, will the Negativland film still have exchange value? Or will consumers be paid directly by advertisers for their attention?
[via
boing-boing]
Posted by johndan at January 31, 2004 03:16 PM
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