Wes Anderson Trailer from Alex Cornell on Vimeo.
Quick edit: how tacky is it of Vimeo to put a line of text like the one above in their embed code?
I stumbled across a video yesterday that’s a part of a graduate design thesis by Alex Cornell. It’s in Wes Anderson’s style about a hypothetical Wes Anderson film festival. I also recently watched Planet B-Boy about how break dancing and B-boy culture has spread around the world, and independently of that had a couple of friends forward me hip-hop videos from Brazil and Japan.
All of this made me think about the creative use of forms in the context of cultural encounters and the ways in which people appropriate and make them stylistically and culturally their own while distinctly being part of a greater genre, art form, or movement. In my Ph.D. studies in Religion we would call this syncretism to describe how religions and indigenous cultures blended to create a hybrid of something new, often to the dismay of colonialist powers. Many Emerson scholars consider him the first writer to mobilize language in a similar fashion for cultural and political criticism.
But in a post-colonial world of global cultures where spacial distances disappear in the context of instant messaging, social networks, and online forums often times ownership of the form becomes a gray area as “outsiders” become dominant authorities to originators. B-boy culture, while distinctly American in origins, clearly falls behind Japan, France, and Korea in pushing boundaries of the art, and hip-hop and graffiti art innovation continues to thrive worldwide while within the U.S. it has slightly stagnant due to domination by corporate label interests in radio and media.
These cross-cultural appropriations also need to be understood in the context of empowerment for the key actors – my sense is a continuity can be traced between motivations to transcend oppressive circumstances on the part of originators and the reasons why those in other countries identified with the form.
Japan – DJ Krush
Brazil meets Brooklyn – Kassiano & Sujihno in collaboration with Zuzuka Poderosa
