(Re)expressionism

I've become fascinated with user-generated movie trailers—the kind that assemble snippets of a film in a manner that drastically changes the emotions of the actual movie. However, the trick only works if you've actually seen the movie that it's rehashing.

These trailers are called recuts, but I don't like that name. It's too shallow. A recut is really nothing more than an alternate version of the original thing. For example, when a studio runs a new and improved trailer for a movie, the one that came second is a recut. Why—because they just shuffled the footage a bit, but they did not put the film itself through any sort of transformative experience, i.e. the signifier changes, but not the signified.

However, with the fan-generated recuts we're really talking about the manipulation of reality—taking an established thing and reordering it in such a way that it transcends simple rearrangement. This is a reshuffling that actually reorients the very nature of the thing itself, but via annexation. So, the substance remains the same, but not the essence, i.e. it's new, but not entirely new.

It made me think that maybe we need a new word for this hypernew art form, but it couldn't be a completely original word; it would also have to be hypernew.

After all, we are the culture of RE—remediated, recycled, recut, rebooted, and reimagined. So why not just refit another word to do the job? So, from now on, I am going to refer to this form of media art as Reexpressionism. Why?

Expressionism refers to a "any art that raises subjective feelings above objective observations. The paintings aim to reflect the artists's state of mind rather than the reality of the external world."

With these trailers, there is clearly an objective thing, i.e. a film. However, these reality-bending video editors are able to manipulate the subjective emotions by distorting and warping the original, objective thing. They are able to superimpose their vision upon that film and redefine its feeling—its essence.

The greatest example that I have seen so far is an amazing reexpression of Dirty Dancing that casts it in a Lynchian mold. Unfortunately, the embed function has been disabled, but you can find this amazing trailer rehash here: If David Lynch Directed Dirty Dancing.

[Relevant Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-cut_trailer]