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One more time: instances, applications, and implications of the replay

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ONE MORE TIME:
INSTANCES, APPLICATIONS,
AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE REPLAY

by

Christopher C.P. Hanson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION—CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2010

Copyright 2010 Christopher C.P. Hanson
ii
Acknowledgments

Given the topic of this dissertation, it should come as no surprise that I have
often felt like I am repeating myself. That said, no amount of repetition of thanks
would suitably express my gratitude to the many people who have helped this project
come to fruition. My advisor Tara McPherson has been a remarkable mentor and
advocate throughout my graduate studies. I can safely say that without her support, I
would never have come to USC in the first place, and would not have been given the
many opportunities I have been offered during my graduate studies. She has been an
unwavering voice of support and a constant source of intellectual and professional
inspiration. David James has been an extraordinarily generous mentor and I have
been enormously influenced by his passion for—and knowledge of—avant-garde
film. I continue to be inspired by both his scholarly and pedagogical approaches, and
I learned to truly appreciate the rich social, cultural, and geographical diversity of the
Los Angeles area under his tutelage. I am especially grateful to Steve Anderson, who
has given me far more than the mere perspective of an “outside” member, sharing
both his vast knowledge and even his office; I will forever value his keen intellect and
generous feedback, as well as his humor and insight into the mundane trials and
tribulations of a graduate student.
Ellen Seiter has remained an influential figure in this project from its earliest
days and I thank her for her excellent advice and guidance on this project and for
reminding me of the importance of keeping one’s sense of humor through the
iii
challenges of academic life. I am also forever grateful to Anne Friedberg for her
inspiration, humor, and her playful and brilliant feedback throughout this project.
Beyond those directly involved in overseeing this project, there are a number
of people to whom I express my deepest gratitude. I thank Vivian Sobchack, in whose
course at USC this project began, for her sharp and rich insights, and for generally
just making me think. Holly Willis has been a fantastic and supportive mentor,
greatly enhancing my understanding of new media and helping me recognize the
nuances of its aesthetics. I am also grateful to the many mentors whose guidance
helped lead me to graduate school, including John Schott, James Poelke, and Eric
Jewart. Tracy Fullerton has been an enthusiastic supporter of my work and a great
source of inspiration for her passion and knowledge of games. My research has been
directly and indirectly influenced by valued exchanges with Todd Boyd, René
Thoreau Bruckner, Rich Edwards, Alice Gambrell, Priya Jaikumar, Rick Jewell,
Peggy Kamuf, Marsha Kinder, Julie Klein, Michael Renov, Akira Lippit, Chris
Swain, and William Whittington, and I am grateful to them and the many others from
whom I have learned in the last few years.
The staff of the Critical Studies office at USC has been truly fantastic in their
help over the years. Linda Overholt has been incredibly helpful and kind throughout
my time at USC and I am certain that I could not have reached this step without her
unwavering support and assistance. I am also grateful to Alicia Cornish and Kim
Greene for all of their help. I thank my wonderful and helpful colleagues at
HASTAC, the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, Loyola-Marymount University, the
University of Michigan, and Vectors.
iv
My research and enjoyment of life have been greatly enhanced by
conversations with and feedback from a number of colleagues and friends at USC. In
particular, Bella Honess Roe has been an excellent friend, colleague, and fellow
survivor through all of graduate school. I am grateful for the many thought-provoking
conversations I have had with her, Daniel Herbert, and Suzanne Scott about this
project and for the many things that they have done to help me along the way. I am
also greatly appreciative for the moral and material support of Carlos Kase, David
Lerner, Paul Reinsch, DJ Nick Roe, and Anna Sampson. My work and life in Los
Angeles have been greatly enriched by many people, including Alex Ago, Elizabeth
Affuso, Patty Ahn, Adan Avalaos, Karen Beavers, Michael Bolton, Bob Buerkle, Rob
Cavanagh, my Swedish homey James Cahill, Jennie and Daniel Chamberlain, Kate
Fortmueller, Kristen Fuhs, Ghia Godfree, Veena Hariharan, Eric Hoyt, Brian
Jacobson, Jorie Lagerwey, Barbara Lempel and Gabriel Lichstein, Alex Lykidis, Liz
Mahoney, Ayana McNair, Rachel Middleman, Jaime Nasser, Veronica Paredes, Luke
Pebler, Sara Peddicord, Elizabeth Ramsey, Ted Rubenstein, Susana Ruiz, Kellee
Santiago, Matylda Szewczyk, Laurel Westrup, Mary Jeanne Wilson, and Sandra
Zalman.
I am also grateful for the support and understanding I have enjoyed and relied
upon from those who were friends long before this process began and remarkably still
talk to me. Brian Corwell has been a peerless supporter and confidant throughout this
process, and I thank him for his unending generosity and friendship. Additionally, I
grateful for the times I have shared with Andrew and Meredith Berg, Laura Cutiletta
and Jesse Hansen, Esther Decambra, Sara and Emerson DuBois, Matt Engel and
v
Sarah Greenberger, Peter Groynom and Craig Barrett, David and Annie Horton,
Webb Haymaker, Jill Harper and Blaine Nelson, Leah Janus and John McCarthy,
Matt Jenkins, Kevin Lee, Yuri and John Lyddan, Kate Maguire and Mark Boissevain,
Simrin Mangat, Carly Marino, Anne Marson, Rob and Erin Martin, Tim Nelson and
Aparna Ramaswamy, Dan and Emily Painter, Jamie and Jessica Ratcliffe, Matt and
Danielle Richmond, Chris Valness, Mike Vana, Alyce Waxman, and Mike
Weissenstein. And special thanks go to my friends with video games systems over the
years for their patience and generosity.
I especially thank my family for their love, assistance, and patience. Many
loved ones have helped me reach this step, including my grandparents, Marion
Devlin, the Clements, the DeCarbonels, and the Fords. I am grateful to the
Heckmanns for their love and generous support through graduate school. My sisters
and their wonderful families have been constant and much-needed sources of support
and joy throughout my life, and in particular during the last few years. I thank my
father and step-mother and my mother and step-father for their endless
encouragement, love, and for taking me to so many films when I was young. I
dedicate this dissertation to my parents, to my father for his humor and bemused
support of my love of “biddley-beeps” and my mother for ceaseless support and her
willingness to buy a Tandy and a Nintendo when it really mattered.
Finally, I wish to thank Kate—although no amount of words will ever be
sufficient to express the gratitude I have to her. I would never have reached this stage
without her brilliant feedback and tireless editing, not to mention her love, support,
patience, and wonderful sense of humor. I thank and love her greatly.
vi
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

Abstract viii

Introduction 1
Material Specificity, Similarity, and Difference 4

Chapter 1: Avant-Garde Practices of Replay 19
Chapter Introduction 19
Film and Reality 21
Modes of Replay in Avant-Garde Film 26
Early Narrative Films & Repetition 29
Medium Specificity, Dadaism and Surrealism 35
Replay in the “Trance Film” 43
Collage and Found Footage Film: Industrial Practices and Reconsiderations 51
Replay & Materiality: Structural Film, Temporality, and Lived Experience 59
Shared Materialities: Film as Experiential Metaphor 71

Chapter 2: Televisual Replay: Is It Live or Is It Television? 83
Chapter Introduction: Television and the Replay 83
Radio: Roots of the Replay 91
The Economics of Repetition: Early Broadcast Syndication 106
Early Television: Liveness & Quality 110
Recycling: Hollywood and Televisual Syndication 116
Reruns and Stripping 127
Flow & Liveness: Is it Live or is it Television? 132
Time Delay & Instant Replay 139
User-Controlled Replay, Televisuality & “Television” 145
Duration, Memory, and the Replay 155

Chapter 3: Re: Play 161
Chapter Introduction 161
Difference and Materiality in Computing and Gaming Structures 165
Computers as State Machines 165
Difference & Game Structures 168
Programmatic Structures of Replay and Repetition 171
Learning the Ropes: Industrial Strategies of Replay 175
Structures of Repetition 182
Replay as Sectional Mastery 187
Strategies of Comprehensive Textual Replay 193
Cultural, Social, and Ideological Deployments and Implications of the Replay 195
Do as I Say: Emulative Replay 198
vii
Re-creation: Replay as Historical Re-Enactment 204
One More Time: Instant Replay 210
Correctional Replay 214
Constitutive Replay 216
Chapter Conclusion 223

Conclusion 228

Bibliography 231

viii
Abstract

First used to describe a rematch of a tied sporting event, the term “replay” was
extended in the early twentieth century to express the playback of a recording. Since
this usage, the significance of the term and concept of replay has expanded
considerably into a range of cultural, social, political, industrial, technological, and
experiential practices. As such, replay resists simple classification and definition, and
this dissertation unpacks the various meanings and implications of its instances and
applications across several media forms. In particular, I interrogate the replay’s usage
and significance in the United States through avant-garde filmmaking practices,
television broadcasting, and the structures and play mechanics of video games.
I begin with a consideration of avant-garde film practitioners who have
engaged with replay through multiple registers. Reliant on the unique relationship
between cinema and reality, filmmakers use film’s capacity to record and replay for a
range of investigations, including psychosexual examination and recontexualization
of extant film. Throughout its industrial history, replay and repetition have played
central roles in the production, distribution, exhibition, and experience of television.
Emerging from the practices of radio broadcasting and reception, television’s
structure has long emphasized regularized and predictable content structured into
organized programming schedules. Additionally, specific modes of televisual
broadcasting have been shaped by methods of textual replay, which alters events
during their broadcast. The capacity for replay has increasingly passed into the
viewer’s control, with the arrival of television technologies which provide users a
ix
degree of control over the stream of programming entering their home. A
consideration of the bipartite nature of the ludic and the digital in the ontology of
video games initiates my discussion of the replay in interactive media. After
establishing this framework, I examine the multiple implementations and implications
of the replay through several critical lenses. This exploration includes the
consideration of the replay’s function as an industrial strategy, its ideological
significance, and its evolving relationship with play itself. Ultimately, I contend that
the replay at once contains and extends time and space, transforming the lived
experience—and its register in memory and media—into a palimpsest.

1
Introduction

I remember that month of January in Tokyo—or rather I remember the images
I filmed in that month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves
for my memory—they are my memory. I wonder how people remember
things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape? How has mankind
managed to remember? I know—the Bible. The new bible will be the eternal
magnetic tape of a time that will have to re-read itself constantly just to know
it existed. – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1983)

Before the events of September 11, 2001 became a primary point of cultural
reference within the United States, perhaps the most commonly cited historical
moment was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
Much like the attacks of 9/11, the assassination effectively became a shared psychical
trauma—those who were alive at the time can often precisely remember where they
were when they learned of the incident even many years after the fact, and, much like
9/11, the news of these events inevitably arrived directly or indirectly via the media.
As such, the memories of these experiences are inevitably inscribed with and shaped
by the imagery and sounds of the media’s reporting; for instance, recollection of the
event may involve the news being delivered by Walter Cronkite’s famous broadcast.
Furthermore, collective and individual memory of the assassination almost inevitably
involves still images or footage of the assassination from the amateur film shot by
Abraham Zapruder—Life magazine printed a series of frames from the film in its first
issue following the assassination, and the short film later played on television in
1975. Thus, as a result of—and arguably due to—not being physically present at
these events, our cultural and personal memory of the day is shaped by—and perhaps
largely constituted of—these moving-image media and their electronic or filmic
2
presence. Memories involving Cronkite’s report were shaped by the immediacy of the
televisual image and the shared live co-presence with his broadcast. The Zapruder
film, however, serves as a substitute for our presence at the event, although its
perspective was not immediately accessible—its moving imagery was essentially
added in a supplementary fashion over a decade after the assassination. The Zapruder
film’s primacy in cultural and individual memory can be attributed to its short form—
the film is a mere twenty-six seconds long and has been played and replayed with
almost compulsive frequency in televised or filmed accounts of the assassination and
its aftermath.
1
I would argue that its replay over the years has effectively privileged
the footage as the definitive record of the event; in effect, the Zapruder film’s replay
concretized the ephemeral, rendering an “absolute” past which eclipses and
transcends our experience and memory of the past.
The replay of this non-commercial film has helped to shape and define both
the memories of the assassination and, thus, our understanding of the assassination
itself. Curiously, one of the first widespread uses of the instant replay on television
was the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald later in 1963—an event which was initially
broadcast live by television cameras on the scene.
2
News broadcasters were able to

1
The Zapruder film was made available to the Warren Commission in 1964, and was screened publicly
for the first time at the 1969 New Orleans trial of Clay Shaw, who was charged and acquitted of
involvement in the assassination. Shaw’s trial is depicted in the commercial Hollywood film JFK
(Stone, 1991), with a climatic scene involving prosecutor Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner)
confronting the jury with the Zapruder film to prove Shaw’s alleged role and disprove Lee Harvey
Oswald’s involvement. The Garrison character plays and repeatedly replays the moments of the
assassination, while describing the movement of Kennedy’s head with the incantation-like phrase,
“Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left.” In many ways, the repetition
employed in the fictional JFK echoes the Zapruder film’s function within U.S. culture.
2
Erik Barnou, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 347-48.
3
repeatedly replay the killing immediately after its broadcast due to their recent
adoption of magnetic recording technologies. Over forty years after Kennedy’s
assassination, the controversial simulation video game JFK: Reloaded (Traffic
Software, 2004) was released; the game situates the player in the role of Lee Harvey
Oswald, tasked with the goal of killing Kennedy. The game was designed to disprove
conspiracy theories about the assassination, rewarding the player with a higher score
for precisely matching the findings of the Warren Commission (with Oswald as sole
assassin). In this capacity, the video game leverages replay with a clear political and
ideological agenda.
The diverse deployments of the replay in each of these instances—the amateur
non-commercial film, the instant replay of the live television broadcast, and the
virtual reenactment of disputed history—demonstrate the multivalent nature of the
term “replay.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was first used in
1884 to describe the repeating of a tied sporting event. It was not until 1922 that the
OED reports the term being used in the Daily Mail newspaper, to describe a
specialized device which, “is fitted with [the] special `Repeater' which automatically
replays records when desired without the operator's attention.”
3
The OED proposes
this is the first instance of the term’s more familiar usage in application to a
recording, namely, “to play (a gramophone record or a tape) again, or to play back; to
reproduce (what has been recorded).” Since this usage, the significance of the term
and concept of replay have expanded considerably into a range of cultural, social,
political, industrial, technological, and experiential practices. As such, replay resists

3
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
4
simple classification and definition, and this project seeks to unpack the various
meanings and implications of its instances and applications across several time-based
media. In particular, I will interrogate the replay’s usage and significance in avant-
garde film practices, television broadcasting, and the structures and play mechanics of
digital video games as a means of differentiating replay from repetition. As I will
demonstrate, the replay’s function within a given medium is inextricably bound to the
materialities of that medium, as well as to the perceptual conditions of lived
experience. I will therefore begin with an examination of the relationship between
medium materiality and our perceptual apparatus.

Material Specificity, Similarity, and Difference
In both experiential and metaphorical terms, our understanding of moving-
image media is constructed from the objective conditions and our subjective
experiences of both similarity and difference. Consider the case of a celluloid film
print—when viewed outside of a projector, the image appears as series of discrete
images. Generally (except in the case of a flicker film, for instance), each frame bears
a marked similarity to the frames which precede and follow it. The minor differences
between each subsequent frame—as well as the major similarities—translate to
change within the frame, be it movement of objects within the frame or changing
patterns of light or color. But it is the similarity between these frames that allows us
to recognize the elements that change from frame to frame, much like a flipbook.
Invoking Gertrude Stein’s description of repetition in her poetry as being analogous
to the properties of film, Bruce Kawin elucidates the duality of this reliance upon
5
similarity and difference: “A motion picture in which each frame was identical would
not move. The ‘near-repetition’ of similar frames, when properly projected,
communicates life.”
4
This near-repetition marks a careful balance between similarity
and difference that constitutes for Kawin that which gives the motion picture its life.
It should be noted, however, that even if the content of two subsequent frames
is identical, the film upon which these frames is printed is not—each frame is a
slightly different composition of chemicals and molecules and may also be in
different physical shape than other frames (for instance, a given frame may have a
scratch which other frames do not share). Kawin suggests that even if two frames are
“identical,” the difference between these frames is marked not only by the individual
physicality of each, but also by each frame’s distinct temporal fixity. Thus the
viewer’s experience of two identical frames is actually unique:
In a properly projected film, no frame repeats. If an identical picture does
return later in the presentation, it is an entirely new piece of celluloid, and has
no effect on the metaphysical position of the earlier frame. (In the case of a
length of film joined at its ends into a loop, the identical frame recurs later in
time, and so is a different time-space unit received by a later, aged, audience;
it is a later instant of projection even if it is the same piece of film, and
completely removed from the art-moment of its earlier appearance. But it can
have the effect of putting the audience back in that first time.)
5

Kawin’s remark indicates the relationship between the physicality of film and the
abstract experience that it evokes in its viewer. Indeed, while the interplay between
similarity and difference may be that which provides cinema its “life,” this life is

4
Bruce F. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Film and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1972), 125.
5
Ibid., 105-106.
6
actually imparted more by its viewer than by the devices through which film is
recorded and projected.
A traditional film-based motion picture camera functions by capturing the
play of light and color upon a series of individual frames. Thus, if, for the time being,
we put aside Christian Metz’s notion that “every film is a fiction film,”
6
we may
agree with André Bazin and suggest that at some level, film records an objective
reality. Or so it appears. It is actually due to a perceptual and physiological defect that
humans perceive the flickering series of images upon which cinema is built as a
continuous and uninterrupted source of sensory data. In projected film, a shutter
rapidly covers up the frame between—and sometimes during—the individual frames
of film. The effect of this flickering tricks the viewer into perceiving the sequences of
frames of a film as continuous motion. Thus, while a film may have a frame rate of
24 frames per second, it appears to its viewer as a persistent image.
7
The function of
motion picture film to display moving images thus relies on both the camera’s
objective recording of physical data and the viewer’s subjective experience of the
sensory data projected film as a misrecognition of reality. The viewer simply
perceives the flickering near-repetition of frames as fluid motion, subjectively
blending the similarity and difference of the frames to constitute meaning.

6
Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 47.
7
This effect is related to the physiological effect known as the “flicker fusion threshold,” in which a
flickering light of constant brightness is perceived as continuous light source rather than an intermittent
one. The precise frequency of the flicker varies from subject to subject—one observer may notice a
flicker at a lower frequency while another may not—and also depends on the brightness of the light
source.
7
In essence, the experience of cinematic technologies is reliant on the artificial
perception of movement generated by the progression of nearly identical still images.
Peter Kubelka argues this sentiment convincingly:
Cinema is not movement. That is the first thing. Cinema is not movement.
Cinema is a projection of stills—which means images which do not move—in
a very quick rhythm… Cinema is not movement. It can give the illusion of
movement. Cinema is the quick projection of light impulses. These light
impulses can be shaped when you put the film before the lamp—on the screen
you can shape it… You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.
This is the first time since mankind exists that you can really do that.
8

As Kubelka’s comments indicate, film presents not movement, but the illusion of
movement. The conception of illusion of movement to which he alludes is a
commonly held conception of cinema’s physiological impression of movement—one
that is often mentioned within in the first few pages of introductory texts on cinema
and described as the product of perceptual processes first observed and theorized by
Peter Roget, Joseph Plateau, Max Wertheimer, and other Gestalt psychologists. For
instance, David Cook, in the opening page of his A History of Narrative Film,
describes the cinema and other moving image devices’ representation of movement as
“dependent for their illusions upon interactive optical phenomena known as
persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon.”
9
This conception of cinema was
embraced by film theorists and historians as early as 1926; within film studies, this
explanation for the perceptual understanding of cinema is broadly accepted, but as
Joseph and Barbara Anderson demonstrate, cinema’s representation of movement

8
Peter Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and
Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 140.
9
David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004),
1.
8
“has nothing to do with persistence of vision or the phi movement.”
10
This concrete
refutation of the “myth” of function of the phi phenomenon and persistence of vision
has done little to change the currency of the term within film studies—for example,
Cook’s explanation is present in the earliest editions of his book as well as in the
fourth, which was printed over ten years after the Andersons’ article. The persistence
of this disproven assumption within the study of film demonstrates the need to both
question the longest-held teleological beliefs about cinema—as well as the resilience
of such doctrines to interrogation and re-evaluation.
11

In the consideration of the relationship between the cinema’s apparent
movement and perception, cinema’s quantification of movement can be productively
linked to the pronounced scientific emphasis on the measurement of the body and the
senses that occurred with the rise in the popularity of physiology in the late eighteenth
century. Jonathan Crary demonstrates that the accompanying mathematization of
vision and the sensory apparatus performed by scientists such as Joseph Plateau,
Hermann Helmholtz, and Johannes Müller demonstrated the body as a site of
potential misperception. Crary argues the camera obscura was understood to operate
in a way quite similar to that of the eye, effectively creating a dominant social and

10
Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of
Film and Video 45, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 4 & 10. They instead propose that the cinema’s apparent
transformation of individual still images into motion be correctly described as “short-range apparent
motion.” the descriptor of the phenomenon in scientific literature on perception. See also Joseph
Anderson and Barbara Fisher, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision,” Journal of the University Film
Association 30, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 3-8.
11
Similarly, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that considerations of the function of vision
should also be radically reconsidered, arguing that the mind and eye actively construct visual meaning
and experience rather than merely collecting and conveying visual information. See Donald D.
Hoffman, Visual Intelligence - How We Create What We See (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1998).
9
cultural paradigm which equated vision with objective truth. However, scientific
experiments at the beginning of the nineteenth century began to demonstrate the
centrality of the body to visual processes; as a result, the recognition of the body’s
ability to misperceive demonstrated that vision could no longer be considered to be
objective, profoundly altering the long-presumed linkage between visuality and truth.
For example, Helmholtz measured the speed of human nerve transmission at ninety
feet per second, and Müller’s experiments demonstrated the capacity of electricity to
produce multiple illusory sensations, such as light and color in the eye in which no
such light or color was present. Crary argues that such experiments effected an
epistemological crisis, stating, “In effect, the doctrine of [these experiments]
redefines vision as a capacity for being affected by sensations that have no necessary
link to referent, thus threatening any coherent system for meaning.”
12
The observer
thus then came to be understood as not just the object of knowledge, but also the
object of stimulation and processes of the body; further, these processes were now
understood to create and produce experiences for the subject. This profound shift in
the understanding of the roles of sensation and perception prompted the
“epistemological crisis” described by Crary; as scientists sought to numerically
represent and explain the processes of experientiality, philosophers such as Henri
Bergson instead rejected the possibility of the representational quantification of lived
experience. However, it is at the intersection of this quantification and the pure

12
Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed.
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 213.
10
continuity of our perceptual apparatus at which the function of replay and repetition
in time-based media forms may be mapped.
Bergson argues that scientifically measurable units do not correspond to true
subjective lived experience; he asserts that while science may attempt to measure
time and define it by discrete units, our true experience of time is actually one of
continuous stream or flow. This immeasurable flow is what Bergson considers durée
(duration); he states,
Pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes,
which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without
any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any
affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity.
13

This notion of time is quite distinct from how society generally considers time as a
linear succession of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. Bergson
suggests that this formulation of time as a measurable magnitude is a false construct.
To clarify this point, he provides the following example: “I say… that a minute has
just elapsed, and I mean by this that a pendulum, beating the seconds, has completed
sixty oscillations.”
14
Bergson argues that true duration is not made up by these sixty
individual oscillations, but by their consideration as a single, continuous motion:
I shall perceive one in the other, each permeating the other and organizing
themselves like the notes of a tune, so as to form what we shall call a
continuous or qualitative multiplicity with no resemblance to number. I shall
thus get the image of pure duration; but I shall have entirely got rid of the idea
of a homogenous medium or a measurable quantity.
15

13
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1990 edition. (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 1908), 104.
14
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 2001st ed.
(Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1913), 104.
15
Ibid., 105.
11
Our experience of duration is unquantifiable and immeasurable—despite the
artificially imposed constructs and measurements of time by which we typically mark
its passage.
Bergson’s conception of durée—duration—shapes his approach to cinema.
Bergson positions his notion of continuous movement as functioning in opposition to
Zeno of Elea’s; Zeno’s claim was that an arrow never reaches its target as the arrow’s
trajectory may be halved at any point during its journey.
16
By Zeno’s theorem, the
arrow never truly reaches its destination, as it is always en route; this conception of
movement can be fruitfully applied to cinema, as its segmentation of movement into
still frames similarly suggests the inherent contradictions of its capacity for the
representation of true movement. But Bergson argues that Zeno ignores the continuity
of movement which constitutes the arrow’s flight to the target; it is this movement
which is actually indivisible, although the path mapped by the arrow’s trajectory may
be. Bergson argues that one may only measure the arrow’s trajectory once it has been
made, but, “we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a
thing.”
17
Bergson believes that a similar contradiction exists at the core of the
cinematic apparatus—because the apparent motion of the cinema is constituted from
a series of still images. Bergson thus proposes that the true duration of cinema is not
to be found in film’s metameric materiality—he argues that film effects an abstracted
sense of time via its intervallic construction of movement through the succession of
immobile images. Bergson argues the impossibility of reconstituting true movement

16
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1913),
308-311.
17
Ibid., 309.
12
through such static images, contending that, regardless of how small the distinction
between two consecutive measured states is, an interval will always separate the two.
He asserts, “The movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to
reconstitute change out of state implies the absurd proposition, that movement is
made of immobilities.”
18
Bergson resists what he views as science’s persistent and
quixotic insistence to quantify lived experience; he instead suggests that time is
experienced as a continuous and immeasurable stream. Bergson similarly took issue
with cinema’s depiction of temporality, arguing that cinema creates an abstract time
through its use of the “immobile” static frames. But Bergson’s position that cinema’s
depiction of time is not representive of true temporality is undermined by our
perceptual experience of film as continuous.
To clarify, the abstraction of time posited by Bergson is reliant on the
cinema’s impression of movement.
19
While this impression is composed of static
individual frames and thus illusory, the apparent motion of the cinema is experienced
as continuous. Anderson and Anderson demonstrate that the perceptual processes of
motion in film are experientially equivalent to those of reality, raising questions about
our understandings of each; they write,

18
Ibid., 308.
19
Gilles Deleuze takes issue with this assertion of Bergson’s, tracing through the development of
Bergson’s conception of movement via several theses to establish Deleuze’s own conception of
“Relations;” Deleuze builds from Bergson’s concept of duration to argue, “If one had to define the
whole, it would be defined by Relation. Relation is not a property of objects, it is always external to its
own terms… We can say of duration itself or of time, that it is the whole of relations.” Gilles Deleuze,
Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 10. For a compact version of Deleuze’s reconsideration of
Bergson, see Ibid., 1-11. Deleuze’s critique and extension of Bergson is characterized by his
investment in his concept of Differénce. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul
Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
13
To the visual system, the motion in a motion picture is real motion. If this is
true, if to our perception the successive still images of a motion picture are
processed in the same way and are indistinguishable from the unbroken
motion of the natural world, then what are the implications? How must a
theory of the cinema be modified to accommodate such a finding?
20

The eye is thus unable to differentiate between cinema’s illusion of motion and the
“unbroken” motion of the real world; effectively rendering one equivalent to the
other. Thus the impression of movement which we experience in the cinema is
perceptually indistinguishable from our experience of movement in the real world. In
this sense, our corporeal embodiment effectively functions as a perceptual filter for
our experiences. This, in turn, is evocative of Bergson’s characterization of the
linkage between our own corporeal materiality and our consciousness. Bergson
strongly links the psychical condition to one of the physicality and materiality of the
lived body when he hypothesizes,
Could it not be laid down that every state of consciousness corresponds to a
certain disturbance of the molecules and atoms of the cerebral substance, and
that the intensity of a sensation measures the amplitude, the complication or
the extent of these molecular movements?
21

This suggestion implies the emphasis he places upon the relationship between
consciousness and the lived experience.
22
In Time and Free Will, he focuses on the
concept of magnitude as means of evaluating notions of quantity. Bergson
distinguishes between what he terms two “species” of quantity, “the first extensive
and measurable, the second intensive and not admitting of measure, but of which it

20
Anderson and Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” 10.
21
Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 6.
22
It should be noted that Bergson can be seen as a precursor to later phenomenological theorists such
as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose writing was more directly influenced by Edmund Husserl) and
Vivian Sobchack, as well as theorists such as Gilles Deleuze.
14
can nevertheless be said that it is greater or less than another intensity.”
23
This
dichotomy between the measurable and quantitative extensity and the experienced
and qualitative intensity is essential to his philosophy and to our understanding of
perception and repetition. Bergson’s theory is applicable to ideas of temporality and
replay in a significant way: while the replay marks a bounded—and thus discrete—
unit of time, our experience of the replay and its duration are continuous.
As Kawin argues in his consideration of repetition in film and literature,
repetition plays an essential role in our lived experience. Kawin builds directly from
Sigmund Freud’s contention that repetition provides a source of pleasure, and he
contends that repetition is a fundamental and essential element of the human
experience:
Life takes its tone and character from repetition. Ordinarily we consider those
events that are capable of being repeated, or those functions that insist on
being repeated, lower or more boring than those “once in a lifetime,”
extraordinary, unrepeatable experiences that we consider the true or
interesting material of our life histories.
24

Thus while mundane repetition defines our everyday existence, the ruptures from
these patterns of repetition are what become truly memorable: while I may not
remember the exact route took to work on a given day from a previous week, I do
remember the route we took on the day I got into an accident. Similarly, we do not
take a vacation by going to our workplace—we instead seek an entirely different
place. Kawin’s stance is that the repetitious mundane of the everyday does not seem
worth preserving—in either our memory or our photographs or film: consider his

23
Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 3.
24
Kawin, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Film and Literature, 1.
15
contention that, “Events whose repetition is not extraordinary do not seem worth
recording, in fact, hardly seem worth noticing. We rest secure in the uniqueness of
our experience and identity.”
25
To return to the example of the vacation, one does not
(often) take photographs of the everyday workplace—instead one is more likely to
feel such impulses when on vacation or in a similarly unfamiliar (and thus
memorable) locale. The linkage to the replay is evident here: replay is rarely footage
of no meaning and consequence—instead it is focused on the extraordinary and
exceptional moments and sequences. A process of selection and privileging is
intrinsic to the replay, as that which is recorded over that which is not, just as that
which is played back is selected over that which is not.
Kawin links his analysis of repetition to the principle of indeterminacy, first
put forth by physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927 (and perhaps more commonly
known as the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle”). Heisenberg suggested the
impossibility to accurately determine both the position and velocity of a particle—
precision in one comes at the cost of accuracy of the other. He also asserted that the
act of observation affects the outcome of an experiment—the mere act of
measurement of the particle is affected by the light quantum used in its observation.
Kawin suggests that the mere act of attempting to repeat or recall an experience
ultimately and irrevocably transforms the original experience; he states,
To extrapolate metaphorically: it is possible to remember either the physical
component of an experience, or the mental, but not both… The falsification of
reality in art or memory comes about from the attempt at repetition, the action

25
Ibid., 2.
16
of voluntarily remembering; by trying to “perceive” the event again, we
change it.
26

Kawin’s implication that repetition (or attempts at repetition) influence and mold the
original experiences is striking—this suggests that while the experience of the
repeated act is clearly affected by the original instance, the transformative effect of
reusing and replaying is not a unidirectional process, as it can also shape its original
context. The influence of the event and the replay upon each other is indicative of a
slippage between lived experience and its recording onto media. Just as our
recollection of an earlier event shapes the perception of the event, the replay
invariably alters and shapes the original as well.
In the following chapters, I will explore the multivarious functions of the
replay across avant-garde film, television, and video games. For each medium, I will
examine the relationship between materiality and the linkage to iterations of replay
engendered by the specificities of each given medium. The first chapter will explore
the multiple modes through which avant-garde filmmakers leverage film’s capacity
for replay. The exploration of the varying aesthetic methods by which replay is
deployed is rooted in an examination of the symbiotic relationship between film and
reality. Film has historically been characterized by its capacity to reproduce reality; I
thus begin by unpacking the means by which it emulates our perceptual apparatus.
From this starting point, I survey the deployments of replay in avant-garde film,
examining its usage by established artists expanding their aesthetic strategies into

26
Ibid., 31. Kawin’s analysis of repetition incorporates Gertrude Stein’s poetry and the function of the
present in her prose. Stein’s famous phrase “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (used in several of her
works, including Sacred Emily (1913)) is a useful example of her view of the impossibility of true
repetition, as each successive repetition irrevocably alters the previouys instance.
17
film, and exploring the application of replay in film for the exploration of interiority.
From here, I explore artists who leverage film’s function as an industrial product for
the purposes of recontextualization to those who use replay to intensely interrogate
the filmic form and representation of temporality. I conclude the chapter with the
examination of film as a functional metaphor for our lived experience.
The next chapter examines the technological and industrial histories of
television, unpacking and exploring the industrial and critical rhetoric and the
regulatory practices which valued and strongly privileged live production. The usage
of recorded material by non-network independent broadcasters is traced here, along
with the cottage syndication and transcription industry which emerged as a supplier of
cost-effective content for local stations which lacked access to network programming
and the resources to broadcast live around the clock. I map the networks’ eventual
and dramatic shift to the widespread usage of reruns, as well as the central theoretical
tension between liveness and segmentation. Next, I examine the function of the
instant replay on television and the emergence of televisual technologies such as
TiVo which have increasingly shifted television into the digital and mobilized the
replay as part of the experience of watching television.
The last chapter explores the replay’s function in video games. This
examination begins with a discussion of the ways in which play relies on aspects of
replay, and then explores the function of difference in the materiality of digital
systems. The role of difference is then charted within the mechanics of play, with
particular emphasis placed on the function of difference in the play mechanics of
video games. I explore industrial strategies of replay, including its function as a
18
didactic tool and through games which encourage or require players to replay parts or
all of them. This mapping of these industrial practices facilitates an examination of
the cultural, social, and ideological aspects of the replay’s implementation. The
evolution of the instant replay in video games is considered as a case study, with an
examination of the transition from non-interactive sequences to games which actively
incorporate instant replay into their game mechanics. This final stage of replay, in
which games are structured around both spatial and temporal navigation, serves as
framework through which the player’s experience of spatiotemporality in the video
game is explored via the replay.
In film, television, and interactive media, the role of replay and repetition
have not yet comprehensively been explored; this project demonstrates that the replay
is inextricably linked to the materiality of time-based media. This constitutive nature
of the replay elucidates the function of similarity and difference in our understanding
of both lived experience and these media forms. As such, my consideration of the
practices of replay illustrates the centrality of replay to our perceptual understanding
and experience of time-based media.
19

Chapter 1: Avant-Garde Practices of Replay

There is no such thing as time. Time is a set of conventions for bracketing
qualitative variation. E-flat does not exist “in time” relative to B-flat, before or
after it: we hear them as they are sounded, which is always here and now. The
adverbs firstly and secondly are pegs we use in our sentence when we wish to
emphasize that those sentences imitate actions. – Hollis Frampton, 1962
1

Chapter Introduction

Avant-garde and experimental filmmaking practices function at the forefront
of the exploration and expansion of the representational modes afforded by moving-
image technologies. The avant-garde, unlike commercial filmmaking, has always
been predisposed to spatiotemporal investigation and meditation. As artists turned to
the palette of tools in moving-image technologies, their expressive and figurative
modes inevitably responded to and adapted the singular characteristics of film, the
commercial and industrial modes of its production, as well as cinema’s unique
capacity of spatiotemporal representation. Some of the earliest examples of
filmmaking evince these tendencies toward reflection on film’s novel faculty for
replay as a means for consideration of the representation, examination, and disruption
of spatiotemporality. Indeed, such inclinations can be traced to pre-cinematic
technologies, as experiments in photography sought to move past the representation
of instaneity toward the depiction of sequential duration. This experimentation

1
Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, “On Plasticity and Consecutive Matters: November 11, 1962,” in 12
Dialogues, 1962-1963, ed. Benjamin Buchloh, The Nova Scotia series -- source materials of the
contemporary arts; Nova Scotia series (Halifax, N.S.) (Halifax, N.S. Canada: Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design ; New York : New York, 1981), 41, http://library.getty.edu/cgi-
bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=229745.
20
demonstrates a cultural desire to capture, record, and control time in a manner not
afforded by still photography.
Avant-garde film implements concepts of replay across multiple registers.
Reliant on the unique relationship between film and reality, filmmakers use film’s
capacity to record reality and replay it for a range of investigations, including
psychosexual examination and recontexualization of extant film. The modes by which
these multifarious explorations operate often employ aesthetic and formal strategies
from other media, redeploying and repeating existing compositional tropes into the
form of film. In order to effectively explore this plurality of implementations of
replay, the consideration of repetition and replay in avant-garde film and its
relationship to our lived experience must necessarily be guided by multiple
theoretical currents. As such, the links between consciousness and the lived
experience of external reality—namely the interconnectedness between the gathering,
compilation, and processing of external sensory data—will be explored. The
operations of the psychical apparatus will also be considered, both in terms of the
function of memory and the role of repetition in generating pleasure. This chapter will
first explore the relationship between cinema and lived experience, in order to map
the unique relationship between cinematic technologies and perceptual experience.
This starting point will facilitate the investigation of the roles of replay and repetition
in early film and their subsequent deployment and implementation by avant-garde
filmmakers. Established artists already aligned with movements such as Dadaism and
Surrealism initially employed the unique capacities of cinema for replay as a tool for
extending their practices into film, in turn expanding the vocabulary and grammar of
21
cinema. The fidelity between perceptual lived experience and cinema’s
representational modes is leveraged by filmmakers such as Maya Deren, who
employs film’s capability for replay as a means for psychosexual investigation.
Collagist Joseph Cornell and found footage filmmaker Ken Jacobs exploit the
industrial nature of commercial cinema to recombine and reconstitute films into new
contextual frameworks, utilizing replay for the purposes of the reconsideration and
reinvigoration of both the original source texts and the syntaxes of cinema. Structural
filmmakers such as Ernie Gehr and Hollis Frampton intensely examine the materiality
and perceptual experience of film in their work; their mode of investigation of
spatiotemporality and usage of replay engenders the further consideration of the
symbiotic relationship between cinema and lived experience. This relationship is
distinctly and plainly rendered via the usage of film as a metaphor for our subjective
experience; as such, the work of Bill Morrison and his replaying of decaying film
stock will be explored in the conclusion.

Film and Reality
Cinema’s capacity for the replication of lived experience (in visual and aural
terms) is central to much of its theoretical assessment. For instance, David A. Cook
begins his introductory text by describing cinema and moving image technologies as
“sophisticated machines that… convincingly represent empirical reality in motion.”
2

The fidelity of this replication of lived experience has shifted over time from early
silent visual experiments to full-color images accompanied by sound; as André Bazin

2
Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 1.
22
argues, the limitations of early cinema were not intentional, as these filmmakers
would have preferred a more complete representation of reality—what Bazin terms
the “myth of total cinema.”
3
This gradual technological movement towards a more
complete, or “total,” representation of reality evinces both an underlying industrial
strategy, such as Hollywood’s attempts to differentiate its product from competitors
through the implementation of color, sound, and three-dimensional technologies, and
what Bazin suggests is the means to satisfy “our obsession with realism.”
4
The greater
sensorial fidelity that moving-image technologies can accomplish to our lived
experience, the more these technologies and practices are often privileged. This is
true for both commercial cinema (i.e. offering improved sound technologies such as
stereo or surround sound), as well as avant-garde practitioners such as Stan Brakhage,
who sought to subvert the function of the camera’s and its false “absolute realism” to
portray a pure form of vision as it is experienced by an “untutored eye.”
5
Brakhage’s
critique of the camera is not that cinema cannot replicate reality and lived experience,
but that cameras and motion pictures merely reproduce the socially and culturally
constructed “manmade laws of perspective” and “compositional logic.”
6
Thus while
commercial cinema may attempt to more perfectly reproduce such laws of
perspective and composition as we allegedly experience them, Brakhage rejects such

3
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What is Cinema?, Vol I., trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967), 22.
4
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema?, Vol I., trans. Hugh
Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 12.
5
Stan Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and
Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 126, 120.
6
Ibid., 120.
23
visual limitations in the making of his films and argues that the modes of visual
expression traditionally afforded by the camera are mere constructs. It is important to
note that Brakhage’s resistance is rooted in his belief that film can convey a pure
sense of vision—dominant cinematic practices have merely co-opted film to function
in a manner which reinforces social and cultural constructions via its enforced
perspective and compositions. As such, both modes of filmmaking seek to accurately
re-create perceptual experience, albeit in completely contradictory fashions.
This common fixation on the capacity of film to reproduce and recreate lived
experience is a common trope within film studies. Early theorists such as Hugo
Münsterberg sought to unpack the photoplay’s singular attributes by linking them to
the processes of the mind. Münsterberg’s assertion in 1916 demonstrates this early
linkage of cinema to lived subjective experience: “The photoplay tells us the human
story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality,
and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention,
memory, imagination, and emotion.”
7
Similarly, Vivian Sobchack argues in 1992 for
the relationship between the viewer’s sensorial experience and that offered in a film:
When we sit in a movie theater and perceive a film as sensible, as making
sense, we (and the film before us) are immersed in a world and in an activity
of visual being. The experience is as familiar as it is intense, and it is marked
by the way in which significance and the act of signifying are directly felt,
sensuously available to the viewer… What we look at projected on the
screen… addresses us as expressed perception of an anonymous, yet present,
‘other.’
8

7
Hugo Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A Psychological Study,” in Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The
Photoplay—A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge,
2002), 129.
8
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 8-9.
24

Sobchack suggest the viewer’s perceptual experience of the cinema is based on the
sensorial information provided by the film—we see, hear, perceive, and experience
that which the film does. While this is not an outright substitution—for instance, the
viewer may experience sensations external to those in the film such as sounds from a
source other than the film—the capacity of cinema to ape our perceptual and
subjective experience suggests a pronounced correlation between its representation of
movement and our own. While Henri Bergson argues that cinema cannot represent
true movement through its immobile elements, he also suggests that our everyday
knowledge of temporality functions in a similar fashion to cinema:
We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are
characteristic of the reality… Whether we think becoming or express it, or
even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of
cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying
in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a
cinematographical kind.
9

Bergson notes that this mundane understanding of time is not the true, continuous
passage of time he terms duration. However, here Bergson seems to acknowledge the
similarity of the experience of the cinema to that of our own—even if both are false
constructs. Indeed, even if the movement of the cinema is an abstracted movement,
what he calls “movement in general,” it is still experienced by the viewer as fluid
motion. This would suggest that while true time may be fluid and continuous as
Bergson asserts, that our perceptual apparatus may be limited in its capacity to
differentiate between successive temporal moments if their granularity becomes too
small. To some, this perceptual limitation is intriguing in its possibilities for film;

9
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 306.
25
Brakhage tantalizingly proposes a spectator not limited by such constraints: “If the
eye were more perceptive it would see the sleight of 24 individual pictures and an
equal number of utter blacknesses every second of the show. What incredible films
might ultimately be made for such an eye.”
10
Despite Brakhage’s hopes, however,
cinema’s abstraction of movement is misperceived as continuous movement by the
viewer.
While it is difficult to argue with Bergson and other theorists’ assertions about
cinema’s segmentation of temporality given the processes by which it functions, it is
necessary to acknowledge that film shares a unique relationship with reality. Beyond
the photochemical and indexical relationship between film and reality, there exists an
essential link between film and reality. Although cinema may merely give the
impression of true movement or an abstraction of temporality, the experience of this
temporality is continuous for the viewer. The mere fact that we are unable to
experience the blackness between the frames that Brakhage highlights is indicative of
our perceptual experience and understanding of film as continuous movement. In this
capacity, film emulates, records, and replays reality in a manner indistinguishable
from our experience of temporality and movement. The cinema’s correlative capacity
for the replication and reproduction of lived sensorial and perceptual experience is an
essential element of its function; as I will demonstrate, this capacity is also a
constituent component of the usage of replay and repetition in avant-garde cinema.

10
Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” 125.
26
Modes of Replay in Avant-Garde Film
Given cinema’s reliance on the dual structures of similarity and difference in
its capture and playback of apparent motion, I argue that this duality is part of film’s
ontology. The appearance of motion in film is constituted by the material relationship
between similarity and difference in successive frames, and thus what defines cinema
is its unique reliance on these structures. Cinema’s ability to mimic and reproduce the
qualities of our lived experience is also an intrinsic ontological aspect which
differentiates the medium from other forms. Central to the indexical relationship
cinema enjoys to reality is the resemblance cinema has to the reality it reproduces;
Bazin argues that cinema and photography are differentiated from other modes of
representation by their “transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction,” but
they are also marked by the transference of reality from this reproduction—cinema is
uniquely capable of replicating reality in its presentation of aural and visual elements
by emulating our lived sensorial experience.
11
This unprecedented capacity to record
and replay sequences of spatiotemporality further differentiated film from other arts,
and became a locus around which experimental film practices coalesced. Cinema’s
ability to record and replay were initially deployed in the service of capturing the
everyday and the unique, as characterized by Tom Gunning’s descriptor of the
“cinema of attractions.”
12
The actualities of early cinema and the films which
emphasized Gunning’s “visual shocks” are both equally reliant on the verisimilitude
of cinema’s recording to reality.

11
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14.
12
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art
and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31-45.
27
The emergence of narrative modes of filmmaking was accompanied by the
deployment of strategies of narration established in existing forms; for instance,
flashbacks deploy cinema’s ability to record events merged with the storytelling
techniques pre-established in literature and theater. Similarly, instances of repetition
and replay can be found in early narrative films are suggestive of the formative stages
of the development of the language of classical narrative cinema. Traditional artists
such as Fernand Léger and Salvador Dali began to tentatively explore cinema’s
unique capacity for replay and repetition, both as a means for illustrating the
mechanization of the human body effected by industrialization and for the purposes
of psychosexual investigation as a vehicle for the depiction and reproduction of
subjective dream states. The surrealists’ implementation of cinema for the purposes of
Freudian psychoanalytic interrogation was further explored by the intensely
subjective experiences of artists such as Maya Deren, who initiated the trance film—a
filmmaking mode heavily invested in the capacity of cinema to allow the return to
and reinvestigation of personal immanent experiences. The commercial nature of
cinema and its massive scale of industrial duplication for the purposes of distribution
enabled and engendered another mode of replay within cinema: the collage or found
footage film. Here, film’s status as industrial product is leveraged for the purposes of
re-contextualization and re-consideration; in this mode of replay, footage from a
single or number of source film(s) is reshaped and placed into new contextual
frameworks. This redeployment recontextualizes the original source film, in turn,
offering new insights into the film from which the collage film draws its material.
While all avant-garde film could be said to be engaged at some level with the
28
representation of spatiotempoality, this exploration is perhaps at its most deliberate in
structural film. Here we can observe as part of the intense consideration of film’s
materiality at the heart of the structural film project an explicit engagement with
repetition that suggests the role of replay as an essential element of film’s ontology.
This use of replay in film reinforces the linkage between film and our lived
experience of temporality, as well as the function of film as a material metaphor for
our lived experience.
Replay within avant-garde film draws attention to the medium itself—films
that emphasize replay are de facto films which emphasize their materiality, be it via
re-contextualization of found footage or via repetition of a given sequence. Avant-
garde filmmakers who leverage repetition and replay generally leverage two forms of
repetition within their work: intertextual, in which the film replays footage from
another source, and intratextual, in which the film loops or repeats its own sequences.
Found footage films are a clear example of the intertextual replay; such films seek to
re-contextualize segments of film by inserting them into new formal and conceptual
frameworks. Intratextual films are marked by a looping structure, in which the formal
or narrative elements of the film may repeat, replay or echo earlier sequences.
13
The
many modes of replay in avant-garde filmmaking are rooted in the materiality of film;
these practices are also inscribed in the technological and industrial development of
cinema.

13
It should be noted that some films combine both approaches—for instance, a found footage film may
intentionally loop this footage to recursively re-contextualize a given segment. For example, Owen
Land’s Bardo Follies (1967-76) loops footage of a woman waving to a boat of tourists is looped and
manipulated.
29

Early Narrative Films & Repetition
In 1889, building upon the success of his financially lucrative phonograph
invention, Thomas Edison sought to create a device which could provide a “visual
accompaniment” for the phonograph. Edison envisioned that this device, which he
dubbed the Kinetograph, as a “coin-operated/entertainment machine” would
supplement the aural recordings on a phonograph with motion pictures and charged
William Dickson with its creation.
14
In order to display the short films produced by
the Kinetograph, Edison designed the Kinetoscope, a viewing device built for a single
user, through which the viewer could watch a film for a small fee. Each Kinetoscope
held a 40- to 50-foot loop of film, which amounted to approximately sixteen seconds
of entertainment before the film loop ran its course back to its beginning and ended
the viewing experience. The brevity of these Kinetoscope films and their permanently
looped mechanical design no doubt encouraged repeat viewings of the films, as did
the entrepreneurial pricing strategies employed by the first Kinetoscope parlor
operators, ranging from charging customers twenty-five cents for access to a bank of
five Kinetoscopes or five cents per individual viewing.
15
As such, the economic and
industrial logics of repetition were inscribed at the very inception of cinema, just as
replay was itself elemental in the earliest exhibition and spectator practices. While the
initial films created by Edison and Dickson’s Kinetograph tended towards staged
productions, Auguste and Louis Lumière dubbed the films made with their

14
Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 5.
15
Ibid., 7.
30
Cinématographe “acutualités”—a term reflective of their emphasis on documentary.
In contrast to the pre-designed scenarios, performances, and slapstick routines that
typify early Edison films, the cinema of the Lumière brothers is characterized by their
evidentiary nature—they are almost all recordings of the everyday.
16
While these
respective fictional and documentary uses of cinema each proved to be initially
profitable, both Edison and the Lumières recognized the viability of one another’s
approach and began to adopt each other’s techniques within ten years, with Edison
producing more documentaries and the Lumières creating more staged productions.
17

These two tendencies of initial cinematic practices—towards fictive creation and the
reproduction of reality—have distinguished the development of critical approaches to
film as well. For instance, Siegfried Kracauer endorses the cinema’s reliance on
reality as indicative of its proper usage; he remarks,
Imagine a film, which, keeping with the basic properties, records interesting
aspects of physical reality but does so in a technically imperfect manner;
perhaps the lighting is awkward or the editing uninspired. Nevertheless, such
a film is more specifically a film than one which utilizes brilliantly all the
cinematic devices and tricks to produce a statement disregarding camera-
reality.
18

But beyond this binaristic consideration of the relative authenticity and credibility of
each usage of film, it is important to note and recognize that both modes of

16
It should be noted that some of the Lumière films suggest a degree of dramatization that stray from
pure documentation, such as L’Arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled) (1895).
17
Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 11.
18
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1960), 30. Kracauer’s notion of a film which records “interesting aspects
of phycica reality” as being “more specifically a film” than other films is also suggestive of the later
practices of the structural film movement. Kracauer suggested that the realist tendencies of the
Lumières formed a dialectic with the films of Georges Georges Méliès, embodying, in his words a
“thesis and antithesis, in a Hegelian sense.” Ibid.
31
filmmaking (and the valuations of “realist” and “formalist” theories) are reliant on the
singular capacity of film to record and replay. Thus, regardless of whether a film fits
more neatly into a “formalist” or “realist” formulation, its ontology is defined by
these properties of reproduction; almost every film, narrative or otherwise, is in effect
a replaying of recorded events.
19

Narrative modes of cinema, from early pioneers such as Edison or Georges
Méliès to later industrialized commercial cinema, have long leveraged film’s unique
capacity to record and replay for the purposes of storytelling. That is, fictional films
are a narrative which has been filmed, edited, packaged, and duplicated and can then
be played and replayed practically endlessly as a discrete unit. That said, some films
place a particular emphasis on a particular notion of replay within their narrative
structures; for instance, narrative films that depict the memories of characters via
flashbacks and reminiscences privilege this mode of replay within cinema. Like many
of narrative cinema’s formal strategies, flashbacks, although most familiarly
articulated in film, are also derivative of descriptive modes in other forms. Sergei
Eisenstein illustratively demonstrates the linkages between D.W. Griffith’s archetypal
narrative film and the literature of Charles Dickens, proposing that Griffith’s
cinematic innovations such as the close-up and parallel montage were informed and
preceded by methods seen in Dickens’ novels.
20
Eisenstein’s essay suggests the
function and influence of textual precursors in the formation and establishment of

19
Of course, there are many exceptions to this generalization—for example, films which do not
actually employ the camera or a recording mechanism, such as Stan Brakhage’s techniques of
manipulating the film stock directly, as exemplified in Mothlight (1963).
20
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” in Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New
York: Harcourt and Brace, 1969).
32
representational strategies in nascent forms; in a sense, this suggests that narrative
film effectively repurposes and replays the textual, narrative, and formal tropes of
literature and fiction. This recasting of established modes is resonant with Jay David
Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion of remediation—that a nascent medium will adopt
and refashion aspects of previous media forms.
21
Similarly, Maureen Turim argues in
her analysis of the evolution of the use of flashbacks in film that the cinematic device
was preceded by similar narrative techniques in literature, on the stage and in other
narrative forms. She observes that popular novels of the late nineteenth century
evince a “narrative obsession with explaining what occurred before, with linking the
present action to a fictional past;” similarly, “vision” scenes in theater and magic
lantern shows of the same era would depict the memories and reminiscences of
characters using visual cues such as photomontages.
22
For instance, French filmmaker
Ferdinand Zecca’s 1901 film Histoire d’un crime use a theatrically-derived technique
to depict the subjective vision of a character using a second stage built above the
plane occupied by the character to give the visual impression that the dream is
floating over the character’s head.
23
Similarly, the 1928 experimental feature The Last
Moment, directed by Paul Fejos, employs a photomontage sequence in a flashback
construction. Lewis Jacobs describes the film as, “a ‘study in subjectivity,’ based on

21
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000).
22
Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (New York: Routledge, 1989), 23-25. John
Fell also demonstrates the connections of the use of flashbacks between film and other narrative forms;
see John Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press,
1974).
23
Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, 24. Turim notes, however, Le Juif errant (1903) as a
rare example of Méliès’s using a flashback narrative device. See Ibid., 28.
33
the theory that at the critical moment before a person loses consciousness he may see
a panorama of pictures summarizing the memories of a lifetime.”
24
The continuity of
such narrative devices across media demonstrates a form of repetition itself, in which
tropes and techniques popularized in one form will be recast and adopted in emergent
forms.
Edwin Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903) vividly demonstrates an
example of such a “vision” sequence, with an on-screen insert over a sleeping fireman
depicting the subsequent rescue in which he participates. American Fireman is also
notable for its use of repetition later in the film. From inside the bedroom of a burning
house, we see a fireman climb through a window and rescue a mother and daughter;
we are then shown same sequence from a perspective outside of the house, replaying
the same events to which we bore witness from inside.
25
The authorial intent of this
sequence has been debated, but the rare deployment of such a multi-perspectival
representation of a series of events is suggestive of a tantalizing experimentation in
the then-evolving grammar of Hollywood narrative film.
26
Whether or not this
sequence was intentional in its design, happenstance and chance played significant
roles in the development of cinematic language. In his 1906 essay “Cinematographic
Views,” Georges Méliès claims to have invented the stop-motion trick accidentally

24
Lewis Jacobs, “Experimental Cinema in America: (Part One: 1921-1941),” Hollywood Quarterly 3,
no. 2 (Winter -1948 1947): 115.
25
It should be noted that there is some debate about this sequence and whether it is reflective of
Porter’s original intention or the product of an edit made years later. See Noël Burch, “Porter or
Ambivalence,” Screen 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 104.
26
Furthermore, it is remarkably suggestive of much later uses of instant replay in televised sports
which would privilege the depiction of the same series of events from multiple perspectives.
34
after his camera jammed while filming at the Place de l’Opéra; the transformation of
filmed objects that resulted when the camera restarted became a staple of his work,
which he states allowed it him to produce, “the first metamorphoses of men into
women and the first sudden disappearances… It was thanks to this simple trick that I
made the first fairy plays, The Devil’s Manor, The Devil in the Convent,
Cinderella…”
27
Méliès’s filmic innovations were not limited to disappearances and
dissolves, however, as his films also demonstrate the use of superimpositions for the
purposes of fantasy and “vision” sequences of characters.
28

These experimentations with film’s methods of representation and
manipulations of its formal elements are useful and informative instances in the
development and articulation of the highly structured dominant language of
Hollywood cinema.
29
As Turim indicates, the deployment of the flashback is a
narrational trope which borrows from pre-existing representational strategies.
However, the capacity for the evocation of a mental return is arguably more fully
expressed in filmic form, than, say, in literature, given the cinema’s potent visually
and aurally communicative means of recording and playback of spatiality and
temporal duration. Furthermore, while the narrative logic and the representational
strategies of the flashback are indebted to literature, theater and other forms, the

27
Georges Méliès, “Cinematographic Views,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A
History/Anthology 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1988), 44.
28
Although, as Turim notes, rarely for the purposes of flashbacks. See Turim, Flashbacks in Film:
Memory & History, 24.
29
In a sense, these examples might be read as instances of parole within the langue of Hollywood film
grammar.
35
filmic deployment of such visions and repetitions are distinctively articulated
employing film’s unique material characteristics.

Medium Specificity, Dadaism and Surrealism
Aesthetic valuation of cinema and its artistic experimentation focused on the
unique properties of film; that is, the ontological characteristics which differentiated
film from other media and aesthetic forms emerged as privileged sites for the material
practice and the theoretical and critical consideration of filmmaking as an artistic
expression. Ricciotto Canudo, in his 1911 manifesto “The Birth of the Sixth Art,”
declares that cinema represents a fusion of the “Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts)
and the Rhythms of Time (Music and Poetry);” furthermore, he asserts the
importance of temporality and duration to the aesthetics of film, describing it as “a
Painting and a Sculpture developing in Time, as in music and poetry, which realise
themselves by transforming air into rhythm for the duration of their execution.”
30

Like many early critics of cinema, Canudo’s description of that which defines and
differentiates film are reliant on—and shaped by—the aesthetic vernaculars of pre-
existing forms such as painting, music, poetry and sculpture. His particular emphasis
on film’s mixture of the spatiality of the plastic arts with the temporal rhythms of
music and poetry are particularly striking, however, as they demonstrate an
unequivocal recognition of the function of spatiotempoality in cinema; Erwin
Panofsky deemed that the “new art” of cinema afforded “unique and specific
possibilities,” which he defines as the “dynamization of space, and, accordingly,

30
Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art,” trans. Ben Gibson et al., Framework 13 (1980): 3-4.
36
spatialization of time.”
31
In a similar vein, avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist
Maya Deren similarly argues that, “the creative action in film… takes place in its
time dimension; and for this reason the motion picture, those composed of spatial
images, is primarily a time form.”
32
These aesthetic assertions privileging the
exploration of spatiotemporal representation are significant, as the investigation and
reconsideration of both spatiality and temporality function as a structuring logic in
much of avant-garde filmmaking, from the earliest films to contemporary practices.
However, Canudo’s cogent insight into the aesthetic and theoretical significance of
cinema is by no means limited to this observation; he argues that cinema is
constituted by two aspects: the symbolic (which he describes, in part, as the function
of velocity in film and its relationship to social and cultural trends), and the real
(“elements which arouse the interest and wonder of the modern audience”).
33
To
further explain his concept of the “real” aspect in cinema, he stresses that cinema
assuages a budding cultural desire of the early twentieth century: “It is increasingly
evident that present day humanity actively seeks its own show, the most meaningful
re-presentation of its self.”
34
Canudo eloquently articulates the capacity of film to re-
present, record and replay the self in the most expressive mode yet realized. This
assertion verbalizes another key tenet of the avant-garde project: the exploration of

31
Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” Bulletin of the Department of Art and
Archeology (Princeton University) (1934). Reprinted in Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the
Motion Pictures,” in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 96.
32
Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” Daedalus 89, no. 1 (Winter 1960):
160.
33
Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art,” 4. Canudo’s terms “symbolic” and “real” are not to be thought
interchangeable with the same terms and their more expansive valences in later film studies.
34
Ibid.
37
the self via the cinematic form. Canudo’s words would prove prophetic, as multiple
strains of avant-garde filmmaking practice would actively interrogate the unique
spatiotemporal traits of the cinema for the purposes of aesthetic, critical, industrial
and psychological reflection. In some sense, all avant-garde cinema is invested in
either or both the vocabulary of spatiotemporality in film and the knowledge and
experience afforded by film’s capacity to record and replay.
These theorists’ remarks in defense of cinema’s unique capabilities are
representative of the discourses lauding the arrival of the “new art.” However, these
defenses are also indicative of the critical and aesthetic crises prompted by the arrival
of photography, cinema, and other social and cultural shifts engendered by
industrialization. Thomas Elsaesser argues that these crises, which occurred in the
arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, are at least partially attributable
to technological developments which significantly hindered the historical
differentiation between artistic practices and scientific experimentation. In many
ways, the emergence of Dadaism was as much of a byproduct of these conflations as
other cultural, social, and political determinants. Elsaesser declares,
The explosive development of new means of representation and reproduction
towards the end of the nineteenth century, indicating for the first time that
aesthetic effects can be attributed to machine-made objects or images, had
profoundly ruptured a traditional relation between art and mimesis. It had also
cruelly exposed the delicate relationship between crafted object and art object
in respect to labor, skill and value.
35

As Elsaesser indicates, new methods of representation and expression such as
photography and cinema, as well as modes of production provoked by processes of

35
Thomas Elsaesser, “Dada/Cinema?,” in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New
York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1987), 14.
38
industrialization began to undermine and reconfigure artistic and critical practices.
Indeed, if photography and cinema “freed the plastic arts from their obsession with
likeness,” as Bazin suggests, their capacity to reproduce reality complicates the
relationship between art and mimesis; the fundamentally mimetic and imitative
qualities of photography and cinema confound traditional modes of representational
art.
36

Cinema’s emergence and its subsequent rapid cultural and social adoption was
significantly motivated by industrial and economic interests, however the
representational possibilities of the medium also attracted artists who already worked
in other forms. Early avant-garde filmmaking was heavily populated by artists who
were established in media such as painting and sculpture; Fernand Léger presents an
illustrative example of such a painter experimenting with cinema. Like many French
avant-garde artists of the 1920s, Léger was intrigued by the representational
possibilities afforded by cinema and the capacity of film to explore the rapidly
shifting sensorial experiences provoked by modernity. In 1924, Léger argues that the
cinema is uniquely capable of reproducing the decidedly modern and unprecedented
spatiotemporal reconfigurations presented by the experiences of spaces through the
windows of trains, automobiles and planes; he states, “Speed is the law of the modern
world. The eye must ‘be able to choose’ in a fraction of a second or it risks its
existence, whether it be driving a car, in the street, or behind a scholar’s

36
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 12.
39
microscope.”
37
Léger’s interest is evinced in his writings, as well as his active
participation in Canudo’s Club des amis du septième art (Club of the Friends of the
Seventh Art), where Freeman describes his involvement included, “[attending]
regular screenings and dinners with directors, film editors, and other réalisateurs in
the burgeoning French film industry.”
38
Participation in this community almost
certainly encouraged Léger’s decision to begin work on his own film, as did his
assistance with Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922). Léger viewed cinema as a new
medium in which to express himself, but felt hampered by his lack of direct
experience with film; as a result, Léger collaborated with American ex-pats George
Antheil, Dudley Murphy, Ezra Pound, and Man Ray to make Ballet Mécanique. The
resultant film demonstrates a remarkable synthesis of abstract imagery composed of
fragmented close-ups of everyday objects contrasted with the human form. A number
of shots within the film are repeated or feature repetitive motions within the frame,
such as the sequences of a young woman on swing towards the start of the film or
smelling flowers near its conclusion (Katherine Hawley Murphy, Dudley Murphy’s
wife). These repetitions are suggestive of the mechanization of the human body and
its shifting comportment in the industrial age, particularly when these shots are
followed or preceded by images of machinery and automated objects.
39
Léger

37
As quoted in Richard Brender, “Functions of Film: Léger's Cinema on Paper and on Cellulose, 1913-
1925,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 45.
38
Judith Freeman, “Bridging Purism and Surrealism: The Origins and Production of Fernand Léger's
"Ballet Mécanique,” in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker &
Owens, 1987), 28.
39
Léger also explored the relationship between mechanization and the human body in his paintings,
such as in Three Women (1921-22).
40
employs film’s unique capacity for repetition as a central theme of the film, recalling
Victor Freeburg’s 1923 observation of the function of repetition in film. Freeburg
likens the use of repetition in film to that of a theme in a musical score:
The photoplay needs repetition, especially because of the fact that any
pictorial motion or moment must by its very nature vanish when we look.
Hence, unless all other circumstances are especially favorable for emphasis,
such a motion or moment may vanish from our minds as well as from the
screen… This is the method in music. A particular series of notes struck and
serves for a theme; then the melody wanders off into a maze of harmony and
returns to the theme, only to wander off again into a new harmony and to
return from a new direction to the same theme. After a while this musical
theme, thus repeated with a variety of approach, penetrates our souls and
remains imbedded there long after the performance has ceased.
40

Léger’s film is in fact structured musically, as the film was originally intended to be
accompanied by a composition written by Antheil; the thematic emphasis provided by
the repetition of the images and sequences suggests and reinforces this reading of the
film. Furthermore, this structure suggests a form of replay through its deployment of
compositional and syntactical tropes from one medium (music) into another (film).
But perhaps the most striking utilization of repetition in the film is the replaying of a
sequence of another woman ascending a staircase; the recurrence of this image
bolsters the film’s simultaneous celebration and critique of modernity. Dudley
Murphy explains the succession:
I saw an old washerwoman climbing a flight of stone stairs. When she reached
the top, she was tired and made a futile gesture. The scene itself was banal,
but by printing it 20 times and connecting the end of the scene with the
beginning of her climb, it expressed the futility of life because she never got

40
Victor Oscar Freeburg, Pictorial Beauty on the Screen (Ayer Publishing, 1970), 107-108. Freeburg’s
comparison of music to film is not uncommon in early film criticism—the function of time in both
forms is often cited as a common element. This shared quality is also suggestive of the replay’s
function in music and musical composition, which is sadly beyond the scope of this project.
41
there. This scene in the editing followed a very intricate piece of shiny
machinery, somehow correlated in movement and rhythm to that of hers.
41

Murphy’s explication evinces the dual function of the sequence as both highlighting
the Sisyphean “futility” of the woman’s labor and possibilities of signification
afforded by film’s material capacity for repetition. That is to say, Léger and Murphy’s
metaphorical deployment of this sequence is made possible by the materiality of film
and its unique faculty for replay; the viability and coherence of this representational
strategy is a direct result of film’s ontology. In this capacity, Ballet Mécanique is
structured around the architectonics of the replay through its theme of repetition and
its strategic deployment of replayed sequences. Curiously, Ballet Mécanique itself
may have been subject to a form of replay; Freeman notes that, the film was “of such
importance to [Leger] that in the final years of his career, he planned to remake it, in
collaboration with Henri Langlois, in a version to be called Ballet des couleurs.”
42

While this project was never realized, the potential recursive aesthetic and theoretical
relationships between two iterations of a film—which itself is structured by
repetition—are intriguing.
Léger was not the only artist exploring the new form of cinema; Luis Buñuel
and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1928) is often cited as the example par
excellence of European surrealist film. It certainly was embraced by French
cinéphiles at the time, as demonstrated by Robert Aron’s declaration, “Apart from the
films of Man Ray and Luis Buñuel, you could search in vain for any other films made

41
As quoted in Freeman, “Bridging Purism and Surrealism: The Origins and Production of Fernand
Léger's "Ballet Mécanique,” 31.
42
Ibid., 28.
42
in France which have real merit.”
43
The disturbing and irrational imagery of Un Chien
Andalou and its defiantly discontinuous temporal and spatial representations evoke
and invoke the experience of nightmares and dreams; Buñuel argued the film was not
the depiction of a dream, but acknowledged that the film benefited from “a
mechanism analogous to that of dreams” and that the only potentially profitable mode
of its analysis would be one rooted in psychoanalysis.
44
Surrealist artists embraced
the unique capabilities of film to transcend the descriptive, expressive and evocative
possibilities of earlier forms and to provide the spectator with singularly experiential
representations of dream states. Annette Michelson describes the Surrealist film
project:
Surrealism’s claim to film was grounded in the manner, obscurely sensed (it
is, I think, still quite unexplored), of the way in which its formal strategies
seemed to facilitate a mimesis of the dynamics of the unconscious in its
dreamwork, the way in which the processes of displacement and
condensation, the conditions of representability in dream as Freud had
specified them, were rendered in the qualities of movement, editing,
superimposition, the lability, the synthetic temporality of the filmic image.
45

Following Michelson’s description, surrealist film functions in mimetic fashion in its
engendering of the depiction, representation and reproduction of the dream state.
French surrealist poet Robert Desnos, renowned for his practice of automatic writing
in which he would produce verse while in or emerging from trance-like states, argued
in 1923 for a more active engagement of film with both dreams and nightmares. He

43
Robert Aron, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel,
vol. 1907 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 432.
44
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974), 4.
45
Annette Michelson, “Rose Hobart and Monsieur Phot: Early Films from Utopia Parkway,” Artforum
11, no. 10 (June 1973): 50.
43
further suggested that film could benefit by drawing greater inspiration from poetry,
which free it from the standardized forms and rote narrative conventions into which it
was already settling, remarking, “While poetry has freed itself from all rules and
fetters, the cinema remains bound by a rigid and strictly common logic.”
46
Desnos
thusly identifies the potential of cinema to more fully explore psychic expressions and
experiences while simultaneously abandoning the unnecessary fetters of structure
imposed by the language and grammar of commercial narrative cinema. The
association of film to the imaginary was long-established, as demonstrated by the
films of Méliès or other early films which demonstrated that the cinematic
representation of the fantastical interior world was not a uniquely European
enterprise, such as Edwin S. Porter’s Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). However, the
capacity of film to depict and re-enact the experiential significance of dreams as a
method of investigation of the self would be more fully realized and articulated a few
decades later.

Replay in the “Trance Film”
P. Adams Sitney characterizes a swath of mid-century American avant-garde
filmmaking practices as “trance films,” a descriptor for a particular mode Sitney
suggests was initiated by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the
Afternoon (1943). Trance films are distinguished by the presence of a protagonist
figure in a dream-like state engaging with profilmic elements ostensibly linked to the

46
Robert Desnos, “Dream and Cinema,” in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology
1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel, vol. 1907 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988),
284.
44
principle character’s reflective investigation of her or his psychosexual self. Sitney
renders these trance films as distinct from—yet inextricably linked to—earlier
European surrealist films such as Un Chien Andalou. Similar to these earlier
Surrealist projects, trance films leverage film’s unique capacity for the reproduction
and replication of lived experience through its spatiotemporal representation as a
means for exploration of psyche. For her part, Deren regularly discouraged
psychoanalytic readings of Meshes, remarking in 1960, “The intent of [Meshes], as of
the subsequent films, is to create a mythological experience. When it was made,
however, there was no anticipation of the general audience and no experience of how
the dominant cultural tendency toward personalized psychological interpretation
could impede understanding of the film.”
47
While Deren was resistant to the
application of psychoanalytic interpretive modes to Meshes, the film’s visual and
aural codes are powerfully reminiscent of a dreamer’s experiences; as Sitney bluntly
states, “Meshes explicitly simulates the dream experience, first in the transition from
waking to sleeping… and later in an ambiguous scene of waking.”
48
The film
employs a cyclical structure, and the figure played by Deren is shown falling asleep at
the conclusion of the first cycle, which initiates multiple variations on the initial
sequence, each successively simultaneously more revealing and ambiguous as the
protagonist is shown retracing the same path and depicted in multiple stages of
waking and falling asleep. The film’s structure, imagery and tone are deliberate, and
its use of symbolism certainly invites decoding based on the calculated objects

47
As quoted in Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 11.
48
Ibid.
45
employed in the film (i.e. the flower, the knife, the key, or the heavy use of mirrors
and reflections). Despite her occasionally contradictory remarks about the film, Deren
seems to invite such a symbolic reading with her statement that the film is “based on
a strong literary-dramatic line as a core, and rests heavily upon the symbolic value of
objects and situations.”
49
However, perhaps more revealing is Deren’s assertion that
the film is engaged,
…with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event
which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in
which the sub-conscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate
an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional response.
50

The implications of this statement are polymorphous; Sitney employs this same
remark to support his positioning of the film as the prototypical trance film, and
Deren’s remarks would also certainly seem to validate a psychoanalytic approach the
to film. But Deren’s words also reveal the significance of Meshes as not the
“recording” of an external event, but instead the reproducing of an experiential
sequence rooted in interiority. Her characterization of the film is suggestive of the
film’s functioning as a descriptive manifestation of an event as psychologically
experienced by the protagonist. Meshes thus attempts to reproduce and replay the
immateriality of conscious experience and the functioning of the unconscious.
Despite her protestations, Deren’s rooting of the film in the “sub-conscious”
of an individual invites—if not demands—a consideration of Meshes in
psychoanalytic terms; indeed, there are no shortage of readings of the numerous

49
Maya Deren, “Maya Deren: Notes, Essays, Letters,” Film Culture 39 (Winter 1965): 1.
50
Ibid.
46
symbols in the film and interpretations of the significance of the depiction of the
relationship between the characters played by Deren and Hammid. But the film’s
cyclical composition is equally provocative through its structure of pronounced
repetition; an aspect which is often acknowledged and cited as evidence of the film’s
dream-within-dream structure in critical readings, but rarely unpacked in terms of its
aesthetic and theoretical implications. Each cycle of the film presents a variation on
the elements introduced in the first, with each iteration framed by imagery of sleeping
and waking. Deren’s theoretical stance that film affords previously unavailable means
of representations of subjectivity are particularly significant in this reconsideration.
As David James points out, film offered Deren a unique mode of expression, a
“combination of photography’s ability to reproduce reality and the capacity of the
cinematic apparatus to transform that reality in creating a subjective world.”
51
Film’s
fusion of the documentation of reality with the faculty for the representation of
experiential interiority uniquely empowers filmmakers such as Deren to express and
explore physiological subjectivity in visual and aural modes unavailable in other art
forms. Deren argues that film must embrace and harness its unique properties to
establish itself as an art form, and simultaneously reject established representational
modes of narrative and experientiality; she contends that,
[Film] must relinquish the narrative disciplines it has borrowed from literature
and its timid imitation of the causal logic of narrative plots, a form which
flowered as a celebration of the earth-bound, step-by-step concept of time,
space, and relationship which was part of the primitive materialism of the

51
David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 173.
47
nineteenth century. Instead, it must develop the vocabulary of filmic images
and evolve the syntax of filmic techniques which relate those.
52

Deren thus articulates her vision for filmmaking practices which abandon existing
narrative structures of causality, linearity, spatiality and temporality introduced,
standardized, and popularized in other forms such as literature and instead advocates
an active engagement with the specificities of the medium of film to realize its
potential as an art form. James observes that Meshes, “stands as one of the great
exemplifications of modernism and medium specificity in cinema”; furthermore, he
argues that the film embraces the,
…unrestricted use of the medium’s specific resources, both in photography—
framing, different lenses, irregular angles and shooting speeds, stop- and
reverse-motion and so on—and in the use of editing to generate temporal and
spatial illusions, especially notable being the use of a continuous action to
bridge incommensurate spaces.
53

His remarks elucidate the film’s distinctive multiple engagements with the unique
characteristics of its medium; these insights also serve to highlight an essential
expressive aspect of Meshes equally reliant on the medium’s singular capacity for
precise repetition. Indeed, the cyclical composition of Meshes is structured around
reoccurrence, as each of the repeated sequences of the film redeploys the same
symbols, themes, actions, characters and spaces. Meaning is constructed in this
reiterative architecture via the symbolic imagery deployed in each successive cycle,
allowing the spectator to gradually unpack the film’s ambiguities based on the
similarities and differences between subsequent cycles. This recurrence is reinforced

52
Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” 167.
53
James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles,
172-173.
48
of the dream-within-dream Russian doll structure several times, as what appears to be
an awakening for Deren’s character instead only actually serves as a continuation of
the dream in the form of a replay until the film’s climatic finale.
54

This use of repetition in the prototypical trance film is noteworthy, as this
particular mode of avant-garde filmmaking practice is demarcated by its unique
engagement with the self and lived experience. In his description of the later Deren
work At Land (1944), Sitney articulates the attributes of the “classic” trance film: “[a]
protagonist who passes invisibly among people; the dramatic landscapes; the
climactic confrontation with one’s self and one’s past.”
55
While Sitney suggests that
Meshes only demonstrates some of these aspects, Meshes does explicitly depict an
ongoing and reiterative engagement between self and past. This generic trope of the
trance film is noteworthy, as the trance film offers a vehicle for the revisitation of an
event, one which often is linked to some form psychic trauma. The containment of
this examination of the self into discrete filmic form further allows the event to be
revisited and reexplored endlessly. In this way, the trance film affords a form of
perpetual return or replay; this affordance is strongly resonant with Freud’s
conception of the relationship between the lived present and our conscious and
unconscious memory. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud argues for the
relationship between repetition and pleasure: “repetition, the re-experiencing of

54
Much like peeling back the layers of an onion, each of these repetitions seem to bring us closer to the
core of the film’s meaning, as well as the protagonist’s death within the film. I am indebted to David
James for this analogy.
55
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 19.
49
something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure.”
56
He suggests that
pleasure derived from repetition can be traced to a childhood game based around
disappearance and return. In his studies, Freud observed a small boy who would
throw his toys into a corner or beneath his bed and celebrate their disappearance with
a cry of “o-o-o-o,” which Freud and the boy’s mother interpreted as the German word
“fort” (“away” or “gone”). Freud also observed the boy playing with a wooden reel
with sting attached to it from the confines of his cot—the boy would toss the reel out
of his cot and emit the cry of “fort” and then pull the reel back in, with a gleeful cry
of “da” (“there”). Freud comments,
This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return. As a rule one
only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself,
though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second
act.
57

Much like a game of peek-a-boo, Freud argues that the intentional (and presumably
unsettling) disappearance is a “necessary preliminary” to the pleasurable return.
Freud traces the enjoyment of the act to one of agency: “At the outset [the child] was
in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but by repeating it,
unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part.”
58
In many ways,
Meshes explores repetition primarily through similar acts of disappearance and
reappearance, as Deren’s character relentlessly pursues figures which elude her and
symbolic objects inexplicably vanish and materialize, undermining her agency.

56
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1953 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Pycho-Analysis, 1920), 36.
57
Ibid., 15.
58
Ibid., 16.
50
Further strengthening the consideration of Freud in its application to the
function of repetition in Meshes of the Afternoon and the trance film’s psychosexual
investigation is his linkage of mastery to dreams. Freud suggests that that dreams
connected to childhood psychical traumas arise, “in obedience to the compulsion to
repeat, though it is true that in analysis that compulsion is supported by the wish
(which is encouraged by ‘suggestion’) to conjure up what has been forgotten and
repressed.”
59
Freud thus categorizes dreams as a manifestation of the compulsion to
repeat, suggesting that, in some capacities, they work to fulfill the wishes of latent
and repressed desires. Dreams similarly appeal to a desire for mastery of past traumas
and experiences. Similarly, Freud argues that the desire for repetition caters to a base
satisfaction linked to perfection:
What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion
toward further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual
repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.
The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which
would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction.
60

Just as recurring dreams may be indicative of a desire to gain mastery over a trauma,
an “instinct towards perfection” remains a central structuring logic in the psyche.
Repetition of an action or an experience suggests the repressed desire for the
satisfaction gained from perfecting that action or experience. The trance film
functions in a similar capacity by reenacting, revisiting and replaying an action or
experience for the purposes of psychosexual investigation. The mode of repetition in
Meshes is one which functions through the prism of the psyche, one which is not the

59
Ibid., 32.
60
Ibid., 42.
51
recording of an external event, but, as Deren suggests reproduce the functioning of
the unconscious to “develop, interpret and elaborate” incidents into psychical
response. As the prototypical trance film, Meshes seeks to reproduce and replay such
processes for the purposes of development, interpretation, and elaboration.
61

Collage and Found Footage Film: Industrial Practices and Reconsiderations
First released in 1939, Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart predates Meshes of the
Afternoon by several years; upon initial consideration, Cornell’s collage film operates
in an almost completely dissimilar modality to the trance film’s usage of cinema.
Rather than employing replay for the purposes of psychosexual investigation, Cornell
uses film’s reproducibility and its status as industrial object to replay extant film,
recontextualizing footage and invoking new meanings and associations. Continuing
the trend established by Léger, Deren, Man Ray, Dali, and other artists versed in the
representational and plastic arts, Cornell’s work in assemblage and use of found
objects such as his shadow boxes preceded and informed his work in film. The
proficiency of Rose Hobart drew the attention of Cornell’s aesthetic peers; at the
screening of the film in New York’s Julien Levy Gallery, Dali “nakedly expressed

61
This mastery through repetition is implied in myriad of forms and texts in commercial culture.
Groundhog Day (1993) is a simple and oft-cited example. Similarly, the Hollywood film Click (2006)
depicts an overworked male protagonist who appears to be losing control of his life. He is
mysteriously given a “universal remote control” that allows him to finally control not only the myriad
of electronic devices in his home, but also his life itself. With the remote, the protagonist can rewind
to any moment of his life and replay his past experiences, much to his delight. At one moment, he
exclaims “I love you” to the remote, a remark his wife interprets as directed towards her. Here, the
capacity to control, repeat and replay becomes the target of ultimate affection for this everyman
character—this remote seems to be the ultimate male fantasy.
52
jealously” of the film’s accomplishments to Cornell.
62
Rose Hobart was constructed
by re-editing footage from George Meleford’s 1931 Hollywood production East of
Borneo, which stars the actress for which Cornell names his version. Cornell had long
been a collector of complete films, fragments, stills, and productions shots,
conducting screenings from his collection at the Julien Levy Gallery in the 1940s; in
1971, in the same year, he donated around 100 complete films from his collection to
the Anthology Film Archives and he estimated that he possessed a further 15,000
stills and shots in his collection.
63
Rose Hobart thus marks a dual return, a reworking
of a text which is reliant on its status as an industrial project, as well as a re-
examination of locus of fascination for Cornell: cinema. The film is also a clear
example of the adaptation of Cornell’s practices using found objects to the medium of
film, effectively replaying his formal and aesthetic strategies in a new form.
Rose Hobart removes the heroine of East of Borneo from the narrative causality of
the source film’s structure, offering fragmented images and sequences from the
original film, mostly of transitions between scenes and Hobart interacting with and
reacting to unseen characters and events. Cornell also replaces the original sound and
dialogue from the film with music, effecting a profoundly different experience from
the same recorded material as the source content. Displacing these elements from
their original context, the film assumes a Surrealist dream-like quality, but one which,
unlike the trance film, does not create and film events for the purposes of description,
representation, and reproduction of a dream-like state. Instead, the film’s surrealistic

62
Michelson, “Rose Hobart and Monsieur Phot: Early Films from Utopia Parkway,” 48.
63
Ibid., 49.
53
aspects are a product of the manipulation and reconfiguration of existing filmed
material, as Cornell repurposes the industrial product that is East of Borneo to create
his own film. Cornell’s strategy of replaying this footage into new contexts supports
Bruce Kawin’s contention that a repetition invariably shapes the original element
which is repeated. As Kawin argues, through the mere act of simply trying to recall or
perceive a prior event changes the event itself. In this sense, Cornell’s Rose Hobart is
not merely the recontextualization of aspects of East of Borneo, but it also effects a
transformation of the original film as well. The mutual influence between the source
film and Cornell’s reassemblage constitutes a literalization of this process, as the
meanings and experiences of East of Borneo and Rose Hobart cyclically shape one
another.
Sitney argues that the fragmentation in Rose Hobart enhances its “surrealistic
dimensions,” suggesting that through the alteration of “logical order,” Cornell, “gives
the impression of repetition and ruptures linear time and attendant causality.”
64
In a
fashion similar to the spatiotemporal disruptions of Un Chien Andalou, Rose Hobart
thus marks a direct challenge to the linearity and causality of narrative film through
its recontextualization.
65
In a similar vein, Léger’s Ballet Mécanique can be read as a
spiritual predecessor to Rose Hobart and the found footage film through its
deployment of recontextualization via repetition of the sequence of the woman on the
stairs. By contrast, Cornell’s mode of recontextualization employs the reproducibility

64
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 330-331.
65
According to experimental film lore, Joseph Cornell later would famously reversed and modified
Stan Brakhage’s Wonder Ring (1955) to repurpose the film as Gnir Rednow (1956) to engage with—
and possibly to directly critique—Brakhage’s film, although Mark Toscano has demonstrated that the
two films are actually composed from different footage.
54
of film as a means for its reconsideration; Rose Hobart replays the constituent
elements of East of Borneo for the purposes of reconsideration of the language of
dominant cinema practices. James argues that Rose Hobart also serves as a source of
introspective pleasure for Cornell, suggesting that Cornell, “abstracted favored scenes
of the female star from their narrative context, transforming them into obsessively
adored spectacles—a personal re-envisioning of the role of the female body in mass
culture,” which he likens to Josef von Sternberg’s fascination with Marlene
Dietrich.
66
Rose Hobart thus replays the material of the actress not only as a re-
consideration of cinematic grammar, but also in a form of psychosexual investigation
for Cornell. By enabling him to revisit and reconfigure these elements from the film,
Cornell leverages film’s material and metaphysical capacity to record and to be
reproduced and replayed in manner distinct from—yet fundamentally linked to—
previous explorations of its expressive and representational potential.
Rose Hobart was not Cornell’s last film, but it effectively provided the
generic foundation for the model of found footage films, in much the same way that
Meshes functioned as the prototypical trance film. Michelson argues that Cornell’s
film, “initiates with striking complexity a genre which will only flower in the late
1960s.”
67
In the decades following Rose Hobart, films constructed using footage from
other films and fragments would emerge as a significant mode of avant-garde
practices; found footage films draw attention to their own construction and

66
James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles,
51.
67
Annette Michelson, “Intellectual Cinema: A Reconsideration,” in Options and Alternatives: Some
Directions in Recent Art. Yale University Art Gallery, 4 April-16 May 1973 (New Haven, Connecticut:
Yale University Printing Service, 1973), 54.
55
simultaneously exploit film’s reproducibility and its commodification. As William
Wees observes,
…whether they preserve the footage in its original form or present it in new
and different ways, [found footage films] invite us to recognize it as found
footage, as recycled images, and due to that self referentiality, they encourage
a more analytical reading than the footage originally received.
68

The images of found footage films are significantly—if not completely—removed
from their original context, allowing for new avenues of analysis and consideration
through the circumstances of their contextual placement within the filmmaker’s work
and the resultant relationship between their original and recontextualized
deployments.
For instance, Bruce Conner’s use of found footage in his seminal A Movie
(1958) sets aside the physical properties of film and its capacity to affect psychical
and cognitive states. Instead, he ironically addresses the narrative conventions of
mainstream Hollywood film. Conner’s re-contextualization of footage from fiction
films, newsreels and documentaries is for comedic effect, highlighting the absurdity
of mainstream cinema through its reliance on—and parody of—the language of
narrative film. Conner toys with his audience and their expectations, as well as the
formal conventions of Hollywood cinema such as the shot-reverse shot structure; in
one instance, the image of a sailor peering through a submarine periscope is followed
by the image of a scantily clad female on a bed before we then return to the surprised
reaction of the sailor. The film contains all of the staples and tropes of narrative film:
crashes, battles, explosions, titles and long takes of the filmmaker’s name swept

68
William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York:
Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 11.
56
together into an exhilarating montage. Conner replays found footage—or, he prefers
to call it, “lost” footage—to expose the inanity of both the industrial apparatus and its
effective programming of our expectations as viewers.
69

Although the aesthetic, representational, and political motives of found
footage filmmakers vary considerably, their shared reliance on film as an industrial
product and commodity and attendant engagement with the materiality of film can be
connected to the emergence in the late 1960s of a movement of intensified
investigation of film’s material properties: so-called “structural film.” This lineage
between found footage and structural film can most clearly be linked through Ken
Jacobs, particularly via his Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969). Similar to the strategy
Cornell employs for Rose Hobart, Tom, Tom is the product of Jacobs’s
comprehensive reworking of a ten-minute 1905 film sharing the same title based on
the nursery rhyme. In a program note written for a 1969 showing of the film at the
Gallery for Modern Art, Jacobs describes his examination and reconfiguration of the
original film’s brief eight shot composition:
I’ve cut the into the film’s monumental homogeneity (8 statically
photographed sets…) with some sense of trespass, cropped and given a
Griffith emphasis to parts originally submerged in the whole—but (this is a
didactic film) it was necessary to do so in order to begin to show how much
was really there.
70

69
Similarly, Conner’s Marilyn Times Five (1973) loops a found footage sequence of Marilyn Monroe,
playfully bridging the realms between commercial and avant-garde filmmaking practices.

70
As quoted in Lois Mendelson and Bill Simon, “Tom, Tom the Piper's Son,” Artforum 10, no. 1
(September 1971): 47. Here, Jacobs refers to his transformations of the film’s long static shots into
close-ups on particular elements, citing the similar formal narratival strategies innovated by D.W.
Griffith in the years following the source film’s release.
57
The intensive and rigorous analysis performed in Tom, Tom is highly suggestive of
the film’s historically critical positioning as an archetypal structural film, although
Jacobs himself rejects this label for the film.
71
Regardless of its precise classification,
Tom, Tom constitutes a highly deliberate reconsideration of the original film, as
Jacobs precisely and methodically explores the numerous details of the film. In her
introduction to a 1973 exhibit at Yale University of artists, musicians, and filmmakers
including Jacobs, Jo Baer, Michael Snow, and Richard Serra, Anne Coffin Hanson
remarks,
The two most pervasive elements in artistic “boredom” are perhaps reduction
and repetition, and we find one or both in most of the works in the exhibition,
although realized in very different ways…Ken Jacob’s [sic] Tom Tom the
Piper’s Son is built on a narrative involving human figures. Yet through the
course of the film the images are transformed in such a way that figures
become grainy abstract conformations, so reduced and repetitious that they
draw our attention more sharply to fewer and fewer and smaller and smaller
details as the films progresses.
72

The structured replaying of footage is often recursive in its nature, as Jacobs deploys
the same sequence in repeated fashion, with each iteration zoomed further upon
particular visual elements. This effects an abstraction of the characters and their
actions into intangible movements, shapes and patterns of light and dark,
simultaneously exposing the grain of the film’s print in increasing scale and
transforming the abstracted forms into pointillist renderings. This reflexivity is
heightened at key moments, such as when two parallel ladders evoke the sprockets of
the film itself, followed later by the appearance of the Jacobs’s hand on the frame

71
Paul Arthur, “Ken Jacobs,” Film Comment 33, no. 2 (1997): 61.
72
Anne Coffin Hanson, “Toward a Definition,” in Options and Alternatives: Some Directions in
Recent Art. Yale University Art Gallery, 4 April-16 May 1973 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Printing Service, 1973), 5.
58
before the light of the projector is revealed behind the screen. Jacobs’s radical
reconsideration is the product of the use of an optical printer and the 1955 purchase of
a variable speed “analytic projector” which allows films to be played forward and in
reverse. As Jacobs indicates, the replaying of the original film effects a didactic
exercise, expanding upon our appreciation of the minutia of the complex visual
compositions; Sitney asserts that the film is “didactic in a specifically modernist
tradition. [Jacobs] has recovered the graphic genius of the film’s original source.”
73

Following Kawin’s observation of the transformative effect of repetition on the
original, Jacobs’s process of re-examination demands a re-consideration of the
original film. It similarly effects a profound reconsideration of the medium, pushing
the reflexive use of replay in Tom, Tom into a new filmic mode—that of structural
film.
74
Annette Michelson suggests that avant-garde filmmaking of the late 60s and
early 70s can be productively linked to Eisenstein’s conception of an “intellectual
cinema;” Michelson describes this as, “the rendering of the movement of
consciousness itself. He envisages the filmic ‘interior monologue’ as the agent of the
dissolution between subject and object,’ first undertaken in the novels of Eduard
Dujardin, ‘pioneer on the stream of consciousness,’ a dissolution completed in the
work of Joyce.”
75
Despite Jacobs’s noted objections, the intensive consideration of

73
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 343.
74
Lois Mendelson and Bill Simon remark, “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, is, with Vertov’s Man With a
Movie Camera, one of the two great works of reflexive cinema whose primary subject is the aesthetic
definition of the nature of the medium.” The linkage of Tom, Tom to the Dziga Vertov’s constructivist
masterpiece is striking, as Annette Michelson, links the film-making practices of the late 60s and early
70s avant-garde characterized by Tom, Tom to those of another revolutionary Soviet filmmaker, Vertov
critic Sergei Eisenstein. See Mendelson and Simon, “Tom, Tom the Piper's Son,” 47.
75
Michelson, “Intellectual Cinema: A Reconsideration,” 11.
59
the materiality of film demonstrated in Tom, Tom is often linked to structural film
practices, and Michelson’s suggestion that the “intellectual cinema” of this period is
characterized by the “rendering of the movement of consciousness itself” strongly
intimated the utility in examining the usage of replay in structural film and its linkage
to our lived experience.

Replay & Materiality: Structural Film, Temporality, and Lived Experience
Of many experimental filmmaking practices, the structural film movement
perhaps most directly engaged with spatiotemporal representation, repetition and
replay through its intense examination of the materiality of film. As such, a
consideration of this mode of filmmaking and the deployment of replay must be
rooted in its precursors and origins. To demonstrate the relationship between replay,
materiality and lived experience, the work of Hollis Frampton will be interrogated; in
order to help unpack his usage of replay, it is necessary to explore the cinematic and
photographic origins of the structural film project. The work of Ernie Gehr serves as
an exceptional example of this movement; he was first described as a “structuralist”
filmmaker by P. Adams Sitney in his 1969 article “Structural Film” in Film Culture.
The definition of “structural” film is somewhat muddled, as demonstrated by
Malcolm Le Grice’s 1972 categorization of similar films as “underground” and Peter
Gidal and Stephen Heath’s insistence on the moniker “materialist film.”
76
Sitney
proposes that the structuralist mode is a

76
Malcolm Le Grice, “Thoughts on Recent 'Underground' Film,” Afterimage 4 (1972): 78-95. For
characterizations of “materialist film,” see Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of
Structural/Materialist Film,” in Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976);
60
cinema of structure in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and
simplified, and it is that shape which is a primal impression of the film. The
structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and
subsidiary to the outline.
77

Structural film, then, is concerned with the form of a film and its medium-specific
processes, rather than the narrative content. The writings and films of Stan Brakhage,
a key theorist-practitioner of the American avant-garde, endeavor to portray the world
through an “untutored eye” which is unfettered and unrestricted by established modes
of seeing. Brakhage sought to expand the visual vocabulary of the cinema, and Sitney
considers him a key filmic influence on the structural filmmakers:
In creating the lyrical film, Stan Brakhage accepted the limitations of that
opening sequence as the basis for a new form. Out of the optical field and
metaphors of the body’s movement in the rocking gestures of the camera, he
affirmed the film-maker as the lyrical first person. Without that achievement
and its subsequent evolution, it would be difficult to imagine the flourishing
of the structural film.
78

Sitney’s connection between Brakhage and the structuralists is useful, especially in
consideration of Brakhage’s active attempts to undermine the Renaissance
perspective he felt the camera demanded. Brakhage felt that the optical apparatus of
the camera insisted upon this perspective, asserting that “its lenses grounded to
achieve a nineteenth century Western compositional perspective… in bending the

Stephen Heath, “Repetition Time: Notes around 'Structural/Materialist' Film,” Wide Angle 2, no. 1
(1978): 4-11; Peter Gidal, Materialist Film (New York: Routledge, 1989). James observes the ironic
tension of the term “structural,” linking the similar debates over film language that structural films
have provoked to those triggered over language itself by Roland Barthes and other members of the
movement of structuralism—see David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 237.
77
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 348.
78
Ibid. Inspired by Gertude Stein, Brakhage explored the impossibility of repetition in his own work—
most notably in Anticiaption of the Night (1958), which features a number of repeated shots at the
beginning.
61
light and limiting the frame of the image just so.”
79
Brakhage’s interest in subverting
the Renaissance perspective was shared by many of the later structural filmmakers,
particularly Ernie Gehr, whose Serene Velocity (1970) can be considered a meditation
on the matter. In the film, Gehr mechanically adjusts the focal length of his camera,
as it depicts a single frame of an institutional hallway. His precise adjustments of the
lens are mathematically derived and timed, effecting a pulsing image of the hall as it
shifts towards and away from the viewer, problematizing traditional notions of
perspective and space. Indeed, Gehr’s film advocates a reconsideration of traditional
representations of space and time. Sitney suggests that Serene Velocity’s depiction is
devoid of a sense of subjective experience: “It is divorced from the realm of
experience and re-fashioned in a purely cinematic time and space.”
80
This contention
seems somewhat at odds with Gehr’s own words about film:
[it] is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on
life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals
of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable
intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given
space.
81

If film “embodies the mind,” as Gehr suggests, then it is hardly “divorced from the
realm of experience,” as Sitney asserts. Gehr thusly renders explicit the relationship
between lived experience and film.

79
Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” 124-125.
80
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 401.
81
Ernie Gehr, “Program Notes for a Film Screening at the Museum of Modern Art,” in The Avant-
Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 247.
62
Gehr’s remark is noteworthy in its similarity to an observation made by Cubist
painter Pablo Picasso: “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them.”
82
George
Heard Hamilton observes that the Cubists provoked a fundamental shift in the
viewer’s relationship to art—since the subjects of their works are:
…suggested rather than described, they must be ‘thought’ by the spectator as
well as ‘seen’. This reversal of the usual relation between percept and concept
is implicit in Cubism… the spectator must reconstruct the appearance of
objects for himself from information provided by the painter.
83

Cubism thus relied upon the viewer to unpack the forms as the artists conceived,
rather than perceived, them. Cubism eschewed linear perspective and realistic
depictions and instead emphasized a plane-based approach to portray multiple,
fragmented dimensions of an object on a flat plane. Cubists endeavored to initiate and
institute an innovative representational strategy for the depiction of three-dimensional
space.
84
While Cubism coincides with early avant-garde film, it certainly predates the
structural movement; however, the desire for fresh representational strategies is
clearly shared by Gehr and other structural filmmakers.
As evidence of this, Gehr deploys a similar experiment in Table (1976). In
this work, Gehr provides multiple still-frame perspectives on the objects on a table.
The film is comprised primarily of blues and reds, bringing to mind a three-
dimensional aesthetic, which is reinforced by the exploration of space performed by

82
George Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940, vol. 6 (New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1967), 246.
83
Ibid. Cubism was developed in the early twentieth century in the art of Pablo Picasso and George
Braque.
84
It should be noted that Cubism was not the first or only art movement to challenge Renaissance
perspective through experimentation in spatiotemporal representational strategies. Other movements
such as Impressionism constitute similarly unique reconsiderations of the representation of spatiality
and temporality.
63
the film. As Picasso and Braque might deconstruct a café table into hundreds of
shifting facets, Gehr similarly rejects traditional modes of cinematic representation of
a table. Like the Cubists, Gehr innovates a representational strategy for depicting the
shape and depth of a three-dimensional object on a flat surface. In this manner, Table
effectively redeploys the aesthetic strategies of Cubism into the medium of film. Gehr
expands on the mode of replay employed by collagist filmmakers in his found footage
film Eureka (1974-79), which uses a San Francisco film from around 1905 of a
streetcar moving through the city. Gehr manipulated the speed of the film and
reprinted frames to transform the film from the four-minute (at 16 frames-per-second)
original to a 30-minute (at 24 fps) piece. Similar to earlier found footage filmmakers,
Gehr leverages film capacity’s for reproduction and recontextualization, but Gehr’s
film extends into structural territory in a manner similar to Tom, Tom. In Eureka,
Gehr rigorously examines the image in detail, much as he examined film stock in
History (1970), using replay for the purposes of not just recontextualization, but
reconsideration of the function of the processes by which film operates.
85
Gehr’s use
of intertextual replay in Eureka is evident: his slowing of the original film forces the
viewer into a far greater investment into the filmic image (much like History),
effecting a contemplative and meditative state.
Several other structural filmmakers bear brief mention along with Gehr for
their leveraging of found footage and repetition. Owen Land (formerly George
Landow) similarly repurposes film—his Film in which there appear sprocket holes,

85
James suggests that the detail of the film is actually its subject: “History is about the grain of the
film as it is illuminated by light leaking through the sprocket hole in the printer.” James, Allegories of
Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, 243.
64
edge lettering, dirt particles etc. (1966) deploys a discarded strip of color commercial
test film. Land loop reprinted the image without cleaning the film, adjusting the test
film so the original image of a woman only occupies the left half of the screen while
the sprocket holes and film lettering fill much of the right side of the screen. As
Sitney observes, “The resulting film, a found object extended to a simple structure, is
the essence of minimal cinema.”
86
The inter- and intratextual replaying of this footage
in Land’s film at once implies the industrial structures of commercial cinema while
also exposing both the most material—and often hidden—aspects of film exhibition
and the reproduction necessary for its distribution.
Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) also employs repetition, while also
deploying strategies borrowed from flicker-filmmakers such as Peter Kubleka.
Sharits’s work is constructed from a series of still images, which repeatedly flash on
the screen to suggest the illusion of movement. The images include a man’s face
staring at the screen intercut with a woman’s hand appearing to scratch his face and a
pair of scissors poised as if to cut off his tongue. These images flash on the screen in
multiple colors, along with occasional still images of genitals and a surgical operation
while a man’s voice rhythmically and incessantly repeats the word “destroy.” The
rhythmic images and droning mantra of destruction are initially jarring and unsettling
before they become mesmerizing—Sharits suggests the influence of Buddhist
mantras in his work.
87
Unlike Gehr or Land’s work, Sharits’s use of intratextual

86
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 364.
87
Ibid., 360-361.
65
repetition seems less about contemplation of the filmic image and more about the
power of repetitions in sound film to induce hypnotic states.
The experiential nature of Sharits’s work is a useful point of departure for the
consideration of the connection between lived experience and structural film
practices. Stephen Heath, describes “the fundamental operation” of what he terms
“structuralist/materialist film” as “the experience of film, and the experience of film”
(emphasis his).
88
Heath’s assertion about structural (or materialist) film suggests that
structural film extends beyond the rigorous examination of materiality and the
fundamental processes of film’s production into the experience of the film and the
experience of film as well. Steve Anderson argues that the categorization of
“structural film” encompasses a multiplicity of modes in its framework; he remarks,
“Although unified by a concern with the essential characteristics of film (frame rates,
photochemical and optical processes; the physicality of production, editing,
projection, etc.), the body of film work described as “structural” is remarkably
diverse in its range of contents.”
89
Following Hollis Frampton’s observation that
Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1966) could be read as a murder mystery, Anderson
notes that “[structural films] are inadequately described as simply being about
filmmaking itself.”
90
Indeed, given the privileged and symbiotic relationship between
cinema and the perceptual experience of reality explored earlier, the engagement of
structural film with the materiality of film would suggest that structural film is also

88
Heath, “Repetition Time: Notes around 'Structural/Materialist' Film,” 4.
89
See Steven Franklin Anderson, “History Written with Lightning: Film, Television and Experimental
Historiography” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 2001).
90
Ibid.
66
inherently about not just film and the experience of film, but it is invested in an
examination of temporal perception and lived experience as well. Fittingly, the
consideration of structural film’s connection to our sensorial understanding of
temporality can be fruitfully performed through the enigmatic Frampton himself.
91

Hollis Frampton’s analysis of the development of still photography elucidates
his own experimentation with spatiotemporal representation. In a comical,
presumably imagined conversation, Frampton suggests (by way of his conversational
partner, a female historian) the central role photography plays in defining our own
history:
The trouble with the Universe, seen from a rigorously historical point of view,
is just this: no one was there to photograph the beginning of it—and
presumably, at the end, no one will bother. After all, history, like
pornography, couldn’t really begin until photography was invented. Before
that, every account of events is merely somebody’s panting prose fiction.
92

In a playful fashion, Frampton points to photography’s indexical relationship with
reality that provides as a means of recording and evincing past events, as suggested
by André Bazin.
93
By this logic, while written histories may embellish and mislead,
the photograph provides compelling evidence of a past moment. Frampton privileges
photography (and film) as an exceptional example of the human desire to create art as
a means of defense against mortality: “I believe that we make art… and every

91
The work of other structural filmmakers could also be fruitfully explored in the consideration of the
linkage between film and lived experience, such as the films of Morgan Fisher—particularly his Phi
Phenomenon (1968) and Standard Gauge (1984).
92
Hollis Frampton, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity,” in Circles of Confusion: Film,
Photography, Video: Texts, 1968-1980 (Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983),
88.
93
See Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 9-16.
67
deliberate activity known to me seems to aspire, however obliquely, to the estate of
art… as a defense against the humiliating, insistent pathos of our one utter certainty:
that we are going to die.”
94
For Frampton, all forms of art (especially photography)
ultimately serve as a means of self-preservation.
95
Frampton’s assertions about
photography also articulate its fidelity with material reality and lived experience, as
he playfully suggests that photography allows history in a manner far more functional
than the “panting prose fiction” of written history.
But Frampton insists that early photography “never quite consciously
addressed itself to that intuition we once called ‘time,’” instead taking hesitating steps
towards a direct portrayal of temporality.
96
He suggests that several key “explorers”
such as Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Thomas Eakins were among
the first to begin to map this uncharted territory. Frampton examines Muybridge in
particular, exploring his personal history and artistic development before his creation
of a multiple-camera device for capturing motion. Frampton suggests that
Muybridge’s still images initially appear still but actually exhibit something more:
Muybridge, in some of his earliest landscape work, seems positively to seek,
of all things, waterfalls; long exposures of which produce images of a strange,
ghostly substance that is in fact the tesseract of water: what is to be seen is not
water itself, but the virtual volume it occupies during the time-interval of the
exposure.
97

94
Frampton, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity,” 89.
95
Given his belief in this self-preservation, Frampton’s role as a man who apparently dies during
Michael Snow’s murder mystery Wavelength is even more dryly humorous.
96
Frampton, “Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity,” 101.
97
Hollis Frampton, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract,” in Circles of Confusion: Film,
Photography, Video: Texts, 1968-1980 (Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983),
76.
68
Frampton’s observation of Muybridge’s work calls to mind Henri Bergson’s notion of
duration as a continuous flow of time. The captured moment is inextricably bound to
those moments which precede and follow, much like the ghostly “tesseract” of the
water that Frampton sees in the image. This linkage between Muybridge and Bergson
also suggests one of the central motives that James identifies for alternative film
practices of the sixties: “phenomenological investigation.”
98
As a precursor to
cinematic techniques, Muybridge’s more famous later work would also fit in this
vein, particularly in its revealing exploration of the flow of time to which Bergson
alludes. Indeed, Muybridge’s photography experiments to help settle a bet on the
positions of a galloping horse’s hooves segment movement into a series of images.
While Bergson would reject this representation of temporality as inaccurate due to its
segmentation, Frampton’s remarks about the “tesseracts” found in Muybridge’s
longer exposure still images suggest that photography has the capacity to depict
intervallic temporality beyond the instant of the photograph. Frampton’s observations
about the depiction of time in photography are useful tools in unpacking his own
exploration of temporality in cinematic terms. His engagement with these
photographs is also engaged with spatial elements; Frampton comments that in
Muybridge’s images of the Pointa Bonita Lighthouse:
there is a kind of randomization, or reshuffling… seen from several different
viewpoints, in space, which destroys the linearity of an implied molecule of
narrative time, reducing the experience to a jagged simultaneity that was to be
more fully explored in film montage fifty years later.
99

98
James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, 11.
99
Frampton, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract,” 76.
69
While this connection to later film practices is significant, his observation also invites
comparison to the exploration of spatiotemporal representation in Frampton’s own
work. The modes of spatiotemporal representation that he employs uniquely reveal
the specificities of the medium of the moving image, as well as larger philosophical
implications—particularly in his use of repetition.
Hollis Frampton’s fascination with Muybridge is understandable, given the
focus on temporality in his own films. Frampton uses elements of repetition
throughout his work, often for the purposes of revealing the structuration of the filmic
form. In Artificial Light (1969) he treats a series of shots of young artists to a
succession of manipulations—the same group is shown upside down, in negative, and
with blobs of color added to their faces, among others. This continuous replaying of
the footage is almost didactic in its treatment of the image; the film iterates in
comprehensive fashion through a series of visual recontexualizations. By contrast,
Critical Mass (1971) the third film of his Hapax Legomena cycle, repeatedly
interrupts and replays sequences of a young couple’s argument in a highly structured
fashion. As the couple stutters their way through their incessantly fractured and
replayed quarrel, the intratextual repetition serves to reveal that which was previously
hidden: the viewer is simultaneously reminded of the complexities of communication
and the capacity of the cinematic apparatus to deconstruct movement and sound. Here
again, one cannot help but be reminded of Muybridge’s work towards decomposing
movement into its constituent elements.
However, Frampton’s reconfiguration of time and space and his use of
repetition also are suggestive of the material capacities of film to emulate—and thus
70
allow further consideration of—our lived experience. The persistent interruptive
structure of Critical Mass decomposes the argument it depicts by fracturing the
quarrel into segments which recursively repeat, advancing the dispute marginally
with each repetition. Frampton iteratively replays the argument in measured and
incremental fashion, drawing attention to both the absurdity of the conversation as
well as to the film’s rejection of a continuous flow. In his analysis of the function of
repetition in literature and film, Kawin marks a distinction between two forms of
repetition: repetitious, or “when a word, percept, or experience is repeated with less
impact at each recurrence; repeated to no particular end, out of a failure of invention
or sloppiness of thought,” and repetitive, namely, “when a word, percept, or
experience is repeated with equal or greater force at each occurrence.”
100
Kawin
asserts that while the former case of repetition is derivative and ineffective, the latter
marks a harnessing of the power of repetition. What is essential here is his insistence
on the notion of a “word, percept or experience” as a constituent element of
repetition. For Kawin, repetition can be effected by repeating an entire experience, an
individual word, or even down to the level of a percept—the basic component of
perceptual processing. This assertion recalls Bergson’s conception of our experiential
nature of successive states of sensory data—for Kawin, even the most minute aspect
of the datum of a given state can be prone to repetition. The use of replay in Critical
Mass combines both repetitious and repetitive elements, as the sentences, words,
actions, gestures of the arguing couple are broken down and repeated at the level of
the percept to demonstrate the repetitious nature of the couple’s argument through the

100
Kawin, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Film and Literature, 4.
71
repetitive segmentation of their dispute. This undermines Kawin’s claims of a point
of differentiation between repetitious and repetitive elements being the effectiveness
of the deployment of repetition. By employing both repetitious and repetitive aspects
in his breakdown of the couple’s argument. Frampton is able to leverage these dual
tendencies of repetition for the purposes of absurdity and thought-provoking analysis.
Critical Mass demonstrates the unique relationship between repetition and near-
repetition through its deployment of successive repetitions which incrementally
advance the footage they replay—these replays are indeed repetitions, but they are
also not exact repetitions as they each replay exists in a unique temporal relationship
to the footage it replays. Similarly, the film’s halting advancement consistently
performs near-repetitions with each successive replay, drawing our attention to the
similarities and differences between each consecutive iteration. Though its use of
replay, Critical Mass thus effects a profound reconsideration of the function of
similarity and difference in both film and in lived experience, intimating the
symbiotic relationship between the two.

Shared Materialities: Film as Experiential Metaphor
Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2004) provides a case study which renders explicit
this metaphorical relationship between film and lived experience, and I will examine
Morrison’s deployment of the ephemeral nature of film stock to conclude my
examination of the multiple registers of replay in avant-garde filmmaking practices.
Germaine Dulac observes that “cinema, by decomposing movement, makes us see,
analytically, the beauty of the leap in a series of minor rhythms which accomplish the
72
major rhythm…”
101
Rather than decomposing movement, Bill Morrison’s Decasia
(2004) uses decomposing film to make us see the beauty in the minor rhythms of—
and visual relationships between—frame-by-frame dissolution which compose the
major “rhythm” of decay. In Decasia, Morrison employs rotting archival film stock
and a score by composer Michael Gordon to examine the unique properties of the
medium and articulate the linkages between film and our corporeal form. Decasia
exploits early film’s nitrate film base; George Eastman first developed nitro-cellulose
base in 1899 and it was used in widely in the first half of the twentieth century, before
beginning to be replaced largely by less volatile safety film by the 1950s. Nitrate film
base is composed of cotton, nitric acid and camphor, making it highly flammable,
dangerous to store and prone to rotting.
102
Decasia links together archival footage
from a variety of sources, compiling material from travelogues, staged performances,
actualities, and narrative films; the source footage he uses shows varying degrees of
deterioration, the variations in decay on successive frames are animated into
pulsations of light and color as the film plays. Morrison used an optical printer to
record and compile these decomposing fragments into Decasia.
The undulating textural movements produced by the shifting deterioration
between subsequent frames in Decasia evoke practices of animation. Curiously, while
studying at Cooper Union School of Art in New York, Morrison was inspired by a
meeting with filmmaker Robert Breer, who has described his own animation work as

101
Germaine Dulac, “From 'Visual and Anti-Visual Films',” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of
Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 32.
102
Kevin Jackson, The Language of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1998), 175.
73
“24 paintings a second.”
103
Breer provides a useful point of reference for a
consideration of Morrison, as Breer has said that he was “interested in the domain
between motion and still pictures.”
104
This connection is evident in Decasia—the
decomposing film stock that he uses evokes a painterly quality, as the effects of the
varying effects of decay upon successive frames produces an animated swirling effect
during their playback.
Morrison’s usage of temporally-engendered decomposition in his work in not
without precedent, and Decasia replays these aesthetic strategies into filmic form;
Czech-Canadian artist Jana Sterbak’s work often anticipates its own decay, such as
her 1996 work Chair Apollinaire which was comprised of flank steak and black
button thread on a polyester resin structure and the same year’s Cake Stool which was
a steel stool with a sponge cake for the seat. Perhaps her most famous—or
infamous—work was a 1987 piece entitled Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino
Anorectic. This sculpture emphasizes the contrast between vanity and bodily decay
and was a dress constructed of fifty pounds of raw flank steak stitched together.
Similarly, the sculptures of earthworks artist Robert Smithson are heavily invested in
their relationship to the environment. 1970’s The Spiral Jetty, located in the Great
Salt Lake in Utah, was an attempt to place art within the land rather than situated
upon the land. Smithson’s works actively explored entropy (the measure of the degree

103
Catherine Wayland, “The Story of 'Decasia',” NY Arts 9, no. 3 (April 2004).
104
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 272.
74
of disorder in a system), visually exploring the effects of time and decay upon
materials.
105

In Decasia, Morrison relies on film in which the images have naturally
deteriorated in archives, stating that his “only manipulation [of the original films]
being slowing down the imagery.”
106
By not manipulating their appearance other than
slowing their playback speed for affective emphasis, Morrison’s Decasia is
reminiscent of Peggy Ahwesh’s 1994 film The Color of Love, which manipulates a
found decayed 1970s pornographic film with an optical printer and sets the piece to a
whimsical tango score. Morrison contends that the images in his film,
can be thought of as desires or memories: actions that take place the mind.
The film stock can be thought of as their body, that which enables events to be
seen. Like our own bodies this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral system that
can deteriorate in countless ways.
107

Thus the images become symbols of our own subjective experiences and memory,
and the inevitable deterioration of both. Morrison cites the “direct influence” of Chris
Marker’s La Jetée (1962) on Decasia, and a parallel can similarly be drawn to Sans
Soleil (1983). Marker’s films position filmic and photographic images as
manifestations of subjective memory, and Morrison’s similar deployment of images
strongly suggests the inescapable deterioration of our corporeal bodies and subjective

105
While there are clear connections between Morrison’s work and artists such as Sterbak and
Smithson, an important differentiation must be made here. Unlike these artists, Morrison’s film does
not anticipate its own decay, but instead leverages the pre-existing and ongoing decay of film. Indeed,
Morrison’s release of Decasia on DVD demonstrates that he is vested in the preservation of his own
work while exploring the decay of the work of others.
106
Bill Morrison, interview by Christopher Hanson, January 2005.
107
DVD liner notes for Bill Morrison, Decasia (New York: Plexifilm, 2004).
75
manifestations. Morrison’s intertextual replay of rotting images become symbols of
our own subjective experiences and memory, and the inevitable deterioration of both.
Morrison’s lineage to earlier avant-garde filmmaking practices is self-evident,
as in many ways Decasia functions as a found footage film. The medium specificity
of Decasia is undeniable. The work is built not only upon a reliance on the physical
properties of film, but also upon the nature of film as an industrial product. While the
visible decay of film itself is evident throughout the work, the availability of this
stock is a direct result of the mass production—and reproduction—of film. Morrison
himself suggests that his film is, “in the tradition of… Cornell and Conner, and
Brakhage and Jacobs.”
108
The influence of each of these avant-garde practitioners can
clearly be traced in the work of Morrison, but so too can the relationship between film
and subjective perceptual experience, particularly as he suggests the film can be
linked to our corporeal existence. Here, Freud’s conception of the function of
temporality in the unconscious, perception, and memory are useful in their
application to Decasia. Freud notes a significant link between his concept of the
unconscious and the writings of Emmanuel Kant, and in his essay “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle,” he states: “As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we
are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time
and space are ‘necessary forms of thought.’”
109
But while Kant would insist on the
organizing and structuring natures of time and space as precursors to our perceptual
experience, Freud instead suggests that the unconscious functions outside of time. He

108
Morrison, interview.
109
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 28.
76
asserts that “the unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless.’ This
means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not
change them in any way and that the time idea of time cannot be applied to them.”
110

The unconscious thus is unaffected by time, and structures of the unconscious such as
the id function independent of any notion of temporality. Other structures such as the
ego effectively synthesize and unify data from other mental processes and the
perceptual system, allowing for the ego’s capacity for reason and restraint of the id’s
“untamed passions.” By way of the timeless unconscious, Freud thus differentiates
himself from Kant’s suggestion that time exists a priori to thought as a structuring and
organizing knowledge.
Freud, however, contends that conscious mental processes function in an
altogether different capacity. He argues that the Perception-Consciousness system (or
Pcpt.-Cs.) combines internal and external sensory data, processing and prioritizing the
information based on the needs of the subject. For Freud, that which we cognitively
perceive as time is a product of the functioning of this system. He notes,
Our abstract idea of time seems to be wholly derived from the method of
working of the system of Pcpt.-Cs. and to correspond to a perception on its
own part of that method of working. This mode of functioning may perhaps
constitute another way of providing a shield against stimuli.
111

Thus while what we consciously understand as time is derived from the processes of
the Perception-Consciousness system, this “mode of functioning” of our
consciousness also serves as a shielding mechanism from external stimuli. Even at the

110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
77
most basic level of temporal perception in cognitive functioning, the psychical
apparatus protects itself from the onslaught of unremitting external sensory data and
stimuli by way of the Pcpt.-Cs. serving as filtering device.
Freud expands upon the operation of this mechanism in his 1925 essay “A
Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad.’” In the short paper, Freud compares the
processing of this temporal sensory data to the functionality of a “Wunderblock,” or,
more commonly, a Mystic Writing Pad.
112
Such a device is comprised of a slab of
wax, with a translucent layer of wax paper covering its face. This face, in turn, has a
transparent sheet of celluloid laid across it. When this pad is written upon with stylus
(like a notepad), an impression of what is drawn is made on the middle wax layer by
the base slab of wax. While this image is erased from the translucent layer when it is
lifted away from the slab, a permanent impression of the scratching remains on the
base slab of wax. For Freud, this device serves as an analogue for the representational
function of memory in the Perception-Consciousness system. Much like this writing
pad relies on a stylus to make its impression on the wax, Freud contends that memory
operates in a similar capacity: a stimulus makes an impression on the unconscious.
The Mystic Writing Pad’s capacity for constant erasure, renewal, and permanent
retention is the essential link to memory for Freud—just as we are able to
continuously process or “write” sensory data, we are also able to store and recall this
data later.

112
Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing Pad.',” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Pycho-
Analysis, 1919), 227-234.
78
Significantly, Freud implies that this process of inscription does not operate in
a purely continuous fashion; he instead proposes that the perceptual system gathers
and relays data incessantly, but that the transfer of sensory data is necessarily
regulated by a degree of discontinuity that stems from the back-and-forth relay of
data between the Pcpt.Cs. and the unconscious. Freud suggests that the unconscious
extends “feelers” into the external world, then “hastily withdraws them as soon as
they have sampled the excitations coming from it.”
113
Freud’s pithy conclusion to this
already brief paper coyly hints at the linkage between this discontinuity and our
perception of time: “I further had a suspicion that this discontinuous method of
functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of
time.”
114
Freud seems to indicate that the tiny lapses inherent to the communicative
relay structure of our psychical apparatus account for our perceptual experience of
temporality. Furthermore, his comparison of the Perception-Conscious system to the
magic writing pad is particularly indispensable in the consideration of Decasia: his
suggestion of memory’s capacity for erasure and constant re-inscription is a vital
intimation towards examining time’s effect on consciousness.
For Bergson, our experience of time is also inherently linked to our
understanding of space. He suggests that our consciousness marks and measures the
successive positions of objects within our perceptual field. He states:
If consciousness is aware of anything more than positions, the reason that it
keeps the successive positions in mind and synthesizes them… We are thus

113
Ibid., 231.
114
Ibid. Indeed, in her discussion of the discontinuous function of the Mystic Writing Pad, Mary Ann
Doane describes Freud’s conclusion as “tantalizingly brief.” See Mary Ann Doane, “Temporality,
Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1996): 313-343.
79
compelled to admit that we have here to do with a synthesis, which is, so to
speak, qualitative, a gradual organizing of our successive sensations, a unity
resembling that of a phrase or a melody.
115

Thus, much like our experience of time, our consciousness synthesizes these
successive spatial states as a qualitative, singular, and unified structure. Our material
existence as beings comprised of atoms and molecules carries with it the notion of our
consciousness as a continuous succession of interrelated physical states. The
constituent elements which compose our corporeal bodies and the continual electro-
chemical reactions which take place in our brains are both marked by their ongoing
succession of related—but dissimilar—states. The succession of states is the
heterogeneous and qualitative multiplicity to which Bergson refers; our consciousness
is defined by the continuous and heterogeneous flow of both space and time. Much
like the disintegrating images of Decasia are subject to erasure by the nature of their
materiality, the construction of our perceptions and memories are temporally inflected
and bound to the successive states of our corporeal embodiment.
By drawing from multiple avant-garde traditions, Decasia resists simple
classification. Its historical basis in the traditions of both found footage films and
“lyrical films” is clear, but it also is aligned with structuralist film (or “pure film”)
movement. Structural film is heavily vested in the importance of time on a micro-
level, exploring the effect of time in a frame-by-frame relationship as in Gehr’s
Serene Velocity. Like the structural filmmakers, Morrison is working on a frame-by-
frame basis as well, both in his selection of footage and in his use of slowing the film
speed down to emphasize each frame and their visual relationship to the preceding

115
Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 111.
80
and subsequent frames. In a similar fashion, Morrison’s film explores time, but on a
macro level. Decasia deals with the effect of time upon the film stock itself and thus
upon the filmic image. The film is structural in the sense that it distinctly addresses
time and film. Decasia explicitly explores a distinct phase of the cinematic process,
though not necessarily one which is part of the filmmaking process. Indeed,
Morrison’s film fits neatly into two of Malcolm Le Grice’s categories for structural
(or what he termed ‘underground’) film: it addresses “concerns which derive from
printing, processing, re-filming and re-copying procedures” and “concerns which
derive from the physical nature of film.”
116
However, like most structural films,
Decasia is not merely an engagement with film’s processes, but also constitutes a
consideration of the metaphoric relationship between film and our lived experience.
Metaphor functions as a central structuring logic in our psyche and logical
processes, as evinced by the many metaphors deployed by the theorists discussed
here; indeed, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that “metaphor pervades our
normal conceptual system.”
117
Given its constitutive function within our mental
processes, Morrion’s deployment of film as metaphor for our lived experience is
hardly surprising. Indeed, it could be argued that, in some capacity, all of the
filmmakers discussed here who employ replay in film are utilizing film as a metaphor
for experientiality; Morrison merely explicitly renders his usage apparent.
From this survey, it is evident that our experience of time and space is dictated
by our cognitive and perceptual understanding of both. As such, our experience of

116
Le Grice, “Thoughts on Recent 'Underground' Film,” 81-82.
117
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, vol. 2003 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 115.
81
time and space in media is regulated at the most primary and basic level by our mind
and bodies—namely by the sensory data gathered by our bodies and by our cognitive
structuring and understanding of this data. While Freud suggests the role of memory
in the structures of our conscious and unconscious and the function of repetition in
shaping our behavior, Bergson points to the importance of experiential data collection
and processing. Kawin contributes the consideration of directed and definitive uses of
repetition within written and filmic texts. The models set forth by these theorists—
and particularly their applications to the consideration of repetition and replay—
indicate that the replay, as a direct result of its linkage to corporeal embodiment, is a
sequential, irreversible, and pleasurable experience.
In commercial culture, mass-produced goods such as films and records appeal
to a similar desire for repetition—material or virtual ownership of a film or record
allows for repeated viewings or listenings and thus a degree of mastery. Much like the
repetitive labor practices that dominate Fordist and post-Fordist workplaces, the
pleasures afforded by commodities in the home are similarly repetitive. Indeed,
repetition would seem to be both a byproduct of—and reinforced by—Fordist and
capitalist structures of production, labor and consumption. Avant-garde filmmakers
and media practitioners provide an essential insight into the modes of repetition and
replay which dominate both our economic system and our understanding of both lived
experience and time-based media. Playing into Peter Bürger’s contention that the
avant-garde is that which seeks to change an institution, experimental filmmakers
harness the capacity of the cinematic apparatus to reveal not just the spatiotemporal
conditions in which we live, but the cultural, economic and experiential structures
82
which we should reconsider.
118
As such, it is apparent that the many renderings of
replay and repetition employed by these filmmakers—and the implications to which
they refer—are essential to my broader investigation of replay and its cultural, social,
industrial, and metaphoric function.
The multivalent deployments of replay in avant-garde film enact explorations
of the self, film’s function as industrial product, its capacity for spatiotemporal
representation, and film’s metaphoric relationship to our corporeality. Each of these
modalities is reliant on the symbiotic relationship between lived sensorial experience
and film; film intimates and apes our experiential and perceptual conditions, and our
lived experience is also shaped by film and its use of replay. Film’s materiality and
our experience of its abstraction of movement are intertwined with one another and
with our understanding of our own materiality and understanding of temporality. The
replay demonstrates the effectiveness of the “illusion” of movement in film—if we
are unable to distinguish the temporality of the cinema from that of reality, how can
we be certain the “illusion” of cinema is so far removed from our lived experience,
after all?

118
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
83
Chapter 2: Televisual Replay: Is It Live or Is It Television?

But memory seems to play no role in television, commercial or otherwise (or,
I am tempted to say, in postmodernism generally): nothing here haunts the
mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film.
1
–
Fredric Jameson

The Communist party is not going to see a nickel out of this goddamn show
until we go into syndication – Lauren Hobbs, Network (1976)

Chapter Introduction: Television and the Replay
During the quarterfinal match between England and Germany at the 2010
FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cup, English player
Frank Lambard kicked the ball just beyond the grasp of the German goal keeper’s
hands. The ball struck the crossbar across the top of the goal and bounced once inside
the goal before rolling out, ostensibly tying the score. England’s fans in the stadium
celebrated, along with those watching the game live the world over, including more
than 19 million in England alone. However, joy turned to confusion and anger as the
referee in the match apparently did not see the ball bounce in the goal and thus did
not award a goal to England. Unlike those of other organized sport leagues, FIFA
regulations do not permit the referees access to instant replays, and thus decisions
made by the game’s officials during the course of play are final and prone to human
error. However, in the broadcasts of the game being beamed to televisions around the
planet, the ball clearly bouncing within the goal was immediately visible in the instant

1
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, North
Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991), 71-72.
84
replays which followed the mistake. Even the massive screens inside the stadium
where the game was taking place showed the same replays, further inflaming the
passions of disappointed England’s fans. While this missed call did not necessarily
determine the game’s outcome, several decisions by referees during the course of the
World Cup tournament were similarly proved incorrect by instant replays shown
during the game’s broadcasts. Complaints about the errors were lodged by fans,
sports commentators and even world leaders—British Prime Minister David Cameron
called for allowing referees access to instant replays during games the day after
England’s loss.
2
The demands for the incorporation of instant replay into game
officiating were initially rebuffed by FIFA, which subsequently gave indication that
the matter would be reviewed for future tournaments. In the interim, FIFA reached a
decision to alleviate the problem—they banned the stadium screens from showing
instant replays during games.
3

Unless one is a fan of a team affected by these erroneous decisions, this series
of events may seem to be rather inconsequential at first glance. Certainly, these
occurrences demonstrate the fallibility of human perceptions: the mistakes of these
referees were revealed by the recordings of these games, as the objective truth of the
instant replay trumped the subjective experiences of the referees. However, upon
further scrutiny, these debates revealed much more by plainly illustrating tensions at
the core of television’s ontology; in these games, the live events being depicted were

2
Jonathan Wilson, “Soccer Could Use Instant Replay, But Not at Expense of Flow,” SI.com, June 28,
2010, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/soccer/world-cup-
2010/writers/jonathan_wilson/06/28/soccer.technology/index.html.
3
“Fifa Evades Technology Questions,” BBC, June 28, 2010, sec. World Cup 2010,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8766423.stm.
85
immediately juxtaposed against recorded instant replays, complicating the sense of
“liveness” in the games. Indeed, while television’s capacity to capture and broadcast
events live has historically been valued by critics, scholars, and the networks, these
events demonstrate the increasingly influential role that pre-recorded content plays in
the function and experience of television. In this chapter, I will explore the tensions
between liveness and replayed material in American television’s history and the
resultant impact on the viewer’s experience of television. As I will demonstrate, while
industrial practices, federal legislation, and critical discourses have privileged
liveness on television since its invention, replay and repetition have instead
increasingly defined the production, distribution, and reception of television.
Television is a slippery medium; even at its creation, its precise ontology was
notoriously difficult to define. Early manufacturers and technological innovators
often sought to define it in relationship to radio, couching the technology in terms
such as “radio with pictures” or “wireless film.” Following a brief hiatus in
development and implementation in the United States during World War II, the
television industry expanded considerably after the war and the television set
increasingly became a fixture in American domestic spaces. During this period of
profound growth, television’s enduring identity as a live medium crystallized and
became an essential point of differentiation from existing moving-image technologies
such as film. This capacity for simultaneous production and broadcast has historically
encouraged theorists to privilege television’s capacity for instaneity as a defining
ontological characteristic. However, while television’s facility for such a simultaneity
of production, exhibition and reception certainly help to distance it from media forms
86
such as cinema and photography, this capability was increasingly marginalized in the
television industry’s historical development. Indeed, while it may still leverage its
“live”-ness in specific modes such as for highly scripted and planned modes such as
news, sporting events, and similar “media events” as characterized by Daniel Dayan
and Elihu Katz, television instead is constituted largely via pre-recorded composition
and chronic segmentation.
4

Throughout its industrial history, replay and repetition have played central
roles in the production, distribution, exhibition, and experience of television.
Emerging from the economic, social, and cultural practices of radio broadcasting and
reception, television’s structure has long emphasized regularized and predictable
content structured into organized programming schedules. Furthering this cyclical
compositional structure is television’s reliance on the re-purposing and recycling of
content, rendered most explicit via its processes of syndication. Replay and repetition
is not limited to broader methods of content production and distribution, however, as
specific modes of televisual broadcasting such as sporting events have been shaped
by methods of textual replay, in turn altering the events which they are broadcasting.
Increasingly, the capacity for replay and repetition has been passed into the viewer’s
control, with the arrival in the home of television technologies which provide users a
degree of control over the stream of programming entering their home. While this
capacity for viewer-controlled replay certainly suggests a slight democratization of
the historically one-way broadcast-reception model of television, its contemporary

4
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992).
87
implementation instead indicates that this affordance is merely an extension of pre-
existing industrial methods of control and regulation of the viewer.
5
Furthermore, the
centrality of the replay to the medium functions as an illustrative means to examine
the complex and unique relationship between the now and the past in television’s
mode of address.
For Raymond Williams, television is an economic, social and political
product, the result of a number of different institutions. While Williams traces
television’s lineage to early magazine and newspaper formats in the nineteenth
century, he famously characterizes its defining trait as one of “flow.” Theorists such
as Jane Feuer have challenged both Williams’ contention of television’s tendency
towards continuity and flow and Herbert Zettl’s suggestion that liveness is an inherent
property of the medium. Feuer, in particular, takes issue with the claim of “liveness”
as part of television’s nature. Rather than being something which is inherent to
television’s materiality, Feuer instead argues that television instead actively insists on
its “liveness,” even when it is in fact pre-recorded.
6
Feuer argues that television is not
defined by its continuity, but conversely by its segmentation.
Feuer’s contention that television is inherently structured by such
segmentation is a useful point of departure for this consideration of television; rather

5
That is, this limited agency on the part of the viewer is limited to the content broadcast by the
networks, and the television industry has leveraged the capacity of digital technologies to monitor
precisely what viewers record and when they play it back. William Uricchio argues that such
technologies demonstrate a profound shift in modes of broadcast and reception; he argues that the
metadata and filters which are generated by the viewer’s selective replays become part of the
“equation” of the relations between viewer and broadcast. See William Uricchio, “Television's Next
Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow,” in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in
Transition (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004), 176-77.
6
Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television (Los
Angeles: AFI, 1983), 14.
88
than a medium characterized by its liveness and continuity of experience, I argue that
television is increasingly characterized by its systemic rupture, through replay and
repetition. This profound shift is a byproduct of the industrial strategies and
technologies employed in its construction and deployment, which have irrevocably
transformed television’s ontology and its spectator’s reception experience during its
brief history.
7
Feuer is not alone in her contention that the specific historical use of
the television apparatus resists liveness; Charlotte Brunsdon, in her analysis of the
function of aesthetics on television, remarks, “the broadcast world is structured
through regularity and repetition.”
8
Brunsdon’s observation is as accurate at it is
succinct, and the centrality of replay to television’s industrial and experiential
structuration will be interrogated here. For example, in order to secure and maintain
audiences, television programming is necessarily based around predictable structures,
and these schedules are in turn populated with syndicated reruns. Derek Kompare
demonstrates the economic importance of the industrial practice of rerun syndication
(and more recently, packaging television onto DVDs) as an essential factor of

7
The history presented here is selective as it is abbreviated. My work has been greatly informed by far
more comprehensive considerations of broadcast and technological histories in the United States,
including Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States
(Belmont, CA: Wadsorth & Thomson Learning, 2002); Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats
Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005); William Boddy, Fifties Television: The
Industry and Its Critics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Christopher Sterling and John
Kitross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of Broadcasting in the United States (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, n.d.); Michele Hilmes, The Television History Book (London: British Film Institute,
2003); Douglas Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2008); Aaron Foisi Nmungwun, Video Recording Technology: Its Impact on Media and
Home Entertainment (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1989).
8
Charlotte Brunsdon, “Television: Aesthetics and Audiences,” in Logics of Television: Essays in
Cultural Criticism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 68.
89
television production and broadcasting.
9
His work shows that significant portions of
programming are reruns, further underscoring Feuer’s notion of segmentation.
However, despite the economic importance of repetition and reruns to television,
there are modes of programming such as news and sports broadcasts which often
adamantly insist upon their “liveness;” but as Feuer suggests, such insistences can be
indicative of a relationship to immediacy fraught with complexities.
The implementations and implications of replay are as diverse as they are
profound; replay marks a unique occasion where television folds in on itself—it is a
mode in which some of the most predominant and tightly-held theories about
television are challenged and subverted. The televisual use of replay erodes the
medium’s conceptual (albeit somewhat contentious) pillars of “flow” and “liveness”
to a significant degree by way of its interruptive and erstwhile nature. As such, I will
examine the televisual replay through several lenses, demonstrating that the
established discursive and conceptual boundaries for the replay are due for significant
expansion. I will first explore the industrial histories of American broadcast
television, tracing the roots of replay and repetition in television’s precursor: radio.
Charting the economic, social and regulatory practices established prior to
television’s emergence as a cultural form both evinces the formative influence of
existing structures on television’s formation, as well as illustrates the historical nature
of the qualitative associations ascribed to liveness on television. The practices of the
transcription and syndication of broadcasts will next be explored in order to further
demonstrates this historical and industrial valuation of live broadcasts over pre-

9
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television.
90
recorded content, examining both the recycling of content by Hollywood studios and
the emersion of reruns and stripping as predominant broadcasting strategies. Next, the
instant replay in televised sports programming—perhaps its most recognizable (and
scrutinized) implementation—will be explored as an exemplar of the intratextual use
of replay on television. The technological and industrial histories of the instant replay
are charted here, investigating its shift from the broadcaster to the viewer and charting
the challenges it poses to theoretical models of television. Finally, I will speculatively
explore the replay’s implications for our understanding of perception and experience,
leveraging the writings of Henri Bergson for support. Just as the use of replay
destabilizes our conception of the “flow” of television, I argue that it also calls for a
reassessment of our understanding of the lived experience of television spectatorship.
As I will demonstrate, the replay functions as a structuring logic in television.
From its inception, American television has been constituted from institutions,
practices, formal strategies, and content adapted from other pre-existing forms such
as radio and film. In addition to recycling these pre-existing modes and material,
television reuses itself—due to economic and industrial factors, much of television
broadcasting is reliant on reruns, which are arranged into repeating programming
schedules which emphasize regularity. Video Cassette Recorders and Digital Video
Recorders have afforded viewers the ability record and play back content; while such
devices allow viewers greater agency in the replaying of material, they also
underscore the centrality of replay to the televisual experience. Similarly,
technologies for the broadcasting, distribution, and exhibition of television have
changed considerably since the emergence of the medium, shifting from analog
91
broadcasts transmitted over the air to digital signals delivered via cables and decoded
via set-top boxes. As the medium becomes increasingly inflected by and reliant upon
the digital, television has adopted the recombinant characteristics of interactive media
and has become evermore disposed toward repetition. Just as the form of television
has evolved, so too has the experience of television; the replay has thus become a
pivotal and privileged component of televisual experience.

Radio: Roots of the Replay
To fully explore digital television’s multivalent implementations of replay,
these contemporary practices must be first situated within a broader historical frame;
as John Belton argues: “Any definition of [video] needs to situate it within a horizon
of related technologies and of cultural uses of those technologies.”
10
This approach
allows the consideration of precise instances of the tensions between liveness and
replay which have shaped industrial and critical discourses about television. The
function of replay in U.S. broadcasting must be traced through what David Hendy has
dubbed television’s so-called “prehistory” in radio.
11
Commercial radio broadcasting
established and solidified the industrial, technological, and economic conditions
which facilitated the rapid growth of television, just as radio engendered and
normalized the social, cultural, and ideological formations upon which commercial
television relied. Many of the institutions and corporations which came to dominate

10
John Belton, “Looking Through Video: The Psychology of Video and Film,” in Resolutions:
Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis, Minn.:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 61.
11
David Hendy, “Television's Prehistory: Radio,” in The Television History Book, ed. Michele Hilmes
(London: British Film Institute, 2003), 4.
92
the production of radio receivers and programming, such as the Radio Corporation of
America (RCA), the General Electric Corporation (GE), the National Broadcasting
Company (NBC), and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) translated their
ownership of the radio marketplace into similar control of modes of production,
distribution and exhibition of television. An exploration of the industrial history of
radio and its usage of replayed material is essential for the consideration of such
practices in television, as the industrial strategies developed by these corporate
entities to dominate the broadcasting of radio were redeployed following television’s
emergence—effectively reconstituting economic practices into the new medium of
television. Additionally, while radio and television are often associated with the
characteristics of immediacy and liveness, the emergence and institutionalization of
both media forms are strongly intertwined with technologies of pre-recorded content.
The industrial and technological history of radio demonstrates that while liveness was
strongly privileged in radio broadcasts via regulatory practices, the multiplying costs
of live broadcast and development of more capable recording technologies
engendered the shift of the usage of replayed content from marginalized independent
broadcasters to the largest networks.
The emergence of the phonograph and its adoption into homes familiarized
audiences and consumers with capacities for aural recording, and the prevalence of
phonographs is strongly linked with early radio broadcasting practices in the U.S..
Following the improvement of radio technologies during World War I, largely
amateur and experimental radio operators had begun to populate and even crowd
American airwaves by 1920. These early broadcasts adopted a variety of program
93
formats, which included both live and pre-record elements, primarily consisting of
conversation, news reports, and music. Even at this early stage in radio broadcast
history in the United States, the use of pre-recorded content during transmissions was
an established practice. The economic and industrial practicality of this practice was
evident even to radio hobbyists; playing records during broadcasts greatly reduced the
labor involved in the production of the programming.
12
As Michele Hilmes
demonstrates, the phonograph’s capacity to record and replay musical performances
had allowed audiences new modes of access to far-flung musical cultures within the
U.S. and around the world, including Native American, bluegrass and jazz
traditions.
13

Following the conclusion of World War I, the U.S. government assisted the
American-owned GE with taking control of the American subsidiary of the British
Marconi Company, then the primary supplier of radio equipment to the U.S. and
Britain during the war. The virtual monopoly on radio in the U.S. secured by GE was
then leveraged into GE’s creation of RCA, a subdivision which unified the major
businesses involved in the production of radio. The RCA functioned as an
oligopolistic institution that sanctioned the division of the elements of radio business
to its individual members: the American Telegraph Corporation (AT&T) was to sell
transmitting equipment, with GE and Westinghouse selling receivers to RCA, which

12
That records themselves may be replayed many times futher underscores this particular function of
replay in broadcasting.
13
The spread of minority musical practices prompted backlashes, particularly in racialized reactions to
perceived threats of African American culture in the form of jazz music recordings. Hilmes, Only
Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 25-27.
94
would then distribute the receivers to retailers.
14
But despite the public appearance of
an equitable division of the radio industry, the complex agreements which settled the
companies into these partitions effectively consolidated ownership; as Douglas
Gomery notes, “If anyone who sold or paid for a [radio receiver] set looked closely,
they would have seen that a percentage of their money flowed back to RCA, no
matter what the brand of radio.”
15
Furthering this consolidation, in 1925, AT&T,
fearing possible regulation of its existing telephone monopoly, sold its broadcasting
equipment to RCA, while reaching a deal with RCA to become the exclusive provider
of the wires to link together RCA’s stations.
16

While amateur and non-commercial radio operators initially flourished in the
United States, the rapid growth in the number of such broadcasters created problems
of congestion on the airwaves, with transmitters overlapping one another’s broadcast
frequencies. Such frequency issues were inconvenient and annoying to radio
enthusiasts, but presented serious challenges to those seeking to capitalize on the
emergent form and commercialize it. In the early 1920s, broadcast frequencies within
the U.S. were federally regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), a
body whose original mandate was to police the expansive powers of railroad
companies; by 1922, the ICC responded to the crowding of airwaves by restricting
content by amateur transmitters, including the use of pre-recorded material. The ICC
required transmitters wishing to broadcast such content (as well as other material,

14
Ibid., 41-42.
15
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 15.
16
This wire-based network system for radio would remain dominant until the arrival of satellite
technology in the 1970s. Ibid.
95
such as news, weather reports and entertainment) to apply for licenses to broadcast at
the 360 megahertz (MHz) band, while the more restricted amateur broadcasts were
banished to below the 200 MHz band.
17
The increased pace of regulation and
materialization of new radio stations was accompanied by a rapid and profound
growth in radio ownership; by the end of the 1920s, almost half of Americans owned
a radio set and by 1940 almost every household owned one.
18
Commercial
broadcasters had already begun to emerge by this point, with Westinghouse
establishing multiple stations by 1921, in Pittsburgh, Chicago, New Jersey and
Massachusetts. As interest grew in the 360 megahertz band, competition intensified
and Westinghouse sought to further differentiate their product from other
broadcasters. In 1922, Westinghouse spurred the ICC to establish “Class B” licenses
(in contrast to the Class A stations operating at 360 MHz), which allowed for more
powerful transmitters that would operate in the 400 MHz band, with more restrictive
standards on the content which could be broadcast. Primary among these restrictions
was that a station operating on a Class B license “was expressly forbidden to play
phonograph records on the air or any other kind of recording. Instead, they were
restricted to airing ‘live talent.’”
19
This decision reflected the recognition of the
economic reality that smaller stations and independent operators would be unable to
use live talent. The insistence on liveness mandated by the Class B license also
allowed the government to restrict the transmission of more powerful stations to

17
This effectively equated higher broadcast frequency (i.e. higher MHz) stations with notions of
quality. Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 42-43.
18
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 15.
19
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 43.
96
corporations of sufficient size and means to produce live content and not rely on pre-
recorded material; accordingly, stations owned by AT&T, RCA and GE began
transmitting within months of the establishment of Class B licenses. This requirement
also clearly established a profound link between liveness and quality for radio, which
would undeniably carry over to television in the years to follow. The distinction of
quality bestowed upon live performance was also linked to audio fidelity, as existing
recording technologies of the time were incapable of producing the audio quality of
live performances and would remain inferior until the late 1940s.
20

The federal facilitation of ownership of higher-power radio transmission
stations by large corporations (themselves part of the mandated oligopoly) functioned
in congruence with this privileging of liveness to engender the development of
broadcast networks. By placing a premium on live broadcasting, the licensing system
directly and indirectly linked notions of liveness with higher quality content. The
enormous financial strength of these corporations were brought to bear in the
production of content, allowing for higher-quality equipment and more expensive
talent, effectively marrying higher production values with live broadcasts. This
substantial investment of capital required to produce the “quality” broadcasts sought
by Class B license stations efficiently fostered the rapid development of broadcast
networks. In order to maximize profits from advertising associated with their
programming, the cold economic logic of the marketplace demanded that these
corporations expand their broadcast reach as rapidly as possible. Stations in far-flung
cities could be linked together by wire, allowing simultaneous broadcast of the same

20
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 75.
97
live content; the first such event took place on the battery manufacturer-sponsored
Everyready Hour program, simultaneously broadcast on November 18, 1924 to
Boston, Buffalo, New York City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Providence.
21
The
success of this initial networked broadcast led to a rapid geographical growth; only
two years later, in 1926, RCA leveraged this expanding network dubbed the National
Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) with a live broadcast hosted by its president in New
York with a live program which was simultaneously broadcast via 25 different
stations featuring on-air performances from cities such as Kansas City and Chicago.
22

The emphasis on live broadcasts also privileged the function of sporting events in
leveraging the capacity of broadcast networks. RCA heavily advertised the broadcast
of a boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in September of 1926 as
the “initial broadcast of NBC” and the network’s first coast-to-coast live broadcast
was the January 1, 1927 Rose Bowl college football game.
23
Such broadcasts
demonstrated the power of networks to not merely receive and broadcast from
multiple locations, but also to transmit from them as well; however, rather than
expensively producing local content for multiple markets, the economics of
production dictated that the bulk of programming could be produced centrally
(primarily in New York) and then sent to multiple national outlets. This
rationalization of content production effectively resulted in a systemization of the
content itself into structures of readily recognizable genres, formats, and stars. This

21
Ibid., 16.
22
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 72.
23
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 16.
98
emphasis on regularity is articulated by David Hendy’s description of the uniformity
of programming on American and British radio at the time:
Across music, entertainment and news, [programs] were being made that had
a sufficiently recognizable structure and style to allow for the pleasures of
hearing new material and of anticipating the reassuringly predictable. A
show’s ‘format,’ and its scheduling to ensure it recurred at a predicable time
each week, allowed for the cumulative pleasures of broadcasting, in which
loyal audiences shared ‘in’-jokes and a sense of belonging to the listening
community. [Emphasis his]
24

The systematized usage of consistent generic modes of production allowed
broadcasters to recycle content and formats, lowering development and production
costs; simultaneously, these recognizable formats, methodically structured into
familiar and regular timetables allowed listeners to acclimate to this rationalization of
broadcast content.
25
The rapid and efficient organization of programming into
planned and ordered schedules served clear industrial and economic purposes for the
broadcasters, and the emphasis on cyclical structures and recurring content also
introduced and inculcated listeners to formations of repetition as part of the radio
experience.
The U.S.government’s regulation of radio helped to solidify the association
between liveness and quality by effectively banishing recorded material to local and
independent broadcasters. The Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of
1934 largely acquiesced control of the U.S. airwaves to commercial interests, with the
former establishing the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) to oversee the industry, and

24
Hendy, “Television's Prehistory: Radio,” 6.
25
For more on the function of genre to the industrial production of media, see Rick Altman,
Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999); Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas,
Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).
99
the latter replacing the FRC with the more expansive Federal Communications
Commission (FCC). Centralized commercial networks dominated the radio airwaves
through the conclusion of World War II (and beyond television’s rapid post-war
growth), but these corporate-controlled entities, while dominant, were not the only
broadcasters in many markets. Lower-power stations not restricted by Class B license
requirements for live programming could more effectively serve local markets and
reach more selective audiences. These smaller stations could cater their service to
audiences marginalized by the national broadcasters, for example, transmitting
foreign-language programming which could accommodate diverse ethnic
communities across the U.S.. Many cities were home to at least one independent
station, and very few could sustain independent broadcasters for only one ethnic
group; as such, the vast majority of these stations featured a “time-broker” system in
which blocks of programming could be dedicated to different groups throughout the
day, and as early as the 1940s over a hundred of such stations existed within the
U.S..
26
These minor broadcasters allowed for profoundly higher levels of community
ownership, engagement, and involvement in radio broadcasts than those afforded by
network affiliates.
27
However, although these stations fostered minority and foreign-
language communities, outright ownership of stations by minorities was not common;
as America Rodriguez argues,
Unlike newspapers, which were largely owned by members of the immigrant
community (or their advocates), radio stations which broadcast Spanish

26
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 158.
27
The term “minor broadcaster” borrows unfairly from and no doubt inappropriately (mis)appropriates
the concept of a “minor cinema” as convincingly articulated by David James. See James, The Most
Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles.
100
language programming were owned by majority society entrepreneurs. There
were no immigrant oriented radio stations in the 1930s—only immigrant
brokered foreign language radio programs. The principle reason for this is
cost. Compared to newspapers, the initial capital outlay for radio stations was
prohibitively high. In the first decades of the broadcasting industry, radio
station owners found that some hours of the day were not commercially
viable. Owners sold these "off hours," for nominal fees, to Spanish (and in
other parts of the country, other non-English) language radio programmers,
who were responsible for acquiring their own sponsors. Owners were hungry
for material to fill air time, and desperate for the finances to support what was
then considered a commercially risky undertaking.
28

As these minor broadcasters functioned as Class A licenses and were not restricted by
requirements for live broadcast as mandated for the more powerful stations—both in
terms of transmission strength and economic capital, they could play pre-recorded
content. This capacity allowed for the promotion and broadcast of cultural and
musical practices which had previously been ignored and marginalized by corporate-
controlled radio. The use of music records by these minor broadcasters functioned
concurrently with patterns of immigration, migration, and settlement into U.S. cities
of non-White and minority populations. This continued from industrialization and the
shift from an agrarian society in the U.S. in the early twentieth century; in 1920, the
U.S. census indicated that the majority of Americans lived in the cities, for the first
time since 1790.
29
Recordings made by African American artists for African
American audiences, called “race records” by the industry, found a thriving market in
these smaller stations between the 1920s and 1940s; the use of pre-recorded material
by these stations thus allowed a venue for the broadcast and dissemination of musical

28
America Rodriguez, “Creating an Audience and Remapping a Nation: A Brief History of US
Spanish Language Broadcasting 1930-1980.,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 16, no. 3 (July 1999):
359.
29
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 14.
101
styles such as bebop, gospel and the blues, which had otherwise been ignored by the
broadcast networks, which favored white performers, swing, and Big Band music.
30

William Barlow demonstrates the role of innovators such as Al Benson and Jack L.
Cooper in harnessing the time-brokered system used by local stations to develop
programming and advertiser support for Black audiences which could be broadcast
across multiple markets.
31
As Hilmes argues, the modes of programming pioneered
by Benson and Cooper also initiated the concept of the disc jockey (DJ), with both of
whom taking advantage of the fact that race records were not licensed and regulated
by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and thus
could be played royalty-free.
32
By effectively providing an enormous supply of
content at no cost to such DJs, the systematic exclusion of recordings for and by
African Americans by the ASCAP thus actually contributed to the broadcast,
dissemination and popularization of African American culture. In order to capitalize
on the increasing number of White teenagers listening to Black radio stations in the
1950s, White DJs emerged to appropriate the program format and musical styles
popularized by Black DJs.
33

30
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 158 & 159.
31
William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1999).
32
Hilmes argues that Cooper’s program All Negro Hour pioneered the DJ concept, which white
broadcasters Al Jarvis and Martin Block adopted with Big Band music in Los Angeles and New York,
respectively, before Benson completed the style of the DJ with a distinctive personality and jargon in
1945. See Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 158-159.
33
The banishment of the replay of recordings to minor broadcasters can thus be clearly traced to the
rise of African American-inspired youth and rock culture. Here, early radio replay functions socially
and culturally in contradistinction to its hegemonic deployment as industrial practice to maximize
profit. Instead, its usage was both necessitated and facilitated by the dominant economic practices,
allowing and engendering the materialization of resistant modes of broadcasting and the development
102
However, beyond the social and cultural practices of marginalized groups and
broadcasters, live broadcasting dominated radio until after the conclusion of World
War II. Although stations had enjoyed the technological capabilities to record
transcriptions onto sixteen-inch discs since the 1920s, the social, economic, and
regulatory stigma attached to broadcasting transcriptions and recordings (as well as
persistent concerns about the reliability and quality of the technology) effectively
prevented the adoption of such practices until after World War II; as Aaron
Nmungwun argues,
The practice of recording for later re-broadcast was practically rare in
American broadcasting prior to 1946, apart from the standard practice of spot
recording of important news events on disc (such as ticker-tape parades, the
Hindenburg disaster, etc.). Only the Armed Forces, which were active in
broadcasting during the war years, were known to have been making
extensive use of the over 3,000 magnetic “wire” recorders manufactured… for
broadcast transcription services.
34

While lower fidelity recordings were used on radio stations with Class B licenses,
network broadcasters eschewed the use of recorded content before World War II.
This avoidance presented problems of synchronicity as broadcast networks grew past
a regional scope for content being broadcast to multiple markets across time zones; a
program being broadcast from New York at 6pm in the Eastern time zone would play
at 3pm in Los Angeles, and thus would reach different segments of the audience. This
quandary necessitated the live production of programs twice for two sections of the
United States: a program for the Eastern and Central time zones and a second

of otherwise marginalized communities. This culturally and socially resistant usage of the replay and
repurposing of audio recordings is echoed by the emergence of late-twentieth century hip hop and DJ
culture, as well as the subsequent development of remix culture.
34
Aaron Foisi Nmungwun, Video Recording Technology: Its Impact on Media and Home
Entertainment (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 78.
103
subsequent broadcast for the Mountain and Western time zones.
35
Curiously, the use
of recording on network broadcast was first popularized by content which has
historically privileged and asserted liveness: the news. As indicated above, wire-
based recording technology was leveraged for “spot recording of important news
events,” but in April 1946, Chicago-based NBC affiliate WMAQ broadcast its first
completely wire-recorded news program, to be followed by its Chicago CBS
competitor WBBM.
36
The practicality and economic logic of this method of recording
for time-delayed rebroadcast soon spread across news and other forms of
broadcasting in the U.S.; Aaron Nmungwun observes,
…the precedent set [by WMAQ and WBBM], most networks and local
stations proceeded to record their news programs on wire recorders. Although
a standard procedure in Europe, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
network began transcribing its evening programming for rebroadcast at a later,
more convenient time on the West coast.
37

The networks’ resistance to recording for the purposes of rebroadcast faced labor
opposition as well, as talent grew increasingly unhappy with broadcast practices
which required multiple live performances of the same programming. Perhaps most
famously, Bing Crosby, an outspoken advocate of the use of pre-recorded material,
left NBC in April 1946 after the network refused to allow him to pre-record his
“Kraft Music Hall Show.” In fall of the same year, ABC premiered Crosby’s “Philco
Radio Time” show, “with ABC giving Crosby ‘a free hand’ to air pre-recorded

35
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 74.
36
Nmungwun, Video Recording Technology: Its Impact on Media and Home Entertainment, 78.
37
Ibid.
104
programs edited on disc.”
38
However, the program and Crosby’s company, Bing
Crosby Productions, struggled to maintain consistent audio quality from one show to
the next, and the program eventually adopted the usage of Ampex magnetic tape
machines, which were used for playback and editing of the shows.
39
Technological
limitations in audio fidelity were among the industrial factors that kept recorded
technology from becoming a dominant broadcast practice until the late 1940s.
While the capacity of radio stations to record audio material on disc had
existed for over twenty years, concerns about unreliable audio quality and the
significant expense of the systems worked in conjunction with regulatory practices
emphasizing liveness. The networks’ hesitancy towards and apprehension about the
adoption of recording technologies can be attributed in part to such technical
restrictions; Gomery argues that the development of newer recording technologies
actually helped to destabilize and put an end to the dominance of network radio. He
suggests that industrial factors and specific labor practices linked to the production of
live music undermined the economic viability and sustainability of the network
model. After the initial investment in a set, radio listeners could enjoy multiple styles
of free music; in the commercial radio system, this “free” music was financed by
advertiser sponsorship. Due in part to New Deal-era federal regulation, the musicians
union, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), had become a powerful entity
as the principal representative and provider of the artists which performed live music.
The AFM effectively required network stations to spend a minimum on live music

38
Ibid., 78-79.
39
Ibid., 89-90.
105
production, driving broadcast costs up dramatically.
40
The AFM subsequently
productively negotiated with over 50 of the largest radio stations that were not
network affiliates in the U.S., requiring them to spend the same percentage of income
on live musicians; only the smallest stations avoided these lobbying efforts and
continued to use records for musical content. Conversely, this mandated usage of live
artists helped to usher out live production on radio, as the model shifted irreversibly
away from economic viability. In this manner, the privileging of liveness effectively
served to industrially validate the replay’s function in network broadcasting.
A constellation of industrial and regulatory factors thus aligned to support the
more widespread usage of recordings on radio, and the arrival in the 40s of newer
audio recording technologies greatly supported this trend towards replay and
repetition. Gomery contends that, “it was only when Columbia created a 33 ⅓ rpm
high-fidelity recording technology and RCA a 45 rpm version in 1948 that records
provided a sound quality that matched live performance.”
41
These recording and
playback devices, along with the tape-based system employed by Crosby’s company,
offered a degree of reliability and quality which substantially and permanently
devalued several of the long-standing industrial justifications for the rejection of pre-
recorded material on radio broadcasts. Technological developments thus worked in

40
Throughout the 30s and the 40s, the AFM and its leadership (most notably its president, James Cesar
Petrillo) had successfully lobbied the radio and recording industries for increasingly just compensation
for AFM members, but this trend in rising labor costs began to have drastic effects on the bottom line
of the networks and affiliate stations. In their negotiation with the networks, the AFM successfully
compelled network affiliates to spend at least 5.5 percent of the station’s gross yearly income on live
music production, leading to the rapid growth of staff orchestras; this requirement had a profound
impact on the cost of music production, in one case, a station which paid $6,000 for live musicians in
1937 had to pay $42,000 in 1938. See Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 55-56.
41
Ibid., 75.
106
conjunction with shifting market and labor practices to facilitate the demise of
network radio and the decline of live performance in U.S. network radio production.

The Economics of Repetition: Early Broadcast Syndication
Despite a lack of support from the networks, the popularity of the use of pre-
recorded material by independent stations aided in the emergence of a lucrative
cottage industry built around replay: syndication. Barbara Moore argues that
syndication practices flourished quickly after the birth of radio:
Syndication of radio programs began not long after the development of the
networks. The new industry survived despite technical problems, opposition
from bester interests, and a lack of support from the Federal Communications
Commission. Syndication’s survival was due to the practical advantages it
offered listeners, stations, and advertisers. As the quality of recorded material
improved, the distribution of transcriptions thrived until TV wooed radio’s
audience away.
42

Evidence of the deployment of pre-recorded material for radio broadcast can thus be
charted from minor broadcasters to key figures of the Hollywood star system such as
Crosby, for linked, albeit distinct, cultural, social, and economic motivations and
purposes. The networks’ resistance to the usage of transcriptions in broadcasts and
the significant number of non-affiliate stations across the U.S. created an untapped
market for pre-recorded content. Autonomous lower-powered stations lacked the
access to network content, and thus were forced to employ alternate and cost-
effective means to fill airtime. Independent content syndicators emerged in the 1930s
to fill this void; the largest and most successful companies to do so were the World

42
Barbara Ann Moore, “Syndication of First-Run Television Programming: Its Development and
Current Status” (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University, 1983), 2.
107
Broadcasting Service (WBS) and the Frederick W. Ziv Company. Derek Kompare
argues that such businesses approached the economic potentialities of radio in a
manner quite distinct from the radio networks and that this novel business model
ultimately shaped the industry at large; he argues that,
[the WBS and Ziv] bypassed the idea of liveness entirely, selling their
programs directly to radio stations and advertisers on an ad hoc basis. The
networks’ vision of radio was national and simultaneous; the transcription
companies’ was local (or regional) and asynchronous. However, as the use of
transcriptions and records expanded and became more accepted, even the
networks eventually embraced the logic of recording by the late 1940s.
43

However, given the hegemonic aesthetic and industrial constructs of the “proper”
uses of radio as a live medium, content syndicators had to position their wares
carefully within the marketplace. Kompare demonstrates the shrewd marketing of
WBS which located transcriptions “as a unique product almost ‘as good as live’”
(emphasis his) which described their recordings as “indescribably clear.”
44

This precise classification of transcriptions functioned within trade advertising
as a result of federal regulation which mandated the identification of transcribed
material prior to its use on air. This requirement, articulated in the Federal Radio
Commission’s Rule 176, became a significant demarcation between live and pre-
recorded programming, and thus became a contentious element of federal legislation
in the 1930s as the acceptance and usage of transcriptions grew. The rule forced
stations which employed transcriptions to frequently interrupt broadcasts (particularly
of the presentation of shorter-form programs in which the WBS specialized) with

43
Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge,
2005), 20.
44
Ibid., 26.
108
announcements of the recorded material.
45
In 1934, the WBS, other syndicators and
individual stations petitioned for a reconsideration of the law, but hearings were
delayed a year by the passage of the Federal Communications Act, which established
the FCC. During the hearings, the AFM and network broadcasters unsurprisingly
opposed any changes to Rule 176, respectively arguing that the directive helped
sustain employment of musicians and that the use of unidentified recordings would
mislead the public, undermining radio’s veracity. A coalition of independent
broadcasters, the WSB and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) all
supported changes to Rule 176, mainly on the grounds that transcriptions were
helping non-network radio flourish, and in some cases providing the only means by
which some independent stations could survive.
46
The networks and the AFM
prevailed, and the FCC determined in 1936 to preserve Rule 176, albeit with minor
modifications and clarifications. The rephrasing of the rule explicitly differentiated
between transcriptions and phonographs, and “requiring announcements at the
beginning and ending of programs [comprised of multiple recordings], and at 15-
minute intervals during a recorded program, rather than after every single recording
presented;” as Kompare observes, this FCC ruling effectively acknowledged the
growing importance of recordings to the broadcast industry while simultaneously
underscoring the privileging of live broadcasts and relegation of transcriptions as
“second class programming.”
47
Economically, culturally, and ideologically, pre-

45
Ibid., 27.
46
Ibid., 29.
47
Ibid.
109
recorded material was deemed inferior to live broadcasts, further reinforcing existing
industrial structures. With the assistance of federal regulation, the established
networks actively sought to strengthen their own unique capabilities to produce live
content while simultaneously devaluing and undermining the use of replayed material
such as transcriptions and records.
However, despite regulatory restrictions, independent transcription services
grew considerably during the 1940s. Started in Cincinnati in 1937 and named for its
founder, the Ziv Company specialized in the production of recorded programs which
were built from adaptations of popular literary characters. This approach was
enormously successful, and Ziv claimed earnings of $10 million from its 24 radio
programs on 850 stations within a decade of its founding.
48
As Kompare argues, Ziv’s
business model is particularly noteworthy, as it,
relies on upon the repetition of established cultural figures and texts, but to a
greater extent than most other transcription firms. The company obtained the
radio (and subsequently television) rights to literary characters such as the
Cisco Kid and Boston Blackie, and produced condensed radio versions of
well-known literary classics in the anthology series Favorite Story.
49

Furthermore, Ziv extended this mode of cultural repetition through its use of
established popular Hollywood stars host programs and to perform as familiar film
characters, including actors such as Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Ziv thus
multifariously leveraged the concept of replay via its use of transcriptions which
culturally repeated known texts and characters, themselves re-enacted by established
recurring stars. Ziv and others in turn successfully replicated this model with the

48
Phil Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” in Television: The
Critical View (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164.
49
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 33.
110
transition to television, redeploying content into the medium. In this capacity,
recycled content echoed across media forms, repeating aesthetic tropes and industrial
strategies alike. However, these multiple modes of industrial repetition did not
incorporate the concept of the rerun, as the vast majority of these programs were
played only once in a given market; as discussed below, this form of repetition would
only become a dominant practice with the advent of television. Kompare elucidates:
The development of repetition on radio from the 1920s through 1940s was
thus concerned more with the principle of fixing program material in mutable,
transportable forms, forms that represented fixed capital, but were in practice
only potentially repeatable. Regardless, the eventual dominance of this
principle fostered a technical, cultural, legal, and industrial environment in
which extant texts were eventually repeated, although in a new medium, and
new priorities, to establish this practice in American culture.
50

These broadcasted transcriptions of adaptations thus constituted a cultural form of
replay in which individual programs were not necessarily repeated, but instead
familiar texts, characters and actors echoed across the airwaves. As such, the function
of replay and repetition across multiple registers of the social, cultural, and economic
strata of early broadcast practices demonstrates the necessity and utility of this
exploration of radio as a precursor to the more extensive, expansive and nuanced
implementations and implications of replay in television.

Early Television: Liveness & Quality
Beyond its technical, industrial, economic, social, and cultural roots in radio,
the technological antecedents to television can be traced in part to Paul Nipkow
through his experiments and subsequent patent in 1884 for what he dubbed the

50
Ibid., 21.
111
“electric telescope.”
51
Nipkow envisioned a system by which a camera would record
images as electrical waves on a spinning disc. While this device was not the success
for which Nipkow hoped, the basic principles of it would be more fully realized in
later televisual technologies. The development of the cathode ray tube (CRT) in 1897
provided the capacity to display electrical images, and experiments in the early 1900s
employed a system similar to Niokow’s before Alan Campbell Swinton and Boris
Rozing separately proposed systems which would abandon the discs and use CRTs
for both the recording and display of images.
52
Competition between proponents of
the mechanical disc- and the purely electronic CRT-based systems continued until
RCA engineer Vladymir Zworykin developed an electronic system, which offered
resolution equivalent to mechanical systems. Implementation of the RCA-proposed
standard was delayed in the U.S. by World War II and FCC hearings until 1945, at
which point the FCC endorsed RCA’s proposed system of a limited number of black-
and-white channels on the VHF (very high frequency) band over a more expansive
but delayed system supported by RCA rival Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)
employing the UHF (ultra high frequency) band and broadcasting in color. As Hilmes
argues, this restricted and limited system helped to concretize the network oligopoly
for television.
53

Following the FCC’s finalization of television standards, the number of
television broadcasters and television sets grew at a considerable pace, rapidly filling

51
Brian Winston, “The Development of Television,” in The Television History Book (London: British
Film Institute, 2003), 9.
52
Ibid., 10.
53
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 146.
112
the limited number of frequencies allocated by the FCC; by 1948, fifty television
stations nationwide were already broadcasting, with another fifty licenses approved
for new stations, prompting the FCC to issue a licensing freeze for new stations
which would last until 1952 in order to re-organize its system of frequency
allocation.
54
The freeze allowed the existing licensed stations, many of which were
owned by the radio networks, to operate with limited competition and gain a
considerable foothold in their markets. Thus, much like radio’s early
commercialization and domination by large corporate entities with the assistance
from the FCC, television’s burgeoning years saw the sustained and largely successful
efforts of the existing major networks to transition their brands and marketplace
dominance into the visual medium, all with the help of federal regulation; as Hilmes
states, “the FCC created television in the form of 1940s radio.”
55
Unsurprisingly,
these corporate entities sought to replicate similar industrial strategies which had
served them well during radio years, as did the independent syndicators which had
enjoyed similar successes.
Continuing the practices which they had already established in radio, the
networks sought to leverage their existing enormous economic and industrial
structures and strongly privileged live television production from 1948 to 1952.
56

This predisposition ignored the marked success and rapid growth of radio syndicators
in an effort to capitalize on the networks’ capacity to generate and broadcast live

54
Ibid., 163.
55
Ibid., 165.
56
Barbara Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series from 1948-
1952,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 8 (1980): 26.
113
content nationally—of which the syndicators were not capable. However, while the
networks emphasized live television production, they reused content from program
formats to actors already popularized in radio form, effecting a form of repetition
under the auspices of the novel. In some cases, the networks would simultaneously
broadcast the same content across both media; as Hilmes notes, “Though the big-
name prestige variety shows made the switch to TV early on, many continued with
their aural portion simulcast on radio.”
57
Thus even that which was ostensibly live
was, in fact, merely recycling and replaying established creative properties and
timeworn characters.
In spite of such tendencies, the networks resolutely insisted on separating their
product from recorded material; in the process of this differentiation from recorded
content, the networks’ decision effectively reaffirmed the perceived linkage between
quality and liveness already established by radio, indelibly inscribing television with
the same association to live production. Critically and historically, the period of
television production from the late 1940s to late 1950s has often been deemed the
“Golden Age” of television by scholars and critics, primarily for the prominence of
live theatrical productions and anthology series which were produced in New York.
This descriptor demonstrates that the industrial and economic rationale for privileging
live production is strongly implicated in the cultural correlation between quality and
liveness. The broadcast networks recognized that maintaining this correlation was an
economic necessity; by privileging live content and association with prestige
productions such as the live anthology dramas, the networks were able to more

57
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 157.
114
effectively keep their local affiliate stations under their control.
58
While the positive
connotation of live content was certainly sought by network broadcasters seeking to
differentiating their product from pre-recorded content (as evinced by their sustained
opposition to syndication practices), the perceived importance of liveness to the
medium specificity of television was also espoused by early television critics such as
Jack Gould, whose 1952 New York Times article titled “A Plea for Live Video”
begins with the declaration,
The decision of television to put many of its programs on film has turned out
to be the colossal boner of the year. On every count—technically and
qualitatively—the films cannot compare with "live" shows and they are only
hurting video, not helping it.
59

Similar to critical writings which accompanied the emergence of cinema, early 1950s
criticism of the television is characterized by an essentialist approach which seeks to
differentiate the medium based on its unique characteristics.
60
This critical rhetoric
championed the immediacy allowed for by television, allowing for the visual
presentation of spatially distant events to a viewer, differentiating it from non-visual
forms like radio or recorded formats such as film. Curiously, perhaps as a byproduct
of the dominant mode of television production, this period of criticism highlights the
capacity of television to present spatially distant events, but rarely acknowledges its
ability to present temporally distant events. Obstinately clinging to the rhetoric of

58
Hilmes notes that this also allowed the networks to resist (albeit temporarily) the encroachment of
Hollywood upon the television industry See Ibid., 165-167.
59
Jack Gould, “A Plea for Live Video,” New York Times, December 7, 1952, sec. 2, 17.
60
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 80-81. The critical tendency is markedly
similar to early cinema theorists, such as Rudolf Arnheim and Hugo Münsterberg, who sought to
identify the particular elements of the cinematic medium which rendered it distinct from previous
forms.
115
liveness, critics and theorists downplayed the capacity of television to present events
of a historical nature in favor of those which emphasized a co-presence between
viewer and event. While it could be argued that film already provided this capacity, it
is important to note that television is not differentiated from film merely by its
capability for simultaneous production and exhibition, but its ability to seamlessly
shift between live and recorded modes. As Feuer notes, “For, from a certain
technological and perceptual point of view, television is live in a way film can never
be. Events can be transmitted as they occur; television (and videotape) look more
“real” to than does film.”
61
Radio’s ability to imperceptibly oscillate between live
broadcast and pre-recorded material was ostensibly at the heart of the networks’
arguments in defense of Rule 176 to explicitly and regularly identify the use of
recordings, despite clear economic motivators that were undoubtedly more primary in
the networks’ rationale. Similarly, industrial and critical rhetoric emphasized the
importance of live material on television as well, although the economic reality of the
substantially reduced costs of using recorded material in lieu of live production would
eventually engender the widespread usage of replayed material in the television
industry. Much like the decline of live production on radio, the alignment of
industrial factors, economic practicalities, and technological developments which
allowed cost-effective recording of material for television engendered a gradual and
irreversible transition to the prioritization of replay as a central network strategy.
Interestingly, while the television industry has historically demonstrated an
escalating tendency away from cost-prohibitive live television production, its mode of

61
Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” 13.
116
address has persistently emphasized its immediacy and “liveness.” As Feuer argues,
liveness is not part of television’s ontology, but instead part of its ideology—that is to
say that liveness is not an inherent property of the medium of television, but instead a
property which television resolutely and adamantly insists and maintains it propagates
and of which it is constituted.
62
This emphatic intimation of liveness is strongly
rooted in the industrial conditions from which television emerged, as its
preoccupation was clearly economically self-induced.

Recycling: Hollywood and Televisual Syndication
Despite Gould’s and other critics’ pleadings, the years between 1952 and 1956
brought an intense period in the development of first-run syndication material as a
result of industrial and economic factors; Moore refers to this time period as “the
golden era of syndication,” and William Boddy dubs it the “golden age of telefilm
syndication for original programming,” both provocatively employing the “golden”
moniker which has historically functioned as cultural short-hand for the link between
liveness and quality.
63
Such a descriptor is indicative of the reversal of the critical
valuation of live content on television prompted by economic necessity; although
television may still privilege liveness, a profound shift in the appraisal of quality in
television programming can be charted historically. While early critical discourse

62
Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.”
63
Moore, “Syndication of First-Run Television Programming,” 24; Boddy, Fifties Television: The
Industry and Its Critics, 140.
117
argued for the vital function of liveness as a marker of quality, later conceptions of
quality have predominantly privileged filmed content over live.
64

Historical accounts of the growth of television often depict an antagonistic
relationship between Hollywood and the television networks; however, Boddy
demonstrates that a substantial and sustained degree of mutual interest and
collaboration marked the relationship between the two beginning as early as the late
1930s, with each industry persistently appraising and assessing the other as a means
to augment its own revenue streams.
65
While Hollywood developed several means by
which to differentiate its product from that of television, the studios also attempted a
number of methods to incorporate the emerging technology into their existing
industrial models. This included experimenting with displaying television broadcasts
onto theater screens and attempting to establish “subscription television,” an early
iteration of fee-based pay cable to receive special content such as films.
66
While such
systems were quickly derailed by FCC regulation, Hollywood was curiously slow to
release its vast libraries of content to broadcasters for reuse.
This initial hesitancy can be attributed in part to the studios’ cautious
approach to the new medium, but one must also take into account Hollywood’s own
industrial indisposition to re-releasing its own films theatrically. Dominant exhibition
practices emphasized new content, with theaters often screening higher-budget

64
For instance, see Charlotte Brunsdon, “Problems with Quality,” Screen 3, no. 1 (1990): 67-90.
65
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 66-69; Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural
History of Broadcasting in the United States, 154. As Hilmes notes, Hollywood’s response to
television was not merely of investment and considering ways it could be exploited, but also via
methods of product differentiation, such as widescreen and color formats.
66
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 154-155.
118
prestige pictures paired with “B-pictures” of lower quality and cost; these films would
alternate continuously, with spectators entering theaters throughout films and staying
until they reached they again reached the point in the narrative at which they entered.
In this sense, theatrical exhibition emphasized repetition, and Kompare notes that
repetition was also emphasized spatially, rather than temporally, by the simultaneous
release of films to many theaters.
67
But the shelf life of theatrical films was relatively
short, and new content was privileged; the films in most theaters were almost always
first-run features, many of which would play for only a week or two before being
withdrawn from distribution and exhibition. Phil Williams argues that Hollywood did
not begin to capitalize on the financial potential of the recycling of its product until
the late 1940s. While reissues of films were relatively uncommon prior to World War
II, studio output declined during the war, effecting a shortage of content for exhibitors
whose customers were accustomed to double features of new films. A syndication
cottage industry emerged to provide recycled content to theatrical exhibitors.
Following the loss of income prompted by the Paramount Decision of 1948 and its
subsequent end to vertical integration, the major studios embraced reissues in
dramatic fashion, with the entire industry releasing 53 reissues in 1947, 105 in 1948,
and 136 in 1949.
68
However, the studios were uncertain of the economic viability of
recycling their existing content for television exhibition and remained hesitant to do
so until the mid-1950s; until this time, the primary Hollywood product to be found on
television was supplied by companies such as Vitapix in the form of B-films

67
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 13.
68
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 162.
119
(primarily Westerns) produced by minor studios, many of which were edited down to
thirty- or sixty- minute versions to facilitate their deployment into existing broadcast
schedules.
69
The high ratings of these lower-prestige theatrical films demonstrated
viewer interest, and the sale of 740 RKO films to C & C Super Corporation in 1956
for television broadcast encouraged the major studios to raid their own archives; by
mid-decade, the amount of pre-existing studio content released for television by
Hollywood increased from a scanty few to a deluge, with a total of only around 4500
being released prior to 1955 and almost 3000 released in 1956 alone.
70
As such, the
replaying of Hollywood content became a dominant mode of non-live content for the
decade; Kompare notes, “Theatrical film represented the largest amount of recorded
material presented on television in the 1950s.”
71
The accelerating pace of the
availability of this backlog of studio films began to cause concern within the
television industry, with trade magazines estimating in 1956 that roughly half of the
estimated 12,000 to 14,000 features had already been released and that the reservoir
of films could be exhausted by the early 60s.
72

69
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 45; William Lafferty, “Feature
Films on Prime-Time Television,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio (Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1990), 238; Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series
from 1948-1952,” 26-27.
70
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 128. and Kompare, Rerun Nation: How
Repeats Invented American Television, 45. Due to studio contracts with the Screen Actors’ Guild
(SAG), the vast majority of Hollywood content released in the 1950s was limited to pre-1948 releases.
71
Ibid., 47.
72
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 166. As Williams notes,
this estimate was revised in 1961, suggesting that there would be no more new content to be mined
from studio libraries by 1967.
120
But while this theatrical content eventually became a predominant form of
broadcasting, Hollywood’s initial hesitancy to make use of its extant archives of
content created a space for independent content producers and syndicators. In
conjunction with the rapid expansion in television broadcasting in the 1950s, a
correlating need for content to fill the airwaves emerged. The expenses demanded by
live broadcasting restricted the operation of stations to limited hours and local
stations—particularly those which were not network affiliates—scrambled for
material to broadcast. The technical limitations of early television necessitated
content to broadcast during network broadcast mishaps and interludes, allowing
affiliates to broadcast material when their network feed was interrupted. An early
popular syndication service filled this niche market: Snader Telescription provided
short musical segments by performers such as Nat “King” Cole, initially three- to
five-minutes long before eventually expanding to fifteen-minute segment; these
interludes allowed stations a source of alternate broadcast material during network
disruptions.
73
Such services demonstrated the practicality of the usage of pre-recorded
material even for network affiliates, but there was considerable early concern that the
cost of film-based production for television would necessarily result in a lower
quality product which would be inferior to Hollywood’s.
74

However, despite such concerns, a burgeoning market emerged in the 1940s
as independent companies rushed to provide content for the growing number of

73
Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series from 1948-1952,” 26. As
Moore illustrates, a “library” service of brief segments of content such as musical and news features
recorded on 16mm film was envisioned by radio transcription firms in the early 1940s.
74
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 66.
121
stations; trade magazine Television reported in 1946 that “new companies [were]
forming every day.”
75
Much like the networks sought to maintain their arrangements
of production, exhibition and distribution, independent radio syndicators similarly
moved to quickly exploit their own established structures of manufacture and
delivery. The Ziv Company consolidated its packaged radio service with the purchase
of WBS, the largest existing transcription library while Ziv simultaneously moved
into television production in the late 1940s, and, as Kompare asserts, continuing its
practice of using pre-existing material.
76
In 1948, Ziv debuted two of its earliest
series, Yesterday’s Newsreel and Sports Album, both of which compiled stock footage
into brief segments ranging from five- to fifteen-minutes.
77
Ziv’s practice of recycling
content extended into the reuse of its own content, as the company adapted several of
its existing radio series including The Cisco Kid in 1949 and Boston Blackie in 1951,
both of which were adaptations of existing characters, furthering their replay across
culture. As it had in radio, Ziv expanded its production rapidly, and by 1952 had nine
syndicated programs in circulation, and as Barbara Moore argues, the company’s
“half-hour action/adventure series were staple ingredients of the prime-time schedule
for many stations.”
78
As with editing of recycled Western B-pictures into thirty- or
sixty-minute programs, Ziv’s products were pre-packaged into standardized lengths to

75
As quoted in Ibid., 69.
76
Morleen G Rouse, “A History of the F. W. Ziv Radio and Television Syndication Companies: 1930-
1960” (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1976), 104; Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats
Invented American Television, 50.
77
Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series from 1948-1952,” 26;
Rouse, “A History of the F. W. Ziv Radio and Television Syndication Companies,” 103-106.
78
Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series from 1948-1952,” 26.
122
facilitate their incorporation into programming schedules for affiliates and
independent stations alike. The market for the syndication companies’ American
products was not limited the United States, as evinced by Ziv’s establishment on an
international sales wing in 1953 and the massive jump in the foreign sales of
American telefilms in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
79

Ziv and other syndication companies faced initial financial hurdles as the
creation of programs required a significant expenditure of capital, and thus the
recycling of already successful properties such as The Cisco Kid was fiscally prudent.
The independent syndicators were not alone in this practice of adapting existing
content and characters to television, and NBC and CBS moved some of their more
successful properties, such as Dragnet and The Guiding Light from radio to the new
medium. However, there was no shortage in creation of new content for television
with an eye towards syndication, as the slowing of film production in Hollywood
prompted a large number of film industry writers, directors and producers to shift to
television production; between 1947 and 1952, around 2000 pilot telefilms were
produced with the hopes that they would be picked up for syndication or advertising
sponsorship.
80
This flurry of independent content production in the late 1940s and
early 1950s created an intensely competitive market for syndicators, in which the
reduction of production costs and the aggressive pricing of products were
privileged.
81
This resulting rationalization of content production benefited those who

79
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 142.
80
Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series from 1948-1952,” 27.
81
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 164.
123
could produce programs inexpensively and quickly, such as Grant-Realm Television
Productions, which bragged in 1949 it could produce a half-hour program in two days
for only 8,500 dollars; maximizing efficiency in production was strongly valued, and
the innovation of the multicam system by early syndicator Jerry Fairbanks allowed
multiple cameras to record material for later arrangement by an editor and thus
reduced set-ups.
82
Independent content producer Desilu productions began filming I
Love Lucy in 1951, using a similar system to synchronize multiple cameras with
shared audio; the economic pressures of early syndication production practices thus
helped to shape and popularize modes of television production that persist today,
particularly in genres such as the situation comedy.
83

Hollywood studios began to set up television production subsidiaries as early
as the 1940s, with RKO establishing RKO Television Corporation, its television
wing, in 1944.
84
As early as 1939, John Western saw the competition that Hollywood
faced from the networks and independent syndicators, noting NBC’s purchasing of
film shorts and its emergence as a “‘baby’ film producer;” he observed these trends
and others as portending the coming shift for film production, stating, “Whether or
not it supplies film footage, Hollywood appears to be faced with potential
competition…rivalry in both production and exhibition.”
85
However, much like their
initial reluctance to repackage their theatrical films for television broadcast, the major

82
Moore, “The Cisco Kid and Friends: The Syndication of Television Series from 1948-1952,” 28.
83
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 127.
84
However, RKO’s expansion into television development raised eyebrows with its exhibitors,
prompting the studio’s president to issue a statement in an attempt to alleviate their concerns. See
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 140.,
85
John Western, “Television Girds for Battle,” Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1939): 561.
124
studios were also slow to begin dedicated telefilm production; it was not until 1955
that MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Brothers had joined
Columbia and RKO in the creation of original filmed television content.
86
By June
1957, over 100 television programs were being produced in Hollywood, forever
shifting the primary center of American television production from New York to Los
Angeles with the transition from live to filmed content.
87

The cost effectiveness of live programming, in distinction to content recorded
on film, began to gradually diminish in terms of both ratings and profits by the early
50s. The economic realities of the enormous cost of live television production began
to have significant impact on industrial practices for the networks and independent
stations alike. By July of 1953, 60% of content broadcast on non-affiliated local
stations was pre-recorded, while half of the broadcasts by network affiliates
connected via wire networks used such material and only 25% of the interconnected
network affiliates’ broadcasts was filmed content.
88
This gradated disparity reflects
the unique role of replayed material in differentiating television broadcasting in terms
of the national and the local; despite the networks’ grandiose rhetoric about the
import of liveness, the implementation at the level of the local station was decidedly
more pragmatic. Independent stations and local affiliates employed pre-recorded

86
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 143.
87
Gomery, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 127.
88
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 47-48. Furthermore, as
Kompare argues, significant portions of the “live” content broadcast on independent stations was little
more than a framing program for pre-recorded content, such as a local host introducing film
programming. He states that, “Local live production was thus already dependent on televisual
repetition by the mid-1950s.”
125
content out of the necessity to fill airtime at a substantially reduced cost, in contrast to
the networks’ preference for the expensive live content which only they could easily
produce. Fittingly, this function of replayed material echoed roughly concurrent
trends in radio, specifically the ascendancy of disk jockeys and the transition to the
use of records on radio with the decline of national radio networks.
89
The economic
logic of using replayed material on television filtered up from the level of local
independent broadcasters and affiliate stations to eventually shape network
broadcasts.
In many ways, the accelerating march toward the usage of pre-recorded
content can be read as an inevitable byproduct of television’s remarkable success and
abrupt growth. After the lifting of the licensing freeze in 1952, the number of
television stations in the U.S. increased around four-fold to over 400 stations by 1955
and over 500 by 1958.
90
An almost insatiable demand for content went hand-in-hand
with this expansion, and even the networks struggled to produce content to satisfy the
prolongation of network broadcasting beyond evening “prime” hours and to meet the
demands of fifty-two weeks of production a year.
91
As early as 1951, trade
publications observed that, like radio, television suffered a summer slump in
audiences and sales and the networks initially responded by shifting to “39 weeks of
original programming…and the summer lull was mostly populated with less costly

89
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 157.
90
Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 157; Kompare,
Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 44.
91
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 55.
126
variety shows.”
92
This strategy proved unpopular with advertisers and affiliates, and
by 1956 the networks soon began to rely on the reruns of filmed content for the
summer months instead of new content. Faced with rising costs for the production of
original content, the networks began scaling back the number of weeks of original
programming, dropping to 26 weeks by 1960 and only 22 to 24 weeks by the early
1970s.
93
As such, the networks’ production of live content underwent a steady
decline, irrevocably diminishing the valuation of liveness on television.
The television networks thus began to adopt the replay as a central industrial
strategy, repeating the same practices which had earlier come to dominate radio
broadcasting. The elevation of the status of recorded material on television was itself
a repetition, as pre-recorded content on radio had enjoyed a similar industrial and
cultural ascension. Given the considerably higher costs associated with live television
production, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that this shift took as long as it did;
broadcasting syndicated programs and reruns of the networks’ first-run content
proved to be a far more economically viable and sustainable mode of television
production than live programming. Illustrating the recursive economic and industrial
logic of the replay in broadcasting, the use and reuse of television programs—
themselves constituted from recycled narrative structures and content from other
media—soon settled into a cyclical and uniform programming strategy of repetition:
the “strip.”

92
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 164-165.
93
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 165.
127
Reruns and Stripping
The gradual reduction in the production of original content reflects the
concurrent ascension of a televisual staple: the rerun. Within the hegemonic social
and economic rhetoric which privileged liveness in television, the concept of
broadcasting previously shown content was widely considered taboo. While playing
material shown on film was quickly a common practice at the level of the individual
station, replaying the same content was eschewed. There was widespread belief
within the industry that viewers would not accept such repeated content. Boddy
points to John Western’s article “Television Girds for Battle” in the Public Opinion
Quarterly in 1939 as evidence of this long-standing sentiment of the television
viewer: Western opines, “Rarely does a movie-goer see a film more than once. There
is no reason to believe that the looker will consent to see a telecine transmission more
frequently. Afterwards, the film must be relegated to the vaults.”
94
Thus, much like
the established practices of theatrical distribution and exhibition, new content was
prized and it was to be issued only once before being “relegated to the vaults.” NBC
president Lenox Lohr struck a remarkably similar tone in his 1940 book Television
Broadcasting, writing, “It appears to be inadvisable to broadcast most programs more
than once. On the second broadcast, the audience is likely to become hypercritical
and to lose interest.”
95
While this broadcasting logic dominated the industry in its
early years, industrial factors and economic indicators began to devalue its base
assumptions. Trade publications observed in 1954 that summer reruns could actually

94
Western, “Television Girds for Battle,” 558.
95
Lenox Lohr, Television Broadcasting: Production, Economics, Technique (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company, 1940), 5.
128
achieve higher ratings than the original broadcasts.
96
Furthermore, the explosion in
independent telefilm production that occurred in the early- and mid-50s had flooded
the television market with content. In 1956, trade journal Sponsor estimated that there
were already over 20,000 episodes of syndicated programs available; this saturation
combined with pressures to reduce the cost of production for original syndicated
programs to force many syndication firms out of business, effecting a tumultuous
drop in the number of original syndicated programs in production from 29 in 1956 to
only one in 1964.
97
Concurrently, the networks’ pace of employing filmed content
quickened: by 1956, filmed content constituted 44% of network primetime
programming and 83% by 1961.
98
These diametrically opposed pressures of the
increasing demand for content and the reduction in the production of original content
inevitably effectuated the widespread adoption of reruns as a broadcast strategy.
The practice of the usage of reruns emerged as a seasonal practice; Phil
Williams argues:
As regional programmers and their syndicated partners backed into
programming repetition, the networks gravitated toward the economics of the
summer rerun. Production costs, especially for the favored live productions,
became increasingly difficult to bear over a 52-week run.
99

In 1954, the Nielsen ratings firm observed that over 95% of a given program’s
audience saw sixteen of twenty-one episodes on their original broadcast, and over

96
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 141.
97
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 56-57.
98
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 165.
99
Ibid., 164.
129
60% saw fewer than three shows.
100
In the face of such research, the networks began
to replace live programming with filmed reruns during the summer months, initially
employing rebroadcasts of programs from previous seasons before expanding the
practice.
101

A broadcasting strategy both linked to and an extension of the usage of reruns
emerged during this period as well: “stripping,” in which different reruns of the same
previously broadcast program are shown five days a week during the same time slot.
The emergence of stripping was a byproduct of the boom in the production of original
content for syndication earlier in the decade, as Moore indicates,
Although the mid-fifties period is remembered as the golden era of
syndication, the problems of the industry never really disappeared. Indeed, the
illusion of a financially healthy business was part of the problem… The
number of producers of first-run programming grew smaller, the remaining
few had to adapt to a new future.
102

The increasing number of successful programs completing their first-run network
broadcasts and the concurrent tumultuous drop in the number of content producers
helped popularize stripping as an industrial strategy. Stripping can also be linked to
theatrical exhibition practices of showing feature films at set show times, and
interestingly, one of the first iterations of stripping involves the broadcast of a
theatrical film. In September 1952, independent stations WPIX in New York began to
experiment with broadcasting the same film five nights a week between 7:30 and

100
Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, 141.
101
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 165.
102
Moore, “Syndication of First-Run Television Programming,” 38-39.
130
9:00pm, emulating theatrical exhibition practices of repetition.
103
There is some
debate about the first instance of network stripping; Phil Williams contends that CBS’
Amos ‘n’ Andy, released to syndication in 1953 was the first, while Kompare instead
suggests Philadelphia station WPTZ’s five-day broadcasts of My Little Margie
starting on September 5, 1955.
104
Either way, stripping rapidly became a popular
industrial practice, with trade magazine Sponsor deemed stripping “The Trend” of
1956 and noted endorsement of the strategy by syndicators NBC, CBS, and Official
Films.
105
The practice of stripping boomed across the industry almost immediately,
from an average of 440.5 hours per week in 1956 to 800.5 in 1957 and 1070.5 in
1958.
106
The rapid adoption of the usage of stripping in the 1950s helped to shape and
transform the industry; the strip-dominated television landscape was infamously
described by FCC Chairman Newton Minow to the NAB annual convention as a
“vast wasteland” in 1961. Minow viewed the television marketplace as stagnated
from a lack of competition, and sought to decisively expand the effective range of
channels of American televisions into the thus-far underutilized UHF band. Under his
leadership, the All-Channel Receiver Act was passed in 1961, requiring all television
sets sold in the U.S. to be able to receive both VHF and UHF signals. Prior to the
passage of the Act, UHF broadcasters had foundered due to FCC regulation, and less
than 10% of television sets in the U.S. were able to receive UHF transmissions by the

103
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 52.
104
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 165; Kompare, Rerun
Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 55.
105
Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, 55.
106
Stripping remains a principal broadcasting strategy, particularly on independent, basic cable and
local affiliate stations during periods of non-network programming.
131
bill’s passage.
107
Minow envisioned the expansion of viable frequencies as a key
facilitator for reshaping television broadcasting practices, including the creation of an
educational network. Furthermore, Minow visualized a re-defined configuration of
content, in which “first-run” VHF networks would broadcast original content, while
UHF stations would specialize in “second-run” programming of reruns.
108
UHF
transmission and reception capabilities grew exponentially in a short period of time,
by the end of the 1960s, the number of UHF stations increased from 85 to 265 and 60
percent of all television sets were able to receive UHF signals.
109
However, in spite of
Minow and other reformists’ idealistic visions for a transformed television
marketplace, the addition of new channels simply seemed to engender the growth of
the so-called “wasteland,” at least in terms of replayed content. While some of the
new UHF stations offered educational, public affairs and foreign programming,
Williams notes that the
majority of these new stations… veered toward the second-run path, using off-
network reruns and syndicated film packages to fill most of their
programming day. The base of the hierarchical programming structure had
been widened considerably, creating more demand for [reruns].
110

In this manner, federal legislation and industrial practices again conspired to engender
the usage of replayed material on television. Stripping, itself a structure of repetition,
helped to actualize the creation of the UHF network, and thus effected a pronounced
expansion of the recycling of content as industrial practice.

107
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 167.
108
“Minow Proposes Second Run UHF Network,” Broadcasting (April 8, 1963): 60.
109
Williams, “Feeding Off the Past: The Evolution of the Television Rerun,” 168.
110
Ibid.
132
Stripping demonstrates the recursive nature of replay in the televisual form, as
repetition itself functions repetitively. In this case, texts which may themselves be
adaptations recycling content, plotlines, and actors from other forms such as radio or
print; these reused elements are repeated as reruns, which replay in a broadcast
schedule structured around predictability and regularity. Here the cultural, social and
ideological substance and meaning contained explicitly and implicitly within these
texts, their themes and their aggregation itself is recycled, reused, reproduced and
reinscribed via their replay.

Flow & Liveness: Is it Live or is it Television?
The strategic deployment of the rerun and the strip clearly demonstrate the
growing industrial and economic centrality of the replay to commercial American
television. However, much like the reluctance with which network broadcasters
adopted the use of recorded material, critical and theoretical discourses on television
likewise have historically emphasized television’s faculties for immediacy,
continuity, and liveness. This rhetoric was initiated by the essentialist approaches
discussed above which embraced and emphasized the unique characteristics which
differentiated the medium of television from other forms, such as its ability to
simultaneously record and broadcast events, allowing viewers to contemporaneously
witness and experience distant events and programming. The theoretical approaches
to television have been heavily shaped by these initial assessments, and this historical
consideration of the replay’s evolving function on television must also necessarily
engage with these theoretical models. Indeed, the replay’s deployment in television
133
flies in the face of the consideration of television as “live,” just as television’s
integration with digital technologies have destabilized its ontology. Thus, in order to
map and navigate the seductive implications of the replay’s multivalent deployments
on contemporary television, it useful to explore the replay’s function within existing
modes of television discourse. Here I will explore the challenges the replay poses to
existing theoretical approaches to television, beginning with the influential
characterization of television’s continuity by Raymond Williams.
While holed up in a motel room in Florida during a conference in the early
1970s, a bemused Williams famously identified American television’s tendency
towards “flow,” a continuous mode which starkly contrasted early live television’s
intervallic structure necessitated by the constraints of live production. While earlier
cultural forms such as poems, novels, or films have often functioned as discrete and
self-contained texts, television instead operates in a continuous mode which resists
containment. In his seminal book Television: Technology and Cultural Form,
Williams argues that the experience of television is characterized by the concept of
flow. He suggests that early television broadcasts were marked by their intervallic
nature—programming was broken up into discrete units that were often separated by
pauses, during which time the station might broadcast a sound or image (such as the
British Broadcasting Corporation’s spinning globe) to indicate that the broadcasting
service remained active.
111
However, as a result of the commercial nature of much of

111
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, vol. 2003 (New York: Routledge,
1974), 83-84. It should be noted that these segments were themselves often recorded elements, for
instance, the BBC’s spinning globe was not necessarily a live shot of the globe, but rather a pre-
recorded segment.
134
more recent television broadcasting, television is marked by a continuous flow of
images and sounds, as programming and commercials stream in an uninterrupted
fashion: “There has been a significant shift from the concept of a sequence as
programming to the concept of sequence as flow.”
112
Thus what was once marked by
distinct programming units with intervals shifted to an incessant stream.
Williams contends that television is its own cultural form—it is not merely a
technological device, but a construct of social and economic conditions. In his
analysis, Williams examines television not only by watching it, but also by studying
printed program schedules. As a result of this approach, Williams notes that flow
operates primarily on three levels: (1) at the level of the programming, scheduling and
printed program ‘listings’, (2) the more apparent flow of “the actual succession of
items within and between the published sequence of units, and (3) “the actual
succession of words and images.”
113
Thus at the level of programming, television
broadcasters intentionally arrange shows in specific sequences. At the second level,
segments of programs and commercials flow into one another in an unrelenting
torrent. Finally, at the level of words and images, he observes that television
broadcasts constantly provide previews of later shows and segments to inform the
viewer what will be coming up. Williams suggests a difficulty in tracking and
accounting for all three levels precisely—and this difficulty in accurately mapping
and characterizing flow implies its complexity. For Williams, “flow” names
television’s sense of the perpetual present—its means of keeping the viewer’s

112
Ibid.
113
Ibid., 2003:90.
135
attention from moment to moment and from program to program. Indeed, it might be
considered the stream of television’s consciousness.
Williams’s concept immediately recalls Henri Bergson’s notion of “duration”
as our perceptual and intuitive experience of the continuous flow of time. While
science and culture insist upon structuring and organizing time into discrete units
such as seconds and years, Bergson instead asserts that our temporality is marked by
its constancy and continuity: durée (duration).
114
Bergson’s theoretical approach is
particularly constructive in my analysis of the replay as his examination of perceptual
experience is uniquely analogous to several key considerations of television’s
ontology. For instance, Herbert Zettl argues that the very essence of the physical
apparatus of television is one of motion and a state of becoming; unlike film,
television constantly rescans its image into the camera and redraws this image onto
the screen:
While in film each frame is actually a static image, the television image is
continually moving, very much in the manner of the Bergsonian durée. The
scanning beam is constantly trying to complete an always incomplete image.
Even if the image on the screen seems at rest, it is structurally in motion. Each
television frame is always in a state of becoming. While the film frame is a
concrete record of the past, the television frame (when live) is a reflection of
the living, constantly changing present. The live televised event and the event
itself exist in the same present. This is impossible with film.
115

Thus while the cinematic apparatus is characterized by its sequencing of still images,
the televisual image is constantly in a “state of becoming” as it is created upon the
screen. The notion of television’s flow might thus be applied to an even more

114
It should be noted that Bergson developed his theories about temporality well before the emergence
of television.
115
Herbert Zettl, “The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics,” Journal of the University Film Association
30, no. 2 (1978): 5.
136
elemental level than the base level “succession of words and images” that Williams
suggests—television, in its mere technological function, literally flows across the
screen as it is drawn in a constant state of becoming—not so much a “succession” as
a true continuum of sound and image. Zettl’s observation supports Stephen Heath and
Gillian Skirrow’s that television is a “production in the present.”
116

Linked to the televisual image’s mode of inscription—understood here as
perpetual and invariably transformative—is an issue at the heart of television’s
ontology: the indexicality of its relationship to that which it records. Jane Feuer
contrasts Zettl’s observation about its continual state of becoming with André Bazin’s
assertion that “photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of its transference of
reality from the thing to its reproduction.”
117
Feuer suggests that Zettl’s argument
invokes Bazin’s belief in film’s reproductive qualities of reality: “Zettl’s
phenomenology of cinema echoes Bazin’s ‘realist’ ontology without admitting, as
Bazin does, that ‘realism’ is based on artifice.”
118
Steve Lipkin supplies a closer
reading of the applicability of Bazin’s theory to televisual images. Lipkin argues that
television and video are more akin to painting than film in their televisual electronic
and “automatic” mediation of the image, as compared to film’s photochemical
processes.
119
Indeed, Lipkin contends that,

116
Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, “Television: A World in Action,” Screen 18, no. 2 (1977): 53.
117
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14.
118
Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” 13.
119
Steve Lipkin, “Technology as Ontology: A Phenomenological Approach to Video Image
Resolution,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12, no. 3 (1990): 93-98.
137
Certainly much of what Bazin says should pertain to video, since there is a
similar relationship between the photographed image and its recorded image.
The “molding” of light is electronic, rather that photochemical, and as such is
equally, if not more “automatic” in presenting what has been recorded.
120

But regardless of the differing means by which the television and cinema transfer and
construct their images, Zettl contends that at the heart of television’s mode of
expression is its capacity for instantaneity and liveness.
121
Thus while film and
television both are moving image technologies with the capacity to “transfer reality,”
the necessary gap between film’s production and exhibition mean that the cinema can
never display a live image.
Feuer thus builds from Zettl and asserts that television embraces its capability
to broadcast and depict live events. But for Feuer, television is rarely truly live—
instead, she proposes that, “Television’s self-referential discourse plays upon the
connotative richness of the term ‘live,’ confounding its simple or technical
denotations with a wealth of allusiveness.”
122
Feuer argues that while television
constantly insists on the appearance of being live, in actuality it relies on
segmentation and narrativization. As a result of this segmentation, Feuer takes direct
issue with Williams:
Yet “flow” as Williams describes it is pure illusion. It would be more accurate
to say that television is constituted by a dialectic of segmentation and
flow…unlike narrative cinema, segmentation is already a property of the text.
Williams should more accurately say that television possesses segmentation
without closure, for this is what he really means by “flow.”
123

120
Ibid., 94.
121
Zettl, “The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics,” 5-7.
122
Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” 14.
123
Ibid., 15-16.
138

For Feuer, television’s ideology of liveness relies on an interplay between the
segmentation of programs into discrete units (which she emphasizes in her essay) and
Williams’s “flow.”
Conceptually, the replay bridges the gap between Williams’s flow and Feuer’s
“segmentation without closure.” Given flow’s emphasis on continuity, its suggestion
of television as functioning in a perpetual present is reliant on its persistent linkage to
the future. In this capacity, flow attempts to maintain the viewer’s attention and
engagement with the television, incessantly informing its viewers of what is “coming
up” while simultaneously dismissing the past. While elements of programming within
flow’s model may refer to earlier programming—for instance, a late-night news show
which refers to a topical aspect of the dramatic program which preceded it, flow
almost invariably dismissively shrugs off the past in its attempts to maintain the
viewer’s interest in the future. With flow as television’s stream of consciousness, the
replay marks a recollection—a chance for television to return to its past. The nature
of this revisitation may be of explicit or implicit in its engagement with the past,
depending on the mode of the replay’s deployment; for instance, an instant replay
explicitly refers to the immediate past of television, while a rerun may instead
obliquely and indirectly cites the past by not drawing attention to recurrent nature.
Thus while the replay itself is a discrete unit and thus fits within Feuer’s
characterization of television’s segmentation, its deployment is rooted within the flow
television’s structure, from the level of the succession of words, images, and portions
of programming (i.e. the instant replay in a sports broadcast) to that of program
139
scheduling (i.e. stripping). Just as the scanning beam of light of the television image
is constituted in a constant state of becoming based on its electronic indexicality to
reality, the replay is rooted in its denotation of television’s past. This association with
the past is inevitably transformative for both past and present; just as our experience
of the present and our understanding of the past are shaped by the replay (i.e. an
instant replay in a sporting event revealing a previously unseen action), the replay
engenders the present and past’s mutual influence upon one another (i.e. the playing
of this same instant replay reinvigorates the past by revealing the previously unseen,
which in turn affects the present of the sporting event). Thus while the replay unfolds
in the continuous present, it is ineluctably based in the past, and therefore recursively
redefines both the present in which it operates and the past to which it refers. With
this grounding of the multivalent nature of the replay and its applications,
implementations, and implications within television theory, we may now productively
explore its more explicit deployments in television programming.

Time Delay & Instant Replay
Just as it had with radio, the national scope of the networks similarly
restrained their capacity to broadcast live across time zones. Nmungwun points to the
research in recording technologies which sought to address a number of the problems
inherent to television, including seeking “to delay broadcast of certain presentations
to a more convenient time” (namely, to account for the three hour time difference
between the East and West Coast markets); to “eliminate labor costs for night work”;
to extend network programming to affiliates not connected by cable or radio relay;
140
and for “postmortem” purposes to allow producers to see complete, finished work
prior to its transmission.
124
Facilitating the introduction of the instant replay to
broadcasting, the rapid growth, expansion, and proliferation of commercial television
outpaced the fairly slow and limited technique of recording television with film.
Instead, the broadcast industry turned to the successful and already established use of
magnetic tape for recording audio and adapted the technology for the purposes of
recording both sound and image. As a result of this research push, videotape recorder
models began to reach network broadcasters in the mid-1950s, effectively addressing
many of the limitations of recording television onto film. CBS became the first
network to leverage the new technology for a time-delayed West Coast broadcast of
its news program, “Douglas Edwards and The News” on November 30, 1956.
125

Thus market and labor conditions in the television broadcasting industry in the
1950s encouraged the adoption of magnetic tape technologies, resulting in their
widespread deployment and adoption by the early 1960s. The usage of magnetic tape
allowed greater and more immediate control over recorded content for the purposes of
editing and re-broadcasting. The implementation of these and related technologies
also facilitated the usage of such systems for perhaps the most familiar recognizable
(and scrutinized) mode of replay: the instant replay in televised sports
programming.
126
There is some debate as to exactly when the instant replay made its

124
Nmungwun, Video Recording Technology: Its Impact on Media and Home Entertainment, 100.
125
Ibid., 131.
126
It should be noted that an instant replay is known as an “action replay” in some countries, including
the United Kingdom. While each term clearly carries different connotations, they should be considered
interchangeable for the purposes of this consideration.
141
television debut. One popular account places its first deployment during the broadcast
of an Army-Navy football game on December 7, 1963.
127
However, this usage was
preceded by almost a decade in Canada—in 1955, George Retzlaff utilized a rapid
processing technology from kinescope recordings to produce replays of key moments
of games on the program Hockey Night in Canada.
128
While such film-based systems
proved expensive and cumbersome, the advent of magnetic tape technologies and
their rapid adoption by the broadcast industries during the 1950s facilitated the
widespread proliferation of equipment with the capacity to perform instant replays.
129

Indeed, perhaps the most familiar form of the replay is its use in sports
television coverage. During the 1960s and 1970s, ABC’s Roone Arledge integrated
novel technology and presentational techniques into sports shows such as ABC’s
Wide World of Sports and ABC’s Monday Night Football; he is widely credited with
the influential development and improvement of such technologies as the instant
replay and slow motion.
130
The instant replay has since become a standardized feature
of televisual sports presentation and its significance has rapidly grown since its debut,
to such an extent that the replay has now been incorporated into the rules of play of
several professional and collegiate sports. Officials may review decisions made in
“real time” by watching recorded footage of previous plays, allowing them to reverse

127
Erik Barnou, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 347-348.
128
Peter B. Orlik, “Hockey Night in Canada - The Museum of Broadcast Communications,” n.d.,
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/H/htmlH/hockeynight/hockeynight.htm.
129
Other early instant replay systems such as the Ampex HS-100 employed a disk-based system
similar to a phonograph to record up to 30 seconds of footage.
130
Brad Schultz, Sports Broadcasting (Woburn: Focal Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002), 11.
142
or revise decisions made on the field. While National Football League (NFL) rules
since 1986 allow officials to review plays by examining instant replays of recent
game events at their discretion, rule changes made in 1999 also grant the coach of
each team the authority to request a set number (currently two per half) of official
reviews of questionable on-field calls.
131
These requests for replays are at the head
coaches’ discretion, and the requesting team is penalized if the initial ruling on the
field is not overturned. NFL teams now employ personnel dedicated to constantly
scrutinizing instant replays of each play during a game in order to minimize risk of
penalty. As such, the proper usage of the instant replay has become an essential
strategic element to play itself of NFL games—and their play is increasingly marked
by interruption more than continuity.
The viewer’s temporal experience of NFL games, as well as other sporting
events, has been similarly fractured by the replay. As previously noted, broadcasting
networks have long employed the instant replay to accentuate specific sequences in
sporting events; these replays often occur outside of the game time of the depicted
event. That is, the game clock of a given sporting event is often paused while the
replay is shown both on television screens at home and on large screens in the
stadium.
132
Thus the viewer’s temporal experience of the sporting event is quite
distinct from the game clock of the event itself—as time continues for the spectator

131
Professional tennis offers another more recent example of incorporating replays into official rules,
adding the ability for players to challenge on-court rulings in 2006. The instant replays used in tennis
are not video-based, however. Instead they are three-dimensional recreations of the ball’s movement
recorded by sensors and rendered as a computer simulation.
132
For more on the video screens used in stadiums, see Greg Siegel, “Double Vision: Large-Screen
Video Display and Live Sports Spectacle,” Television and New Media 3, no. 1 (February 2002): 49-73.
143
during these replays, it freezes in the game. In the NFL (as well in other sports), the
replay therefore ruptures the analogous temporalities between the sport and its
spectatorship alike as well as further differentiating the two from one another.
However, despite disrupting both the game’s flow of play and its spectatorial
temporalities—and further detaching the game time from the spectator’s experience
of the game—the instant replay has become a requisite component of both the play
and spectatorship of sport. Feuer suggests that the technologies which engender the
usage of this form of replay on television demonstrate the tenuous relationship with
liveness that even “live” broadcasts such as sporting events enjoy:
Curiously, the most sophisticated new technology—such as computerized
graphics and instant replay techniques—was developed precisely for the
purpose of recording and freezing those “live” sports events that were
supposed to be the ontological glory of the medium… Clearly, in terms of this
simplest conception of the “live,” current American network television is best
described as a collage of film, video and “live,” all interwoven into a complex
and altered time scheme. Why, then, does the idea of television as essentially
a live medium persist so strongly as ideology?
133

As such, sport has become a natural locus for research on—and theoretical
investigation of—the “instant” replay. Margaret Morse analyzes the differences
between the experience of a stadium spectator and that of a television viewer. She
notes the use of replay and multiple cameras to induce temporal alteration and
compression of space, respectively.
134
Garry Whannel discusses not only the
transformation of time alluded to by Morse, but also what he terms the “spatial
fragmentation” of sporting events, which television producers craft from their use of

133
Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” 15.
134
Margaret Morse, “Sport on Television: Replay and Display,” in Regarding Television (Los Angeles:
American Film Institute, 1983), 48.
144
multiple camera angles and levels of zoom.
135
He suggests that this fragmentation is a
necessary byproduct of television’s transformation of sport into spectacle. This would
seem to indicate that the use of crosscutting to imply the simultaneity of disparate
actions, when combined with instant replay, redoubles the transformation of time and
space. Barbra Morris, in her analysis of professional wrestling and basketball, argues
that the replay serves as a “parenthetical phrase” in the liveness of television—it is an
aside which functions as a means of both appreciation and analysis of a current
text.
136
As Morris argues, the instant replay operates as a form of “descriptive
repetition” which forces the television viewer to shift from merely watching
television to a more active mode of engagement which incorporates analytical
assessment of replays.
137
For Morse, Whannel, and Morris, then, the instant replay
marks a form of fragmentation—be it temporal, spatial, or textual.
However, despite this established theoretical focus on sport as a means to
examine the instant replay, its historical and technological development and adoption
demonstrate the replay’s measured reach into other discursive dominions. In asserting
that “[m]ost viewers probably associate replay with ‘non-serious’ content on
television,” Morris suggests that the technique is generally leveraged during
programming considered trivial and thus passes as insignificant. I would argue,
however, that the replay has become an indispensable component in our wider
experience of television and other media. Rather than something which is associated

135
Garry Whannel, Fields in Vision (New York: Routledge, 1992), 97.
136
Barbra S. Morris, “Reading Replay in "Live" Television Text,” Journal of Popular Culture 20, no.
4 (Spring 1987): 149 & 152.
137
Ibid., 154.
145
with the trivial and insignificant, the replay has instead become a fundamental
component of the broadcast and reception of television, shaping both industrial
strategy and the experience of viewership. Televisual replay also plays crucial role in
our construction of social and cultural memory, as the events which are played and
repeated on television often become part of our cultural lexicon. Erik Barnou supplies
a provocative sequence for the popularization of instant replay, tracing its widespread
use through the reporting of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in late 1963.
138
The
incessant replaying of this shocking event attests to the pervasiveness of magnetic
technologies in news broadcasting as early as 1963. Moreover, the fact that this event
is roughly concurrent with one of the earlier sports-broadcast uses of replay indicates
that the instant replay resonated culturally far beyond the sports arena.

User-Controlled Replay, Televisuality & “Television”
Theoretical conceptions of television as a cultural and social form have shifted
as the television as a technological form has evolved. Since the 1970s, a growing
number of consumer electronic products have placed increasingly greater degrees of
replay control into the hands of the viewer, effectively transforming viewer into user
and forever altering the experience of the moving image. As Anne Friedberg has
indicated, the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR)’s capacity for playback, “significantly

138
Barnou, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2:347-348.
146
altered the terms of both televisual and cinematic viewing.”
139
By affording the user
the power to record and play back video, Friedberg contends that the VCR introduced
the potential to ‘time-shift’ by allowing the user to watch what she chooses at a time
of her choosing and to re-watch films and programs as often as she likes. This
capacity for active control of pre-recorded content (be it televisual or filmic) allowed
users the capability to instigate their own replays; as such, the VCR represents an
early instance of user-initiated and -controlled replay.
Vivian Sobchack argues that the technological innovations of film, video tape,
and electronic media have also effected a greater cultural and perceptual shift:
…although relatively novel as “materialities” of human communication,
cinematic and electronic media have not only historically symbolized but also
historically constituted a radical alteration of the forms of our culture’s
previous temporal and spatial consciousness and our bodily sense of
“presence” to the world, to ourselves and to others.
140

Sobchack argues that these media forms have forever changed our understanding not
only of media, but also of our lived experience. Similarly, these comparatively
nascent forms both reflect and effect significant shifts in our perceptual recognition
and cognitive processing of space and time. As Sobchack contends, cinematic and
electronic media have transformed not just our sense of presence, but our sense of
presence “to the world.” I argue that this shifting sense of presence is ongoing: as
technologies such as the replay allow us greater—and more precise—control over our

139
Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Reinventing Film
Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Christine. Williams (London: Arnold ; Co-published in the United
States of America by Oxford University Press, 2000), 440.
140
Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence’,” in
Electronic Media and Technoculture, ed. John Thornton Caldwell (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2000), 137.
147
experience of media, they similarly alter our understandings of materiality and bodily
presence. Our conceptions of our presence to ourselves, others, and to the world were
certainly transformed by cinematic and electronic media, but the evolving nature of
that which constitutes electronic media demands that these conceptions of presence
similarly continue to transform. Indeed, while these conceptions of presence were
altered by our ability to represent ourselves in an e-mail message, they are also
further reconfigured by our participation in a social network or our creation of an
avatar in a virtual world such as Second Life. Similarly, as the replay becomes an
increasingly central element of our experience of television, our conceptions of
presence and temporality must continue to transform.
In her book Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey similarly suggests that the
ability to control (specifically to pause with precision) both the image and story
afforded by new media technologies such as DVDs and video recorders has
fundamentally transformed our experience of film.
141
Mulvey reasons that the
“cohesion of narrative” of film is subjected to undue pressures by newer technologies
which allow viewers to experience films in settings and under conditions quite
removed from traditional theatrical exhibition practices (that is, viewers may no
longer be in a darkened room and may be subject to any number of external
distractions). In addition to engendering potentially distracting environments, Mulvey
asserts that “digital spectatorship also affects the internal pattern of narrative:
sequences can be easily skipped or repeated, overturning hierarchies of privilege, and
setting up unexpected links that displace the chain of meaning invested in cause and

141
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006).
148
effect.”
142
Through their enhanced capacities for environmental flexibility and direct
control of previously linear narratives, digital technologies therefore impose
irrevocable challenges to film’s traditionally dominant narrative mode of
sequentiality.
As both Sobchack and Mulvey distinctly illustrate, it is clear that such technologies
have familiarized spectators with the active manipulation of formerly linear narrative
forms. Mulvey’s focus on the precision of control of play back afforded by DVDs,
and I would argue that emergent televisual devices such as TiVo similarly and
significantly expand upon the viewer’s agency in the precise control of the linearity
of television’s passage.
While television may have historically functioned as a predominantly linear
narrative form, its adoption, incorporation, and cooption of a range of technologies
have fundamentally modified its material structure and function. In their book
Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin note the dual tendencies of new
media (and television) toward transparent immediacy or hypermediacy.
143
Clement
Greenberg’s analysis in “Modernist Painting” provides a useful point of reference for
this dichotomy: while representational art (or in this case, transparent new media)
seeks to conceal itself, modernist art (read hypermediacy) seeks to draw attention to
itself.
144
For television, Bolter and Grusin observe that “hypermediacy is the style of

142
Ibid., 28-29.
143
Jay David and Richard Grusin Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 21-44.
144
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical
Texts (New York: Harpers Collins Publishers, Inc., 1992), 308-314.
149
most news and sports programming.”
145
Indeed, the televised broadcasts of both news
and sports have undergone dramatic televisual transformations in the last ten years.
News broadcasts are now dominated by multiple screens of reporters and newsmakers
talking to one another from across the globe. The geographical placement of these
reporters clearly connotes “liveness,” and as Bolter and Grusin observe: “Just as
reality and mediation have become inseparable off-screen, so hypermediacy has
become the formal mark of liveness on television.”
146
The omnipresence of the
crawling news ticker is another sign of this reverence for “liveness,” with some
stations displaying multiple tickers in order to keep their viewers informed, most
prominently in the days following September 11, 2001.
147

This trend towards televisual hypermediacy has also become clearly prevalent
in sports broadcasting. The constant development of new CGI video graphics is
typified by the Fox network’s graphics-laden presentational style following their
acquisition of NFL broadcast rights in 1994. New camera technologies such as the
SkyCam places a camera suspended from a wire harness above the football field,
strongly evoking the angle of virtual cameras found in football videogames. The CBS
EyeVision (which allows for rotating replays, reminiscent of the “bullet time” special
effects technology developed for The Matrix (1999)) further the televisuality of sports
broadcasting. These developments add weight to John Caldwell’s 1995 observation
that even seemingly unscripted media events such as sporting events are

145
Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 187.
146
Ibid., 194.
147
It should be noted that financial stations have long favored this multi-ticker approach for economic
indicators such as stock prices.
150
“comprehensively planned, scripted and rehearsed.”
148
Thus, while they appear to be
fully “live,” they are, in fact, carefully choreographed and orchestrated productions.
This false appearance of liveness also supports Bolter and Grusin’s assertion that,
“whether transparent or hypermediated, all television programs present the experience
of watching television as itself authentic and immediate.”
149
For Bolter and Grusin,
two of the key claims of television are its authenticity and immediacy—the
importance of that which is portrayed on-screen is both real and relevant, regardless
of how truly “live” it is; this contention supports Feuer’s assertion that television
actively produces a sense of liveness, regardless of its source material.
Caldwell, however, challenges the importance of liveness to his own
investigation. He boldly declares that “any effective analysis of televisual style must
also shake itself of one other theoretical obsession: liveness.”
150
As previously noted
in his discussion of sports programming, Caldwell maintains that television’s alleged
liveness is often an illusion: “Television has always boasted liveness as its claim to
fame and mark of distinction, even though the programming that floods from its
channels seldom supports this air of distinction and pretense of liveness.”
151

Caldwell’s suggestion that examinations of televisual style should “shake
themselves” of considerations of liveness seems overly dismissive, as televisuality
and the notions of liveness are often bound together—consider the clear example of

148
John Thorton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 18.
149
Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 187.
150
Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, 27.
151
Ibid., 31.
151
televisual hypermediacy: the news ticker or sports score. These evolving
informational graphics are rooted in notions of both liveness and the televisual.
Similarly, the televisual can also lend itself to the production of Williams’ flow:
consider the use of promotional clips advertising upcoming shows that visually
supersede the closing credits of shows—or more commonly now, the shows
themselves. Caldwell’s analysis is rooted in the shifting nature of television
production due to the influence of computer graphic and editing technologies, but his
work suggests the importance of examining similar changes which have been taking
place in the home.
These changes are indicative of the changing nature of television and
television studies—as the television set increasingly adopts the qualities of “new”
media, its ontological status shifts, and so must its closely-held theoretical models.
These models must be re-examined in order to evolve and adapt them appropriately;
as television and the experience of television change, so too must our theoretical
approaches. Digital cable and satellite services have further fragmented the television
audience as homes can now receive hundreds of channels. This fragmentation goes
far beyond the economic crisis that Caldwell identifies in Televisuality and is
indicative of the increasingly desperate battle for audience share. The process of
digitization effects such a fundamental shift in traditional definitions of television that
it requires another ground-up rethinking à la Williams or Caldwell—but one that
acknowledges that their models still retain significant currency. The rapid growth of
the U.S. digital cable industry means that television increasingly is delivered into the
home via wire rather than arriving via shared airwaves. Instead of as a broadcast
152
signal, television now reaches homes as a purely digital stream that is decoded into
channels by a set-top box.
Television is thus increasingly assuming the qualities that theorists have
reserved for new media. The reduction of broadcast signals to digital bits suggests
Lev Manovich’s criteria of “numerical representation”: “whether created from scratch
on computers or converted from analog media sources, [new media objects] are
composed of digital code.”
152
Bolter and Grusin suggest that even the term ‘channel’
may be outmoded:
Although a vast network of technical devices and economic and social forces
typically intervenes between the origin and delivery of the image, we still
behave toward television as if it were a direct channel between ourselves and
the event. We even use the term channel to designate the signal delivered on
one frequency.
153

These perspectives seem to indicate that the arrival of digital cable, to borrow
Manovich’s terms, is how television became new. Television’s ontological shift has
not been immediate—a number of technologies have gradually chipped away at the
traditional conception of television to produce its current—and continuously
changing— experience.
The appearance of devices such as Digital Video Recorders (DVRs)—TiVo,
for example—has altered the role of the television in the home and has given the user
a greater and more direct degree of control of replay.
154
That the TiVo is essentially a

152
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), 27.
153
Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 188.
154
William Urrichio provides a useful historical context for this change with tracing of the
technological development of television. See William Uricchio, “Old Media as New Media:
Television,” in The New Media Book (London: The British Film Institute, 2002), 219-230.
153
computer running the Linux operating system also provides a clear confirmation of
Ellen Seiter’s prediction, in 1999, that “Television sets and computer terminals will
certainly merge, cohabit, and coexist in the next century.”
155
Boddy deftly
investigates the early days of TiVo and other devices he terms PVRs (Personal Video
Recorders) in his article “New Media as Old Media: Television.” Boddy suggests that
DVRs/PVRs have “put into question traditional industry accounts of [television’s]
role as signifier of national identity (i.e. the BBC), its ontology of liveness and
photographic realism and its place as a consumer product within the gendered
household.”
156
These devices actively and digitally record “live” television, allowing
the user to instantly and precisely “pause” and “rewind” what she watches—much
like a VCR, but without cumbersome electromagnetic cassette system used in the
VCR.
157
The remote control for the TiVo includes an instant replay button, which will
automatically “jump” the user back three seconds in her program; an advertisement
for TiVo proclaims, “Instant replay in the palm of your hand!” Similarly, digital cable
services such as OnDemand allow users to stream or download programs from a
central video computer server to their television and typically feature pause, rewind,
and fast-forward capability. All of these devices indicate a fundamental shift in both
televisual and cinematic viewing practices, with replay as a central unifying and

155
Ellen Seiter, “Television and the Internet,” in Electronic Media and Technoculture (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 228.
156
William Boddy, “New Media as Old Media: Television,” in The New Media Book (London: The
British Film Institute, 2002), 242.
157
In an interesting development, a number of television commercials have appeared that employ the
DVR or its interface. In a series of “DVD Ready” Sprite advertisements, “hidden” messages appear for
a frame or two, encouraging the user to pore over the commercials frame-by-frame to “win” free soda.
Other ads depict an artificial DVR interface to simulate a user rewinding to watch the commercial
again.
154
structuring logic. The replay has thus become a pivotal, implied, and privileged
component of our televisual experience; the capacity to actively and instantly rewind
and replay portions of programming—even that which is “live”—is becoming both a
familiar feature of the remote control and a requisite attribute of the server-based
distribution of programming. This user-controlled deployment of programming has
already begun to affect conventional broadcast strategies (such as HBO’s offering of
new episodes of shows a week before their broadcast) and may soon replace them
altogether. Television’s march towards digitality has effectively redoubled its
tendency toward repetition, as the material transformation of television “from atoms
to bits” has subjugated television to the algorithmic malleability of software and
hardware code.
158

This shift to the digital perhaps rendered most explicit by internet video
service YouTube. Following the completion of playing a video on YouTube, the user
is immediately presented with the option to “Replay” the same video, or to select
from a sampling of videos deemed to be related to the one just watched by shared
information in the digitized videos’ metadata.
159
The popularity of services which
privilege replay such as YouTube demonstrates the increasing role that the digital
plays in the experience of television; this popularity similarly evinces importance and
relevance of this consideration of replay. YouTube announced in 2010 that over 2

158
The phrase “from atoms to bits” is taken from Nicholas Negroponte’s conception of the
transformative shift engendered by digital technologies. See Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New
York: Knopf, 1995).
159
This opportunity to “Replay” the just-watched video has been replicated by other online video
services such as Vimeo, and websites such as www.tubereplay.com offer automatic replays of selected
YouTube videos.
155
billion videos were watched daily on its website, almost double the prime-time
viewers of the major American television networks for the same period.
160
This
profound shift of viewership from traditional broadcast television to YouTube’s
digital television service is illustrative of the seismic shift underway in both the
television industry and in its modes of reception. The agency afforded by control over
the playback and replay of content on YouTube and other similar services is
unparalleled in analog television, but broadcast television’s shift to the digital has
engendered a transformative effect in its ontology. In its conversion to Manovich’s
numerical representation, television has become increasingly recombinant in its
nature, with programming offered in segmented, piecemeal fashion via à la carte
services such as OnDemand, YouTube, and DVDs. At the ontological core of these
emergent modes of distribution, exhibition, and reception is the capacity for replay—
they each emphasize and privilege replay in distinct, albeit shared, fashion.

Duration, Memory, and the Replay
As I have demonstrated in exploring the historical deployments of replay, the
privileging of replay enacted by these digital technologies is not without precedent in
television’s past. Be it in the form of digital television, analog reruns, or at the level
of the instant replay, the replay fits within televisusal flow, but it is equally
characterized by its segmentation—as Morris suggests, the replay marks a fragmented
interruption or aside to the flow of television. In his articulation of immeasurability of

160
Glenn Chapman, “YouTube Serving Up Two Billion Videos Daily - Yahoo! News,” Yahoo! News,
May 17, 2010,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100517/tc_afp/lifestyleusitfilmtelevisioncompanygoogleyoutube.
156
the lived experience of durée, Bergson argues that while science strives to quantify
spatiality and temporality into discrete units—kilometers and inches, hours and
seconds—our consciousness is instead defined by the continuous and heterogeneous
flow of both space and time. It should be noted, however, that for Bergson our
conceptions of time and space are by no means absolute. He asserts that
consciousness must perform necessary processes of selection and filtering to properly
parse essential information for the mind:
In one sense we might say that the perception of any unconscious material
point whatever, in its instantaneousness, is infinitely greater and more
complete than ours, since this point gathers and transmits the influences of all
the points of the material universe, whereas our consciousness only attains to
certain parts and to certain aspects of those parts. Consciousness—in regard to
external perception—lies in just this choice. But there is, in this necessary
poverty of our conscious perception, something that is positive, that foretells
spirit: it is, in the etymological sense of the word, discernment.
161

This process of discernment effects a “necessary poverty” of consciousness—we are
only acutely aware of the most relevant pieces of sensory data. The same could be
said of the replay—by necessity, the replay is confined to the medium in which it
functions. The television replay does not replay anything external to the television
broadcast, of course. As such, the instigator of the replay—be it a television producer
or a TiVo user—similarly exercises a degree of discernment through the processes of
selection exercised to privilege certain moments and sequences over others. This
privileging in turn may resonate culturally as well—consider the familiarity of
sequences such as Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination or the more recent “wardrobe

161
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, vol. 1990 (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 1908), 38.
157
malfunction” of Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl.
162
Furthermore, this demarcation
and containment of a given time and space evokes something of a “necessary
poverty.” In this sense, the replay’s discernment exposes the specificities of the
medium—that is, the constitutive elements which define it and differentiate it from
other forms but also its obsessions, preoccupations, and traumas.
163
Through
processes of selection, the television replay allows its viewers to fixate on specific
moments and sequences as it replays them repeatedly, privileging these occurrences
over others in an unrelenting stream. Similarly, Bergson defines our capacity to
function in the present with an overwhelming amount of external stimuli and past
memories as a product of processes of discernment. Thus, much like specific
elements of our conscious experience and memory are favored at particular moments
(i.e. our focus upon the consecutive words on a page when reading and their
relationship to both our memories of the text and personal experiences), the replay
selectively concentrates the viewer’s focus upon certain limited portions of the
televisual text’s past. In this sense, the replay functions in a fashion akin to Bergson’s
discernment, as these moments and sequences are purposely differentiated from
television’s continuous flow. The replay insists upon its own import amongst a stream
of comparatively inconsequential information.

162
It should be noted that TiVo issued a press release in the weeks following the Super Bowl,
identifying the Miss Jackson sequence as the most replayed moment in television history. This
statement revealed the degree to which TiVo monitors and tracks user statistics, somewhat
undermining their image to TiVo customers were unaware of their datamining practices. See Paul
Bond, “TiVo Bares Facts on Instant Replay,” Hollywood Reporter 382, no. 21 (February 3, 2004): 79.
163
That is to say, that which constitutes a replay in television is quite different than that which defines
a replay in film or in interactive media, as discussed elsewhere in this project.
158
Replay can function as a repetition within the program itself, and through its
privileging of a specific section of a broadcast, it further enhances this portion of
programming. That is to say, by replaying a particular sequence, the instant replay
often divulges information which was previously hidden or unknown. New details are
often revealed to the viewer—particularly when new camera angles or effects such as
slow-motion are employed—essentially broadening the experience and appreciation
of the given sequence. The replay may allow an individual to re-view a previously-
experienced moment, but, as suggested by Bergson’s explication of the way we
conceive of duration, a replay is not a true repetition:
Now, if duration is what we say, deep-seated psychic states are radically
heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any two of them should
be quite alike, since they are two different moments of a life-story. While the
external object does not bear the mark of the time that has elapsed… duration
is something real for the consciousness which preserves the trace of it, and we
cannot here speak of identical conditions, because the same moment does not
occur twice.
164

Given our ontological status as constantly changing beings, we can never truly re-
experience something as the first time. The implications for the replay are evident:
though replay may represent a precise repetition of a given previous experience, our
current state has already been shaped by that previous experience. When a replay
occurs, our experience and consciousness are certainly not a constant: each iterative
experience of a replay affects our experience and perceptual understanding of the
world—the replay effectively recursively redefines our consciousness. “That under
the influence of the same external conditions I do not behave to-day as I behaved
yesterday,” Bergson comments, “is not all surprising, because I change, because I

164
Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 199-200.
159
endure.”
165
Thus, because we constantly change, we will always experience each
moment differently (even if only minutely so)—even under the same circumstances.
And because the replay is a repetition of something we have already experienced, our
re-experiencing of that sequence has unavoidably been fashioned by our previous
experience of the sequence. The replay thus iteratively and recursively re-defines our
experience of a given sequence—it is at once very much a part of the flow of
television, yet is also a disruptive break in its passage. In this sense, Bergson’s notion
of duration is essential in this consideration. While the replay may mark a rift in
television’s flow, it concurrently functions as an uninterrupted element in our
experience of television’s succession of sounds and images. The replay thus enhances
our experience of television, adding a dimension to television’s “duration” by
facilitating our re-consideration of its content. Furthermore, the instant replay
compels television to function more like the process of our own perception and
memory; it operates in a capacity markedly similar to Bergson’s intuitive
understanding of the interrelation between past and present. Just as our present
perceptions and stored memories interact and feed into one another, the replay’s
constant engagement with the historical and the ongoing evinces its unique
relationship with both—as well as its analogous connection to our own perceptual and
cognitive functioning.
The replay functions in multiple registers on television. While inherently
based in the industrial and regulatory practices and the magnetic and digital
technologies which have engendered its usage, its practice is increasingly prevalent in

165
Ibid., 209.
160
our everyday lives and our lived experiences. As technologies which incorporate the
instant replay become more common in our experience of television, our
understanding of television must necessarily shift. Just as DVRs and similar
technologies call into question some of our long-held ontological and industrial
beliefs about television, the instant replay also demands a closer examination and
reconsideration of our perceptual experience of television’s duration. The replay
demonstrates that television can no longer be characterized simply by its flow,
liveness, or continuity, but is also now marked by its selective fragmentations and
segmentations, privilegings and repetitions. As I have demonstrated in this chapter,
television’s deployments of the replay have profoundly shaped its industrial practices
and the viewer’s modes of reception; just as the replay has transformed that which
constitutes television, it also, in its recursive fashion, has re-defined how we
understand and experience the past, present, and future. Unfortunately for Frank
Lambard, the rest of England’s World Cup team, and their fans, it has not yet changed
the way in which FIFA officiates its games.
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Chapter 3: Re: Play

Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.
We are left with nothing to embrace but the new or the nostalgic... – Jim
Thorn, “Play’s the Thing”

Chapter Introduction
In “Towards Computer Game Studies,” Markku Eskelinen makes a case for
computer game studies requiring their own unique academic approach—in fact, he
specifically criticizes the use of pre-existing narrative theory in its application to
game studies.
1
Eskelinen summarizes: “A sequence of events enacted constitutes a
drama, a sequence of events taking place a performance, a sequence of events
recounted a narrative, and perhaps a sequence of events produced by manipulating
equipment and following formal rules constitutes a game.”
2
It is difficult to take issue
with Eskelinen’s assessment that video games warrant a novel academic
methodology, as Janet Murray’s seminal Hamlet in the Holodeck clearly
demonstrated in 1997.
3
But it seems overly dismissive and counter-productive to
reject the theoretical models developed in other academic arenas simply due to the
fact that games offer new narrative paradigms and novel media experiences.

1
Note that for the purposes of this discussion, the phrases “computer games” and “video games” may
be used interchangeably.
2
Markku Eskelinen, “Towards Computer Game Studies,” in First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance, and Game (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 37.
3
Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997).
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While narrative theorists prefer to examine games as communicative story-
based texts, ludologists instead consider games in a systemic analysis of their formal
and abstract elements. This structural focus engenders the examination of games as
systems, scrutinizing the core components of play. However, this structural and
systemic focus upon games often overlooks the patterns of player behavior, perhaps
because such practices are considered to fall under the purview of the sociological
consideration of games (as championed by pioneers such as Johan Huizinga).
However, I wish to propose that the study of video games requires an approach which
incorporates the consideration of their cultural, social, and political aspects of games
and the symbiotic relationships these facets enjoy with the industrial, economic and
ideological factors which shape them. Furthermore, this approach must necessarily be
grounded in the ontological deliberation of the dual constituent elements of video
games: the ludic and the digital. I will therefore begin this exploration with a
discussion of this bipartite nature of the ontology of video games. After establishing
this framework, I will then explore the multiple implementations and implications of
the replay through several critical lenses. This exploration will include the
consideration of the replay’s function as an industrial strategy, its ideological
significance, and its evolving relationship with play itself.
While it is readily apparent that play is a central component of any traditional
game experience, the pleasures of most—if not all—games also rely upon the
mechanic of replay. Rarely does one play a game just once and this repetition is an
essential element in learning a given game. For instance, a beginning checkers or
tennis player may engage in multiple contests in order to fully learn the rules and
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develop effective play strategies. In almost all games, a player practices her play
through actions of repetition, both in specific drills (such as a tennis player hitting
balls against a wall) but more commonly through playing and replaying a game. As
previously noted, non-digital games often offer a far greater degree of variability due
to their play within the “real world” (i.e. a potentially infinite number of variables
such as environmental factors are often unrepeatable). While a player may repeat her
exact moves in subsequent contests, the precise replay of a game based in the “real
world” is often impossible. For instance, if, in a given sequence of play, tennis player
‘Anne’ served a ball and then ran to the left side of the court to lob the return volley
to a place unreachable by her opponent ‘Barbara,’ what would happen if the serving
player Anne attempted to repeat her exact moves on a subsequent point? Anne might
be thwarted by Barbara’s return instead being hit to the right side of the court, thus
rendering her movement to the left side to return useless. Similarly, environmental
conditions such as wind might affect the ball’s movement, requiring both players to
adjust their play, movement, and strategies accordingly. Games with multiple players
are necessarily less predictable and less prone to repetition or replay than games for
single players as they inherently introduce a degree of unpredictability to their play.
For example, in contrast to a game of tennis, a game of solitaire with a deck of cards
is far more open to notions of replay and repetition. If a deck is shuffled exactly the
same way each time a game of solitaire is played, a player may truly replay her game
by pursuing the exact same strategy and moves each turn, resulting in the same
predictable outcome on each move.
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Video games place an even greater emphasis on the function of replay, as the
player must familiarize herself with increasing complex control and interface systems
in order to master game environs, often demanding multiple navigational attempts
through particularly challenging areas within the game. For example, a player of
Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) must learn the spatial and temporal patterns of
the game in order to successfully navigate its levels and challenges. Games such as
Guitar Hero (Activision, 2005) emphasize replay as a form of mastery, rating a
player’s “performance” by the accuracy with which they are able to emulate and
mimic the game’s prompts. Replay may also function on a macro-level in video
games, as some texts encourage players to re-visit and re-explore areas or replay
through them in their entirety in order to fully complete the game. Furthermore,
several recent video games incorporate elements of replay and repetition in their core
game mechanic—I will discuss categories, instances, functions and modes of replay
below.
Although I have noted that replay is a core defining characteristic of play, it is
important to note the flexibility and versatility of the term, and of its application and
implications to play. I employ the term to describe digital, industrial, cultural, social,
ludic, and ultimately spatial and temporal practices specific to video games. I will
explore replay as an industrial strategy first through its utilization at the underlying
logics of computer programming and then via its function as an economic tool for
games as commodities. Video games may incorporate sectional and comprehensive
replay, encouraging or effectively requiring players to replay either portions thereof
or their entirety, and fan and player practices have also emerged which emphasize
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linked notions of replay. More recently, games have increasingly privileged replay
via their capacity to record the player’s actions, and replay has thus begun to emerge
as constitutive to the play of these games.

Difference and Materiality in Computing and Gaming Structures
Computers as State Machines
In this section, I will explore role of difference in computational and gaming
structures, arguing that difference functions at the core of the ontology of digitality.
At the most fundamental levels, computational structures are inherently structured by
binaristic logical systems, as almost every computer-based device is governed by the
flow of electrically charged particles through a series of simple gates. Much like a
light switch, these gates effectively operate as switches that can be set to one of two
states—on or off. The elementary duality of this logical structure is at the core of
computer processors—from a rudimentary electronic device to the most profoundly
complex supercomputer. The alignment and continuous reconfiguration of these
switches essentially means that computers are in a constant state of flux, shifting from
one state (a specific configuration of switches) to another. This succession of discrete
states explicates a term applied to this principal function of processors: a finite state
machine, or more simply, a state machine.
That computers and software are dramatically more complex than they were a
few years ago is no surprise. Consecutive generations of computer processors
effectively increase the possible processing capabilities of a chip in an exponential
fashion—computer scientist Gordon Moore proposed that the capacity to increase the
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number of transistors (a basic component of a computer chip) doubles every two
years.
4
This predictive model for processor development has remained roughly
correct since its writing in 1965, as advancement in design and material used in
fabrication have provided for the continued exponential development of processors.
As such, one of the few constants for computational technologies is the steady and
rapid evolution of their processing capacities. But while computational technologies
are marked by the constancy of their transformational evolution, the core technologies
of digitality remain unchanged. As even the most complex processors (and the
algorithms and software which run upon them) are fundamentally governed by binary
logic, further consideration of the implications of their status as state machines is
warranted. The difference between successive states in a state machine is the
principle through which a program functions, and it is the same principle which
governs the user’s experience. For the user, it is the difference between states which
constitutes the feedback loop of “interactivity;” as well as the core principle by which
we process visual and aural movement—as discussed in the introductory chapter.
5

Much like the function of near-repetition in our experience of cinematic and

4
In 1965, Moore initially suggested that processors would double in capacity every year, but he
revised this assessment, suggesting that processors actually double capacity every two years. See
Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, April 19,
1965; Gordon E. Moore, “Progress in Digital Integrated Electronics,” Technical Digest 1975,
International Electron Devices Meeting, IEEE (1975): 11-13.
5
The origin of the digital realm’s particular conception of difference is often traced to Charles
Babbage’s Difference Engine, a mechanical device considered the first step toward the digital age, and
so named for its use of the mathematical method of differences that reduced complex logarithmic
tables to simple addition and was thus especially suited for simple automation. For a thorough
overview of the history of the development of the Difference Engine and its guiding mathematical
principles, see Michael Lindgren, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Miller,
Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz., trans. Craig G. McKay (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1990).
167
televisual movement, the concept of difference in the digital is inherently and
symbiotically linked to sameness, in that preserving the state of a given system can be
just as important as changing it.
The ability to change or preserve the given state of a system is instantly
recognizable to anyone who has ever used a word processor. As we enter data into a
document, we change its state. When we save the document and close it, we preserve
the document in its given state, which then allows us to return later to further modify
it; the “undo” function in word processors acts in a comparable fashion, allowing a
user to iterate through earlier states. The “Back” button of a web browser operates in
much the same manner, allowing a user to return to the previous state an earlier web
page in the browser’s history.
6
In a very fundamental sense, principles of difference
dictate basic notions of interactivity. As a user inputs data into the state machine of a
computational system, the state of the system changes, and it thus correspondingly
changes its output in response to the input. This input/output cycle constitutes
interactivity—as we input data via the interface (most commonly today via a
keyboard or mouse), this data alters the system and the system correspondingly
outputs data (for instance, moving the mouse will move the corresponding mouse
cursor or pressing the letter “k” will produce the character “k” on-screen). It should
be noted that changes to the state machine may be made explicit to the user (such as
the appearance of “k” on the screen) or, more often, remain hidden to the user (the

6
Tara McPherson contends that computer technology encourages a fluidity of movement—a
“volitional mobility”—by way of their nimble navigation and intensive processing of complex code.
She suggests that computer thusly enable our own (virtual) mobility: “As we roam the web, the
computer remembers where we’ve been, even if we don’t.” See Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness,
Mobility and the Web,” in The Visual Culture Reader 2.0 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 463.
168
addition of the “k” to the current file in the computer memory and/or hard drive).
However, regardless of the degree to which such changes are readily apparent to the
user, the centrality of difference between successive states to computational systems
is evident.

Difference & Game Structures

Video games offer a useful means of exploration of the fundamentality of
difference to digital media as they render explicit its primacy to interactivity, as
interactive media—and video games in particular—are reliant on principles of replay
and repetition. Given the rapid development of the graphical capabilities of video
games and their increasingly life-like depictions and capacity for representation, it is
sometimes easy to forget the processes upon which these systems are built. In
simplified terms, games are assembled from data structures and algorithms that are
then processed through the hardware on which they run. As software code being run
through processors, games are built and operate upon the aforementioned minute
electrical currents that navigate the tiny physical spaces of circuits, constantly
changing the state of countless switches between the binary state of 1 and 0 in a
highly regulated and rule-based temporality. In essence, these electrical currents are
the physical manifestation of the computational bits to which they correspond. As
such, in the representational spaces and times that they depict in game spaces, these
bits also correspond to tangible electrical currents within the physical space of the
chip. Thus the electrical pulses of computer circuits that represent bits of data, in their
larger and allegorical representation of time and space within games, are very much
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also regulated by “real world” time and space in the physical circuits in which they
are generated and function. In this manner, the virtual representations rendered in
games correlate to physical elements in the material function of computer hardware.
Given their construction as computational structures, it is helpful to build from
Jesper Juul’s articulation of the game as a state machine:
The more fundamental part of games is a change of state, the movement from
the initial state (the outcome has not been decided) to another state (the
outcome has been decided)… a game is actually a state machine: it is a system
that can be in different states; it contains input and output functions, and
definitions of what state and what input will lead to what following state.
7

In the most rudimentary sense, games are rule-based systems governed by changes in
states. Video games process data input by the player in accord with these rules and
output a change in the game state in response to this data. In turn, the player inputs
more data, and the loop continues, with the player constantly responding to the
changing game state. Successful play of a game requires proper response to the
game’s state, and it should be noted that even non-digital games are almost entirely
state machines in which a state or finite set of conditions exists and then is altered by
the player’s or players’ play. Consider a game of chess—to begin play, the pieces for
both sides are arranged in a pre-determined pattern on opposite sides of a board.
When the first player moves a piece, the board and game’s state changes in a discrete
fashion, altering both the configuration of pieces upon the board, but also the possible
moves (as defined by the rules of the game). That games of chess may be expressed
in a shorthand form such as descriptive or algebraic notation (i.e. the movement of the

7
Jesper Juul, “Introduction to Game Time,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and
Game (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004), 132-133.
170
Queen to a specific square may be represented by “Q-QB3” in descriptive notation or
“c1 c3” in algebraic notation). A player’s ability to precisely reproduce a famous
game of chess or a specific set of moves written in such notation evinces the capacity
of the game to be represented discretely and thus its status as a discrete state.
Almost any game’s structure is reliant on an explicitly bounded space or arena
in which the play occurs. That which occurs within the boundaries of this space is
considered to be governed by the rules of the game, and that which exists outside of
this bounded space is not. Johan Huizinga refers to the arena and conventions of play
upon which players agree as the magic circle—the social contract to which
participants in the game must abide, typically delineating the boundary between the
“play” world and the “real” world.
8
Huizinga’s magic circle articulates the
occasionally nebulous area in which players agree to follow the rules, within reason.
The bounds of this circle can be broken by players refusing to play or by a physical
danger—for instance, a game of tag will take a lower priority when crossing a busy
street or other such dangerous area.
9
This bounded space is vital to a game’s
definition as a state machine—by defining the limits of the game, one makes the
number of variables in a game finite and thus defines the game within discrete units.
It goes without saying that some non-digital games are more readily translatable to

8
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press,
1950), 15.
9
Some games exploit the tensions created by the magic circle. For instance, Alternative Reality Games
(ARGs) in which the boundaries of the game are blurred with those of real-life, making it difficult to
determine when one is playing the game and one is not. Examples include those used in advertising
campaigns, such as the advertising campaign The Beast designed to promote the film Artificial
Intelligence A.I. (Spielberg, 2001) or commercial games such as Majestic (Electronic Arts, 2001).
Similarly, the narrative of the film The Game (Fincher, 1997) depicts the protagonist drawn into an
ARG.
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discrete modes of representation—for instance, while algebraic notation may be well-
suited to describing and re-enacting a chess game, developing a similar system for a
playground game of tag would be considerably more complex given the lack of
distinct spaces, pieces and a host of other variables which resist simple mathematical
representation. That some games are more suited to digital forms is apparent—the
vast number of video game versions of chess compared to the dearth of digital games
based on tag demonstrates this spectrum of the capacity for quantification of game
systems. But the mathematical representability of video games evinces their particular
utility as a means of exploring digital notions of difference. With the centrality of the
function of difference to digitality thus clarified and established, we may now turn to
the usefully expansive concept of replay to continue our consideration of video
games.

Programmatic Structures of Replay and Repetition
In order to navigate the theoretically rich implications of the replay’s
multivalent applications and implications in the modalities of video games, it is
necessary to map their historical and technological emergence and development.
There is some debate as to what precisely constituted the first computer or video
game. Several roughly concurrent developments occlude and complicate a precise
chronology, but a commonality across these earliest games is suggestive of
limitations of early game development. At the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a
government nuclear research facility, William A. Higinbotham created what some
believe to be the first computer game, Tennis for Twoin 1958. Higinbotham, who had
172
previously worked in early radar research and engineered timing devices for atomic
bombs, created a two-player tennis game for entertaining visitors to the facility.
10

Independent of Higinbotham’s creation, students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) created Spacewar! four years later as a two-player experience
pitting two spaceships against one another in a duel. But the video game industry did
not blossom until Nolan Bushnell created a commercial version of the MIT game
which he entitled Computer Space (Syzygy Engineering, 1971) and used the nominal
royalties from this adaptation to finance the creation of a new company, Atari, and its
first original game.
11
The tennis-like game Pong debuted in 1972 and its immense
success fueled the rapid growth of both Atari and the video game industry as a whole.
That these early games were based around competition between two players is
by no means accidental, as technical limitations in early games often restricted the
types of games that could be created. Hardware and software constraints initially
prevented game developers from realistically simulating a computer player with
artificial intelligence (A.I.), especially as the graphics themselves were particularly
processor-intensive. Later games allowed for rudimentary behavior of computer-
controlled elements, enabling simple and predictable movement of opponents in the
game—for instance, the behavior of the A.I. paddle in a single player game of Pong is
effectively limited to one axis of movement and a constant speed of movement. As
hardware and software rapidly evolved, games systems allowed for increasingly
complex computer-controlled behavior. Consider the difference between the simple

10
Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution, 15.
11
Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon—The Story Behind
the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, 1st ed. (Three Rivers Press, 2001), 38.
173
left-right patterned movement of the gradually descending aliens in Space Invaders
(Taito, 1978) to the more complex behavior and double-axial movement of the ghosts
in Pac-Man only two years later. While A.I. behavior of computer-controlled
characters has grown increasingly complex over the years, the progression of
complexity has by no means been a constant—largely due to the simple fact that
some games and game types privilege more complex A.I. than others. Extant
instances of A.I. are almost invariably designed with their end-task in mind and even
the most apparently complex and capable A.I. algorithmic structures do not possess
any degree of proficiency for anything other than the task for which they are
designed. For instance, IBM’s Deep Blue (1995-) supercomputer, which has
challenged and even beaten chess world champion Gary Kasparov, would be
incapable of playing a game of checkers or performing an apparently simple task such
as explaining basic rules of chess to a new player without some degree (and by no
means insignificant) of re-programming. Similarly, computer-controlled characters in
(what was then) a graphically-advanced game such as Doom (id Software, 1993)
behave in a fairly simple fashion (namely, reacting to a player based solely on her
virtual proximity to them) compared to the game’s revolutionary apparent depiction
of three dimensions from a first-person perspective.
12
Thus while far more complex
A.I. behavior is certainly possible in later video games, it is not always (and in fact

12
The game actually is closer to a depiction of two-and-a-half dimensions, as despite its appearance of
multi-planar environment of variable heights, the game’s engine illusionistically renders two-
dimensional maps as simply having multiple heights. As such, no object can truly exist above or
beneath another, and thus can also be represented in two dimensions, much like a road map.
174
rarely) implemented, and almost always within narrow rule sets, such as those for
chess.
What all this suggests is that, to varying degrees, most video games
demonstrate essential elements of predictability in both their play and the behavior of
their A.I. characters. This predictability is strongly linked to the pleasures of play,
from video games with the most rudimentary A.I. behaviors to those which are the
most multifarious. For the purposes of clarification, if, via observation from play or
replay of a game, a player can predict that the aliens in Space Invaders will constantly
move from left to right, then she may plan her actions accordingly. Similarly, a player
of Halo (Bungie, 2001) will know that certain computer-controlled characters will use
cover and hide behind elements of the game maps (such as a boulder) to better protect
themselves when the player is assaultive and then conversely become more
aggressive when the player is not attacking. While such complex behaviors are made
possible through more sophisticated A.I. routines, it is important to note that both
examples of computer-controlled behavior are ultimately based on patterns of
movement; in the more simple case of Space Invaders, these patterns are pre-
determined and hard-coded into the game program, while the A.I. routines of more
complex games demonstrate a pattern of movement that is adaptive to the player’s
play. Elements of pseudo-randomness may be inserted into the behavioral routines of
such A.I. characters, affording a degree of relative unpredictability to their
movements. As such, these A.I. characters appear to be more life-like than instances
found in earlier games as the more complex characters may act or react to player
movements in variable fashions, eschewing the predictability of earlier, less adaptable
175
patterns of movement.
13
As the hardware and software systems upon which video
games run grew more powerful, these games could become more elaborate in their
play mechanics and behaviors; in a sense, this enhanced complexity engendered a
diminishing in the predictability of the behavior of game elements, effectively making
games more difficult to learn and play. As will be explored in the next section, replay
historically emerged as an economic and formal strategy to ease the aptitudinal
challenges inherent to new and unfamiliar video games.

Learning the Ropes: Industrial Strategies of Replay
Industrial practices emphasized replay as a means of helping to both introduce
consumers to video games and to allow players to learn how to play them. Here, the
primacy of replay to video games is apparent through the mechanics of play
underlying their basic structure, intimating the role of the digital materiality of games
in shaping both their formal play mechanics and their industrial and economic
deployment. Many video games are fundamentally built around challenges of
physical dexterity or logical problem-solving. Players must typically manipulate an
interface, such as a gamepad or joystick and several buttons, to control a character, or
avatar, or sequence of events presented on an electronic screen. The player must
inevitably complete trials which range from the rudimentary (i.e. move a character
from one game space to another) to the considerably more conceptually complex (i.e.

13
Indeed, more complex patterns of play may emerge from the dialectical relationship between the
player’s play and the game’s response, including unintended play mechanics and the behavior of
computer-controlled elements—such processes are called emergent play. See Katie Salen and Eric
Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
2004), 159-163, 383-385.
176
solve a puzzle to acquire an object from one game space which may only be used in
conjunction with several other objects to overcome another obstacle).
14
Many games
privilege exact and dexterous manipulation of game elements—most often, the
player’s avatar—in order to succeed within the game’s system of scoring and play. In
order to reduce player frustration, games which require such exacting control often
incorporate mechanisms to accommodate the learning curve inherent to the variations
of their interfaces and play mechanics. Through these mechanisms, a player is given
more time to learn the mechanics of play within a given game, rather than
immediately ending the game upon a player’s mistake. Perhaps the most readily
apparent example of this type of mechanism is the notion of “lives” or “tries” in a
game, which were popularized by early arcade video games such as Space Invaders.
15

This mechanism effectively allows the player several (most commonly, three)
attempts within the same particular game instance. If a player fails to navigate a
particular section (for example, being caught by a ghost in a game of Ms. Pac-Man), a
“life” is deducted from the player and the game’s state is reset to an earlier moment or
difficulty level at which the player lost the life.
16
In some games, players may be
awarded bonus lives for reaching specific goals within the game such as accumulated

14
In games in which an avatar is noticeably absent, players often must still complete designated tasks.
For instance, Tetris (Alexey Pazhitnov/Spectrum Holobyte, 1985/1986) requires players to complete
homogeneous lines from falling blocks of different shapes. As the game progresses, the blocks move
increasingly faster, placing a greater emphasis on manual dexterity.
15
The origins of the play mechanic of offering multiple chances within a video game can be traced into
games of chance found in carnivals and mechanical arcades.
16
It should be noted that the game generally does not reset to precisely the game conditions which
immediately preceded the player’s “death,” but instead games often re-create conditions similar to
those which preceded this player failure, such as the speed of the game, complexity of enemy character
movements and so forth.
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point totals, effectively rewarding the player for precise play and extending the length
of her game.
17
In addition to alleviating player frustration, the development of this
game mechanic can also be read as an industrial strategy, given its popularity in
arcade games in which players must pay each time they play a game.
18
Permitting
players multiple opportunities to navigate obstacles psychologically offsets the
player’s investment of capital for the purposes of play by implicitly emphasizing the
role of skill in play. By being given multiple chances to play for a given fee (i.e. 25
U.S. cents), a player at once feels that she is getting more play for her money and
encouraged to believe that the unsuccessful play of a game (and its associated “game
over” screen) is the result of unskillful play and not an unfair game. The video game’s
incorporation of repeated attempts as a core mechanic thus clearly evinces the
replay’s function as industrial strategy.
It should be noted that as games became increasingly popular in domestic
settings on personal computers and home consoles, more nuanced mechanisms for
extending play became more prevalent, occasionally linked to the emergence of other
game genres.
19
For instance, Castle Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992) allocates the
player only one life, but instead employs a heath meter which fluctuates upwards and

17
In many arcade games, players may continue play after losing their accumulated lives or attempts,
allowing the arcade game to continue to generate revenue from a player, rather than forcing a player to
start the game over from scratch.
18
This practice can also be traced to pinball games and other carnival games of amusement which
emphasize skillful play and afford players multiple chances or attempts to complete specified goals or
accumulate points.
19
For example, role-playing games, with mechanics of play adopted and adapted from pencil and
paper games, often give a player’s character one “life,” but assign the character a set number (i.e. “hit
points” which reflects the overall health of the character. Injury to the character results in a
diminishment of this number, while healing adds points to this total.
178
downwards respectively based on injuries sustained and healed by the player’s avatar.
As a player learns the mechanics of play and attempts the navigation of the game’s
spaces, her avatar may be gradually injured (in lieu of being killed outright), allowing
her to learn how to better negotiate the game and manage her avatar’s virtual health
state.
However, while it may initially appear that such practices discourage more
immediate notions of replay as repeated attempts are not explicitly incorporated into a
game’s structure, such games in fact enact replay in a more literalized sense of the
term. While arcade games are often structured by successive levels characterized by
increasingly rapid play, multifarious enemy characters, and complex levels without a
clear or definitive ending, games developed for home gaming systems such as Castle
Wolfenstein 3D often are constructed as series of linear levels or game spaces which
the player must traverse in order to ultimately complete a final objective and
complete or finish the game (such as killing Adolf Hitler in Castle Wolfenstein 3D).
20

The economic and practical circumstances of play almost certainly shape the
structures of arcade and domestic video games. Play of arcade games is generally
allowed by the player’s outlay of a small amount of capital (generally 25 cents) in
order to play a singular instance of the game—the player essentially rents the game
with this capital to play it for a time determined by the game itself (in games in which
the length of play is temporally predetermined regardless of player skill), the player’s

20
Any number of exceptions to this distinction are evident, such as the ability to finish arcade games
such as Dragon’s Lair (Cinematronics, 1983) or Renegade (Taito, 1986) or the inability to complete
home console or personal computer games such as Tetris. However, I wish to merely indicate a
tendency amongst each broad categorization of game which is informed by the economic
circumstances of their play.
179
skillful play (more proficient players may play for a longer period of time), or a
combination of both.
21
Home games, on the other hand, are most typically purchased
by the player for a far greater amount of capital (buying a new game for a home
console is typically $40-60 U.S. dollars). The pronounced difference in cost between
games designed for arcade and home markets has effected an assessment of the price
of the purchase of a game for the home as measured against its long-term recreational
use-value; this valuation of a game’s potential for pleasurable return on investment is
termed “replay value,” by which a game’s potential for continued play after its
completion is measured. Given that arcade games generate revenue by encouraging
players to insert monies to initiate new games or to continue a game, play is typically
structured around shorter-term goals and levels and difficulty is increased at a rapid
rate to quickly surpass the skill levels of average players; this industrial strategy also
encourages shorter-term play of the game, allowing more players access to the arcade
unit. As such, games designed for arcade and non-domestic settings tend to
demonstrate broadly dissimilar tendencies toward average length of play, with games
designed for domestic settings (which are thus sold to the consumer) being
characterized by significantly longer investments of player time and a pronounced

21
For example, a racing game such as Out Run (Sega, 1986) offers the player a set amount of time to
reach checkpoints along the track; passing these checkpoints will reward the player with more time to
reach the next checkpoint—but this time is sufficient only provided the player makes no mistakes en
route to the next marker. Conversely, a game like Gauntlet (Atari, 1985) will provide the player’s
avatar with a set amount of “health” for each coin the player inserts; this health automatically
decrements as time passes during play, the steady decrease accelerating when the player’s avatar is
injured and occasionally being raised to reward the player. The persistent counting down of this
attribute effectively functions as a timer for the player’s game session, and this attrition can only be
slowed by skillful play or by inserting more coins into the machine—unambiguously linking capital to
the length of game play.
180
propensity towards game designs which incorporate an element of finality and
completion.
The video game’s technological development and its associated economics are
reflected in the multivalence of the replay’s utility as an industrial strategy. Early
arcade games predated relatively low-cost means of storage devices for retaining data
between game sessions. Arcade systems were built from circuit boards which
generally did not support the capacity to store data when they are powered down, and
so even the small amounts of data that are preserved while the game was powered on
(such as the high scores of recent players) are lost when the system is turned off.
While early home systems demonstrated a similar tendency (again, due in part to
expense of storage devices), home games begin to emerge which allowed players to
continue play from a previously reached point.
22
This enhanced capacity was also the
product of increasingly complex games which would require many hours of play to
complete them. Games such as Metroid (Nintendo, 1986), allow players to “resume”
play with their accumulated objects and abilities by providing a unique 24 character
code when the player dies; when the player wishes to resume play later, she may re-
enter this code, in which the player’s progress is saved. These save codes are pre-
determined, however, and not uniquely generated—a player of Metroid on another
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console may enter the same code with the
same results.
23
The U.S. version of The Legend of Zelda included a battery in the

22
It should be noted that games designed for home computer systems, which included storage devices
such as floppy disk drives or hard drives allowed users to save games earlier than mass-market game
consoles.
23
This save code system applies to the U.S. release of Metroid, as the original Japanese iteration
employed an add-on accessory for the NES console (called the Family Computer or Famicom in
181
cartridge for the game, which would allow a player to preserve her game after power
is extinguished, effectively bypassing the cumbersome save code system used in
Metroid and the U.S. release of Kid Icarus (Nintendo, 1986).
24
However, games such
as these only permit a player to save her game progress in an approximated form, as
each time a player restores her saved game, she will start in a pre-designated space
within the game, albeit with her accumulated possessions, abilities and
accomplishments.
25
For example, entering the code for a saved game in Metroid
would start the player at an arbitrary pre-determined place in the virtual space (such
as the start of a level), rather than in the specific place where the game was saved.
Such games thus only allow players to save a rough approximation of the game’s
state—essentially, they allow a player to preserve the essential elements of the game,
such as the precise amount and variety of items the player has accumulated, while
disregarding other elements such as the exact position and trajectory of other in-game
characters. In this sense, the notion of replay is somewhat diminished, as players may
restore a saved game to replay something fairly close to the last iteration of play.
More recent games such as Wolfenstein 3D allow players to save the game state in a
far more complete and nuanced form, effectively preserving almost all elements
observable by the player, such as A.I. characters and their trajectories. A player may

Japan) called the Famicom Disk System, which allowed players to save games on proprietary floppy
disks.
24
The earlier Japanese version of The Legend of Zelda (1986) did not use a battery—instead, it was
released as a “launch title” to coincide with the release of the Famicom Disk System and instead also
employed the rewritable disks upon which to save games.
25
By this I mean objects accumulated, special “skills” the character has gained, and accomplishments
such as dungeons completed. If the player is in the open world, she starts in the same place and if she
saves in a dungeon, she restores to the start of the dungeon.
182
thus save the game in a particular state and then restore it any number of times with
profoundly similar results, as the player’s precise position and those of other
characters will be reproduced identically with each restore. The player’s capacity for
replay is thus greatly enhanced in such games, allowing players to replay a sequence
of a game ad infinitum. Thus affords the player the capacity to try different strategies
of play in order to overcome specific examples, especially in games which privilege
stealthy play over more aggressive approaches, such as Metal Gear (Konami, 1987)
or Thief: The Dark Project (Looking Glass Studios, 1998). Thus as replay emerged as
a constituent element in the industrial design and marketing of early video games, it
has more recently been reinstated and reinscribed in this capacity, albeit in a
distinct—yet perhaps more literal—sense of the term. As video games have grown
more powerful and increasingly shifted to domestic settings, the function of replay
has been both further underscored and elaborated in its deployment and application.

Structures of Repetition
As video games demonstrate a diverse range of notions of replay in their play,
through their design, and via their function as commodity, it is essential to
acknowledge the role of repetition in their software architecture. Built upon the
binaristic systems of difference inscribed in a video game’s hardware is the software
code which constitutes the game itself. Within the language and syntax of this code,
structures of repetition are central to even the most elementary programming and
software design as code relies on algorithms which themselves rely on recurrence. In
order to accomplish more complex tasks, computer programs must generally parse
183
compound activities into relatively simple tasks which a computer system may
sequentially (or concurrently) accomplish. Algorithms are designed to perform tasks
on and with data structures in order to achieve the results desired for the program’s
output. In a very basic sense, one example of this type of repetition can be thought of
the use of counters in program functions. Say, for example, that a particular program
action must be performed ten times; it is common practice to design a function (a
smaller part of a program) that contains a looping structure that will iteratively
increment a counter each time a task is performed until the counter reaches ten. Such
tasks are common to software design, allowing programmers to instruct computers to
perform repetitive tasks while avoiding explicitly writing repetitive instructions to do
so. Iterative looping structures can be performed until a specific condition is met,
such as the counter reaching a specified number or while a predetermined condition
has not been met (for example, displaying a message until the user presses a button).
Similarly and by contrast, a programmer may structure a function to loop via a
concept known as recursion, by which a function may enact (or, in programming
parlance, “call”) itself as part of its structure. Rather than repeating all of its
instructions completely before repeating, a recursive function will effectively begin to
loop again before it concludes the execution of all of its instructions, only to complete
a given instance when the loops initiated by earlier instances complete; this technique
effectively allows programmers to design functions which employ more simple code
which simultaneously performs more complex behaviors.
26
The centrality of iterative

26
Recursion is fairly complex concept and can be difficult to explain without diagrams. For example, a
function designed to paint a group of Matryoshka dolls nested in another could use a recursive loop
called Open&Paint which would open a doll, check to see if another doll is inside, and if so, call itself
184
and recursive looping demonstrates the intrinsic nature of repetition to structures of
software and video game design. In turn, this evinces the systemic import of replay to
video game structures at their most fundamental levels of the materiality of hardware
and the encoding of software.
The more nuanced behaviors allowed for by later games and more complex
A.I. routines and algorithms help elucidate the concept of replay as an industrial
strategy. Complex patterns of movement introduce a higher degree of variability to
successive instances of play of a particular game, providing a player with a distinctive
play experience each time. If the computer-controlled characters in a game move in
identical patterns each time a game is played, the long-term potential enjoyment of
the game is significantly diminished. Conversely, greater degrees of variability
between and within games can be linked to the potential pleasure a game offers a
player on successive plays. Within casual and critical discourses, games are often
ascribed a “replay value” which attempts to approximate or quantify the longer-term
pleasures offered by a game. Games built around more linear narratives in which the
player may accomplish goals through via singular solutions are considered to have
low replay value, as playing the game after its completion will likely offer the player
a profoundly similar to experience to their first time play, but without the element of

again. If no other doll is present, it would then paint the doll found. So, if 3 dolls are nested, the
function would open the first doll, note the second doll and recursively start over, open the second doll
and note the third doll. After unsuccessfully attempting to open the third doll, the program would then
reach the next instruction: to paint the current doll (the third and smallest doll). With this loop
complete, the program would now continue on the half-finished loop which initiated this completed-
loop, allowing the program to paint the second doll (an action which was not yet finished as the second
doll was opened by the program before it was painted. Finally, with the second doll painted and that
loop complete, the program returns to the first loop, which had opened the first doll by completing its
remaining task: to paint the first doll.
185
newness. Certain game genres are more prone to such low valuation in terms of
replay, as their narrative and play structure often afford little degree of variability. For
example, adventure games such as the King’s Quest (Sierra On-Line, 1984), Police
Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (Sierra On-Line, 1987), and The Secret of
Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games, 1990) generally are built around a linear narrative
through which players progress by solving a series of puzzles. Such games often offer
little in the way of new experiences to players who replay them, as the same series of
actions will be generally be required on each play through of the game, effecting
identical resultant narrative developments. In contrast to such pre-determined
narratives, other types of games lend themselves to greater replay value due to the
higher degree of variability built into their design. For instance, simulation games
such as F-19 Stealth Fighter (MicroProse, 1988) or X-Wing (LucasArts, 1993) allow
players navigation of three-dimensional space with little in the way of a pre-
determined narrative, other than the conceit of the fictional scenarios in which they
are set.
27
The player’s actions determine her own experiential narrative, resulting in
far greater degree of variability on successive plays. It should be noted that games
which offer little-to-no replay value often offer a greater narrative richness and
nuance in their initial play, as such game types allow a game design to more precisely
craft the player experience through scripted events and pre-determined sequences
rather emergent gamic narrative produced by the player’s play.

27
It should be noted that F-19 Stealth Fighter was a more complex version of Project: Stealth Fighter,
released in 1987 (MicroProse).
186
Given the linkage between a game’s perceived replay value and the likelihood
of its purchase by a player, varied game design and industrial strategies have emerged
as a means of increasing a game’s replay value. One approach establishes set rules of
play and then randomly generates the content of the game in an attempt to effect a
unique play experience each time the game is played (within the confines provided by
the rules of the sport). Such an approach could be compared to a sporting event—the
rules and regulations of a given match are pre-determined, but each instance or game
played of the sport results in a relatively unique outcome.
28
An early example of such
a game is Rogue (1980), a game first developed by students Ken Arnold, Michael
Toy, and Glenn Wichman on large computer mainframes found in research
institutions.
29
The fantasy dungeon-exploring game employed simple “graphics”
based on the character set found on computers—while variants of the game used
different symbols, the player’s avatar might be represented by an ampersand (@),
which they guide through simple maps represented by minus signs (-), pound signs
for hallways (#), and plus signs for doors (+), battling increasingly challenging
creatures represented by other letters of the alphabet. Each time Rogue is played, it
randomly generates the maps and the challenges that the player will face, producing a
unique game experience each time. As such, Rogue is an example of enormous replay
value—the game proved so successful that the developers released a commercial
version of Rogue in 1983 through their newly-formed company Artificial Intelligence

28
As determined by the rules and regulations of the sport and other factors such as weather conditions,
player performance, injuries and the like. True variability is somewhat restricted by the rules which
govern the play, but still allow for a large degree of unpredictability.
29
After Arnold, Toy, and Wichman developed the non-commercial Rogue at UC Santa Cruz and UC
Berkeley, it inspired later hobbyist iterations such as Hack (1982) and NetHack (1987).
187
Design. The replay value which is the product of Rogue’s style of generative content
and can be clearly traced to later, far more financially successful games such as
Diablo (Blizzard, 1996) and Spore (Maxis, 2008). The economic utility of this
industrial strategy of replay is clear; however, other industrial and social practices
employ and articulate quite different modes of replay; these approaches will now be
explored.

Replay as Sectional Mastery
Espen Aarseth argues that space—and its representation—is an essential
element of all computer games.
30
But while he acknowledges that this virtual space is
inflected with a degree of ambiguity stemming from its representational abstraction,
Aarseth asserts the import of spatiality to their function; he suggests that games
“celebrate and explore spatial representation as their central motif and raison
d’être.”
31
For Aarseth, this “preoccupation with space” is what truly differentiates
games from other cultural forms such as novels or films. To be certain, despite the
abstracted nature of the spaces depicted in video games, the navigation and
exploration of spatiality is a dominant trope of many video games. The games in
which spatial navigation are emphasized often indirectly or directly require players to
replay portions of them. The earlier-mentioned Super Mario Bros. remains a utile
example here—successful completion of Super Mario Bros. is nigh impossible for

30
Aarseth builds from the work of Anita Leirfall and (in limited fashion) Henri Lefebvre.
31
Espen J. Aarseth, “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games,” in
Cybertext Yearbook 2000, ed. Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa (Saarijaärvi: Research Centre
for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä, 2001), 161.
188
first-time players, as players must iteratively and recursively study and build from
their mistakes while learning the controls of the game (i.e. the correct button to jump)
and the required movements to successfully navigate the game’s levels (i.e. when and
where to jump). Such games certainly derive a degree of their pleasure—and
displeasure—from their emphasis on repetition. A player gains a degree of mastery of
these virtual spaces through her repeated attempts at its navigation and negotiation.
Similarly, a player may be frustrated by the inability to successfully traverse a given
virtual space or level within the game, stymied even after numerous attempts to do so.
These twin drives inherent to navigational repetition indicate the linkage between
replay and affect—a relationship which will be further discussed below.
This form of sectional replay—the practice of replaying specific portions of a
game to allow for navigational mastery—is inherently linked to both a desire for
knowledge and sensorimotorial performance, as a player must practice to learn both
the patterns of the game but also to practice and refine her own control of the game.
Games such as Super Mario Bros. are often classified as “platform” games or
“platformers” given their heavy emphasis on the player’s navigation of virtual spaces
dominated by floating platforms which the player must jump to and from to
successfully complete levels. The mechanics of this genre of games dictates precise
platform-to-platform movement, as missing or mistiming a jump is almost always
penalized, either directly (i.e. the player’s avatar falls of the bottom of the screen,
effecting a lost life) or indirectly (i.e. through lost time or forcing the player to re-
attempt navigation of the space).
189
In addition to spatiality as a central component of the play mechanics of video
games, temporality is also an essential element. Mark J. P. Wolf reminds us that, “as
in the cinema, temporal structures are a central element of a video game’s
experience.”
32
He suggests that the tendency of games to loop obstacles (such as in
the case of the repeating traffic pattern through which a player must guide a frog in
Frogger (Konami, 1981)) is indicative of the need for the player’s mastery of both
spatial and temporal structures within a game: “Just as players must often have some
idea of a game’s spatial structure in order to navigate through them, a sense of the
temporal loops and their timing, linkages and other structures is often also important
and may even be navigable.”
33
Given the complex spatiotemporal navigation required
by such games, replay of them is essential in order to both better familiarize the
player with the control interface, as well as to allow the player to study the movement
and timing of in-game elements and to practice her own spatial movement through
the virtual space and its associated temporalities. For instance, a player of Donkey
Kong (Nintendo, 1981) generally must replay the game a number of times to study
the timing and movement of in-game elements such as barrels being thrown by the
game’s namesake antagonist while simultaneously rehearsing and gaining knowledge
of effective strategies of play; in order to become more successful in the game, the
player thus must learn and enact effective spatiotemporal navigational techniques—
put simply, the player must learn not just where to move, but when to move.
Processes of trial and error are intrinsically associated with the play of many video

32
Mark J. P. Wolf, “Time in the Video Game,” in The Medium of the Video Game (Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press, 2001), 90.
33
Ibid., 81.
190
games, and thus the pleasures of their play can be strongly connected to Freudian
pleasures of repetition.
In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud argues for the relationship between
repetition and pleasure: “repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is
clearly in itself a source of pleasure.”
34
Freud associates the pleasures of repetition to
his observations of a childhood game based on the anxieties and pleasures provoked
by the dual processes of disappearance and return of a familiar object. But this
linkage between Freud and the pleasures of repetition in video games is rendered
even more explicit with his suggestion that repetition also satisfies a desire for
perfection. For Freud, an “instinct towards perfection” functions as a central
structuring logic in the psyche: repetition of an action or an experience suggests the
repressed desire for the satisfaction gained from perfecting that action or experience.
In her desire to successfully navigate a gamespace, a player must persistently replay
the section in order to perfect her play and gain mastery over the space.
While many video games implicitly rely on this spatiotemporal mechanic and
its related desires, some expand on this category of replay in illustrative applications
which are useful for the purposes of this discussion. Super Mario Kart (Nintendo,
1992), an example of a fairly simple go-kart racing game, allows players to record
their lap times on the game’s race courses. Players may then compete against existing
records on the track, which are recorded as “ghosts” against which the player races.
Here, the player replays sections of the game (in this case, racecourses) in order to
directly challenge her previous navigational attempt of these same spaces. The

34
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 36.
191
player’s desire for perfection is thus inscribed into the play of the game itself, with
each successful iterative navigation overtly evincing Freud’s proposed “instinct
towards perfection.” In this sense, the play of the player is recorded to augment and
supplement subsequent replay—rendering replay as a central component of play.
Other games make use of this variation of replay in distinct yet analogous fashion,
placing a pronounced emphasis on sectional mastery as a means of advancement.
Games such as Gran Turismo (Polyphony Digital Inc./Sony, 1998) incorporate timed
portions which reward players with incremental bonuses and rewards for completing
sections within specified time requirements.
35
Similarly, the practice of obliging the
player to repeatedly navigate spaces until she can perfect that space is evident in
games such as Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003), a first-person shooter game set in
World War II. Rather than utilizing the mechanic of providing a player multiple lives
with which to traverse a large gamespace, Call of Duty instead supplies its player
only one opportunity to negotiate a space, but instead limits the size of the space and
automatically saves the player’s progress through a larger game space at regular
intervals.
36
As the player’s progress through a large space and game level is regularly
recorded, she must only start at the last point at which the game saved if her character
is killed. In particularly challenging areas of the game, the player is thus compelled to

35
Games will often offer staggered rewards, which compensate the player in a tiered fashion—for
instance, a racing game may offer rewards of varying degrees (i.e. bronze, silver, and gold) to players
for meeting specific temporal requirements. It should also be noted that a wide range of games
incorporate timed portions, this is a feature which is not limited to racing games.
36
Other games employ a comparable mechanic by which allow the player to manually save her
progress or automatically save it at regular intervals or “checkpoints.” Examples of this approach can
be found in titles such as Out of this World (Delphine/Interplay, 1991) and Half-Life (Valve/Sierra On-
Line, 1998).
192
replay the same section over and over until she can successfully navigate it. Again,
processes of trial and error are privileged in games such as these, as the player must
iteratively attempt different strategies in successive replays of specific portions.
While somewhat dissimilar to the sectional replay engendered in Super Mario Kart,
replay in games such as Call of Duty is all but compulsory.
It should be noted that while each of these instances of sectional replay
certainly cater to the player’s desire for the pleasures inherent to repetition, they also
function as industrial strategy. Either by requiring players to achieve sectional
mastery of games or rewarding players for such mastery though incentives, the
producers of such games may effectively extend the game’s replay value at relatively
low cost—particularly in contrast to the cost of designing and implementing new
content in the game. Games may also similarly incentivize players to play through
levels on multiple difficulties or to achieve secondary goals in order to encourage
their replay. For example, Xbox Live, the online service for the Microsoft Xbox 360,
awards players bonuses entitled “Achievements” unique to accomplishing specific
tasks within each game. Points are awarded to a “Gamerscore” on the player’s
account on the service which may be compared to those of other players, encouraging
players to compete with one another to attain higher scores.
37
Effectively this feature
of the online service indirectly encourages replay, as players must often repeatedly
attempt to meet the criteria for these achievements to obtain them. Higher

37
The “Achievement” and “Gamerscore” features also encourage players to purchase and play multi-
platform games (those which are released on multiple consoles to reach the widest possible audience)
on a Microsoft Xbox system, as other comparable systems such as Sony PlayStation 3 did not initially
incorporate such a feature—although Sony has since added one to its online service.
193
Gamerscores on the Xbox Live system roughly equate to more accomplished—or at
least, more dedicated—players, and thus this form of replay correlates to a degrees of
social and cultural capital within the Xbox Live community. Encouraging players to
achieve mastery of specific sections and portions of games thus emphatically
demonstrates this industrial function of replay. The economic practicality of this
particular application of replay as an industrial strategy can be demonstrated via a
consideration of games which urge players to replay not just portions thereof, but
instead replay their entirety.

Strategies of Comprehensive Textual Replay
While some games offer or promote replay through their design or encourage
replay of specific levels or sections, other games encourage players to replay the
game text in its entirety. In these games—which are most often adventure or role
playing games (RPGs) in which the player must solve a number of puzzles and
advance the development of their character or avatar over the course of a number of
hours of play, players are encouraged to replay through the entire game after its
completion. Such games offer players incentives, such as new costumes, equipment,
or abilities for their avatar within the game, effectively altering their repeated play of
the game in minor or significant fashions. This design strategy is motivated at some
level by economic factors—given the significantly higher cost of new games
(typically 40-60 U.S. dollars in 2009 prices), video game creators often attempt to
deliver an arbitrarily-defined amount of play time for a game. This amount of time is
the investment of time that a player must make to complete the game—game reviews
194
often quantify the minimum amount of time required to complete a game, noting any
potential extra time that players may invest to fully “complete” the game—namely, to
fulfill secondary and tertiary objectives within a game. This amount of time is by no
means an established quantity, and instead is most often adopted by game companies
as an acknowledgment of offering game buyers a perceived fair-market value for the
investment of their financial capital (and thus both their vocational and recreational
labor). Games which explicitly or implicitly encourage the replay of their entire text
can effectively multiply the amount of play time with minimal financial investment in
terms of game development costs. For instance, if a game involves the exploration of
a haunted house which concludes when a player navigates all of the rooms in a house,
allowing the player to restart the game by exploring the same house with some degree
of variation would be far cheaper to incorporate than designing another house for the
player to explore. A player of Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996) who has completed the
game is “rewarded” with the opportunity to replay the same game with a different
costume for the player’s avatar (or as a character with the same attributes but a
different visual representation). Other games offer more varied experiences in their
comprehensive replay—for instance, Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero (Sierra
On-Line, 1989) allows the player to choose one of three different types of character
when she initially starts to play, and each type of character allows the player access to
different areas of the game and pre-determined sequences. Later games such as
System Shock 2 (Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios, 1999) and Deus Ex (Ion
Storm, 2000) allow the player to assign their characters specific skills and attributes
and develop them through play, solving the puzzles in each game in different fashions
195
as the player chooses (i.e. sneaking past a guard with a stealthy character versus
confronting the same guard with more aggressive character); these games’ design
provide for an inherent flexibility in problem-solving in the game, allowing players to
replay the game and complete it with different play strategies on successive replays.
Similarly, Dead Rising (Capcom, 2006) allows players to restart the game with the
same developed version of their character—thus allowing players the benefit of
controlling a more capable character immediately rather than tediously developing the
character from scratch once again. Other games explicitly encourage players to replay
the game one or more times to reveal the true ending for a game—for instance, the
Nintendo Gamecube title Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon
Knights/Nintendo, 2002) prompts its players replay the entire game several times,
with each iteration revealing more of the game’s backstory and re-casting its
conclusion, culminating with a final “true” ending which explains and encapsulates
each iterative play-through. In these multiple fashions, games may encourage players
to replay them in their entirety in order to comprehensively “finish” the game by
exploring all of the options offered in its play. Such design strategies clearly mark a
concerted appeal to the aforementioned replay value, thus raising the perceived use-
value of the given game.

Cultural, Social, and Ideological Deployments and Implications of the Replay
As we have seen, replay in video games functions at the level of material
digital and algorithmic processes and in multiple fashions as an industrial and
economic strategy deployed by the producers. However, as I will now demonstrate,
196
replay in video games functions as cultural, social, and ideological practice as well.
While some games encourage and engender replay explicitly by their design, others
intimate its application and usage through their play. In these cases, players are not
necessarily encouraged to actively re-play the game by the game itself, but instead
choose to do so for the purposes of perfecting and ultimately recording their play for
as demonstrative exposition of their mastery. As I noted above, some games require
that players play them multiple times for the purposes of sectional or comprehensive
mastery (i.e. to successfully navigate a particularly challenging sequence of events).
In such cases, player performativity is privileged, as the most precise response to the
game environment is required. Genres such as Shoot ‘Em Ups (or shmups)
demonstrate this privileging of precise spatial navigation and reaction time, as they
require players to traverse increasingly complex environments while avoiding the
trajectories of obstacles which reach numbers in the dozens (or even the hundreds).
Mastery of play has long been a form of social capital with game-playing
communities—for instance, even the earliest arcade games such as Space Invaders
provided for a “high score” table in which players who had earned the most points
could save their score (generally with 3 letters to denote their chosen initials). Such
high scores were preserved by the circuitry of the arcade cabinet, sometimes only
until the machine was switched off, effecting a reset of the high score table. Video
game championships and official score-keeping systems such as Twin Galaxies made
possible the longer term preservation of video game scores, and the online
capabilities of game systems have facilitated such preservation.
38

38
For instance, the game service Xbox Live allows players to compare their scores for and within
197
The importance of replay to these aspects of gaming is at its most evident in
specific fan-based practices which incorporate the recording of gameplay for creative
and instructional purposes. One such practice, known as the “speedrun” (or “speed
run”) involves players recording their play of a particular game as evidence of their
mastery, demonstrating a player’s rapid navigation and completion of the game or a
portion thereof. Fan-produced videos of speedruns have recently enjoyed far greater
circulation with the wider availability of software and technologies to simplify their
production and the systems of distribution and exhibition engendered by the internet.
Competitive players may record these videos to evince their accomplishments,
attempting to beat the times and records established by other players. However, given
the malleable nature of digital games and the inherent possibility that the producers of
these videos may alter game code or automate input to facilitate the creation of
speedruns, the verifiability of videos is often suspect. While the creation and sharing
of “legitimate” speedruns remains a common practice in the arena of competitive
gaming, the practice of “tool-assisted speedruns” is perhaps more common, in which
players use specially-designed software or hardware tools to record gameplay to, as
the fan website TASVideos puts it, “create art and provide entertainment.”
39
This
assertion, as well as the community’s active and often explicit attempts to distance
itself from competitive gaming, demonstrate the subculture’s agenda of the
appropriation and re-purposing of games for their re-contextualization and re-
consideration. An explanation from the “About” F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked

games to millions of other players on the internet.
39
“TASVideos / Why And How,” n.d., http://tasvideos.org/WhyAndHow.html.
198
Questions) section of TASVideos reads almost like a manifesto: “We attempt to
perfect the games to a godly level of precision, observing every slightest detail to gain
control over it in ways that the makers never imagined. We search for perfection.”
40

Such claims clearly evince the community’s desire to achieve a mastery over games
that is strongly suggestive of Freudian notions of repetition—an association which is
only strengthened by the assertion that the creation of some tool-assisted speedruns
may take several months, with the creation of such recordings often requiring “tens of
thousands re-records.”
41
It should be noted that the creation of these tool-assisted
speedruns do not necessarily require skilled players for their creation, as their
production instead relies on the skilled manipulation of the tools which in turn “play”
these games. The tool-assisted speedrun is thus evidence of a cultural desire to not
merely achieve command of a game or situation through its mastery, but instead to
illustrate the possibility of mastery engendered by the closed-state systems of games;
the speedrun this effectively function as an illustrative case study of the structuring
logics of repetition in video games.

Do as I Say: Emulative Replay
In the following sections, I will demonstrate that the replay’s application may
also be inflected with more explicit ideological practices as well; for instance, in
games which require a player to mimic and repeat actions enacted by the video game.
The patterns of such modes of emulative replay and repetition found in some digital

40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
199
games can be traced to traditional games in which players must repeat the actions of
other players. Such traditional games often build from relatively simple patterns to
more complex ones—for instance, in the first round, Player ‘Anne’ pats her head, in
the second round, Player ‘Barbara’ pats her head and rubs her belly, leading to third
round in which Anne pats her head, rubs her belly and touches her nose. Such games
are structured around simple memory challenges and also linked to similar traditional
round-robin narrative games and constructions in which multiple players or narrators
construct a story by iteratively adding elements to the narrative. These gamic
practices can also be linked to practices of play inspired by cultural movements such
as Dada and the New Games movement of the 1960s. The dadaist game of Exquisite
Corpse takes this concept, but eliminates an underlying narrative or aesthetic thread,
forcing subsequent players/narrators/illustrators to build only from a fragment of the
previous work, seeing the entire composition only when it is complete. Similarly the
New Games movement emphasized co-operation and collaboration with games such
as Aura, Knots, Hug Tag, and Prui.
42

Digital games privilege repetition in no small part due to their ontology—
games of emulation can be found in both early commercial electronic games and
more contemporary practices. Curiously, some of the more successful of these games
privilege and emphasize physicality and performativity. Simon (Milton Bradley,
1978) provides a compelling early example of such emulative replay. Ostensibly an
“electronic toy,” Simon is a stand-alone circular plastic device with four different-

42
The New Games Foundation, New Games Book (New York: Doubleday/Dolphin, 1976), 36-7, 68-
69, and 132-3.New Games book, pages 36-37, 68-69, 114-5, and 132-133
200
colored buttons demarcating the four quadrants of the device. Simon generates
patterns which sequentially illuminate the buttons in each quadrant, with a distinct
electronic tone accompanying each light. Players must memorize and then re-enter
the same pattern generated by Simon by pressing the corresponding quadrantal
buttons in proper succession.
While the gameplay afforded by Simon is quite simple, the patterns of replay
and repetition inherent to its structures of are instructive on several levels. Even in
this simple form, the electronic circuit’s capacity for storage and sequentiality here is
highlighted—even its fairly rudimentary computer chips are capable of storing
sequential patterns which test and exceed the player’s (and thus human) faculties of
memory and re-enactment. The pleasures of the play of Simon is produced through
the challenges presented by the player’s ability to memorize, recall, and
systematically reproduce and replay the patterns which Simon generates. The player
must physically and methodically press the buttons illuminated in proper sequence in
order to continue play, and Simon effectively rewards players who are most able to
mimic its patterns with longer play. Simon is indicative of the digital’s proclivity
towards sequentiality, but it is also illustrative of the replay’s linkage to practices of
industrialization. Simon essentially produces play from machinistic mimicry, echoing
Fordist practices of labor; just as the better Simon player is “rewarded” by being
allowed to play longer, a worker in a factory who proves herself capable of
completing repetitive tasks in an expedient fashion may be similarly rewarded with
continued employment. While this association is at its most distinct in the analogous
relationship between replay and Fordist models of production, the correlation
201
between the replay and forms of repetition in most forms of industrialized and post-
industrialized forms of labor is also of note. After all, almost all occupations require
specific skill sets and vocational practices of bodily and/or physical comportment,
and thus inherently require the repeated application and usage of these skills and
practices. In consideration of other forms of replay, it is necessary to consider this
fundamental relationship between the role of replay in video games and the role of
repetition in labor and capital.
The emulative repetition demanded by Simon in its play has remained a
popular trope in video games—while Simon represents an early popular electronic
game, echoes of its core gameplay mechanic can be found in more recent video
games. One of the more popular franchises to employ emulative replay is the music-
based game Guitar Hero (Activision, 2005), in which players follow patterns on the
screen and manipulate controllers suggestive of musical instruments to “perform”
popular songs. While the initial version of the game was built around the instrument
indicated by the title’s name, later iterations of the game introduced other simplified
instrument-based controllers reminiscent of drums, a bass guitar, and a microphone
(arguably in response to competition to games such as Rock Band (MTV Games,
2007)). While such games are perhaps among the more familiar instances of such
music-based games which emphasize emulative replay as a core gameplay mechanic,
Guitar Hero’s musical, rhythmic and bodily usage of replay can be linked directly to
the series of arcade (and later console) games created by Konami’s Games & Music
Division (later renamed Bemani), particularly GuitarFreaks (1998), in which players
similarly use a guitar-based controller. Among the series’ most popular titles is Dance
202
Dance Revolution (1998) which requires players to press on large buttons at the base
of the arcade machine with their feet, “dancing” by pressing these buttons in proper
sequence at the times indicated by the particular song track being played (the four
buttons are arranged on the floor of the unit much like the points of a compass, with
the game prompting players to press these buttons in proper sequence and timing in
correlation to the musical and rhythmic elements of the song). Players are awarded
points for their successful traversal of these button sequences, with greater rewards
being given for precise timing of these movements. Such an interface eschews the
increasingly complex control mechanisms found in games, replacing a larger number
of buttons with more immediately familiar physical motions (in this case, moving
one’s feet in a particular motion, in a simplified fashion similar to performing dance
moves) and effectively broadening the game’s appeal beyond traditional gamers.
43

While the popularity of such games can certainly be ascribed in part to their
simplified control schemes, one must also note the centrality of sensorimotorial
practices to these games and their basic familiarity to players. While a game
controller typically emphasizes eye-hand coordination through its implementation of
a handheld collection of buttons, these games emphasize novel means of control
which instead require more familiar practices of bodily comportment (rather than just
the hand or a few fingers). Such forms of corporeal control are inherently more
recognizable to players as their usage and mastery is required for most (if not all)
non-game related activities such as standing, walking, eating and other forms of

43
The Nintendo Wii console (2006) evinces the commercial market potential for such simplified or
more readily-familiar control schemes.
203
movement.
44
The cognitive and sensorimotorial familiarity of such practices
intrinsically broaden the appeal and limit the learning-curve of such games, as they
essentially require simple variations of already-familiar movement—for instance,
“dancing” in Dance Dance Revolution simply requires moving one’s feet in one or
two of four different directions in time to the music. Better players are simply those
who can rhythmically control and contort their bodies in greater precision in
correspondence to the game’s temporal demands—a gameplay mechanic which
plainly elicits that of Simon. While the control schemes of such games is clearly more
complex and nuanced than the simple repetition of Simon, the synchronicity and
mimicry inherent to these forms of emulative replay means that such games
essentially derive their pleasures from the bodily mastery of machinic actions and
digital principles.
45
The modes by which these games prize efficiency and precision
of movement are highly evocative of the scientific measurement and quantification of
the factory workers during industrialization performed to optimize productivity. Thus
while these experiments on early workers may now be considered inhumane, a
modern incarnation of this same mode of physical optimization has been re-
articulated as entertainment.

44
It should be noted that physically-challenged players may not benefit from the familiarity of such
bodily comportments but may enjoy the freedoms afforded by the pleasures of virtual mobility in ways
that physically capable players may not.
45
It is not hard to imagine the adaptation of such games to train workers for mastery of physical or
mental tasks—for instance, the VR interfaces used by formerly migrant laborers to operate
construction robots in the U.S. as suggested by the film Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2009).
204
Re-creation: Replay as Historical Re-Enactment
While replay functions at the heart of structures of play, its usage, as we have
seen, is also evident in economic, cultural, and social practices linked to play. The
ideological function of replay’s implementation in games can also be tracked at the
intersection of industrial and fan practices in military simulations. The lineage of
commercial military simulation games can be traced to both simulators developed by
defense contractors for use by the U.S. armed forces and to the popularity of
Microsoft Flight Simulator.
46
Originally developed by in 1977 by another company
(subLOGIC), Microsoft acquired the rights to the game and released it in 1982,
several years before its ubiquitous Windows operating system. The immense
popularity of Flight Simulator encouraged the rapid growth of the game genre;
combat simulation games emerged as a popular genre as the graphical capabilities of
personal computers advanced, with companies which specialized in their production
being founded in the early 1980s.
47
MicroProse and Spectrum Holobyte, founded in
1982 and 1983 respectively, focused largely on military simulations games which
emphasized realistic modeling of contemporary and historical military vehicles and

46
While the influence of military simulators on the commercial market is apparent, they have
occasionally been developed both for use by the military and for commercial release, such as in Full
Spectrum Warrior (THQ, 2004). The game was designed and developed as a training tool for the U.S.
Army, and was released in two versions: a classified version for military use, and a commercial version
for the general public. For more on the relationship between the military and game development, see
Lara Crigger, “The Military-Entertainment Complex,” n.d., http://www.cgonline.com/computer-
games-magazine/article/the_military_entertainment_complex/.
47
Such military simulation games often employ military advisors in their creation (perhaps most
famously in the Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Air Trainer series (Electronic Arts, 1987-1991),
demonstrating a strong link to the defense industries. The strength of this association is further evinced
by the presence of veterans and former contractors on the founding staffs of MicroProse and Spectrum
Holobyte and their foundation in geographical locations with large existing defense industries (Hunt
Valley, Maryland and Alameda, California respectively).
205
strategies. Games such as Silent Service (MicroProse, 1985) focused on submarine
warfare in World War II, while Spectrum Holobyte’s Falcon series (1987-2005) and
MicroProse’s F-19 Stealth Fighter (1987) eschewed the rudimentary control schemes
of more simple games to emulate the complex controls and flight dynamics of
military jets by using dozens of keys on a computer keyboard to control the
intricacies of the simulation.
48
Such games would typically employ settings which
ranged from purely fictional to painstakingly accurate depictions based on maps and
geo-political conditions. Players complete missions within these settings, attacking
the enemies within the game according to specific instructions provided by each
fictional—albeit often realistic—assignment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the production
of such games strongly reflects the national and cultural interests of the context in
which they are produced, and the prevalence of American entertainment software
companies is reflected in the abundance of games which simulate the vehicles of the
U.S. or its alles. Regardless of the nationality of the player, she thus must physically
enact the ideological interests of the country which produces the games, which are
overwhelmingly American. While some exceptions to the depiction of Western
vehicles exist, many of the games which do so often still keep in check the limited
anti-American gameplay they contain. Games such as Their Finest Hour: The Battle
of Britain (LucasFilm Games, 1989) and Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat (Electronic
Arts, 1991) allow players to control planes from both sides of a given simulated

48
F-19 Stealth Fighter was based on estimated capabilities of the then-rumored stealth fighter, and
coincidentally was released the same day that the U.S. Air Force officially announced the existence of
the plane. A subsequent version of the game entitled Nighthawk: F117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 (1991)
correctly renamed the aircraft and included missions in the “Operation Desert Storm” theater, based on
the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
206
conflict, effectively tempering the facility to use non-Western planes with American
or British planes. Other games would focus on purely on such non-Western vehicles,
but similarly contain the player’s capacity for play against American ideological
interests; for instance, while SU-25 Stormovik (Electronic Arts, 1990) simulates a
Soviet-era jet fighter, the player’s missions revolve around the decline of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s in support of democratic reforms.
49

But while the performance of missions set in these semi-fictional settings
constitutes an enactment of specific ideological interests, these games do not
necessarily evince a true sense of replay in this form. In fact, given the number of
variables often contained in the complexity of these simulations, the structures of play
within them are often resistant to the notions of repetition and replay we have already
explored. That said, these types of games do demonstrate a remarkable capacity for
the replay and re-enactment of historical military engagements. Evidence of this
explicit linkage to real-life military endeavors can be found both in games based on
particular incidents and the description of such events and directions for their re-
enactment in the instruction manuals which accompanied some games. Operation
Chastise, an attack staged by the Royal Air Force on German-controlled dams during
World War II, was the basis for The Dam Busters (Sydney Development Corporation,
1984), in which players are tasked with piloting a bomber in attacks on German
dams.
50
However, rather than specifically hard-coding particular events and

49
The ambiguity of the fictional setting in Stormovik and its depiction of a nebulous Soviet Union can
also be read as proving Electronic Arts a degree of flexibility in presenting the game as a contemporary
depiction of the shifting and transient nature of the nation during the game’s development
50
The same military operation was also the source material for the film The Dam Busters (1954).
207
sequences into the structures, other games relied on the open nature of their
simulations to allow players to enact and re-create historical events. F-15 Strike Eagle
(MicroProse, 1984) originally released with generic, non-specific missions in pseudo-
realistic geopolitical settings of U.S. intervention and conflict in areas such as
Vietnam and the Middle East. However, a 1986 release of the same game featured an
addendum to the game’s instruction manual which included a summary of the 1986
U.S. bombing of Libya and detailed instructions on how to re-enact the mission
within the confines of the game’s simulation. Thus while F-15 Strike Eagle does not
expressly require or direct the player to re-create this attack, it instead provides a
schematic for its re-enactment and encourages the player to actively replay the
mission.
51
Both approaches to this form of replay as re-enactment can be found in a
range of military simulations, as well as games of other genres—for instance, sports
games allow players to replay famous games or particular famous moments in sports.
More contemporary military simulation games evidence this faculty for replay
as historical re-enactment, simultaneously rendering explicit the profound capacities
of the virtual for rendering historical events. Kuma\War (Kuma Reality Games, 2004)
re-creates simulations of recent military engagements (again, predominantly
American), as well as creating hypothetical scenarios based on historical events.
Kuma Reality Games, the game’s creators, leverage the internet’s modes of rapid
distribution to offer players frequently updated content based off of recent real-world
events. In the logo, “Real War News. Real War Games” blazoned across the

51
It should also be noted that a later edition of the game, F-15 Strike Eagle II (1989) was
supplemented with the game add-on F-15 Strike Eagle II: Operation Desert Storm Scenario Disk
(1992), which added specific missions and maps from the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War.
208
company’s website, Kuma\War clearly privileges the game’s basis in “reality,” or at
least as presented via news outlets and military press releases.
52
The company
description of the game plainly emphasizes this notion of replay as historical re-
enactment:
Kuma\War is more than just a game—it is an interactive chronicle of the war
on terror with real news coverage and an original video news show for each
mission. Kuma tells the stories of soldiers on the ground by putting players in
their boots.
53

Missions which have been made available for download from the Kuma website
include “Uday and Qusay’s Last Stand,” based on the 2003 U.S. killing of the sons of
Saddam Hussein and “Iran Hostage Rescue Mission,” which hypothetically depicts
the aborted 1980 U.S. attempt to recover hostages taken at the U.S. Embassy in Iran
in 1979. Kuma\War thus permits the player to replay through highlights of American
military involvement—be they historical re-creations or profound re-imaginings of
these events. While such games afford the player a degree of autonomy and resistance
by allowing the player independent action, they ultimately restrict the player through
the confines of the agency they provide. A player may choose not to re-enact these
events as the developers choose, but the player’s actions are ultimately guided
through both subtle means (such as restricting the player to move within the confines
of a pre-determined map) or more explicitly (i.e. penalizing the player or ending play
for not successfully completing mission objectives). The game thus allows players to
practice and perfect the past in order to satisfy ideological and social fantasies of

52
“Kuma Reality Games Website: Online Reality War Games for PC War Games Online,” n.d.,
http://www.kumawar.com/about.php.
53
Ibid.
209
control, effectively allowing players to unambiguously re-write history to meet the
desires of not just themselves, but also those of the developers of the games and the
culture which produces these games.
54
One popular press critic considered the
implications of games such as Kuma\War with this assessment: “If Kuma has its way,
the next revolution won’t just be televised, it’ll also be digitized.”
55
The nature of
such an observation does not go far enough—not only will the supposed “revolution”
be digitized, its suppression by the powers that be will also be packaged and made
available the recreational purposes. Here the replay is leveraged as an ideological
tool, as such games not merely sanction but encourage and compel players to rehearse
and perform actions in support of the hegemony.
As I have shown, the replay’s multiple applications in the video game are
rooted in the ontology of the digital and this basis in materiality is echoed in the
industrial and economic strategies of its deployment. It is also reflected in the
cultural, social, and political practices, which themselves are steeped in the pleasures
of mastery, the associations with social capital, and politically through enacting its
ideologically-inflected content. From here, I will examine the means by which the
replay redeploys and recontextualizes formal and aesthetic strategies borrowed from
other media, and the resultant incorporation of structures replay into play mechanics
themselves.

54
Other games have found their basis in the U.S. conflicts of the early twenty-first century, including
the previously mentioned Full Spectrum Warrior and the canceled Six Days in Fallujah (Konami).
55
Steve Bauman, “Kuma Chameleon,” n.d., http://www.cgonline.com/computer-games-
magazine/article/kuma_chameleon/.
210
One More Time: Instant Replay
As shown in the chapters on avant-garde film and television, the recursive
redeployment of formal syntaxes and aesthetic tropes from one medium to another is
long-established practice associated with the replay; the video game similarly apes
and appropriates the representational strategies cultivated in other media. One of the
replay’s more common instances within gamic structures is a form which is indicative
of the strong common link between video games and the televisual apparatuses upon
which they run. While computer systems commonly use monitors to display their
visual information to their users, video game systems (also called consoles) often
leverage a common pre-existing device of the modern living room: the television.
This reliance upon the televisual explicates any number of visual, aural, and interface-
based metaphors employed by video games and their systems, demonstrating the
gamic repetition of tropes from other forms. As such, one of the more immediately
recognizable examples of replay in video games is the instant replay—a feature
initially found in sports and fighting games, but now increasingly prevalent across a
range of genres. While now common, instant replay functionality was not a standard
feature of early video games—it began as a feature that was added in an attempt to
improve certain games’ presentational techniques.
56
In this category of instant replay,
the player is afforded the ability to visually and aurally revisit earlier sequences of
play—de-emphasizing ludic elements of replay, instead casting the replay in terms of

56
Game programmer Patrick Dickinson summarizes the conventionality of the feature of replay in
contemporary computer games: “It is common for games to offer a ‘replay’ feature. This feature allows
the player to record a sequence of game play and then watch it over again, perhaps from a different
viewpoint in slow motion.” See Patrick Dickinson, “Instant Replay: Building a Game Engine with
Reproducible Behaviour,” April 21, 2006,
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010713/dickinson_pfv.htm.
211
spectacle. However, as I will demonstrate, the development of instant replay in games
has effectively facilitated new forms of replay as part of the play of video games.
Games and their genres continuously evolve, and, as some argue, their gradual
development is not unlike the feature-driven toy industry’s methods of product
differentiation.
57
Concurrent with this expansion of game features is the steadfast
redoubling of computational and processor power; as hardware and software systems
mature, they become more capable in their capacity for instant replay. Given this
ongoing development, we can see several distinct phases of the evolution of instant
replay in games: from early, non-interactive sequences, through primitive automated
and user-controlled instant replays which would allow the player to watch brief
replays of game play, to more advanced instant replays that visually allow the user to
spatially and temporally navigate a specific sequence of previous game time, finally
reaching the last—and current—phase of instant replay, which incorporates its
function as part of both the game’s pre-constructed and emergent narrative and its
core game mechanic. That is, in this iteration, the replay is integrated into the diegetic
world in which the game takes place, and the ability to influence and harness the
passage of time is similarly incorporated into the game play as a useful and necessary
element of the game’s controls. Historically, the use of instant replays has been

57
Barry Atkins, “What Are We Really Looking At? The Future-Orientation of Video Game Play,”
Games and Culture 1, no. 2 (2006): 128. Ted Friedman comments that the one constant of the evolving
form of game representations is change itself: “Each new game must rethink how it should engage the
player, and the best games succeed by discovering new structures of interaction, inventing new genres.
What would be avant-garde in film or literature—breaking with familiar forms of representation,
developing new modes of address—is standard operating procedure in the world of computer games.”
See Ted Friedman, “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space,” in On a
Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology (New York: New York University
Press, 1999), 133.
212
confined largely to sports games (although a number of exceptions exist)—as such, I
will explore their initial evolution primarily through the sports genre, before charting
the expansion of their presence into other game genres and practices of play.
In the first phase, what I will term “Proto-Instant Replay,” so-called “instant”
replays are static and pre-determined sequences that often emphasize a particularly
dramatic moment within a sports game and are used for affective purposes. One
example can be found in Double Dribble (Konami, 1986), a basketball game for the
Nintendo Entertainment System which featured a fairly straightforward side court
viewpoint—one familiar to television fans of the sport. However, this viewpoint and
the pace of the game shift when a player attempts a slam dunk: time slows and a
close-up of the dunk is shown on screen; this is not really an instant replay, per se, but
does employ a slowing of time and spatial close-up for dramatic effect. Similarly,
Tecmo Bowl (Tecmo, 1988), which also features a side camera perspective on the
game, utilizes zoomed sequences to highlight key temporal moments in the game. In
both of these examples, an emphasis is placed by the game upon a particular moment
of the game play itself, which constitutes a privileging of a specific time-space for
emphatic and affective purpose.
During “Simple Instant Replay,” the second phase of the evolution of instant
replay, simplified replays become a standard feature in sports games, showing a
recent moment of scoring from the same perspective and angle as the original
moment of game play. John Madden Football ’92 (Electronic Arts, 1991) marks an
early incarnation of the commercially popular football franchise. This iteration
features a camera that floats over the field to provide the player with a perspective
213
better suited for player control, and offers the appearance of three dimensions.
However, like the previous games I have highlighted, John Madden Football ’92 is
essentially a two-dimensional game featuring “sprites” and an isometric viewpoint, so
its flat space does not allow for multiple moving perspectives.
58
This game allows
players, however, to “instantly” replay the last few seconds of their most recent play,
basically showing a recording of their actions and allowing players to re-watch both
significant plays or inconsequential moments at their discretion. Like its predecessors,
the game also features some close-up sequences to emphasize dramatic moments,
such as a crowd shot or disappointed kicker following a missed field goal.
During the third phase, “Navigable Instant Replay,” the player can now
initiate and control replays, moving the camera around in three-dimensional space,
and even occasionally affecting the game’s outcome via replay (according to the rules
of the sport being simulated). Later in the Madden series, Madden NFL ’99
(Electronic Arts, 1998) allows the player to move both the game play and replay
cameras in three-dimensional space. Additionally, players are afforded greater control
over the replay during this phase, as more powerful hardware and software processing
allows for greater manipulations of the recorded material. Thus, in Madden NFL 2001
(Electronic Arts, 2000) in accord with NFL rules and regulations, players are allowed
to “challenge” a last play via the replay. For instance, if one felt a virtual player
stepped out of bounds on the play, one could use the replay to “challenge” the play
and overturn the decision made by the virtual referees. Indeed, the game’s referees

58
A sprite is a computer-generated image which is either pre-rendered or the product of graphical
compositing for the purposes of reducing processing power in its display—for example, the arrow
representing the mouse pointer in a Graphical User Interface such as Windows or Mac OS is a sprite.
214
were programmed to make occasional “mistakes” during game play, which they
would then ostensibly correct during the challenge replay.
As the example of instant replays modifying gameplay in Madden NFL 2001
tentatively intimates, the development of instant replay features in games reaches a
critical stage at this juncture. While an instant replay feature is increasingly common
in a range of genres, we can also trace the concurrent growth of its influence on the
practices of play. Rather than providing the player the ability to re-watch and re-
experience the recorded instances of her play, these games instead shift temporal
selective control into the active experience of play, allowing the player to correct her
play while she plays.

Correctional Replay
Next, we enter the current phase of instant replay: “Correctional Replay,”
which shifts the focus of the instant replay from a presentational technique to a ludic
component. Here, replay functions as a mechanic of the game play itself: the player
can control time, selectively moving backwards to change and improve her navigation
of space. Driving games such as Full Auto (Sega, 2006) allow players to reverse time
so as to back up to the point in time and space before they made a mistake and
crashed their vehicular avatar. Action/adventure games such as Prince of Persia: The
Sands of Time (Ubisoft, 2003), a recent incarnation of a game that first debuted on the
Apple II in 1989, furthers this capacity. Within the embedded narrative of this version
of the game, the player attempts to re-capture the “sands of time,” which have been
loosed from their hourglass container. As the player collects these “sands of time,”
215
her ability to actively control time within the game grows, from slowing it down to
reversing it altogether, allowing her to correct mistakes and defeat enemies more
easily.
59
This control of time is built into the game’s embedded narrative: the game
actually begins with its own ending and then proceeds from the perspective of a
fictional Prince character which the player controls. The game’s ongoing events are
“told” by this Prince protagonist as though they occurred in the past: for instance,
when the player dies, the voice of the Prince says, “No, that’s not what happened” or
“Wait, wait, wait. That’s not what happened. Now where was I?”, and the player is
allowed to continue.
60

The game mechanic of rewinding time complicates some established notions
of gameplay linked to causality. Theorist and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
suggests that any challenging activity which requiring specific skills may be mastered
to the point at which one feels completely comfortable with the task at hand and no
longer directly aware of their active engagement in the task. Csikszentmihalyi
describes this condition as the “flow state”—the “particular state of enjoyment in
which a player achieves a high degree of focus and enjoyment.”
61
In game terms, it

59
While this capacity for the active reversal of time is novel, it should be noted that previous games
such as Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment, 2001) allowed for the active slowing of time during play
as part of their embedded narrative and play mechanic. Other games employ a time reversal
mechanism similar to The Sands of Time, such as Blinx: The Time Sweeper (Microsoft, 2002) and
TimeShift (Sierra Entertainment, 2007). Note that players watch a non-interactive “instant replay” of
their traversal of a level after completing it in Blinx, a presentational feature which can also be found in
other games.
60
It should be noted that this humorous approach has been similarly employed by films such as the
Burt Lancaster vehicle The Crimson Pirate (1952, Warner Brothers), in which the narrator corrects
himself during the opening sequence, changing the plot. Interestingly, the original Prince of Persia
itself was inspired by similar swashbuckling films, indicating an ongoing dialogic relationship across
media.
61
Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, 336.
216
can be characterized as the point at which a player is no longer considering the
causality of their actions—they are lost in the moment.
62
However, games with
correctional replay resist and even subvert Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow by
compelling the player to constantly assess and her re-assess her play; in so doing, the
player becomes somewhat removed from this sense of flow as she inevitably remains
acutely aware of her active engagement in the task at hand.
As The Prince of Persia demonstrates, in this phase replay becomes a core
and unambiguous component of the game play mechanic itself, rather than merely a
feature which enhances the presentation of the game. The player is able to replay the
time and space which she just played, albeit with significant variations that influence
the narrative. Rather than simply replaying a temporal moment while re-navigating
her perspective on the space, the player is afforded the ability to replay and negotiate
time and space and to and experience them in a newly significant way.

Constitutive Replay
The replay’s enhanced temporal and spatial navigations are further—and far
more complexly—evinced in games such as Braid (Number None/Microsoft, 2008)
and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (The Odd Gentlemen, 2008).
63

Curiously enough, while both games represent radical reconfigurations of play, they

62
Game designer Jenova Chen’s USC MFA thesis project articulates this state in his game fl0w (2006),
which constantly adjusts the difficulty of the game to the player’s experience and play. See
http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/flowing.htm
63
I should also note the advent of 3-D games which challenge and subvert traditional conceptual
representations of space, such as Prey (3D Realms, 2006) Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007), but my
focus here will be on the expansion of both spatial and temporal practices of play via replay.
217
both are two-dimensional platform games, and thus both innately allude to game
mechanics which are almost passé in contemporary three-dimensional game spaces.
Both games employ similar temporal navigation game mechanic; as such, I will focus
here on Braid, as many of the observations about each game apply to the other.
64

In its gameplay and level design, Braid is clearly referential (and reverential)
to earlier popular games and their mechanics of play. As a two-dimensional
platformer, Braid could be construed as being intentionally nostalgic in its lack of
three-dimensional graphics and its painterly visual aesthetic. However, these design
elements could also be interpreted as a product of production constraints, as the game
was made by a small, independent design team unable to leverage the resources
necessary for the design and implementation of complex three-dimensional worlds
seen in larger-budget games.
65
However, Braid’s relatively anachronistic design also
openly alludes to popular games of the platformer genre, employing game mechanics
and other elements which strongly suggest games such as Super Mario Bros.; for
instance, the player defeats many enemies by jumping on their head, a mechanic
made popular by Super Mario Bros.. Additionally, open completion of some of the
game’s levels, an animated sequence explicitly references Super Mario Bros., with
the iconic conciliatory message “The Princess is in another castle” taken directly from
the Nintendo game. In this way, Braid playfully and nostalgically replays the past, but
this appropriation of formal and ludic elements moves past mere pastiche. This use

64
Braid was released before Winterbottom; furthermore, Jonathan Blow, Braid’s game designer served
as a faculty advisor on the student project which later became Winterbottom, suggesting the primacy of
Braid’s influence on the design and game mechanic in Winterbottom.
65
Braid was picked up Microsoft for distribution on its online Xbox Live service after the game
received awards at the Game Developer’s Conference and Independent Games Festival in 2006.
218
and recollection of past styles extends into a dramatic re-consideration and re-
invigoration of established practices of video game play.
The game’s narrative structure is intentionally ambiguous, with no framing
“backstory” supplied to the player at the game’s start. The player controls an avatar
named Tim who must be guided through the rooms of a house, each of which offers
an entrance to a series of levels which are structured by differing temporal behaviors
and logics. At the start of each level, the player is given snippets of text which
vaguely imply Tim’s pursuit of a lost love which seems to exist in his memory, at
times intimating past misunderstandings and mistakes which led to the demise of the
relationship. The game thus loosely implies a revisitation to the protagonist’s past,
helping to undo past mistakes and restore the relationship with Tim’s lost “Princess.”
While the narritival trope of rescuing a princess is all-too-familiar in popular video
games, the game’s story is found in fragmented textual elements supplied to the
player via books (which are inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities) found during
navigating the game. These texts occlude the initial apparent simplicity of Braid’s
story considerably.
66
Occasional oblique references suggest that the game’s Princess
is actually a metaphor and Tim is a scientist conducting research, along with
progressively more unequivocal references to a nuclear explosion as the result of
Tim’s research. These textual references begin with a mention that finding the
Princess would provoke for Tim an “intense light that embraces the world,” and
concludes in the game’s epilogue with far more explicit references to the Trinity Test,

66
See Chris Dahlen, “Braid,” August 12, 2008, http://www.avclub.com/articles/braid%2C6917/.
219
the U.S. government’s nuclear test in July of 1946.
67
While Blow, the game’s
designer, has resisted explication of the game’s meaning, a number of theories have
emerged in online forums about the significance of the opaque backstory.
68
But
regardless of the Braid’s precise meaning, its core mechanic of temporal navigation
and its themes of memory, temporal reversal, and other reconfigurations of
spatiotemporal constructs thus intimate the possibility of undoing actions done in
both interpersonal and scientific contexts. While the game’s conclusion ultimately
suggests the real-world impossibility of such reversals, Braid clearly satisfies a desire
for mastery by affording the player opportunities for temporal navigation which
would otherwise be impossible to experience.
Braid’s utilization of a two-dimensional gameworld can be read as a means of
limiting the complexity of the game interface, given its innovative and unfamiliar
affordance of multifaceted temporal control and navigation. While three-dimensional
games typically must provide the player with a suitably elaborate control scheme for
navigation of gamespaces, two-dimensional games may employ less intricate
interfaces. This relative simplicity allows the game to instead focus a larger share of
its interface to temporal control, by which the player may control time in an
increasingly complex fashion. After introducing the player to the basic elements of
spatial navigation, Braid then familiarizes the player through gradually more

67
Perhaps most overtly, the game’s epilogue includes an uncited quote from Kenneth Bainbridge, the
director of the Trinity Test, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Bainbridge reportedly made this
comment to Robert Oppenheimer after the explosion—see “The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945,” n.d.,
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/trinity.htm.
68
For several interpretations of the game’s story, see “The Story of Braid - rllmukforum.com,” n.d.,
http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=190136%C2%A0. and “Spoilers Entire Braid
Story in Order with Notes Spoilers,” n.d., http://forums.xbox.com/22049680/ShowPost.aspx.
220
conceptually complex behaviors of time and temporal interaction. The player first
learns the ability to rewind time, much like the games which introduced the mechanic
in the correctional replay games of the previous section. However, subsequent levels
in Braid expand considerably upon this engagement with temporality, with each set
of levels (or “world”) structured around radically reconfigured temporal structures.
For instance, one world, “Time and Mystery,” introduces objects which defy the
player’s reversal of time, while another, “Time and Place,” directly links the player’s
movement to the passage of time in the game: when the player moves their avatar
quickly right, time proceeds normally, but when they move slowly to the right or left,
time slows or reverses. This direct correlation between time and space effects entirely
new modes of play, as clearly evinced by the “Jumpman” level of “Time and
Mystery.” A substantial portion of the level’s design is constructed as an
unambiguous homage to Donkey Kong, requiring the player to navigate a structure
mimicking the iconic initial level of Donkey Kong and the name “Jumpman” taken
from the original name of the protagonist in Donkey Kong—who was later renamed
the more familiar “Mario.” However, while the physical structure of the level imitates
Donkey Kong’s design, the linkage of temporal progression to the avatar’s movement
radically extends and expands the core game mechanic (as well as dramatically
subverting the player’s expectations). Rather than merely jumping over a series of
obstacles while progressing back and forth up a layered sequence of gradated girders,
time reverses direction each time the player reverses the movement of her avatar. The
obstacles in the world move in expected fashion as the avatar moves up the beams
which angle up to the right, but when the avatar must be moved up the beams which
221
angle up to the left, these same obstacles now reverse direction, forcing the player to
adopt far more complex strategies in her play. Braid thus nostalgically replays
Donkey Kong while also emphasizing replay as a core game mechanic—the player
must repeatedly reverse and replay time in order to navigate the game’s levels. This
complex temporal interaction extends beyond mere novelty to a profound
reconsideration—and ultimately subversion—of long-established structures of play
and the familiar casting of player as the game’s hero. For instance, in the final
untitled level of the game, time moves backwards, forcing the player to transpose
much of what she has learned in order to properly control her character (here,
reversing time actually causes it to flow forward), eventually recasting the player’s
long-sought rescue of the “Princess” as her escape from the player’s grasp by being
instead rescued by a knight in shining armor.
69

The centrality of replay to the Braid’s core mechanic is evinced by the
player’s sustained capacity for rewinding time throughout the game; at any instance,
the player may choose to replay her actions by rewinding time and adjusting her
actions.
70
This interaction with the past is furthered in the levels of one of the game’s
worlds, “Time and Decision.” Here, the rewinding of time introduces a “ghost” avatar
of the player which performs the actions which the player enacted before rewinding
time, while the player may continue to actively control the avatar of the present. The
player may thus interact with multiple instances of her play, as she actively controls

69
This final sequence also overtly nostalgically references the framing story, graphical style, and
animations found in Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins (Capcom, 1985), another popular platform game.
70
It should be noted the game also employs a “speed run” feature (similar to those discussed in fan-
produced replays) , encouraging player so complete levels within determined time constraints ,
demonstrating another example of Braid’s use of replay.
222
the current instance of her play while the ghost performs the actions of her immediate
past. The puzzles in this portion of the game revolve around these multiple
temporalities, as the player may effectively be in several places at once to accomplish
necessary tasks.
71
Rather than merely focused on the now and the near-future as Barry
Atkins suggests is common in video game play, the player instead finds herself in a
dialogic relationship with the present, future, and past. Actions and behaviors of the
past shape the present, but these past interactions become charged via the player’s
ability to actively engage and interact with them.
Braid’s use of replay further complicates Csikszentmihalyi’s model of flow
and its application to the practices of play. What is essential to Csikszentmihalyi’s
flow state is an adherence to convention within the game and of predictability to the
game system: if the player behaves in a certain fashion, she must be certain that the
game will react in a predictable manner. In consideration of the role of flow in the
experience of play of Braid, the predictability of the behavior or computer-controlled
characters in the game is particularly important—these A.I. characters must move in
predictable, uniform patterns for players to anticipate and control their movement in
solving the game’s puzzles. The game’s mechanic of time reversal complicates the
notion of flow as it requires the player to constantly and actively assess and re-assess
causality in the game her engagement in the “present” of the gameworld and its
relationship to the past; thus in this sense, by rewinding time, the player breaks free of

71
A “ghost” or “shadow” version of the player is a familiar trope of videogames, employed as a means
of interacting with multiple instances of the character’s avatar to solve puzzles, such as in the original
Prince of Persia (Brøderbund, 1989) or Cloning Clyde (NinjaBee, 2006) or as a narrative tool of facing
a character’s inner conflicts, such as the “Dark Link” character in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
(Nintendo, 1987).
223
Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow. Thus while Braid’s time reversal mechanic
initially allows players to correct mistakes, but the gradual expansion of the
implications of this temporal reversal ultimately results in a profound meditation on
the role of causality and flow in play.
Braid thus marks a profound shift in the role of replay in the play of video
games; by weaving replay so tightly into the navigation of the game’s environs and
the solution of its puzzles, replay effectively becomes the central component of its
play. The player’s comprehension of, interaction with, and eventual mastery of
Braid’s variable temporal behaviors and structures are all required in order to solve
the game’s puzzles and to progress through its levels. Braid thus compels the player
to un-learn familiar spatiotemporal constructs and representations in order to
successfully navigate both the game’s spaces, but also its times. Braid thus shifts the
core game mechanic of the platformer from one of spatial navigation to one of
temporal navigation, boldly intimating possibilities for ludic and narrative structures
made possible by interactive technologies. Here replay moves past being a mere
element of play, instead profoundly expanding to become constitutive to play.

Chapter Conclusion
In his analysis of the function of time within games, Jesper Juul proposes that
games stress the linkage between the player’s actions in the “real world” and the
temporality of the events in the game. He asserts that as a result, games emphasize a
persistent present: “In this way, there is a basic sense of now when you play a game;
the events in a game, be they ever so strange and unlike the player’s situation, have a
224
basic link to the player.”
72
Thus, whether the game constantly emphasizes speedy
reactions in real-time (such as in the case of an action or sports game) or if it instead
slows time to a turn-based structure (such as in a strategy game such as chess), the
significance of the player’s action at the moment of their play is linked to the “now.”
This emphasis on the now brings to mind Henri Bergson’s duration as our continuous
experience of the flow of time—especially his observation that this flow is our actual
experience of the time between two mathematically demarcated intervals.
73
Despite
the mathematically and computationally defined nature of games, our experience of
game play is continuous, much like Bergson’s duration.
74

Much like the focus on the “now” that Juul proposes is essential to game play,
Barry Atkins contends that the player’s focus is always upon that which is yet to
happen. Atkins suggests that video games place the player’s attention on “what
happens next if I,” shifting the focus from a traditionally unfolding narrative to one in
which the player is the center of the narrative and always future oriented.
75
In this
fixation on the future, the player’s recognition of and familiarity with the patterns of
the game environment can play a large role in her success. Thus while the player’s
movement and action is firmly grounded in the now (as Juul suggests), Atkins points
out that the player’s attention is always focused on the future.

72
Juul, “Introduction to Game Time,” 134.
73
Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 194.
74
The systems upon which video games run are the product of mathematical and computational
structures which are built from digital logics Cartesian-based representational systems; similarly, they
use vdeo technology to give the impression of moevemnt, much like television and cinema. However,
the player’s experience of them is continuous, despite this basis in segmentation.
75
Atkins, “What Are We Really Looking At? The Future-Orientation of Video Game Play,” 137.
225
The consideration of the game as a state machine demonstrates the systemic
rules and physical laws which govern game structures. The dual facilities of games as
systems to both demonstrate predictable behavior and allow for multiple points of re-
entry into them as experiential texts reveals their unique status as objects ripe for
phenomenological investigation. Bergson’s notion of duration is a helpful guiding
tool here, particularly his insights regarding the immeasurable continuity of human
experience versus science’s discrete units of calculation. He suggests that science’s
insistence on quantitative measurement relies on a constant—a means by which a
state or a change in states can be measured:
In short, in order to foresee the state of a determinant system at a determinant
moment, it is absolutely necessary that something should persist as a constant
quality throughout a series of combinations; but it belongs to experience to
decide as to the nature of this something, and especially to let us know
whether it is found in all possible systems, whether, in other words, all
possible systems lend themselves to our calculations.
76

But Bergson contends that no such constant exists in human experience—it is purely
qualitative in its nature. Due to the irreversibility of time, we are unable to ever return
to an earlier state. He uses an example of a road map to make his point:
If I glance over a road marked on the map and follow it up to a certain point,
there is nothing to prevent my turning back and trying to find out whether it
branches off anywhere. But time is not a line along which one can pass again.
Certainly, once it has elapsed, we are justified in picturing the successive
moments as external to one another and in thus thinking of a line traversing
space; but it must then be understood that this line does not symbolize the
time which is passing but this time which has passed.
77

76
Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 151.
77
Ibid., 181-182.
226
Thus while we may physically return to an earlier point, we are mentally unable to do
so because we cannot “undo” our own temporal experience since that point. Due to
constraints of our embodiment, we are unable to truly “replay” our own experiences.
But the systemic structure of the video game suggests perhaps the closest articulation
of this capacity for return. The computational and algorithmic structure of the video
game allows for the precise return to a specific spatiotemporal point (albeit virtual)
and replay from that point on—we may repeat our experiences precisely or may chart
a new path on Bergson’s roadmap. While other media allow for a return to any point
in the narrative, the story always remains the same from that point. Games, however,
allow for contingency, variation, and potentiality in a way that linear forms such as
film and television do not—they provide for a distinctly unique means to return, re-
experience, and replay in a fashion which Bergson could not have anticipated.
By way of the saved game and its inherent capacity for return, the video
game’s ontological status as a system thus reifies the role of replay in the gamic
experience: it serves as an indicator of the central role of replay and repetition to a
player’s experience of a game. A player’s capacity to return to saved points and
literally “re-play” those portions evinces the constitutive nature of repetition and
replay to play. It is indisputable that mastery of both spatial structures and timing is
essential to play; however, my examination of games which focus upon the instant
replay suggests that, as with other media, the practice of actively control and master
temporality is increasingly becoming a part of play. Indeed, by allowing us as players
to manipulate time itself, such games are not just emulating the inexperiencable, but
they are also familiarizing and normalizing processes which are quite contrary to the
227
basic tenets of the human experience. Ultimately, I propose that this control over time
and space effectively transforms our experience into a palimpsest, as the perceptual
data through which we understand the world is prone to constant re-writing, editing,
and erasure.
228
Conclusion

When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with
incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a
process of reproduction. The conditions of production are also those of
reproduction.
1
– Karl Marx

In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far / Pictures
came and broke your heart, put the blame on VTR. – The Buggles (Geoff
Downes, Bruce Woolley, & Trevor Horn)

In his book The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern examines the
profound and diverse shifts in temporal and spatial practices and conceptions which
took place at the end of the 19
th
and the beginning of the twentieth century. Kern
maps the social, cultural, and political changes in the wake of the standardization of
time which accompanied industrialization. Modes of local time keeping submitted to
national and global standards, while new modes of travel similarly radically
reconfigured conceptions of space and distance. Kern traces the impact of these
temporal and spatial shifts through a variety of lenses and contexts, including through
the emergence of Cubism and other revolutionary modes of spatiotemporal
representation. Wolfgang Schivelbusch performs an examination of roughly the same
time period, although his approach intensely interrogates the impact of the train in
particular. Schivelbusch argues that railroads effected an “annihilation of time and
space,” in which long-standing conceptions of the distance and associated travel times
which separated communities and regions were compressed and collapsed, effecting a

1
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1990),
711.
229
dramatic reduction in geographical conceptions.
2
Schivelbusch connects the temporal
and spatial collapse characterized by trains to that of cinema, arguing that film
similarly allowed formerly disparate places and contexts to be juxtaposed against one
another.
3
While Schivelbusch’s connection of the train to the cinema is hardly unique,
his examination of the cultural and social shifts in temporal and spatial structures
effected by technologies developments of rail is noteworthy. Similarly, Kern’s
consideration is enriched by the breadth of his approach—the connections he draws
between aesthetic practices and philosophical, scientific, and industrial developments
is rendered all the more effective by the unique cross pollination which characterizes
his multidisciplinary approach.
My project demonstrates that similar reconsiderations and reconfigurations of
temporality and spatiality have been prompted by the representational modes afforded
by film, television, and video games. The materialities of these media have
engendered both unique modalities and implications of replay in each medium. The
flexibility and multivalence of the concept of replay has allowed this exploration to
both link and contrast disparate areas, while also exposing otherwise unapparent
thematic commonalities. The replay demonstrates the relationship between lived
experience and the varied representational modes offered in film, television, and
video games. Just as the act of recalling an event shapes the recollection and the event
itself, the replay similarly shapes that which it replays. I would argue that the replay
is a quintessentially unique experience of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

2
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, trans. Anselm
Hollo, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. (New York: Urizen Books, 1979), 41.
3
Ibid., 48. Schivelbusch draws further parallels to architectural practices as well.
230
Furthermore, if the cinema and the train are the archetypal symbols of modernity,
then the replay’s nature is symptomatic of postmodernity: it is an experience which
recursively redefines itself.
231
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Asset Metadata

Creator Hanson, Christopher C. P. (author)

Core Title One more time: instances, applications, and implications of the replay

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 08/13/2010

Defense Date 07/27/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag digital,film,OAI-PMH Harvest,repetition,replay,television,video games

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Anderson, Steven F. (committee member), James, David E. (committee member)

Creator Email chanson@usc.edu,cphanson@syr.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3398

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hanson, Christopher C. P.

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