Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Critical Commons

Sections
Personal tools

Project Showcase

Start screen for Killer Entertainments

Start screen for Killer Entertainments

Jennifer Terry's Killer Entertainments is a rare example of academic analysis of user-generated video that presents the videos themselves in their entirety. And these are no ordinary YouTube videos of teens lip-synching to pop songs or smashing their old cell phones. All of the videos in this project were created by soldiers in Iraq, some as "official" documents; others that were taken as home movies on cell phones or personal video cameras. In part because it is dealing with non-commercial media as objects of fair use, Killer Entertainments takes particular care to treat its objects of study with respect, resisting the temptation tosimply overlay heavy-handed revisionist critiques or politically charged diatribes against the cynicism of the war. We feel that the way Terry's project uses these clips is "fair" because of the radically transformative recontextualization this project enacts and the many tools of analysis and critique that are deployed - each video is embedded in the critical context of the overall project and juxtaposed with other, related clips; in addition, each video has attached commentaries and text highlights overlaid on the image.