ABSTRACT
As William S.Burroughs intimates in the lines above from “St Louis Return,” cinema and video seldom simply offer innocuous “good clean magic for all the family.”1 Like any other genre, video displays an array of effects, ranging from the good, the bad, and the ugly to the downright nasty. Unlike older genres, video also challenges our cultural expectations. First, as Walter Benjamin might have argued, it realizes modernism’s vague aspirations toward “effects which could only be obtained by a changed technical standard.”2 Video is this sort of changed technical standard. Second, as a specifically postmodern practice interacting with other genres, video precipitates an increasingly prevalent multimedia sensibility.
