Quick Mini-Review of Remembering Composition

This morning I was going through some papers, and I found my copy of the film Remembering Composition, a documentary about multimedia rhetoric. I decided to watch it while I did a few other things. I may have more to say about it later -- perhaps I'll even do an audiovisual response -- but for now, just a few thoughts:

• I hadn't really thought about it until reading this article, but I now appreciate the "not the usual suspects" selection of interviewees. It's true that not everyone Bump Halbritter and Todd Taylor chose to interview is a big computers and composition person. It was interesting to get the perspectives of some of the comp people who aren't well known as techies. Administration was well represented, with Sidney Dobrin, Deborah Holdstein, Erika Lindemann, and Kathleen Blake Yancey (apologies if there are some I've forgotten). I especially liked the inclusion of students in the film; in fact, I wish they'd done even more with that.
• Throughout the film, there were these interludes inspired by Memento. I wasn't crazy about those; I don't know if it's due to the execution of the idea or the idea itself.
• Some of the interviewees' comments represented the biggest surface-level clichés about new media out there. It was kind of astonishing. I wondered if they made other, more specific and insightful comments that were edited out. It seemed like the remarks could have been preliminary warming up as the interviewees were getting over their nervousness and summoning their thoughts.
• There were some standouts, the most excellent of whom were Erin Sullivan (one of the students) and Gregory Ulmer. Sullivan provided a useful comparison based on an ethnographic study of a community. The scholar offers the community the product of his or her study; in one scenario, it's a research paper, and in the other, it's a documentary film. In the film, the community gets to see itself in their own images and hear itself in the words of its own members. I was thinking too that the documentary has a certain simultaneity; it can be experienced by many people all at once in a way that a research paper cannot. Ulmer set forth a smart analogy of academia to entertainment as the church to science in the Renaissance. I also appreciated Holdstein's comments toward the end about institutional context.

Overall, the film was pretty good, but I liked Take20 a little better. The concept is simple but elegant, and I like the fact that the Take20 questions are listed for us, and I like the snappy editing showing the commonalities of the interviewees' responses:

"If you had to pick only one essay for a writing teacher to read, what would it be?"

"Inventing the University."

"Inventing the University."

"Inventing the University."

"If you had to pick only one book for a writing teacher to read, what would it be?"

"Errors and Expectations."

"Errors and Expectations."

"Errors and Expectations."