Reclaiming the 'vanilla' DVD: brand packaging and the case of Ealing Studios

Pride and Pudency: Paratextual Domestication and the US DVD Release of Pride

“…In addition to reflecting inwards on the texts they accompany, paratexts also project outwards and offer contributions to popular culture and reflections of our cultural milieu. Whilst paratextual scholarship is growing in screen studies (Klecker, 2015;Johnston, 2014Wuest, 2018Shaw, 2018), notably, as this paper will examine in relation to Pride, audiences and online press are also demonstrating increased awareness of and investment in paratexts, leading to a proliferation of unofficial paratexts in response to issues of domestication. The erasure or distortion of LGBT subject matter in marketing materials has particularly garnered attention, reflecting Brookey and Gray's contention (2017) that such content is highly susceptible to domestication.…”

“…Suspicions from critics and audiences that the move was a strategic ploy by CBS are not unfounded. The design of DVD cover art is strategic (Johnston, 2014). targeted women and framed the film as a universal love story.…”

‘Choose, collect, manage, win!’: Neoliberalism, enterprising culture and risk society in video game covers

“…Another purpose of paratexts is to construct authorship (Alacovska, 2015;Brookey and Westerfelhaus, 2002;Grant, 2008;Gray, 2010Gray, : position 2134Gray, -2034Johnston, 2014). For example, Mittell (2015: 86-117) shows how paratexts such as DVD extras, podcasts and interviews 'have helped create the phenomenon of star showrunners' (Mittell, 2015: 102) which has been strategic in order to produce television authorship and raise the medium's cultural worth.…”

Tout(e) Varda: the DVD collection as authorworld

“…Existing scholarship on DVD -when not focused on the format per se -has largely been organised around individual feature films, franchise films and television series Westerfelhaus 2002, 2005;Hight 2005;Skopal 2007;Grant 2008;Brown 2008;Evans 2010;Tompkins 2014). Thus, although the ways in which auteurism is mobilised in DVD paratexts has been a recurring concern, this has largely centered on the commercial value of the auteur relative to an individual film, franchise or series (Grant 2008, Johnston 2014, and/or their didactic role in shaping interpretations of specific storyworlds (Brookey & Westerfelhaus 2002, Hills 2007, Tompkins 2014. This is in keeping with a broader emphasis in DVD scholarship on the ways in which extras extend engagement with the storyworld, and what this means for both patterns of consumption and modes of spectatorship.…”

“…In contrast, I am concerned with how the DVD collection shapes -and extends -an engagement with the authorworld: with Varda as a filmmaker, photographer, artist and commentator occupying particular (political, domestic, creative) positions and offering her own (re)interpretations of her work. Of course, it is hardly unusual for film directors and other creative personnel to have their films "boxed up" by DVD distributors (Johnston 2014), or, indeed, to take an active role in paratextual DVD content (Grant 2008). That said, both Varda's apparent involvement in every aspect of this collection and the particular form of her paratextual engagements do seem unusual.…”