Charliepaulcmp's Blog

Session 10 Wed 8 Dec: “The End of History” the end of everything

Critical practices in Postmodernism, grand narratives and the era of the postmodern. Figures of the postmodern: irony, pastiche, Fukuyama, Hutcheon, Lyotard, Jameson, Harvey

Viewing: D-i-a-l History –J.Grimonprez –Life of Brian, Monty Python.

Whereas postmodernity is a condition or a state of being associated with changes to institutions and conditions (Giddens, 1990) and with social and political results and innovations, globally but especially in the West since the 1960s, postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, the “cultural and intellectual phenomenon”, especially since the 1920s’ new movements in the arts.

According to the Postmodern Worldview, the Western world society is an outdated lifestyle disguised under impersonal and faceless bureaucracies. The postmodernist endlessly debates the modernist about the Western society needing to move beyond their primitiveness of ancient traditional thought and practices.

Session 9 Wed 1 Dec: The Postmodern Era – fundamental break or just more modern?

Warhol Multiples: The Break with the Modern and The cult of personality-

Ref John A Walker, Gablik, Walter Benjamin, Warhol

Viewing: Brazil- Terry Gilliam, Life of Brian- Monty Python, The Day Today- Morris, Ianucci BBC, From Duchamp to Pop Art.- Arte video 93-8

Brazil is a science fiction fantasy/black comedy comedy directed by Terry Gilliam. Brazil‘s bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that it has a buffoonish, slapstick quality and lacks a ‘Big Brother’ figure. Brazil has been recognized as an inspiration for writers and artists of the steampunk sub-culture.

How does one inject reason and reality into a fantasy-inspired cycle of violence which always results in an iron Republican grip on power? If they resist Bush’s fantasy, will the organizations of the left be gradually and deliberately transformed by the label “extremist” slowly morphing to mean “terrorist?”

Session 8 Wed 24 Nov: Psychoanalysis in film, feminism and cultural reading:

Butler, Sherman, Pollock, Mulvey, Mitchell, Rose, Freud,  Zizek, Lacan

The gaze, narcissism, voyeurism, advertising, masquerade, identity, ‘the subject’.

Viewing: Tomb Raider/ Cosmetic Surgery Live, Guerilla Girls, Thriller Michael Jackson +look-alikes(Naomi Harris):

Women’s lives are represented by the roles they either choose or have imposed on them.

Women have always been disempowered due to their gender in modern and ancient times alike. In Corinth they are expected to run the household and conform to social expectations of a dutiful wife.

Lara Croft, played by Angelina Jolie, clearly shows the influence of male filmmakers behind the scenes. Although the narrative follows the actions of a female heroine who is both intelligent and physically strong, aspects of both the story line and mise-en-scene present her from a ‘male gaze’. She is clearly presented as an erotic object for the male audience, as can be seen in her costume for the majority of the film and on the film’s promotional posters. She wears a tightly fitting vest and tiny shorts, which emphasise both her exaggerated breast size and her feminine curves, thus supporting Mulvey’s theory of voyeurism within the representation of women in films.

Session 7 Wed 17 Nov: Surveillance, spectacle, simulation

Reality is to do with meaning and representation, integral reality, which means that it has no boundaries and everything is realized and technically materialized without any references to the final purpose. everyone responds on media’s power in today’s society, we are reminded of this and know very well how media has taken over our thoughts and the way we behave. What we see, we must believe in it, not because we are sure it is reality, but because we think what is shown is the truth. Every part in media has been simulated.

A point Baudrillard is trying to make is that simulations have devoured reality, and that models have taken “precedence over things.” Too much reality has resulted in saturation and explosion.

Baudrillard argues that nothing has the same meaning anymore once it has been confronted not with its unfinished form, but with its accomplished or even excessive form

Spectacle

Way of seeking attention. Another word for the spectacle is the media.

Mediation: Reality is mediated by images; media has taken all aspects of our lives

Simulation:

Art loses value as it is reproduced. Benjamin uses the idea as “aura”.