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According to the Postmodern Worldview, the Western world society is an outdated lifestyle disguised under impersonal and faceless bureaucracies.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.

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?”

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.

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”.

Content – content overload – media suration – post modern

• Ferdinand De Saussure – The fundamental groundbreaking point in Ferdinand De Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is a structuralist theorization of the system of language.
• “a system of signs that express ideas,” and suggests that it may be divided into two components: langue, referring to the abstract system of language that is internalized by a given speech community, and parole, the individual acts of speech and the “putting into practice of language”.

The sign

• The sign (signe) is described as a “double entity”, made up of the signifier, or sound image, (signifiant), and the signified, or concept (signifié).
• Saussure is adamant that language cannot be considered a collection of names for a collection of objects (as where Adam is said to have named the animals). According to Saussure, language is not a nomenclature. Indeed, the basic insight of Saussure’s thought is that denotation, the reference to objects in some universe of discourse, is mediated by system-internal relations of difference.

Photographs are metonymic – Natural isolation of cultural artifacts of representation – poses as universal – common sense

• Althusser – Theory of ideology
• Subject – Subjected to ideology
• Ideological state Apparatuses – Codes and shared understanding

Jacques Lacan - refashioned Freudian psychiatry, and suggested that the unconscious was structured like a language, thereby giving a key role to semiotics and dissolving the usual boundaries between the rational and irrational.

Though without foundation, the view supported many aspects of Postmodernism, and is therefore attractive to those fighting repression in western society.

Semiotics within film can be argued as the way messages are told to the audience.

Does film duplicate reality or articulate reality?

Iconic signs \ picture – painting

Arbitrary signs \ random sign

Film is a chemical reaction of something real in the world / an imprint / an index of reality.

An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one’s goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things.

• structuralism: linguistics defined as the analysis of formal structures in a text or discourse
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Structural linguistics has exceeded traditional grammar in several ways. It has allowed for more structural analysis of words and word formations, has allowed for the identification of phrasal verbs (a new class), has brought attention to analyzing and identifying helping verbs or modals, and has caused analysis of the English tense system which was previously ignored. Some structural linguists were able to discover structures and patterns in English which were buried in the language and were not previously noticed due to their lack of similarity to Latin.

Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed along linguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: ‘functions’, ‘actions’ and ‘narrative’. ‘Functions’ are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an ‘action’, and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key ‘functions’ work in forming characters. For example key words like ‘dark’, ‘mysterious’ and ‘odd’, when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or ‘action’. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality.

work on narrative from the 1960s onwards) Todorov suggested that stories
begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces
are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of
events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the
fiction.

tales to see if they shared. any structures. His book on this ‘Morphology of the
Folk Tale’ was first published in 1928) Propp looked at 100s of folk tales and
identified 8 character roles and 31 narrative functions.

Definitions of modernism on the Web:

• genre of art and literature that makes a self-conscious break with previous genres
• modernity: the quality of being current or of the present; “a shopping mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village”
• practices typical of contemporary life or thought
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Definitions of postmodernism on the Web:

• genre of art and literature and especially architecture in reaction against principles and practices of established modernism
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn 
• Postmodernism literally means ‘after modernism’. While “modern” itself refers to something “related to the present”, the movements modernism and postmodernism are understood as cultural projects or as a set of perspectives. …
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism 
• Any style in art, architecture, literature, philosophy, etc., that reacts against an earlier modernist movement
  en.wiktionary.org/wiki/postmodernism

Modernity/ism and postmodernity/ism definitions.

Definitions of Critical theory on the Web:

• Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. …
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

Critical Theory is one of the names given to a series of new approaches to the study of culture, literature and thought that developed during the 1960s, primarily in France. It includes the work of Jacques Derrida (philosophy), Roland Barthes (literary criticism), Louis Althusser (Marxism), Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis), Luce Irigaray (feminism) and many others. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982, 244). Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed.

Critical Theory is a way of thinking that encourages us to critically approach our assumptions about ourselves and the world.