European Mass Media

Review and Update on Public Service Broadcasting. Enjoy. Here.

Eastern European Mass Media

Here are two more articles on the passage from the state/party controlled monopolies of Eastern European nations to the commodified systems post-1989.


Splichal, "From State Control to Commodification: Media Democratisation in East and Central Europe"

Sparks & Reading, "Re-regulating Television After Communism: A Comparative Analysis of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic"

Race Gender Final Paper Assignment

Secret word of the day is "final paper assignment". You know what to do when you hear the secret word: SCREAM.

Find it here.

The Conformist

Readings for Bertolucci's The Conformist.

Marcus, "Bertolucci's The Conformist: A Morals Charge"
Walker, "Style and Narrative in Bertolucci's The Conformist" from Cineaction #41, 1996

The Oppositional Gaze

To tie into our discussion on audience agency and activity. This is bell hooks' classic article on black female spectatorship from her book Black Looks: Race and Representation.

bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze"

European Mass Media: Deregulation and De-Stalinization

Here are two articles to think through some of the more specific issues we will be covering in class this week and next. The article on the media in Eastern Europe is a good overview for your presentations and work on the single former Soviet Bloc countries (and more).

Umberto Eco - "A Guide to the Neo-Television of the 1980s"

Kevin Williams - "The Media in Eastern Europe" from European Media Studies

Convergence Culture: Hackers as Interactive Users + Evil Bert

Evil Bert with Che Guevara.

As we move forward in talking about the cultural logic of digital media and finish investigating the concept of interactivity and begin dealing with the intuition of 'collective intelligence' the following readings should help you focus on the theoretical underpinnings of our class discussion. The Marshall, Manovich and Jenkins articles are a good review and primer for the basic ideas we have been discussing in class and that you have been encountering in the screenings and examples we have analyzed. The Himanen and Wark articles on the other hand are two influential attempts at trying to map a rhetoric and an ethos of network culture.


Marshall, "Forms of Interactivity: The Disappearance of the Audience"
Marshall, "The Web Economy"
Jenkins, "Worship At The Altar of Convergence"
Manovich, "Principles of New Media"

Himanen, "From Netiquette to a Nethic"
(includes Linus Torvalds' Preface to The Hacker Ethic, "What Makes Hackers Tick?")
Wark, "The Hacker Manifesto"

Evil Bert is referenced in the Jenkins article above. Find the original Bert Is Evil website here at WayBackMachine. The story of the Bert Is Evil website is told here at Wikipedia. A contemporary site for all kinds of Evil Bert stuff is here.

Queering Texts II: Popular Culture and Popular Music

Susan Sontag, "On Camp"

Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Richard Dyer, "Judy Garland and Gay Men"

Alexander Doty, "There's Something Queer Here"
Bruce LaBruce, "Pee Wee Herman: The Homosexual Subtext"

Joli Jenson, "Fandom as Pathology

Queer Texts I: GLBT Representation and Criticism in Film and Television

Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, "Representing Gay Men on American Television"
Diane Raymond, "Popular Culture and Queer Representation: A Critical Perspective"

Susan J. Hubert, "What's Wrong With This Picture: The Politics of Ellen's Coming Out Party"
Fred Fejes, "Advertising and the Political Economy of Lesbian/Gay Identity"

Active or Interactive: Copyrights and Copyfights II

Matt Mason - We Invented The Remix

Henry Jenkins - Photoshop for Democracy

You can find James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind --which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License-- available for download from Yale University Press here.

"Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical development and indebtedness as benign and organic. … [Sampling] is a different kind of borrowing than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, or law?"

This is good material for those of you interested in copyright and appropriation especially if you are thinking of working on these issues for your final papers. Chapter 6 ("I Got A Mashup") is especially pertinent. Chapter 6 is here, from the 'annotatable' version on the website of Boyle's book.

This next article by Jenkins will work as a bridge to our next section which is 'collective intelligence' and its ties to interactivity:
Henry Jenkins - Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans

Also, Dancehall/Reggae History Bonus (Recommended Reading):
Dick Hebdige - from Cut'N'Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music



Finally, Download Girl Talk's Feed The Animals from the Illegal Art website on a pay-as-you-please basis. Enjoy the 'official' 322 samples. You can find a spreadsheet with all of them listed here. Wikipedia breaks it down song by song but there's 80 unidentified samples compared to the official list (click on the picture above for the official CD liner notes).
Bob Christgau, the "Dean of American Rock Critics", provides an inter-generational appreciation of Girl Talk on NPR here.

Active or Interactive: Copyrights and Copyfights I

Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins - Bound By Law?
This is the comic book on copyright. Don't be fooled by its form: this is required reading.
You can also find it free on-line from its publisher --crazy, huh?-- Duke University and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain in a variety of formats. You can also 'remix' it and you're encouraged to translate it. It's all here.

From Technology Review (free registration might be required) read the debate around the question:

Who Should Own Ideas?

Larry Lessig - The People Own Ideas!
Epstein - The Creators Own Ideas!
And the winner is...

While you're at it, look at your 'friends' on Facebook and ask yourselves: Who Owns Your Friends...

Here's the Lessig talk we started watching in class.
(I took the embedded video out as it starts automatically and it uselessly hogs bandwidth. Actual download here.)


This was Lessig's 'last' talk on Free Culture and it has that sort of summing up about it.
You can find his original presentation in a number of different formats (powerpoint, mp3, flash presentation, transcript, pdf, etc.) here.

Lawrence Lessig and The Future of Ideas by Bryan Alexander from Mindjack is an interesting summary article with lots of links.
Finally, here is the site for Creative Commons. Look them up.

National Cinemas, Art Films, American Friends and Cultural Imperialism or, What's Wrong With A Cowboy in Hamburg

What's wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?
"The Americans have colonized our subconscious" (Wenders in "Kings of the Road")

Readings for this week's discussion on the concept of National Cinema, the Art Film and Wim Wenders' Der Amerikanische Freund (1977)

Bordwell, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice" from Poetics of Cinema
Elsaesser, "American Friends: Hollywood Echoes in the New German Cinema"
Jarvie, "Free Trade as Cultural Threat: American Film and TV Exports in the Post-War Period"

Here is a mainstream review of the film from everyone's favorite middle-brow film critic, Roger Ebert.

Return to the Real: New Wave Neo-Realism

The three Antonioni films we screened (L'avventura, Il deserto rosso and Blow-Up), although very different, did share an apparent obliviousness to concrete social issues and a much more evident interest in larger framing questions and issues of form. This week we are starting to investigate a number of films and filmmakers who mark a return to the concerns of realism --even though if you look at the dates to the films you will realize that all of this is happening in sync with the other more formally oriented films-- and to concrete social investigation. This 'return' however, as we will see, is certainly not a stale or naive re-proposal of neo-realism's outlook.

Here is a first group of readings to accompany the screenings this week. I would further urge everyone to return to the Abercrombie, Lash & Longhurst article, "Popular Representation: Recasting Realism".

Barthes, "The Reality Effect"
McCabe, "Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses"
McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure"
Sitney, "New Wave Neorealism: Pasolini, Olmi and Rosi" from Vital Crises in Italian Cinema
Marcus, "Olmi's "Il Posto: Discrediting the Economic Miracle"

I am also going to assume that by the end of this week everyone will have seen Fellini's La Dolce Vita and therefore you are all invited to read Peter Bondanella's "La Dolce Vita: The Art Film Spectacular"

30 Rock on Italian Politics

A short clip for all.

The Social Construction of Race, Part Deux

This is the bulk of readings for the 'discourses of race' section of the course as we wade through it this week and next. There will be two chapters from bell hooks' Black Looks: Race and Representation which I will post over the next weekend so as to not give the impression that I'm burdening you all with too much reading. Fair warning, then. Please have these articles read in the order posted. Pay particular attention to Zook's article on the Fox Network as it invests that political economic perspective that is so well dramatized in Bamboozled as well as the Means-Coleman article on 'black sitcoms' which is a good example of textual analysis.

Also, a couple of posts back you can find a 20 minute segment of a Sarah Jones performance as well as a radio piece/interview by and with her. Make sure you have watched/listened to this material as we will be referencing it in class.

Kristal Brent Zook, "The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television"
Robin R. Means-Coleman, "Black Sitcom Portrayals"
Donald Bogle, "Workplace Dramas, Ensemble Casts 1990s Style"
Chyng Fen Sun, "Ling Woo in Historical Context: The New Face of Asian American Stereotypes on Television"

The Social Construction of Race

This a short introductory article on race and the media. As we conclude screening Bamboozled and discuss the film Ash Corea's "Racism and the American Way of Media" is a good summary of the issues raised in the Spike Lee's film and those that you will be reading about in greater detail with the next group of articles. As a bonus, a classic article by Stuart Hall.

Ash Corea, "Racism and the American Way of Media" from Questioning the Media
Stuart Hall, "What is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture" from Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies




Clip from a 1949 film, Hollywood Varieties, where actors Glenn Vernon and Edward Ryan apply blackface make-up while on stage and reminisce about 'the good ol' days' --as they say-- of ministrelsy.

Modernism, Art Cinema and Antonioni

This is an initial batch of readings regarding modernist cinema and (European) art films. Specifically theoretical and historical readings are accompanied by specific analyses and readings of the films we are screening in class. We are taking on Antonioni as our object of analysis and the readings will relate to L'avventura, Il Deserto Rosso and Blow Up.

Bordwell, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice" from Poetics of Cinema
Sitney, "L'avventura" excerpt from Vital Crises in Italian Cinema
Marcus, "Antonioni's Red Desert: Abstraction as the Guiding Idea" from Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism
Godard, "Jean-Luc Godard Interviews Michelangelo Antonioni" from Cahiers du Cinema #160, November 1964
Chatman, "Blow Up: Questioning the Seen, Questioning the Scene" from Antonioni or, The Surface of the World

Sarah Jones and the Aural Characteristics of 'Blaccent'

As a bonus to this week's entry into the issues of race and the media and as we finish watching Spike Lee's Bamboozled here is a segment from this week's Studio 360, a radio program on WNYC/NPR. The piece is centered around Sarah Jones and her reflections on the cultural characteristics of 'voice' and 'accent'. As The New Yorker wrote of Jones, "she is ... a sort of multicultural mynah bird, lays our mongrel nation before us with gorgeous, pitch-perfect impersonations of the rarely heard or dramatized." You can also download the mp3 of the segment here.



Sarah Jones is also well known for a couple of spoken word/rap pieces from some years back. Her performance of Blood was one of the highlights of Lyricist Lounge, Vol. 1, a seminal hip-hop anthology from 1998 which featured The Roots, De La Soul, Q-Tip, Mos Def and Talib Kweli among others (the more obviously identity based/political anti-bling fringe of the hip-hop movement). Her Your Revolution is a more specifically feminist inflected invective backed by Russian turntablist DJ Vadim. Find both linked below.

Sarah Jones - Blood (from Lyricist Lounge Vol. 1 on Rawkus Records, 1998)
DJ Vadim featuring Sarah Jones - Your Revolution (from DJ Vadim, USSR - Life From The Other Side on Ninja Tune, 1999)

Finally, since we're on the topic here's a great Sarah Jones performance where you can appreciate what she does with voice, language and accent. This was part of the TED Talks and recorded in February 2009. One thing to reflect on is the way in which voice and accent signify and what can be said of the use of accents as a source of comedy and/or as a source for critique.



Finally here's a video of Jones performing Your Revolution live on stage for Def Poetry Jam.

Intro to Mass Media Study Guide

Hi. Study Guide here.

The Yes Men Strike Again

See the Rachel Maddow report on yet another wildly successful Yes Men hoax this time involving the US Chamber of Commerce and the revelation that the CoC was reversing its position on climate change policy and was promising to immediately cease lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer bill.The fake news conference was preceded by a fake on-line press release (Find that here.)

Note that the url to the press release is www.chamber-of-commerce.us while the real CoC website is at www.uschamber.com. Look around and you can see how The Yes Men operate in setting up fake corporate and government agency websites as part of their jamming tactics.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

More media repercussions. Here's FoxNews giving the news live on the air and then immediately retracting the story. Who said Fox does not fact-check?

European Parliament Debate

Judith Sargentini, Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Greens, pleads in the plenary session for a directive on media concentration in Italy.

(Not A) Study Guide for Race and Gender

Read on here for study/exam tips (in reality it's not much as per the post title but I guess it's better than nothing --at least it looks like one).

'Free' or 'Pirate' Media?

Below is Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" where he discusses the concepts of 'emancipatory vs. repressive uses' of the media while offering a radical critique of traditional progressive conception of public/state media in favor of the 'new media' potentials of 'free' media.

Roger Chapman's article is a comparative analysis of the two main British 'pirate' radio stations, Radio London and Radio Caroline and how they differentiated themselves on the basis of their attitude to commercialism and their mission.

Finally John Downing writes on 'radical media' in Italy covering a number of activist situations and their use of new communication technologies by political movements during the late '60s and early '70s. This last article will be the clearest contextualization of Marco Tullio Giordana's I Cento Passi.

Something to think about in relation to I Cento Passi is how Peppino Impastato's attempts at carving out a space for communication and direct political action (a public sphere within the confines of a small community dominated by organized crime and their ties to the political realm) is dramatized in the film --from traditional political rallies to 'free radio' after navigating dadaist street theater, pamphleteering, film screenings and be-ins. Think specifically of the characteristics of RadioAut --programming, control, voice, 'mission', etc.


Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media"
Chapman, "The 1960s Pirates: A Comparative Analysis of Radio Caroline and Radio London"
Downing, "Radical Media in Italy" from Radical Media

Signs and Meaning

Following the screening of Jhally's Dreamworlds 3 here are two articles related to our discussion on signs, meaning and culture and their intersections with the construction of identity, desire and power.

Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture"
Scott McCloud, "Semiotics" from Understanding Comics

Additional reading on 'media semiotics':
Jonathan Bignell, "Introduction + Cinema" from Media Semiotics

New Media: The Internet as Technology

Jeremy G. Butler, "The Internet and the World Wide Web"
P. David Marshall, "The Internet: The Multi-Media Accessible Universe and the User"
Bolter & Grusin, "The World Wide Web" (from Remediation)

Feminist Film Theory: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look"
Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

New Media: Gaming

Pac-Man Skull

These are two articles on videogames and their history. Use them in conjunction with the screening of Game On: The Unauthorized History of Video Games screened in class. Check back soon for the articles on The Internet and the WWW.

Bolter & Grusin, "Computer Games" (from Remediation)
P. David Marshall, "Playing Game Cultures: Electronic Games"

Construction and Performance II: Masculinity

Jackson Katz, "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From Eminem to Clinique for Men"
Brian Locke, "Here Come The Judge: The Dancing Itos and the Televisual Construction of the Enemy Asian Male"
Gail Dines, "King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity"

Transitions: After Realism I

Here are the readings to contextualize the screenings of the so-called 'transition' period: from Rossellini's Voyage To Italy to Fellini's Il Bidone. This should also provide you with ample material to help you think through your first short writing assignment.

Laura Mulvey, Vesuvian Topographies
Pierre Sorlin, Fourth Generation
Millicent Marcus, Fellini's La Strada: Transcending Neorealism

Please remember that in the Bazin collection of articles in the previous reading post there are a number of readings related specifically to these same films. The link is here. For your paper an important source for thinking is the Kracauer chapter on 'the found story' as well as the Abercrombie, Lash and Longhurst article on 'popular representation'.

Enjoy.

Popular Representation: Recasting Realism

This is the poster for the US release of L'onorevole Angelina. Note how the film is characterized as a 'lusty topical comedy-drama of life in present day Italy'. When two different understandings of the cinema inevitably meet in the market.

As we move away from neo-realism proper: the Abercrombie, Lash & Longhurst article below can get us thinking about how 'realism' can be recast as something that opens itself up to further scrutiny rather than a closed proposition predicated on particular historical and social contexts. This article is important both for how it allows us to think and talk of a film like Luigi Zampa's L'onorevole Angelina (or Giuseppe De Santis' Riso amaro (Bitter Rice) as well as Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy). Next screening will be Federico Fellini'sIl Bidone.

Abercrombie, Lash & Longhurst, "Popular Representation: Recasting Realism"

Chomsky & Herman: The Propaganda Model

Please find, following our discussion in class of media bias and the political economy of the mass media an excerpt from the first chapter of Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media (NY: Pantheon Books, 1988). This is where Herman develops and explains the 'five filters' that distill what is presentable in the media.

Construction and Performance

Jean Kilbourne, “The More You Subtract, the More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size”
Diana Crane, “Gender and Hegemony in Fashion Magazines: Women’s Interpretations of Fashion"
Deborah D. Rogers, “Daze of Our Lives: The Soap Opera as Feminine Text”
Gloria Steinem, “Sex, Lies and Advertising”

Daphne A. Brooks, "Suga Mama, Politicized (on Beyoncé)"
Susan McClary, "Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly"

Blackwashing on The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Blackwashing
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

'New' Media: Impact of Digital Technology on Film and Television

These are the readings for the first weeks of class and discussion. Remember that we are still in the process of investigating the concept of 'new' media and trying to go beyond a mere chronology of now technologies in favor of a more nuanced and specific understanding of the truly 'new' aspects of digital converged media and the social potential/consequences from a politically progressive perspective --the 'what's new for society' question.

The articles here will introduce you to some of the more practical transformations that the appearance of digital technologies have produced in 'old' media like film and television. Please note that as we discussed in class, even in this case, the transformations are both smaller and larger than those one could imagine: on the one hand, the film and televisual experience is for the most part unchanged; on the other, however, the film medium and the specificity of the photo/cinematographic image has been dramatically transformed as it loses its indexicality and the medium goes from a synthetic to an analytic one while television's horizon ceases to be that of a regulated/national context to an open/transnational one.

David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"

Sean Cubitt, "Digital Filming and Special Effects"
P. David Marshall, "Rejuvenation: Film in the Digital World"
Anne Friedberg, "CD and DVD"
Janet Wasko, "The Future of Film Distribution and Exhibition"

Michele Hilmes, "Cable, Satellite and Digital Technologies"
P. David Marshall, "Rejuvenation: Television"

Text and Context: Political Economy and Reception

Janice Radway, "Women Read The Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context"
Jan Nederveen Pitersem, "White Negroes"
David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"
Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture"

Textuality: Semiotics

To complement the other readings here are three different discussions of 'semiotics' and semiotic analysis and their use for cultural studies and media representation. There are not required readings but those of you who are encountering 'semiotics' for the first time would certainly benefit from grappling with the concepts presented here.

Mieke Bal, Semiotics for Beginners
Scott McCloud, from Understading Comics: Chapter 2, Semiotics
Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics: Introduction + The Cinema

European Mass Media Text

Please note that due to the non-arrival of the textbooks readings for the class are going to be available at the copy place in Via Fratelli Bonnet and on-line right here. Refer to syllabus for reading assignments.

(Neo) Realism I

still from Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (Italy, 1948)

Overbey, Introduction to Springtime in Italy
(This includes a number of short articles by Zavattini, Antonioni, De Sica & Rossellini)
Bazin's collection of articles on neo-realism from What Is Cinema?; Vol. II
Merleau-Ponty, Preface to Phenomenology of Perception
Kracauer, The Found Story and the Episode from Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality

Cultural Studies and Representation: Race and Gender I

Power Privilege and Discrimination

Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture"
Sanjukta Gosh, "'Con-Fusing' Exotica: Producing India in US Advertising"

Ideology and Hegemony

Stuart Hall, "The Whites of Their Eyes: Racing Ideologies and the Media"
James Lull, "Hegemony"

all readings are from Dines and Humez (eds), Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader; 2nd Edition (Sage, 2003)



Clip from The Tyra Banks Show on "eyelid surgery": relate to general introduction to Cultural Studies in Kellner essay.

Welcome to the 2009-2010 Academic Year

Welcome back to those returning and to those here for the first time. You will find readings, clips, discussion material and more. Check back regularly. Friday is also 'Weekend Tunes' day.

Returning September 1st

Hello all. Returning September 1st. In the meantime here's a summer song for all.

The Boat That Rocked

Something for you to do on what is looking to be a rainy weekend.

The Boat That Rocked, Richard Curtis' film about the British Pirate Radio Stations is playing at the Metropolitan, the movie theater in Via del Corso, near the Piazza del Popolo. The film is in English (with Italian subtitles). Of course the film is directed by the guy that did Four Weddings and a Funeral so like Xan Brooks says in The Guardian, it's more 'born to be mild' than anything else, but it's nonetheless a good example of how pirates, with hindsight, can be cuddly and cute.

A light hearted take on some of the issues we discussed at the beginning of the session and like I said it's something to do --it keeps you out of the rain if it rains or it gives you some air conditioned respite from the heat if the sun's out.



Review in The Guardian here. Video review here.

The Democratic Right To Know

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Ver. 4.0)

James Boyle from The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
Link above is for the whole book which Boyle made available through the Creative Commons License. You should read Chapter 6: I Got A Mashup.
If you don't want to download the whole book you can find a link to the annotatable online version of the chapter here.

Matt Mason - We Invented The Remix

Henry Jenkins - Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans

Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins - Bound By Law?
This is a comic book on copyright. Don't be fooled by it's form: it's a great read and I strongly encourage you to read at least the first 15 pages.
You can also find it free on-line from its publisher --crazy, huh?-- Duke University and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain in a variety of formats. You can also 'remix' it and you're encouraged to translate it. It's all here.

From The Cultural Resistance Reader: please have the articles in Section Seven read. The following articles from Section 8 are also required: Jordan on 'Reclaim the Streets'; Jason Grote on 'Revered Billy' and Ricardo Dominguez's 'Electronic Disturbance'

Bonus:

This is an old post from the blog where you can find a link to download Girl Talk's latest work, Feed The Animals.

Bonus reading for those interested in reading more on Jamaican music:
Dick Hebdige - from Cut'N'Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music

True Norwegian Black Metal

From VBS.TV - True Norwegian Black Metal - a portrait of Gorgoroth's Gaahl.

Subcultures I

Please complete the readings in Section III from The Cultural Resistance Reader. I will be assigning those from Section IV tomorrow in class.
Don Letts' Punk: Attitude in on reserve in the library for those of you who did not see it in class.

Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Chapter 6 : Subculture: The Unnatural Break
Chapter 7 : Style as Intentional Communication
Chapter 8 : Style as Homology

Towards A Third Cinema

Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value to images."
--Med Hondo

Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema
Med Hondo, What is Cinema for us?

If you are interested in reading a brief outline of the life, ideas and struggles of Ousmane Sembene: OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST

Cultural Resistance Readings I

Reading assignments for the first two weeks:
in Duncombe Cultural Resistance reader:
for the material covered in Week 1: Introduction + in Part Two: Williams, Marx&Engles, Gramsci, Benjamin + in Part Three: Baudrillard, Bey
for the material covered in Week 2: Part Three: Scott, Kelley, Reed

Extra Readings:
Hesmondalgh - Alternative Media, Alternative Texts?
Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media
John Downing - Radical Media in Italy

Steven Wright - A Love Born of Hate: Autonomist Rap in Italy

Filmography for Final

Here is the complete list of the documentary films screened in class since the midterm which you are responsible for. I have also included a couple of titles which we only saw excerpts of but which are nonetheless important.

This is the link for the pre-midterm 'filmography'.

Resisting Surveillance

Articles on Resisting Surveillance:

David Lyon, "Resisting Surveillance" from Surveillance After 9/11
John Gilliom, Resisting Surveillance

Documentary and Reality TV

Rodney King Video

Final article on the intersection of documentary film and Reality TV (Susan Murray, "I Think We Need A New Name For It: The Meeting of Documentary and Reality TV") here. Enjoy.

Documentary History III + Paper Assignment

Find the list of films and the guidelines for the paper here.

Readings:

From Jack C. Ellis & Betsy McLane's A New History of Documentary Film
English-Language Documentary in the 1980s: Video Arrives
English-Language Documentary in the 1990s and Beyond: Reality Bytes

Carl Plantinga, Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This Is Spinal Tap
Sheila Petty, Silence and Its Opposite: Expressions of Race in Tongues Untied
Julia Lesage, Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics

Pop Music Readings

Assuming that at this point you are (basically) all done with the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments up to the end of the semester:

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.

On Gender:
from The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock:
Sara Cohen, "Popular Music, Gender and Sexuality"

Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.



On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.


On sampling, mash-ups and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"
Negativland, "from Wired: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"