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.