Women's Cinema, Women in Cinema: Visual Pleasure, Narrative and Feminism + Third Cinema

To accompany the screening of Agnes Varda's Vagabond:
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Make sure you have this read by next class. We will continue discussing Godard's Masculin/Féminin in relation to the ideological critique of the institutional mode of representation put forward by the various cinematic new-waves as well as Vagabond as a feminist text that takes off on that critique but adds sexual difference and the representation of gender to its concerns. Laura Mulvey's essay should be a key to navigating these concepts.

Take a picture of her.

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

Post-Rock, Subcultures and the End of Authenticity

Assuming that at this point you should be on your way to completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments for the next couple of weeks:

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

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


On Gender:
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.

The Ramones, "Rockaway Beach" Live in Rome, 1980




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"

TV After TV: Global Media Trade, Formats and Channel Branding

Brennan, "A Political Economy of Formatted Pleasures"
Torre, "Reversal of Fortune?: Hollywood Faces New Competition in Global Media Trade"
from Oren & Shahaf (eds), Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders (Routledge, 2012)

Chap.1: "Deregulation, Differentiation and Niche Targeting: The Emergence of Branding in the Cable/Satellite Era"
Chap.2: "From Channel Brands to Service Brands: US Television Enters the Digital Era"
from Catherine Johnson, Branding Television (Routledge, 2012)

Bonus Article:
"Why HBO Passed on The Walking Dead" from Mother Nature Blog.

Also, if you are interested in the intersection of technology, creativity, production practices and televisual style make sure you follow Ben Consoli's GO Creative Podcast (and Blog). You'll find episodes in the artchive where Consoli interviews the DP for House of Cards, has an in depth conversation with Shane Reynolds, a true one-man band/jack of all trades who produces, shoots and edits his work all on his own for the Travel Network, Nat Geo and others and also speaks with Chris Manley, the cinematographer and DP for Mad Men. Great insights on how network pressures and studio concerns with the bottom line all line up with technological possibilities and stylistic choices.

Structuralism 101

"Structuralist Theories" from Selden et al. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd Edition (Prentice Hall, 1985)

Art Cinema and Modernism in Film

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1966)

On the 'art cinema' and modernism in film:
Bordwell, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice"
from Poetics of Cinema

For Those About To Rock: Return of the Aura

Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart

"I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

-Jack Kerouac

-Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

Here are a couple of articles to integrate Keightley's Reconsidering Rock article. The first Frith article is required; the second article is a highly recommended read. Enjoy the Lester Bangs reviews from Creem. Reebee Garofalo's article on Soul ("Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement") is required.

Simon Frith - "Rock and Popular Culture"
Simon Frith - "The Magic The Can Set You Free": The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community
Paul Clarke - "'A Magic Science': Rock Music as a Recording Art"
Lester Bangs - Various Record Reviews from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Reebee Garofalo - Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement

Also, here is Andrew Chester's "For A Rock Aesthetic", Richard Merton's response, "Comments" and Chester's response to the response, "Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band". It's all here at this link --the whole epochal exchange in one handy location.

Please read in 'Rocking Out' up to and including Chapter 8.

AC/DC, Let There Be Rock (1977) 

Reverend Bon tells you all about it. As you can see the 'aura' is back around Angus' head.

Audience Heatmaps: Assessment, Interactivity, Analytics and Chatter

The Audience Response Heatmap from Bluefin

Andrejevic, The Twenty-First-Century Telescreen
Marshall, Screens: Television's Dispersed 'Broadcast'

McChesney, What is the Elephant in the Digital Room? from Digital Disconnect

Refer to Jon Gertner's epigraph in Chapter 6 of The Television Will Be Revolutionized:

"Finding out whether ''C.S.I.'' beats ''Desperate Housewives'' is just the beginning. Change the way you count, for instance, and you can change where the advertising dollars go, which in turn determines what shows are made and what shows then are renewed. Change the way you count, and potentially you change the comparative value of entire genres (news versus sports, dramas versus comedies) as well as entire demographic segments (young versus old, men versus women, Hispanic versus black). Change the way you count, and you might revalue the worth of sitcom stars, news anchors and -- when a single ratings point can mean millions of dollars -- the revenue of local affiliates and networks alike. Counting differently can even alter the economics of entire industries, should advertisers (thanks to the P.P.M.) discover that radio or the Web is a better way to get people to know their brand or buy their products or even vote for their political candidates. Change the way you measure America's culture consumption, in other words, and you change America's culture business. And maybe even the culture itself."

The complete Jon Gertner (from The New York Times Magazine), "Our Ratings, Ourselves" here.

A recent Toby Miller blogpost, "TV is Dead" chock full of nice links and statistics about TV consumption

The following are good background readings about network and transition era audience assessment methods. They also offer a good reflection and analysis of the ways in which audience assessment are used in developing a political and regulatory environment for media systems in general and television in particular.

Meehan, The Blame Game
Meehan, Don't Blame The Viewers

Ang, The Nature of the Audience
Gandy, Tracking the Audience