Fatal Strategies & Slackers: Withdrawing or Accelerating?

Matthias Leupold, Im Kino / In the Cinema, Part II Berlin GDR, 1983

Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media"

Additional Recommended Baudrillard Readings:

Jean Baudrillard, Requiem for the Media
Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media from Simulacra and Simulation

The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow.

Please read the section 'Disciplines and Sciences of the Individual' in Part II, particularly the first four segments (from "The Body of the Condemned" to "Panopticism")

Foucault, "The Repressive Hypothesis" from The History of Sexuality, Vol. I

Faster! Faster! Faster!


#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (Srnicek & Williams)
Steven Shaviro, "What is Accelerationism?" from No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

Bonus:
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (Laboria Cuboniks)

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What About 'Today'?

Christian Fuchs, "Participatory Web 2.0 as Ideology" from Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies

McKenzie Wark, The Hacker Manifesto

"Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death"
"Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy."

Screenings: EPISODE III: ENJOY POVERTY by Renzo Martens in GG1 @7.15pm

Please note the changed day and time of this screening. 
Screening will be on Wednesday, November 15 @7.15pm in GG1.

This is mandatory viewing for all students in both sections of COM 470 Advanced Communication Theory. (For information on the A Ciambra screening see post below)


"Enjoy Poverty: Disclosing the Political Impasse of Contemporary Art" in Art Papers

-an interview with Renzo Martens

Paul O'Kane, "Renzo Martens: Episode III" review in Third Text, 2009

T.J. Demos, "Poverty Pornography, Humanitarianism and Neo-Liberal Globalization: Notes on Some Paradoxes in Contemporary Art"

Bonus Interview from the "Africa is a Country Blog" here.

Bonus Reading:

Susan Sontag, "Looking At War/Regarding the Pain of Others"

SCREENINGS: A Ciambra by Jonas Carpignano. Monday @7pm in Aula Magna

"The electrifying sophomore feature from rising director Jonas Carpignano (Mediterranea). 14-year-old Pio (Pio Amato) wants nothing more than the respect of his older brother, whom he emulates in every way including his career as a petty criminal. When both his father and brother are arrested, Pio is determined to prove that he can step up and be the head of his sprawling Romani family. But a fateful night and a wrenching decision soon test just how ready he is. Steeped in the complex social fabric of Southern Italy where Italians, Romani, and African migrants coexist in uneasy tension A Ciambra is a bracing plunge into a world in which growing up fast is a matter of survival."

A Ciambra (Jonas Carpignano, USA/Italy, 2017) will be introduced and followed with a q&a by the film's producer, Paolo Carpignano. The film, mostly in the local Calabrese dialects, was distributed in Italian cinemas with Italian subtitles. This is a unique opportunity to see it with English subtitles ahead of its US distribution in 2018 when it will also be the official Italian entry to the 2018 Academy Awards.

This is required attendance for CMS 241 Italian Cinema and CMS 360 Race and Gender in Media students. COM 470 students are strongly encourage to attend.

Jonas Carpignano's first feature, Mediterraneo (2016), which is the first film in the projected trilogy (A Ciambra is the second part) is on reserve in the library for those interested.

Surveillance and Time: Power as Pathology

Marcus, Elio Petri's Indagine: Power as Pathology

The Conformist: Coming To Terms With The Past

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
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Theodor Adorno, "What Does Coming To Terms With the Past Mean?"

The 'Post' Archipelago: A Brief Intro

Young Jacques Derrida's English Comp Essay
Note the teacher's comments. Do they still apply to Jacques' adult writing? Read 'Différance' below to find out.

Some introductory readings to the various 'posts' that we will be reading in the next weeks. Having just concluded our discussion of structuralism, here is some material to bring us towards the post-structuralist theoretical framework. Remember that a good exercise for us is to read the theories in their original form. As you read get a sense of the language, of the rhetorical processes, of the way the argument proceeds. I am including here, in addition to the Roland Barthes essay on "The Death of the Author" also a brief introduction to poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonial studies (the pdf has these entries in alphabetical order but please read them in the order above). I've also included Derrida's 'Différance' --this is a bonus reading but I would urge all of you to tackle it in order to get that sense of the language mentioned above so that we may talk about it in class. Enjoy.

"poststructuralism"; "postmodernism"; "postcolonial studies" entries
from A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory; 2nd Ed. (Wiley-Blackwell)

Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" from Image/Music/Text

David Harvey, "Postmodernism" from The Condition of Postmodernity

Jacques Derrida, Différance

Cinema Going as Social Act: Westerns, Giallos and Other Generic 'Trash'

Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace

Wagstaff, "A Forkful of Westerns: Industry, Audiences and the Italian Western"
from Dyer & Vincendeau, Popular European Cinema (Routledge, 1992)
Koven, "What Is Giallo?" + "Toward an Understanding of Vernacular Cinema"
from Koven, La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (Scarecrow Press, 2006)

Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars

Structuralism 101

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

Below are some very basic intro articles on Semiotics and the media for those that need a refresher/recap:

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

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. 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.

Kristal Brent Zook, "The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television"
Robin R. Means-Coleman, "Black Sitcom Portrayals"
Herman Gray, "The Politics of Representation in Network Television" from Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (University of Minnesota Press, 1995/2004)

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"

Please watch this 'incomplete sentence' vaudeville routine by Mantan Moreland & Ben Carter from the Charlie Chan movie The Scarlet Clue (Phil Rosen, 1945)

Below is Sarah Jones' 'Your Revolution' (with DJ Vadim) from Def Poetry Jam's Season 1 (2002)

Return to the Real: New Wave Neo-Realism

Anna Magnani as Mamma Roma (Città Aperta)

Antonioni and Fellini, although in very different ways and with different degrees, did share an apparent obliviousness to concrete social issues and a much more evident interest in larger framing questions and issues of form. Pierpaolo Pasolini is one of a handful of 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 and is operating from a modernist perspective.

Viano, Mamma Roma from Pasolini: A Certain Realism
Indiana, Pasolini, Mamma Roma and La Ricotta + Pasolini Interview
Siciliano, La Ricotta + Pasolini Interview
Sitney, "New Wave Neorealism: Pasolini, Olmi and Rosi" from Vital Crises in Italian Cinema

These are some essential readings that are, however, not required. I recommend these to anyone interested in investigating further issues of 'realism', reality and cinema.
Barthes, "The Reality Effect"
McCabe, "Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses"
McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure"

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

The Social Construction of Race I

This is a short, introductory article on race and the media. As you watch Spike Lee's Bamboozled and discuss the film, Ash Corea's "Racism and the American Way of Media" is a good summary of the issues raised by Lee 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.

Through Bamboozled please reflect on the mechanisms that Lee describes (through a satirical register) as well as how he narrativizes the power dynamics at work inside the CNS network. How does he convey the conversion of aspects of African-American culture into a commodity within the context of a white-owned and controlled corporation? Also, as Delacroix is 'permitted' to move up in the corporate entertainment ladder by becoming show runner and head writer of a 'variety' show what are the conditions that he needs to submit to? How does the white construction of black culture play into what he is being asked to conform to? In the end, what is the price that Delacroix has to pay according to Lee?
Finally, what does Spike Lee say about the way in which Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show's genealogy in minstrel shows and blackface performance (along with the accumulation of historical artefacts) has become an empty gesture, a comedic ploy that removes the complexities of history and society and keeps racial hierarchies intact? What forms of contemporary popular culture do you think Spike Lee would consider to be operating through the same mechanisms today?
That's a whole lot of questions. Enjoy.

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 the 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 minstrelsy.

Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker

The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross

Even the New Yorker catches up:

"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”

These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"

Art, Modernism: Antonioni, Fellini

Bondanella, History of Italian Cinema; Chapters 5-9

Bordwell, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice"
from Poetics of 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

Barthes, "'Dear Antonioni...'"

Text of a speech given by Roland Barthes in 1980; from Cahiers du Cinema #311, May 1980

Bondanella, "La Dolce Vita: The Art Film Spectacular" 

from The Films of Federico Fellini

(nb. You are responsible for the Bordwell, Marcus and Bondanella on La Dolce Vita. The Godard interview and the Barthes letter are extra readings which I will talk about in class)

"Beneath the cobblestones, the beach": Theory, Situationism and Cultural Resistance

Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)

Extra:
John Downing - Radical Media in Italy

How To Talk Like A Situationist

Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)

If you are interested in reading more of the Situationist International's documents, manifestos and screeds (they are always fun, engaging and inspiring) you can find an excellent selection in the anthology edited by Tom McDonough and published by MIT Press titled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Modern day situationists have made the book available here. Of course all of the Situationist documents are also available online at the Situationist Online Archive which is a true treasure trove of material. There are many other sources for Situationist materials freely available online, a direct result of the 'proto-free culture' approach the Situationist International always promoted.

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Film

Stills from Otto Preminger's Laura, 1944

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look."

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

‘Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Jill Soloway, the creator of the TV series Transparent and I Love Dick (based on the Chris Kraus book of the same title about having a crush on cultural studies scholar and critic Dick Hebdige which some of you might have read in previous classes). This is a talk she gave on 'The Female Gaze' at the Toronto Film Festival.