The 'Boom': Big Deals and the Easy Sweet Life (aka The Consequences of 'the Miracle')

Essays around the 'economic miracle' (aka The Boom). These cover our discussion of Monicelli's I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) and Risi's Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life).
In the Bondanella book you should read up to Chp. 8. Chapter 7 ("Commedia all'italiana: Social Criticism for Laugter's Sake") you should read with particular attention.

Remì Fournier Lanzoni, "The Years of Euphoria and the Commedia all'Italiana"

Remì Fournier Lanzoni, "The Age of Neorealismo Rosa" (concentrate on pg. 28-43)
Paul Ginsborg, "The 'Economic Miracle', Rural Exodus and Social Transformation, 1958-1963"

Luisa Passerini, "Gender Relations"

from Dino Risi's 'I Mostri' (1963)

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.”"

Text and Context: Reception

Janice Radway, "Women Read The Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context"

Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"

The Limits to Neorealism

Silvana Mangano and Doris Dowling photographed by Robert Capa on the set of Riso Amaro (1949)

Millicent Marcus, "De Santis's Bitter Rice: A neorealist hybrid"
Millicent Marcus, "De Sica's Umberto D: Dark Victory for Neorealism"

'Maria wakes up' sequence from De Sica's Umberto D

Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy

Eisenstein Diagram

Here are the 'notes' re: the taxonomy of Hot and Cold media.
+

To get a sense of what a non-deterministic historical account of the changes brought about by the printing press:

Ben Reynolds, "The Printing Press" + "Industrial Production"
from The Coming Revolution (Zero Books, 2018)

You are not responsible for the Reynolds chapters above but they are very useful and helpful.

You are, on the other hand, responsible for this Raymond Williams critique of McLuhan, in order to be done with ol' Marshall. Even though you're never really done with him.

Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society" from Television: Technology and Cultural Form

Below is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Conference' program from 1977 where McLuhan discusses and responds to audience questions on his main theoretical ideas. If we don't get to watch and discuss this in class please watch it on your own:

That James Dean vs That Daydream Nation Look: Taylor Swift covered by Ryan Adams - Genre, Gender and Style

Here's a nice press review of the discourses surrounding the Ryan Adams/Taylor Swift operation. I've also included a few articles from the past past, mainly Taylor Swift profiles from mainstream magazines like The New Yorker and New York Magazine. Make sure you all read the Tavi Gevinson article linked to at the bottom of the post in .pdf format. Also included is a recent article from The Atlantic about authorship in pop music and the strategies used by record companies to downplay the 'outsourcing' of pop hit manufacturing. Enjoy.

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the Vindication of Taylor Swift

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift

No Blank Space, Baby: Taylor Swift Is The Soul Of Ryan Adams

Ryan Adams isn’t revealing something ‘good’ about Taylor Swift’s ‘1989.’ The album was already great.

Beats 1 Ryan Adams interview about '1989' with Taylor Swift call in 'surprise'

Platinum Underdog: Why Taylor Swift Is the Biggest Pop Star in the World

You Belong with Me

How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire.

Taylor Swift Is Confusing

Haters Gonna Hate: Listening to Ryan Adams’s “1989”

The Reinvention of Taylor Swift

Flavorwire Interview: Talking Taylor Swift With Tavi Gevinson

JUST KIDDING, LOVE SUCKS

NOTES ON TAYLOR SWIFT

The complete version of this article by then 16-year old Tavi Gevinson published in The Believer in 2013 is below in PDF. Tavi Gevinson started the Style Rookie blog when she was 12. Rookie Mag below is a treasure of 'readings' of Tween/Teen culture from a non mainstream perspective --with all of its exhilaration and limitations.

Tavi Gevinson, JUST KIDDING

Rookie Mag 

Why must we hate the things teen girls love?

Hit Charade: Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.

Neo-Realism II: An Aesthetic of Reality

Marcus, De Sica's Bicycle Thief: Casting Shadows on the Visionary City

In the Bazin document you should read the following short articles: "An Aesthetic of Reality", "Bicycle Thief", "De Sica: Metteur-en-scene", "Umberto D"

Following the Overbey article you will find a number of short artist declarations regarding neo-realism proper. You should read Zavattini's "A Thesis on Neo-Realism", De Sica's "Why Ladri di Biciclette" and Rossellini's "A Few Words on Neo-Realism". 

Monopolies of Knowledge and Space/Time Bias

Harold Innis, "The Bias of Communication" from The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 2008; orig. 1951)

Genre and Gendered Media Spaces

The article by Gledhill & Vicky Ball is from the Stuart Hall edited Representation (2nd Ed., Sage, 1997/2013). It's a long chapter but filled with information and notions. You are responsible for pgs. 335-361 -the rest is recommended, up to you, based on your own interests and projects. You don't need to actually do the 'activities' listed in the various sections but they are at the very least good mental exercises and opportunities to think through some of the issues.

Christine Gledhill & Vicky Ball, "Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera"

For an example of a political economic reflection on the media:
David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"

EXTRA READINGS:

Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"
Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture"

Textuality: Semiotics

To complement our discussion, the screening of Codes of Gender and the other readings, here are three different takes on 'semiotics' and semiotic analysis and their use for cultural studies and the analysis of media representations. These are not required readings if you have encountered 'media semiotics' before. I would however suggest, to those of you who are encountering 'semiotics' for the first time, to treat these readings as required readings: your work in class, your ability to grapple with the other required readings and your final project would certainly benefit from a familiarity 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

(Neo) Realism I: Cinema, The World and Truth

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

Bondanella: Chapters 1-4

Overbey, Introduction to Springtime in Italy
(This includes a number of short articles by Zavattini, Antonioni, De Sica & Rossellini)

Marcus, Rossellini's Open City: The Founding
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

Communications: Ritual vs. Transmission? Works vs. Acts? Message vs. Text?

from Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising'

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)

Construction and Performance I: Privilege and Representation

Power, Privilege and Discrimination

Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Cultural Studies & Representation: Ideology and Hegemony

Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture"
James Lull, "Hegemony"

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

Instructions for Accessing Audio/Visual Files on Network Servers

Follow these instructions to access the folder called 'SarramCourses' on the CINEMA network drive. You will need to log in to a campus computer (the PCs in one of the Computer Labs or the Macs in the Digital Media Lab and Mac Lab). Make sure you have a pen drive or an external hard disk with enough capacity as the files that you will find on the server are usually quite large. You will most probably need the VLC player in order to play the files on your computer.

Welcome to Fall 2019: Theory, R/G/S, Italian Cinema