TV: The Idiot Box, the Electronic Babysitter, the Toaster with Pictures, "Drug of the Nation, Breeding Ignorance and Feeding Radiation"...

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

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

Enjoy some tunes about TV below:

Art & Folk

The virtuoso instrumentalist and composer as superstar: Franz Liszt.

Good interview on WNYC's Soundcheck with Tim Blanning author of The Triumph of Music, a 'social history' of musicians in the west and how they went from being considered merely servants to being 'stars'. This is an excellent example of metacontextual musical knowledge. Required listening.

Download entire interview mp3 here.

Popular Music: Music Becomes A Thing

Readings Week 1&2:

in Garofalo, Rockin' Out:
-Introduction + Chapter 1: Tin Pan Alley

in Cambridge Companion:
-Introduction + Chronology
-Theberge, "'Plugged In': Technology & Popular Music"
-Frith, "The Popular Music Industry"
-Frith, "Pop Music"

from Durham & Kellner (eds), Media & Cultural Studies: Keyworks
-Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

from Frith & Goodwin (eds), On Record
-Adorno, "On Popular Music"
nb. You can find this essay together with "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" co-written with Max Horkheimer --an essay which if you have not read should definitely do so-- here.

from Even Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa
-Eisenberg, Chapter 2: Music Becomes a Thing

Grimes, "Genesis" Live Session for KEXP

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)

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 Spring 2020

Theory Final Study Guide

You can find the study questions/study guide for the final here. We will talk about these in class. Enjoy.

We Want Roses Too. The Women's Movement and Cinema

Vogliamo anche le rose / We Want Roses Too (Alina Marazzi, 2008)

Screening link above.

Half The Picture: Screening + Q&A with director Amy Adrion

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 @ 6.30pm in G.1.1
Please note this surprise addition to our events this semester.
Director Amy Adrion will be presenting and taking questions from the audience at a special screening of her HALF THE PICTURE, a film that celebrates women filmmakers and investigates the mechanisms of systemic discrimination that has denied opportunities to women in Hollywood.
This should be required viewing for students in CMS 360 Race and Gender in Media and COM 470 Theory. CMS 241 Italian Cinema, given our discussion of the dearth of women directors in the national cinema of Italy.

Cinema, Postmodernism and Television

Nichetti's 'Ladri di Saponette' being broadcast on the Canale5 network: a film about the impact of commercial television as it airs on Italy's preeminent commercial network owned by Silvio Berlusconi's Fininvest/Mediaset.

Millicent Marcus, "From Conscience to Hyperconsciousness: Maurizio Nichetti's The Icicle Thief"

Umberto Eco, "Make Your Own Movie"

Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

For context:

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

Paul Ginsborg, "The Making of a Television Empire"

The clips below are from Videocracy (2009), a documentary by Erik Gandini.

Queering Texts: Popular Culture and LGBTQ+ Representation

Find Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's The Celluloid Closet (USA, 1996) here. 
This is required viewing for CMS 360.

You will need VLC or a similar video player (on Mac and PC) to view this.

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"
Alexander Doty, "Modern Family, Glee, and the Limits of Television Liberalism" 

Alexander Doty, "There's Something Queer Here"
Susan Sontag, "On Camp"
Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"

bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze"

Reccomended Readings:

Fred Fejes, "Advertising and the Political Economy of Lesbian/Gay Identity"
Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, "Representing Gay Men on American Television"
Bruce LaBruce, "Pee Wee Herman: The Homosexual Subtext"
Richard Dyer, "Judy Garland and Gay Men"

"I'm A Rebel"

"I Know You Are But What Am I?"

History, Memory, Terror: The Strategy of Tension

The 'angel of history' in the Taviani's Night of San Lorenzo

See below for link to Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much

In Bondanella read Chp. 9, 10 & 15.

Some context on the 'anni di piombo' (the 'lead years'):
John Foot, "The Strategy of Tension and Terrorism: Piazza Fontana and the 'Moro Case'"
from John Foot's Italy's Divided Memory

Millicent Marcus,"The Taviani Brothers's Night of the Shooting Stars: Fascism and War Reconsidered"

For a philosophical and critical reflection on history:
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

The image above is Klee's Angelus Novus the inspiration for Benjamin's image of the 'angel of history': "There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

Remember Theodor Adorno's "What Does Coming To Terms With the Past Mean?" that we talked about in relation to The Conformist.

Ettore Scola's WE ALL LOVED EACH OTHER SO MUCH (C'eravamo tanto amati, 1974) is here.

The Conformist and Investigation of a Citizen: Coming To Terms With The Past and Power in the Present

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


For the extra screening of Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion:

Marcus, Elio Petri's Indagine: Power as Pathology

LINK TO FILM HERE

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

In the clip below the scene discussed in the first pages of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism.
from Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaròn, US/UK, 2006)






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)

+

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 & Events: EPISODE III: ENJOY POVERTY by Renzo Martens + Audrey Tang on Nov. 14 at 6pm

As announced in class we will be screening Renzo Martens' ENJOY POVERTY in class. The screening will be on Wednesday, Nov. 13 (Section 1) and Thursday, Nov. 14 (Section 2). Expect class to go over for about 20-25 minutes. You will be out by 1.15pm at the latest.
This is mandatory viewing for ALL students in COM 470 Advanced Communication Theory.

The readings below are not part of the reading requirements but they are helpful in contextualizing and helping you come to terms with Enjoy Poverty. Please take a look at them, particularly the interview with Martens and the Susan Sontag essay on 'looking at war'.

"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"

Also, remember that the second mandatory event of the Digital Delights and Disturbances will be on Thursday, Nov. 14 @ 6pm in the Aula Magna with Audrey Chang, Taiwan's Minister of Digital.