Towards A Third Cinema

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

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

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

To accompany the screening of Agnes Varda's Vagabond:
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here. Make sure you have this read by next class. We will be 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.

Stills below from Otto Preminger's Laura and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty

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

Take a picture of her.

Angela Davis in Rome: Monday, March 14 @ 10.00am, RomaTre

As announced in class, Monday morning Prof. Angela Davis will give a talk at the Universita degli Studi RomaTre on 'The Meaning of White Supremacy Today'. This is a excellent opportunity for everyone to get to hear a key political activist, radical personality and academic scholar who participated in many of the countercultural political activities of the 1960s and 1970s. Her talk should be of interest to many of the students in this semester's classes particularly the ones in Popular Music and Mass Culture and Communication Theory. Students interested in questions of class, race and gender and in the complex ways in which these intersect would do well in attending. You can also ask Prof. Davis about her experience as a graduate student at the University of Frankfurt during the 1960s and how it was working under Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.

Link to RomaTre website here.
Flyer with program poster here.
Meet in front of RomaTre, at the Aula Magna della Scuola di Lettere Filosofie e Lingue
Via Ostiense, 234/236 (right off the OSTIENSE Metro B station)

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

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.

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

Popular Music and Film Study Guides

Study Guides for:

Pop Music

Film

Comcast: We (Almost) Own Everything...No, Really, We Do.

Four Infographics Reveal Why the Comcast Merger Is Bad for You

The Comcast-Time Warner Deal, by the Numbers

Netflix To Pay Comcast to Not Ruin Your Evenings

Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video

Comcast claims competition from Google Fiber, Netflix & Hulu are reasons to approve merger

Netflix Quality Sucks Because ISPs Won't Bother Fixing It

The Real Problem with the Comcast Merger

The In-Between Years (or The Empire Strikes Back)

The Folk Revival:

The Kingston Trio - Tom Dooley
Pete Seeger - Turn Turn Turn!
Joan Baez - Silver Dagger
Bob Dylan - Masters of War
Lyrics here.

Surf & Hot Rod Combos:

The Beach Boys - Surfin USA
Dick Dale & The Del-Tones - Miserlou
Link Wray & His Ray Men - Rumble (Outtake)
The Stingers (Jack Cole) - Mustang

Uptown R&B from Motown/All songs by Holland-Dozier-Holland:

Martha & The Vandellas - Nowhere To Run
The Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There
The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love
Marvin Gaye - How Sweet It Is

Girl Groups/Phil Spector Wall of Sound/Songs by Weill & Mann:

The Ronettes - Be My Baby
The Crystals - Then He Kissed Me
The Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron

Cynthia Weill & Barry Mann songs NOT produced by Phil Spector:

Lesley Gore - It's My Party

The Wall of Sound in full-effect:

Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep, Mountain High

The Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling

Readings:
Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

nb. You will not be responsible for this reading for the midterm. We will discuss the issues and concepts raised in it after the exam. I do however urge you to read it as it offers a lot of points that would help your review of material that will actually be covered on the midterm.

In Garofalo you should read up to and including Chapter 6.

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.

Cinematic Specificity: Language or Reality

On Montage:
Vsevolod Pudovkin, "On Editing" from Film Technique
Sergei Eisenstein, "Methods of Montage" from Film Form

On Realism:
André Bazin, What is Cinema, Vol. 1
(nb. please only read the essays at pg. 9 and pg. 41: "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" + "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage (aka Montage Interdit).

R'n'R or Transubstantiated R'n'B?

Elvis Presley - That's All Right, Mama + Blue Moon of Kentucky
Bill Haley & The Comets - Crazy Man Crazy
Fats Domino - Ain't That A Shame + Blueberry Hill
Little Richard - Tutti Frutti
Chuck Berry - Almost Grown + Little Queenie
Bo Diddley - Pretty Thing
The Chords - Sh-Boom
Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers - Why Do Fools Fall In Love

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 we discussed. We didn't get to see the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Conference' program from 1977 where McLuhan discusses and responds to audience questions on his main theoretical ideas. Please watch this on your own:

Whitey's Lindy Hoppers: Something Wild

This is the Lindy Hop, the Jitterbug, the Suzie-Q. The clip is an excerpt from H.C. Potter's Helzapoppin' (1941). The Lindy Hoppers doing "The Big Apple" in 1939 are here. Enjoy.
In this clip the dancing starts at the 2:15 mark.



from Jonathan Demme's Something Wild; The Feelies play David Bowies's "Fame" and Jeff Daniels dances with his eye on the 'Other' for cues.

Groovy Movie (1944): Instructional Video for the Lindy Hop