POMO MixTape / Music Non Stop

Click image to download playlist.

Boing, Boom, Tschak. Music Non Stop. Techno Pop.
A playlist celebrating the diversity of popular music, dance beats, twangy guitar riffs, synths and eclectic sounds.

Track-listing:

1. Biting Down / Lorde
Listen to the beats resound.

2. Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) / Scritti Politti
Because I wish I'd lived through the 80s and sophisti-pop.

3. Let's Dance / David Bowie
Just... put on your red shoes and dance the blues.

4. The Dream / The Cure
"Japanese Whispers" - Tolhurst switched from drums to keyboards and never looked back.

5. Off To The Races / Lana Del Rey
"Lolita got lost in the hood."

6. Nothing Bad Ever Happens To Me / Oingo Boingo
Danny Elfman's ska-influenced new wave octet. Need I say more?

7. So Far... / Eminem
Guess who's [back] exploring sub-reggae, grabbing Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good"???

8. Music Non Stop / Kraftwerk (The Mix)
This should be pretty self-explanatory by now... 

9. Kristine / Sky Ferreira
Ska/grunge/noise/psychedelia? I don't know what it is. But it's great.

10. Peek-A-Boo / Siouxsie and the Banshees
"It sounded like nothing else on this planet."

11. House Of Balloons / The Weeknd
"Happy House" is worked into a softly anthemic slow-burn number full of diva-ish vocals tied to a chilly beat."

12. No Church In The Wild / Jay-Z & Kanye West (Frank Ocean, The-Dream)
 "The listener enters a bejewelled realm, one filled with musings on the spoils of riches and the chaos that accompanies it."

13. True Faith / New Order
*slap* *slap* *slap* *slap* *slap-slap-slap-slap-slap* *slap-slap-slap-slap-slap-slap-slap*

14. Full Of Fire / The Knife
Uncomfortable and disturbing, but in a good way. 

15. Daily Routine / Animal Collective
It sounds as good as the illusory cover looks.

16. "You Fuckin' Die...!" / Pixies
...It didn't have anything to do with anything.

17. Eminence Front / The Who
"This song is about what happens when you take too much white powder."

Her: Love In The Modern Age

Spike Jonze's Her: The Digital Muse & Postmodern Culture

Click on the image for an illuminating critical perspective of the Spike Jonze film 'Her' by Amy Edelstein.

Her: Trailer

Leos Carax Explains Holy Motors

Click the image for an IndieWire interview with Leos Carax.

Holy Motors - Let My Baby Ride

Edith Scob in Eyes Without A Face and Holy Motors

Eyes Without A Face (1960)

Holy Motors (2012)

Holy Motors: A Critical Perspective

Click image for article.

Holy Motors Is A Strange Cinematic Prayer

BY EDWIN TURNER

Holy Motors (2012) dir. Leos Carax

Criticisms of Postmodernism (James Rosenau)

Rosenau (1993) identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:

1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5. By adamently rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

Postmodern Audiences

The impact of postmodern media on audiences and the ways in which we think about texts:

How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world? 

• Have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?
• Has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?
• In terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text? Think here about a film like Moulin Rouge where the plot is in some sense irrelevant to the overall impact of the film.
• Has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts?
• In its ‘waning of affect’, has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see? They are desensitised and unable to respond ‘properly’ to suffering and joy.
• Has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to?

Postmodernism and Audience Theory

Two commentators have developed some interesting ideas about postmodernism and audiences.

Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’ (157)

‘VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in relation to the moving image.’

Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to capture it.’

Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’

Postmodern & Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry.

Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy.

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms.

G325 Exam Board Advice

1a Topics

• Creativity
• Digital technology
• Research and planning
• Post Production
• Real Media Conventions

The Driver (1978) - Opening Title Sequence - Dir. Walter Hill

The Driver (1978) - The Getaway - Dir. Walter Hill

"Drive" Intro in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Fan-made video using GTA: Vice City footage to adhere to Winding-Refn's opening scene in "Drive".
(Music by Kavinsky - Nightcall (feat. Lovefoxxx))

"Cool Short Film Puts Ryan Gosling Inside Two Grand Theft Auto Games"

"What’s the mystery connection between Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V? It might be Ryan Gosling’s no-name character from Drive. Gamebill Studio’s Nabil Ayari captured footage from GTA IV and GTA V and stitched them together with shots from the 2011 miniimalist action thriller. The result? A moody, well-edited clip that throws the cities, characters and tension from three different worlds of criminals into one smooth heist. Well, until the end anyway."

Cited by Evan Narcisse

Ryan Gosling’s "Drive" Jacket Is In GTA V?

"It was the film that inspired a million man-crushes, countless Halloween costumes and now, the biggest game of the year. Yes, Ryan Gosling's iconic jacket from the film Drive makes a guest appearance in Grand Theft Auto V. Dubbed the "champagne Driver blouson", the silver-and-brown bomber is emblazoned with a yellow crab - a nod to the film's scorpion - and can be purchased by Trevor in the discount stores of Blaine County. (Although we'd have thought, as the team's driver, it would be more suited for Franklin). Hijack a Mustang-esque Dominator and equip yourself the hammer (it's available as a weapon in the Special Edition version) for full Gosling effect. Our only complaint? That Kavinsky's "Nightcall" is missing from the soundtrack, so you'll have to make do with Kendrick Lamar."

By Oliver Franklin

Drive: "The Greatest Grand Theft Auto Film There Will Never Be"

"Every couple of months, rumours of an impending video game-to-movie adaptation of the Grand Theft Auto series rears its head. And with good reason; taking their cues from iconic gangster flicks from the silver screen, RockStar Game's infamous crime sims have become very cinematic (particularly Grand Theft Auto 4), and as much about weaving a deep and considered morality-challenging story as they are indulging our desires to drive fast and blast guns.

I for one had eagerly been awaiting news of an almost inevitable GTA film.

But I won't be any more. Last night I saw Drive, the latest movie from Nicolas Winding Refn. Full of car chases, heists, gangsters, neon lights and nail-biting tension, it's everything a great Grand Theft Auto film could be and should be. It's so good as to warrant any GTA movie-pipe-dreams wholly irrelevant. It ticks all the boxes. Here's why:

1) Ryan Gosling's nameless driver is every bit the brooding GTA anti-hero

Drive centres around Ryan Gosling as a nameless, Hollywood stunt driver. He's the best in the business, and makes a fair bit of cash on the side moonlighting as a wheelman for robberies. Just like GTA IV's Niko Belic, he's as cool as ice and doesn't flinch when forced into a dangerous, potentially violent situation. However, just like Niko, Gosling's driver is also a complex man whose slow-burning romance with his vulnerable neighbour Irene (played by Carey Mulligan) force him into an abyss of underworld trouble. Despite both characters' dubious actions, we cant help but sympathise with Niko and the driver.

2) Both are effortlessly stylish and cool

We all know that a life of crime doesn't pay, and both GTA and Drive go a long way towards cementing how destructive a lifestyle it can be. That doesn't stop it from being alluring though, and both GTA and Drive know this too. From Gosling's monosyllabic phrasing to his trend-setting wardrobe, the tooth-pick chewing driver cuts a very James Dean-style figure. Likewise the LA setting, sports cars, neon lights and 80's synth-inspired soundtrack hand picks all the greatest excesses of cult gangster flicks. GTA over the years has likewise styled itself as the premier "cool" game, always highlighting the hippest artists on its soundtrack, tipping its cap to the best gangster cinema has to offer and always oozing a "don't give a f*ck" attitude.



3) Both have smoking-hot cars

I'm not much of a car man, truth be told. But even I can appreciate the sleek lines of a Chevy or a Mustang, as seen in Drive. Though it doesn't have real world cars, Grand Theft Auto is, as its title suggests, all about storming down the highway in a stolen sports car. If you like the sound of a revving super car engine, both Drive and GTA will be right up your street.

4)The soundtracks for GTA and Drive are so, so good

The quality of the Grand Theft Auto series soundtracks are well documented. From Blondie to Michael Jackson in Vice City, to Les Savy Fav and Justice in GTA IV, RockStar have their finger on the pulse not only in terms of songs that get the blood pumping when speeding down the highway, but also those that perfectly evoke the feelings of the setting and era that the games are trying to recreate. Drive, though set in the present day, is clearly inspired by 1980s aesthetics, and the soundtrack likewise reflects this to stunning effect. Tracks by College, Desire and Kavinsky add a hauntingly icy accompaniment to the shocking events on screen, every bit as memorable as the footage they support.

5) Both are shockingly, but fittingly, violent

Whether you sit on the side of the fence that brands GTA excessively violent, or the side that sees it as a fitting representation not only of the dangers of the underworld lifestyle but also clearly inspired by the gritty Goodfellas and Godfather flicks, there's no denying the series has spilled a fair bit of blood. Likewise, Drive is punctuated by a few scenes of intense violence. Like, REALLY intense. However, in both GTAs story missions and the plot and characterisation of Drive, it never feels out of place considering the unique pressures the characters are put under.

This list could go on and on, but at the end of the day, I just wanted to highlight how great a film Drive is, and how much fans of the Grand Theft Auto series will enjoy it. The fact that GTA has become so massively popular means that any potential movie probably couldn't indulge the same art-house tendencies that Nicolas Winding Refn's film does, which is a crying shame as the genuinely beautiful moments in Drive make its bloodier scenes all the more harrowing. Any GTA film would now undoubtedly become a dumb exercise in "The Fast and The Furious" style car porn.

Head down to your local multiplex and catch Drive if you can; I defy you not to go home afterwards and immediately want to go for a spin around Vice or Liberty City in GTA."

By Gerald Lynch

Nightcall - Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx

Drive: Ending Explained

"If you’re reading this, then you’ve already had the chance to watch Nicolas Winding Refn’s pulpy crime-drama Drive, and hopefully enjoyed it as much as we did (be sure to read our Drive review).
Though Drive seems like a standard action/thriller (albeit with some art house style and flare), a lot of movie goers have walked away with questions about the movie’s final moments, which leave a fair amount of ambiguity hanging over the fate of “Driver,” the character played by Ryan Gosling.
In the past with our Shutter Island and Inception Ending Explanations, we here at Screen Rant have had to rely on our prowess as movie aficionados in order to form some logical deductions about what transpired in some of our favorite mind-bending movies, and what filmmakers intended with their ambiguous endings. In the case of Drive, however, we were fortunate enough to snag an explanation right from the primary source: director Nicolas Winding Refn.
When we last see Driver – bleeding out while behind the wheel of his car, before pulling himself together and speeding off into the night – there is a certain amount of lingering doubt about the literalness vs. figurativeness of what we are seeing. When I asked Refn first-hand what the ending of Drive was all about, I expected the typically coy filmmaker to hand me an equally coy answer. However, he was surprisingly straight forward in his response:
“Well all my films always have open endings. All of them. Because I believe art is always best when…you talk about it and think about it, so forth. Maybe once in a while I’ve gone too far, but I always believe in finding the right balance. And in ‘Drive’ he lives on for more and new adventures.”
So there you have it – if you were wondering whether or not the ending of the film was to be taken literally, or was some metaphoric death scene, you at least now know how the director sees it.
Refn has continuously referred to the film as a modern Grimm fairytale (unlikely hero rises to battle evil king, saves princess) and I for one always saw the ending as the hero saving the girl, while also being denied the “happily ever after” cliche he may want. Indeed, the implications of the film are such that Driver will likely speed off into new adventures, as Refn claims, albeit still stuck in the lonely and isolated existence in which we found him. The only difference is: he now knows what kind of hero he can be."

Written by Kofi Outlaw

Drive: Soundtrack

The soundtrack to Drive includes an original score by Cliff Martinez that was inspired by ’80s-style, synth-pop. In addition to crafting his own compositions, Martinez built the film’s sonic landscape from ideas pioneered by European electronic bands, such as Kraftwerk. Other songs in the set — which were recorded and arranged with a similar retro edge –  include “Nightcall” by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx of Brazilian dance-rock outfit CSS, a tune by the Chromatics, and others. 

01 Nightcall – Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx

02 Under Your Spell – Desire

03 A Real Hero – College feat. Electric Youth

04 Oh My Love – Riz Ortolani feat. Katyna Ranieri

05 Tick of the Clock – The Chromatics

06 Rubber Head

07 I Drive

08 He Had a Good Time

09 They Broke His Pelvis

10 Kick Your Teeth

11 Where’s The Deluxe Version?

12 See You in Four

13 After The Chase

14 Hammer

15 Wrong Floor

16 Skull Crushing

17 My Name on a Car

18 On The Beach

19 Bride of Deluxe

Tracks 6-19 by Cliff Martinez

Violence: A History Of Violence (2005) Dir. David Cronenburg

A History of Violence is a 2005 American crime thriller film directed by David Cronenberg and written by Josh Olson. It is an adaptation of the 1997 graphic novel of the same name by John Wagner and Vince Locke. The film stars Viggo Mortensen as the owner of a diner who is thrust into the spotlight after killing two robbers in self-defense.

The style of violence is reminiscent to that in Drive. It is visceral and brutal. Is it real or hyperreal? How do you feel when you watch violent scenes like this and why do you feel the way you do? Are your experiences of violence informed by other media texts?

Cult Film: Drive

With his hyper-stylised approach to filmmaking and curt, dismissive approach to seemingly everything else, Nicolas Winding Refn is a man who really couldn’t help but acquire an avid cult following. That said, up until 2012, his career was characterised primarily by the maddening sense of great potential being left untapped: Pusher, Valhalla Rising and Bronson all effectively advertised his eye for alluring visuals and talent for visceral ultra-violence but none of them fully came together as films. While this year’s disappointingly self-indulgent Only God Forgives suggests that Refn has returned to old habits in a way that leaves the true extent of his talent as a filmmaker as questionable as ever, last year brought about the movie that would instantaneously fire itself and its helmer into the highest ranks of cult phenomenon, to stand alongside Big Lebowskis and Donnie Darkos forevermore. That movie was Drive.

The plot is pretty standard Hollywood fare: a mysterious young man falls for the girl next door, tries to use his talent as a wheelman to help out her and her young son, and quickly finds himself in a desperate struggle to protect them from the local mob boss after a seemingly simple heist goes badly wrong. Under many directors, that storyline could easily become a Fast & Furious-style, testosterone-fuelled exercise in mindless excess. This is a neon-drenched piece of neo-noir, an electro-infused Taxi Driver, a slickly minimalist thriller, a postmodern fairytale and, above all, a ninety-three minute masterclass in style.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is the confidence it carries itself with. Legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki once spoke about the cinematic importance of the Japanese term ‘ma’. Roughly translated, it means ‘emptiness’; in film, it refers to the quiet moments in between those filled with action and emotion. Whilst the Michael Bay school of cinema demands a neverending stream of explosions, gags and leering chest-shots to scream for the viewer’s attention at every turn, Refn’s faith in his work and his audience allows him to move at his own pace. He knows that his movie oozes style; that every frame is so meticulously composed and perfectly complemented by Cliff Martinez’s ethereal electronic score that he can afford to dwell, to draw you into the film’s quiet moments before blowing you away with its loud ones. Few films create the same degree of exhilaration emptying entire clips that Refn manages with Drive’s single nerve-shattering report.

It’s possibly this patience that allows Drive to get away with its more exuberant tendencies because, in many ways, it’s a film that absolutely should not work. Take the opening credits: a shot of the illuminated LA cityscape with the film’s title emblazoned across it in hot pink cursive as Kavinsky’s Nightcall blares and we slowly cut to our satin-jacketed hero stare wistfully into the middle distance before driving off into the night. What should be ridiculous is instead made impossibly, ineffably cool, partially because of what preceded it: a near-silent, car-bound game of cat-and-mouse with the police that slowly cranks the tension up to bursting point before finally exploding into the aforementioned musical queue. Again, the quiet moments earn the loud ones.

Drive is a movie destined to become a vital pop culture touchstone in years to come, one whose rabid fans will proselytise its glory to anyone who’ll listen, never to be deterred by the fact that the majority are never going to love it quite as they do. If not for the fact that it is an expertly crafted thriller featuring an eclectically-chosen cast all on top form and one of the best soundtracks of recent years, it’s worth seeing just to see which side of the line you personally land on.

By Ross McIndoe
 http://www.strathclydetelegraph.com/2013/11/cult-film-drive/

Drive: Trailer

Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn

Click the image to go to review.

Drive (2011)

By day, the mysterious, taciturn young man (Gosling) works as a Hollywood stuntman and a mechanic at a dirty Los Angeles garage, while by night, as a driver with inhuman skills, he lends his services to criminals. His idyllic, peaceful triple life becomes complicated when he falls in love with his beautiful neighbour (Mulligan) with a small child and a husband in prison.

Numerous enthralled critics and viewers characterised Drive as “one of the greatest surprises of 2011” and a “Tarantinoesque film”. The latter notwithstanding, instead of a postmodern pastiche, a citation of and homage to road movies, heist films, film noir and 1980s cinema, Refn actually managed to create something more: he merged all the mentioned references into a unique whole, an entirely new model of auteur genre film for the new millennium, which simultaneously shocks and seduces with its honest mixture of brutality and elegance, existentialism and romance. Drive is Frankenstein’s monster built piecewise by Walter Hill, Monte Hellman, Richard Sarafian, Dennis Hopper, Robert Bresson, Nicholas Ray, Chris Petit, Wim Wenders, Clint Eastwood, Warren Oates and Steve McQueen, but it is a seamless monster that learned to walk in Victor Erice’s school.

Drive was adapted from the eponymous novel by James Sallis (who last year already followed up his instantaneous 2005 literary cult with a novel published under no less a laconic title, Driven). On the level of the story, the plot, and partly also the level of dramaturgy, it does not bring anything essentially new. The fundamental surplus, the very core of the film, lies in its form, in the exclusive authorial signature of Nicolas Winding Refn. As with his previous masterpiece Valhalla Rising (2009), we could again say that the story (or its germs) arise from the form, from the audiovisual, that is, the inherently filmic. Similarly, the surplus of Sallis’ novel lies almost exclusively in its form, a crossbreed between Carver, Bunker and Chandler. This admittedly evident thesis is confirmed by Refn himself, who tersely and wittily characterises Drive as a story “about a man who drives around listening to pop songs at night.” In short, the main hero’s character does not proceed from any in-depth psychology, or even a surface one, but is born entirely out of the mentioned night melodies that surround him, from the monumental way he is filmed, from the unexplained drive that propels him from scene to scene, from one story line to another, from one gear to another, to the end and beyond. It concerns real mythology, a timeless film for every moment.

“A brilliant piece of nasty business that races on a B-movie track until it switches to the dizzying fuel of undiluted creativity. Damn, it’s good. You can get buzzed just from the fumes coming off this wild thing.” Peter Travers

http://www.isolacinema.org/en/programme/films-and-sections/drive

Daft Punk - Giorgio By Moroder

M.I.A. - Bad Girls

Kraftwerk - The Robots

Postmodernism Video - Sky Ferreira

Postmodern Music Task - Sky Ferreira

Homage

Julianne Escobedo Shepberd from Rolling Stone wrote that Ferreira's "songs are catchy, but they’re also thickly glazed with fuzz and synths, evoking influences like Suicide, Siouxsie Sioux and the krautrock group Harmonia". Karolina Ramos from The GW Hatchet compared Ferreira to New Zealand recording artist Lorde, both of whom she felt "tackle contemporary love, desire and insecurity with depth, composure and frankness." She compared her musical style to 1980s pop music, and noted that "her throaty, sultry vocals call to mind Lana del Rey, abandoning brightness and vivacity for a colder tone."
Ferreira said of the song (You're Not The One):
"The production is super-inspired by Low by David Bowie [...] I wanted to make a super-poppy version. Like not when you're rolling up your car windows because you don't want anyone to know you're listening to it. Like trying to hide it in your iTunes. Ariel had the idea. People say it sounds like Siouxsie Sioux. I guess the song was originally about a relationship when you're not chasing after them. You know they're kind of fucked up. It's like a game of cat and mouse. They're interested but not interested enough and it's not fair. That's basically what it should be called, 'It's Not Fair.'"
Ferreira's earlier work incorporated elements of dance-pop and synthpop, most notably seen in tracks from As If! and Ghost. As her career progressed, Ferreira more frequently experimented with elements of indie rock and indie pop, which were commonly heard in Night Time, My Time. Ferreira has cited Madonna, Prince, Gwen Stefani, Alice Cooper, Nancy Sinatra, Cat Power, Britney Spears, and The Runaways as musical influences.

Pastiche 

Does your chosen artist use other peoples music in order to mock it and its fans? Are they attempting to damage the ‘authority’ of a style of music?

-

Bricolage

"Ferreira's Eighties-weaned diva pop recalls no-nonsense Nineties alt-rockers like PJ Harvey and Shirley Manson, setting love-wracked disclosures to grungy guitar static, electronic gauze and computer-groove churn." Rolling Stone
Musically, Night Time, My Time differs from Ferreira's extended play Ghost. Drawing inspiration mainly from 80s pop and 90s grunge, the LP distances itself from the "relaxed" and "developed" sound found in Ghost. A late 1970s art rock influence is also prominent in Night Time, My Time. Additionally, "coin-slot video game samples" are often heard in album tracks. Lyrically, Ferreira disscusses the "familiar" themes of heartbreak and identity in ways that, according to Lauren Martin from Fact (UK), are "refreshed and engaging". The atmosphere of the album evoked records of Best Coast, Garbage and Siouxsie and the Banshees with "fuzzy, distorted tracks".
The album opens with "Boys", which "employs ringing blasts of guitar" and show Ferreira "optimistic about love". "Ain't Your Right" is a "cynical break-up-and-make-up anthem", and "24 Hours" was deemed a "sadder, somber take" on the song "Teenage Dream" by American singer-songwriter Katy Perry, and is a pop song with a "dreamy" and new wave music-inspired instrumental. "Autobiographical anger" is emulated on the "major rock anthem", "Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay)", that channels Ferreira's "frustrations". Fifth track, "I Blame Myself", sees Ferreira "spit[ting] self-doubt and frustrations" and is a "song about the power of vulnerability", alongside "bubbly melodies" and "driving beats". "Omanko", (Japanese slang for the vagina), has an indie rock-based sound, and in the song, Ferreira goes "full-on Alan Vega". It is followed by the album's first single, "You're Not the One", that's been described as a "masterfully carved" pop record with "equal parts self-loathing and redemption", and as blending Ferreira's "unmistakable early-90s pop sensibility" with "something decidedly harder to place". Eighth song on the album, "Heavy Metal Heart", is an electro rock ballad, which Ferreira sings with an "art-damaged" voice. "Kristine" contains ska undertones and sees Ferreira singing about "lifestyle posturing", while "I Will" demonstrates the singer's self-confidence, "taunt[ing] those who expect her to act a certain way or be deferential". The "Robyn-esque" song "Love in Stereo" is "new wave-tinged", while the title track (and closing song of the album) has a "distorted" and "strange jarring beat".

Intertextual References

Ferreira titled the album after lines spoken by Laura Palmer in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and the lyrics to the album's title track are almost entirely lifted from dialogue in the film.
"You're Not the One" was serviced as Night Time, My Time's lead single on 24 September 2013. Its music video, paying visual homage to 1983 film The Hunger and set in a high-fashion night club, was released on the same day.

Simulacrum

The cover art for Night Time, My Time, photographed by Argentine film director Gaspar Noé at Hotel Amour in Paris, was revealed by Ferreira on October 10, 2013. The singer appears topless in the artwork, wearing a cross necklace inside a shower, with a "demented" facial expression. While defending the cover, Ferreira described it as "raw" and revealed that she had two options for the album's cover to pick from. Aside from the actual Night Time, My Time cover, the other image that Capitol Records wanted to use depicted Ferreira with long blonde hair, while sitting on a bed wearing a black dress.
After establishing a friendship with recording artist Miley Cyrus in 2013, Gregory E. Miller from New York Post noted that the media and general public would continue "following her every move". Ferreira commented that "[Miley’s] obviously way bigger and all eyes [are] on her, but I feel like we’re kind of going through a similar thing where everyone’s trying to say that we’re trying to make ourselves objects, but really, everyone else is making it more like that — sensationalizing sex and reading into things. It’s nice to have someone that gets it." Ferreira had also generated a minor controversy after appearing topless on the cover for Night Time, My Time, to which she responded "there’s nothing about that photo that’s pornographic; we came on this earth nude."

Consumption

Night Time, My Time was first released as a digital download on October 29, 2013. A physical release as a compact disc was eligible for pre-order on Amazon.com, although for unknown reasons, it was indefinitely postponed. In addition, the vinyl edition of the record was not ready for release on the album's street date, as confirmed by Ferreira, who criticized Capitol Records and affirmed that she'd be producing vinyl copies of the record herself, which were sold through her online store. The album was later pressed on vinyl by Capitol Records and released on January 28, 2014, in addition to CD copies, including a limited edition CD combination package which included Ferreira's Ghost EP (2012).
After the release of Night Time, My Time: B-Sides Part 1, an online shopping page for the singer revealed various editions of the album available for purchase, including a green translucent vinyl and a CD. Furthermore, a bundle including the compact disc, a digital download and a poster was also revealed. On November 27, 2013, Ferreira revealed on her Twitter account that all physical Night Time, My Time copies pre-ordered had been shipped.
On late February 2014, the album started being sold on Amazon.com as a limited CD edition, which includes the original album and the Ghost EP, and as a double vinyl LP.

Creation

Night Time, My Time:
Sky Ferreira – vocals/songwriting
Chris Kasych – Pro Tools
Emily Lazar – mastering
Rich Morales – assistant mastering
Daniel Nigro – additional vocals, guitar
Justin Raisen – additional vocals, co-production, guitar, keyboards
Garrett Ray – drums
Ariel Rechtshaid – additional vocals, bass, guitar, keyboards, production, recording
Nick Rowe – editing
Mark Santangelo – assistant engineering
David Schiffman – mixing

"You're Not the One" is written by Ferreira, Ariel Rechtshaid, Justin Raisen, and Daniel Nigro, and produced by Rechtshaid and Raisen.
"Everything Is Embarrassing" was written by Ferreira, Dev Hynes, and Ariel Rechtshaid, while the latter two produced the track. Hynes, a friend of Ferreira, had sent her a demo of the song, which was inspired by a failed relationship; Ferreira then modified the original lyrics and structure along with Rechtshaid.
"Red Lips" was written and produced by Greg Kurstin, with additional songwriting provided by Shirley Manson.

Performance

A music video for "Red Lips" from the "Ghost" EP was directed by Terry Richardson. She went into its filming open-minded in regards to its concept, and ultimately agreed with the creative direction that Richardson proposed. The final product was premiered through Vevo on July 13, 2012. The clip sees Ferreira, dressed in nude-colored underwear, applying lipstick on her entire face, and is interspersed with footage of its co-star, the spider "Toby the Tarantula", crawling across her body. She stated that her wardrobe was intended to compliment the simplistic nature of the music video, rather than an attempt to create sex appeal.
Critics directed their commentaries of the music video towards Ferreira's increasingly risqué public persona, shifting from the more innocent image with which she launched her career. A writer from MuuMuse provided a favorable review, comparing it to the visuals for "Criminal" by Fiona Apple and summarizing that "Sky Ferreira is cooler than anything you and I could ever be." Becky Bain from Idolator stated that the appearance of Toby the Tarantula was "somehow nowhere near as disconcerting as the image of Sky, looking washed out with platinum hair against a white background, crazily painting her face with a tube of red lipstick." Michael Cragg of The Guardian felt that Ferreira's friendship with the controversial Richardson showcased a "shift away from the pop princess she felt she was being moulded into", and commented that the spider was "not for the faint-hearted". It differs from the previous electropop styles displayed in her earlier works, which was deliberately done in avoidance of being branded in a similar fashion as recording artist Britney Spears.
A music video for the album's title track, "Night Time, My Time" directed by Grant Singer and released on 27 November 2013, sees Ferreira wearing a variety of wigs and lingerie. Natasha Stagg of V wrote that, in the video, Ferreira "embraces the title she's been deemed by dressing in provocatively infantile accessories" and "cleverly [delivers] the junkie role back in her detractors' faces."

Influence

Andrew Unterberger stated that "through a variety of singles, EPs, guest features and live appearances, Sky has proven herself one of the most talented singers, creative songwriters and savvy collaborators currently working in the genre", but blamed "bad marketing, label disputes and her own perfectionism" for the extended delay of Night Time, My Time; he also stated that the repeated renaming of the record itself "should give you some idea of the musical identity issues she’s suffered over the years."

Postmodern Music

According to Kramer (Kramer 2002, 16–17), postmodern music:

• is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension
• is, on some level and in some way, ironic
• does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present
• challenges barriers between 'high' and 'low' styles
• shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity
• questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values
• avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not want entire pieces to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold)
• considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts
• includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures
• considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music
• embraces contradictions
• distrusts binary oppositions
• includes fragmentations and discontinuities
• encompasses pluralism and eclecticism
• presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities
• locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers

"You're talking about real life, and I'm talking about the movies."

"Why the need for such gruesome, graphic violence...?"

"BECAUSE IT'S SO MUCH FUN, JAN."

Analysing the "Tavern Scene" - Inglourious Basterds

For Lights, Camera . . . , we ask a craftsperson to talk about a specific scene in his or her latest film. This week, Sally Menke,Sally Menke, film editor on " Inglourious Basterds," talks about the shootout scene in the basement tavern.
Quentin Tarantino told the multiple stories of "Inglourious Basterds" in five distinct chapters, and we knew from the script stage the film would hinge around the set-piece in the tavern La Louisianne. The daunting task of putting a 25-page dialogue sequence, spoken almost entirely in German, in the middle of the film, weighed heavily on everyone's minds, and it all had to come together in the cutting room. Just mentioning the name La Louisianne created tension among the crew, but we needed that tension to transcend to the audienceIn La Louisianne, the Basterds meet their German movie star contact, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) for the first time, and they must all pretend to be old friends by posing as Nazi officers. Much to the Basterds' surprise, they not only find Bridget in the dangerously cramped tavern, they find the basement bar filled with drunken, celebrating Nazis, one of whom happens to be enamored with the German movie star and continually pesters their table. The tension in the group runs high as we watch the real Nazis begin to question the origin of the British Archie Hicox's (Michael Fassbender) strange accent, and we hold our breath.
La Louisianne required detailed attention to character development as well as numerous story points, all the while using the device of language to create tension. Quentin and I felt it was essential to have the characters not simply drive the scene toward a plot point, but to be fully nuanced characters, while continually building the tension that would culminate in an explosive gun battle that kills all but one. We knew the gunfight would work all the better if we could carefully manipulate and build the tension through a give and take of emotions, playing a cat-and-mouse game with our characters -- and our audience.
Our editorial intentions had to be completely clear in how we wanted the audience to feel at any specific moment in the scene -- the Basterds are screwed, wait, no, they're OK, oh, no they aren't, this Nazi knows, he's on to them, no, no, they are OK -- until Hicox makes the fatal error that unequivocally gives them all away as impostors. Every line had a layer of tension, and we needed to play their reactions to the lines as much as the lines themselves to build it properly. Every beat counted. Every second someone delayed their response gave the audience a chance to think, "Did they figure it out? Do they know?"
We obsessively controlled every moment so that in contrast, when the climactic gun battle finally does erupt, it explodes in the loudest, craziest and most shocking way possible. But again, while doing this, we always had to return to the human element -- our character development. Hicox gets a bit of a tear in his eye when he realizes he will live no longer, and if we have done our jobs correctly, so will our audience.
Another challenge was to seamlessly integrate a lot of key information for upcoming plot points without them feeling perfunctory, heavy-handed or pedantic. For example, we needed to show a close-up of Bridget's shoes so there was no doubt in the audience's mind who it belonged to later on when Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) discovers the shoe while inspecting the aftermath in the bar. We can't draw attention to the shoe in a way that says, "We're showing you a close-up of a foot," but we do need to make enough of a point of it so the audience knows it's Bridget's -- instantly. The solution was to use the shoe as character introduction, to show the style and glamour of this movie star/double agent whom we, the audience and our characters, meet for the first timeThe tavern music was another way we developed a character. The music at first works environmentally and emotionally in the scene but then functions to locate a yet-to-be-seen, off-screen character, the Gestapo Maj. Hellstrom, who, when revealed, we see has clearly been controlling the music selections. We also now know that without a doubt Hellstrom had been listening to the Basterds' conversation the entire time, and we now use the absence of that same music when Hellstrom purposefully removes the needle from the record player to show that he has taken control of the scene. The Basterds, and our audience, are now in Hellstrom's hands.
The last issue we had to contend with was the length. A nearly 25-minute dialogue scene that starts 69 minutes into the film can be a potential challenge for audiences, as most scenes by this point play considerably shorter. But it was our belief that if we could hold the scene's tension, we could not only develop character and attend to the story but actually stop the scene to allow Hellstrom to play his King Kong card game, a story in and of itself, which cinematically alludes to another oppressed group, the slaves in America. I could go on about many other layers that needed our attention, but, unfortunately, in this situation I am not the editor with final cut and must end the piece here.

Los Angeles Times
January 13th 2010

Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds

"I'm going to find a place that actually resembles, in one way or another, the Spanish locales they had in spaghetti westerns – a no man's land. With US soldiers and French peasants and the French resistance and German occupation troops, it was kind of a no man's land. That will really be my spaghetti Western but with World War II iconography. But the thing is, I won't be period specific about the movie. I'm not just gonna play a lot of Édith Piaf and Andrews Sisters. I can have rap, and I can do whatever I want. It's about filling in the viscera." - Quentin Tarantino.

Quentin Tarantino concludes his seventh feature, the Nazi-bludgeoning fantasy Inglourious Basterds, with a grisly flourish and a self-satisfied review. Having performed one of his signature mutilations, a character peers down at his handiwork and into the camera and declares: "This might just be my masterpiece." This is typical Tarantino bluster, in keeping with the image of the bratty wunderkind that he worked hard to cultivate and that, even at 46, he refuses to outgrow. But as the rare filmmaker who's also an avid reader of film reviews, he also surely knows that it's been a while since the critical establishment thought of him as a maker of masterpieces.

Since it premiered at Cannes in May, Basterds has met with some wildly conflicting reactions (some of them—no surprise given its breezily outrageous approach to a loaded subject—highly negative and morally accusatory). Tarantino's career since Pulp Fiction continues to seem like one long backlash. Could it be that one of the most overrated directors of the '90s has become one of the most underrated of the aughts?

Tarantino's filmography is split in two by the six-year gap that separated Jackie Brown (1997) and Kill Bill Vol. 1(2003), during which, among other things, he worked on the notoriously unwieldy Basterds screenplay (which was at one point supposed to be a miniseries). The received wisdom has it that he never quite made a comeback. But the criticisms most frequently leveled against him these days—he's a rip-off artist, he makes movies that relate only to other movies, he knows nothing of real life, he could use some sensitivity training—apply equally, if not more so, to the earlier films. (Reservoir Dogs lifted many of its tricks directly from the Hong Kong film City on Fire; Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown are the Tarantino movies with the most flamboyant use of racist language.) Reviewers and audiences may have wearied of the blowhard auteur, but there's an argument to be made that Tarantino, far from a burnout case, is just hitting his stride, and that his movies, in recent years, have only grown freer and more radical.

Taken as a yin-yang whole, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 constitute a globe-spanning feat of genre scholarship, blithely connecting the dots from Chinese kung fu to Japanese swordplay, from blaxploitation to manga to spaghetti Western. Tarantino's reference-happy method is often dismissed as know-it-all geekery or stunted nostalgia, the video-store dreams of an eternal fanboy. But there is something strikingly of the moment and perhaps even utopian about Kill Bill's obsessive pastiche, which at once celebrates and demonstrates the possibilities of the voracious, hyperlinked 21st-century media gestalt: the idea that whole histories and entire worlds of pop culture are up for grabs, waiting to be revived, reclaimed, remixed.

First released as part of Grindhouse, 2007's double-header exercise in retro sleaze, Death Proof confirmed that Tarantino has no interest, or maybe is incapable of, straightforward homage, even when that's the nominal assignment. While partner in crime Robert Rodriguez tossed off a scattershot bit of zombie schlock for his contribution (Planet Terror), Tarantino borrowed a few motifs from sorority slashers and car-chase zone-outs and fashioned a curious formal experiment that would have given a '70s exploitation producer fits. Death Proof (on DVD in an unrated, extended version) is split down the middle into mirror-image halves. In each segment, the same scenario unfolds (with very different outcomes): a group of young women has a scary run-in with Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a killer in a muscle car, and the exhilarating final burst of action is preceded by a provocatively long bout of directionless yapping.

Like their creator, Tarantino's characters never shut up and are plainly enthralled by the sound of their own voices. More than the spasms of violence, the lifeblood of his movies is their ornate dialogue, which tends to unfurl at great, meandering length. (Tarantino was sly enough to call attention to this hallmark early on: In Reservoir Dogs, when Tim Roth's character, an undercover cop, is handed the scripted anecdote that he will have to perform to pass as Mr. Orange, he balks at the sheer level of detail: "I've got to memorize all this? There's over four fucking pages of shit here.") Tarantino movies are known for two kinds of verbal expulsions: the stem-winding monologue (Samuel L. Jackson's Old Testament shtick in Pulp Fiction) and the micro-observational tangent (Steve Buscemi's anti-tipping tirade in Reservoir Dogs). In Death Proof, which revels in a buzzed, leisurely camaraderie, he quietly masters a third kind: the language of downtime and hanging out, not exactly naturalistic (his most subdued chatter retains a heightened quality) but less baroque and truer to the rhythms of actual human interaction. Modest as it seems, Death Proof is in fact a clear-cut demonstration of Tarantino's gifts. By so pointedly breaking the film into long, alternating sections—talk, action, talk, action—he distends the normal rhythm of his movies, weighing aural against visual spectacle and pushing each to its limit.

But it's in Inglourious Basterds that the relationship between language and action becomes truly charged. Though the violence (much of it perpetrated by Jews against Nazis, with baseball bats and bowie knives) is graphic and memorable, the film consists largely of one-on-one verbal showdowns. As in Death Proof, but with greater purpose, Tarantino gives the conversations room to soar and stall and double back on themselves (especially in two agonizingly tense and protracted scenes, in a farmhouse and a basement tavern). Language is the chief weapon of the insinuating villain, brilliantly played by Christoph Waltz, a Nazi colonel fluent in German, English, French, and Italian. Power resides in the persuasiveness of speech; the success of undercover missions hinges on the ability to master accents; and as characters strive to maintain false pretenses, words are a means of forestalling death.
Inglourious Basterds addresses head-on many of the standard anti-Tarantino criticisms. You say he makes movies that are just about movies? You think they present violence without a context? Luring the elite of the Third Reich to an Art Deco cinematheque in Nazi-occupied Paris, Basterds gleefully uses film history to turn the tables on world history; its context is nothing less than the worst atrocity of the 20th century. This only seems to have further infuriated Tarantino's detractors, some of whom are appalled that this terminal adolescent would dare to indulge his notorious penchant for vengeful wish fulfillment on such sensitive and sacrosanct material.

Needless to say, Tarantino's movie shares little common ground with—and, indeed, is probably a direct response to—your typical Holocaust drama. It has no interest in somber commemoration, and it refuses to deny the very real satisfactions of revenge. Like all of Tarantino's films, Inglourious Basterds is about its maker's crazy faith in movies, in their ability to create a parallel universe. His films have always implicitly insisted that movies are an alternative to real life, and with Inglourious Basterds, for the first time, he has done something at once preposterous and poignant: He takes that maxim at face value and creates his own counterfactual history. It may not be his masterpiece, but for sheer chutzpah, it will be hard to top.

By Dennis Lim Posted Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009, at 1:13 PM ET

Postmodern Theories & Texts

Postmodern Adverts #2

Sony's "Greatness Awaits" advert is postmodern due to its surreal context. The advert blends video game footage with reality, forcing the audience to suspend disbelief and promising that their experience using the console will be similar, when in reality, it won't.

Postmodern Adverts

The Thomson TV Advert uses "Where Is My Mind" by the Pixies, which is also used in Fight Club.
The song has been modified to suit the holiday advert but "it is impossible to get away from the Pixies version or the Fight Club version whilst watching the advert". This intertextuality is particularly postmodern.

Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard rejected what he called the “grand narratives” or universal “meta-narratives.”

Principally, the grand narratives refer to the great theories of history, science, religion, politics. For example, Lyotard rejects the ideas that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress. He would reject universal political ‘solutions’ such as communism or capitalism. He also rejects the idea of absolute freedom.

In studying media texts it is possible also to apply this thinking to a rejection of the Western moralistic narratives of Hollywood film where good triumphs over evil, or where violence and exploitation are suppressed for the sake of public decency.

Lyotard favours ‘micronarratives’ that can go in any direction, that reflect diversity, that are unpredictable.

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

Inception - Understanding The Plot #2

Inception - Understanding The Plot

Inception: Intertextuality & Hyperreality

"You gotta draw from stuff you know, right?"

Disney's Ducktales

Penrose stairs are incorporated into the film as an example of the impossible objects that can be created in lucid dream worlds.

The mirror scene references Citizen Kane as he sees himself indefinitely reflected. This reinforces the "dream within a dream" concept.

There is also a slight reference to the photographer Ori Gersht whose artwork is similar to this scene in Inception:

"In Inception, Nolan wanted to explore "the idea of people sharing a dream space...That gives you the ability to access somebody's unconscious mind. What would that be used and abused for?" The majority of the film's plot takes place in these interconnected dream worlds. This structure creates a framework where actions in the real or dream worlds ripple across others. The dream is always in a state of production, and shifts across the levels as the characters navigate it. By contrast, the world of The Matrix (1999) is an authoritarian, computer-controlled one, alluding to theories of social control developed by Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. Nolan's world has more in common with the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Nolan combined elements from several different film genres into the film, notably science fiction, heist film, and film noir. Marion Cotillard plays "Mal" Cobb, Dom Cobb's projection of his guilt over his deceased wife's suicide. As the film's main antagonist, she is a frequent, malevolent presence in his dreams. Dom is unable to control these projections of her, challenging his abilities as an extractor. Nolan described Mal as "the essence of the femme fatale", the key noir reference in the film. As a "classic femme fatale" her relationship with Cobb is in his mind, a manifestation of Cobb's own neurosis and fear of how little he knows about the woman he loves. DiCaprio praised Cotillard's performance saying that "she can be strong and vulnerable and hopeful and heartbreaking all in the same moment, which was perfect for all the contradictions of her character".

Nolan began with the structure of a heist movie, since exposition is an essential element of that genre, though adapted it to have a greater emotional narrative suited to the world of dreams and subconscious. Or, as Denby surmised, "the outer shell of the story is an elaborate caper". Kirstin Thompson argued that exposition was a major formal device in the film. While a traditional heist movie has a heavy dose of exposition at the beginning as the team assembles and the leader explains the plan, in Inception this becomes nearly continuous as the group progresses through the various levels of dreaming. Three-quarters of the film, until the van begins to fall from the bridge, are devoted to explaining its plot. In this way, exposition takes precedence over characterisation. Their relationships are created by their respective skills and roles. Ariadne, like her ancient namesake, creates the maze and guides the others through it, but also helps Cobb navigate his own subconscious, and as the sole student of dream sharing, helps the audience understand the concept of the plot.

Nolan drew inspiration from the works of Jorge Luis Borges, the anime film Paprika (2006) by the late Satoshi Kon as an influence on the character "Ariadne", and Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott."

Inception: A Postmodern Text

"The term “post-modern” refers to a paradigm shift in philosophy. It is the logical succession of Existentialism. While in the past, philosophical views believed in objective reality and that people must operate on the basis of what that reality is, Existentialism created a world where people cared more about experience than truth and what is real. Postmodernism, like Existentialism, is an atheistic and relativistic system of beliefs, but it differs in that it is basically the view that there is no such thing as objective reality. To the postmodern, life has no meaning, and we cannot be sure what we perceive as truth or reality is actually real. You cannot judge whether something is real or not, so absolutes and morality are dispelled with. Brian Godawa, author of the book Hollywood Worldviews explains the difference between Existentialism and Postmodernism: “The two worldviews agree that… there is no underlying objective reality… no absolute reference point to judge true and false, right and wrong, real and unreal… But whereas the existentialist idolized the individual as supreme, the postmodern posits the loss of identity for the individual in favor of collective groups of people (cultures) constructing reality through their own interpretations and imposing them on others.” 

The intricate web of plot that is woven so masterfully by Nolan is so easy to caught up in, especially because the ideas are so perplexing and philosophical. In the film we are introduced to Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who is a rogue specialist in a field known as “dream sharing”. This technology, apparently created by the government to train soldiers, allows people to go into other people’s dream and do whatever. They can simply walk around inside this world created by this person’s subconscious or they do something else, something illegal – they can steal information from that person’s mind! Dom is running from the law, and so he gets work in high-tech corporate espionage, but we have “sympathy” for him because he’s really just trying to get back to his family. A rich businessman offers Dom a guarantee that he can return home, if he will perform an impossible task: inception! This involves going deep into a man’s subconscious, down many levels of dreams, and actually planting an idea in his mind so carefully that he won’t know that it was planted! (Sound like a imposing your views on others via a “prison house of language” to you?) The businessman says he wants Dom to perform inception on an industry rival and make him give up his dying father’s business. To do this, the band of rogues that Dom assembles to help him, have to manipulate the man’s emotions, knowledge and relationships to finally plant the idea “your father would want you to be your own man”.

The process of dream sharing is so real seeming, that you need to carry an object with you that tells you whether you’re in the real world or not. (Dom carries a top that will only stop spinning in the real world.) At one point in the film, Dom ends up in a room where people come to sleep and go into the dream world, because “the dream has become their reality, who are you to say otherwise?” Is there objective reality or isn’t there? That is a thesis that the film battles out between Dom and his dead wife. You see, in the dream world, Dom’s guilty subconscious haunts him in the ghost of his dead wife, Mal. What?! To answer that, I need to explain another facet of the plot; I told you this was complex. When you are dream sharing, you are put to sleep and the effects only last awhile. However, in the dream world, five minutes can feel like a week (or more), and it gets longer the deeper down you go. So, unless you want to be stuck in the dream world for years (though only minutes in reality) you need to get out sooner. This requires a “kick”, a dropping sensation that jolts you awake. Getting killed in a dream will also do the trick, except when you’re too deep in the subconscious; if you get killed then, you end up in “limbo” where you wait for years and years until the time runs out and you wake up, or you kill yourself. This ending up in “limbo” thing happened to Dom and Mal. They happily built their own world, down in limbo (sounding very postmodern), for decades (in “dream years”) until finally Dom can’t take it – he needs to get back to reality. But Mal has convinced herself that the dream is reality. Dom then performs inception on her to make her realize that “her world was not real, and to get home we needed to kill ourselves.” This they do and they wake up in the real world, happily home. But, the idea that Dom planted was still there. Dom refers to ideas as “parasites”, this is because in Postmodernism, as Dom says, “a single idea can grow and grow inside someone” shaping who they are. Mal believes that she is in a false reality and so she commits suicide again, only this time for real! Dom, torn by guilt because of the idea he planted, and being blamed for her death by the authorities, runs away.

Now, to get safely through this last mission, and thus home to his now parent-less kids, he must confront his guilt about Mal. They have a final confrontation inside the dream. Mal (or Dom’s subconscious projection of Mal) wants him to stay in the dream with her. He insists he must get back to the real world for their kid’s sake. To this she responds, “you keep telling yourself what you know, but what do you believe, what do you feel?” This is explicit postmodern belief: knowledge is impossible, what do you want reality to be? What Dom told Mal as they committed suicide was, “you’re waiting for a train; a train that will take you far from here. You hope you know where this train will take you, but you can’t know for sure – but it doesn’t matter!” If there is no reality or truth, then suicide is a valid and logical choice: maybe you’ll end up in a better non-reality. However, Dom seems to stand up against Mal’s enticement to forget what he knows for want he wants. He leaves Mal, they finish the mission, and he makes it home to the kids that he loves and missed! Maybe there is objective reality? A happy ending disguises Nolan’s final statement, right before the credits roll: Dom is so overjoyed to see his children that he spins his top on the dining room table, to make sure he’s not still dreaming. But he doesn’t care anymore. He walks off happily with his family, and the camera pans down to the top, still spinning. The audience all lean forward in their seats, a hush falls over the room, people hold their breathe – is he in the real world? Will the top fall? It looks like it just might be wobbling when – black. The credits roll and the audience lets out a groan.

http://bluebannermedia.com/inception-movie-review/

Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation

Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".

Hyperreality

Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterize the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Some famous theorists of hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco.

Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges (who already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.

Examples

1. A magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer.

2. Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI (e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with all settings super-imposed).

3. A well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).

4. Any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts" (e.g. "General Ignorance" from QI, where the questions have seemingly obvious answers, which are actually wrong).

5. Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of the human beings.

6. Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally 'creation out of nothing'): Disney World; Dubai; Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas.

7. TV and film in general (especially "reality" TV), due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds. The current trend is to glamorize the mundane using histrionics.

8. A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating a world of endless identical products.

9. A life which cannot be (e.g. the perfect facsimile of a celebrity's invented persona).

10. A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of a bodily or psychologically unattainable partner.

11. A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artifact, by simulating the feel of age or aging.

12. Constructed languages (such as E-Prime) or "reconstructed" extinct dialects.

13. Weak virtual reality which is greater than any possible simulation of physical reality.

A Postmodern World

George Ritzer (1996) suggested that postmodernism usually refers to a cultural movement – postmodernist cultural products such as architecture, art, music, films, TV, adverts etc.

Ritzer also suggested that postmodern culture is signified by the following:

• The breakdown of the distinction between high culture and mass culture. (Think: Black Swan-a film about a prima ballerina laced with a liberal dose of crowd pleasing sex and (psychological) violence.)

• The breakdown of barriers between genres and styles. (Think: Django Unchained - a mixture of spaghetti western, drams, action film, serious comment on slavery.)

• Mixing up of time, space and narrative. (Think: Inception or The Mighty Boosh.)

• Emphasis on style rather than content. (Think: Little Mix, One Direction.)

• The blurring of the distinction between representation and reality. (Think: TOWIE or Celebrity Big Brother.)

The French theorist Baudrillard argues that contemporary society increasingly reflects the media; that the surface image becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the reality. Think about all the times you have heard an actor on a soap-opera say, that when they are out and about, people refer to them by their character’s name. Look at The Sun’s website and search stories on Nicholas Hoult when he was in Skins: he is predominantly written about as though he is ‘Tony’, his character in Skins.

Key terms:

• intertextuality – one media text referring to another

• parody – mocking something in an original way

• pastiche – a stylistic mask, a form of self-conscious imitation

• homage – imitation from a respectful standpoint

• bricolage – mixing up and using different genres and styles

• simulacra – simulations or copies that are replacing ‘real’ artefacts

• hyperreality – a situation where images cease to be rooted in reality

• fragmentation – used frequently to describe most aspects of society, often in relation to identity