"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

"Death Of Uncool" Shuffle Mix

1) Untitled / The Cure (gothic rock)
2) Debaser / Pixies (alternative rock)
3) A Letter To Elise / The Cure (gothic rock, alternative rock)
4) No. 1 Party Anthem / Arctic Monkeys (indie rock, piano rock, soft rock, blues rock)
5) Ride / Lana Del Rey (blue-eyed soul)
6) Heroin / The Velvet Underground & Nico (avant-garde, experimental rock, psychedelic rock, art rock, protopunk)
7) This Is England / The Clash (post-punk, synthpunk)
8) Behind Blue Eyes / The Who (rock, hard rock)
9) Bankrobber / The Clash (punk rock, reggae)
10) American / Lana Del Rey (indie pop)
11) My Generation / The Who (rock, hard rock, protopunk)
12) William, It Was Really Nothing / The Smiths (alternative rock)
13) Hand In Glove / The Smiths (alternative rock)
14) A Night Like This / The Cure (gothic rock, alternative rock, new wave)
15) Call Me Lightning / The Who (rock)
16) The Weedy Burton / The Cure (post-punk)
17) Arabian Knights / Siouxsie & the Banshees (post-punk)
18) End / The Cure (alternative rock, gothic rock)
19) Gypsy / Lady Gaga (europop, electropop)
20) I Wanna Be Yours / Arctic Monkeys (psychedelic rock, indie rock, R&B)

Genres Mentioned:
- gothic rock
- alternative rock
- indie rock
- piano rock
- soft rock
- blues rock
- blue eyed soul
- avant-garde
- experimental rock
- psychedelic rock
- art rock
- protopunk
- post-punk
- synthpunk
- rock
- hard rock
- punk rock
- reggae
- indie pop
- new wave
- europop
- electropop
- R&B

Brian Eno

"It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating. The category I had a hand in starting—ambient music—has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked. A similar bifurcation has been happening in every other living musical genre (except for “classical” which remains, so far, simply “classical”), and it’s going on in painting, sculpture, cinema and dance.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life."

Bricolage

Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.

Modern Art VS Postmodern Art

Everything Is A Remix - Q&A

Postmodernism: Definition #3

"Postmodernism is a cultural movement that came after modernism, also it follows our shift from being an industrial society to that of an information society, through globalization of capital. Markers of the postmodern culture include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox. Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding modernism."

"Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch."

By R. Lee from Media Studies 180 Hunter College, Sections 102, 103

Of course, intertextual references are often found in postmodern texts.

Postmodernism: Definition #2

Label given to cultural forms since the 1960s that display the following qualities:

Self reflexivity: This involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding.

Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony.

Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media.

Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:

• Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions
• Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations
• Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race
• Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality

Postmodernism: A Definition

Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (i.e. experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they have no preferred reading and present a a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously. Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (e.g. using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).

Postmodernism

...In its simplest terms:

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