The advent of film and television has redefined the way we approach and understand culture, from the popular to the fine arts. Arguably the last century has witnessed the materialization, spread, and ubiquity of Clement Greenberg’s frightful “ersatz” culture, of the duplicate, and of nearly all other cultural ‘abominations’ he wrote about . Remakes, reruns, covers, memes, are more than ever part of our cultural fabric, and flows into the fine arts by means of appropriation, kitsch endeavours, collage, to name but an established few. In addition, an obvious think-tank of pop-cultural cannons has established itself alongside video media – Hollywood. As expected, many artists have naturalized filmic vocabulary into their art practices. At the same time, concerns about the relationship between art and its viewers have taken a prominent position in contemporary artistic discourse. In some respects, Canadian artist Kelly Mark is an artist interested both in the vocabulary of video and in conceptual relational concerns. In this light, my essay will discuss Mark’s 2010 video work “Public Disturbance: HB Series: Take 1/ Take 2/ Take 3”, a filmed performance featuring two actors infiltrating Toronto’s 2010 Power Ball fundraiser and reciting movie lines. First, I will describe the work; then I will take a two-pronged reading of the piece. The first will be concerned with various social commentaries while the second will discuss relational aspects of the work. Note that in this essay, bibliographical references are identified by superscripted numbers that refer to endnotes. Footnotes are denoted by superscripted letters and contain additional information concerning works by Mark. HB Series is shown at Montreal’s Darling Foundry until Apri... ... middle of paper ... ...e: Rachel Echenberg, Louis Joncas & Kelly Mark (Ottawa : The Ottawa Art Gallery : 2005), 46 Adler, Dan: "Kelly Mark" Artforum. December, 2007, page unknown: accessed March 2011 http://kellymark.com/REMWR4.html “Kelly Mark HB Series: Public Disturbance” Andrieux, Caroline. Accessed March 2011. http://www.fonderiedarling.org/soutenir_e/index.html "New numbers confirm Toronto's rank as Hollywood North". City of Toronto. Accessed March 2011. http://wx.toronto.ca/inter/it/newsrel.nsf/0/a196b48a551afa4285256df600461208?OpenDocument Madill, Shirley, ed., Kelly Mark. 32 Madill, Shirley, ed., Kelly Mark. 29 Falvey, Emily. Dead Nature / La Vie Immobile p.10 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy “Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television,” in Channels of Discrouse: Reassembled ed. Robert C. Allen ( University of North Carolina Press: 1992) 2nd Edition. 203-246
Rowe visits North’s assertion that the role of the mask, as applied to visual art, is “convention embodied, the sign of signs,” which exposes the structure of art b...
The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.
Creativity occurs within the context of society: this is unavoidable as even artists who view themselves as outside of the 'mainstream' are constructs of society: their social construction of reality is inevitably grounded in the discourse and belief structures of the society they inhabit and were formed by, however much they choose to struggle. Indeed, philosophers such as Foucault argue that it is impossible to escape one's own society due to the effects of language and meaning being so closely intertwined. Within the context of our own society post-modernist art, especially film making, seeks to undermine the dictates of broader society in relation to meta-narratives – yet to make movies that can be easily inserted into the market costs money. Here I discount mass-market pulp-fiction success such as 'Paranormal Activity' as these are not aiming to be an expression of pure art. Those movies that aim to have a story that challenges the 'norms', that undermines the capitalist/materialist meta-narrative of the major movie production houses therefore face a struggle that in some ways parallels the struggle that young artists themselves face. This struggle can, for young artists just as much as for any citizen, be a stressor that leads to drugs and death.
It is a common mis-conception that films are merely entertainment, and serve no other purpose than to provide for the viewer a two-hour escape from reality. This is a serious under-estimation of the power, purpose, and potential of film, because film, upon reflection, revea...
Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press, 2009: 649-657.
My work proposes a broader view of the theatre-film interface, one that relies on intertextuality as its interpretive method. I believe it is valuable-both pedagogically and theoretically-to ask broad questions about the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological exchanges between the history of theatre and contemporary film and television. For example, this paper will study how the "Chinese Restaurant" episode of the sitcom, Seinfeld, intertextually reworks Samuel Beckett's modernist play, Waiting for Godot. In each text, characters encounter an existential plight as they are forced to wait interminably, and thus confront their powerlessness at the hands of larger social forces. As a pedagogical matter, this connection encourages the students to see academic culture in the guise of having to read Beckett's play for my course, not as foreign and alienating, but instead as continuous with their understanding of leisure activities like watching sitcoms. As a theoretical matter, this intertextual connection allows important ideological matters to come into bold relie...
During the course of this essay it is my intention to discuss the differences between Classical Hollywood and post-Classical Hollywood. Although these terms refer to theoretical movements of which they are not definitive it is my goal to show that they are applicable in a broad way to a cinema tradition that dominated Hollywood production between 1916 and 1960 and which also pervaded Western Mainstream Cinema (Classical Hollywood or Classic Narrative Cinema) and to the movement and changes that came about following this time period (Post-Classical or New Hollywood). I intend to do this by first analysing and defining aspects of Classical Hollywood and having done that, examining post classical at which time the relationship between them will become evident. It is my intention to reference films from both movements and also published texts relative to the subject matter. In order to illustrate the structures involved I will be writing about the subjects of genre and genre transformation, the representation of gender, postmodernism and the relationship between style, form and content.
Often times people neglect the fact that the things- such as films- that they see and hear day to day can actually be worthwhile in teaching them. They come into contact with them purely for the purpose of being entertained and, sometimes, do not even realize that they are being taught valuable life lessons in the process. In conjunction with this theory, Professor Michael Taylor once said, “We don’t often think of the value of media beyond its entertainment, but there is a whole area that has to do with education through entertainment. As filmmakers, the work that we do has a huge impact on our culture. With that comes an opportunity, and may be even a responsibility, to use that impact for greater good.” Many French and Francophone films
... movie stars like royalty or mythical gods and goddesses, viewing the drama between great archetypal characters in a personal psychic realm. By considering the statements made and their societal impact from a Marxist perspective, Benjamin’s method is highly effective, as it does not simply consider art in terms of pure aesthetics anymore, but considers art’s place in a society capable of mechanically reproducing and endlessly duplicating film, photography, and digital art. His qualm with losing the aura and mystique of an original work is negated by the cult of movie stars, the adoration of fame, the incorporation of soundtracks which embody a particular time period, cinematographic allusions, and time-capsule-like qualities of a film such as Basquiat, a 90s tribute to the 80s, produced both as a part of and resulting from the art movements and trends it addresses.
In his article Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon, he used the ‘photo effect’ conception of Roland Barthes to examine the present/ absent paradox of stars. He proposed influential qualitative distinctions in between stardom in films and television. He argued that ‘Stars are incomplete images outside the cinema: the performance of the film is the moment of completion of images in subsidiary circulation, in newspapers, fanzines, etc. Further, a paradox is present in these subsidiary forms. The star is at once ordinary and extraordinary, available for desire and unattainable. This paradox is repeated and intensified in cinema by the regime of presence-yet-absence that is the filmic image’(1992). Therefore, the impractical mode of ‘this is was’ on nature of stardom ‘awakens a series of psychic mechanisms which involve various impossible images’, such as ‘the narcissistic experience of the mirror phase’(1992). Ellis then continued to indicate televisual stardom, which is more current or ‘immediate’ than cinematic fame. He argued that ‘What television does present is the “personality”. The personality is someone who is famous for being famous and is famous only in so far as he or she makes frequent television appearances… In some ways, they are the opposite of stars, agreeable voids rather than sites of conflicting meanings’. Ellis’ thesis definitely points out the differences between cinema and television fame, due to the multimedia and transmedia of current era implies a much more diverse and unpredictable relationship in between stars’ images in any kind of
This paper deals, in broadest terms, with the questions of how artwork is connected to the changes and dynamics that prevail in a society. To describe these changes, I will investigate how a specific type of art reflects its social content in contemporary societies. My analysis is carried out by closely looking at the Pop Art movement, especially with Andy Warhol, who has come to be known as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. It will be argued that Pop Art managed to successfully articulate its time, and in so doing, it became a widely influential art movement whose effect is still very much existent in today’s world of art. In order to prove its claim, this paper relies on the theory of “the field of cultural production” by Pierre
...ea. "Film and Mental Illness: Fetishisation, Romanticism or Misinterpretation?"Diorama. Diorama, 13 Mar. 2013. Web. 05 Mar. 2014.
Stanley, Robert H. The Movie Idiom: Film as a Popular Art Form. Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 2011. Print
In Hollywood today, most films can be categorized according to the genre system. There are action films, horror flicks, Westerns, comedies and the likes. On a broader scope, films are often separated into two categories: Hollywood films, and independent or foreign ‘art house’ films. Yet, this outlook, albeit superficial, was how many viewed films. Celebrity-packed blockbusters filled with action and drama, with the use of seamless top-of-the-line digital editing and special effects were considered ‘Hollywood films’. Films where unconventional themes like existentialism or paranoia, often with excessive violence or sex or a combination of both, with obvious attempts to displace its audiences from the film were often attributed with the generic label of ‘foreign’ or ‘art house’ cinema.
Barry, Peter. "Psychoanalytic criticism." Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. 92-115. Print.