Representation of Women

Objectification 

 Sucker Punch

Young girls kept as prostitutes try to escape their fate. Despite their physical weakness they attempt and succeed to fight men.
--> Sexist view combined with a slight element of feminism: most female characters have very strong personalities. They use men just as much as they are being used by men. It is also a genre convention of action films to employ attracting women. In this movie all spectacular battles are fought by these female warriors instead of a stereotypical male hero.

Black Swan 

The tough life of a ballet dancer: the road to perfection involves hard training, anorexia and conflicts with both the inner self and the outside world.
-->

• Marxist-Freudian liberation model of sexuality as a natural instinct repressed by authoritarian familial and social institutions. 
• Foucault: 'Power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress.'

Cyberia

Cyber => The word 'cyberspace' was coined by science-fiction writer William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer and defined as 'consensual hallucination'. The term became to be applied to the 'room' or any space generated by software within a computer that produces a Virtual Reality (VR) experience.

More generally, cyberspace is the 'nowhere space' in the telephone line between you and where all things online happen. The artificial landscape on Internet or Compuserve, computer networks that connect millions of users throuhout the world, through which one can move, download information, talk to other users, visit  special discussion forums, shop, make airline and hotel bookings, is cyberspace.

Virtual reality (VR) = compute-mediated, multisensory experience, one designed to trick our senses and convince us that we are 'in another world'. In VR world, the computer takes complete control and guides the way of sensing, feeling and thinking of participants.

So how did we end up here? 

The beginning: 
 Computers --> cybernetics, binary system --> binary opposites (Claude Levi-Strauss)

The 80s:
Cyberpunk began as a subgenre of science fiction popular in the late 80s. Cyberpunk represents the implosion of the future into the present and total intrusion of technology into human lives. Here iant corporations wield more power than governments, anarchistic computer hackers lead rebellions against them on thenew frontier of global networks,

Influential films:

• Terminator (1984) with Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Blue Velvet by David Lynch (1986)
• Robocop  (1987)
• Twin Peaks (1989) - TV series

The 90s:
Hyperreality slowly becomes part of everyday life as PCs are widely used at home.
Virtual reality is a popular subject matter in cinema & philosophy.
Cyber is one of the most used prefixes of the 90s, signifying a world of computer dominance and disembodied experience.

Influential Films:

• Total Recall (1990)
• Sliders - Tv series
• The Matrix Trilogy

Today: 

• YouTube
• Google
• Facebook has as many memers as the third largest country in the world. It has become a 'virtual home' for millions of people, where they have a chance to socialize, talk to friends and family, who are phisically in a great distance.
• Games

About the Future:

Reading:

•  Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom, 1983 
•  Peter Huber, Law and Disorder in Cyberspace: Abolish the FCC and Let Common Law Rule the Telecosm, 1997 
• Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006

Structuralism

Derrida:

Meaning includes identity (what it is) and difference (what it isn't) and is therefore continuously being 'deferred'. Derrida invented a word for this process, combining difference and deferral - différance.

 'THERE'S NEVER ONLY ONE MEANING'

Rejects the dogmatic representation of Reason as timeless and certainty.

Foucault: 

epistemology = the verification theory of knowledge concerned with distinguishing genuine from spurious knowledge.
An episteme dictates what counts as knowledge and truth and what doesn't.

'There is no history but a multiple, overlapping and interactive series of legitimate vs. excluded histories.'

Art: meta-epistemic; it is about the episteme as a whole, an allegory of the deep arrangements that make knowledge possible.

Moral Panics

Link to Media Know All: Mediaknowall: Violence in the Media — Moral Panics

Social networking

Many companies and theaters use social networking sites for advertisements to reach niche audiences. It's easy, friendly and familiar. It feels like returning to friends rather than serving the needs of a company.

Link to Article: How Twitter transformed dance

San Francisco Ballet 

Signs

Semiotics: the study of signs

Signifier: the word or acoustic image

Signified: the concept to which the word refers

Sign: the signifier and the signified together make up the sign

Meaning: product of a system of representation which is itself meaningless

A bit of Grammar

Structuralism: examines the language from a synchronic (existing now) rather than a diachronic (existing and changing over time) point of view.
See: Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Swiss professor

Phonemes: sounds or letters (e.g. C)
Monemes: words (eg. Cat)
Discourse: extended speech; the code of language used to express thought.

Language: sign system
'language games' (Wittgenstein): use of language in social practice; the association of sound and what it represents is the outcome of collective learning

Syntagmatic series: (contiguity, combination): the linear relationships between linguistic elements in a sentence (e.g.: subject-object-verb)
Paradigmatic series: (substitution): the relationship between elements within a sentence and other elements which are syntactically interchangeable (e.g.: verb-verb, noun-noun)

Metonymy

Metaphor: descriptions that are not literally true (eg.: 'tower of strength', 'a glaring error')
--> generated by paradigmatic substitution through perception of similarity

Metonymy: naming an attribute or adjunct of the thing instead of the thing itself (eg.: 'crown' for 'royalty', 'turf' for horse-racing, 'deeps' for ocean)

Synecdoche: naming the part for the whole (eg.: 'keels' for ships)
--> both generated by syntagmatic combination through perception of contiguity

Audience Theories

Passive Audiences

Reception Theory

• preferred / target audiences --> see: audience profiles
• opposed audiences (complain --> censor [age, religion, sex, politics etc.])
• negotiated audiences (move opinion)

Uses & Gratifications

• how we use media & the pleasures we get from that use
• company --> media characters become our friends (informal address)
• social needs --> friends associate with the same products (voyeurism)
• relax --> leisure
• structure & order --> reassurance
• PLEASURE --> scopophilia, reinfication GAZING
• Surveillance, spying (CUs) 
• Escapism (reality) - ASPIRATIONS (Baudrillard + Lyotard) 
• HYPERREALITY - simulacrum, -a (obsession)

Active Audiences

Two-step flow

• criticism of Capitalist media (Marx) 
• influential media --> consider DEGREE OF INFLUENCE
• command words --> Moving audiences from A to B (eg.: shopping)
• Influence (Gramsci) 
• Quantity vs. Quality (Althusser) 
• INTERPELLATION

Hypodermic needle (~ magic bullet)

• injecting an idea --> medical analogy : 'addiction'
• brainwashing / propaganda
• visual violence --> violent behaviour (dismissed!!)
• SHOCK --> horror
• see: Orson Welles radio broadcast  1938 (War of the Worlds) --> people believed they were actually being attacked by aliens
• charity ads: try to make us feel guilty (poverty, maltreated animals, illnesses etc.)

Comedies - and what else?!

Postmodernism:

• self-reflective ( story within the story)
• hybrid genre
• mockery of genre
• tragicomedy / black comedy
• not necessarily conventional satisfying ending

Django Unchained

Django Unchained (2013)

The ultimate shoot-out for revenge. Western movie -  Southern style.


Link to Trailer 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8CZKbDzP1E

Lin to Trailer 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5sks1-EGfw

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

   A writer who writes a script about seven psychopaths.

 Comedy with a hint of melodramatic sadness.

Link to Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOsd5d8IVoA

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
  A reporter's search for psychics and real Jedi.

Link to Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC2TzspJn5A

Censorship

Online Privacy

April 2012 - Internet firms have warned that government plans to monitor email and social media use in Britain are liable to be used by repressive regimes elsewhere in the world to justify their state surveillance

http://m.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/02/internet-companies-warn-government-email-surveillance

June 2012 - The government is to offer a blank cheque to internet and phone firms that will be required to track everyone's email, Twitter, Facebook and other internet use under legislation...

The communications data police and others may seek about an individual includes email addresses and phone numbers of people who have been in contact, when this happened, and where, the details giving the police records of suspects' associates and activities.

Link: Online privacy: Home Office to write blank cheque for 'snoopers' charter'

Online Offence Policy

December 2012 - Social media misuse guidelines to differentiate between silly offensive posts and those that involve credible threats

Link: http://m.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/19/twitter-facebook-jokers-prosecution

Influences

Short Video Production:

Title: 'The Nightmare'
 Storyline: A girl is unable to live with guilt after the murder of her twin sister. Dreams and reality melt together as she sways towards the edge of  madness.

My  Influences:

 
The Nightmare
by Mihaly Babits

The novel 'A gólyakalifa' (stork caliph) by Mihály Babits, translated to English under the title of 'The Nightmare'. The protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in another life. Throuhout the years he becomes unsure which life is real.

Link: http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/the-nightmare-by-mihaly-babits/

Inception
by Christopher Nolan

Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) invented the procedure of entering people's minds in a shared dream. He had to pay the price: lost his wife and children. Now he has to face a mission which will either cost his life or give it back. But doesn't matter how clear his past is on paper: he cannot clear himself from the guilt and responsibility he feels over the suicide of his wife. As the team enters the subconscious, he unintentionally drags them lower and lower into the unknown. 

Sucker  Punch 
by Zack Snyder
"Sucker Punch" is an epic action fantasy that takes us into the vivid imagination of a young girl whose dream world provides the ultimate escape from her darker reality. Unrestrained by the boundaries of time and place, she is free to go where her mind takes her, and her incredible adventures blur the lines between what's real and what is imaginary. She has been locked away against her will, but Babydoll (Emily Browning) has not lost her will to survive. 

Black Swan
by Darren Arnofsky

Nina (Natalie Portman), the talented and perfectionist ballerina finally receives the credit she deserves: the leading role in Swan's Lake. In order to get to the top, she has to stand the malevolence and jealousy of her competitors, face as well as a physical and mental fight with herself. At the same time she is sexually harassed by her mentor and embarrassed to admit her homosexuality.


The Dark Half
 by Stephen King

The Dark Half is a horror novel by Stephen King, published in 1989. Publishers Weekly listed The Dark Half as the second best-selling book of 1989 behind Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger. It was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1993.

Stephen King wrote several books under a pseudonym, Richard Bachman, during the seventies and eighties. Most of the Bachman novels were darker and more cynical in nature, featuring a far more visceral sense of horror than the psychological, gothic style common to many of King's most famous works. When King was discovered to be Bachman, he wrote The Dark Half in response to his outing.

Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106664/

Fight Club
by David Fincher

Everyone knows who Tyler Durden is. Or do they? David Fincher's cult classic is exactly about telling us that not everything is what it seems. The hero, of course, doesn't recognise the enemy within until the last moment.
Link: http://creative.sulekha.com/fight-club_302570_blog

Auteurism

Guy Pearce in Memento

Christopher Nolan
Films:

• Memento (2000)
• Insomnia (2002)
• Batman Begins (2005)
• The Prestige (2006)
• The Dark Knight (2008)
• Inception (2010)
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
• Man of Steel (2013)

Characteristics:

• spectacular action scenes
• psychological depth to characters
• open endings
• noir elements, focus on shadows
• music often includes strong bass

Emily Browning in Sucker Punch

Zack Snyder
Films:

• 300 (2006)
• Watchmen (2009)
• The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010)
• Sucker Punch (2011) 
• Man of Steel (2013)

Characteristics:

• emphasis on visual and special effects
• digitalized images, unrealistic lighting
• coordinated battle and fight scenes
• distancing from reality, escapist
• musical choices are often remixes or upbeat songs

Darren Arnofsky:

Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Films:

• Pi (1998)
• Requiem for a Dream (2000)
• Fountain (2006)
• Black Swan (2010)
• Noah (2014)

Characteristics:

• hallucinations as part of story
• didactic, includes strong moral message
• suspense building
• focuses on a small number of characters
• emotive music, often orchestra
• refers to classical artists

Identity

Heroes & Villains:

With the blurring of morality the figure the hero often melts together with the villain's.
For example, in Inception, Cobb's character (Leonardo diCaprio) shows the layers of his personality as the story progresses. The audience explores the complexity of the character through observing him different situations, relating to other characters. Firstly, he seems as a noble leader of a small group of people, secondly, he appears as a man with a troubled past, with greed for money in order to return to his normal life, and towards the end it becomes clear that his guilt is enormous not only against the team members who trusted but against his own wife and family.

 Dual Identity:

 In Arnofky's Black Swan, Nina plays both the White and the Black Swan in the famous Ballet production, The Swans' Lake. Nina (Natalie Portman) not only has to struggle with the hard ballet training which slowly damages both her soul and body, but also has to emerge from the back row to fame. The competition begins to become a star, to be a real artist - and to be perfect.

• Nina (Black Swan) from a feminist perspective:  A student's comments on Black Swan

Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ioan Gruffudd in Ringer

Similarly there is two crashing female personalities in the TV series 'Ringer' (2011-12). The leader roles are played by Sarah Michelle Gellar ( Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; The Grudge) and Ioan Gruffud (Titanic, Fantastic Four). 
Plot:
Bridget becomes the sole witness to a professional hit. She flees to New York, telling no one. In New York, Bridget reunites with her estranged twin, Siobhan. Wealthy, pampered and seemingly happily married, Siobhan lives what appears to be a fairy tale life. The identical twin sisters seem to be mending their frayed relationship, until Siobhan disappears overboard during a boat trip the two take together, and Bridget makes the split decision to take on her sister's identity. She discovers shocking secrets, not only about her sister and her marriage, but other secrets as well. Bridget soon realizes she is no safer as Siobhan than she is as herself.

Link: Ringer (TV series 2011) - Pictures, Photos & Images - IMDb

Internet Facts

• The Well was the first social network group.
• Wikipedia is free to edit for anyone.
• In China there are over 30 thousand people censoring the Web.
• Facebook has so many members that it could make the third largest country in the world.
• Flickr contains 3 million pictures and videos.
• Amazon is the world's most popular retailer with 124 million members and started as a bookshop.

• Stanford University has worked out an algorithm, which makes link counting possible in search engines such as Google. This is why the most popular page pops on top when you search.
• Google makes $200 profit every second.
• Gmail tracks your personal mail to give you more advertisement.
• Behavioural targeting means tracking the sites you visit and offer similar ones. 

• Recommendation engines can tell your taste of music or films and personalise your computer without even asking you to do anything.
• Google has a structured bidding process for adverts based on the formula p = b x q (price=bidding x quality)

Digital Media

BBC's Virtual Revolution
 YouTube connected to Google
Google Expands: Google Drive, Blogger, Google+, Google Docs, Gmail

Name dropping:

•  Tim Berbers-Lee: creator of world wide Web 
• Bill Gates: Co-founder of Microsoft 
• Jimmy Wales: creator of Wikipedia 
• Chad Hurley: Co-founder of YouTube
•  Mark Zuckerberg: creator of Facebook 
• Jack Dorsey: creator of Twitter
• Bush: inventor of the computer and the atomic bomb 
• Peter Thiel: Pay Pal

 Theorists:

•  Robert Wiener: action-reaction loop 
• Gramsci: hegemony 
• Bush: associative thinking 
• Füredi: culture of fear 
• Dunbar equation: the upper number of close social relations (friends) you can have (150)

Dates: 
1965: email was born
1991: first website on www.
1994: online order at Pizza Net (Pizza Hut)
1995: Internet Explorer
2005: first video on YouTube