liz-contextual & Theoretical Studies
Sunday, 27 March 2011
bibliography
Doane,M A(1987) The Desire To Desire: The woman's Film of the 1940's. United States of America, Indiana University Press
Mulvey, L (1996) Fetishism and curiosity. United States of America, Indiana University Press.
Denzin.N.K (1995) The cinematic Society, The Voyeur's Gaze. London, SAGE Publications.
Williams.T(2000) Structures of Desire, British cinema, 1939-1955.United States of America, State University of New York Press.
Monaco. J(1977) How to Read a Film: Movies and Beyond. England, Oxford University Press
Rapaport. H(1994) Between the sign & the gaze. New York, Cornell University Press
Freedman. B (1991) Staging the gaze: postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean comedy. New York, Cornell University Press
Cassetti F(1996) Inside the gaze: the fiction film and its spectator. United States of America, Indiana University Press
Fischer- Lichte.E (1997) the show and the gaze of theatre: a european perspective. United States of America. University of Iowa Press.
Betts.D (2000)Breaking the gaze: a nonfiction chronicle of the 60's. United States of America, Mushroom ebooks.
Hirsch.M(1999)The familial gaze. Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, Hanover
essay
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Task 6
I have decided to choose Garys blog post about graphic design as a communication. I created this piece of work in an images class about type as images, by taking a work from a piece of writing and turning the word in to what it is, "batteries".
Task 5
Write a 500 word critical summary of the text which explicitly adresses the following questions
- How is sustainability defined in the text?
- What are the main characteristics or tendencies of Capitalism
- Define a 'crisis of Capitalism'. Offer an example.
- What solutions have been offered to the sustainability question? Are these successful or realistic? - If not why are they flawed?
- Is the concept of sustainability compatible with Capitalism?
2. Capitalism is an economic system which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit. karl Marx developed the idea of capital accumulation in his work Capital. Originating in both trade and expropriation, it arises from the constant need to realise surplus value. Capitalism is constantly looking for new things to commodify. Capitalism thrives on creating , then subsuming the other. Marx states "a precondition of production based on capital is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of circulation, whether the sphere is directly expanded or whether more points within it are created as points of production"
3 "crisis indicates a passage, which is the turning point in every systematic cycle of accumulation, from a first phase of material expansion (investment in production) to a second phase of financial expansion (including speculation)". The environmental orgins is a crisis for capitalism.
4.
Task 4
The Shannon- Weaver Mathematical Model 1949
For this task I have decided to look at a perfume advert by Gucci and will use the Shannon Weaver model to explain communication. The Gucci Guilty advert campaign was art directed by Riccardo Ruini which is the information source.
In this advert you can see a golden man and woman arm in arm, the man is lower than the woman and he has his eyes closed smelling her neck in pleasure. The woman is holding the back of his head pushing her body in to his while lifting her head up so that he can smell her neck with ease. The woman is looking at us, knowing that she is being looked at and seems to be enjoying the male attention. The advert is sexual and exciting. The perfume bottle is place at the front of the advert and is in the same gold as the bodies. I think the advert is trying to make the viewer want to be irritable . This is how I interpret the image which will be received differently by each individual which is the destination. The channel is where it will be seen and how this would effect the target audience, it needs to be seen where women of late teens to mid 30s will view it because they can associate with the woman's age and make you want to be like her too.
lecture 6
- Socialist- The process of transformation of local regional phenomena in to global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.
- Capitalist- The elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly intergated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result.
Globalisation- distinct political, economic, and cultural trends.
- if the global village is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.
- key thinkers- schiller -chomsky
- media conglomerates operate as oligopolies
- local cultures destroyed in this process and new forms of cultural dependency shaped, mirroring old school colonialism.
- schiller- dominance of us driven commercial media forces US model of broadcasting on to the rest of the world but also inculates US style consumerism in societies that can ill afford it.
- ownership
- funding
- sourcing
- flak
- anti communist ideology
- sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs
- needs (particularly of the worlds poor)
- limitations of technology
Monday, 17 January 2011
the gaze
SLIH clip from r pieto on Vimeo.
This short clip from Billy Wilder’s film Some Like It Hot (1959) illustrates some of the contradictions that exist within the male gaze in Classic Hollywood Cinema. We see the introduction of Marilyn Monroe’s character, Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, as Joe/Josephine (Tony Curtis) and Jerry/Geraldine/Daphne (Jack Lemmon) watch her entrance.
On one level this clip can be read as articulating the male gaze. The film’s mise-en-scène constructs Sugar’s image in a highly erotic way; she wears tight fitting clothes accented with feathers and fur, which among other things, signify sensuality. Monroe’s performance accents her walk and facial expressions, thus heightening her sexuality. The corresponding music is a kind of Dixieland/stripper motif that aurally corroborates her image. Sugar’s eroticism even affects inanimate objects, as evidenced by the train in the scene which appears to be aroused, in a sense, by Sugar’s intense sexuality. The train’s brakes shoot out a burst of steam as if to grab her as she passes by.
The sequence also follows Mulvey’s assertion that the gaze works through three channels: the male characters in the film; the camera; and the male viewers. First, the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon characters gaze at Sugar as she walks by. The editing in the scene reproduces the gaze in their eyeline match as they watch Sugar walk by. Secondly the camera frames Sugar in a precise and specific way. We see Sugar’s face in medium close-up, then a cut to Joe and Jerry, then a cut to a medium close-up of Sugar’s derrière. Here the camera and the male characters are in perfect harmony to reproduce Sugar as an object to be looked at by men. And thirdly, from all this we can assume that the film’s construction of the male gaze is situating male viewers within the audience to take up this viewing position.
Here with this discussion of camerawork we can plainly see one of the strengths of Mulvey’s thinking on the male gaze. We could write off this particular style of camera work used with Sugar as just standard Hollywood cinematic practice. Indeed, it is standard film practice in Classic Hollywood; however, this specific camerawork is almost exclusively reserved for female characters. If we do a little thought experiment and try to imagine John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart or Clark Gable shot in this manner, we can see Mulvey’s insight. Male actors were seldom, if ever, shot with this set up. Imagine John Wayne entering a scene shot like Sugar’s entrance; first with a medium close up of his face and then cut to a medium close up of his derrière? According to Mulvey, this is because the male characters can seldom be eroticized in the same way as female characters. Male characters can be handsome and dashing, but the camera can seldom frame them to be erotic objects of the male gaze as the above scene does with Marilyn Monroe.
key points
- articulating the male gaze
- what she is wearing, tight fitted clothing\
- her walk and facial expressions, heightening her sexuality
- the train being an object and recognising her sexuality and shooting out steam
- Mulvey's 3 channels
- the male characters in the film
- the camera
- the male viewers
- how the camera views sugar