Download Y200 Politics and Film

October 4, 2011
From McCarthyism to
Multimedia Mergers
 1950-54 McCarthyism and the Blacklist
 1964 End of the Production Code
 Hollywood reacts to the political movements of the
1960s (civil rights, the anti-war movement)
 1970s Rise of the “movie brats” and the new
blockbuster films
 1980s Multimedia Mergers and the emergence of the
new infotainment technologies
Important Changes in Television
 Rise of the 4th network (Fox).
 Rapid spread of VCRs.
 Cable TV: many new cable networks and cable
channels with specialized content.
 Future prospect of competition involving over-theair broadcasters, cable operators, satellite
broadcasters, and phone companies.
Market Penetration of VCRs and Other
Technologies
The Home Theater and
Cocooning
 Main movie-going is
by young people on
dates.
 Families are
retreating to “home
theaters.”
 Cocooning is a
general trend in the
US.
Siliwood
 Digital technology
already used in film
production and postproduction.
 Studios use the
Internet to advertise
products.
 Digital technology will
be used increasingly for
distribution.
Main Members of the Frankfurt
School
 Theodor Adorno
 Max Horkheimer
 Herbert Marcuse
 Walter Benjamin
 Leo Lowenthal
Need to see the school as
an offshoot of Marxism,
with key issues being the
failure of the European masses to rise to support the revolution
in Russia and the rise of Fascism in Europe in the 1930s.
Key Ideas of Theodor Adorno
 Popular culture in capitalist societies creates a false
sense of “needs” in the public, thereby serving the
dominant capitalist classes
 Cultural goods become commodified and fetishized
and judged on the basis of their exchange value and
not their intrinsic value
Diddy Mercedes Commercial
The Creation of False Needs
“Capitalist productive forces are capable, according to
the [Frankfurt] School, of producing such vast
amounts of wealth through waste production like
military expenditure that ‘false needs’ can be created
and met.”
Source: Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to
Theories of Popular Culture, p. 59.
Elements of Theodor Adorno’s Theory of
Commodity Fetishism
Taking off from Marx’s distinction between exchange
value and use value of commodities, Adorno says
exchange value dominates use value in capitalist
society via commodity fetishism = “the fantastic form
of a relation” defined by a thing (money) and the value
of objects in capitalist consumer societies
Source: Strinati, p. 57.
Adorno on the Culture Industry
 “The culture industry intentionally integrates its
consumers from above.”
 “The customer is not king, as the culture
industry would have us believe, not its subject
but its object.”
 “.. The concepts of order which it hammers into
human beings are always those of the status
quo.”
Source: Strinati, pp. 62-63.
Theories of Walter Benjamin
 Marginal member of
the Frankfurt School
 His major work, The
Arcades project, was
partially lost when
Benjamin attempted
to escape Nazioccupied France by
walking over the
border to Spain.
Benjamin’s Ideas about Commodities
“The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in
commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a
phantasmagoria, constantly changing shape according
to the tides of fashion, and offered to crowds of
enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their
deepest desires.”
Source: Essay on Benjamin by J.M. Coetzee at
http://lists.tamil.com/lists/it/2001-01/msg00053.html
The Origins of
Postmodernism
 Rejection of the
ideologies of the 19th
century in light of the
two World Wars and
the holocaust.
 Rejection of
objectivity as the sole
Michel Foucault
criterion of truth.
 Emphasis on the
importance multiple
perspectives.
Postmodernist Preoccupations
 Consumption rather than production
 Growing importance of:
 advertising
Meta-narratives are in decline along with
 marketing
class-based categories like family,
 design
neighborhood, religion, trade unions,
 architecture
and the nation-state.
 TV journalism
 raider capitalism
Strinati, pp. 238-9.
Postmodernism and
Contemporary Cinema
“From the postmodern point of view, contemporary
cinema is seen to be indulging in nostalgia, living
off its past, ransacking it for ideas, recycling its
images and plots and cleverly citing it in selfconscious postmodern parodies.”
Strinati, p. 243.
Characteristics of
Postmodernist Style
 Emphasis on style, spectacle, special effects instead of
character, substance, narrative and social commitment
 Examples of postmodernist films:
 Dick Tracy
 Indiana Jones
 Back to the Future
 Brazil
 Blue Velvet