A2: 'Star Wars Is A Postmodern Masterpiece'

Detailed article by Forrest Wickman, exploring the postmodern make-up of Star Wars.

It will further your understanding of pastiche and bricolage. If you know the original trilogy well it could also serve as an additional case study.

'May the force be with you, always.' ;-)

A case study in "Parody", "Artistic motivation" and "Laying bare the device."

The following extract comes from Chapter 2: Story Causality and Motivation pp.21-23, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Modes of Production to 1960, (London: Routledge, 1988.)

Artistic motivation can emphasize the artifi- ciality of other art works; this is usually accomplished through the venerable practice of parody. Hollywood has, of course, never shrunk from parody. In Animal Crackers (1930), Groucho Marx shows up the soliloquys in Strange Interlude, while in Hellzapoppin (1941), Olson and Johnson mock Kane's Rosebud sled. In *My Favorite Brunette (1947), Ronnie Johnson tells Sam McCloud he wants to be a tough detective like Alan Ladd; McCloud is played by Alan Ladd. Parody need not always be so clearly comic. At the climax of The Studio Murder Mystery (1929), the Hollywood montage sequence is parodied when the director explains at gunpoint what will happen after he kills Tony: 'Quick fade out. Next, headlines in the morning papers.' The following exchange from The Locket (1946) parodies the already mannered conventions of the psychoanalytic film of the 1940s. The doctor's wife has just returned from a movie.

Nancy: I had a wonderful time. I'm all goose pimples.
Dr Blair: A melodrama?
Nancy: Yes, it was ghastly. You ought to see it, Henry. It's about a schizophrenic who kills his wife and doesn't know it.
Dr Blair (laughing): I'm afraid that wouldn't be much of a treat for me.
Nancy: That's where you're wrong. You'd never guess how it turns out. Now it may not be sound psychologically, but the wife's father is one of the ...
Dr Blair: Darling, do you mind? You can tell me later.

When an art work uses artistic motivation to call attention to its own particular principles of construction, the process is called 'laying bare the device.' *Hollywood films often flaunt aspects of their own working in this way. In Angels Over Broadway (1940), a drunken playwright agrees to help a suicidally inclined man get money and thus to 'rewrite' the man's 'last act.' The playwright then looks out at the audience and says musingly: 'Our present plot problem is money.' In von Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1922), the susceptible Mrs Hughes reads a book, Foolish Wives, by one Erich von Stroheim. In His Girl Friday (1939), as Walter starts fast-talking Hildy into staying with the newspaper, she begins to mimic an auctioneer's patter; this not only mocks Walter but foregrounds speech rhythm as a central device in the film. The show-business milieux of the musical film make it especially likely to bare its devices. The 'You were meant for me' number in Singin' in the Rain (1952) shows Don Lockwood staging his own spontaneous song; the way he sets up romantic lighting, mist, and backdrops calls attention to the conventional staging of such songs. An even more flagrant baring of this device occurs in 'Somewhere there's a someone' in A Star Is Born (1954).

Classical films are especially likely to bare the central principle of causal linearity. In *One Touch of Nature (1917), when the hero succeeds as a baseball player, an expository title dryly remarks: 'In the course of human events, we come logically to the deciding game of a World's Series.' In The Miracle Woman (1931), a despairing writer is about to commit suicide because, having received a rejection slip from Ziegler Company, he exclaims: 'I've tried them all from A to Z. What comes after Z?' He hears an evangelist's radio broadcast and resolves to try again: 'What comes after Z? A!' *A Woman of the World (1925), contains an amusing image of the story's own unwinding. Near the beginning of the film, two old women sit on porch rockers gossiping and knitting, with their balls of yam smaller each time we see them. At the film's end, the camera shows the chairs rocking, now empty, and the yarn all gone.

Hollywood's use of artistic motivation imputes a considerable alertness to the viewer: in order to appreciate certain moments, one must know and remember another film's story, or a star's habitual role, or a standard technique. To some extent, artistic motivation develops a connoisseurship in the classical spectator. Yet most artistic traditions show off their formal specificity in some way. We must ask what limits classical cinema imposes on artistic motivation. Generally, moments of pure artistic motivation are rare and brief in classical films. Compositional motivation leaves little room for it, while generic motivation tends to account for many flagrant instances. Indeed, baring the device has become almost conventional in certain genres. Comedies are more likely to contain such outre scenes as that in The Road to Utopia (1945), in which Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, mushing across the Alaskan wilds, see the Paramount logo in the distance. Likewise, the melodrama is likely to contain a shot like that in The Fountainhead (1949), in which two characters stand at opposite edges of the frame while the woman asserts: 'This is not a tie but a gulf between us.' In His Girl Friday, Walter can describe Bruce (Ralph Bellamy) as looking like Ralph Bellamy, but in Sunrise at Campobello (1960), no one notices FDR's resemblance to the same actor.

Preston Sturges's *Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) permits us to watch compositional motivation take artistic motivation firmly in hand. The opening scene of the film is silent and is announced to be from Harold Lloyd's The Freshman. But this fairly overt reminder of the work's conventionality is undermined by the covert insertion of shots not from the original film. These interposed shots, filmed by Sturges, show a businessman watching the football game. The businessman is compositionally necessary, since he will offer Harold a job in the next scene, but remotivating The Freshman's opening to create a smooth causal link between the two films tones down the silent segment's distinct, palpably conventional qualities.

The classical cinema, then, does not use artistic motivation constantly through the film, as Ozu does in An Autumn Afternoon (1962) or as Sergei Eisenstein does in Ivan the Terrible (1945). It does not bare its devices repeatedly and systematically, as Michael Snow does in La region centrale (1967) or Jean-Luc Godard does in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). Compositional motivation for the sake of story causality remains dominant.

Wes Anderson (Follow Up)

Following on from my previous post, Matt Zoeller Seitz has completed the set of videos based on his book 'The Wes Anderson Collection'. Anderson's films make a fantastic case study in postmodern film-making and Seitz's videos do a great job of illustrating this.

Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson is a fantastic film maker. Without a doubt postmodern, his visual aesthetic and referential style are worth careful study.

This essay by Matt Zoller Seitz is a great place to start. He has been following and writing about Anderson's work since he made the short film 'Bottle Rocket' with regular co-writer Owen Wilson. He recently published a book about Anderson titled: 'The Wes Anderson Collection', and is now publishing each chapter as a short video. The first three are available now on Vimeo.

*If you have never seen a Wes Anderson film, I suggest that you begin with 'The Royal Tenenbaums'.

Reading and annotating an article [Screencast]

After today's revelation, that some of you are not actively reading and annotating articles as part of your preparation for the Audiences and Institutions section of the exam, I decided to create a screencast to show you how I expect you to read and annotate an article. It's a bit rough and ready but it does the job!

Link to the original article: http://www.economist.com/node/21556635

Where to look for articles about the Magazine Industry...

To help you get to grips with reading around the topic of the magazine industry, I thought it would be helpful to share a few websites that you can trust (to an extent).

MediaMagazine - Remember to ask me for the username and password.

Guardian Newspaper (Media Section)

Independent Newspaper (Media Section)

The Association of Magazine Media

The Economist

Wired

TechCrunch

Please remember that even sites like these are open to bias and should be handled critically.

Keep up with your case studies!

You must remember that the Audiences and Institutions unit is a case study and as such is an active, evolving topic. With that in mind, you need to keep up with events.

Playstation Magazine which I gave out as a case study has since shut down. This follows the closure of Nintendo Power, a long running Nintendo-related magazine. Both magazines were published by Future US, Inc.

A quick glance at Future's website suggests that they are concentrating their energies in the digital market, significantly updating GamesRadar, as well as launching a new weekly interactive digital tech magazine.

While I was looking through related articles I also came across this article about the fact that Newsweek is going 100% digital.

You have got to keep researching and reading. This topic is alive, kicking and is never not interesting. There is always something to learn!

Thinking through audiences and institutions...

Successfully responding to the audience and institutions section of the exam is about being able to link your case studies to the theory. This needs to be thought through. Here's an example...

NME is one of the longest running music magazines. It has expanded horizontally (Melody Maker merged with NME in 2000) as well as diagonally multiple times: 

• NME.com (1996)
• NMEVideo.com (2011) - replacing the defunct TV channel
• NME TV (2007 - 2010)
• NME Radio (2008)
• Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) 

Each of these expansions can be seen to be in response to a number of factors including consumer demand for converged content, and the desire to turn NME (the weekly indie-music magazine) into a recognised Brand at the heart of the British music industry. 

Moreover, each of these expansions have caused changes in both production and exchange. 

Production has evolved moving from a concentration on written content even into the launch of NME.com but that soon changed as web technologies improved. With the move to high speed broadband connections  NME has sought to make the most of streaming audio and video online through their websites. Moreover, they have launched several apps that do the same. This suggests that they have recognised the power of these mediums. As such, NME as a production company has grown to include a diverse mixture of roles beyond the traditional journalists. Moreover, the magazine itself has become integral to promoting the online arm of the brand through intertextual referencing to the website and apps on every single page.  

Exchange has also certainly been effected. In their efforts to meet consumer demand they have developed a more direct relationship with their target audience. Events such as a Nirvana Nevermind Listening Party (2011) organised through Twitter shows how the company is seeking to leverage social media to keep readers engaged in the NME brand. In part due to the success of this event the magazine has continued to produce content related to classic albums including self-produced documentaries...

This is unstructured and would need to be presented more eloquently in your essay, but what I am trying to show you is how you need to be thinking this through... you have to connect the theory: expansion, convergence, social media etc, with the case studies, in this case NME.

You should be able to do this for three magazines to support different arguments within your essay.

I'm posting this because I care!

Part of me does not want to post this as it will only contribute to perpetuating dependency... but I guess some of you are not ready to think for yourselves. However, I only want to see you do well, so if this helps you take the next step...

Your current essay question is asking you what factors have affected institutions within the magazine industry and what decisions have they made in response to those factors that have affected the processes of 'production' and 'exchange'?

Discuss the issues raised by media ownership in the production and exchange of media texts.

What are those factors you ask? And my knee-jerk response would be seriously!? But alas... those factors are:

• Expansion (particularly diagonal expansion)
• Which is arguably a response to the continued growth and impact of multi-media convergence.
• Which has grown significantly because of the WWW
• Which has also seen the growth of social media

So in other words how have the above areas affected the magazine industry and how have magazine institutions responded to them? And specifically how have they impacted on the way magazines are produced and how have they impacted on the point of exchange?

Now, the next bit you have to do for yourselves. I am not going to do it for you. Your essay structure is there in the bullet points. You need to develop each of those points with 'secondary' and 'primary' (3 magazines and their owners) evidence that you explore and discuss.

*This is the last time I will help you in this way... The problem I fear for a number of you is that you simply do not know the content well enough. You need to read, digest, discuss and then read some more. If you were more confident with the content and the concepts you might not find putting the essay together such a struggle. Please think about that.

Mr. M.

Completed Audiences & Institutions Mind Map

Audiences & Institutions: The Magazine Industry [Mind Map]

Here is a PDF of the mind map (as far as w got in the lesson). Your HOMEWORK is to complete the mind map adding more info to the various sections; in particular: Challenges, NMT and Synergy. 

I have added a few extra bits of info already so do look at the document carefully. I really want to see you add features from your case studies and also quotations from your wider reading on the topic. 

You need to be prepared to share and feedback what you have added in our first lesson after half term.

Investigating reading habits...

Follow the link and add your questions to be included in a survey of people's magazine reading habits.

Consider, what would we want to know and why?

Link: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/magsurvey