John Storey on Film

For next Tuesday (September 27th) read John Storey's chapter on film in Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture. He references two seminal essays on film: Will Wright's 'Sixguns and Society ' and Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure'.

To fully appreciate these essays re-read your notes on structuralism from the first year, it will be a great help in this lecture.

It would also be a great help to think of the cliches of Hollywood films, I will use a Western or 'Cowboy' film as my example to explain structuralism, but any visual text will do. So come prepared thinking about Storey's essay and about predictable and hackneyed story lines we often see in films.

A James Bond film is also useful for this analysis of predictable plots in movies.

Lecture 3 (next week) is also preparation for the Bend it Like Beckham lecture in week 4, so also think about how national and cultural identity is portrayed in films. Again, does popular cinema put a series of stereotypes into effect?

Keep blogging and keep reading Storey and Sandbrook.

Summary of lecture: 20/09/11

Dear Richard,

I am fully aware that my contribution to the blog is considerably over the 150 word limit, but I think it’s relevance to the lecture will be apparent to anyone who wishes to read it. I do this in the full knowledge that I risk losing 10% of my overall mark, but I would ask you to put the issue to the class should there be any ambiguity over the way my grade is marked. If the majority of the class finds it useful in disseminating the lecture I would gratefully ask that my marks’ be awarded in the same manner that everyone else’s are. If, however, the majority of the class finds it irrelevant and a complete waste of time to read, I will happily concede 10% of my overall mark for this module.

Not only is my submission relevant to Baudrillard’s theory on simulation with regards Disney and Americanisation, which I took to be the main issues of our last lecture, it also aims to present these theories in a humorous way. Sometimes the best way to demystify something is to laugh about it. I recall fond memories of sitting around the fire at Christmas  time with my family, uproariously pissing ourselves about the time my father sharpened his index finger to a point using an electric pencil sharpener; this was just before “the incident”. . .  but I digress, the point I am making is that humour can help shed light on the most perplexing issues. So, without further a do, I hand over to Armando Iannucci with an article (clearly inspired by Baudrillard) from his book, The Audacity of Hype (2009 p106).

Suppose we woke up to discover America was a lie?

Monday. It suddenly dawns on me that though I think Casablanca is one of the best

films ever made, I still haven’t managed to see it. I’ve heard a lot about it, though, and today I decide to go and speak to all those people who recommended it to me.

It turns out none of them has seen it either. I ring Warner Bros, but it goes quiet and tries fobbing me off with a free ticket to see Scooby-Doo. I think something’s going on.

Tuesday. A scandal in Hollywood. Warner Bros admits that Casablanca was never made. When pushed, it also reveals that Humphrey Bogart was mostly wishful conjecture. ‘We had an actor under contract in the 1940s and 1950s who looked 

a bit like what we imagined Humphrey Bogart to be,’ said a Warner Bros

spokesman, ‘and we’d always planned to make something like Casablanca, but

never got round to it. Then, when people started talking about how good it was, we 

just played along with it.’

Soon every other major Hollywood studio makes a similar confession: 20th 

Century Fox admits that The Return of the Jedi was never made, while Francis Ford

Coppola confesses to having made The Godafther, Parts Two and Three, but not Part One.

By nightfall, I sit stunned by the realisation that the American film industry 

does not have as successful a back catalogue as it has always claimed. I go to bed

furious, just as Gregory Peck is arrested for claiming to have been in more than 

thirty-five films, when in fact, for the past fifty years, he’s just been a baker.

Wednesday. Wake up to hear America admit it only has one-twentieth of the wealth

it claimed to have. The dark news emerges when all the casinos in Las Vegas confess they’ve been operating for the past seven years on an average profit of 

four hundred dollars.

By noon, most of the board of directors of the Disney Corporation is being taken in for questioning for saying their company is stinking rich when in fact it owes

someone ninety pounds. The discrepancy was spotted by a quick thinking FBI official, who realised that nobody had ever liked Mickey Mouse and therefore 

Walt Disney’s claimed wealth may not have existed.

Thursday. Phillip Roth is taken away from his house in handcuffs. He may have written only one novel. It’s now dawning on the world that, for about the past hundred years, America has been taking all of us for a ride.

The Statue of Liberty turns out to be made of cork. Mount Rushmore is a

backlit projection. The Lincoln Memorial is a giant hand puppet. The film Capricorn One was filmed entirely on a studio lot on the Moon.

With every hour, it’s becoming clearer that America has been pretending to 

be more influential than it actually is. Its official claim to be a superpower is slowly 

being rescinded as people learn that its intelligence network is dumb, its armed 

forces unsuccessful and the bulk of its population incapable of affording the most 

basic of medical attention.

Friday. Hysteria in America when 100 million people suddenly become confused; the

mental strain of spending a lifetime trying simultaneously to oppose abortion and support the death penalty turns them all to idiots. Millions of God-fearing capitalists

confess to thievery and agnosticism.

I wake up to the morning of the first day in the modern era, in which no one

believes in America anymore. And it doesn’t feel good, just frighteningly ridiculous.

This, I feel, adequately relates to this weeks' lecture in a way that I, for one, certainly find amusing. As I expressed during the class, my own belief is that if you follow Baudrillard’s theory to it’s natural conclusion everything man made is a simulation and nothing exists; which could equally be considered ‘frighteningly ridiculous’, as is Milton Keynes.  

Bibliography:

Ianucci, A. The Audacity of Hype, London, Little Brown, 2009.

PC200 Popular Culture and History - Lecture 1 Review

Our first lecture was an introduction to the module and we gained an understanding and outline of its main themes. After taking us through the module requirements and assessment arrangements, Richard began by informing us of the origins of cultural studies.

We were told that cultural studies is used as a synonym for ‘popular culture’. We discussed grand narratives and micro narratives, and how popular culture reflects bigger events, for example: Disney 1955/1956-Theme Parks.

The lecture then progressed to Richard talking about the Americanisation of popular culture, and the fact that America dominates Pop culture, and Britain is influenced.

We were informed that we were going to be studying the strands of meaning that interconnect to form British Popular Culture, and that these strands create a very colourful picture of contemporary Britain. The ideas of our module span the last fifty years, approximately 1956 to 2006.

Discussion of 1956 as a key year helped us understand how the past has influenced our lives and culture today. It was the year of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and the Comets and The Suez Crisis. The topic of Britain always having been a multi ethnic society because of commonwealth and empire brought us on to think about how Britain’s culture has changed very significantly through its eating habits, and we discussed relevant examples that were on our handout.

The differences between high and low culture were introduced to us by discussing television. Hugh Carleton Greene, brought the BBC into the sixties, and we compared the BBC to ITV, which was launched in 1955. ITV was initially seen as common and vulgar, soon had 72% of viewing public. Hoggart and Williams hated ITV and described it as shiny barbarism, anti culture and synthetic culture. We discussed

Coronation Street

which was introduced in 1960, which was loved by the working class people it represented, but hated by middle class critics. The last point we discussed about TV was that television was seen as a threat to the theatre and cultural elitists.

The Sun newspaper was introduced in 1955, captured working class, as they were drawn to consumerism.

We briefly heard about The Beatles and ‘The Menace of Beatlism’. Private Eye regarded the Beatles with contempt. They were seen to have no aesthetic worth.

Overall, the lecture introduced many ideas and themes that the module involves, and we learnt a lot about the cultural industry in Britain and also the influences that other countries cultures had, and are still having, on British popular culture.

Supermarkets are new!

Another iconic 1960s spy film, The Ipcress File, staring Michael Caine(1965) comments on commercailisation. In it, his boss upbraids him for shopping in a supermarket. Supermarkets were new in Britain in 1966, and again, were seen as examples of crass commercialisation and Americanisation.

See if you can find the clip. Sandbrook mentions it in his book.

Richard

On You Tube watch Adam Adamant Lives from 1966, Episode 3, 1 minute and 55 seconds.

Here is the link: http://youtu.be/VHTBDmdZ-lY

Sandbrook mentions it in his sixties book as an example of how commodification, Americanisation and commerce has taken root in London. The character Adam has been frozen for 60 years, he wakes and doesn't recognise London: this is an Edwardian gentleman and his shocked by what he sees. That is the neon of Piccadilly Circus, the noise (transistor radios, the advertisement hoardings and the crowds of people.

To Adam, the commercialisation is Hell. He panics and yells, 'What infernal place is this'?

Sandbrook reads this as a critique of England's infatuation with the tawdry, the shallow and the vulgar.

Richard

20 September: Postmodern City Lecture

Dear All,
Continue reading Storey and Sandbrook for the course in general. It would also be helpful to read Chris Barker's chapter on Postmodernism in Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (Sage: 2005)pp 186-214. This book was on your reading list for FP 100, so familiarise yourself with Barker's writing.

The LRC is also full of books on Disney, so do some research and feed back on this blog which books were the most useful.

Vinyl Leaves by Fjellman and Introducing Disney by Wasko are also very useful for some general background reading and Consumer Culture and Postmodernism by Mike Featherson is also very useful.

I am also expecting two blogs from Jochem and Laura-Jane for tomorrow.

Richard

1956 and 'Shiny Barbarism': Suez, Elvis, Disney and ITV.

Some of you were asking questions about the Suez Crisis in the seminar. Your first stop is to read Dominic Sandbrook's section on the 'war'. If you go to You Tube and enter 'The Other Side of Suez' you will be able to watch a three-part documentary on the crisis. Here is the link:

http://youtu.be/nOSG-mTttzE

As I said in the lecture, Sandbrook's book juxtaposes the mini-narratives of popular culture and the grand narratives of history throughout his text.

Think of the proliferation of American popular culture and commodities, fast food outlets, TV dinners and cop and quiz shows in Britain after the Suez crisis. A coincidence?

Richard

PC200

Welcome to PC200: Popular Culture and History. We have had one lecture so far on British Popular Culture and Americanisation. Next week we are studying the influence of Disney on British culture.

Each week two students will review a session, this will be a great help when you come to write your coursework and revise for the exam.

Just a reminder that the core texts for the course are John Storey's Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had it So Good: From the Suez Crisis to the Beatles, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties and Ian Fleming's Casino Royale.

As well as reviews of each week's lectures and seminars, I will attach clips, discussion points, notes and a general miscellany of popular culture from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the noughties!

Happy blogging!

Richard