POMO Essay 1

"Postmodern media manipulate time and space". To what extent does this definition apply to texts you have studied?

1. Decide upon your opinion. Can you express it clearly in 20 words?
2. Create a detailed plan listing your texts and specific examples 

 This is the essay structure you should always follow:

• OPINION
• PAST
• PRESENT
• FUTURE
• CONCLUDE

The skills are always the same:

POINT - EVIDENCE - THEORY - LINK TO QUESTION

The kinds of thing you might use as case studies include:

• How post-modern media relate to genre and narrative
• post-modern cinema,
• interactive media,
• music video,
• advertising,
• post-modern audience theories,
• parody and pastiche in media texts or a range of other applications of post-modern media theory.

Write your essay

1. You MUST refer to at least TWO different media
2. You MUST refer to past, present and future (with the emphasis on the present- contemporary examples from the past five years)
3. refer to critical/theoretical positions

Inglourious Basterds soundtrack

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack toQuentin Tarantino's motion picture Inglourious Basterds. It was originally released on August 18, 2009. The soundtrack uses a variety of music genres, including spaghetti western soundtrack excerpts, R&B and the David Bowie song "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)".^[6] This is the first soundtrack for a Quentin Tarantino film not to feature dialogue excerpts. The french "The Man with the Big Sombrero" was recorded for the movie. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, but lost to Slumdog Millionaire (soundtrack).

1. "The Green Leaves of Summer" - Nick Perito & His Orchestra
2. "The Verdict (La Condanna)" - Ennio Morricone (mislabled "Dopo la condanna")
3. "White Lightning (Main Title)" - Charles Bernstein (Originally in White Lightning)
4. "Slaughter" - Billy Preston (Originally in Slaughter)
5. "The Surrender (La resa)" - Ennio Morricone
6. "One Silver Dollar (Un Dollaro Bucato)" - Gianni Ferrio
7. "Davon geht die Welt nicht unter" - Zarah Leander
8. "The Man with the Big Sombrero" - Samantha Shelton & Michael Andrew
9. "Ich wollt' ich wär ein Huhn" - Lilian Harvey & Willy Fritsch
10. "Main Theme from Dark of the Sun" - Jacques Loussier
11. "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" - David Bowie (Originally in Cat People)
12. "Tiger Tank" - Lalo Schifrin (Originally in Kelly's Heroes)
13. "Un Amico" - Ennio Morricone (Originally in Revolver)
14. "Rabbia e Tarantella" - Ennio Morricone

Tracks not on soundtrack cd that also appear in the film.

1. "L'incontro Con La Figlia" - Ennio Morricone
2. "Il Mercenario (ripresa)" - Ennio Morricone
3. "Algiers November 1, 1954" - Ennio Morricone & Gillo Pontecorvo / The Battle of Algiers
4. "Hound Chase (intro)" - Charles Bernstein
5. "The Saloon (from Al Di Là Della Legge)" - Riz Ortolani
6. "Bath Attack" - Charles Bernstein
7. "Claire's First Appearance" - Jacques Loussier
8. "The Fight" - Jacques Loussier
9. "Mystic and Severe" - Ennio Morricone
10. "The Devil's Rumble" - Davie Allan & The Arrows
11. "What'd I Say " - Rare Earth
12. "Zulus" - Elmer Bernstein
13. "Eastern Condors" - Ting Yat Chung
14. "3 Thoughts" - Einstürzende Neubauten (In the beginning of the trailer)
15. "Comin' Home" - Murder by Death (trailer)

POSTMODERN ADVERT #1

This Rolls Royce advert has emphasis on the emotion the car brings to both the driver, a sense of empowerment, and the women, a sense of lust and desire. The advert also emphasises the style of the car way over substance and content, not mentioning any specific details on the performance of the car and showing the car in a purely aesthetic manner therefore emphasising style greatly. Furthermore, with the use of slow motion and the stopping of the footage (whilst panning around the car) confusing the audience over time and space resulting in a postmodern advert.

UNDERSTANDING INCEPTION #2

UNDERSTANDING INCEPTION #1

THE DEATH OF UNCOOL SHUFFLE MIX

Foals- Moon 

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs- That One

MGMT- Electric Feel

Arctic Monkeys- Arabella

Kanye West- Lost in the World

Crystal Castles- Air War

Kendrick Lamar- Now or Never

King Krule- Baby Blue

Pirupa- Party Non Stop

Foals- Alabaster

Mentronomy- Heartbreaker

AlunaGeorge- Kaledioscope Love

Magnetic Man- I Need Air

Kanye West- Devil in a New Dress

J.Cole- Mo Money

J.Cole- Crooked Smile

Gil Scott Heron & Jamie XX- Ill Take Care of You

Jagwar Ma- Man I Need

ASAP Rocky- Acid Drip

SBTRKT- Right Thing To Do

POSTMODERN WORLD?

We frequently hear it said that ‘we are living in a postmodern world.’ Are we? How do we know? And how is postmodernism as a theoretical perspective applicable to Media Studies? 

Where do we start? How about some definitions? George Ritzer (1996) suggested that postmodernism usually refers to a cultural movement – postmodernist cultural products such as architecture, art, music, films, TV, adverts etc.

 Ritzer also suggested that postmodern culture is signified by the following:

• The breakdown of the distinction between high culture and mass culture. Think: Black Swan-a film about a prima ballerina laced with a liberal dose of crowd pleasing sex and (psychological) violence.

• The breakdown of barriers between genres and styles. Think: Django Unchained a mixture of spaghetti western, drams, action film, serious comment on slavery.

• Mixing up of time, space and narrative. Think: Inception or The Mighty Boosh.

• Emphasis on style rather than content. Think: Little Mix, One Direction.

• The blurring of the distinction between representation and reality. Think: TOWIE or Celebrity Big Brother.

The French theorist Baudrillard argues that contemporary society increasingly reflects the media; that the surface image becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the reality. Think about all the times you have heard an actor on a soap-opera say, that when they are out and about, people refer to them by their character’s name. Look at The Sun’s website and search stories on Nicholas Hoult when he was in Skins: he is predominantly written about as though he is ‘Tony’, his character in Skins.

Key terms

Among all the theoretical writing on postmodernism (and you might like to look up George Ritzer, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson and Dominic Strinati), there are a few key terms that you’ll find it useful to know. These terms can form the basis of analysis when looking at a text from a postmodern perspective:

• intertextuality – one media text referring to another

• parody – mocking something in an original way

• pastiche – a stylistic mask, a form of self-conscious imitation

• homage – imitation from a respectful standpoint

• bricolage – mixing up and using different genres and styles

• simulacra – simulations or copies that are replacing ‘real’ artefacts

• hyperreality – a situation where images cease to be rooted in reality

• fragmentation – used frequently to describe most aspects of society, often in relation to identity 
  
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 32, April 2010.

POSTMODERNISM- DEFINITION #4

"A general explanation is that postmodernism is a contradiction in terms, as post means after and modern means now, it is impossible for anything to be after now. The term itself is supposed to be deliberately unexplainable.

In terms of literature and media it is generally considered to be anything which makes little attempt to hide the fact that it is not real, it wants you to know that its been created and it wants you to recognise elements from elsewhere (i.e. that they have 'stolen' ideas from other sources), that there are no new or original ideas and that everything is in someway connected. Importantly it doesn’t want you to view it as being any more or less valid or important than a text which pretends to be real, postmodernists want everything to be equal, they want to remove binary opposites and start again. Students are often criticised for being post modern as they tend to like 'naff' things and think they are cool precisely because they aren't cool (thus removing binary opposites)"

Michael Smith (2009)

POSTMODERNISM- DEFINITION #3

"Postmodernism is cultural movement that came after modernism, also it follows our shift from being a industrial society to that of an information society, through globalization of capital. Markers of the postmodern culture include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox. Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding modernism"

"Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch."

By R. Lee from Media Studies 180 Hunter College, Sections 102, 103

Of course, intertextual references are often found in postmodern texts.

POSTMODERNISM- DEFINITION #2

Label given to Cultural forms since the 1960s that display the following qualities:

Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding

Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony

Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media

Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:

• Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions
• Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations
• Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race
• Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality

POSTMODERNISM- DEFINITION #1

Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (ie experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading (check out your Reception Theory) and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously. Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (eg using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).