My Playlist...

1. Aristocats - Everybody wants to be a cat.
-It was my favourite Disney film.
2.Repulica - Ready to go.
-Used to play it on long car journey's.
3. Spice girls - Wanna be.
-I loved the spice girls.
4. The Who - Baba O'Riley.
-My favourite song.
5. Discoradio - Saturday Night.
-School disco.
6. The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York.
-The bets Christmas song.
7. Pokemon - Gotta catch em' all.
-Big Pokemon fan.
8. Shania Twain - That impress me much.
-I sang this song in my year 4 talent contest.
9. Ian dury and the Blockheads - Clever Trevor.
-Reminds me of my Grandad.
10. Westlife - Up town girl.
-My first concert.
11. Natalie Imbruglia - Torn.
-I used to love this song.
12. Oasis - Half the world away.
-The royle family is incredible (Theme song).
13. Lethal Bizzle - Pow.
-When i was a chav.
14. The Clash - I fought the law.
-When i got taken to the police station.
15. Ziggy Marley - Dragonfly.
-My weed smoking faze.
16. Bob Dylan - Subterranean homesick blues.
-I love him, but my dad hates him.
17. Alice cooper - I'm eighteen.
-When i turned 18.
18. Blink 182 - All the small things.
-Reading festival 2010 - Greatest band i have seen live.
19. Lady Gaga - Poker Face.
-Because she is a joke.

Postmodern Music

Research based task:

-the postmodern sensibility that anything can be considered cool in an

ironic ‘I know it’s bad, but it’s so bad it’s good’ way. Artists such as susan boyle and Jedward.

-Work that is created based (entirely or in part) on older material. This incorporates sampling and will take you from the realms of hip hop culture transporting you finally in today’s modern fragmented musical landscape.

-Audiences that are both niche and mainstream. E.g.: Radio 1, 1xtra, BBC6,

XFM.

-The ways in which people engage and listen to music e.g.: iPod, DAB, mobile phones, radio, youtube.

-The legal issues surrounding sampling. (Led Zeppelin ‘borrowed’ heavily from old bluesmen and it took years for the songwriters to be credited and paid royalties. The same group took a hard-line stance initially to be
sampled by hip hop groups.)

-The state of the music industry incorporating any recent developments that change how we access/ interact with music e.g.: Spotify, X Factor, iTunes, illegal downloading, free cds with newspapers etc

All of the above need to have example attached to help them make sense. The.
examples need to have explanations that place them within a postmodern
context.

Pastiche

Pastiche in its simplest form is an imitation of an existing style. Normally it is used in a lighthearted way but more often it is very satirical.
A satire attempts to mock topical issues, which means that its humour and purpose is fleeting as it relies on the audiences knowledge of the issue that is being sent up.
Pastiche is now seen as part of Postmodernism and is used in both support and criticism of postmodernism.

Jacques Derrida - The Centre Is Not The Centre

“The centre is not the centre. The concept of a centered structure…is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of desire.”

The centre actually doesn’t exist, but because we have a need for it to make sense of the world around us, we perceive it to be there – however, according to Derrida, the need for and perception of a centre doesn’t necessarily mean that centre exists.

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons was a sociologist in the 1950s who made observations of society leading to the structural functionalist view. This view suggests that society (like literature and film) has necessary structures that keep it together.

Post-Modernism is fundamentally the diverse mixture of any tradition with its immediate past: it is the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence (Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? 1986).

Baudrillard Hyperreality

One easy to understand example of hyperreality is the McDonald's "M" arches create in the eyes of the viewer, the huge foodchain that it is known as today, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite. (Shown in simulacra and simulation)
Marshall McLuhan who created the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ heavily influenced Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality. Marshall’s phrase basically means that the way the message is presented becomes more important than the meaning of the message itself.

Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation

From the 9/11 example of 'it was like a Movie', Baudrillard gives this Derrida’s point a name, Simulacra Simulation. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience of things is of a simulation of reality. He believes that we cannot separate the image from the 'reality', for example, when we eat a Big Mac, we eat the marketing and lifestyle associated with it, giving the impression that the Big Mac we are eating is the great thing advertised on the television, rather than just one of millions mass produced, we believe the one we see on the television is the one that we eat.

Levi Strauss - Genre

Levi Strauss developed the theory of 'bricolage'. Bricolage is a change that takes place giving traditional objects or language a new, often subversive, meaning and context.

A very obvious example was the use of a safety pin by punks as a piercing. Strauss believed that texts were constructed from various parts of other texts, which means that all texts used elements from other texts in order to create something new. That DOESN'T make it postmodern. However, for a text to become postmodern, it deliberately takes elements from outside its 'genre' and makes you notice them (like the safety pin piercing).
Levi-Strauss saw any text as constructed out of socially recognizable debris from other texts. He saw that writers construct texts from other texts by a process of:
Addition Deletion Substitution Transposition

Jacques Derrida - Genre

Jacques Derrida said that 'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text'
(Derrida 1981, 61).

Derrida’s point explains why commentators on September 11th could only understand what they were seeing as ‘like a movie’.

Also why Kick-Ass is thought of as ‘like a superhero’. This is perhaps what Fiske means by saying ‘we make sense of it by turning it into another text.’ Steve de Souza, the director of Die Hard says that: “[T]he image of the terrorist attacks ‘looked like a movie poster, like one of my movie posters” (119). Film experts were not the only ones to resort to cinematic examples that they remembered when confronted with the events of September 11, unable or unwilling to believe their own vision of horrific events, people do not think back to imagery of the nightmare, but compare that nightmare to films they have seen.

Fiske - Genre

Fiske thought that we make sense of the world not through our own experiences but through the media's portrayal of them. We use 'codes' to create meaning, for example, within Kick Ass, we view the character ‘Kick Ass’ as a superhero, just because he is dressed like a superhero, showing that our perception of a superhero is only apparent through intertextuality from other films for example batman and Spiderman. Infact Kick Ass isn’t a superhero, because he has no super powers and is therefore no different to any other normal person.

René Magritte

René Magritte was an artist. His work, which showed a juxtaposition of everyday items in an unusual context, which gave a new meaning to familiar things. For example, he showed this through his painting, The (La trahison des images), displays a pipe, which looks like it could be used as an advertisement for a tobacco store. Magritte painted below the pipe "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which appears to contradict what he has just painted, but is actually true: the painting is not of a pipe; it is an image of a pipe. When Magritte was asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.

He highlights is that everything is a copy of something that doesnt exists.

Spaghetti Westerns

Spaghetti Westerns

Spaghetti Western, also known as Italo-western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western film that emerged in the mid-1960s, so named because most were produced and directed by Italians, usually in co-production with a Spanish partner and in some cases a German partner. The partners would insist some of their stars be cast in the film.

The typical team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian and Spanish actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone's films. The films were typically shot in inexpensive locales resembling the American Southwest, primarily the Andalusia region of Spain, Almería, Sardinia, and Abruzzo.

Because of the desert setting and the readily available low-cost southern Spanish or southern Italian extras, typical themes in spaghetti westerns include the Mexican Revolution, Mexican bandits, and the border region shared by Mexico and the United States. Below is a link to a classic example of the genre, directed by Sergio Leone.

Spaghetti Western films:

The first entirely Italian western movie was Il terrore dell’Oklahoma (1959), directed by Mario Amendola . The best-known and perhaps archetypal films were the "Man with No Name" trilogy (or "Dollars Trilogy") directed by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood and with the musical scores of Ennio Morricone: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).

Example of Blaxpoitation

This tariler of the fiolm shaft is an example of Blaxpoitation.

Super Heros Profile.

Super Heros Profiles

Quentin Tarantino

Birth Name

Quentin Jerome Tarantino.

Born

March 27th 1963.

Nickname

QT.

Height

6' 1" (1.85 m).

Job

Film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and occasional actor.

His Films

Pulp fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds etc.

Trade mark

Tarantino has a foot fetish, his always includes a shot with  feet e.g. Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, in the car after she come out of a Coma.

Film reviews

Inglourious Basterds - 87% liked it.  Average Rating: 7.7/10.

Music in the film Inglourious Basterds

This is the exploitation of negative stereotypes of black people e.g. Gang crime, drugs, violence.
 

• The Green Leaves of Summer – Nick Perito – From the movie The Alamo
• The Verdict – Ennio Morricone – From the movie The Big Gundown
• L’incontro Con La Figlia – Ennio Morricone – From the movie The Return of Ringo
• White Lightning – Charles Bernstein – From the movie White Lightning
• Il Mercenario (Reprisa) - Ennio Morricone – From the movie Il Mercenario
• Slaughter - Billy Preston – From the movie Slaughter
• Algiers, November 1954 – Ennio Morricone & Gillo Pontecorvo – From the movie The Battle of Algiers
• The Surrender (La resa) – Ennio Morricone – From the movie The Big Gundown
• One Silver Dollar (Un Dollaro Bucato) – Gianni Ferrio – From the movie Blood for a Silver Dollar
• Davon geht die Welt nicht unter – Zarah Leander – From the movie Die große Liebe
• The Man With The Big Sombrero – June Havoc – From the movie Hi Diddle Diddle
• Ich wollt ich wär ein Huhn – Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch – From the movie Glückskinder
• Cat People (Putting Out Fire) – David Bowie – From the movie Cat People
• Mystic and Severe – Ennio Morricone – From the movie Death Rides a Horse
• The Devil’s Rumble – Mike Curb and The Arrows – From the movie Devil’s Angels
• Zulus – Elmer Bernstein – From the movie Zulu Dawn
• Tiger Tank – Lalo Schifrin – From the movie Kelly’s Heroes
• Un Amico – Ennio Morricone – From the movie Revolver
• Eastern Condors – Sherman Chow Gam – Cheung – From the movie Eastern Condors
• Rabbia e Tarantella – Ennio Morricone – From the movie Allonsanfàn.

Blaxploitation

Blaxploitation is a film genre that emerged in the USA in 1971 when many exploitation films were made specifically (and perhaps exclusively) for an audience of urban black people; the word itself is a mixture of the words "black" and "exploitation". Blaxploitation films were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music. These films starred primarily black actors. . Others argue that the Hollywood-financed film Shaft, also released in 1971, is closer to being blaxploitation, and thus is more likely to have begun the genre.