Thursday 10 December 2015

The Politics of American Media

Booker, K., From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film Account
  • p160 ‘tendency in the american national pysche towards violent and hatred of the other’
  • Americans as ‘saviours of the vietnamese people’
  • The Green Beret ‘depicts the war in Vietnam as a simple, good vs evil struggle of good guy Americans against bad-guy Americans’
  • p161 ‘Films made after the end of the war had come to grips with the fact that this American victory did not occur’
  • ‘most American films had… glorified war’

Dimaggio, A. When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, public opinion and the limits of dissent
  • p12 New York Times committed to “ democracy protection”
  • p165 ‘opposition to the United States is common in the Muslim world’
  • p166 ‘ the field of media stdies focuses too heavily on the United States and Europe
  • p168 ‘ corporate media ownership is inherently undemocratic
  • p171 ‘western corporations are assaulting the cultural autonomy of poorer states

Kellner, D.,  Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan*(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
  • p1 ‘the rise and decline of 60s radicalism, the failure of liberalism, and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s; and the triumph and hegemony of the right in the 1980s’
  • 1960s ‘film transcoded the discourse of the anti war, new left students’
  • “New Hollywood” eg Bonnie and Clyde
  • ‘Hollywood film, like U.S Society, should be seen as a contested terrain… struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life’
  • Conservative films: star wars, rocky, superman, close encounters of the third kind

Kellner D., Media Spectacle http://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MEDIA118/celebrity+culture/Book_media+spectacle_douglas+kellner.pdf
  • p vii ‘Media culture excels in creating Megaspectacles of sporting events, world conflicts, entertainement breaking news,’
  • p3 ‘capitalist society seperates ’art from life’

Wednesday 9 December 2015

Orientalism

from the book Orientalism by E., Said, 1979, NY, Random House

  • pxxviii 'herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like 'America' or 'Islam' and invent collective identitiesfor large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse
  • p1' a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes and remarkable experiences
  • 'Americans will not feel the same about the orient' - more association with China and Japan
  • 'The orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and more recurring images of the Other'
  • p94 'a realtion between Western writing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the West's great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient'
  • p95 'Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient'