Key terms

• 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

George Ritzer 1996

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: drama about Dame Margot Fonteyn, a famous prima ballerina, on BBC4.

• The breakdown of barriers between genres and styles. Think: Shaun of the Dead a rom-com-zom.

• Mixing up of time, space and narrative. Think Pulp Fiction or The Mighty Boosh.

• Emphasis on style rather than content. Think: Girls Aloud.

• The blurring of the distinction between representation and reality. Think, Katie Price or Celebrity Big Brother.

Postmodern music, easter activity

Apply as many of Kramer's rules (in your own words) to five pieces of music. Embed a clip of each piece in your blog.

Timbaland

Stockhausen

Alvin Lucier

LED ZEPPLIN

Rihanna

Karlheinz, Stockhausen and Alvin Lucier.

karlheinz stockhausen

- 1928 - 2007

- German composer

- Most important & controversial composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

- Work includes electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and musical spatialization.

Helicopter String Quartet

- Best-known pieces

- Most complex to perform

- String quartet, four helicopters with pilots, as well as audio and video equipment and technicians

- First performed and recorded in 1995

Alvin Lucier

- 1931 - present day

- American composer of experimental music

- Professor at Wesleyan University

- Most of his work is influenced by science

I am sitting in a room

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but, more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

- 1969

- Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it, and then repeated

- Certain frequencies are emphasized, until the words become unrecognisable, replaced by the harmonies and tones of the room itself.

Jonathan Kramer - postmodern music theory

"the idea that postmodernism is less a surface style or historical period than an attitude". Kramer says there are 16 characteristics of postmodern music:

1. Is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension

2. Is ironic

3. Blurs boundaries between past and present

4. Challenges style barriers, including 'high' and 'low'

5. Shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity

6. Questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values

7. Avoids totalizing forms

8. Considers music as relevant to cultural, social, and political

9. Includes music of many cultures and traditions

10. Considers technology as a way to distribute music and enhance production

11. Accepts contradictions

12. Questions binary opposites

13. Includes fragments and breaks or gaps

14. Encloses plural and multiple sources

15. Has multiple meanings

16. Locates meaning and structure to listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers

Postmodern Artist

White Lies



Below is a review on Virgin Music's Website of the bands first album To Lose My Life where Death is the embarking track, during this review they are examined against other bands of similar genres and compared to Joy Division.

http://www.virgin.com/music/news/white-lies-to-lose-my-life

Joy Division

In interviews White Lies have always expressed clearly their influences and reality of their lyrics. Their influences include Joy Division.
1. Although these songs aren't identical in sound, beat and rhythm, there are clear similarities.
- JD have used a 25 second, guitar based instrumental before the first words are vocalised in LWTUA, this acts as an introduction to the music. WL have opted for a similar introduction of 20 seconds, but here the sound is structured around the drum beat.
2. Vocals
-Harry McVeigh lead vocalist in WL has had his singing voice (which is different to his spoken voice) likened to Ian Curtis lead of JD. Said voice is quite unexpected of a 22 year old Man from west London.

The death of uncool

Brian Eno

Produced work with U2, Coldplay, Ultravox, David Bowie.

Theory
-There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.
-Go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating.
-I had a hand in starting—ambient music—has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked.
-We’re living in a stylistic tropics.
-The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

Roxy Music

-Early Roxy Music (first three albums : Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, Stranded)
-Unique sound that drew on many different influences: 50s rock n' roll, 30s style crooning, modern electronic music, sound manipulation and collage, classical instrumentation, sound effects and Pop Art.
-The group were styled by the fashion designer Anthony Price and lead singer Bryan Ferry.
-Each piece of work made a definite artistic statement.
-They were retro and futuristic at the same time.
-They were of their time and also before and after it.

Jim Jarmusch's Golden Rules

Rule #1: There are no rules.
Rule #2: Don’t let the fuckers get ya.
Rule #3: The production is there to serve the film.
Rule #4: Filmmaking is a collaborative process.
Rule #5: Nothing is original.

Postmodernism and Music

Dan Black- Symphonies
Dj Shadow - Organ Donnor
Daft punk- Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Participation
Daft Punk - Using a website called dothedaft.com we can recreate the song, making our own original copy.

Modification
Dj Shadow - Uses lots of bits of music and re arranges them in a new order which therefore is modification, his album endtroducing was the first of its kind made entirely of other music reordered.

Authenticity Disrupted
Dan Black - Makes it obvious that his song Symphonies is copied from various other songs, he also illustrates this in his video.

Originality

Characters (so far)

Edward Norton's Character
-Strange
-Insomniac
-Can only cry in the company of people with actual issues
-Can't enjoy it with another faker in the room.
-See's things
-Lost as a person
-Why is he like this?
-Office job/ on the road, boring
-we don't know his name

Martha Singer
-Strange/ Scary/ Tough
-Pale
-Dirty/ Unclean
-Intriguing
-Fearless
-Smokes alot
-Contradicting behaviour

Fight Club and Grand Narratives

Comedy

Postmodernism and Violence

-Since its 1999 release, Fight Club has solidified its place among American pop culture.
-Humor is often used as a means of accepting violent imagery.
-Fight Club is just one of many recent films that treats violence in an ironically humorous manner.
-"In the postmodern procession of simulacra, traditional images of violence have lost their affective power, and consequently have been replaced by a more neutral style" (Grant 24).
-The film's release was delayed because of the spring shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.
-Prior to Fight Club's release, ultimate fighting clubs had been thriving in various American cities.
-Just as the men in Fight Club attempt to reclaim their masculinity through violence, "the contemporary wrestler exemplifies the thoroughly postmodern idea that human identity is purely a construction, a matter of choice, not nature" (Cantor 20).
-Fight Club the power exchange is purely competitive.
-Violence is not the answer.

In the first weekend Fight Club opened in 1999 it grossed $11 million in ticket sales placing it number one at the box office for the weekend of October 15-17. Sixty percent of the audience was male and 58% of the audience was under the age of 25.

David Ansen
This is not a movie that can be easily dismissed or forgotten. An outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire, and sensory overload, Fight Club is the most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time. It's a mess but one worth fighting about.

Fight Club and the Postmodern Dilemma of Manhood

-Men's role in society is vastly changing due to the feminist movement of the 1970's and women in the workplace.
-The primary subject and focus of the movie Fight Club is the generation of men born in America since the 60s, while certainly the film will appeal to both sexes, men and masculinity will be central to the discussion.
-The movie is primarily about the relationship between Tyler and Jack, which takes seems to be a father-son type relationship, in the sense that the father is a role model for the son.
-Through Tyler, Jack experiences an awakening from a group called Fight Club, in which men get together in a basement and fight one another for the simple pleasures of fighting and bonding with one another.
-Roger Ebert describes Fight Club as "the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since 'Death Wish,' a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.
-Fight Club is incredibly popular among young men because young men can identify with the film, men work the tedious jobs that Jack and Tyler suffer through to survive, and they are victims of the same feelings that Jack suffers from.
-Fight Club speaks to listless and directionless young men in a calculated attempt to shock and disturb them from their mundane slow deaths and it speaks to and shocks women in an attempt to wake them up to the way the change in society is damaging and killing their sons, brothers, and husbands.

Dust Brothers

The Dust Brothers are the Los Angeles, California based, Grammy Award winning producers, E.Z. Mike (Michael Simpson) and King Gizmo (John King) who met in 1983 while working at the Pomona College radio station, are famous for their sample-based music in the 1980s and 1990s, and specifically for their work on the album Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys. In the years to follow, the Dust Brothers emerged among the most sought-after remixers and producers in the industry. They also founded their own label, branching out even further, in 1997 they produced Hanson's chart-topping "MMMBop," as well as a handful of tracks from the Rolling Stones. Their first full-length solo record was the score for the 1999 film Fight Club.

David Fincher Filmography

Alien 3 (1992)
Seven (1995)
The Game (1997)
Fight Club (1999)
Panic Room (2002)
Zodiac (2007)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
The Social Network (2010)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Fight Club

An office employee and a soap salesman build a global organization to help vent male aggression.

Postmodern Elements of Inglorious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino uses alot of postmodern elements within his films, and Inglorious Basterds is no exception.
The film opens with 'once upon a time' and is split into chapters, this is not a convention you would typically associate with a War film, however you may expect to see it split up into dates/years. This element connotates that the story is a fairy tale and possible made up, which some of it quite clearly is, yet the idea is that you believe this happened during WW2.
In the first scene there is an intertextual reference from one of his other films 'Pulp Fiction', where he uses painted back drops as apposed to real ones, this like the getting ready scene with Shosanna in the cinema where the set is revealed is obviously used to show that it is only a film and however WW2 was real this film is not.
The music used in Inglorious Basterds is also postmodern. The use of italian composer, Ennio Morricone's music was used not only for the film but featured on the soundtrack aswell. There is music from Westerns during the film aswell, this also doesn't really fitt with the War genre of the film these elements could also be used for humour during fight scenes. This is completely contradictory of the genre of this film.

Promblems with intertextual references

As the movie ramps up for the lengthy, action-packed finale the music is clearly Murphy's. It's Murphy's music for 28 Days Later, one of the variants of In the House – In a Heartbeat. As the movie progresses there's more from Murphy, what sounds like his music from Sunshine. Kick-Ass reuses his scores, his highly recognisable scores that have previously been heard not only in the movies for which they were written, but also achieved omnipresence on trailers, adverts and TV - The Guardian.



Intertextual references can go wrong, especially when films like Kick-Ass use music that has been previously associated with other high profile texts, in this context intertextual references can ruin a film and make you think of a part of another film that is possibly better than the one you are watching. On the other hand they can be used well and input and interesting element to a film.

World War 2 - Time Line

1939

Hitler invades Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declare war on Germany two days later.

1940

Rationing starts in the UK.
German 'Blitzkrieg' overwhelms Belgium, Holland and France.
Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Britain.
British victory in Battle of Britain forces Hitler to postpone invasion plans.

1941

Hitler begins Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of Russia.
The Blitz continues against Britain's major cities.
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and the US enters the war.

1942

Singapore falls to the Japanese in February - around 25,000 prisoners taken.
American naval victory at Battle of Midway, in June, marks turning point in Pacific War.
Mass murder of Jewish people at Auschwitz begins.

1943

Surrender at Stalingrad marks Germany's first major defeat.
Allied victory in North Africa enables invasion of Italy to be launched.
Italy surrenders, but Germany takes over the battle.
British and Indian forces fight Japanese in Burma.

1944

Allies land at Anzio and bomb monastery at Monte Cassino.
Soviet offensive gathers pace in Eastern Europe.
D Day: The Allied invasion of France. Paris is liberated in August.

1945

Auschwitz liberated by Soviet troops.
Russians reach Berlin: Hitler commits suicide and Germany surrenders on 7 May.
Truman becomes President of the US on Roosevelt's death, and Attlee replaces Churchill.
After atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrenders on 14 August.