Film 20 Final Exam

Cult value vs. exhibition value

-Cult value = an older model, artwork used to be seen as "magical" and served a ritual function, you might not be able to see them and only certain groups of people have access, more associated with aura

-Exhibition value = reproducibility replaces cult value, focuses on circulation rather than aura

Reproducibility

-Artwork has always been reproducible (woodcuts, etching, engraving, etc.), but technological reproducibility is something new

-Aura decays in the face of technological reproduction

-Hand replications will always be different from the original, but technological reproductions can be the exact same

-Film is the first artform entirely determined by its reproducibility

Lithography

-the process of printing from a flat surface treated so as to repel the ink except where it is required for printing

-A new stage in technological reproduction, which allowed graphic art to be produced in large numbers with daily changing variations

Contemplation vs. distraction

-Contemplation (looking at an original artwork, completely absorbed), an old, bourgeois mode of perception

-Distraction (walking past a mural, in a movie theater),

-connected to the global transformation tied to technology, historical changes in modes of perceptions

Camera eye

bringing out aspects of the original only available to the lens

How does technology of reproduction elude authenticity?

-Can't be discovered through natural optics (the human eye can only see things a certain way vs. the camera eye)

-You meet the art piece halfway (you don't have to physically be in a space like the Louvre)

-Too many copies threatens authenticity

Aura

-Perception of distance or uniqueness (associated with authenticity, tradition, and cult value)

-The aura's decay is associated with the rise of the masses

Changes to the human sensorium

-Humans relinquish their humanity in the face of the apparatus (the technological system, the assembly line)

-Later then the masses go see films where the actors assert their humanity, the apparatus (the equipment used in film production) instead in his service

-Film's relationship to technology is essential (montage makes it art, actor performing in front of an apparatus)

"equipment free aspect of reality"

A scene that appears to be nature isn't at all because it was created through a very artificial process

Film's democratic potential

-A mass medium = reproducible and exhibited to the public

-Expert appraisal = audience has a right to make judgements (the film should make sense, I should relate) as opposed to painting or other artforms

-The masses can simultaneously enjoy and understand a film

-The opposite of absorption and contemplation

-"Reception in distraction"

the "optical unconscious"

Walter Benjamin's conception of what the camera can show us that other art forms can't, i.e., the visible signs of what our unconscious is thinking or what consciousness is trying to repress

Aestheticizing politics vs. politicizing art

-Fascism aestheticizes political life

-Communism replies by politicizing art

Some ways Walter Benjamin thinks about film

A new mass medium that accompanies industrialization and urbanization: produces 'the masses'

- Trains human sensorium for new conditions of industrial age

- Destroys aura [linked to authenticity; uniqueness; distance]

- Destroys old (bourgeois) mode of contemplation; replaces with 'reception in distraction'

- The "interpenetration of reality with the apparatus" - Has both reactionary and revolutionary potential (aestheticizing politics vs. politicizing art)

What is Barthes' method in Camera Lucida (as opposed to semiotics)?

Phenomenology (starting with his own experience and using it to try to get to the truth of photography)

Photograph's ontology

Ontology refers to the being of things — what makes them what they are?

• Barthes also calls this its eidos -from Greek: ideal form of something, its essence.

Eidos

cynical phenomenology, picture is trying to tell you something but you only consume it with polite interest

Pathos

Affective intentionality, the true affect of photography, approach something intentionally to understand the process of perception

Our relationship to photography, says Barthes is...

inherently or essentially personal.

How does photography have the power to move people?

The photograph is a sign that represents or signifies something, as it is existentially related to its object (referent)

Optics

photography's physical order

Index

photography's chemical order

Photographer vs. spectator's perspective

-"What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once"

- view photos differently once we know their history (so the photographer would view a photo in a different way to the spectator)

-ex: photo of father and son changes meaning when you know their history

Studium

-Gives information

-Casual, polite, general interest

-Part of how photograph's work, but not their essence

Punctum

Punctum is Latin for a small point or prick—the sharp wound made by a pointed instrument.

• The punctum is the element in a picture which pricks you, which calls to you, which draws your attention, captivates or disturbs you (it punctures you, wounds you).

-an unexpected detail which grabs your attention

-May not necessarily be something the photographer was trying to show

-Personal and subjective

-Part of the essence of photography

Photography vs. cinema

-The punctum is something that the viewer adds on top of the objectivity of the photograph

-Cinema is the rhetorical foil for photography

-Barthes doesn't think the viewer adds to the images in a film in the same way with photographs

-Films have the screen, not a frame but a "hideout"

-A "blind field doubles our partial vision"

"That has been"

-The essence/noeme of photography

-You can't deny that a thing has been there, superimposes reality and the past

-Every photograph foretells death

-e.g. photograph of the boy about to be executed, he is dead and he is going to die, the punctum of time

Air

-the expression, the look

-Expresses the essence of the subject (like Barthes' Winter Garden photograph)

-Without the air the photo does not truly capture the subject

Barthes vs. Benjamin

-Benjamin: Aura decays in the "age of mechanical reproduction": photography reproduces things and brings them closer

-Barthes: Photograph has a kind of aura (he doesn't call it that but rather "punctum"), because what remains singular(not repeatable) and distant in the photograph is the past fragment of time it preserves by a kind of magic

"Liveness"

-suggests instantaneous transmission

-TV's ontology (it's essential technical basis) according to Zettl

-Implies the "unmediated event"

-In practice it is very rarely actually unmediated

Flow

-Notion coined by Raymond Williams

-Defined by Feuer as "segmentation without closure"

-Gaps are sutured together (similar to continuity editing)

-The openness of seriality, always anticipating another thing, closure is artificial

shifters

-"grammatical units ... (such as personal pronouns), which can be decoded only by reference to the specific situational context of particular messages: time, place, addresser and addressee." Their meaning depends on the situation of their utterance, thus creating an effect of 'liveness.'

-Examples: I, you, we, here, today, now

-Imply a shared space and time

Television's noeme

This is going on

What is the structuring principle of television?

Time

TV's three temporal modes

-Information, crisis, catastrophe

-Television blends these three temporal modes

Information

-Providing information with no drama, just what is happening

-Explaining what is happening

-"Newsworthy"

-But also easily forgettable

-Continuous flow, the next bit of information will override it

-Not "shocking or gripping"

-Doesn't matter if you miss anything, you can still pick up the info

Crisis

-Krisis = decision, suggests implied meaning that we don't usually think about

-Has a subject, active decision making

-Calls for some kind of solution or resolution

-Limited duration

-Calls for human agency

-Becomes a suspenseful drama of decision making, everyone is glued to television seeing how this crisis will be resolved

Catastrophe

-A kind of crisis, but the most urgent one that overrides all the others

-Instantaneous, "punctual," nature, unpredictable and unexpected

-The scale is also important

-Unexpected discontinuity in an otherwise continuous system

The attention economy

-Tied to industrial capitalism

-Time is commodified

-Television time is "programmed and scheduled"

-Nielsen rating system= total system that calculates a whole family's use of time in relation to media

Coerce feedback

-Living in a post-internet era, no longer spectacular but ordinary

-Loss of the momentum of resistance happening in the 80s, 90s, from gamers and hackers making glitches into resistance art

subversive vs. lethargic mode of art

-Embracing failure

-Boredom or monotony

-Failure to engage

-Game without a subject

-Absence of liveness

-Example: Cory Arcangel's self playing nintendo

Disengagement

-Disconnection

-Unfulfillment

-Devaluation of connectedness

-We usually think of social media as being something that constantly connects us

-That connection becomes oppressive

Lethargy

-He's saying don't just reject lethargy

-It's a response to the sense of disconnection we all feel (in spite of our constant connection, a paradox)

It is a social symptom but also a response to the problem of ubiquitous connection

Two poles of lethargy

-Depressive underperformance

-Excessive action (video games, you disengage with your social environment)

Couch potato vs. NEET

-Couch potato: emerges in the 70s and 80s, alongside the slashing of welfare programs and "welfare queens"

-Based more around passivity and privilege, who has the privilege of being a couch potato (minorities are often stereotyped as lazy while still having to constantly work to support themselves

Neets: the new couch potatoes

-More active than passive, users are now multitaskers

-Algorithms even exploit passivity

-Problematic for both the right and left

timepass

-South Asian term for doing nothing or wasting time

-Rather than a waste of time, something to do in the meantime

-Taking back power by opting out of the attention economy

Gamification

-Term emerged in 21st century, and is derived from behavioral economics•

-"refers to the use of game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities" (114).•

-Used in business, marketing, psychology, design.•

-Goal: encourage engagement with a product or service.• -"Game-based learning" has also become popular both in formal educational settings and in learning apps•

-Game developers have come to resist the concept of "gamification" (115)

Society of the spectacle

-Published in 1967 by Guy Debord

-Considered a seminal text of the Situationist movement • -Spectacle is a "sociopolitical theory of mediation that described 'a social relationship between people that is mediated by images'"

- Image of apparent unification that covers over underlying fragmentation

- Direct experience being replaced by representations "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" (Debord, 1967).

Society of the game

-Contrast to the society of the spectacle

-Emerges in the 80s

-Video games and virtual worlds replace TV and mass media

-Images are replaced with activity

-Appearing becomes interacting

-Separation becomes networked connection

Serious games movement

-Games that emphasize failure over winning to critique the structural issues of capitalism

-Spent, Third World Farmer, Thresholdland

Play without gamification

FAILURE

• EMPATHY

• EXPERIMENTATION

• UNCERTAINTY

• "inspire curiosity, imagination, involvement, paranoia, apophenia, dissatisfaction, connection, flexible optimism, critical loss, but not always fun" (144).

Reality television

Reality TV is a combination of the "society of the spectacle" and the "society of the game," a gamification of television

The user

-Impossible to opt out of work in the same way as the couch potato, defined as active

-Overworked, part of the attention economy

-Our data is tracked even when we're doing nothing

Mean image

-A probable image/composite of many different images

-AI generated

-Also "mean" as in cruel, may different contradictory layers of meaning (the word itself is a composite)

Francis Galton's Composite Image

-Eugenicist who devised the technique of composite portraiture to classify different human "types" (e.g. the physical characteristics of criminals vs. "upstanding citizens")

-Complicates our understanding of photographs as objective

Key points in Steyerl's analysis of AI

1. AI images, functioning as statistical models of probability, reveal a kind of cultural "unconscious," albeit one with a psyche. They reveal societal conceptions by aggregating and generalizing them, producing "aquasi-platonic idea of discrimination as such" (87)

2. Connection to neoliberalism and market logic (p. 89): like a market, machine learning structure should be unregulated

3. Invisible labor (p. 93)

4. AI comes from a system in which causality is replaced by correlation: a society structured like a gambling hall - gamified. She parallels this again to images (there is no cause and effect like in photography)

Invisible labor

-"Automation" actually relies on underpaid microworkers

-People will sometimes have to impersonate AI as part of their job

-The "ghost in the machine"