DOCSLIB.ORG

Metareference in Three Selected Works by Charlie Kaufman

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Metareference in Three Selected Works by Charlie Kaufman Metareference in Three Selected Works by Charlie Kaufman Masterarbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Arts (MA) an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Alisa Katharina PATTERER am Institut für Anglistik Begutachter: O. Univ.-Prof. Mag.art. Dr.phil. Werner Wolf Graz, 2015 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, O.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Werner Wolf for inspiring my interest in the field of metareference. I would also like to thank him for always encouraging independent thought in his students and for sharpening my analytical skills through his detailed and honest feedback over the years. Most of all, however, I would like to thank my family and friends, particularly those at CodeFlügel, for their never-ending patience and for ever so gently providing me with the necessary motivation to reach the finish line. I could literally not have done it without you. Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Theoretical Background 2.1. Various Forms of Metareference 7 2.2. Intramediality, Adaptation and Intermediality 9 2.3. Simulacra and Simulation as Metareferential Elements 13 2.4. Metareference and ist Use in Film 17 3. Metareference in Adaptation 3.1. A Short Synopsis of Adaptation 19 3.2. The various Levels of Adaptation 20 3.3. The Treatment of the Concept of Adaptation in Adaptation 24 3.4. Scene Analyses 3.4.1. The Beginning of Adaptation 27 3.4.2. Charlie Kaufman in his own Screenplay 31 3.4.3. The Ending - Donald Kaufman's Part 35 3.5. The Functions of Metareference in Adaptation 38 4. Metareference in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 4.1. A Short Synopsis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 43 4.2. The (Metareferential) Structure of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 44 4.3. Metareferential Lacunae 47 4.4. Scene Analyses 4.4.1. After the Erasure - The Beginning of the Ending 53 4.4.2. Trying to Resist the Erasure 60 4.5. Functions of Metareference in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 66 5. Metareference in Synecdoche, New York 5.1. A Short Synopsis of Synecdoche, New York 71 5.2. The "Chinese Box World" of Synecdoche, New York 72 5.3. Scene Analyses 5.3.1. The Beginning with the Built-in End 77 5.3.2. The Creation of a Simulacrum 84 5.3.3. A Tragic Ending - The last few Scenes 88 5.4. Functions of Metareference in Synecdoche, New York 91 6. Conclusion 96 7. Works Cited 99 1. Introduction The works of screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman show unusual awareness of literary concepts, especially for large-scale Hollywood productions aimed at the mass market. Particularly the field of metareference in all its variations is strongly represented in Kaufman’s oeuvre. Using concepts such as metalepsis, mise-en-abyme and non-linear diegetic structures, he regularly explores questions of philosophy and the relation between literature and film as well as the relation between reality and fiction in his critically acclaimed films. The three works selected for analysis in this thesis span six years and a wide array of filmic techniques inspired by the field of metareference, which has been a much studied subject in literature since the period of postmodernism. Despite the fact that it has entered the filmic mainstream over perhaps the last ten years, rarely any other filmmaker has explored this topic to the same extent and with the same regularity as Charlie Kaufman. Chronologically the first one among the three selected films, Adaptation (2002) is an interesting example of both intermediality and metareference. Directed by Spike Jonze and written as an adapted screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the film explores the boundaries between reality and fiction in an explicitly metareferential story about writing, creation and, eponymously, literary and filmic adaptation. The source material for the film was Susan Orlean’s non- fiction book The Orchid Thief. Rather than simply adapting the narrative to film, however, Kaufman also tells another story, namely that of the adaptation process. Thus Charlie Kaufman himself (played by Nicholas Cage) and Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) are both present in the film’s diegesis. 4 Therefore, Adaptation presents the viewer with two distinct story levels, which are, however, curiously interwoven. As will be discussed in chapter three, the boundaries between reality and fiction in this film are not clearly delineated from the beginning and become ever more blurred as it takes its course. Therefore, the concepts of mise-en-abyme and metalepsis as they relate to Adaptation will also be discussed. This discussion will be followed by analyses of some important scenes in the film which illustrate its high level of metareference. Finally, in a separate chapter, possible functions of and reasons for the use of metareference in Adaptation will be explored. The second film considered for analysis in this thesis is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Michel Gondry and jointly written by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth1. “If we seek, in Kaufman’s film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the formulaic, the comfortable, the linear character arc, the conclusion-driven plot sequence, we miss the point”, writes Kea Trevett (2009: 210) in an essay on the film. Indeed, the film is a highly artistic exploration of human consciousness in the form of memories. As the main characters have their memories erased and relive them in the process, the viewer here is confronted with a non-linear structure of hypodiegetic levels which become more and more entangled with each other even as they disappear into nothingness. Also in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the adaptation not of narratives but of literary concepts into film is one of Kaufman’s interests. Here, the ‘lacuna’, a meaningful and deliberate blank in a text or narrative, is explored in various 1 The screenplay was written by Kaufman alone. However, the film at times represents such a strong departure from the contents of the shooting script, that Bismuth and Gondry (the film’s director) were also credited by the WGA (Writers Guild of America). (Cf. The internet movie database (2010). “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. IMDb. The Internet Movie Database. [Online]. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/fullcredits. [2015, Oct. 10]. 5 forms. The representation of absence in film, however, differs from that in literature, also including performed drama, as the medium adds various discursive dimensions, such as the sound track and the recorded film track, which can be manipulated. Moreover, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in particular further thematizes absence itself (e.g. absence of memory, meaning, morality), thus adding another dimension which cannot be ignored when aiming to identify possible functions of metareference in this film. The third and final film selected for analysis is Charlie Kaufman’s highly metareferential film Synecdoche, New York (2008), about a writer and director who attempts to build a realistic and life-sized replica of New York in a warehouse. The embedded world grows ever more detailed as actors are hired to play the parts of ‘real’ people, after which actors are hired to play their parts and so on, ad infinitum. Eventually, the director’s mimetic work develops a life of its own, forming an intricate structure of mises-en-abyme, which, to use Brian McHale’s term, resembles a “Chinese-box world” (McHale 1987: 112). In the end, the embedded world becomes a simulacrum in a succession of events which is similar, to name but one example, to the one in Julian Barnes’ novel England, England in which a replica of England built on the Isle of Wight takes the place of the ‘real’ England. Also similar to Barnes, one of Kaufman’s concerns in this film is the contrast between reality and fiction, between mimetic filmic representation of reality and simultaneously showing absurd and impossible transgressions from it. In analyzing three reference examples of Charlie Kaufman’s oeuvre as a screenwriter and director, I hope to be able to identify key ideas and concerns in his films and to perhaps discover Kaufman’s reasons for choosing to use various forms of metareference to transmit those messages. 6 2. Theoretical Background 2.1. Various Forms of Metareference As previously mentioned in the introduction to this paper, metareference has become a commonly used device in today’s popular cinema. While, prior to the 1990s, meta-films were predominantly shot as independent film productions, they now have a fixed place in Hollywood (cf. Gymnich 2007: 127). Originally, however, the concept of metareference was known under the narrower term metafiction and only used in literary analysis. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 1984: 2). Werner Wolf then introduced the broader concept of metareference to include other media as well. First, a differentiation is made between heteroreference, medial signs pointing to the real world, and self-reference, signs referencing the entirety or parts of their own medial system. Metareference can therefore be classified as a special case of self-reference, which “establishes a secondary reference to texts and media […], viewing them ‘from the outside’ of a meta- level from whose perspective they are consequently seen as different from unmediated reality and the content of represented worlds” (Wolf 2009: 22f). Metareference within the medium of film is described by Jean-Marc Limoges as “any device that intentionally reveals […] the enunciative apparatus of film itself” (Limoges 2009: 392). 7 One such device frequently encountered in metareferential works is the mise- en-abyme.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Art and Hyperreality Alfredo Martin-Perez University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected]
    University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2014-01-01 Art and Hyperreality Alfredo Martin-Perez University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Philosophy Commons, and the Theory and Criticism Commons Recommended Citation Martin-Perez, Alfredo, "Art and Hyperreality" (2014). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 1290. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/1290 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HYPERREALITY & ART A RECONSIDERATION OF THE NOTION OF ART ALFREDO MARTIN-PEREZ Department of Philosophy APPROVED: Jules Simon, Ph.D. Mark A. Moffett, Ph.D. Jose De Pierola, Ph.D. ___________________________________________ Charles Ambler, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © By Alfredo Martin-Perez 2014 HYPERREALITY & ART A RECONSIDERATION OF THE NOTION OF ART by ALFREDO MARTIN-PEREZ Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of Philosophy THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO December 2014 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my daughters, Ruby, Perla, and Esmeralda, for their loving emo- tional support during the stressing times while doing this thesis, and throughout my academic work. This humble work is dedicated to my grandchildren. Kimberly, Angel, Danny, Freddy, Desiray, Alyssa, Noe, and Isabel, and to the soon to be born, great-grand daughter Evelyn.
    [Show full text]
  • Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism Deborah Tudor [email protected], [email protected]
    Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Neoliberalism and Media Global Media Research Center Spring 2012 Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism Deborah Tudor [email protected], [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/gmrc_nm A much earlier version of this project was published in Society, May 2012. This version expands upon the issues of individualism under neoliberalism through an examination of ways that the protagonist portrays a neoliberal subjectivity. Recommended Citation Tudor, Deborah, "Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism" (2012). Neoliberalism and Media. Paper 4. http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/gmrc_nm/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Global Media Research Center at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Neoliberalism and Media by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men , Postmodernism and Neoliberalism Deborah Tudor Fredric Jameson identified postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” in his 1984 essay of the same name. Late capitalism, or neoliberalism, produces a society characterized by return to free market principles of the 19 th century and cultivates a strong return to rugged individualism. (Kapur) Postmodern cultural logic emphasizes visual representations of culture as a dominant cultural determinant. It is this framework that opens a discussion of Mad Men, a series that uses a mid century advertising firm as a filter for a history that is reduced to recirculated images. In Norman Denzin’s discussion of film and postmodernism, he examines how our media culture’s embodies neoliberal, postmodern notions of life and self.
    [Show full text]
  • Baudrillard's Bastards: 'Pataphysics After the Orgy
    SEMIOPHAGY: JOURNAL OF PATAPHYSICS VOL. III, WINTER, 2010 AND EXISTENTIAL SEMIOTICS Baudrillard’s Bastards: ’Pataphysics After the Orgy – Some Lessons for Journalists Peter Hulm Most thinkers write badly because they tell us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of the thoughts. – Nietzsche (1878), Human, All Too Human, Aphorism 188. The Invisible Philosopher Let’s start with the ‘pataphysian himself: • The consumer “no more ‘believes' in advertising than the child believes in Father Christmas, but this in no way impedes his capacity to embrace an internalized infantile situation, and to act accordingly” (1968/2005:182). • “Information is directly destructive of meaning and signification” (1981b/1994:79). • “The Gulf War did not take place” (1991/1995). 1 SEMIOPHAGY: JOURNAL OF PATAPHYSICS VOL. III, WINTER, 2010 AND EXISTENTIAL SEMIOTICS From his earliest writings Jean Baudrillard has been a media provocateur of such Nietzschean brilliance that it has blinded many theorists to the depth and originality of his critique of the news business and television in the DisInformation Age. In addition to smarting at his accurate and aphoristic barbs about current affairs production, mainstream media feels even stronger resentment at his dismissal of the industry’s claims to be a major force in shaping public consciousness. For Baudrillard, scientific jargon, Wall Street, disaster movies and pornography have deeper impact on our imaginations than the news industry. Television and written media, he wrote in 1970, have become narcotic and tranquilizing for consumers in their daily servings of scary news and celebrity fantasies. Only 9/11, he later declared with his usual withering acerbity, has been able to break through the non- event barrier erected by media to the world (2001).1 To recognize the accuracy of Baudrillard’s daily observations, therefore, it is no surprise that we need to turn to a financial statistician, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
    [Show full text]
  • Baudrillardian Concepts of Hyperreality and Simulacra in Margaret Atwood’S Oryx and Crake
    Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Volume 21 № 4 2018, 36-54 © Khazar University Press 2018 DOI: 10.5782/2223-2621.2018.21.4.36 Baudrillardian Concepts of Hyperreality and Simulacra in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake Behzad Pourgharib Golestan University, Golestan, Iran Afsaneh Pourebrahim English Department, Faculty of Literature and Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Iran Introduction it is dedicated to a Baudrillardian study of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The examples of simulacra and hyperreality in the novel are mentioned and discussed. In addition, Baudrillard theory is used for explaining the events. The way the real is replaced by signs and the way hyperreal is created and influenced in the novel is also explained. Finally, a conclusion of the chapter is presented. Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is a post-apocalyptic novel and has many similarities with The Road. The protagonist of the story is Snowman who used to be called Jimmy before the catastrophe. Snowman lives near some creatures that are called Crakers. They were created by Jimmy’s Friend, Crake. The progresses in science results in the catastrophe as Carke creates a disease that kills everybody expect him, Jimmy and Oryx. Crake kills Oryx and Jimmy kills Crake and thus he is left alone. At the end he sees several humans and contemplates killing them, but it is not revealed whether he kills them or not (Brooks, 2010). Baudrillard’s hyperreality and simulacra are elaborated in his book Simulacra and Simulation. Raking up the term hyperreality from a movement in modem art, Baudrillard identified the dissolution of relations between subject and object, real and fake, true and false, in the triumph of consumer capitalism.
    [Show full text]
  • S Handmaid's Tale
    Postmodernism Aspects in Lens of Baudrillard Theory in the novels DeLillo’s white noise and Atwood `s Handmaid’s tale Fatemeh Sadat Basirizadeh1, Narges Raoufzadeh2, Shahrzad Mohammadhossein3, Muhammad Natsir4, Fauziah Khairani Lubis5 1.2,3 Department of English Language and Literature, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran 4,5Faculty of Languages and Arts, Universitas Negeri Medan, Indonesia Email: [email protected] [email protected] Abstract: This paper focuses on Postmodernism Aspects in Lens of Baudrillard Theory in the novels DeLillo’s white noise and Atwood `s Handmaid’s tale. To consider the United States as our case study, we know that the affluence and waste are quite related to each other. In a way that we might count it as a throwaway society or garbage can sociology like how Baudrillard has put in words. We are cognizant of the fact that all moralists have criticized the lavishing of wealth. An individual who does not comply with the moral law regarding the internal use-value of commodities. The mystification of the commonplace in White Noise can be interpreted as a revolt towards Modernism, which equated rationalization with an increased and general knowledge of the condition under which one lives, i.e., the belief that there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play. Modernism located the romantic idea of mystery, of the unknown, geographically, in faraway places like Africa or America. The Handmaid's Tale suggests a particularly postmodern feminist space for resistance a space located within the discourses of the symbolic order including technologically produced and disseminated discourses) rather than in opposition to them.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Hey! What Did You Do to the World?': Conceptualizing the Real With
    ISSN 1751-8229 Volume Ten, Number One “‘Hey! What Did You Do to the World?’: Conceptualizing the Real with Baudrillard and Žižek” Louis-Paul Willis, New Media Creation Department, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue As it is well known today, one of Žižek’s more important contributions to contemporary psychoanalytic media and cultural studies remains his focus on the Lacanian Real. As he puts it in one of his first articles written in English, while discussing the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in 1970s ‘Screen Studies’, “[t]he Lacan who served as a point of reference for these theories […] was the Lacan before the break” (Žižek 1989: 7). This break, of course, corresponds to Lacan’s attention to the Real as that which lies beyond representation and symbolisation during the last decade of his teaching. Over the decades, and through an ongoing opus, Žižek has put forth a theoretical edifice that focuses on this “late turn in Lacanian teaching; a turn that could be summarized concisely by the Special Issue: Baudrillard and Žižek formula: ‘form the signifier to the object’” (7). While 1970s film studies focused on the “boundary separating the Imaginary from the Symbolic”, and thus paid little attention to the object but instead gave much room to the ideological foundations of the signifier, Žižek allowed the emergence of a Lacanian approach to film, media and culture grounded in an emphasis on “the barrier separating the Real from symbolically structured reality”; he provided the framework allowing Lacan’s thought to be applied to “those leftovers or remnants of the Real that escape symbolic ‘mediation’” (Žižek 1989: 11).
    [Show full text]
  • Simulacra and Stimulations 8Dx`Hjgz, Postmodernism, and Richler’S Phallic Hero
    Brian Johnson Simulacra and Stimulations 8dX`hjgZ, Postmodernism, and Richler’s Phallic Hero Whether or not Mordecai Richler’s Cocksure (1968) can still be regarded as “one of the most embarrassing books in Canadian literature” (Warkentin 81), it has certainly been treated as one of Richler’s least successful and least significant satires. Despite winning the Governor General’s award for fiction in 1968 (an award it shared with Richler’s essay collection Hunting Tigers Under Glass), and despite Richler’s own judgment that it is one of his best novels, many early reviewers agreed that Cocksure’s ribald mockery of everything from sexual liberation and bourgeois bohemia to mass media and identity politics “lashes out without having a definite place to lash out from” (Wain 34). Subsequent scholarship on the novel echoes this criticism and is similarly hesitant to endorse Richler’s enthu- siastic self-evaluation (Woodcock 53; McSweeny 27; Ramraj 78). Yet, the “flaws” that unite the novel’s detractors—its enthusiasm for “pornographic” vignettes, its seemingly incoherent superabundance of satiric targets, and its apparent lack of a stable moral center—may be accounted for in terms other than an authorial imagination that is “arrested at the level of the high-school lavatory wall” (McSweeny 27). Margaret Gail Osachoff comes closest to identifying an alternative approach to understanding the novel’s complexity when she notes that Cocksure satirizes “the cult of youth, organ transplants, and, especially, the film industry,” drawing particular attention to the way that “movies can usurp life . to the extent that those lives are lived (if that is the right word) in a moral vacuum” (37).
    [Show full text]
  • Willis, Louis-Paul « Hey! What Did You Do to the World
    Auteur(s) : Willis, Louis-Paul Titre : « Hey! What Did You Do To the World?: Conceptualizing the Real with Baudrillard and Žižek » Type de publication : Articles des chercheurs Date de parution : 2016 Résumé : This paper aims to propose a tentative consolidation of Baudrillard?s notion of the Real as that which is inaccessible through its status as always-already reproduced. Pour citer ce document, utiliser l'information suivante : Willis, Louis-Paul. 2016. « "Hey! What Did You Do To the World?": Conceptualizing the Real with Baudrillard and Žižek ». En ligne sur le site de l’Observatoire de l’imaginaire contemporain. <http://oic.uqam.ca/fr/publications/hey-what-did-you-do-to-the-world- conceptualizing-the-real-with-baudrillard-and-zizek>. Consulté le 2 octobre 2021. Publication originale : (The International Journal of Žižek Studies. 2016. vol. 10-1). L’Observatoire de l’imaginaire contemporain (OIC) est conçu comme un environnement de recherches et de connaissances (ERC). Ce grand projet de Figura, Centre de recherche sur le texte et l'imaginaire, offre des résultats de recherche et des strates d’analyse afin de déterminer les formes contemporaines du savoir. Pour communiquer avec l’équipe de l’OIC notamment au sujet des droits d’utilisation de cet article : [email protected] Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) ISSN 1751-8229 Volume Ten, Number One “‘Hey! What Did You Do to the World?’: Conceptualizing the Real with Baudrillard and Žižek” Louis-Paul Willis, New Media Creation Department, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue As it is well known today, one of Žižek’s more important contributions to contemporary psychoanalytic media and cultural studies remains his focus on the Lacanian Real.
    [Show full text]
  • Redalyc.BAUDRILLARD: WORK and HYPERREALITY
    RAE-eletrônica ISSN: 1676-5648 [email protected] Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo Brasil Thiry-Cherques, Hermano Roberto BAUDRILLARD: WORK AND HYPERREALITY RAE-eletrônica, vol. 9, núm. 1, enero-junio, 2010 Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo São Paulo, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=205115349010 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative ESSAYS - BAUDRILLARD: WORK AND HYPERREALITY Hermano Roberto Thiry-Cherques BAUDRILLARD: WORK AND HYPERREALITY Jean Baudrillard (Reims, July 27, 1929 – Paris, March 6, 2007), French sociologist, poet, photographer and philosopher, was never an academic. He failed his agrégation exam (for a high school teacher job), and did not hold a position in a university. He was a structuralist, having adapted structuralism to understand the limit between reality and imagination. He engaged in the study of the impact of media and technology in contemporary life. Without minding criticisms against his style of expression and the concepts that he invented (King, 1998), Baudrillard tried to demonstrate how today’s culture is the result of a constructed reality or “hyperreality”. He questioned the domination imposed by systems of signs, the “symbolic value” which replaced the exchange value and the use value as drivers of economy and society. Baudrillard argued that the continuous expansion of the sign structure of domination demanded the establishment of information networks and a technological system which substantially changed contemporary rationality, thought and action.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Change Is Not a Choice'
    Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy ‘Change is not a choice’ An analysis of the poetics of Charlie Kaufman, based on ‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘Adaptation.’ and ‘Synecdoche, New York’ Supervisor: Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Prof. Dr. Ilka Saal the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Nederlands - Engels” by Max Dedulle 2009 - 2010 Dedulle 2 Dedulle 3 ‘Change is not a choice’ An analysis of the poetics of Charlie Kaufman, based on ‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘Adaptation.’ and ‘Synecdoche, New York’ Dedulle 4 Acknowledgements This MA thesis could not have been written without the help of (among others) the following people. A big thanks to: Professor Saal, for allowing me to work on this author, who had fascinated me for years. Additionally, her interesting remarks and questions were very inspiring. Many, many friends whom I do not have to name for them to know who they are. Special thanks to my thesis buddies, Martijn Dentant and Aline Lapeire, for advice, support, revisions and motivational coffee breaks. Any animosity between the three of us on the subject of Bruce Springsteen is hereby gladly and safely tucked away. Martijn is still completely wrong, though. My parents. For everything. Dedulle 5 Contents 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 7 1.1. The auteur theory throughout the years ......................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Ed
    The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens (objectif).2 Analysis and reproduction (ressemblance) are of no help in solving this problem. The technique of photography takes us beyond the replica into the domain of the trompe l'oeil. Through its unrealistic play of visual techniques, its slicing of reality, its immobility, its silence, and its phenomenological reduction of movements, photography affirms itself as both the purest and the most artificial exposition of the image. At the same time, photography transforms the very notion of technique. Technique becomes an opportunity for a double play: it amplifies the concept of illusion and the visual forms. A complicity between the technical device and the world is established. The power of objects and of "objective" techniques converge. The photographic act consists of entering this space of intimate complicity, not to master it, but to play along with it and to demonstrate that nothing has been decided yet (rendre evidente l'idee que les jeux ne sont pas faits). "What cannot be said must be kept silent." But what cannot be said can also be kept silent through a display of images. The idea is to resist noise, speech, rumours by mobilizing photography's silence; to resist movements, flows, and speed by using its immobility; to resist the explosion of communication and information by brandishing its secrecy; and to resist the moral imperative of meaning by deploying its absence of signification.
    [Show full text]
  • From the Perspectives of Paradigm and the Simulation Theory*
    American International Journal of Social Science Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2017 Subterranean Failures of Education in Flourishing Individuals: From the Perspectives of Paradigm and the Simulation Theory* Hamit Ozen, PhD Educational Sciences Department Eskisehir Osmangazi University Eskisehir, Turkey Abstract Even though transformations have been made in Turkey, schools have turned into places where partners are unhappy. Recently, education has moved into a new dimension called the system of objects in consumer society. The consumer society has become devoted to the system of objects, as people are not consuming for need but for want. Model schools and education are couched not within humanitarian paradigms but as promoters of this system of objects, thereby acting to deceive humanity. In this research, simulation theory is used to develop an ontological view of school and educational systems as the simulacra for a radical humanist paradigm. In conclusion, Education systems today tend to anonymize the individual within the nation, enabling the capitalist system to become the reality, thus allowing those in power to shepherd the herd easily. Keywords: radical humanist paradigm, simulacra, simulation theory, modern school Introduction The Turkish school and education system has been developed hastily and poorly over the decades through the implementation of ill-conceived policies that have never met the expectations of all students or school partners. Various people from students at the heart of education system to businessmen contributing to economic growth have decried the lack of basic academic, social and interpersonal skills in recent high school graduates. The failure of the education system to develop skillful and capable people has darkened Turkey’s future.
    [Show full text]