School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 63
-
ItemCarpaccio, Saint Stephen, and the topography of Jerusalem( 1984)Those buildings and topographical motifs in Jerusalem represented by Carpaccio in his Saint Stephen cycle are discussed, as are the ways in which they were represented by artists before Carpaccio. It can be deduced that Carpaccio's sole source for his renderings was in the woodcuts by Reuwich in the 1486 book by Breydenbach on the Holy Land. Suggestions of other sources and of a visit by Carpaccio may be discarded. Conclusions can be drawn about Carpaccio's approach to the representation of real landscape.
-
ItemMuscles, hybrids and new bad futures( 1994)Since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made their respective debuts onto the cinematic screen the muscle phenomenon has become a dominant factor in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Muscle, in all its hard and sweaty glory, has found a market especially in the big budget extravaganzas whose narratives centre around the spectacle of the built bodies of male stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lundgren, Van Damme, Snipes and Seagal, and the more padded forms of actors such as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. This new brand of cinema whilst harking back in part to an American tradition of genre cinema (the Western, Detective films, War Films etc.) appears to owe more to genres that emerged outside America: the Italian `gladiator' pictures of the 1950s and 1960s which retold the adventures of Hercules and other mythic heroes via the forms of bodybuilding stars such as Steve Reeves and Reg Park; and the martial arts action films popularized by Hong Kong Cinema and which found a very profitable market in the West ‐ and which also saw the migration of the genre into American cinema starring a series of martial arts experts including Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Jean‐Claude van Damme. Both genres revealed an unabashed display of the spectacle of action and the spectacle of the male body in action. The camera found any excuse to unapolegetically caress the bodies of the stars with pans, tracks and close‐ups of various fragmented body parts in ways that always denoted strength, agility and power.
-
ItemMuscle, excess and rupture: female bodybuilding and gender construction( 1995-02)In recent years bodybuilding culture has provided the backdrop to a series of debates centering around issues surrounding representations of gender and in particular the potential inherent in bodybuilding bodies to rupture preconceived notions regarding 'norms' of masculinity and femininity; for the meticulously controlled, predetermined construction and definition of mass and muscle on the bodybuilding figure has shifted the body from an arena dominated by assumptions centering around the natural to a sphere which exposes the body itself - and with it the power structures that impose meaning onto it - as informed by culture. The bodybuilding physique reveals the body as a socially determined construct, or to cite Kuhn, with the willed construction of bodies in bodybuilding, 'nature becomes culture'. (Kuhn 1988, 5) The question of marketability has, over the years, emerged as a key concern in bodybuilding. Of all sports, due to its tendency towards things excessive, bodybuilding tends to stand outside the mainstream appealing primarily to a select, cult following. There have been some exceptions of bodybuilders who successfully escaped the margins and entered mainstream culture, the most successful being Arnold Schwarzenegger (seven time Mr. Olympia) who opened the doors to big-time muscle in action cinema. More recently, female muscle has also started to make itself felt in the popular sphere, with Cory Everson (six time winner of the Ms. Olympia) appearing in films such as Double Impact alongside Jean Claude van Damme, and professional bodybuilders Raye Hollitt, Shelley Beattie and Tonya Knight starring in the successful U.S. television show American Gladiators. Despite breaking through to mainstream culture, however, these bodybuilders have served as examples of 'freaks' in a world of 'norms'; they signal a moment of excess allowed to seep through into the dominant, but these moments are always about controlled forms of excess - they, in a sense, constitute an orderly disruption.
-
ItemTelevision: presenting the memory machine( 1987)This essay situates developments in contemporary television in relation to the dominant social relations of time. It argues that time is a perpetual ‘problem’ for television, extending beyond the terms of configuring narrative formats and strategies of visual reflexivity, and instead indicating deeper epistemological and existential issues. While contemporary television programming often seems driven by a desire to give viewers the immediacy of a perpetual ‘now’, this creates a series of increasingly intense contradictions concerning the social experience of time and the functioning of memory.
-
ItemBut, Who, Derrida?( 1990)This essay investigates the politics of reading and interpretation using the critical framework articulated by Jacques Derrida. It argues against hasty dismissal of Derrida’s work by those who claim to be supporting ‘face-to-face social relations'. Instead, it suggests that a critical understanding of contemporary culture, characterized by the heightened importance of media technologies, should begin from Derrida’s critique of the philosophy of presence, including the social relations of time in which it is implicated.
-
ItemPornography and pleasure: the female spectator( 1982)In this paper, I wish to make some comments on the pornographic film text and the question of pleasure for the female viewer. My starting point is The Story of O, a film which is ‘about’ sado-masochistic relationships but I shall also refer to Emmanuelle, The Anti-Virgin, which is part II of the Emmanuelle trilogy, a group of films which have been more widely viewed that any other recent soft-porn products.
-
ItemDigital dialectics: the paradox of cinema in a studio without walls( 1999)This essay presents a brief history of the impact of digital technology on cinema. Drawing on original interviews with leading Australian film makers, it firstly examines how changes in technology are affecting contemporary film production. It then extends this analysis to consider the implications of such changes for contemporary film theory.
-
Item"Causa di stravaganze": order and anarchy in Domenico Gargiulo's Revolt of Masaniello( 1998)Three paintings by Domenico Gargiulo of the revolt of Masaniello in 1647 have been interpreted as an anti-Spanish commentary. Close analysis of the events depicted in Gargiulo's major painting of the revolt and of the political sympathies of his patrons, however, reveals the contrary to be the case. In this and other paintings, Gargiulo reinforces conventional stereotypes of the Neapolitan lower classes as fundamentally capricious and irrational. These negative visions of popular anarchy are to be contrasted with the propriety, unity, and stability displayed by the establishment in Gargiulo's other pictures of contemporary events.
-
ItemThe uncanny home: television, transparency and overexposure( 1997)I recently read a description of the house which is currently being built for Microsoft cyber-baron Bill Gates. Gates conceived his new residence as a state of the art merging of computer technology with architecture. At an estimated cost of $50 million, the house will naturally boast all the standard automated functions such as climate control and electronic security systems, as well as a few extras like a hot tub which switches itself on as soon as the master's car enters the grounds.
-
Item'The go-for-broke game of history': the camera, the community and the scene of politics( 1994)Contemporary transformations in communication technologies – such as the digitalization of traditional photography, the proliferation of new delivery systems for television, the merging of camera, computer and television systems in fully ‘interactive’ media, Virtual Reality – have generated considerable debate. The fact that these debates now extend across was are often isolated discourses, linking technical manuals to corporate agendas and government policies, while granting cultural theory its place in the sun of the popular media, registers the extent to which these shifts are perceived to intervene at the fundamental levels of social life.