The Neosurrealist Musical and Tsai Ming-Liang’s the Wayward Cloud

Author(s):  
John Richardson

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. This chapter theorizes an important new development in auteur cinema, the neosurrealist metamusical, through Jan Assman’s idea of “figures of memory,” which are aspects of cultural memory that are differentiated from everyday experiences by their ritualized and temporally displaced nature. Musical numbers in this view become figures of memory that highlight reflectivity. Tsai Ming-Liang’sThe Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun, 2005) is a classic example of a neosurrealist metamusical, a surrealist sensibility manifesting itself in the film’s collage-like assemblage of genres-art house cinema, film musicals, and hard-core pornography-combined with an element of absurdism. The use of vintage popular songs as found objects is central in negotiating cultural meanings, including tensions between local Taiwanese culture and mainland China, the mediatized West and the local everyday. Although the film contains potent critical messages, its dominant modality is playful camp aestheticism, which is theorized by means of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of “reparative reading.”

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 352-364
Author(s):  
Natalia G. Fedotova

The article is devoted to the discourse of the city’s cultural memory. The relevance of studying this topic is determined not only by the fundamental aspect associated with the episodicity of existing studies of this phenomenon. From an applied point of view, the city’s cultural memory is a symbolic resource that can be used to create an appealing image, form a sustainable urban identity, and strengthen the citizen’s sense of belonging to the city. The accumulation and objectification of cultural memory take place in symbolic forms, which makes it important to study the practices of symbolizing the urban past, the essence of which is to generate the significance of the relevant or latent layers of cultural memory for the citizens.The article presents the results of the final stage of research related to the study of the process of constructing the cultural memory of the city. The purpose of the article is to analyze modern practices of symbolizing fragments of the urban past, which mean their significance for contemporaries. Basing on the culturological cross-section of the issue, the author integrates different research contexts. The methodological basis of the article is the communicative approach that focuses on the processes of meaning formation, and the constructivist method that considers memory as a multi-layered and dynamic construct. Analyzing the practices of symbolizing the urban past by the example of Russian cities, the author of the article demonstrates how the episodes of the city’s memory are updated in the modern world, how cultural meanings become memorable for citizens. The author uses the results of previous studies and identifies the following elements of the symbolization of the urban past: a) ways of encoding fragments of the past; b) communicative trajectories of memory symbolization; c) factors of producing meanings about the collective past of the city. The obtained results open up new frontiers in understanding the processes of formation of the collective ideas about the city, and prospects for empirical research, forecasting and constructing the cultural memory of Russian cities, giving them the opportunity to change their present and future.


Modern Italy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-425
Author(s):  
Sarah Patricia Hill

Photographs play a crucial role in the ways the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro are remembered in Italian culture. Locating photographs of the two men taken before and after their murders against the backdrop of the changes in photographic practice that took place in Italy from the period of the economic boom in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, this article explores and compares the cultural meanings of the photographs of the bodies of these two very different but equally symbolic public figures, both alive and dead. Analysing the significance of these images in Italy in the 1970s and after, it notes how contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium – particularly in terms of understandings of mass media forms and the theoretical linking of photography and death – shaped how the photographs have been understood in relation to their social and political context. It argues that the afterimage of the photographs of the corpses of Pasolini and Moro is overlaid in Italian cultural memory over the visual record of the two men during their lives in a kind of mnemonic ‘double exposure’ that constitutes these bodies of images as collective icons of their times.


Linguaculture ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana-Maria Ştefan

Abstract Our study is conceived as a comparative analysis of Zakes Mda’s postcolonial and postmodern novel The Heart of Redness and Joseph Conrad’s canonical and colonial novella Heart of Darkness, from the viewpoint of a literarily encoded anthropology of the body. In both texts, body marks and body pain are prominent and recurrent motives, carrying along important cultural meanings, related to several classic themes of colonial and postcolonial literature: the birth and becoming of cultural identity and awareness, culture shock, cultural contacts, enculturation versus deculturation, and cultural memory, as a vehicle and repository of myths, history and (body) image stereotypes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 111-142
Author(s):  
Danuta Minta-Tworzowska

The article discusses an issue of intertextuality of “pictures” in Palaeolithic art, and colour as its constituent. An important concept in these regards appeared to be that of an open and interdisciplinary approach towards an image, derived from the anthropology of images. In my opinion, essential is an “acting” of an image, based on so called “interimaginal relations”. It is legitimate when referring to prehistory, as numerous images reveal interpenetrating traces of other representations. Either consciously or unconsciously, some solutions had been used repeatedly, copying other representations, including selection of colours as a kind of stereotype deeply rooted in cultural memory. In cave “pictures” there were one or two main colours used, rarely three or even four. It has been acknowledged that the most important features of Palaeolithic “pictures” were movement, colour, especially expressed by a contrast of black and red or yellow, and also an illusion. They were also interrelated with a sound. The world of colours of contemporary people was a significant constituent of cultural meanings and of images “acting” in “mediatisation” of important existential contents between past and present.


2016 ◽  
pp. 10-31
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Jankowska

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role modern apocrypha play in the processes of collective remembering. From the perspective of cultural studies the modern apocrypha can be seen not only as literary or religious texts but also as an important element of cultural autocommunication. And if we understand autocommunication as a crucial mechanism of cultural memory, we can describe intertextuality (which is a form of cultural autocommunication) as an autoimmune technique of preventing the basic cultural meanings from the oblivion. The canon is a basic tool of collective memory in the so called ‘literate cultures’ or ‘Cultures of the Book’. That is the reason why the apocrypha, which deal with canonical contents, build the unique set of texts playing an essential role in protecting the source myth and tradition from the ‘semiotic death’.


Lege Artis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Irina Erofeeva ◽  
Olga Ushnikova

Abstract The research aims at discovering the basic elements of energy potential in a media text. On the basis of the analysis of journalistic and advertising texts internal and external factors of the text energy circulation are singled out. The authors argue that a media text, representing a national worldview, contributes to the author’s and addressees’ energy augmentation as well as supports sustainable cultural meanings, fixed in the text.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Tahir Pekasil

<p><strong>Theological - Cultural Framework of Memory in Mardin Syriacs</strong></p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>In this article, “theological/ritual-cultural framework of memory”, "memory participation tools" "recall figures" will be examined in the case of Mardin Syriac Orthodox Church. "Ritual participation" and "rhythmic repetition" which enables "theological-social inclusion" and "integration", also mobilizes remembering instruments and guarantees protection, revival and transfer of cultural memory. This also ensures continuation of sense of belonging. Priests who are accepted as "vicarious memory" enable participation to memory in church which is a "memory space" mediating to the "transmission of blessing and grace by ritual representation". Priests also by institutionalizing ceremonies and rituals which integrated with music, makes cultural meanings functional. The theme is discussed from the perspective of cultural memory and supported by face to face interviews.</p><p><strong><br /></strong></p><p><strong>Mardin Süryanilerinde Belleğin Teolojik-Kültürel Çerçevesi</strong></p><p><strong>Öz</strong></p><p>Bu yazıda, Mardin Süryani Ortodoks Kilisesi örneğinden hareketle “belleğin teolojik/ritüel- kültürel çerçevesi”, “belleğe katılım araçları”, “hatırlama figürleri” ele alınacaktır. “Teolojik ve toplumsal katılımı”, “bütünleşmeyi” sağlayan “ritüel katılım” ve “ritmik tekrar”, hatırlama araçlarını harekete geçirerek kültürel belleğin korunmasını, canlandırılmasını ve aktarılmasını garanti etmekte, aidiyetin devamını sağlamaktadır. Belleğe katılımı sağlayan “vekil hafıza” olarak kabul edilen papazlar, bir “hafıza mekânı” olan kilisede, “inayetin ritüel temsille aktarımına” aracılık yapmakta; “ritüel tasarım” yoluyla müzikle bütünleştirdikleri ayin ve ritüelleri kurumsallaştırarak kültürel anlamlara işlerlik kazandırmaktadırlar. Çalışma konusu, kültürel bellek perspektifinden ele alınmış ve mülakat örnekleri ile desteklenmiştir.</p>


Author(s):  
Natalia G. Fedotova ◽  

From the standpoint of the cultural approach, the cultural memory of the city is a complex space for storing, transmitting and updating the cultural meanings of the city (events, dates, legends, myths, famous personalities, places, etc.). The scientific interest in its research is explained by the fact that the cultural memory of the city is a symbolic resource capable of determining the urban reality, identifying the present and future of the city. The presence of current and potential layers gives the cultural memory of the city the property of mobility, which makes it necessary to artificial support the city cultural meanings and, on the contrary, opens up the possibility to update their repertoire in the urban space. This function is performed by the practice of urban commemoration as a means of forming the cultural memory of the city. Since the cultural memory of the city is a socio-cultural construct, there-fore, the role of urban commemoration increases, which, through the actualization of episodes of the past, determines what to remember and how to perceive cultural meanings. The identification and analysis of urban commemoration practices can be carried out on the basis of studying the specifics and conditions of broadcasting commemorative information, through an in-terdisciplinary synthesis of available fragmentary studies. Thus, a variety of urban commemoration practices should be presented using the following typology: a) visual and verbal practices; b) emotion-al and cognitive practices; c) institutional practices; d) performative practices; e) symbolic practices. Separately, it is necessary to highlight the practices of urban commemoration, which purposefully shape the cultural memory of the city and are directly related to the memorial culture of the city, which sets the contours of the social policy of memory. The general condition of commemorative practices is communication, which provides the process of structuring cultural memory itself. It is in the process of communication that symbolic marking of the cultural meanings of the city is carried out through the transformation of individual memories into collective ones, as well as through the cultivation of the city memory fragments (actual or latent). In the era of the information society, a special communica-tive role belongs to the media as a powerful generator of cultural meanings that accumulates com-memorative practices. Becoming a part of the media field, a fragment of cultural memory can acquire a certain value, become famous, get a peculiar assessment and interpretation. The presented typology of practices of urban commemoration and the revealed features of their representation in the urban environment are primary in nature and are an attempt to unite separate studies into a single continuum, thus creating the conditions for a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of the city cultural memory formation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Chen Liu ◽  
Rong Yang

This article explores the creative consumption of popular music and explains how audiences involve their place-based emotions within their representations of popular music in an everyday setting, drawing on a qualitative study on people’s interpretations of Phoenix Legend (a popular music duo in mainland China) and its music. We collected the texts created by Phoenix Legend’s audiences from Douban Music ( http://music.douban.com/ ), a Chinese online music forum. Our analysis focuses on how fans, non-fans and anti-fans interpret and re-write the meanings of Phoenix Legend and its songs emotionally and how these interpretations shape and are shaped by these audiences’ senses of self and place. The key finding of this article argues that through the consumer-to-consumer network provided by social media (Douban Music), the rural–urban division, ethnic cultures and the role of Chinese nationalism in the global marketplace are generated by audiences’ creative writings and their interactions with other consumers. Moreover, we suggest that anti-fans’ and non-fans’ emotional engagement within music consumption and their interactions should be paid more attentions to.


Author(s):  
V. F. Oleshko ◽  
◽  
E. V. Oleshko ◽  

The first part of the monograph “Mass Media as a Mediator of Communica­tive-Cultural Memory” considers key methodological and theoretical-practical issues that determine the novelty of the study results, as well as the specifics of the research. Communicative-cultural memory is identified as an object of inter­disciplinary study and presented as a special symbolic form of communicating subjects, actualization and translation of cultural meanings, memorial signs of various kinds, extending beyond the experience of individuals or groups. Communicative-cultural memory is identified as an object of interdisciplinary study and presented as a special symbolic form of communicating subjects, actualization and translation of cultural meanings, memorial signs of various kinds, extending beyond the experience of individuals or groups. The accent is made on how new information technologies can be used both as a necessary element of the self-organization of civil society and as a tool to implement the manipulative intentions of actors. The measure and degree of social responsibility of the diversity of subjects of information activity, as well as the information culture of individuals, are the dominant features. It is considered in the monograph in the scientific discourse and is defined by the authors as an actualized social practice of “space”, which includes various meanings, cultural codes, methods and the latest technologies of their production and reproduction, transmission and storage, as well as texts and other forms of materialization of information, usually directly related to the mass media. A systematic analysis of recent practice has allowed the authors to implement an approach that identifies the culture of mass media production in general and the specifics of the profes­sional culture of journalists of the digital age in particular as the most important resources contributing to the effective identification of moral and philosophical values of Russian society. As it is proved, as system-forming factors of optimi­zation of media processes management, they should include such components as the professional and educational level of employees, creativity, technological and performing discipline, system use of possibilities of all variety of sources and information resources, orientation on dialogue character of created texts and some others. Professional culture as a concept with a creative meaning implies a search for the dominant features characterizing its level of development, which requires identification of certain criteria and indicators. The normative, profession­al-communication and social-personal characteristics of a digital-era journalist can serve as sufficiently clear “markers”, as substantiated, which can be defined also as a more or less successful model of human realization in the profession.


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