Peter Watkins: Notes on The Media Crisis (2010)
Filed under pamphlet | Tags: · audience, audiovisual, critique, documentary film, education, film, mass media, popular culture, television
Peter Watkins (Norbiton, United Kingdom, 1935) gained critical recognition in the sixties as a result of the scandal arising from the BBC’s boycott against his film The War Game. Nevertheless, although he continued to produce a series of essential, radical works that did not fit within conventional film or adhere to the timing standards of mainstream cinema, his films where no longer mentioned or taken into account as key works in debates on political commitment and the cinematic image. Peter Watkins’s last work, La commune (1999) represents, among many other things, a curious rereading of the relationship between film and the discourses of history, by means of the rupture of the illusion of representation through the blurring of the boundary that usually separates actors from the characters they play.
In Spring 2010, the MACBA presented a retrospective on Peter Watkins, which reviews his contribution to contemporary film and, in particular, his status as a pioneer of docudrama and false documentary.
Edited by Vida Urbonavicius
Publisher MACBA, Barcelona, 2010
Quaderns portàtils (Portable Notebooks) series
ISSN: 1886-5259
14 pages
Jacques Rancière: The Emancipated Spectator (2008/2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, audience, life, philosophy, political art, spectatorship
The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking.
The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.
In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?
First published as Le spectateur emancipe, Editions La Fabrique, 2008
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso, 2009
ISBN 184467343X, 9781844673438
134 pages
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-14)
PDF (no OCR; essay published in Artforum magazine, March 2007; updated on 2012-7-14)
Mark Andrejevic: Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · audience, mass media, public broadcasting, reality tv, television
Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of “Big Brother” to the increasingly important economic role played by the work of being watched. The author enlists critical social theory to examine how the appeal of “the real” is deployed as a pervasive but false promise of democratization.
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 2004
Series: Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture
ISBN 0742527484, 9780742527485
Length 253 pages