Chapter 25, Carnival Mirrors: The Hermetic World of the Music Video

Music Video
From the text:
"an alternative world where image is reality"
"transfer the familiar aspects of our world"
"bring celebrities into our lives and create a sense of familiarity with people who would otherwise be remote"

Commedia dell'arte
comedy, artisans
Italy
16th century 
improvised performances
props
temporary stage
passing the hat
entertainment for high and low class
relate to peoples plight, exaggerating it

Source link and more info here.

Italian Renaissance
Cultural change and achievement
time period approx. 1400 - 1600
Rebirth
prior - Dark Ages, fall of Roman Empire, intellectual darkness, economic regression.
Learning Resources for the Italian Renaissance at The National Gallery of Art.  Link here.

Max Fleischer, Bunny Mooning (1937)

Music Video

Presentation of music and pictures together.

Visual aspects of musical acts become important  considerations for artists like Elvis Presley and the Beatles (appeared on TV and in film).
Mid-1980's video standard.
Closer connection to the stars.
Simulated live performances.

Launched 1981.  

Videos for everyone, all the time.

Previously 1940's 60's special equipment.

Switch to internet showing videos.

MTV goes to reality TV

Madonna, Vogue, 1980's, iconic images.

icon - a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something

Music Video and Commedia, Common Ground:
"use shorthand to communicate succinctly and visually".
"…the transformation potential of imagery and entertainment to create the bizarre, otherworldly, and intriguing qualities that characterize music videos."
"a narrative ultimately completed by the viewer"
-masks - key characters readily identifiable (important-quick reference for audience)
-mask of celebrity, mask is public image
-hold attention of viewer
-sexuality is spectacle, erotic movements and choreography
-Challenges idea of reality.
-messages of aggression, misogyny, drug culture to segments of the population that do not engage in these activities - cathartic experience. 

cathartic |kəˈTHärtik|adjective1 providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions; causing catharsis: crying is acathartic release.2 Medicine (chiefly of a drug) purgative.nounMedicinea purgative drug.DERIVATIVEScathartically adverbORIGIN early 17th cent. (in medical use): via late Latin from Greek kathartikos, from katharsis ‘cleansing’ (seecatharsis) .

Masks
-one's virtue is maintained as long as identity is undisclosed.

Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke, 2013

Argo, Read and Listen, National Public Radio

Link here to listen, read and images.

Argo, Review, Wall Street Journal

A movie studio, Orson Welles famously said, is the best toy a boy ever had. Far from being a boy, Ben Affleck is his own man, a distinctive actor who, in recent years, directed "Gone Baby Gone" and "The Town," a couple of medium-size movies that established him as an accomplished filmmaker. Now, as director and star of "Argo," he has deployed a studio's full-scale resources on an intrinsically dramatic story, and the results are nothing less than sensational. This political thriller has it all: a suspense plot centered on Americans in mortal peril during the Iranian hostage crisis that erupted in late 1979; a stranger-than-fiction subplot that was, in fact, concocted by the CIA to effect the Americans' escape; and a movie within the movie that's all the funnier for being fake.

The crisis began when Islamist revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 Americans hostage. In the midst of the terror and chaos, however, six of them escaped into the streets, then took refuge in the home of the Canadian ambassador. It's their tale the film tells, not that of the 444-day crisis in its sprawling entirety, and what a tale it turns out to be. (The factual details, declassified by President Bill Clinton in 1997, are brilliantly embellished in the screenplay that Chris Terrio based on a Wired Magazine article by Joshua Bearman.) To rescue the six before their whereabouts are discovered, the CIA's top "exfiltration" operative, Tony Mendez—a real-life figure played by Mr. Affleck—devises a cloak-and-camera plan to sneak into Iran, give the sequestered Americans new identities as Canadian filmmakers scouting locations for a sci-fi film called "Argo," then whisk them out on a regular commercial flight from Tehran's international airport.

As the Iranian revolution reaches a boiling point, a CIA 'exfiltration' specialist concocts a risky plan to free six Americans who have found shelter at the home of the Canadian ambassador. Video courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

It's often said of incredible but true stories that you can't make such stuff up. Sure you can; you're free to do whatever you want in the wonderful world of motion pictures. But you wouldn't want to make this story up if it weren't rooted in reality, because Tony's plan is, before anything else, utterly preposterous as well as inventive and wildly daring: "This is the best bad idea we have, sir," his superior, Jack O'Donnell (Bryan Cranston), tells the CIA's director in a meeting at Langley headquarters.

What makes the whole thing delicious in the bargain is that the CIA really did enlist Hollywood's help in creating a sham production company to give the agency's fake movie the ring of truth. John Goodman brings his droll wit to the role of John Chambers, the Hollywood makeup artist who was, in fact, Tony Mendez's friend and co-conspirator. As the fictional director Lester Siegel, an acidulous has-been who drives a gold Rolls-Royce, Alan Arkin gets some of the best lines—it would take too many asterisks to quote the topper, which becomes a running gag—and he turns a smallish part into a thriller's antic soul.

As the hero of the enterprise, Mr. Affleck is sufficiently restrained to be believable, yet he provides enough of a star presence to sustain what is, after all, a mainstream entertainment. As the director of a large and diverse cast, he has done himself proud: "Argo" abounds in fine actors—none of them household names—who don't look like they're acting at all. Victor Garber is the Canadian ambassador, while his six involuntary houseguests are played by Tate Donovan, Scoot McNairy, Kerry Bishé, Christopher Denham, Clea DuVall and Rory Cochrane.

As a filmmaker working on a large canvas in a quasidocumentary style, Mr. Affleck rises to one challenge after another with a sure touch. (And with the help of such collaborators as the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, the production designer Sharon Seymour, the editor William Goldenberg, and Alexandre Desplat, who did the original score.) Tony's crash program to teach his six frightened charges their assigned roles feels convincing and fresh. The sci-fi script, billed as a "cosmic conflagration" for the benefit of the Hollywood trade press, gets a reading by actors in full regalia at a Beverly Hills hotel during a set piece that's staged with a delightfully straight face. The action sequences, with revolutionaries on a rampage in an epic conflagration, combine news clips culled from archival sources—shades of Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings, plus a doggedly optimistic Jimmy Carter—with footage adeptly shot and directed to look archival.

The production plays fast with events of the period, but not loose. A lucid introduction puts Iran's 1979 revolution in the historical context of the 1953 coup, engineered by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, that replaced the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh with an increasingly repressive regime headed by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The revolutionaries themselves are neither demonized nor romanticized; it's quite remarkable how many of the perfervid young soldiers and gimlet-eyed bureaucrats come to life, however briefly, as individuals. (It's also remarkable how the advent of the film coincides with yet another crisis involving Iran.) Most studio productions these days are about nothing but entertainment; this one treats the world of volatile politics, both at home and abroad, with mature interest and respect.

Yet it does so with a flair for showmanship. "Argo" is a movie about storytelling that tells its own story briskly and clearly; there's very little fat on the narrative bones. It's a movie about movies that savors the medium's silliness. Mr. Goodman's bottom-feeding makeup artist could be an escapee from "Ed Wood," or one of Wood's sleazy productions. After listening to Tony outline his desperate scheme, he asks: "So you want to come to Hollywood and act like a big shot without doing anything?" When Tony says "Yeah," the makeup man replies gleefully, "You'll fit right in." The script is smart about the medium's allure: Tony wouldn't have a chance of pulling his scheme off if the Iranians, like everyone else in this star-struck world, weren't instantly intrigued by the prospect of a movie being made.

And "Argo" exults in what a movie can do when its story has a compelling core. There's been no shying away from the joys of expert manipulation, no reluctance to heighten the fact-based drama with fictional inventions. What's startling is that the invented elements have been done so well. (One tolerable, perhaps inevitable, exception is a moist, uplifting coda.) Without giving any plot points away, I can tell you that a climactic scene turns on a marvelous surprise, and promise you frequent spasms of suspense that will grow almost unbearable. If you've forgotten how gratifying a Hollywood studio film can be, this is the best good idea you could ask for. -source link here. 

A Review of Argo

Not every critic was pleased to see Argo win Best Picture last night. After its nomination was announced last month, Kevin B. Lee trashed the film. His article is reprinted below.

Now that Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage drama Argo has garnered seven Oscar nominations to add to its mantel, upon which already sit $110 million in domestic box office, near unanimous acclaim from critics, and even a whisper campaign for Affleck to run for John Kerry’s soon-to-be vacated Senate seat, it needs to be said: Argo is a fraud.

Sure, Argo’s an easily consumable mashup of well-worn genres (exotic adventurer, political caper flick, derelict daddy redemption movie, Hollywood insider satire) whose geopolitical themes make it feel smart and important. One could even say that it’s good at what it does: giving these old Hollywood formulas a fresh coat of vintage 1970s paint (color: avocado). But this tactic is what makes the film not merely overrated, but reprehensible. Its modest achievements point to larger failures both in the film and in Hollywood’s ability to regard the world honestly.

Perhaps my disgust wouldn’t be as intense if it weren’t for the potentially great film suggested by Argo’s opening sequence: a history of pre-revolutionary Iran told through eye-catching storyboards. The sequence gives a compelling (if sensationalized) account of how the CIA’s meddling with Iran's government over three decades led to a corrupt and oppressive regime, eventually inciting the 1979 revolution. The sequence even humanizes the Iranian people as victims of these abuses. This opening may very well be the reason why critics have given the film credit for being insightful and progressive—because nothing that follows comes close, and the rest of the movie actually undoes what this opening achieves.

Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of revolutionary Iran, the film settles into a retrograde “white Americans in peril” storyline. It recasts those oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde, the same dark-faced demons from countless other movies— still a surefire dramatic device for instilling fear in an American audience. After the opening makes a big fuss about how Iranians were victimized for decades, the film marginalizes them from their own story, shunting them into the role of villains. Yet this irony is overshadowed by a larger one: The heroes of the film, the CIA, helped create this mess in the first place. And their triumph is executed through one more ruse at the expense of the ever-dupable Iranians to cap off three decades of deception and manipulation.

Argo makes the Iran hostage crisis, one of the most cataclysmic episodes in U.S. foreign affairs in the last 50 years, a mere backdrop to a silver-lining subplot—one that even Robert Anders, one of the Argo hostages, admitted was a “footnote.” The film thusdistorts and belittles an event that transformed U.S. history. Ironically, the larger narrative of the hostage crisis would make for a more compelling movie from both a plot and action standpoint: A great filmmaker could make an amazing sequence of Operation Eagle Claw, a failed rescue mission that resulted in two helicopter crashes, several dead U.S. soldiers, and a subsequent overhaul of U.S. military operations. Imagine the last act of Zero Dark Thirty, but with an unhappy ending.

I’m not naive. I know such a film wouldn’t go over well with the home audience. And I’m not demanding that Hollywood make a movie about Iran as bracing and uncommercial as Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, my top movie of 2012 and a true reflection of Iran's reality, using all the resourceful invention that's missing in Argo. But apologists will argue that a film like Argo is the best we could hope for in depicting this episode of history, which makes the film less about history than about our national addiction to happy endings in movies. Argo is ostensibly about how a fake movie saves lives, and thus about the redemptive power of movies at large. But since it’s about a fake movie, it’s not really about moviemaking—it’s about the power of Hollywood bullshit. Instead of a real filmmaker, we get Alan Arkin’s wise-guy hack producer dispensing chestnuts over how to create hype and attention to make it seem like a film is important— lessonsArgo’s promoters no doubt took to heart. (My favorite Argo publicity factoid is that Ben Affleck majored in Middle Eastern studies. No one mentions that he didn’t graduate.) Arkin’s remarks may very well be an accurate insight into how Hollywood really works, but they reflect the movie’s smug complacency over its ability to pull its gilded wool over our eyes. 

Looking at the runaway success of this film, it seems as if critics and audiences alike lack the historical knowledge to recognize a self-serving perversion of an unflattering past, or the cultural acumen to see the utterly ersatz nature of the enterprise: A cast of stock characters and situations, and a series of increasingly contrived narrow escapes from third world mobs who, predictably, are never quite smart enough to catch up with the Americans. We can delight all we like in this cinematic recycling act, but the fact remains that we are no longer living in a world where we can get away with films like this—not if we want to be in a position to deal with a world that is rising to meet us. The movies we endorse need to rise to the occasion of reflecting a new global reality, using a newer set of storytelling tools than this reheated excuse for a historical geopolitical thriller.

Late in the movie, Affleck’s CIA agent dazzles Iranian soldiers at a checkpoint with storyboards from his fake sci-fi production. The scene plays into the hoary sentiment uttered at every Academy Awards ceremony, one surely to be repeated with each OscarArgo wins: People across the world are movie fans at heart. But like Oscar night, the scene is really a reflection of Hollywood’s hubris in trumpeting its own power. This moment, of course, is more bullshit, a self-serving fantasy concocted by the screenwriter. But it reminds us of Argo’s opening sequence, when it was us dazzled into submission by a series of storyboards. A razzle-dazzle con job worthy of its CIA subject,Argo thinks of you just like it thinks of those buffoonish Iranian soldiers: too easily impressed with a flimsy fabrication to see beyond it.

Kevin B. Lee is a film critic, filmmaker, and producer of more than 100 video essays on film and television. He is founding editor and chief video essayist at Fandor Keyframe and founding partner of dGenerate Films. Kevin has contributed to Roger Ebert Presents at the Movies, Sight & Sound, and the Chicago Sun-Times. He tweets at @alsolikelife.

source link here

Kara Walker, American, b. 1969

Kara Walker speaks about her silhouettes. 14:15.

https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s2/kara-walker-in-stories-segment/

Room-size Tableaux of Black Cut-paper Silhouettes

Antebellum - Latin - ante = before and bellum = war.

American Civil War 1861 - 1865

Jim Crow Laws - Legalized racial segregation. 

https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws

Civil Rights, 1960's

Walker comments:

"The history of America is built on inequality, this foundation of a racial inequality and social inequality," the artist has said. "And we buy into it. I mean, whiteness is just as artificial a construct as blackness is." (information from MoMA caption). -text source is NYC loves NYC

A Subtlety 

or 

The Marvelous Sugar Baby: 

An Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our sweet tastes from the cane fields to the kitchens of the New World on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

New York City, 2014

35 feet tall, 75 feet in length

Fig Gesture

Sugar brown in raw form. 

Harvest sugar cane - cut, bleach, bag

Scale

Beat down but still standing. 

Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt

About 5000 BCE

Greek tradition - female

Mythical creature, body of lion, head of human, falcon, cat, sheep. 

Power

Fons Americanus

Tate Modern, London

2019

History of monuments. Questions narratives of power. 

Water - Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Source Link: 

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kara-walker-2674/kara-walkers-fons-americanus

Victoria Memorial, London

1901 - 1924

Enthroned Queen Victoria

Winged Victory

Roman Goddess of Victory

Equivalent to Greek Goddess of Victory Nike