Tag: Leibniz Uni Hannover

Film & TV Reading Group: Lynn Spigel on TV, Housewives, and MoMA

The Film & TV Reading Group at the Leibniz Universität Hannover will be meeting this Wednesday, November 30, 2011, to discuss Lynn Spigel‘s “Television, The Housewife, and the Museum of Modern Art” (in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson; Durham & London: Duke UP, 2004; pp. 349-385).

Lynn Spigel will be one of our keynote speakers at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle,” December 15-17, 2011. Her talk is entitled “Designer TV: Television and the Taste for Modernism in Mid-Century America” (click for abstract).

The reading group will meet at 6:00 pm in room 609 (in the “Conti-Hochhaus” at Königsworther Platz 1). New members are always welcome to join us!

Jason Mittell’s Third Way: A Preview

Television scholar Jason Mittell, who is currently spending a year in Göttingen as a fellow in the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Practice,” will–as readers of this blog will already know–be giving one of two keynote lectures at our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated,” December 15-17, 2011 (our other keynote speaker is Lynn Spigel).

Now, over at his blog Just TV, Jason has a new post on Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine’s new book Legitimating Television: Media Convergence & Cultural Status. And included in this “unofficial review” (as he puts it) of Newman and Levine’s book is also what would appear to be an (unofficial?) preview of Jason’s talk in Hannover. I recommend reading the review in full, but I wanted to highlight those points that give us an idea of what kind of ground we can expect Jason to be covering in his keynote, “The Complexity of Quality.”

Jason writes, “this response [to Newman and Levine’s book] will be part of a larger argument I’ll be making in a presentation next month at the conference Cultural Distinctions Remediated at University of Hannover, so I will point toward larger arguments still to come, and welcome feedback to help me craft that talk.”

So what can we look forward to in Mittell’s keynote? Jason identifies what he takes to be a central problem in Legitimating Television: namely, a “false dichotomy” that he sees Newman and Levine putting forward in their book. According to Mittell:

“The book links the discourses of legitimation to structures of gender and class, highlighting how television has traditionally been feminized and stigmatized as lowbrow, arguing that recent legitimation practices work to masculinize and “class up” television. While I think this is correct, I do not see it as a self-evident problem to be avoided at all costs like Newman & Levine seem to, as suggested by the book’s final words: “We love television. But legitimizing that love at such a cost? Paying for the legitimation of the medium through a perpetuation of hierarchies of taste and cultural value and inequalities of class and gender? No” (171). Implied in this conclusion and their analysis throughout is a choice: we (as scholars, critics and viewers) can either embrace legitimation and its concomitant reinforcement of cultural hierarchies, or we can reject it, with the latter framed as the more politically progressive choice.”

Later, and here’s where we get an indication of – some very interesting – things to come at his talk in December, Jason writes:

“What I wanted from the book that I did not get was a third way to discuss television’s cultural legitimation, moving beyond either accepting legitimation discourses of quality television and progress, or rejecting them as illegitimate or ungrounded. (In my talk at Hannover, I hope to offer such a third approach, specifically concerning cultural evaluation.)”

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that these are exciting prospects; I very much look forward to hearing Jason’s argument and his vision of/for this “third way.”

Bollywood Nation: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

On Thursday, November 24, 2011, we will be screening the second film in our Bollywood Nation series: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge [The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride]. Please note that this and subsequent screenings in the series are now scheduled to begin at 6:00 PM (room 615 in the Conti-Hochhaus).

The film, directed by Aditya Chopra and released in 1995, was the first successful new global NRI film, considered a classic of its kind. The short description at imdb.com indicates the global scope of the conflicts, concerns, and identities that inform the film:

“A young man and woman – both of Indian-descent, but born and raised in England – fall in love during a trip to Switzerland. However, the girl’s traditional father takes her back to India to fulfill a betrothal promise.”

Conference Poster, Program, and Paraphernalia

Here is the final poster (above) that Florian Groß and I put together for our conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle.” As mentioned before, artist James Hance graciously allowed us to use his “Dark Starry Knight” for our conference materials. For this we are very grateful. (And if you like his artwork, please consider making a donation to the fund that James has set up to help pay the medical bills for his daughter Maddy.)

Here (below) is the final program as it will be printed (as a 6-sided folded flyer):

 And here’s the inside view:

Click to enlarge. (And see here for links to abstracts for all the presentations.) Finally, in case you missed it, here’s the unofficial promo video for the conference:

Bollywood Nation: Background / Context

On the occasion of the first screening in our Bollywood Nation film series, which is set to begin in just under an hour from now (with Swades – more info below, and here), Jatin Wagle has put together the following very useful background information on Bollywood and tonight’s film.

Bollywood Nation

27.10.2011 – Swades: We, the People [Homeland] (Dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2004, 187 mins.)

Bollywood: A widely accepted but not unproblematic term for Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani language commercial cinema in India. The expression is problematic because it suggests a close relationship with or dependence on Hollywood. Even as American popular cinema remains an important frame of reference and influence for Hindi cinema, straightforward comparisons are not necessarily useful. Although the films are actually shot all over the world, the undisputed site of production of commercial Hindi cinema is the megacity of Mumbai (or Bombay as it was called before 1995). In this sense, Bollywood is both about India and Mumbai, or to be more precise, about the Indian nation as it is constantly imagined and staged in the crowded, multilingual diversity of the metropolis.

There are no clearly defined genres in Hindi commercial cinema. Instead, a typical Hindi film contains varying elements of romance, melodrama, action and comedy interspersed with song-and-dance sequences. The principal reason for this has been the complex mode of production – called “disaggregated” by M. Madhava Prasad – and the precarious mode of distribution of films in India. Although Hindi cinema has been perhaps the most significant site for the social/cultural negotiation of the Indian nation, until 2001 it was not accorded the status of an industry by the Indian Government. This has meant that over the years Hindi films have been financed through more-or- less informal networks, and this financial precariousness lies at the root of Hindi cinema’s reluctance to fragment its potential audiences. This used to be evident until a few years ago, i.e. before the advent of the multiplexes, in the typical experience of watching a Hindi film in an Indian city, when one invariably watched it with the family in a “cinema theatre” with a seating capacity of around a thousand. Thus, instead of genres, Hindi commercial cinema has historically developed a range of masala [Gewürzmischung] or formula films, i.e. mixes of or compromises between plot compositions, narrative structures and genre elements. For instance, the popular masala films of the 1970s were slight variations on either the lost-and-found/family reunion plot (e.g. Yaadon Ki Baaraat 1973) or the angry young man action hero format (e.g. Deewaar 1975, Amar Akbar Anthony 1977). From the mid-nineties, a new sort of masala film has become popular, with a diaspora setting (or at least a strong diaspora component) and an NRI (non-resident Indian) protagonist who portrays a guiltless blend of so-called Indian tradition with Western modernity.

Swades: We are beginning our film series titled, needless to say with obvious irony, “Bollywood Nation” with a film aptly called Homeland. Even with its NRI protagonist, played by Shahrukh Khan, and its partial diaspora setting, this film is untypical for a variety of reasons. Its expatriate protagonist is different from the typical hero of the recent NRI masala film. Although successful in the West, he is plagued by the guilt of having left behind the land of his past, a developing, third-world country with its complicated challenges, for a relatively uncomplicated life in the U.S. In terms of its aesthetic, the film is not obviously “camp” [filmy] and has been described as more “realistic” than a typical Bollywood film. Although it was not really a box office success within India, Swades sold well in what have been called the diaspora markets, and its music composed by A. R. Rahman became popular even within India. Ashutosh Gowariker, who wrote the script, and produced and directed the film, is known for at least one more film, Lagaan [Land Tax] (2001), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Conference Program: “Cultural Distinctions Remediated”

“Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle”

Leibniz Universität Hannover, American Studies, 15-17 December 2011

Like any discursive phenomenon, categories of cultural distinction (such as “high” art, “low” culture, or the less well-researched area of the “middlebrow”) require the substrate of some medium or medial field—be it language, mass media, or new media—in order to articulate the differences upon which they turn. Cultural clout or capital, for example, is accumulated, and the conditions of such accumulation are defined and regulated, in media ranging from the popular press to specialized academic and legal treatises. At the same time, the categories of cultural distinction not only take shape within media but apply as well to concrete media and media products. Individual novels, films, and music productions are classed according to oppositions such as high vs. low, art vs. kitsch, quality vs. trash, mainstream vs. alternative, while at times whole media are more generally relegated to a lowly status (such as was the case with “primitive” or pre-classical cinema or with the videogame in the eyes of many today) or, on the other hand, accorded a higher one (e.g. the “graphic novel” vis-à-vis the pulpy comics from which it evolved). Clearly, these examples attest to the fact that cultural distinctions are negotiable and historically indexed, but more importantly, they point to the role of media transformations in the historical revision and renegotiation of distinction categories. Notions of film-as-art, for example, first emerge (in the film-aesthetic writings of Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg) in the 1910s, amidst the sweeping and uncertain changes of the “transitional era” between early and classical cinema, and the aesthetic revalorization of the popular medium finds its most pronounced expression (with the likes of Rudolf Arnheim) in the wake of the film-technological transition from silent to sound cinema. Similarly, the rise of so-called “Quality TV” takes place at a highly overdetermined moment of media change, one marked by digitalization, convergence trajectories, the rise of alternative delivery media, and a general reorganization of the televisual landscape. The conference “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” aims to shed light on such processes of transformation, in which the medial “double articulation” of distinction categories—i.e. the fact that they are both articulated in media and apply to media—is most crucially at stake, by looking critically at what happens when existing media and attendant categories are “remediated” by newer ones: How are categories of cultural distinction transformed, or how do they relate to a transformed media landscape? These questions will be pursued across a wide range of media and from comparative (both cross-medial and historical) perspectives.

Program (links lead to abstracts):

Thursday, 15 December 2011, 6:00 pm (Niedersachsensaal)

Welcome: Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)

Keynote I

Jason Mittell (American Studies, Film & Media Culture, Middlebury): “The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television”

Moderation: Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)

Friday, 16 December 2011

Panel I, 10:00 am – 12:30 pm (Room 103)

Regina Schober (American Studies, Mannheim): “Imagining the World Wide Web: Cultural Constructions of Virtual Space across Media”

Bettina Soller (American Studies, Göttingen): “Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction: Collaborative Writing and the Solitary Genius”

Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (Media Studies, Göttingen): “Desperately Seeking the Mainstream: Independent Games and the Cultural Logic of Distinction”

Moderation: Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover)

Panel II, 14.30-17.00 (Room 103)

Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover): “‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?”

Christina Meyer (American Studies, Osnabrück): “Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics: Reading Nell Brinkley’s Newspaper Romance Serials”

Shane Denson (American Studies, Hannover): “Lady Gaga’s Mainstream Queer: A Serial Media Remix”

Moderation: Vanessa Künnemann (American Studies, Hannover)

Saturday, 17 December 2011, 10.00-12.00 (Raum 103)

Keynote II

Lynn Spigel (Screen Cultures/Communication, Northwestern University): “Designer TV: Television and the Taste for Modernism in Mid-Century America”

Moderation: Shane Denson (American Studies, Hannover)

Conclusion

Jason Mittell, “The Complexity of Quality”

Abstract for Jason Mittel’s keynote at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

The Complexity of Quality: Cultural Hierarchies & Aesthetic Evaluation in Contemporary Television

Jason Mittell (American Studies, Film & Media Culture, Middlebury)

In much popular and scholarly discourse about television, there is a slippage between the terms “quality television” and “narrative complexity.” The former is a well-worn signifier demarcating both an aesthetic judgment, and an assumed set of textual norms and mode of address—in the vein of Bourdieu, it is a classification that classifies the classifier. Narrative complexity, as I and other scholars have been exploring, is a textual mode that highlights particular storytelling structures, industrial formations, and strategies of consumption, but it need not inherently point to an evaluative hierarchy. In this talk, I will tease out the differences and overlaps between these two cultural categories, arguing that by dispensing with the rhetoric of quality television, we can use narrative complexity as one (of many) measures of aesthetic evaluation that might present a more nuanced way of discussing televisual taste and value.

Regina Schober, “Imagining the World Wide Web”

Abstract for Regina Schober’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Imagining the World Wide Web: Cultural Constructions of Virtual Space across Media

Regina Schober (American Studies, Mannheim)

From the early days of the internet, there have been attempts to understand and represent this newly emerging medial realm within other media, from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) to Martin Dodge’s and Rob Kitchin’s Atlas of Cyberspace (2001) to David Fincher’s recent film The Social Network (2010). What all these examples have in common is that they represent the new digital media within another, more traditional medium. In my paper I will examine a variety of such representations of the internet and discuss the aesthetic and cultural processes involved in such inverted “remediations” (Bolter & Grusin). With particular focus on the World Wide Web and its inherently multimodal nature, I will explore how this essentially hybrid configuration characterized by a complex and interactive set of highly heterogeneous data content in dynamic flow has been defined, conceptualized, and evaluated in the process of intermedial transformation.  How can media products which take up such aesthetic features and transform them within their own medial framework be critically assessed, accounted for, and categorized? In reference to some exemplary medial conceptualizations of the internet, I will discuss the question of whether certain media or medial configurations are more pertinent for such adaptations than others and if there are specific elements that can be identified in these transformation processes. In a second step, I will reflect on the cultural implications at work in such ‘translations’ of the digital. Which image of the internet as ‘new territory’ is portrayed in these cultural representations and how do these attitudes, implications, and ideologies expressed in cultural constructions of the World Wide Web relate to prevalent technological and cultural discourses of the 21st century?

Bettina Soller, “Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction”

Abstract for Bettina Soller’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Authorship as a Category of Cultural Distinction: Collaborative Writing and the Solitary Genius

Bettina Soller (American Studies, Göttingen)

When literary critics turned to questions of authorship and hypertext, they rapidly created a canon of texts worthy of discussion. The predominant concept of the singular author as the sole originator of ideas and the authority over text has strongly been shaped by literary studies and has also been applied to new media. Popular forms of collaborative writing that exemplify the more radical changes in questions of authorship in digital projects like Wikipedia or fan fiction writing are still marginalized in literary theory. It seems that, like in print media, the higher the values that are associated with a text or product, the less collaborative authorship is seen as a legitimate category. Especially advocates of a strong canon have used different forms of authorship as categories for cultural distinction. While the ‘solitary genius’ has been hailed as the producer of ‘high’ art or academic achievements, collaborative authorship has been devalued, not only by academia, but also by the public imagination. Therefore, traces of collaboration have been erased or veiled from literary texts as well as other media texts such as films or TV series that are produced through collaborations of a team of writers and producers, or with the help of spouses, friends, and editors. The performance of authorship by the producers of texts as well as the construction of authorship by texts’ recipients generally conforms to the idea of a singular author, while many actual practices include collaborations. Especially the forms of digital writing that make public the processes of collaboration that are involved in other media as well, illustrate how the development of non-evaluative concepts of collaborative authorship will enrich theoretical discourse.

Florian Groß, “‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?”

Abstract for Florian Groß’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?

Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover)

The terms Quality TV and Graphic Novel have become almost synonymous with a broad revaluation of television and comics, two media that have traditionally been related exclusively to popular, even mass, culture. And yet, both terms are less about a democratization of taste than about new forms of cultural distinction. Reminiscent of, though by no means identical with, historical processes of cultural distinction, both Quality TV and Graphic Novel refer to a certain subset of texts with higher aesthetic value and emphasize the role of creativity and education in their production as well as reception. Given the media to which these two categories of cultural distinction are applied and the timeframe in which they have developed, it is necessary to come to terms with their specific forms of distinction, which can no longer be read along the lines of high/low culture, but rather as embedded processes of an ever-expanding popular culture that ultimately have to be considered on their own.

Through an analysis of the terms Quality TV and Graphic Novel with respect to collaborative and individual authorship/production, seriality, and media convergence, this talk attempts to highlight the specific cultural work performed by the terms and thus shed light on related intra-/intermedial developments. Furthermore, it will explore their instrumentality in redefining television and comics, as well as media culture in general, in times of a rapidly changing media landscape.