Film, Media and Music

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Patrick Clarke

This chapter examines the enormous importance of Top of the Pops when it came to boosting a musician’s profile in the early 1980s, due to this being the only opportunity for mass exposure aside from the music press, and how Soft Cell’s performance on the programme propelled them to overnight mega-stardom. It also argues that this was in no small part due to the queerness of their performance, and the radicalism of this, given the pervasive homophobic attitudes within the media at this time. It also explores the impact that sudden fame had on the band, for both good and bad.

in Bedsit Land
Patrick Clarke

This chapter documents Soft Cell’s splintering into side projects and separate collaborations, most notably the Mambas and the Immaculate Consumption, and their ultimate collapse following their brutal third album This Last Night… in Sodom. It argues that it was a combination of multiple factors including tensions with their label that eventually reached breaking point, the chaotic management of Stevo, an overtly hostile press, the pressures of fame and extreme drug use that ultimately led to their decline. It also argues that despite this, the band’s final album was in fact their most powerful and purest artistic statement, notwithstanding general apathy from the industry at large. It also acknowledges the increasing influence of esoteric and avant-garde music on the band, which was having an increasing influence thanks to the scene’s key players’ gravitation around the Some Bizzare offices.

in Bedsit Land
Patrick Clarke

This chapter discusses the factors that made Leeds Polytechnic, the educational institution at which Almond and Ball were to meet while studying art, one of the most radical schools of the twentieth century, thanks to the influence of Basic Design and the installation of countercultural icon Jeff Nuttall as one of its most prominent tutors. It examines how Nuttall’s encouragement of the provocative and scandalous had a key effect on their development as the band evolved out of Almond’s performance art and film pieces and Ball’s experiments in electronic music under the tutelage of John Darling. It charts the wider Leeds music and art scene at the time, and why there were tensions developing between straightforward guitar bands and a growing crop of synth-based acts. It also contrasts the radicalism and flamboyance of these creatives, who centred around nightclubs such as the Warehouse and gigs held at nights such as the F Club, with overtly hostile forces in the city such as the National Front and the terror imbued by the string of murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe. It examines how all of this combined with the aforementioned influence of seaside towns to form what was to be Soft Cell’s defining aesthetic.

in Bedsit Land
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Robert Lapsley
and
Michael Westlake

The application of psychoanalysis to cinema is by no means new. The absence within psychoanalysis of a satisfactory explanation of feminine sexuality was severely to restrict its value in understanding the exchange between film and women spectators. Broadly speaking, two phases may be distinguished in the use made of psychoanalysis, each of which emphasised one aspect of the Lacanian model. The concept of fantasy at once continued and developed the earlier application of psychoanalysis to film. The continuation lay in the attention to the spectator as the subject of the enunciation, the development in the greater complexity accorded to this subject. Psychoanalysis was introduced into film theory as a supplement to historical materialism and semiotics. Although by the end of the 1970s psychoanalysis had contributed to a persuasive account of the exchange between a film and the male spectator, no comparable account existed for the female spectator.

in Film Theory an Introduction
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Robert Lapsley
and
Michael Westlake

By the time of film theory's politicisation a number of studies of narrative had accumulated, mostly within literature and to a lesser extent within film. At the micro level the most persuasive analyses of narrative have been those offered by Raymond Bellour. His global concept is that narrative consists of a play of sameness and difference. Indeed the success of any narrative depends on the achievement of a balance between the two tendencies, which is what gives rise to the impression of unity. Heath's thinking on narrative has been far-reaching, particularly as his central thesis that space is organised by the logic of the narrative has received authoritative support from the work of Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson. Narrative is 'the discovery [of lack] perpetually remade with safe fictions'.

in Film Theory an Introduction
Television and the illustration of Middlemarch
Ian MacKillop
and
Alison Platt

The 'classic novel TV serial', or CNTVS, is a special television mode, and one that has perhaps had less attention than it should. To define it provisionally, and to introduce the 1994 BBC Middlemarch, this chapter begins by comparing the CNTVS with the classic novel film adaptation or CNFA. One of the greatest differences between the manner of the BBC Middlemarch and that of the novel is that on the screen the intimate style does not dominate. The BBC Middlemarch begins with the town and works in the key characters through a process of layering. It prefers to show the total community: each episode has a focus on a big event, whereas in the novel one follows individual characters and sees the events through their eye. Both the novel and the CNTVS obviously end with Dorothea's commitment to private life in the service of her partner-to-be, Ladislaw.

in The classic novel
Waugh to the knife
Fred Inglis

Granada broadcast Brideshead Revisited as an eleven-part serial across the winter of 1980/1. Brideshead famously caught the conscience of the King of British Theatre, Laurence Olivier, in its net, together with his inevitable regent, John Gielgud, as well as the honorary stepdaughter of both men, Claire Bloom. Evelyn Waugh himself intuited the new significance of hedonistic travel. The television Brideshead candidly wallows in its vast extension to the mass tourism of today. The serial is an architectural education and a celebration of cultivated tourism such as Waugh would have despised. It is extremely charming and, as Anthony Blanche warned us, the charm spots and diseases the art from time to time. It is a meaningless consolation to the millions who watched Brideshead devotedly. It was largely meaningless to Waugh's own readership in 1945 as the poet Henry Reed, reviewing the book, complained at the time.

in The classic novel
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The changing face of the Soviet soldier in Stalinist cinema
John Haynes

As the rave reviews and enthusiastic critical plaudits poured in for the Vasil'ev Brothers' 1934 classic Chapaev, it seemed that the new 'single method' of socialist realism in art had got off to a flying start. On the surface, the humour may help to make the political message more palatable, but cracks are already appearing in the subjective armour of the Soviet soldier hero, and Chapaev is ranked very firmly within a series of films that implicitly detail the crisis of Soviet masculinity of the 1930s. Internal montage allows the focus to remain sharply on the inner workings of the character's mind, as Eisenstein struggles to come to terms with his destiny as a man. Eisenstein's avowed intent was to make a film about a 'difficult personality', and for the first time in Stalinist cinema, we are presented with a genuinely self-reflexive male hero.

in New Soviet Man
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From page to screen

Film has been around now for over a hundred years, so it is surprising that the nature of its relationship to literature is still an open question. The transfer of an 'original' (literary) text from one context of production to an (audio-visual) other has begun to attract academic attention. The ideological investments at stake in this process reveal themselves in the central critical category of adaptation studies: the notion of 'fidelity', or 'faithfulness to the text'. This book takes the question of fidelity as their primary critical point of reference. As a critical term, fidelity behaves anomalously. Brian Mcfarlane has shown that there is no reliable equation between fidelity and critical approval, infidelity and disapproval. It is fascinating to see that Alison Platt and Ian MacKillop are interested in what it is about the experience of reading a classic novel that its adaptation restores to us. The book presents a group of essays loosely clustered around the English literary canon and ordered according to its chronology, not that of the films in question. The inference we might draw from the essays is not merely that 'English literature' remains a productive frame of reference for the study of film. It is also, perhaps, that the study of film might now derive more benefit from a treaty of union than a war of independence.

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John Haynes

This book attempts a marriage of psychoanalytic and Bakhtinian theory to explore the discursive pressures exerted on the psyche of the model New Soviet Man - as man - by the radical remasculinisation of Stalinist culture, following the Cultural Revolution and the establishment of socialist realism as the single method in all Soviet art. It discusses the scapegoating of experimental cinema as 'unintelligible to the masses', and the subsequent realignment of film production under a single state organisation, Soiuzkino, and with newly-trained scenarists to provide intelligible scripts to be followed without deviation by the directors. The book examines in more detail the parallels between psychoanalytical models of the male ego and Bakhtinian accounts of the discourses of nationhood. Characteristic of both was the existence of centripetal forces or libidinal binding diversity into a fragile and illusory unity.

in New Soviet Man