New Realism
This media course is the result of cooperation between two departments of the University of Aalborg. The teaching language is English.
Plan:
Lecture
1 Jørgen
Riber Christensen Monday 4.2. 14:30 – 16:15 Room 4.130
Introduction: What is realism and what is metafiction?
The introductory lecture defines and illustrates the area of new realism in
the light of classic realist theories plus postmodern theories of metafiction
and paratextuality.
Literature:
Introduction from Mark Currie, ed., Metafiction, Longman, London 1995,
pp.1-18
Georg Lukács, Realism in the Balance, from Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics
and Politics, NLB, London 1977, pp. 28-59
Resources for the lecture
Lecture
2 Bent Sørensen Monday 11.2. 14:30 – 16:15 Room 4.130
Teena Brandon - Brandon Teena: The realities of transsexuality (true crime fiction, documentary film and Oscar winning Hollywood feature film)
In the 1999 film "Boys Don’t Cry" and several other texts portraying the violent death of Brandon Teena in rural Nebraska, 1993, the issues of gender-negotiation find their paradigm examples. But the realities of transsexuality turn out to be multiple and slippery:
Brandon, the transgendered persona, is depicted as a victim in "Boys Don't Cry", Kimberley Pierce’s fictionalised version (starring Hilary Swank) of the case - yet a victim who for a brief moment finds joy and validation through paradoxically sharing a masculine identity with his/her later murderers, and later a lesbian identity with her female lover. These paradoxes make the film rife with tragic potential: Issues of betrayal, ideals of behaviour, contrasted with extreme violence and dumbness of sensibility all mingle in a heady brew that works straight on the viewers’ emotions.
Another account, the true-crime book "All (S)he Wanted" by Aphrodite Jones, attempts a realist (factual) narrative, yet also dramatizes the events and takes liberties with point-of-view that disturb our expected non-fiction contract with the text.
Of most interest in this context is Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir's documentary about the murder case and the back-story: "The Brandon Teena Story", which features interviews with people who knew Brandon, recorded interrogation and trial transcripts, and photographs and file film footage, and therefore strongly appeals to us to apply a factual reading protocol. Yet score and cinematography borrows strongly from the Hollywood register...
The lecture examines the sliding scale of factuality/realism and fictionality in these three texts.
Literature:
Aphrodite Jones: All S/He Wanted. Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, New York etc., (1996)
Lecture
3 Torben Rølmer Bille:Monday 25.2. 14:30 – 16:15 Room 4.130
Fictionalised
Realities - from Zelig to Jackass
"The insistence of reality-based shows have also led filmmakers to incorporate
the stylistics and thematics from reality based shows and documentaries into
their own fictions. This lecture will attempt to clarify how this is done -
both thematically and formally, but also discus how these fictions blur the
distinctions we as viewers have of reality vs. fiction"
Read Johannes Riis'
article "Is Realist Film Style Aimed at Providing an Illusion" from
Jerslev (ed.) Realism & Reality in Film & Media
David Bordwell & Kirstin Thompson, Film Art - An Introduction,
McGraw-Hill, 1997, pp. 42-46
Lecture
4 Gunhild Agger Tuesday 4.3. 10:15 – 12:00 Room 3.015
Realism and Genre
In Danish TV fiction, realism was for many years a dominant way of presentation.
TV fiction was not determined by genres to the same extent as later. Of course,
genres such as the sitcom, the historical drama and the police series existed.
During the 1980s, deregulation and increased competition changed these conditions.
However, in certain genres realism is extremely important. Narrative realism
is prevalent in many police series. In postmodernist TV fiction, a kind of phenomenological
realism can be found as well as an inspiration from documentary realism. These
combinations will be illustrated by clips from The Kingdom 1994/97
and Unit One 2000-02.
Literature:
Bondebjerg, Ib: “Film and Modernity: Realism and the Aesthetics of Scandinavian
New Wave Cinema”. In Bondebjerg, Ib (ed.): Moving Images, Culture
and the Mind.Luton: University of Luton Press, 2000.
Agger, Gunhild: “Crime and Gender in the Provinces”. In Agger, Gunhild
& Jensen, Jens F. (eds.):
The Aesthetics of Television. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2001.
Resources for the lecture
Lecture 5 Andrew
Fish Tuesday 11.3. 10:15 – 12:00 3.015
NARRATED REALITIES
The Puritan Manifesto rejects “poetry and poetic licence in all its forms”. Among the devices that are shunned are “devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides…flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing”. Meanwhile, social scientists, linguists and discourse researchers have become increasingly interested in the way that reality is constructed as narrative and by narrative in everyday interaction. If reality only exists as constructions and such narrative construction relies on the very same poetics rejected by New Realism, then New Realism can only be a new form of anti-realist poetics.
This session will explore this notion by introducing some of the theory of everyday narrative and by using a few examples from everyday interaction. There is no reading for the session, but a reading list will be delivered during the class for those who wish to follow up on the topic.
Lecture 6 Tove Arendt Rasmussen Thursday 27.3. 14:30 -
16:15 Room 3.015
Expressions - from reality tv to usergenerated content - Permanently canceled due to ilness
In the late 90ties reality tv became a new and fresh hybrid genre of television. Ordinary people had the chance of getting even more than "15 minutes of fame" but the performance was still limited to playing the role of participant in a show. This has changed with the upcoming of the social web 2.0 and we will discuss the new forms of mediated social and aesthetical expressions by ordinary people.
Literature:
Joshua Meyrowwitz, No Sense of Place, OUP, 1985, pp. vii-xv,
35-53, 93-114
Ib Bondebjerg, "The Mediation of Everyday Life. Genre Discourse and Spectacle
in Reality TV" in Jerslev (ed.) Realism & Reality in Film &
Media
General literature:
Anne Jerslev (ed) (2002): Realism and Reality in Film and Media, Museum
Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen.