'NETWORK' REVIEW / SEMESTER 2 BEGINS!

Our second (and last) semester of HCJ begins by introducing us into the new texts we'll be looking at until the end of this year...

Our first media text was the movie Network, inspiring and shocking at the same time and with a great script as well as screenplay.
Besides the wonderful performance by William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall and others... or a great story, there is a more important philosophical value with a clear accusation to society and the way it works.

The way in which we are targeted by TV and become complete slaves of their manipulation and their never ending scheme of deceiving information and censored content is a topic that very few people have dared to argue.

The first time I heard of Network was when I saw the conspiracy theorists favourite movie, Zeitgeist which repeatedly showed footage of Peter Finch criticising the way the corporate media worked and moving people with his charisma. After I saw the movie I realised there was some sort of outcry of truth behind Sidney Lumet's work...
many questions were raised regarding the influence of the TV and the information we receive, the way our individuality is constantly jeopardised by the way in which we allow systematic manipulation from corporate media.

Some of my favourite scenes include one of the scenes we saw in the lecture when Howard Beale (Peter Finch) asks people to get mad and shout out of the window that they are angry and they will not tolerate any longer the conditions they live in.

I thought to myself if we have ever done something like this before? I realised we have done so and actually in the millions. The social networks, blogs, freedom of information in the Internet is full of people that complain and get mad and move people to get even more angry and move other people too.. I realised that the Internet is the modern window by which we are all shouting "I'm mad as hell!"
perhaps one day our conditions will enrage us enough to actually turn our anger into an action that will bring us to prosperity..

Psychoanalisis & Irrationality / L'Age d'Or

We begin this new academic year following an endeavour that we begun the previous one. I'm glad to initiate this year's posts with L'Age d'Or, a 1930 surrealist film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel who wrote the script along with Salvador Dali (a nice touch of picturesque surrealism).

The plot is based around a couple that is in love and constantly has to fight their way through various obstacles imposed by the Church and bourgeois society in general.

Its methodology was, and remains extremely controversial.

The movie is filled with 'aggresive' sexual symbolics and criticism to the Church and a repressed, puritanical society. A 'sensored-since-inception' work of art.

Its provocative content varies from a woman that fellates the toes of a religious statue, a man who repeatedly shoots his own son with a shotgun (several times after his death) or kicks a dog several feet up in the air for no reason, to a final scene narrating an orgy similar to Marquis de Sede's 1785 novel '120 days of Sodom' in which a Jesus like character involved in this 'deplorable' situation.

Analysis:

Clearly a shocking work of the 7th art, most certainly deserved its censorship in 1930 and its fairly criticised now. I do not personally believe in censorship, however the 30s did not remotely scrape the new modern liberalism and freedom of speech and literature. Not only the symbolism is violent, but certain scenes themselves that confused the public and outraged the former high-culture, as well as fascist groups that assaulted viewers and destroyed work by the Spanish 'artists' involved.

The repercussions where as severe as anyone would expect.