scholarly journals The Demonization of a Rock Musician’s Image in Western Cinema

2021 ◽  
pp. 344-365
Author(s):  
V.D. Evallyo ◽  

In this article, attention is mainly focused on the images of musicians with supernormal abilities in Western cinema, their recognizable external and behavioral features, which are largely a clichéd perception of one or another stylistic of rock music. Why do the images of rock musicians fit so well into the visual structure? First of all, this is the high potential of the represented stories for multilevel decryption. The interest of mass culture in the field of rock music is characterized by many criteria, and not least of all associated with the carnival, mystical elements of concert activity; detective elements, and existential twists and turns. The clichéd motives of protest do not coincide with everyday life or do not directly correlate with it, but it is precisely the struggle that becomes in demand among the audience. It is symptomatic that rock musicians appear in many films in the images of Others, endowed with superpowers. Different myths are intertwined, and transformations and demonic forces are initially regarded as something unrighteous, but it is to the au- dience’s judgment that options are presented in assessing the Others and their fate. The author examines in detail a number of characters of rock musicians who appear in many films in the images of Others, supreme beings. This kind of character assumes the individual assessments of ethical principles inherent to this or that superhero.

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatsiana Astrouskaya ◽  
Anton Liavitski

The scope and content of public debate in the USSR increased radically with the onset of perestroika. The ‘new thinking’ introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sought to embrace both societal organisation and the individual set of values. This change in political organisation made broad public discussion possible, centring on change as well as the means leading to it. Culture happened to be at the very epicentre of this debate, as it lay at the intersection of collective and private. Socialist culture claimed to be an intrinsically ‘serious’, ‘genuine’ culture setting itself against the ‘trivial’ and ‘superficial’ bourgeois culture of the West. The CPSU used socialist realism to promote and encourage monumental genres in literature (novel and poem), music (symphony), art and architecture. The late 1980s challenged the established notion of culture. In the BSSR (Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic), the younger generation of intellectuals (for the main part literati) explored previously neglected genres of mass culture such as the comic, detective novel, erotica, and rock music, thus questioning the ‘sacred’ status of literature and art. Simultaneously, they pushed the boundaries between the local and the global (looking for worldwide connections with Belarusian culture), past and present (rehabilitating authors and ideas rejected by Soviet censorship). Such semantic processes were coincident with a material turn. A group of intellectuals arose willing to invest personal time and finances into projects that prompted a revolution in the field of culture. Individual efforts had a cumulative effect, in one way or another requiring the re-distribution of public resources: for example, the publishing plans of the state publishing houses, the thematic scope and structure of academic research, school and university education. Considering these two aspects of structural change and relying on publications in the leading intellectual journal of the time, this paper seeks to grasp the features of this structural change. Staying away from teleological, lineal interpretations, we emphasize the discrepancy, contradiction and multilayering of the structural change as understood by Foucault and Skinner. The third concern of the article is the grip of the old language structures with the new discursive reality of perestroika.


2019 ◽  
pp. 22-29
Author(s):  
Н. В. Фрадкіна

The purpose and tasks of the work are to analyze the contemporary Ukrainian mass culture in terms of its value and humanistic components, as well as the importance of cultural studies and Ukrainian studies in educational disciplines for the formation of a holistic worldview of modern youth.Analysis of research and publications. Scientists repeatedly turned to the problems of the role of spirituality in the formation of society and its culture. This problem is highlighted in the publications by O. Losev, V. Lytvyn, D. Likhachev, S. Avierintsev, M. Zakovych, I. Stepanenko and E. Kostyshyn.Experts see the main negative impact of mass culture on the quality approach, which determines mass culture through the market, because mass culture, from our point of view, is everything that is sold and used in mass demand.One of the most interesting studies on this issue was the work by the representatives of Frankfurt School M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno «Dialectics of Enlightenment» (1947), devoted to a detailed analysis of mass culture. Propaganda at all socio-cultural levels in the form is similar in both totalitarian and democratic countries. It is connected, according to the authors, with the direction of European enlightenment. The tendency to unify people is a manifestation of the influence of mass culture, from cinema to pop. Mass culture is a phenomenon whose existence is associated with commerce (accumulation in any form – this is the main feature of education), in general, the fact that it exists in this form is related to the direction of the history of civilization.Modern mass culture, with its externally attractive and easily assimilated ideas and symbols, appealing to the trends of modern fashion, becomes a standard of prestigious consumption, does not require intense reflection, allows you to relax, distract, not teach, but entertains, preaches hedonism as the main spiritual value. And as a consequence, there are socio-cultural risks: an active rejection of other people, which leads to the formation of indifference; cruelty as a character trait; increase of violent and mercenary crime; increase in the number of alcohol and drug addicts; anti-patriotism; indifference to the values of the family and as a result of social orphanhood and prostitution.Conclusions, perspectives of research. Thus, we can conclude that modern Ukrainian education is predominantly formed by the values of mass culture. Namely, according to the «Dialectic» by Horkheimer and Adorno, «semi-enlightenment becomes an objective spirit» of our modern society.It is concluded that only high-quality education can create the opposite of the onset of mass culture and the destruction of spirituality in our society. It is proved that only by realizing the importance of cultivating disciplines in the educational process and the spiritual upbringing of the nation, through educational reforms, humanitarian knowledge will gradually return to student audiences.Formation of youth occurs under the influence of social environment, culture, education and self-education. The optimal combination of these factors determines both the process of socialization itself and how successful it will be. In this context, one can see the leading role of education and upbringing. It turns out that the main task of modern education is to spread its influence on the development of spiritual culture of the individual, which eventually becomes a solid foundation for the formation of the individual. Such a subject requires both philosophical and humanitarian approaches in further integrated interdisciplinary research, since the availability of such research will provide the theoretical foundation for truly modern educational and personal development.


Author(s):  
Pavlov B.S. ◽  
Sentyurina L.B. ◽  
Pronina E.I. ◽  
Pavlov D.B. ◽  
Saraikin D.A.

The state policy of health preservation of Russians and the process of introducing a healthy lifestyle into their everyday life is hampered by the lack of sufficient self-activity and purposefulness of the individual ecological and valeological behavior of representatives of various population groups. According to the authors of the article, one of the important indicators of the maturity of professional and labor competencies of school and student youth is their readiness and desire for permanent self-preserving behavior. “With numbers in hand,” the authors show the scale of deviant deviations and the phenomena of spontaneous irresponsibility in the educational and leisure activities of students, hindering the preservation and development of physical culture, the accumulation and effective use of their psychophysiological and labor potential. The conclusions of the proposal of the authors of the article are based on the results of a number of sociological surveys conducted in 2000-2020. at the Institute of Economics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in a number of secondary schools and universities of the Ural and Volga Federal Districts.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-52
Author(s):  
Hamid Mavani

The adoption of the Mu`tazili school of “rationalist” theology and the institution of ijtihad enabled Shi`i legal theory to exhibit vibrancy and made it adaptable to changing contingencies and circumstances. But because Shi`i jurists did not face the challenge of governing a state, their juridical focus and orientation remained fixated on resolving issues confronting the laity or their followers (muqallid) at a personal level and did not provide an ethical framework for the ijtihad process. The establishment of a Shi`i state in Iran in 1979, which forced them to tackle social, political, economic, educational, and cultural issues, demanded a change in orientation – away from the individual and toward society as the unit of analysis vis-à-vis ijtihad. They marshaled various methods, legal devices, and strategies to address contemporary social issues in order to provide pragmatic guidance to the citizens that would be in conformity with the moral and ethical principles laid out in the revelatory sources. This paper examines the writings of Ayatullahs Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Muhammad Mahdi Shamsuddin, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlullah, and Ruhullah Musavi al-Khomeini and studies this phenomenon of change from individual-oriented ijtihad to society-oriented ijtihad.


Author(s):  
O. I. POPOVA ◽  
◽  
A. S. LESYK ◽  

The article emphasizes that the world around us sets its own requirements for the ability of a junior student to adapt to it, to his tolerant willingness to build constructive relationships with others. In reading lessons, which aim, among other things, to form the values of primary school students, they learn to choose an individual way of self-presentation, behavior and communication. The task of the teacher is to teach to observe life, to notice human kindness, sacrifice, courage, as well as heartlessness, cruelty, indifference. Hence the signs of a tolerant personality, such as patience, indulgence, tolerance for differences, kindness, the ability to listen to others, not to judge others, to take their position, the ability to empathize, humanism. The updated content of literary material, which comprehensively covers the sphere of interests of junior schoolchildren, its emotionality, novelty, decoration, interesting forms and methods of working with texts of works and children's books with preference to problematic, creative tasks should convince students that fiction is a special kind of art, and reading – a special, unique means of satisfying cognitive interests, knowledge of the world and self-knowledge, which can not be replaced by any other means of mass culture. In the process of experimental learning, we tried to design and implement such types of educational activities of students, which contributed to the formation of tolerance in them as the most important value of the individual. After analyzing some aspects of updating the content and methodology of reading lessons in primary school in the context of implementing the ideas of tolerant education, we note that the new textbooks and manuals for extracurricular reading contain many texts with the potential for educating this quality of personality. actions of characters; to feel the state of another person, to make a moral choice. Key words: formation of tolerance in junior schoolchildren, reading lessons, educational potential of reading lessons, formation of personality of junior schoolchildren.


Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.


Author(s):  
Tine Damsholt

The article deals with questions of subjectivation. The emotional bonds between a landscape and the individual as interpreted in Danish patriotic songs from the 19th-century are seen as crucial in the process of subjectivation turning the Danish population into a patriotic or selfconscious people. In the songs the sensing self is turned into a Danish self, an individual subject but part of a certain landscape, history and nation. Furthermore the Danish folkhigh-schools are seen as institutions of subject-ivation, since singing patriotic songs here became a natural part of everyday life. In the light of the Foucauldian perspective the emotional and bodily experiences at the folk-highschools (often staged outdoors in the Danish landscape) are interpreted as "technologies of the national self", since it is precisely via individuals’ work with themselves that the national subjectivation takes place.  


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thangbiakching ◽  
Dr. Eric Soreng

Grace, in the Christian understanding, is the unconditional love, the free, and undeserved favor of God. Grace, in this context, is not of man, but of the Divine through which the knowledge of truth is gained— truth that surpasses man’s natural knowledge and experience; by which the soul is likened to the Divine. In this paper, an attempt is made to decipher (through phenomenological inquiry) the experience of grace in the life of a middle-aged individual and how it provide resilience in the functioning of ones’ everyday life. The paper also discusses the possibility of the essential nature of the experience of Gods’ grace as it look into the subjective experience of the individual.


Author(s):  
Richard Rechtman

Veena Das has introduced a major shift in our contemporary conception of ethnography. While she brings forward a new way of looking at everyday life, which is already a major achievement, she also offers a conceptual resolution to a classical unresolved opposition between the individual and the collective, and between idiosyncratic psychology (subjectivity) and collective modes of thinking, through a challenging debate on what makes one a member of a group and yet radically distinct from all others. The ethnography in her book Affliction stands on three major pillars: The first is the ethnographer’s subjective position in the field regarding the issues of lives, testimony, and research. The second is the neighborhood as the site of fieldwork, with all of its heterogeneity, rather than the group, such as an ethnic or racial group or one cohering around another criterion of belonging. The third and final pillar is the focus on the ordinary through ethnography of the everyday. I then illustrate Veena Das’s perspective on subjectivity with my own fieldwork with survivors of the Cambodian genocide.


2020 ◽  
pp. 50-54
Author(s):  
M. I. Korobko

The article is an effort to analyze the image of the modern television hero. Who is he? A hero or a villain? The analysis of modern protagonists is given through ethical and film theories. The problem of clarity of moral boundaries is very important in the light of the trend, which popularizes villains as normal people in modern storytelling, moral boundaries are blurring because of attraction of such heroes. According to Chapman scholars, the functions of modern "bad boy" as an architype are: a) bad boys have the strength to give us freedom at the personal and societal levels; b) a bad boy with a critical view of society can emancipate us on both personal and societal levels; c) bad boy's criticism can lead him to become isolated or withdrawn on a personal level or become a leader of resistance and rebellion on a societal level; d) the comedic bad boy parallels the evils of society and can shed a critical light on what is happening, which in turn can express the need for resistance as well as encourage the individual to retreat from social functions and live in an isolated manner. The complexity of people implies the bad boy limitless in determination because the bad boy appears in many shapes. Many modern heroes in movies and tv-shows are morally ambivalent, they combine features of Hero and Trickster archetypes and become bad boys and girls who question the very essence of our world order. Today there are so many characters like this in mass-culture (tv-series, movies and cartoons) because we live in time of the global world crisis and our culture reflects this, our heroes demonstrate us our problems and try to find a solution. And sometimes the classic understanding of morality can't help us and we are trying to solve the problems through immoral actions. Villains are attractive through their rebellion. Today we can't find clarity of moral boundaries in tv-shows. But it's very important. The influence of series and movies on the young generation is enormous. Cinematography in all forms (cinema and television) is very powerful ethical instrument. And it is not just the mirror of human morality but it has a teaching function too.


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