Clubbed to Death (Lola) Yoland Zauberman 1996

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tLJKyGZpEU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk-KJJfqTTg

When I first saw this film at Chapter Cardiff it reminded me of the old rave days. The music was spot on and the jerky camera angles and movement was real. You feel the crowd. When you look at the club scene you understand it is directed by a woman. She catches the way people interact. Elodie Bouchez's performance of the innocent protagonist stumbling across the Parisian dance scene reflects many first experiences of rave culture. It is gritty and amusing at the same time. The music sound track is a character in itself because of the familiar recognition of the tracks. Its ironic that the tracks have been used in Hollywood films when this film has been forgotten. (Not even available on dvd!)

Research - Reading List

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: 100 Years of the Disc Jockey - Frank Broughton (2006)

Raving '89 - Neville and Gavin Watson (2009)

Night Fever: Club Writing in the "Face", 1980-96 - Richard Benson

Adventures in Wonderland: Decade of Club Culture - Sheryl Garrett (1999)

Lastnightsparty: "Where Were You Last Night?" by Merlin Bronques (2006)

EDMC

Last week I joined Dancecult - Journal of Electronic Dance Music and Culture
http://www.dancecult.net/

Dancecult is is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture. In the next few months I will begin contacting other graduate students and scholars with similar interests to support my study and research.

Photographs, Narratives and Subcultures - A context for Practice based PhD

‘Everything is a self-portrait.’ (Palahniuk, 2000, p132 – 133)

‘To photograph is to violate them (the sitters), by seeing them as they never can see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’ (Sontag, 1977, p81)

‘The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readibility.’ (Sekula, 1982)

‘There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.’ (Goldin,1986, p6)

The contemporary world is continually in motion where new forms of art mediums are on the rise. In recent years artists and writers seem to be experimenting more with embedding photographs within their works of prose fiction and vice versa. As a result, the emergence of multimodal works of art are now reflecting how people experience everyday life, popular culture and the visual media of television and film by producing not just one story line for the reader/viewer to follow but also multiple narratives to analyse through image and words. This marks the increasing need for critical analysis that can manoeuvre such print multiple narratives. For this reason, photo diaries, multimodal texts and popular culture’s influence on them need to be considered in academic discussion in more depth.

Texts that have had a major impact on me

Photographers


Nan Goldin

Corinne Day

Cindy Sherman

Valerie Phillips

Elaine Constantine



Artists

Vanessa Beecroft

Sophie Calle

Tracey Emin

Tamara de Lempicka

Sam Taylor Wood

Tracey Moffatt

Gillian Wearing



Literature

Margaret Atwood – The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin

Angela Carter – Nights at the Circus, Love

Brett Easton Ellis – Less than Zero, Rules of Attraction, Glamorama

Scarlet Thomas – Popco, Bright Young Things,

Douglas Coupland - J-Pod, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Girlfriend in a Coma, Eleanor Rigby,

Ian McEwan – The Cement Garden, Atonement, Enduring love

F Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and damned, Tender is the Night

Tama Janowitz – Slaves of New York, Peyton Amberg, A Certain Age

Rebecca Miller – The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Andre Breton – Nadja

W.G. Sebald – Rings of Saturn

Carol Shields – The Stone Diaries

Jeffrey Eugenides – The Virgin Suicides



Magazines

I-D

The Face

Dazed and Confused



Film

Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary 2002)

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson 2001)

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson 2007)

Rushmore (Wes Anderson 1998)

Timecode (Mike Figgis 2000)

Clubbed to Death (Yolande Zauberman 1996)

Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer 1998)

Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet 2001)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards 1961)

American Beauty (Sam Mendes 1999)

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly 2001)

Juno (Jason Reitman 2007)

Go (Doug Liman 1999)

Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant 1989)

Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 1996)

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie 1998)

My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski 2004)

Atonement (Joe Wright 2007)

Lords of Dogtown (Catherine Hardwicke 2005)

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater 1993)

Kids (Larry Clark 1995)

The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola 1999)

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola 2003)



Plays

Neil LaBute – In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things



Music

Joy Division

Air

Daft Punk

Mylo

Massive Attack

Zero 7

The Shins

Depeche Mode

Sia

Editors

New Order

Beloved

Soul II Soul

Stone Roses

Cocteau Twins

P J Harvey

Leftfield

Groove Armada

Primal Scream

Stars

Goldfrapp

Blondie

The Future Sound of London

Bent



Festivals

The Big Chill Eastnor castle

The Garden Festival Zadar Croatia

Snapshot Fiction - A creative journey through a practice based PhD

My love for photography began when I first picked up a camera at nine years old. Since that first photograph I have been using this medium to create a visual diary of my world. I started by taking photographs of my friends and family. This developed into a more detailed visual record of my life and the world I lived in as I grew older. At university I began creating visual diaries which involved photographs as well as text and various mementoes such as ticket stubs, beer mats, notes etc. The idea of photography embedded with text has always interested me. Through my art work, my personal visual diaries and my work as a Media and Film studies practitioner I have been drawn back time and time again to photographs and narratives.


Books have always been important to me. I read a lot of books for my job and for fun. Although I enjoy a variety of genres I particularly enjoy reading novels that explore popular culture and relationships. I like to read about youth culture and sub cultures. From F Scott Fitzgerald who captured the zeitgeist of the Jazz age and the bright young things to Douglas Coupland who spoke for Generation X. I enjoy the mindless narcisstic hedonism of Brett Easton Ellis' early work - Less than Zero and Rules of Attraction and the cruel gritty realism of Irvine Welsh. Although Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oats, Tama Janowitz and Angela Carter have offered a feminist perspective of women in the last thirty years I feel that there are very few women writers exploring popular culture in the same way as Coupland, Ellis and Welsh. Are there contemporary women writers exploring subcultures and popular culture?

My fascination with media and film texts led me to study journalism film and broadcasting at university. I was mainly interested in modules that explored photography and film that addressed social trends, issues and problems.


The first time I looked at Nan Goldin’s and Corinne Day’s work made me realise my interest in people and in particular subcultures. Her work made sense to me. I understood that the narrative running through her work deals with some of the issues that I want to explore - dancing, flirting, friendship and music. In a similar way to Day and Goldin a very big source of inspiration for me is music. I think underground parties as a subculture is an important and complex social experience that merits further investigation. Photographing subcultures throws new light upon the way in which our lives are constructed, experienced and lived as we head further into the twenty–first century. Goldin’s ballad examines dancing, music, sex, dressing–up and drugs and how each of these aspects feeds into and creates the unique social group, which makes them radically different from other more socially accepted groups.


Underground parties are a profoundly visceral and corporeal phenomenon, it is a leisure activity that allows individuals to shake off their everyday world identity and subsequently recreate their experience of the world. Like Day and Goldin, the tribe or family I am interested also live their lives at the edge of society. My interest in capturing people and the lives they lead has developed as my expertise and knowledge of photography as a medium has grown. This has in part been because of my use of my Canon Rebel EOS and the various compact digital cameras over the years. My interest and understanding of Photography through Foto gallery courses introduced me to a more theoretical understanding of the medium. The courses allowed me to begin to question photographic images and their ambiguous but potent force in the modern consciousness and to consider whether photography is an art or a tool.

To conclude, my journey through my study has ultimately confirmed to me, that photography is a way to explore the world and myself.