"Blonde Ambition" Documentary

The artifact is the documentary film Truth or Dare, released in 1991. The subject of the documentary is a tour by rock signer Madonna, a tour called "Blonde Ambition." the film presents portions of this tour in the form of stage performances along with backstage documentary footage, interviews, and on-the-road activities and events of the tour. Different views of the film can be found in different commentators.

Camille Paglia, a professor considered to have an anti-feminist bent, states of Madonna and Truth or Dare:

"Madonna is the true feminist. . . She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism . . . Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny all at the same time (Sobran 32).

Her communication in Truth or Dare thus is seen as having a didactic effect that is socially beneficial.

Another view is that Madonna serves only herself and that the communication in this film does nothing more than challenge whatever the censors among us would not like:

But for Madonna, art is defined by the censors: it's whatever they don't like. So someone who gets the censors howling must be an artist. Silly, but a lot of people agree with her, and they buy tickets. Madonna offers something new under the sun: vicarious selfabsorption. It takes a special kind of imagination to identif

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iticism are act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose, serving as guides in discovering motives. The rhetorical claim is as follows: Madonna through her film Truth or Dare asserts the right of a woman to be individual, daring, and even offensive as a feminist statement leveling the sexual playing field. ANALYSIS Act: The act is the presentation in a film of the backstage life of Madonna on the "Blonde Ambition" tour and some of the performances on that tour. Truth or Dare is a hybrid documentary, utilizing different documentary styles and mixing them with the somewhat different tradition of the concert film. The emphasis in this film is on the backstage life, with the concert material interspersed in a different style than is used for the rest of the film. The filmmaker is not merely observing. He is never visible, but he interacts with the subject of the film, sometimes speaking off-camera, and the subject is herself fully aware of everything that is taking place and who has helped shape the final product through commentary and presumably other input. In Truth or Dare, the filmmaker creates the atmosphere of the cin�ma-verit� in the way the camerawork is handled, in the basic look of the film, and in the overall style

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