Popular Culture & Cultural Artifacts
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Popular culture appeals to the public on a basic level, offering images, character, and stories that fit with the prevailing mood and which further reflect a nation's underlying values and predispositions. This process can be seen in a wide variety of popular culture artifacts. Most people would see movies, popular music, and television as elements of popular culture, while they might fail to note the equally important role of such things as advertising and even political discourse which borrows from popular culture for imagery and associations--George Bush saying "Go ahead--make my day," for instance. The power of popular culture can be seen in the concerns often raised about certain types of expression, notably that involving sexual material or violence, and the belief that repetition of such things as violent images in popular culture leads to violent behavior by viewers. In a broader sense, popular culture both reflects prevailing attitudes in society and shapes those attitudes for the future. The makers of popular culture are aware of the issues raised by such a reality, and popular culture is often self-reflexive, meaning that it examines itself and its effects even as it produces those effects in a social setting. Popular culture also examines the wider issue of cultural conflict which is prevalent in a diverse society such as that of America, and this sort of examination again takes place in a reflexive way because many of the makers of popular cu
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s the viewer in determining what is subjective, what is objective, what is true, and what may be false. It also raises ethical issues concerning itself as an approach and specifically concerning elements such as its use of actors, its narration, or the involvement of its filmmaker in the action itself.
THE REFLEXIVE MODE AND NARRATIVE
Andre Bazin suggests that a film should represent reality as closely as possible following a mimetic theory of art, or a theory of imitation in art. Bazin is emphasizing film as realism, but a more expressive theory developed in the view of film as exploring issues of reflexivity. Reflexivity is defined by Thompson and Bordwell as follows: "A tendency, characteristic of cinematic modernism, to call attention to the fact that the film is an artifact or an illusion" (Thompson and Bordwell 823). Such an approach is self-conscious and self-referential, looking at the film experience from both the outside and the inside at the same time. The film remains mimetic in that it is a photographic account which seems to take place in the real world and to present images from reality, but the attitude taken by the filmmaker draws attention to the fact that this is a film, that the filmmaker has selected
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4067
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)
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