1,720,971 research outputs found
Doctor Who and History: Critical Essays on Imagining the Past
No full textFifty years after its initial transmission on the BBC, Doctor Who has become part of the cultural history of Britain itself, and its many stories have played out across the medium of television, audio plays and books. Whether set in the past or populated with the inevitable bug-eyed monsters, these adventures in time and space have engaged with important contemporary and historical issues and events. While many recent publications have celebrated the show’s longevity, or reflected on the program as a product of the bbC as british institution, Doctor Who and History is the first volume of essays to focus on the topic of history as it is expressed thematically in the show itself, as well as how its program-makers and audience are situated within that history. the diverse essays here promote a scholarly and inter-disciplinary approach, exploring how Doctor Who reflects on and contributes to notions of history
Journeys through Cathay: Remediation and Televisuality in “Marco Polo”
No full textThis essay considers Doctor Who’s depiction of “Marco Polo,” the fourth serial in the show’s history and the first “lost” one, and explores the decision to present the story of the Doctor and his companions as observers in the company of, and through the narrative focus upon, the explorer Marco Polo in China, asking after the historical process of remediation in piecing together how audiences adapt and retell the story through different media. the essay asks how fan reconstructions use media as an immersive tool in re-experiencing television nostalgically or alternatively to wake viewers to how media shapes historical content and, indeed, memory of missing stories
Black Archive: Marco Polo
Full text link'How long have you been travelling? It is twelve hundred and eighty nine and this is the Plain of Pamir, known to those who travel to Cathay as The Roof of the World.'
Marco Polo was broadcast during an era of cultural change, reshaping television’s role as historian, and locating the reader, not the author, at the center of interpretation. This is crucial given how the fourth serial recruits the viewer as a fellow traveller in Marco’s caravan.
The epic journey is staged through camera-treatments and mobility, adaptive and remedial interventions, public and book history, cultural assumptions and memories. Rather than the solitary authorial figure of Marco, this book celebrates the collaborators, copyists, studio personnel and fans, whose community storytelling is in the philosophical spirit of Doctor Who.
The author investigates several threads while keeping to the rhythm of the travelogue, exploiting how the exhaustive televisual experience inverts the trope of time travel. His book is itself a wayfaring reflection on how we travel through media and memory in reconstructing this most famous and earliest of missing stories
Materialising Meaning(s): Fans, Fashions and the Twelfth Doctor
No full text‘Kidneys… I’ve got new kidneys. I don’t like the colour.’ So says the regenerated Doctor at the climax to Season 7. While he was necessarily frugal with his words, his wardrobe, revealed by the BBC just a month later, was somewhat more voluble. Costume is a ‘speech act’ (Austin 1962, Derrida 1988 and Butler 1990) a ‘declaratory’ mark that here announces Peter Capaldi’s Doctor so far ahead of Season 8 we must assume the mark to exemplify Derrida’s notion of différance(1988), to profit, that is, from the discursive hiatus between authorship and reception. This paper examines the Doctor’s costume as having to speak across this gap via divergent systems of meaning production, from authorship through to appropriation by fans and consumers, and finally as feedback to the official producer. I draw on relationships between fan creativity and the bricoleur writing of both the classic and new series, acknowledging the significance of the programme reliance on intertextuality and the transmedia setting. These are not only useful storytelling strategies, they are also a challenge to the notion of ‘the author,’ one who has original thoughts which then trickle-down to the audience, as well as being amenable to the notion of audience agency, from whom ideas might plausibly bubble-up or trickle-across (see King, 1963). [...] The vulnerability of the mark is both a performative opportunity for fans, consumers and cos-players, and a potentially productive one in terms of the programme and franchise
Transition transmission: media, seriality and the Bowie-Newton matrix
Full text linkThe character Thomas Jerome Newton survives the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg 1976) to appear in adaptations, music videos and the play Lazarus (2015). Like David Bowie he can be understood as a serial figure, one who exists as a series across media. The notion of Bowie as changeling resonates with popular culture’s preoccupation with identity and a common trope of biographies in reading his music, film and art, yet there has been little attempt to acknowledge recursive themes and patterns or explore his identity as serially instantiated through and across media or read his story through a transmedia lens. Working with the concepts of performance theory and performativity, celebrity, media communications, actor-network theory and seriality, I ask about Bowie’s agency as medium for ‘his’ characters, a conceit made possible via McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message (1999) and indeed, Bowie’s own suggestion that he ‘is the medium for a conglomerate of statements and illusions’. Drawing particular attention to the figuration of Bowie-watching-Newton-watching (after a sequence in Roeg’s film), I pursue the notion of a Bowie-Newton matrix, and speculate on the dispersed agencies – of author/actor, character, and studious viewer – behind Newton’s resurrection
Between Sound and Vision: Low and Sense
No full textThis chapter considers how we experience Low and how the sense we make of it is haunted by the historical tripartition of composer/performer/listener, figures which territorialize and marshal music. In the artwork to Low, this hierarchy has collapsed into the virtual figure of Bowie-Newton, a superimposed spectre which threatens both to materialize each discreet monadic position and dissolve them into a nomadic force, one that’s visuality confounds the ‘listening ear’, that legacy of music training and writing. To subvert these figures and uproot the essentialist representational doxa on which they depend, I turn to Deleuze and concepts amenable to experiencing the album as a sense-flow, one that connects and confuses sense and through which Bowie’s ear becomes a shell from a strange beach: we place it to our ears to be invited inside-out, to become as a sound-body assemblage
An adventure in English Space and Time: Sound as Experience in Doctor Who
No full textMad Dogs and Englishness connects English popular music with questions about English national identities, featuring essays that range across Bowie and Burial, PJ Harvey, Bishi and Tricky. The later years of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in cultural and political meanings of Englishness in ways that continue to resonate now. Pop music is simultaneously on the outside and inside of the ensuing debates. It can be used as a mode of commentary about how meanings of Englishness circulate socially. But it also produces those meanings, often underwriting claims about English national cultural distinctiveness and superiority. This book's expert contributors use trans-national and trans-disciplinary perspectives to provide historical and contemporary commentaries about pop's complex relationships with Englishness. Each chapter is based on original research, and the essays comprise the best single volume available on pop and the English imaginary
The Big Shave: Fashions In Modern Male Facial Hair
No full textThe everyday repetition of the shaving ritual makes it an important site for the cultural production of masculinity. Examining the rhetoric deployed to promote men’s shaving products makes visible different modes of masculinity, such as traditional and modern, as well as the discourses surrounding face hair, hygiene and imagined perils to the social and material body. Such an approach has implications for ‘performativity’, Butler’s (1990) theory that gender is something we do, rather than something we are [...] since it places the emphasis on the negotiation of gendered identity, therefore allowing for more nuanced accounts of power and individual agency. For example, the exploitation of a diverse range of masculinities by advertisers gives male consumers the opportunity to dwell on contradictions in performance. All the same, men’s consumer negotiations occur within a highly regulated social and symbolic framework predisposed to particular manifestations of masculinity. Indeed the cultural regulation of facial hair may be seen as an attempt to rein in the persistent materiality, or ‘nature’, of the socially-significant body
Adventures in English Time and Space: Sound as Experience in Doctor Who ‘An Unearthly Child’
No full textThis paper focuses on the music and sound effects of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop for the first episode of Doctor Who, now commonly referred to as An Unearthly Child (first transmitted November, 1963). The programme’s musical effects support its visual landscaping in helping to create a grammar of strange-familiarity that both evokes the timespace of 1963-London as well as subverts it. This timespace is already mediated through the ‘common myths and historical memories’ of England (Smith 1991) and John Reith’s high-minded broadcasting values (Crisell, 1997). Yet the auditory unsettles these ideological frames by submerging the listener into an encounter where the excess and instability of timespace exhorts the listener to think difference and becoming (Deleuze 1987). I partly commit to an approach that sees sound as a referral mechanism to notions of site-specificity and narrative-timespace, underlining the importance of incidental music as prompting emotional connections to the narrative, visual iconography and setting of the programme [...] But I also hijack this approach by promoting the validity of the phenomenological response [see for example Voegelin, 2011]... [The] hiatus between listening and viewing Doctor Who, at the very least, reorders the conventional sense hierarchy and demands we re-evaluate the significance of aural perception. The resulting partnership of seeing and (a heightened agency in) listening, signifies in the context of Doctor Who, I argue, an unstable code of Englishness that is always materialising and dematerialising: one that is immediately recognisably conservative and yet discordant, jarring, over-whelming and pointing to a new paradigm for identity construction
‘Skull designs upon my shoes’: David Bowie Fans in the Media Mirror
No full textThe day Stephen Shapiro’s photographic study Bowie (2016) was published, I hastily took a snap to promote my good taste on social media. My phone’s camera spilled light across Shapiro’s beautiful cover, trapping my own reflection, a dark shape that by chance aligned perfectly with the shadow of Bowie cast by professional lighting. The serendipity became clear later that day as I wrote this proposal deliberating on the uncanny “anti-narcissistic form of self-reflection” (Boym, 2001) that media offers fans. Fan Studies vacillates between theorising fans as media-consumers (Sandvoss, 2005), active users (Duffett, 2013) and projecting identity onto it (Gee, 2003) tending to frame the interaction around an active/passive reader dynamic (per Barthes, 1998). However, my aim is to identify and explore media as reflecting back the image of the fan at the moment of their most enchanted engagement with the fan object.
I begin by outlining the concepts of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000) and seriality (repetition-with-variation or difference as per Deleuze 1994 and différance Derrida 1982) seeing Bowie as both mediated and media. This conceit is made possible via McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message (1999) and, tangentially, through Colin Wilson’s claim that Bowie is a medium (Blanks, 2016). I then identify how Bowie-related media function as memory sites, looking at media-specific monuments as well as intermedial and remedial morphing between music papers, film, records and fan interactions.
Finally, I explore the notion of media-as-mirror, one developed from Holmes’ observation of photography as “the mirror with a memory” (quoted in Ruchatz, 2010), Holdsworth’s account of domestic television as a black mirror (2011), and my own work on fan memories as augmented by intersensual listening experiences with Bowie (October, 2015b). The character of Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg, 1976) is a cipher for these ideas, glancing ‘himself’ differently through multiple television screens (October, 2015a) and re-emerging as Lazarus (2016). That Bowie could not let go of this character is evidenced by Shapiro’s photographic remediation of the film, and through fan reflection, one that engenders further reflections and serialit
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