Saturday, November 11, 2017
The screen is magical though enslaving too
MARSHALL McLUHAN, THE PROPHET OF ALL SCREEN MANIPULATIONS
THE SHADOW IS INSIDE THE LIGHT
CINEMA AND TELEVISION
Published Research (March 2013 to today) & Reviews (February 2 to December 18, 2016)
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Published on Jan 1, 2017
To speak of TV series and TV or cinema films makes us veterans of some cultural war against the impossibility to live in real life the fantastic adventures we may, might, should live and experience in films and series.
Can we be what we are not?
Can we be one of the two Winchester brothers? Can we be both? Can we onanistically experience their brotherly love and empathize with it?
Can we be Dexter or his sister or his brother?
Films and series are not cathartic. They are mesmerizing, but in two different ways if we consider TV versus cinema.
With television, we have to get an all-sensorial experience common to all the people watching at the same time. You project yourself into the situation and eventually the characters to share the same emotions and sensations as everyone else. Television is making us unanimous in our diversity that is negated and pushed aside. Television is a supremacist medium: you like what you see or you zap it.
If we consider the cinema we are locked up in a dark room, maybe with many people but you do not see them, you don’t even hear them or smell them. You are alone in front of the film and you have to enter it in a way or another. You can step back for five minutes to ponder about the characters, the situations, the appeal or the repulsion you feel mounting in you, the fear or the empathy. You are alone with your culture and your mind in front of this world on the screen.
The two media are not equal as for our experience of what we see.
We could also wonder if series are the same as films. And series can be in fact one story in serial form or a series of successive independent stories. A film is always one even if it is in two parts or in three parts. Even the serials in the cinema in the old days, one episode every week. The next episode was always starting where the previous episode had stopped and it had stopped with a cliff-hanging situation, tied up on the rails and the train arriving and “CUT” just when the wheels are about two meters away from your neck. And next week, there we start all over again. And we feel relieved because the cliff-hanging situation appears to be as flat as a plain and as peaceful as a spring afternoon with nice sunshine and a cool soft breeze.
So just enjoy films, series, television, cinema and all screens you can imagine.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU, November 11, 2017
Cinema and television have become obsessions in me over the years and today with the large flat screen we have, with a universal, all zone and all standard DVD reader we can access all the films that are available in the whole world on a digital medium.
In the following pages, which are more a book than a paper, I have brought together all the full studies published at Amazon Kindle or on Academia.edu (these studies are extensive and I only give the presentation and the front page of them. Then I have collected all the reviews published on various sites, particularly various Amazon national branches over about the last eleven months.
Be sure I also have plenty of music, operas, books and other cultural artifacts in the field of research and reviews (I just finished a 13,000 word article on Benjamin Britten’s operas), plus creative writing (the latest poetry volume is An Untellable Story, A Dramatic Confession, The Nineteen stations of Saraphic Love, Amazon Kindle, ASIN B00UP4CX88) and at the same time I go on with my basic research on the phylogeny of language with Homo Sapiens over the last 250,000 years, plus the psychogenetics of language in our modern world from before birth to adult age.
For you to be able to find what is in this volume I have built a full table of contents with hyperlinks. Have a good navigation.
Olliergues, France, December 22, 2016
They tell us there is no escape from all the screens that are going to invade our life and environment and be sure if there is some money to make out of this new slavery they will impose it onto us. We are their guinea pigs and mules and we will cultivate their cotton fields while they crack their whips on well-tempered airs and on our backs if need be.
Imagine the world in ten years when screens are everywhere:
From the screen(s) in our bedroom when we are woken up by the clocking in alarm;
To the screens in our bathroom to tell us to wash properly behind our ears;
To the screens in our kitchen mixing our cereals with milk, sour or not for breakfast;
To the screens in our cars or our buses or our subway trains to go to work;
To the screens at our workplace, everywhere including the toilets to entertain us with live music canned inside a screen,
To the same as in the morning when going back home in our cars, in our buses, in our subway trains, in the streets too;
To the screens in our home for supper and for television in the evening and in the bathroom to make sure we brush our teeth on the proper rhythm;
To our bedroom till we go to sleep and yet still going on all night to make sure we learn our lesson properly.
Good morning at all hours in the day not to Big Brother but to Big Regressive and Repressive Womb with a screen all the time there like an umbilical cord that feeds us our submissive sauce, drug, morphine, etc.
What’s more all these screens can be eyes and they look at you, at your face, at your eyes and they know everything about you, even the type of porn you watch in secrecy and in privacy, and even the one you dream of in your mental closet, and they can satisfy on the screen in your glasses or on the screen on the microchips embedded in your brain anything you have wanted to see and had never dared ask Mum, Dad, your teachers, the local cops, your bosses, your priests, your friends and even your MPs.
That’s why it is high time we start becoming screen-literate and we learn how to analyze the messages, decipher the shackles they contain and liberate our brains and minds from the gladiator’s net they are throwing onto us to keep us prisoners in that dungeon of multimedia screened slavery.
I dedicate this long collection of views and reviews to those who maybe still want to dream of a world that the screens could not control, and particularly my friends Ivan, Serban, Michel, José, Maïté, Paula and a few others who may know what is coming. If we can’t avoid this inescapable, at least let us learn how to tame it, maybe control it. Catch the elephant by the Trump and look into its eyes and maybe we might be permitted to mesmerize it.
Dr. Jacques Coulardeau, Olliergues, February 14, 2017
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:17 PM 
