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 You will use this site to post your reading responses. Please include your name and include "core" in the title for your five core posts.




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Sierra Dague Supplemental Response 4

While the Oscars occurred several weeks ago, I highly recommend watching the Last Repair Shop, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film. Ben Proudfoot, an USC alumni, co-directed it. The film is only around 45 minutes long and focuses on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s free musical instrument repair shop for its students, one of the last in the nation. Rather than documenting the process of repairing the instruments, however, it records the life stories of some of the workers. They explain the life events that led to them getting the job, the importance of their work, and include student testimonials.  I bring this up now because I'm an intern for LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin. I had the fantastic opportunity to tour the Last Repair Shop and meet the people in the documentary (one of whom knew Elvis!). It was incredible to see the documentary’s success in raising awareness and funds to keep the shop open, which is highly necessary. Back in 2003 there ...
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Pau Brunet – Core Post #3

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As we have seen in class, separating movie stars and, by extension, television and music from their socio-economic significance is almost impossible. Stars exist because of economic production systems and political ideology mechanisms that need them. In his article "Articulating Stardom," Barry King delves into the "political economy" behind celebrities in mainstream cinema and television (167). King points out some economic areas in which stardom operates, understanding the notion of economics in this text as "a system of control that mobilizes discursive resources in order to achieve a specificable effect" (167). What I find more interesting in the text is the conflicts around naturalism and the ideas of impersonation and personification.  Beyond ideas of genre, mainstream cinema always tries to make their stories visually believable, and the actor's role is to make a performance that supports that goal. Then, the physicality of the actor becomes the...
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