Panopticism

Discipline and Punish

Michel Foucault

Foucault begins with a description of measures to be taken against the plague in the seventeenth century: partitioning of space and closing off houses, constant inspection and registration. Processes of quarantine and purification operate. The plague is met by order. Lepers were also separated from society, but the aim behind this was to create a pure community. The plague measures aim at a disciplined community. The plague stands as an image against which the idea of discipline was created. The existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring and supervising abnormal beings brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms created by the fear of the plague. All modern mechanisms for controlling abnormal individuals derive from these.

Foucault then discusses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a building with a tower at the center from which it is possible to see each cell in which a prisoner or schoolboy is incarcerated. Visibility is a trap. Each individual is seen but cannot communicate with the warders or other prisoners. The crowd is abolished. The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power. Bentham decreed that power should be visible yet unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower but never knows from where he is being observed.

www.sparknotes.com

Peep Show

ahh!

weird stuff.

Casino Royale

Ignoring the the cheeky advertisements at the end.

The Gaze

December 1997 interview with Terry Gilliam

http://www.smart.co.uk/dreams/tgdecint.htm

Terry Gilliam interview

http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/10/31/terry_gilliam_the_brothers_grimm_interview.shtml

films

Gilliam continued to animate as a member of Monty Python right up through their final original film together, 1983's 'Monty Python's Meaning of Life'. At the same time, he also got more heavily into live action direction (with films like 'Jabberwocky' (1977) and 'Time Bandits' (1981).)

www.digitalmediafx.com/Features/terry-gilliam.html

Storytime (Gilliam, 1968)

Short animation by Monty Python great Terry Gilliam.

Terry's Website

 

  

  

  

  

A little bit about the sillyness

Monty Python's Flying Circus was the totally meaningless name coined for the innovative English comedy troupe comprised of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and the late Graham Chapman. Embraced by the critics and public alike, the team enriched airwaves with their distinctive brand of irreverent and often surreal sketch comedy and satire on BBC-1 from 1969 through 1973 and on BBC-2, without Cleese, for the last few months of 1974. The show offered savage broadsides against the pomposity and repression of the British establishment, outlandish spoofs of European history, knowing satires of leading intellectual and cultural figures, and lots of men in dresses. 

www.intriguing.com

The two shows had a similar, zany feel and Do Not Adjust Your Set was spiced-up further by the inclusion of some hilariously surreal animations by an eccentric young American upstart named Terry Gilliam.
Forming a strong mutual respect, the six decided to team up and work together on 'something new' and with the help of Barry Took (who was then a comedy consultant at the BBC) they were given their own series, famously being told "you can have thirteen shows, but that's it".
Having toyed with several names (including Owl Stretching Time and The Toad Elevating Moment), the group settled on the appropriately bizarre Monty Python's Flying Circus: 'circus' being suggested by the BBC, and Monty Python being envisaged by the team as the perfect name for a sleazy entertainment agent.
Their writing effectively threw away the rulebook of traditional sketch writing, dispensing with punchlines and allowing sketches to blend into each other or simply stop abruptly.

It was a technique already pioneered by Spike Milligan, but the ruthlessly self-critical Pythons mastered it.

Gilliam's unique animation style became crucial, segueing seamlessly between any two completely unrelated ideas and making the stream-of-consciousness work.

 

 

Flying Circus was fortunate too in being broadcast in colour, unlike their previous shows, helping transmit to viewers the Pythons' vibrant, crazy ideas.
The show took a short while to find a fanbase but grew into a phenomenon, so much so that George Harrison claimed the spirit of the Beatles had passed onto Monty Python.
Episodes often had a surreal and barely identifiable theme and the Pythons joyfully weaved sketches throughout every show so viewers had no idea where they would be taken next.

www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/montypython/

 

Proposal

Monty Python - Terry Gilliam

For my essay, i am going to analyze the graphics/visual aesthetic of the illustrations in Monty Python.

Counterculture.
Psychedelic

Linking between the animations and Gilliam's movies.

Mass media - Ideaology

Contemporary politics
Marx Theory

Dessussion about of contempoary political situation Brian or the west
Analysis of mass media and analysis of Marx theory
Its idelogicle dipiction of men and women. The gendering of the roles of men and women that in lots of ways we get coded through the media.
Aim - to get a critical definition of idelogy, mass culture, popular culture.
We are created to a curtain extent, we are made as subjects by the idelogy of the mass media.
One could have an idelogy, and that can mean a system of belief, but marx theory - not only a system of ideas, but a system of ideas that are presented to disuss the real nature of things. the real social imbalance of society. Ideology is asystem of faulse ideas that cover up race or social devisions, blinds us from the real state of the world.
Faulse conciousness.

"IT HAS TO REPRESENT ITS INTREST AS A COMMON INTREST OF MEMBERS OF SOCIETY, TO GIVE ITS IDEAS OF ONE VIEW VERSALITY, AND REPRESENT THE, AS THE ONLY RASSION WE UNVERSALLY VALID ONCE".

System that produces competitiveness, atomization and the ideology that the myth, that is you are hardworking and if you try your best you will get on in society, capitalism claims to be meritocratic and get what they deserve. But we all know this is Bull....

How society in culture determins human behaviour marx argues that there are too many stratas to society there is BASE and SUPER CULTURE.
It is any given time society forces inproduction what things it can make for money, profit and what technologys it has, the amount of workers it has, skills that society has and in the base there also existing relations that goven peoples lies and actions. such as
Employer - Employee

We as designers exists in this superstructure but marx would argue even though we are making somethings thats purly creative purely cultural, purly in the superstructure thats constanty informed by our place in the base, to our existance our relations of production, relation to my class and the upperclass.

The media is an ideological state apparatus. The media is about protecting and deseminating the ideas and interests of the ruling class.

Economic
Legal, political institutions also forms of understanding the world, ways of thinking, ways of seeing legally influenced by ideology's and ideology.