111-256/356 The Entertainment Experience: Cross-Media Forms and Interactive Technologies

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Subject Description:

'The Entertainment Experience' will look at the interconnection that exists between various entertainment industries. Students will be required to look at the emergence and significance of various entertainment vehicles which dominate mainstream cinema (e.g. blockbusters, spectacle, action films, special effects etc.). The implications behind the cross over that exists between the film, television, comic, and computer game industries will also be explored. Students will also be expected to evaluate critical and theoretical frameworks which may be applied in response to the altering shape of entertainment structures, particularly issues centring around questions of realism, narrativity, spectatorship and audience reception. These will be explored in response to: the central role played by new technologies and science fiction on film narratives; the science fictional nature of the film medium; computer games and the collapse of the linear narrative flow; the applicability of film spectatorship/identification theories in relation to these more interactive media forms; and gender, performance and spectatorship within the sphere of interactive technologies.

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Prescribed Texts:

• Hayward P Wollen T (eds), Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, British Film Institute, London 1993.
• Landon B, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction in the Age of (Re)production, Greenwood Press, London and Connecticut 1992.