NARRATIVE THEORY #4/MEDIA LANG - Simulacra + Simulations

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

Wiki on Jean Baudrillard:

was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality.

In 1981 he published a book called Simulacra and Simulation, which outlines four stages (from wiki):

1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
2. The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
4. The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

Red Dress In Schindler's List

UPDATE:

Found out that Steve Spielberg got the idea from a film Don't Look Now

...

I have seen the image of something red in black and white in these other formats

• Italian Restaurant in a village close to mine
• Hotel near the school
• Facebook Profile Photo of someone I know (everything black and white apart from shirt)

Depeche Mode - Where's The Revolution




...

...

No mention of the possible simulacra with Schindler's List

Mentioned on the Italian wikipedia.

...

Tracing it back even further, colour correction, or colour tinting as it was called, has been used as early as the 1924 silent film, found out about in this YouTube video about Colour In Storytelling:

...