Piers Britton on Mad Men's visual style, series structure, and Sixties-philiac tendencies, and how the TV series turned its tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness and a preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures into a branding strategy.
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Tags: "Person to Person", 1960s, AMC, Breaking Bad, fashion, Janie Bryant, Mad Men, matthew weiner, media aesthetics, paratexts, television, televisual style
Posted in Perspectives, TV | Comments Off on Style, Structuring Conceits, and the Paratexts of Mad Men
Piers Britton explores questions of representation and issues of authorship and creative control in "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Tags: Age of Ultron, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., authorship, Black Widow, branding, feminism, Joss Whedon, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, media franchise, synergy, The Avengers, Thor, Twitter
Posted in Industry, Perspectives | Comments Off on Black Widow and Whedon Exceptionalism: Accounting for Sexism in Age of Ultron and the MCU
How far are Marvel Studios’ film and television franchises visually coded for homogeneity? How insistently, that is to say, is brand identity maintained at the levels of design, cinematography, editing and post-production processing?
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Tags: Aesthetics, Agent Carter, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Arrow, color, comics, Daredevil, Dark Knight Trilogy, DC Comics, Marvel, Marvel Comics, media aesthetics, Netflix, paratexts, The Flash, The Wire
Posted in Perspectives | 2 Comments »
Piers Britton reflects on the unacknowledged divergences in use of the term “aesthetic” within television studies, and suggests that some of the elisions are leading to unproductive argument.
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Tags: Aesthetics, Mad Men, media aesthetics, Sherlock, television
Posted in Columns, The Aesthetic Turn | 2 Comments »
In this latest entry in The Cultural Lives of Doctor Who series, Piers Britton discusses the use of costume as a marker of authenticity in "The Name of the Doctor" and its many ramifications for Who tradition and canon.
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Tags: authenticity, BBC, Christopher Eccleston, Colin Lavers, costumes, Doctor Who, Howard Burden, James Acheson, John Hurt, Maureen Heneghan, mise-en-scene, Paul McGann, The Day of the Doctor, The Five Doctors, The Name of the Doctor, The Night of the Doctor, The Three Doctors, Time Lord, War Doctor, William Hartnell
Posted in Columns, The Cultural Lives of Doctor Who | Comments Off on The Cultural Lives of Doctor Who: Of Anniversaries and Authenticity, Costumes and Canon
