Researchers have identified many transcultural elements in mass media, especially in popular films. According to the Matrix trilogy director Lilly Wachowski, science fiction, dystopian and fantasy narratives, compared to other mass media, often have “fabulous subtext”. The use of symbols in mass media can be understood through several theories of communication: symbols are an important segment of every communicative process according to Burkart (2002); Noam Chomsky’s concept of generative grammar suggests that all humans have equal capacity for the development of language, which results in similarities among various cultural narratives and symbols. The results of research by Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss show that similar topics and stories occur worldwide, enabling intercultural and interreligious dialogues. The same premise can be applied to films. Film is a mass medium which includes references to different cultures and religions. Films by Darren Aronofsky are especially filled with religious subtext (Davidowicz, 2016). This paper aims to systematically identify and compare religious and transcultural elements by analyzing narratives and visual symbols of the film The Fountain (2006). The methods used include a narratological analysis according to Maša Grdešić (2015) as well as a content analysis of signs and symbols in the film. The method is interdisciplinary, based on communication sciences for the analysis of messages and signs, while also including an approach of cultural and religious studies. The paper has a pragmatic implication for communication sciences. It indicates how film as a mass medium unites different cultural contents and facilitates intercultural and transcultural communication.
This paper investigates how the Chinese film industry exhibits itself as a new media spectacle. In 2002, the Chinese state redefined the film sector as a profit-oriented cultural industry, and it has since experienced rapid growth. Drawing on two decades of industry data, this paper proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework centered on “box office myths,” “urban spaces,” and “aesthetic functions.” First, “box office myths” reveal how high-grossing films balance socialist propaganda with commercial interests while navigating state policies and market dynamics. Second, the film industry reshapes Chinese cities and redefines urban public spaces, where cinematic representations and audience responses collectively articulate traditional culture. Third, the “aesthetic functions” of film can be categorized into three aspects: artistic function, cultural inheritance function, and aesthetic education function. Together, these three aspects constitute the new media spectacle as a composite cultural phenomenon within China’s contemporary film industry.
The late twentieth-century art form Responsive Environments (REs) comprised interrelations between artist, artwork, and audience, wherein response-ability and responsibility to the social and/or physical environment of the artwork could be tangibly evoked. Wherein participants’ collective behavior within an artwork-as-environment serves as a proxy for the cumulative effect of human behavior on the more-than-human environment. As an extreme form of interactive art, behavior within a Responsive Environment, both to fellow human participants and to the installation itself, thus offers an interface to the world. In so doing, this art form offers a particular capacity to address human understanding of self and other at an amoral level that can encompass the scale of the self-other/response-responsibility crises facing contemporary Western society. To articulate what this capacity entails, this article uses theoretical analysis and case studies of Responsive Environments by Allan Kaprow, Myron Krueger, Simon Penny and David Rokeby, to explore the interaction between responsiveness (the motor dimension of interactivity) and responsibility (its moral/social dimension). Such questions of selfhood and otherness, especially as they relate to responsibility, are highly pertinent to current society, where individual responsibility seems invisible, and our sense of engagement with that which is ‘outside’ our personal ‘inside’ seems severely lapsed. Wherein, the article explores how the dynamics of response-ability and responsibility within Responsive Environments actually manifest, in order to untangle where authorial responsibility ends, and the unpredictable act of participatory art begins. Therein, the article re-examines the potential of REs as an important and valuable art form moving into the twenty-first century, drawing on a body of historical artworks whose mechanics reflect some of the most pressing social, cultural, and political conversations needed in a global community facing down the Anthropocene, which apparently has no mechanism for conducting that conversation.
