Seduction, Performance and Pop Culture

The significance of the medium of film for popular culture is multifaceted and provides numerous points of connection for methods of specific popular culture research. According to Christoph Jacke’s definition, film is part of popular culture because it is part of the “commercialized, societal area” that “industrially produces themes, mediates them on a mass media level, and can be used and further processed with pleasure (as information and entertainment offers) by numerically predominant population groups” (Jacke 2004, p. 21). Film is therefore a medium of mass entertainment that has generated its own media-specific forms of expression and iconographies since its introduction at the end of the 19th century. These include not only different genres (feature film, documentary film, animated film, etc.), but above all the different genres of narrative feature films and the establishment of a studio and star system. Genres and stars are popular mechanisms of the medium to this day and are closely related to a delimitation of popular culture to the area of pop culture, which is defined by the initially music-centered concept of pop music and its effects since the 1950s: However, film also became an expression of pop and rock music (as in the Elvis films of the 1950s), just as pop music has become an integral part of many soundtracks since the New Hollywood cinema (e.g., Easy Rider [1969] by Dennis Hopper). An analysis of popular or pop culture is therefore hardly possible without considering the medium of film. On the other hand, for film analysis, the view of pop culture is often indispensable, so the development of a cross-media analysis method seems particularly important since the modernization of film in the late 1950s.