LITERATURE REVIEW

This essay primarily draws on Baudrillard’s discussion of hyperreality and simulation theory in discussing the current cultural condition. While Baudrillard discusses what hyperreality is, his writing lacks a coherent analytical system that can describe how signs, simulacra and simulations function. His four levels of simulation grant perspective on the relationship between signs and reality but offer no kind of vocabulary that examine how these mechanisms operate. Baudrillard tells us we may be in the third or fourth stage of simulation but cannot explain the specific components that produces artificial yet coherent media pieces.

Fisher’s hauntology does effectively describe a cultural condition where what is imaginable is occupied by capitalism, therefore the media that is made acts as temporal paralysis – nostalgia emerging as a stabilising force. While Fisher’s writing accurately describes the sense that the future has been ‘cancelled’, yet his writing often remains atmospheric. Using the language of cinema and montage, Fisher’s writing becomes less of a description and more of an analytical tool in dissecting contemporary hyperreality.

Within film studies, montage theory - mainly Eisenstein, Murch and Kuleshov in this dissertation - has largely been reserved for the analysis of cinema. While theorists have been able to create a coherent vocabulary that explains how editing and montage creates meaning, continuity and a cut temporal experiences, these frameworks have rarely been extended to analyse broader cultural reality beyond films.

In extending the frameworks outlined by films’ theorists, this essay looks at Colomina’s architectural theory which argues that modern buildings are primarily media objects rather than functional buildings. Yet, even in her discussions, where she outlines how the modern building is designed for image capture, windows act as viewfinders to frame individuals, she does not connect this explicitly to cinema.

This dissertation seeks to fill this research gap – existing writing describes hyperreality but lacks a formal framework in analysing its construction. Perhaps this is impossible – hyperreality is inherently a kind of inexplicable, information-saturated system, but on a case-by-case system ‘the cut’ as a metaphor for thresholds, breaks, juxtapositions, becomes an analytical tool that discovers how hyperreality is constructed. Where Baudrillard gives us stages of simulation, montage theory reveals the editing operations. Where Fisher identifies temporal stagnation, cutting logic explains the temporal mechanism. The cut offers:

• Vocabulary for types of cuts (parallelism, synchronism, juxtaposition etc.)
• Framework for analysing constructed continuity
• Method for examining thresholds and transitions
• Precision that "simulation" or “nostalgia” lacks