by rogerco on Sat 4th Nov 2023

An Unstirred Mixture

Full review

The archive footage used to illustrate was fascinating but the film didn't really give a clear exposition of what its subject was about - unless it is true that he was just a confused intellectual thinker. Much of his talking head seemed to be spouting high sounding high falutng ideas that were not very clear.

Cultural Studies seems to me now to have been a middle class construct (I somewhat dipped into that stuff as a young man) that didn't really produce any understanding of the sub-culures that merge together to create our society's overall cultural identity.

For me it is more like lixing different colours of pain in a pot - when you add a new colour at first it maintains its identity as swirls and lines in the body of paint but as it gets strirred or shaken it merges in to adjust the overall tone. Hall, and cultural studies ingeneral, seemed to be more about trying to keep the mixture separated.