A lot of people have assumed this is going to be the most difficult concept to apply, but I don’t think it need be. If you think back to the AS TV Drama exam, when you had to look at the technical codes and how they operate, that was an exercise in applying media language analysis, so for the A2 exam if this one comes up, I’d see it as pretty similar. For moving image, the language of film and television is defined by how camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene create meaning. Likewise an analysis of print work would involve looking at how fonts, layout, combinations of text and image as well as the actual words chosen creates meaning. Useful theory here might beRoland Barthes on semiotics- denotation and connotation and for moving image work Bordwell and Thompson
So what do you do in the exam?
You need to state which project you are using and briefly describe it
You then need to analyse it using whichever concept appears in the question, making reference to relevant theory throughout
Keep being specific in your use of examples from the project.
Hi folks, if you could watch the videos and read the links/slides and then make notes on Representation Theory. Even though this is media language, it's completely linked to representation: http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/downloads/filmanalysis.pdf
Here is a really useful introduction to the overview of Media Representation theory:
It's really worth your while watching this lecture from leading theorist Stuart Hall. It is also interesting to think of who constructs representation of race, gender, politicians etc too. This presentation is very useful as it gives a short synopsis of the dominant critics/theories. It is very important that you try and see if these theories apply to your own production work so far, or if not, how not. It is fine if a theory doesn't apply, but you must articulate and argue why you think it doesn't.
The Male Gaze – Laura Mulvey – Feminist Theory – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema – Written in 1975 The cinema apparatus of Hollywood cinema puts the audience in a masculine subject position with the woman on the screen seen as an object of desire. Film and cinematography are structures upon ideas. Protagonists tended to be men. Mulvey suggests two distinct modes of male gaze – “voyeuristic (women as whores) and fetishistic – women as unreachable madonnas”. (Also narcissistic – women watching film see themselves reflected on the screen). (Film texts: Alien, Jackie Brown).
People who criticise her ideas say that she is ignoring the fact that all genders – male and female want to feel dominated and overwhelmed by the cinema experience. Also, she ignores the fact that men are capable of ‘metaphoric transvestism’ whereby they are able to view the film from the perspective of a woman. (Thelma and Louise, The Piano, Knocked Up, Brick Lane).
Lacan – Psychoanalysis and ‘The Mirror’
Lacan’s theory of ‘the mirror’ is an idea around the idea of identity. He considers the point at which a person develops a sense of self and conscious identity. He considers the point at which a child recognises their own reflection and begin to consider how others perceive them, modifying their appearance to satisfy their perceptions of how others see them. Mulvey extends this idea when she writes about ‘the silver screen’ which she suggest operates like a metaphorical mirror; reflecting back to the female viewer representations of female identity, but these representations are not genuine reflections of the viewer but rather male perceptions of idealised femininity.
Queer Theory – Judith Butler
Emerging out of field of Gender studies (the study of males and female roles historically, politically, socially etc). Queer theory challenges the idea that gender – being male or female – is part of the essential self, that it is fixed, immovable – in other words Queer theory suggest that our male or female gender does not control all aspects of our identity or how we perceive other peoples identity. In other words gender, particularly as it is represented in performance – on TV, Film etc, is fluid, flexible depending on the context in which it is seen. For example an audience can see Tom Cruise playing a “straight” pilot in The Right Stuff and interpret his gender, although male, as having very “queer” or “gay” attributes. The theory developed as a way of combating negative representations of gay sexuality in the Media. It combats the idea that people should be divided and categorised, indeed marginalised, due to their sexual orientation or practice and that a persons’ identity should not be limited to their sexual preference. It asks us to consider how the media constructs gay representation. (Apply to representation of gay sexuality in Knocked up...any others? What about Graham Norton? Alan Carr? Does Post Modern Irony regarding representation of gay characters relieve the audience of burden of moral responsibility regarding evolving attitudes a more flexible idea of gender?)
Subculture – Representation of Groups – Dick Hebdidge
In his book, Subculture and The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdidge said that a subculture is a group of like minded individuals who feel neglected by societal standards and who develop a sense of identity which differs to the dominant on to which they belong. Ken Gelder lists 6 ways in which a subculture can be recognised: 1) Often have negative relationship to work 2) Negative or ambivalent relationship to class 3) Through their associations with territory ( The street, the hood, the club) rather than property 4) Through their stylistic ties to excess 5) Through their movement out of home into non-domestic forms of belonging (social groups as opposed to family) 6) Through their refusal to engage with they might see as the ‘banalities’ of life. Other ways of recognising a subculture might be symbolism attached to clothes, music, visual affectations like tattoos etc. (Examples – Ben and his friends in Knocked up representing a subculture some of the values of which Alison and as such the America she initially represents might benefit from). Subcultural values often associated with being ‘cool’.
Anthony Giddens – Traditionalist vs Post Traditionalist views of society
Media representations of society can be seen as traditional or post traditionalist. Traditional societies are ones in which individual choice was limited by its dominant customs and traditions. Whereas post traditionalist societies are one where the ideas set by previous generations are less important that those of individuals. Post traditional societies no longer feel so dependent and limited to time and place. Giddens says, we are living in a post traditional society where we are much less concerned with precedents set by previous generations and that our options are only limited by what the law and public opinion allows. We have replaced seen/discreet systems with remote ‘expert’ systems, institutions and corporations.
Bell Hooks: Interconnectivity of race, class and gender.
Pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins. First major work “Ain’t I a woman? Lack, women and feminity” written in 1981. Focused on the perpetuation of systems of oppression and domination in the media paying particular attention to the devaluation of black womanhood. The idea of ‘lack’ or ‘otherness’ refers to the way that women and ethnic minorities are usually represented as ‘other’. Their primary purpose is simply to be other than the norm (usually a white male hero). They are therefore known more by the context of lack than by a realised or complex identity. This theory can be linked to ideas of the monstrous feminine found in feminist analysis of literature and art.
Representation
Acland - Argued that representations of delinquent youths help reinforce dominant hegemony. Referred to as the 'ideology of protection' model. (Deviant Youth, 1995). 'Normal' adult and youth behaviour, contrasted with deviant youth behaviour, allows the state to have more control. Young people need constant surveillance and monitoring.
Chris Allen – studied the representation Muslims in the media.
Alvarado et al. 1987) ‘Television is... the most rewarding medium to use when teaching representations of class because of the contradictions which involve a mass medium attempting to reach all the parts of its class-differentiated audience simultaneously...’
John Berger – performance narrative. Berger’s most famous written work, the 1972 book Ways of Seeing, offered not just an idea but also an invitation to see and know the world differently. He says, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Berger’s idea that looking is a political act, perhaps even a historically constructed process – such that where and when we see something will affect what we see – comes across most powerfully in the second episode of Ways of Seeing, which focused on the male gaze.
Judith Butler: theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity. She wrote ‘Gender Trouble’. Butler suggests that gender is not the result of nature but is socially constructed e.g. male and female behavior and roles are not the result of biology but are constructed and reinforced by society through media and culture. Furthermore, rather than being a fixed attribute in a person, she argues that gender should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times. However, the media reinforces and exaggerates stereotypical ‘male’ and ‘female’ behaviour, which we adopt as ‘normal’. In this way, gender becomes a performance, with the media providing the script.
Queer Theory explores and challenges the way in which heterosexuality is constructed as normal and homosexuality as deviant. (Queer Theory isn’t just about homosexuality. It also explores cross-dressing, gender-ambiguity, gender-corrective surgery and intersexual identity).
The media has historically limited the representations of gay men and women. Hollywood films, TV ads, and other mainstream texts often construct images of ‘normal’ happy heterosexual couples, but homosexual couples are often represented in terms of sin, sickness or shame. Thankfully this is changing…
Stanley Cohen defines 'Moral Panic' as "... a mass response to a group, a person or an attitude that becomes defined as a threat to society." He argues that the media, especially news media, often create and/or enforce moral panics in the public. The term 'Folk Devil' is the name given to the object of the moral panic.
Corner, John Examined the process of realism/verisimilitude within media texts.
Emile Durkheim – Labelling theory holds that deviance is not inherent to an act, but instead the result of the externally-imposed label of "deviant". It focuses on the tendency of majorities to negatively label minorities or those seen as deviant from standard cultural norms. The theory is concerned with how the self-identity and the behaviour of individuals may be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them. The theory was prominent during the 1960s and 1970s, and some modified versions of the theory are still popular today .
Erik Erikson – he created an eight stage theory of identity and psychosocial development. Erikson was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud; he explored three aspects of identity: the ego identity (self), personal identity (the personal idiosyncrasies that distinguish a person from another), social/cultural identity (the collection of social roles a person might play).
Barbara Fredrickson – objectification; she explored the consequences of being female in a culture that sexually objectifies the female body. Objectification theory posits that girls and women are typically acculturated to internalize an observer's perspective as a primary view of their physical selves. This perspective on self can lead to habitual body monitoring, which, in turn, can increase women's opportunities for shame and anxiety, reduce opportunities for peak motivational states, and diminish awareness of internal bodily states.
Giroux - Focused on youth representations as 'empty categories' because most media representations are constructed by adults.
Hall, Stuart – Reception theory and Mediation is the process by which all media products are read by audiences. Theories of representation are linked to encoding and decoding. Hall says there are three ways the audience decodes (reads) texts:
The audience fully accepts the preferred meaning, showing they agree with dominant values.
The audience takes a negotiated position, meaning that they only agree with some-not all of the preferred meaning.
The audience takes an oppositional position, whereby they understand the preferred meaning but decide to reject this and make their own interpretation
An extension of this is a fourth reading called the aberrant reading, where a completely unintentional meaning is taken away by audiences.
Hebdige (1979) Studied British youth subcultures (Late 1970’s) He focused on the reality of youth cultures. Subcultures = Youths to express themselves and to challenge hegemony (Mostly through style). By looking at this theory we are able to see that the media in society tends to ignore the good and the hard working and focuses on the fun and the trouble. This therefore makes adults believe that all Youths behave in this manner.
Kaplan - Feminism - defined women as a distinct group in two approaches - essentialist approach and anti-essentialist approach (women constructed by male society).
Kilbourne – Suggests women are more often shown “dismembered” (just parts of their bodies shown), associated with products, shown as smaller than a man, engaged in various forms of ritualized subordination, prostrate or recumbent, bent or leaning back, infantilized (with finger coyly in their mouth, standing pigeon-toed, wearing little girl clothes, sucking on lollipops, etc.) and looking dreamy and introverted, overcome with emotions, or symbolically silenced with hand over the mouth.
Lippmann – representation theory. He tried to explain how pictures that arise spontaneously in people’s minds come to be—a simplification of his theory is that we live in second-hand worlds. Because we are aware of much more than we have personally experienced our own experience is mainly indirect. Lippmann felt that the only feeling that anyone can have about an event, that they did not experience, is the feeling aroused by their mental image of that event.
Meehan - conducted a Study of feminist representation in the 1970s - useful to contrast to modern day studies.
Mulvey, Laura: Feminist Theory - the concept of women as objects in media and men as subjects. Contested in some modern films/adverts of today. In her 1973 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema she argued that classic Hollywood cinema puts the spectator in a masculine position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire.
Because the viewer is gendered as male (even if she’s a woman!) the woman on the screen is ‘controlled’ and made an ‘object’ of male desire. "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female"
Historic power roles: directors tend to be male, thus presenting a ‘male’ representation of their subject. Therefore, even if you’re a woman, you’re seeing the world of the film through a man’s eyes.
Viewers are encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film who, more often than not, is a man. Therefore, even if you’re a woman, you’re identifying with a man’s view of the cinematic world.
In both these examples, the ‘male’ is active (the one doing the looking) and the ‘female’ is passive (the one being looked at). Male characters may also be looked at, but it is still a male viewpoint. Mulvey believes that women take on the male gaze because they view media from the perspective of men – they then view other women the way men would and objectify them in the same way. She believes that the female gaze is negated, or ‘drowned out’ by the dominant male gaze.
Nakamura - defines cybertyping as the distinctive ways that the internet propagates, disseminates, and commodities images of race and racism.
Perkins - counter argument that the use of stereotypes can be good, that stereotypes can change and even be positive (1979). Perkins also argues that stereotypes are not simplistic, they contain complex understanding of roles in society. Not always negative and often contain truth.
Jonathan Schroeder - Viewing such recorded images gives the viewer's gaze a voyeuristic dimension., 'to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze' (Schroeder 1998, 208).
Carol Vernallis describes how verbal, musical, and visual codes combine in music video to create defining representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and performance. "In video our attention to the song shapes the way we perceive the image, but to an equal extent what we attend to in the image helps determine how we hear the music".
Genre is a way of categorising a text through style and form. It is vital to be able to categorise texts in this way - both for production and analysis. Most students associate genre with film, and indeed this is where categories can be most easily identified. There are a particular set of theories associated with film genre and you can read more about them here.
A text is classified in a genre through the identification of key elements which occur in that text and in others of the same genre. These elements may be referred to as paradigms, and range from costume to music to plot points to font (depending on the medium). Audiences recognise these paradigms, and bring a set of expectations to their reading of the text accordingly: the criminal will be brought to justice at the end of the police thriller. These paradigms may be grouped into those relating to iconography (ie the main signs and symbols that you see/hear),structure (the way a text is put together and the shape it takes) and theme (the issues and ideas it deals with).
Genre is important for both the readers and creators of texts (ie the audience and the producers).
Audiences
select texts on basis of genre, often because texts are arranged at retail outlets by genre (just pop along to HMV). Also, certain genres are considered appropriate to certain ages/genders in society, and choices are made accordingly eg teen movie, 'chick flicks'
have systems of expectations about the content and style of a text, according to its genre. This enables them to take particular pleasures in the text, those of repetition, and of predicted resolution. Pleasure may also be drawn from differences.
identify with repeated elements in generic texts and may shape their own identity in response (eg fans of a particular genre of music dress in a specific way - metalheads in their band t-shirts, for instance)
Producers
market texts according to genre because a niche audience has already been identified as taking pleasure in that type of text
standardise production practices according to genre conventions, thus cutting costs
subscribe to established conventions of versimilitude, thus reinforcing genre conventions, but also allowing creativity within a given format eg) it is an accepted convention in science fiction that spaceships make noises, which helps create excitement in battle scenes, but it is a scientific fact that no sound travels through the vacuum that is space.
Classification by genre is seen as both positive and negative by audiences, producers and theorists. On the one hand, rigorous conformity to established conventions while giving the audience what they want, can actually lead to stagnation and the eventual ossification of a genre as a "they're all the same" judgement is passed. This is what happened to the traditional Hollywood Western and Musical - once many profitable examples of these genres were pumped out by the studio each year, but the formats became stale through over-repetition and audiences lost interest. It is now only when a new Western or Musical that challenges the conventions and defies expectation (Brokeback Mountain or Moulin Rouge) comes along that non-niche audiences are willing to watch.
On the other hand, the genre of reality television has defied criticism that it is stale, contrived and predictable, and is now the basis of programming for entire networks. Although all possible variations of the same structure (contestants compete for a prize/live in the same house/go about a heightened version of their daily lives), iconography (surface realism and non-actors) and theme (aren't these people making idiots of themselves?) seem to have been run through in the space of a decade, it's still popular with audiences, who seem to enjoy the familiarity of the patterns presented onscreen.
Genre can provide structure and form which can allow a great deal of creativity and virtuosity, especially when a genuine reworking of generic conventions comes along (the Coen Brothers' reimagining of the Western in No Country For Old Men). Genre provides key elements for an audience to recognise, so that they may further appreciate the variation and originality surrounding the representation of those elements. When Scream was released in 1996, writer Kevin Williamson was praised for his fresh, ironic take on the conventional teenage slasher movie. He took the conventions (band of promiscuous teenagers picked off one by one by killer unknown) and turned them around, with the characters' self-awareness of their own predictability ("Oh, please don't kill me, Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!") used as a prime point of pleasure for the audience. However, by the time Scary Movie 4 was released in 2004, it was seen as "formulaic and predictable". Thus we can see that most genre paradigms form part of a fluid system - they are constantly changing and adapting according to audience tastes, individual entries into the genre and societal influences.
Current state of genre theory
The definition of genre from dictionary.com is "a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, context, technique, or the like." Although it seems that genre should be easy to define, the finer points of textual categorization are not yet established.
Genres, according to Daniel Chandler, create order to simplify the mass of available information. Creating categories promotes organization instead of chaos. Jane Feuer has divided ways to categorize genres into three different groups. The first is aesthetic. By using this method one can organize according to certain sets of characteristics, and so the overall work of the artist is not disparaged by generalization. The second classification method is ritual. Ritual uses its own culture to help classify. If one performs a ritual associated with a system of ritual, one can be said to be practicing as a member of that system. The common taxonomical method is ideological. This occurs most often in the marketing of texts, music, and movies. The effectiveness of this type of categorization can be measured by how well the public accepts these categories as valid.
Amy J. Devitt focuses on rhetorical genre. Scholars generally recognize the restrictions placed on works that have been classified as a certain genre. However, viewing genre as a rhetorical device gives the author and the reader more freedom and "allows for choices." Genres are not free-standing entities, but are actually intimately connected and interactive amongst themselves. Rhetorical genre recognizes that genres are generated by authors, readers, publishers, and the entire array of social forces that act upon a work at every stage of its production.
This recognition does not make the taxonomy of texts easy. Chandler points out that very few works have all the characteristics of the genre in which they participate. Also, due to the interrelatedness of genres, none of them is clearly defined at the edges, but rather fade into one another. Genre works to promote organization, but there is no absolute way to classify works, and thus genre is still problematic and its theory still evolving.
Moreover, the metagenre as a concept has been an importaint point to study. According to Giltrow, metagenre is "situated language about situated language". Metagenres such as institutional guidelines can be "ruling out certain kinds of expression, endorsing others", constraining and enabling. The concept of metagenre also provides a valuable way to understand the dynamics of institutional interrelations between genres. In the mental health discourse, for example, has been demonstrated the metageneric function of the American Psychiatric Association's (DSM) for standardizing and mediating the localized epistemological communicative practices of psychiatrists.
