Theoretical approaches
REPRESENTATION
- Representation: the way reality is ‘mediated’ or ‘re-presented’ to us.
- David Buckingham: "What are the social implications of media representations? The media do not just offer us a transparent 'window on the world', they offer us a mediated version of the world. They do not just present reality, they re-present it."
- Martin Sohn-Rethel (2016, Reel To Reel asserts that films cannot be 'windows on the world' and can only be constructs. He explains how 7 codes make them appear real. Realism is not a given reflection of the world but rather a construction that must, often laboriously, be worked at.
Film and television are not windows on the world, transparent, reflective and neutral. Sohn-Rethel coined his approach “anti-window-on-the-world-ism”.
For Sohn-Rethel, there is not one single ‘real world’ realism in film, but many constructed ones.
Realism is a constructed effect.
So why do texts look ‘real' ? Sohn-Rethel proposes a set of 7 codes of realism in analysing texts, such as the requirement of surface realism, that the representation looks and sounds like the real world it claims to show; the code of ideological truth, that is, does the fictional representation construct a compelling, persuasive truth; the code of psychology and character motivation, that is, the fictional representation invests greater realism in the psychology of its characters than in other codes. - For Paul Kerr (1990): “One of the cliché of clichés of television is that it is a window on the world (a phrase once the subtitle of Panorama); the medium is seen as a mirror,, as transparent, reflective, neutral. It is of course none of these things.”
- Jean Luc Godard echoes this view. For Godard, "cinema is not the reflection of that reality but the reality of that reflection.” Godard believes that the film image is fundamentally and profoundly ideological. He insists that film does not exist as a neutral medium to convey reality.
- Stuart Hall Reception theory entails the recognition that meaning is made by viewers, not just by makers, of texts.
- Julie D’Acci: ‘It is through representational or signifying systems such as language, photography, film and television that the categories that seem so natural to us and the differences that organise out thinking and our lives (like masculinity and femininity, male and female) actually get determined’ (Defining Women, 1994)
- David Buckingham, Branston and Stafford (2001) - Stereotypes in media texts depend on shared cultural knowledge – some part of the stereotype must ring true. Stereotypes are always about power: those with power stereotype those with less power (Dyer, 1979).
- Collective Identity: the individual’s sense of belonging to a group (part of personal identity); the idea is that through participating in social activities –in this case, watching films and television - individuals can gain a sense of belonging and in essence that transcends the individual.“ A focus on Identity requires us to pay closer attention to the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social groups” - David Buckingham.
- Application of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of Hegemony – much of the media is controlled by the dominant group in society and the viewpoints associated with this group inevitably become embedded in the products themselves (i.e. via representation of race, class, gender, sexuality, for example), even if the promotion of these views isn’t conscious – dominant views come to be seen as the norm. This is developed in the book Manufacturing Consent where Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman summarise the process of hegemony thus: The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. Hegemony is a representational strategy of power; it involves the uses of representations to control people (to manufacture the consent of the ruled to the rule of the rulers). Hence the general marginalisation in the representation of the working class in British cinema until the late 1950s in this patriarchal, white, middle class ‘governed’ society.
- Can we resist this representation? Are audiences passive or active. Can audiences be influenced by what they watch? There are a number of theories about this. The Hypodermic Syringe theory posits that audiences are passive and absorb what they see in the media and can be influenced by it. Uses and Gratifications suggests audiences are active viewers and use the media in various ways to get some kind of gratification that will depend on the viewer. Hall and Morley’s Encoding/Decoding model (1973) claims that audience reaction can be broken uo into four basic groups: A preferred reading of a text would imply that the spectator may accept the dominant values within the text and read it in a way consistent with the intentions of the producer. A negotiated reading means the spectator chooses whether or not they accept the preferred reading as their own. An oppositional reading would mean the spectator completely rejects the preferred reading. An aberrant reading means the spectator picks up an entirely different reading to that which was intended by the maker.
- How is identity formed? Foucault: We often talk about people as
if they have particular attributes as 'things' inside themselves -- they
have an identity , for example, and we believe that at the heart of a
person there is a fixed and true identity or character (even if we're
not sure that we know quite what that is, for a particular person). We
assume that people have an inner essence -- qualities beneath the
surface which determine who that person really 'is'. We also say that
some people have (different levels of) power which means that they are
more (or less) able to achieve what they want in their relationships
with others, and society as a whole. Foucault rejected this view.
For Foucault, people do not have a 'real' identity within themselves;
that's just a way of talking about the self -- a discourse . An
'identity' is communicated to others in your interactions with them, but
this is not a fixed thing within a person. It is a shifting, temporary
construction. People do not
'have' power implicitly; rather, power is a technique or action which
individuals can engage in. Power is not possessed; it is exercised. And
where there is power, there is always also resistance.
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM & STEREOTYPING
- Richard Dyer (1979): "Stereotypes are about power. Those with power stereotype those with less power." "The ideological work of stereotyping involves closing down the range of possible meanings, making fast, firm, and separate what is in reality fluid."
- Stuart Hall (1981) proposes that there are three kinds of representation of black people – the native, the entertainer and the social problem. Hall proposes that meaning is made by the reader, that is, through a preferred, negociated or oppositional reading.
- Alvarado et al (1987) argue that there are four main categories of race representation in the media: The exotic, the dangerous, the humorous and the pitied
- What are stereotypes? According to Walter Lippmann in 1922, stereotypes had four major characteristics: they were an ordering process; a short cut; referred to the ‘real world’; and expressed our ‘values’ and ‘beliefs’. Categorisation is a basic cognitive process that people employ to make sense of their lives and their group affiliations.
- Alison Griffiths sees stereotypes as rigid, simplistic, overdetermined and inherently false…they misrepresent people’s ‘lived identities’ by falling back upon narrowly conceived preconceptions of racial, cultural and gendered difference, thus perpetuating myths about social, cultural and racial groups.
- Michel Foucault takes a more active view of audiences: rather than viewers coming to the television screen with already-formed identities, television genres actually help to inform the identity in question.
- Erving Goffman and Performance The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 1959
The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life is a seminal sociology
book by Erving Goffman. It uses the imagery of the theatre in order to portray
the importance of human social interaction
Many second & third generation immigrants
openly and confidently challenge their parents (Anita), whilst others
'bend', showing flexibility and moving between two cultures (Bend It Like
Beckham). Some feel forced to hide their real identities in the face of
entrenched traditional values (East Is East, where 'east' and 'west' do not
meet).
For Erving Goffman, identity becomes a matter of performance, with front and back stage
behaviours, which serve to define appropriate behaviours in two different
spheres. For example, Tariq pays lip service to obeying his Muslim
father but morphs into his western identity as ‘Tony’ at college and in the
night club. Some conflict leads to outright war, with positions taken that are
poles apart, as when Nazir is disowned by George after fleeing an arranged
marriage for a homosexual relationship. The message of this film is that hybrid
identities are not accepted by traditional Muslim parents.
- Michel Foucault on identity
Foucault rejected this view. For Foucault, people do not have a 'real' identity within themselves; that's just a way of talking about the self -- a discourse. An 'identity' is communicated to others in your interactions with them, but this is not a fixed thing within a person. It is a shifting, temporary construction.
People do not 'have' power implicitly; rather, power is a technique or action which individuals can engage in. Power is not possessed; it is exercised. And where there is power, there is always also resistance.
That's a really boiled-down version of one or two big ideas that people take from Foucault's later works. Foucault developed different approaches for his different studies, but his work can be simplistically divided into 'early' Foucault, where he worked on the ways in which state power and discourses worked to constrain people, and 'later' Foucault (from the mid-1970s to his death in 1984), in which that idea of power as a 'thing' is broken down, and it is instead seen as a more fluid relation, a 'technique' which can be deployed.(Source: David Gauntlett www.theory.org)
Michel Foucault on internalising regimes of power (=being the person your parents / community expect)
For Foucault (Discipline and Punish), regimes of power are internalized so that people self-police, that is, they behave as if they are actually being watched and policed even when they are not. This model of behaviour is taken from Bentham's Panopticon, which is an architectural prison model where a single guard controls the behaviour of many inmates in a circular (panoptic) tower. As a metaphor for how Muslim and Sikh communities seek to shape the behaviour of their children, it explains why the younger generation seem to exhibit hybrid identities, that is, they seem to adopt traditional cultural practices in front of their parents (self-policing) while covertly behaving in a way that fits in with their peers when their parents cannot see. Erving Goffman referred to this attempt to reconcile conflicting identities in terms of 'identity as performance'. The front stage behaviours conform to traditional community expectations whilst the backstage behaviours are unguarded. Examples include the Khan family's stiff, uncharacteristically careful behaviour in front of the brides-to-be and their families (East Is East), Meena's performance at a family gathering with guests in the autobiographical Anita and Me in which Meera Syall depicts her younger self as a frustrated novelist prevented from self-expression by her community's expectations about female goals; and Jess' dual life as promising footballer hiding her formidable talents and hopes from her community until the traumatic moment when she is caught in the act training (Bend It Like Beckham).
Equally, in Yasmin we are given the representation of a spirited and independently-minded young Muslim woman who has a job, drives her own car, wears tight jeans and hopes for her relationship with a handsome co-worker to deepen, yet obeys her father's order to enter into an arranged marriage so that a Pakistani man that she has never met and who does not speak English can enter the UK. When he is caught up in a police sweep post 9/11 and suffers injustice in police hands, Yasmin's encounter with actual regimes of power challenges her own notions of her hybrid identity as a second generation British Muslim and she starts to understand how young people like her brother becomes radicalized.
In Ae Fond Kiss, Tahara and her brother Casim are second-generation Glaswegian Pakistani Muslims who handle their dual identities differently. Tahara is open about her complex identity. Her incendiary claim that she is "a Pakistani Glaswegian who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic school...I'm a dazzling mixture and I'm proud of it". Conversely, Casim hides from his family that he has fallen in love with Roisin, a Catholic divorcee, despite ongoing plans about the arrival of the Pakistani bride for his arranged marriage. This interracial love story scandalises his extended family and, as in Bend It Like Beckham, the stigma causes his sister's arranged marriage to be cancelled. Casim refuses to condemn his father for his bigotry and chauvinism in refusing to meet Roisin. For years, Casim has witnessed his father suffering racist abuse in a community that fails to accept him as one of them. Casim avers that his father's reactionary patriarchal views are his community's castle-keep for survival.
The love-affair of a South Asian British man and a white woman is a dangerous interracial love story. Reversing the sexual roles would raise the stakes, bringing us into the world of 'honour killings' - the murder of errant young women by their outraged families - of which there have been a number in recent years.
The case of Shafilea Ahmed is one on these. Her murder by her parents was openly reported in the press on 12.08.2012 (The BBC, Telegraph, Guardian: see below), unlike the very many accusations against Pakistani men concerning child abuse, which were treated with extreme caution to avoid accusations of racial bias. The conclusions drawn about the collective identity of Pakistani Muslim men were only openly expressed after the Rochdale men were convicted in court.
In the texts that we have studied, collective identity is always a site of conflict.
SEMIOTICS
- Roland Barthes : CODES
What he is basically saying is that a
text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate
out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute
plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one
way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and
create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative
from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create
an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you
wanted to.
Barthes wanted to - he was a semiotics
professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling
little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so. All you
need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be ´open´ (ie
unravelled in a lot of different ways) or ´closed´ (there is only one
obvious thread to pull on).(MediaKnowall
site)
Barthes
also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are
called narrative codes and that
they could be categorised in the following ways: action codes (proiarectic), enigma codes, semiotic codes (symbols & signs)
TRENDS
- CONSUMERS AS PRODUCERS Hugh Mackay (The Open University) describes the web as a stage where anyone can perform nuanced aspects of 'the nation'. Where this becomes particularly interesting is in the diaspora communities: the web now offeres a place where people who have left a physical location can gather to experience a sense of national belonging. They can access the same cultural touchpoints as people in residence, from local news to comedy, and can engage in the same debates. the web allows for the expression of the diversity of the UK.
- Michael Wesch Digital Ethnography (2007) consumers as producers
- Sathnam Sangheera (The Times 10.01.2011) reports reactions about "the barrage of generalizations" about attitudes of Asian males towards women: British Sikhs and Hindus have contacted him to distance themselves from the contoversy, proposing letter-writing campaigns objecting to the use of the word 'Asian' where 'Pakistani' would be more accurate. He noted anti-Muslim comments on internet discussion boards and received texts from contacts asking him to voice the opinion that 'It's a Pakistani not an Asian problem." Sangheera asserts that few demographic groups are more stereotyped already than Asian males.
- Andrew Norfolk (The Times 09.05.2012) Headline: A Nation's Shame reports successful conviction of Rochdale Nine for sex trafficking British children and the 'failure of duty' by Greater Manchester Police, Crown Prosecution Service and Rochdale social services. The Chief Crown prosecutor now states that "imported cultural baggage" defined the attitudes of the convicted men. Evidence about the sex-grooming network was presented to police in August 2008 but the authorities failed to act; the Chief Constable now says that the force had "learnt an awful lot since 2008."
- Mohammed Shafiq CEO Ramadhan Foundation, Rochdale (The Times 09.05.2012)"There has been an increase of people speaking out against such men.Five years ago it was very different: I was threatened with violence because some people thought that by speaking out, I was doing the work of the far Right. How things have changed. The bad news is that there is a generational split. Our community leaders say they have no responsibility to tackle the issue.The difference in attitude between our younger and older generatiins presents a continuing challenge."
- Baroness Warsi (The Times 19.05.2012) states that her father demanded that she urged her to speak out. Arriving from a Punjab village and working double shifts in a rag mill, he encouraged his five daughters to embrace the best of their Pakistani heritage and British culture. She asserts that the sex grooming crimes against vulnerable young girls that led to nine successful convictions in May 2012 have a connection with the Asian cultural identity of the abusers: "There is a small minority of who see women as second-class citizens and white women as third-class. Some Pakistani men see white girls as fair game. We have to be prepared to say that." It took years for the authorities to act and for the many cases to come to court in a collective trial. In the future, Warsi believes that cultural sensitivities will be less of a bar to applying the law.
Theoretical approaches to frame discussions about your productions
SEXISM & STEREOTYPING
MUSIC VIDEO
Andrew Goodwin Dancing In The Distraction Factory: offers a framework for analysing the key codes & conventions of music video
- John Berger Ways of Seeing
In Ways of Seeing, a highly influential book based on a BBC television series,
John Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being
questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men
look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47). Berger argues
that in European art from the Renaissance onwards women were depicted as being ‘aware of being
seen by a [male] spectator’ (ibid., 49),
Berger adds that at least from the seventeenth
century, paintings of female nudes reflected the woman’s submission to ‘the owner of both woman
and painting’ (ibid., 52). He noted that ‘almost all post-Renaissance European
sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist
is the spectator-owner looking at it’ (ibid., 56).
He advanced the idea that the realistic, ‘highly tactile’ depiction of things in oil
paintings and later in colour photography (in particular where they were portrayed as ‘within
touching distance’), represented a desire to possess the things (or the lifestyle)
depicted (ibid., 83ff). This also applied to women depicted in this way
(ibid., 92).
Writing in 1972, Berger insisted that women were still ‘depicted
in a different way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be
male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’ (ibid., 64).
In 1996 Jib Fowles still felt able to insist that ‘in advertising males gaze, and
females are gazed at’ (Fowles 1996, 204). And Paul Messaris notes that female models in ads
addressed to women ‘treat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker,’
adding that ‘it could be argued that when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing
themselves as a man might see them’ (Messaris 1997, 41). Such ads ‘appear to imply a male point
of view, even though the intended viewer is often a woman. So the women who look at these ads
are being invited to identify both with the person being viewed and with an implicit,
opposite-sex viewer’ (ibid., 44).
We may note that within this dominant representational tradition the spectator is typically assumed not simply to be male but also to be heterosexual, over the age of puberty and often also white.
Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus 1651
- Laura Mulvey investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. Central to Mulvey's writings is the position of women in relation to patriarchal myth. Mulvey makes use of Freudian psychoanalytic theory to argue that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’ (ibid., 28). Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’ (ibid., 33), presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’ (ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.
- However, gender is not the only important factor in determining what Jane Gaines calls 'looking relations' - race and class are also key factors (Lutz & Collins 1994, 365; Gaines 1988; de Lauretis 1987; Tagg 1988; Traube 1992). Ethnicity was found to be a key factor in differentiating amongst different groups of women viewers in a study of Women Viewing Violence (Schlesinger et al. 1992). Michel Foucault, who linked knowledge with power, related the 'inspecting gaze' to power rather than to gender in his discussion of surveillance (Foucault 1977). From Notes on The Gaze, Daniel Chandler
- Alison Bechdel devisedThe Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule, which is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test was popularized by Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out For, in a 1985 strip called The Rule.
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| Watch the video here |
NARRATIVE
- Tvzetan Todorov - suggests narrative is simply equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium
- Vladimir Propp - characters and actions (31 functions of character types)
- Claude Levi-Strauss - constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack. Binary oppositions.
- Roland Barthes Action/proiarectic code & enigma code (i.e. Answers & questions). Read about Barthes' Five Codes here
- David Bordwell on narrative: see his blog on understanding film narrative here
- See our class blog post
- How to describe your target audience: mainstream, niche, prestige; how to segment your audience using GEARS to define them (gender, ethnicity, age, region / nationality, socio-economic group). It is therefore appropriate to talk about different audiences, rather than one audience.
- Audiences: passive or autonomous? 'Effects' model v. 'Uses and Gratifications' model
- Maslow's hierarchy of needs: audiences consuming media texts are seeking to gratify higher order aspirational needs such as self-fulfilment
- Young and Rubicam's 4Cs model
- Adorno and the culture 'industry' For Theodore Adorno, advertising creates false needs. Adorno
(1903-69) argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a
'culture industry' - the opposite of 'true' art - to keep them passively
satisfied and politically apathetic.
Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life.False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness.Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again.
- Katz and Lazarsfeld assumes a slightly more active audience. It suggests messages from the media move in two distinct ways. First, individuals who are opinion leaders, receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual media content. The information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience, but is filtered through the opinion leaders who then pass it on to a more passive audience. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow.This theory appeared to reduce the power of the media, and some researchers concluded that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpret texts. This led to the idea of active audiences.
Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies
RECEPTION THEORY focuses on the scope in textual analysis for 'negotiation' and 'opposition' on the part of the audience. This means that a text ( a book, film, advert, poster or other creative work) is not passively accepted by the audience but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the texts based on their individual cultural background and life experiences.
Stuart Hall’s encoding decoding model; dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings; why Hall says he studies culture instead of media specifically, and media hegemony. Audiences are no longer considered passive recipients.
MUSIC VIDEO
Andrew Goodwin Dancing In The Distraction Factory: offers a framework for analysing the key codes & conventions of music video
· Genre characteristics
· Relationship between visuals &
lyrics (illustrate, amplify, disjuncture) Visuals
· Relationship between visuals & music
(Cutting to the beat)
· Lip synching (authenticates
performance)and CUs on performer’s hands playing instruments
· Notions of looking (screens)
Intertextuality (Bond brand;
superheroes Marvel comics; meme [Gangnam & Harlem Shake])
· * Fij only: we made a music video for
an unsigned solo artist who will build his audience and distribute his music
through social network sites and word of mouth; as a free agent, he has no
label to tell him what he can and cannot do in terms of creating and projecting
an image or ‘star brand’.
Richard Dyer Stars proposes that:
A star is an image not a real person that is constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines, films, music videos).Their image often contains a USP
Dick Hebdige
& subcultures
Roland Barthes –semiotics
Roland Barthes –semiotics
Michael Wesch Digital
Ethnography 2007
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