COLLECTIVE IDENTITY DATA & THEORY

OLDER TEXTS   TV                               Film Radio Internet Press            The                     The Millionairess [Goodness Gracious Me] (Pe                                                             Peter Sellars 1960)                                                           Goodness Gracious Me                                    The Coopers Go To Church Meera Syall                                                                                 The Kumars                                                                     Anita And Me (2002)                           My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985)                                                          Bend It Like Beckham 2002                                Bhaji On The Beach Gurinder Chadha 1992                    East Is East  (Damien O’Donnell) Ayub Khan Din           A                                              Ae Fond Kiss (Ken Loach, 2004)                              Tahara:“I'm a Glaswegian Muslim woman of    P            Pakistani descent who supports Glasgow Rangers in a               Catholic school. I'm a dazzling mixture & I'm proud of                                                                              of it.”              Internet Shafilea Ahmed 'honour killing' by parents fro b                                          ecoming too Westernized (2012) IIdentity crisis of both Shafilea (drank bleach) and sister (left home; arranged robbery: It wasn't until I was at university that I saw how wrong the family life was.' nternet  Timothy Garton Ash The Guardian + blog Reasons why British Muslims identify more with being Muslim than being British (Pakistani diasporic origin;libertine urban behaviour, WOGT)

ISSUES and DEBATES    I have chosen to look at how British Asians are represented as a collective identity on TV, film, radio, the internet and the press, as well as how British Asians represent themselves. ‘British Asian’ is a collective term that encompasses a huge range of ethnicities, with different cultural practices and religious beliefs. It equally can be used to refer to people of first, second, third and later generation immigrants.Therefore there is no one single 'collective' identity.(Sathnan Sangheera, Tahara) All representations are mediated, even those that individuals or collective groups make of themselves, and we should remember this when considering issues about 'reality' of representation and whether media reflects or affects representations: Cultural Imperialism is an issue with minorities and sub-cultures particularly when ethnicity is part of the equation (evidence of pre-1990s texts)  British Asians are now active contributors and participants on media platforms such as films, TV, newspapers and radio (Gurinder Chadha, Ayub Kan Din, Meera Syall) British Asians may see themselves as BrAsians- hybrid identities- whose family life is a site of conflict because of differing approaches to cultural practices (children in Bend It, East Is East, Anita And Me) Along with film representations that British Asians make themselves, we now have Web 2.0 which offers every individual the chance to create their own representations. For Michael Wesch, this is the future and I can see that this will continue: look at the popularity of Diary Of A Badman (nearly 4 million views) in which a British Asian Muslim presents a comic video diary. Media representations can only ever be just that: individual stories, not stereotypes anchored in 'truth'. Khan Din rejects George Khan is 'typical' Muslim father. Media representations sanitize or sensationalize representations becuase of genre conventions: romcom sweeps issues under the carpet (Bend It) or generates conflict, problematizing collective identity (Make Bradford British) Individuals rather than institutions also shape representations thanks to Web 2.0: all of us chose how we present ourselves, for eg on FaceBook, online, photos, private language (LOL, WTF)

NEWER TEXTS                                        Four Lions Chris Morris (2011)                    Slumdog Millionaire  (Danny Boyle, 2009)                                         The Indian Doctor (BBC1, 2012)                                       Make Bradford British (C4, 2012) Ter                Terrorist widow: caption about ‘prom queen to hijab’                   (for Roland Barthes, this would code her as a terrorist) NE R                                                                   Rochdale convictions                      Press: Nottingham Asian Arts Council Press release on                                                                                       MELAS                   Rad                                   RADIO: The British Asian network                      Sathnam Sangheera ‘Sad to see the back of the A  sian               Network? I’m not.’ (The Times, 03.03.2010) The                                                                THE FUTURE IN                                               INTERNET: Diary of a Badman  (Mi                                         Michael Wesch's work on YouTube

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS Dick Hebdige & subcultures Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony  Gramsci says that Marx's model of economic power is outdated & that mechanisms of domination are intellectual. His focus is on culture & ideology: television & cinema are now central to popular culture and exert huge power; Erving Goffman and Performance  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 Roland Barthes  visual codes as signifiers (clothing codes) Michel Foucault scopic regimes: we internalize mechanisms of power Bentham'sPanopticon is the model for how we police ourselves (act as if we are being watched and conform to how our society expects us to behave as in the women of Bhaji On The Beach)

Section A q.1 b) NARRATIVE

For Section A question (b) 25 marks,you  select one production (of your own) and evaluate it in relation to a media concept. The list of concepts to which questions will relate is as follows:

• Media language(film language = camerawork, mise-en-scene, editing, sound)

• Audience

• Representation

• Narrative

• Genre

in the examination, the questions will be set using one of these concepts only.

For NARRATIVE I suggest you think about incorporating the following points:

• At the start, offer ideas on the place of narrative in the music video form in general: how is narrative usually handled? Is it handled in the same way in this genre as in say, film? Apart from narrative, what does the M V genre require? (eg performance, stars, relationship with the band, repeatability).

• Narrative in MV is rarely linear; editing sees to that: explain why. What elements of MV form shape narrative, such as the chorus (lyrics, and the visuals that go with them); instrumental sections (like your opening shot)?

• Refer to genre conventions: we learn from Andrew Goodwin Dancing In The Distraction Factory that narrative treatment may be illustration, amplification or disjuncture in relation to the lyrics: which is yours? How much ENIGMA is there?

• ELLIPSIS? A huge feature of MV narrativ

• FLASHBACKS?

• Is there quite a lot of repetition? Why?

• POV shots? To immerse the audience in the world of the MV, to 'privilege' the audience

• Cinematography. Stress that form IS a huge part narrative. For instance, 'Using a fish eye lens in a rapid pan delivers the visual code about disorientation.'
• Closure of narrative: CLIMAX? Resolution

Here are some provocative thoughts! MV have often been characterized as the ultimate medium of the postmodern world:  Fast. Empty. Lascivious. At least that is how the majority of the academic and educated world perceives them. Using Frederic Jameson's terms, music videos have been defined as a schizophrenic string of isolated, discontinuous signifiers, failing to link up into a coherent sequence, as a string without a centre. Andrew Goodwin talked about "semiotic pornography", "electronic wallpaper" and "neo-fascist propaganda" and Michael Shore defined the medium by its so-called "decadence", its "surface without substance", by its "clichéd imagery". For Heidi Peeters (2004), what gives narrative coherence to the form is the star:

“The star is the one that lends the video world its splendour, that gives the audiovisual elements their enchanting attraction and that illuminates viewers all over the world from the Olympus of the screen. This may seem rather obvious, but one would be surprised at how the majority of theorists still consider music videos to be visualizations of a song. While they may seem discontinuous .., the shots (in music videos)are highly connected through the image of the star.”

“The star promotes the phenomenon of identification, a process by which viewers become attached to a star, ranging from emotional affinity limited to the context of the movie theatre to projection, by which fans try to become their idols through imitating speech, movements and consumer patterns. It is obvious that when the object of projection appears to be the owner of fancy cars, expensive clothes and luxurious houses, a capitalist establishment can only welcome the attitude of identification. Identification with stars does not necessarily have to be based on appearance or sex, as especially for pop stars, it can also rely on the musical style and the subcultural group to which the singer refers. Sometimes identification is not so much a question of the male-female opposition as it is a question of us versus them, young versus old, rebels versus establishment.”

Will and Alex made an ALTERNATIVE treatment. That is, you show both the public face and the private struggle of the band. Both narrative treatment and cinematography shows this dichotomy (opposite worlds). You don’t create a Utopian world of which the star seems to be the instigator, as claimed by Richard Dyer's Entertainment and Utopia. What you do is create the world of the band, the place where they hang out, practise, play and fall out, in a more realistic, indie way. You would agree with Peeters that “Narrativity does not seem to be an absolute necessity within the medium.” What you are doing is creating emotional connection with your band through a series of poetic montages.

“The fact that music videos in this sense are primarily poetic does not mean that clips never contain narrativity. Most music videos do develop a storyline, embedded within its poetic structure and some clips even contain introductory story sequences or non-musical narrative sequences inserted within the video number but "outside" its musical score. Narrative in clips becomes a device to structure the poetic clip world and make it more accessible and recognizable to the viewer.”