Category: Media

Watching a film is never just entertainment.

Audience studies tries to predict what kind of film will be a success at Christmas or if the ending is successful whereas spectatorship studies refers to how viewers relate to or decode texts.

Effects approaches

• Does the media have an effect on the consumer? Make you go out and buy the product? Make you go out and kidnap and torture a small boy?
• How does this work if it does?

Hypodermic model – where the media injects values into the consumer or a two step flow model where certain individuals called opinion leaders had their world view affected by the media and passed on this effect to their peers. (e.g. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth)

An alternative suggestion is the Classic Realist text where the spectator is placed by the usual codes of editing, mise en scene, camerawork and sound, in the unthreatening position of virtual power.

Uses and Gratifications
To avoid boredom
To feel part of a community
To have a topic of conversation next day
Voyeurism

Cultural Studies

• Realised that texts have to be seen in their contexts and that individual spectators bring different backgrounds and experiences to their viewing.

Psychoanalytic models of the viewing community

• Not for nothing Hollywood called the Dream Factory
• We are encouraged to believe in the Reality of what we see on the screen.
• We are surrounded in the dark with larger than life human figures, surround sound, full colour and loud music all of which combine to ensure we ‘forget’ ourselves for a while.
• Questions: what do we do? What do we allow to happen? While the film is on? (No phones / eat popcorn / snog? etc. What about at home? Door? Phone? Ironing? Read? Talk? …)
• We are driven to watch or look to satisfy our curiosity.
• Male characters are typically active, investigative like John Wayne or Dirty Harry while the women are fetishised as the objects of the male gaze like Dietrich and Monroe.
• Of course there has been a backlash against that type of purism in films like Alien, Thelma and Louise but nevertheless the former type still way outweighs the latter!

Freud argued that the Oedipus complex, where the infant boy has eventually to realise he cannot win the primary love object his mother without killing the father, his rival, and must submit to the Law as represented by his father and settle for castration and second best; another woman. This is seen all the time in films: a character begins attached to his mother, struggles throughout the film with symbolic father figures, reaches sexual maturity at the end of the film where he is saved from death by the forces of law and order and a new woman takes the place of his mother (see The Birds!!)

 

Semiology
This is the science of signs!

Film is a series of conventions which need decoding as signs.

Iconic – e.g. American landmarks; stars who stand for certain standards e.g John Wayne as law maker and enforcer.

Indexical – smoke indicating fire; a glance at the clock indicating someone’s late or something will happen e.g. High Noon

Symbolic – signs which are arbitrary e.g.

In films the focus came to be on how iconography, mise en scene, camera, lighting and sound ‘make meaning .’

Low key lighting and strange camera angles help to create a threatening and uneasy atmosphere in film noir.

The use of the colour red in Marnie to indicate the character’s mental fragility; and in Pleasantville to indicate love or sexual knowledge.

Iconography such as crucifixes, garlic, knives, tombstones all signify the horror genre.

 

Structuralist approaches to narrative Propp:

By breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative units, or narratemes, Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures. By analyzing character and action types, Propp concluded that there were 31 generic narratemes in the Russian folk tale. While not all were present, he found that all the tales he had analyzed displayed the functions in unvarying sequence.

Please see Wikipedia section on Characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp#Characters.

Todorov you should remember from sit com: 5 narrative elements to bring a story full circle:

Equilibrium — disruption —period of disequilibrium —resolution —return to equilibrium.

 

Levi-strauss discovered what he called Binary oppositions; narratives are structured around binary oppositions which are significant for their culture. E.g. in Westerns:

• law——-disorder
• knowledge ——lack of knowledge
• male —–female
• individual ——community / town
• civilisation ——wilderness

However the role of the individual hero in Westerns has changed over time from audiences wanting John Wayne to wanting Clint Eastwood. Why?

 

Finally what of the future of spectatorship?

Less cinema going?
Less losing oneself as increasing cgi means less involvement?
More home viewing?
DVDs enable director’s commentary or scenes to be played in any order / fast forwarded / omitted / drop into at any point?
Pc viewing / mobile phone viewing?
More own films being made and watched (see you tube!)

• Sherry Lansing is the longest serving head of any leading film studio “the most powerful woman in the history of the entertainment industry.” Los Angeles Business Journal.
• After 100 years women run three of tinsel town’s six main studios.
• Amy Pascal is chairman at Columbia.
• Stacy Snider at Universal Pictures.
• Some of Lansing’s films include: Fatal
  Attraction, The Accused, and Indecent Exposure – controversial touchstones for Hollywood’s portrayal of women and exploration of sexual issues.
• Titanic (another of hers) was the highest grossing film of all time and an even bigger draw for women than for men finally proving that successful films need a female audience.
• “When I became president at 20^th Century Fox it was on the front page of the New York Times…Today these appointments are in the business section.”
• Behind the scenes many speculated that she had slept her way to the top because she is so good looking!
• Coming from a post-holocaust Jewish family she started out in pictures starting with John Wayne but soon realised that the real power was behind the camera.
• Even today no woman has won the director Oscar, few even nominated.
• At Columbia she reckoned she should have the job as head of production but the board asked “How could you possibly get a man to report to you?”
• Dawn Steel VP of Paramount in 1980 learned to play rougher than the boys. Known as the Queen of Mean! And the worst boss in California.
• Among Steel’s hits were When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and a clutch of female oriented films.
• In the 90s gradually it became clear to the bosses that women could be perfectly effective as studio heads and Hollywood was forced to admit that women were a force to reckoned with.
• Demi Moore, Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts and Sandra Bulllock all came out of that era. They could all do something no woman had been able to do consistently since the mid 70s and that was to open a film i.e. bring in a big enough audience on opening weekend to make the film a hit.
• While for many decades women had been the biggest stars: Garbo, Stanwyck, Hepburn, Kelly… these were chauvinistic times when men dominated the industry.
• Yet men still do predominate.
• Pascal wanted more overtly female fare and became a leading protagonist in the move towards more female driven films.
• Routinely slated as “chick-flicks” if they flopped but not if they were hits like Panic Room, Charlie’s Angels.
• Behind her office is a fully equipped nursery for her adopted son.
• “I think the thing that makes women good in this business is bringing things out of people and not needing to credit yourself…I have always embraced being a woman and working with female writers and directors; nobody else wanted to be their champion.”
• Whereas the big action pictures of the 80s and 90s were aimed at teenaged boys, Titanic proved that blockbusters had to appeal to women too. Pascal insisted that Spider-Man have a love story at its heart.
• Charlie’s Angels could be described as post-feminist “we wanted films to say that you can be sexy and capable and you don’t have to give one up. You can like men, look great and still run the world.”
• Yet few films are awarded the budgets bosses throw at male-oriented action movies and the new generation of female studio heads has made no difference to the number of women behind the camera.
• Men still direct 90% of studio films and almost all of the big budget films.
• The surprising top ten hit (of 2004?) My Big Fat Greek Wedding was the only one to have a female lead and that film did not come from a big studio.
• Stacy Snider looks more Beverley Hills housewife than power-suited executive has an important relationship with Julia Roberts; she was responsible for boosting Roberts’ salary past the $20m mark for Erin Brokovich.
• Some of the studio heads have used their power to make films that reflect their personal concerns as women.