CCR 1: COMPLETING 'HOW YOUR FILM OPENING REPRESENTS SOCIAL GROUPS & ISSUES'

In the autumn, during your research, you created Pinterest boards collating images of social groups and issues in your film opening. Your production is now nearly completed and you have a clear concept not only about who and what is in your film but also how you want them to come across to your audience.

In this presentation, you will use your knowledge of theoretical frameworks to present your characters in their social contexts and the issues / ideas that inform their world. 

In class, you watch two presentations that are core concepts in your entire course:

Video on representation  

Stereotypes can be distort representation because they reinforce specific ideas about people, often negatively.

For Stuart Hall, stereotypes are generated because of the limited stereotypes the hegemonic elite show us.

 

Video on reception theory  

For Stuart Hall, there is no one single fixed 'meaning' of any media representation or text; different audiences understand representations differently. A film maker may encode a character in a particular way, but different audiences decode the same character differently. Hall writes about these different understandings of any media text as the dominant (or preferred) meaning /reading, a negotiated meaning /reading and an oppositional meaning /reading.

 

In class, we look at how you have used visual and sound codes to construct your characters.

We discuss how your audiences may 'read' your characters. 

 

For instance, Vendetta includes a scene in which the murderer plays his guitar in front of what resembles a shrine to the girl who has betrayed him. Her picture, the flowers and the darkened room along with the music, suggest an element of ritual, of displaced self-righteousness, of warped justice. Is he made mad by love? Crimes of passion and jealousy are familiar themes in literature and a teenage / young adult audience may see in this central character similarities with the Duke of Ferrara from Robert Browning's dramatic monologue My Last Duchess in which the Duke justifies his murder of his young wife:  

Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

    Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

    Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together.