MEDIA LANGUAGE: STRAUSS & STRUCTURALISM

Our recent work covered how hegemony influences representations.
Today, we build on our understanding of representation and media language, two of the course's 4 key concepts, that underpin how you analyse what you see in television drama questions, the film industry as well as in your own productions. We use a text book that I have bought for the media department; it has online worksheets at www.essentialmediatheory.com. We start with Claude Levi-Strauss.

 

Levi-Strauss analysed the structure and narrative of hundreds of mythic tales he collected from all round the globe. He sought to uncover the invisible rulebook of storytelling in order to look closely at the essential nature of human experience. He believed that if he discerned any common themes, the myths would reveal essential truths about how the human mind structured the world. He concluded that all stories worked through oppositional arrangements - through the construction of characters or narrative incidents that clash or jar. Moreover, he came to believe that stories and storytelling perform a vital social function: oppositional presentations are resolved to outline societal taboos and socially acceptable behaviours.

LS outlined his key academic ideas in his book The Savage Mind 1962. For LS, different cultures might speak different languages, but stories told across the globe and throughout history employ a remarkably simple but stable formula.. Myths, he argued, universally explore human experience using polarised themes (birth competing against death, wisdom competing with innocence...). Can you think of any fairy tales that support this idea?

Concept One:  media narratives use binary opposition

LS offers a structuralist approach to media language, suggesting that humans encode and decode the world using universally shared principles.
• The media uses binary oppositions to explain and categorise the complexities of the world around us.
• Oppositions can be found in the media in the presentation of characters: audiences expect villains to battle heroes; secondary characters are constructed with contrasts in terms of youth or maturity, strength or intelligence, masculinity or femininity. In news stories, criminals exploit victims; in documentaries, innocent subjects fall prey to anonymous corporations.
• Oppositions can be found in the media in the presentation of narrative themes. Print and TV advertising transforms failure into success through simplified binary presentations. TV narratives conventionally end in a grand narrative collision in order to deliver an exciting finale to their audiences.
• Media makers also apply stylistic oppositions to mise-en-scène, camera work, editing styles and image construction.The juxtaposition of different styles might include camera work changing from quiet stillness in one scene to frenzied whip pans in another. This sort of transition might reinforce wider character-oriented oppositions. They can also create aesthetic interest. Look at the table below.

• Thematic oppositions in media products can be  genre driven. Some binary oppositions are so deeply entrenched within genres that they become a genre convention (expectation). Sci-Fi regularly offers audiences 'humanity v. technology' driven narratives; crime drama 'law enforcer v. law breaker; romances resolve in romantic couplings.

WHY ARE BINARY OPPOSITIONS USED? The function of oppositions

You can draw on these points when you write about your own characters & narrative in CCR1

• To clearly explain ideas To simplify complicated ideas, viewpoints. News stories often explain complex topics by referencing interviewees with oppositional viewpoints to generate simplified overviews. When you think about writing about press regulation, for instance, you will offer oppositional views ("Arguably.... On the other hand...")
• To create compelling narratives Audiences are more likely to engage with a film if they are promised a narrative clash. What are the clashes in your own productions?
• To create identifiable character types Audiences quickly pick up the sense of direction in a story once oppositional characters are introduced (hero / villain; good guy winning his girl). Clashing characters also offer audiences a range of other gratifications - comedy, fear...
• To create audience identification Binary oppositions prompt audiences to identify with one central character, group or viewpoint. An advert that contrasts dull reality with the promise of a sparkling outcome, for example, positions the audience to empathise with that brand. Have you noticed any casting choices for villains in US films?

The poster will prompt our exploration of genre driven oppositions. Look at the heading to identify the genre then look down the list.

Concept Two: the way binary oppositions are resolved creates  ideological significance
For Levi-Strauss, myths give us a version of the world around us and generate culturally specific norms of behaviour (=belonging to a particular culture /period in time / place). Narratives provide audiences with a set of privileged behaviours that they are encouraged to copy. For example, he cites Sophocles' famous Oedipus myth. Cultural products in art, media and literature don't just present conflict; they offer resolutions to oppositions. Think about James Bond or The Avengers.

• media producers construct ideologies by positioning their audiences to favour one side of an opposition (How does 'Britishness' triumph in a Bond movie? How are the NHS presented in the Press during the Covid19 crisis?)
• narrative resolutions -  the ending of media products - often help us to diagnose which oppositions a product favours. (Who gets the girl / the medal / the hero's welcome home?) Oscar Wilde famously said "The good end happily, the bad unhappily; that is what fiction means.")

Theorists who challenge Levi-Strauss's thinking

• Stuart Hall: would argue that media products can be encoded using binary oppositions, but audiences do not necessarily decode products in the way that media producers intended
• Paul Gilroy: argues that Western binary thinking has traditionally classified ethnicity in terms of simplified white /non white and civilised /uncivilised categories. He calls for the media to move beyond these simplistic and damaging binary classifications.
• Judith Butler: similarly argues that conventional Western gender binaries mask the complex nature of sexuality. 

 

PRESS REGULATION

Let's continue looking at Press Regulation, as we did last Friday.

UNDERSTANDING HEGEMONY

Today's classwork:

Parasite directed by Bong Joon Ho
(South Korean) 2019

WHAT? In writing, sum up simply what you understand, with one brief paragraph per question point from the article that you read last lesson.
WHERE? On your blog with the blogpost title UNDERSTANDING HEGEMONY
HOW? Follow the '1 to 6' but not write the actual numbers. Place the images wherever you think it helps.
IMAGES? Add images to support your points (I have grouped the ones below on a Word document to make them fit.) 

I have made a start (under the first images) to suggest how you could tackle this.

(left) The Guardian Observer
July 2015 Vanessa Thorpe
(right) https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/movie-awards-so-male-so-white-so-what/

Hegemony refers to the way in which the media encourage people to consent to status power structures. The media tends to be dominated by a narrow set of people (middle class white men) who tend to represent people like themselves as more powerful / significant than other groups. Therefore one specific set of images of this dominant group of people are represented as superior and more powerful. These are often white, male, Western people. For example, I looked at how Western journalists report on the film industry and found that the accompanying image reflected this point (article by Vanessa Thorpe about the film industry) as every actor featured was male and all but five were white. Other groups are less often represented as powerful / significant: people from the working class, women, BAME, people with disabilities. For example, I have looked at the representation of working class issues (Ken Loach's films Sorry We Missed You and I, Daniel Blake) as well as of disabled actors (such as the BFI trailer for 100 Years of Disabled People in Film). Arguably, this approach is so entrenched and subtle that it is rarely challenged, so what the media reflect back to us perpetuates what is considered normal. For Gramsci, this is media 'manufacturing consent'.

Behaviourist models analysing the effects of the media ....

BFI's trailer  is available here

THEORY LESSON: HEGEMONY

Please read this slowly! It is not as hard as it looks.

TV DRAMA

It's Monday so we will work on our skills analysing the film language of TV drama. 
The text is very short: BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES on Claremont's ClickView 
Find it under Media > Film Openings > Bonfire of the Vanities
Email me what you manage to write (Header with your name + Bonfire) between 11.30 and 12:55 please. I will be at my desk in case you are stuck and would like to email me a question.

SUPPORTING INFO
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 American satirical black comedy film directed and produced by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Kim Cattrall. The screenplay, written by Michael Cristofer, was adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe. 

Trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=896Yk-JmCGo
Film synposis here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonfire_of_the_Vanities_(film)

CHARACTERS: Peter Fallow - author

SETTING & CAMERA MOVEMENT The 330-second Steadicam shot of Peter Fallow arriving at the Palm Court of the Winter Garden was a tour de force for operator Larry McConkey. He had to track backwards, get on a golf cart, ride it for 380 ft, get off it again, track backwards 234 ft, get into the elevator, get out again, and track for another 250 ft.^[17]

The huge party scenes were shot at the L.A. Natural History Museum.

This is the format for every question:

1 Discuss the ways in which the extract constructs meaning through the following:

• camera shots, angles, movement and composition
  
• editing
  
• sound
  
• mise-en-scène.
  

Here is the media language (open this link) terminology to refresh your memory. 
We usually attempt to formulate an introductory sentence that shows our grasp of the whole.
We usually find the terms 'establishing shot' useful in starting our writing.

Remember our essay technique:

• T identify the terminology
• E examine the example
• EAA explain / anaylse / argue how the example creates a particular representation

PRESS REGULATION

GoogleMeet Friday 1 May 11.30 - 12.30
We are discussing Press Regulation. You will need to have open the relevant A2 blog page which is here https://a2mediaclass.blogspot.com/p/film-regulation.html

CHALLENGE At A2 for your Advanced Production, you will also show that you have done Preliminary Exercises - these will be different from your Foundation Production. Here is the first idea: make a short edited video of montage shots  

• Use the music from this work
  https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/34615686/a-world-we-deserve/babyshop
• perhaps a combo on video and stills
• perhaps with some slowmo
• perhaps text on screen

AUDIENCE THEORY

To support your answer for CCR2, we are going over aspects of Audience Theory so that you can show your understanding. You can include it in your CCR2. Where possible, make links between theory and your own production.

CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION 2: How does your film opening engage with your target audience?

There are many good examples; this is one
https://ls1666x.blogspot.com/p/creative-critical.html