Skyscraper Production

Sunday, 10 September 2023

AUDIENCE THEORIES

Parkin’s/Hall’s Audience Readings Theory

Frank Parkin (1972) and later Stuart Hall (1980) analysed the readings within audiences as either:

1.Dominant or Preferred Reading: The meaning they want you to have is usually accepted.

2.Negotiated Reading: The dominant reading is only partially recognised or accepted and audiences might disagree with some of it or find their own meanings.

3.Oppositional Reading: The dominant reading is refused, rejected because the reader disagrees with it or is offended by it, especially for political, religious, feminist, reasons etc.

Dennis McQuail’s Uses And Gratifications Theory (1972)

Dennis McQuail (1972) An audience can be described as a “temporary collective”

This active audience theory argues that the audience control textual meanings; they select texts for certain psychological needs:

Diversion/Escapism
Personal Relationship: A talking point
Personal Identity: identifying with the representations on display
Surveillance: Information

Katz & Blumler’s variation (development) of U+G

You have this in the genre guide. They tweaked McQuail’s formulation. ‘Uses and gratifications’ (Katz & Blumler) research has identified many potential pleasures of genre, including the following:

One pleasure may simply be the recognition of the features of a particular genre because of our familiarity with it. Recognition of what is likely to be important (and what is not), derived from our knowledge of the genre, is necessary in order to follow a plot.

Genres may offer various emotional pleasures such as empathy and escapism - a feature which some theoretical commentaries seem to lose sight of. Aristotle, of course, acknowledged the special emotional responses which were linked to different genres. Deborah Knight notes that 'satisfaction is guaranteed with genre; the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation' (Knight 1994).

Goals for media use can be grouped into five uses. The audience wants to:

be informed or educated
identify with characters of the situation in the media environment
simple entertainment
enhance social interaction
escape from the stresses of daily life

Bridgit Cherry (2010) UGC to Extend Commercial Releases

The research outlined by Brigid Cherry in “Horror Zone” (2010) is examined the FanFiction.net site, noting the 69 fan fictions for Scream. She doesn’t make the point, but what this UGC or fan-made content actually reflects is the trend of ‘reimagining’ franchises, as seen with Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street… In the music video context, the point really is that fans are no longer content with just the official, commercial releases; they also extend these through their own creations (viral media, UGC):

‘… the concerns and interests of this group of horror fans centre around the desire for narrative continuation and more detailed narrative in some cases. As Will Brooker has stated of science-fiction cinema, cult texts generate fan material which suggests new narrative directions, develops characters or builds on the frameworks of the films. It is clear from the above survey that this fan culture is a “community of imagination” surrounding a heterogenous genre. Unlike fans of an ongoing television text, horror film fans have no continuous weekly fix of new stories. Accordingly, they are constantly seeking new films, and the various segments within horror fandom (be they oriented around identity or taste) are looking for information which will then inform them as to whether a production is likely to be of interest.’

Saturday, 9 September 2023

NARRATIVE THEORIES

In this blogpost, I will cover:

-Kate Domaille's 8 Narrative Types
-Levi-Strauss' Binary Opposition
- Proppian character archetypes
- Roland Barthes's 5 codes
- Todorov's 5 part narrative structure
- Carol Vernallis
- Tim O'Sullivan
- Andrew Goodwin
- Campbell

Kate Domaille's 8 Narrative Types

Every story ever told can be fitted into one of eight narrative types. Each of these narrative types has a source, an original story upon which the others are based. These stories are as follows:

1. Achilles: The Fatal Flaw that leads to the destruction of the previously flawless, or almost flawless, person e.g. Superman
2. Candide: The indomitable hero who cannot be put down, e.g. James Bond
3. Cinderella: The dream comes true, e.g. Pretty Woman
4. Circe: The Chase, the spider and the fly, the innocent and the victim e.g. Terminator
5. Faust: Selling your soul to the devil may bring riches but eventually your soul belongs to him, e.g Wall Street, Devil's Advocate
6. Orpheus: The loss of something personal, the gift that is taken away, the tragedy of loss or the journey which follows the loss e.g. The Sixth Sense.
7. Romeo and Juliet: The love story, e.g. Titanic.
8. Tristan and Iseult: The love triangle. Man loves woman. Unfortunately, one or both of them are already spoken for, or a third party intervenes

IN OUR MUSIC VIDEO: We started by exploring Achilles: The fatal flaw We wanted to use the simulacrum (Baudrillard) of Olivia’s existing brand as a teen pop star to show the decay of her character under pressure. We decided to move away from that concept. We can apply Orpheus: the tragedy of loss. Olivia looses her popularity and social status which sends her on her heros' journey (Campbell's monomyth)

Our video - Olivia looses her social status

Levi-Strauss' Binary Opposition

Claude Lèvi-Strauss (1958): his ideas about the narrative amount to the fact that he believed all stories operated to certain clear Binary Opposites e.g. good vs. evil, black vs. white, rich vs. poor etc.
The importance of these ideas is that essentially a complicated world is reduced to a simple either/or structure. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad. There is no in between.
This structure has ideological implications, if, for example, you want to show that the hero was not wholly correct in what they did, and the villains weren’t always bad. From James Cagney’s 1930s characters to Clint Eastwood’s amoral spaghetti western character, the anti-hero has been a common feature of cinema. Consider too homo-/heterosexual: what about bisexual? Queer theorist Judith Butler (performativity of gender) also argues the binary opposite of gender is problematic

Our video - clear binary opposition and usage of the anti-hero

NARRATIVE: Propp's 7 Character Types

Vladimir Propp was a soviet scholar and folklorist who analysed the basic plot components of fairy tales to identify their basic narrative elements. He did this by breaking the fairy tales into different sections.

Through these sections, Propp was able to define the tales into a series of sequences.
At first he had divided them into 31 different sections. However, he soon realised that those 31 sections could be resolved into 7 broad character functions.

These are the seven basic character types also known as archetypes:
From the study of fairytales:
1. The Villain (antagonist) - struggles against the hero.
2. The Donor - prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
3. The Helper - helps the hero in the quest.
4. The Hero - reacts to the donor, saves the day, weds the princess.
5. The False Hero - takes credit for the hero's actions or tries to marry the princess.
6. The Princess or Prize - the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. The hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and father cannot be clearly distinguished.
7. The Dispatcher - character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.

NARRATIVE: Roland Barthes' 5 Codes

The Enigma code - the audience is intrigued by the need to solve a problem.
The Action code - the audience is excited by the need to resolve a problem.
The Semantic code - the audience is directed towards an additional meaning through connotation.
The Symbolic code - the audience assumes that a character dressed in black is evil and forms expectations of his/her behaviour on this basis.
The Cultural code - the audience derives meaning in a text from shared cultural knowledge about the way the world works

IN OUR MUSIC VIDEO: You can apply the enigma code as we don't find out who slushed Olivia until later in the video. Symbolic code for costume. Light pink means innocent and pristine and black means evil.

Our video - symbolic code of black clothing meaning evil

NARRATIVE: Todorov's 5-Part Narrative Structure
1. A state of equilibrium at the outset.
Everything is balanced evenly - there is no problem - everything is calm.
2. A disruption of the equilibrium by some action.
Something happens to upset the balance - chaos - things have gone wrong.
3. A recognition that there has been a disruption.
What has upset the balance is recognised. The characters see what has changed.
4. An attempt to repair the disruption.
People make an effort to bring the balance back - to restore equilibrium - the characters will have to work to make things different.
5. A reinstatement of the equilibrium.
The balance is back - equilibrium is restored - all the problems are sorted out.

Our video - disruption- we find out Olivia is the anti-hero

CAROL VERNALLIS (2004)

‘Experiencing Music Video differs from previous work on music video because it takes the music of music video most seriously.

'I argue that music videos derive from the songs they set. The music comes first – the song is produced before the video is conceived – and the director normally designs images with the song as a guide.’ ‘Music videos often suggest a story, we obtain no more visual information than we might derive from a single narrative painting.’

‘In music video, what is concealed and what is revealed serve to encourage multiple viewings by engaging the viewer in a process of reconstructing, interpolating or extrapolating a story behind the scenes that are actually visible. When the narrative mode is present even fleetingly, it creates an aura of mystery, a sense that things need to be puzzled out’.

Videos use ellipsis in such an extreme fashion that causality is often absent.

‘Music video presents a range all the way from extremely abstract videos emphasizing colour and movement to those that convey a story. But most videos tend to be nonnarrative. An Aristotlean definition – characters with defined personality traits, goals, and a sense of agency encounter obstacles and are changed by them – describes only a small fraction of videos, perhaps one in fifty. Still fewer meet the criteria that David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson require in their Film Art: An Introduction: that all of the events we see or hear, plus those we infer or assume to have occurred, can be arranged according to their presumed causal relations, chronological order, duration, frequency, and spatial locations. Even if we think we have a sense of a music video’s story, we may not feel that we can reconstruct the tale in the manner that Bordwell and Thompson’s criteria demand.’

TIM O’SULLIVAN (1998) NARR UNIVERSAL

argues that all media texts tell us some kind of story. Media texts offer a way of telling stories about ourselves – not usually our own personal stories, but the story of us as a culture or set of cultures.

ANDREW GOODWIN RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LYRICS, VISUALS, MUSIC: asked what is the relationship between lyrics, visuals and music:

(1) illustrative – images provide a literal representation

(2) amplifying – repetition of key meanings and effects to manipulate the audience

(3) contradicting – images contrast with the music

(4) disjuncture – when the meaning of the song is completely ignored.

A video may combine some of these. He argues that the most common function of a video, looking at Madonna's example, is to frame the “star-in-text”; creating a role that boosts their star appeal and branding.

GENERAL THEORIES LEARNED

POSTMODERN THEORIES

Jean Baudrillard: Intertextuality/Simulacra

The music video is noted for its postmodern style, especially borrowing widely not only from other videos but also from other media.

Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ to denote the practice of utilising elements of other texts. Andrew Goodwin identifies this as one of the six core defining features of music videos. We can see this in any number of music videos,

Death metal band Morbid Angel’s “Existo Vulgare”, which is presented as a 1920s silent movie, a meme which the hit film “The Artist” helped spread. This is a great example of what Baudrillard terms a ‘simulacra’: a signifier of an existing signifier in an endless chain of signification with no ultimate, definable reality behind it.

Rammstein’s “Sonne” which presents a bizarre deconstruction of the Snow White fairytale; Rage Against Ramstein's “Mein Land” in which they appear as Beach Boys-style surfers, etc etc. Famous directors Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze are both well known for this postmodern approach.

Jonze’s “Buddy Holly” video has the band, Weezer, appearing as characters in the 70s sitcom Happy Days, which was a representation of the 1950s, a clear simulacrum.

Rammstein - Mein Land

Weezer - Buddy Hole

Richard Dyer

He argues we should always ask these questions of representations:

1. What sense of the world is it making?

2. What does it imply? Is it typical of the world or deviant?

3. Who is it speaking to? For whom? To whom?

4. What does it represent to us and why? How do we respond to the representation?

He claims there are three main characteristics of contemporary media representation:

Representation is selective: individuals in the media are often used to replace a group of people. One member of this group then represents the whole social group.
Representation is culture-specific: representations are presentations. The use of codes and conventions available in a culture shapes and restricts “what can be said ... about any aspect of reality in a given place, in a given society at a given time”.
Representation is subject to interpretation: although visual codes are restricted by cultural convention, they “do not have single determinate meanings”. To a certain degree, their meaning is a matter of interpretation.

HOW WE APPLIED THIS IN OUR VIDEO: Our Olivia represents the female teen social group while Elvis Costello represents the older male social group. We reinforce age stereotypes with Olivia being a rebellious teen and Elvis Costello an overbearing parent.

Our video

Star Theory:

Richard Dyer's theory that stars lead media products and create marketing publicity to sell products such as films.

STANLEY COHEN: MORAL PANICS

Stanley Cohen in his book Folk Devils And Moral Panics (1972) defines a ‘Moral Panic’ as:

“…a mass response to a group, a person or an attitude that becomes defined as a threat to society.”

Cohen argues that the media, especially news media, often create and/or reinforce moral panics in the public.

The term ‘Folk Devil’ is the name given to the object of the moral panic, i.e. it is another name for a scapegoat.

An example would be media discourse on ‘outrageous’, shocking, sexualised music videos, especially those from female performers – the ‘flak’ from the likes of the Daily Mail intended to form a moral panic. For example Miley Cyrus and her music video for Wrecking Ball. The term moral panic was popularised by Stanley Cohen, and is taken to mean an issue being grossly exaggerated through media (especially newspaper) coverage, creating a sense of social fear and generating calls for censorship or new laws/regulations.

Moral panic surrounding Olivia's recent campaign

James Baker (2007)

Mediation works in 3 ways:

(1) Selection: Whatever ends up on the screen or in the paper, much more will have been left out.

(2) Organisation: The various elements will be organised carefully in ways that real life is not

(3) Focusing: mediation always ends up with us, the audience, being encouraged towards concentrating on one aspect of the text and ignoring others.

Baker also claims there are 3 ways to look at representation:

(1) The Reflective view: when we represent something we are taking its true meaning and trying to create a replica of it in the mind of our audience – like a reflection

(2) The Intentional view: the opposite of Reflective; the most important person in the process is the author, and their intentions are key

(3) The Constructionist view: individuals make up their own mind and are influenced by their society in how they do so. Any representation is a mixture of (1) the thing itself (2) the opinions of the people doing the representation (3) the reaction of the individual to the representation (4) the context of the society in which the representation is taking place

Levi-Strauss (1958)

PARADIGMS, PREFERRED REPRESENTATION: All representations have ideologies behind them. Certain paradigms are encoded into texts and others are left out in order to give a preferred representation. The CHOICES of what to include/exclude (and WHY these choices were made) are important when considering representation.

Retromania

Simon Reynolds and Retromania: he argues that contemporary music is dominated by the past; even the young tend to include some older music in their collections, while new genres and tracks carry obvious influences from the past. Digital media means that instead of experiencing pop music forms when we’re young and then moving on, now everything ends up catalogued, repackaged, on YouTube etc

He Argues that pop music has become increasingly backwards looking and referencing the past (intertextuality), with older adults no longer ceasing to listen to music of their youth while young people mix listening to new acts with older acts, partly as a consequence as the cheap/free availability of music through digital technologies.

Pop music, even though sales of vinyl and cassettes are going up, is less likely to exist in material form. There's no need to dream about what a particular Velvet Underground bootleg or Frankie Wilson's famously rare northern soul stomper "Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)" or 20s field recordings of Inuit might sound like: they're available at the click of a mouse. The deleted, the obscure, the exotic: archaeological layers of musical history are constantly being rediscovered, circulated and filtered into records being released today.

Henry Jenkins & Convergence/Participatory Culture + Collective Intelligence

Convergence - the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes

Participatory culture - circulation of media content depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer.

Collective intelligence – combining skills and resources which is enabled by convergence.

This circulation of media content – across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders – depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer.

Stereotypes

First coined by Walter Lippmann (1956) the word stereotype wasn’t meant to be negative and was simply meant as a shortcut or ordering process. He distinguishes three major functions of stereotyping:

(1) Ordering process: categorisations, generalisations and typifications are instruments of societies to make sense of themselves. Such orderings are partial, but not always untrue, because “partial knowledge is not false knowledge, it is simply not absolute knowledge”.

(2) Short cut: stereotypes work like signs, they are simple, striking and easily grasped, but still carry complex information.

(3) Reference: as a sign, a stereotype refers to something we know in reality and associate certain ideas with. In referring to ‘reality’, reality is interpreted. In this sense, stereotyping is a projection of values onto ‘the world’. Stereotypes are therefore defined by their social function.

Orrin E. Klapp's (1962) distinction between stereotypes and social types is helpful. Klapp defines social types as representations of those who 'belong' to society. They are the kinds of people that one expects, and is led to expect, to find in one's society, whereas stereotypes are those who do not belong, who are outside of one's society.

Dyer (1977) – we recognise tropes/have immediate preconceptions: if we are to be told that we are going to see a film about an alcoholic then we will know that it will be a tale either of sordid decline or of inspiring redemption. This is a particularly interesting potential use of stereotypes, in which the character is constructed, at the level of costume, performance, etc., as a stereotype but is deliberately given a narrative function that is not implicit in the stereotype, thus throwing into question the assumptions anchored by the stereotypical iconography.

Gramsci & Hegemony

Gramsci was a 1930s Italian Marxist. Like Marxists generally he believed there is an elite which dominates wealth and power, and exploits the ‘masses’ to create this wealth. He argued that power is achieved and exercised not just through brute force (police, army etc) but as much through culture. He contends that the ideas which become seen as ‘common sense’ tend to reflect the views and strategies of the elite, although hegemony is always unstable and open to counter-hegemonic challenge. You should be able to discuss your work as being one or the other (perhaps a bit of both).

Chomsky’s Propaganda Model/5 Filters: Gramsci links naturally with Noam Chomsky, whose ‘propaganda model’ argues that the media do not seek to accurately represent the world around us, or to fulfil the democratic function of providing information that enables us make informed democratic choices and scrutinising the powerful – instead they exist to encourage support for the dominant elites at any given time. He argues that any counter-hegemonic content tends to be marginalised or excluded from most media, particularly the mainstream, mass media, through five ‘filters’:

Flak - anything counter-hegemonic will be attacked and criticised by other media.