Research Investigation: Guidance & Deadline

Candidates are required to undertake an individual investigation into a specific area of study focused on one of the following concepts: genre, narrative or representation.

This MUST involve RESEARCH which draws upon a range of both primary and secondary sources. Reference approximately 15-20 sources!!!! - not just the internet.

Primary resources

Detailed Scene/Image/lyrical analysis. For example of detailed primary analysis would be the James Bond scene we analysed in class in regards to representation of females.

Secondary resources

Academic books, online research, magazines, documentaries , Media Theory,

You are not the first people to write about these issues. Read, it will inform your own views and give you content you may not have considered. Remember to quote to demonstrate your research. Also ensure you use the information you have read and apply it to your own texts, your specific question. That could be done in your commentary about the quotations. It could back up a statement you have made. Make sure the theories you have chosen help in answering your question.

Media Terminology

Ensure you use the correct terminology/language at any appropriate opportunity

Bibliography/Referencing

Make sure any quotations or references used in your investigation are numbered chronologically.

For example. “quote” (1)  Then within your bibliography you will write;

For Books

Surname, initial,  year, book title, publisher

Website

Surname, initial, year, web address

Text (film, music video, song, scene)

Title, type of media, director, specific time and duration. You can include images/screen shots within the content section of your essay to help explain your points.

Word Count 1800 words

1 Page Draft Deadline 25/10/13

Research Investigation: Mark Scheme (Grade A-C)

*To achieve the highest grade WIDE RESEARCH 'MUST' be undertaken*

Russell Brand vs. Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight 2013 [Full Interview]

The Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test, if you’re not familiar with it, is a benchmark for movies developed by Alison Bechdel in 1985. For a movie to pass The Bechdel Test, it must contain just one thing - a scene in which two or more named female characters have a conversation (that is, back and forth dialogue) about anything at all besides men. Anything, even if it’s something stereotypically feminine, like shopping or shoes.

You may find it shocking to find out that out of 2,500 movies, only about half pass the test.

The Social Network

Why it fails the test:

None of the women in the movie ever talk to each other. In fact, they’re kinda just flat characters who the male characters ignore or have sex with. Aaron Sorkin, the film’s writer, actually commented on the lack of three-dimensional female characters in an interview with Stephen Colbert, saying that the women are “prizes”.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II

Why it fails the test:

None of the female characters in the film actually have a conversation. They trade quips a few times, like when Prof. McGonagall makes a comment about “always wanting to use that spell” to Mrs. Weasley when she brings the stone statues to life, or when Mrs. Weasley calls Bellatrix a bitch…but no one actually responds and converses. They might as well be talking to themselves.

Avatar

Why it fails the test:

Like Harry Potter, there are a few brief moments where female characters say a single line at each other, but they don’t actually hold a conversation…except in one scene, where Neytiri and her mother have a drawn out discussion. The only problem is that the conversation is about Jake, who, you probably noticed, is a man. You were so very close, James Cameron.

The Entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Why it fails the test:

Despite having three strong female characters in Arwen, Eowyn, and Galadriel, they’re all in completely different parts of Middle Earth and they never even meet, much less talk to each other. In the entire 10-hour trilogy, no two female characters ever actually speak to each other.

A2 Media investigation guidance

Introducing research investigation from christimothy12

‘Sin City’ (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller)

Sin City brought noir back to its pulp-magazine origins, using green-screen CGI technology to exactly recreate the exquisitely etched, near-monochrome ink-splash world of four of comic-book legend Frank Miller’s Sin City stories, all set in the seething dystopian hellhole of the imaginary Basin City. The actors (Bruce Willis et al) are shot and lit by Rodriguez to merge seamlessly into animated panels from Miller’s pages. For anyone who’s ever been a comic-book fan, it’s an exhilarating experience – one that’s much truer to the Pop Art quality of, say, the Marvel or DC superhero comics of the 1960s than any ‘realistic’ adaptation of those has yet achieved. There’s apt usage of Miller’s trademark white-out-of-black effects: white blood, the rectangles of sticking plaster on the rock-like head of doomed thug Marv (Mickey Rourke), the figure of Dwight (Clive Owen) falling as a flat white shape against black tar. Similarly enjoyable are the privileged small details – eyes, a bed, a dress – picked out in colour at key moments. 

Transparently immersed in a graphic-novel vice world, Sin City is able to push its levels of violence – and show nearly all women as lissome, semi-clothed or naked S&M vamps – to a degree you’d never get away with in a realistic-looking movie. The film is a relentless hymn to bloodlust, with a sidebar concern for romantic promises. At the scene of the massacre of bad guys at the end of the fourth story ‘The Big Fat Kill’, wanted murderer Dwight – who has engineered the doom of gangsters trying to take over the prostitute- run Old Town – describes his machine-gun toting former lover thus: “The Valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter... and so am I.” Marv, the implacable super-tough hunk of ‘The Hard Goodbye’ section, extols the pleasures of torture. It’s comical – in the gallows sense – to see how blatantly Rodriguez takes noir’s position as a site of repressed and undirected desires and opens up the valve. 

As with A History of Violence, there’s a mock-epic quality to the way graphic-novel voiceover description and speech-bubble dialogue is written that also tends to grant further distance from the real world, allowing greater licence. Sin City is fantasy fiction of a kind that caters blatantly to the urges of young males, cashing in on the fact that we remain fond of our adolescent pleasures in later life.

Source: Sight & Sound Feb 2013

'The Gaze': Jacques Lacan

The Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan. It describes the relationship of the subject with the desire to look and awareness that one can be viewed. The gaze can be motivated by the subject's desire to control the object it sees, and an object that can likewise capture and hold the subject's eye. The term 'gaze' is often defined as looking long and intently with affection at a subject. The gaze in this case is a relationship and not something that can be performed. A person who determines a sense of themselves as an individual element in the world makes up the idea of the gaze. The concept of the gaze is also a central part of theories looking within modernity. The gaze has affected historical, economical, and cultural environments.

In traditional psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is linked to fantasy and desire. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage that concerns itself with the infantile psychological development. Children gaze at a mirror image of themselves (a twin sibling might function as the mirror-image), and use that image to co-ordinate their physical movements. He linked the concept of the gaze to the development of individual human agency.

Modern media utilises the Lacanian fascination with the image, showing us pictures into which we are invited to project ourselves.

For further notes visit: Notes on 'The Gaze' by Daniel Chandler

Or

lacanonline.com

Click image to access site

Media Theory Links: Making the most of this blog

The column on the right hand side of the blog titled 'Useful Blogs/Sites' provides very good links for the further study and referencing of Media theory.

Visit these sites for a deeper understanding of the key theories that you need to apply to coursework and exam texts.

From these links you can access the full transcript of Laura Mulvey's - Visual pleasure & Narrative Cinema.

Or
Postmodern theory

Looking for the underlying messages within media texts!

Take a look at this short video analysis of the John Carpenter film 'They Live' (1988) which takes an interesting approach to the hidden messages contained in modern media texts. The sci-fi narrative deals with aliens influencing human thought processes as a way of controlling  society, but this can also be read as a metaphor for the way society is controlled by powerful media organisations within a capitalist society. It's basic message is made very clear though - all media texts contain ideas which shape our existence.

Exam response advice - Advice

Here is an example of a, A grade student introduction to the genre question. You can see this would give a great impression to the examiner and sets up the specific textual analysis (identify and justify) for Fish Tank, Sin City and District 9.

Good practice would be to include a micro introduction for each text. Firstly identify each genre the text belongs to and make evaluative comments which uses language from the question. You could say you almost answer the question simplistically in the first couple of lines and then go on to proof it with real detail in terms of specific genre conventions backed up with specific and appropriate scenes/narrative description.

The above and below images are from the A2 Media studies guide available from the exam board, WJEC, found on Amazon.

Sin City can quite easily be established as postmodern due to it being a clear collaboration of a number of genres, creating hybridity within the text. The opening sequence, however, conveys genre conventions that can strongly be associated with the film noir genre.

Could have establish the two main genres which it belongs to most.

An establishing shot is used to, at first, frame an unknown ‘assassin’ (The Man) on a balcony in a cityscape, this mise-en-scene highlights the urban environment commonly employed in film noir films from the 1940’s.

No Specific detail here. I think a different scene would have been more appropriate to represent classic noir iconography.

Further film noir conventions can then be seen with the inclusion of the ‘lady in red’ who displays the characteristic features of a major noir element, the femme-fatale – with red lips, cigarette in-hand and slinky dress. This character is also lit using low-key lighting, a commonly used technique in film noir to suggest deception or deceit. Audiences familiar with the genre would therefore make assumptions about her narrative role by relating her to similar characters seen in classic noir films of the 40’s, such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Combo.  

Good point in terms of the visuals, which link to the noir genre and femme fatale. However due to the experimental narrative we do not get any back story on this particular femme fatale so it is difficult to real identify how pure a femme fatale she may be. Again there are more appropriate scenes. Comparison to other noir films is a real strength.

Sin City, though, then breaks away from the stereotypical femme-fatale character when ‘The Man’ shoots the ‘lady in red’. This plays with the normal narrative convention and provides genre difference to the text, making it untypical. This adds a shock for the viewer and could be regarded as a way to keep the genre fresh for the audience.

Very good, answers the question and justifies the texts actions.

Further film noir conventions can be seen later in the film when the more established noir protagonists arrive in the form of the heroic ‘flawed’ males – Hartigan, Marv and Dwight. Each of these male characters is cynical, damaged and ‘hard-boiled’ like the original noir heroes from the 40’s features I mentioned earlier. Marv, for instance, states in a voice-over narration (another typical characteristic of the genre), that “Sometimes I even wonder why I’m on this earth” - therefore expressing a cynical viewpoint on his existence and his worth in the world. As with all the scenes throughout Sin City, Marv is regularly framed at a ‘dutch tilt’ angle and in stark high contrast black and white to not only represent his skewed view on the world but also his strong moral views of what is right or wrong.

The response is getting stronger, good reference to genre convention and justified with a quote, quote isn’t quite accurate, but gets the point across. Further quotes could have been added from the other protagonists.

The merging of genres in Sin City, to create a hybrid, clearly makes the film untypical of the original genre though. The continuous use of comic-book conventions, such as Marv’s ‘superhuman’ strength, establishes the fact that Sin City, although displaying many opposing conventions, is in itself a text which is both noir and comic-book; a comic-noir if you like. Evidence of this can be seen with the persistent use of comic-book framing and over-exaggerated actions. Hartigan’s shooting on the docks, by Bob (his cop-buddy), clearly shows signs of both noir and comic-book features when John is shot multiple times but still manages to save Nancy and express his feelings through a voice-over; again a noir convention.

A scene could be linked to Marvs super human strength. Not entirely sure what is meant by over exaggerated actions? However, this paragraph helps answer the questions. The hybrid nature of the text will of course dilute the conventions.

'Sin City' Homework

Choose 1 question and discuss 'Sin City'

A1. Explore the ways in which your chosen texts reinforce or challenge typical representations of gender.

Or

A2. How do your chosen texts use genre conventions? Or  How typical of their genre(s) are your chosen texts?

Refer to 2/3 scenes in your response.

Include some technical details (camera/lighting/sound etc)

A2 Media blog quiz

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Sin City (Genre/Representation/Narrative)

Sin City - noir/comic-book

View more presentations from christimothy12

Sin City - Booklet

View more presentations from christimothy12

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

'Kes' is a 1969 British film from the social realist director Ken Loach (a former student at King Edward Grammar School, Nuneaton). The film has certain similarities to 'Fish Tank' as it focuses on 15-year-old Billy Casper, who has little hope in life and is bullied both at home, by his physically and verbally abusive half-brother, Judd, as well as at school. He is mischievous himself; he steals milk from milk floats, gets other students into trouble and generally fights and misbehaves. Billy comes over as an emotionally neglected boy with little self-respect. Billy's mother refers to him in the film as a "hopeless case".

'Kes' and social realism:

• Low budget filmmaking
• Hand-held camera (documentary feel)
• On location
• Deals with social issues/problems
• Socio-political messages and values
• Working class lifestyles
• Non-actors
• 'Kitchen Sink'

Fish Tank: Genre/Representation - Social Realism

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

The British New Wave Cinema lasted only a few years, in effect from 1959 to 1963. And its output amounted to no more than, arguably, half a dozen films at most. But, albeit small in number, they were influential films and powerfully evocative, and enough to prompt leading critics of the day to talk of ‘a renaissance in British cinema’.

Coming at the end of a decade that was widely perceived as ‘a doldrums era’, replete with lightweight comedy fare, gothic horror films and endless war vehicles, or so it seemed, the New Wave films were greeted by audiences as a breath of fresh air – and paved the way, moreover, for the transatlantic success that awaited British cinema in the Swinging Sixties.

Directors and Writers

The leading directors of New Wave cinema were Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger and Lindsay Anderson. Most came from the theatre, principally the Royal Court Theatre, where Richardson had directed the plays of John Osborne, notably Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer to great critical acclaim. In fact, the major production company behind British New Wave cinema, Woodfall films, was set up by Richardson and Osborne precisely to put these stage plays on to the big screen, which they did with the likes of Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier in the leading roles.

Woodfall’s fortunes fared even better when Richardson and Reisz spread their net wider to draw on northern realist novelists or playwrights such as Alan Sillitoe and Shelagh Delaney, and, what’s more, took the unusual step for the film industry of those times of engaging these authors to do the screenplays for the films of their own works. Taking the cameras out of the studio confines and engaging in larger amounts of location shooting was another first for the industry, and not at all welcomed in mainstream circles. But social realism was the watchword of these new film-makers, scriptwriters, and a younger generation of actors, including Albert Finney, Rita Tushingham, Shirley Anne Field, Tom Courtenay, Alan Bates, Rachel Roberts, Richard Harris and the like.

Karel Reisz had the first big commercial success with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), while Tony Richardson made A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Lindsay Anderson engaged David Storey to script his own book of This Sporting Life (1963), which effectively brought New Wave Cinema to an end.

Realism and After

The social realism fostered by New Wave Cinema, in particular, made an indelible and lasting impression on British film-makers for many years, and can even be discerned in such recent films as Pater Cattaneo’s international hit, The Full Monty (1997), as well as Lynne Ramsay’s art-house success, Ratcatcher (1999) and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009). The spirit of the New Wave, in short, extended way beyond its own period and, indeed, still flourishes in British cinema today.

'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'

Adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s rebellious first popular novel, which is about the new young working class, directed by Karel Reisz and produced by Tony Richardson, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning stars Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field. The film was a revelation when it was initially released, not just for its realistic style, but also for its graphic portrayal of sex, extra-marital affairs, strong language, and, most contentious of all, abortion.

The British Board of Film Censors, for instance, urged a general toning down of all the language and sex scenes. In particular, it required that the successful abortion scene promised in the screenplay and evident from the first in Sillitoe’s original novel, be rendered ultimately ineffective and that the film-makers follow a policy of ‘social responsibility’ as far as possible.

Extract edited from: The Open University

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

What is Social Realism?

Cinematically the British New Wave is part of a tradition of social realism within British film which has seen many shifts since the growth of the British documentary movement in the 1930s. Realism is a difficult concept because encapsulated within it there are a range of changing aesthetic conventions all of which have as a central concern the intention of representing ‘the world as it really is’ or ‘life as it is really lived’. Lay (2002) points out:

There is no universal, all-encompassing definition of realism, nor is there agreement amongst academics and film-makers as to its purpose and use. But what we can say is that there are many ‘realisms’ and these realisms all share an interest in presenting some aspect of life as it is lived’. Carroll (1996) suggests that the term should only be used with a prefix attached. This is because another important feature of all realisms is how they are produced at specific historical points. The addition of a prefix, such as social-, neo-, documentary-, specifies the’ what’ and crucially, ‘when’ of that movement or moment. What is regarded as ‘real’, by whom, and how it is represented is unstable dynamic, and ever-changing, precisely because realism is irrevocably tied to the specifics of time and place. ‘Moment’” (Lay, Samantha, 2002: p 8)

As Andre Bazin also noted, each era looks to the technique and aesthetic which can best capture aspects of reality, thus realism is in itself an aesthetic construct dependent upon a set of artistic conventions and forms. It has been noted that for a film to be realist rather than just realistic there are 2 necessary fundamentals. There must have been the intention to capture the experience of the event depicted and secondly the film-maker must have a specific argument or message to make about the social world employing realist conventions to express this.

Raymond Williams has argued that the four main criteria of social realism incorporate the following features:

• Firstly that the texts are secular, released from mysticism and religion
• Secondly that they are grounded in the contemporary scene in terms of setting, characters and social issues
• Thirdly that they contain an element of social extension by which previously under-represented groupings in society become represented
• Fourthly there is the intent of the artist which is mostly a political one although some artists have used the genre as route into a mainstream film-making career.

Social Realism and Representation

Social realist texts usually focus on the type of characters not generally found in mainstream films. Social realist texts draw in characters who inhabit the social margins of society in terms of status and power. This ‘social extension’ has usually involved the representation of the working class at moments of social and economic change.

For example there was a shift in modes of representation of the working class from the Grierson documentaries of the 1930s to British Free Cinema documentaries and the British New Wave features which followed on from the Free Cinema Movement. Free Cinema and New Wave chose to represent the working class neither in victim mode, nor in heroic worker mode as had been done previously. The working class were to be seen as more energetic and vibrant.

Critics generally accept that women have faired badly in the representations of the British New Wave, although Loach’s Poor Cow (1967) and TV docudramas Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home helped redress the balance. By the 1980s social realist films such as Letter to Brehznev (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) reflected the changing nature of society and the growing importance of women in the workforce, not only women but humour too was more apparent. This approach continued into the 1990s with films such as Mike Leigh’s Career Girls (1997). Some have argued that the portrayal of women took a retrograde step in the mid to late 1990s as they became adept consumers unsupportive of husbands as in Brassed Off (1996) and The Full Monty (1997). Alternatively women became victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse such as Stella Does Tricks (1996) or Nil By Mouth (1997).

It has been argued that in general the representation of the working class has shifted from being producers to consumers reflected in a move which has seen members of the working class in more privatised domestic environments and leisure-time settings instead of as members of geographical communities or in workplace environments where collective bargaining procedures are in place.

Whilst social realist representation has tended to focus upon white working class males there has been some breakthrough in terms of race in films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Bahji on the Beach (1994). The changing sense of Britishness has been represented through cultural hybridity and multiculturalism from the mid 1980s through until Chada’s Bend it Like Beckham moving from social real to a more fantasy mode in the process. Recently social extension has begun to be granted to the position of asylum seekers and refugees and those effected by the diasporic forces relating to globalisation and the collapse of the post-capitalist states such as Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002) which concerns issues of globalised inequality from a social realist perspective.

Source: blogs.warwick.ac.uk

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

Fish Tank: Review

Director Andrea Arnold works wonders in Fish Tank, an Essex-based kitchen sink drama which shows British film at its best.

It was clear from Red Road, Andrea Arnold’s darkly compulsive tale of surveillance and revenge in Glasgow, that a distinctive new British filmmaker had arrived on the scene.

We need all of these we can get, so praise be that Arnold’s follow-up, Fish Tank, has the same confident signature. The sinuous camerawork of Robbie Ryan prowls around a housing estate, this time in Essex, and the story is a collision course whose precise moment of impact we can’t guess. If this is social realism, it’s a kind with prickly cinematic voltage and no redundant lesson to teach. It’s tremendous.

Fifteen-year-old Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis) is the film’s heroine, and rarely has a more scowling, stroppy, wilful teenager had the whole forcefield of a movie at her disposal. She lives on insult. “Call me back, you bitch!” may not be the best-chosen words to patch up a blighted friendship; there’s even less love lost between Mia and her single mum (Kierston Wareing), who wants to pack her off into juvenile care.

If Arnold has one great skill, it’s charging up the spaces between her characters – she can put two people in a room and make it seethe. When Irish charmer Connor (Michael Fassbender) walks half-naked into their kitchen for the first time, sex is added to Fish Tank’s miasma of tensions.

Mia falls back on her natural defence mechanism – lippiness – but there’s clearly something between them. She peeks into her mother’s bedroom at night, and pays Connor coy visits at work. His own status in the household is hard to read. Is he protector, predator, or what?

Even by Fassbender’s high standards, this is a spellbinding turn, and the film shifts gears unmistakably whenever it’s around him. Arnold coaxes totally convincing performances from Jarvis, who ably suggests awkwardness and shyness beneath Mia’s keep-off exterior, and Rebecca Griffiths as her younger sister Tyler, a swearing tyke with an amazingly filthy laugh.

There are false notes here and there: a subplot about a local gipsy (Harry Treadaway) and his ailing white horse feels like standard urban fairy tale. But Arnold works wonders almost everywhere in this film: the drip-drop drabness of kitchen-sink drama is stilled, alive, and newly dangerous.

By Tim Robey3 (Telegraph) : 10 Sep 2009

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

For a history of Social Realism in British Cinema visit the Screenonline site here. it will be useful for understanding the genre and representational issues at work in 'Fish Tank'. Watch the trailer below.