Media texts

The influence and consumptions of media texts by the audience can help them with issues such as learning, emotional satisfaction, relaxation, help with issues of personal identity, help with issues of social identity, and issues of aggression and violence.

Feminist Film Theory & Audiences

• Laura Mulvey
• Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975)

The Theory

• Cinema reflects society
• Therefore cinema reflects a partiarchal society
• How does a patriarchal society manifest itself in cinema?
• FOR EXAMPLE: patriarchy and phallocentrism are linked.
• The phallus is the symbol of power
• Note how guns are used in films
• Gun = phallus = power

The Gaze

• The gaze of the camera is the male gaze
• The male gaze is active, the female gaze is passive
• Within the narrative, amle characters dorects their gaze towards female characters

Theory

• The spectator is made to identify with the male look, because the camera films from the optical, as well as the libidinal point of view of the male character
• There are three levels of the cinematic gaze - camera gaze, character gaze and spectator gaze, that objectify (sexual character) the female character (triple gaze)
• Therefore the audience is constructed as thpugh everyone was male
• women are forced to look as though they were a male audience member

Agency

• In the classical Hollywood cinema the male protagonist has agency - he is active and powerful
• He is the agent around whom the dramatic action unfolds
• The female character is passive and powerless - she is the object of desire for protagonist and audience

Erotic Disire

• Mulvey argues that women have two roles in film:

1. an object of erotic desire for the characters
2. as an object of erotic desire for the audience

Suture

Classical Hollywood narrative and editing "sutures" or postions the audience in certain ways of making only one preferred reading possible, however unconscious the audience is of that position.

Storyboard

We have started drawing up our story board and having group meetings in order to discuss our ideas for our music video. We have our main ideas of what we want to do, and we have also discussed the props we need to use, our coustumes; how many times we will change, what we are going to do with our hair ect. The story board is complete and everyone in the group knows what we are doing. We now just need to arrange dates to actually start our filming.

Gratifications Model

• It is still unclear that there is any link between the consumption of violent media texts and violent imitate behaviour.
• The theory is not proven as many people who do watch violent texta appear to be not influenced.
• Therefore a new theory is necessary....its called the uses and gratifications model.
• The uses and gratifications model us the opposite of the effects model.
• In this theory the audience is active.
• The audience uses the text and is not used by it.
• The audience uses the text for its own gratification or pleasure.
• Here the power lies wirth the audience NOT the producers.
• This theory emphasises what audiences do with media texts - how and why they use them.
• The audience is free to reject, use or play with the media meainings as they see it.
• Audiences therefore use media to gratify needs for: diversion, escapism, information, pleasure, comparing, relationships, lifestyles to ones own and sexual stimulation.
• The audience is in control and consumption of the media helps people with issues such as: learning, emotional satisfaction, relaxation, help with issues of personal identity, or issues with aggression or violence.
• Controversialy the theory suggests the consumption of violent images can be helpful rather than harmful, because the audience are in control.
• When playing violent games are not influenced to be violent but are acting out through the consumption of media violence.
• The theory suggests audiences inclination towards violence is sublimated (absorbed) and are less likely to commit violent acts.

New Song

Cincere never emailed us back to give us permission to use their song. So we have found another song called 4 the camera, and have now emailed 4flava to ask if they could allow us to use their song. They emailed back and have given us permission to use this song. In lesson we are now going to start planning our idea's and our work so we can start filming as soon as possible.

Audience Theory

1). why do audiences choose to consume certain texts?
2). how do they consume the texts?
3). what happens when they consume the texts?

There are three theories that we can appl to help us come to a better understanding about the relationship between text and audience:

• the effects model or the hypodermic model
• the uses and gratifications model
• reception theory

The effects model is the consumption of media texts that have an effect or that influence upon the audience. Audiences are passive and powerless to prevent the influence and the power lies with the message of the text. This is also known as the hypodermic model, where the message in media texts are injected in to the audience by a powerful "syring-like" media. The audience is powerless to resisit, therefore the media works like a drug and the audience is drugged and addicted.

Key evidence for the effects model includes: the frankfurt school theorised in the 1920's and 1930's that the mass media acted to restrict and control audiences to th benifit of corporate capitalism and governments. The Bobo Doll experiment is a very controversal piece of research that apparently proved that children copy violent behaviour.

Examples that are sited as causing or being contributory factors are:

• film child play is argued to be the influence of the murder of Jams Bulger in 1993
• game manhunt influenced the murder of Stefan Pakeerah in 2004
• film clockwork orange for a number of rapes and violent attacks in 1971
• film severance contributed to the influence for the murder of Simon Everitt in 2006