The Politics of American Media

Booker, K., From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film Account

• p160 ‘tendency in the american national pysche towards violent and hatred of the other’
• Americans as ‘saviours of the vietnamese people’
• The Green Beret ‘depicts the war in Vietnam as a simple, good vs evil struggle of good guy Americans against bad-guy Americans’
• p161 ‘Films made after the end of the war had come to grips with the fact that this American victory did not occur’
• ‘most American films had… glorified war’

Dimaggio, A. When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, public opinion and the limits of dissent

• p12 New York Times committed to “ democracy protection”
• p165 ‘opposition to the United States is common in the Muslim world’
• p166 ‘ the field of media stdies focuses too heavily on the United States and Europe
• p168 ‘ corporate media ownership is inherently undemocratic
• p171 ‘western corporations are assaulting the cultural autonomy of poorer states

Kellner, D.,  Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan*(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)

• p1 ‘the rise and decline of 60s radicalism, the failure of liberalism, and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s; and the triumph and hegemony of the right in the 1980s’
• 1960s ‘film transcoded the discourse of the anti war, new left students’
• “New Hollywood” eg Bonnie and Clyde
• ‘Hollywood film, like U.S Society, should be seen as a contested terrain… struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life’
• Conservative films: star wars, rocky, superman, close encounters of the third kind

Kellner D., Media Spectacle http://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MEDIA118/celebrity+culture/Book_media+spectacle_douglas+kellner.pdf

• p vii ‘Media culture excels in creating Megaspectacles of sporting events, world conflicts, entertainement breaking news,’
• p3 ‘capitalist society seperates ’art from life’

Orientalism

from the book Orientalism by E., Said, 1979, NY, Random House

• pxxviii 'herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like 'America' or 'Islam' and invent collective identitiesfor large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse
• p1' a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes and remarkable experiences
• 'Americans will not feel the same about the orient' - more association with China and Japan
• 'The orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and more recurring images of the Other'
• p94 'a realtion between Western writing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the West's great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient'
• p95 'Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient'

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Notes

from Laura Mulvey's article in Screen

• film plays on sexual difference
• sexual difference controls images, spectacle and 'erotic ways of looking'
• patriarchal society unconsciously influencing film form

Phallocentrism 1. Relating to or reflecting a perspective that is predominantly or exclusively male.

2. Dominated or controlled by men: a phallocentric society.

phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning

Laura Mulvey asserts that it:

• 'depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to the world'
• a woman's 'lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies'
• a woman 'first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and thereby raises her child into the symbolic'
• her child is the 'signifier of her own desire to possess a penis'
• 'women then stand as a symbol in patriarchal culture for the male other'
• men can 'live out their phantasies and obsessions... by imposing them on the silent image of a woman, tied to her place as a bearer of meaning, not a maker of meaning'

• 'Destruction of pleasure is a radical weapon'
• hollywood is skilled at manipulating visual pleasure
• 'mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order'

The cinema offers many pleasures: 

1. Scopophilia - looking itself is a source of pleasure, 'erotic base for pleasure in looking at another person as an object' 'pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight'
2. 'producing for [the audience] a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy'
3. conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator the illusion of looking in on a private world'
4. develops scopophilia in a narcissistic sense - child imagines mirror image to be more complete than actual body according to Jacques Lacan, 'misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego', ;the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego'
5. hence pleasure can also come from 'identification with the image seen'

How this is affected by gender: 

• pleasure in looking has always been split between male/active and female/passive'
• women have a 'traditionally exhibitionist role' where they're 'simultaneously looked at and displayed'
• 'the determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure'
• women's appearance is strongly coded with to be looked-at-ness
• 'she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire'
• 'her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line'
• traditionally the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: for characters with story and for audience
• 'according to the principles of the ruling ideology... the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual identification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like'
• 'as the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto tht of his like'
• 'the controlling male gaze within the screen scene'

Summary:

'The image of a woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of the man'

'woman as representation signifies castration inducing fetishistic or voyeuristic mechanisms to circumvent her threat'

'the satisfaction, the pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest''

Jean Baudrillard

• telly developing new 'cold' universe of communication
• tv screen keeps subject in a position of alienation
• plentitude offered through changing of texts but is forever defferrred
• the faustian, promethean  period of production and consumption' has given way to 'the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact continuity feedbaxk and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication'
• the whole earlier 'intimate' universe with its domestic scene, interiority, private space time correlative to a public space is all disappearing
• instead 'there is a screen and a network'

Whose imaginary? The televisual apparatus, the female body and textual stratergies in select rock videos on mtv by E. Ann Kaplan

Female Spectators: Looking at film and tv

verso

second edition 1990

How we used Conventions of Real Media Texts in Our A Level Production

Form:

Conforming - Film opening

Challenging - Music Video

-Long in duration shots -Wide Shots -Establishing Setting - Titles  Examples: Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)

Music videos (Vernallis) -didn’t break the rules of continuity editing -didn’t feature ‘foregrounded’ cuts   One Shots -Bright colours -plain backgrounds -Lots of quirky props -Bright/noteworthy costumes  -Mise en scene providing the progression -Narrative within shot -Frames within frames -Artist's movement driving shot movement Examples: Taylor Swift, We are Never Ever Getting back together (Declan Whitebloom, 2012)

Narrative:
Film Opening conformed to Todorov, Levi-Strauss


Music Video also used Todorov, Propp but didn't use music video narratives like Vernallis as much


Genre:


Coming of age genre

• Young protagonist
• Quirky best friend
• Best friend as love interest
• Transitional stage of life
• Seeking independence/self discovery

But

• no high school setting
• no quirky family
• parents as challenging the protagonist's choices

Indie Pop

• retro style
• investigating ideas of traditional femininity

Representation:

Typical coming of age drama protagonists -male -troubled -nerd/popular -awkward/misfit/looking for place to fit in Examples: Charlie in ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’, Sutter in ‘The Spectacular Now’	Lila -female -troubled -not defined in those terms, not in high school setting so less focus on those stereotypes and marks of status -awkward, quirky, likeable, relatable
Typical Female Pop Stars -Other indie stars less polished, elements of masculinity in their dress like Gabrielle Aplin’s leather jacket -Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze   Recent Indie stars in the Top 40 are also usually male like Ben Howard, Bastille	Ava -Conforms to retro style but is sophisticated and in control, sauve and chic -More feminine that other indie artists -Ava not sexualised, skirts are mid thigh length

Style:
Indie Style
Film Opening conformed:

1. Birds
2. Sunrise shots/natural lighting
3. Birds
4. Travelling
5. Photography/photos
6. notebooks/writing
7. Handheld camera
8. Gentle/mellow guitar music

Music video was limited in its conformity:

1. Our video is a lot more bright and cheery than most indie music videos but this serves to heighten its satirical nature
   
   
2. Our music video is less gritty and uses less realism than many indie videos, but this can be a convention when producing videos for a track with an ideological message such as Lily Allen's 'The Fear' whichtake place in a doll-house style mansion filled with giant presents and balloons to connote the fakery and greed of celebrity culture
3. Ava's image is far more feminine than many other female British indie artists, conforming more in this respect to American indie artists like She and Him 
4. incorporated a retro feel into their artist identity through their dress sense and iconography such as tea/rockabilly dresses

Propp's Character Theory

1. Hero
2. Donor
3. Helper
4. Princess
5. False Hero
6. Villain 

Steve Neale's Genre Theory

• Genres are instances of repetition and difference
• Mere repetition would not attract the audience
• genre is a set of expectations
• genres are not systems they are processes-they are dynamic and change over time

How we used in our music video production:

• Followed some conventions: acoustic guitar music, bird iconography
• Broke conventions with our representation: female protagonist, Asian helper
• Number of female protagonists in coming of age genre is increasing - changing over time
• This change however is not specific to our genre but to most
• Audiences expect romance - Coming of Age drama has a strong element of teenage relationships so to exclude this would be to disappoint our audience

Coming of Age Dramas as a Genre

Matthew P Schmidt - Coming of Age in American Cinema: Modern Youth films as a genre

• Contain characteristics of the novelistic Bildungsroman and its modern literary variants, the childhood initiation tale and the coming-of-age or the rites-of-passage story
• includes not only teen entertainments but also social problem films and more personal, quasi-autobiographical works
• dramatize situations and events that bear upon the child's initiation into new domains of psychosocial experience and the adolescent's and postadolescent's encounters with the pleasures and perils of modern life

Robert McKee - Story
Part of Maturation plot

Norman Friedman

Plots of Character — in which the narrative’s protagonist undergoes a change of moral character.

• The Maturing Plot — The classic coming-of-age tale in which the protagonist passes into adulthood, either literally or on some figurative level. Examples include Sixteen Candles, Stand by Me, and Almost Famous.

Kate Erbland

• high school hijinks
• making own family/accepting your family
• falling in love for first time
• social outliers
• popular people having hidden depths

http://freeteawithpurchase.com/

• popular vs unpopular
• apprehension of future
• change from school to university
• world weariness

Aaron Weiss

• looking for acceptance
• rite of passage

Dusty McGowan

• Underdog
• Dreamgirl
• Older mentor
• quirky characters
• unexpected moments

Bazin's Theory of Film Language

'The Evolution of the Language of Cinema' Written when the artistic prestige of Hollywood had reached an all time low

• rejected the typical antithesis of silent vs sound cinema
• Thought there were 'directors who believe in image and those who believe in reality'
• former favoured montage to allow them to impose an interpretation of the events they portrayed
• Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Griffith
• the other would use long takes that preserved as far as possible the unity of time and space to disengage the 'deep structures' of reality and to bring out 'pre existing relations'
• Welles, von Stronheim, Jean Renoir
• in his opinion film should be evaluated 'according not to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it'
• Called for aesthetic that would preserve the continuity of experience
• Condemned trick effects such as expressionistic devices and low angle shots
• image should ideally produce an objective record of reality rather than the illusion of realism by means of a network of signs
• need to enlist artifice to give the illusion of transparency generated a creative tension that was crucial
• true mimesis would result in flat and unheightened naturalism
• 'Realism in art can only be achieved only in one way -artifice'
• ideally wanted cinematographic image to be an objective record
• 'there is not one but several realisms'

Significance:

• Broke out of the dogma that film had gone into irremediable decline
• realism not as a symptom of degenracy but as a medium of expression which one could achieve artistic excellence
• influence on Metz

Anti-Bazin Position:

• related to the philosophy of Personalism
• His criterion of reality was of harmony and unitary - based as much on ideological premises as those that pictured the world as discordant and contradictory that he rejected
• Bazin denying that film is a culturally determined language system
• Saw Relationship between signified and signifier was intimate and existential not arbitrary
• analogies between death masks or fingerprints with photography
• naively optimistic in thinking that cinema was evolving towards perfection
• Contradiction in his ideas that he stressed the actuality rather than the ideal
• inability to resolve the contradiction between film as a record of reality and as a producer of meaning