Introduction to Film and television Studies - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 15
About This Presentation
Title:

Introduction to Film and television Studies

Description:

A film offers bad role models and turns young people into whores and murderers ... any claim to make sense of all the evils of our life is an illusion (and perhaps ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:47
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 16
Provided by: Bac83
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Introduction to Film and television Studies


1
Introduction to Film and television Studies
  • Fears and fantasies

2
Fears
  • A film offers bad role models and turns young
    people into whores and murderers
  • Rapid editing reflects and further spurs the
    hectic pace of contemporary society and causes
    alienation
  • Film and TV may produce psychophysical
    disturbances
  • Film is mechanical and artificial and causes
    alienation
  • Television prevents people from developing
    themselves by offering entertainment according to
    lowest common denominator
  • Classical editing "sutures" the spectator into
    the film experience thus causing ideological
    numbness
  • Seeing films or watching television is passive
    and makes people apathetic and politically passive

3
The Production Code (Hays Code)
  • Established by the Motion Picture Producers and
    Distributors of America (MPPDA)
  • Director Will H. Hays
  • Implementation
  • Regulations about susceptible topics in1924
  • More strict rules in 1927 and 1930
  • The actual Motion Picture Production Code in 1934
  • The code was enforced for about twenty years
  • Some basic principles
  • A film may not lower the spectators moral level
  • Las, natural or human, must not be disparaged
  • Methods of crime should not be explicitly
    represented
  • Sexual perversion fo any kind is forbidden

4
Pleasures of audiovisual representation
  • Visual pleasure in itself (scopophilia)
  • Voyeurism
  • Identification and consequent emotional
    experiences
  • Escapism
  • Sensation of the sublime
  • Learning about the world (epistemophilia)

5
Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema(I)
  • Scopophilia the pleasure of looking at other
    people as objects, subjecting them to the
    controlling and curious gaze
  • Mainstream film portray a hermetically sealed
    world, which unwinds indifferent to the presence
    of the audience ? voyerist fantasy of looking in
    on a private world.
  • Illusion of voyerist separation in the auditorium
  • The conventions of mainstream film focus
    attention on the human form scale, space,
    stories are all anthropomorphic ? fascination and
    identification with certain screen characters

6
Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema(II)
  • Pleasure in looking split between active/male and
    passive/female ? the male gaze projects its
    fantasy on the female, whose appearance is coded
    for strong visual and erotic impact
  • A male movie stars glamorous characteristics are
    not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but
    those of a more perfect, complete and powerful
    ideal ego
  • Fetishistic scopophilia builds up the physical
    beauty of the object, transforming it into
    something satisfying in itself.
  • Selectively following Laura Mulveys article

7
Identification and engagement
  • What is identification?
  • to imagine one actually is a character in the
    story
  • to sympathize with one or more characters
  • to project oneself in the situations depicted
  • What is engagement? (Murray Smith)
  • recognition
  • alignment
  • allegiance

8
Why do we need fiction?
  • The evolutionary value of narrating factual
    accounts of causal chains of events
  • Narratives enable us to communicate our
    experiences
  • Socially and psychologically important things can
    be treated and communicated in a persuasive and
    pleasant way ? identity formation
  • Fiction helps us to learn about and come to terms
    with emotions by presenting them in ways which
    are detached from our own private concerns
  • Freedom from the necessities and responsibilities
    of immediate reality enables the processing of
    latent questions, wishes and desires
  • Emotional experiences generated by stories are a
    part of Making special (Dissannayake)

9
Jahn cycle of narrative
  • Model of the cycle of narrative which connects
    external and internal stories
  • The cycle creates a causal chain linking
    reception and production and suggesting that both
    processes are mutually dependent
  • Manfred Jahn Awake! Open your eyes! The
  • Cognitive Logic of External and Internal
  • Stories.

10
Jahn External and Internal Stories
  • external story
  • physical
  • recordable
  • public
  • addressee orientation
  • permanent
  • internal story
  • virtual
  • reportable
  • private
  • no addressee orientation
  • fleeting

11
Notions about reality, fiction and fantasy as the
basic constituents of conscious being
12
Three interfaces
  • Fiction emerges from the interaction between
    notions about real people and fantasies about
    human (or inhuman) action fiction in turn
    influences both notions about real people and our
    fantasies about them.
  • Notions about real people are processed both in
    private fantasies and public fiction those two
    in turn influence notions about real people.
  • Fantasies feed on fiction but gain their
    relevance from being related to our needs and
    desires in respect of real people fantasies in
    turn inspire fiction and to some extent even our
    relationship with real people.

13
Whats wrong with escapism?
  • Does entertainment make us more passive?
  • Does entertainment offer us mere substitute
    satisfactions?
  • Does entertainment entail mental regression? Or
    succumbing to social control?
  • Does entertainment trivialize and sentimentalize
    problems?
  • Is entertainment used to suppress problems and
    anxieties as opposed to finding solutions to them?

14
Learning from fiction
  • Propositional knowledge
  • Values and attitudes
  • Strategies and patterns of behaviour for various
    social situations
  • Understanding of situations and social
    configurations which have fallen beyond ones own
    experience
  • Alternative points of view to familiar situations
  • Empathetic knowledge gained through
    identification

15
The meaning of tragedy
  • Tragedy is only an illusion in so far as any
    claim to make sense of all the evils of our life
    is an illusion (and perhaps tragedy does not
    claim this). The tragedies of real life, unlike
    those of the stage, are often shapeless, sordid,
    capricious, meaningless. But supposing this to be
    true (as I do), what then? It is not human to be
    content with this useless, even if ultimate,
    truth. We must try to understand, to cope, to
    respond. It is in this attempt that tragedy -
    that most great art - has its place. For it gives
    the hurtful twists of life a shape and meaning
    which are persuasive, which can be lived with.
    And that endurance and perspective are none the
    less real. As Gorgias so neatly put it the man
    who is deceived has more wisdom than he who is
    not. And so in the end the deceit is true to
    life and part of life and makes life the better
    for it. (Oliver Taplin Greek Tragedy in Action)
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com