Introduction to Film and television Studies

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Introduction to Film and television Studies

• Fears and fantasies

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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.

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Jahn External and Internal Stories

• external story
• physical
• recordable
• public
• addressee orientation
• permanent

• internal story
• virtual
• reportable
• private
• no addressee orientation
• fleeting

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Notions about reality, fiction and fantasy as the
basic constituents of conscious being
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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.

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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?

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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

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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)