Introduction to Film and Television Studies

1
Introduction to Film and Television Studies

• Basic concepts
• Communication model

2
Basic concepts semiotics

• The nature of a sign (de Saussure)
• signifiant / signifier / merkitsijä
• signifié / signified / merkitty
• Categories of signs (Peirce)
• Index
• Icon
• symbol

3
Basic concepts formalism

• Categories of motivation
• Realistic
• Compositional
• Transtextual
• Artistic
• Diegetic
• Categories of meaning
• Diegetic
• Explicit
• Implicit
• Symptomatic

4
Kognitivismi vs. Screen-theory

• conventionalism
• theory centred
• semiotic theory of signification
• historical development of signifying practices
• psychoanalytical theory of pleasure
• social constructivism
• neomarxist theory of power relationships
• study of reception and interpretation
• ideology critical textual analysis

• realism (natural sciences)
• emphasis on empirical study
• ecological theory of perception
• analogies with real world and film perception
• cognitivist theory of spectatorship
• psychological constructivism
• historical poetics as a study of film style
• neoformalist film analysis
• value-free textual study

5
Evans Reality Programming Evolutionary Models
of Film and Television Viewership

• Humans consume popular media such as newspapers,
  television, and film in large part because these
  media facilitate environmental surveillance.
  These media provide cost-effective surveillance
  across a wide range of people, places, and
  phenomena. p. 201
• The human preference for television and film over
  print media is perfectly natural, in that humans
  are hardwired to attend and respond to visual
  stimuli, especially when visual stimuli include
  other people and especially when these people are
  engaging in salient behaviour. p. 201.
• Television and film producers exploit our innate
  preferences, offering us content that is highly
  salient and extremely realistic but that often
  presents a misleading account of our environment.
  p. 202.

6
Jakobsons communication model

• context
• addresser text addressee
• channel
• code

7
Context

• Text can be meaningful only in relation to a
  relevant context
• The addresser and the addressee might have
  different contexts
• Several contexts may be in operation
  simultaneously aesthetic, ideological,
  historical, social, practical
• A scholar or a critic must be able to discern
  which contexts are relevant from a given point of
  view
• Context of everyday life

8
Codes

• Combinations of rules or sign patterns which
  determine how a sign in a given context should be
  interpreted
• For the most part conventional and culturally
  specific
• Can to a varying degree be motivated
• Relatively unambiguous in their own contexts
• More or less consciously applied
• Encoding and decoding may differ form one another
• Should alternative cinematic devices such as
  shot-countershot-patterns or the system of
  standard framings be thought of as codes?

9
Channel

• Media specificity how does a given media
  condition and modify messages?
• Comparison of the purely audiovisual qualities
  of film and television with verbal expression
• Comparison of film and television as means of
  communication and artistic expression
• Film and television in the historical continuum
  of moving image technologies

10
Addresser, artist, filmmaker

• Biographism artist as a mediator of a higher
  reality or level of awareness
• Work of art as a message of the artist
• Comparison with exegetics tracing the intentions
  of the artist
• Symptomatic meanings
• Freud and the mysteries of creation

11
Auteur theory

• Film is a form of art and a director is
  comparable to an author of a book
• The rise of the status of studio directors Ford,
  Hawks, Sirk, Ray, Hitchcock
• Cine-structuralism to uncover behind the
  superficial contrasts of subject and treatment a
  structural hard core of basic and often recondite
  motifs (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith)
• Structuring oppositions (Claude Lévi-Strauss
  research on clusters of myths)

12
Criticism of auteur theory

• Filmmaking is a collective effort
• In a studio system producers and above all the
  system as a whole have a greater role than the
  director
• Steven Heath filmmaker as an ideological
  construction - we only have the public image
• John Ellis dialectical relationship between the
  film-maker and the institutions within which he
  operates
• David Bordwell filmmakers are conditioned but
  not determined by technical, economical and
  production related constraints

13
Arguments in favour of taking into account the
addresser

• The author as a prism through which the original
  context may be studied
• Discrepancies between intentions and results
• Discrepancies between the public image of the
  filmmaker and his/her actual output
• Biography as a key to the oeuvre of an artist
• The influence of the public image of the
  filmmaker on reception

14
Text centred criticism

• Close readings of texts
• Comparison with interpretation of the law
• No subjective interpretation tolerated
• Intentional fallacy
• Extreme form all that really matters is the
  internal evidence - all biographical data, even
  the context should be ignored
• Concept of implied author ?

15
Implied author

• The implied author is an agent internal to
  narrative fiction, who guides the reading or
  viewing. It is a construction which the reader or
  spectator regards as the source of the meaning of
  the work (Chatman)
• Jerrold Levinson The implied author is the
  agent who appears to have invented, arranged, and
  integrated the various narrative agents and
  aspects of narration involved in the film, as
  well as everything else required to constitute
  the film as a complete object of appreciation.
  The implied filmmaker, in short, is the picture
  we construct of the films maker - beliefs, aims,
  attitudes, values, and personality - on the basis
  of the film construed in its full context of
  creation

16
Gregory Currie Kendall Walton

• Mimesis as make-believe
• Fictional truth the way things actually are
  within the story world
• Fictional author, whom we imagine as telling her
  story as the truth in terms of her beliefs
• Fictional author is constructed according to what
  we know about the original context of the work
  what people used to believe at that time in that
  place in that sphere of society

17
Reception aesthetics

• Artists cannot completely control how people
  receive their works
• Communication is by nature dialogical and
  polyphonic
• Meanings actually emerge in contextualized
  readings
• Reception is always a process in which several
  cultural and social factors intermingle
• Time and ever new contexts function as ghost
  writers

18
Factors which condition spectatorship

• David Morley To what extent are individual
  readings conditioned by cultural and
  socio-economic structures?
• Manfred Naumann belonging to a society or a
  social group, living conditions, environment,
  educational level, age, gender
• Janet Staiger political views, ideological
  factors, generally held opinions, nationality,
  race, sexual orientation, life style
• Pierre Bourdieu symbolic power - cultural
  hegemony as a a form of social control