Pop culture - Cinema and TV Flashcards
What is an mimesis?
Questioning authentic representation of the world.
What do metaphors and allegories do?
Act as vehicles querying the ways things are represented.
How the world is imagined and how we see. Not what the world is actually like.
How does cinema reflect and construct reality?
Authenticity - The extent to which people can trust and present an authentic image of the world as it actually exists.
There is an assumption that the gaze of the camera moves across objects, people and landscapes and this gaze is what is constituted as the reality that is fixed and unchanging. This freezes the place in time to preserve that sense of reality as the place cannot change for that sense to exist.
How is reality reflected and constructed?
Example: Kefalonia and Captain Corelli.
The Greek island of Kefalonia was made famous by the novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and the subsequent film. this shows what the ‘real’ landscape is.
People may only visit for the idyllic version presented in the media texts, to capture the essence of the narrative.
Different frames of context are produced from the media we consume.
How do we read moving images?
By reading films like texts it shows the expanding circulating frameworks that help us understand the world.
The meaning beyond the frame - The real and the reel.
Film and TV is produced by reality by creating its own reality which is uncritical and idealised, as a form of escapism.
Moving images enact imaginative geographies. How we imagine the world and not just how it is. This is comprehended through experiences and cultural contexts.
How are identities portrayed as the exotic ‘other’ through film?
Example: Avatar and Pocahontas.
Reductive version of difference male/ female, cultured/ savage.
Imaginative geography of exotic ‘new world’ - Native America and Pandora.
Romanticisation of the ‘primitive’/ ‘natural’ other. Forms representations of people that are collectively held as norms.
Post colonial reflection on the displacement of ‘others’ for material gain.
How are identities portrayed through othering?
Example: Not another teen movie.
Meta critique - Writers putting critique of own medium through film, through the context of race.
Shows how the world is mediated. The power over how we read the world around us and understand what the ‘norm’ is.
How does movement impact how we read cinema?
Images are not fixed. Instead a film involves the observer taking a mobile view.
Moving images are made distinct geographical objects of inquiry through their movement.
Movement puts into question the fixity of ‘reading’ images as texts. Movement can change meaning.
What are the four points of visual methodology for studying images?
(Rose, 2016)
Rose, 2016.
1. The site of the production of the image.
2. The site of the image itself.
3. The site of audiencing.
4. The site/ routes of circulation of images.
What occurs at the site of the image itself?
The experience of viewing the image and the organisation of how we view the image.
What is not there, absences are equally as important as what is on screen. Imagining the wider universe that exists within.
Use of visual effects to produce a sensory experience. Each sound has a purpose e.g. Bourne Identity car chase.
What occurs at the site of the production of the image?
Where the image is made - The kinds of techniques or technologies that are used to produce the images.
New technologies can draw ion conventions form other media - remediation (Bolter and …
Remediation - We often adopt the conventions of existing media for ‘new’ media. Linear framework of release, where broadcast media was the only way it was seen by an audience. Franchisement, creates a language of business. Media properties e.g. marvel. Ways of understanding ideas that are sets of characters that are not only peculiar in one film but can span over many films, series or books. Multi-media in their nature.
What occurs at the site of audiencing?
Context in which the image is encountered. Including social and cultural.
Context of the viewing is interwoven with place. No longer specific locations such as the cinema. Instead it is now mobilised through streaming platforms.
Means of representation and (re)interpretations of images by audiences, particularly fans.
Second screens - Mediated across screens and via for our attention. Social media used to ‘interact’ to create involvement e.g. voting. An attempt to facilitate emerging audiences and keep a hold of their attention.
What occurs at the site/ routes of circulation of images?
Just as images are ‘remediated’ they are also distinct from a medium.
How does broadcasting connect the public?
Communication technologies mediate between public and private, connecting domestic spaces with the public realm.
The domesticity of images makes it talkable as it is relatable to a number of people.
Broadcasting has developed distinct forms of intimate publicity’ (Barnett, 2003)
How do we capture and produce culture?
Cool hunting - MTV researchers visit teens at home and how they consumed different media.
Ethnographic surveillance.
Identifying and targeting ‘alpha’ consumers for marketing.
Massive data-driven surveillance via set-top boxes/ internet accounts and social media.
