Monthly Archives: April 2016

Lectorials, Media 1

Textual analysis in practice

Building on this week’s reading, in our Lectorial we put these concepts into practice by analysing a Brooks Brothers advertisement from GQ magazine. We identified as many individual components as possible and noted their denotative and connotative meanings.

Denotative meaning (first order): a universal, literal interpretation/description of what is depicted

Connotative meaning (second order): a more associative meaning based on personal context and wider social/cultural conventions

Supima-Image1

A reading of the advertisement might identify the following denotative components, along with their more associative connotative meanings:

Denotative Connotative
Bearded, mid-30s man Affluence
Hipster/fashionable style
Flowing, blue shirt with rolled up sleeves, patterned shorts, bare feet Comfort
Holidays/recreation
Boy being thrown into the air, smiling Happy, fun-loving father/son relationship
Adventure
Pool Summer, heat, holidays/recreation
Angle draws focus to the main figures
Resort lounge area with blue/white colour scheme Colour coordination, fashion awareness, aesthetic sensibility
Palm trees Exotic or tropical location
Holidays/recreation

When you look at this scene, very little of our understanding of the situation comes from denotation – there is nothing inherent in the image that definitively states the relationship between the man and boy, why they are in that location, etc. (In fact, they are likely both models with no previous relationship, and are only in that location for the photo shoot.) But through connotation the entire scene is built up in our own minds, as well as all the associations that come with that scene – and, the advertisers probably hope, an aspiration to achieve the same in our own lives by purchasing the product being advertised.

In the advertisement, to the right of the above image sits a panel with four levels of hierarchical copy including a cursive Brooks Brothers logo, a slogan (“the difference you can feel”, with emphasis on the “you”), and product branding. A connotative reading of this panel would identify the cursive logo as a signifier of luxury, trustworthiness and tradition, and the slogan as a signifier of quality, accessibility and affordability.

Standard
Media 1, Readings

Textual analysis is my jam

This week in Media 1 our readings were about textual analysis, which is defined in Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis by Alan McKee as follows:

“When we perform textual analysis on a text, we make an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of that text.”

Textual analysis has been an interest of mine for a number of years – at least in an informal way. I’ve been reading and writing cultural criticism (particularly cinema and music) for a number of years, and have built up a working knowledge of the basics of textual analysis even though I never had a grounding in the fundamental terms and definitions. So this week’s readings have been particularly enjoyable.

Textual analysis is a methodology of reading and interpreting works (texts), but it’s less rigorous than the methodologies used in science. Using a standardised, repeatable set of tools and methods work well when considering questions/topics of the natural world, i.e. those that only have one answer, but in artistic fields there are multiple meanings that can be interpreted – and all of them can be correct simultaneously.

This is because there’s no such thing as a single “correct” interpretation of any given text we analyse. Meaning isn’t inherent in the text, it’s assigned by the interpreter based on context.

The accuracy or inaccuracy of a text is irrelevant to its interpretation, because viewers interpret texts as “accurate” only when they conform to the viewer’s world view, making this an unreliable measure by which to judge texts. Similarly, as we’ve learned in past weeks, editing is a process in which decisions are made, and therefore even seemingly objective or “truthful” works (like documentary films) go through a process where someone decides whether to include or discard certain elements. Therefore all media is subjective, even documentaries, because they reflect the point of view of their author just as much as works of fiction do.

There are three levels of context that can be helpful to use when analysing a particular text:

  1. The rest of the text – i.e. the self-contained “universe” of the text. Some things make sense and are meaningful in the contexts of some texts but would be baffling or incongruent in others, depending on whether the text itself has been set up as an environment in which that thing could exist.
  2. The genre of the text – conventions and expectations based on the type of text being analysed. This relies on the interpreter’s familiarity with conventions of genre – i.e. characters breaking into song during a musical. This can also include eschewing conventions of genre to build meaning, such as a song appearing in a non-musical film (e.g. Magnolia).
  3. The wider public context in which the text is being interpreted – societal and cultural norms and cues that inform how texts are interpreted. I’ve explored this particular analytical context in the post Textual analysis, artistic intent and feminist film theory.

Within these contexts, semiotics is a way of labelling and making sense of different elements within a text (in semiotics these elements are called signs). Signs exist within a code, which can be thought of as the contextual language in which the signs are interpreted. Depending on the code, signs can be analysed in isolation, in terms of their place among surrounding signs, within a wider context that includes the signs found in other texts, or a combination of all of these.

Standard
Media 1, Workshops

Week 4 Exercise: Favourite Place on Campus

In this week’s Workshop we used the ZOOM H2N audio recorder to make a short audio piece and familiarise ourselves with the equipment and process for editing sound.

We were extremely constrained by time and barely managed to record any sound at all, but I managed to layer what we got into a (simple) piece in which I discuss my favourite place to sit and chill on campus. There are three layers of audio in this piece.

Editing sound is something I’ve done in the past (see my podcast here) so I didn’t learn too much from the editing part of this exercise, but it was good to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the ZOOM recorder for future reference.

Standard
Cinema Studies

Mise-en-scène and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

The term mise-en-scène describes a wide range of visual elements and techniques that make up what’s in the frame at any given point in a film. To give his film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou a heightened, storybook quality, director Wes Anderson manipulates mise-en-scène to build an artificial world entirely its own.

Setting: Many scenes are set in an underwater dreamland, populated by weird and wonderful sea creatures brought to life with stop-motion animation and clay models. Zissou’s ship, the Belafonte, is shot in cut-away style reminiscent of the 3D diagrams in children’s cut-away books. To an audience this deliberate style (and the movement of characters between locations in the cut-away ship) highlights the constructed artificiality of the film, for comedic effect and also to heighten the feeling of artificiality and the sense that the universe of the film is not governed by ordinary rules of physical movement. Even the composition of Anderson’s shots, which are often perfectly symmetrical and evenly balanced, constantly reinforce to the audience that each shot and scene has been hand-constructed to achieve the director’s purpose and meaning.

Costume and make-up: Similarly, the red hats and blue uniforms of Zissou’s crew serve multiple purposes: as striking visual elements, as opportunities for physical comedy, and also help reinforce the idea that Zissou and his crew are a group removed from regular society operating in their own universe. The red hats highlight Zissou’s quirky, antiquated notions of his crew as a family (a common theme in Anderson’s films), and also hints to the audience that Zissou has a dictator-like hold on his crew’s every move — explaining character motivations and driving the plot forward.

Lighting: As most of the film is set either underwater or in the lower decks of the Belafonte, lighting is another area that Anderson crafts to manipulate the intellectual or emotional response of the audience — particularly the quality, direction and source of light. Each room in the ship uses an entirely different lighting set-up, to change the feeling of each location, and the above-ground scenes are lit with a wide range of intensities and quality of light. Lighting also functions as a recurrent joke in the film referring to Team Zissou’s incompetence, as all the lights in the Belafonte turn off completely at different points in the film.

Acting and performance: The speech and mannerisms of the actors also reinforce the artificiality and comedy of the film. Bill Murray’s quirky, unpredictable characterisation of Steve Zissou adds comedic anticipation to any scene, because he doesn’t act in a rational way that audiences would expect. Cate Blanchett’s character speaks and acts as if she just stepped out of a Lauren Bacall screwball comedy, but this incongruity is not felt as strongly since all of the other characters act and speak in a stilted, cartoonish way too.

The combination of all these elements (plus many more artfully crafted visual techniques) give The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou a feeling and personality unlike almost any other film.

Standard