Category Archives: Readings

Media 1, Readings

Audiences

The “audience”, since it first became codified in the 18th century as a term for those who are consumers of an event of some sort, has been evolving along with the rest of thought around media/communication ever since. First it was extended to the mass consumption of media such as books in the 19th century, and then again expanded with the development of cinema and television in the 19th and 20th centuries.1

A mediated audience is one whose experience is restricted or directed — by, for example, the publisher of a widely-read newspaper. The publisher’s decisions about what to include in their newspaper, and what angle to take on particular issues, places them in a position of power as a kind of “gatekeeper” to the audience’s experience. Throughout history this has led to huge amounts of power being restricted to a very small number of (white, rich, old) men.

The development of the internet completely broke down this paradigm, as one-way broadcast media was quickly replaced with interactive, two-way communication. Now, instead of having to watch a news broadcast on television at 6:00pm, consumers can discover news direct from the source in real time. Instead of having to buy a DVD copy of a television show, consumers can stream it whenever they like. Publishers and broadcasters, who used to wield the majority of the power in their relationship with their audiences, lost much of this power to democratisation and the increased choice of unmediated experiences offered by the internet.

Today, audiences are just as likely to be creators as consumers. We have seized the means of production from monolithic overseers (through blogs, podcasts, web series, etc.) and have transitioned from passively consuming media to actively engaging with it through discussion, discourse and sharing.2 The fundamental distinction between creator and audience essentially no longer exists, and although there are remnants of the Old Way still present in society, they are actively losing power and relevance, not gaining it.

  1. Morley, D. (2005), ‘Audience’ in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Bennett, T, Grossberg, L. & Morris, M (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, pp.8-10. ↩
  2. Rosen, J. (2006), ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink, June 27. ↩
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Media 1, Readings

Non-narrative cinema

Since I’m doing a Cinema Studies contextual stream I’ve previously blogged about non-narrative form and experimental cinema. Doing this week’s reading1 has been handy to consolidate the forms of non-narrative cinema:

  • Categorical form: Enumerates subject matter and organises it into categories and subcategories. Examples: The Fog of War, Tokyo Olympiad, At Berkeley, The Clock.
  • Rhetorical form: An attempt to persuade the audience to adopt a certain position. Examples: The Hunting Ground, The Invisible War, Bowling for Columbine.
  • Abstract form: Manipulates shapes, colours and lines in experimental ways. Examples: Stan Brakhage, Len Lye.
  • Associational form: Poetic juxtaposition of mismatched elements to create associations in the audience’s minds. Examples: Baraka, Samsara, La Jetée.
  1. Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. (1997), Film art: An introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill. ↩
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Media 1, Readings

Flow

I really responded to the reading on Group Flow this week. 1

When I was younger I worked in my spare time as a freelance web designer, building websites and doing design work for local bands and musicians. It was in doing this work that I first experienced “flow” or being in The Zone, as I better knew it. On occasion I would get so into the work I was doing that I would work all through the night and into the next morning, well past sunrise. This happened multiple times, and I’ve never in my life been so productive as during those all-night sessions fuelled by music and terrible junk food.

One of the best articles I’ve read about The Zone is “A Precious Hour” by Rands, an engineer and artist who has worked all through the technology industry. As someone who is easily distracted and expert at procrastinating, I really jive with the idea that The Zone should always be a destination you’re striving to get to. I can get so much more work done in one hour in The Zone than I could in a whole day in what Rands calls the Faux-Zone, which gives you all the positive chemical feedback of productivity but without the actual productivity.

I’ve already discovered that I can’t get any study done at home – I need to travel into the city to base myself in the library or another quiet study space if I want to get anything done. Just being in a distraction-free environment goes a long way to getting me to The Zone.

(Incidentally, Rands has a few other fantastic articles including one about the psychology of being an introvert, and the importance of having a cave. (Note: this is not the same as a “man cave”, which is a concept I detest.))

But in terms of group work, the rules that govern flow are a lot different. With disparate voices, opinions and desires all forced to coexist, there needs to be a more rigid structure supporting the group to collaborate in a productive, pleasant way. Sawyer (2007) dictates ten conditions that should be met for group flow to be achieved:

  1. The group’s goals need to be aligned and recorded
  2. Group members need to practice close listening
  3. Complete concentration
  4. All members should feel in control, heard by the group
  5. Blending egos is of utmost importance, lest people feel overwhelmed or crowded out of decision making
  6. Participation should be equal amongst all members
  7. Familiarity
  8. Communication
  9. Moving it forward, always building on ideas with progression in mind
  10. Accepting the potential for failure
  1. Sawyer, K. (2007), Group Genius: The creative power of collaboration, New York: Basic Books, pp. 39-57. ↩
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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Narrative and story in a poetic short film with no dialogue

The presence of Michael Dudok de Wit in the 2016 Cannes film festival announcement prompted me to re-watch his 2000 film Father and Daughter, which won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Animated Short Film. You should definitely watch it if you have a spare 10 minutes:

It’s a beautiful film. The amount of story and feeling Dudok de Wit is able to express without dialogue, just through movement, music and sound effects, is really incredible.

It got me thinking about this week’s readings, and I realised that Father and Daughter has all the major elements that a cohesive film should have. There’s a three-act structure, a protagonist and an antagonist, and the success of the film relies on its ability to evoke empathy in its audience (which is does very well, at least in my case).

The protagonist is the daughter, as the whole story is told from her point of view narratively and emotionally. She undergoes the most change/development, as she grows from a little girl to an old woman, and has a conscious desire (for her father to return).

The antagonist is the father. This is interesting because the father is actually barely in the film at all, and he’s not an enemy in the traditional sense, but his character’s desires/behaviour lie in opposition to the daughter.

Act I sets up the characters (father, daughter) and the setting. Depending on how you read the film the inciting incident could be the birth of the daughter, or it could be the start of a war. There is a first-act turning point when the father gets into a boat and rows away, never to return. The film leaves it intentionally ambiguous, but this could be read literally (he abandoned the daughter) or metaphorically (rowing away could be a symbol for death, or for going off to war, or various other potential explanations).

In Act II we watch as the daughter goes through her life, growing older little by little, revisiting the many places she and her father visited on their bikes when she was younger. We see her go through her entire life, wondering about her father and the loss in her life.

Finally, in Act III we see the daughter, now an elderly woman herself, literally follow in her father’s footsteps as she steps out from the beach and finds his abandoned, decaying rowboat. Again, depending on your reading of the film the climax and resolution could actually mean different things, but they’re certainly present at the end of the film.

So it goes to show that even a poetic animated film with no dialogue can be read according to the principles of narrative and story laid out by McKee and Rabiger.

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Media 1, Readings

“The protagonist must be empathetic (whether or not he is sympathetic).”

— Robert McKee (1997) 1

I think there is no better embodiment of this principal (that you don’t have to like a character for their characterisation to be successful) than David Brent.

  1. McKee, Robert, (1997), ‘The substance of story’ in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154 ↩

Empathy and cringe comedy

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Media 1, Readings

Three-act structure

Michael Rabiger (2009)1, a professor and academic specialising in documentary studies, gives a helpful and succinct summary of the three-act narrative structure:

  • ACT I: establishes the setup (characters, relationships, situations and the dominant problem faced by the central character/s
  • ACT II: escalates the complications in relationships as the central character struggles with obstacles
  • ACT III: intensifies the situation to a point of climax or confrontation, which the central character then resolves, often in a climactic way that is emotionally satisfying

The name given to this collection of changes and developments is the dramatic or story arc, and each individual moment of change is called a beat.

I still struggle with the idea that rigid structures like three-act narrative are necessarily good. My natural inclination is to suspect that such formulaic progressions are used not just as vague guides but as templates that actually hinder the development of interesting or new stories. Indeed, some of my filmmaker friends seem entirely wedded to the idea that particular story beats must occur at certain points in their script.

But basically all of the films it’s possible to see in mainstream cinemas today, even those I would consider “unconventional”, are still governed by three-act structure even if the structure is not immediately identifiable. The only films that truly eschew traditional structures like these are the genuinely experimental films of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker and Maya Deren.

  1. Michael Rabiger, 2009, Directing the Documentary, 5th Edition (Focus Press) pp.283-291 ↩
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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Everything is a text

For certain types of media, textual analysis seems quite natural and obvious. Attempting to find meaning in visual art, cinema, music, television, etc. (where there is an author and they are trying to elicit some kind of meaningful response from an audience) is a relatively normal thing to do and is generally an inherent part of understanding that piece of media.

But I’ve begun to realise that almost any form of communication can be read as a text. Building on our exercise in Week 1 in which we surveyed the visible media at the State Library, practically every part of our environment can be analysed in this way, including things as small and seemingly insignificant as directional and traffic signage.

Why is a stop sign red, and why is it octagonal? What meanings are connoted by these aesthetic properties? Why do the directional signs at Emporium use a sans serif typeface and monochrome colour scheme? Answering these questions can explain how society functions on a deeper level. Even an entire city as a whole could be analysed in this methodical way — what are the semiotic signs and codes that can be identified within it, and what part do they play in forming meaning?

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Do you see what I see?

I picked up on an interesting point from this week’s reading Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis, that depending on the culture to which the interpreter of a text belongs, a text can mean very, very different things. It reminded me of a fascinating BBC Horizon programme I watched online about five years ago, in which researchers performed experiments and found that people from the Himba tribe in Namibia could not identify the blue square in the right half of this diagram:

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The researchers discovered that Himba, who culturally and linguistically treat blue and green as the same colour (with just one umbrella word that describes both), but have hundreds of words to describe individual shades of green, actually see the blue square as being visually indistinguishable from the green. And the opposite was also true – Himba were able to positively identify two different shades of green in the left half of the diagram that, to westerners, were seen as a single hue (spoiler: it’s the same position as the blue square).

Unfortunately the documentary I saw is no longer available online, but the next best thing is the xkcd colo(u)r survey, in which web comic artist and former NASA engineer Randall Monroe surveyed over 200,000 people and asked them to name colours. The differences in results from men and women is really interesting – although it must be remembered that the data set for this particular study is incredibly small and skewed (not just to people of the western world, but specifically to people who read xkcd) – and backs up the idea that what I see may not match what you see.

The results of both these studies prove that even something as seemingly universal as the interpretation of colour can vary widely between cultures. The differences would get wider and wider as you move further up into high-level cultural differences – making it a wonder we’re able to function as a global society with common thoughts and interpretations at all.

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Media 1, Readings, Thoughts

Textual analysis, artistic intent and feminist film theory

In discussing textual analysis this week, and in particular the idea that interpretation is dependent upon (and dictated by) context, I started thinking about artistic intent and how big or small an influence it has on the interpretation of a work.

One of the major shifts in the discourse of cinema occurred in line with the development of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, when feminist film theory became an active area of study based on the idea that the cinema of the early 20th century reflected the place of women in wider society, and that cinema is a tool used by a patriarchal society to reinforce the idea of a natural difference between sexes (and the inferences that can be drawn from this idea, that women should possess certain qualities, act in certain ways, etc.). This topic is explored in Molly Haskell’s 1973 book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, and the paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey (published in 1975), and has continued to develop in the decades since.

The filmmakers discussed by Haskell, Mulvey and others were presumably not consciously striving to make a comment on the place of women in society, or perpetuate damaging stereotypes, but post hoc interpretation took those films and analysed them as artefacts in the context of wider society at the time they were made. Artistic intent was irrelevant; the signs and signifiers of the texts themselves were the things deemed important and worthy of study.

Feminist film theory shows that texts can be analysed and found to hold certain qualities or attributes that the creator may not have intended, even long after the work was created. People are still analysing Italian renaissance art and interpreting what it reflects of 15th and 16th century society, and scholars in the 24th century will probably be doing the same for art being created right now.

It’s a slightly scary idea that your work could be analysed by others decades or centuries after its creation and found to hold qualities or attributes that you never intended — but, then again, that’s one of the beautiful things about discourse: it shifts and changes as much as art itself does. The fact that there can never be any one “correct” interpretation of a text is central to the ongoing conversation of cultural criticism.

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