Category Archives: Thoughts

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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Media 1, Thoughts

Will technology destroy cinema like it destroyed the music industry?

One of my favourite things about being at RMIT so far is the way that topics in my elective subjects (Introduction to Cinema Studies, and Music in Popular Culture) tend to correspond in some way with what we’re doing each week in Media 1, so you get to delve into an idea or topic from multiple perspectives.

This week in Music in Popular Culture we discussed how technology has shaped popular music, in particular how recorded sound basically revolutionised the practice of making music in the early 20th century and how home formats (vinyl, cassette, CD) continue to influence music in a multitude of ways long after their obsolescence.

I’m not a musician so I haven’t had much experience with the recording/performance aspects of music, but even as a music fan it’s remarkable just how much my experience as a listener has been shaped by technology. When I was 15 and got a casual job for the first time, I spent my first month’s pay on a Sony Discman and from then on I was basically never separated from it. Everywhere I went my Discman would come with me, and I even used to carry around a hard-case CD wallet that held 88 CDs. Looking back it was hilariously impractical and there’s no way I would bother lugging that much weight around each day now, but at the time it was basically the only choice for people who couldn’t bare walking anywhere without their headphones in.

Today, everyone carries dozens of times more music on their phones than I ever could carry on CD, and they do it without needing to account for a physical storage medium. Untethering the act of listening to music from its physical formats has been as revolutionary for the music industry as the democratisation of the internet — listeners can now be much more liberal with their buying (or downloading) decisions, amassing vastly larger music collections than ever before possible. And with SoundCloud, Bandcamp and similar artist-focused commercial platforms taking off over the last five years, a major beneficiary of this power shift has been small, independent or unsigned artists — those whose commercial viability is too low for the artist to be offered a contract by a major record label, but who can grow a small, self-sustaining cult following and operate in perpetuity outside the traditional commercial pathway.

(For a brutally frank breakdown of just how difficult it was to make enough money to survive in the traditional recording industry framework, read this 1993 polemic by producer and musician Steve Albini.)

This dynamic shift has led to the rise of microgenres and the increasing concentration of music fans into tribes, like fractals of communities that become more and more distilled the closer you look. With literally the entire history of recorded popular music at people’s fingertips — and without the need to have a radio DJ or television video clip program play their favourite music for them to hear it — people are now seeking out exactly the music that interests them, only the music that interests them, and nothing else. If you want to listen to nothing but cloud rap, bubblegum bass or blackgaze all day every day, you absolutely can.

For makers this can be both a blessing and a curse (and increased availability clearly makes it more difficult for any creator to be heard above the crowd), but as long as an artist makes music that appeals to at least a small subset of the music community, with the help of the internet they can now connect with that group and sustain their work as an artist much easier than ever before.

This shift doesn’t seem to have yet translated to filmmaking, though cinema tends to lag behind music in major paradigm changes generally, but I can imagine a future in which the Hollywood studio system has collapsed under the weight of billion-dollar budgets and in its wake has risen a new independent cinema, built on the back of technological advancement and cheap online distribution. This could be the world that my classmates and I graduate into, and it’s something that I think we need to keep an eye on as we move through our degree and out into the real world of media production. Perhaps we shouldn’t just be hoping to get a job as a cog in the machine that is the media industry, when we could be looking forward to a future as creators and artists answering to no one but our own audience.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Foley

The topic of foley came up in the lectorial this week, and since I’ll take literally any excuse to revisit the Police Academy movies I decided to watch this little collection of Michael Winslow’s scenes:

Worth it.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Vocal timbre

This week’s lectorial on the elements of sound, in particular timbre, got me thinking about just what it is about some voices that make them more or less enjoyable to listen to than others.

99% Invisible is a podcast I should love. As a former designer myself I have a sharp appreciation for the tiny, seemingly insignificant details that designers spend hours upon hours slaving to get perfect. The hidden complexity of everyday life is fascinating, and indeed so would the podcast dedicated to finding and explaining that complexity — except for one thing.

I can’t stand Roman Mars’ voice. It’s literally the only thing stopping me from listening to the show. He gets so close to the microphone and has an irritating half-whisper that sounds like he’s doing a voiceover for a late-night phone sex commercial, but apparently a lot of people find it soothing and therapeutic. Judge for yourself:

By contrast, Zoe Chace has worked on Planet Money and This American Life and is often said to possess one of the most annoying voices on radio — but she’s easily one of my absolute favourite presenters. She has an unusual combination of timbre, accent and vocal fry that for some reason I just love — I recognise that her voice probably isn’t the most suited to traditional ideas of news/economics reporters, but perhaps that’s part of why I like it so much.

I still don’t really understand the mechanics of vocal timbre, and why exactly I find some voices irritating and others irresistible, but it’s interesting to note just how much of a difference it can make.

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