26 April

The writer places time, money and people at risk because his ambition has life-defining force. What’s true for the writer is true for every character he creates

In Robert McKee’s ‘The Substance of Story’, the substance is defined as the nucleus to the story: “alive but intangible”. This reading highly focused on the Protagonist in stories and their necessary qualities as characters who inspire and are well-regarded. According to McKee, Protagonists are evidently: wilful; have conscious desires; have self-contradictory unconscious desires; have a capacity to pursue their Object of Desire convincingly; have a chance to attain their desires; cause closure at the ‘end’ of the story; and are empathetic. I agree, I disagree; I am befuddled. In order to determine my level of agreement on the matter, I consulted the second reading – ‘Casablanca’ by Umberto Eco.

a cult movie must display some organic imperfections… To become cult, a movie should not display a central idea but many. It should not exhibit a coherent philosophy of composition.

Ah, yes. Finally some clarity. My mind’s hazed-cloud of opinion has been blown away (or has possibly slowly dripped and fallen during precipitation of the quote). By using Casablanca as a case study, Eco reveals how the cult film embodies five genres in the space of two minutes. Which leads me to my overarching perspective: intertextual referencing by postmodernity.

Yes, McKee’s Protagonist qualities are common and anticipated in cinema history and future respectively. My view, however, is that the manifest of these qualities is directly associated with the degree of ‘cult-ness’: the superfluous nature of these qualities intensifies dependent on the level of ‘cult’ – or postmodernity. This goes hand-in-hand with the “text based on text” and “cinema based on cinema” realisation. There is no true original text; they are inevitably influenced by predecessor texts and societal/cultural knowledges. My own example to support my perspective is Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore – arguably a text thats degree of postmodernity is almost unparalleled – with intertextual referencing to: Western and Eastern cultural texts; Western and Eastern music; Western and Eastern celebrities; Western and Eastern food… Basically Western and Eastern everything. The synthesis of Western and Eastern cultures and texts enforces a postmodern explosion of intertextuality. Through all of this, the Protagonist’s association to McKee’s qualities of a Protagonist is ostensibly variant. Reading Kafka, the Protagonist: is not wilful but random; has no conscious desires whatsoever; has unconscious desires that not even the reader knows upon the completion of the text; cannot pursue the Object of Desire convincingly as the Protagonist acknowledges ‘his’ unconvincing nature; attains minor desires through no force of his own; causes an opposition of ‘closure’ at the end of the text; and is neither empathetic or sympathetic to the readers. After this, you may think that Kafka on the Shore is probably a stupid fucking novel. It’s postmodernism and opposition to stereotypical Protagonist qualities, however, solidifies it as a cult text. Therefore, it is my view, that as McKee’s qualities of a Protagonist wane, the degree of postmodernism encourages the attribution of a text as part of cult-culture.

24 April

Victor Burgin’s Looking at Photographs (Ch. 6) – ‘Thinking Photography, 1982

In Looking at Photographs, Burgin discusses photography in particular as a media ‘text’:

Photographs are texts… what we may call photographic discourse… [which] is the site of a complex ‘intertextuality’.

As an introductory reading to media ‘texts’, the analysis and deconstruction on photography is quite interesting. In relation to the textual analysis applied to photography and media ‘texts’ in general, Burgin discusses semiology:

Semiotics or semiology is the study of signs, with the object of identifying the systematic regularities from which meanings are construed.

The focus on semiotics in the reading drew parallels to this week’s lectorial discussion whereby semiotic textual analysis was introduced. Signs, denotations and connotations, and codes are primary aspects of semiology. The chapter concluded with a description of the four ostensible types of ‘look’ in a photograph: the look of the camera; the look of the viewers’ perspective; the ‘intra-diegetic’ looks exhanged between subjects and objects in the photograph; and the look the subject gives to the camera.The reading was a good introduction to semiotics however did not go into much depth in relation to what a media ‘text’ is. The second reading, however, did.

Gill Branston’s & Roy Stafford’s Approaching media texts – ‘The media student’s book’, 2010

[Media texts] are seen as actually structuring the very realities which they seem to ‘describe’ or ‘stand in for’.

In structuralist analysis of texts and semiotics, the text is considered a highly structured work that’s intentional deconstruction of this structure generates meaning. Textual analysis is easily supported through evidential aspects of the text. The two approaches to media texts are qualitative and quantitative, or semiotic and content, analysis.

With semiotic analysis we, the audience, are called ‘readers’, partly as a way of emphasising that we are dealing with something learnt rather than ‘natural’ and partly to indicate the degree of activity needed to make sense of signs.

Quantitative or content analysis, on the other hand, focuses on the parallels and patterns between the aspects of texts and the intertextual relationships with other texts – both explicitly represented and alluded to. Charles Sanders Peirce states that there are three types of signs in relation to semiotics:

Symbol: Signs for which the relation is arbitrary… there is no necessary connection
Icon: Signs which resemble what they stand for
Index: Casual link between the sign and what it stands for

Index is the type of sign that is most subjective in semiotics and can generate different meanings dependent on the knowledge of the ‘viewer’: their personal knowledge and experiences; their opinions and perspectives; their goals and motivations.

I am now feeling crazily nostalgic this week in relation to the lectorial’s focus and the readings. I am brought back to my prior learnings of the four approaches to meaning in texts: author-centred, reader-centred, textual analysis, and world-context approaches. I would like to delve into structuralism, post-structuralism, marxism and psychoanalysis again for Project Brief 4; I think they will amazingly compliment the semiotics of textual analysis. My group has been given ‘texts’ as our basis.

6 April

Collaboration: a term that keeps popping up in the Media One course. The idea of collaborationism has been studied viciously by many theorists and writers, especially on social media and internet sharing. In the “What is Collaboration Anyway?” reading, it states:

User-generated content and social media create the tendency for confusion between sharing and collaboration. Sharing of content alone does not directly lead to collaboration.

This forms the basis of collaboration study. Where does collaboration begin? Who initiates the collaboration when social media is concerned? The answer, I believe, is the non-human entity linking the relationship of two human collaborators: the Internet. Although the internet does not consciously choose with its brain to assist in collaborationism (or does it?), the Internet’s ubiquitous nature in collaborationism in 2015 is not to be ignored. Probably the most important section of the reading (again my opinion), is the ‘Criteria for Collaboration’ sub-chapter. It details how on assessing the strength of collaboration, particular criteria can be questioned: intention, goals, governance, coordination mechanisms, property, knowledge transfer, identity, scale, network topology, accessibility, and equality. I realise after writing out the specified criteria you are now probably confused by the ‘list-y’ nature; I feel the same way. But there is relevance to it. Whilst collaboration can be an unintentional happening, it generally is a planned and motivated occurrence between multiple parties to achieve a similar or same result. The reading’s deconstruction of Wikipedia’s collaborative nature was vitally interesting. Although the stigma of Wikipedia is DO NOT TRUST WIKIPEDIA, I tend to take this less seriously than I am instructed to. Wikipedia is the world’s most collaborative online database and although sometimes the information may be misconstrued or embellished, it is a perfect example of successful collaboration at work.