1B question [2]

'Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to the concept of audience.'

Genre Analysis

D.I.Y. Generic Analysis

The following questions are offered as basic guidelines for students analysing their coursework in relation to genre. This is a potential question in Section B of your summer examination. 

Note that an analysis of a text which is framed exclusively in terms of genre may be of limited usefulness. 

Generic analysis can also, of course, involve studying the genre more broadly.

 This is something we simply don't have time to do in class so you will need to spend time outside of class doing this (although you will hopefully have done lots of this when planning your production).

General

• In what context did you encounter it? (web, film, TV etc)
• What influence do you think this context might have had on your interpretation of the text?
• To what genre did you initially assign the text?
• What is your experience of this genre?
• What subject matter and basic themes is the text concerned with?
• How typical of the genre is this text in terms of content?
• What expectations do you have about texts in this genre?
• Have you found any formal generic labels for this particular text (where)?
• What generic labels have others given the same text?
• Which conventions of the genre do you recognize in the text?
• To what extent does this text stretch the conventions of its genre?
• Where and why does the text depart from the conventions of the genre?
• Which conventions seem more like those of a different genre (and which genre(s))?
• What familiar motifs or images are used?
• Which of the formal/stylistic techniques employed are typical/untypical of the genre?
• What institutional constraints are reflected in the form of the text?
• What relationship to 'reality' does the text lay claim to?
• Whose realities does it reflect?
• What purposes does the genre serve?
• In what ways are these purposes embodied in the text?
• To what extent did your purposes match these when you engaged with the text?
• What ideological assumptions and values seem to be embedded in the text?
• What pleasures does this genre offer to you personally?
• What pleasures does the text appeal to (and how typical of the genre is this)?
• Did you feel 'critical or accepting, resisting or validating, casual or concentrated, apathetic or motivated' (and why)?
• Which elements of the text seemed salient because of your knowledge of the genre?
• What predictions about events did your generic identification of the text lead to (and to what extent did these prove accurate)?
• What inferences about people and their motivations did your genre identification give rise to (and how far were these confirmed)?
• How and why did your interpretation of the text differ from the interpretation of the same text by other people?

Mode of address

• What sort of audience was your text aimed at (and how typical was this of the genre)?
• How does the text address your classmates?
• What sort of person does it assume they are?
• What assumptions have you made about their class, age, gender and ethnicity?
• What interests does it assume they have?
• What relevance does the text actually have for you?
• What knowledge does it take for granted?
• To what extent do you resemble the 'ideal reader' that the text seeks to position you as?
• Are there any notable shifts in the text's mode of address (and if so, what do they involve)?
• What responses does the text seem to expect from your audience?
• How open to negotiation is their response (are they invited, instructed or coerced to respond in particular ways)?
• Is there any penalty for not responding in the expected ways (think in terms of enjoyment for the audience or consequences for the institution)?
• To what extent did people find themselves 'reading against the grain' of the text and the genre?
• Which attempts to position your audience in this text do they accept, reject or seek to negotiate (and why)?
• How closely aligned is the way in which the text addresses you with the way in which the genre positions you (Kress 1988, 107)?

Relationship to other texts

• What intertextual references are there in the text you have created (and to what other texts)?
• Generically, which other texts does the text you created resemble most closely?
• What key features are shared by these texts?
• What major differences do you notice between them?

Postmodern Essay 3

Postmodern Essay 3 by billyraybouldmedia

Postmodern Essay 2

Postmodern Essay 2 by billyraybouldmedia

Postmodern Essay 1

Postmodern Essay 1 by billyraybouldmedia

1a and 1b Tips

OCR A2 Media studies Exam Questions 1a and 1b tips from Mr Smith

How To Answer Question 1b

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions.
Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre
Apply theories of narrative to one of your coursework productions.

You will notice that each of these questions is quite short and fits a common formula. You can be assured that the same thing will apply this summer. You will be asked to apply ONE concept to one of your productions. This is a quite different task from question 1a, where you write about all of your work and your skills, as this one involves some reference to theory and only the one piece of work, as well as asking you to step back from it and think about it almost as if someone else had made it- what is known as ‘critical distance’.

There are five possible concepts which can come up

Representation
Genre
Narrative
Audience
Media Language

If you look through those questions above, you will see that the first three have all already come up, but don’t be fooled into thinking that means that it must be one of the other two this time- exams don’t always work that predictably! It would be far too risky just to bank on that happening and not prepare for the others! In any case, preparing for them all will help you understand things better and there are areas of overlap which you can use across the concepts.

So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? First of all, you need to decide which project you would be most confident analysing in the exam. I believe that any of the five can be applied to moving image work, so if you did a film opening at AS, a music video, short film or trailer at A2, that would be the safest choice. Print work is more tricky to write about in relation to narrative, but the other four areas would all work well for it, so it is up to you, but to be honest, I’d prepare in advance of the exam as you don’t want to be deciding what to use during your precious half hour! What you certainly need is a copy of the project itself to look at as part of your revision, to remind yourself in detail of how it works.

Representation

If you take a video you have made for your coursework, you will almost certainly have people in it. If the topic is representation, then your task is to look at how those representations work in your video. You could apply some of the ideas used in the AS TV Drama exam here- how does your video construct a representation of gender, ethnicity or age for example? You need also to refer to some critics who have written about representation or theories of media representation and attempt to apply those (or argue with them). So who could you use? Interesting writers on representation and identity include Richard Dyer, Angela McRobbie and David Gauntlett. See what they say...

Genre

If you’ve made a music magazine at AS level, an analysis of the magazine would need to set it in relation to the forms and conventions shown in such magazines, particularly for specific types of music. But it would not simply comprise a list of those conventions. There are a whole host of theories of genre and writers with different approaches. Some of it could be used to inform your writing about your production piece. Some you could try are: Altman, Grant and Neale- all are cited in the wikipedia page here

Narrative

A film opening or trailer will be ideal for this, as they both depend upon ideas about narrative in order to function. An opening must set up some of the issues that the rest of the film’s narrative will deal with, but must not give too much away, since it is only an opening and you would want the audience to carry on watching! Likewise a trailer must draw upon some elements of the film’s imaginary complete narrative in order to entice the viewer to watch it, again without giving too much away. If you made a short film, you will have been capturing a complete narrative, which gives you something complete to analyse. If you did a music video, the chances are that it was more performance based, maybe interspersed with some fragments of narrative. In all these cases, there is enough about narrative in the product to make it worth analysis. The chances are you have been introduced to a number of theories about narrative, but just in case, here’s a link to a PDF by Andrea Joyce, which summarises four of them, including Propp and Todorov. 

Audience

Every media product has to have an audience, otherwise in both a business sense and probably an artistic sense too it would be judged a failure. In your projects, you will undoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a target audience- who you are aiming it at and why; you should also have taken feedback from a real audience in some way at the end of the project for your digital evaluation, which involves finding out how the audience really ‘read’ what you had made. You were also asked at AS to consider how your product addressed your audience- what was it about it that particularly worked to ‘speak’ to them? All this is effectively linked to audience theory which you then need to reference and apply. 

Media Language

A lot of people have assumed this is going to be the most difficult concept to apply, but I don’t think it need be. If you think back to the AS TV Drama exam, when you had to look at the technical codes and how they operate, that was an exercise in applying media language analysis, so for the A2 exam if this one comes up, I’d see it as pretty similar. For moving image, the language of film and television is defined by how camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene create meaning. Likewise an analysis of print work would involve looking at how fonts, layout, combinations of text and image as well as the actual words chosen creates meaning. Useful theory here might be Roland Barthes on semiotics- denotation and connotation and for moving image work Bordwelland Thompson 

So what do you do in the exam?

You need to state which project you are using and briefly describe it
You then need to analyse it using whichever concept appears in the question, making reference to relevant theory throughout
Keep being specific in your use of examples from the project

Barthes Five Codes

Linguist Roland Barthes described Five Codes which are woven into any narrative.

The Hermeneutic Code (HER)

The Hermeneutic Code refers to any element of the story that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the reader.
The full truth is often avoided, for example in:

• Snares: deliberately avoiding the truth.
• Equivocations: partial or incomplete answers.
• Jammings: openly acknowledge that there is no answer to a problem.

The purpose of the author in this is typically to keep the audience guessing, arresting the enigma, until the final scenes when all is revealed and all loose ends are tied off and closure is achieved.

The Proairetic Code (ACT)

The Proairetic Code also builds tension, referring to any other action or event that indicates something else is going to happen, and which hence gets the reader guessing as to what will happen next.
The Hermeneutic and Proairetic Codes work as a pair to develop the story's tensions and keep the reader interested. Barthes described them as:

"...dependent on ... two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence."

The Semantic Code (SEM)

This code refers to connotation within the story that gives additional meaning over the basic denotative meaning of the word.
It is by the use of extended meaning that can be applied to words that authors can paint rich pictures with relatively limited text and the way they do this is a common indication of their writing skills.

The Symbolic Code (SYM)

This is very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level, organizing semantic meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning.
This is typically done in the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of opposing and conflict ideas.

The Cultural Code (REF)

This code refers to anything that is founded on some kind of canonical works that cannot be challenged and is assumed to be a foundation for truth.
Typically this involves either science or religion, although other canons such as magical truths may be used in fantasy stories. The Gnomic Code is a cultural code that particularly refers to sayings, proverbs, clichés and other common meaning-giving word sets.

Found Footage Exercise

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1A Question [2]

Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for production developed over time. [25]

Postmodern Audiences

The impact of postmodern media on audiences and the ways in which we think about texts. 

How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world? 

• have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?

• has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?

• in terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text. Think here about a film like Moulin Rouge where the plot is in some sense irrelevant to the overall impact of the film.

• has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts


• in its ‘waning of affect’, has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see. They are desensitised and unable to respond ‘properly’ to suffering and joy.


• has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to

Postmodernism and Audience Theory

Two commentators have developed some interesting ideas about postmodernism and audiences.


Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’ (157)

‘VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in relation to the moving image.’


Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to capture it.’


Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’


Postmodern & Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry.


Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy.

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms.

LINK 

Thanks to MEDI@CHS

Criticisms Of Postmodernism (James Rosenau)

Rosenau (1993) Rosenau identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:

1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.

2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.

3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.

4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.

5. By adamently rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.

6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.

7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

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