Wednesday 26 February 2014

4.1 Lesson Half Term Knowledge & Understanding FMJ Screenig


Objectives:
Film & Audience Experience
To investigate the relationship between film form and audience response
To explore varieties of audience experience gender, ethnicity, sexuality on spectator response
To issues of audience and impact on emotional, sensory and cognitive experiences
CASE STUDIES: Brokeback Mountain, Full Metal Jacket, City of God, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Baise Moi, Django Unchained 


Starter: What Case Study? Emotional Response & why?

Feedback from homework

Concept
Audience vs Spectator - define?
Emotional Response (last week)
Factor that affect (gender, sexuality, experiences, beliefs)
Film Consumption


Activity:
Share Learning: Textual Evidence to discuss how we are aligned with the characters/meaning created.
Map out emotional responses to the film
What factors have affected your response
What is the preferred reading?
Mind map on Sheets answers to questions:
The Big Shave
Metropolis
Desserts
Goodfellas
FMJ & Platoon

Apply to demonstrate:
Response & Construction:
Exorcist, Brokeback Mountain, Full Metal Jacket scenes

Rotate and answer

In groups watch FMJ


Emotional Responses & Alignment
FMJ

Task: Analyse the Micro techniques (MES, Cinematography, Editing, Sound) used by the director to provoke/manipulate these responses to gain the preferred reading/response from the spectator. Explain how this functions and what factors affect this?

Map these out as notes to build on next week.

Write up response to question assess responses to questions from Homework

Homework: Prep reading/tasks:
Watch Clock work Orange
&

answer the questions

  

Tuesday 4 February 2014

Clockwork Orange Spectatorship Analysis

http://sssfcfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-male-gaze-clockwork-orange.html







During the treatment scene, how is the spectator punished? By this point of the film, it is believed by many that since the audience is still here with Alex (as oppose to choosing to just not watch the film at all), then they too are in need of punishment due to their involvement of the previous crimes. Alex introduces the scene via his narration, and refers to the audience once again as his 'brothers'. The audience, who have now been directly identified, are invited in to the scene. During the punishment of Alex, the audience are given an Extreme Close-Up of Alex's right eye (which has been identified earlier in the film as symbolic of the evil side of Alex's persona, due to the make-up in his costume. This connotes his evil persona is being punished) which has been cramped open by metal prongs. The audience are forced to watch this which in turn will distress and disturb some audiences. The Close-Up of Alex's face as he is being tortured also tells the audience of the terror and pain Alex is going through. His excessive screaming and begging to stop can also distress some audiences. It is thought that while Alex may be being punished for violent crimes through the Ludvigo Technique, the audience are being punished for their involvement in the crimes by being shown these distressing images. With the Audience and Alex both being punished for their crimes, it enhances their growing relationship, showing a sort of solidarity and unity between the two. The audience will also sympathise with Alex more through this scene, thus aligning with him more.

A Clockwork Orange - Kubrick Responses

Baise-Moi (2000) controversial Female Gaze?

Theory Overview - Reception & Spectatorship


Thought provoking Films - Prometheus


The Black Gaze - Django



Fandom Map - your case study




Condition of Reception

What?
A Condition of Reception theory is primarily related with uncovering how actual spectators interact with films. How the spectator who passively absorbs meanings and messages embedded in the filmic text.
When?
Condition of reception was first found out in a research during the 1980-1990s.
Who?
It affect the people who watch the movie and the film itself when they make another movie later on e.g. a sequel.
How?
It when you watch a film and you interpret it in your own way to a general audience.
Why?
It is there to find out how people interpret a movie and from this the director or the producer can learn and improve on what he or she wants to get across to the audience.
  • Cinema –
    • Odeon
    • Cineworld
    • Vue
    • 2D
    • 3D
    • IMAX
    • TV –
      • Channel 4
      • ITV
      • BBC
      • Film 4
      • Sky Movies
      • Virgin Media
      • On Demand
      • Online –
        • Streaming(Paid)
          • Love Film
          • NetFlix
          • Blockbuster
  • Download(Paid)
    • Love Film
    • NetFlix
  • Streaming(Illegal)
    • Megaupload
    • Watchmovies.net
  • Downloading(Illegal)
    • Pirate Bay
    • MegaUpload
    • Torrents
Where?
Cinemas, at home, clubs, online anywhere where you can watch a movie.

Intriductory Reading Pre- and Post-Viewing Experiences and Conditions of Reception: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 7

Pre- and Post-Viewing Experiences and Conditions of Reception: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 7



The enjoyment of a film can also be affected by the pre and post-viewing experiences of the person who watches it and where and how they watch it. For example if a viewer watched all the trailers, promotional clips, interviews with the stars etc before a film is released, they may have extremely high expectations of the film. This might mean the film fails to meet these expectations. Comedies often have many of the best jokes in the trailers of the films and these jokes will not be as funny when they are in the final film if you have seen the trailer a few times. Similarly many trailers give a great deal of the story away and show many of the best stunts. The recent Fast and Furious 6 trailer seemed to have clips from all the major set-pieces and therefore there was no sense of surprise when watching the film. Prometheus was also a victim of its excellent marketing because people had huge expectations and the film was not as good as many had hoped.
Before or after a film, reading reviews might also affect a person’s enjoyment of a film. Sometimes I read a review and I can’t get the words of the writer out of my head and it ends up affecting my opinion. For this reason many wait till after they have seen a film to read any reviews. Also discussing a film after it has finished can potentially change your opinion of it. Though I still love The Dark Knight Rises, hearing people pick out the all the plot holes has lessened my love for it a little bit.
How you watch a film is also important as watching a film at an IMAX cinema with state of the art sound is a very different experience to watching a film on a mobile phone or a dodgy pirate DVD copy. Blockbusters particularly are supposed to be seen on a big screen in a dark room with the sound up loud to get the full audio visual experience. If an audience is laughing in a comedy or screaming in a horror, it will likely have an effect on other viewers. Watching a film with mates is different to watching it with parents or on a first date and watching it alone is very different to watching it with a large audience. All these factors can affect enjoyment and interpretation. 3D is supposedly more immersive but many hate it and some people have home cinema set ups because they would rather watch a film in their own home. I also find that if I see a really good film early (at a preview before it is released) I think I often love it even more than if I was (seemingly) the last to see it. I certainly feel the need to talk about it more to convince more people to go and see it.

Intriductory Reading Fandom: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 6

Fandom: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 6



Films do not just have the potential to have an effect on audiences but also audiences can have an affect on films. With fandom it can go both ways. Fans are people who love a particular film, genre, character or star and they share camaraderie with other fans. Sometimes being a fan can involve a huge range of activities such as attending conventions, dressing up, writing fan fiction, blogging, starting a website, attending premieres, collecting merchandise, writing fan mail or even getting into film production and referencing the films you are a fan of.
Though the films have clearly had an effect on the fans by making them get obsessed and turning the film into a hobby for the person, the fans also have an impact on the film. They turn it into more than a film, making it a cultural phenomenon such as Star Wars. Fans are now becoming filmmakers so Kevin Smith references Star Wars in most of his movies and J.J. Abrams is now making a Star Wars movie after being a huge fan of the original. Fans have expanded the Star Wars universe by writing their own fan fiction and their continuing love for the franchise has led to more and more sequels. Some fans have even gone as far as to call ‘Jedi’ their religion and some Trekkies have learned the (fictional) language Klingon from Star Trek. Some Avatar fans were even reported to be feeling depressed or suicidal as they could not visit the fictional planet Pandora. How much of this is really believable is debatable but there can be no doubt that fans take films very seriously and films can have a big impact on peoples lives.Check out this story on the tension between fans.

Introductory Reading Frameworks of Interpretation: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 3

Frameworks of Interpretation: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 3



Part of the theory of active spectatorship is that the audience is made up of individuals who all read and interpret films differently from each other. What makes us individuals are a range of things and these could be considered our frameworks of interpretation. For example I am a (vaguely) young white British man who has been through higher education and is (probably considered) middle class. All these factors such as my age, my class, my ethnicity, my education and even my past experiences will all have some bearing on the way I read and interpret a film. Though I might agree with many other people, there could also be differences. For example my interpretation of a film might be very different to an old African lady. Though the film may have a preferred reading, there may be some differences in the way people interpret it due to their differing frameworks of interpretation.
Examples of this can be found everywhere. Where I found Avatar to be about a so-called ‘primitive’ species of aliens that taught a human that he should be more respectful of his surroundings and nature and the environment, others criticised it for portraying the aliens as savages and for the use of African-American and Native American actors in the roles of the aliens. I interpreted it as James Cameron suggesting that the ‘primitive’ cultures were honourable, noble and cared for the planet, whereas the humans (often played by Americans and Europeans) had basically destroyed Earth through carelessness and greedy consumption of natural resources. However others consider it a patronising view of non-white cultures and criticised it for having a white hero who has to save the savages. Perhaps some critics with different frameworks of interpretation to my own were more sensitive to these issues than I was.

Pleasures of Film Watching: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 2

Pleasures of Film Watching: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 2


Part of the theory of active spectatorship is that audiences do not all just watch whatever they are told to watch and instead different individuals consume different films for different reasons and pleasures. The Uses and Gratifications theory suggested by Blulmer and Katz indicates that there are four main pleasures that audiences gain from films; diversion, personal relationships, personal identity and surveillance.

Diversion is probably the most common reason people choose to watch films. Quite simply many viewers will watch a film just to get away from the problems and reality of their own lives. This is why most big Hollywood blockbusters offer pure escapism. They tell easy to understand stories where good usually triumphs over evil and people can go home feeling good. They can provide us with emotions we may not always feel in the mundane routine of our everyday lives, making us laugh, cry or scream. Many films even take us to fantasy lands like Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings or far off planets like in Star Wars, allowing us to completely escape the reality of our lives.

Some people may use films as a substitute for personal relationships. A classic example of this is a viewer choosing to go and see a romantic comedy because they are single. The idea of a relationship or finding a happy relationship is played out in the film. Similarly films that are about groups of friends may help a person to feel like part of a group. In films like the American Pie series or The Inbetweeners, viewers might find characters that they would like to be friends with and watching a film is like being in their company. I’m not sure I fully agree with this one and think it may apply more to TV shows like soap operas rather than films.

On a perhaps more concerning note, many people may watch a film for reasons of personal identity. This is where a viewer watches a film because they see themselves reflected in it, whether it be one specific character or a certain subculture of lifestyle. Stoner comedies are a perfect example of this. People who smoke certain substances are much more likely to relate to the stoner comedies of Jay and Silent Bob, Cheech and Chong or Pineapple Express. Similarly some people chose to watch violent films about football hooliganism such as Green Street and The Football Factory because it is a lifestyle that they can relate to. The viewer may even learn some of their values from the text. For example when I first saw Fight Club, I was taken in by much of what the revolutionary character Tyler Durden said found my own beliefs altered after watching the film.

Finally surveillance is another pleasure of film watching that means finding films that might contain information that is useful for living. For example watching documentaries such as Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11 might educate the viewer about the current state of America. I might also watch world cinemas to learn more about cultures that are foreign to me. For example the films City of God and La Haine teach the viewer about what it is like to live in poor areas of Brazil in France. While this could be considered escapism from my own life in Britain, they could also contain information that is useful in my life.

Active Spectatorship: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 1

Active Spectatorship: The Relationship between Audiences and Films Part 1

http://ilovethatfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-relationship-between-audiences-and.html

Films can have a huge amount of effects on audiences from simply causing an emotional response to some would argue much worse effects such as causing copycat violence. Audiences however can also affect a film and particularly the longevity of its popularity and its status in our culture. Audiences are made up of individuals however and it is impossible to say that a film will have the same impact on every single viewer and also that a film will be read or understood by each viewer in the same way. It is a complex relationship that deserves further exploration. Over the next couple of weeks I will be looking at active spectatorship, the pleasures of film watching, the effects of films, fandom, different viewing experiences and things that affect our interpretation of films.

Active vs. Passive Spectatorship
 One of the fundamental debates in media theory is over whether audiences are made up of individual active spectators or a passive mass of unthinking consumers who watch what we are told to watch and fail to question what we are told or the messages of the media we consume. Active spectatorship theory suggests each viewer is different and many people in the audience will question the film and react to it in different ways to others, not just blindly accepting the messages. Active spectators do not just consume what they are told to watch by marketing that is aimed at them but instead choose different films to watch for different reasons. The passive spectator theory on the other hand suggests we are all the same and our intelligence, life experiences and everything else that makes us individuals does not affect our reception of the film.
Perhaps it can be argued that some filmmakers try to turn the audience into passive spectators by filling their films with very obvious, unambiguous preferred readings. Others wish to encourage active spectatorship by making their films more open to individual interpretation and making it easier for people to read the film differently and respond to it in different ways. A preferred reading is where the producers of the text encode it with meaning using various codes such as music, lighting and cinematography in order to try and get as much agreement over the meaning of the text as possible. It is made very clear how the filmmaker wants the audience to think and feel about the characters, story and events in the film. Blockbusters generally have a clear preferred reading, so for example in Titanic when the protagonist Jack dies there is very sad music on the soundtrack and he is played by Leonardo DiCaprio who audiences are very familiar with. Everything about the way the scene is shot, edited and scored makes everyone (mostly) in the audience agree that it is sad that Jack has died.
On the other hand some other films encourage spectators to be more active and to have to think about how to feel and respond to the film. For example Pulp Fiction is told in a non-linear fashion and so the audience has to construct the real chronology of the story in their own head. The film does not have heroes and villains either. There is very little that tells the audience how to feel at certain times or what to feel about certain characters. Spectators think for themselves about whom to be sad about if they die or even who is the main character of the story. Similarly the ending of Memento leaves the viewer with a great deal of ambiguity about how to feel about the protagonist. The reverse chronology and the revelations in the final scene reveal that the character is somebody quite different to what the audience had been previously led to believe and it takes a very active mind to decide how to feel and interpret the film by the final scene.

"FILM ART" AND FANDOM

"FILM ART" AND FANDOM

In comparison with the early twentieth-century creation of movie fandom, the figure of the movie fan is perhaps less clearly gendered as feminine/feminized today, but this is because of a much changed cultural context, wherein both men and women are frequently targeted and imaged as consumers. In addition to the star system, with its "picture personalities," directors and those involved in the technical craft of filmmaking are now also increasingly publicized celebrities in their own right. This shift means that film fans can align themselves more clearly with notions of film as art—and partly avoid negative stereotypes of celebrity obsession—by indicating their fandom of film directors.
This aspect of fandom moves closer to the scholarly appreciation of film, since treating film as art and dignifying certain directors with "authorial" or auteurist status is a strategy that has historically characterized film studies, and that still retains more than a foothold today. So-called "auteur theory" was initially employed solely by intellectuals and cinephiles seeking to value film as a medium, and although it carried cultural cachet, it was also accessible enough for nonacademic audiences to appreciate (Taylor, p. 87). Moving from being an exclusive/elitist view of film held by French cinéastes, auteurism entered the US scene and became popularized to the extent that Hollywood incorporated its discourse into its own publicity. Auteurism is no longer just a critical approach, but also a commercial strategy for organizing how audiences may respond to film texts. Uniting filmmakers, scholars, publicists, and fans, the notion that certain privileged directors are artists has tended to create and sustain aesthetic personality cults around them. This type of "personality cult" also has been significant to certain organized fandoms, such as those surrounding offbeat, sleeper, quirky, and classical Hollywood films labeled "cult movies." These organized fandoms have tended to use auteur theory as a means of claiming to find artistic value within the terrain of independent film.
One of the most significant cultural activities undertaken by film fans, then, is the way in which they seek to invest the work of their preferred performers and directors with cultural capital, setting their tastes against what they perceive and construct as mainstream cinema. However, such an apparent detachment from "the commercial" is itself commercial, since these fans are still placed within a specific market. Though this is related to the debate over fandom's resistant capability, it can also be viewed as a matter of film fans' cultural practices. Cult-film fans seek to defend and value their favored texts, but by doing so they also hope to reflect their own aesthetic taste, for they can see "true" artistic worth where general audiences cannot. Such fan audiences' bids for distinction are especially clear in relation to genres that are frequently devalued in "dominant" film criticism, such as "trash" and exploitation cinema. Mark Kermode argues that horror fans actively perceive the genre's aesthetic value, whereas nonfans passively consume horror as if its representations are actual rather than aestheticized images of gore; he offers a convincing opposition between "active" fans who read horror films in relation to surreal genre precedents and "passive" nonfans who are characterized as reading horror films more naively.
In Kermode's account, horror fans are, crucially, "genre literate." Like fans of other genres or specific movie stars, they are expert consumers, able to trace generic histories and interpret new films in relation to countless preceding examples. This type of movie fan has a keen sense of intertextuality; thus, boundaries around "the text itself" tend to be partly dissolved by fans who,
Conrad Veidt and Annabella in Under the Red Robe (Victor Seastrom, 1937).
even while they carry out close readings of certain films, relate texts to others, either by generic category, in auteurist terms, or by focusing on a favored star. Organized fandoms, like those for cult movies or the horror genre, therefore challenge the idea that any film's meaning and significance are inherent. Rather, it is by reading films in relation to, and through, other texts that fans can convert "the film" into those meanings and values that characterize their fandom as a kind of interpretive community. Fans read films not only through official publicity texts such as DVD extras, but also in relation to fan-produced texts (fan fiction). Henry Jenkins proffers the example of one fan who wrote an alternative ending to the film Thelma and Louise (1991) in which these female characters transform themselves into bats (Jenkins, 2000, p. 177). Recontextualizing the film as a lesbian vampire tale, this creative fan interpretation (and production) of meaning indicates how generic identities and textual boundaries can be reinscribed by film fans, sometimes working against what producers, and other audiences, may view as the obvious categories, boundaries, and identities of a film. Thus, whether it is the interpretive activities of individual fans, or the socially organized, communal practices of fandom, fans and fandom have been as important to film studies as to the film industry. They demonstrate how loyal audiences can be a part of film commerce and also set themselves apart from commercial processes.
Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination . London: Sage, 1998.
Barker, Martin, and Kate Brooks. Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd—Its Friends, Fans, and Foes . Luton, UK: University of Luton Press, 1998.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society . London: British Film Institute, 1986.
Fiske, John. "The Cultural Economy of Fandom." In The Adoring Audience , edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 30–49. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Fuller, Kathryn H. At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture . Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures . London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Jenkins, Henry. "Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the Vampire's Kiss." In Reinventing Film Studies , edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 165–182. London: Arnold, 2000.
——. Textual Poachers . London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Kermode, Mark. "I Was a Teenage Horror Fan, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linda Blair." In Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate , edited by Martin Barker and Julian Petley, 57–66. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Klinger, Barbara. "Digressions at the Cinema: Commodification and Reception in Mass Culture." In Modernity and Mass Culture , edited by James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger, 117–134. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Meehan, Eileen R. "Leisure or Labor?: Fan Ethnography and Political Economy." In Consuming Audiences?: Production and Reception in Media Research , edited by Ingunn Hagen and Janet Wasko, 71–92. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000.
Sanjek, David. "Fans' Notes: The Horror Film Fanzine." In The Horror Reader , edited by Ken Gelder, 314–323. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship . London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Staiger, Janet. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception . New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Taylor, Greg. Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Matt Hills

David Bordwell's blog on fandom

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/fans-and-fandom/

Film Fans & Spectatorship



Spectatorship - Alignment & Reception Theory

Part 1:
http://www.slideshare.net/mattheworegan/spec-resp-lesson-5#

Intellectual
Spectacle
Provocative

Textual & Extra-textual

Central Imagining

3 processes of spectatorship:
Recognition

Alignment

Allegiance (& identification)

Part 2:
http://www.slideshare.net/mattheworegan/spec-resp-lesson-6

Emotional Response Once Were warriors

Spectatorship & Responses to Film Intro


Alignment

Film Consumption







Spectatorship: Emotional Responses