Critical Investigation: Task #4 UNF

We have the last 30 issues of Media Magazine in pdf format and also in the archive is a Word document with the contents for each issue. 

Media Magazine 46: Gothic

• Throughout history, horror films have reflected both the times in which they were made and the anxieties of contemporary audiences.
• Psycho (Hitchcock 1960 USA). This film prompted a group of films known as the ‘mini-Hitchcocks’
• A Feminist reading of such roles may interpret them as a reflection of the fact that women within society are still perceived (or preferred) to be oppressed, weak and in need of a man to protect or validate them.This suggests that little has changed over the centuries; in a male dominated world, where directors are conventionally and overwhelmingly male, women are supporting characters or victims.

Media Magazine 43: Independence

• Alfred Hitchcock worked in the UK film industry from 1919 until 1939 when he moved permanently to Hollywood. By his peak period in the 1950s, Hitchcock was the master of his own productions as an independent director and producer – highly unusual for Hollywood.

Media Magazine 34: The Change Issue

• In the early 1970s the cultural critic John Berger summarised the way in which gender was represented in the media through visual images:Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Berger 1972

mediaedu:

Username: greenford
P/W: MUB1/wh

https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/horror-genre-codes-conventions/

• Split into sub genres (see below), often hybridised

• Primary target audience – male, 16-24, Mainstreamers

• 15 or 18 Certification (promises of pleasure) – debates on passive consumption

• Uses and Gratifications (active audiences) theory can apply

• Extensive use of Narrative enigmas

• Exploration of Narrative Themes

• Slow pace of Editing, builds tension. Long takes

• Three act narrative structure

• Predictable narrative content (follows format)

• Clear binary oppositions e.g. good v evil

• Use of low key lighting

• Use of CGI, FX

• High production values but many low budget horror films

• Dominant, hegemomic representation of gender: The Female Victim

• Extensive use of close up

• Incidental non-diegetic sound

• Distorted diegetic sound

• Extensive use of narrative off-screen space

• Young/teenage characters

• Use of hand-held camera: audience identification/realism

• Point of view shots

• Low angle shots

Horror can be split into sub genres:

• The Monster Scare
• Psychological Thrillers
• Slasher Pics
• Zombie Films

• https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/media-and-collective-identity-representation-of-young-women-exemplar/

It is important to remember exactly this – that representations change

 In 2014, audiences could and should expect to see distinct moves away from old fashioned, traditional patriarchal culture and the embracing of a much more pluralistic understanding of gender representation but as David Gauntlett states: “identity is complicated, everyone’s got one”. Young women are sometimes empowered but often subject to stereotyping which I hope to illustrate using two primary media – Television and in Women’s Lifestyle Magazines but also cross referencing my points with other media.

Gender representation is affected by genre, cultural factors and in terms of media representations on audience and up to a point, audience expectations. Media producers encode dominant preferred meanings into texts but mainstream audiences that consume or decode mass media arguably have as much responsibility in terms of the representation of how women are represented – this means that meaning is put in but also taken out whether on television, looking at gender in advertising, sports journalism, gender in situation comedy, video games and one of my case studies, Women’s Lifestyle Magazines for example. 

Both producers and audiences dictate representations but using Stuart Hall as a framework, audiences also decode dominant and oppositional readings – in Hollyoaks, a long running British soap opera broadcast on E4 the programme is known for its sexualised narratives and young male and female characters who are framed for the female and male gaze; women are obsessed with their interpersonal relationships are seen to be so. Hollyoaks reflects an evolution in the soap opera genre to deliberately attract, and maintain young audiences through upbeat,...

• https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/understanding-regulation-and-censorship/

• The Media Effects theory has achieved widespread acceptance by society.  This theory suggests that those who are exposed to violence in the media are influenced to behave in a violent manner.  Although it is extremely difficult to “prove” this theory, a number of high-profile cases have been used to support the theoretical link between media and actual violence.
• Moral panics, (first identified by Cohen in the 1960s), where the repetitive reporting of incidents in the media creates a (possibly inflated) fear.

Jump Cut is an online contemporary Media journal - the current issue is available here and the archive can be found here.

• http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/MassacreWomen.html

At this point, the CHAINSAW MASSACRE shifts from being a film about violence in the United States in general to a film which, for the most part, concerns itself with the varieties of violence men perpetrate against women.

• http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/Carrie.htm

From its beginnings, classical Hollywood cinema has relied on and reinforced the “natural” characteristics of women (reproductive or destructive) in order to motivate and propel its closed narrative structures. Certain coded behavior on screen could represent a woman as ideal mother or as lustful vamp.