Media and Collective IdentityRepresentation in film

“If the hippies cut off all their hair, I don't care” - Jimi Hendrix

• Modernism (art)– Structuralism (theory)

» British social realism

• Post-modernism » Brit grit – new social realism

Pick a media text (film/ TV series)

Preferably one of the texts we have looked at together this year.

• We will be applying these theories to that text during this lesson:– Binary opposition– Film as commercial imperative/ cultural document– Representation of class, race, gender– Ideology and false consciousness

Binary Oppositionsof modernism/ structuralism

Self / OtherSubject/Object

Producer / Consumer

Media / Reality

Power / resistance

What is a film?

Cultural document Commercial imperative

Artistic representation

The ‘burden of representation’:British social realism:

Class Age

British social realist cinema

British New Wave... Ken Loach, Mike Leigh...

Gender & Sexuality

Youth

Modern Social realism – hybrid genres...

Billy Eliot, The Full Monty

Race & Ethnicity Black British / British Asian film

Bhaji on the Beach, East is East, Britz

Representation

Invisibility(marginalisation)

Authenticity (realism)

Which is better: bad representation

or no representation?

Ideology and False Consciousness• Interpellation – misrecognising yourself:

film.. “as a pre-existing structure… interpellates the spectator, so constituting him/her as a subject”

• Male Gaze revisited:• “the gaze between cover model and women readers marks the complicity between

women that we see ourselves in the image which a masculine culture has defined.”» Janice Winship

• White gaze:• “The white gaze is looking at the world through a white person’s eyes. In America it is

everywhere. It is in history books, on billboards, on television, in films, in fashion magazines, on the Internet. It is the world as told by white people for white people.”

• Ideology:... is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a false

consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives.

Freidrich Engels