Representation in film

Media and Collective

Identity
“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 Oppositions
of modernism/ structuralism
Self / Other
Subject/Object

Producer / Consumer

Media / Reality

Power / resistance
 What is a film?
Cultural document Commercial imperativ

Artistic representation
The ‘burden of representation’:
British social realism:
Class British social British New
realist cinema Wave... Ken
Age Loach, Mike
Leigh...
Gender & Modern Social Billy Eliot, The
Sexuality realism – hybrid Full Monty
genres...
Youth
Race & Ethnicity Black British / Bhaji on the
British Asian film Beach, East is
East, Britz
 Representation

Which is better:
bad representation
or
no representation?

Invisibility
(marginalisation) Authenticit
y
(realism)
 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