Narrative

Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a play or film. Many scholars have analysed dramatic structure, beginning with Aristole in his name


In his poetics the Greek philosopher Aristole put forth the idea that (A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end)
   


Aristoles three part view of a plot structure (with a beginning, middle and end - technically, the protasis, epitasis and catastrophe) prevailed until the Roman drama critic Horace said it should be no longer than 5 parts.
 




According to Freytag, a drama is divided into five parts, or acts, which some refer to as a dramatic arc:, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement.
Although Freytags analysing of dramatic structure is based on five act plays it can be applied (sometimes in a modified manner) to short stories and novels as well.
 




Exposition or intro
The exposition provides the background information needed to properly understand the story, such as the problem in the beginning of the story, characters and setting.
 




Rising action
During rising action, the basic internal conflict is complicated by the introduction of related secondary conflicts, including various obstacles that frustrate the protagonists attempt to reach his goal. Secondary conflicts can include adversaries of lesser importance than the story's antagonists, who may work with the antagonist of separately.
 




Climax
The third act that of the climax, or turning point, which marks a change for the better or the worse in the protagonists affair. If the story is a comedy, things will have gone badly for the protagonist up to this point; now, the tide will go well for him or her from now on. If its a tragedy it is the opposite of that.
 




Falling Action
During the falling action the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist unravels with the protagonists winning or losing against the antagonist.
 




Denouement, resolution or catastrophe
The resolution comprises events between the falling action and the actual ending scene of the drama or narrative and thus serves as the conclusion of the story. Conflicts are resolved, creating normality for the characters and a release of tension for the reader.
Simply put, the resolution is the unravelling or untying of the complexities of a plot. More modern works may have no resolution because of a quick surprise ending




(My intro follows Freytag's theory of a drama being divided into 5 parts, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement.)




Bordwell and Thompson


Narrative
In film art: an introduction, Bordwell and Thompson define narrative as a chain of events in a cause effect relationship occurring  in time (Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art 1980)


Diegesis
The internal world created by the story the characters themselves experience and encounter (hence non diegetic anything that is not part of the characters world experience)
 
Story and Plot
Story - all events referenced both explicitly in a narrative and inferred (including backstory
as well as those projected beyond the action)
 
Plot - the events directly incorporated into the action of the text and the order in which they are presented.
 
Unrestricted narration - A narrative which has no limits to the information that is presented
Restricted Narration - Only offers minimal information regarding narrative

encoding and decoding

Hall addressed the issue of how people make sense of media texts, presenting three hypothetical methods

1. The "preffered" reading
2. The "negotiated" reading
3. The "oppositional" reading

Different social situations lead to different social stances
The social position of some audiences puts them in direct conflict with the dominant position.

When an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. This results in a "prefferred" reading.

In a dominant-preffered reading, producers and the audience are in harmony, understanding, communicating, and sharing mediated signs in the established mindset of framing.
Not all audiences may understand what media producers may take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding.

Negotiated positions are the result of the audience struggling to understand the dominant position or experiencing dissonance with those views.
These media consumers understand a text's contextual inflections and decode its messages by oppositional means

Oppositional audiences operate with an "oppositional" code which understands dominant hegemonic positions but finds framework to refute them
Stuart Hall believes that this position is necessary to begin a struggle in discourse or the "politics of signification"

My intro was about prostitution and the men trying to get the girl back, there are different ways the audience can react to the message I am trying to put accross. Stuart Hall came up with a theory, taking about preffered, negotiated and oppositional readings. My preffered reading for my intro is if the audience is in agreement to the message I was trying to put across about men taking advantage of woman and understanding the meaning I was trying to encode into my intro. My negotiated reading would be if my did not fully understand what I meant by the meaning of my intro but trying to pick out bits that they agree with but also have bit that they dissagree with.

My Opposional reading would be the audience completely disagreeing with the message I was trying to encode into my media text. 

Scripts

Theory - A statement about reality which seeks to predict or explain the relation between phenomena
Hypothesis - A specific predicted result derived from a theory

Theory - If I give someone a pencil they will like me more
Independent Variable - Giving of the pencil
Dependent Variable - The reaction different people give me

Scripts

These shared expectations get performed with hugely different degrees of commitment, or subversion, bypass, the actors (see Durkin; Goffman). They involve important images of how like may be lived; how to behave with others in particular situation, and so on.

Script Example 1

The very conventionalised ways in which romantic encounters are often portrayed may make you  feel you will know when 'true love' hits you because you've seen its stages scripted so many times. Maybe you have even rehearsed it in private fantasy moments

Script Example 2

You may have tried to copy the ways that being a 'real man/woman is framed and scripted by repeated media imagery, often involving, above all, notions of toughness/femininity.

All the men in my intro were macho as they were the bad guys and the hero and the woman was the victim and innocent.

Scripts and performances

These scripts often include a sense of when is the appropriate time to resort to be active of passive, use brute force or be gentle, and how to express or not express emotion etc. Of course they differ depending especially on ethnicity and class

Origins of the word stereotype

Where prejudices lurk, stereotypes are seldom far behind. The term stereotype coined in 1978 by the French printer Didot, originally referred to a printing process used to create reproductions.

Journalist Walter Lippmann (1922) later likened stereotyoes to "pictures in the head" or mental reproductions of reality, and from there, the term gradually came to mean generalizations -- or, quite often, over generalizations -- about the members of a group.

Walter Lippmann

In public opinion, his classic 1922 study of "public mind" and the forces that shape popular consciousness, Lippmann presented "stereotypes" as axiomatic (self evident or unquestionable) elements of human perception

Question 1b Representation

Stereotypes and scripts

Branston and Stafford identify two ways that media induce is to imagine particular groups, identities and situations:

when these relate to people they are sometimes called stereotypes or types

when they offer images of situations or processes the term 'script is sometimes used.

Familiarity and performance

We grow familiar with these scripts and often know how to perform them in our own lives, to the exclusion of other ways of being.

Representational effects

Both kinds of imaginings can have material effects on how people expect the world to be, and then experience it, and how they in turn get understood, or legislated for, or called names, or not given employment

Stereotypes and scripts

Stereotypes are widely circulated ideas or assumptions about particular groups. They do not exist about all groups. The term is felt to be derogatory.

Characteristics of stereotypes

B&S found 4 characteristics of stereotypes

1. Stereotypes involve both a categorizing and an evaluation of the group being stereotypes. - We employ categorizing to make sense of the world. We all employ pre-judgement to navigate our way through it. We all use typification to describe and identify things. All fiction uses a shorthand of types owing to constraints of time and space
2. Stereotypes takes easily grasped features presumed to belong to a group. They foreground them and imply that all group members always have these features. They suggest these characteristics are historically the cause of the groups position. - One of the seductions of stereotypes is that they can point to features and apparently have a grain of truth. but they then repeat, across the whole range of media, jokes, ect., that this characteristic is and has always been the central truth about that group. (There is a stereotype that black people are always up to no good and lurk in the shadows, but obviously this is not the case as some individuals may do that but not all do. I repeat this stereotype by showing my black characters hanging out in a dark ally way in Croydon, which creates the thought that maybe it is not the grain of truth but the central truth.)
3. The evaluation of the group is often, though not always a negative one - Though historically oppressed groups have been heavily stereotyped, this usually happens through more than one stereotype. Each stereotype itself changes over time, and relates to broader historical discourses, such as those of colonialism or patriarchal values.
4. Stereotypes often seem to insist on absolute boundaries, where in reality there exist spectrum's of differences and have discourses. - The idea of spectrums is not usually how arguments against stereotypes are made. More usually, anti-stereotype arguments are made. More usually, anti-stereotype arguments involve one of the dominant values of western culture; that we are all unique individuals, which stereotypes will not allow for. - In some ways this is true (however much it ignores the social structuring where all shaped by.) Yes it is much more helpful to think of differences as involving shared and changing historical structures within social orders. We can then understand many of our experiences as being typical, or held in common. - Our differences are due not to unique essences but to the particular ways in which very big, shared social forces (such as class, gender, ethnicity, regional identity ect.) have intersected and blended in all of our unique instances (+ genetic element and personal histories) - This broadens the opportunities for understanding both other peoples uniqueness and their capacity to act together to challenge unjust social structures 

Gill Branston & Roy Stafford said however realistic media images seem, they never simply present the world direct. I can apply this to my media intro as the genre I used was social realism and that is realistic it still does not present the world direct and it is still a construction

The characters in my intro could be seen as being stereotyped as I catergorised young black males as being up to no good and hanging out in dark dingy areas which is a stereotyped that is said often by the public. I did this because as a lot of people know of this stereotype it lets them understand the characters and the storyline quicker and better as it is some peoples instinct to think of the stereotype.

Julian McDougall (AS)
Representation. put simply, is is the "re-" part of the word that is important. Media is not a transparent window on the world and that audiences are not passive

Instead we see media texts as mediating between out sense of reality and the fictional or factual representation of reality - of people, places, ideas, themes, time periods and a range of social texts

how the text presents reality is always a "re" construction of a mediated version of the real world. The media students job is to deconstruct representations at the macro level of the text.

Julian McDougall (A2)

the process by which audience members come to understand media texts in term of how they seem to relate to people, ideas, events, themes and places

this is a very complex idea, as the reader of a media text will play an active role in construction these meaning him/herself. as it is most simple, it is how media texts are understandable.

Gill Branston & Roy Stafford

1. However realistic media images seem, they never simply present the world direct. They are always a construction.
2. How do groups or situations, get routinely represented in the media? This relates to the world of political representatives: people who stand in for us
3. It signals the way some media re-present certain images, stories, ect. over and over again, making them seem, natural and familiar and thereby often marginalising or even excluding others, making them unfamiliar or even threatening

Lesson 2

Media producers use familiar codes and conventions that often make cultural references to there audiences knowledge of society and other texts.
For example 21 jump street is using a cultural reference to there knowledge of a major drug issue in american high schools.

"Genre enables audiences to make choices about what products they want to consume." - Jason Mittle
I agree that this statement is true as after seeing different types of genres audiences can see which ones they prefer to others for example some people may not enjoy the thrill of being scared whereas others may enjoy it. Different types of people have different interests which will cause them to be interested in different genres.

"I was moved"
"On the edge of my seat"
"I want to be made to feel empathy"
"I want to feel tense and uncomfortable"
By all these different responses by the audience the producer can work towards getting the perfect genre

Rick Altman (1999) argues that genre offers audiences 'a set of pleasures'
Emotional Pleasures - Effects emotions (sad, happy and angry ect)
Visceral Pleasures - can be a feeling of revulsion, kinetic speed or a roller coaster ride
Intellectual Puzzles - movies that make you think for example "whodunit"  or being surprised by the unexpected

The docu-horror we made offers visceral pleasures. Altman (1999) says that genre offeres audiences 'a set of pleasures' one of the things he mentions are visceral pleasures, as it makes you feel uncomfortable whilst watching it, As it uses lighting and sound that would make you instinctively feel uncomfortable

Metz (1974) says that genres go through a cycle of changes during their lifetime
John Ford - Stagecoach (1939)

experimental stage
classical stage
parody stage
deconstruction stage

Nicholas Abercrobie (1996) "suggests that the boundaries between genres are shifting and becoming more permeable"
David Buckingham (1993) "genre is not simply given by the culture: rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change."
As postmodern theorist Jacques Derrida reminds us 'the law of the law of genre is a principle of contamination, a law of impurity'

Chandler (2001) - how we define a genre depends on our purposes

Section A: Question 1B

Section A: Question 1B (Theorical Evaluation = 25%):

Definition: Genre is a critical tool to help us study texts and audiences responces to texts by dividing them into catergories based on common elements
the word genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word for "kind" or "class" - Daniel Chandler (2001)
All genres have sub genres
more hybrids in short film
(Short films = short form) (Long films = Long form)

Major genres are divided up into more specific categories that allow audiences to identify them specifically by familiar characteristics become more familiar over time

Steve Neale (1995) stresses that: "genres are not systems, they are processes of systemisation". genres are dynamic and evolve over time.

my intro

my film intro was in the processes of systematization as i took enough common elements from the social realism genre and used them but also put new elements into it

dirty area, low class
low key lighting
untrained actors
unexpected protagonist
long takes
naturalistic performance

Jason Mittell (2001)
Genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audiences and cultural practices as well
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