Les Revenants - Lesson 2

 Les Revenants is a unconventional TV drama 

Hermenutic code at the beggining "What the hell is happening"

Questions we ask ourselves:

Who is the little boy?

How has she come back to life?

Why do people come back to life?

How are the sisters connected?

Who is the murderer?

Who are the boys parents?


Les Revenants is a narrative which is completely reliant on a series of on a series of hermenutic codes.

Not a show for a mass audience. Niche audience. 18+. Its very mysterious and violent which might put some people off. 

Classical Hollywood narrative: invisible narrative. Every problem is solved in teh course of the narrative, and every mystery is made clear to the audience. 'Overly obvious narrative' 

Atypical narratives allows for a cult audience to actiley engage with the show.

Audiences can recieve and negotiate Les Revenants in a variety of different ways 


Themes:

Death

guilt

how people have moved on with their lives since the people have deid

how death effects people 

supernatural 


Genre is the style or category of a media product

Its a way to categorizing media products

Genre allows producers to target audiences and allows audiences to select the media product that they wish to engage with. 

Producers target pre-excisting audience as this is the best way to make profit

Conventions are things that show us what genre it is through codes, signs, and signifers, and any kind of iconography.

Paradigm(better word than convention): a feature, code, or symbol within a media product that tells the audience what genre a product belongs to.

Les Revenants features a variety of generic paradigm of the horror, mystery, zombie genre. for example...

Hybrid genres are a combination of two or more genres

Sub genre is a genre within a genre

Genre conventions are repeated and reinforced over time and this is why producers use it, because they know it works. 

Zombie genre:

  • violence
  • survival 
  • graves
  • Hordes of zombies
  • dead coming back to life
  • adbandoned/desolate locations
  • few vs. many

Camile comes home scene 10:00-14:00


  • Cross cutting of the camera, Camille then the mum , back and forth
  • Tracking shot of the mother going down the stairs 
  • We are sometimes positioned with Clarie the mother in a POV shot
  • Low key lighting throughout
  • Set in the nightime
  • The soundtrack is tense and eerie, low heavy murmur stereotypical of the horror genre 
  • Normal everyday clothes
  • Camille acts as if everything is fine "this is ungly" she says about a cup
  • Claire's heavy breathing makes it all more intense as if there is going to be a jump scare
  • The continuous long take shot  with no cuts whalst the mum is frantically trying to clear the room 
Non-diagetic is the sound of the soundtrack (the music) and sothing the actors won't hear
Diagetic is the sounds in the show that the actors would hear, like footsteps

In a conventional horror film in the part when Camilie is taking somthing out the fridge and the mum is slowly walking towards her we might expect there to be a jump scare but there is not.

Binary opposition simultaneously - Two different genres unfolding at the same time in this scene
Stereotypical horror music contrasts with the drama scene, creating contrapuntal sound. 





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