Les Revenants - lesson 3

 Key context facts about Les Revenants:

  • 26th November 2012 on Canal+ (first aired)
  • UK released on 9th June 2013 on Channel 4
  • 2 series, 8 episodes 
  • Based on the French film (they came back) 2004
  • created by Fancice Gobert 
Les Revenants is a show completely based on Hermenutic codes.

Classical Hollywood narrative - the narrative of every media product should be understood by everyone who choses to watch it. 

Key Terms:
  • Negotiation - The process where an audience decides which ideologies they accept and reject / the process of give and take between audience and producer
  • Intertexuality - Where a media product or text makes reference to another media product or text
  • Polysemy/polysemic - where a media product holds many different meanings. Different audiences may therefore come up with many different interpretations of the text. 
  • Ideology - A system of believes and values of the producer. Every media product has an ideology.
  • Hegomony  - The influence of power over one group or another. Leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others. We follow rules and regulations everyday - hegemonic norms and values. 

Reception Theory - Stuart Hall 
Preferred, negotiated, and oppositional reading 
Every media product reflects the dominant ideologies of the producer, but the audience are able to negotiate it according to their own lifes and experiences

Audiences can negotiate this show in a variety of different ways. Whereas the preferred reading is to take pleasure from the mysterious setting and the range of hermenutic codes, other audiences may particularly enjoy ..........
- the violence 
- horror 
- zombies
- relatable small town 
- includes famous actors 
- enjoy mystery 
- family based 
- drama/history between characters
- if they relate to one of the characters situation
- attractive characters 
- soundtrack 


Julie and Victor scene: 23:00 bus stop, 28:30-32:00 walking into the flat 

Bus stop
  • Low key lighting, shadows created by the street lamp and car lighting 
  • Diegetic sound of the cars, rain, low rumbling thunder, then the non-diegtic soundtrack is introduced. 
  • Diagetic atmospheric sounds
  • The soundtrack is purposely eerie-low, and repetitive bass punctured by sudden synth notes, changing and slightly off-key
  • Contrasting harsh lighting connotes mystery and isolation.
  • Light and dark, life and death, binary opposition of Victor and Julie  
  • The framing of Julie in the centre of the wide shot, represents her as small, lonely and isolated.
  • Julie is hegemonically atypical representation of a women, not much make up, dark bags under eyes, unattractive clothes, bored and tired slouching body language. 
  • This is a long take shot where there is no camera movement, this builds tension 
  • Victor shoes a subtle appearance coming up from the dark shadowed background, this is a clear paradigmatic feature of the horror genre, it connotes potential violence but then nothing really happens, he says nothing and it cuts to the scene where they are both sitting on the bus 
 Walking into the flat 
  • First of all she gets of the bus, she walks straight past the camera and the kid follows
  • very still movements in the camera, empty shots where we just see the kid following her
  • Again low-key lighitng with Harsh contrasting lighting form the street
  • The area they are walking around in is representated as abit run down, maybe where the lower class people live like Julie, this further reinforces the atypaical representation of her; she is a middle aged women living on her own in a run down flat. 
  • The shot where Julie is framed in  one half going up the lift and Victor is framed in the other half looking through into the flat 
  • The next shot we see is Juile going into her flat and looking down out her window to see Victor stand in the middle of the field, this creates mystery and is further reinforced by the rhetorical question Julie asks "what is he doing here" - this is something the audience would be asking as well. 
  • Victor does not speak at all throughout the scene further increasing the mystery and this is not seen as stereotypical behavior for a young boy.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Richard Dyer Theory of stereotypes

A Stereotype is a commonly held belief or assumption about a certain group of people. There are 4 parts to a stereotype Appearance Behaviour constructed to fit in to a particular medium Comparison with normal behaviour  Richard Dyer suggests that stereotypes are often used as a shortcut for the producer to convey their ideology. He also thinks that they are reference points for the audience and an expression of dominant societal values. Stereotypes legitimise inequality, " A way to ensure unequal power relations are maintained is to continually stereotype – GTAV is a misogynist video game where players have the opportunity to kill prostitutes in their own violent way – the game is entirely male point of view and arguably serves to maintain dominant male culture" This is something Dyer said himself, and we can see from the example he gave that there are many man and woman stereotypes.
Read more

Videogames 8 - Assassin's Creed and reception theory

Reception Theory - Stuart Hall Otherwise known as the encoding and decoding model The ideological perspective of the producer is encoded in every media product, through media language. Every media product therefore demonstrates a mediated perspective - Bias According to Stuart Hall audience's don't just stop at encoding a media product, it goes a lot further because audiences can decode the media messages. -Preferred Reading/Dominant reading The audience agrees with the dominant ideological perspectives encoded by the producer - Oppositional reading The audience disagrees with the ideological pperpectives encoded by the producer - Negotiated reading The audience agrees with certain ideological aspects of the media product, while dismissing and disagreeing with others. This is by far the most common reading. Assassin's Creed  One of the biggest dominant ideological perspectives of Assassins creed is that violence can be justified if it is used to further a...
Read more

Magazine - Next article analysis - 350ppm

Image
Adbusters uses a lot of culture jamming by sub-verting or sabotaging mass media messages. 350ppm is talking about the amount of polution in the atmosphere. 350 is the safe level but scientists say we must reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 400 parts per million to below 350ppm. There is no anchorage to the image on the left hand side, no headline or subheading to tell you what they mean. This is similar to a lot of pages in the Adbusters magazine. This double page spread shows a binary opposition between the model on the left who is all glamorous and the beggar on the right siting on the ground who is homeless.
Read more