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.


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