Practice Question - Les Revenants

'In the 21st century, it is essential for TV shows to offer their audience multiple meanings' evaluate this claim with reference to Les Revenants. 

Plan:

Polysemy - multiple meanings

some context about the show 

  • 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 

Niche audience not a mass target but there are many different characters in the show wich will apeal to a wider audeince  

The TV show Les Revenants presennts multiple meaning to the audince as there are many scenes in the first episode that create many polysemic interpretations

Les Revenants presents the audience with a complicated and hard to decode set of ideologies

highly uncommercial themes and ideologies

Reception theory, audiences can negotiate

Roland barths semeotics - completley based of hermenutic codes

Julie and Victor scene and the bus stop - media language analyses in depth

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


Les Revenants presets the audience with a complicated and hard to decode set of ideologies. It features highly uncommercial themes and ideologies that not everyone will be interested in. This means the target audience for this show is niche, they are not targeting a mass audience but instead having a cult audience who will actively engage with the show. Les Revenants was first aired on the french channel Canal+ on the 26th November 2012, it is an unconventional TV drama that includes themes of death, zombies, mystery and horror. The show could be described as polysemic, meaning it has multiple meanings and therefore different audiences can come up with their own interpretations of what the meaning of this show is. 

There are many scenes in this first episode that create polysemic ideologies, for example the scene where Julie is going home and is being followed by the little boy, Victor. This scene is a long take shot meaning there is no movement by the camera and we are fixed on the low-key lit bus stop for around 30 seconds. There is however some contrasting harsh lighting coming from the street lamps and car lights. The framing of Julie in the centre of this wide shot, represents her as small, lonely and isolated. Julie subverts hegemonic expectations of how women should look and behave. For example her slouched body language when waiting for the bus and unattractive clothes. Victor shows a subtle appearance coming up from the dark shadowed background. This is a clear paradigmatic feature of the horror genre and connotes potential violence, we as the audience would expect something to happen here but the boy just stands there as we listen to the eerie low soundtrack and diagetic sound of cars, rain, and low rumbling thunder. This show in general uses many hermenutic codes but Roland Barthes theory of semiotics is especially seen in this part, creating mystery and something the audience to figure out what is going on. The audience would be asking themselves many different questions at this point like who is this child walking around at night on his own?, who are his parents?, and why does Julie just let this strange child into her flat without a second thought which we see later on in this scene?  

Another scene where the producers have create multiple meanings for the audience is in the scene where Lena and Simon are walking to Adele's house. There is a lot going on in this scene which may confuse the audience and make this hard to decode. Both Lena and Simon are walking down a dark light tunnel, the mise-en-scene of this tunnel symbolises crime, furthered anchored by the eerie atmosphere and dog barking. We see that Simon is a stereotypical aggressive man and is quite rude to Lena when he just walks away from her without saying anything. He then goes to Adele's house and starts shouting and aggressively banging at the door. The audience at this point don't know what the relationship between them is so this could have many different meanings. This links to Stuart Hall's theory of Reception, he states that every media product reflects the dominant ideology of the producer but the audience are able to negotiate and choose how they interpret a media product. There are different readings; preferred, negotiated and oppositional reading. Audiences can negotiate Les Revenants in a variety of different ways, some people with a preferred reading would probably be really interested in the mysterious setting and range of hermenutic codes, they might particularly enjoy, horror, zombies, drama/history between characters, the soundtrack or the attractive/famous actors.

In conclusion, I think it is quite essential for TV shows to offer multiple meanings as it will appeal to more people and these audiences can make up their own ideologies and what they think the show is about. This is very much not a classical Hollywood narrative where every part of it should be understood by who chooses to watch it. It is much more complicated but also more interesting and less predictable. 


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