What Is Representation?

Archetype - An often repeated character type or representation which is instantly recognisable to an audience.

Attitudes, Beliefs and Values - Terms commonly used when discussing the audience for media products and the factors influencing the reception of media messages.

• Attitudes are the positions people adopt in relation to a particular issue.
• Beliefs are deeply held views.
• Values represent the morals or ideological structure within which beliefs and attitudes are formed.
• All these factors affect the reception of media texts. Research also focuses on the ways in which media content influences the formation, representation and reproduction of attitudes, beliefs and values.

Closed Text - Media text that is anchored in such a way as to restrict the number of ways in which it can be interpreted

Connotation - A meaning attributable to an image beyond the obvious denontational level.

• Such meanings may be metaphorical, symbolic or culturally generated and will vary line with the cultural background and attitudes, beliefs and values of the individual viewing the material.

Demographic - Information concerning the social status, class, gender and age of the population.

Denotation - The first and simplest level of meaning of an image.

Dialogue - Dialogue is speech from actors/ presenters.

Dominant Ideology - the belief system that serves the interests of the dominant ruling elite within a society, generally accepted as common sense by the majority and reproduced in mainstream media texts.

• Dominant ideology establishes a hegemonic position in society which is reinforced by media representations and is consequently difficult to challenge.
• The term derives from a Marxist theory and is addressed in detail in the work of Gramsci, Althusser and Hall.

 Hegemonic
 
Ellipsis: the removal or shortening of elements of a narrative to speed up the action.

Empathy: the ability to share the emotions or point of view of a group or individual.

• Empathy involves recognizing shared experience rather than sympathising from a detached position.
• Human interest journalism, feature writing and reality television often involve emotionally identifying the reader/writer with the subject, with the intention of thereby sustaining audience interest.

 

Encode: the process of constructing the media message in a form suitable for transmission to a receiver or target audience.

Enigma Code: a narrative structure that involves the creation of riddles or problems to be solved by the resolution.

• Suspense and horror genres use enigma to retain the attention of an audience.

 

Icon: a sign resembling the thing in represents.

• An icon can also be an image representative of an ideology or religion.  Icons were originally religious paintings of Christ and the Virgin Mary and treated as sacred objects.
• E.g.  A photograph.
• TIP of a public figure who, having achieved the ultimate in a particular field, has become the focus of mass adoration is also called on icon, e.g.  Pop icons such as Kylie Minogue or Madonna.

Iconography: the distinguishing elements, in terms of props and visual details, which characterise a genre.

• Genres are said to be recognisable through their characteristic iconography.
• E.g.  The iconography of gangster films include smart suits, guns and fast cars, while Westerns have horses, dozen locations, clapboard houses and men in hats.

Ideology: key concept of a set of attitudes, beliefs and values held in common by a group of people and culturally reproduced within that community to sustain its particular way of life.

• Ideologies can be described as dominant, subservience, or opposition all depending on their status within a society.
• E.g.  Capitalism, Communism, Christianity and Islam.
• TIP Ideology is present in all media texts.  You can explore it by assessing the attitudes, beliefs and values within the text and the assumptions made about what the viewer or reader thinks and feels.

 

Incidental music: the use of music to punctuate for a specific events or action, or to provide a sound background.

Intertextuality: the practice of deliberately including references to one text in the narrative of another, either as homage to the text referred to or as a device intended to engage the interest of the audience by appealing to their prior knowledge and experience of media texts.

• Intertextuality can generate levels of meaning for the viewer and anchors a current text within texts of similar or related genre.
• For example, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003) makes many references to Westerns, gangster and Japanese Samurai films.

Linear Narrative: a sequential narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end-in that order.

• Linear narratives provide a straightforward, sequential representation of events leading to a single resolution.  As such, easily accessible to audiences and are the dominant form in mainstream media representations.
• TIP Linear narrative are increasingly challenged by the non- linear, which is more reflective the random experiences of life and the complexity involved in the viewers construction of meaning, e.g.  Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997).

 

Male Gaze: term used by Laura Mulvey in her essay ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) to describe what she saw as the male point of view adopted by the camera for the benefit of an assumed male audience.

• Mulvey view the practice of the camera lingering on women’s bodies as evidence that women were being viewed as sex objects for the gratification of men.  She argued that the central active characters in films are male and that the male audience identifies with them in their viewing of the passive females.  Women in the audience are also positioned by the narrative to identify with the male gaze and see the world through male eyes.
• Mulvey’s essay was hugely influential in the development of feminist film studies.
• TIP Mulvey’s approach owes much to Freudian psychology.  The arguments can be challenged by simply pointing out that not all central heroic characters in films are male.  Also, Mulvey denies the existence of a ‘female gaze’, which has enjoyed physically attractive men in films from the earliest days of cinema, with stars ranging from Rudolph Valentino to Brad Pitt.  Lastly, changes in the representation of women have resulted in fundamental challenges to stereotypical gender roles since Mulvey’s essay was written e.g. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2004)

Mode of Address: in narrative studies, the way in which media texts talk to an audience.

• In audiovisual texts, this can be in the form of a voiceover where an unseen narrator addresses the audience.  The narrator could be one of the texts characters and provide insight into what occurs on screen us. 
• In film noir, the private detective’s voice often provides a running commentary on the action, from his perspective.
• TIP fans of the cult movie Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) dispute which of the two versions of the film, one with lead character Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) off-screen narration and one without, is the most successful.

Narrow casting: the targeting of a small, carefully defined social group for a media product; the opposite of broadcasting.

• Multichannel television allows for narrow casting in line with viewer interest, e.g.  The History Channel

 
Negotiated Reading: a reading of a text which assumes that no absolute meaning exists and that meaning is generated and negotiated by what the reader brings to the text in terms of attitudes, values, beliefs and experience.

• The term is part of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model along with dominant and oppositional  readings. 
• TIP a negotiated reading emphasises the position of the subject or audience member.

Oppositional Reading: a reading of a media text that rejects the ideological positioning and apparent meaning intended by the producers of the text and substitutes a radical alternative.
 
Parallel Action:  the narrative technique of showing two or more scenes happening at the same time by cutting between them.

Parody: the imitation of one media text by another for comic effect.

 
Pastiche: a media text made up of pieces from other texts or of imitations of other styles.

·         The term is often used to describe an unoriginal, derivative text that it can be used positively if the pastiche involves a deliberate homage to other works.

Patriarchy: male domination of the political, cultural and socioeconomic system.

·         Under patriarchy, male perspectives and male achievements are valued and rewarded at the expense of the female.  Female contributions to society are ignored and women are culturally and economically invisible, being defined solely by the relation to men.

·         Patriarchy is an important assumption behind some feminist film criticism, which sees the male domination of film discourse is evidenced in the male gaze.

Pleasure: a motivating factor in the consumption of media texts.

• Pleasure has often been ignored by researchers seeking to explain the motivation of audiences that is reflected in the uses and gratification theory and is an increasing feature of the appeal media products have in a hedonistic, self-gratifying and consumption-orientated cultural environment.

 
Positioning: the locating of a media product in a marketplace with regard to audience and socio economic, political and cultural factors.

• Five television was position to aim at a ‘modern mainstream’ young audience and this was reflected in its presentation of news programmes and its choice of presenters.
• The Daily Express newspaper has recently shifted its political positioning away from New Labour in order to adopt a stance more critical of government

Racism: practices and behaviour involving social and economic discrimination, based on the false assumption that one particular ethnic group or race is culturally and biologically inferior to another.

• Concerns have been expressed about the role played by the media in sustaining and reinforcing race stereotypes.
• Stuart Hall first raised concerns about negative representations of black people on British television in 1971 and has since investigated representations of black people in period films, identifying three types: faithful happy slaves, primitive and cunning natives and clowns or entertainers.  Hall sees such negative stereotypes as reinforcing dominant ideology by making slavery and colonialism appear acceptable for and by inviting black people themselves to accept the hegemonic position e.g. Gone With The Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
• Blaxploitation films have also been accused of reinforcing negative stereotypes.
• In spite of multicultural initiatives and the expansion of ethnic minority representation and ethnic television programming, some critics argue that racism is still institutionalised in the British Media and the positive changes are token and nominal.
• TIP the negative reaction of tabloid newspapers to asylum seekers could be said to have a hidden racist agenda since the majority of those seeking asylum are black or Asian.

 
Reaction Shot (also known as ‘nodding shot’): the shot devised for an interview between two people, usually showing an interviewer responding to the interviewee’s answers by nodding or reacting in some way.

Realism: a film and television style that attempts to represent the real world.

• Concepts of realism are governed by recognisable codes and conventions which change over time.  Black and white newsreel images of the 1930s and World War Two carried strong messages and, as filmed ‘reality’, define a period in which they were constructed.  Rare colour footage of the same period shocks the viewer with its sense of immediacy and newness, making the events in fresh and the passing just like the present.
• In the film Schindler’s List (1993), Spielberg chose classic monochrome film and a 1930s/1940s treatment style to replicate the ‘realism’ of newsreels he remembered from his youth.  The only colour image is of a young girl in red, a symbolic victim representing the whole holocaust.
• TIP Remember that film images are never ‘real’, they are only ever representations of the real.

 
Representation: key concept of the process whereby the media construct versions of people, places and events in images, words or sound for transmission through media texts to an audience.

• Representations provide models of how we see gender, social groups, individuals and aspects of the world we all inhabit.  They are ideological in that they are constructed within a framework of values and beliefs.  Representations are therefore mediated for and reflect the value systems of their sources.  No representation is ever real, only a version of the real.
• The representations are part of cultural mythology and reflect deep-seated values and beliefs e.g.  Of such places as the north of England, Scotland and America.
• TIP representation is the key to many media debates and is usually described as being positive or negative, depending on the view of the group being represented.  Achieving positive representations (versions of themselves that they agree with and approve of) has been a goal of minority groups who have criticised the perceived negativity of media stereotypes, e.g.  homosexuals, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, disability groups and women. 

 
Sexism: representations that discriminate on the basis of sex, especially against women, which is seen to derive from an sustain patriarchy.

• Some feminists would see any media representation of women confirmed a stereotype as sexist, for example, the display of women’s bodies as sex objects in ‘Lads Mags’ for the entertainment of men.
• TIP in a post feminist environment, challenges are launched at representations of men that showed them as sex objects or as being humiliated at the hands of women.

 

Stereotype: the social classification of a group of people by identifying common characteristics and universally applying them in an often oversimplified and generalised way, such that the classification represents value judgements and assumptions about the group concerned.

 

Sign: a term to describe the combination of the signifier and the signified, where the signifier is the physical object and the signified is the mental concept or meaning that the signifier conveys.

• A photograph of a rose makes the viewer think of the flower
• There are different categories of the sign to explain the relationship with what is described as their object.

Social Realism: the representation of characters and issues in film and television drama in such a way as to race serious underlying social and political issues.

• Social realism involves a drama-documentary treatment in the sense that, while the characters may be fictional, the contexts and circumstances in which they are placed represent social realities.
• The films are usually shot in a naturalistic way, avoiding the use of sophisticated editing and treatments and sometimes giving the impression that the camera is simply recording events as they take place.  There is often little use of  non-diegetic sound.

Subjective Shot: a type of shot in which the camera is positioned as if looking at the world through the subject’s eyes.

• E.g.  The opening title sequence of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) shows the world through the eyes of driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) as he views the streets through the rain on his windscreen.  The image is blurred and distorted, as is his view of the world.

 

Superimpose: the appearance of writing/symbols or images on top of an image so that both are visible at once, increasing the amount of information the viewer has in one shot.

Transgressive: a practice which transcends conventional approaches and either subverts these existing ways of working or challenges their value.

Verisimilitude: seeming to be like or to be connected to the real.

·         The term is important in many media genres because it determines the level of audience engagement and willingness to engage in suspension of disbelief.

• TIP contemporary war films need to convey a sense of verisimilitude to be credible.  Reconstructions of Second World War battle scenes, with special effects bullets flying around the heads of the actors, are now seen as more real than newsreel footage of the actual events