Introduction to Film and Televisioon Studies, 4

1
Introduction to Film and Televisioon Studies, 4

• Narratives and Gazes,
• Fears and desires

2
Fears

• A film offers bad role models and turns young
  people into whores and murderers
• Rapid editing reflects and further spurs the
  hectic pace of contemporary society and causes
  alienation
• Film and TV may produce psychophysical
  disturbances
• Film is mechanical and artificial and causes
  alienation
• Television prevents people from developing
  themselves by offering entertainment according to
  lowest common denominator
• Classical editing "sutures" the spectator into
  the film experience thus causing ideological
  numbness
• Seeing films or watching television is passive
  and makes people apathetic and politically passive

3
Pleasures of audiovisual representation

• Visual pleasure in itself (scopophilia)
• Voyeurism
• Identification and consequent emotional
  experiences
• Escapism
• Sensation of the sublime
• Learning about the world (epistemophilia)

4
Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema(I)

• Scopophilia the pleasure of looking at other
  people as objects, subjecting them to the
  controlling and curious gaze
• Mainstream film portray a hermetically sealed
  world, which unwinds indifferent to the presence
  of the audience ? voyerist fantasy of looking in
  on a private world.
• Illusion of voyerist separation in the auditorium
• The conventions of mainstream film focus
  attention on the human form scale, space,
  stories are all anthropomorphic ? fascination and
  identification with certain screen characters

5
Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema(II)

• Pleasure in looking split between active/male and
  passive/female ? the male gaze projects its
  fantasy on the female, whose appearance is coded
  for strong visual and erotic impact
• A male movie stars glamorous characteristics are
  not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but
  those of a more perfect, complete and powerful
  ideal ego
• Fetishistic scopophilia builds up the physical
  beauty of the object, transforming it in to
  something satisfying in itself.
• Selectively following Laura Mulveys article

6
Identification and engagement

• What is identification?
• to imagine one actually is a character in the
  story
• to sympathize with one or more characters
• to project oneself in the situations depicted
• What is engagement? (Murray Smith)
• recognition
• alignment
• allegiance

7
Jahn cycle of narrative

• Model of the cycle of narrative which connects
  external and internal stories
• The cycle creates a causal chain linking
  reception and production and suggesting that both
  processes are mutually dependent
• Manfred Jahn Awake! Open your eyes! The
• Cognitive Logic of External and Internal
• Stories.

8
Jahn External and Internal Stories

• external story physical
• recordable
• private
• addressee orientation
• permanent

• internal story Virtual
• Reportable
• Public
• no addressee orientation
• fleeting

9
Notions about reality, fiction and fantasy as the
basic constituents of conscious being
10
Why do we need fiction?

• The need to make socially and psychologically
  important things pleasant
• The evolutionary value of narrating
• Freedom from the necessities and responsibilities
  of immediate reality enables the processing of
  latent questions, wishes and desires
• Making special (Dissannayake)
• A narrative gives a communicable form to our
  experiences
• Fiction helps us to learn about and come to terms
  with emotions by presenting them in ways which
  are detached from our own private concerns
• Emotional experiences generated by stories are a
  part of identity formation

11
Whats wrong with escapism?

• Does entertainment make us more passive?
• Does entertainment offer us mere substitute
  satisfactions?
• Is entertainment conducive to mental regression?
  (Freud)
• Are problems and anxieties suppressed as opposed
  to finding solutions to them?
• Does entertainment trivialize and sentimentalize
  problems?

12
Learning from fiction

• Propositional knowledge
• Values and attitudes
• Strategies and patterns of behaviour for various
  social situations
• Understanding of situations and social
  configurations which have fallen beyond ones won
  experience
• Alternative points of view to familiar situations
  
• Empathetic knowledge gained through
  identification

13
The meaning of tragedy

• Tragedy is only an illusion in so far as any
  claim to make sense of all the evils of our life
  is an illusion (and perhaps tragedy does not
  claim this). The tragedies of real life, unlike
  those of the stage, are often shapeless, sordid,
  capricious, meaningless. But supposing this to be
  true (as I do), what then? It is not human to be
  content with this useless, even if ultimate,
  truth. We must try to understand, to cope, to
  respond. It is in this attempt that tragedy -
  that most great art - has its place. For it gives
  the hurtful twists of life a shape and meaning
  which are persuasive, which can be lived with.
  And that endurance and perspective are none the
  less real. As Gorgias so neatly put it the man
  who is deceived has more wisdom than he who is
  no. And so in the end the deceit is true to
  life and part of life and makes life the better
  for it. (Oliver Taplin Greek Tragedy in Action)