https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhVpEc5NaUKa7J34wvHzFMsysRbPrO_L/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17N7ri3XMsDLdp4Yl6QoFvtC1wXTAdEmm/view?usp=sharing

premier pro was acting up with playback, so it was frustrating to edit in more detail, but here’s what i could get

Definitions –

Sexism – Refers to the typical way in which men and women are taught to view each other as opposites, with the male being the more dominant/ superior gender.

Feminism – A range of social, political and ideological movements that aim to achieve equality in all fields for the sexes.

Patriarchy – A social system in which men hold most power and dominate in roles such as political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property – a system where women are largely excluded.

Enfranchisement – The giving of a right or privilege, especially the right to vote.

Conservatism – Commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation.

Neo-conservatism – Someone whose politics are conservative or right wing, who believes strongly in the free market and thinks that their country should use its military power to become involved with or try to control problems in other countries.

• Feminist = Political position
• Female = Matter of biology
• Feminine = Set of culturally defined characteristics

Key Theorists/ People

Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) – English writer and a passionate advocate of educational and social equality for women. She called for the betterment of women’s status through such political change as the radical reform of national educational systems. A Vindication of the Rights of Women .

Virginia Woolf (1929) – Argues that a woman needs financial freedom so as to be able to control her own space and life—to be unhindered by interruptions and sacrifices—in order to gain intellectual freedom and therefore be able to write independently (expressed through the title of her book – A room of one’s own).

Simone de Beauvoir (1949) – The Second Sex, discusses the treatment of women throughout history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949.  The author also uses the comparison of girls being ‘treated like a live doll’, showing how they are totally submissive and only serve the purpose of looking pretty and being admired for that.

Jean Kilbourne – In the late 1960s, Jean Kilbourne began her exploration of the connection between advertising and several public health issues, including violence against women, eating disorders, and addiction, and launched a movement to promote media literacy as a way to prevent these problems. Critic of how women are depicted in advertising. made the documentary “Killing Us Softly”. began collecting ads with shaming or anti-feminist implications in the late 1960’s and things keep getting worse. Heavily critical of the use of women’s images in ads that teach women that looks are what matters most. most women feel ashamed and guilty when we fail. failure is inevitable because images are retouched, impossible for women of color to be perfect because only light-skinned woman achieve the ideal black women in ads are frequently featured in jungle settings and animal-skin-like clothing.

Laura Mulvey – Male Guise – The concept that texts present females through the eyes of a heterosexual male, often objectifying the physical form for gratification.

Waves Of Feminism –

The First Wave Of Feminism – Occurred during the 19th and early 20th century throughout the Western world. It focused on legal issues, primarily on securing women’s right to vote, a key movement/ group would be the suffragette movement which occurred during this period.

The Second Wave Of Feminism – began in the United States in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades. It quickly spread across the Western world, with an aim to increase equality for women by gaining more than just enfranchisement.

The Third Waves Of Feminism – Influenced by the postmodernist movement in the academy, third-wave feminists sought to question, reclaim, and redefine the ideas, words, and media that have transmitted ideas about womanhood, gender, beauty, sexuality, femininity, and masculinity, among other things. Started in the US in the early 1990s and continued until the fourth wave which began in the 2010s.

Raunch Culture – Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005) is a book by Ariel Levy which critiques the highly sexualized American culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves. Levy refers to this as “raunch culture.”

What is postmodernism? Postmodernism is a broad movement that was developed in the late 20th century in philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term is generally used to describe a historical era said to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era.

Pastiche – Artistic work that stylisticly imitates that of another work, artist, or time period.

Bricolage – A creation rom a diverse range of different things avaliable. 

Intertextuality – the connection of different texts and their influence.

Implosion – sudden failure of an organisation/system.

cultural appropriation – adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture. 

LOCATION:

I aim to do my music video in a bedroom type setting as throughout quarantine, I was mostly in my bedroom doing work and playing video games. I feel like most will be able to relate to at least spending a lot of time in their bedroom during lockdown and therefore would be a good element to have in my video.

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At the start of my video I will have a scene of the protagonist just chilling on the bed and being really bored which then cuts to scenes of an empty town, empty beaches, empty parks etc to show the audience how the protagonist is not allowed outside acting as a verisimilitude. The video then cuts back to the protagonist and as the protagonist is so bored, they open up their laptop to watch some cartoons to keep them entertained and play some video games too. When the protagonist puts on some colourful headphones to listen and play their video game at a better quality they will be transported to a video game 8bit-like world.

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How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to CSP “Ghost Town” and “Letter to the Free” in your answer.

I believe that the narrative within a music video is important as it gives understanding story line. The theorist Todorov looks into the narrative theory and how all narratives should follow a structure of a beginning equilibrium (start), a disruption (middle) and a new equilibrium (end). Another theorist who looks at narratives, is Levi Strauss. He proposed a theory of binary opposites and how the majority of narratives within media, such as books, films, contain opposing main characters. Lastly, the theorist Vladimir Propp, who talks about media having 7 different character types.

Looking at the music video ghost town, it has an equilibrium, disruption and a new equilibrium. It starts with the band driving along the road, set in east London, giving off a ghostly atmosphere. The middle shows the band suddenly drive out of control, representing the employment state, and how it has become a large problem, as unemployment rates in the UK were rising significantly. For the end of the music video, it shows the band throwing rocks along the water on the beach, representing the calmness that has been resonated, and how everything has returned back to normal, suggesting the economic state has retuned back to normal.

On the other hand, with the music video letter to the free, its equilibrium starts with a slow-motion scene of a prison, with an unusual black box. this represents an infinite symbol of black lives. When the symbol appeals again at the end of the video, it gives us a constant reminder of the message black lives should always matter.

Linking back to the question, narrative is useful when analyzing music videos, as it allows the audience to capture the perceptions and messages. As using just a speaker to convey a message can be difficult, so applying narrative to music videos is important.

1.  Pastiche – any form of creative work that imitates the work of another artist or group of artisits.
2. • Bricolage – work created out of a diverse range of things that happened to be available
3. • Intertextuality – the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text.
4. • Implosion – a therapeutic technique in which clients imagine and re-live aversive scenes associated with their anxiety
5. • cultural appropriation. –  the adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture

Overview

• According to Michelene Wandor, “sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s.
• Sexism is the systematic ways in which men and women are brought up to view each other agnostically, with the assumption that the male is more superior then the female
• The issue of women’s inequality has history that dates back to the 1960s.
• Female critical thought has become more prominent during the cultural movements during the late 1960s and are 1970s.
• The late 1960s and early 1970s were known as the “second wave of feminism”, which happened after the first wave of feminism, which was galvanized by organizations such as the British Women’s Suffrage Committee of 1867, the International Council of Women of 1988 and the International Alliance of Women of 1904, which had worked in order to give women the rights to vote.
• According to Wandor, the Women’s Liberation Movement influenced everyday conduct and attitudes. Whereas, Barry said that it “exposed the mechanisms of patriarchy…which perpetuated sexual inequality”
• In social, political and economical realm, there were demands for equal pay, education, opportunities, free contraception, abortion and greater provisions for childcare.
• In summary, the definitions are:
  • Female = a matter of biology
  • Feminist = a political position
  • Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics.

Laura Mulvey

• She is the writer of the 1975 Polemical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.
• Central to Mulvey’s thesis was the role of the male gaze, which is a theoretical approach that suggests that the role of “women as an image, man as the bearer of the looks”
• A quotation taken from Mulvey’s essay. = “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed and their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact”
• Mulvey makes it clear that “the cinema offers a number of pleasures”. With one of the pleasures being based on scopophilia (taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling an subjective gaze”. The other pleasures include voyeurism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking) and fetishism (the quality of a cut out…stylists and fragmented).
• Mulvey draws on the work of Jacques Laban, which highlights the parallel between the “mirror stage” of child development and the mirroring process which occurs between an audience and a screen.
• According to Mulvey, “Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like‘, thus, he must control the look, and thereby, the narrative. Made possible ‘by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify”.

Third and Fourth Wave feminism

• Third wave feminism began in the early 1990s and according to Naomi Wolf, it was a response to the generation gap between the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which challenged and recontextualised some of the definitions of feminist that grew out of that earlier period.
• The third wave sees Women’s lives as intersectional and it demonstrated a pluralism towards race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion and nationality.
• According the Kira Cochran’s, the fourth wave of feminism began in 2013 and raises the issues of intersectionality and nw issues, such as body shaming, privacy, rape culture and pornography.
• Fourth wave feminism also seeks to recognize the potential of new social platforms to connect, share, and develop new experiences, perspectives and responses
• Fourth wave feminism opposes to oppression and are tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online‘ (Cochran’s 2013)