these are from one of my locations I chose for my music video

As i have decided to film mostly in slo-mo, my test shots are in slo-mo.

• main character has lost a friend, not wanting to accept it
• she feels lonely, isolated and vulnerable
• revisits the places they spent time together – walks in her past footsteps
• dances for freedom
• falls into water “ocean” – feeling trapped and can’t escape – the Tragedy that has happened is slowing drowning her
• dreams about husky – huskies signify your appetite for freedom and the journeys that you take in life, whether you want to or not. – as they also symbolise inner strength, the running clip represents her inner strength escaping (shes losing her inner strength)
• the end scenes show her wearing a black dress (mourning)
• she lights a candle for her lost friend
• blows it out, showing she has finally accepted it and moved on.

An introduction towards theories of gender representation

Systematic Society Sexism

MISOGYNY – a fear and hatred of women (SEXISM) – a way of exerting power and control in society (PATRIARCHY)

A critical articulation for equality

According to Michelene Wandor, ‘sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s.” – sexism refers to systematic ways where men and women are brought up to view each other antagonistically – males are always superior to female

1st wave feminism – feminist critical thought became much more prominent and pronounced during the counter cultural movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s

1st wave fo feminism = galvanised by organisations such as the British Women’s Suffrage Committee (1867) the International Council of Women (1888) The International Alliance of Women (1904) = – worked to get women the right to vote

1970s – the womens liberation movement set great store by the process of conscious raising – influencing everyday conduct and attitudes + exposing mechanisms of patriarchy – a cultural mind set that had perpetuated a sexual equality.

Tori Mois

feminist = a political position

female = a matter of biology

feminine – set of culturally defined characteristics

Kean Kilbournes

looks at visual narrative media

Laura Mulvey

1975 polemical essay: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘ – role of the male gaze (theoretical approach that suggests the role of “women as image, man as bearer of the look”

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

• “cinema offers a number of possible pleasures – freuds theory of scopophilla (taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze -OBJECTIFICATION)
• vouyerism – sexual pleasure gained in looking
• fetishism – quality of a cut-out – parts of female body are presented as something to be looked at (OBJECTIFIED and SEXUALISED)

Jacques Lacan

mirror moment – highlights parallel between the mirror stage of child development and mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen. ‘a complex process of likeness and difference‘. 

explains that the audience are spectators who project their ‘repressed desire onto the performer‘.

Sut Jhally

draws a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video.”

There’s no such thing as communication that doesn’t have something behind it, that it is always constructed by someone. And I want people to be active in the construction of their own world because if you’re not active in the construction of your own world then you’re a victim of someone else’s construction.“

Raunch Culture – 3rd wave feminism (1990s)

• coined by Naomi wolf
• response to generation gap between the feminist movement of 1960s (challenging + reconstextualising definitions of femininity
• 3rd wave sees women lives as intersectional, demonstrating a pluralism towards race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and nationality when discussing feminism.
• according to Barker and Jane, 3rd wave feminism put forward the following characteristics:
• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

Ariel Levy book “raunch culture” is ‘a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution‘

‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’

4th wave feminism – same as 3rd but more active – from the radical stance of #MeToo to the Free the Nipple campaign, which Miley Cyrus endorsed and supported (which may encourage you to re-evaluate your initial reading of her video Wrecking Ball above), the use of new media technologies has been a clear demarcation for broadening out the discussion and arguments that are played out in this line of critical thinking.

intersectionality: Queer Theory (founded by Alan Sinfield and Johnathon Dollimore)

Judith Butler

• expressed doubt over the reductionist, essentialist, approach towards the binary oppositions presented in terms of: male/female; feminine/masculine, man/woman.
• suggests that gender is fluid, changeable, plural 

ideas presented by Laura Mulvey seem to suggest that gender is fixed – male/female – that it is structured by institutions and those powerful individuals who are able to exert power and control

we have multiple identities that are performed to different people, in different social settings, under different social conditions.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

a way of understanding yourself, your community and the world. – a good way to understand is through music videos – philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE. 

Parody v Pastiche 

pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist ( work that imitates the original)

parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony (imitates with irony/joke- deliberate)

BRICOLAGE – rearrangment and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (Barker & Jane)

 INTERTEXTUALITY – suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs – meaning is a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts.

Shuker

• the fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos that break up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’

As Shuker notes, two points are frequently made about music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.

Richard Hoggart

noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘neighborhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near‘

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

is an argument that postmodern culture is a consumer culture, where the emphasis on style eclipses the emphasis on utility or need. 

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.

• fragmented identity construction.

• individually identity

• individually consumption

• postmodernism is a precarious world

The loss of a metanarrative

• metanarrative = meta = big narrative = big story

Fredric Jameson claimed that Postmodernism is characterized by pastiche rather than parody which represents a crisis in historicity. Jameson argued that parody implies a moral judgment or a comparison with previous societal norms. Whereas pastiche, such as collage and other forms of juxtaposition, occur without a normative grounding and as such, do not make comment on a specific historical moment. As such, Jameson argues that the postmodern era is characterised by pastiche (not parody) and as such, suffers from a crisis in historicity.

This links to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s proposition that postmodernism holds an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives‘ (1979:7) those overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief, For example, the belief in religion, science, capitalism, communism, revolution, war, peace and so on. Lyotard points out that no one seemed to agree on what, if anything, was real and everyone had their own perspective and story. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason postmodernity is characterised by an abundance of micronarratives.^[28] It can be also characterised as an existence without meaning

a process which the French intellectual Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA. The idea that although the media has always been seen as a representation of reality – a simulation, from Baudrillard’s perspective of implosion, it is has become more than a representation or simulation and it has become SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL.

Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Fredric Jameson explain there is a loss of a metanarrative = we are in a world that is superficial

A process which the French intellectual Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA. The idea that although the media has always been seen as a representation of reality – a simulation, from Baudrillard’s perspective of implosion, it is has become more than a representation or simulation and it has become SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL.

An introduction towards theories of gender representation

Systematic Society Sexism

MISOGYNY – a fear and hatred of women (SEXISM) – a way of exerting power and control in society (PATRIARCHY)

A critical articulation for equality

According to Michelene Wandor, ‘sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s.” – sexism refers to systematic ways where men and women are brought up to view each other antagonistically – males are always superior to female

1st wave feminism – feminist critical thought became much more prominent and pronounced during the counter cultural movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s

1st wave fo feminism = galvanised by organisations such as the British Women’s Suffrage Committee (1867) the International Council of Women (1888) The International Alliance of Women (1904) = – worked to get women the right to vote

1970s – the womens liberation movement set great store by the process of conscious raising – influencing everyday conduct and attitudes + exposing mechanisms of patriarchy – a cultural mind set that had perpetuated a sexual equality.

Tori Mois

feminist = a political position

female = a matter of biology

feminine – set of culturally defined characteristics

Kean Kilbournes

looks at visual narrative media

Laura Mulvey

1975 polemical essay: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘ – role of the male gaze (theoretical approach that suggests the role of “women as image, man as bearer of the look”

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

• “cinema offers a number of possible pleasures – freuds theory of scopophilla (taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze -OBJECTIFICATION)
• vouyerism – sexual pleasure gained in looking
• fetishism – quality of a cut-out – parts of female body are presented as something to be looked at (OBJECTIFIED and SEXUALISED)

Jacques Lacan

mirror moment – highlights parallel between the mirror stage of child development and mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen. ‘a complex process of likeness and difference‘. 

explains that the audience are spectators who project their ‘repressed desire onto the performer‘.

Sut Jhally

draws a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video.”

There’s no such thing as communication that doesn’t have something behind it, that it is always constructed by someone. And I want people to be active in the construction of their own world because if you’re not active in the construction of your own world then you’re a victim of someone else’s construction.“

Raunch Culture – 3rd wave feminism (1990s)

• coined by Naomi wolf
• response to generation gap between the feminist movement of 1960s (challenging + reconstextualising definitions of femininity
• 3rd wave sees women lives as intersectional, demonstrating a pluralism towards race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and nationality when discussing feminism.
• according to Barker and Jane, 3rd wave feminism put forward the following characteristics:
• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

Ariel Levy book “raunch culture” is ‘a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution‘

‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’

4th wave feminism – same as 3rd but more active – from the radical stance of #MeToo to the Free the Nipple campaign, which Miley Cyrus endorsed and supported (which may encourage you to re-evaluate your initial reading of her video Wrecking Ball above), the use of new media technologies has been a clear demarcation for broadening out the discussion and arguments that are played out in this line of critical thinking.

intersectionality: Queer Theory (founded by Alan Sinfield and Johnathon Dollimore)

Judith Butler

• expressed doubt over the reductionist, essentialist, approach towards the binary oppositions presented in terms of: male/female; feminine/masculine, man/woman.

• suggests that gender is fluid, changeable, plural 

ideas presented by Laura Mulvey seem to suggest that gender is fixed – male/female – that it is structured by institutions and those powerful individuals who are able to exert power and control

we have multiple identities that are performed to different people, in different social settings, under different social conditions.

• Q1:How can you apply the concept of Orientalism to Common’s Letter to the Free?

the concept of orientalism can be applied to commons Letter to the Free, as commons music/video tries to change the stereotypes that have been given to black americans.

• Q2: Can you apply Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action to this music video?

It was been produced to inspire people to gain more knowledge about their culture and heritage.

• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellated)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

the music video aims to show the ‘hail’ the audience, in order to make them aware of the racism in the USA, caused by the 13th amendment. Throughout their lyrics, they use words to describe the situation of racism. for example “the caged birds sings fro freedom” “black bodies being lost in american dream”

• Q1: Where can you identify ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’ in this music video?

it shows multi cultures, between white, black and jamaican culture. They mix the cultures together to educate people on other cultures – mixed reggae and rock together.

• Q2: How does this text apply to Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action?

they used it to bring cultures together and gain knowledge about the problems in uk during that time, such as unemployment.

• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellation)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

it was made to address the audience about the violence, unemployment problems in the uk during that time. “Government leaving the youth on the shelf’ they are acknowledging the problems that need to be changed and they use this to get the audience to engage and fight for change.

Define these terms

1. COLONIALISM – the policy of having full or partial political control over another country
2. POST COLONIALISM – used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink history
3. DIASPORA
4. BAME – black, asian, minority ethnic
5. DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS (GILROY) – internal conflict experienced by subordinated groups in an oppressive society.
6. CULTURAL ABSOLUTISM / RACIAL ESSENTIALISM – idea of certain principles and sets of values that are objectively right or wrong in every context
7. CULTURAL SYNCRETISM – combination of separate concepts into one new idea
8. ORIENTALISM (SAID) – tendency in Western media to depict the cultures of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa in imperialist terms
9. APPROPRIATION -use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them
10. CULTURAL HEGEMONY – process by which certain values and ways of thought promulgated through the mass media become dominant in society.
11. THE PUBLIC SPHERE (HABERMAS) – individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action
12. THE ROLE OF PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING IN TERMS OF FAIR REPRESENTATION OF MINORITY GROUPS / INTERESTS –

looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.

perspective of the Atlantic salve trade:

orientalism: the power to narrate, or block other narratives from forming or emerging is very important to culture and imperialism = Edward Said

he suggested that culture is important as violence for creating “an accepted grid for filtering through the orient into western consciousness”

black slavery is done through belief, visions

as he came from middle east – he wanted to recognise that the non white doesnt have the power to narrate = dominant cultures ‘(white slave traders)

Orientism – ‘distort your vision’

postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim 

Paul Gilroy puts it, ‘a civilising mission that had to conceal its own systematic brutality in order to be effective and attractive’ 

Jacques Lacan – theory of the orient as the other

• you never know who you are’ = we are socially constructed

• we only know who we are, by exploring the other
• mirror stage – we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not

Louis Althusser – theory of interpellation – ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject

= ideology state apparatus (ISA)

• ‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.
• = hailed or interpellated to look something
• society forms you – the dominant ideas are from the dominant class
• we are trapped in ideological state apparatus and hailed and kept in your place – you just go along with what everyone else says
• BLACKFACE – a cultural history of a racist art form – racist show business

Frantz Fanon – ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared”

came up with a 3 point plan:

1. Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

antontio gamschi – hegemony – culture/society changes and shift (nothing is fixed – things move: cuture, power.

use the culture to challenge

media creates things to have the potential to change society, power, in the concept of hegemony:”the last poets” – “niggers are scared of revolution”

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation

mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities. – book = “Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack” — A proposal for a new flag for the UK and other socially engaged art work by Gil Mualem – Doron

Britain haas a multi cultural community = workers from India, and other cultures come to work in Britain after the ww2

hybrid identity

ambrigurity = unsure

cultural polyvalency = having many cultural identities

immigrants grow up listening to reggae – living in Britain -becomes aware of rock – two tone expression (merge of two genres of music)

Paul Gilroy (British, black academic = ‘we must become interested in how the literary and cultural as well as governmental dynamics of the country have responded to that process of change and what it can tell us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.’ 

talks about double consciousness = Paul developed from a black American W.E.B Dubois (talks about being a American black ‘split identity’ – thinking about two things – talks about being black and British (double consciousness)

Black History

• Roman, tudor
• slaves were not feed instantly

Systemic Societal Sexism?

• MISOGYNY = This is a term that derives from psychoanalysis and essentially means a fear and hatred of women, or put simply: SEXISM, a mechanism used by males as a way of exerting power and control in society, otherwise known as PATRIARCHY.

• we are looking at sexism from an institutional perspective + individual level

feminism

= A critical articulation for equality

second wave of feminism American civil rights movement in the early 1960s. – according to michelene wandor

As a final part of this brief introduction, it is useful to draw upon Toril Moi’s (1987) crucial set of distinctions between: ‘feminist’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’.

• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Laura Mulvey – specifically focus on her 1975 polemical essay: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘. Central to her thesis was the role of the male gaze, a theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look,’ in contemporary visual media.

“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” = females are looked at and males look

cinema offers a number of possible pleasures’. One is based around Freudian psychoanalytic concept of scopophilia taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ 

fetishism – parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ – ‘close-ups of legs . . . or a face‘, of lips, hips, bums, tums, thighs, legs and breasts, etc. etc) which are exaggerated through cinematic conventions of ‘scale’, ‘size’, ‘focus’. = women become objects

Jacques Lacan = interested in child development, you slowly developing consciousness – highlighting the parallel between the ‘mirror stage’ of child development and the mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen – ‘a complex process of likeness and difference‘. She also, discusses the position of the audience, categorising them as spectators who project their ‘repressed desire onto the performer‘.

Sut Jhally‘s work at the Media Education Foundation (where Jean Kilbourne also produced much or her work) draws a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video. = how music videos link to the representation of women

Raunch Culture – 3rd Wave Feminism

• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity
• According to Ariel Levy, in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs raunch culture is ‘a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution‘ (2006:74). In other words, while on the one hand, the idea of liberation involves new freedoms for sexual exhibition, experimentation and presentation, on the other, it may well be playing out the same old patterns of exploitation, objectification and misogyny?
• ‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’

4th wave feminism = much more drastic and active than 3rd wave

Intersectionality: Queer Theory

Van Zoonen

Similarly, Lisbet Van Zoonen also highlights the idea that the concept of ‘woman’ is not a homogenous, collective noun. That students need to be aware of the differences between women, that ‘gender is not the defining quality alone for women, and intersects with race, sexuality and class.’ (Hendry & Stephenson 2018:52). Van Zoonen, develops and applies ideas of cultural hegemony (GRAMSCI) and interpellation (ALTHUSSER) towards feminist studies,

Hook: Multicultural Intersectionality

As Barker and Jane note, ‘black feminists have pointed ot the differences between black and white women’s experiences, cultural representations and interests’ (2016:346). In other words, arguments around gender also intersect with postcolonial arguments around ‘power relationships between black and white women’. So that ‘in a postcolonial context, women carry the double burden of being colonized by imperial powers and subordinated by colonial and native men’ (ibid).

As a way of exploring this notion of intersectionality ie the idea that an approach such as feminism, is NOT UNIVERSAL, SINGULAR or HOMOGENEOUS as this is a REDUCTIONIST and ESSENTIALIST way of seeing the world. Rather intersectionality highlights the way ideas and concepts such as ‘female‘, ‘feminist‘, ‘feminine‘ (Moi 1987) intersect with other concepts, ideas and approaches, such as, sexuality, class, age, education, religion, ability. A way of exploring these ideas is through the work of bell hook.

bell hook (always spelt in lower case – real name: Gloria Jean Watkins) advocates media literacy, the need to engage with popular culture to understand class struggle, domination, renegotiation and revolution. Put another, encouraging us all to ‘think critically’ to ‘change our lives’.ethnicity and race, see for example here work ‘Cultural Criticism and Transformation‘ which was another video production by the Media Education Foundation (MEF), directed by Sut Jhally – part 1 below, parts 2 & 3 at the end of this post.

narrative is based around time –

its gernally chronological –

its sequential – (having a the video clips link up/ or ramdomized, going back in time)

its linear –

narrative of space and being connected (

narratives have a under lined theme – (music video – theme of isolation, lonliness, sadness – oppisite: happiness, joy, cheerful)

todorov – theroy of tripartite narrative structure (three prt narrative sturcutre: beggining, middle, end: equilibrium, disruption, new equilibruim ( make sure you reppresnt that begginning)

in my music video: whats the equilibruim? whats the disruption? friend dies. whats the new equilibruim? friend becomes lonely, lost, depressed

vladirmir propp – stock characters ( hero, helper, princess, villian, victim, dispatcher, father, false hero)

claude levi strauss – (binary oppostions) – stories are important as they provide messages and idenitfications, (better understanding)

symour chatman: satelites and kernels

narrative if the over all structure – can be broken down into a story and plot. ( music video is about the struggle of accepting the past, and feeling lonely)