- Linear– events of the plot unfold the way that they happen
- Chronological– events are sequenced in order of time
- Sequential– events which are arranged one after the other in a sequence within a narrative.
- Circular structure– when a plot begins in the same place in the way it ends. Character undergoes a transformation.
- Time based- continuous moving image that displays a change in time.
- Narrative arc– The path the story follows- ups and downs, climax and resolution which is reflected in an arc shape.
- Freytag’s Pyramid– 19th century German playwright ‘Freytag’s’ diagram of dramatic structure.
- exposition- background information on the characters and setting explained at the beginning of the story. Earlier events are alluded to.
- inciting incident– The hook, the event that sets the main character or characters on the journey that will occupy the narrative.
- rising action– The incline of a narrative arc. Often, the events that lead up to the climax.
- climax– The point of highest intensity or major conflict within in a narrative. The steepest point of a narrative arc.
- falling action– The declining part of a narrative arc. Often, what happens after the climax and resolution of the major conflict.
- resolution-
- denouement– The final part of the narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.
- Beginning / middle / end- How linear narratives are sequenced.
- Equilibrium– First stage of Todorov’s theory. The situation and characters are introduced in a normal circumstance.
- Disruption– Second stage of Todorov’s theory. A change takes place causing an alter in the norm.
- New equilibrium– Third stage of Todorov’s theory. The change in circumstance is overcome and the situation reaches a new normal.
- Peripeteia– A sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances
- Anagnoresis– A character discovers their own, or another character’s true identity.
- Catharsis– The process of releasing and providing relief from repressed emotions. The purging of strong emotion.
- The 3 Unities: Action, Time, Place– The 3 traditional unities of drama. The Aristotelian idea that a narrative should be set in once place, in one time frame, focused on one action.
- flashback / flash forward- Flashback is when the current narrative is interrupted by a previous event which could provide key information about a character etc. Flash-forward is when the current narrative is interrupted by an event that is yet to take place.
- Foreshadowing– When events that take place later on in the narrative are alluded to or hinted towards.
- Ellipsis– The exclusion of action from a narrative because it can be inferred from dialogue and other action.
- Pathos– A quality that evokes feelings of pity and sadness.
- Empathy– The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
- diegetic / non-diegetic sound– Diegetic sound occurs within the context of the story and able to be heard by the characters. Non diegetic sound occurs externally to the narrative, not heard by the characters
- slow motion– Visual effect created either by the actors or as a special effect in the edit. Time is slowed down.
Monthly Archives: February 2022
Filters
ghost town
The Idea of Resistance and Political Protest:
Political protest:
○ Attempts to change to laws or legislation
○ Organised political movements
○ Public protests
○ Petitions, marches
Political protest can be seen in terms of:
○ Cultural resistance
○ Everyday people
Why look at cultural resistance?
○ Overt political protest is uncommon. When it occurs, it often results in a backlash.
○ Even if overt political protest does results in changes in legislation, it won’t necessarily change public
opinion.
○ Culture is what influences people’s hearts, minds and opinions. This is the site of popular change.
Key idea: the political, personal and cultural are always intertwined
Cultural Hegemony:
Antonio Gramsci: Italian philosopher writing in the 1930s
Key Terms:
● Hegemonic: dominant, ruling-class, power-holders
● Hegemonic culture: the dominant culture
● Cultural hegemony: power, rule, or domination maintained by ideological and cultural means.
● Ideology: worldview – beliefs, assumptions and values
Cultural hegemony functions by framing the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate
ideology.
The ideologies of the dominant group are expressed and maintained through its economic, political, moral,
and social institutions (like the education system and the media).
These institutions socialise people into accepting the norms, values and beliefs of the dominant social
group.
As a result, oppressed groups believe that the social and economic conditions of society are natural and
inevitable, rather than created by the dominant group.
Subcultural Theory:
Subculture:
● Working-class youth culture
● Unified by shared tastes in style, music and ideology
● A solution to collectively experienced problems
● A form of resistance to cultural hegemony
The Birmingham School (1970s)
● They argued argued that the formation of subcultures offered young working class people a solution to the problems they were collectively experiencing in society.
● Looked at working class cultures like the teddy-boys, mods, skinheads, and punks – subcultures unified by shared tastes in fashion, music and ideology.
Teddy Boys: 1950/60s
● Responding to: post-war social changes
● Music: influenced by American rock n roll
● Style: upper-class Edwardian fashion
(narrow trousers, lapelled jackets), fused
with an element of rebelliousness in the form
of exaggerated hairstyles and shoes (quiffs
and creepers)
Skinheads: 1960s
● Responding to: social alienation.
● Rejected: late 50s conservatism,
as well as the ‘peace and love’
middle class hippy movement of
60s
● Expression of: working class
pride
● Music: West Indian music (ska,
rocksteady, reggae)
● Style: shaven heads, Dr Marten
boots, braces, shirts, and cropped
trousers
● Politics: Original skinheads were
anti-racist, however the movement
quickly polarised
Punk: 1970s
● A Reaction to:
● 1) Capitalist middle class culture
that has achieved dominance and
legitimacy (hegemony)
● 2) Their alienation from the adult
working class culture of their
parents and grandparents
● 3) The social, political and
economic crisis of the mid1970s,
resulting in high youth
unemployment
● Values: anti-establishment,
emphasis on individual freedom,
on doing it yourself.
● Fashion: emphasised ugliness,
shock value, irony. Used items like
safety pins, ripped shirts, chains.
● Music: often self-produced and
independently distributed, the
music is loud and aggressive, with
lyrics expressing antiestablishment views and working
class concerns.
Positives of The Birmingham School’s subcultural theory:
● Validated the study of popular culture – previously considered superficial
Criticism The Birmingham School’s subcultural theory:
● Focused on white working class masculinity
● Ignored ethnic minority, female and queer youth cultures
Gilroy
Gilroy highlighted how black youth cultures represented
cultural solutions to collectively experienced problems
of racism and poverty
Racial otherness: ‘Ain’t no black in union jack’- His book
Civilisation: For Gilroy, the 9/11 World trade Centre terrorist attack in 2001, and it’s aftermath, radically altered both the tone and nature of the media-orientated representations regarding race and racial difference.
Legacy of the Empire: Gilroy suggests that we live in a ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’ (Gilroy, 2004) He argued that the British are undergoing a crisis of national identity: the loss of the British Empire has forced a collective question regarding British identification.
Race Relations
1970s and 1980s:
Racism from the State: The Police
● Frequent clashes between the police and black youth
● Widespread fears over law and order, black street
crime and the figure of ‘the mugger’
● SUS laws
● New Cross Fire (1981)
Racism from Far-Right Groups: The NF (national front)
● The National Front was a far-right group
● Advocated the an end to immigration and the
repatriation of non-white Britons.
● Blamed immigration for the decline in employment,
housing and welfare.
● In the 1970s, the NF gained the support of
disillusioned white youth
● Racial attacks, violence and intimidation
Margaret Thatcher:
● Prime Minister 1979-1990
● Militant campaigner for middle-class interests
● In an 1978 interview: ‘British national identity
could be swamped by people with different
culture’
● Hard line attitude towards immigration
● Conservative Manifesto: ‘firm immigration control
for the future is essential if we are to achieve
good community relations’
● British Nationality Act of 1981: introduced a
series of increasingly tough immigration
procedures and excluded Asian people from
entering Britain.
● Scapegoating
Rock against Sexism
Rock Against Sexism was British anti-sexist campaign that
used punk as a vehicle to challenge sexism, promoting
female musicians while challenging discrimination in the
music industry between 1979 and 1982.
Why was RAS needed?
– 1970s saw a plethora of sexist song lyrics,
record covers and band advertisements, many
depicting violence towards women.
– The terms ‘feminism’ and ‘sexism’ were not
in common currency during this time, and there
was widespread scepticism among young people
with regards to organised feminism.
BBC News
The Specials: How Ghost Town defined an era
Jon Kelly
Specials gigs began to attract the hostile presence of groups like the National Front and the British Movement. When vocalist Neville Staple sighed wearily on Ghost Town that there was “too much fighting on the dance floor”, he sang from personal experience.
“But you don’t listen to Ghost Town and think it’s weird. I was 11 when it was released and I don’t remember going, ‘What’s this?’ At the time there were a lot of political songs in the charts. But if a record like that got to number one today you’d go, ‘Wow, that’s bizarre.'”
“It sums up how it felt to be young at the time,” he says. “But at the same time it’s timelessly resonant. “There are a handful of tunes that do that and Ghost Town is one of them.”
The conversation (news)
‘Ghost Town’: a haunting 1981 protest song that still makes sense today
Abigail Gardner
It’s an odd, eerie song, nodding to pop convention and sitting wilfully outside of it. It’s included, in passing, in Dorian Lynskey’s beautifully written book on protest songs, “33 Revolutions Per Minute”, but unlike the band’s “Free Nelson Mandela” does not merit its own chapter.
Claude Levi-Strauss (Binary Oppositions)
This theory suggests that NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg. good and bad.
As such, it encourages students to understand narrative as a structure of key (oppositional) themes that underpin action and dialogue to develop a set of messages that the audience are able to decode and understand.
It creates a dominant message (ideology) of a film, TV programme, advert, music video, animation etc. So in this way audiences are encouraged to make a judgements about characters, groups, places, history, society etc.
Texts can be seen to either support the dominant ideologies of a society, which would make it a reactionary text ,or to challenge, question or undermines the dominant ideologies of society, in which case it could be seen as a radical text.
ghost town in depth
the political, personal and cultural are always intertwined
the theory that the political problems chain on to personal and cultural views that are all connected by a a single problem or causes
Antonio Gramsci: Italian philosopher writing in the 1930s
Antonio talks about hegemony and tat the domination of ideology and rule and that the thought of one view being correct and that you cant change a view forcefully and that the way of change occours in music and fashion which could be a idle consumption of change
the main causes of the political problems is a person called Margaret thatcher who used black people/the wind rush generation as a scape goat for the fall in economy after world war II she also shut down many factory’s as a result of these factory’s shutting down many people were unemployed as a company they sacked people in order to keep their money and sack those who weren’t needed or crucial to the job to work she also shut down mines which also resulted in unemployment of the masses the song ghost town was Addressing themes of urban decay, deindustrialization, unemployment and violence in inner cities and this song was published while the riots were on the rise and was liked by many and was put at the number one spot on the charts as the riots and such were going on this was also a way of protesting the way that things are and what they are like the music genre was called ska and it had a mix of race within it. the music video shows reckless driving and fighting and empty streets and boarded up houses suggesting the economy decline and the affects of unemployment you can say that the buildings were victims of Thatcherism and that they have been abandoned as the tenants have moved on to the streets as money was scarce the reckless driving symbolizes the craziness of thatcher’s idea of closing down the mines and making many unemployed as if they are on a (wacky ride) or it can symbolize the amount of people who got frunk out of boredom as they are un employed meaning that they give up with trying to look for them as they are all being declined a job so they have nothing better to do so they just sit around and drink. during a scene we can see a group of people fighting suggesting a riot has occurred or a mugging due to riots were a big thing during this time or it could relate to the stereotyping of mugging which thatcher coined to be black people who mug people for their money. there is a part where the car crashes into a wall suggesting the world coming to a stand still or the amount of people who have hit a metaphorical wall of unemployment. at the end we can see the singers throwing stones out onto a river or lake with buildings in the back ground this could signify as them throwing rocks at those who fired them or at big company’s who are all happy and safe with a job this could also be a hint at the riots that occur by signifying throwing things at big businesses’ and smashing window as riots do and by doing so supporting the riots.
during the era of Thatcherism a party of 13-17 year old’s who were all of a black ethnicity were killed by a fire that engulfed the building that killed all of them sadly but one lucky person who survived but Margaret thatcher’s scapegoating of the wind rush generation caused the police to do nothing even though it was said that there was someone who caused it but the police just said that they were probably doing drugs and or they caused a fire by fighting ignoring any other ideas because they were so set on believing on these things that were happening due to those causes and no one was right except them.
this is from the guardian article discussing this topic: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/15/race.london
Thirteen of the people in the house died – including the birthday girl, Yvonne Ruddock, and her brother. One of the survivors was so traumatized that he committed suicide two years later…