Bibliography:
Maggie Andrews and Elspeth Stevenson, 2009, AQA Media Studies: A2 Media Studies, Thornes, Nelson, Cheltenham UK, pg.144:
Richard Dyer’s Theory of Utopian Solutions (theory of how we are influenced & affected):
This is a great theory of thinking about what media audiences get from almost any media text. Dyer (1992) proposed that media texts helped make up for some of the deficiencies of modern life. These were as follows.
Community – media texts often present us with groups of people working towards common goals and constructed communities that we can victoriously enjoy. This is in contrast with real life, where increased population movements and other societal pressures such as increased isolation, the breakdown of the extended family and fear of crime have diminished real-world communities. Social networking is an interesting phenomenon in this respect!
Intensity – most people’s lives concist predominantly of routine, such as going to work or collage, raising family etc. Media texts offer world where eciting things happen as a matter of course, and this is pleasurable for the audience. Consider the old-age complaint about soap operas not being true to life (as if they had a duty to be!) and think how dull they’d be without all the dramatic events that befall characters and families within them.
Abundance – one of the key pleasures of the media texts is seeing worlds where people can drop whatever they’re doing and peruse adventures without any apparent financial cares. We also like to see glamorous and exotic locations and lifestyles that contrast with our own. Abundance may not just be about money – texts can offer an abundance of other desirable things such as open landscapes as well as material wealth.
Strinati, Domonic, 2000, An Introduction To Stereotyping Popular Culture, Routledge, New York, pg.55:
“The gangster film is all about law, order and crime, but unlike any other crime and police genres, it focuses upon the figure of the gangster. Therefore, while the gangster film is about law, order and crimeit commonly takes a specific angle on the subject no matter which is represented through the character and the narrative of the gangster. It concentrates as much on power and corruption and the ambiguities of law enforcement as it does on the need for justice to prevail and for the gangster to be punished. This arises from its concern with the criminal rather than the police and how it treats the social world of crime and its relation to the institutions of law and order.”
Pam Cook & Mieke Bernick, 1999, The Cinema Book 2nd Edition, London, pg.174:
Iconography:
“Most notable within the first category was Collin McArther (1972), one chapter of which was concerned to layout the basic unity of the genre’s iconography, which he understands as the community over several decades of patterns of visual imagery, of recurrent objects and figures in dynamic relationship (McArther, 1972, pg.23). These stable iconography elements can be divided into three categories:
1. The physical presence, attributes of actors and actresses and the roles they play;
2. The urban milieux in which the fiction is played out;
3. The technology at the character’s disposal, principally guns and cars”
Neale, Steve, 2000, Genre & Hollywood, Brown University USA, Routledge, pg.15:
“In Little Cesar (1930) a police lieutenant and two of his men visit a nightclub run by gangsters. All three wear large hats and heavy coats, are grim and sardonic and stand in a triangular formation, lieutenant in front and his two men behind him in the rear. The audience knows immediately what to expect of them by their physical attributes, their dress and deportment.”
Sanders, Jon, 2009, The Film Genre Book, United Kingdom, Auteur, pg. 124:
“The reincarnation of the gangster film, replete with glamour, extreme brutality and an uncanny eye for the humanness and rivals of their ink would later breath life into the T.V. creation, glorious bloody The Sopranos.”
Pauline Wilson and Allan Kidd, 1998, Sociology and Modern Studies, London, Collins, pg.34:
“The mass media which include television, radio and newspapers, are powerful source of information and knowledge. The media have a role in gender socialization. Research, for example, has focused on the way in which males and females are represented in children’s educational programmes such as Sesame Street. Dohrmann (1975) found that the male child was much more likely to be shown as heroic, whereas the female child was shown was more likely to be shown as helpless and passive. It is possible that such messages affect attitudes and behaviour. Particularly when reinforced families and schools.”
Pauline Wilson and Allan Kidd, 1998, Sociology and Modern Studies, London, Collins, pg.306:
What are the effects of the Media on the audience?:
“Sociologists, social psychologists, members of the public and politicians have, for long time, been concern about the possible effects of the media on their audience.
Films such as The Wild One and A Clockwork Orange caused concern in the past. A Clockwork Orange was released in the UK in 1971. a series of beatings and rapes was linked to this film by the police and its director banned the film in the UK. Recently, films such as Reservoir Dogs and Crash have caused concern in terms of the images represented, their impact on the audience and the possible effects of such images on our behaviour.”
Philip Rayner, Peter Wall, Stephan Kruger, AS Media Studies, London and New York, Routledge, pg. 55:
“Genre is a formula that is successful, is often repeated again and again and can be used over a long period of time. For instance in a gangster film, (Goodfellas 1990, pg.53), we expect to see some, or all, of the following elements, which will also properly have been in a gangster film from the 1930s:
Car chases
Guns
Heroes
Villians
Violence
Urban meetings
Mafia
Corrupt police/politicians
Beautiful women
Italians
There are also certain actors that we may associate with the genre of films (James Cagney in the 19302, Robert De Niro in the 1980s or currently Vinnie Jones) as well as certain directors (Martin Scorsese and Guy Richie).
Genre and Audiences:
Audiences are said to like the concept of genre (although we may not identify it by the name) because of its resuring and familiar promise of patterns of representation and variation.
The concept of genre is important in arousing the expectations of an audience and how they judge and select texts. Placing a text within a specific genre plays an important role in signalling to an audience the type of text that that they are being invited to consume. Audience become familiar with the codes and conventions of specific genres. Familiarity through representation is therefore one of the key elements in the way audiences understand and relate to media texts.”
Philip Rayner, Peter Wall, Stephan Kruger, AS Media Studies, London and New York, Routledge, pg. 299:
“What we have now is a genre that is so aware that the audience know the codes and conventions almost backwards that it has started to become self-referential and post-modern in its approach. Thus we are told in Scream (directed by Wes Craven, 1996) that virgins are safe, only to discover that they are not. We watch Buffy fight werewolves, yet are aware that the series is about much more than simply the fight between good and evil. We read novels that describe over four pages the act of disembowelling and we laugh – or smile – because we are aware that the author is playing with our own fantasies. We watch documentaries on the television about serial killers.
It is the ability of media producers to adapt and develop any generic text that is what allows it to last and continue in popularity. The gangster genre was reviewed by The Godfather in 1871 when a fundamentally ordinary gangster story was given a new angle – the gangsters were humanised, given families and problems and were no longer simply the ‘bad guys’.
Richard Dyer’s Theory of Utopian Solutions (theory of how we are influenced & affected):
This is a great theory of thinking about what media audiences get from almost any media text. Dyer (1992) proposed that media texts helped make up for some of the deficiencies of modern life. These were as follows.
Community – media texts often present us with groups of people working towards common goals and constructed communities that we can victoriously enjoy. This is in contrast with real life, where increased population movements and other societal pressures such as increased isolation, the breakdown of the extended family and fear of crime have diminished real-world communities. Social networking is an interesting phenomenon in this respect!
Intensity – most people’s lives concist predominantly of routine, such as going to work or collage, raising family etc. Media texts offer world where eciting things happen as a matter of course, and this is pleasurable for the audience. Consider the old-age complaint about soap operas not being true to life (as if they had a duty to be!) and think how dull they’d be without all the dramatic events that befall characters and families within them.
Abundance – one of the key pleasures of the media texts is seeing worlds where people can drop whatever they’re doing and peruse adventures without any apparent financial cares. We also like to see glamorous and exotic locations and lifestyles that contrast with our own. Abundance may not just be about money – texts can offer an abundance of other desirable things such as open landscapes as well as material wealth.
Strinati, Domonic, 2000, An Introduction To Stereotyping Popular Culture, Routledge, New York, pg.55:
“The gangster film is all about law, order and crime, but unlike any other crime and police genres, it focuses upon the figure of the gangster. Therefore, while the gangster film is about law, order and crimeit commonly takes a specific angle on the subject no matter which is represented through the character and the narrative of the gangster. It concentrates as much on power and corruption and the ambiguities of law enforcement as it does on the need for justice to prevail and for the gangster to be punished. This arises from its concern with the criminal rather than the police and how it treats the social world of crime and its relation to the institutions of law and order.”
Pam Cook & Mieke Bernick, 1999, The Cinema Book 2nd Edition, London, pg.174:
Iconography:
“Most notable within the first category was Collin McArther (1972), one chapter of which was concerned to layout the basic unity of the genre’s iconography, which he understands as the community over several decades of patterns of visual imagery, of recurrent objects and figures in dynamic relationship (McArther, 1972, pg.23). These stable iconography elements can be divided into three categories:
1. The physical presence, attributes of actors and actresses and the roles they play;
2. The urban milieux in which the fiction is played out;
3. The technology at the character’s disposal, principally guns and cars”
Neale, Steve, 2000, Genre & Hollywood, Brown University USA, Routledge, pg.15:
“In Little Cesar (1930) a police lieutenant and two of his men visit a nightclub run by gangsters. All three wear large hats and heavy coats, are grim and sardonic and stand in a triangular formation, lieutenant in front and his two men behind him in the rear. The audience knows immediately what to expect of them by their physical attributes, their dress and deportment.”
Sanders, Jon, 2009, The Film Genre Book, United Kingdom, Auteur, pg. 124:
“The reincarnation of the gangster film, replete with glamour, extreme brutality and an uncanny eye for the humanness and rivals of their ink would later breath life into the T.V. creation, glorious bloody The Sopranos.”
Pauline Wilson and Allan Kidd, 1998, Sociology and Modern Studies, London, Collins, pg.34:
“The mass media which include television, radio and newspapers, are powerful source of information and knowledge. The media have a role in gender socialization. Research, for example, has focused on the way in which males and females are represented in children’s educational programmes such as Sesame Street. Dohrmann (1975) found that the male child was much more likely to be shown as heroic, whereas the female child was shown was more likely to be shown as helpless and passive. It is possible that such messages affect attitudes and behaviour. Particularly when reinforced families and schools.”
Pauline Wilson and Allan Kidd, 1998, Sociology and Modern Studies, London, Collins, pg.306:
What are the effects of the Media on the audience?:
“Sociologists, social psychologists, members of the public and politicians have, for long time, been concern about the possible effects of the media on their audience.
Films such as The Wild One and A Clockwork Orange caused concern in the past. A Clockwork Orange was released in the UK in 1971. a series of beatings and rapes was linked to this film by the police and its director banned the film in the UK. Recently, films such as Reservoir Dogs and Crash have caused concern in terms of the images represented, their impact on the audience and the possible effects of such images on our behaviour.”
Philip Rayner, Peter Wall, Stephan Kruger, AS Media Studies, London and New York, Routledge, pg. 55:
“Genre is a formula that is successful, is often repeated again and again and can be used over a long period of time. For instance in a gangster film, (Goodfellas 1990, pg.53), we expect to see some, or all, of the following elements, which will also properly have been in a gangster film from the 1930s:
Car chases
Guns
Heroes
Villians
Violence
Urban meetings
Mafia
Corrupt police/politicians
Beautiful women
Italians
There are also certain actors that we may associate with the genre of films (James Cagney in the 19302, Robert De Niro in the 1980s or currently Vinnie Jones) as well as certain directors (Martin Scorsese and Guy Richie).
Genre and Audiences:
Audiences are said to like the concept of genre (although we may not identify it by the name) because of its resuring and familiar promise of patterns of representation and variation.
The concept of genre is important in arousing the expectations of an audience and how they judge and select texts. Placing a text within a specific genre plays an important role in signalling to an audience the type of text that that they are being invited to consume. Audience become familiar with the codes and conventions of specific genres. Familiarity through representation is therefore one of the key elements in the way audiences understand and relate to media texts.”
Philip Rayner, Peter Wall, Stephan Kruger, AS Media Studies, London and New York, Routledge, pg. 299:
“What we have now is a genre that is so aware that the audience know the codes and conventions almost backwards that it has started to become self-referential and post-modern in its approach. Thus we are told in Scream (directed by Wes Craven, 1996) that virgins are safe, only to discover that they are not. We watch Buffy fight werewolves, yet are aware that the series is about much more than simply the fight between good and evil. We read novels that describe over four pages the act of disembowelling and we laugh – or smile – because we are aware that the author is playing with our own fantasies. We watch documentaries on the television about serial killers.
It is the ability of media producers to adapt and develop any generic text that is what allows it to last and continue in popularity. The gangster genre was reviewed by The Godfather in 1871 when a fundamentally ordinary gangster story was given a new angle – the gangsters were humanised, given families and problems and were no longer simply the ‘bad guys’.
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