Representation: Research And Present

representation Research and present

objectives • Focus on individual text for research and present to class • Target set based on current assessment

starter • Create a target for yourself for this lesson with respect to UNIT4. • Use the mark scheme and tracker to assist • Discuss target with a partner and refine

Choose a text for research • Choose a text from those you have studied. • Refine that choice to a scene, trailer or even still image

Focus • Choose from Do the right thing, Crash, Boys n the Hood, Macintyre investigates, current newspaper discourses, La Haine, Bullet Boy, Adulthood, Fresh Prince. Etc. • Each to present on their reading in relation to: – fair and accurate – alternative representations

• of this group.

Research time • 30mins • Follow your targets

Presentation • Remember your focus: – Fair and accurate – Alternative – Biased

• Include in your analysis Theoretical views and SHEP

Plenary • Did you meet your target? • WWW and ebi

Gramsci • Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others (e.g. bourgeois hegemony). This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common sense' and 'natural'.

Fiske • 'Consent must be constantly won and rewon, for people's material social experience constantly reminds them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a threat to the dominant class... Hegemony... posits a constant contradiction between ideology and the social experience of the subordinate that makes this interface into an inevitable site of ideological struggle'

Stuart Hall • argues that the media appear to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it. • argued that the dominant ideology is typically inscribed as the 'preferred reading' in a media text, but that this is not automatically adopted by readers. The social situations of readers/viewers/listeners may lead them to adopt different stances. 'Dominant' readings are produced by those whose social situation favours the preferred reading; 'negotiated' readings are produced by those who inflect the preferred reading to take account of their social position; and 'oppositional' readings are produced by those whose social position puts them into direct conflict with the preferred reading

Hall’s codes • dominant (or 'hegemonic') reading: the reader fully shares the text's code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading (a reading which may not have been the result of any conscious intention on the part of the author(s)) - in such a stance the code seems 'natural' and 'transparent’. • negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests (local and personal conditions may be seen as exceptions to the general rule) - this position involves contradictions. • oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') reading: the reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.) (e.g. when watching a television broadcast produced on behalf of a political party they normally vote against).

Monaco • This unusual ability of film to “validate” reality is its most important mimetic political function. (2000) • It is still rare for a casting director to hire an African-American to play a role that isn’t specified as “Black”. (2000) • Racism pervades American film because it is a basic strain in American histroy.