Youth Culture

Teenage Riot

The teenager was not recognised as a lifestage category until around the 1950's, with the 19th century came groups of males known as 'Bowery Boys' or 'Soaplocks', who cared hugely about their appearance and spent money on looking good. They became a recognisable youth culture with their own slang, dress code and their own individual music tastes. This was the first time entertainment and fashion industries began to target a youth group, based on what the youth defined themselves with.

Case Study; Fish Tank

Director: Andrea Arnold
Release Date: 11 September 2009
Country where made: UK
Awards Won: BAFTA film Award, British Independent Film Award
Genre: Drama, Realism
Certificate: 15
Production Company: BBC Films







Fish Tank follows the life of a 15 year old girl, Mia, living with her younger sister and mother in low-income housing in Essex, near London.

Director Andrea Arnold was fed up of films about working class being made by middle class people, and not accurately portraying the working class life. Therefore she took steps to ensure she made a realistic, truthful performance to give people, who may have no idea, an insight into this lifestyle. Arnold said: "All my films have started with an image. It's usually quite a strong image and it seems to come from nowhere. I don't understand the image at first or what it means, but I want to know more about it so I start exploring it, try and understand it and what it means. This is how I always start writing." The name of the film, Fish Tank, refers to the way we see inside Mia's world, how she is longing to look out, and also her entrapment in a single-parent family, a housing estate, around people she cannot respect.

Arnold firstly decided not to use an actress and instead, after months of casting, found her leading girl, Katie Jarvis, fighting with her boyfriend at Tilbury Train Station in Essex, where the film was shot. Katie was not a great dancer, which simply added to the realism of her progression in dance, as she clearly improves as the film goes on. Arnold concentrated on channelling her naturalness into the story, sometimes letting her improvise and adding her own opinions. The film was also shot in continuity, making it easier for the cast to understand and follow and adds the element of surprise or unpredictability, as sometimes actors didn't know what they were doing until the day.

Whilst the production company, BBC Films, wanted it to be made as a more commercial film, Andrea's vision was more about authenticity and real life. She fought for it to have a '15' certificate and certain scenes which the company were against, for example where the younger sister is drinking and smoking with her friend, although the actresses weren't actually doing it, the BBC thought it wasn't politically correct and went against broadcasting regulations however Arnold fought to be able to portray life as it really is. The 4 x 3 format, rather than wide screen, was also chosen to concentrate more on the character and her life, instead of the background distractions that can come with a widescreen format.

Within Fish Tank, in many of the home scenes, MTV is on the TV showing programmes like 'Cribs' and 'Sweet Sixteen' and R&B music videos, the unreality of life in these videos, glamorising sex, fame and fortune is contrasted with the way they actually live in the film struggling with problems with alcohol, violence and relationships.

The film shows Mia's struggle to find an identity, she looks for it through dance, after seeing videos of a dance group on the internet, she aspires to be part of it, to have a collective identity within that group. Although the original script was intended to based around a dance film- with Mia getting into the dance group, blowing everyone away with her talent but deciding to leave after being placed in a strip club - the film went down a different route, along the themes of an older man falling for a younger girl, a family falling apart and the revenge of Mia on Connor and his family, which all go to show Mia's personal identity and how it is made up of various aspects rather than just her aspirations to dance.

This film is so popular with young people due to the identification they can get with it , recognising themselves within characters or certain situations, the harsh familiarity of living in a council housing estate with a broken community and feared culture and the accuracy of reality. This film doesn't construct a stereotypical or forced representation of young people, it is an honest representation created by the character of Mia and her surroundings.

Collective Identity

'A collective identity refers to individuals' sense of belonging (the identity) to a group (the collective). From the perspective of the individual, the collective identity forms a part of his or her personal identity. Sometimes, the sense of belonging to a particular group will be so strong that it will trump other aspects of the person's personal identity (for example, the person may be willing to assume great risks for the group, even as great as loss of life)'

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposed a theory called the Mirror Stage, at which a child begins to develop their identity. The Mirror Stage describes the formation of the Ego through the process of identification, the Ego being the result of identifying with ones own image. He pointed out that a baby can recognise itself in the mirror at around six months, and this can represent a phase in which a subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image. We can apply this theory to how audiences recognise images on screen, which can reinforce and define their personal identity and also lead to identification, aspiration and escapism. When an audience see a character on screen that they like, this could be due to the fact that they can identify with the character or aspire to be like the character, or both.

What makes up a person's identity?
-Work
-Religion
-Aspirations
-Family
-Peers
-Social Class
-Community: school/clubs/groups
-E-community: social networking sites (facebook)/online gaming (second life)

How does media influence our identity?
Over many different media platforms we are given false impressions of identity, through magazines, TV programmes, films and celebrity obsession offering idealised images of fame and fortune. This can affect how we create our own identity, who we idolise or aspire to be like, through peer pressure and false advertising our identity can be affected in a negative way. It can also affect who we identify with.

Genre Theory

'Every genre positions those who participate in a text of that kind: as interviewer or interviewee, as listener or storyteller, as a reader or a writer, as a person interested in political matters, as someone to be instructed or as someone who instructs; each of these positionings implies different possibilities for response and for action. Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader' of the text. (Kress 1988, 107)'

Genre theory is used in the study of films in order to facilitate the categorisation of films. Genre are dependent on various factors such as story line, whom the director is, what are the audience expectations etc... In using genre theory we create a shortcut in how we describe films.
In order to understand Genre we may look at several examples. When we speak of the western we know that within this collection of films we may expect to find gun fights, horses and indians, the solitary cowboy and to some degree the actors and directors of such films. Another example would be when looking at the horror film where we know everyone will die except one. The audience whom go to those films expect to see zombie, were wolves,werewolves and more. They also expect certain content and a certain style of film making.

Narrative Theory

OCR will expect candidates to be able to utilise narrative theory with regard to case studies/films/TV texts and production.

• Narrative is the order in which a story is told or plot untangled. It also refers to the style with use of specific archetypes and representations.
• The story is what happens, the substance or content.

Films that use a diverse or non-linear narrative include: Memento, Pulp Fiction, Slumdog Millionaire and Vantage Point. There are also texts like Tom's Midnight Garden and Handmaids Tale.

Films or texts like these bring in a large audience because audiences can relate, engage and escape. Humans dream, imagine and remember. Part of the human condition is that we don't dream nor remember or imagine events in linear order. 'The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts.' Audiences use intertextuality, constantly relating and comparing films or media texts.

Having learned this, we have experimented more in our music video, with a non-linear narrative, using flashbacks and preempting later events early on. This makes it more interesting to watch, and relatable to the audience.

Barthes' Codes - Open and Closed Texts

Barthes was a semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s who got paid to spend all day unravelling little bits of texts and then writing about the process of doing so.

He said that 'a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can seperate out the colours. He decided that the threads you pull on and try to unravel meaning from are called Narrative Codes.'

Audiences bring psychological, sociological and cultural baggage to a text, so everyone reads it differently. Ambiguity in a text suggests different interpretations or meanings. How and where, or the context of a text, is important too.

Barthes proposed that texts may be 'open' (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or 'closed' (there is only one obvious thread to pull on). eg Action Adventure
He decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following ways:

-Simple description/reproduction
-Action Code and Enigma Code(ie Answers & Questions)
-Symbols & Signs
-Points of Cultural Reference

Tvzetan Todorov - equilibrium, disequilibrium, new equilibrium

Tvzetan Todorov's conventional narrative structure has five stages:

1. A state of equilibrium is defined

2. Disruption to the equilibrium by a crisis/action

3. The characters recognition that there has been a disruption, setting goals to resolve problem

4. The characters attempt to repair the disruption

5. Reinstatement to the equilibrium, situation resolved, conclusion announced.

For example “The Piano” has a linear narrative. The equilibrium is before Ada goes to New Zealand the audience assume that there is an order, the whites are taking control of the Maoris and taking the land, Stewart has the land and Baines has gone native and is unconventional. The disequilibrium comes with Ada's arrival in New Zealand with her daughter, being uprooted and moved and problems with the piano - a metaphor for art, the imagination and Ada's voice. The new equilibrium is when the audience assume order is restored, Baines is gone, Stewart has more land, Ada and her daughter have left, Stewarts attitude to marriage has changed but the piano is at the bottom of the sea.

Claude Levi-Strauss

After studying hundreds of myths and legends from around the world, Levi-Strauss found that we make sense of the world, people and events by seeing and using binary oppositions everywhere. He proposed that all narratives are organised around the conflict between binary opposites.

Examples of binary opposites include: good vs evil; black vs white; boy vs girl; young vs old; protagonist vs antagonist; strong vs weak; first world vs third world; humanity vs technology etc..

Levi-Strauss observed that narrative can only end on a resolution of conflicts between opposition.

Male Gaze in Anchorman

The Male Gaze

The male gaze is a feminist theory proposed by Laura Mulvey, known for writing the seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1973. In this essay Mulvey wrote about the objectification of women within media and that due to the high amount of male workers within the media, women are repeatedly being perceived and shown as objects of sexual fantasy. She argues that the passive role of women in films provides visual pleasure through scopophilia - 'voyeurism as the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity'.

She writes: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning."

Whilst Laura Mulvey's paper is an important feminist film theory, she also looks at voyeuristic ideas and ways of watching the cinema and identifying with actors on screen.
She identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women. 'The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.'

Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' was written during the time of second-wave feminism, concerned with achieving equality between gender in the workplace and eliminating stereotypes and traditional gender roles. Mulvey argues that in order to achieve equal representation for women in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are, lacking sexual objectification. She therefore calls for destruction of modern film structure as a way to free women from their sexual objectification in film, by creating distance between the female character and the male spectator.

The male gaze can be seen in some films we've looked at, such as Sin City, American Beauty, Casino Royale, Fast and the Furious and The Piano.

New Blog

Check it out.