Media Theories • Structuralism• Postmodernist • Psychoanalytical

• Feminist • Genre

Structuralism theory Structuralism: is an area of social & cultural theory that focused on and analysed the

structures found in human society Culture affects out concepts In 1960/70: Foucault & Lacan developed the theory of structuralism suggesting that

structure existing in all the texts and those art forms are shorthand’s based on our cultural. You can apply this to film.

Genre is a recipe of all paradigms

Paradigms Iconography: the main signs and symbols you hear Structure: way and shape a text

is put together Theme: the issues and ideas it deals with Structure: way and shape a text is put together

Post modernist theory

This is the mixture of past tradition and both continuation of modernism and transcendence within media products.

You can guess what happens in most mainstream films and seeing it play out is where we get pleasure from the text

Theorists include John Belton who identified 3 characteristics of modern cinema and Vladimir Propp’s identified 8 character types used in film.

0 Binary oppositions: Levi Strauss 0 Constant creation of conflict propels the narrative. Opposition

can be visual (light/dark) or thematic (Good/evil) or Aural (Quiet/ loud)

Psychoanalytical theory

0 This is an approach that focuses on discovering the ways in which cinema, and the elements of specific films in particular, are both shaped by the unconscious.

0 The unconscious is has been attributed to four different categories: the filmmaker, the characters of a film, the film's audience, and the discourse of a given film.

0 The unconscious mechanisms can be explained by a range of psychoanalytical perspectives, most commonly Freud's explanations.

Feminist theory 0 The male gaze = when women are objectified in film

because heterosexual men are in control of the camera0 Camera lingers on the curves of the women’s body0 Films played to models of voyeurism and scophillia

0 Erotic object for both characters within the film and audience0 It focuses on the presentation of struggle between men and

women.0 Taking into account how female producers, the few that there

are, interpret and construct media products compared to men.

Genre theory

0This is when knowing the genre of the media text is the only way to fully understand the meaning and storyline.

0Generally there are several genre categories –types like thriller, comedy, romance. Then you need to judge it against the conventions of that genre. You get to observe if the genre has been gone against or gone with the genre conventions.