BFI Study Day: Follow up notes

Notes made from the session:

- 'Liberal Feminism' - Focusing on individual women's personal and political autonomy
- The media is male dominated - it reinforces the patriarchy even the representations of women are constructed and formulated by men in power
- key conventions can be manipulated to create alternative meanings
- the idea of the 'fragmented self' and how there is no 'real' you as you are the result of external influence, societal structures and cultural experience.
-'Nothing is original' - representations in the media are as 'real' as actual experiences and this results in the absence of an 'objective reality'
- There is no essential 'truth' but rather a multitude of truths that are all equally valid.
- The 'truth' is a narrative that is essentially a belief that helps us temporarily make sense of things or a situation
- History is progressive, Knowledge and insight liberate us, and Knowledge is a secret unity.
- Mediated experiences - intense and resonate with audiences for repeated viewing
- Readerly/Writerly texts- [R] has a fixed meaning and requires passive reception whereas [W] requires the audience to contribute to their experience to fully enjoy the text

Summary of theories:

bell hooks: Race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity and social class combine into a lack of power in the media, women are objectified and we live in a flawed patriarchal society.

Liesbet van zoonen: Sex role stereotypes; our society prescribes sex appropriate behaviours and appearances, as well as interests and reinforces gender assumptions.

Judith Butler: Gender is a performance, that is repeated until it becomes 'reality'.

Saussure: Denotation/Connotation- Connotations are naturalised, but polysemic.

Barthes: Denotation is a dominant connotation; 'myths'

Stuart Hall:  Encoding is the preferred reading, Decoding is how the audience reads the meaning.

Lyotard: We are a character in our own lives and that totalising cultural narratives that organise our thoughts and values into a 'grand story' that we can make sense of.

Baudrillard: Imitation that seems more real than the thing it is imitating.


300 word theory analysis of Inception [2010, Dir. Christopher Nolan]

Inception reinforces the ideas suggested by Baudrillard heavily throughout the movie, The scene where Ellen Page's Character is unaware that they're dreaming references the idea of simulacra, that the imitation of something can sometimes seem more real than the thing that they're imitating. However, this is subverted as we, as an audience, are constantly reminded of how they're dreaming through 'wake up' scenes and the existence of the spinning top. The entire movie is extremely hyperrealistic, with characters such as Mal, being a blurring of a real person and a projection of Cobb's imagination. Inception also reiterates the ideas presented in bell hooks theory of a flawed patriarchal society, that the expectations and stereotypes implemented in our society are harmful to both men and women. The expectations of Cobb lead to him taking more risks in order to 'prove himself' and become a good father, an oxymoronic experience throughout the film, and these choices are made motivated by a conformity to what society and the fictitious society believe what makes a 'good' man/father. You can see this create an act of turmoil for the character which reinforces the flawed aspect of these patriarchal standards. In relation to Hall's theories, I think that Nolan's intentions were to have the audience make their own decisions regarding the characters and 'realities', by creating characters that are morally ambiguous but still have relatable intentions and motivations for the intended audiences. The preferred readings of this film are unclear however it is clear that Nolan expects us to sympathise with Cobb, despite his arguably immoral actions, and the oppositional reading would be to take a dislike to Cobb and condemn his actions. The idea of 'unreliable reality' is also important as it reinforces many post-modern theories but also acts as a subversion for the simplistic theories such as the denotation/connotation theories as the 'denotations' are not what they seem as well as the connotations having to be negotiated depending on what part of the film you're watching and it fluctuates to a state where simply understanding the meanings of what seems 'obvious' becomes far more complex.