MediaSpace Wiki

Critical Analysis S2010 S06

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8_bmzRhfag

• Perspective matters
• Tonight I want to talk about two methods that are built on perspective
  • Reader-oriented criticism - Our primary focus tonight
  • Auteur theory - The effect of the creator on content
    • Oddly, a variant of genre theory (last weeks focus)

Wonderfalls-based stories (perhaps Strong reactions)

Reader-oriented criticism

• Meanings are not in texts, but in viewers
  • There is a confrontation between the act of viewing and the intention of the text
  • It is possible to liberate the consumer's voice from its "enforced silence"
  • It is possible to examine the process of reception
• Not a singular method, but an assertion of emergent meaning that can be explored using a variety of methods
  • Semiotics/structuralism
  • Ideological approaches/feminism/marxism
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Phenomenology (the focus tonight)
• Central questions of reader-oriented criticism
  • What happens when we consume a message?
  • What issues and complications arise when we consume from one medium (e.g. television) rather than another?
  • How do our expectations affect our view of content?
    • Personal/connotative expectations
    • Social/interactive expectations
    • Structural/generic expectations (known rules)
    • Semiotic/denotative expectations (the impact of the auteur)
    • Narrative/locally projected expectations (the impact of the story, its characters, and other narrative features)
• These are, in many ways, the same questions McLuhan is taking on when he talks about a "global village" or asserts that "the medium is the message"
  • Are there characteristics of the medium that make viewing television different than
    • Listening to the radio
    • Reading a book
    • Talking on the telephone
    • Chatting via instant messenger
    • Or talking face to face with friends
  • McLuhan asserts that one effect of radio and television is the creation of a global village
    • when we consume a message, we consume the same message as millions of other people
    • how do television messages differ from those of other media in this regard
    • for there to be a "global village", there must be a message in the medium
• The phenomenological approach to reader-oriented criticism
  • Views text as a construction of the viewer
    • Follows a general view of the world as a product of consciousness
    • Which taken to its existential extreme assumes that everything we perceive is a product of our imagination
    • From a certain point of view, this is accurate
  • Message consumption is a personal experience in which we draw on
    • personal experience
    • socially driven expectations
    • genre/preference based expectations
    • auteurial expectations
    • the expectations projected by the narrative
  • At the same time as millions of other people
    • Our common experience of television gives us more common experience to construct with
    • But it's still our experience
  • Hence the experience of consuming television is a performance (is performative)
    • We watch a performance, but we also imagine it
    • We fill in missing information
      • Closure or "gap-filling" (ClosureInReading)
  • What sorts of things do we "fill in"
    • Cuts
    • Time manipulations
    • Relationships
    • What characters are thinking
      • Emotional reactions within the character
        • Love/caring
        • Mirth/happiness
        • Fear/awe
        • Catharsis/transformations
      • Intent for good or ill
      • Perspective - who knows what
        • Redundancy is sometimes a matter of perspective
    • What might happen next
      • Syntagmatic organization
      • Paradigmatic organization
    • In open narratives like a soap opera
      • Questions
      • Problems
      • Mysteries
      • Resolutions
      • Complications
      • Narrative roles (which change)

Auteur Criticism

• "Auteur" simply mean author (French vocabulary strikes again :-)
  • Texts on "auteur criticism" indicate that "auteur" means, in effect, "artist"
• The idea behind auteur theory is compelling, however
  • The core of an artists work is their vision and personality
  • The artist brings a distinctive point of view to every work they create
  • Elements of the artists work act as a "signature" that identifies their work as theirs
  • The artist can be regarded as a "genre"
• This last point is central to "auteur" criticism
  • The method of auteur criticism is that of Aesthetic Genre Theory
  • The primary difference is that the body of work is that of a particular artist
• Artist can be variably defined
  • Film auteur criticism usually focuses on the work of a writer or director
  • Occasionally an actor or actress is treated as an auteur (Jerry Lewis and Lucille Ball both fall in this category)
  • In television, producers (especially writer/producers), ensembles, production companies, and even programming executives are sometimes treated this way
• Auteur Criticism focuses on two things:
  1. The stylistic features common to the entire body of an auteur's work
  2. The thematic features common to the entire body of an auteur's work
• It considers genre and biography, but does not focus on them
  1. Genre, to the extent that existing generic categories apply, but with a focus on how the auteur adapts the genre to their creative vision
  2. The auteur's personal history, but not at the level of specific instances which may be reproduced on film, but on the way personal history has shaped the auteur's creative vision.
• Some gotchas
  1. Auteur theory is generally based on the "entire" body of an auteur's work (that's a lot of viewing)
  2. Auteur theory generally frowns on assertions of "intention".
     • It's fine to identify recurring themes and stylistic conventions.
     • It's OK to find roots for those themes and stylistics in biography
     • But try to avoid the "intentionalist fallacy" (the idea that you can know the mind of the auteur)
  3. As we've already noted, auteurs often focus their efforts within a larger genre, which returns us to genre criticism
     • Indeed, if we treat a series as a genre, there is no difference between "ensemble" (e.g. production team, cast) oriented auteur theory and genre theory