Semiotics:
- Developed by Ferdinand De Sessure
- Studied how language created meaning
- Language doesn't reflect reality - meaning is constructed
SIGNS ------------------ >
REPRESENTATION ------------------- > INTERPRETATION OF SIGNS
Signs: SIGNIFIER + SIGNIFIED = SIGN
Visual Pleasure + Male Gaze:
- Theory developed by Laura Mulvey
- Feminist Film Scholar - 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema'
- Argued that female characters were objects for male characters sexual desire.
- The Male Gaze - male characters are 'the barer of the look' which is usually aimed at physically desirable, sexually submissive characters.
- Mulvey argues that spectators watch the films though the eyes of male due to 'The Male Gaze'
- Cinema offers voyeuristic pleasures.
- Women connote 'to-be-looked-at-ness'
Stereotypes:
- Stereotypes are often used as a cultural shorthand when represented by the media.
- Dyer had argued that stereotypes are only used to reinforce peoples differences and singling people out as this stereotype.
- Dyer had also argued that stereotypes are used to represent peoples differences as natural.
- EG: Stereotypes about youth represents that they are all wreck less and irresponsible - giving the brand of 'youth' to everyone.
Simulacra:
- Theory developed by Jean Baudrillard
- Representation is problematic
- Simulations of realities which don't exist
- Hyper reality - 'a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are blended together so there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins'
- Celebrity images are a good example of this.
- There is no distinction between reality and and representation, only the simulacrum.
- Baudrillard researched hyper reality, noting how humans accepted simulation as reality.
- Realized that many people now couldn't identify the line between reality and altered representation.
- Baudrillard questioned if anything was truly real in the age of mass media.
- EG: The Only Way is Essex.
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