POWER & THE MEDIA: REPRESENTATION

We continued this topic on Friday 18 September before working individually on trailer practice. Remember that your page PRELIMINARY EXERCISES needs building up with evidence; renew work on camera angles / shots types and add any additional work that you are experimenting with (like Charlie's ident). Your practice trailer will go here, too. 

MEDIA TEXTS REFLECT & PERPETUATE STEREOTYPING UNLESS CHALLENGED 

Our introduction plunges us straight into debates about the power of the media to create representations that perpetuate the status quo and, therefore, stereotypes. In a week when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars)  have presented new standards for representing diversity and inclusion in the movies, with mixed reception, we look at the representations of different ethnicities. (We also note how women have been represented in media, starting with the film industry.

For Stuart Hall, representation in popular culture (like film, advertising, television and magazines) is a site of conflict where black people are routinely stereotyped in particular ways which reinforce social inequalities. He draws attention to the limited representation of black people: that there are three kinds of representation of black people – the native, the entertainer and the social problem.

To understand how Hall saw the term 'the entertainer', think how it was within living memory that shows like The Black and White Minstrels aired on primetime BBC television and the nation ate its breakfasts with Robertson's jam decorated its brand logo golliwogs. The Black and White Minstrel Show, which ran from 1958 to 1978, was arguably the BBC’s most glaring failure to understand the damage it could do when it traded in out-dated stereotypes.

In The Millionairess (1960) the movie star Sophia Loren is depicted as besotted by an Indian doctor, played by the very popular Peter Sellers. In the seduction scene, audiences are invited to laugh at (not with) Sellars who sings "Goodness gracious me!' in a cod Indian accent and black up. The idea of a non-Asian playing the Peter Sellers role may now be considered in bad taste. pokes fun at the idea that a beautiful Western woman (Sophia Loren) could find an Asian man (Peter Sellers blacked up) irresistible attractive. Even though he plays the part of a highly qualified doctor, he is positioned as a figure of fun, a shared joke, with the intended reading of the text being "Goodness gracious me, how could she!"  

The Indian Doctor (BBC1, 2012) created by Deep Sehgal and starring Sanjeev Bhaskar, is set in the same period of the early 1960s but offers a very different intended reading: the audience is offered a sympathetic understanding of what it is like to be 'the Indian doctor' emigrating a Welsh mining village and treated with at best some suspicion and at worst outright hostility. As Dr Sharma travels hopefully through the idyllic pastoral landscape, visions of Eden are under-scored by the them tune lyrics 'I'm half way to Paradise' and then ironically punctured by the reality of his arrival at the village hall where the community is being prepared for his arrival with screenings of official broadcasts about immigrants into the NHS and a showing of 'The Millionairess'. No one sees how inappropriate such racist stereotypes are (a sign of the times) but we do, as contemporary audiences.

To understand Hall's term 'the native', we look at a scene from historical text Gone With The Wind. Mammy takes the role of a plantation servant. The point here is that whilst films about black oppression are moving, revelatory and often worthy, the focus is on the black experience as 'victim' rather than as someone who has agency.

In The Help (dir, Tate Taylor 2011), the story focuses on a young writer's relationship with two black maids, Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, during the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 Jackson, Mississippi. As an aspiring journalist and writer, she decides to write a book from the point of view of the maids, exposing the racism they are faced with as they work for white families. Black domestic workers in 1960s America were referred to as "the help", hence the title of the journalistic exposé, the novel and the film. 

Rebecca Carroll writes: "In the contemporary film The Birth Of A Nation, the racial and political climate was ripe for a film about black uprising, even about one of the bloodiest slave revolts in American history – and soon after, as the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite went viral during the 2016 Oscars, the Academy of Motion Pictures couldn’t believe its good fortune. Oscar buzz was immediate for The Birth of a Nation, and its handsome, hardworking, golden boy director, Nate Parker. It had a legion of black supporters who saw this as a remarkable and major moment: in the wake of all these black male bodies being killed, here was one black male body that was not just living, but showing up for and on behalf of us, telling our history, and being celebrated for it. " So what went wrong? Read the article in The Guardian. 

Films with representations of troubled, failing or criminal black or ethnic minority representations include Bullet Boy (dir. Saul Dibb, 2004) with the versatile Ashley Walters. Akin Ojumo writes in The Guardian: "The award-winning film Bullet Boy is a powerful and controversial drama about urban Britain. But as the country faces fresh soul-searching over young black men and guns, does it offer a cautionary tale or perpetuate a stereotype?"

By 2015 Ashely Walters is starring as PC Ryan Draper, a lead policeman in the TV drama Cuffs, altogether a more positive and mainstream representation. "It was beautiful for once to be playing the role of a good father, a positive role model. That’s what I’m all about and I would love to see more of that on TV."

Young Brixton activists challenge cultural stereotyping

 

TEXTS THAT EXPLORE RACISM AND STEREOTYPING

• Cultural Imperialism is an issue with minorities and sub-cultures particularly when ethnicity is part of the equation (evidence of pre-1990s texts) The Millionairess (1960) pokes fun at the idea that a beautiful Western woman (Sophia Loren) could find an Asian man (Peter Sellers blacked up) irresistible attractive. Even though he plays the part of a highly qualified doctor, he is positioned as a figure of fun, a shared joke, with the intended reading of the text being "Goodness gracious me, how could she!" The Indian Doctor (BBC1, 2012) created by Deep Sehgal and starring Sanjeev Bhaskar, is set in the same period of the early 1960s but offers a very different intended reading: the audience is offered a sympathetic understanding of what it is like to be 'the Indian doctor' emigrating a Welsh mining village and treated with at best some suspicion and at worst outright hostility. As Dr Sharma travels hopefully through the idyllic pastoral landscape, visions of Eden are under-scored by the them tune lyrics 'I'm half way to Paradise' and then ironically punctured by the reality of his arrival at the village hall where the community is being prepared for his arrival with screenings of official broadcasts about immigrants into the NHS and a showing of 'The Millionairess'. No one sees how inappropriate such racist stereotypes are (a sign of the times) but we do, as contemporary audiences.
  • Richard Dyer (1979): "Stereotypes are about power. Those with power stereotype those with less power." "The ideological work of stereotyping involves closing down the range of possible meanings, making fast, firm, and separate what is in reality fluid."
  • Stuart Hall (1981)  proposes that there are three kinds of representation of black people – the native, the entertainer and the social problem. 
  • Alvarado et al (1987) argue that there are four main categories of race representation in the media: The exotic, the dangerous, the humorous and the pitied 
  • What are stereotypes? According to Walter Lippmann in 1922, stereotypes had four major characteristics: they were an ordering process; a short cut; referred to the ‘real world’; and expressed our ‘values’ and ‘beliefs’. Categorisation is a basic cognitive process that people employ to make sense of their lives and their group affiliations.
  • Alison Griffiths sees stereotypes as rigid, simplistic, overdetermined and inherently false…they misrepresent people’s ‘lived identities’ by falling back upon narrowly conceived preconceptions of racial, cultural and gendered difference, thus perpetuating myths about social, cultural and racial groups.
• British Asians are now active contributors and participants on media platforms such as films, TV, newspapers and radio (Gurinder Chadha, Ayub Kan Din, Meera Syall. In Syal's Goodness Gracious Me (1996-2000, BBC radio and TV comedy sketch) the humour cuts both ways. took Asian stereotypes but used them to illustrate comic ideas of universal appeal. It took Asian stereotypes but used them to illustrate comic ideas of universal appeal. It was wickedly apt for the creators of this show to choose a title so reminiscent of the stereotypical portrayal of Asians that had blighted the British media for decades. They set their stall almost immediately with the classic "going for an English" sketch, in which a group of Asians embody the loutish behaviour of lager swilling Brits in an Indian restaurant (one diner asks for something "really bland"). British Asians mock their own need to integrate at the expense of retaining their own cultural roots:the Kapoors (pronounced Coopers), social climbers who were at great pains to deny any of their heritage, desperate to be seen as 100% British. In the episode The Coopers Go To Church it satirizes the wholesale adoption of British culture, religion, cultural practices and accent in a comic way as the immigrants open themselves up to ridicule by gettting it all so wrong: to the Vicar "Get me a good seat, not too near the band, my good chappie." In The Kumars at No.42 (BBC, 7 series, 2001-6), Sanjeev Bhaskar creates television comedy out of self-mocking stereotypes: he plays an inept TV presenter whose parents have built him a studio for live interviews in their garden.
  
• Michel Foucault takes a more active view of audiences: rather than viewers coming to the television screen with already-formed identities, television genres actually help to inform the identity in question.
  

Stuart Hall: stereotyping

 

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