CCR: HOW MY FILM REPRESENTS SOCIAL GROUPS & ISSUES

This completed section should be posted on your blog before next lesson on Wednesday 2 February 2022

SOCIAL GROUPS - images collected in Pinterest boards, labelled and groups: How does your film opening represent social groups or issues? Find images (= representations) and collate them in different Pinterest boards like this.

• You have identified the social groups featured and presented them visually (in Pinterest). Roles and jobs? You could pull screenshot of your Pinterests here or perhaps take images from your casting post?
• The focus is on how they are represented: stereotypes? anti-stereotypes? What are they like? Gender, status, age? 
• Identify the issues in your film opening: recent 'issues' have included artificial intelligence, people smuggling, bullying, kidnapping, art theft, online fraud. How are they presented in your production?
• Use theorists where relevant, with a light touch: see below the image about how to use Stuart Hall on representation

STUART HALL

For Stuart Hall, there is no one single fixed 'meaning' of any media representation or text; different audiences understand representations differently. So, in Off The Leash, whilst the film makers may have aimed at conveying the Transparent Animals as protesters standing up for democracy some audiences may view them as dangerous anarchists. However, the representation of the newsreader, the mouthpiece for the Government, tends to reinforce the likely preferred dominant meaning: he is coded as calm and composed, well dressed, white, middle class. He warns the audience that the protesters are dangerous and violent. The makers of Off The Leash use animal masks to encode the protesters as dangerous and the film's name reflects this.

For Stuart Hall, stereotypes are generated because of the limited stereotypes the hegemonic elite show us. If the makers of the film intend to develop an anti-Government, pro- freedom agenda in the rest of the film, they will no doubt write about this here. Alternatively, they may have decided to show in their film the explosive danger of withholding basic freedoms from a society that is used to a very much more democratic process.

Video on representation

Video on reception theory