Representation

Representation

For your coursework- be absolutely sure of the following
• Identify characters, events or issues within the production to discuss.
• What representations have been generated?
• Discuss the specific elements of character representation, i.e. facial expression, costume, behaviour etc.
• Have any stereotypical representations been generated?
• Does the production conform to, or subvert, any dominant ideologies?

Representation

• Generally gender is the dominant representation in music videos:
Men Women
Rebellious males (clothing), links to the backdrop, losers (unshaven, shabby, noble), street (dangerous, hard), pretty boys (non-threatening, handsome) Mature Chanteuse, Solo Folkie-artist, the torch singer, sexy singers, bubble gum pop star

• However the music can also be represented
Heavy Metal – long hair, certain guitars, Indie – Rough and ready style – casual look
R n B – dark, gold, sex appeal, darker skin Techno/Dance – typical club clothing and costumes

• REMEMBER: Representation refers to the construction in any media text of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and others.
• However it can also be argued that because music videos are obviously “not real” they can seek to subvert reality and accepted levels of “reality”.

Theorists
Mulvey – The purpose of this displace is to facilitate a voyeuristic response in spectators, which presumes a ‘male gaze’ one that is a powerful controlling gaze at the female on display, who is effectively objectified and passive (can this be subverted?)
Dyer – A star is an image not a real person that is constructed out of a range of materials and stars represent shared cultural values and attitudes, and will promote a certain ideology. Stars also provide us with a focal point for our own cultural thinking — particularly to do with Youth & Sexuality. Stars provide audiences with a focus for ideas of 'what people are supposed to be like'
Foucault – sees representation as a discourse (a group of statements)
Alvarado – Racial Representation – exotic, dangerous, humorous, pitied
Class - contradictions which involve a mass medium attempting to reach all the parts of its class-differentiated audience
Hall - encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience. Messages are coded into the media text for the audience to draw messages from – there are preferred readings, dominant readings, negotiated readings and oppositional readings.
Tee - However, the critical questions really are the extent to which the images of music videos have the power to make a representation, have any relationships with the events of reality, or have the ability to portray these events.

Introduction example
The production being discussed is my A2 Advanced portfolio music video “Walking on Sunshine” from the genre of mainstream pop.

Paragraph example

The biggest issue with representation is the difficulty is promoting an ideology to the audience (Dyer). With our artist, we needed to represent of our artist as a rebellious, masculine man as this is expected in genre, although the inclusion of a youthful focus was needed to reach our target audience. This was done through a series of close-ups on the costume which included a leather jacket and tracking, on-tempo shots of him playing an electric guitar, although through cross-dissolves to a nonlinear narrative we also established our artist surrounded by a set of modern gadgets and a series of close-ups on the artist using an i-phone and facebook.