representation essay

My thriller conforms to certain traditional structures of representation but it also challenges these structures going against them and trying to portray a new postmodern approach.

In my thriller we do conform to the ideologies and representation structure, especially the marxism theory. We have a motherly figure who cares for and is worried about her child. This is common sense and is dominant ideology because you would expect this from a mother. The way the scenes are edited shows that the child is a illusion in the mothers imagination because the child has actually died. The fact that the mother still cares and sees the child conforms to the motherly ideology.

Our thriller does not conform to the structure of feminism and Laura Mulveys theory that women are a 'male gaze'. Our main character is a girl but her costumes does no convey her to be sexualised, it is a long white gown, showing pureness and prominence on the screen. We use close ups, not of her body parts or in a sexualised manner but of her face to show intimacy. Many women are shot sexually traditionally in hollywood films but we have chosen a different approach to shoot our main character that challenges the 'male gaze' representation. 

The stereotype representation according to John Berger states that people have to conform to the dominant ideology and what is the 'norm'. In our case we challenge this as we cast a women to be our lead actress not the traditional male. This challenges Bergers theory that 'men act and women appear'. We also did not cast any male roles in the thriller opening reinforcing that we are challenging this traditional representation that males always take the lead roles 

Our thriller uses hyper reality as our character has psychological issues and does not live in the real world. She has simulations of reality as Baurillard suggests. She has visions of her dead child and flashbacks so we are not seeing her life as it is now. This is a post modern theory and as it is not a traditional structure of representation we are breaking the conventions of traditional representations again.

Overall i think that our thriller challenges the traditional structures of representation. Although we conform to one of the theories we could also argue that we challenge this because even though our character is portrayed as motherly she is the one that kills her daughter, so this is not common sense and dominant ideology. 

genre essay

The genre that we chose for our film opening was thriller. I think that our thriller conforms to most of the traditional structures that make up a thriller.We haven't evolved the genre and given it new meaning, but we tried to stick to the conventions and keep within the one genre.

Daniel Chandler said that there is a distinctive type of text/genre. We conformed to this as we did not break the barriers for a thriller and didn't attempt to mix genres together. We kept to the thriller theme by the use of shot types, fast pace, quick shot changes and a lot of close ups to show mystery. The  lighting and editing we used was also mysterious as it was dark and the editing of the camera gave effects such as shaking and this was suppose to give a trippy feel to interest the audience. The soundtrack we had created ourselves and this was made with the intention to sound creepy, it was slow paces pianos which is relative of a thriller theme. We did however break the male role stereotypical rule as we cast a woman for our psychologically troubled role.

Altman said that media texts have genre to create emotion,visceral and intellectual meaning.To some extent our thriller caters for the emotional meaning because there is a mother and daughter reltionship. This is not very apparent to the audience though so this is a faint connection. Our thriller is categorised under the sub genre of 'psychological thriller' this creates mystery and keeps the audience thinking. This could be classed as intellectual because the audience is not fed all the information they have to try and piece things together.

Steve Neale  said that genres are dynamic and evolve over time. We did not evolve the thriller genre very much. We cast a woman to attract more women as thrillers are mostly watched by the male audience. But apart from that we broke no boundaries and stuck to the main rules of creating a traditional thriller opening.

Mittel says that genres are a way of selling to an audience. We tried to make our thriller apply to a wider target market than just the 12-25 year old men. We tried to broaden the audience type so

that we would not limit the people we could sell too. So we broke this traditional structure of genre as we tried to cater for the needs of different target markets.