MEDI@CHS

http://thackshan.blogspot.com/2009/04/music-magazine_28.html

http://aejmcmagazine.bsu.edu/Testfolder/integratedcover.html

http://www.frankwbaker.com/magazines.htm

The best magazine covers of the year from The Guardian web site.

Here’s an example of high level magazine cover analysis so you can see how it’s done.

Semiotic Analysis of Teenage Magazine Front Covers by Sian Davies.

Quite a few of you missed lessons this week because you were climbing mountains with PE etc. Can you make sure that you catch up and make sure that you undetststand each of the following terms. If you were there, make sure that you understand all of these. To find out about them read the definitions and look at the clips by going to this page of the lovely blog and looking at the stuff on terminology. You must know this stuff by your lesson next week.

L6 (3) 1

Camera Shots, Angle, Movement and Composition

Shots: establishing shot, master shot, close-up, mid-shot, long shot, wide shot, two-shot, aerial

shot, point of view shot, over the shoulder shot.

Angle: high angle, low angle, canted angle.

Movement: pan, tilt, track, .

- shot/reverse shot, eyeline match,

• Sound

• Diegetic and non-diegetic sound.

L6 (3) 2

Camera Shots, Angle, Movement and Composition

Shots: establishing shot, master shot, close-up, mid-shot, long shot, wide shot, two-shot, aerial

shot, point of view shot, over the shoulder shot.

Angle: high angle, low angle, canted angle.

Movement: pan, tilt, track, .

- shot/reverse shot, eyeline match,

• dissolve, fade-in, fade-out, wipe, long take, short take. 

Sound

• Diegetic and non-diegetic sound; synchronous/asynchronous sound; sound effects; sound

motif, sound bridge, dialogue, voiceover, mode of address/direct address, sound mixing, sound

perspective.

Fly magazine

http://www.kehs.org.uk/the_school/magazines

http://www.caterhamschool.co.uk/news/assets/The%20Caterhamian%202008.pdf

http://www.gshs.org.uk/school-magazine/evolve/back-issues-of-evolve

http://www.schoolsportmag.co.uk/

http://www.adventurephotography.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/footy%20magazine%20cover.blog.jpg

In a media-saturated world it is:

-         increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from fiction

-         perhaps impossible to locate the ‘truth’ within the bombardment of media images

NEWS

-         the ‘news’ is presented to us increasingly as a spectacle. Something that needs to compete with the visual excitement of films and video games. It can be argued that when we watch the ‘news’, we treat it as another dimension of media entertainment. We enjoy the spectacle and far from helping us understand the issues and think seriously about the human cost, these ‘events’ are held up as ‘meaningless’ spectacles that are provided for our entertainment.

-         The attack on Baghdad in 2003 was codenamed ‘shock and awe’. It was designed to ‘shock and awe’ not just the Iraqis but global media audiences. The key thing from a postmodern point of view is that this episode blurs with the fictional explosions that we see on films etc and that the stuff we see on TV far from being ‘the truth’ is all part of the same spectacle that operates simply on the surface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neDgVb9YHcA

Thinkers like Baudrillard are associated with doubts about whether some of these events really happened. Are they just ‘media events’?

The 9/11 bombings are particularly relevant here.

Much has been made of the ways in which Hollywood and other media outlet antipicated 9/11 in various fictional forms. We are not so much interested in the conspiracy theory highlighted at the end of this clip. What’s of interest to us is the ways in which the Holllywood version of 9/11 and the actual events of 9/11 become blurred.

In the days after  9/11 many people said it was so strange because it felt like the sort of thing that happens in films. Truth was imitating fiction and in a way this altered our sensory response to 9/11. It all felt unreal and like the sort of thing we have become desensitized to in films. It was hard for some people to recognize that this was real and that this involved real victims.

Here’s a programme made before 9/11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCX4dEqD9E&feature=related

Youtube and the internet only adds to this bombardment of issues and the confusion between reality and fiction.

Here’s some personal footage of 9/11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqo4oh-AzU

One of the planes crashed in Pittsburgh. This flight (flight93) has been the subject of a film that is very gritty and real in its production values. It is not a documentary but there is a sense in which we trust that this film is telling the truth. Amid all the conspiracy speculation on youtube surrounding 9/11, is it any more true than these alternative versions.

Watch the last 30 minutes or so of Flight 93. How does  our experience of watching this fictionalized version work alongside our understanding of the real events.

Do we lose ourselves in this fictionalized version and start thinking in a ‘Hollywood way’. In other words, do we start to believe that they can take over the play and be rescued? Are we lulled into the possibility of a happy ending. Does fiction start to take over from our awareness of the truth.

Do we implicitly trust this version of events?

It’s interesting to watch this short clip where Donald Rumsfeld (a key figure in the Bush administration) seems to be suggesting that the plane was actually shot down. This has been denied as a slip of the tongue. Among all the competing news stories, what really is the truth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Xoxaf1Al0&feature=related

If you look at an actual new report in the aftermath of the event, the news have nothing really to report. The images could be of anything. Who/what can we trust? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnfQfBhfrMw&feature=related

This is supposed to be a flight recording from Flight 93. Can we be sure that it is:

So much of our understanding of the world is filtered through the prism of the media. What can we really know?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnfQfBhfrMw

Molly Ellis thought it would be a good idea if you had some more stuff on Baudrillard to help with your homework. She’s got a point.

You can search about on the internet, but the basic stuff from the lesson is below:

Here’s some of the stuff:

a)Reality/Fiction – the impossibility of ‘truth’. ‘Depthlessness’?

- in  a media-saturated world, where we are constantly immersed in media, 24/7 – on the move, at work, at home – the distinction between reality and the media representation of it becomes blurred or even entirely invisible to us. In other words, we no longer have any sense of the difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them. Media reality is the new reality. (JM, 137)

- The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of simulacrum. Images refer to each other and represent each other as reality rather than some ‘pure’ reality that exists before the image represents it – this is the state of hyperreality.

- All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses – and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely a ‘winning’ discourse.

Jean Baudrillard: ‘it is now impossible to isolate the processes of the real, or to prove the real’: all that we have are signs and simulations.’

Hayden White, amongst others, has argues that history itself is just another narrative that is no more deserving of our trust or ‘belief’ than other more explicitly fictional narratives. History is therefore at base just another more or less socially acceptable narrative, competing for our attention and our assent; just another way of putting things, which will survive, or not, through a process of discussion and debate.

‘historical narratives…are verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.’ White, 1978

Frederic Jameson defines postmodern culture in terms of a ‘depthlessness’ representative of ‘a new culture of the image or the simulacrum.’

You should be aware of the basic principle behind semiotics: signs represent ideas, people and places. Baudrillard disputes this with his notion of hyperreality. Essentially, Baudrillard suggests that there is now only surface meaning; there is no longer any ‘original’ thing for a sign to represent – the sign is the meaning. We inhabit a society made up wholly of simulacra – simulations of reality which replace any ‘pure’ reality. ‘Pure’ reality is thus replaces by the hyperreal where any boundary between the real and the imaginary is eroded. Baudrillard’s work is an attempt to expose the ‘open secret’ that this is how we live and make sense of the world in postmodern times.

To try to explore this more fully, it is useful to look at an example. ‘Baudrillard argues that the events of 9/11 are as much televisual as ‘real’, that we cannot distinguish the representation of the events on television from the actual events, so the events are hyperreal, neither real nor ‘just’ media, but both in combination, impossible to separate. The idea of ‘pure reality’, untainted by media representation, is no longer any use.’ (JM, 141)

A useful theory in this context is Roland Barthes’ theory about ‘The Death of the Author’. This has been very influential in literary and media studies.

‘We know not that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message of the Author-God’) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original blend and clash….Literature…by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text, (and to the world as text) liberates what may be called an anti-thological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is in the end to refuse God and his hypostasis – reason, science, law.’ Roland Barthes, 1977.

What this means, as Christopher Butler explains is that ‘Meanings became the property of the interpreter, who was free to play, deconstructively, with them. It was thought to be both philosophically wrong and politically retrogressive to attempt to determine the meaning of a text, or any semiotic system, to particular ends. All texts were now liberated to swim, with their linguistic or literary or generic companions, in a sea of intertextuality in which previously accepted distinctions between them hardyly mattered, and to be seen as forms of playful, disseminatory rhetoric…’ Butler, 2002.

What is being suggested here is that reality can never be fixed by language because all language is open to different interpretation. ‘Reality’ can never be wholly or convincingly mastered…..so can there even be such a thing as ‘realism’.