MART/FAMS 110: Identification & Spectator Position

• Study notes for MART/ FAMS 110 Spring 2025 Midterm.

Week One: Identification & Spectator Position

• Identification is the pleasure of projecting oneself into the world of the text or onto characters in the text.
• A protagonist is the leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, film, novel, or other fictional text.
• Alignment gives access to character information through cinematography, narrative, and mise-en-scene.
• Spatial attachment occurs when the camera stays close to the character.
• Subjective access involves learning about a character's subjective mental state.
• The perceptual point of view shows what the character sees/hears.
• The spectator position is a theoretical position that the audience inhabits, constructed by the camera.
• Film repositions the audience from shot to shot.
• The audience sees more than if they were "really there".
• The audience identifies with the camera.

Laura Mulvey’s Critiques of Hollywood Cinema

• The spectator position for audiences was always male.
• The spectator position was reinforced by witnessing the male protagonist desiring female characters.
• Women on screen stopped the progress of the narrative.
• Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze: women on screen are spectacles for the male gaze, with their principal quality being "to-be-looked-at-ness".
• The camera, the male protagonist, and the audience work together to create the male gaze.
• An anti-hero is a central character who lacks conventional heroic attributes.

Week Two & Three: Semiotics & Representation

• Representation involves producing meaning through language.
• Conceptual systems organize the world in minds through concepts, like "love," "freedom," and "danger."
• Language systems communicate these concepts using words, images, and symbols.

Theories of Meaning

• Reflective theory says language reflects reality.
• Intentional theory says words mean what the author intends them to mean.
• Constructionist theory recognizes the public, social character of language.
• Signs convey or hold meaning.
• The signifier is the form the sign takes (written, spoken, or image).
• The signified is the meaning the sign holds.
• Denotation is the literal meaning of a sign.
• Connotation is the secondary, associated meanings that have come to be associated with a sign.
• General beliefs, conceptual frameworks, and value systems of a society help in deconstructing connotation.
• Myths are widespread cultural values.

Week Four: Photography & Susan Sontag

• Photography is a false reality because images show fragments of reality.
• Passive spectatorship is viewing suffering without action.
• Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: shadows equal the illusion of knowledge, and people mistake shadows on the wall for reality.
• Gordon Parks used photography as a tool for activism, exposing racism, social injustice, and poverty.
• Parks' images gave a human face to social issues, challenging stereotypes and systematic oppression.
• Parks' images aimed to inspire action, not just observation.

Susan Sontag

• By looking at photos, people think they "know" something, but they only show fragments of reality.
• Photography creates passive spectators—seeing images of suffering can induce feeling informed without taking action.
• A photograph's framing context and selection may change its meaning.
• Photography is like shadows, giving the illusion of knowledge but not the full truth.

Week Five: Cinematography & Editing

• Framing includes camera height, distance, and angles.
• Depth of field controls what's in focus.

Types of Shots

• Extreme Close-Up (ECU) is even tighter framing around a small detail, even cutting off part of the object.
• Close-Up (CU) framing shows the detail of a person or object, e.g., the face.
• Medium Close-Up (MCU) frames the body from the head and shoulders up.
• Medium Shot (MS) frames the body of a person from approximately the waist up.
• Medium Long Shot (MLS) is a 3/4 view of person, often to show person from the knees up.
• Long Shot (LS) places considerable distance between camera and scene, showing character from head to toe but still showing details of the character.
• Extreme Long Shot (ELS) shows surrounding space, dominating the human figure.
• Tilt is stationary vertical camera movement.
• Pan is stationary horizontal camera movement.
• Tracking Shot means the camera moves with the subject.
• Establishing shot shows spatial relations among the important figures, objects, and setting in a scene.
• Point-of-view (POV) Shot is where the camera is placed approximately where the character’s eyes would be, showing what the character would see.

Editing Techniques

• Parallel Editing (Crosscutting) means cutting between two storylines, for example the Godfather baptism scene.
• Montage is the juxtaposition of shots to create meaning.
• Continuity Editing maintains logical coherence between shots (180-degree rule, shot/reverse shot, match on action, and eyeline match).
• Reframing repositions the camera within a single continuous shot.
• Jump cuts interrupt a particular action to create discontinuities to distance viewers from the work of art.
• Eye-line Match is a cut in which the first shot shows a person looking off in one direction and the second shot shows a nearby space containing what the character sees.
• Match-on-action shot is splicing two different views of the same action together at the same moment in the movement, making it seem to continue uninterrupted.
• Shot/Reverse Shot is two or more shots edited together that alternate characters, typically in a conversation situation.
• The 180-degree rule keeps the camera on one side of an imaginary line between subjects to maintain consistent screen direction (applied in shot/reverse shot).

Color

• Hue refers to the dominant color family.
• Intensity is the brightness level of an image, also called saturation.
• Value refers to the relative darkness or lightness of a color.

Week Six: Narrative Structure

• Linear plots are chronological, while non-linear plots are out-of-sequence storytelling.
• Flashback is when a story shifts dramatically to an earlier time in history (Sunset Boulevard, 1950).
• Non-Linear Plot means story events do NOT go in chronological order.
• Serial storytelling means the story continues from episode to episode (a relatively recent style in TV).
• Episodic storytelling means narratives are self-contained in each episode.
• Sitcoms follow an episodic structure.
• Anthology dramas are self-contained episodes with no relation to one another.
• Compilation films are made by editing together scenes from multiple existing films or TV shows.

Narration Types

• Narrative is how the story unfolds.
• Narration is who tells the story.
• The unreliable narrator is the POV from which the story is not telling the complete truth.
• Multiple narration is different POVs telling the story (Rashomon effect).
• Classical Hollywood Narrative includes a clear protagonist with goal-driven plot, cause-and-effect storytelling, and centers on central characters who propel the plot forward.
• Plots develop with linear chronologies directed at certain goals, often a single hero/protagonist.
• There is omniscient or restricted narration that suggests some degree of realism.
• Story arc: the situation, the disruption, the resolution.

Week Seven: Non-Narrative & Experimental Cinema

• Experimental Film experiments with some aspect of the filmmaking process, e.g., editing visuals and/or audio, filming techniques, and even the mode of presentation.
• Artists came from other disciplines like painting, sculpting, music, anthropology, and photography.
• Approaches to Experimental Film include abstraction and figuration.
• New technology has made creating film easier.
• Super 8 (1965) was made for the middle class family, for personal use, or for home movies and memories.

Approaches to Experimental

• Abstraction is non-representational, formal experimentation used to elicit emotional responses or simply play with form.
• Figuration invokes recognizable aspects of the real world.
• Could be used narratively or non-narratively.
• Many films are figurative but experimental with storytelling or form.
• Modernity is a style of filmmaking that embraces innovation, experimentation, and a rejection of the past.
• Experimental film has roots in modernity, technological/scientific progress, belief in the knowability of the world, and human capacity to shape history.