Lecture Notes

 06/01/2021

Research Page

• Secondary first, and primary second
• This unit is for you to aim at a new audience
• Explain what the audiences can be, all possible audiences
• Demographic = who is watching (statistical)

1. Age
2. Gender
3. Religion
4. Race
5. Disability
6. Sexuality
7. Occupation
8. Cultural Identity
9. Social Class
10. Interests
11. Income

• Psychographic = why they are watching
• Geodemographic = where they are watching

First guess demographic, next guess psychographic. Think of 5 TV channels that suit your piece
Research the demographic profile for those channels. Find statistics, pie charts, data etc. Look at the viewing habits of your audience.

(google statistics, google books)

For geodemographic, write what country.

20th Jan

Characters in my piece:

• Presenters - tell the stories
• Experts - Give facts and verify the stories
• Interviewees - Gives a personal touch that the audience can relate to

Laura Mulvey:

Laura is a feminist film theorist, she talks about the male gaze, the female gaze and the queer gaze. She talks about how men view men, how women view women and how women view themselves. The male gaze is a highly sexualised vision of women in the media today, and the female gaze is about empowerment.

Male gaze:

Mulvey states that “the gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses.”  This basically means that film and media are consciously and unconsciously sexualising women to appeal to the straight male audience. In the history of film this was done in every piece of media, but as the world has become more progressive different things have come into play to move away from this inherently sexist practice. She says that women in older pieces of media are not there to take control of a scene, but rather to be viewed from an objectified point of view. This inequality enforces the ancient and outdated idea of “men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.” The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men. From the feminist perspective, this theory can be viewed in three ways: How men look at women, how women look at themselves and finally, how women look at other women. Typical examples of the male gaze include medium close-up shots of women from over a man’s shoulder, shots that pan and fixate on a woman’s body, and scenes that frequently occur which show a man actively observing a passive woman.

Mulvey has shone a light on the old-fashioned and repetitive style of cinema we see every day, and her ideologies have helped create a more modern and truthful version of cinema as we now have more realistic portrayals of women than ever before. She allows audiences to have a refreshing look at women in strong and powerful positions without a man by their side, thus enforcing the important message that women do not have to be put in a box and objectified, they can play a variety of different, versatile roles and they can be considered through the eyes of society in a way that doesn’t patronize and sexualise them via the Male Gaze.