Response to Class on 10/21

One of the things that I have enjoyed about this class is the ability we have had to learn about media across the board. It is not just film, or TV, but we bring in all aspects of media we see today. This includes the documentary, reality TV, games, and so on. Being able to relate the topics we learn to different types of media has been extremely useful to me and I hope to be able to take what I have learned and use it in what I end up doing.

In class we spoke about a couple different new topics. The first was structuralism, which is a method for anlyzing the deep structuring logic of cultural products and practices. Continued, structuralism stresses its meaning from its relationship to every other element in the system. Or another way to see it is the structure of the media is established based on relational encounters.

To give us an example we viewed a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. In this scene Hitchcock uses alternating shots where we look at the character, Melanie, it switches to an object we assume she is looking at, and back to her.

To give an example of this, I took a clip of an alternating shot scene from another one of Hitchcock's movies, Vertigo, which I hope shows up properly into this account. It is shown below.

In this scene James Stewart is following a women, and the entire 1:45 clip is nothing but showing these alternating shots. The structure of the scene is built around James Stewart acting and reacting to the woman he is following.

Secondly, we talked about semiotics. Which is the study of signs and signification. This is about how meaning is generated in various forms of text.

Concerning this, there are certain denotations, which signifies and has literal meaning. There are also connotations, which imply and have an implied meaning.

One of the concepts we focused on in class were the signs associated with structuralism. There are three categories of signs: 1) Icon/iconic signs - something that can be seen or perceived, 2) symbol/symbolic signs - where the signifier does not resemble the signified, the relationship must be learned, and 3) index/indexical signs - the signifier is not arbitrary but is directly connected to the signified, people can usually figure this out.

To give an example of the I am sitting in my room looking at a painting of a baseball player sliding head first into home where a catcher is blocking the plate. To the casual observer, in regards to this picture, the iconic signs would be the baseball, or the overall picture. The symbolic signs would the catchers equipment. It might be a necessity to describe why the one player has on such pads and gear. A majority of what is happening in this picture would fall under the indexical sign. Take for example, the dirt from the player sliding would indicate he is not just laying on the floor, or the extended are of the catcher preparing for receiving the baseball, these are not necessarily known, but the indications of the surrounding elements would most likely lead the observer to understand what is happening in the sequence.

The last concept we learned was about "The Gaze." Another term being scopophilia which is the desire to see. Hitchcock uses this element quite a bit in his films. The two that are great examples of this are, of course, Rear Window, where the entire film is based around one man watching what is going on in his neighborhood. The second would be in Psycho, where the disturbed Norman Bates is seem looking through a peep hole into the unsuspecting hotel guest. The gaze, arguably, is a humanistic element of life, that we like to "see" into the lives of others. Take for example the tabloids or any magazine that focuses on the lives of celebrities, athletes, politicians, or any number of other people. It is not just a sexually driven concept either, it is one that, in some, is just a concept of "people watching."