The Text

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Film Language—shot, montage, movement, iconography, narrative, mise-en-scene, palette…

Semiotic analysis:

Stuart Hall—Encoding / Decoding

Saussure—Sign = Signifier + Signified

Pierce—Signs can be symbols, indices or icons

AUDIENCE

Who are they? (Demographics, psychographics, age, gender, income, race …)

Are they active or passive?

What’s the attraction? (Uses and Gratifications, star appeal, cultural capital (Bourdieu), popular cultural capital (Fiske)… )

What are the possible effects on the audience?

What kinds of readings can they have? (Hall / Morley—Preferred, Dominant, Negotiated, Oppositional, Subversive…)

IDEOLOGY

Dominant or subversive ideologies?

How are the ideologies coded and transmitted?

Does the text support or challenge hegemony? (Gramsci)

Is the text open or closed? (Umberto Eco)

GENRE

What genre is it? How do you know? Is it a hybrid?

Iconography (Buscombe)

Are genre conventions adhered to or challenged?

Is there an auteur at work?

INSTITUTION

Who is the institution behind the text?

Are they a mainstream institution? An independent institution?

Are they primarily a commercial body? Does this affect the construction of the text?

Is the text a marketing tool? Are the audience ‘working’? (Dallas Smythe)

REPRESENTATION

Gender, age, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality… places, ideas, beliefs...

Who is NOT represented?

Male Gaze? (Mulvey)

Star Theory? (Dyer)