Tuesday 23 September 2008

Books

Film Genre - Rick Altman

One of the particular sections that I picked out from the book is from the reception approach to genre with comparison to semantic section.

like reception study, a semantic/syntactic/pragmatic approach refuses determinacy to textual structures taken alone, but in addition it acknowledges the difficulty of extracting those textual structures from the institutions and social habits that frame them and lend the apperance of making meaning on their own. My perception of this extract is that it backs up the idea that the text is based around the social issues that are going on around the time, therefore it is a factor in which effects the perception that a person gets out of a text, therefore effecting their actions/beliefs/motives.


An Introduction To Film Studies (third Edition) - Jill Nelmes

Audience study,even though concerned with large collections of people, is now less likely to generalise than is spectator studies; it is concerned rather with local and specific that may explain audience behaviour.
From the earilest studies of film audiences it is clear that the routine methods of social science could tell us a great deal. in these audience studies and in many others like them since the 1910s, what we have are deductions made from the collectionof quantifiable information - information about, for example, frequence of visits to the cinema and genre preferences. (this contrasts with the inductive approach of spectatorshi, which starts with a theory and then projects it onto the object of study - the person in front of the movie screen.) For me this extract means that by studying the amount of times a spectator comes and views a certain movie genre is a means to answering the question of the behaviour of the movies audience, therefore proving that the idea the audience watch apocolptice films for the purposes of recreation or Entertainment (linking to the uses and gratifications theory). However the last sentences project the idea that apocolyptic films of the future are used as warnings to the audience of possible future events, trying to effect attitudes and beliefs as well as motives within its audience.

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