10:50 p.m. - 2003-01-24
oh! To join the ranks of Academia!
what we learnt in "media culture and analysis" this week
Formalism.
Texts are not there by themselves, someone must be there in the first place to create it.
Hence, formalism admits the constructed nature of a text and seeks to examine how it works. A text can refer to anything from a book, to a tv show, an ad, or even a film.
Formalism in literature focuses on the literary text, on the various words and phrases, and how they �mix� to create a certain effect. (It ignores the biographical and socio-historical context in which the author wrote the text.)
3 key questions to be asked when we are pretending to be formalists and analysing a text:
1. what are the different elements, symbols, stuff?
2. how do they work to complement or contrast each other?
3. what is the effect?
But,
Formalism in film is more complex as it involves various distinct elements like sound, lighting, props, camera shots, editing etc.
In addition...
going into the hairy world of academia, we are bound to traverse into the areas of narratology, gender representation, emasculation of ideals, cultural hegemony, social anthropology, intertextuality etc... with all these different approaches by which we can abstract meaning from the film, it is easy to lose direction and to spiral away till we talk about themes that are too universal to be specific.
To add more spin to our thought compass, it is not clear where formalist critique ends and the other critiques begin.
Form cannot be separated from content.
