Posts Tagged ‘Figure’
Post #19-Food Network Star (Figure)
Posted on: June 16, 2011
In this short clip of an episode of Food Network Star, the camera plays a very important role in how viewers react to what is taking place on the show; the signifiers and their signifieds helps the audience to formulate interpretations. Some of thee things I noticed in this clip what the shot of the guy at the farmers market when they just arrived and the way the camera focused on the judges as they critiqued the contestants plates. The long trailing shot made you think that there was a surprise awaiting to happen when the constants came to the farmers market. The emotions that are evoked while looking at this particular shot influences how the audience felt at that moment. The camera shots on the face of the judges as they react to the performances of the contestants and the food they have presented, influences the audience’s interpretations. How we read the interactions within the show assist us in formulating ideas of what could be taking place.The camera, music and motion
assist the audience in reading tv shows. The camera seemingly becomes our eyes, a
way of seeing the show as if we were there. By doing so we can formulate interpretations of
what is occurring through the eyes of the camera. Images from television shows seems to not
require much decoding, we interpret what we see based upon what the character
or scene is depicting. Since we have internalized these codes at a very young
age, we become conscious of their existence as we watch and analyze the conventions and non conventions of a show. It is easily understood that the conventions in a television shows are of the norm and can easily be recognized by any member of a particular audience. There is not much work that needs to be done when “reading” this type of television show.
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Media represents narrative, argumentation and image structured cinematography within a single text. The synthesis is the connection and function of all these three components of a text combined. The synthesis allows us to look at all the components as a whole. We can look at the film in terms of what the story is, what rhetorical nature of the film based on conventions and the intratextuality and intertexuality of the film. The narrative of the film is a story of a man seeking repentance for accidentally taking the lives of seven people. He does so by donating his organs to seven strangers.
The argumentative aspect of this film is whether or not this extraordinary story can be seen in “reality”. Of course there are quite a number of organ donors who “give life” to people who they may not even know. However, is this particular story as real as it is on a movie theatre screen as it is in reality. The story, the characters, setting, diegetic conventions and film editing and experimentation influenced how the audience “reads” the film as a single text. A casual viewer may never really pay much attention to these critical aspects to formulate interpretations of what system of signifiers and signifieds at work. The film 7 Pounds and the visual metaphors, signifiers and rhetorical conventions allow the audience to look beyond just what appears on the screen. We are given free rein to analyze all aspects of the movie. Its more than just the story of a man seeking forgiveness for what he did, more over, it is a film about the same man realizing how each moment of his life is worth more than just living. But, could we also argue that this theme is very typical for the majority of Will Smith movies? I must agree that there is the recurring theme that most Will Smith films have, but are all of them conventional or even be considered “realism”. Image-constructed cinematography plays a critical role in how images evoke emotion and influence our own perspectives.
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Cultural myths were developed based upon the events that are occurring in a society’s culture. Roland Barthes, according to the text, talks about how they came to be via the bourgeois society and how they utilized myths as a means of asserting their values. One might ask then, why did these myths become so common place? Who allowed these myths to be upheld to this day? Well, society has a lot to do with how popular, “truthful” and the duration of these myths. We, as members of the society, are capable of controlling what becomes a myth and what is “truth”. One cultural myth that is quite common in the American Suburbia is “American are addicted to driving”. I can agree that this myth may only seem plausible in Suburbia because not all Americans like to drive, whether it is in their daily commute or just travelling to various places. Members of Suburbia are seen by the rest of society as being “car happy” because of the hustle and bustle of their daily schedules. In all actuality, Americans aren’t addicted to their cars; it’s merely a tool for getting tasks completed at a faster rate. If you look at any city, you can see that cars are the dominant mode of transportation. Living in Suburbia doesn’t necessarily mean that you like driving your automobile more that the next person. It’s just out of convenience.
The function of this myth is to placed or rather, categorize citizens living in Suburbia as “car happy”, associating that signifier with its signified as the population of people who own multiple cars as being addicted to them. The same concept can be traced back to how the bourgeois utilized myth. The signifier being car relates to a specific signified: Suburbia is “car happy”. However the bourgeois would make the connection to a new signified of being wealthy or in a negative sense, cars being an addiction. This idea then, becomes naturalized and is viewed as being the truth. This is how myths have been upheld for such a long time.
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