Blog 3: Genre theories

Talking about the vicious theories that will exterminate us, some are closely related to film narrative and presentation.

Roland Barthes is the dude that talks about coding. He first implied that every piece of media includes a process of denotation and connotation. Connotation is when you mix an implicit message into a bit of media.

And denotation is when the audience breaks the message's coding and interprets the media's true meaning. These two processes can be found in almost all media, including posters, films, games, music, books and even conversations between you and your parents.

Here are five codes that you can connotate in the media. Hermeneutic codes, Proairetic codes, Semantic codes, Symbolic codes, and Cultural codes are the fancy names of the five codes, which respectively stand for:

· things that gets your audiences confused

· acting

· What did you do for your mise en scene?

· Still mise en scene, but what does it connect to in real life?

· Things that require the audiences to have historicalc understandings to understand.

The dude right here is called.

Claude Lévi-Strauss. He talks about the opposition. The main idea is that media uses opposition to help audiences easier understand, e.g., character settings and make the story interesting. The ez est example is that you always get a good and a bad guy in a story. Opposing both characters with costumes, lines, and acting allows audiences to understand more easily.

Tzvetan Todorov is the dude with funny hair right here. His main idea is that every story follows a character layout. (You always have a villain, a hero, a hero's girlfriend, and a bro that helps the hero and gets nothing and dies 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀). A story always includes breaking the story's equilibrium (disruption) and creating a new equilibrium established when the story is finished. This helps make the story exciting and attractive so the audience won't sleep while watching your film.

Media itself is about repetition. Similar narrative structures have been repeated so often in so many stories that the audience is "trained" to understand the story immediately. However, highly repetitive plots and narration will bore the audience. This is when some directors start to give out altered structures.

Audiences come with certain expectations about the plots. Some people expect a standard structure based on their stereotypes and personalities of being willing to work around familiar things. Take flashbacks as an example; this is a commonly known method for creating suspense and resolving it. Audiences have already experienced many films using these methods; therefore, audiences do not have to worry about not getting the point that the director is trying to convey. However, Art, it develops over time. The spirit of challenging rules has been a long convention in the history of visual art. Just like progressive rock and afrobeat genres, musicians explore more musical devices out of the box to influence the development of genres. Similar to media, some films explore a complex structure, such as multiple storylines with interposed narration. E.G. 《God’s Town》. These explorations help to include more complicated stories in movies.

In the movie Saw, James Wan explores Hermeneutic codes from Barthes right from the beginning, where you see a shiny blue thing drift down into the draining hole. This act is an enigma that might significantly impact plot developments. Semantic codes are used where the scene is set in disused public toilets. Character oppositions are also used, where two personalities form a sharp contrast. The surgent is way calmer in many ways than the bathtub guy. The enigma from the title sequence might suggest that the structure is an interposed narration. Disequilibrium was already established during the start. Studying the theories not only helped me a lot with recognising the director’s intention. It also helps me to be able to pay more attention on codes and understanding the connotations under the object and mise en scenes.