Sexism

Laura Mulvey’s theory suggests that the male gaze denies women as a human with feeling, downgrading them to the status of objects to be admired for physical appearance sexually. Her theory suggests that woman can more often than not only watch a film from a secondary perspective and only view themselves from a man’s perspective.

A woman in mainstream film texts is something that is vital. Often a female character has no real importance herself, it is how she makes the male feel or act that is the importance. The female only exist in relation to the male. The male gaze leads to Hegemonic ideologies within our society that people follow. Hegemonic ruling or dominant in a political or social context.

Laura Mulvey argues for women that they are being represented in the media as sex objects through the male gaze. Which then leads women to be objectified by other women as they are used to mean also doing it.

In Visual pleasure, Laura Mulvey states that the role of female characters only have two roles in in a narrative. Number one as an erotic object for the characters within the narrative to view. Number two as an erotic object for the spectators within the cinema to view.

Mulvey also uses the term scopophilia, which means ‘love of watching’. As we sit in a darkened movie theatre, of people on the screen who are unaware that they are being watched. This comes from Freud’s study of the psyche.

Female objectification is related to the gaze when a person’s gaze are objectified, and treated as an object whose sole value is to be enjoyed or possessed by the voyeur. Objectified characters are devalued and their humanity removed.

A patriarchal society is where men dictate the rules over women. Mulvey argued we live in a patriarchal society in which men set the most of the rules and construct the visions,  that males are dominant over woman. The worry is a passive audience will be influenced by this representation of reality and copy it and it will actually become reality if it hasn’t all ready. 

This pop video created such an outrage as we were used to Miley Cyrus as the innocent Miley Stuart. As the world was used to seeing Miley in her hit TV show Hannah Montanna, who has a sweet innocent little girl, which is a huge contrast to the Miley in this music video. Wrecking ball has broken records with 38,000,000 views in only one day, this may be due to the fact that she is naked in the video. The lyrics of the song have a lot of meaning as it describes her hurt and pain, but the video makes it more sexual.  

The video consists of extreme close ups of her face as she cries, her facial expression represents her sadness after breaking up with her long term boyfriend Liam Hemsworth. The extreme close up is a  typical shot type for music videos.


The music video is very literal with the songs lyrics, as Miley sings ' i came in like a wrecking ball' in which she is on a wrecking ball as it swings in a medium long shot. Which does make sense with the lyrics.  


This continues throughout the video as Miley is no longer a innocent little girl, but now a broken women. This is shown through her being a sexual object, which gets her message across. As her clothes were white, which represented purity, has now been taken off and she is naked.


Sinead O’Connor warned Miley not to let them 'prostitute you', although it seems like she is being exploited.  Which agree's with Laura Mulvey's theory of women being sexualised. 



Lily Allen's hard out here video is meant to be seen as a feminist video as she is tired women being seen in a certain way and being sexualised, but the video appears to be a parody pop video.  

The video starts with her being operated on as it shows how many women try to make themselves perfect throw plastic surgery in order to please men.  In which she disagrees with as women shouldn't have to exist only for men. 


Her lyrics are in direct contrast with the rest of the music video. As her lyrics state that she 'dont need to shake my ass for you cause i've got a brain' although throughout the music video. Her back up dancers are shaking their bums. 


Some of her lyrics does represent her and the music video, as she states she isn't a size 6 but she doesn't care. She is fully clothed and she is still gaining attention. 

The whole song and music video is a contradiction but with meaning. 

Animatic

 This is my groups Animatic for our music video project. Which will help us plan exactly what we want in the video. 

Alex Southam

Agile Films describe Alex Southam on their website as:

‘Alex Southam is an exciting new talent, working in a dizzying variety of styles across live action and animation. Entirely self-taught, his inventiveness and creativity have caught the eye with a series of diverse promos for the likes of the Walkmen, Alt+J and Lianne La Havas. Alex joined Agile in August 2012.’

He is a one man band, where he does all the camera, lighting, editing by himself, but now he uses a Director of Photography.

He likes to arrange his music videos as a way that, ‘you can try new techniques and can have real artistic freedom’. This is why he isn’t keen on commercials as they don’t allow his freedom. He uses Vimeo to showcase his videos, this is becoming an increasingly important platform for him. As it is seen to have a ‘higher status’ than YouTube.

His discovery came with the Tesselate video for Alt J, which had the budget of £10,000. The video was shot in one day and it had a large cast, it also contains the special effect called AfterEffect. 

The whole video is a recreation of the 'School of Athens' painting.






The video starts starts with 4 extreme close ups of  two pairs of eyes, a t-shirt and fingers. Which the 5th close up being a bit faster with the girl standing with two boys. 









The video seems to be showing young people in a negative light, as it shows clips of boys fighting, girls in dancing in a sexual way and images associated with gang members. 









The lost and found video, by Chase and Status had a £50,000 budget and was shot in Los Angeles using a Steadicam. It had 36 frames per second which was then slowed down. Its influence is Massive Attack’s Unfinshed Sympathy that went for an early 1990s VHS video look. 






Unfinished Sympathy was filmed on Pico Avenue in Los Angeles 1991. It was the first ever promo music video to be done in one take. The original ending of the video was to do a, wide angled camera shot, that would slowly crane over the hosuing levels of the street. Although the cameraman was too tired and it became a quick fade-out instead.