FILM AS AN EXPRESSION FILM AS AN EXPRESSION OF CULTURAL AND OF CULTURAL AND

NATIONAL IDENTITYNATIONAL IDENTITY

Donata PuntilDonata PuntilKing’s College LondonKing’s College London

23rd March 201223rd March 2012

donata.puntil@kcl.ac.ukdonata.puntil@kcl.ac.uk

• Cultural and Cultural and social/historical perspective social/historical perspective

• Linguistic perspectiveLinguistic perspective

• ConclusionsConclusions

• Bring “the world” into our houses/lives: cultural landscape

• Bridge the gap between “imaginary” and “real” life

• Offer multicultural contexts and interpretations or mis-interpretations

• Are frameworks of behaviours and linguistic patterns, codes and conventions

CULTURECULTURE Linguistic Anthropological

Social Individual

Political

Cultural/Social/Historical Cultural/Social/Historical PerspectivePerspective

“Each significant period is constructed around a particular ‘mode of production’; that is , the way in which a society is organized […] to produce the necessities of life […]how society produces its means of existence […] ultimately determines the political, social and cultural shape of that society”.

Storey, 1997 –p. 101-102

GramsciGramsci : dominant culture (culture as representative of ruling class ideology)

AlthusserAlthusser: Ideological State Apparatus (simbolic representation of the established reality)

Marxist approachMarxist approach

Mutual dependenceMutual dependence:

• bounded in organizational systems, but enjoying autonomy from the state

• more active audience

1970-801970-80

BarthesBarthes:: mass media as a process analogous to language where meaning is constructed instead of represented (myth)

MacLuhanMacLuhan: the medium is the meaning

1990s1990s

Lacan – Foucault - EcoLacan – Foucault - Eco:

• media as modes of discourse, distorting reality being hypotheses, ideologies, illusions• appear to reproduce reality

• invisible oppression and ideological manipulation

Audience

Reader

Student

Post-modern Post-modern approachapproach

reflect dominant culture

determine cultural views

are a cultural product

“Almost everything we know about people, places and events that we cannot visit first-hand comes from the media […] television and film have become the story-tellers of our generation; these stories tell us about who we are, what we believe and what we wan to be.”

Tyner and Lloyd, 1991

Visual representation Visual representation of realityof reality(iconic code – (iconic code – images)images)

Verbal Verbal representation representation of realityof reality(texts and sounds)(texts and sounds)

AUDIO-VISUAL MESSAGEAUDIO-VISUAL MESSAGE(multidimensional - (multidimensional -

multimodal)multimodal)

Films contain:Films contain:

ELEMENTS

SOCIALANTHROPOLOGICAL

LINGUISTIC SEMANTIC

CULTURALARTISTIC

Films contain:Films contain:

The duality

TEXTCONTEXT

LANGUAGE CULTURE

FORMMEANING

Films work at:Films work at:

LEVEL

COGNITIV LINGUISTIC EMOTIONAL

…………every film is:every film is:• An artistic product• An historical document• A cultural product and a producer of culture

• A representation of society• A reproduction of “reality”• A subjective and ideological interpretation

• A complete text with its own language, its own narrative structure, its own symbolism, its own semantics, etc.

…… …… every film is:every film is:

• A very rich product which allows many possibilities of being interpreted, first of all as a cultural product of a given period, but also as an instrument to see how society represented itself in a different time and space

……so it’s very important to distinguish:

REALITY REALITY FROM FICTIONFROM FICTION

REAL EVENTS REAL EVENTS FROMFROM

IMAGINARY EVENTSIMAGINARY EVENTS

In an interview on cinema In an interview on cinema PasoliniPasolini said said:

“I have always being interested in editing and I always thought that every documentary always presents a very subjective point of view: with this I mean that if there had been 700 documentaries on Kennedy’s assassination, each of them could have shown a different perspective, even if all of them would have been based on the same historical event, but they would have portrayed a different vision of that reality. I like to think that if a detective could have worked on the editing process of all those documentaries, maybe he could have arrived at the truth behind that death. For this reason I really think that editing is an extreme important part of a film narrative …… it is a bit like death ….until a person is dead, you don’t really know who that person was…...”

Channel 4, “Whoever says the truth shall die”, 4th February 1987

Reading a film is:Reading a film is:• An interactive process in which the audience is in a relationship with the creator of a film and is interpreting all his/her messages through the language of the images

• It is never a simple, linear, transparent process, but ...

• ……… is the result of that interaction between many different factors (images, music, colours, movements, gestures, words, etc.) each of these factors has a different impact on a different viewer/reader

• Is the interaction between the “creator” of the meaning (the director etc.) + the historical period it has been created + the historical period it portrays + its ideology and the “consumer” of that message + the historical period it is watched + its ideology, etc.

INTERPRETATIONINTERPRETATION::

• UNCONSCIOUS UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSPROCESS

• Implied knowledge

• Own experiences

• Implied social and ideological influences

• CONSCIOUS PROCESSCONSCIOUS PROCESS

• Acquired knowledge

• Critical analysis

• Social and cultural/ideological external experiences

INTERPRETATION:INTERPRETATION:

•intuition

•observation

•contestualization

•decodification

• Develop general competences (transferable skills, autonomous reconstruction of meaning)

• Develop communicative competence (linguistic)

• Develop cultural competence (awareness of one’s and foreign culture)

• Develop inter-cultural competence (awareness of one’s own culture, of cultural diversities)

• Develop a critical perspective (active receiver/reader, challenging stereotypes)

WHAT DOES IT MEAN BEING WHAT DOES IT MEAN BEING MEDIA-LITERATE?MEDIA-LITERATE?

Communicative

Socio-cultural

Strategic (learning how to learn)

Language and culture awareness

WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHAT DOES IT MEAN BEING MEDIA-LITERATE?BEING MEDIA-LITERATE?

-Offer many opportunities to be “read-interpreted”- Are a mirror of a certain age and society- Are cultural products but also they produce culture- Represent the way a country portrays itself- Rely on previously acquired knowledge (inter-textuality)- Expand language awareness-Encourage talks about opinions, feelings, points of view -Represent a stimulus for language acquisition

ITALIAN NEOREALISMITALIAN NEOREALISM• A creative movement in Italian cinema and literature after World War II

• Had a huge influence all over the world

• Was a way in which a nation portrayed itself, represented itself to itself and to the world

• Was very important for the development of a national consciousness/identity

• A reaction to 20 years of dictatorship and censorship

ITALIAN NEOREALISMITALIAN NEOREALISM• Use of non-professional actors• Use of real locations• Use of natural light• Non based on a script• Use of dialects• No special effects etc.• Portray of “reality” as close as possible to real life

• Direct relationship with the viewer• Based on real stories/people

“[…] Italian culture is more than everything a visual culture: cities, landscape, people, food, you cannot understand these aspects without seeing them with your own eyes […]”

(student interview)

“A film opens up a wild spectrum for discussion, culturally, linguistically, it’s very rich to have a film as a basis for discussion and broadening one’s view as well as language knowledge […] “

(student interview)

“What do you think you you learned most in this term?”

“I feel I have learned so much not only on the language side, but also on Italian culture and film in general.”

“Primarily the culture, although I am noticing that I am picking up expressions and words that I would not hear from the teacher or fellow students, so I am getting good exposure to the Italian language as well.”“Culture more than language, […] although it is possible to follow a film without understanding the language.”

(students’ interviews)

• “ Through multimedia in particular, language is no longer just a list of grammatical paradigms or lexical items. Rather, it is intimately associated with all kinds of verbal and paraverbal behaviours, an acoustic and visual context that is indissociable from the larger societal context in which the words are uttered. Language, in a sense, has become culture. Similarly, culture is no longer just the factual pieces of information that textbooks present in the form of culture capsules on foreign mores, but is produced and reproduced under our very eyes, on the screen, through what people say and how they say it. In multimedia, culture is inscribed in language use…

• From a discourse or anthropological perspective, linguistic structures, as they are used in communicative situations, are embedded in the whole social system and historical context of culture; they are but one system of signs among many that people use to give meaning to their environment. Other signs include not only gestures, facial expressions, body movements, verbal and non-verbal sounds, and proxemics, but also cultural artefacts such as traffic, noise and folk, music, pictures and billboards, and landscape and city maps. Linguistic signs acquire their meaning because they point to other signs in the environment. When learners go abroad and interact with the members of the host culture, all these signs are there, live, to be recognized and decoded.”

• Andersen, R.W., Kramsch, C.,Teaching Text and Context through Multimedia, in “LANGUAGE LEARNING & TECHNOLOGY”, Vol.2, n.2, Jan.1999. Pp.31.

BIBLIOGRAPHYBIBLIOGRAPHY

Andersen, R.W., Kramsch, C.,Teaching Text and Context through Multimedia, in “LANGUAGE LEARNING & TECHNOLOGY”, Vol.2, n.2, Jan.1999.Althusser, L., “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus”, in Lenin, and philosophy and other essays, Western Printing Services, Bristol, 1971Barthes, R., Image, Music, Text, Fontana/Collins, Glasgow, 1977Bignell, J. Media Semiotics, an Introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, Continuum, New York, 1983.Evans, J., Hall, S., Visual Culture: the Reader, Sage, London, 1999Fairclough, N. Media Discourse, Arnold, London, 1995Gramsci, A., Lettere dal carcere, Einaudi, 1947Kracauer, S., Theory of Film, the Redemption of Physical Reality, OUP, London, 1960.Inglis, F., Media Theory: an introduction, Blackwell,Oxford, 1990Landy, M., Italian Film, CUP, Cambridge, 2000MacLuhan, M., Understanding Media:the extensions of men, MacGrawHill, N.Y., 1964Sholle, D. and Denski,S., Media education and the (Re) production of Culture, Greenwood P.G.,Westport, 1994Sorlin, P., Italian National Cinema, Routledge, London, 1996Storey, J., Cultural Theory and popular culture, Prentice Hall, Hertfordshire, 1997Tyner K.R.and Kolkin,D.L. Media and you: elementary literacy curriculum, 1991