What Is Representation? All types of media are representations of reality, they are composed, written, framed etc… Every form of media is a perception of someone’s reality. As an audience we are given the opportunity to critique allowing us to form opinions on characters for example, however our perception of the reality is limited. The information we receive from any form of media is restricted, for example if we’re watching a documentary the producers have selected certain elements that they want the audience to see allowing them to craft the program, this could make the programme bias, or perhaps we were just not allowed the truth when viewing the documentary for example. The basic idea is that Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of 'reality' such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures. Representation includes, age, gender, sexuality, status/class and race etc… The study of representation is about decoding the different layers of truth/fiction/whatever. In order to fully appreciate the part representation plays in a media text you must consider • Who produced it? • What/who is represented in the text? • How is that thing represented? • Why was this particular representation (this shot, framed from this angle, this story phrased in these terms, etc) selected, and what might the alternatives have been? • What frame of reference does the audience use when understanding the representation? In order to gain a better understanding I have decided to break down different elements of representation in films.
ETHNICITY: Race is biological, and can also be based on cultural ethnicity. In film we tend to see stereotypes of ethnicities exaggerated. In addition to this we also tend to see a lot of the historical views in terms of ethnicity in films, for example we see a lot of films that are based in the past therefore it takes on the story of racism, the idea of one race being superior to another. In a lot of cases we see the race of the whites being superior to blacks. This is sometimes deemed risky, but at the end of the day the film is only trying to tell a story, a lot of the time the racism is seemed to be uplifting in movies as characters often demolish the rules of the times and defeat the odd… possibly even become friends.
GENDER / SEXUALITY:
Shawshank Redemption