PCC - Press Complaints Commission

- Press Complaints Commission
- Voluntary regulatory body (self-regulating) non Governmental and had no legal powers
- Closed on 8th September 2014
- Criticism due to lack of action during the News of the World phone hacking affair
- Started in 1953
- Replaced by IPSO

Question One B - Audience Summarised

Hypodermic Needle Theory - Frankfurt School - Germany between the wars 1920s and 1930s - the rise of Hitler and the influence of mass media on the public, Propaganda - released into film as well as newspapers. The Effects Tradition, the media has the power to influence an audience.

Cultivation Theory - George Gerbner - keep seeing representation on the media and it reinforces a stereotype - people who watch soaps think there is more divorces, murders, dramatic events etc... in society than there actually is. Passive audience.

Roland Barthes - myths are created in society

2 Step Flow - Paul Lazarsfeld - opinion leaders influence society more than the original text does - this relates to film critics influencing you to watch a movie

Uses and Gratifications - a text can inform , entertain, cause/identify with the characters in the text, social needs.

Stuart Hall - Reception Theory - Preferred or dominant reading, oppositional reading and negotiated reading

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - media texts meet the needs of an audience

Tzvetan Todorov's Theory

Todorov argued that there were five steps to a narrative story which can be applied to most 'mainstream' film narratives.

1) Initial EQUILIBRIUM (status quo)
2) The equilibrium is disrupted by an event (DISRUPTION)
3) There is a RECOGNITION of the disruption
4) An attempt to REPAIR the disruption
5) A return or REINSERTION of the new equilibrium

Applying Todorov's theory to The Lion King:

Equilibrium: Mufasa is King of the pride and the other lions really look up to him.
Disruption: Scar kills his brother (Mufasa)

The BBFC

1) The BBFC was founded in 1912 by the film industry when the local authorities started to impose their own strategies of censorship. It was originally called the British Board of Film Censorship but was later changed to the British Board for Film Classification. It is independently owned and has non-governmental intervention, they were made to impose age certificates and analyse whether films were acceptable nationally.


2) Some of the case studies that the BBFC looked at was A Clockwork Orange, Juno and others like Little Miss Sunshine.
To start with, A Clockwork Orange caused a stir due to a very violent rape scene. The film was originally classes as an 'X' rated film, uncut, however was later passed to an 18, still without cuts. Some of the issues were that, even though Stephen Murphy approved the film although having said he was mildly "disturbed although satisfied" there was an uproar with the public opinion and press stating that the violent behaviour could have been imitable. The press released stories on the news stating that there had been recent violent crimes due to imitable behaviour under the influence of A Clockwork Orange.

3) The licensing legislation is what gives the BBFC the power to regulate films while the Video Recordings Act of 1984 determine whether the material is suitable for viewing in the home.

The Hypodermic Needle Theory

The Hypodermic Needle Theory implies that the media is powerful enough to inject highly influential information into the brains of the audience, whether the information be true or false its up to the audience to decide if they believe it or not as they have no other sources of media information to compare it to so they have no option but to act upon it. 

Hypodermic Needle Theory promotes a few basic assumptions:

1. Humans react uniformly to stimuli.

2. The media’s message is directly “injected” into the “bloodstream” of a population like fluid from a syringe.

3. Messages are strategically created to achieve desired responses.

4. The effects of the media’s messages are immediate and powerful, capable of causing significant behavioral change in humans.

5. The public is powerless to escape the media’s influence. 

One example is when Orson Well's audio book was first aired on the radio in the US he decided he wanted his to be more realistic so when the people of America tuned in on the radio, they thought that there was martians invading New Jersey. This caused an outcry and people began panicking and buying emergency supplies of food, the police, firefighters and ambulances were flooded with calls as the audience had no form of media to compare it to. This was around the time that Hitler had began taking over Germany and he took over the newspaper and censored it followed by introducing highly influential Propaganda. 

Apply narrative theories to one of your coursework productions.


For my AS Coursework I constructed the opening of a film in the sub-genre of teen drama and researched a lot of films that were similar to our genre such as Wild Child, John Tucker Must Die, Mean Girls and She the Man. These all contributed to developing our knowledge on typical soundtrack, camera shots and storylines for teen drama.The storyline for our film was a young teenage girl and her two friends taking revenge on her cheating ex-boyfriend and was a comedy like Mean Girls unlike a dark humour such as Heathers. My group decided that our pre-title sequence should hook the audience into the narrative of the film in a number of ways.   

Roland Barthes discusses narrative in terms of a number of codes that are used to help to unravel the text for the viewer.  One of these is his Enigma code – the purpose of this is to keep the audience watching the story. In order to hook our audience we need to create a mystery that needs to be solved. Barthes also discussed a film in terms of Action codes.  In our film we included the main protagonist ripping the photo of her boyfriend, which is an indicator to how the revenge is going to take place. It also implies her anger towards the individual. 

Another action code we included was the science girl making an experiment, which again, indicated that the experiment might have something to do with the revenge.Semantically, we also included key codes to help our viewers understand our narrative.  For example, the reflective shot in the mirror and the cucumbers on the eyes which suggest that females are very conscious about their appearance and give a very generalised view.  We also included what Barthes describes as Referential codes, we used these in our film opening for example, the girls being in school are an obvious indication that they are in education. 

 Vladimir Propp is a theorist who discusses narrative purely in terms of character and actions.  Despite his research being about fairy tales, his work is helpful in decoding our sequence.  The protagonist in our film clearly meets Propp’s definition of a hero in that she departs on a search and has some sort of mystery or quest that needs to be solved, in our case the protagonist has a plan to get revenge on the ex-boyfriend and has to complete this plan with the help of her friends.  Furthermore, Propp came to the conclusion that all narratives can be boiled down to a number of functions initiated by these characters.  Our film follows the function of the villain being defeated, in this case the ex-boyfriend and the task is resolved in that they get revenge on him.

Todorov’s theories of narrative discuss texts in terms of the arc of a storyline.  His theory split stories into 5 clear steps: equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, the recognition of the disruption, the repair of it and then the new equilibrium.  Our title sequence plays with these codes in a non linear way in that the opening starts with a disruption when the boy cheats on the girl followed by the repair and then the equilibrium as they all end up living happily.

Finally Claude Levi-Strauss defines narrative as requiring the constant creation of conflict and opposition.  He summarised this in terms of visual opposition (such as light versus darkness) or conceptual (eg. Love versus hate, control versus panic).  We included a number of binary oppositions in our opening sequence, such as the main protagonist loving the boyfriend that when he cheats on her she turns to hate him but still loves him. We also had a few binary oppositions in terms of character personality for example, all the girls are different in terms of how they act for example, Hayley is very clever and 'geeky' whereas Tiffany is very popular and self centred. 

Vladimir Propp's Theory

A typical list of characters that show up in most movies

- The hero 

- The villain

- The donor

- The dispatcher 

- The false 

- The helper 

- The princess 

The Vampire Diaries

1) The hero - the heroine of the film, saviour. 

Matt, Stefan and Damon

Throughout the episodes, Matt saves a lot of people being the only human and risks his life to save his friends. 

Stefan saves Elena right at the beginning of the show when her car is thrown off a bridge. 

Damon risks his life for many others and kills the very powerful witch Kai. 

2) The Villain - the one that competes and struggles against the hero.

Kai, Silas etc...

Kai is a powerful witch who kills his whole family and is sent into a mortal hell but releases himself to complete his mission and kills his sister but is defeated by Damon (the hero)

Silas is also a very powerful witch who possesses a number of people and pretends to be them in order to get the blood of the doppelgänger (Elena) who is good.

3) The donor - the one who gives the hero help in order for them to complete a mission

Bonnie 

Bonnie helps the heroes by making a spell in order for them to have a daylight ring so when they go out in the light they won't burn (she gives it to Caroline who is also a minor hero) 

4) The dispatcher 

Klaus 

Klaus sends Stefan off on a quest to turn his humanity off and kill as many people as he can possible in order for him to be a 'proper' vampire. It can be argued that Klaus is also a villain but he changes half way through and ends up helping a lot of people. 

5) The false hero 

Katherine Pierce

She pretends to be Elena because she is her doppelgänger so takes advantaged of this but ends up getting exposed and Elena forces her to swallow the cure to become a human and no longer has her powers 

6) The helper 

Damon and Alaric

They both help find Stefan when he has been taken by Klaus, they help under the order from Elena as she still has hope that she will find him.

7) The princess

Caroline 

Caroline is the princess as she identifies all the villains but also falls in love with the villain Klaus after he changed to a good person, she sees the good in everyone.