TEACHING MEDIA

 Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier

 Vol. 1 (3) Fall 2013

 Charlotte Howell

 University of Texas at Austin

 

The naturalized primacy of the text has a firm grip on many students’ relation to media, but I have found using paratexts in the media history classroom to be an excellent counterbalance and modeling tool for seeing film and television texts as historical artifacts.  Students easily understand Jonathan Gray’s argument in Show Sold Separately, “Hype…creates meaning,” and that meaning is clearly historically and industrially situated [1].

The most useful paratexts for teaching students new to media history are overt, intentional, and fleeting, affixed to a particular moment. Promos for channels or programs, trailers, advertisements, and the like instantly read as belonging to a particular historical moment and often convey the state of the industry and the idea of the audience at that time. Thus, they foreground the nexus of negotiation media history courses ask of our students: the fraught interactions among audience, industry, regulation, memory, and content.

For film history courses, promotional material can also shake the assumption of high art students may attach to canonical films. In my film history classes, I will show three trailers for films fitting into a certain Classical Hollywood genre and ask my class to use the trailers and their knowledge of the genre from reading or experience to try and identify the key generic element. For example, for Westerns, I show this trailer for The Searchers in conversation with the trailer for the Western parody, Blazing Saddles. Both emphasize the importance and grandness of the frontier setting as well as the focus on frontier wildness and civilization in tension. When I focus on the science fiction genre in the 1950s as an exploration of contemporary fears and anxieties through genre displacement, I use the trailers for Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman to illuminate the range of anxieties—from Communism and conformity to female sexuality and power–and the B-movie budgets and “low” character of science fiction at that time.  The trailers serve as genre shorthand, helping the students identify to whom the film was aimed, for what purpose or reach, and how it was marketed in its initial release. These trailers focus my students on the non-narrative genre characteristics that allow them to understand genre as a negotiation of contextually situated expectations between audience and industry.  When I instead showed clips from the films alone to illustrate genre, it took more guidance to get them to understand the web of the genre’s paratext and its historicity.

In broadcasting history classes, paratexts can help reiterate the various layers of commercialization in the history of American broadcasting. This becomes ever more important as the rise of “Quality television” discourses is becoming one of the primary ways our students relate to television.  When Breaking Bad, The Newsroom, and The Walking Dead are the shows that the students watch and want to discuss, it can occasionally be difficult to get them to take “lower quality” programs and genres as seriously or to examine the industrial and commercial drives behind the “art” of the “quality” shows. Thus, having students examine press releases touting ratings, news articles that discuss the advertising rates for these shows, and synergistic linkages with other programs within the corporate family lays the groundwork for discussing how this era of “Quality television” is shaped by its industrial and historical context and how it is shaped by the long history of broadcasting. These paratexts are evidence of the construction of the stories that the industry wishes to tell about itself, and as such foreground the role of the commercial broadcasting industry even in what many students consider “art.”

This theme of discursive analysis and the self-reflection and –mythologizing of the television industry is even more clearly illustrated by using promotional paratexts for the creation of new networks. Promotional videos for the WB, UPN, and Fox from the 1980s and 1990s are great examples of these stories that the industry tells about itself. Students instantly understand the youth audience, the homogeneity, and the desired brand identity of the WB following its “The Night Is Young” promo.  The story UPN chose to tell through this promotion is an industrial one, of “edginess” and partnership with a high-class film studio, yet the brand identity that UPN became known by owed more to its African-American audience than its studio parentage. Thus, promos can illustrate the unstable nature of branding and the adaptation of a network to find an audience in its nascent stages. Channel promos give a sense of the stories the industry tells itself and the audience about television while foregrounding the fundamental instability of those stories. This helps the students to understand some of the key historiographical tenets: what we think of media’s past (and its present) is founded on many levels of discourse and construction.

In my classes, I often have my students create or include paratexts in creative activities, for broadcasting often focusing on sponsorship as a key “filter through which we must pass on our way to ‘the text itself’” [2].

These activities can help students understand that commercials, product integration, and attempts to appeal to specific demographics are among the ways in which the commercial element of broadcasting media reinforce both the industrial history of radio and television and the significance of the commodity audience in the creation of programming.  More importantly, integrating such sponsor-heavy paratexts with the students’ own creative thinking about programming reinforces that the commercial nature of broadcasting and creativity are not mutually exclusive. Commercialism is not necessarily base and “quality” (in its various historical inflections) needs economic support to occur. Below are some examples of my in-class activities that include paratexts as part of my students’ thinking. I have provided links to some of the handouts I use and assess comprehension through in-class discussion and dialogue in small groups first then as a whole.

1. To reinforce my history of radio and television students’ understanding of the golden age of radio, I have them build a day-to-night network schedule, including sponsorship, and how it appears in one program per hour. The sponsors and strategies must align with actual historical practices.
2. When those students work in a group to “pitch” a modern equivalent of the 1950s suburban sitcom, I make sure they include products that would be advertised during the show, the audience such an advertisement would target, what channel it would appear on, and when it would air.
3. When teaching the birth of the netlets, I have them build their own network and imagine the various paratexts (commercials, bumpers, intertextual references) that would construct the brand and its appeal to their chosen desired audience.
4. In an internet scavenger hunt for the convergence era, I ask them to find an example of a twitter conversation that influenced the text of a television show.

These paratextual assignments allow me to assess whether or not the students are integrating the interrelation of audience, text, industry, and context into their critical thinking about broadcast history.

The understanding and articulation of the negotiation of imagined audience, actual audience, and industry relationship to both through programming is one of the most important learning outcomes of my class. In explaining why they generated for this assignment a particular sponsor, brand, or mode of advertising for a particular text and how such sponsorship would be presented and to whom it is intended, they must acknowledge that texts are always seeking to address a certain audience, and that that audience is constructed by socio-cultural and industrial history. Paratexts not only challenge the centrality of texts, they also foreground their context and usefulness as artifacts in ways that indicate historical learning as media history students recognize, articulate, or replicate them.

 Notes

[1] Gray, Show Sold Separately, (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 3.

[2] Ibib, 17.

Charlotte Howell is a Ph.D. student in the department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published “Value in Brokenness: Fractured Subjectivities in Contemporary American Telefantasy” in Networking Knowledge and “The Gospel of the Winchesters (And Their Fans): Neoreligious Fan Practices and Narrative in Supernatural” in Kinephanos. Charlotte has worked for FlowTV and InMediaRes, was a co-coordinator of the Flow Conference 2010, and is the graduate assistant for Media Industries, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal launching in 2014.

 

 Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier

 Vol. 1(3) Fall 2013

 Sam Ford

 MIT/ Western Kentucky University

 

Discussing with Americana his scholarly work on the U.S.-style soap opera, Robert C. Allen (2004) said his interest began in a graduate seminar. Allen recalls a discussion in a narrative theory class at the University of Iowa in which he asked whether stories existed that challenged one of the core tenets of the experience people have with a narrative: a discrete beginning, middle, and end. Allen questioned how soap operas fit into this construct, and “a lively discussion ensued, which prompted me to think further about the curious formal nature of serial narrative and its most fully elaborated and complex manifestation: the television soap opera.”

Today, media scholars find themselves more frequently teaching media texts for which the narrative does not adhere to a discrete beginning, middle, and end—especially as more shows adopt transmedia storytelling strategies in which the primary text of a film, a video series, a comic book series, etc. is supplemented by material across multiple media formats. Further, access to paratextual material about the narrative—to archival footage relevant to the narrative, to “professional” criticism and analysis about the text, and to fan discussion and fan-produced texts in relation to the narrative under analysis in the classroom—expands exponentially what it means to teach “a text.”

Because many of these transmedia narratives still prioritize a particular primary text—the film itself, or the 13-episode season arc of the primary television show—many instructors’ impulse is to return to the safe confines of traditional narrative pedagogy. As teachers, we favor drilling deeply into the vertical complexity of a multilayered and dissectible finite text, as opposed to engaging with the messiness of the horizontal complexity that accretes from a text that expands quite broadly.

While there is great value in narrative analysis such as close readings, in continuing to focus so heavily on textual analysis while overlooking the importance of everything outside a finite primary text, I fear we do little to help our students think critically about the full narrative experience an audience increasingly has with the popular culture they engage.

To best embrace the horizontal complexity of how a narrative expands across multiple official and unofficial parts of the story, much can be learned from considering more deeply the strategies of what I’ve labeled elsewhere as “immersive story worlds” (Ford 2007), such as superhero comic book universes, U.S.-style soap operas, “celebrity culture,” and politics. In my experience teaching semester-long courses on U.S. soap opera and on professional wrestling, I have uncovered pedagogical principles which may help others as they consider how to bring horizontal complexity into their classroom analysis of media texts of all sorts.

When I have taught semester-long courses on soap opera, students have spent the entire semester watching a particular daytime serial drama in “real-time,” typically with five new episodes per week. Those four months or so which comprise the average length of a semester are still only a tiny fraction of the full “text” of the soap. Nevertheless, I’ve found that engaging students in the confusing process of joining a soap opera narrative mid-stream and trying to piece together who characters are, their relationships to one another, and how storylines progress proves to be a useful way to drive understanding and deep consideration of the nature of media texts and the lived experiences audiences have with narratives. The classroom becomes a communal experience through which we all acclimate to this world we’ve entered. For almost every student, it has taken the full semester to truly begin to appreciate the narrative experience of a dedicated soap opera viewer, and to see how these texts—which often appeared quite unsophisticated to them as single episodes—started to gain deeper layers of complexity and meaning through the accretion of knowledge of the story world and characters over time.

As complex as teaching a soap opera narrative may be, its story world is still primarily contained within a linear track of one primary series. The challenge with teaching a genre like that of professional wrestling becomes many times more complex. First, while various wrestling promotions may have their own narrative histories, wrestling characters have traditionally jumped from one promotion to the other. This creates a semi-cohesive master fictional universe of “the wrestling world” or “the wrestling industry,” within which the narratives of many different franchises fit.

Second, pro wrestling is—by its nature—“transmedia.” The genre’s origin and continued staple is the live event. Television series, magazines, and other types of material were originally created to further promote these live event tours. However, over time, they became staple parts of the pro wrestling narrative in their own right—and significant pieces of the pro wrestling business model. Today, the narrative of “World Wrestling Entertainment” takes place across the promotion’s various live events; seven hours of original television programming per week; two weekly online television series; monthly pay-per-view events; a monthly magazine; the WWE.com website, which acts as a fictional news organization covering the WWE story world; and various outlets for accessing historical wrestling content. Further complicating the sheer volume of these varying “primary texts” is the fact that the pro wrestling narrative plays out in “real time,” and its narrative setting is “the real world,” meaning that these wrestlers rarely appear in what could truly be considered “out of character” situations. Wrestlers maintain their own Twitter accounts and other presence in social media as their wrestling personas, and they often conduct their public appearances—from press interviews to chance encounters with fans—somewhat in character.

Simultaneously, because we the audience live in the story world of this narrative and have the potential to interact not with the actors but with the characters themselves in chance encounters in airports or bars and because all in-arena wrestling shows and non-televised events focus so heavily on the performance of the fans in the stands in addition to the performers in the ring, audience-produced content becomes more directly part of the narrative world in wrestling as well (in addition to the analytical, fictional, and theoretical writing from pro wrestling critics and fans from outside the fictional world—a line that often gets quite blurry for performer and fan alike).

Similar to my approach for teaching soap opera, my classes studying pro wrestling have followed the WWE narrative in real time throughout the semester. Yet, rather than assigning a particular portion of that real-time volume of texts, I have tasked students with keeping up with the narrative world in whatever combination they best see fit—from some combination of watching television series, engaging with online texts, reading critical and fan analysis from both inside and outside the story world, and either holding a class viewing party for a pay-per-view wrestling event and/or attending a live event as a class during the semester. Class discussion has focused on students bringing together what each has found about the story world and connecting it together, as well as to our various readings and in-class viewings.

Especially crucial in each class I’ve taught on pro wrestling or on soaps has been that one—if not multiple—longtime viewers ended up among the students. As is often the case within online and offline fan communities surrounding these two genres, those with deeper experience with the story world became the elders of our classroom community, passing along knowledge from their years of experience and helping the class piece together historical information about characters and stories that are contextually relevant to the current narrative we are following as a group.

Further, I’ve found it helpful to challenge students to both follow or—if they feel comfortable—join online community discussions about the genre for the duration of the class and to supplement our discussion of the current narrative by bringing in fan discussions and analyses, rumors from online news sites, archival clips, etc., to share with the rest of the class. In most of these cases, the students have also published their thoughts about the genre in question in a class blog, which has typically drawn some interest from dedicated fans as well, who came to be involved in some of the class discussions over time.

In all those experiences, true learning has not come through the results of these student explorations but rather through the process itself. By tackling narratives that could not possibly be neatly contained within the model of a “viewing lab” and follow-up discussion, students become responsible communally for analyzing and making sense of the narrative, for even defining what is or isn’t “the narrative” itself.

Whether teaching content from an “immersive story world” or from single films, novels, plays, or short-run television series, the access our students have in today’s classroom to a broad range of paratextual material allows us to open up for class discussion what constitutes a narrative and how that narrative might best be understood. Rather than curate for students a finite and easily intelligible classroom experience in engaging with media texts, it’s incumbent on us as instructors to engage with the messiness of the lived narrative experience we have as audience members. If this becomes a true classroom goal, students will leave our courses better equipped to think critically about popular culture and the autonomy with which audience members make meaning out of popular texts.

Works Cited

Allen, Robert C. “Conversations with Scholars of American Popular Culture: Robert C. Allen.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900 to Present) (Spring 2004). Accessed 05 October 2013. http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2004/allen.htm.

Ford, Sam. “As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture.” Master’s thesis, MIT, 2007. Accessed 05 October 2013. http://cmsw.mit.edu/as-the-world-turns-in-a-convergence-culture/.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013.

 

Sam Ford is an affiliate of MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program. He is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011) and co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (NYU Press, 2013). He has taught courses on the U.S. soap opera and U.S. professional wrestling at MIT and WKU and also teaches Introduction to Popular Culture Studies at WKU. Sam has published/will publish essays with Transformative Works and Cultures, The Journal of Fandom Studies, and Panorama Social, and has written for anthologies including Third Person, Bodies of Discourse, Making Media Work, and The Essential Cult Television Reader. He is currently is co-curating an annotated bibliography on U.S. soap opera research for Oxford University Press. He is also Director of Audience Engagement with Peppercomm, a strategic communications and marketing firm.

 Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier

 Vol. 1 (3) Fall 2013

 Marc Raymond

 Kwangwoon University

 

In the Fall of both 2008 and 2009, I taught the course “History of American Cinema” in the Department of Cinema Studies at the Korean National University of Art in Seoul, South Korea. Teaching media to students from Korea and other parts of Asia, all with advanced but not fluent English language skills, was a difficult task, one for which I was ultimately ill-prepared. Relying on traditional analysis of films such as Citizen Kane, The Searchers, and Vertigo and reading academic analysis of these texts did not allow for a dynamic learning environment, despite the enthusiasm and effort of the students. Beginning in March 2013, I started a full-time position in the Department of Communication at Kwangwoon University in Seoul, teaching courses on “Social Media and Human Relations,” “The History of Mass Media,” and “Popular Culture.” Having acquired experience teaching ESL in the interim, I felt more confident in adapting to teaching media to non-native speakers, and the experience was definitely more satisfying. One of the more valuable tools in accomplishing the goal of greater student engagement was the discovery of the pedagogical value of the paratext.

I use the word “discovery” because, as much as I would like to claim this was a pre-planned choice, it was much more accidental. It was partially the result of teaching different subjects beyond traditional media analysis, especially the course on social media. As Ted Hovet has argued, there is a connection between the rise of the “student-centered” classroom and new media platforms such as YouTube: “The shift to a more ‘student-centered’ classroom has led to the possibility of reversing this traditional (educational) exchange, much as new interactive media technology has transformed passive viewers into active content producers and circulators” [1]. As a consequence of teaching and, of course, learning about social media as an instructor, the importance and potential of using the paratext became more and more apparent, especially in a foreign language context. Despite the large number of teachers working in the ESL/EFL field outside of their native country, there has not been a great deal of focus on teaching media itself. Media is seen as a tool for language acquisition rather than as a way to teach a broader media literacy. As Carla Chamberlin Quinlisk argues, “When we think of literacy in the language learning context, the critical examination of media may not come to mind as quickly as notions of reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills” [2]. As a Media Studies teacher learning about cultural material requires confronting questions of language and meaning, most notably the problem of context. This is where the value of the paratext can be seen most directly.

The most thorough examination of the media paratext to date is Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010). In his opening chapter on theorizing the paratext, Gray makes a seemingly obvious but crucial observation: “Texts make sense because of our past textual experiences, literacy, and knowledge. At a basic level, for instance, if we are new to a language, we can only decode small parts of anything that we read or hear” [3]. This aptly describes the situation of many of my students when faced with English language media culture. Despite their wide exposure to Hollywood cinema, there is a great deal of contextual meaning that is missing. The first example of a classroom paratext that proved especially instructive was the parody trailer for The Shining. Although both the original text and this particular parodic paratext are familiar entities to many students in the North American media environment, they are much less so in Korea, and thus led to some fresh responses. Some students were familiar with the original and understood the joke; others were unfamiliar yet still recognized the parodic element, while others were not quite aware of the spoof. By comparing an original trailer for the film with this fan-created remix, a broader discussion of how meaning is constructed could take place. All of this arose not from teaching The Shining as a text, but from a lecture about YouTube and the distinction between professionally generated versus user-generated content, a line that the parody trailer blurs. This use of paratexts gave the students an accessible point of entry into the cultural texts being studied, partially because the text itself (The Shining) was not the main focus of the discussion.

It quickly became apparent that paratexts could also be useful in teaching text-based analysis. For my course on “Popular Culture,” I had chosen to focus on American cinema, and while the course was still structured around twelve main filmic texts (from Casablanca to Zero Dark Thirty), I started to use more paratexts in the classroom environment. I began with some of the paratexts discussed by Hovet in relation to Casablanca [4], although the results here were less successful, perhaps due to the difficulty of conveying the film’s domestic reception cross-culturally. In this case, more traditional forms of analysis, such as Robert Ray’s framing of the film in relation to American isolationist ideology and World War II, made more of a connection [5]. Another major cultural icon, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, was greatly enhanced by paratextual examples. Hitchcock’s famous trailer for the film introduced students to the original audience’s expectations and  to Hitchcock himself as a personality and icon. A second paratext, a video essay by Alan Proctor-Thompson on the authorship of the shower scene, provided an example of concrete visual analysis while giving students an appreciation of the craft of filmmaking and the different contributions of a film’s collaborators.

Most fruitful of all in this class was a comparison of The Shining parody trailer with another example that it clearly inspired, the parody trailer for Taxi Driver. In this case, the students also viewed the original films and thus could see more clearly how the paratexts resituate each. Moreover, the comparison brought out elements of the original texts that students had not noticed during their initial viewing. For example, when asked which parody was more effective, the vast majority said The Shining, and when asked why, they observed that many of the scenes used in the trailer were already parodies of typical family films. Thus, what at first seemed like simply a horror film became something more complicated. As Gray observes, “Genre serves an important duty in the interpretive process, of course, because it acts much as I have said paratexts do, by providing an initial context and reading strategy for the text” [6]. In this case, the paratexts play with genre pointing out either total incongruity (like Taxi Driver) or secret affinities (like The Shining). Instead of listening to a lecture on the connections between the horror film and the family in The Shining, the students could use paratexts to identify these connections themselves.

In the course on social media, I attempted to have students make their own paratext by contributing an entry to Wikipedia. For this assignment, I decided to give as little instruction as possible. The only task was to contribute to Wikipedia and not have the entry removed. As students soon found out, this was more difficult than expected, and not for reasons of language ability. In her book The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, José van Dijck describes the core principles of Wikipedia that act as guidelines for contributors, most notably the use of reliable sources, the rule of no original research, and the policy of a neutral point of view [7]. The students learned these protocols through their often frustrating attempts to make an entry that met these conditions. Only one student succeeded, basically by keeping it simple and making an actual paratext rather than an original entry. By going through this exercise, students were able to appreciate Wikipedia and how it operates and to define the text/paratext distinction. More importantly, it showed them how much they could contribute to the global media studies knowledge base from their position as Korean media students. Rather than seeing their language difference as a constraint, they understood the opportunities available for sharing their cultural knowledge with international readers.

Increasingly, scholars teach in environments outside of their home country and occasionally with students with different language backgrounds. This essay points out ways in which this difficulty can be overcome and acts as an encouragement to take on these challenges through the use of paratexts. At the same time, I think it can also be a benefit to think about teaching as if your students do not share your cultural background, even when they do. By not taking cultural knowledge for granted, teachers can avoid alienating students and better connect to a wider range of learners. The use of the paratext provides one way to ensure this connection between the text and the student, which I believe has applicability for educators in all situations.

Notes

[1] Ted Hovet, “YouTube and Archives in Educational Environments,” http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/hovet/#.UkenTSQmyts (accessed on September 27, 2013)

[2] Carla Chamberlin Quinlisk, “Media Literacy in the ESL/EFL Classroom: Reading Images and Cultural Stories,” TESOL Journal 12, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 35.

[3] Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010): 31.

[4] Hovet, “YouTube and Archives in Educational Environments”

[5] Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985): 89-112.

[6] Gray, 35-36.

[7] José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 139-140.

 

Marc Raymond is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications at Kwangwoon University in Seoul, where he has taught the courses “Social Media and Human Relations” and “The History of Mass Media” and is currently preparing to teach a graduate course on “Spreadable Media and Cultural Convergence” and undergraduate courses on “Media and Gender” and “Globalization and Culture.” He has also taught the course “History of American Cinema” in the Cinema Studies department at the Korea National University of Art in Seoul (2008-2009), as well as ESL courses at Gachon University in Seongnam, South Korea (2008-2012). He received his PhD in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University in 2009 and taught in the Film Studies department at Carleton from 2003-2007, teaching the following courses: “Film Theory, Historiography and Criticism”; “Forms and Conventions of the Cinema”; “History of American Cinema”; “Martin Scorsese and Film Culture”; and “American Independent Cinema.” Funding support for this research was provided by the Kwangwoon University Research Fund.

 Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier

 Vol. 1 (3) Fall 2013

 Monika Mehta

 Binghamton University, SUNY

 

Teaching Hindi Film Song Sequences Video Presentation

In this video presentation, Monika Mehta explains how she uses paratexts to teach Bollywood song-and-dance sequences and includes a sample assignment below.

(click image to play presentation)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Essay Assignment: Analyzing Song Sequences

Assignment Parameters

For the second essay assignment for this course, you will be analyzing song-sequences.  The purpose of this assignment is to be able to examine how song-sequences are constructed, to identify their functions in the filmic narrative and to investigate the song’s circulation beyond the film narrative (cassettes, cds, mp3s, reality shows, etc.).  To begin the assignment, you will select a film featuring your star.  Please do not select a film that we have all ready watched in class or will be watching prior to this assignment’s due date.   You will analyze three song-sequences in your chosen film; these song sequences should feature your chosen star.   I would urge you to make a decision about the film as soon as possible so you can view the film and the songs multiple times.  Also, you will need to find out information about the playback singers.  You will have more time to find out this information the sooner you select your film.  If you’d like assistance in making a decision, I would be glad to offer suggestions.  You may rent the film via Netflix or Blockbuster.  You might also check the Binghamton library for a copy.  Alternately, you can purchase the film from  http://www.bhavanidvd.com/ or www.amazon.com.

To prepare for this essay, I have attached a song-sequence assignment which we will be doing in-class. We will be watching a song from Pakeezah/The Pure One and subsequently, in small groups, you will be answering the questions in the assignment.

The song sequence assignment will provide you with a set of guiding questions and themes for formulating the thesis for your essay and analyzing songs in your chosen film.  For your essay (and chosen film), you will address questions that are listed under the section Genre and Star Image in the song sequence assignment. This will allow you to incorporate the information and analysis you have produced in you star assignment.  In addition to this, you will choose questions from one more section (e.g., Narrative, Editing, Space & Costumes etc.). While you can discuss space and costumes in an essay that is on the Genre & Star Image and Narrative, the focus of essay and its argument must remain on Narrative and Genre & Star Image.

In the thesis, you will present an argument based on the topics you have selected (e.g. Genre & Star Image and Narrative). The thesis should be one or two sentences at the most. It is generally placed at the end of the introduction. Subsequently when you write the essay, you will develop an argument which supports your thesis, providing appropriate evidence.  Furthermore, when appropriate in your essay, you will refer to articles we’ve read, films we have watched or class discussions. You may also do further research and look at outside sources.

The essay needs to 6-8 pages, double-spaced (12 points, Times New Roman or Garamond). A bibliography needs to be attached to the essay.  This is in addition to the 6-8 pages.  You may use MLA, Chicago or APA style.  Please be consistent with regard to the style.  Please make sure that you cite properly and give credit to appropriate author(s).

You will turn in a thesis statement, along with the Basic Information (the first sheet of the song-sequence assignment), on Friday, November 5.   In the Basic Information, you need to fill out the information for the film that you’ve chosen.  You can find out this information via a Google search or Wikipedia.  We will be holding a writing workshop for this assignment on Wednesday, November 17. Please bring 3 copies of your rough draft and 2 copies of the feedback-evaluation sheet (I will distribute this later). Your rough draft should be as complete as possible.  The final, polished draft of the assignment is due on November 22. Please bring a hard-copy to class and upload a copy on blackboard.

Timeline:

Friday, October 29:  Song Sequence Assignment Workshop; Work in Small Groups.

Friday, November 5:  Turn in your thesis statement and Basic Information on your film.

Wednesday, November 17:  Bring 3 copies of your draft and 2 copies of the feedback evaluation sheet

Monday, November 22:  Final, polished draft is due.  Please upload a copy on blackboard.

 

In-Class Song and Dance Sequence Analysis Worksheet

[This portion of the assignment is adapted from an assignment designed by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Honors Faculty Fellow, Arizona State University.]

In preparation for your essay assignment, we will be doing an in-class assignment devoted to song sequences.  The topics in this assignment will serve as a set of guiding questions for the essay that you will write on your chosen film featuring your star.  For the essay, you are expected to address questions under the section, Genre and Star Image.  In addition, you can pick one more section (Narrative, Space & Costumes, Editing etc.).  Along with thesis statement, you will need to hand in the following Basic Information about your chosen film.

BASIC INFORMATION (document outside sources in this section)

1. Title of film
2. Briefly summarize the film’s story (3-4 sentences at most).
3. Year
4. Film director
5. Music director
6. Choreographer
7. Lyricist
8. Singers
9. Name major characters in the film and actors who are playing these roles
10. Provide titles of songs, name singers who sing each song, and name the main actors/actresses who lip-synch each song in the film.

MUSICAL and DANCE STYLES

• How is this song organized musically in terms of different sections, instrumentation, and lyrics? Is it a verse-chorus form? Do the same melodies reappear with different lyrics? (e.g. “x” is a song that evokes both big-band type of sound and techno. As a song that takes place in a discotheque, it is a contemporary sounding song that makes little or no reference to traditional Indian instruments from the classical tradition).
• What dance styles are used in the song sequence?  (e.g. hip-hop, classical Indian, Bhangra, a mixture)? Do the dance movements complement the lyrics and the music?

NARRATIVE

• Briefly state what the song is about.  (e.g. The main characters declare their love for each other in the song).
• What is happening in the story at this point, and the function of the specific song sequence?
• Does this sequence work in tandem with the narrative? Does it advance the narrative?  Does it function as an interruption?  Does it enable covert action?
• In addition, try to determine what function and significance this segment has for the film as a whole and your understanding of it (foreshadowing, climax, transition, exposition, etc.)
• Does the song sequence reinforce or challenge social and cultural codes advanced in the narrative? (i.e. gender, religion, class etc.).  For example, in the narrative the heroine might be a submissive, quiet girl but in the song sequence, she verbalizes her desires through both lyrics and dance movements.

SPACE AND COSTUMES

• Space: Is space—landscape or interior—used as a “comment” on the character’s inner state of mind?  Does it figure as a character-like presence?  Does it exude a certain atmosphere, etc.?
• Where does the song take place?  Is space in the song-sequence continuous or does the song take place at multiple locations?  List the locations and their potential functions (e.g. it is more thrilling to have a romantic song travel across and varied spaces so we become virtual tourists)
• In a related fashion, do the costumes change along with the locations?  What might be the function(s) of multiple costume changes?
• How do costumes contribute to the construction of the characters, the stars and nature and atmosphere of the song-dance sequence? (e.g. cabaret song sequence)
• Are the costumes of the characters color-coordinated in the song-dance sequences?  If so, why?
• Do the characters wear the costumes and inhabit the locations in the song sequence in their ‘real narrative worlds’?  Explain.

EDITING

• Position of segment (what comes before, what after the segment?)
• Length of Individual shots: (extremely long or particularly short; does the director hold on a certain face or landscape after the action has been played out, etc.)
• Rhythm/Pace (flowing/ jerky/ disjointed/ more panning shots than cuts/ acceleration of cuts/ fast-paced/slow-paced/ unusually long takes)

AUDIENCE ADDRESS

• Does the song sequence acknowledge the spectator or do events transpire as if no one were present?  Do characters look into the camera or pretend it is not there, for instance?
• How does the song sequence position the spectator vis-à-vis the onscreen events?  Are we made to favor certain characters, to respond certain ways to certain events (e.g. we along with the male audience or male character are supposed to enjoy the female dancers? Or we along with characters are positioned as devotees for a religious song sequence).   Here, consider the concepts of gaze and darsan that we have studied in class.

GENRE and STAR IMAGE

• Does the song sequence appeal to certain expectations, i.e. generic conventions?  (e.g. We don’t expect a song situated in a strip-club in a historical)? What kind of conventions are they?
• Does the song sequence follow convention or does it attempt to challenge them in any way?  If so how? (e.g. A contemporary romantic film might be feature a conventional song sequence where the romantic couple is cavorting on Swiss hills or a similar looking outdoor location).
• How does the song-dance sequence advance, challenge, or support star images?
• Does the song-dance sequence enable the display of a star’s performance style?  Provide examples.  (e.g. Shah Rukh Khan’s outstretched hands).
• Given Majumdar’s argument in “The Embodied Voice,” examine the relationship between the visual and aural stars in the song-sequence.  For the essay, you need to think about the relationship between your star and the playback singer who is singing for your star.  Do the qualities of the aural star (playback singer) match the image of the visual star?  Is their a consonance or dissonance?  What might be the consequences of either a fit or a lack of fit?  For the essay, you will to find out which playback singer or singers have sung for your star in your chosen film.   You will need to find out what information circulates about the aural star (play back singer).  Here, Wikipedia might be a useful source.  Some playback singers have their own website and/or blogs devoted to them.

ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS

• In more recent films, there are many more non-diegetic songs, that is to say songs that are not lip-synched by an actor or actress but ones that are free-floating.  How does this unmooring affect the relationship between what Majumdar calls “aural” and “visual” stardom?
• What role might gender play in crafting and producing song and dance sequences? (e.g. It might give an opportunity for the female choreographer and female dancers to take charge of production and screen respectively).
• Is the song-dance an item number?  If so, does it feature a prominent star or stars?
• Was the song-dance important to the film’s publicity?
• Are their multiple versions of the song available (i.e. original, unplugged, remix)?
•  Did the song become popular?  What aspects might have been important in its popularity (choreography, lyrics, music, stars, photography, location etc.)?
• Examine the use of lighting and framing in the song sequence.

 

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors Ted Hovet and Lisa Patti for allowing me to do this video presentation.  Thanks to Lisa Patti for introducing me to Screencast-o-matic, offering useful suggestions for the video, and most of all, for encouraging me to undertake this project.  I am indebted to Nilanjana Bhattacharjya who shared her fantastic essay assignment and allowed me to adapt it for my course.  Rajesh Bhaskaran generously loaned me his hi-fi head-set and shared his seasoned video production skills.  My daughter Sahana Bhaskaran ably assisted in choosing the appropriate video clips.

Select Bibliography

Articles

Majumdar, Neepa. “The Embodied Voice: Stardom and Song Sequences in Popular Hindi Cinema.” In Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music edited by Arthur Knight and Pamela Wojcik, 161-181. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Mehta, Monika.  “DVD Compilations: (Re)Shuffling Sound, Stardom and Cinephilia,” South Asian Popular Culture 10, no. 3 (2012):  237-248.

DVDs

Lata a Journey: Best of Lata Songs.  Prod. Yash Raj Films. Perf. Mangeshkar, Lata. Yash Raj Films, 2008. DVD.

Mujras & Qwallis:  From Films Old & New.  Prod.  Shemaroo Video. Ltd.  DVD.  n.d.

Websites

“Bhavani DVD.”  Bhavani DVD.  Accessed on October 5, 2013.  http://www.bhavanidvd.com/index.php?cPath=46

“Nightingale of India Lata Mangeshkar turns 84.”  artistaloud.com.  Posted on September 28, 2013.  Accessed on October 3, 2013.  http://www.artistaloud.com/news/details/id/427.

“Singing Legend Asha Bhosle turns 80.”  Indian Express.  Accessed on October 3, 2013.  http://www.indianexpress.com/picture-gallery/singing-legend-asha-bhosle-turns- 80/3359-15.html.

Online Videos

“Dil Cheez Kya Hai-Umrao Jaan Song [HD] (1981) W/E Subs.”  YouTube video 6.01, from the film Umrao Jaan (1981).  Posted by “KabulHDvideoCenter.”  December 28, 2010.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oFm4MYbb9o.

” ‘Ghagra Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’ Song Making |Madhuri Dixit, Ranbir Kapoor.”  YouTube video, 4.46.  Posted by “T-Series.” May 25, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73AdN41Y-n0.

“Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Woh Kahan Hai HD.”  Youtube video 6.30, from the film Pyaasa 1957.  Posted by “MannuDreamer.”  February 25, 2012.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlDwgYWnJWY.

“Journey of India’s melodious voice Lata Mangeshkar.” IBN LiveWatch video, 1:43.  Posted by CNN-IBN.  August 13, 2013.  http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/413884/watch-journey-of- indias-melodious-voice-lata-mangeshkar.html?utm_source=ref_article

“Lata Mangeshkar – Jo Wada Kiya (Live Performance).”  YouTube video 3.31, from a performance by Lata Mangeshkar from her “Lata An Era In An Evening” concert in Bombay on March 9, 1997.  Posted by “gussie5555.”  June 27, 2008.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou0B9T89L0g

“Pakeezah – Inhi Logon Ne Le Liya Dupatta Mera.”  YouTube video 5.53, from the film Pakeezah (1972).  Posted by “yasjan2012.”  August 23, 2013. . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQRbPBk-wUw.

Monika Mehta is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY. Her research and teaching interests include new media and film studies; cinema in South Asia; theories of nation-state; postcolonial critique; and globalization and cultural production.  She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (University of Texas Press, December 2011; Permanent Black, January 2012).

 

 

 

 

 Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier

 Vol. 1 (3) Fall 2013

 Jonathan Gray

 University of Wisconsin – Madison

 

A key tenet of my argument about paratexts in Show Sold Separately (2010) is that paratexts are not just additions to the text itself, they often are the text itself … at least if we see the text as in any way a cultural, political, and/or sociological entity. It therefore follows that much media culture is paratextually led. Indeed, as I read gushing reviews about Gravity, read, see, and hear interviews with its cast members, have ads for it pop up throughout my Internet travels and television viewing, and see tweets about its dodgy science by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I would need to engage in a radical form of willful ignorance to state that these aren’t deeply constitutive of Gravity’s place in popular culture, perhaps even more so than the film itself. However, if film culture, television culture, and media culture more generally are so intricately paratextual in genesis, these excellent pieces about paratexts in the classroom by Sam Ford, Charlotte Howell, Monika Mehta, Marc Raymond, and Lynne Stahl not only provide helpful prescriptions for how to use paratexts in the classroom, but they also lead me to conclude that paratexts are required to teach film culture, television culture, and/or media culture properly.

Paratexts’ place and legitimacy in the textual analyst’s classroom have been questioned as far back as I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1956[1929]), complete with its call for professors to place poems in a vacuum, protecting them from the paratextual information that may otherwise “corrupt” students’ readings. And perhaps Richards was right, if we’re just interested in aesthetics, and if we honestly believe that aesthetics are objective, immutable qualities, not socially constructed. But if we have any interest in the lived environments of texts and to which texts contribute, if we want to know what texts do, how and why they matter to any community of viewers, and hence what role they play in culture, a classroom without paratexts is a classroom without context, and one in which all analyses will fall short. Yet perhaps, these pieces suggest to me, we might even go a step further and say that paratexts will at times be the most important parts of the classroom. We risk doing our students a disservice by inordinately privileging the film, television show, or other Work, and by therefore suggesting that it is the most important part of the text’s placement in society. An examination of The Searchers, for instance, that focuses on the film alone might thereby risk suggesting – erroneously – that this film was so powerful that it did and does not need paratexts, and that responses to the text were and are only responses to the film itself. Such an examination would downplay, at its peril, the importance of various paratexts that situated the film, that variously allowed it to do and to mean certain things, that encouraged viewers to pick up on such meanings, and/or that shifted meanings from the film.

If a classroom in which paratexts are central, by contrast, sounds heretical, let me temper the suggestion by insisting that I am not calling for the expulsion of films, television shows, and other works from the classroom. Indeed, an honest theory of paratexts must allow for “the thing itself” to vary from audience to audience, such that precisely what counts as the Work and what counts as the paratext will shift from audience to audience anyways. But just as the Work can often be eclipsed in importance by paratexts, or can do battle with its paratexts, or might simply be one among many with its paratexts as peers not vassals, we should therefore be wary of returning with adorable yet misguided faithfulness to the Work alone time and time again in our classes.

Making paratexts more central and using more paratexts in the classroom strike me as having several other benefits:

Paratexts could help us to get rid of the Great White Man Theory of Creativity (otherwise known as Auteur Theory) once and for all, and to realize the multiple authors behind any text. This in turn will offer our students a more nuanced theory of creativity and innovation that draws their attention to the inner workings of collaboration – interpersonally, legally, embedded in and performative of social hierarchies. Such a theory could expand our reach in terms of teaching students critical skills for the analysis of media. To direct their critical faculties towards the Work alone is to ensure that they miss much of what makes our media ecosystem what it is, and thus whether our interests lie in teaching about how art works, how ideology works, or how society works, we’re leaving out a great deal of the picture unless we encourage students to subject paratexts to the same levels of analysis and critique as they apply to the Work itself. Meanwhile, for students who wish to become media producers, a classroom full of paratexts may expand their sense of where creativity happens, and of where and how they can make an impact through their own acts of creativity.

As Marc Raymond suggests, we may make our classes more accessible in the process. While Raymond presents a stark case of paratexts helping to negotiate cultural unfamiliarity, a continuing struggle for any teacher is to negotiate all sorts of other levels of cultural unfamiliarity. When few of our students have seen the same television shows, when many of them don’t know films and shows that we consider basic touchstones, it is too easy to continue our classes as though they all do, and to engage in our discussions only the elite few who share our viewing histories. Paratexts might open up our classes in important ways, emphasizing how “familiarity” is created instead of shaming students for not being familiar with our own canons and favorites.

Finally, perhaps an attention to paratexts would make us better archivists. Once one engages paratexts meaningfully, one is soon faced with the frustrating reality that many paratexts have disappeared from the historical record. We need to be better at keeping them, and at making it obvious why they should be kept. When, as Monika Mehta shows, the back cover of a DVD can tell us so much about film culture, let’s ensure we’re not throwing those back covers out.

As Charlotte Howell notes of her own experience of teaching with paratexts, I too have often been amazed by how easily students “get” paratexts and how quickly and excitedly they can get to work at analyzing them. We could better capitalize on this easy embrace of paratextual scholarship. Using some of the techniques described in these five excellent pieces, perhaps we can offer our students yet more and yet better tools for examining the media around them.

Works Cited

Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1956[1929].

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin – Madison. His most recent books are A Companion to Media Authorship (with Derek Johnson), Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz), and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts.