THEORIES NOTES

The Formalist Theory

The Formalist film theory focuses on the formal, or technical, elements of a film: i.e., the
lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of colour, shot composition, and editing. It is
probably a major theory of film studies today.

Formalism generally considers the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple elements of
film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the
individual elements. For example, take the single element of editing. A formalist might study
how standard Hollywood "continuity editing" creates a more comforting effect and noncontinuity
or jump-cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile. On the other hand, one might
consider the synthesis of several elements, such as editing, shot composition, and music. The
shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy is a notable example of
how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from very wide
to very close and tense; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards its end;
the music builds. All of these elements, in combination rather than individually, create tension.
Formalism is unique in that it embraces both ideological and auteurist branches of criticism. In
both these cases, the common denominator for Formalist criticism is style.

Ideological Formalism
Ideologies focus on how socio-economic pressures create a particular style, and auteurists on
how auteurs put their own stamp on the material. Formalism is primarily concerned with style
and how it communicates ideas, emotions, and themes (rather than, as critics of formalism point
out, concentrating on the themes of a work itself).

Two examples of ideological interpretations that are related to formalism:

The classical Hollywood cinema has a very distinct style, sometimes called the Institutional
Mode of Representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point lighting, "mood"
music, dissolves, all designed to make the experience as pleasant as possible.

Film noir, which was given its name by Nino Frank, is marked by lower production values,
darker images, underlighting, location shooting, and general nihilism: this is because, we are
told, during the war and post-war years filmmakers were generally more pessimistic (as well as
filmgoers). Also, the German Expressionists (including Fritz Lang, who was not technically an

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expressionist as popularly believed) emigrated to America and brought their stylized lighting
effects (and disillusionment due to the war) to American soil.

It can be argued that, by this approach, the style or 'language' of these films is directly affected
not by the individuals responsible, but by social, economic, and political pressures, of which the
filmmakers themselves may be aware or not. It is this branch of criticism that gives us such
categories as the classical Hollywood cinema, the American independent movement, the New
American independent movement, the new queer cinema, and the French, German, and Czech
new waves.

The Realist Theory

Realism borders around the belief that reality exists independently of observers, whether in
philosophy or in applied arts and sciences. In this broad sense it is frequently contrasted with
Idealism, which is regarded as utopian expression of things; something one hopes to attain,
which may turn out to be unattainable. Realism in the arts concerns the depiction of subjects as
they appear in everyday life.

Realism has been an extremely useful concept for asking questions about the nature of
cinematographic images, the relation of film to reality, the credibility of images, and the role
cinema plays in the organization and understanding of the world. Realism, at the very least, has
been a productive illusion.

In film history, realism has designated two distinct modes of filmmaking and two approaches to
the cinematographic image. In the first instance, cinematic realism refers to the verisimilitude of
a film to the believability of its characters and events. This realism is most evident in the
classical Hollywood cinema. The second instance of cinematic realism takes as its starting point
the camera's mechanical reproduction of reality, and often ends up challenging the rules of
Hollywood movie making. Remember a camera/picture does not lie and is 100 percent perfect as
a representation of reality. This shows that a picture (particularly the motion picture) brings us
closer to reality. Nothing stands in its way. Pictures are just true.

Historical and Artistic Context of the Realist Theory

In spite of the fact that contemporary film and Greek drama are radically different modes of
representation, one model for the rules for realism in movies comes to us from Aristotle's Poetics
. In the Poetics , Aristotle staked the success of dramatic representation on what he called the
play's probability (eikos). For Aristotle, dramatic action was a form of rhetoric, and the role of
the play-wright was to persuade the audience of the sense of devoid of reality, or verisimilitude,
of the dramatic work.

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From here flowed rules about characters, the words they speak, and the actions they perform on
stage. For characters in a tragedy to be believable, for instance, they must be noble, that is to say
slightly more virtuous than the citizens watching the play, and they must act and speak in
accordance with their rank in society. If the characters were not more virtuous than the
spectators, and if their actions were not consistent with their rank, the audience would feel
neither the pity nor the fear, which, for Aristotle, justify the creation of drama. As for events, to
be believable they must meet three criteria:

• They must be logically justified, what today we call motivation

• They must conform to the rules of genre
• They must have, as Aristotle famously said, a beginning, middle, and end.

Aristotle's Poetics is a brilliant defense of the art of fiction and at the heart of this defense is a
plea for the importance of verisimilitude. Small wonder, then, that Hollywood plots are so
closely tied to Aristotelian notions of believability. As a number of film critics have shown,
verisimilitude in Hollywood cinema is supported by very specific forms of filmmaking that have
remained remarkably consistent over the years. The "excessively obvious" style of the classic
Hollywood period is bound up with modes of production and with technical or stylistic elements
that ensure a film's continuity and stylistic transparency. First and foremost, the films that
constitute classical Hollywood cinema are driven by narrative causality. More often than not,
they centre on individual characters, who are often subject to the whims of fate and who undergo
dramatic reversals of fortune, even if the films end happily. In Hollywood films, narration is
determined by a rigorous chain of cause and effect, with scarcely any room for events that do
not, somehow, announce future actions.

Ultimately, for narrative causality to seem real, it must be ushered in by a series of technical
elements that maintain the film's continuity. The historical accuracy of wardrobe has long been a
key to the realism of Hollywood's period pieces. Extra-diegetic music plays an important role in
narrative causality by announcing on-screen action and smoothing over gaps in the narration.
Irises, fades, and dissolves serve to mark the passage of time and maintain narrative flow. Match-
on-action editing, shot/reverse-shot, the 180 degree rules, and synchronized sound serve to create
the illusion of spatial continuity. All these technical elements that dominated classical
Hollywood but also regularly appeared throughout the cinema of the world work to make
cinematic fiction more believable. Even the star system served to maintain the verisimilitude of a
film—central casting and spectators came to expect stars to play certain roles—hero, villain,
femme fatale —and attempts to get beyond typecasting were often met with skepticism.

Within the confines of this verisimilitude, Hollywood films have defied the laws of nature,
challenged scientific objectivity, and promoted a vision of life as an unending melodrama, but
this matters little. Once verisimilitude is established, spectators enter into a rhetorical contract

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with a work of cinematic fiction wherein, to reprise Samuel Coleridge's formulation, they
temporarily suspend their disbelief. Rules of verisimilitude may change over time, but this
rhetorical illusion nonetheless helps to explain why spectators in the 1930s felt the frisson of evil
when watching The Invisible Man (1933), which seems so dated to contemporary audiences.
Understanding the rules of verisimilitude is a key to understanding audience reactions to films.

As regards the use of the term "realism", it was first applied to painting and literature in the
1830s to describe new forms of art that developed in parallel with the rise of nineteenthcentury
democracies and claimed a privileged relation to material reality. If Romanticism glorified the
imagination, realism, as Peter Brooks has said "makes sight paramount." Thus the novels of
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), George Eliot (1819–1880), Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), and
Émile Zola (1840–1902) emphasize description and luxuriate in the details of everyday life. But
realism also brought with it new subject matter, in particular the everyday existence of ordinary
people, and it closely linked character development to social factors. In painting, Gustave
Courbet (1819–1877) first developed this new form of realism, bringing to his canvases a
concern for the present, a representation of the working class, a refusal to slavishly reproduce
established genres—there are no historical or mythological scenes in Courbet's paintings—a
move away from neoclassical idealization of the human body, a representation of bodies at work,
and an emphasis on description at the expense of narration.

Nineteenth-century realism was an immensely successful artistic movement. Dominating

literature and painting, it spurred scientific positivism and encompassed the invention of
photography and film. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the invention of these forms of
mechanical reproduction was less a great technological leap than a symptom of an age when
representation of the real became tantamount. Many of the scenes of the early films by Auguste
(1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948), such as the workers leaving the factory, men
playing cards, a middle class family having breakfast, or a barge on a river, could have figured in
the pages of a realist novel or the paintings of Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte, or Courbet.

Central Arguments of the Theory As Presented by Different Theorists

Film critics and theorists have long given their intellectual support to the practice of realist
filmmaking. For Rudolph Arnheim, writing in the early 1930s, film offered the possibility of "the
mechanical imitation of nature" in which original and copy become indistinguishable in the eyes
of the public. Yet it was Bazin who, a decade later, would transform the mechanical reproduction
of the cinematic image into a prophecy. A prolific critic, Bazin is best known for his defense of
cinematic realism.

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For Bazin, what filmmakers as different as Robert Bresson (1901–1999), De Sica, Renoir,
Rossellini, and Orson Welles (1915–1985) had in common was a desire to put cinema at the
service of what Bazin called a fundamental faith in reality. The credibility of a film did not come
from its verisimilitude but from the identity between the photographic image and its object. In
"The Ontological Realism of the Photographic Image" (1945), Bazin sketches a brief history of
art, in which he identifies cinema as the fulfillment of the human craving for realistic
representation. Cinema's mission was thus to fulfill this goal. For Bazin, realism was a style
whose chief elements were the long take, deep focus, limited editing and, when possible, the use
of non-professional, or at least relatively unknown actors. Realism for Bazin was both the
essence of cinema—its ontology—and a rhetoric whose keys were simplicity, purity, and
transparency.

In 1960, two years after Bazin's death, Kracauer continued and radicalized Bazin's project in his
book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Like Bazin, Kracauer argued that of
all the arts, film is uniquely qualified to record physical reality. Kracauer conceded that many
films combine realist with formalist tendencies, but he concluded that the films that make us
"experience aspects of physical reality are the most valid aesthetically." Thus for Kracauer, the
best moment in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948) is not Shakespeare's text, or Olivier's acting, or
even his direction, but a moment when the camera, almost by inadvertence, frames a window of
Elsinore castle and lets us see the "real ocean" in all its force. In his previous book, From
Caligari to Hitler (1947), Kracauer traced the rise of Nazism through the psychological terror of
German expressionist cinema. It is possible his conclusions for the redemption of physical reality
through cinema were a reaction against films whose formalism he deemed tainted by its
association with totalitarianism and racism. For, in the end, the realist tendency is a form of
humanism. In Kracauer's vision, cinema's ontological realism reasserts the fundamental equality
of all before the camera.

Philosopher Stanley Cavell also has argued for the ontological realism of cinema, even though
his main references are the films of classical Hollywood. For Cavell as for Bazin and Kracauer,
the basis of the film medium is photographic. A photograph, and by extension film, always
implies the presence of the rest of the world. Film "displaces" people and objects from the world
onto the screen. This is not only proof, for Cavell, of film's ontological realism, it is also the
beginning of our reconciliation with the world. Movies permit us to view the world unseen, at a
distance, and this sets in motion the intellectual process that will bring us back to the world and
will reaffirm our participation in it. More than any other film critic or theorist, Cavell insists that
film's fundamental realism makes it an art of contemplation, an intellectual and spiritual exercise
meant to restore our relation to the world.

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A Word on Bazin (1918 – 1958)
Fifty years after his death, André Bazin remains the world's most important film critic and
theorist. Bazin started writing about film in Paris in 1943 and went on to produce an extremely
varied and prodigiously enthusiastic body of work. During his short career, he authored nearly
three thousand articles, published in a variety of journals, including, most famously, Cahiers du
cinéma , which he cofounded in 1952. An indefatigable defender of filmmakers such as F. W.
Murnau, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, and Roberto Rossellini, Bazin also
influenced a generation of French filmmakers who cut their teeth as critics at Cahiers du cinéma
and went on to become the French New Wave, including François Truffaut to whom he was
mentor and adoptive father.

Bazin wrote about such varied topics as Hollywood westerns and musicals, theatre, film, and
animation, but he is best remembered for his spirited defense of realism. In his famous article,
"The Ontology of the Photographic Image" (1945), Bazin presented his core argument for
cinematographic realism: photography and cinema allow a mechanical reproduction of
reality unseen in any previous art form. According to him, photography differs from painting
in that it produces not a likeness, but the object itself snatched from "the conditions of time and
space that govern it."

For Bazin, this realism was enhanced through certain stylistic techniques and choices, including
its tendency toward on-location shooting, which helped confirm the existence of a world beyond
the screen. Deep focus and minimal editing promoted an ambiguity of vision that more closely
resembled the spectator's perception of reality. According to Bazin, films that use depth of focus
allow the spectator's eye to wander around the picture and to determine the importance of each
object on the screen.

Throughout his essays, Bazin tied the films he loved most to a form of asceticism. This austerity
was a way of cutting through the rhetorical artifice that had invaded commercial cinema and
modern life itself. The cinematic image, for Bazin, allows just enough detachment for us to
contemplate the mysteries of the world, whether they take the form of "a reflection on a damp
sidewalk," the pockmarks on a character's face, or Ingrid Bergman walking through the ruins of
Pompeii.

Criticism of the Realist Film Theory

In the 1850s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) condemned realism (in general) as
a "war on imagination." In the 1960s, cinematic realism came under sustained attack for being an
imaginary construct. This attack took several forms, all of which argue against the ontological
realism of cinema. Theorists under the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Louis
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Althusser's Marxism argued that what Bazin called realism was nothing more than an illusion.
More recently, philosopher Noël Carroll has judged that Bazin's realism is based on logically
inconsistent assumptions about resemblance. Realism, in these views, was nothing more than the
product of what Roland Barthes called a "reality effect." For the critics, the realist tendency to
insist upon the transparency of the cinematographic image was little more than a pernicious
bourgeois illusion.

Kolker (2006) argues that an image, whether photographed, painted, or digitized, is not the thing
itself. It is a representation of a mediated transmission – composed, lit, pushed through the
camera lens, or a computer, and transferred onto film or through binary code onto the computer
screen, appearing to be the thing itself, though in reality, only its image. Mediation is involved.
The subject of a photograph is not neutral – the person or a thing is first chosen to be a subject,
and then poses or is posed for the camera, often assuming a camera-ready attitude dictated by
culture (e.g. smiling). ―Artificiality of the image‖, he argues, ―is a hard concept to accept,
because evidence seems to go against it.‖ However, he concludes that images provide a powerful
illusion of owning reality. Images humanize and make the external world our own
(identification). They also allow us to maintain a real connection with the external world, a solid,
visual connection. The question is on whether images should be taken real and indeed taken at
the face value.

Kolker (2006) further argues that reality is always a mutually agreed upon social construct, a
more or less common consensus about what is out there and what it all means to most people.
Our shared ideas of truth, beauty, morality, sexuality, politics, and religion; the ways we interpret
the world and make decisions on how we act in it are determined by a complex process of
education, assimilation, acculturation, and assent that begins at birth. Reality is always
something said or understood about the world. The physical world is there but reality is always a
polymorphous, shifting complex of mediations, a kind of multifaceted lens, constructed by the
changing attitudes and desires of a culture. Reality is a complex image of the world that many of
us choose to agree to. The photographic and cinematic image is one of the ways we use this
―lens‖ to interpret the complexities of the world.

He observes that when the critic Andre Bazin said that the history of art is equal to the history of
people’s desire to save an image of the real world, he quickly modified this idea by saying that
the desire to capture reality is in fact the desire ―to give significant expression to the world‖. It’s
not the world we see in the image but its significant, mediated expression. For Bazin, such
expression becomes very significant in photography and film because of the apparent lack of
interference from a human agent. This is a peculiar paradox. The image is a significant
expression of the real world; it almost is the real world because its image is formed without

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human interference. According to Bazin’s theory, at the instant of transferring the image to the
film, the photograph occurs without human intervention.

From the arguments by Kolker and various other scholars, one can conclude that Realist Theory,
apparently, has a kernel of truth but is deeply compromised by all the manipulation that goes on
before and after the image is actually made (and even while the image is being made, because
lenses are not neutral). Out of the paradox come many of our confusions over what the
photographic and cinematic image actually is and actually does.

Neo-Realist Theory (Italian Neorealism)

American cinema is the dominant form across the world. Given this domination it should not be
surprising to find that when filmmakers in other countries seek their own style, thus their own
methods of seeing the world in cinematic terms, they begin by thinking about American film and
how their own work might be different. After World War II, Italian filmmakers linked the
commercial cinema of prewar Italy with all that was bad about the fascists. They also saw a link
to Hollywood film in those fascist comedies and melodramas about romance among members of
the upper middle class – called ―white-telephone‖ movies because of their overdone décor. They
knew that all of this production, with its reliance on elaborate sets, stars that were removed from
the life of ordinary people, stories that addressed the lives of people who could not possibly exist
in the day-to-day world – the whole artifice of middle-class fantasy – had to be overthrown. In its
place would be a new genre of film that addressed poor people in their daily lives, peasants in the
countryside, workers in the streets and in their apartments and meeting halls.

Instead of the studio melodramas, films would be made on the street, on location, amid the
buildings, traffic, and the people of the cities, or in the countryside. Instead of movie stars,
ordinary people or semi-professional performers would be used. Their faces would not be
familiar or associated with other films. Hollywood cinema, and the cinema of fascist Italy, were
seen as altogether an act of evasion. People went to movies to see movie life, not the life of the
world. Do away with these conventions, strip generic formulas and generic responses, get to the
people, and film would in turn communicate back to the people images of life as it is.

Ideologically, the characteristics of Italian neo-realism were:

• a new democratic spirit, with emphasis on the value of ordinary people

• a compassionate point of view and a refusal to make facile moral judgments
• a preoccupation with Italy’s Fascist past and its aftermath of wartime devastation
• a blending of Christian and Marxist humanism
• an emphasis on emotions rather than abstract ideas

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Stylistically, neorealism was:

• an avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favour of loose, episodic structures that evolve
organically
• a documentary visual style
• the use of actual locations–usually exteriors–rather than studio sites (which often
displayed the post-war destruction of Italy)
• the use of nonprofessional actors, even for principal roles
• use of conversational speech, not literary dialogue
• avoidance of artifice in editing, camerawork, and lighting in favour of a simple
―styleless‖ style

The beginnings of Italian Neorealism can be found with the director Roberto Rossellini and his
movie, Rome, Open City. It is a movie about the collaboration of the Catholics and Communists
fighting the Nazi occupation of Rome shortly before the American army liberated the city. Some
of the footage is reported to have actually been shot during the Nazi retreat out of the city. Parts
of the film are conventional and some stereotyped. Rossellini wanted to convey the cruel
atmosphere that existed during Nazi occupation, and many of the film’s narrative elements are
based on actual events during this time.

If Rossellini brought neorealism to the forefront of world cinema, it was Vittorio de Sica who
sustained the movement. He collaborated with scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini on all of his
neorealist films. One of his greatest and most widely known films is Bicycle Thieves. The film is
acted entirely by nonprofessionals and consists of simple events in the life of a labourer. The
film is about the protagonist getting a job (at the time of the movie, 25% of the Italian workforce
was jobless) and in order to get to work, the protagonist has to get his bicycle out of hock. In
order to do that, the protagonist and his wife have to pawn their sheets and bedding (her wedding
dowry.) On his first day at work, the bike is stolen. The rest of the movie deals with the attempts
to recover the bike. It touches on Italy’s institutions and cultures–the government bureaucracy,
political parties, the Church, popular beliefs, neighbourhoods, the family, soccer. It is a painful
realization for the protagonist’s son, Bruno, that his father is human and not the super hero that
he considers his father to be.

Influence and Legacy

It is important to repeat that neo-realists were not interested in making documentaries, even
though they influenced documentary filmmakers. (Documentary films are an example of films in
which everything we see was present when the shooting was made. The documentarist looks for
or tries to re-create a whole on-going event). They wanted to continue using fiction as a means to
structure an ordered narrative. But for them the narrative and the mise-en-scene would appear to

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grow out of the present circumstances of history and place. Many of the films they made had an
immediacy and texture, a visual quality quite unlike anything ever seen before. They spoke about
Italian life during and after the war and all of them have a roughness and directness that move
the viewer beyond the form of the film to the movement of its story and its characters. But unlike
Hollywood films, which also take us beyond their form and into their content, neo-realism
addresses poverty and desperation, the social life of the poor, and the difficulties of forming
supportive communities in a way Hollywood genres rarely permit. Unlike the classical
Hollywood style, these films demand our visual attention. By filling the screen with images of a
shattered and destructive world, they ask us to observe what we have never seen in film before.

And yet Italian neo-realism is, basically, melodrama. Hollywood melodrama is about the politics
of subjective suffering – individuals oppressed by gender, domesticity, unrealizable desires to
escape. Italian neo-realism is about the suffering brought on by political and economic
events, as well as the lives affected by them. The characters of neo-realism are deeply
oppressed, not by domesticity or gender but by war and poverty. Neorealism was absorbed into
American filmmaking very quickly because of its melodrama and because its style of exterior
shooting was so novel and economically feasible. By the late 1940s some films were being
promoted as shot ―on location‖, where the action ―actually takes place‖.

The Expressionist Theory (German Expressionism)

One of the most influential movements in film is German Expressionism, which flourished in
Germany during and right after World War I (Note the distinction in timing from that of Italian
neo-realism which came to life after World War II). It was one of the earliest film styles that
used composition, and everything that makes it up, to create a mood – in this case of darkness,
despair, and madness. Its influence was profound, particularly because many of its practitioners
came to the United States. Mise-en-scene encompasses everything that happens in the frame,
including character placement, camera position, camera movement, lighting, how colour is used,
even sound and music.

"Expressionism is a symbolic representation of a state of mind" It is a film form where a

subjective feeling, rather than objective observation, is represented symbolically in forms such as
shapes, colour, contrasts and subject matter. During the period of recovery following World War
I, the German film industry was booming. However, because of the hard economic times,
filmmakers found it difficult to create movies that could compare with the lush, extravagant
features coming from Hollywood. German filmmakers developed their own style by using
symbolism and set design, or mise-en-scène, to add mood and deeper meaning to their films and
explore the darker psyche of the mind.

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Expressionist films are characterised by: 
highly stylized visuals
• strange asymmetrical camera angles
• atmospheric lighting
• non-diegetic sounds
• harsh contrasts between dark and light.
• shadows and silhouettes, which were often painted on to the set.

Many directors, such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau were able to use these techniques in their
own style, creating tension, fear, excitement and intense feelings in the audience throughout the
movie or specific scenes. Its purpose was to deepen the audience’s interaction with the film,
combining technology and imaginative filming techniques in order to intensify the illusion of
reality. The Expressionists supplanted reality with myth and fantasy in order to liberate visual
perception from the other senses.

Expressionist Influence and Legacy

The Expressionists practically reinvented the look of film in a number of ways:

• unusual editing rhythms (it was very hard to follow the plot due to this fact)
• respectively distorted sets
• exaggerated gestures
• weird or different camera angles
• the ―camera unchained‖, the term used for the camera now able to move within the scene,
which vastly increased the character's subjectivity.

The genres that have been especially influenced by Expressionism are, inevitably, the horror
film and film noir. Amongst the best remembered are films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(Robert Weiner, 1920), Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927).

Carl Laemmle and Universal Studios had made a name for themselves by producing such famous
horror films of the silent era as Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera. German filmmakers
such as Karl Freund (the cinematographer for Dracula in 1931) set the style and mood of the
Universal monster movies of the 1930s with their dark and artistically designed sets, providing a
model for later generations of horror films. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto
Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Carol Reed and Michael Curtiz introduced the
Expressionist style to crime dramas of the 1940s, expanding Expressionism's influence on
modern film making.

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In conclusion, no other film genre of the 1920's was as innovative and influential as German
Expressionism. It opened the world's eyes to the possibilities of filmmaking, and where an
audience could be taken. It was very much a product of its time, and so flourished and declined
in that 10 year period of social and economic change. But its influence lives on in terms of
production aesthetics and audience-driven production decisions. Simply put, modern films would
not be the same if it was not for the ground breaking achievement of German Expressionist
cinema.

The Marxist Theory

Marxist film theory is one of the oldest forms of film theory. Sergei Eisenstein and many other
Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian
dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the
development of montage. While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was
used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative
structure of Hollywood filmmaking.

Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist
(hero character) and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told
through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that
the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been
worked over. Eisenstein himself, however, was accused by the Soviet authorities under Joseph
Stalin of "formalist error," of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the
worker nobly.

French Marxist filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, would employ radical editing and choice
of subject matter, as well as subversive parody, to heighten class consciousness and promote
Marxist ideas. Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle,
began his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni [Wandering around in the night we are
consumed by fire] with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about
his dispossessed daily life.

Situationist filmmakers produced a number of important films, where the only contribution by
the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks? (1973) a
Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and
Proletarian revolution.

Marxist film theory has developed from these precise and historical beginnings and is now
sometimes viewed in a wider way to refer to any power relationships or structures within a

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moving image text. Emphasis is on the history of class consciousness, particularly in relation to
the class struggle between the haves and the have-nots. The argument of Marxists, therefore, is
that cinema must show man’s place in the web of social and political relationships of the society
he finds himself in.

The Reception Theory

Reception Theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the reader’s
reception of a literary text. It takes a textual analytical approach and focuses on the scope of
information on the part of the audience. Its origin is in literature, particularly in the work of
Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 1960s.

Its thesis is that people are not passive recipients of information. This means that a text—be it a
book, movie, or other creative work—is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that
the reader/viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural
background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text or TV broadcast material is
not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the
reader.

What do we interpret from a message?

Stuart Hall stressed the role of social positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by
different social groups. In a model deriving from Frank Parkin, Hall suggested three hypothetical
interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text, which are otherwise known as reception
models.

(i) Dominant (or hegemonic) reading: the reader (in this case the viewer) fully shares the
text code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading (a reading which may not have been
the result of any conscious intention on the part of the author or authors) – in such a stance the
code seems natural and transparent.

(ii) Negotiated reading: the reader (viewer) partly shares the text code and broadly accepts
the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own
position, experiences and interests – this position involves contradictions;

(iii) Oppositional (counter-hegemonic) reading: the reader (viewer), whose social situation
places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred
reading but does not share the text code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative
frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.) e.g. a UDF supporter watching a proDPP film clip).

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Contextual Considerations: Crucial to understanding the Reception Theory
The understanding of environment and context as components of reception (neuropsychology) is
very important. Reception theory provides a means of understanding media texts by
understanding how these texts are read by audiences. Theorists who analyze media through
reception studies are concerned with the experience of cinema and television viewing for
spectators, and how meaning is created through that experience.

An important concept of reception theory is that the media text—the individual movie or
television programme—has no inherent meaning in and of itself. Instead, meaning is created in
the interaction between spectator and text; in other words, meaning is created as the viewer
watches and processes the film (within their mind, guided by their social positioning).

Reception theory argues that contextual factors, more than textual ones, influence the way the
spectator views the film or television programme. Contextual factors include elements of the
viewer's identity as well as circumstances of exhibition, the spectator's preconceived notions
concerning the film or television programme's genre and production, and even broad social,
historical, and political issues. In short, reception theory places the viewer in context, taking into
account all of the various factors that might influence how he or she will read and create
meaning from the text.

Cultural Studies and Film Reception (Kolker, 2006)

It is important to note that ideology is at work in the construction of the classical style. Most film
viewers have assented, across the American culture and, increasingly, across the world, to what
film is supposed to be and not supposed to be – what it should look like and, to a large extent,
what it should say. They have agreed that film is the transparent communication of a story: no
work should be involved in getting access to that story, and no conscious process of reading and
interpreting that story should be required. Film should give all and demand little.

Content is generated by the form and structure of the imagination’s work and is specific to the
kind of work being done. The form and structure of painting are different from that of novel
writing or filmmaking. In all cases, some kind of interpretive work is involved on the part of the
viewer or listener. On some level, reading is involved, reading in its most general sense of
engaging the form of a work, comprehending it, interpreting it, comparing it with other, similar
examples of its kind, contextualizing it, in short, making sense of it. Sense is not given. It must
be made. Making sense out of film is not automatic. We have to learn how to read shots and cuts
and the narrative images they create. But this job is easily and quickly accomplished at an early
age as a person grows.

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Gender
Gender drives many cinematic conventions. Gender-specific stereotypes of the strong man
saving the weak and passive woman informed the early development of cross-cutting – the
editing of captivity/rescue sequences by intercutting shots of the woman in peril with shots of her
approaching rescuer. In general the structure of the gaze in film is really the structure of the male
character and male viewer, gazing at the female character, who is built into the narrative as the
object of desire. The exchange of looks in film is very often erotic, and so the structure of the
gaze drives the narrative, drives our emotions, and propels the characters across the cutting and
into each other’s arms. Even small gestures are gender marked, and much narrative material is
expressed through the gender of the person who uses it. Only women put their hands up to their
faces to express horror, fear, sadness. Women cast eyes upward for a variety of sexually related
reasons. Men may raise their eyes, but usually as a look of annoyance.

Film in the Realm of Culture

Films have emotional and moral designs on us. They ask us to respond with our feelings and to
think of the world in moral certainties, to assume there are clearly defined good people and bad,
ethical acts and unethical ones, clearly discernible. They even suggest ethical solutions to the
problems of how we should act in the world. Film (with the exception of a few of course) does
not demand great intellectual powers to understand it. Film is too often condemned, like popular
music and fiction, as being exploitative, commercial and stupid.

Cultural Studies (Cinematic Perspective)

Cultural studies examines the form and structure of cultural texts as they create meaning or have
meaning created by the people who produce them and the people who are entertained by them.
Cultural studies thinks about meaning as an ongoing process built out of complex relationships
between people in their daily lives and the works of imagination they look to for emotional and
intellectual sustenance and release.

The Frankfurt School

Dating back to the 1920s, the Frankfurt School viewed the rise of popular culture in the German
society as part of the growing authoritarianism in Germany’s political culture. Instead of a web
of interrelated texts in which the listener or viewer is part of a complex structure of commercially
produced and distributed music, news, images and sound, the Frankfurt school saw a vertical
structure where government and industry worked in close collusion with each other, producing
mass media that was distributed downward to the people, dominating the masses with films,
music and radio. The audience for popular culture was an undifferentiated and passive mass,
robbed of subjectivity and individuality by an authoritarian government, which swayed the
people to its needs by manipulating the popular media.
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To the Frankfurt school, the audience for the popular was in fact created, given form, made
compliant, composed, turned into a willing tool of the ruling political party – Hitler’s Nazi
government used the media (radio and film) as a controlled means of communication, fashioning
information, entertainment, and outright propaganda in such a palatable way that its audience
could not resist. The Frankfurt school looked upon the government and its associates in industry,
journalism, broadcasting, and film as strong and controlling, the audience as weak, ailing, and
easily fooled.

The Frankfurt School understood that mass media did not have to clobber its audience into
submission, that people have free will that can be easily and willingly subdued. They saw and
noted how easily popular culture accepted anti-Semitism, agreed to mindless calls for sacrifice to
the fatherland, to the promises for redemption from a despairing and oppressed life. Totalitarian
power – along with the offering of banal entertainment in the form of musicals, melodramas, and
comedies made by the ruling powers – was hard for most Germans to resist.

Under Hitler, cultural difference, individual expression, artistic experimentation were not simply
discouraged but destroyed. Serious art, modern and critical art, was declared decadent and was
banished. Books were burned. Artists fled the country. Popular art was moulded into the narrow
spectrum of hatred of Jews and communists, adulation of Hitler, and celebration of a lower-
middle-class life of home, family, and fatherland, driven by exhortations to keep sacrificing in
order to perpetuate Nazi ideals. Fascism became a model for the Frankfurt’s school of analysis of
the culture industry as a conspiracy of politics and business to form, out of the most profound
and uninformed aspects of a culture’s collective fears and desires, superficial entertainments that
confirmed and reinforced the basest instincts of that culture. The culture seemed to yield
unquestioningly.

Walter Benjamin and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The growth of film studies in the 1960s and the development of feminist theories in the early
1970s laid the ground for a growing interest in serious analysis of popular culture. Many of these
theories grew from an essay by an associate of the Frankfurt school, originally written in 1936. It
helped form the basis of a nonjudgmental, appropriately political, speculative, and complex
meditation on popular art and its relation to the larger matrix of cultural practice. Walter
Benjamin’s ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” takes as its starting
point the new elements of reproduction, storage and distribution that made film and other forms
of popular cultural practice possible. For Benjamin, the difference between the old art of the elite
classes and the new popular art of the masses is that popular or mass art is readily available
outside the usual high-culture sites of museums and libraries. The image is not a unique, one-of-

Page 16 of 26
a-kind event, kept in one place and viewed with awe and reverence. The image is now infinitely
reproducible and available. It has lost that which makes it special (as in artistic painting), even
worthy of cultural reverence, what Benjamin calls its aura.

Aura can be thought of as the uniqueness of a work of traditional high art. An original painting
has aura. Aura is the non-reproducible, the authentic, the original production from the hand of an
artist or ensemble, viewed from a reverent distance. Popular, mass-produced art is without aura
because as audiences we only own copies, the exact semblance of which are owned by thousands
others.

Benjamin, unlike most of his Frankfurt school associates, did not look at this with alarm. He
looked at it as historical and technological fact – something going on despite what social and
cultural critics might think about it. He thought about the growth of popular culture as something
to be understood not as an oppressive reality but as a potentially liberating one. Loss of aura and
ease of access meant two things. Everyone could come into contact with works of the
imagination, and everyone would be free to make of the auraless work what he/she could.
Curiously, the loss of aura could lead to a greater intimacy with the work. The ritual and awe that
surround the creation and reception of original genius might be replaced by the intimate
interpretation of each viewer. ―The progressive reaction,‖ Benjamin writes, ―is characterized by
the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.‖
Every person becomes a critic, able to make sense and make judgments. Every person’s
perception becomes enlarged. ―By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden
details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of
the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule
our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of
action.‖ The camera, he says, is like a surgeon’s knife, cutting through reality, bringing the
viewer into an intimate connection with the world.

The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies

Cultural studies, started by the Germans in 1920s and 30s, coalescing around Benjamin’s essay,
was developed by the British cultural theorist Raymond Williams, and given its name by the
British Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It is a wide ranging discipline,
always in process but with some important foundational principles: that the study of culture be
interdisciplinary and broad. All events are seen in the context of cultural practice, and that
practice is determined not only by the elite culture industry but by the activities and interventions
of many subcultures, which are determined by class, race and gender. Cultural practice involves
both the production of works and their reception by an audience. Culture and all its various
components can be understood as coherent, legible, interactive ―texts‖.

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These texts can be briefly isolated for the purpose of study and then placed back in their cultural
context. One can analyse any movie as he/she might a novel, examining the film’s formal
structure, images and narrative form. One can also integrate the film within the culture of the
period they were produced or the time the analysis is being done. For example, James Cameron’s
The Terminator (1984) can be figured as a response to the end of the Cold War and the unknown
terrors that occur when we discover that ―the enemy is really us and not them‖. It can be seen as
a way in which the American (or Western) culture continues to come to terms with the modern
world, with despair, emptiness, and terrors of the unknown, how it deals with issues of the
feminine and masculine, with its attraction to and repulsion by sexuality, with its fascination with
and fear of otherness and difference.

Reception and Negotiation

Text and context – in their usual senses of the work of art and its cultural and historical
surroundings – are reconfigured in cultural studies. The individual work, the work of culture, our
acts of looking, understanding, and participating, can all be read as interacting texts. The very
interaction of viewer and film is a kind of text that can be interpreted. Form and meaning make
sense only when we examine their intersections in all their complexity. The key is legibility, the
ability to read culture and its work, to understand, dissect, and then reassemble what we have
read into a coherent analysis. No one element can be taken for granted. The whole is made of its
parts, and each part responds to the other [the essence of continuity].

Cultural Studies sees a complex interaction of production and response and reception. The
consumers of popular media are not a dumb, cowed, undifferentiated mass, repressed and
oppressed by the banal homogeneity of what they see and hear. People consume in many
different ways, and with varying degrees of comprehension and ability to make interpretations.
Individuals, as well as small and large groups, determined by their economic and social classes,
make up subcultures which negotiate (a key word for the Birmingham school of cultural studies)
meanings with popular texts, much like readers of high cultural products do. Negotiation implies
a relationship between the work of popular culture and the consumer, with the latter taking what
he/she wants from a song, a television show, or a movie, and possibly not taking it at all
seriously.

People have different backgrounds and different needs, which they put to use in negotiating with
the text meanings that are most useful or pleasurable. People are capable of comprehension and
of articulation, of struggling against the desire of the producers of the popular to inundate them
with sounds and images. Everyone interprets; everyone responds. What traditional mass media
studies saw as a monolith, cultural studies sees as a complex group of class-race-, and gender-

Page 18 of 26
marked individuals, with desires and with intelligence. We don’t merely accept what the culture
industry hands down: we deal with it and use it.

Cultural studies attempts to be nonjudgmental while maintaining a moral centre. Cultural studies
first seeks to describe and analyse and broaden. Judgment comes after comprehension. This is a
very complex point, because it places us between common sense, careful analysis, and wholesale
dismissal. Many people still dismiss film, TV, and rock as worthless and potentially dangerous.
They see the Web as a hotbed of pornography or stealing other people’s intellectual property.
Conservative politicians blame Hollywood for ruining the culture. Study after study attempts to
discover whether violent film and television provoke violence in children, and each study seems
to deliver a different answer.

In the end, some judgment had to be applied. The interplay of perception and analysis, guided by
methodology, that makes up critical thought must lead any critic to abstract what she finds about
the culture into broad, general patterns and then analyse those patterns for subtle meaning. The
description and evaluation of these patterns will be subjective, based upon the values and moral
beliefs held by the critic. Some aspects of popular culture will, indeed, be found wanting, even
intellectually or morally degrading, but this judgment ought not then become an all-embracing
condemnation. Perhaps the key element of cultural studies is its ability to analyse broadly and
make judgments discriminatingly.

Reception Theory
Reception Theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the reader’s
reception of a literary text. It takes a textual analytical approach, and unlike the Agenda Setting
Theory, it focuses on the scope of information on the part of the audience. (Remember Agenda-
setting theory focuses on the scope of information on the part of the transmitter). Its origin is in
literature, particularly in the work of Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 1960s.

Its thesis is that people are not passive recipients of information (contrary to the assumption of
the Hypodermic Needle Theory, also known as the Magic Bullet Theory). This means that a
text—be it a book, movie, or other creative work—is not simply passively accepted by the
audience, but that the reader/viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual
cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text or TV broadcast
material is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the
text and the reader. Think about the reception of an MCP or UDF supporter watching news on
MBC about a cabinet minister castigating the opposition in Parliament. The way such a person
would receive the said information would be different from the way a supporter of the ruling
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) would receive the same information.

What do we interpret from a message?

Page 19 of 26
Stuart Hall stressed the role of social positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by
different social groups. In a model deriving from Frank Parkin, Hall suggested three hypothetical
interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text, which are otherwise known as reception
models.

(i) Dominant (or hegemonic) reading: the reader (in this case the viewer) fully shares the text
code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading (a reading which may not have been the
result of any conscious intention on the part of the author or authors) – in such a stance the code
seems natural and transparent. A very good example is a case of a DPP staunch (and possibly
irrational-thinking or uneducated) supporter watching the presidential diary on MBC during the
DPP era. He or she would end up accepting every aspect of the text (audio-visual) being
transmitted.

(ii) Negotiated reading: the reader (viewer) partly shares the text code and broadly accepts the
preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own
position, experiences and interests – this position involves contradictions. For instance, a rational
thinker watching a propaganda programme on MBC; he or she is bound to accept part of the
information and reject the rest.

(iii) Oppositional (counter-hegemonic) reading: the reader (viewer), whose social situation
places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred
reading but does not share the text code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative
frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.) e.g. an MCP supporter watching a pro-DPP television
broadcast, emphatically referring to the DPP regime as perfect in terms of political and economic
governance.

Contextual Considerations: Crucial to understanding the Reception Theory

The understanding of environment and context as components of reception (neuropsychology) is
very important. Reception theory provides a means of understanding media texts by
understanding how these texts are read by audiences. Theorists who analyze media through
reception studies are concerned with the experience of cinema and television viewing for
spectators, and how meaning is created through that experience.

An important concept of reception theory is that the media text—the individual movie or
television programme—has no inherent meaning in and of itself. Instead, meaning is created in
the interaction between spectator and text; in other words, meaning is created as the viewer
watches and processes the film (within their mind, guided by their social positioning).

Reception theory argues that contextual factors, more than textual ones, influence the way the
spectator views the film or television programme. Contextual factors include elements of the
viewer's identity as well as circumstances of exhibition, the spectator's preconceived notions
concerning the film or television programme's genre and production, and even broad social,
historical, and political issues.

In short, reception theory places the viewer in context, taking into account all of the various
factors that might influence how he or she will read and create meaning from the text.

Page 20 of 26
Agenda-setting Theory
The theory describes the mass media as a tool that influences public opinion by providing people
with topical issues for their discourse. In other words the mass media is looked at as a tool that
shapes public opinion by setting the agenda in the public discourse.

The theory shows how the media affect public opinion, not necessarily by supporting one view
over another, but by emphasizing certain issues in the public sphere. According to agenda-setting
theory, the news does not tell us what to believe, but it does tell us what issues and debates are
worthy of our attention. This derives from Bernard Cohen (1963) who stated that, ―The press
may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly
successful in telling its readers what to think about.‖

Think about MBC and Joy. When it comes to issues to do with government or the ruling party,
MBC will try to tell people what to think, but through listening to other radios that take an
objective approach (and indeed if it were possible watching news on other local TV stations),
one would be able to get what to think about rather than merely what to think. In terms of Joy, it
has always been views that are in line with the political cause of the Muluzi family (the former
president Bakili or his son Atupele, the proprietors of the station) which has always been
advanced and one can clearly seen that through the treatment of news to do with the wrangles
between the Friday Jumbe faction and the one favouring Atupele Muluzi in the run-up to the
convention that would elect United Democratic Front (UDF)’s 2014 presidential candidate.

Research has shown a recurrent correlation between media coverage of an issue and the
perceived importance of that issue among the general public. The theory explains this correlation
as the result of ―media gatekeeping.‖ This is the controlled, selective system for emphasizing
certain stories over others, and for allowing some issues to be discussed in the news while others
are not. This is primarily the duty of news or programme editors and producers or directors.

History
In 1963, Cohen was the first to articulate agenda-setting theory in its current form. His ideas
were probably based on the earlier writings (in 1922) of journalist Walter Lippmann. While
Lippman did not use the words ―agenda-setting theory‖ in his writings, his concepts were very
similar. According to Lippman, people are more responsive to the pseudo-environment of mental
imagery than they are to reality. To him, this meant that the mass media would have a greater
effect on public consciousness than the interactions and events of our daily lives.

Apart from Cohen, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw investigated presidential campaigns in
1968, 1972 and 1976. In the research done in 1968 they focused on two elements: awareness and
information. Investigating the agenda-setting function of the mass media in the 1968 presidential
campaign, they attempted to assess the relationship between what voters in one community said
were important issues and the actual content of the media messages used during the campaign.
McCombs and Shaw concluded that the mass media exerted a significant influence on what
voters considered to be the major issues of the campaign.

Core Assumptions and Statements

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Two basic assumptions underlie most research on agenda-setting:
(1) The press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it;
(2) Media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those
issues as more important than other issues.

There is some debate over whether media gatekeeping is simply a reflection of public opinion, or
whether public opinion is actually shaped by it. According to Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder
(1987) the perceived value of a news story is determined largely by certain presentation
techniques. Through their study, they showed that the placement of a story, among others, and
the way it is emphasized has a strong effect on its perceived importance. Awarding politics prime
time in TV news bulletins or emphasizing certain facets of politics over others has an effect on
public opinion. For example, in case of MBC, taking some items into the analysis segment of the
news bulletin would make one to have a perception that such items are probably the most
important. Although these studies have not definitively shown a direct causal relationship
between media presentation and public opinion, and although it is still unclear whether people
shape the media, OR the media shape people, OR if people and the news shape each other, one
fact remains: there is some correlation between media content and public opinion on various
topical issues and this correlation is very significant.

There is a broader correlation between the agendas of the media, the public, and policy makers
(politicians and public officials). One or two often shape the other. It can be said not only that the
media can affect the agenda of public discussion, but also that it can shape public policy (see the
figure below).

Agenda-setting Conceptual Model

Source: McQuail & Windahl (1993)

2.3.3 Expounding the Agenda-setting Model

In the figure above, there are a number of facts (to do with the media’s role in agenda-setting)
that have been illustrated. First and foremost, a media agenda that is capable of influencing
public opinion is set through gate-keeping. So it is the gate-keepers working for various media
houses, particularly those trusted by the masses (therefore influential) who actually shape media
content that is finally taken to the public, which has an effect of setting topics for discussion in
the public sphere. The media agenda therefore result into a public agenda.

Page 22 of 26
However, within the public sphere one would find policy makers. These too are influenced by
the media agenda (represented by the bottom, curved arrow). Policy making may also be
influenced by public agenda (originating from media agenda anyway). As a matter of examples,
think about the issue of government referring back to the Law Commission some of the laws
deemed repressive by the public as well as the media. This is a typical example of policy agenda
influenced by both media and public agenda.

Sometimes what the policy makers come up with may result into adoption by the media as their
agenda, which would in turn become a public agenda (represented by the top, curved arrow of
the model). A typical example is when through the media people learn about what government
officials have done, which originates from neither the media nor the public.

One important element though, is that the three types of agenda highlighted in the model (media
agenda, public agenda and policy agenda) are all influenced by two factors. These are:

(a) Personal experience and interpersonal communication (represented by the top-most block
in the diagram)

(b) Real world indicators of the importance of the agenda issue or event (represented by the
bottom block in the diagram)

For example, media coverage and public opinion on the homosexual engagement of Tiwonge
Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza were both influenced by personal experiences and
interpersonal communication of the reporters and individual members of the general public as
well as global trends on minority rights of homosexuals. The same was the case with policy-
makers: the two were pardoned because of world indicators on the agenda issue, while
amendment of the law to accommodate such individuals could not be done because of the policy-
makers’ consideration of their personal experiences and interpersonal communication with
various stakeholders including family members, traditional leaders, faith leaders, etc (most of
whom regard homosexuality as extremely unacceptable).

Favourite Methods of Assessment

Two-way approach: Content-analysis of media as well as interviews of audiences. Thus, for you
to be able to know if the assumed correlation between media content and public opinion exist in
a particular environment, you have to match what the media transmits (content) and how it has
been arranged for presentation (gate-keeping) with the audience’s views (audience may be both
the general public and policy-makers). In other words, you assess the content of the TV station in
question and thereafter ask people on what they hold to be the most important topical issues
within the community or society, so that from there you can then see if there is any link between
media content and what people perceive to be important issues in the public discourse. (In case
of policy makers, reflected by the policies they put in place after the media highlighted certain
issues). The aim is to assess if what the media is transmitting has any influence on the opinion of
the receivers of the information being transmitted.

Scope and Application

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Just as McCombs and Shaw expanded their focus, other researchers have extended investigations
of agenda setting to issues including history, advertising, foreign, and medical news. For
example, here in Malawi MBC has been using a historical approach in demonizing
demonstrations and its organizers by emphasizing on loss of life during the 2011 July 20
demonstrations as a way of persuading people not to take part in any subsequent demonstrations.
On the other hand, another TV station would use history to emphasize the fact that Malawi is
where it is because of demonstrations. They would point out that the Federation of Rhodesia and
Nyasaland was brought to an end partly due to the 3rd March 1959 riots, which eventually
resulted into national independence in 1964; and that a similar situation in 1992 forced the
Malawi Congress Party (MCP) one-party regime to call for a referendum that ushered Malawi
into multi-party democracy in 1993.

The Uses and Gratification Model

The basic theme of the Uses and Gratifications Theory is the idea that people use the media to
get specific gratifications. This is in opposition to the Hypodermic Needle Theory (also called
the Magic Bullet Theory) that claims consumers have no say in how the media influences them.

The theory’s main idea is that people are not helpless victims of the all powerful media, but use
media to fulfill their various needs. These needs serve as motivations for using media. In other
words, instead of being passive, people play an active role in dealing with the messages they
receive from the media.

Thus, the Uses and Gratification Approach focuses on why people use particular media rather
than on content. In contrast to the concern of the 'media effects' tradition with 'what media do to
people' (which assumes a homogeneous mass audience and a 'hypodermic' view of media), the
Uses and Gratification Approach can be seen as part of a broader trend amongst media
researchers which is more concerned with 'what people do with media', allowing for a variety of
responses and interpretations.

History
The Uses and Gratification Approach arose originally in the 1940s and underwent a revival in
the 1970s and 1980s. The approach springs from a functionalist paradigm in the social sciences.
It presents the use of media in terms of the gratification of social or psychological needs of the
individual (Blumler & Katz 1974). The mass media compete with other sources of gratification,
but gratifications can be obtained from a medium's content, from familiarity with a genre within
the medium, from general exposure to the medium, and from the social context in which it is
used.

Uses and Gratification theorists argue that people's needs influence how they use and respond to
a medium. Zillmann (in McQuail 1987: 236) has shown the influence of mood on media choice:
boredom encourages the choice of exciting content and stress encourages a choice of relaxing
content.

The same TV programme may gratify different needs for different individuals. Different needs
are associated with individual personalities, stages of maturation, backgrounds and social roles.

Page 24 of 26
Developmental factors seem to be related to some motives for purposeful viewing: e.g. Judith
van Evra argues that young children may be particularly likely to watch TV in search of
information (educative and not necessarily news) and hence more susceptible to influence (Evra
1990: 177, 179).

Conceptualisation of the Theory

Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz devised their Uses and Gratifications Model in 1974 to
highlight five areas of gratification in media texts for audiences. These include:

(i) Escape — Watching TV to escape from reality; for example, video games.

(ii) Social interaction — People create personal relationships with the characters in a media text,
particularly those appearing on TV. This has the potential to create a common ground for
conversation in people’s every day lives.

(iii) Identify — People often identify a part of themselves in a media text, either through
character or circumstance. For example, hair style trends stemming from presenters or actresses
seen on TV. This can go a long way in people’s ideologies. The Sense of group and belonging
makes reception of messages easy in social context.

(iv) Inform and educate — the audience gain an understanding of the world around them by
consuming a media text, for example news bulletins, current affairs programme such as business
review.

(v) Entertain – consumed purely for entertainment purposes, meaning that text need not have
any other gratifications.

Another empirical study in the Uses and Gratification tradition might typically involve audience
members completing a questionnaire about why they watch a TV programme. Denis McQuail
(1987: 73) offers the following typology of common reasons (four only) for media use, which
are similar to the five areas of gratification as devised by Blumler and Katz:

(i) Information
- Finding out about relevant events and conditions in immediate surroundings, society and the
world.
- Seeking advice on practical matters or opinion and decision choices
- Satisfying curiosity and general interest
- Learning; self-education
- Gaining a sense of security through knowledge

(ii) Personal Identity

- Finding reinforcement for personal values
- Finding models of behavior
- Identifying with valued others (in the media)
- Gaining insight into one's self

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(iii) Integration and Social Interaction
- Gaining insight into circumstances of others; social empathy
- Identifying with others and gaining a sense of belonging
- Finding a basis for conversation and social interaction
- Having a substitute for real-life companionship
- Helping to carry out social roles
- Enabling one to connect with family, friends and society

(iv) Entertainment
- Escaping, or being diverted, from problems
- Relaxing
- Getting intrinsic cultural or aesthetic enjoyment
- Filling time
- Emotional release
- Sexual arousal

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