Audience theories

Write about audience theories explaining which one/s you are likely to consider in your film noir coursework and how and why?

Film Noir is French for black film, it is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas. It was popular between the early 1940s to the late 1950s, but is seen as outdated now could this because of the cultivation theory.

The Uses and Gratification theory was established by the researchers Blulmer and Katz in 1974, this was after the first generation to grow up with television widely available (1960s) The Uses and Gratification theory suggests that individuals might choose and use a text for a range of purposes including; Diversion (escaping reality), Social Interaction (the water cooler effect; talking about the text in a social environment i.e. work), personal identity (finding yourself, learning and relating to others), Surveillance (voyeurism) and to fill a gap (stories about socially difficult situations i.e. Eastenders with abortion). After studying the Uses and Gratification theory we think that this is something we need to consider when making our film noir. We would want our audience to personally identify with our characters, to feel a sense of diversion and to get encapsulated in our story.

The Reception theory was established between 1980 and 1990 by Stuart Hall. It highlights how individual circumstances (gender, class age and ethnicity) affect their reading of a text. Stuart Halls encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience explains how the producers encoded text which is then decoded by the audience. Producers can use ‘preferred readings’ to ensure that the audience will decode the text in the way the produce intended to be. For example specific movie stars are used to portray a character that relates to their personal life and history in other movies. Whilst creating our film noir we will have to think carefully about all potential messages that different members of the audience will decode. To help get the correct message across to all readers we will attempt to use ‘preferred readings’.

The cultivation theory was developed by Daniel Chandler in the 1960s.  It explains the effect a text has on the audience, he believes the more the you told or watch something the more you accept it. This is why old thrillers are much softer and new thrillers which often include a vast amount of swearing, violence and sexual content. He believed that violence in media encourages real life violence and that attitudes can be changed by the media. For this reason we think that film noir is not as popular in modern day due to the low amount of ‘video nasty’s (i.e. missing violence, drugs etc). This is something that we will incorporate in our film noir production so that it can be enjoyed in the twenty first century.

Overall whilst creating our film noir production we have decided to consider with great detail the three above theories. With this in mind we hope that our production will be suitable for all audiences and that it will be thoroughly enjoyed.