Representation is the description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular manner. In this essay I will be analysing my film opening, which includes the representation of age, gender and class.
In AS, our coursework production was a film opening called Untamed. This was a in the genre of teen drama which focused on the disruptive relationship between a teenage girl, Aubrey, and her mother, Carol, who did not understand Aubrey's rebellious teenage characteristics. The film opening begins with Aubrey drunkenly stumbling into the house, then arguing with Carol about where Aubrey has been. Aubrey stands up to Carol, then the film opening ends with Aubrey running away from home in the night.
The research of which we conducted in class of representation was majoritevly looking at other teen drama genre films, such as Perks of Being a Wallflower, and analysing their representations of age and gender, in order to incorporate these representations into our own film opening.
In Untamed, our main representation was of gender, and age of mature adults and teenagers. As we only used two characters in our film opening, there was a large emphasis on their age due to the age gap between them both. Here, we conformed to Levi Strauss's theory of binary opposites with the opposites between the mother, Carol, and the daughter, Aubrey. Carol was a mother who was at home alone and sober, sitting in a dressing gown and reading, whilst Aubrey arrives home from being with friends, drunk and dressed ruggedly with messy hair and makeup (intentional mise en scen). The opposites here highlight the representation of age which we presented. We conformed to the stereotype of teenagers being reckless drug takers, whilst mature adults being strict, bad tempered, and boring.
The use of camera shots emphasised Carol's dominance over her daughter, Aubrey. We used many low shots whilst filming Carol in order to make her seem larger and of heightened importance, whilst using higher shots when filming Aubrey. For example, we filmed Aubrey from the top of a stair case in order to make her smaller than the audience and look confused and insignificant.
We then used the camera to emphasise Aubrey's drunken recklessness which conforms to another stereotype of teenagers. To do this, we used the camera with a purposefully shaky hand and using black out cuts between quick shots in the editing process.
Angela McRobbie is a second theorist that we researched and used in the process of our film opening production. McRobbie focuses on gender roles in the media, and states that the media tells us how to behave and that we follow this. McRobbie's theory argues that men are presented as masculine, and powerful, whilst women are comparatively weak, submissive with low ranking jobs, such as a stay at home mother like Carol in our film opening. Therefore, we conform to McRobbie's theory with the character of Carol, due to her staying at home by herself lounging in a dressing gown, which is not a symbol of power.
However, we subverted to McRobbie's theory by making Aubrey independent and aggressive despite her age and gender.
The final theorist that we used was Mulvey and her theory of male gaze, which declares that men view women for pleasure, and refer to women as objects. We subverted to this theory, shown by both of the characters being dressed non-provocatively and not making any provocative claims or actions. Both of our women in the film opening showed their intellect as more significant than their bodies/ appearance by arguing passionately for their thoughts on the same subject of Aubrey's newfound independence.
In conclusion, the theorists of representation and the research around this topic allowed us to use the useful information in our own film opening. Therefore we leaned a considerable amount about representation and how to use this construct in our own production.
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