film communications

Paper instructions:
read a little bit of a book and watch a video that i will upload and fill in the worksheet provided. Here is her example from another student:
Worksheet #5 Example B

This worksheet earned 100% of the possible points.

Reading – Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess

Author – Linda Williams

This essay is about 3 specific types of film genres: Pornography, Horror and Melodrama. The author’s essay focuses on the different types of excesses found in each of these types of films and how these excesses are interrelated among these three genres.

The author cites the article written by Rick Altman in which he espouses the “need to recognize the possibility that excess may have been much slower to emerge in the genres whose non-linear spectacles have centered more directly upon the gross display of the human body.” She decides to narrow the focus of her essay on the three types of genre already listed and she describes both pornography and horror films as the two lowest genres in cultural esteem.

She makes the case that the excesses in each of these genres are related to each other. The first example she gives is that they all have “the spectacle of the body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion.” For pornographic films it is the over the top portrayal of the intense orgasm or ejaculation, for the horror films it is physical shudder, and for the melodrama it is the excessive weeping. She calls each of these ecstatic sex, ecstatic violence, and ecstatic woe. They all cause the audience to react sympathetically to what they are seeing (although they won’t have the same reaction to what is really being viewed). The audience empathizes with the characters on the screen and their emotions closely reflect on what they are seeing. She equates these feelings back to primal fantasies that she says we all share: seduction for the pornography, castration for the horror films, and origin for the melodramas. She goes further to explain that these genres also evoke temporal fantasies within each of us: being on-time (primal seduction in pornography); too-early (the anxiety of not being ready as shown in horror films); and too-late (discovering the origin of self in melodramas).

I thought this was an interesting take on the three genres she focused on in her essay. I thought that tying the excess she expressed in each type of film to primal fantasies was really thought provoking and could very well be true, at least in some cases. I found it interesting that she doesn’t condemn the pornographic film industry for their exploitation of women but instead claims it is moving into a more accepted genre, with many women among its audience. I disagree with this view and still think it is an exploitative industry and often uses women in their production that have been abused in some way during their life.

The only word I had a little difficulty with was temporality and only because it confused me in the context in which it was used. It is defined as ‘the quality or state of being connected with time and the world.”

I thought of films like Halloween and The Shining when she talked about the excess in horror films. The reason that I thought of these two in particular was that they both put me in a physically heightened sense when I watched them – Halloween because it was well constructed (for the genre) and The Shining because the believability factor was high and the actors (especially Nicholson) gave a chilling performance into what it may be like to go insane.

Video – Game Over: Gender, Race, and Violence in Video Games.

The video was about the video game industry and what, if any, responsibility they have when it comes to characters depicted in their games. The authors of the narrative film clearly want to try and make a connection between video game violence and real world violence committed by those who play a lot of these types of games.

The video starts with the statistics that 90 % of households with children rent video games and that the children in these homes play the games for an average of 1 ½ hours. To emphasize the popularity and pervasiveness of video games they cite the fact that in 1999 215 million games were sold for 7 billion dollars.

The majority of successful video games marketed today have explicit representations of both males and females. The men are ov
erwhelmingly shown as muscular and aggressive while the women are often shown scantily clad, with unrealistic body proportions and in need of rescue. People of color are often shown in stereotypical ways, with black women shown as prostitutes and vagrants and black men shown as drug lords and gang members. Even games that don’t feature any female characters at all are still marketed using buxom female characters. These games are mainly produced by white males and they are using these games to vicariously live out their fantasies.

The violence in the games is pervasive and graphic and players are encouraged to be as violent as possible in order to be successful. Some people believe that this desensitization to and normalization of violence is a direct cause of increased violent acts by our youth today. The gaming industry denies any connection and instead insists this is a fantasy world and “everybody” knows that. They also contend there is not any proof of any connection between these games and increased violence. The authors contend there is already enough evidence supplied by the U.S. Military.

The U.S. military has used video game technology to train its front-line troops in order to get them used to shooting at people. Pre-WWII soldiers were trained using round targets and the military found that only 15-29% of their riflemen during that war fired at an exposed enemy soldier. They used silhouettes to train soldiers after that and found that 95% of soldiers in Vietnam would shoot at an exposed enemy soldier. They then incorporated video gaming technology into this training in order to desensitize the soldiers from firing at another human being. Many of the video games also available to kids are similar or the same (Doom) as those used for military training. The difference is that the soldiers are trained when and where it is appropriate to use their weapons while kids don’t have this training.

The overriding theme of the video was the effort to connect video game violence with an increase in violence in teenagers. They contend that there is a clear correlation between the graphic, excessive violence in the games to violent acts committed by many youth today. They also contend that even those that don’t actively participate in violent acts are desensitized to violent acts by others. They see this as normal behavior and it is learned and reinforced by these violent games.

There were not any vocabulary words or terms used that I was not familiar with.

This video is pertinent because this is a hotly debated topic today. I think the authors made a very strong connection between their assertions and the fact that the military uses these games for training. As shown by their own statistics this training is very effective in desensitizing their troops, making them more effective killers. Although I knew the military used video games for training I didn’t realize that there was such a marked difference in results when they went to more “realistic” depictions of the “enemy”. Being a veteran I can understand why this was done but it saddens me nonetheless. Once you cross that line you lose part of your humanity and part of your soul.

Some of these new games are so realistic that they make it seem that you are there. These games have become an enormous business and their production is now modeled after the old Hollywood studio system. They have their own version of screenwriters who come up with the storyline, the computer graphics imaging (CGI) department where many people work on different computer-generated facets of the game, the editor who pulls all of these pieces together, and the producer who finances the whole thing. Many of these games now also use actors (or sometimes the people portrayed in the game) to get live action shots so that they can be transferred digitally and the game more realistically mimics real life

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