Ghislaine Mann

Film and Cultural Studies – Lecture 3

In our third lecture of the course we looked at film and how it is analysed by structuralisms and post-structuralisms.
Structuralism (see Saussure and Levi-Strauss) tries to find meaning behind the texts in films, the way they are constructed and the rules they follow. We also looked at Will Wright’s theory of Hollywood Westerns. He stated that there are 16 ‘functions’ in most Westerns (e.g. the hero, the villain, the fight and the victory for the hero) that help the films to send out a message of Americas social attitudes and beliefs at the time.
Post-Structuralism aims to deconstruct the texts in the film and find the gaps between them. A good example of this is looking at soaps and how they are unrealistic because the characters don’t swear. Laura Mulvey’s theory of ‘visual pleasure’ is a good post-structural analysis of film. She argues that women in films are either objects of lust or a threat.
In the seminar we discussed our favourite films and what happened in them. We found that almost all of the Hollywood films still followed the same rules or ‘functions’ that Wrights Westerns in the 1930s-1970s did.