an inconvenient truth
NQ Higher Media Studies
Media Analysis (Non-fiction)
www.LTScotland.org.uk/sustainabledevelopment/climatechange
Key Aspects of
Media Studies
TEXT
CATEGORIES
• medium, purpose, form, genre, style, tone
LANGUAGE
• technical and cultural codes, anchorage
encode
decode
NARRATIVE
• narrative structure and narrative codes
REPRESENTATIONS
• selection, portrayal, ideological discourses
INSTITUTION
AUDIENCE
• internal controls
TECHNOLOGY
• external controls
• target audience
• differential decoding
CAPITAL
MEANING
select
SOCIETY
• individual, social, cultural,
economic, political events
and ideologies
TIME
Explanation of Concept Map
•
The concept map tries to show how the key aspects of media studies are
integrated. The map shows that the media are involved in a twin circuit of meaning
and capital.
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In SQA Media Studies arrangements there are seven key aspects: Categories,
Language, Narrative, Representation, Audience, Institution and Technology. The
map has an eighth key aspect – Society.
•
The concept map tries to express the following: Media institutions, working under
internal and external constraints, select aspects of society for representation. Media
producers encode meanings in texts for target audiences through categories such
as genre, through technical and cultural codes, narrative and representation. How
audiences decode texts depends on the individual and social differences of
audience members. How they react has more or less influence on society.
Technologies of production, distribution and reception are central to these
processes. The arrow of time through the centre indicates that this circuit of
meaning is a continuous, dynamic process.
an inconvenient truth Timeline
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2000: After election defeat former Democrat Vice President Al Gore starts giving his ‘slide show’ again
May 2004: Producer and climate change activist Laurie David sees Al Gore give a short version of his
presentation ago at the premiere of disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow”
Early spring 2005: Lawrence Bender and Davis Guggenheim see Gore presentation
Spring 2005: David, Bender and Guggenheim approach Al Gore
Summer 2005: Jeff Skoll of Participant Productions agrees to filming with $1m budget
July 2005: start shooting and taping Gore interviews (at his home Tennessee home, Nashville office,
touring the USA and China)
29 August 2005: shooting in New Orleans cancelled because of Hurricane Katrina
End September 2005: two days of shooting Gore’s presentation
October 2005: editing and scoring starts and rough cut is ready in January
January 2005: rough cut premiered at Sundance independent film festival in Utah; Paramount Classics
pick the film up for distribution
20 May 2006: final cut shown at Cannes film festival with new end-titles and Melissa Etheridge song
24 May 2006: released in USA
21 November 2006: DVD released in USA
25 February 2007: An Inconvenient Truth wins Oscars for Academy Awards for best documentary and
best song
Categories: Medium 1
‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was conceived as a film to be experienced collectively in the
cinema. In the USA films are rated by MPAA (Motion Picture Association of
America, www.mpaa.org).
The film is also distributed via
• DVD (which includes a ‘making of’ documentary, an update from Al Gore and
Melissa Etheridge’s “I Need To Wake Up” music video)
• TV screenings
Spin-off products include:
• Two books by Al Gore (one for adults and one for children)
• “I Need To Wake Up” song download by Melissa Etheridge
(www.melissaetheridge.com)
• Soundtrack album by Michael Brook (www.michaelbrookmusic.com)
Categories: Medium 2
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The film also has a web presence at www.climatecrisis.net (which had downloads, news,
blogs, sections on the science, educational materials).
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The film also features on Gore’s website www.algore.com with news of his campaigning
activities including Live Earth (www.liveearth.org)
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The distributor Paramount Classics worked with Technorati (www.technorati.com) to market
the film to film-buff bloggers (Technorati tracks blogs in near real-time and allows people to
track what is being said). Engagement with bloggers created a buzz around the film and
allowed virtual communities to strengthen their engagement with the film. This is an example
of viral marketing in which the audience does some of the promotion.
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The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) has a useful source of information and links
on the film.
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Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org ) also has useful links. Note Wikipedia information is
sometimes wrong and you should check critical information against other sources.
Categories: Purpose
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Media texts can have a variety of purposes: entertainment, information, education,
artistic expression, persuasion, propaganda, profit, …
Q. Which of these purposes do you think motivated the makers of ‘An Inconvenient
Truth’? Use evidence from the film to justify each of your answers.
Q. Of these purposes which one do you think was most important? Use evidence from
the text to justify your answer.
Categories: Form
Typical documentary forms are:
• Feature documentaries
• Documentary series
• One-off TV documentary
• Short documentary
Q. What is the form of the text? Justify your answer.
Categories: Documentary
• The Scot John Grierson (1898-1972) is regarded as the founder of
the documentary movement in Britain in Canada.
• Grierson defined documentary as “the creative treatment of
actuality”.
Q. What is meant by actuality?
Q. Think of the phrase ‘creative treatment’. List ways in which
documentary makers can treat real events in a creative manner.
Q. Is it possible to capture the ‘real’ world on film?
Q. Do you think it is ethical to stage real events in a documentary?
Categories: Genre
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One way of categorising documentaries is by the degree of creative treatment of
recorded material. Three subgenres are:
– realist documentary: imposing minimal treatment on recorded material i.e. ‘flyon-the-wall’
– formalist documentary: imposing a particular narrative structure on recorded
material i.e. ‘fly-in-the-soup’
– subjective documentary: which express the filmmaker’s personal vision.
Any one documentary can mix these techniques.
Q. In recent years there has been an explosion of ‘reality television’. What is meant by
this term? What different kinds of reality television have you seen on television?
Q. What kind of documentary is ‘An Inconvenient Truth’?
Categories: Documentary Conventions
• Most documentaries have different look and sound from fiction films.
Q. What is the conventional look of documentary? In other words, how
does the documentary look connote realism?
Q. How does sound connote realism?
Q. Do you think ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a typical documentary. Why?
Q. Does it use any techniques which are similar to fiction films?
Categories: Tone
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A documentary (like any film) can have different tones: serious, light-hearted,
optimistic, pessimistic, celebratory, condemnatory, resigned, critical, uncritical,
ironic, …
Q. Identify different tones in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. What are the purposes of these
different tones? Identify how these tones achieved are achieved through images,
sound and voice.
Language: Technical Codes
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You should already know how to describe shots in terms of camera distance,
camera angle, camera movement and lighting. You should be able to analyse how
shots are edited by describing the transitions and whether or not continuity editing
is used.
Q. Analyse a sequence in terms of technical codes. Why have these codes been used?
Q. What visual and audio material has been used to construct the vignettes?
Q. What visual and audio material has been used to construct the lecture segments?
Q. In the vignettes we learn about Al Gore’s past. What technical codes are used to
connote the past?
Language: Cultural Codes
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The film wishes to persuade us of the authority of the evidence over climate
change and the need to tackle it immediately.
Q. What cultural codes are used to connote authority?
Language: Anchorage
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Images or sounds on their own may have many different possible meanings i.e.
they are polysemic
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Anchorage refers to the ways that image and sound are combined to reduce the
polysemy of each on their own. The meaning is pinned down or ‘anchored’ by the
combination of sound and image.
Q. Analyse the opening sequence to show how images and sound/music construct
meaning and mood.
Q. Repeat this for some other sequences.
Language: Image Analysis
Director Davis Guggenheim’s favourite shot which occurs in the last
sequence of the film when Al Gore appears silhouetted by an satellite
image of Hurricane Katrina.
Q. What do you think Guggenheim was trying to say to the audience with this
image?
Narrative: Segmentation
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Study the transcript and the diagram of the narrative segmentation.
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You will see that he narrative of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ alternates between
vignettes about Al Gore and lecture segments.
Q.
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Why do you think Guggenheim has used this structure?
Would it have been a better idea just to film the lecture?
Narrative: Narrative Structure 1
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In ‘Film Art: an Introduction’, American film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson identify four types of narrative structure in documentary:
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Story-telling: stories about people, events, places, …
Categorical: conveying information by ‘chunking’ it into various categories.
Rhetorical: presenting an argument to persuade the audience to adopt an
opinion on an issue and perhaps to act on that opinion. A typical structure for
rhetorical form is: introduction to the problem – discussion of the facts –
what to do about the problem – summary epilogue.
Associational: suggesting links between images that might not have any
obvious connection.
Narrative: Narrative Structure 2
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Any one documentary can show one or several of these structures. ‘An
Inconvenient Truth’ has aspects of all four.
Q.
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What stories does ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ tell?
How does it categorise the information it seeks to convey?
Study the lecture segments in the narrative segmentation. Does it conform to the
typical structure of rhetorical form? Summarise the structure of the argument in
the film. Work out the time given to each stage of the argument.
The film juxtaposes biographical and reflective vignettes with lecture segments.
Choose some of these juxtaposed sequences and analyse what links are being
suggested by the film.
Q.
Narrative: Rhetorical Narrative
Typical features of rhetorical narrative are that it:
• Presents a reasoned argument
• Appeals to the emotions
• Addresses the audience directly e.g. to camera or by voiceover
• Uses repeated motifs to emphasise its argument e.g. recurring images, sounds,
phrases
• Suppresses, mocks or criticises contrary opinions
• Encourages the audience to act.
Q. Identify how ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ uses each of these features to advance its
argument.
Narrative: Argumentation Schemes
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When we construct arguments about issues we use a number of typical ways of
arguing (argumentation schemes).
The fact that a scheme is used does not mean the argument is valid.
Examples of argumentation schemes are:
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Problem-solving: “If X is a problem, then do Y”
Numbers: “If number X is too large/small, then do Y to reduce/increase X”
Authority: “As expert X says …”
History: “History teaches us that …”
Illustration: “As the situation in X shows …”
Comparison: “If X can do A then so can Y.”
Identify different argumentation schemes in which Al Gore uses in ‘An
Inconvenient Truth’.
Do you think that these arguments are valid? Justify your answers,
Narrative: Narrative Codes
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One can analyse narrative in terms of overall structure. However narrative can also
be analysed in terms of narrative codes which work moment-by-moment in a text.
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One of the most important is the enigmatic code. Focusing on the enigmatic code
lets us view a film as a sequence of questions and answers. The film poses
enigmas (questions) which engage the viewer’s attention and these questions may,
or may not be, resolved (answered) by the end of the film.
Q. What are major enigmas are posed in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’? Are these enigmas
resolved by the end of the film?
Representation 1
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Documentaries are not ‘a window on the world’. Rather they select particular
aspects of the world and portray these in particular ways which reflect the beliefs
and values of the organisations which make the film and of the audiences who
watch.
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The film was made primarily for an American audience so it uses narrative
structuring familiar to American audience from fiction feature films.
Representation 2
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In American mainstream fiction films we are usually invited to identify with one
special individual who is driven by individual psychological forces rather than
collective social forces.
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Such films often use a narrative structure which Joseph Campbell has called the
hero’s journey. In this a hero(ine) undergoes tests and struggles before achieving
his/her goals. Joseph Campbell said we all have to undertake a hero’s journey to
find fulfilment in our own lives and that can be done by ‘following our bliss’. In other
words, to be truly happy we must find what really motivates us.
Q. How has director Davis Guggenheim used these fictional techniques to structure the
film?
Q. Another aspect of American ideology is its ‘can-do spirit’. How does the film reflect
this spirit?
Representation 3
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Films draw on various ideological discourses to represent nature:
– Conservationism: nature as a resource to be managed and developed for use and profit
– Preservationism: preservation of nature for spiritual and aesthetic contemplation
– Mainstream environmentalism: environmental problems as technically soluble within the
existing state and corporate system
– Radical environmentalism: mainstream environmentalism merely perpetuates the cause
of ecological damage; we need a more radical political solution in which changes the
relations between people, the state, corporations and nature.
Q. Which of these discourses are expressed in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’?
Audience: Target Audience
Q. ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is aimed primarily at a US market. What evidence is there for
this in the film?
Q. What might put people off going to see the film?
Q. What steps have been made in the film to broaden its appeal?
Audience: Mode of Address
The film uses various modes of address:
• Direct address to the audience with Al Gore’s voiceover and his lecture
presentation
• Uses ‘popular media’ human interest approach by appealing to our emotions
• Uses ‘quality media’ approach by the use of rational argument.
Q. Identify sequences in the film which make an emotional appeal.
Q. Identify sequences in the film which use rational argument.
Audience: Differential Decoding
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Different audiences have different reactions to the same film because of age,
gender, social class, ethnic group, lifestyle, politics, religion, values, taste,
education and so on.
Q. Use the web to find out different reactions to the form and style ‘An Inconvenient
Truth’. Comments can be found at www.imdb.com.
Q. Use the web to find critiques of the science in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. What criteria
do you think should be used to evaluate the credibility of such claims?
Q. What do you think about Gore’s argument? Why?
Institution: Production Company 1
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‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was co-produced Lawrence Bender Productions. Bender
produced the Quentin Tarantino films ‘Reservoir Dogs’, ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘Kill Bill 1
and 2’. He was a fund-raiser for Democrat John Kerry who stood against George
Bush in 2004. He has helped to launch www.18seconds.org a US online campaign
for energy efficient lighting.
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It is obvious why Bender would be interested in producing a film about Al Gore on
climate change.
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In the making of the film the only control Al Gore had was over the content of the
lecture.
Institution: Production Company 2
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‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was co-produced by Participant Productions.
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Research the company by visiting their website
(www.participantproductions.com ). Locate their mission statement.
Q.
In what ways does ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ reflect the aims of Participant
Productions?
Q.
Film productions often involve conflict between producers providing funds and
the creative personnel actually making the film. Listen to the producers’
commentary on the DVD and assess whether the production of the film was
characterised by conflict or unity.
Institution: Market Context
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Documentary features very popular in recent years:
– ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ (budget $6m est., US gross $119m),
– ‘March of the Penguins’ (budget $8m est., US gross $77m)
– ‘Bowling for Columbine’ (budget $4m, US gross $21m)
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Often feature alternative viewpoints which receive little coverage in mainstream
news
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Has encouraged companies to finance production and distribute documentaries
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An Inconvenient Truth cost just over $1m and grossed $24m in the USA and to
date around $50m worldwide)
Institution: Distribution
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The film was distributed by Paramount Classics, now a division of Paramount
Vantage (www.paramountvantage.com) They specialise in distributing films to the
art house rather than the multiplex circuit.
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Paramount is part of the global media conglomerate Viacom (www.viacom.com)
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Paramount Classics were persuaded by the producers to release the film in
summer 2006 rather than the autumn when documentaries tend to perform better at
the box office
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Paramount Classics used viral marketing as well as traditional promotional
techniques
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Taglines used were “By far the most terrifying film you will ever see.” and “We’re all
on thin ice.”
Institution: Promotion 1
Q. Analyse the poster as follows:
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Draw a table with two columns
headed denotation and connotation.
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In the denotation column describe the
images and text (title and taglines).
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In the connotation column write down
the connotations of each element.
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Write down the overall meaning of the
poster by completing this sentence
“See this film and …”
Institution: Promotion 2
Q.
Repeat the previous exercise for
this poster.
Q.
Which of the two posters has
greater appeal to mainstream
audiences?
Q.
Why do you think penguins are
used in the poster when they do not
feature in the film?
Institution: Ratings
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The film’s US rating by MPAA was PG
for mild thematic elements.
Q. What parts of the film might the MPAA
ratings board thought of as being
unsuitable for children?
Technology
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There was a small budget of $1m
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Some of the shooting was done without a crew, Davis Guggenheim simply used digital video
cameras
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The producers were determined that the climate change issue was so urgent that the film
had to be made quickly
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The disruption of shooting by Hurricane Katrina only increased their determination
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The film was shot with many different formats of film, digital video and animation
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These had to be converted to the same digital format HDCAM SR on order to edit
sequences and produce the digital intermediate version of the film
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Efilm who were responsible for conforming and colour correction were involved at the start
and informed filmmakers, editors and the labs at Cut+Run of their requirements; this
reduced technical delays and hence kept the production on-time and on-budget
Technology: Stages in Production
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Shooting footage, recording audio interviews, collecting archive and other
material
Cut+Run labs convert film and digital video in various formats into HDCAM SR
format
Guggenheim and several editors edit sequences using Avid digital editing
software
At Efilm sequences conformed and film is scored and titled to produce rough cut
in digital intermediate form
Rough cut screened at Sundance
Due to criticisms of lack of attention to solutions new end-title sequence by
yU+co added
Final cut conformed at Efilm and converted to film by Deluxe
The process has been summarised in the post-production workflow diagram
which you should now study.
Technological Context
Q. Davis Guggenheim used prosumer digital video cameras to shoot Gore at work or
travelling. What are the advantages of this for such shots?
Q. The film only took 6 months to make. What advantages does digital editing have
over traditional film editing?
Society
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Use the Internet to gather evidence about how the film has been received as well
as its individual and social impact.
Q. Do you think that ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ has influenced how people see and act on
climate change?