DIGI TECHS

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

During this year and the creation of my film, review page, and poster, I have used the most efficient, simple but effective technological methods and techniques.
To film my film, I used this digital camera which was light and small, so good for taking abroad. It was capable of all standard uses of a digital camera: and because I was filming in a 60s style, I didn’t need too many modern, up to date technological capabilities in the camera, as I wasn’t going to attempt any difficult, modern style camera shots. Of course, the advantage of using a digital camera was that it was simple to transfer the filmed footage onto a computer for editing purposes.
This method of filming greatly contrasted to what I used at the start of the year – as you can see in my pitch, I used Apple’s photo booth software to film myself. This is very basic and very restrictive – as of course the camera is part of the computer hardware.
For editing I used the software Imovie. I used a manual to find out how to remove the sound from footage so I could create my own soundtrack using copyright free sound downloads from the software Itunes , recorded sounds using a microphone – mainly for voice-overs, and sounds that come with the software: Garageband programme. I also learnt how to change colour/contrast levels as the lighting on location wasn’t how I envisaged it – I mainly used this tool to brighten the picture .
During editing, I hadn’t yet created a soundtrack. So I added ‘A fistful of dollars’ main theme into Imovie so I could have a sense of how the soundtrack I would make might work with the picture. I couldn’t use this soundtrack though as it was copyrighted and I wanted to make my own one.
For audience feedback, I used the camera, questionnaires created on the software Microsoft word, but also the internet, specifically the social networking website Facebook. This meant I could access a wide audience very quickly, to find out what they thought about the film.
I also uploaded it to youtube.com, as it shows statistics on who views the video .
For my poster, I used the design software photoshop, specifically the colour overlay tool, which was useful for creating the silhouette effect . I downloaded a font from the uncopyright font website DAFONT.com because they had a larger selection of fonts than photoshop, and more that were suitable.
I took stills for my review page and poster, from my film, using cmd.shift.4. I also created a slideshow out of my storyboard, which I coloured using photoshop. I took the colours using the eyedropper tool from my location shoot, to find out what my storyboard might look like after it was filmed.

evaluation

I used lots of different methods to find out what a potential audience might think of my film.
One of the methods was the internet. Using www.facebook.com, I could reach a wider audience, a network of people my age, and would perhaps get honest answers, as people might feel less inclined to say nice things from safety from behind their screens.
On Facebook, I got good feedback on the sound and sound effects , an area of film that I had worked quite hard on, and even got feedback from someone my age who had seen a Spaghetti-Western – quote them: ‘Frank has effectively and economically applied the techniques so commonly found in the genre’ .
So from the internet feedback I found out that there was lots of different areas of my film that different people could enjoy, and that fans of Spaghetti-Westerns could enjoy my film as much as people who had not seen them.

I got more feedback from my class. I thought it would be interesting to get their opinions, as they had recently created short films and could provide intuitive feedback. I gave them a questionnaire after screening my film, as using a questionnaire I would be able to focus their attentions on specific detail; on areas I was concerned about.
I learnt that having a cross instead of a woman was ‘suitable’ and ‘ok’ and that the location was good, but asked whether they cared about the outcome of the duel, I received mixed feedback – someone suggested I could have provided more detail about the cowboy.

essay cohen feminism

To what extent does Angela Carter’s THE BLOODY CHAMBER both invite and challenge a feminist reading? (1490)

“And I longed for him. And he disgusted me”. There is no doubt from anyone that
THE BLOODY CHAMBER isn’t a feminist novel, but it is statements such as this
one, statements from the protagonist, a seemingly innocent 17 year old, that can make the feminist messages Carter is trying to portray ambiguous. It can be even more ambiguous for a modern reader – many of Carters originally radical feminist ideas we now take for granted. Nevertheless, we can still examine the short story to see what the feminist reading is, and what Carters groundbreaking work is trying to tell us.

A major talking point is the protagonist’s passiveness. She succumbs to the Marquis’ every request instead of taking a stand and acting against him, even when he orders: ‘prepare yourself for martyrdom…decapitation’. Carter continually makes her passiveness very explicit: ‘I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between those well-manicured fingers’. Because of the retrospective narration, the protagonist talks straight to us, making us even more surprised and dumbfounded by her inability to act.

To exaggerate it further, she offers little explanation as to why she does not act: ‘I felt a terrified pity for him’ surely doesn’t suffice. But how is the ridiculous portrayal of her limitless passivity feminist? Well, she is an overly-exaggerated version of the traditional ‘damsel in distress’, and Carter is mocking this stereotype. We surely feel surprised by her passivity, but the surprise comes out of a feeling that her character seems very unrealistic. Even when she realises her mother is just around the corner, she declares to herself that she ‘must go to the courtyard where my husband waited…with his sword’. As an audience we are crying out for her to hide, to run, to waste time, but all she does is ‘loiter’, obeying the tyrant as far as death. So Carter is telling us that the stereotype of girls as passive and helpless is completely unrealistic.

The ending, where her mother arrives, enforces this idea. Carter has subverted the stereotypical traditional dashing young hero, and replaced him with a completely unexpected heroine: the protagonists mother. Carter also associates her with the kind of words expected of a damsel-in-distress’s saviour: ‘the waves crashed at the horses fetlocks…she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent..’. Carter uses her to suggest that, after all, women aren’t helpless, they can just as easily be as heroic as men. Carter intertwines the heroic language with blunt, womanly descriptions: ‘her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked around her waist’. She is not a damsel in distress, but a plain, normal woman in a skirt, and the fact that it surprises us indicates societies prejudice at the portrayal of heroes and females in literature.

There are more feminist ideas we can take from the protagonists’ passivity. Before she is to be martyred, there is a strange sequence of dialogue between her and the blind piano tuner. The way their debate seems so out of place (they are talking so calmly before her death) makes it feel as though we are being directly addressed by Carter:
‘You do not deserve this’ he said.
‘Who can say what I deserve or no? I’ve done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.’
She admits to her passivity, but questions whether that means that she should be martyred, or, if we think about the wider picture, whether that means all damsels in distress should be punished.
On the other hand, we could suggest that, all of her problems are caused by her passivity – maybe ‘women should not be passive to men’ is Carters idea? Her passiveness does, after all, nearly lead to her beheading. But we could say that this is perhaps an equally feminist idea, a rallying call for women to stick up to the tyranny of men, not just in literature as presenting women as less passive, but in the real world too.

We can also look into a different area of the text, the presentation of sex. The beginning of the story is heavily littered with sexual reference: words such as ‘throb’, ‘bore me’, ‘burning’, ‘ceaselessly thrusting’ and ‘pounding’ occur frequently, and they simply describe the train. This foreshadows the consummation scene of later, but does the sexual language empower or degrade the protagonist?

The sexual connotations used by the narrator show her sexual anticipation. We could view this as empowering: it is not only he who wants to bed her but she who wants to bed him. However she describes the sex as a ‘one sided struggle’ – but this could be her presentation shaped by hindsight – she doesn’t want to admit to enjoying her sexual experience because of how horrible he turns out to be.
So her use of sexual language empowers her, as it shows not only that she is sexually aware but also subverts the idea of male action and female reaction.

There is a particularly striking use of the word ‘cunt’ later on. We have traditionally taken it to mean something bad, and use it as an insult. But the protagonist uses it matter of factly, and for its original purpose, to describe female genitalia. So again, she is showing she sexually aware and not as naïve as she presents herself. But, further than that, Carter is almost trying to claim the word back for women, trying to stop something used to describe a part of the female body as a word used to describe something negative.

But in an entirely less feminist way, could we see her sexual presentation as degrading? That she marries a man for money and sex? We could say that Carter intentionally wants us to be incensed by this, to show that women are not like that in the real world. But what if she wants to? Can she not marry not for love but for sex, just as the Marquis does? We get a sense of her life of previous as uneventful: ‘away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment’. If we bear this in mind when we consider the beginning it takes on a new significance. ‘…the wedding night….deffered until we lay in his great ancestral bed in his domain, beyond the grasp of my imagination’. Is it simply his ‘domain’ she is trying to imagine, or ‘the wedding night’?

This idea becomes clearer in the opera scene. She catches sight of the Marquis, looking at her in a mirror with ‘lust’, she ‘sensed in myself a potential for corruption…the next day we were married’. Does this indicate that a reason for marrying was her potential for corruption; perhaps she wants to be used. Is this true though? Does she really desire the Marquis, the man who ‘disgusts’ her? She freely admits that she ‘crisps’ at his touch. Although not explicit in this story, one idea is that her desires are shaped by societies expectations of gender norms in relation to sexual relationships. She is however explicitly young and naïve, so would be a perfect victim for this theory. It would be the modern day equivalent of young girls wearing revealing clothes after watching too many sexually explicit music videos. We can say that the girl only thinks she wants to be corrupted and used. When she sees herself as having ‘a potential for corruption’, it is not on her own accord, but because of the lustful stares of the Marquis and the opera audience: although the story is from her perspective, she quite often views herself with his thoughts in mind. So there is some evidence to support this theory.

Furthermore, she falls in love with the blind man, who cannot view her voyeuristically and suggests that she doesn’t want to be used – an idea that would be quite non-feminist. She is also left with a red mark, a mark that ‘spares my shame’. The blind man cannot see this, so Carter is linking the male gaze with the potential for corruption. Carter’s final message is that only in men’s eyes, societies lustful eyes, do women gain a ‘potential for corruption’.

In the end, it is hard to view this story as at all non-feminist, as we can’t take anything at face value. Nothing is straightforward, as it is not just about a girl who is taken to a castle to be married, but passively lets the man do whatever he wants with her. It is about Carter trying subvert one of the oldest forms of tradition – the fairy tale – to try and fight traditional views on women. She very significantly changes the hero from Bluebeard from a man to a woman, and uses the passiveness of the original protagonist as an example of some particularly demeaning, ridiculous stereotypes some people, some whole cultures, have of women.

essay cohen feminism

To what extent does Angela Carter’s THE BLOODY CHAMBER both invite and challenge a feminist reading? (1490)

“And I longed for him. And he disgusted me”. There is no doubt from anyone that
THE BLOODY CHAMBER isn’t a feminist novel, but it is statements such as this
one, statements from the protagonist, a seemingly innocent 17 year old, that can make the feminist messages Carter is trying to portray ambiguous. It can be even more ambiguous for a modern reader – many of Carters originally radical feminist ideas we now take for granted. Nevertheless, we can still examine the short story to see what the feminist reading is, and what Carters groundbreaking work is trying to tell us.

A major talking point is the protagonist’s passiveness. She succumbs to the Marquis’ every request instead of taking a stand and acting against him, even when he orders: ‘prepare yourself for martyrdom…decapitation’. Carter continually makes her passiveness very explicit: ‘I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between those well-manicured fingers’. Because of the retrospective narration, the protagonist talks straight to us, making us even more surprised and dumbfounded by her inability to act.

To exaggerate it further, she offers little explanation as to why she does not act: ‘I felt a terrified pity for him’ surely doesn’t suffice. But how is the ridiculous portrayal of her limitless passivity feminist? Well, she is an overly-exaggerated version of the traditional ‘damsel in distress’, and Carter is mocking this stereotype. We surely feel surprised by her passivity, but the surprise comes out of a feeling that her character seems very unrealistic. Even when she realises her mother is just around the corner, she declares to herself that she ‘must go to the courtyard where my husband waited…with his sword’. As an audience we are crying out for her to hide, to run, to waste time, but all she does is ‘loiter’, obeying the tyrant as far as death. So Carter is telling us that the stereotype of girls as passive and helpless is completely unrealistic.

The ending, where her mother arrives, enforces this idea. Carter has subverted the stereotypical traditional dashing young hero, and replaced him with a completely unexpected heroine: the protagonists mother. Carter also associates her with the kind of words expected of a damsel-in-distress’s saviour: ‘the waves crashed at the horses fetlocks…she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent..’. Carter uses her to suggest that, after all, women aren’t helpless, they can just as easily be as heroic as men. Carter intertwines the heroic language with blunt, womanly descriptions: ‘her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked around her waist’. She is not a damsel in distress, but a plain, normal woman in a skirt, and the fact that it surprises us indicates societies prejudice at the portrayal of heroes and females in literature.

There are more feminist ideas we can take from the protagonists’ passivity. Before she is to be martyred, there is a strange sequence of dialogue between her and the blind piano tuner. The way their debate seems so out of place (they are talking so calmly before her death) makes it feel as though we are being directly addressed by Carter:
‘You do not deserve this’ he said.
‘Who can say what I deserve or no? I’ve done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.’
She admits to her passivity, but questions whether that means that she should be martyred, or, if we think about the wider picture, whether that means all damsels in distress should be punished.
On the other hand, we could suggest that, all of her problems are caused by her passivity – maybe ‘women should not be passive to men’ is Carters idea? Her passiveness does, after all, nearly lead to her beheading. But we could say that this is perhaps an equally feminist idea, a rallying call for women to stick up to the tyranny of men, not just in literature as presenting women as less passive, but in the real world too.

We can also look into a different area of the text, the presentation of sex. The beginning of the story is heavily littered with sexual reference: words such as ‘throb’, ‘bore me’, ‘burning’, ‘ceaselessly thrusting’ and ‘pounding’ occur frequently, and they simply describe the train. This foreshadows the consummation scene of later, but does the sexual language empower or degrade the protagonist?

The sexual connotations used by the narrator show her sexual anticipation. We could view this as empowering: it is not only he who wants to bed her but she who wants to bed him. However she describes the sex as a ‘one sided struggle’ – but this could be her presentation shaped by hindsight – she doesn’t want to admit to enjoying her sexual experience because of how horrible he turns out to be.
So her use of sexual language empowers her, as it shows not only that she is sexually aware but also subverts the idea of male action and female reaction.

There is a particularly striking use of the word ‘cunt’ later on. We have traditionally taken it to mean something bad, and use it as an insult. But the protagonist uses it matter of factly, and for its original purpose, to describe female genitalia. So again, she is showing she sexually aware and not as naïve as she presents herself. But, further than that, Carter is almost trying to claim the word back for women, trying to stop something used to describe a part of the female body as a word used to describe something negative.

But in an entirely less feminist way, could we see her sexual presentation as degrading? That she marries a man for money and sex? We could say that Carter intentionally wants us to be incensed by this, to show that women are not like that in the real world. But what if she wants to? Can she not marry not for love but for sex, just as the Marquis does? We get a sense of her life of previous as uneventful: ‘away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment’. If we bear this in mind when we consider the beginning it takes on a new significance. ‘…the wedding night….deffered until we lay in his great ancestral bed in his domain, beyond the grasp of my imagination’. Is it simply his ‘domain’ she is trying to imagine, or ‘the wedding night’?

This idea becomes clearer in the opera scene. She catches sight of the Marquis, looking at her in a mirror with ‘lust’, she ‘sensed in myself a potential for corruption…the next day we were married’. Does this indicate that a reason for marrying was her potential for corruption; perhaps she wants to be used. Is this true though? Does she really desire the Marquis, the man who ‘disgusts’ her? She freely admits that she ‘crisps’ at his touch. Although not explicit in this story, one idea is that her desires are shaped by societies expectations of gender norms in relation to sexual relationships. She is however explicitly young and naïve, so would be a perfect victim for this theory. It would be the modern day equivalent of young girls wearing revealing clothes after watching too many sexually explicit music videos. We can say that the girl only thinks she wants to be corrupted and used. When she sees herself as having ‘a potential for corruption’, it is not on her own accord, but because of the lustful stares of the Marquis and the opera audience: although the story is from her perspective, she quite often views herself with his thoughts in mind. So there is some evidence to support this theory.

Furthermore, she falls in love with the blind man, who cannot view her voyeuristically and suggests that she doesn’t want to be used – an idea that would be quite non-feminist. She is also left with a red mark, a mark that ‘spares my shame’. The blind man cannot see this, so Carter is linking the male gaze with the potential for corruption. Carter’s final message is that only in men’s eyes, societies lustful eyes, do women gain a ‘potential for corruption’.

In the end, it is hard to view this story as at all non-feminist, as we can’t take anything at face value. Nothing is straightforward, as it is not just about a girl who is taken to a castle to be married, but passively lets the man do whatever he wants with her. It is about Carter trying subvert one of the oldest forms of tradition – the fairy tale – to try and fight traditional views on women. She very significantly changes the hero from Bluebeard from a man to a woman, and uses the passiveness of the original protagonist as an example of some particularly demeaning, ridiculous stereotypes some people, some whole cultures, have of women.