Les Revenants & Genre

Highly atypical show: Les Revenants

Genre

• Thriller/Horror
• Romance
• Action
• Supernatural
• Drama-
• Avant-Garde
• Zombie
• French?
• Unconventional/atypical/subversive

Example of cult TV

• Fans who are devoted to a particular TV show

• Intertextuality
• Setting in the low French-Alps
• Architecture is French-esque
• Explicit amounts of blood
• Produced by a French channel (Canal)
• Treatment of genders is more relaxed than in the UK
• Stereotypically looks of French people

If a TV show is aimed to multiple audiences, it's known as a double mode of address

For example: younger and older generations for Les Revenants

Facts

• Released 26th November 2012 on Canal+
• Released in the United Kingdom on the 9th June 2013, on Channel 4
• 2 series, 8 episodes each
• Based on the French film 'They Came Back' in 2004
• Les Revenants (the movie) was directed by Robin Campillo
• Created by Fabric Gobert
• The show has a significant majority of white people suggesting it presents the ethnic diversity of France, this shows the target audience
• George Gerbner argued that if a certain group of people was left out of a media product is called symbolic annihilation 
• Mogwai- Band
• Unconventional rock band
• Extremely normal looking, not wearing anything special (Atypical)
• No vocalist
• Genre is post-rock and has a niche/cult audience
• Can ensure the show that has a pre-sold audience
• The soundtrack is Atypical/ they composed the entire soundtrack for Les revenants
• 
  

"In the 21st century, it is essential for TV shows to offer their audiences multiple meanings" - evaluate this claim with reference to Les revenants/The Returned

1. Representation can be used by the producer to manipulate the audiences ideology
2. This allows the producer to construct a perfect reality that may be reflected in the real world
3. This makes Les revenants highly polysemic as people's choices may not want to follow the producer's ideology

========================================================================

Promotional images for advertising

• Camille is stereotypically attractive
• Ginger suggests rebel
• Dress older then she is, suggesting she's a mature teenager
• She does display being grumpy
• makeup suggests she's tired and ill
• Is a highly subversive atypical representation of a teenage girl
• This suggests that the audience has high expectations

• Claire has nice hair, well dressed
• She has a very understated glamour
• Atypical representation of a middle-aged woman
• Stereotypically middle class

Promotional image

• 
• Set in a valley in the French Alps, targets a French audience because it's something they would be familiar with
• Black Rose is symbolic of Mourning which is a binary opposition between the wedding and the funeral
• Binary opposition between life and death
• Canal + co-produced I, Daniel Blake
• Caption "The past has decided to resurface" suggests its edgy
• Wedding dress has connotations for it being a romance genre
• Specific stereotypical French people were chosen to show that this is a French show
• Stuart Hall suggests that Les Revenants is a show that is supposed to have negotiated reading
• The text is split in half which could be referring to binary opposition that Simone and Adele are divided and broken
• The show is marketed differently in different nations because different nationalities stereotypically have different tastes
• This is because of Cultivation theory by George Gerbner, that French people experience more edgy, sexual TV shows than other nationalities
• 
  

• The characters in Les Revenants are stereotypically attractive to a French Audience

Trailer

• The trailer uses a rapid fire montage and cross-cutting, this is very conventional for a trailer
• Trailer is exciting, has a range of characters, same footage but done by a different director instead of Robin Campillo
• the distributors had taken a different role with the footage
• Has english subtitles and english texts, meaning its aimed towards an english audience
• Is exciting and fast-paced
• close-up of pictures covered in blood suggests horror
• Bus crash also suggests horror or action (very dramatic)
• Atypical horror cult show, just like Mogwai
• Also demonstrates a romance, horror, thriller, action hybrid genre
• a philosophical cult drama
• This is done to get a wider audience
• the distributors are clearly targeting a mainstream audience
• Hard-sell show

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Camille and Lena

• Lack of non-diegetic sound anchors the audience into a tense and deliberately uncomfortable scene, appealing to a niche audience or fans of horror and mystery
• Knocking on wall in hermeneutic codes, indicating a dramatic and mysterious event
• Deliberately confusing and challenging

Simone, Adele and Lena Scene

• Adele's response is not logical and is not typical of the genre
• Mid-shot of Adele collapsed against the door is symbolic of her misery and her lost of sanity, along with the high angle view makes her seem isolated, exposed, alone and weak
• Preferred reading of this scene was to make her seem happy again, but Les Revenants puts us in a confused position by making her not happy to see her.
• Terror intertextuality, the diajetic knocking sound, coupled with the shot of the handle moving is highly conventional of the horror genre.
• The scene demonstrates hybrid fluidity between the genres of horror and romance
• Brighter lights on Adele's side contrasts the low-key lighting on Simone's side of the door
• Non-diajetic music creates a stereotypical horror track, instruments such as a piano can be played very creepily. An arpeggiated song, symbolises loss 
• Big theme about this show is death, this means that this is final, and there is no return from death but Les revenants flips this, and for example Adele is upset because she believed she is being haunted by Simone
• We have a shot of Simone yelling "open the fucking door" with a counter shot of Adele screaming "go away'. This creates a barrier between the two and a diametric opposition.
• Extremely uncommercial scene
• Mise-en-scene of the mirror symbolises that Simone is a ghost and that he doesn't belong here
• Adele wears a white dress symbolises the fact that she is married
• Simone is wearing a suit which creates a binary opposition between Adele and Simone,  Simone is giving order and being stereotypically masculine, Adele is being stereotypically feminine and being scared and isolated, this links to Lisbet Van Zoonen's theory that genders are portrayed in a certain way across all media
• Low-key lighting in Adele's house is a proairetic code suggesting something bad is going to happen to her
• This could be an intertextual reference to the gothic genre
• lighting is artificial suggesting Adele carries herself now and doesn't want Simone in her life
• Long shot of Lena suggests how lonely she is and how vulnerable she is
• Middle-class characters for a middle-class audience
• Every character in the show is white, suggesting a white middle-class target audience
• Slow paced editing but increases as the music gets more intense

Monsieur/Madame Costa

• Mise-en-scene or the ropes that bond her make her seem vulnerable, the fact that the audience is place in another room to her on the other side of the fire on the other side of the door frame
• Completely atypical response
• Soundtrack doesn't fit the scene, it is a contrapuntal sound
• There is a mundane/boring response to the fire, Mr Costa thinks he's gone mad, Mrs Costa is confused by the fire
• Classy old fashioned house suggests middle-class elder persons house

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steve Neale wrote about Genre such as conventions to give movies and TV shows certain generic classification 

Genre can sometimes be ineffective in categorising media if it involves completely different media products that follows the same genre partially

Genre limits creativity 

1. Twin Peaks
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
3. The Wire
4. Doctor Who

The Walking Dead

Television Industry

All media industries are specialised in their own way

Digital media has completely changed the way in which the television industry works

Television

1. Television is a global industry
2. Television is a commercial industry
3. Public service broadcasting
4. Private television channels
5. Global private television channels
6. During the early days, TV was seen as manipulative, spreading propaganda and makes you stupid

Broadcast

Piece of media that spreads a wide net across a various amount of audiences

Netflix

• The end of the fucking world is a perfect example of narrowcasting
• It appeals to edgy, moody teenagers
• Stranger Things
• Big Mouth

Youtube

• Prosumer: when the audience makes the content

Digital convergence

• The coming together of different industries
• This makes the media industry impossible to regulate

BBC

• British Broadcasting cooperation
• Public service broadcaster
• threatened by online streaming platforms as they are taking away huge amount of viewers
• the TV industry is almost impossible to regulate, all thanks to online streaming platforms
• Only 400 tv sets were in the UK when the BBC aired it's first HD programme
• The BBC creed was to inform, educate and entertain

• Soap Opera: created and was funded by soap companies

Humans is aired on Channel 4

• Distribution: how a product is 'given' to the consumers
• Circulation: how big the share  is
• Marketing: how it is sold

• Persona Synthetics Advert
• Ominous connotations of the low angle shot of synth leading child up the stairs, a hermeneutic code further reinforced by the sparse narrative
• Highly polysemic advert: synth leading boy upstairs could either be construed as threatening or could emphasise the synth's maternal nature
• Boy walking downstairs, followed by eye-line match to mother, followed by the unexpected conclusion of the synth instead leading the boy upstairs perfectly demonstrates the themes of the TV show
• Todorov: use of disequilibrium
• Utilisation of direct mode of address is included to deliberately make the audience feel uncomfortable.
• Advert lacks any form of anchorage, taking the form of a consumer product advertisement as opposed to a trailer for a sci-fi TV show. Highly subversive
• Elements of post-modernism. Lacks meaning, and is selling something that does not actually exist. A hyperreal advertisement
• Synth is expressionless and appears to lack humanity, Takes on the role of a housewife or maid. 
• Additionally plays the role of the doll

Theorists summary

1.  Roland Barthes- Semiotics
1.  Every media product has a hidden meaning
2.  Tzvetan Todorov- Narratology
1. Every story has a beginning that is good, a period of mass chaos, and an end with partial mending good
3.  Steve Neale- Genre Theory
1. States that all media products have a type of story and that they change over time
2. This creates combined genres, aka sub-genres
4.  Claude Levi-Strauss- Structuralism
1. Believes that all media products create two opposite ideas that are used to show difference one another
5.  Jean Baudrillard- Postmodernism
1.  claims that lifestyle's boundaries between what is real and what is not is no longer boundary
6.  Stuart Hall- Representation
1.  He says that overtime, people have been grouped together to make life easier for creators to create media products to target audience
7.  David Gauntlett- Identity
1.  Media products help people to create people their own personality and character, a pick and mix theory
8.  Liesbet van Zoonen- Feminism
1. Says that women in every media product are created to be sexy for boys to enoy
9.  bell hooks- Feminist
1. Claims that feminism is not just for women but for everyone and is used to end the powerful man lifestyle and the 'wanting to be powerful'  women.
10.  Judith Butler- Gender Performativity
1.  Claims that boy's and girl's character are created by how they walk, talk, dress etc
11.  Paul Gilroy- Ethnicity and Postcolonial
1.  Paul says that the idea of peoples beliefs on certain people were created after the settling and claiming of land from the empire period such as the British Empire
12.  Curran & Seaton- Power and Media industries
1.  Overtime the movies are being controlled by a smaller number of companies who love money, such as Disney
2.  This creates a lack of creativity, quality and variety in media products
13.  Sonia Livingstone & Peter Lunt- Regulation
1. Rules and restrictions that issued to every movie, stating how old you should be to watch this movie
14.  David Hesmondhalgh- Cultural Industries
1.  When companies by other companies, either on the same level of that company or smaller companies
15.  Albert Bandura- Media Effects
1.  Claims that movies, videogames and more have a great effect on people, changing their personality
16.  George Gerbner- Cultivation
1. The idea that long exposure to TV boosts the beliefs set on certain people groups
17.  Stuart Hall- Reception
1. When we are given a book, movie, tv show, videogame and more, we are expected to view it in a certain way, understand what it means but may disagree, argue against what the thing is showing or completely misunderstand what its supposed to show.
2. Negotiation
18.  Henry Jenkins- Fandom
1. Media fans appropriate texts and read them in ways that are not fully intended by the media producers (textual poaching)
19. Clay Shirky- End of Audience
1. no such thing as audience anymore, we are all producers
2. Media consumers have become producers who 'speak back to' the media in various ways, creating and sharing