Kimberly's Thesis: Chapt. 3: Methodology

Methodology

3.1 RATIONAL

Why Movies?

Films are the most essential element in the day to day life. Films reach a wider audience than literature as they move across the barriers of class, literacy, religion and even language. Not only do they reflect reality, they also construct reality. Their reach and impact makes it very important to work the theme of the movie.  Going to the cinema hall to catch a good movie adds a little spice to our otherwise monotonous lives. Bollywood movies or Hindi movies have become an essential part of Indian families. Watching one of these movies is like watching a fantasy.

Bollywood films have been evolving from time to time. Bollywood movies range from emotional sagas to patriotic legends, romantic comedies to heart stopping thrillers, movies for children to bold documentaries. Bollywood has something for all kinds of audience. Entertainment is packed for everyone. Hindi being the national language also has a national audience.

Majority of India is rural so majority of the audience is also rural. Usually directors go for something, which will be accepted by audience of all kinds but recently many directors have been experimenting and making movies on bold subjects. At times, movies are made to bring about awareness among the people.

Why ‘page 3’?

‘Page 3’ is unlike the other conventional Hindi movies as it was a successful movie. Sahara One Motion Pictures have investigated into the lives of the rich and prominent. It takes the audience to the lives of the upper strata of society – right from gay fashion designers, to struggling actors, from social workers, to socialites and the media isn’t spared!
Page 3 takes the viewer to a world that’s surreal, where relationships and friendships are unpredictable, people in the movie lead dual lives, sporting a [false] mask all the while. In short, the movie has exposed, ridiculed and mocked at the lives of Page 3 personalities.

The film is covered with a lot of suspense. It stars Konkona Sen Sharma as Madhavi Sen Sharma,in the lead role Tara Sharma as Gayatri, Atul Kulkarni as Vinayak Mane and Boman Irani as Deepak Suri, the editor of Nation Today.

                

3.2 OPERATIONAL METHEDOLOGY

Objectives

The main objective of this study is the factors that depict youth through the movie ‘Page 3’. To ascertain this, qualitative content analysis of “Page 3” is undertaken. Representation of what is real

The story or the theme of the film somehow leaves an impression on its audience or viewers to relate themselves with it. The film throughout its story, theme, dialogues scenes, songs, narration, costumes, sets etc makes an attempt to portray and identify a culture, society, traditions, customs, beliefs and reality to its audience.

The cinema reproduces specialized parts of our world by framing, focusing and juxtaposing aspects of visible in “acceptable” ways. Films show the dramatic or symbolic significance of a certain arrangement of these parts from an integral and combining perspective.

Realism in the cinema is driven by an aspiration to make the audience ignore the process of worth and to grasp directly the film’s plot or plan; for most film viewers, the plot is summarized and completely what a film represents.

In this way realism soothes the temperamental aspect of film, rotating the flow of pictures into a single large picture whose process of coming into being has been hidden behind the effect of its plot. While the semiotic work of such theorists such as Metz and Barthes has disclosed the cleverness of the realist system, it has simultaneously provided by a momentum for both the critic and the filmmaker to go beyond realism. (Andrew, 1984:47-48)

3.3 CONTENT ANALYSIS

Content analysis is a research technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of content of document. This is a method of data collection and analysis. This is used for the gathering of data from archival records, documents, newspapers, diaries, and letters of minutes meeting.

Content analysis is a method that was used in the United States as a branch of social Psychology known as communication research. (Methodology of research in social sciences, 2008)

According to Walizer and Weiner (1987), content analysis is any systematic procedure devised to examine the content of recorded information. Krippendorf (1980) defined content analysis as a research technique for making reproduction and valid references from data to their context. Kerlinger (1986) suggested that content analysis is a method of studying and analyzing and communication as systematic, objective and quantified manner for the purpose of measuring variables. His definition includes three concepts:

· Content analysis is systematic

· Content analysis is objective

· Content analysis is quantifiable

The goal of content analysis is the accurate representation of body of message. However, purely quantitative features might not be of importance. More qualitative factors may reveal more about meaning conveyed by media.

Thus the researcher has adopted the qualitative content analysis for this research.

Qualitative Content Analysis

There has been a growth in media research using interpretive methods to analyze. These methods used include observation, depth interviews and various forms of qualitative content analysis.

Qualitative content analysis procedures were influenced by the writing of Weber (1907),

Bulmer (1933) and Levi-Strauss (1963)

Analytical tools deriving from the disciplines such as literary criticism, film studies and linguistic have been applied to the investigation of text structure and production of meaning. Qualitative content analysis produces emphasize the capacity of texts to convey multiple meanings, depending upon the receivers. Kripperidoff (1980) distinguishes two key concepts of framework and logic in relation to content analysis. The framework of content analysis involves a clear statement of main research question, the kind of data, the context relative to the data and the naming of interferences from data to certain aspects of their context or the target of the inferences. That is to say that, so accomplish these inferences needs to have the operational theory of the data – context relationships.

Logic deals with the procedures involved in the selection and production of data, the processing of data, methods of inference and analysis, including the assessment of validity and reliability.

 Different types of Qualitative Content Analysis

· Structuralistic – semiotic analysis

· Discourse Analysis

· Rhetorical Analysis

· Narrative Analysis

· Interpretive Analysis

These are explained below:

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis as well as being an aspect of semiotic, can be seen as a form of critical linguistics. Discourse has been used to refer to written text, but it also has been used in connection with audio-visual media. Its application to the media grew out of semiotics studies attempting and discourse analysis pay specific attention to linguistic component of language use in the media.

Rhetoric analysis

Rhetoric analysis implies in reconstruction of the composition or organization of a directly observable and perceptible message by way of a detailed reading of fragments or larger of text or virtual matter. It involves unraveling formal external characteristics of the language and or imagery used. Sometimes emphasis is laid on construction and therefore syntactical properties of a text, sometimes the stress is put on pragmatic aspects of language use, and therefore on communicator choices, practices and strategies.

Production is rhetorical analysis are primarily focused on qualities of the plain text.

Interpretative analysis

This form of analysis is mainly of social scientific origin. This is shown in its design and

procedural elements. Researches methods are clearly spelled out. Coding rules are more

explicitly explained. These are also often clear links between theory and method.

Researchers employing interpretative content analysis ask descriptive research question aiming at the discovery and formulation of theory.

Structuralistic – semiotic analysis

This approach is concerned with the deeper meaning of the message. The method is concerned with structural relationships of representation in the texts. The referential nature and symbolic meaning of the message is explicitly taken to be the subject matter of the analysis. The production of the meaning is grounded in conventions, codes and the cultural agreement. Semiotic can be defined broadly as a domain of investigation in that explores the nature and function of signs as well as the systems and processes underlying significance, expression, representation and communication. As can be demonstrated from numerous cultural traces(verbal, pictorial, plastic, spatial artifacts, etc), the role of signs in human life has been an ongoing concern over the ages whenever questions have been asked about what constitutes signs and what laws govern them.

Defining Semiotics Terms

Semiotic Versus Semiology And Semantics

Ferdinand De Saussure used the term semiology to refer to the systematic study of the signs. Now a day, the term semiotics is used.

Semantic is the science which studies how linguistics texts (words, sentences, etc) are used to represent the world.

Synchronic and Diachronic Analysis

Semiotic method includes both the synchronic and diachronic study of signs.

Synchronic refers to the study of signs at a given points in time. Diachronic refers to the study of signs change, in form and meaning, over time. Synchronic analysis of a text looks for the patter of paired oppositions buried in the text (paradigmatic structure) while a diachronic analysis focuses upon the chain of events (syntagmatic structure) that forms the narrative.

Analytical, Simultaneity, Static, Relations in a system are some of the elements of

Synchronic analysis whereas Historical, Relations in time, prop, Succession are some of  the elements of Diachronic analysis.

Denotation and Connotation

Denotation describes the commonsense meaning of the sign, usually understood as a proper or literal meaning. (Word, image, sign)

Connotation is the meaning derived by an individual receiver. It is the suggestive or associative sense of an expression (word, image, and sign) that extends beyond its literal definition.

The greatest difficulty for international language of sign is that the same denoted signs can have many different connotations. Within a culture, denotations often match connotations. But when messages are attempted across the culture – whether based on age, economic, gender, ethnic, backgrounds and locations – it often results in aberrant decoding. For e.g. in many cultures eye contact between two individuals talking to each other is assign of interest. In other culture, it may indicate disrespect or insult. Human always see and hear through the filter of who are within a community.

The relationship between the signs and communicated meaning is indicated by denotation and connotation. (Lester 1995).

Narrative Analysis

This theory has its roots in the soviet union of the late 1920 and has been fed by the studies of diverse, international groups of linguistic, semiologists, anthropologist, folklorists, literary critics and film theorists. (Allen 1997)

This focuses on formal structure, but the form the perspective of narrative. The narrative distinguishes itself from the other texts by a clearly marked beginning and ending.

Narration itself involves the handling characters and the plot and of resulting patterns. In this type of analysis, it is not so much the characteristics of the plain text as the characters themselves that are crucial as well as their acts, their difficulties, their choices and the general development. All kinds of media products and media content such as films, television series, and documentaries can be described from the narrative point of view. In narrative analysis, texts are considered as stories. The message is taken to be presented or edited version of a sequence of events, of which elements are describes and characterization as to their structure. The procedure focuses on the reconstruction and description of the narrative structure on the basis of acts, choices, difficulties and of events happening to characters.

Narrative theory suggests that stories in whatever culture and whatever media share certain features but particular media are able to “tell” stories in different ways. This theory studies the devices and conventions governing the organization of the story

(Fiction or factual) in to sequence. The names of Todorov, Barthes prop and Levi

Strauss, working mostly with myths and folk tales, are ones we will come across in discussion of media narrative process. The theories of narrative analysis include the following theorists:

Tzevtan Todorov was a Bulgarian structuralist linguist publishing influential work on narrative from the 1960’s onwards. He argued that all stories began with what he called ‘equilibrium’ where any potentially opposing forces are ‘in balance’.

This is disrupted by some event, setting in train a series of events, to close with a second, but different ‘equilibrium’ or status quo. His theory may sound just like the cliché that every story has a beginning, middle and an end.

But it is more interesting than that. His ‘equilibrium’ labels a state of affairs, or status quo, and allows us to think about how this is ‘set up’ in certain ways and not others.

Vladimir prop was a Russian critic and folklorist. He argued that whatever the surface difference, it is possible to group characters and action into:

· Eight characters roles (or ‘spheres of action’ as he called them to indicate how inseparable character and action are)

· Thirty one functions (such as prohibition or ban is imposed on hero’ or ‘the villain learns something about his victim’) which move the story along, often in a highly predictable order.

Levi Strauss argued that an abiding structure of meaning making news was dependence on ‘binary oppositions’ which can be defined as conflict between the two qualities or terms. Less interested in the order in which events are arranged in the plot (called

syntagmatic relation); he looked ‘beneath’ them for deeper or paradigmatic arrangement of themes. This theory was applied to the western genre in 1970s. (Branston et al, 1996: 26,27, 29). Narratives are not only the dominant type of text on television, but narrative structure is to a large extent, the portal or grid through which even non – narrative text must pass. The world we see in the films is a world that has been shaped by the rules of discourse. Every narrative can be split into two parts ‘the story’, that is ‘what happens to whom’ and the ‘discourse’, that is ‘how the story is told’.

Ideological Analysis

Ideological criticism has its origin in the Marxist theorist of culture. It is concerned with the ways in which cultural practices and artifacts-in this case, the films-produce particular knowledge and positions for their user-in the present case, film audience. This knowledge and position link the viewers with and allows the reception of the economic and class interest of the industry. Ideological analysis is based on the assumption that cultural artifacts – literature, films, television and so forth – are produced in specific historical contexts by and for specific social groups. It aims to understand culture as a form of social expression.

Because they are created in socially and historically specific contexts, cultural artifacts are seen as expressing and promoting values, beliefs and ideas in relation to the context in which they are produced, distributed and received. Ideological analysis aims to understand how a cultural text specifically embodies and enacts particular ranges of values beliefs and ideas. (White,1992: 163, 172, 173)

Ideology in Narrative

Ideological criticism examines texts and viewers text relation to clarify how the meanings

and pleasures generated by films express specific social, material and class interests. This

is not to say that a given film directly express the beliefs of a particular producer, writer

or director – though obviously these may be contributing influences and viewpoints.

Ideological analysis focuses on the systematic meanings and contradictions embodied in textual practices. This includes the way familiar narrative, visual or generic structures orient our understanding of what we see and how they naturalize the events and stories in a film. Narration and generic conventions are crucial ways in which television handles social tensions and contradictions. In every case, one choose a specific set of events and analysis them with the goal of understanding the cultural logic that sustain them

As the researcher has defined all the terms involved in qualitative content analysis, which has been adopted for the study. But to get a clear picture of the study the movie will be analyzed on the basis of following on the basis of following criteria. And the prime focus will be on youth and how they are represented.