Theoretical Research

Auteur Theory:

The auteur theory holds that a film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as they were the primary auteur (the french word for author.) In law, a film is treated as a work of art and the auteur being the creator of the film, is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law, the film director is consider the auteur/author or one of them auteurs of the film. An auteur is a film maker whose style is very distinctive which becomes the auteurs signature and it also keeps the creative control over their work.

Genre Theory:

The genre theory draws the audiences attention towards what is different between the films the auteur does rather then the similarities such as their signature. It looks at the types and kind of things in a certain genre and the characteristics and features expected in that types of genre, by the audience.

Audience Theories: 

There are three theories - 

The effects model (Hypodermic Needle Model): It's a rather outdated model of audience consumption. The audience is seen as a single mass that passively receives the messages from the text in the media. It implies that the media "injects", like a needle, messages into an unquestioning audience. However, this is seen to be an oversimplified model. Examples of this is propaganda and the internet.

Uses and Gratifications Model: It emphasises what consumes of media products do with them, the power is considered to lie with the individual consumer of the media who is seen to use certain tests to gratify certain needs and interests.Theorists Blumler and Katz postulated that there were five main reasons why audiences consumed media texts:

• To be informed or educated.
• In order to identify with characters and situations.
• To be entertained.
• To enable themselves to socially interact with others (watching, listening or reading together or through discussion of what they’d consumed.)
• To escape from their daily troubles or worries.

The Influence Model: Emphasises the subtler, less direct capacity of the media to influence perceptions. It recognises that people respond to other influences, such as opinion leaders, who may mediate the message of the media. Thus, media effect can be seen as one of reinforcement – closer to ‘influence’ than ‘brainwashing’. Research by Stuart hall found that rather than the autonomous individualised audience members of the uses and gratifications approach, that audience members shared certain frameworks of interpretation and that they work at decoding media texts within these frameworks.