Jane Stadler with Kelly McWilliam,
Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television.
Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009
ISBN: 978 1 74175 448 3
AU$49.95 (pb)
390pp
(Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin)
The authors of Screen Media do a highly commendable job of making a wide array of information about media analysis accessible to a reader with little or no academic grounding in the field. However, the text lacks a stable conceptual or theoretical context with which to orient its numerous definitions and short descriptions of technical processes and analytical tools, and this leaves the serious student of film and television studies with little to take away from the work, while simultaneously threatening to overwhelm newcomers to the field with its sheer abundance of ungrounded information.
Screen Media is roughly divided into two halves: the first five chapters of the book focus on different aspects of production (design, cinematography, sound, editing, and screenwriting, respectively), while chapters 6 through 11 outline different approaches to film analysis and larger media movements: narrative theory, realism, genre theory, celebrity and stardom, cult media and postmodern media hybridisation. McWilliam is credited in the table of contents with writing the chapters on genre and celebrity, and these are in many respects the book’s most interesting sections. In comparison with the rest of the text, which is somewhat looser and more conversational in tone and structure, McWilliam’s sections stand out for being tightly organised and critically precise while retaining the clarity of exposition Stadler cultivates throughout the work.
Both Stadler and McWilliam are careful to distinguish between film and television with respect to their modes of production, narrative forms and potential theorisation, which gives the text a rather ironic function. Although it aims to encompass film and television under the broad scope of its title, Screen Media actually works much better as a comparative study of the two audiovisual forms that highlights their differences rather than their commonalities. The early chapters effectively demonstrate the technical distinctions between the two forms in the areas of cinematography, sound design, editing, and other major aspects of production, including the qualities of film versus video, and explore a number of implications arising therefrom. Conceptual and textual differences between works of cinema and television programs are explored in later chapters, such as the narrative and dialogue conventions particular to each, and the modifications that must be made to analytical approaches with respect to each form, including the effect of domestic viewing practices on reception theory and the resistance of television series to auteur theory. While these consistently insightful distinctions help to justify the inclusion of both television and film as objects of analysis, the use of the umbrella term “screen media” is nonetheless problematic, since the authors pay only passing attention to animation, video games, and other forms of digital media.
Screen Media is designed less as a film or television studies textbook and more as a primer on contemporary media studies that focuses on these two media forms. As such, it contains little information on the history and development of cinema and television, their most influential works (Citizen Kane, for instance, is not mentioned), or significant aesthetic or ideological movements in each media form, with the exception of the section describing the development of cinematic realism. Its intended readership of casual, non-academic film and television enthusiasts is attested to by its extensive glossary, which includes not only technical terms related to production and media studies but also more general concepts such as “Marxism” and “semiotics”. These glossary words are set off in bold in the text, and definitions are offered in sidebars; each chapter also ends with a list of “key skills” which summarise what the reader should have learned from each section. Examples and illustrations of concepts draw heavily upon works expected to be familiar to most young Australian, American, British or Canadian readers, with more than half of the credited films and television programs having been produced after 2000, the vast majority of them in English-speaking countries. The implicit readership extends beyond those interested in academic media studies to “those who intend to become involved in the screen media industries as directors, producers, writers, reviewers, researchers, educators, policy-makers, or any of the myriad collaborative roles that media production, distribution, circulation and regulation necessitate” (p. xi).
As the broadness of its intended audience would suggest, Screen Media sacrifices depth for breadth in many respects. Its first five chapters contain a mass of technical terms and information on aspects of production such as shot types, lighting, editing techniques, sound recording, and screenplay formats, yet rely only upon brief allusions to their use in specific films and television series in order to make them recognisable to the reader. In fact, other than a small number of two-to-three-page subsections focused on specific works (for example, “The soundscape of Lost Highway” and “Applying genre analysis: Grey’s Anatomy”), and the final chapter’s sustained examination of intertext in Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, there is very little demonstration of applied media analysis in the text. This fact makes it all the more difficult for the potential reader to assimilate the technical terminology from the first half of the book with the conceptual approaches to media analysis offered in the second half.
Ultimately, Screen Media could be considered a lighter, more readable, and more contemporary alternative to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, and one which encompasses television studies as well. Bordwell is, significantly, one of the only theorists whom Stadler and McWilliam repeatedly reference, implicitly or explicitly employing his cognitivist approach to film analysis at several points. Many of the scholars and professors of film and media studies who complain about the dense prose of Bordwell and Thompson’s textbook and the fact that the authors use it to further their own theoretical position may find Stadler and McWilliam’s work a significant improvement on the first count, if a little too familiar on the second.
Christopher Rowe,
Melbourne University, Australia.
Created on: Saturday, 19 December 2009