Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

Appendix: Doing Process-Relational Media Analysis

APPENDIX Doing Process-Relational Media Analysis The process-relational model follows a film through three concurrent and parallel life cycles, or three ecologies: the material, the social, and the perceptual. The model can be pictured as in Figure A1. In this model, the focus is on perceptual ecologies, because that is where film’s main distinctiveness lies. The film experience—the experience of viewers watching and interpreting a film—is a key moment in film’s impact on perceptual ecologies. It consists of the process of viewers entering into a filmworld (which is anthropomorphic, biomorphic, and geomorphic) through encountering filmic firstness (sound-image spectacle), secondness (narrativity), and thirdness (exoreferentiality). The effects of the film experience continue after the viewing of a film as its images, sounds, feelings/affects, and meanings percolate into the lives and worlds of viewers. FIGURE A1 The Process-Relational Model 342 APPENDIX Questions that a process-relational analysis of films might ask include the following. (Note that the word “film” can be substituted with other terms, such as “television program,” “video,” “genre,” “artwork,” etc., as appropriate for one’s analysis.) 1. The Film World • Geomorphism: How does the film present the objectivity of the world and of things? How does it depict place, space, and territory (e.g., as stable or unstable, conflictual, negotiated, clearly belonging to one group or another)? How does it portray differences between the various kinds of space: between here(ness) and there(ness), home(ness) and away(ness), “our” world and “their”/other worlds? • Place and landscape: How is non-human nature, including specific places and landscapes, portrayed? How does this correspond to what you know of these places and landscapes? • Relationship: How is the relationship between people and the non-human landscape portrayed, and how is it differentiated among various social groups? (Recall the variations examined in Chapter 3: land as us; land as for us; land as becoming us; land as encounter/experience; land as other; etc.) • Biomorphism: What sorts of relational processes are depicted in the film? How does the film depict aliveness as well as sensorial interactions (seeing, hearing, feeling, etc.) between different kinds of things? • Animals, wildlife, non-human agency: How are non-human animals and life forms portrayed, and what, if any, differences are there in how the various forms of life shown in the film are portrayed? • Relationship: How is the relationship between people and animals or other non-human life forms portrayed? What kinds of tensions (if any) arise at the boundaries between humans and other forms of agency? How are these tensions mediated or developed over the course of the film? For instance, are there boundary crossers, and how is their boundary crossing portrayed? • Anthropomorphism: What sorts of human (or human-like) actors or agents people this film? Who are the main subjects or active agents in the film, and how is their subjectivity or agency expressed, enabled, and constrained? How are obstacles dealt with, problems solved, obligations met, changes produced, ideas conceived? • Cultural difference: What capacities for action are portrayed, and how are they distributed among different actors? If there is a contrast between two radically dissimilar social groups, what, in the film’s depiction, are the differences and similarities between them? (Recall the variations examined Doing Process-Relational Media Analysis 343 in Chapter 4: “we’re okay, they’re okay”; “we’re okay, they’re not okay”; “they’re okay, we’re not okay”; “neither we nor they are okay.”) How are these differences mediated or developed over the course of the film? • Power: How are power relations and political agency represented? Are certain people/groups shown to be passive and others active, and, if so, is this presented in a critical light or does it appear natural, unquestioned, and unchangeable? What dilemmas or problems are the characters faced with, and are the underlying structural causes highlighted or are these left unquestioned or unaddressed? • Identities: How are the following represented: – Gender and gender relations? – Race and race relations? – Socio-economic class? – Ethnicity and cultural identity? – Sexuality and sexual orientation? – Normalcy and deviance? – What, among humans, is represented as “natural” and/or “unnatural”? 2. The Film Experience • Firstness (spectacle): What kinds of audiovisual elements and combinations present themselves in this film? How do they appear? What are the recurrent images, sounds, or image–sound combinations that repeat at key moments and “stay with you” the longest? What...