Browsing by Subject "Film and Media Studies"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 45
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    “According to social media…” Examining the influence of social media on political reporting within Zimbabwe’s mainstream media
    (2019) Ndou, Delta Lau Milayo; Chuma, Wallace
    The Internet’s liberative qualities have been hyped by a number of Zimbabwean scholars who argue, on the basis of the existence of online alternative media that carries political content, that democratisation can be technology-led. Given that the question of source selection is connected to the democratising potential of the Internet (Lecheler and Kruikemeier, 2016) by some scholars – this study interrogated the liberative potential of the Internet by tracing the social media sourcing patterns of four daily newspapers within Zimbabwe’s polarised mainstream media. Using a mixed methods approach which deployed Actor-Network theory as a preliminary methodological tool, this study collected and evaluated empirical data drawn from 146 social media sourced political stories published over a 30-month period and the responses from semi-structured interviews with purposively sampled participants – to account for the human and non-human actors in the news production network. A social constructivist analytical lens was then used to appreciate the contexts in which social media sourcing was being adopted in newsrooms, which revealed how unique circumstances had triggered unprecedented reliance on social media as a political news source. Those unique circumstances involved an escalation of factional fighting within the ruling ZANU PF that morphed into a propaganda war, which was waged through The Herald newspaper by one faction and through social media by the other faction. The public feud, which played out on social media, forced political reporters to gather story ideas from social media and overly rely on a few tech savvy elite sources. In these circumstances, social media’s influence on the political news agenda was overstated as it was conflated with the influence of a news event (ZANU PF factionalism) and the influence of social media users (high-ranking ZANU PF members) who could not be ignored. It is hoped that the findings of this study will contribute towards filling the lacuna in terms of scholarship demonstrating the influence of social media within Zimbabwe’s political narratives.
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    Adapting Mozambique : representations of violence and trauma in Mozambican cinema and literature
    (2013) Mulliken, Douglas; Botha, Martin
    This dissertation examines the ways in which violence and trauma are represented in two novels - Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988) and Mia Couto’s Terra Sonâmbula (1992) - and the cinematic adaptations of those novels - Margarida Cardoso’s A Costa dos Murmúrios (2004) and Teresa Prata’s Terra Sonâmbula (2007). All four works take place in Mozambique and actively engage with the two primary conflicts that occurred in that country - the Mozambican War of Independence (also known as the Anti-Colonial War), fought between 1964 and 1974, and the Mozambican Civil War, fought between 1977 and 1992. In order to provide suitable context for the textual and theoretical analysis found in the body of the dissertation, the study begins by providing a brief review of the history of cinema in Mozambique, focussing primarily on the period stretching from the start of the Anti-Colonial War in 1964 to the present day. It also examines the concept of national cinema, and whether such an idea is justifiable in a Mozambican context. The study continues by considering, in Chapter 2, the concept of adaptation and its limits. This chapter also provides an historical background for some of the atrocities committed during the Mozambican Civil War. Chapter 3 consists of close textual analysis of the two versions of A Costa dos Murmúrios. The chapter identifies two main themes running through both works - the question of subjectivity and a postmodern presentation of history, and the tense, erotic relationship that exists between the two main female protagonists of the narrative, both of whom end up the victims of severe trauma. Chapter 4 looks at the literary and cinematic incarnations of Terra Sonâmbula, with special attention paid to the function of magical realism in both works. This chapter argues that Couto uses magical realism as a sort of coping mechanism which allows his characters to remain hopeful, while the relative absence of magical realism in Prata’s film results in an entirely different representation of both the Mozambican Civil War and the experience of those who lived through it. This work concludes by arguing against too essentialist an understanding of how we define and categorise works of art, regardless of medium. Finally, it calls for further English-language scholarship in the field of Lusophone African cinema.
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    An analysis of SABC coverage of political parties in the 2019 elections
    (2021) Zulu, Nelly Teressa; Chuma, Wallace
    This study critically analyses the coverage of the three main political parties (ANC, DA and EFF) in the 2019 elections by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). The SABC has been one of the main sources of information for millions of citizens across the country and many South Africans rely on the SABC for news concerning election proceedings. Therefore, the study aims to observe the role of the SABC in society, and politics during the 2019 elections in South Africa. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate whether the SABC‘s coverage was fair on the three main political parties or not. This research chose to use framing and social responsibility theory as guidelines to reliable and convincing information. Data for this research was obtained through secondary data from the SABC online channel; the study used election reports and its visuals such as pictures, videos for analysis. The study further used videos from the beginning of 2019 election campaigns, until the last day of elections which was scheduled on the 10th of May 2019. According to the research findings, the SABC did not represent the real image of the political parties which may be regarded as unprofessional and may taint the quality of their work. The research shows that in the media there are deep-rooted social and cultural issues that need transformation. The studies notes that media reforms can be the solution to some of the issues discussed in this dissertation. During election period the media was seen as bias, giving more coverage to the ruling party and this conduct led many to conclude that the SABC was used as a mouthpiece of certain political parties. However, the study also observed that there are traditional news factors that influenced the news selection.
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    Art, outrage, dialogue: a McLuhan reading of three visual communicative practices in Cape Town public space
    (2015) Brown, Storm Jade; Irwin, Ronald
    This mini-dissertation places a specific focus on the City of Cape Town and considers the space between aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual communication practices. Instead of making a general statement or providing a value judgement, this research examines the nature of the debate surrounding public artistic practices by referring to three main artists; namely Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam. The basis of the discussion is centred around the recent controversy surrounding Michael Elion's Sea Point public art sculpture, Perceiving Freedom (2014) and the respective questions it raised about what public space means, who has the right to represent themselves, and what that looks like. By drawing a comparison with Perceiving Freedom (2014) to the visual communicative practices of Freddy Sam and The Tokolos Stencil Collective, this research examines the progression of the debate. This encompasses the ways in which each artist and their work serve to illuminate the different visual modes of engagement in Cape Town's public spaces. Due to the contemporary nature of the subject matter, this debate is engaged with on three different levels. The first level examines the context of this debate and each artist, whereas the second level considers the points where their respective visual communicative practices intersect and engage in dialogue with each other as well as the general public. The last level considers an alternative way of reading the content, context and form of visual communicative practices so that their resulting effect can be better understood. This is done with the use of Marshall McLuhan's (1964) total effect media theory. Although several other prominent South African artists are mentioned in the scope of this research, it is important to note that the focus still pertains to the aforementioned themes of aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual representative practices. Therefore Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam remain the specific focus of discussion, as their respective works are used to illustrate these three themes. The first level of engagement offers a theoretical background to the reader by briefly familiarising them with international street art and graffiti practices. This brief yet concise background allows for a better understanding of the history and politics surrounding unsanctioned public visual practices and how they differ to formal sanctioned and funded ones.
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    Begging for change: engaging with Johannesburg in post-apartheid South African film
    (2012) Herman, Daniel David; Rijsdijk, Ian-Malcolm
    The city of Johannesburg is globally identified with issues of inequality, prejudice and transformation. This identification is reinforced by the city's representation in film, in particular those of the post-apartheid era, which tend to emphasize the city's problems. The transformative power of living in Johannesburg, in particular how this experience impacts and shifts the personalities and experiences of the city's inhabitants, is often ignored. This thesis sets out to explore and analyse the consequences of engagement with Johannesburg by exploring the impact of the city on the protagonists in four post-apartheid Johannesburg films. The films that will be analysed - Jump the Gun (1996), Hijack Stories (2000), Tsotsi (2005), and District 9 (2009) - portray life in post-apartheid Johannesburg. These films were chosen because they have narratives that illustrate character transformation through exposure to the city of Johannesburg. The decision to focus on films that depict this era is deliberate, and I have done this in order to identify a new way of living in Johannesburg that is unique to this time period. In addition, the spread of years highlights how the experience of living in Johannesburg has changed over time.
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    Border crossings : how students negotiate cultural borders during digital video production
    (2010) Cronje, Franci; Archer, Arlene
    This thesis explores emerging patterns of communication in student video production and the extent to which such patterns signify cultural border crossings in a South African upper income group school context. The investigation was carried out with specific reference to the politics of difference, an educational philosophy defined by Henry Giroux (2006) as border pedagogy. Within the framework of multimodal pedagogy, four learners from diverse cultural backgrounds collaborated with one another in a timeframe of three days to create digital video productions using guidelines provided by the researcher. The production unit was observed in order to answer questions around the utilisation of video production in the classroom, as well as how learners interact and negotiate cultural issues while producing video. The data was analysed with a custom-made multimodal toolkit as proposed by Baldry and Thibault (2006). By employing Kress and Van Leeuwen's four strata of Discourse, Design, Production and Distribution various types of data illuminated themes around social memory, race, the influence of class difference, and gender representation. Assessment techniques in terms of the multimodal theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) also enabled the researcher to look at the way in which meaning is made "in any and every sign, at every level, and in any mode" (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001: 4). The classroom intervention was designed to encourage adolescents as "unique hybrids" (Bhabha 1994) to cross borders of cultural identity, hypothesising that difference might emerge more clearly in the negotiation and video production process, than what might crystallise in analyzing the final video production. Metaphorical border crossing in a cultural and racial sense might become more apparent in production than final product. The negotiation of Border Difference took preference over the ultimate erosion of these borders.
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    Cirque du Pan : panic circuit : an exploration of the accelerative effects of information communication technology
    (2006) Maggs, Charles; Van der Schijff, Johann
    Much of the developed world operates under what is referred to as liberal democratic capitalism. This implies government by the people, operating in a free and profit driven market, which in theory suggests an equality of voice and access to markets for personal profit. However the 'powerful movements of acceleration and excess' which Auge refers to above are less to do with the intentions of a liberal democratic capita list system and more accidental effects of it. This dissertation explores the constant push of commerce and the digital communication revolution as contributory factors to this hypermodern or globalised state.
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    Colour adjustment: race and representation in post-apartheid South African documentary
    (2009) Pichaske, Kristin; Botha, Martin
    The goal of this dissertation is to examine the process of racial transformation within South Africa's documentary film industry and to assess how the nation's shifting identity is both influenced by and reflected in documentary film. Drawing examples from a diverse collection of local and international films, I have examined changes in who is making documentaries in South Africa and how, as well as the representations of race that result. In particular, I have focused on how the balance of insider vs. outsider storytelling may be shifting and to what effect. At the same time, I have qualitatively examined the representations produced by black/insider filmmakers as compared to those of white/outsider filmmakers in order to assess the impact of the filmmaker's racial status on outcomes. Finally, I have investigated ways in which the tradition of white-onblack storytelling must change in order to satisfy the political shift that has taken place in South Africa and the cultural sensitivities that have resulted.
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    Communicative freedom in a digital democracy: political and economic resistance to freedom of speech and the rise of digital activism in South Africa
    (2022) Brevis, Chad; Haupt, Adam
    This dissertation explores political and economic resistance to communicative freedom in South Africa. Through a mixed methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics analysis, this dissertation seeks to explore how our understanding of democracy is being transformed as we move from a physical, industrialised world into a digital, networked society. South Africa is trying to keep pace with technological advances while still clinging to archaic forms of governance. This project considers whether these archaic forms of governance and older forms of communication legislation are effective in governing communicative freedom in South Africa's emerging network society. I argue that the Protection of State Information Bill (2010), Protection of Personal Information Bill (2009) and the Promotion of Access to Information Act (2013) are ineffective for two reasons. Firstly, the legislation's language is so open-ended that it can be abused by political and economic elites to stifle free speech and transparency. Secondly, the legislation can be used to punish whistleblowers and digital activists who are vested in sustaining a digital commons in the interest of openness and transparency in a functional democracy. In fact, digital activists say that they experience political and economic intimidation that forces them to self-censor under the threat of heavy-handed sanctions. The problem of corporate monopolisation contributes to this problem because the costs of meaningful online access and participation are prohibitively expensive. Effectively, this undermines constitutionally enshrined communicative freedoms. I also explore historical and theoretical approaches to democracy and consider what democracy is in a developing network society. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which vague language choices within laws are used to subvert and undermine the right to communicative freedom. I then engage the work of the civil society organisation, the Right2Know Campaign (R2K), as a legitimate response to impunitive exercises of power. The dissertation offers a Corpus Linguistics analysis of the Protection of State Information Bill (2010), Protection of Personal Information Bill (2009) and the Promotion of Access to Information Act (2013) to suggest that, in the nexus between political and economic resistance to communicative freedom and digital activism, South Africa has regressed into an autocratic dystopia. The argument is that digital activism should be protected in the same way as physical protests in our material world. In an age where South Africa's socio-political and economic sectors are reimagined in the digital space, an inevitable reliance on digital activism has emerged. This study explores newer forms of governance that may be established in the power vacuum created in the new, digital space of politics and economics in our networked society.
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    Crisis management at South African universities: A case of the University of Cape Town crisis management strategies
    (2024) Makubalo, Siyavuya; Irwin, Ronald
    In recent years, crises have become frequent in society, affecting individuals, organisations, and institutions. Traditionally, higher education institutions were regarded as protected spaces. However, with the rising cost of tuition that significantly affects students from less privileged backgrounds, higher education institutions have been facing increasing crises in the form of student protests. When these crises have emerged, higher education institutions have resorted to implementing crisis response plans rather than developing crisis prevention strategies. The former can be distinguished from the latter by its focus on short-term resolution, which allows for crisis dormancy. This study examines whether higher education institutions' failure to distinguish between dormant and resolved crises has contributed to a culture of crisis management rather than crisis prevention.
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    The cross-cultural camera of Akira Kurosawa
    (2003) Molapo, Mpaki; Marx, Lesley
    This minor dissertation is undertaken to examine the cross-cultural similarities that are revealed by motion pictures through analyzing the work of Akira Kurosawa and contrasting it with selective mainstream cinema texts. Kurosawa is a critical case in point due to his welding of Occidental and Japanese ideas into his films, and his origin from a hybridized Japan, a society which historically has freely absorbed and embellished itself from numerous cultures, including America, Korea, China and Europe.
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    The cutting edge : deviant realisms and cinematic disruption
    (2007) Watson, Mary; Higgins, John
    This thesi explores two possibilities and relates them to each other: infusions of fantasy (or magic, the dream, the ,marvellous) which undermine realism and the use of disruption as a specific strategy for communicating disorder or elusive experience. It examines the expression of both fantasy and disruption with an emphasis on film editing. This study considers editing as the foundation of narrative structure in film, and explores the effects of alternative articulations of space, time and the body in film that deliberately subvert the norms of continuity editing.
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    'Digital storytelling' - unplugged public video voices and impression management in a participatory mobile media project for youth in Khayelitsha, South Africa
    (2012) Hassreiter, Silke; Walton, Marion
    This study documented the process of mobile Digital Storytelling with a particular focus on the development of civic awareness and voice as well as the participants’ strategies to address multiple audiences of digital stories and to distribute their video creations through pre-existing peer-networks.
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    Don't hide the madness perception, bipolar and the film form
    (2019) Rai, Kimberley; Maasdorp, Liani
    Human perception is a process that begins with sensory input that is organized and then interpreted. During this process there is a movement of information about an event in the real world, into information that represents that event in the mind. This movement of information in the form of perception is similar to the filming process; where the event, sensory input, organisation and interpretation is like the pro-filmic event (that which exists in the world before or regardless of whether it is filmed), the light entering the camera lens, and, the editing process and audience experience, respectively. When these systems are influenced at any stage of the process, there is an alteration in the resulting representation. The pro-filmic event can be influenced through the filmmaking techniques used to record it that may influence beliefs that concern the event. For example, the recording of films that concern mental illness need to be approached with caution because treatment of the pro-filmic event can either reinforce or challenge stereotypes about the mentally ill. Bipolar is a mental disorder of mood that is often represented with wild inaccuracy in films. The biographical drama, Shine (1996), for example, attempts to represent the life of David Helfgott, a musician who suffered a mental breakdown and spent subsequent years in mental asylums. He is portrayed as an imbecile, always mumbling indistinctly. In the film, the connection between psychopathology and creativity is supported, heavy- handedly. This demonstrates how the intervention (by the filmmaker and his filmmaking techniques) can transform meaning and influence viewer perception through the film medium. For the case-study documentary film, Don’t Hide the Madness (2017), I use recording and editing techniques to portray a personal account of bipolar in a way that challenges mainstream beliefs about the disorder. I argue that this application of the film medium has the capacity to confront stigma and change perceptions about mental illness.
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    Exploring South African youths' on/offline political participation
    (2012) Mbenga, Chilombo; Ndlovu, Musa; Walton, Marion
    This study is located between the contradiction that youth is politically disinterested and that youth is very much politically engaged. Some scholars have argued that youth political disinterest is a threat to the life of the traditional public sphere and democracy. Against the notion of the youth's disinterest and disaffection from politics, this study points out the deficit in exploratory studies that examine and explore the relationship between young people and their political participation both in the on/offline context. In light of the contradiction as well, this current study asked the following question: how does a group of South African youth use social media to participate in the virtual public sphere? Also, what are the views of a group of South African youth about political participation (via their use of traditional and new/social media)?
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    From #MenAreTrash to #MensConference: Networked masculinities in South African Twitter
    (2021) Aguera, Reneses Pablo; Bosch, Tanja
    Despite the extensive literature on men and masculinities in South Africa, researchers have largely overlooked the role of digitally mediated networked publics in the coproduction and negotiation of contemporary masculinities. This dissertation attempts to fill the gap by engaging in an exploration of networked masculinities in South African Black Twitter through the analysis of two recent case studies. The first case study looks at the hashtag #MensConference, a fictional conference organised by men in opposition to Valentine's Day. The second focuses on the #MenAreTrash movement, a digital feminist campaign against gender-based violence, and men's response through the hashtag #WomenAreTrash. Employing a small data approach, this dissertation engages in a critical thematic analysis of a selection of tweets for each of the hashtags through the theoretical lens of critical masculinity studies. The dissertation takes a decolonial approach to African digital media research by examining the digital experiences of African men as sites for knowledge creation in their own right. In accordance with the notion of masculinity as multiple, fluid and discursive, the analysis uncovered a wide range of masculinity discourses on South African Twitter across a traditional-liberal spectrum. While expressions of sexism and misogyny were common throughout the sample, men also upheld alternative and progressive models of manhood. The affordances of social media provided men with a space to express themselves, but also to police and contest each other's masculinities through in-group dynamics that worked to reinforce patriarchal hegemony. The dissertation also provides insights into the role of women in shaping online discourses of masculinity by both challenging and reinforcing vii gender power structures. The findings present similarities with previous studies on networked masculinities from the Global North, for instance, in the anti-feminist resistance strategies deployed against #MenAreTrash. However, the interactions between black South African men on Twitter were defined by their specific social, economic and cultural context, with local media and consumerist culture playing a substantial role in influencing networked masculinities. Ultimately, this research demonstrates the critical role of social media, and Black Twitter in particular, as a prominent space for both the reproduction and contestation of hegemonic masculinities in South Africa. The dissertation concludes by highlighting the value of social media for researching the relational processes of co-construction and performance of contemporary South African masculinities, as well as its potential for gender justice efforts working to promote progressive masculinities in the country.
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    From chef to superstar : food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web
    (2007) Hansen, Signe; Higgins, John
    This thesis examines representations of food in twenty-first century media, and argues that the media obsession with food in evidence today follows directly from U.K. and U.S. post-war industrial and economic booms, and by the associated processes of globalisation that secure the spread of emergent trends from these countries to the rest of the so-called Western world. The theoretical frame for the work is guided in large part by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967), which follows a Marxist tradition of examining the intersection between consumerism and social relationships. Debord's spectacle is not merely something to be looked at, but functions, like Marx's fetishised commodity, as a mechanism of alienation. The spectacle does this by substituting real, lived experience with representations of life. Based on analyses of media representations of food from the post-war period to the present day, the work argues against the discursive celebration of globalisation as a signifier of abundance and access, and maintains, instead, that consequent to the now commonplace availability of choice and information is a deeply ambiguous relationship to food because it is a relationship overwhelmingly determined by media rather than experience. It further argues that the success of food media results from a spectacular conflation of an economy of consumerism with the basic human need to consume to survive. Contemporary celebrity chefs emerge as the locus of this conflation by representing figures of authority on that basic need, and also, through branded products (including themselves), the superfluity of consumerism. The subject of the work, therefore, is food, but the main object of its critique is media. Food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web is about the commodification of history and politics, through food, and the natural (super)star of this narrative is the modern celebrity chef.
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    Gender identities at play : children's digital gaming in two settings in Cape Town.
    (2013) Pallitt, Nicola; Walton, Marion; Prinsloo, Mastin
    This thesis investigates children's gaming relationships with peers in out-of-school settings, and explores their interpretation of digital games as gendered media texts. As an interdisciplinary study, it combines insights from Childhood Studies, Cultural Studies, Game Studies, domestication and performance theory. The concept ludic gendering is developed in order to explain how gender "works" in games, as designed semiotic and ludic artefacts. Ludic gendering also helps to explain the appropriation of games through gameplay, and the interpretation of gendered rules and representations. The study expands on audience reception research to account for children's "readings" of digital games. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to study gaming relationships. Combining SNA with broadly ethnographic methods provided a systematic way of investigating children's peer relationships and gendered play.
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    Interpersonal communication and brand interaction on mobile social media: South African adolescents' use of MXit, Facebook Twitter
    (2012) Griffiths, Samantha; Irwin, Ronald
    This paper explores the mobile social networking patterns of a sample of Black, White and Coloured adolescents attending three different schools in Cape Town, South Africa. The researcher utilises the Uses and Gratifications theory and qualitative research methodology in the form of focus groups and one-on-one semi-structured interviews to explore what gratifications this sample of students, aged 14-7 years, derive from three mobile social networking brands - MXit, Facebook and Twitter.
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    Lockdown fatigue: A content analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic was framed in South African newspapers before, during, and after the termination of the National State of Disaster
    (2023) Solomons, Soligah; Wasserman, Hermanus
    Both domestically and abroad, the COVID-19 pandemic has gotten a lot of media attention. When covering crises, the media frequently uses frames. This study looks at the frames used by the media to cover the time leading up to, during, and following the termination of South Africa's national state of disaster. The study examines the media coverage of four weekly print newspapers using content analysis. Additionally, a deductive analytical method is employed to discover the frames beforehand, including the alarming frame, neutral frame, and reassuring frame. The results of this study showed that the media's reporting was predominantly alarmist in nature. The reassuring frame and the neutral frame respectively came next. Males made up the majority of the sources for the reporting, who were mostly representatives of various agencies. The majority of the stories analysed at this time gave no information about the abolition of the national state of disaster. Additionally, the few stories that did cover the pandemic often omitted information on what it meant for citizens after the two-year lockdown regulations were lifted. According to this research, the media's overall coverage of the COVID-19 virus has reduced. This study also shows that despite advancements in the COVID-19 viral control methods put in place, the media continued to portray the situation as alarming. Keywords: media framing, COVID-19/covid-19, coronavirus, newspapers, public health crises, pandemics, South Africa