Start of "Atonement"

In the beginning 20 minutes of the film we see that the genders are shown as typical stereotypes for the time of the film (1935). The women are shown running around and putting on make-up inside their huge house whilst we see the male doing work outside on the garden. We also see a male servant who was given instructions by the woman. This may seem incorrect as at this time males were seen to have the authority.

There seems to be a theme within the film as there are a lot of scenes that envolve water which makes the audience wander whether the plot may be based around this.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes was born on 12th November 1915 in Cherbourg, Normandy. Barthes's work extended over many different fields. He infleunced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existialism, social theory, Marxism and post-structuralism.

He was the son of a naval officer Louis Barthes who was killed in a battle in the North Sea, he was only one year old at the time. His mother Henriette Barthes, aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. When Barthes was eleven he and his family moved to Paris.

Between 1939 and 1948 he largely spent his life obtaining a licence in grammar, philology and also publishing his first papers. He spent the early 60's exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France and continued to produce more studies.

He described text as a "galaxy of signifiers" and claimed there were 5 ways of categorizing narrative codes:

1) Action code and enigma code
2) Symbols and signs
3) Points of a cultural reference
4) Simple description/reproduction
5) Structures

Representation

The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions of the word:
1. To represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description
or portrayal…..; to place a likeness of it before us in our mind.
2. To represent also means to symbolise, stand for, to be a specimen of or to substitute
for; as in the sentence, “In Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion
of Christ.”
It is worth thinking about each of these for a moment: the first one is the more straightforward
— the media are in the business of describing things to us — they represent people and types
of people to us so that we end up feeling that we know what they are like.

Meida Diary

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