Thursday, 13 November 2014

Rick Altman and the three pleasures

Rick Altman suggested that each genre within film offers the audience "a set of pleasures" these are generally defined by the media language within the product for example, semantic elements and codes within a western are conventionally guns, horses, landscapes and stars like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. As well as the semantic approach he also said they could be defined by syntactic elements too by using ideologies and narrative.
He declared that there are three main pleasure within film.
The first would be emotional pleasures; this is where the pleasure offered to the audience of genre films are significant and generate a strong audience response, this causes controversy and passion.
The next  is visceral pleasures, this response is defined by the films stylistic construction and elicits a physical effect upon its audience, for example a feeling of revulsion, kinetic speed or a roller coaster ride.
The final pleasure is intellectual puzzles as particular genres such as thrillers offer the pleasure of mystery or puzzle for the audience to speculate. This pleasure is derived from trying to decipher the plot and forecast the ending.
I aim to apply the intellectual puzzle pleasure to my film trailer as it is a convention of most trailers as they are supposed to hold some form of mystery for the viewer as the plot should be briefly established.

 A film that applies to the emotional pleasure would be Gone Girl:


A film that applies to the visceral pleasure would be Avengers Assemble:


A film that applies to the intellectual puzzles would be Now You See Me:


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