useful analytical device to be adapted for film analysis, as it assumes representation to be a sort of 'symbolic practice by which meaning is given to the world' (Brooker, 2003, 223). This approach will be carried out in combination with a semiotic approach, in order to give a historical dimension to an otherwise too abstract and theoretical system of investigation. Attention has to be paid to the way certain visual statements in a film provide knowledge on a topic, such as crime and its representation, through its actors, narratives, techniques and reference to traditional or innovative sources of cultural practice. However, the coincidence of representation with discourse in Foucault's system seems a little too restrictive for my film analysis, as I would prefer to keep the two dimensions of analysis (the semiotic and the discoursive) as the two sides from which to look at the issue of representation: the way it works and its possible effects and consequences. Such an approach will provide an opportunity for a multiple reading of a film narrative and enhance its comparative perspective.
One criticism that needs to be made of Stuart Hall's general theory and system of representation in particular is that he tends to overstate the incorporating power of ideology, the detail of discourse analysis and its relationship with semiotics, without paying enough attention to how the economy and the State shape cultural production (Stevenson, 1995, 42). In particular, he ignores 'the growing economic interpenetration of different media sectors and the internationalisation of media conglomerates' (ibid., 43). I will address these points in chapter 3, where I am going to articulate a tripartite notion of culture, in order to disclose several points of contact between a micro analysis at the textual level and a macro one in terms of social structure and the conditions under which the production of cultural products takes place.
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Conclusions
In the first section of this chapter, I have reviewed some of the key texts in the criminological discussion about media and crime that have shown the discipline of criminology to be a field of studies intimately related to urgent contemporary public debate. Starting with the famous notion of moral panic developed in the seventies by Stanley Cohen, I have emphasised the relationship between this type of research and the problem of deviancy amplification as highlighted in young rival groups. I have shown how the media acted as intermediary between a young generation and an older audience, labelling a social problem in terms of social disorder and thus generating anxiety and panic. I have suggested that the reasons for the success of such a theory were also the reasons for its demise, since the concept of moral panic entered the vernacular and came to be applied too widely to a series of diverse social phenomena. I have introduced a preliminary definition of culture, stressing its connections with the concepts of language and representation. Policing the Crisis, one of the books published following Cohen’s work, has subsequently been discussed as providing particular indications relating to the definition of social crisis by the media at the end of the seventies. This work has been praised as a successful example of bridging the gap, in social analysis, between the study of crime and cultural studies. In particular, its analysis emphasised the re-organisation of the State in repressive terms, and the media’s ability to exploit an economic crisis in terms of deviancy amplification and social alarm, while exploiting racial differences and social deprivation.
I then introduced the polemic about ‘the great denial’ that followed this work, which was considered too abstract and not adequately involved in studying the real nature of crime in daily life. Subsequently I examined why, during the eighties, research was focused elsewhere than on the study of crime and media. Following this shift in the criminological agenda, I analysed some aspects of Sparks’s work on the portrayal of crime on television, in which he presented some concerns relating to the everyday dimension of media consumption and the methodological tools of cultural studies. I stressed the fact that this was one of the first works on fictional crime to address the notion of pleasure, alongside fear and anxiety, derived from watching crime stories.
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I subsequently moved on to sociological contributions to cinema, analysing how Melossi investigated the concept of the ‘representation of the criminal’ in order to relate this to wider social contexts, the European and the American. Melossi argued that a more sympathetic notion of criminals seems to prevail at some periods compared with others, as economic and social circumstances change. I also underlined how his analysis included cinematic representation, as the discourse about crime and criminals comes to expression in diverse public representations drawn from different institutional sources. I then compared the limitations relating to the study of cinema in this work with studies devoted entirely to film and crime. I underlined how Rafter’s contribution to the subject establishes collaboration between film scholars and criminologists. This joint endeavour tends towards defining how crime films are becoming a kind of popular criminology for a wider public in search of both information and entertainment from crime films. In the final paragraphs, I discussed the recent return to a collaboration between a media and criminological perspective in the form of cultural criminology, and I suggested how this new academic paradigm has many parallels with film noir. Finally, I have shown how this trend offers an opportunity for turning a sociological project into a dialogue between cultures, and for expanding criminology’s imaginative parameters in the same way as noir has become the locus of possible regeneration for a critical and aesthetic project.In the second section of this chapter, I have reviewed some notions that are closely related to my research, introducing the concept of film noir and its international legacy, with some of the relevant methodological aspects of my dissertation. Starting with the exposition of the history of film noir, in the first three paragraphs. I have covered the common features and some of the problems related to the classification of this group of American films. In particular, I have stressed how they have become the object of opposing feelings regarding the homogenisation of popular culture, while at the same time triggering an international debate about the flexibility and popular appeal of their narration and set of stock characters. I moved on to introducing my research project, its aims, and some of the problems related to its limitations together with possible ways of tackling them. Subsequently, I have expanded on the structure of my dissertation, describing how it has