Theory: Stuart Hill

Stuart Hall is a narrative theorist who came up with the encoding/decoding theory.

Hill stated that all texts have a preferred meaning that the director has encoded but the audience who is decoding the text may not read it as intended by the producer. This is because everyone has a different social and/or cultural background. Texts which are meant to communicate hegemony will be encoded so that they can be easily interpreted by the mass audience who will watch the film and attempt to decode it. The hegemonic position is where the consumer decodes the text in the same way as it was encoded, meaning that they perfectly understood what the director was trying to portray. However if the preferred meaning is blurred and the information which is shown to the audience is insufficient for the text to be decoded accurately then the reaction to that text would most likely be negative. This is something which is extremely important to us when thinking about our narrative and our audience. The preferred meaning is important to think about when we are encoding our narrative as we would like to restrict our audience to 15 and over. For us to do this, we must ensure that our preferred meaning and what we encoding is in line with the BFI guidelines.

AF