Second Artifact Evaluation

For this artifact I screened three films, each varying in their portrayal of reality and asked the audience to complete a short questionnaire about the film. My reasoning behind running this artifact was to see how much of the narrative the audience understood when presented with different portrayals of what is “real”.

I researched into the design of questionnaires and found that open-ended questions were best used to gather a precise judgement of each individual response and closed questions were used in summarising the answers in order to produce an overall viewpoint of your audience. It was important that the audience didn't have any options they could use just to skip the question if they didn't know the answer. It was important to not give them any encouragement or clues and really test how much of the narrative they understood.

The first film was a documentary called Malcolm and Barbara – Love’s Farewell. The documentary followed a couple through their struggle with Alzheimer’s. My results show that the audience got confused with dates and the time scale of the filming. They were, however, very emotionally attached to the characters within the film and believed there was a clear boundary between director and characters. This is quite an interesting result as they felt a clear boundary between the real people and the production team. In the plot questions section they audience scored 7/15.

The next film was Downfall about the last days of Hitler. I chose this film because it is a piece of history that everyone familiar with on some basic level. I wanted to explore how the audience would respond to a very real piece of history in a film context. The film is in German so is subtitled which the audience all agreed made the narrative seem realistic. The score was 8/15 the plot questions. All of the audience agreed they felt like they were watching a piece of history.

The third film was eXistenZ. A film that toys with the ideas of reality throughout. In this questionnaire the audience explained their answers in great detail and were much more inclined to elaborate on their ideas. The audience scored 9/15 on the plot questions showing a steady rise in their understanding of the narrative the looser it is based in reality.

In conclusion, it seems that the audience is much more willing to accept a reality that is placed in front of them rather than try and follow a narrative which is set in a version of reality they are familiar with. With the Malcolm and Barbara documentary the audience felt emotional attachment to the characters. Does the representation of reality effect the audience's emotional attachment to the narrative ? Interestingly though, this was the film they remembered least about the narrative. The next film on the list of Downfall. The film was very 'real' in it's stark portrayal of the last days of Hitler, like the audience, i felt i was watching a real piece of history when viewing the film for the first time. And even more interestingly the narrative which was understood the most, is the one based in a completely implausible world of several layers of reality portrayed within. The audience were willing to expand on their answers in much more detail than the previous films and even spoke of the symbolism throughout the film.

Leading on the results obtained in my first artifact it seems that the audience is much more comfortable in a narrative based in a foreign version of reality. Is this audience escapism at it's very based ? does an audience interpret narrative in a different based on the representation of reality ? Only time will tell.......