Les Revenants

Les Revenants does not answer the questions - presents enigma or hermeneutic codes

Although Les Revenants is highly unconventional, it does it to retain the audience

Steve Neale argues genre works as repetition and difference

Todorov - Narrative Theory

Les Revenants is not a conventional narrative

What happens in the episode?

• Camille comes home
• Simone tries to get home
• "Victor" tries to go home
• The bartender tries to get home (gets killed along the way)

What is a cyclical narrative?

Where the end is similar or the same to the beginning

What is polysemic?

Where a media product can be interpreted in several ways

Les Revenants has a cyclical narrative and is polysemic

What is Roland Barthes theory?

Semiotics theory - the study of meaning; codes and conventions. All narrative structures share structural features that each narratives weaves together in different ways

What is Claude Levi-Strauss' theory?

Where oppositions construct meanings

What is Jean Baudrillard's theory?

Post-modernism; nothing is real and meaning has collapsed, hyperreality, where the representation is more real than the thing being represented

Extreme long shot --> mid shot --> close up

Opening scene

2 kids in the reflection who we can't see. Where are they? Are they dead? Are they going to be people coming from 'The Returned'?

Binary opposition between dead and alive/life and death

Baudrillard - are we actually alive?

Reflections symbolise the supernatural

Victor by the house he eventually stays at

Why is Victor alone? Why does he not speak? Where are his parents? How old is he?

2 people kissing next to 2 graves, are they theirs?

Have they come back from 'The Returned'?

Binary opposition between dead and alive with the couple kissing passionately in overgrown grass, and a set of two crude grave markings that suggest a dead couple. This unsettling binary opposition proairetically refers to many events in the show, and makes clear the relationship between life and death

Why is there a goat under the water?

Why is she so unphased by the fact she has just woken up at the bottom of a mountain?

Audience are confused

The mid-shot climbing over a barrier situates her in an unexpected and highly liminal setting. Not where we expect to see her but her isolation constructs a hyperreal representation of a motorway at night, an experience that few will ever experience, that positions the audience. Audience are confused and interrogative mode of address. She is passive, confused and has no knowledge of the narrative. Highly post-modern narrative occurrence as it draws attention to the fact that nothing is real and nothing matters, leaving us confused

How has the butterfly come to life?

Foreshadowing (dead and alive; supernatural) what's to come and the themes of the TV show

Shows the fragility of life

MES of the butterflies fragile wings functions as a symbolic code for fragility and over-coming problems, which are core themes of the show

Camille's depression is both constructed and reinforced through the anchorage of the close up shot of her staring miserably out of the coach window. This forms a binary opposition between her and the lively students who surround her, and even goes to reinforce the themes of depression, fragility and death

Through the complex and contradictory series of images in the opening sequence, the audience are left unable to make sense of what is alive and what is dead, or even what is real and what is not real. Instead, a highly fractured, confusing and postmodern narrative is presented where audiences must instead make their own conclusion.

Additionally, themes of madness and psychosis are presented through a series of confusing and postmodern images. For example, the fantastical shot of a delicate and dead butterfly bursting forth from behind hard glass constructs a contradictory and infuriating visual motif with symbolic themes of madness, control, destiny and lack of free will. Additionally, the physical impossibility of a butterfly breaking glass with it's soft wings symbolically and proairetically reinforces the various impossible themes that manifest itself in this show.

In media res - in the middle of the action

Cold opening - thrown in to the action with no context

What makes Les Revenants stereotypically French?

• it is quiet, muted, depressing and flat
• abstract themes based around symbolism and semiotics
• there is lots of smoking
• sex - conventional of French media
• it's dark, depressing and moody

Scene - Camille comes home

Consider:

1.  French theories
2. Genre - zombie show
3. Representation of teenage girls

2 genres of the opening scene are horror and thriller