tailieunhanh - Lifestyle, aesthetics and narrative in luxury domain advertising

In film studies, there has been a longstanding and ideologically charged debate on the effects of selective depth of field. In his essay ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ (1950), André Bazin opted for the use of deep focus and long takes to offer the spectator a deliberately ambiguous rendering of the events depicted, so that he or she might explore them independently. According to Bazin, shallow depth of field in conjunction with the use of montage pre- organises the cinematic material and guides the viewer’s perception to a great degree. But the material discussed here is of. | Lifestyle aesthetics and narrative in luxury domain advertising Barbara Flueckiger University of Zurich This study investigates a pattern observed in recent lifestyle advertisements. In the domain of luxury goods a certain type of advertisement has emerged that relies almost exclusively on the evocation of pure sensation. Only in part do the depicted scenes characters or objects trigger these sensations. Rather aesthetic features of style - such as depth of field diffusion colour or light - enhance the spectator s sensorial response. In the context of the avant-garde of the 1920s similar strategies were employed. While these avant-garde films combined a modernist hope for utopia with a democratisation of aesthetics and taste for the masses contemporary lifestyle advertisements tend to be suffused with nostalgia. However this nostalgia is ahistoric offering only the most pleasurable aspects of an imaginary experience. In his 1964 essay Rhetoric of the Image Rhétorique de l image Roland Barthes analysed the three messages at work in an advertisement for the pasta brand Panzani a linguistic message a coded iconic message and a non-coded iconic message 1977 36 . In the linguistic domain Barthes discovered a double communication in the name Panzani which denotes a France-based food company while at the same time - by its assonance - evoking a culturally coded connotation he called Italianicity 1977 34 . On the level of the pictorial representation the coded iconic message carries a number of connotations freshness expressed by the depiction of the half-opened bag Italianicity with the vegetables and the tri-coloured hues the idea of a total culinary service with the serried collection of all the objects necessary for a carefully balanced dish and finally the nature morte still life with its tradition in painting and photography 1977 34-35 . Each of these connotations requires specific knowledge to be deciphered knowledge that is culturally coded to various degrees. .