Fish Tank: Genre, Representation and Narrative.

The film Fish Tank is a social realism film, the purpose of social realism is to show real life and every day difficulties and struggles through texts such as fish tank. We are shown many conventions of social realism throughout the text. Some of these  conventions are things such as; natural lighting, realistic camera shots and movement (hand held), gritty urban settings and diegetic sound. I am going to be analysing some of the technical conventions used the scene at the beginning of the film where the main character, Mia is dancing in an empty flat - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoofjmU6RW4. At the beginning, before Mia puts on her music and starts to dance, she's looking out of the window onto the urban council estate, a clear use of diegetic sound is apparent here as you can here cars on roads in the distance and people fighting in the distance, this is an example of a social realism convention as these are every day noises heard by everyone on a day to day basis in urban under-class area's such as hers. The use of diegetic sound doesn't stop there. As Mia puts on her music and starts to dance the music is played out of her own 'cheap' CD player, the music quality is bad and muffled portraying the reality of the situation to the reader. Also in this scene we see that it is lit only by the natural light coming from the windows, at times when the sun is shining through, Mia's face becomes overexposed and details are lost, again this creates a realistic feel to the scene. Where as in a mainstream, hollywood style text, studio lighting, reflectors and more would be used to create the light they want for the situation making it an unrealistic representation.

In the film Fish Tank there is a strong representation of women. Mia the main character lives with her single mum and younger sister - a broken family. Her mum is not represented as the stereotypical 'carer' as a mother. Instead she is aggressive, violent and loud. In the scene when Mia's mum is having a party, her mum aggressively pinches her and tells her to go to her room, this is an example of the non-stereotypical role appose to an stereotypical caring loving mother. However in some ways there are some stereotypes shown through the 3 girls in the text, as we see that their family cannot seem to function without a man. This is shown through Connor - seen as Mia's mum's new boyfriend. In the scene where Connor takes the girls fishing the four of them seem like a real family, the girls are happy and for the first time we actually see them getting on with each other. It is shown that they can actually operate as a family with a man to be the father figure.

The narrative theory of Propp can be applied to Fish Tank in the scene when Mia takes away Connors daughter, Keira. Kiera is represented as the 'princess' we are shown this through her pink and sparkly clothing, which is stereotypical to the princess role. To oppose that Mia is then represented as the villain of this scene as she is wearing all black, black usually has a negative connotation which also represents her as the villain. stereotypically all fairytales there is always a happy ending however in this case Mia is preventing Keira from having her happy ending and breaking the stereotype in Propp's theory.