Ideology
• Systematic body of ideas, attitudes, values and
perceptions
• Collective views, attitudes, positions and dogmas
of a societal group
• Ideology is both specific and general
• Seen and unseen
• Can be conscious but is more often unconscious
• It is pervasive and impacts every aspect of human
existence
Ideology
• Filmmakers communicate something to the
audience
• Watching a film is engaging in the
transmission of knowledge
Text and Context
• Text looks at film as film
and draws out of it
themes that reflect back
on culture
• Context looks at the
context in which the
film was produced
• Real analysis comes at
the intersection of
these two views
• What you believe is hugely dependent on where you
come from and where you live
• Our specific experiences have gone on to construct us
• Looking at science fiction films—date at a faster rate
than other genres
Collective Authorship
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Writer
Composer
Producer
Sound
Location
Production Manager
Editor
Visual Effects
Authorship
• All of the influences, contexts etc. can render
the intent of the writer/director irrelevant
Form
• A film’s form often goes unnoticed by its
audience
• Remains hidden to audience and is fully visible to
the filmmaker
• Ideology can easily be communicated on a
subconscious level
• Repeated ideologies can be perceived as natural
• Homogeny of ideas, characters, class, body type
can communicate ideology
Dirty Harry 1971
• 1970’s attitudes towards violence, gender and
race
• Harry is “bad” but the criminals are worse
• He is the only person that can save the
innocent
• Right-wing view of individualism and the right
to violence
Realism
• All of the devices used by filmmakers to
disguise the fact that what the viewer is
shown isn’t real
• Realism is the illusion that what is shown onscreen is in some way connected to reality
Ideology
• Unlike real life film presents a clear viewpoint
• Offers ideological resolution if not narrative
resolution
• Realism inevitably presents ideological unity
and an ideological world view
Naturalism
• Realist film appears natural
• Should appear unmediated
• Achieved through the story and also through
the form
Realistic Storytelling: Protagonist
• Moral ambiguity
in order to be
perceived as real
• Describe a
character that
has moral
ambiguity:
Genre
• Signifying practice that has emerged over time
by the repeated use of particular codes and
conventions
Genres relationship to Ideology
• Audience familiar with
codes
• Works like realism
• Lulls the audience into
suspension of disbelief
• A message can pass
quickly and easily from
filmmaker to viewer
• Qualities of Film Noir
(Ideologies)
Hegemony
• Systems that a film will use to make its
ideology appear natural
• In cinema this would be the repeated and
often subtle prioritization of one viewpoint
over another
Statistic
• less than 5 percent of actors in top Hollywood
films are Hispanic
• Latinas are more likely than women of any
other ethnicity to appear partially or totally
naked on screen.
• http://everysinglewordspoken.tumblr.com/
Interpellation
• Where the individual already exists as a
subject receptive to ideology
• Film plays to our existing expectations about
who and what we are
Camp
• Sontag claimed that “the essence of Camp is
its love of the unnatural: of artifice and
exaggeration…” (3). I have isolated this one
sentence because it is a definition that can be
applied to John Waters’ films.
• Waters makes a guest appearance as a
collectable junk store owner called
John. Upon visiting his store, Homer
asks John why a “grown man” would
collect such junk, and John replies:
• JOHN: It’s camp!
• Homer looks back at John with a blank
expression, not comprehending what
he means.
• JOHN: The tragically ludicrous, the
ludicrously tragic.
• HOMER: Oh yeah, like when a clown
dies.
• JOHN: Well sort of, but I mean more
like inflatable furniture or Last Supper
TV trays or even this bowling shirt…
Polyester 1981
Polyester was meant as a send-up of “women’s pictures,”
an exploitative genre of film that was popular from the
1950s-60s and typically featured bored, unfulfilled, or
otherwise troubled women, usually middle-aged
suburban housewives, finding release or escape through
the arrival of a handsome man.
Sirk's melodramas of the 1950s were generally very poorly received by reviewers.
His films were considered unimportant (because they revolve around female and
domestic issues), banal (because of their focus on larger-than-life feelings) and
unrealistic (because of their conspicuous style).
• This dismissal of Sirk's films changed drastically
in the 1970s
• his work was reexamined by British and French
critics.
• His films were seen as masterpieces of irony
Transgressive vs Subversive
• Transgress: to break, violate or go beyond boundaries
or laws (even of decency)
• Subvert: To upset or overthrow (there is a
connotation of secrecy)
Sirk
Form subverts content
Use of melodrama and garish colors
A way to subvert culture?
Transgress
• Aesthetically: rebels
against rules and
conventions
• Taboo (topics and
actions that are
strongly prohibited by
culture)
• Campy, shocking,
gross
Bad Taste as Good Taste
• Multiple Maniacs (1971) 5,000
• Pink Flamingos (1973) 12,000
• “assault on conventional sensibilities” “Dregs of
human perversity” “one of the most vile, stupid
and repulsive films ever made”
• “Perfect underground flick for a generation
coming of age during Watergate, devoid of the
ideals of the late-sixties counterculture, but
equally disdainful of their parents’ institutions”
Polyester 1981 (Studio Indie)
• Odorama