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

• 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 on-screen 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 anddomestic issues), banal (because of their focus on larger-than-life feelings) andunrealistic (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