Ideology and the Cinema

This paper discusses the relationship between the cinematic medium and contemporary ideology. I begin by locating cinema as part of the system of economic relations and subsequently  posit the thesis that the cinematic medium is particularly well placed to critique or  reinforce ideology. I discuss the various  means of representing social and political agenda through the formal and narrative elements of the cinematic medium, and suggest a number of categories through which ideology can be studied in film. I demonstrate, by example, the role of film in reinforcing:

(1) political ideologies and national identity: (Triumph of the Will, Rifenstahl, 1935)) (2) social movements: (Trash, Andy Warhol, 1971), and(3) aesthetic ideologies: (Rythmus 21, Richter, 1921 ).

I suggest that these films are representative of the capability of the cinematic medium and conclude that the medium is  a powerful tool for portraying and promoting ideologies.

Nader Alaghband

Government 360: Ideology

Final Paper

May 2002


Cinema as a means of critiquing Dominant Ideologies.

Situating the cinematic medium:

First, it should be noted that every film is political, at least inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology that produces it (or within which it is produced, which stems from the same thing). The cinema is all the more thoroughly and completely determined, according to critics, because unlike other arts or ideological systems its very manufacture (but not necessarily distribution and sale) mobilises powerful economic forces in a way that the production of literature, for example, does not. In the economic system film is a product manufactured within a given system of economic relations, and involving labour to produce.  It becomes transformed into a commodity, possessing an exchange value, which is realised by the sale of tickets and contracts, and governed by the laws of the market. Film is also, as a result of being a material product of a system, also an ideological product of that system. Furthermore, because every film is part of the economic system, it is also part of the ideological system because ‘cinema’ and ‘art’ are branches of ideology.

The merging of film and ideology is reflected in the first instance by the fact that audience demand and economic response have been reduced to one and the same thing. In direct continuity with political practice, ideological practice reformulates the social need and backs it up with discourse.

The cinema ‘reproduces reality: this is what a camera and film stock are for’, at least according to conventional film theory. At the same time, however, the tools and techniques of filmmaking are part of ‘reality’ themselves, and furthermore ‘reality’ is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology. The camera in fact registers the vague, unformulated world of the dominant ideology. ‘Cinema is effectively a universal language through which the world communicates with itself’ according to Andre Bazin. ‘Films constitute their ideology for they reproduce the world as it is experienced through the ideological filter.’ Althusser defines it more precisely in the following way: ‘Ideologies are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects, which work fundamentally on men by a process they do not understand. What men express in their ideologies is not their true relation to the to their conditions of existence but how they react to their conditions of existence, which presupposes a real relationship and an imaginary relationship.’ In other words, the act of filmmaking is encumbered by the necessity of reproducing things not as they really are but as they appear when refracted through the ideological lens. ‘This includes every stage in the process of production: subjects, ‘styles’ forms, meanings, narrative traditional; all underline the general ideological discourse.

In summary it might be argued that in conventional theory film is a product and a tool of ideology. Taking this as the premise, it may be worth categorising on a general level some of the more notable types of film with regard to ideology.

The National Socialist Film:

The first, and broadest category encompasses films that are imbued through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated form and give no indication that the filmmaker was aware of the fact. These films constitute unconscious instruments for reinforcing the ideology which produces them, and form the majority of all types of film, irrespective of whether they are situated in commercial, avant-garde, modern or traditional filmmaking convention. It has been argued that while there is such a thing as public demand, the notion of ‘what the public wants’ should be more closely associated with ‘what the dominant ideology wants’.

By implication filmic content, as part of an ideological medium, is not representative of public demand but rather of ‘what the dominant ideology wants’. The contradiction this poses to the notion of films as commodities in free markets illustrates the tension that characterises this category. I suggest that the notion of a cinematic public and its tastes is created by the ideology it is produced by to justify and perpetuate itself, and the fact that that public can only express itself within the ideological box is at the heart of the perpetual cycle of reinforcing of ideology in the cinematic medium.

The formal elements of films in this category are similarly tainted by their ideologies. They embrace established systems of depicting reality, or more precisely ‘bourgeois realism and the whole conservative box of tricks: blind faith in ‘life, humanism, common sense etc’. Nothing in the films in this ideologically saturated category jars against the ideology or the audiences acceptance of it as reality, although as Leni Rifenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will demonstrates, there are plenty of ways of enhancing the audience’s reception of the ideology or enhancing its belief in it as an accurate depiction of reality by formal means. The Nazi party controlled Illustrierte Film-Kurier put out a film program that separates the film into six main segments. These are: Introduction, Happy Morning, Festive Day, Joyful Evening, Parade of the Nation, and The Fuhrer.

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The most abiding after-images for anyone viewing the film are its opening shots of Hitler descending on the city of Nuremberg from storm-clouded skies like a saviour of his people; abstract patterns of massed humanity, banners ‘jostling like a field of sunflowers’ and of the interaction of the Fuhrer and his delirious people, formally represented by means of ‘the measured, rhythmical alternation of object-spectator, object-spectator’.  The cross-cutting of low angled shots of the Fuhrer, Himmler and Lutze first walking the length of the Luitpoldhain, and high angled shots of his volk work to generate the impression that he towers ...

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