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The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
DIFFERENT WORLDS CONSTRUCTED WITH FILMS: RHAPSODY IN AUGUST
AND PEARL HARBOR
Abstract
In the 19 th century as a result of studies to record moving pictures, cinema device
emerged as a technical invention. It has developed in a short period of time and become
means of mass communication and a combination of all branches of art and gained a
significant place in people’s lives. While cinema is representing changes, developments and
discomforts in its own artistic reality, it transfers the expressions of social life as cinematic
narrations by encoding patterns, figures and representation. Therefore, the cinema provides
ideological superiority to its owners as it is used in ideology and conscious construction and
the contents of films and ideologies are together.
This study is a discourse analysis study which was undertaken to display how different
perspectives and ideologies were cinematically mounted in the films Rhapsody in August and
Pearl Harbor. Thus, the study aims to reveal the differences in the reflection of the same
historical event on the curtains in the cinemas of the two different countries.
Key Words: Cinema ideology, historical event discourse analysis.
1.Introduction
In the last decade of the 19th century, the efforts to reflect moving pictures on a
curtain got more intense. Technical conditions like the advancements in photograph
technique, the invention of susceptible projection devices and the invention of pellicle which
can pass through projection machine have come together and thus this invention emerged in
many different parts of the world at the same time. Lumiere Brothers in France, Edison in the
USA, Max Skaladanovsky in Germany, William Grene in England presented the first moving
pictures to viewers (Pearson, 2003:30). Cinema has industrialized in a short period of time
with the integration of moving pictures with sound and become a means communication,
propaganda and entertainment. In other words, cinema has become both an industry, an
important means of communication which enables transmitting messages to remote place and
which is a social power source and a branch of art (Yaylagul, 2010:9).
Cinema unlike plastic arts like painting, sculpture and upper culture products like
classical music addresses to all layers of the society and meets them in the same place within
the same viewing time. In dark halls, tens of people view animated dreams on large curtains.
Moreover, while people are watching these dreams, they are not moving physically but they
are emotionally and visually creative or active and are aware of their psychological existence,
where lays the “the crucial” experience unique to cinema. This enables cinema viewers to be
somebody else other than himself and to be nomadic in his seat. It deepens social imagination
(Lausten and Diken,2010:19). In this sense, the cinema is a temple and going to the cinema is
a ritual. Cinema with its gods, priests and believers covers all the social structure. Therefore,
cinema with its structure which removes differences between social classes has attracted
attention and identified as a branch of art closest to society. (Ozkaracalar,2003:37,
Erkılıc,2009:52). Cinema is informal powerful source of education and therefore no matter
what its content is, it is never away from values and even ideological and political tendencies.
The content of cinema reflects the beliefs, attitudes and values. In other words, the dominant
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