(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
According to Fargier, ideological efficiency of cinema is realized in two points.
Cinema represents existing ideology and disseminates them and creates the reflection of
reality –as a unique ideology- on the curtain. Lebel argues against the general view that
camera is an ideological device. While he argues that receiver is nothing more than
ideologically neutral entity and that ideology comes out when film reaches to viewer, Baudry
contends that ideological effect result from the film itself but from technological features of
the cinema and to him cinematographic device creates fantasia of the subject. It achieves the
effects of what they produce by being in the dominant ideology. According to Nichols,
ideology represents the image of constant repetition of society. Cinema serves to the
understanding of the function of ideology and representation. Images -as the representations-
are the carrier of ideology (Guchan,1999).
According to Rayn and Kellner, representation of social world is political. Therefore,
choices of different representation types express different political stances to world. The
position of each camera, each picture arrangement, each montage decisions and each narrative
choice is related with a representation strategy including all kind of interests and desires.
Cinema has no aspect which solely exhibits or depicts reality. Films posit the world to its
viewers as a place to be lived in certain patterns constructing phenomenal world (1995:419).
There is a dynamic relation between the creator, viewer, the product (film) of cinema
and the social structure in which they all exist (Guchan,1993:52). Through its films, cinema
reestablishes the reality of the society in which we live with its unique narration. As a part of
representations system inherited from the society it was born to, cinema -articulating the
individual to the established system- is closely related with political, economic and social
context (Seylan and Imancer, 2010:77). Films transfer discourses-form, figure and
representations- as cinematic narrations. Cinema achieves a transaction between different
expressions rather than being means for reflecting reality out of its context. In this way,
cinema takes its place among cultural representation systems which establishes social reality
(Rayn and Kellner,1995:35). In some cases, it even makes it possible to be a step further than
social reality and to envisage the results of steps yet-to-be made (Lausten and Diken, 2010:19-
20). Reality is nothing other than the expression of existing ideology. Productions, patterns,
meanings, narration tradition all underline general ideological discourse. The contents of films
and ideologies go hand in hand (Guchan,1999).
The starting point for the ideological molding of cinema is the concept of
“propaganda”. After it was noticed by political power groups during the World War I that
cinema activate not only with emotions but with ideas, the first method states turn to in their
political and economic organizations was to make propaganda film to deliver their messages
to large masses in the cinemas. In time, cinema intellectuals of the state started to make films
that make ideological propaganda of bourgeois and state policies by directly using the capitals
of power holders (Kirac, 2008:59, Scagnamillo, 1997:182). Cinema served as militant for
people front in the US, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, in Fascist Italy and in France before the
World War I. Although cinema was used as an efficient means of propaganda in Nazi Party
and USSR, the only dominant in this domain was the US especially in the mono-polar world
order after the 1990s and American cinema industry has become a power which can continue
its propaganda activities to the world for a long period of time.
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