(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
4.Aim and Method
4.1.The Aim of the Study
In this study was undertaken to show how different points of views and ideologies in
films Rhapsody in August and Pearl Harbor are cinematically mounted and aims to reveal the
differences in the way how historically related two events during World War II.
4.2.The Method of the Study
This study is a discourse analysis undertaken to reveal ideological contents of two
films from world cinema which treat World War II. Discourse is related with all dimensions
of life in social, economic and cultural domains. Besides talks and chats, it covers all
communication forms and takes its place among mass communication means (Sozen, 1999).
Cinema is among these means of communication, as well. Filmic discourse reproduces
information and representations about social order and presents them in concrete pictures and
ideologically encodes them to be transmitted to cinema viewers (Ozden,2000:143). Therefore,
in this study cinema is regarded as a means which reflects desires, fears and worries in society
and reconciles them through various mechanisms (Rayn and Kellner,1995:26).
Discourse analysis emerged just as other social sciences which study the function,
structure and duration of text and speech like anthropology, ethnography, cognitive-social
psychology as a trans-disciplinary field of study in the 1960s and 1970s (Van
Dijk,2008:108). According to Van Dijk, discourse analysis is like the tip of an iceberg. Not all
meanings can be explained, only a small portion is explained and the rest of knowledge is
assumed. Therefore, the aim of discourse analysis is to reveal secret meanings (2004:25). Van
Dijk mentions two different approaches about discourse analysis in different texts. These are
critical and ideological discourse analyses (Imancer and Yurderi, 2010:128).
In ideological discourse analysis, Van Dijk regards ideology –which he defines as the
basic beliefs of a group and its members- handles it as false consciousness and wrong belief.
Members of a group who share their feelings and ideas about thought systems defense many
general idea which lie in the basis of worldly beliefs and which shape their explanations of
events and social habits. The most significant social habits are the use of language and
discourse (2010:128).
Van Dijk defined some concepts in ideological discourse analysis and thus determined
categories for ideological discourse analysis and made use of these categories in his analyses.
The basic categories which make discourse analyses more understandable and meaningful are:
Meaning (Headings, Identification level, Implications and assumptions, Local consistency,
Synonymy, Contrast, Telling with Examples, Denying), Proposition Structures (Actor
Identification, The Use of Modals, Confirmation, Riddling, Space), Stylistic Structures,
Sentence structures, Discourse Styles, Argument and Rhetoric (Van Dijk 2004:40-60).
The universe of the study is composed of all films about World War II and the sample
is composed of Pearl Harbor and Rhapsody in August which are among war theme films in
world cinema. The basic reason why these films are chosen is that they are about related
events: atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US as retaliation for Japan’s
bombardment of Pearl Harbor during World War II. The films which make up the sample are
analyzed by considering Van Dijk’s categories in the framework of the following questions,
and the ideological approach of cinema was determined.
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