Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan* Douglas Kellner (
Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan* Douglas Kellner (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/) In our book Camera Politica: Politics and Ideology in Contemporary Hollywood Film (1988), Michael Ryan and I argue that Hollywood film from the 1960s to the present was closely connected with the political movements and struggles of the epoch. Our narrative maps the rise and decline of 60s radicalism; the failure of liberalism and rise of the New Right in the 1970s; and the triumph and hegemony of the Right in the 1980s. In our interpretation, many 1960s films transcoded the discourses of the anti-war, New Left student movements, as well as the feminist, black power, sexual liberationist, and countercultural movements, producing a new type of socially critical Hollywood film. Films, on this reading, transcode, that is to say, translate, representations, discourses, and myths of everyday life into specifically cinematic terms, as when Easy Rider translates and organizes the images, practices, and discourses of the 1960s counterculture into a cinematic text. Popular films intervene in the political struggles of the day, as when 1960s films advanced the agenda of the New Left and the counterculture. Films of the "New Hollywood," however, such as Bonnie and Clyde, Medium Cool, Easy Rider, etc., were contested by a resurgence of rightwing films during the same era (e.g. Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and any number of John Wayne films), leading us to conclude that Hollywood film, like U.S. society, should be seen as a contested terrain and that films can be interpreted as a struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life.
[Show full text]