Sunday, February 8, 2009
The Ideology Behind the Image
Two films from which we have seen excerpts Birth of a Nation and the Battleship Potemkin have a political message: either a justification of a racist, Jim Crow South or a communist Russia, respectively. How do these films use the language of film (shots, cuts, lighting, images) to make their political statements? What about other films we have seen? Do they have a political message? If so, how do they state that message using the techniques of cinema? How do they appeal to and/or manipulate our emotions? How do they tell a politically relevant story?
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I'm surprised we haven't talked even a little bit about the politics of The General. Keaton was born in Kansas according to Wikipedia but I feel like film audiences in the 1920s were probably of an urban demographic, and therefore mostly Northern...So what does the fact that The General has Southern sympathies tell us? Obviously, it is meant as entertainment and not propaganda, but ~all~ art is reflective of the mind of the artists. Today, a civil war film with Southern heroes would get a lot of flak if it didn't at least depict some of the evils of slavery; political correctness demands this. But apparently in the 1920s it was more acceptable to sympathize with the Confederates. In this way, The General makes a statement that preserves part of the American mentality of the time. I'm not trying to say that such to sympathize with the Confederacy is ethically okay or ethically not okay or anything like that; my point is that even a lighthearted comedy like The General is political in some way or another, that it says something about the society from which it comes. Can't you imagine that a hundred years from now, people with doctorates will be using The 40-Year-Old Virgin to measure our society's attitude towards sex?
ReplyDeleteThe difference, of course, is that Griffith and Eisenstein had political agendas behind their filmmaking, while the politics only provided the backdrop for Keaton's entertainment. But it's definitely there in the Keaton film--yes, Johnnie Gray is a bumbling idiot, but his quick resourcefulness in bending the railroad tie keeps the Union's best and brightest busy for what appears to be hours. Keaton emphasizes their stupidity by returning several times via cross cut to that same shot of them puzzling over the problem, having accomplished nothing during the concurrent action.
I suppose you could refute the example I just gave by saying that those moments are anti-military in general (no pun intended), that the humor lies in the fact that a clumsy railroad engineer just outwitted a bunch of high-ranking military men, and that the scene would have been as funny had the officers been Confederate. But I still think the fact that Keaton included it the way he did speaks to what 1920s American filmgoers and 1920s American production companies found acceptable.
I've rambled on long enough but my point: Politics pervades even art that isn't propaganda.