This week was a fun one. With a film like 300, how could it not?

That was sarcasm. I think 300 is one of the most heavy-handed, murkily racist, pro-war, unnecessarily grimdark films I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing, and I don’t have a much higher opinion of its director Zack Snyder. (Or for that matter, content originator Frank Miller, despite his work on some Batman classics.)

However, I did enjoy our readings this week, which were all about ideology in the cinema. I agree with Comolli and Narboni – every film is political. And every film is steeped in ideology, even if it’s just because it’s a product of a certain system. At this point, I did wonder what the authors would think of crowdfunding solutions such as Kickstarter and Pozible, which could be seen as a different economic system. The people who donate can also be seen as backers or sponsors, just on a smaller scale than traditional film, and the money they donate will still go into the larger economy.

This reading goes deeper than that, arguing that reality itself is only an expression of the current ideology. The camera captures reality, but is reality really impartial? I found this particularly noteworthy as reality is extremely subjective. (Anyone who has watched a reality show knows.) Comolli and Narboni argue that films that don’t challenge the audience by accepting the “established system of depicting reality” are not worth it. Rather, a film that explicitly attacks the established system, or goes against the grain of the established system, is far more interesting (and is what they want to feature in Cahiers.)

The authors have more groups that films can fall into in regards to ideology: Films that are explicitly political but don’t actually challenge or criticise the system, films that seem non-progressive but become ambiguous, and two types of “live” cinema.

Moving onto the Casetti reading, I was able to put a little historical perspective on the issue of ideology in film. Apparently something shifted in 1968 in regards to how politics engaged with cinema. “One tried, first, to identify cinemas’ behaviours; then, to grasp their political implications; finally, to project the implications onto the map of the whole of society.” Before 1968, it was the opposite. (I did a quick search and I believe the 1968 shift is due to the May 1968 student riots in France.) Casetti reinforces the idea that the camera doesn’t necessarily depict reality, but rather a reality “restructured on the basis of a figurative code”. He even assigns the camera and camera image a part of the blame: it “pretends” to behave like our eyes, the image “pretends” and even “persuades” us that it’s real. Ultimately, cinema will side with ideology because reality is dependent on ideology.