The Relationship Between The Civil Rights Movement And Hollywood
Because entertainment such as film inevitably “contains, reflects, and promulgates” ideology (Grant 32), the shift of the film genre is almost always interrelated with the shift of the myth. This social ideology that derives from the entertainment is what Roland Barthe, a french literary theorist, describes as the myth. Barry Grant borrows the Barthe’s argument of the myth in his critical essay talking about film genre: “[He] argues that the very principle of myth is that ‘it transforms history into nature’— that is, cultural myths endorse the dominant blues of the society that produces them as right and natural, while marginalizing and delegitimizing alternatives and others” (Grant 35). This correspond with Glen Jeansonne’s view of Hollywood’s
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However, the nexus between the social movement and Hollywood’s response cannot be overlooked. Hollywood experienced the magnificent shift from the classical period to the modernist period during 60s. The imposing meaning of producing a film like Altman’s M*A*S*H signifies that studios are no longer political propaganda machines that produce entertainments that soothe the uneasiness of life (Keyssar 102). Entertainments like film now speaks the voice of the millions. Instead of going to the cinema and being imprinted by some messages, one goes to the cinema to find a resonating voice that speaks the truth of their heart. Indeed, with the vivid visual imageries showing on the silver screen, film becomes a truly powerful media in terms of shaping one’s worldview of the past, establishing one’s ideology of the good and vice, and as Dr. Casper repeatedly stresses, in its later days, self-consciously questioning the social and moral …show more content…
According to Robert Self, a Historian scholar at Brown University, “Robert Altman constantly restates the heterogenous, the contradictory,the plurality which threaten, delimit, define it as that apparent unity sought by the auteur theory” (Self 4). M*A*S*H overthrows every single traditions of the war genre movie. However, Altman practices formalism in which that he utilizes the familiar iconography just to ask the audience to deliberately realize how different his work is set apart from the traditional genre film. The film sets fairly close to the battlefield, and thus repeated iconography of blood and human flesh constantly appear in the movie. It is Altman’s vision for the story makes M*A*S*H a revolutionary work. Not only did one find it hard to state the content, he or she may not even see the point behind the story’s construction. This quality is what exactly Robert Altman sees in a “good movie”. In an interview with the director, he confesses to reporter Harmetz that his vision for a good movie “takes the narrative out of it” (Sterritt 8). Altman further explains that a good movie enables the audience to “sit and see the film and understand the movie’s intention without being articulate it” (Sterritt 8). But the movie is meaningful even people struggle to put words
However, the nexus between the social movement and Hollywood’s response cannot be overlooked. Hollywood experienced the magnificent shift from the classical period to the modernist period during 60s. The imposing meaning of producing a film like Altman’s M*A*S*H signifies that studios are no longer political propaganda machines that produce entertainments that soothe the uneasiness of life (Keyssar 102). Entertainments like film now speaks the voice of the millions. Instead of going to the cinema and being imprinted by some messages, one goes to the cinema to find a resonating voice that speaks the truth of their heart. Indeed, with the vivid visual imageries showing on the silver screen, film becomes a truly powerful media in terms of shaping one’s worldview of the past, establishing one’s ideology of the good and vice, and as Dr. Casper repeatedly stresses, in its later days, self-consciously questioning the social and moral …show more content…
According to Robert Self, a Historian scholar at Brown University, “Robert Altman constantly restates the heterogenous, the contradictory,the plurality which threaten, delimit, define it as that apparent unity sought by the auteur theory” (Self 4). M*A*S*H overthrows every single traditions of the war genre movie. However, Altman practices formalism in which that he utilizes the familiar iconography just to ask the audience to deliberately realize how different his work is set apart from the traditional genre film. The film sets fairly close to the battlefield, and thus repeated iconography of blood and human flesh constantly appear in the movie. It is Altman’s vision for the story makes M*A*S*H a revolutionary work. Not only did one find it hard to state the content, he or she may not even see the point behind the story’s construction. This quality is what exactly Robert Altman sees in a “good movie”. In an interview with the director, he confesses to reporter Harmetz that his vision for a good movie “takes the narrative out of it” (Sterritt 8). Altman further explains that a good movie enables the audience to “sit and see the film and understand the movie’s intention without being articulate it” (Sterritt 8). But the movie is meaningful even people struggle to put words