Hollywood - Capitol of Global Ideology

“The economics of film determines its infrastructure and therefore it’s potential.  The politics of film determines its structure:  that is, the way it relates to the world.” (Monaco)

Film is our society’s modern equivalent of story telling:  A film’s value system will reflect in the style of the movie.  When a director makes a movie it becomes a reflection of his or her political beliefs and ideology.  “Whichever way we look at it, film is a distinctly political phenomenon.” (Monaco)

While the potential of film can change society’s dominant ideology and be revolutionary; the reality is that it is a controlled political landscape of media ownership.  Who ever controls the systems of distribution and production in essence, controls the political message and the belief systems of society.  Mainstream cinemas are movies that amplify certain aspects of culture and attenuate others.

Movies are a part of Louis Althusser ideological state apparatuses, a part of the institutions that the state (linked to media ownership) uses to literally sell its ideology.  This is done through the control of screening, distribution and its links to broadcasting systems.  An example is Ted Turner’s Time/Warner which is a huge conglomerate of mass publishing, broadcasting, production and distribution of movies.  Turner, a democrat in theory, has an American political agenda that reflects the dominant ideology of American Democratic Party to a global market.  The problem lies in that this dominant culture in film is western, written, white, male, and heterosexual negating the stories (films), of minorities, woman, different cultures, gender cultures and the marginalized.  Opposition cinema today is working, but without the clout of money and politics to back it up, the films are often not distributed.

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