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Example research essay topic: The Power Of Cinema And Obscura - 1,086 words

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Cinema has been used ruthlessly for their own ends since its creation, by politicians, entrepreneurs, generals, zealots, bishops, mass murderers, pedants, pedagogues, and snake oil salesmen. The early establishment of major studios, along with the creation of Hollywood and its subsequent emergence as the world centre of cinematic production, resulted in the studio system, which concentrated power over the medium in the hands of a few studio heads, who even owned the cinemas themselves. Consequently, the philosophies underpinning the message of most films became those of a few conservative men like Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner. In 1934, all the major Hollywood studios signed a treaty that merely rubber-stamped what had been common practice widespread adherence to moral guidelines in cinematic productions. The document was known as the Hollywood Production Code and was administered by the Hays Office, headed by the Catholic League of Decency's nominee, Joe Breen.

This entity eventually gave way to the formalised Government censorship that exists to this day, but the industry retained a culture born of those days that perpetuated the cinematic viewpoint of white Christian male dominance of society. Consequently, the medium of cinema has been used to brainwash generations of us to accept, for the advancement of their own ends, a semiotic dogma consisting of the following premises White people and the Christian God are superior, and others are inferior Men are superior, women are inferior The white, male-dominated, Christian family unit is superior, other relationships and people are inferior As a member of this majority, it is morally superior to share the preferences of your peers in politics, morals, looks and adornment, sexuality and personal conduct, lifestyles, and products, as expressed to you in films and filmed advertisements. Everyone who is not part of a traditional white male-dominated Christian family unit can become less inferior by imitating these preferences. Cinema has also been used by persons of broader views, but an imbalance existed, and the more sinister forces prevailed for most of the century.

Social consciousness in films gradually forced its way to a more prominent position, partly as a reaction by Hollywood's creative artists to the persecution of their peers in the early 1950 s by Senator Joseph McCarthy who accused the industry of fostering Communists, and received the studio heads fawning assurances that they would eradicate such people from the industry. Proponents of a more open and un blinkered medium hoped it would better protect the civil liberties of its public and its artists at the same time. Cinema Obscura and the Democratic Dollar The title, Cinema Obscura and the Democratic Dollar is drawn from my belief that cinema obscures as much as it reveals, and that economic pressure is the main factor determining what cinema reveals and what it obscures. Camera Obscura, one of the basic technologies that eventually became cinema, provides an analogy for the predicament of humankind in understanding the effects a century of dogmatic cinema has had on its collective conscious.

The audience sits in a closed and darkened room (hence the term: camera = room, obscura = dark). Through a very small hole in the wall, a scene of the world beyond the room is naturally projected, inverted, onto the opposite wall. Our knowledge of the world beyond our direct experience consists of what we see projected on screens, including the screen of our memory, from through the pinhole-sized aperture of the mediums dogmatic point of view. We are inside the box, trying to see the exterior of the box. When cinema developed as a commercial medium, the effect of the democratic dollar was to only allow cinematic works to dominate that space that fitted the world view of the audience segment most enfranchised by its ticket-buying power, the white family unit, as perceived through the lens of commercial interest and government and religious doctrine. No brainwashing technique, persuasive doctrine, or force of arms could be more effective a tool for enabling social control.

Effects of the Technology It is the nature of cinematic technology, even, its definition, that it creates such a verisimilitude of reality as to suspend disbelief to some degree in the audience. This is mainly because, to the eye of the viewer, the narrative space employed by cinema is apparently infinite. The vision fills, or almost fills, the viewers entire field of vision, and the audio surrounds the audience, creating experiential virtuality. Such an effect is very powerful in its ability to coordinate sensory stimuli holistically, and therefore imbues upon its content a particular potency. The vision of cinema as an infinite narrative space is a myth held by the consumers, not the creators, of the mediums works. The process of creating a cinematic experience involves many competing factors that limit the outcomes within that space.

One of those limiting factors is the very vastness of possibilities the medium has the potential to explore, the consequent power causing powerful forces to seek to control it, and allowing art to be consumed by artifice, and reality to be outranked by appearance. The nature of the medium also has inherent limitations not immediately obvious to the consumer the narrative space is crowded beyond the margins, like the wings of a stage, crammed with lights and anxious people. Those who perform in it are often huddled together to fit the frame, splitting takes of a momentary emotion over shoots taking days, holding positions for close-ups, getting coffee and a pedicure between instants of film time, and production time costs dictate urgency over precision and focus of intent. Of all the forces applied to it, the creativity of cinema is most strongly influenced by money. The artists imagination is curbed by the exorbitant costs of film production, and the need to make a product that fulfils the expectations of studio heads, producers, directors, and stars, and the demographic groups most likely to spend heavily at the box-office. Cinemas power to enlighten will continue to be obscured while the Democratic Dollar decrees it should be so.

Race and Ethnicity in Film Depiction of race in cinema has a sorry history. The attitude most prevalent in Western Cinema has been White is right, and the rest are heathens! Races other than whites were portrayed as less than truly human in many films, or ignored, or patronized. Some pivotal early films were pure racist propaganda, most notably D. W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation (1915), which was made far more powerful than its script deserved, by the use of new effects and a...


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