Ideology in Film

December 5, 2019

We started this semester by looking into the Feature Length Film as our object of study, with the
understanding that film is, by function, a medium which works in producing illusions.
Specifically, we looked into how the mainstream film industry, modeled from Hollywood’s
framework despite having relative variations, develops its products and practices throughout the
years of its existence.

We have established the following, at least in the context of the Philippines:

 That the Classical Hollywood Narrative, along with its conventions and styles, is the
dominant film language in the Philippines, with years of backwardness in its
developments.
 The Classical Hollywood Narrative imported the practice of involving genre into its
framework. Set of conventions which makes it easy for the audience to determine the
narrative that they are viewing.
 With regards to style, since the Philippine Films has adapted the Classical Hollywood
Narrative, it imported also its concern over realism. Realism brings forth emphasis with
coherence both in mise en scene and seamless editing.
 Realism is a vital part of Classical Hollywood Narrative. Realism lessens the tension
between the audience and the film product. Adherence to realism erases traces of
syntheticity and of being constructed. Realism is often presented in two ways: mise-en-
scene and dialogue.
 In the country, we have also adapted the studio system of production – a manifestation of
the industrial nature of filmmaking – wherein a film is not just singularly authored, but is
produced in an assembly-line like way, that it goes from various aspects of production
(Creatives, Talents, Logistics and Finance) to distribution (film studios, distribution
companies, platforms, brokers, etc) and exhibition (commercial cinemas, specialized
theaters, streaming platforms etc.).
 The Philippine film industry has also imported the practice of Star System, of which
assumes that a film’s success is partly due to the actors that played in it. An actor which
 makes a film which becomes either box office or critical hit may be considered as star.
Star system is a mode of valorization wherein the film’s value is determined by either
who appears on screen, and such, the production is planned with the actor at the center.
The same kind of valorization seems to apply too with film directors, but it is seldom that
audience identification happens with film directors, which makes it hard to determine
whether film directors actually contribute to the “star factor” of a film.

Such is common practice with industrial, and even small-scale independent filmmaking that it
almost “disappears” in the film product. Our craving for narrative and seamless storytelling,
realistic dialogue and performances, fulfilment of spectacular expectations from specific genres,
now appears to be natural. But cravings, like desire, are learned. Nothing is natural about these
desire of ours for a Hollywood-style narrative in cinema. We became receptive of films which
are similar to dominant practices because precisely we are thought to view cinema in this way.
To look for films these things, and not the other. These development of our desire for a
Hollywood-like cinema, came from decades of our practice in watching films. And from these
practices, ideological mechanisms are produced, developed and reproduced.

The production of desire is a practice which happens within the realm of ideology. Cinema is just
one of its mechanism to reproduce desire, as what Slavoj Zizek said: cinema teaches you how to
desire. Hinting that the role of ideology in Film in the formation of our desire is more in the way
it operations than its content.

To expound further on ideology, I want us to look into the work of Louis Althusser, a
philosopher whose lifework has been to describe and make sense of ideology within the realm of
material reality. Althusser forwarded two theses on Ideology:

 Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of

existence.
 Ideology has a material existence.

The first thesis can be our working definition of ideology moving forward.

The first thesis implies a sensuousness in the definition: we can refer to the word “imaginary” in
the way psychoanalysis uses it. That is, in the realm of images. Using this definition, ideology is
then an apparent relationship. What faces you even before “real conditions of existence.”
However, due to ideology’s dependency with “disappearance” for it to work successfully, we
have always accessed ideology through what Jacques Lacan, coming from Karl Marx, as
symptom.

Slavoj Zizek defined symptom as “a particular element which subverts its own universal
foundation, a species subverting its own genus.” In line with what Greame Turner has identified
in his definition of ideology: “Ideology works to obscure the process of history so that it appears
natural, a process we cannot control and which it seems churlish to question.”

In our last discussion on stars, we refer to mythologies in the terms of Claude Levi-Strauss as
“were used to deal with the contradictions in experience, to explain the apparently inexplicable,
and to justify the inevitable.” Myths work to make us believe that there is something within our
world which is “natural” and therefore something which cannot change. This do not refer to any
point of organic origins, but natural in a metaphysical way. Myth, as part of the discourses, is
just one way which ideology works. Zizek refers to Myths as “ideological Universals”: notions
which includes specific cases which breaks its own unity. Most of what we determine as
“common knowledge”, “common sense” at present can be said as ideological. However, what we
refer to as “common knowledge” is only common in so far as the conditions for the said
“knowledge” (including its learning) is met. It is in the similar manner that cinema works
exactly like ideology: what film techniques in classical Hollywood narrative do is to make it
seem that “techniques” are not there. We can say that a good film is that film which erases
cinema and leaves out the narrative for you to remember.

The proof of existence of an ideology, its symptom, can be found in these instances of utterance
of “nature” or “common sense”. Our social practices bear with it ideological content: going to
churches, attending school, finding our means of entertainment. Contrary to what is commonly
thought in relation to ideology, it is not all ingrained deep. Most ideological manifestations are
often on the nose.

Althusser identified what he calls as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), in contrast with
Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), as means where we can validate the existence of ideology.
Belonging to this ISAs are cultural ISAs such as cultural institutions, artists, etc; educational
ISAs; religious ISAs to name a few. ISAs reproduces dominant ideologies through the products
of its specific institutions. Cinema, belonging to the complex of cultural and business ISAs, more
often than not reproduces the dominant ideologies. However, looking at ISAs dialectically, it is
also seen that these are also sites wherein resistance to dominating systems are expressed either
in a manner which is fully militant, or in a negotiated manner.

It can be observed with the deployment of film techniques. A study by Robert Stam and Louise
Spence provide an introduction in the way Colonialism and Racism is deployed through film
techniques in classical Hollywood films. They emphasized, however, that the colonialist images
in cinema did not began on Film but rather “it is rooted in a vast colonial intertext, a widely
disseminated set of discursive practices.” (Stam & Spence, Colonialism, Racism and
Representation). Some examples they made is with casting: the presence or absence of African
americans in films which context should have their presence or absence.

In the Philippines, colonial imagery can be seen in the way we recognize who should be on
screens. Despite the overpowering presence of Malayan or Indonesian qualities in our populace,
most Filipino films in the early days are populated with images of Mestizas and Mestizos. Such
practices persist up to this day.

What Althusser refers to as “real conditions of existence” is derived from the dialectics between
the Economic Base (the dominating mode of production) and the superstructure (the set of
culture and politics). Mode of production in the dialectical materialist understanding, is a social
relation. It determines the place of each individual in accordance to the way society organizes
them within itself. In Althusser’s historical understanding, the mode of production in 20th century
Europe is dominantly capitalist. We can therefore say that most of the films produced in the
Europe over the last century bear with it either practices or belief relevant to the maintenance of
the dominating order, or expressions of resistance against it.

To situate the Philippines’ economic base, it is important to look into its history to determine at
what point has it developed in the present. Our developments from the Feudal mode of
production from the Colonial Times to the Imperialist plunder during the 20th century to the
present, provides the Philippines a very specific development in its conditions of existence.
While we adapt the capitalist system in the city centers, vast majority of the islands are still
working under feudal ownership whose compradors are also complicit with imperialist interests.
Amado Guerrero from the 1960s has rightfully identified the development in the mode of
production at the middle of the 20th century as semifeudal and semicolonial. Since the country is
running in the same objective condition economically, it has also affected the superstructure of
our country greatly.

As a direct correspondence with the semifeudal and semicolonial realities, Philippine Cinema
has been founded also in the same vein of conditions. Early film studios are founded by Land-
owning people, and as such, being ran like feudal lands. Issues of delayed and below living
wages are of a great concern in the Film Industry in the 60s which led to a massive Filipino Film
Workers’ Strike. The strike came alongside the Philippines’ development towards a more radical
movements such as the Diliman Commune and the First Quarter Storm. These developments in
the history of the city center bookended what was considered as the Golden Age of Philippine
Cinema.

If we are to reconsider the films being made by those in the foundation of Philippine Cinema in
the light of its ideological function, nothing can be clearer in its semifeudal and semicolonial
character than LVN’s first film, Giliw Ko, where we see an obvious preference of the then new
elite with the American way of life over the Spanish legacy, but are both depicted in a light and
positive way, as if the colonization did not take place.

In a more recent example, we can see more imperialist pandering in films such as Heneral Luna.
If we are to see it in its entirety, the film was never about a nation but its doubt of it. Heneral
Luna panders over its brand of humanism (which is just postmodern cynicism coated in words
like “humans” and “nature”, hence, a directly ideological stance). But as if it’s not enough to
transmit the film’s cynicism and defeatism by just depicting the humanistic errs of each
characters and pointing the fingers back to ourselves, the film sought validation of its views from
Luna’s enemies: America. The merry drunk caucasians on the pseudo-interview scenes in the
end is depicted as though they are the only professionals of war between the Filipinos and
Americans, thus, it was never complete without sharing five cents from them. After all, the
Filipinos are depicted as traitors in this film, therefore, not one word is to be trusted.

In these kinds of dialogue between film and ideology that we try to make sense of a social
ideological development we call nationalism. A nation is quite vague, but its existence is within
establishing a community formed in a basis of a certain commonality (either a common
language, history, ethnicity, etc). At one point, establishing a nation helped emancipate the
oppressed and the colonized towards their own liberation against their oppressors. The concept
of a nation helped imagine a scope outside the bounds of one’s limited world. It is in such
imagination that Benedict Anderson referred to this idea of a nation as an Imagined Community.

In film, such imagination also takes place. Some of us call these stereotypes if the imaginations
seem to us quite absurd or just hasty. Stereotypes in film help the narrative unfold easier by
establishing lesser effort for characterization by not considering the supposed complexity of
human identity. In the practice of cinema, stereotypes has been domains of symbolic domination
of the powerful over a specific community’s discourse. In our case, as in Heneral Luna or Giliw
Ko, it is their discourse, funded by landed millionaires, imagining us – all of us – in a frame
which are still contended, but are claimed to be real.

The dialogue between film and ideology brings us back to the generic function of Cinema’s
social practice to produce illusions as a point of synthesis. While we aspire to access what is real,
we also get to acknowledge that reality is more often than not, constructed by various agents, and
thus, not a homologous space. Ideology is also contended: in the multitude of contradicting
thoughts, which one should dominate? And it is within this field of contention that the
acknowledgement of cinema as illusion is important: it isn’t a matter of recognizing whether
what we see is real or not, but whether or not should we enjoy the illusions that are presented to
us, or should we create our own.