Ideological Differences between Hollywood Films and Art-house Films - Movie Review Example

Introduction

Every movie presents the audience with methods of exhibiting and judging ideas. Consequently, films present their viewers with an explicit or implicit perception on morality and ideology. Ideologies can be referred as the underlying images of the society that films present to the viewers. Film directors have the freedom to craft the plot of a movie or use certain aesthetics in a film to portray their views on morality. These views; however, differ to a great extent, depending on the director’s own perception, the market or the genre in which the film belongs. Clearly, certain films express ideologies in different lights and in varying degrees (Sage Publishers, n.d. p. 160).

Basically, viewers do not just perceive films based on their visual, aural or tactile data. Viewers also make subtle conclusions about the director’s vision for the film. The audience constructs judgments based on their background information. Background experience could be anything from the viewer’s previous contacts with other films to more substantial knowledge on the conventions of filmmaking. These judgments, though temporal, are a primitive form of ideological analysis based on the films’ data. However, some or all of them can be utterly inaccurate since our minds heavily rely on the rapid progression of images to construct inner representations of the same images (Thomson-Jones, 2008, p. 88 & 89).

Once the viewer has the initial perception of the movie, he or she (at his/her own discretion) might endeavor upon developing thematic and symptomatic abstractions. However, experienced critics might depend on the power of psychoanalysis to derive the director’s idea for the film. Using Bordwell’s analytical method for films, critics relate traditional concepts to those derived from their perception of the film. On the other hand, other critics might rely on the director’s own confessions, be it; legal, religious or social to assess the ideologies, which he/she represents in the film. Either way, ideologies are abstract depictions in any film. Whether or not they are clearly depicted in a film does not change the fact that they are embedded in these films (Thomson, 2008, p. 91&91; Kaplan, 2010, p. 286 &287; Elseasser and Hagener, 2010, p. 32&33).

A view of art cinema and mainstream Hollywood cinema presents diametrically opposite themes. Hollywood cinemas manipulate the audience’s emotional ‘pathways’, and rely on its culture to draw them to certain ideals. While ideas might be powerful tools of creating ‘cult’ effects on movies; emotions offer greater power to identify and dis-identify with certain themes in a film. Hollywood relies on certain cinematic techniques such as positive and negative emotion and lighting techniques to present actors in a certain preferable way. However, ideas abstracted from such films depend on the cultural code and conditioning. Within the scope of this discussion, an assumption can be made as to how Hollywood movies represent ideologies in their films. The latter class of cinema is not focused on spreading ideologies from its narrative and aesthetics but appeals to the emotions of the audience (Kaplan, 2010, p. 287).

Contrary to the way Hollywood appeals to its audience, art-house cinema diverges from the Hollywood emotional narratives. This does not mean that they do not emotionally appeal to their audience. However, it implies that art cinema does not heavily rely on the power of sentimentalism. The vision of art-cinema directors is to represent ideas and a body of emotions that appeal to a sub-species of the audience. These films embody emotional constructs that can be carried on as legacies in the cinematic and real world. Art-house films represent the ideals of social-realism; the actors one interacts with in film are meant to portray social realities in the world. Art cinema in its entire truism relies on propaganda to attract an audience. Consequently, propaganda is used to relay unique aesthetics and themes that may be unfamiliar in the real world. Thus, they would invoke emotional responses, albeit in a different way. All the same, art-house films as well as Hollywood cinema have the power to indoctrinate its audience.

Summary of Select Hollywood and Art-house Films of 2014

In a bid to understand the ideological differences between Hollywood and Art-house films, four films from both classes of cinema will be analyzed. The main aim of analyzing these films is to determine whether either class of cinema is more or less ideological than the other.

Interstellar (dir. Nolan, Christopher)

Nolan’s film is an apocalyptic depiction of the future. Interstellar a science fiction drama that tells the story of a group of scientists and a spaceship pilot who travel through a wormhole in a bid to save the earth. In a futuristic depiction of the world, famine and drought ravage the earth. This causes an acute shortage of resources and; consequently human beings are on the brink of extinction. Cooper (played by Mathew McConaughey) by the help of his young daughter, Murphy (Ellen Burstyn) discover coordinates encrypted in gravitational waveforms. Using this coordinates they discover a hidden NASA spaceship facility headed by Professor Brand (Michael Caine). Professor Brand presents Cooper (a former space pilot) with the task of travelling through a wormhole in search of new habitable worlds. This team, led by the professor’s daughter, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), embarks on a dangerous journey to secure the future for an ailing world. The story represent betray, commitment and an altruistic element in order to save the earth (Christopher & Emmy Nolan, 2014).

Gone Girl (dir. Fincher, David)

Fincher’s psychothriller film is the story of a psychotic woman’s mission to punish her unfaithful husband. Amy (played by Rosamund Picke) goes missing on her wedding anniversary. However, this is an elaborate plan to frame her husband for her ‘murder’. Nick Dune (Ben Affleck) falls into her wife’s plan and through this he is entangled in a possible murder charge and revelations of his infidelity. Fincher, takes the viewer through an emotional narrative, where Dune tries to escape from the lethal mental traps, which her wife as set. At the same times he sentimentally attaches his film to the infidelity problems facing many American middle-class marriages (Milchan &Fincher, 2014).

Leviathan (dir. Zvygintstev Andrey)

Set on a small coastal town by the Barents Sea (Russia), Leviathan is a tragic drama film that takes the viewers through a story of love, fate and social ills that bedevil the Russian society. Zvygintstev is thematically similar to the biblical story of Naboth’s Vineyard where King Ahab uses his authority to rob Ahab of his vineyard. Koyla (Aleksei Serebryakov) together with his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) are forced to evacuate their plot of land by the seaside. The mayor of the municipality, Vadim (Roman, Madyanov), which Kolya and Lilya are inhabitants; force them to leave their land in order to erect a communication mast. However, Kolya feels that the land is undervalued and also that the mayor’s motives are not genuine. He contracts the legal services of his friend, Dima (Vladimir, Vlodivichenkov) to sue the mayor. A series of betrayals, intrigues and misfortunes follows Kolya’s search for justice in a film that portrays Russia as an immensely corrupt nation (Zvygintstev & Rodnyansky, 2014).

A Touch of Sin (dir. Zhiangke Jia)

Zhiangke’s film draws upon real life stories to create a set of four separate narratives in a single movie. The story is based on acts of violence derived from headline events in China. The stories trace retribution of common citizens against corrupt managers and government institutions. Zhiangke depicts income marginalization as it is in real life. In one of the stories, Dahai (Jian Wu) tries to fight some form of injustice. In this story, Dahai tries to kill a mine owner who does not share the proceeds of the mine with his workers. Though, the pictures are high quality cinematic representations of real life situations, the thematic references in Zhiangke’s work are hard to abstract (Zhiangke, 2014).

An Ideological Comparison of Nolan’s Interstellar and Zvygintstev’s Leviathan

Nolan’s Interstellar and Zvygintstev’s Leviathan are both stepped into deep social-political consciousness. In a peak, Interstellar embodies technological capitalism as its most predominant theme. Technological capitalism is an ideological construct that describes the effect of technology on the economic landscape in society. Technological capitalism seeks to explain the overdependence of man on technology and the possible repercussions on the future of humanity. Additionally, technocapitalism explains the development of corporations as centers of power in the society. Nolan presents futuristic representations of the outcomes of the ongoing technology race. The climate becomes erratic; humans are unable to fend themselves. They are forced to return to the agrarian roots of human evolution. He simply expresses that human beings are undergoing a cyclic ideological evolution. He further uses the motion picture of an Indian space drone in full majestic flight over corn plantations to depict the true value of technology. Cooper hacks into the drone only for the batteries, which could only be used to charge his combine harvesters. This is despite the fact that the drone was an expensive military hardware of its time (Christopher & Emma Nolan, 2014).

The film does not extensively depend on humongous costumes and special effect to exhibits Nolan’s ideologies rather it appeals to the audience through his representation of libertarianism. Nolan’s uses a simple space-themed apocalyptic cinematic representation to highlight the concept of libertarianism. In its true meaning libertarianism calls for the liberation of humanity from the control of state and political organs, a principle which Nolan symbolically advocates in his film. One of the scenes of the movie, Nolan uses a black hole to embody the transition of regulated world into a free scientific universe. Inside the deep, dark black hole, Cooper tries to control the ship but in vain. Doyle (Wes Bentley) advises Cooper that he has no control of the spaceship, Lazarus; he can only observe and record. Furthermore, despite the control of the government to determine who attends college and who qualifies to be a farmer; Murphy (Cooper’s young daughter) manages to become a scientist and her role is central to the whole plot. This is true because, Murphy is the one who decodes Cooper’s gravitational codes to save the earth. Therefore, it implies that there is no legal or scientific body that should control the outcome of science, as human beings transit through the ‘blackhole’ of evolution. Salvation is only profoundly achieved through nature’s own means; a minimum control over the processes that define it.

Nolan’s partly presents an aspect of nihilism in his film. Nihilism is the rejection of all ethical and religious principle in the belief that life has no meaning. Nolan adopts a predominant scientific theory of time travel with assistance from physicist Kip Thorne (a well-known humanist and atheist). The main actor Cooper is styled as the savior of the Lazarus mission. Additionally, by naming the mother ship Lazarus he draws analogies from the Bible, where Lazarus wakes up from the dead. In the Biblical story, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. On the other hand, Cooper wakes up the Lazarus mission from the ‘dead’. This depiction of Cooper as a Savior is an implicit rejection of the morality of religion in the movie. Furthermore, the idea that human beings will be reproduced from a small set of eggs shatters the long held principles of bioethism where human life was held in high regard.

Nolan’s insatiable appetite for abstract philosophical concepts compels him to depict altruism and humanism. Humanism and altruism puts a human being at the center of all productive change by showing concern to the life around him. The Lazarus mission to secure the fate of the earth is Nolan’s effort to show that human beings from any social or intellectual class can ‘remove themselves from the equation’ for the sake of others. On the same line, Nolan embodies fatalism in his film. Fatalism can be described as the subjection of human life to predetermined circumstances of which none has control over them. The presence of a ‘fifth dimension’ where Cooper interacts with his own timeline presents time as a physical dimension. Hereby, events in his own life are constant as the distance from one point to another seems to reinforce the idea that a man’s life is fixed (Christopher & Emma Nolan, 2014).

Zvygintstev’s portrays two main ideologies; plutocracism, and fatalism; concepts that portray wealth and other predetermined circumstances as controlling human life. Widely considered as a masterful depiction of Russia’s socialism and emerging capitalism, Leviathan also does not fail to depict social-realism. Leviathan depicts fatalism in the character of Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov). In one of the dialogues, Kolya, a lowly paid mechanic asks a pious priest why God had treated him so unfairly. The Orthodox priest refers to the biblical story of Job, where Job submitted to God’s fate and suffered in silence. The priest uses this analogy to show that if Kolya accepts his fate as a poor man with no rights then he would live a simple happy life. Additionally, Kolya ends up in jail and loses his parcel of land, though

The film mocks the piety of the Orthodox clergy by using the image of Mayor Vadim’s friend, the bishop. It is seen that Russia is a plutocratic state only governed by the wealthy and restrained by a shallow sense of religiosity. This is in fact the case since the movie is largely allegorical to Russia’s civil and social life. Additionally, Zvygintstev indicts contemporary Russia by showing that only the rich have the right to justice and good things in life. Kolya’s wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) is portrayed as troubled soul who engages in sexual relations with Kolya’s old army buddy, Dmitri (Vladimir, Vlodivichenkov). It happens that Dimtri, is a well-to-do lawyer. This visual style of representing social relationships can be Zvygintstev own method of showing the attractiveness of capitalism in a simple socialist Russian life.

However, Zvygintstev is critical of the current political state of Russia. He uses a Vodka-laden film to manifest the drunken hatred he feels towards the Russian government. It might be also be the common perception of the Russian people. In this specific scene, Dmitri, Kolya and a bunch of policeman are seen shooting at the portraits of Russian political oligarchs. Someone then says refers to the shooting by saying they are the drunken Russian mob assassinating past. It is fair to say that in this specific film, Zvygintstev wanted to express his liberal views about the corruption-infested Soviet Republic. Additionally, the director seems to add weight onto utilitarianism. It is safe to assume that if Koyla had followed a simple quiet path, as the priest advises him, then he would have been happier. Moreover, morally it would be trues to say that such an action represents greater happiness since in that case his wife Lilya could have been alive.

An Ideological Comparison of Fincher’s Gone Girls and Zhiangke’s A Touch of Sin

This second class of films represents both Hollywood and Art-house cinema which are not ideologically laden but still manage to carry some conventional ideologies. In the case of Gone Girl, a viewer must take Fincher’s work as a story but must not refer to people in specific. On that line Amy’s represents feminism in the narrative. Fincher explores the good and evils of feminism through Amy. Feminism alleviates the woman; politically socially and economically to a status more of equal to that of man. In recent years, feminism has become a hot-button issue, which has segmented society on gender lines. Most people view the rise of feminism as an Amazonian approach to take over the control of society from men. Nolan depicts a leftist brand of feminism by contrasting Amy’s control over all situations, including her perfect plans to implicate Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), with Dunne’s weak masculinity. Amy is put in a scene where she draws her former lover, Desi Collings (Patrick Harris) into a psychological trap. She later kills him brutally with a butter knife. In this specific scene, Amy is scene intentionally smearing herself with the blood of Collings as the Camera takes shots into the agony of Collings, in quick repeated flicks. This scene symbolically represents militant feminism, where masculinity subdues to the rise of feministic control of modern marriages. While, Fincher himself does not point at any ideological connotations in his work, one cannot resist the way in which Amy’s feminist side has been brought out in the film (Milchan & Fincher, 2014).

Zhiangke’s film of four independent stories represents a ‘new’ China, where the big corporations are taking over from the once all powerful Communist party. The director takes a combative approach on this form of capitalism in the story Wujinshan (Black Gold Mountain). Hu Dhuai (Jiang Wu), a former mine worker kills all the elite mine owners in a way that criticizes the effects of privatizing Chinese companies In this particular story, Zhiangke points shows that materialism has polluted the moral fabric of the Chinese society which justifies ‘honor killings’ to put an end to this evil. In the second story, The Water Margin, Hu, uses a Tiger patterned-cloth to conceal his weapon.

This scene evokes the powerful memory of the legendary tiger-killer Wu Song. In this sense he represents the common man as the hero and bestows upon him mystical power against the state Communist Machinery. Zhiangke, a well-known critic of the communist control over all aspects of Chinese, is keen to depict the negativity of materialism and capitalism (Zhiangke, 2014; Kellner, n.d. 7)

In summary, it is evident that both Hollywood and Art-house films represents ideologies in varying degrees. It is not wholly true to assume that Hollywood movies are less ideological than art-house movies. While the latter class has more freedom to express the ideologies specific to their audience culture, the ideological content often depends on the director’s vision for the film. Nolan’s Hollywood film Interstellar represents a class of Hollywood films which are not merely appealing to the emotions but are communicating developing global ideals such as liberalism. On the other hand, Gone Girl is only a psychological thriller with shallow representation of ideologies. Art-house films spread the ideologies that will appeal to its target audience. In that case, Zhiangke’s work and Zvygintstev film depict ideological perspectives based on their country of origin.