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Rating: 
Summary: The Hollywood propaganda machine
Review: Is Hollywood cinema harmless entertainment or sophisticated propaganda? Is what we see up on the screen a passive reflection of our social world, or does it actively shape it? These are just some of the themes this excellent study explores. The authors suggest that the way cinema communicates meaning is not just a matter of content but of form. That the use of certain camera angles, editing techniques and narrative strategies can be read politically as well as the script these techniques articulate. They also maintain that conservative cinema is inherently metaphoric in style, presenting its historically specific worldview as a timeless domain untouched by material reality. They oppose to this a cinema that do does not attempt to transcend its material underpinnings, but instead highlights the provisional nature of our most deeply held beliefs, thus opening up the possibility of exploring new ways of seeing the world. Perhaps Kellner and Ryans most controversial idea is that Hollywood played no small role in ideologically preparing the masses for the oncoming conservative onslaught that was Ronald Reagan. Kellner takes up this idea again in his "Media Culture" where he convincingly argues that films such as "Top Gun", "Missing in Action", and the latter Rambo movies played a significant part in engineering the subsequent pro-Gulf War hysteria. Published in 1988 when Derrida was all the rage, Camera Politica does tends to overdo the deconstruction thing a bit, but this is a small criticism in what is a genuinely illuminating study.
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