The Ideology of Love: Film and Culture

Abstract

That cinema is a cultural phenomenon is beyond dispute, but what do we mean when we say such a thing? What is meant by the assertion that a film is produced by, read in, and gains meaning from, its cultural postionings? There has been a wide and diverse range of film theories that have attempted to deal with these sorts of issues. These include: theories devised out of a Marxist tradition, where the emphasis is on the ideological processes in different aspects of film;feminist film theory, where the emphasis is on the formations and explorations of gender, sexuality, and power; and certain psychoanalytic approaches to the film text, which see a melding of different influences, including, for example, Althusser’s blending of Marxist philosophy and Lacanian theory, and Kristeva’s intellectual lineage of psychoanalysis, feminism and cultural theory. The complexity of the issues involved, and the diversity of approaches, makes summary neither practical nor desirable. Instead the focus here (and in the following chapter) will be on some possibilities for locating cinema within cultural contexts and processes. To this end the following discussion will focus on a particular example — that of love — in order to work through some of the ideas on cinema and culture. The issue will be how cinematic formations of love can be analysed to interpret relationships between film and cultural contexts. This, in turn, will allow us to consider how certain critical movements argue for a type of intertextual exchange between culture and text.