The Carnivalesque: Film and Social Order

Abstract

Films, like other narrative processes, establish social orders which are constructed from a variety of sources, including the social order of the created world, the socio-historical contexts which the film draws on, the critical contexts of its reception, and the social contexts of the spectator. These orders are all played out within what we might call the architectonics of social orders. Such architectonics (the systematised ordering of knowledges and formations of contexts of meaning) operate within themselves to give relational points to events, people, histories, ethics, etc. within the film and outside of it. Part of this process is the construction of boundaries which delimit and establish the hows and whys of narrative events and objects. Such boundaries, often unacknowledged (as they operate largely at a level of invisibility within the textual fabric and act of reading), most often do not function as restrictive practices, but as moments where difference is mapped in order for it to become part of the spectating process. For when we watch a film we continually oscillate between the film’s social world order, the social order it is derived from, and our own. Perhaps such boundaries are limitless, or form part of the unrepresentable, or are ephemeral and specific to a film. But some are more persistent and recurring than others, and the overall structure of such boundaries is common to all films.

Artifice is at the very heart of reality.

(Baudrillard)