ABSTRACT
Film is intensely political and ideological, and thus the viewer who wishes to discern how films embody political positions and have political effects should learn to read films politically. This means not only reading film in a socio-political context, but seeing how the internal constituents of a film also either encode relations of power and domination, serving to advance the interests of dominant groups at the expense of others, or oppose hegemonic ideologies, institutions, and practices. Thus reading film politically involves situating film in its historical conjuncture and analyzing how its generic and cinematic codes, its subject positions, its dominant images, its discourses, and its formal-aesthetic elements all embody certain political and ideological positions.
