ABSTRACT
The term ideology refers to the unwritten rules or norms that govern the attitudes, behaviours and outlooks of any given society. Apparatus theorists further argue that film can have a particularly potent ideological effect as a result of its ability to 'suture' readers into the fictional worlds of cinema-based narratives. The inadvertent ideological effect of mainstream cinema is also constructed through the character hierarchies presented by films that the gender, class or race of lead characters reflect or reinforce the wider social inequalities. The formalist ideas of the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov also provide the readers with another useful framework to explore the ideological effects of narrative in film. Where Stuart Hall's development of apparatus theory was interested in the way that cultural products used stereotyping, Laura Mulvey draws upon Althusser's approach and Freudian psychoanalytic theory to explore the ideological effects of film in terms of gender.
