BRITISH CINEMA, POLITICS, AND AUDIENCE FROM THE THIRTIES TO THE FIFTIES

Abstract

With the growing influencing power of media in general, and cinema in particular, in everyday life, this thesis examines the way the audience could be ideologically manipulated by films. This research is significant because not enough attention has been paid to the way British cinema disseminated rightwinged ideology for political purposes during a relatively longer period of time, especially those which are marked by pivotal historical events. Through a textual and contextual study, that is to say, an analysis based on both content and concomitant circumstances, this work has tackled the issue via a synchronic and diachronic level by examining six films purposefully sampled. This study is based on the Historicist and Cultural Studies’ approaches, the theoretical framework that has been applied here is composed of two critical theories that both belong to the Marxian tradition: Gramsci’s Cultural Hegemony and Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model. The period covers to a thirty year stretch of time comprising the thirties, the forties, and the fifties. Results were consistent with the aforementioned hypothesis. Findings show that those films confirmed that the seemingly ideological shift through time was only superficial and sustained a strong right-wing tendency in the background, leading us to think that the ideological manipulation of the audience was consistently top-down, that is, from the Ruling Class to the Working Class with the aim of sustaining the status quo. In this sense, the theoretical assumptions are, in turn, confirmed as well.