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.
