Let’s go to the movies!Let’s go see the stars! Navirah Zafar
Uploaded by eddyslash on Mar 20, 2009
Let’s go to the movies! Let’s go see the stars!
By Navirah Zafar Jilani
Silver screen is one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the world today. With such a wide audience base, movies can touch and influence lives in ways no other forms of media can do in their attempts to entertain the audience. It is no wonder that producers and filmmakers fill their movies with messages that can and do strike sensitive chords in society.
Movies cannot solely be confined to entertainment, but an in-depth study helps understand what baggage is brought with them: a whole setup of ideologies, attitudes and mechanism of the controlling power. Media organisations and filmmakers start developing movies with preconceived notions of communities, races, religions and genders. There are many factors such as script, dialogues, characters, shots, wardrobe, lighting, makeup and many more which constitute the build up of any portrayal. It is through these units, one can understand how downplay of various non-white characters results in positive and negative portrayals.
A handful of firms dominate the globalised part of the media system. Many media organisationss lack in delivering social values and responsibility, they merely serve the purpose of exploiting consumers' minds in order to instigate a stereotypical image of anything which is not white. These were the findings of a research carried out by Mehtab Ismail, a media student at the University of the Punjab. Her research revolved around the premise that non-white characters are always portrayed in negative connotations against their white counterparts.
American cinema has always been a pioneer in creating, sustaining and reinforcing imagery of non-whites. Race for many may vary, but it is a complex term defined not by biology as much as by politics, history, fear and social hierarchy. Often these forces are disguised as scientific truths, in order to assert their authority as objective. The objectivity, assumed to reside in photographic media including film, makes it apparent as to why images of races have such authority on the minds of ordinary people. Race is an ideological term bearing imagined, stereotyped social and behavioural qualities or as an ever changing socio-cultural construction.
The portrayal of white and non-white characters in movies is always in opposite. The white muscular male is always shown as law abiding, down to earth, protecting environment and looking to benefit everyone in his surrounding. On the other hand, the evil non-white,...