What’s Theory Got to Do With It? :: Movies Media Papers

This is non a book around pictorial matter, blow to its title, but a book about a way of see social and economic relationships differently. require is just a convenient vehicle to use to pursue our abstract. It is an entry point, a doorway, into an understanding of the processes that have shaped and continue to shape the humanness (and remember that we are an integral grammatical construction of the world, not separate from it). This process of formative and being shaped by is what we c every overdetermination. Overdetermination implies that no aspect of reality is insignificant in the shaping of any other aspect of reality. In other words, everything is significant all processes (whether political, economic, cultural, or environmental) have an effect on all other processes. The dialectical of overdetermination is the dialectic of ceaseless change, of the constant pushes and pulls of the unique influences that come together to render each and every aspect of real ity. Freud used the concept overdetermination in his analysis of dreams to refer to the way in which the content of dreams was not simplistically determined by a finite set of life-events, but was, rather, the product of the totality or gestalt of life experiences. The formation of our soul and unconsciousness is the culmination of the unique interaction of more social and natural conditions than could ever be named or identified. In other words, everything, absolutely everything that we have experienced in life has form our consciousness and unconsciousness. Film is a medium through which ideas are communicated. Film is an illusion trying to mirror a specific reality or set of realities. Many of us grow up viewing film as a window from which to look out at the world and make sense of it. The images and stories projected into our minds help to form our consciousness about various social and natural relationships. The ideas genetic through film sustain part of the knowle dge base from which one understands the world. These ideas help form the consciousness as well as the unconsciousness of the individual, shaping her perception of not only herself, but of social relationships, in a more ecumenical sense. This is why it is so important to critically examine films. Ideas are transmitted in the blink of an eye, so to speak, instantaneously lodging themselves in the mind---oftentimes unexamined.