Using some research to find ways to 'see' a film besides the 'cool-fun-90 minutes-eyeball-ride' makes each movie (or whatever) much more interesting and you might find things hidden in there you didn't expect.
There isn't as much difference between 'art' and 'politics' as we are led to believe.
It's all deliberately crafted expression meant for a percieved audience made at a specific place/time and distributed at a specific time to deliberate places by a specific technical group for varied strategic purposes.
Plenty of baggage built into what you get to see just right there!
But I used to 'dowse' the store shelves for a video rental the way most folks do and developed a good eye for non-mainstream stuff that seemed much more satisfying to watch with subtle production and scripts having rich dialogue in, y'know, independent or foreign or some Coen brothers movieas or, y'know, something with William Macy, an actor safe to follow.
What else have you got to go on?
-Title
-Video cover/poster
-genre
-plot blurb
-previous ads
-reviews
-cast
-director
-word of mouth buzz
Then I discovered psy-ops stuff in movies I had liked when I first watched them cold with just 'face value.'
So I started scrutinizing and researching more of the 'mainstream' movies at the megaplex and found the same devices all over the place...and that led me to go back and find them in even more of the 'savvy' movies I had once liked.
This made sense as I learned more of the long history of psy-ops science being used to make life imitate art instead of art imitating life.
Plus since WWII the tasks of both of the two main types of psy-ops, propaganda and counterpropaganda, have become more difficult... with the ever-growing need for counterpropaganda to hide the ever-growing pile of political liabilities that time brings to governments... taking up more of our media bandwith every day.
So fitting in the desired propaganda into one movie requires increasingly more efficient overlapping of these two functions.
Seems to me many folks have only an in-a-subjective-vacuum de-contextualized impressionistic view of an article's/movie's/book's (alleged) plot and might not, for time or interest reasons, spend much time searching up some contextual stuff to figure out the piece's-
original artist intent
or
spook psy-ops function
or
both intentionally intertwined
or
both un-intentionally intertwined
...as modified by
the social delivery network that gets it to you in the form of-
1 - pre-theater advertising
2 - a run at the multiplex theater
3 - pre-rental advertising
4 - the rental store shelf
5 - pre-rerelease advertising
6 - rerelease as
----A a new media
----B a new script version
And that's a chain of people with differing influence and agendas synthesizing into a many-parented experience better described in the plural as 'THEM' that you add to with your own agenda, 'I.'
And lots of us don't know how we got the attitudes we did
and are still figuring out what they are...
which then changes them, sometimes quite a bit.
*So that's the 'WE' side of discussing a movie we take for granted.
*So on the 'coming-at-you' end one can consider lots of things about 'THEM.'-
>Timing
...year written
...for which media
...year beginning prep for different media
...year of release to public
...years of rerelease to public
>Source
...name
...biography
...politics
...allies
...enemies
...other works
...awards
...sponsors
...grants...etc.
>Cultural context of themes
...war
...elections
...institutions
...scandals
...court cases
...gender
...justice
...resources
...economics...etc.
...and much more to scrutinize as listed in this Data Dump thread-
(200+ Questions to Analyze Political Language)
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=12692
