Social discourse in Hollywood’s historical cinema

Authors

  • Fabio Gabriel Nigra Universidad de Buenos Aires Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2012v19n27p76

Abstract

In the 1980’s, Eliseo Verón studied the problems posed by social discourses understood as phenomena which produce meaning. These phenomena can help understand social construction of reality. Historical cinema can be included is one of them. The “linguistic turn over” in the elaboration of  historical stories has offered us not only new spaces for the concept of historical task, but also for its representation. Therefore, we can say that the massive, global presence of Hollywood cinema, its economic leadership and its formulas for message elaboration are today part of a mechanism which generates a social discourse very much related with the production of hegemony.  The idea of “social discourse” has been revived by Marc Angenot, to analyze the literary France of the year 1889 though its theoretical and methodological consequences can be applied to other types of social “elaboration of reality”. This social elaboration of reality is based in another construction designed by the film production and also according to the audience’s expected media knowledge, the audience’s media memory, understood as those concept-images found in popular imagery, which are a known locus which films must be based on. This paper wants to start building an analytic tool useful to understand the structural elements within this particular type of social discourse, specially taking into account that nowadays the film version of a historical fact is considered the real thing that happened. This process is based in the partial suspension of the spectator’s disbelief, which elaborates a model of representation which makes this biased version of the past believable.

Author Biography

Fabio Gabriel Nigra, Universidad de Buenos Aires Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Historiador por la Universidad de Buenos Aires, ha realizado diversos estudios de postgrado que le han valido un Posdoctorado en Ciencias Sociales y Humanas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, un Doctorado en Historia  de la Universidad de Buenos Aires y una Maestría en Política Económica Internacional de la Universidad de Belgrano, ambas de la Argentina. Dichos estudios se han dirigido a la Historia de Estados Unidos de América, especialización que se materializó en diversos artículos publicados en revistas argentinas, mexicanas y brasileñas, Director de proyectos de investigación en la Universidad de Buenos Aires y autor de varios libros tales como “Hollywood y la historia de Estados Unidos. La fórmula estadounidense para contar su pasado” (ed. Imago Mundi); “Hollywood. Ideología y consenso en los Estados Unidos” (ed. Maipue), “Una Historia Económica (inconformista) de los Estados Unidos” (ed. Maipue), y en colaboración con Pablo Pozzi, “La Decadencia de los Estados Unidos” (ed. Maipue), “Invasiones Bárbaras en la Historia de Estados Unidos” (ed. Maipue) y “Huellas Imperiales. Historia de los Estados Unidos de América, 1929-2000” (ed. Imago Mundi). Entre otros desempeños,  es Profesor del Doctorado de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UBA, Profesor Adjunto regular de la Cátedra de Historia de los Estados Unidos de América, en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la UBA, y Profesor Adjunto de Historia Económica y Social Contemporánea en la Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora. Asimismo, es contribuiting editor del Journal of American History.

Downloads

Published

2012-06-09

How to Cite

Nigra, F. G. (2012). Social discourse in Hollywood’s historical cinema. Esboços: Histories in Global Contexts, 19(27), 76–98. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2012v19n27p76

Issue

Vol. 19 No. 27 (2012): Dossiê História e Cinema

Section

Special issue

License

Esboços: histories in global contexts adopts an Open Access policy and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Authors will be asked to sign an open access license agreement before publication.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors grant the journal Esboços: histórias em contextos globais (ISSN 2175-7976) right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0).
  2. This license allows users to remix, transform, and build upon the material, on the condition of giving acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  3. 3.Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or a personal website, or publish it as a book chapter or a translation).

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.