Cinema is ideological — that’s just a statement of fact, because it’s true for anything produced for any form of media. Either a film, through its plot and its form, is trying to communicate something about our world, or its refusal to do so is a statement itself. The mainstream Hollywood package of style and content — because it has such clear dominance across the board in cinema and television around the world — appears to be “normal”, and other films and shows are judged in relation to this model.

Either a film has the pleasurable and coherent qualities we expect from Hollywood, or if it deliberately challenges these qualities, it is labeled “Art Cinema” — both of these designations are forms of containment, and they mean that there are certain types of stories and certain ways of telling them that can be excluded. (This kind of exclusion is sometimes subtle and invisible to the mass audience; for example, This Film is Not Yet Rated examines the ways in which the prejudices of film ratings boards influence what we see and what we don’t see in theaters.) But on a broader level, films which can’t fit into one of these two boxes become marginalized and dismissed as bad cinema. This notion was one of my motivations for writing about Sucker Punch (#46), because that film seems to have suffered exactly that fate.

One of the primary ways for a dominant ideology to marginalize what it considers dangerous elements is to label them insane; historically this happened to homosexuals and feminists and other radicals. This should be familiar to the viewers of Sucker Punch because that is literally what happens in the film, as well as in Sheer Madness (#44) and A Question of Silence (#42) – authority justifies its claim to decide who is insane by the virtue that they possess a scientific metric.

In the same way, Hollywood (that is, mainstream cinema) has a metric, based on a number of economic and political factors, that allow for a very narrow range of films to be produced. Films which deliberately fracture their narrative or reveal their own inner workings or espouse an ideology outside the norm are marginalized, and can only be produced under the banner of “art film” or “avant-garde.” Again, the Hollywood claim is a scientific one: they know how to produce movies that the audience wants and will make money. It knows how to deliver pleasure (in a broad sense) to the audience.

Yes, there are films that fail, just like there are actual insane people. But part of good critique is examining if a film that appears to be bad is actually succeeding at something else entirely. Consider Memories of Underdevelopment, adapted by Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and writer Edmundo Desnoes from his own novel Memorias del subdesarrollo. The film is a fictional story that nominally tracks writer Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) and his neurotic inner life and relationships in post-revolution Cuba; however, it goes on long documentary tangents on events such as the men involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion — studying those real people and their real actions in a segment that continues until we’ve almost forgotten about Sergio (even though he’s narrating), before returning to his stories of seduction, self-doubt, and romantic intrigue.

The film has plenty of rough edges, but Alea and other filmmakers in the Third World have argued that these rough edges are the point. In an era defined by two clashing superpowers, many nations and peoples strove to opt out of that definition, and this was a path chosen by many filmmakers as well: instead of the glittering glamor of the First Cinema of Hollywood, or the ivory tower of the Second Cinema produced by auteurs in Europe, filmmakers in developing and underdeveloped countries were agitating for a Third Cinema, one that was in many ways explicitly political and called for revolution and resistance.

But while art cinema and this revolutionary cinema were both defined by how they rejected the form and content of Hollywood, the manifesto of revolutionary cinema seems to be its direct call to action, in which screenings of films were used to organize groups of resistance and form an ideological banner to march under. The assumption here is that media and images on their own do not have the power to affect change. After all, in his acceptance speech for the Best Documentary Academy Award for Inside Job, director Charles Ferguson said, “I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail.” More than anything, this seems to point to cinema’s limited ability to affect change in the specific. The media can cause lasting cultural and political shifts, but in some ways it’s like tracing the effects of a glacier.

(The Film School Thesis Statement Generator says: “The conflicting duality of progress and humanity in Memories of Underdevelopment reduces the canonical status of scopophilic tendencies of the viewer.” I know this thing is supposed to be a parody, but sometimes it just gets things so right)