A Cinema of Loneliness Quotes

“Modernism in literature tried to rectify this by foregrounding narrative processes and making reading as complex as the reading and decoding of ordinary experience.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“Film tends to support the dominant ideology when it presents itself as unmediated reality, entertaining the viewer while reinforcing accepted notions of love, heroism, domesticity, class structure, sexuality, history.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“Every culture has a dominant ideology, and, as far as individuals assent to it, that ideology becomes part of the means of interpreting the self in the world and is seen reflected continually in the popular media, in politics, religion, education. But an ideology is never, anywhere, monolithic. It is full of contradictions, perpetually shifting and modifying itself as struggles within the culture continue and as contradictions and conflicts develop.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“Terry Eagleton writes that ideology “is the very medium in which I ‘live out’ my relation to society, the realm of signs and social practices which binds me to the social structure and lends me a sense of coherent purpose and identity.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“Ideology is not a slogan under which political and economic interest of a class presents itself,” write Rosalind Coward and John Ellis. “It is the way in which the individual actively lives his or her role within the social totality; it therefore participates in the construction of that individual so that he or she can act.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“But for all the challenge and adventure, their films speak to a continual impotence in the world, an inability to change and to create change. When they do depict action, it is invariably performed by lone heroes in an enormously destructive and antisocial manner, further affirming that actual change, collectively undertaken, is impossible.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness

“The phantom promise of “artistic freedom” offered when the old Hollywood structure collapsed has turned into something of an economic nightmare where costs, salaries, profits, and reputations are juggled and manipulated, with the film itself all but disappearing in a mass of contracts and bookkeeping.”
― Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness