Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Critically assess the relevance of Marxist theory to the study of Essay

Critically assess the relevance of Marxist theory to the study of media texts - Essay Example Moore looks into the presidency of George W. Bush and analyzes the future of the country in the light of his policies and actions. Moore alleges that Bush family had long-term business relationship with the Saudi royalty and the family of bin Ladens. Bush and his inner circle avoided pursuing the Saudi connection to 9/11, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis and Saudi money had allegedly funded Al Qaeda (Fahrenheit 9/11). Fahrenheit 9/11 shows how a nation is kept in constant fear by FBI alerts and ultimately lulled into accepting the USA Patriot Act, that according to the film infringes on basic civil rights further adding that it is in this atmosphere of "confusion, suspicion and dread" that the Bush Administration "invades" Iraq. Fahrenheit 9/11 shows clips of the war to highlight the US casualties and the human cost to individual soldiers and their families thus invoking anti-state feelings within the armed forces. The core narrative of Fahrenheit 9/11 paraphrased from various reviews on the film: the Bush administration seize... ure the world's second largest reservoir of oil-all on the dubious grounds that Saddam Hussein was behind Al Qaeda's attack on World Trade Centre and his regime which possessed weapons of mass destruction posed a serious threat to the security of the United States and its Western allies. Fahrenheit 9/11 has been one of the most controversial and provocative documentary films since 2004 when it was released in the United States and worldwide. It seems to have borrowed the title and inspiration from Ray Bradbury's fiction novel "Fehrenheir 451" published in 1953. The thrust of the novel is towards highlighting the major concerns of the 1950s such as McCarthyite witch-hunt against communists , burning of books in Nazi Germany; Soviet leader Stalin's suppression of writers and books and the horrifying consequences of a nuclear weapon on the fictional town of Phoenix. Fahrenheit 451 belongs to George Orwell's "Big Brother" genre which is not exactly a Marxist comment on the society but a reflection of Western liberal thought. One may argue that Bush comes out in the film as the main protagonist, however, in its over all impact the film, wittingly or unwittingly, shuns narrative structure of story-telling that is the hallmark of the Hollywood style of film-making. Vertov and his colleagues believed both in the absolute ability of the cinema apparatus to reproduce reality as it actually appears and in the necessity of editing to arrange this reality into an expressive and persuasive whole. This doctrine, called by Vertov kino-glaz ("cinema-eye"), contributed significantly to the montage aesthetics which came to dominate the Soviet cinema after 1924. (Cook, 1996 p.134) Fahrenheit 911 does not use a protagonist or a narrative and uses a format which is more associated with the

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