El discurso social en el cine histórico de Hollywood

Abstract

In the 1980’s, Eliseo Veron 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.