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Last year, film critics took to each other to praise Oppenheimer for Hollywood’s blockbuster treatment of Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb.
The New York Times praised the biopic as “a drama about individual and collective genius, hubris, and fallacy.” [that] A fascinating look into the eventful life of an American theoretical physicist who contributed to the research and development of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the catastrophes that ushered in an era of human domination. is drawn on.
Director Oppenheimer, who is widely expected to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, portrays his eponymous protagonist as a complex but heroic figure, who creates the H-bomb, Later, it only condemned the proliferation of nuclear warheads. Strangely, he expressed no remorse in his public life for the sacrifices his inventions had made to the Japanese people.
And while the film goes to great lengths to explore Oppenheimer’s inner turmoil, scenes of the hellish fires on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are nowhere to be found in this three-hour epic. Not found.
Oppenheimer’s solipsism is representative of the Hollywood film industry, which is both a maverick and a trendsetter in world cinema, said Toukufu Zuberi, chair of the sociology department and professor of African studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Ta.
“Oppenheimer gives us the idea that something noble was going on in the making of the atomic bomb,” Zuberi told Al Jazeera. “But that wasn’t the case. We didn’t need the bomb to end the war. The Japanese army had already surrendered. We told the world, primarily the Soviet Union, what would happen if we fought America. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to show that
The expressions of shock and awe at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “at the heart of NATO’s mission and the military-industrial complex on which the United States relies to do business with the world,” Zuberi said. “Well, welcome to 2024. There are an incredible number of wars going on, and they all depend on certain stories about the past, and if we don’t tell stories that make people feel okay about it. It won’t.
“The last thing I want is a movie that claims that the military-industrial complex has introduced a new process of settler colonialism based on white supremacy.”
“The most important thing in art”
Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony is a big night for the Hollywood film industry. But while film may be America’s greatest cultural export, its tendency to romanticize, if not outright ignore, the ways in which the West has dispossessed large parts of the world, especially the Global South, has made its international Reputation is tarnished. academics told Al Jazeera. This is because the main purpose of Hollywood movies is to entertain people, to raise awareness and to raise social This is because it is not about promoting change or challenging class relations. Just to name a few, Asghar Fakhradi’s masterpiece A Separation, released in the same year.
“Hollywood, by and large, is not set up to make revolutionary films,” said Nana Acheampong, director of the Department of Creative Arts at Africa University in Accra, Ghana. “They’re driven to make movies that soothe, console, and make people feel good.”
Film historians generally attribute the world’s diverse film output to the political tensions that defined the 20th century: capitalism versus communism. Vladimir Lenin declared that “for us cinema is the most important of the arts,” and he used Soviet cinema to form a national identity and unite Russian tribes that had historically fought each other between tsars. Nationalized industry. As a result, Russian writer Sergei Eisenstein’s films, particularly Battleship Potemkin and Strike, have become less racist than Eistenstein’s films such as Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. This is in stark contrast to Hollywood movies. rival, D.W. Griffith.
From its earliest days, cinema developed along two distinct trajectories. While much of the world parrots Italy’s gritty post-war neorealism, Hollywood goes its own way with romantic scripts aimed at numbing the people’s revolutionary impulses by glorifying their films. I walked. He values the individual rather than the community and encourages obedience to authority.
Keeping the lie of white settler colonialism alive
Zuberi said the 2023 blockbuster “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a good example. The film, directed by Martin Scorsese and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, stars a corrupt local, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is accused of stealing oil-rich land from an oil-rich Native American tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The film depicts a political boss facing criminal charges.
“While this is presented as some kind of exceptional activity, it was actually a U.S. policy to steal land from indigenous peoples,” Zuberi said. “Very few people went to prison.”
From Brazil to India’s Bollywood, Mexico to Turkey, Argentina to Nigeria, the film industry is taking off as more countries come to terms with their colonial past and its aftermath. Compared to these recent works, Africans describe typical Hollywood films in terms similar to those used to describe cartoons, such as funny but mediocre, or laugh-inducing but ultimately unsatisfying larks. It’s not uncommon to hear people do this. But Zuberi describes Hollywood films as “Orientalist” (a term coined by Palestinian scholar Edward Said to describe Western efforts to justify colonialism through artistic misrepresentation). That said is not completely accurate. Because most American studio executives are painfully unaware. A historical agreement.
Adisa Alkebran, a film scholar and professor of African studies at San Diego State University, told Al Jazeera: [Hollywood executives] They’re just looking for interesting stories that they think their audience will respond to, not necessarily stories that have the potential to raise awareness among a particular group of people. ”
Ever since 29 African and Asian countries came together in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955, the African film industry has primarily sought to portray Africa’s independence struggle in intimate and innovative ways. As an example, Zuberi points to the 1973 Senegalese film Touki Bouki, which, to put it too narrowly, is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off set in an anti-colonial context.
However, both Zuberi and Acheampong point out that the global film industry is moving towards the blockbuster style pioneered by Hollywood and reaping financial benefits. More and more African films are following the romantic comedy formula popularized by Hollywood and featuring exceptional black protagonists murdering their enemies one after the other, each murder bloodier than the last.
“The main role is [Hollywood] The purpose is to make money,” Todd Stephen Burroughs, author and adjunct professor of African studies at Seton Hall University, told Al Jazeera. “But while making money, we import values and brutal manipulations of sound, text, speech, etc., knowing the effect it has on the nervous system. But that doesn’t mean all art is propaganda. It’s even more complicated than saying, and I don’t agree with that. As an individual who consumes media, I consume and enjoy these things, but about how it affects me psychologically. You have to think about it all the time. Most people in America and around the world are anti-intellectual. Most people have never studied what the role of the media is.”
“If you look at what’s happening in Gaza right now, you can clearly see that Hollywood movie narratives are stuffed with legitimization of the state of Israel,” Zuberi said.
“The reality is that a large part of Hollywood is just keeping the lies of white settler colonialism alive.”
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