Rosemary Hennessy

“As one of the most pervasive forms of cultural narrative in industrialized societies, commercial film serves as an extremely powerful vehicle of myth… To some extent the scripts that do get picked up manage to be supported because they already articulate a culture’s social imaginary – the prevailing images a society needs to project about itself in order tomaintain certain features of its organization. This social imaginary is not simply encoded in a film or decoded by the viewer from the film’s formal structures. Rather, the mythicmeanings of films are the effect of a social and dynamic process of meaning-making in which their production and reception participate. Any film text comes to make sense by means of thehistorically available modes of intelligibility – a variety of assumptions about reality – through which the spectator chains together the film’s signifiers into a meaningful story.”