El cine desde la perspectiva de la Ciencia Política

Abstract

Popular culture is probably one of the strangest and most significant phenomena of the 20th
century, and one which has been the least studied from the viewpoint of political science. In the
first place, this article places particular stress on the reasons that may have motivated this lack of
interest, in terms of political science, in popular culture in general, and specifically in the
cinema, one of its most obvious exponents. Secondly, we report on the way in which over the
last fifteen years the discipline of political communication has, moving beyond the dominant
paradigm of voter persuasion, opened up to the study of discourses based on fiction and
entertainment. The third and final section is devoted to a short analysis of how the cinema is
used by some social movements as a weapon and a place where political response can occur, and
this is where we home in on the relationships existing between socialism, feminism and
the cinema. We consider that the political-scientific study of public discourses which recreate
collective identities and construct the political worlds of all citizens is a productive study field.
The growing expansion of focusses placed on the theory of discourse and Cultural Studies in
political science seem to confirm this academic liberalization.