Reproducing Orientalism With Cinema

Abstract

The place and importance of mass media as an ideological device is accepted without any discussion today. The sovereign states, trying to impose their ideology and world view to “others,” impose the dominant ideology by using the media as well as economic and political pressure. Cinema is like a mirror that reveals the socio-cultural and economic structures in societies and reflects all changes and conflicts. Therefore, the relationship between cinema and social structure is quite strong. At this point, the relationship between cinema and orientalism, which is the subject of the study, becomes important. Orientalism is constantly being reproduced through cinema, which is one of the most effective mass media. In this context, the movie Aladdin produced in 2019 will be analyzed in order to analyze how the orientalist perspective is reproduced with cinema and how the eastern image is “otherized.” In the study, critical discourse analysis method was preferred for the purpose of analyzing the social and political backgrounds of the ideologies in the film.