Discourse and Ideology in Cinema: A Review on the Films of Samira Makhmalbaf

Language, which plays a dominant role in understanding and reproducing social practices, is important in the process of revealing clear and implicit contents. Language provides the basis for the creation of a society order by forming ideology and discourse in the development of power concept and domination of masses. Due to these influences, language is supported by this process of actions, symbols, semiotics, words, and common items; and it is again these influences which ease the adaptation of individiual to the world order that is established before the self. Nevertheless, the existence of an independent habitat is not possible without discourse and ideology. These concepts are living practices, and are beginning to be produced and shaped as soon as one is involved in the social process. Those who have the power to manage this process is shaping some material - media texts, visuals, television programs, etc. - to their own advantage.The form of the rhetoric created within ideology provides the practice of thinking about what is good or what is bad, but this often leads to the reproduction of the ruling bodies. There is a similar situation in cinema. The cinema, which usually uses a masculine approach, reproduces the power and generalize the process with its dialogues between characters and with technical structures -fiction, scales of shoot, camera angles etc.-. Samira Makhmalbaf, an Iranian female film director, is also noted as a critic of this in Iranian cinema. Makhmalbaf, while questioning masculine power and focusing on the background of its process, with her cinematic language which contains elements of discourse and ideology, wants to create a content integrity. This article’s scope is limited to two films by Makhmalbaf, “Blackboards” and “The Apple”. These two films are analyzed within critical discourse analysis method. Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Dominance book is also going to provide the main framework for the analysis mentioned