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There were a couple of slight problems with this presentation, as I indicated to you on the day. To begin with, you state that ‘we interpellate things’ and while this is not exactly wrong it would be better to acknowledge that we ourselves are interpellated by the world that we find ourselves in. Hence, we acknowledge the name we are given, and ideology provides us with a sense of identity and an idea of our place within the social world. You cover this via the Lapsley/Westlake quotation later on, and you might have been better beginning with the idea that a film interpellates the spectator.  There is also a small confusion over the prison/panopticon metaphor, which is actually Foucault. These are minor technical issues though, and you go on to make some good observations about how the film can be critiqued from an Althusserian perspective.  It might have been worth considering the idea that the director waited until certain digital technologies were available before making the film. Aside from the issue of how material technology influences the development of art and culture, you could have speculated about what this technology might have meant for interpellating the viewer. Perhaps the new digital techniques allowed the viewer to empathise or identify with the Na’vi as the motion capture could make them more human like. A good project though, and a great picture of Althusser to begin with.

Huw

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"In Lenin and Philosophy Althusser contends, “Art does have a quite particular & specific relationship with ideology…What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’, is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.” A key term in Althusser is interpellation, which explains how individuals perceive the world from their specific position, in a capitalist setting with a bourgeois point-of-view. In films, the spectator is interpellated into a fixed position and s/he follows the dominant perspective as directed by Ideological State Apparatus. “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”
(“Ideology &Ideological State Apparatuses”). Ideological State Apparatus persuades us to behave in a particular manner, for example, church, family, education, legal system, media; all these institutions expect us to conform to certain norms."
http://nptel.ac.in/courses/109106078/Ideology%20in%20Cinema.pdf

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Good to see that you are posytng material, and the Lapsley/Westlake view on film and interpellation should be really useful.

Huw

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This is quite interesting because they're discussing how Interpellation links with media and films.
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/interpellation/
"Furthering the discussion about the relationship between a medium and its audience, many film scholars have employed Althusser’s framework to investigate how spectators view a film. Lapsley and Westlake describe how in structuralist film criticism a film “as a pre-existing structure… interpellates the spectator, so constituting him/her as a subject” (Lapsley and Westlake, 1988: 12). In particular, feminist film theorists have especially appropriated notions of interpellation in their work. Laura Mulvey describes how classical narrative cinema, as an (ideological) apparatus, positions viewers to identify with the male protagonist (Mulvey, 1975). "