progressive paper

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“[A] film's ‘accuracy’s is that it relays the voices and the perspectives—we emphasize the plural—of the community or communities in question. While image evokes the issue of mimetic realism, ‘voice’ evokes a realism of delegation and interlocution, a situated utterance of ‘speaking form’ and ‘speaking to.’”.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in “Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation” provide discourses into how not only the marginalized groups have come to their state of powerlessness, but, also, how the institutions perpetuate and audiences receive the information. They state, “That films are only representations does not prevent them from having real effects in the world; racist films can be mobilize the Ku Klux Klan, or prepare the ground for retrograde social policy. Recognizing the inevitability and the inescapability of representation does not mean, as Stuart Hall puts it, that ‘nothing is at stake’”. In essence, a film’s quality of representation can move individuals to ascertain ideas of positive or negative thoughts. In “The Orchestration of Discourse” section, Shohat and Stam find that multivocality plays an integral part in constructing the positive image and “accuracy” for films. This paper will explore how different voices in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre functions as a mirror of the real world and reaches the “mimetic accuracy”.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is set in the remote Sierra Madre Mountain in the Mexico border. Although Spanish is the dominant language of that specific location, English is still the primary language spoken throughout the film, which reinforces a notion of whiteness is a still a kind of dominant power. Other than the trio and Cody, the minor characters in the fil...

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...ey need, while Howard is responding accordingly; therefore, the voice is speaking from a Mexican, he is speaking to Howard, and vice versa when Howard speaks to them.
To fully understand the conversation between Howard and the Mexicans, some level of Spanish fluency is required. And yet, this is what Shohat and Stam claim as multivocality, “an approach that would strive to cultivate and even heighten cultural difference while abolishing socially-generated inequalities”. Dobbs and Curtin are not the ones that do not understand the Spanish conversation; most of the audiences, including myself also wonder what the entire conversation is about since subtitle is not provided. Perhaps by doing so, John Huston, is able to allow the voices of the given group to be heard and understand by a given group and reflect the real world as it is and reached the “mimetic accuracy”.

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