a) “films which are imbued through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated form, and give no indication that their makers were even aware of the fact.”
b) “films which attack their ideological assimilation on two fronts”: “by direct political action, on the level of the ‘signified’, i.e. they deal with a directly political subject,” and by “a breaking down of the traditional way of depicting reality.”
c) films whose “content is not explicitly political, but in some way becomes so through the criticism practiced on it through its form.”
d) films “which have an explicitly political content . . . but which do not effectively criticize the ideological system in which they are embedded because they unquestioningly adopt its language and its imagery.”
e) “films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner.”
f) “films of the ‘living cinema’ (cinema direct) variety . . . arising out of political . . . events or reflections, but which make no clear differentiation between themselves and the non-political cinema because they do not challenge the cinema’s traditional, ideologically conditioned method of ‘depiction.’”
g) “films of the ‘living cinema’ (cinema direct) variety” that attack “the basic problem of depiction by giving an active role to the concrete stuff of [the] film. It then becomes productive of meaning and is not just a passive receptacle for meaning produced outside it (in the ideology).”
--Jean-Louis Comolli & Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”
