Sunday, March 6, 2016

Argo and Media Frames

The Academy Award winning movie Argo captured the fight to bring home six Americans that were being held captive in Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-1981). The movie is based off of Tony Mendez's book The Master of Disguise and the Wired article by Joshuah Bearman, "The Great Escape: How the CIA Used a Face Sci-Fi Click to Rescue Americans from Tehran". The movie was praised after it's 2012 release and was honored with seven Academy Award nominations, including a win for best picture.


While this movie was fantastic and covered historical events in a cinematic-ally interesting movie, it wasn't all accurate and included some framing in the way the movie was perceived.

Before we delve further into the implications of the framing in this movie, let us first discover what framing really is and how it is evident within this movie.

Framing is the selection of some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in a communicating text. This means that a media context might make one piece of information more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to an audience, otherwise known as salience.

In the movie Argo, the Canadian Embassy becomes a sort of safe house for escapees, but the movie downplayed the real amount that Canada played in helping the rescue of the Americans. The movies sets the framing to show that America was on it's own in getting them home. While this may seem insignificant in the entirety of the story, it plays a major part in how we will remember the history of this event and the way other countries were involved.

This clip shows the Canadian Embassy as a safe house.

The film also shows the escapees being turned away from the British and New Zealand Embassies.

This causes those that watch the film to have false recollections of this historical event, and may cause some to have harsher feelings towards the embassies that turned the escapees away, even though this wasn't historically accurate.


All extra information on the movie and historical events found at Wikipedia Argo Film.

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3 comments:

  1. Lauren BoumanMarch 6, 2016 at 10:39 PM

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  2. Lauren BoumanMarch 6, 2016 at 10:44 PM

    I really enjoyed this blog post. I have never thought of Argo in terms of framing but you opened up my eyes (metaphorically). I wonder how our perceptions, as a society, would have changed in regards to the situation if the history had been portrayed accurately? With that, do you think the movie would have been less successful? Overall, I think this was written really well and that you used framing in a unique and insightful way.

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  3. UnknownMarch 13, 2016 at 8:30 PM

    I think the way history is presented in film can really change the way we perceive the events to have happened, it is a really interesting topic to look into. I think the way the movie was framed increase the success for sure. People, and Americans especially like to see how their country succeeded in things like this, and to show that we did it alone increases people's pride and therefore increases viewership. Even if the events are not portrayed truthfully.

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