Three Kings: A Closer Look at the Ideology

As we discussed in class earlier in the week, Three Kings is filled with many themes and tropes. This critical article that I am providing primarily focuses on the theme of neocolonialism. By utilizing both ideological and formalist methods, Lila Kitaeff establishes the fact that an "American" point-of-view is created through the use of camera angles and other formalist properties. Overall, I thought the article was very interesting and revealed things that I did not pick up on the first time I viewed the film. The name of the article is "Three Kings: Neocolonial Arab Representation" and it was written for the Jump Cut website. The quote below shows the level of analysis that Lila Kitaeff used throughout the article.

In Three Kings, viewer positions are set up to create a sense of identification (the viewer’s feeling a sense of “self”— I’m briefly in that person’s shoes) or to see characters or situations as safely “other.”