Understanding Film

Description

Film remains one of the most dominant cultural forms in the world today. Crossing classes and cultures, it permeates many aspects of our consciousness. In film, perhaps more than any other medium, we can read the politics of time and place, past and present.



The history of Marxism has intersected with film in many ways and this book is a timely reminder of the fruits of that intersection, in film theory and film practice. Marxist film theory returns to film studies some of the key concepts which make possible a truly radical, political understanding of the medium and its place both within capitalism and against it. This book shows how questions of ideology, technology and industry must be situated in relation to class - a category which academia is distinctly uncomfortable with.



Exploring the work of some of the key theorists who have influenced our understanding of film, such as Adorno, Althusser, Benjamin, Brecht, Gramsci, Jameson and others. It shows how films must be situated in their social and historical contexts, whether Hollywood, Russian, Cuban, Chinese or North Korean cinema. The authors explore the political contradictions and tensions within dominant cinema and discuss how Marxist filmmakers have pushed the medium in new and exciting directions.
Introduction: Marxism, Film and Film Studies

Mike Wayne

1. Benjamin/Adorno/Brecht and Film b yEsther Leslie

2. Gramsci, Sembène, and the Politics of Culture by Marcia Landy

3. The Althusserian moment revisited (again). by Deborah Philips

4. Jameson, Postmodernism and the hermeneutics of paranoia by Mike Wayne

5. ‘Making It’: Reading Boogie Nights and Blow as Symbolic Economies of Surplus and Sentiment by Anna Kornbluh

6. The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm by Colin McArthur

7. Economic and Institutional Analysis: Hollywood as Monopoly Capitalism by Douglas Gomery

8. Hollywood, Cultural Policy Citadel by Toby Miller

9. State Cinema and Passive Revolution in North Korea by Hyangjin Lee

10. Narrative, Culture, and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju by Xudong Zhang

11. Cinemas in Revolution: 1920s Russia, 1960s Cuba by Michael Chanan

Notes on Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Communism
• Socialism
• Post-Communism
• History of film
• Communisme

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781783716296
• Langue: English

Extrait

Understanding Film
Also by Mike Wayne
Dissident Voices
The Politics of Television and Cultural Change
‘Consistently compulsive reading and a must for all students and specialists in the field of recent and contemporary television culture.’
Professor Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, University of Reading
‘A clearly written and uncluttered teaching text.’
Media International
Political Film
The Dialectics of Third Cinema
‘Wayne injects a lively sense of political urgency into contemporary film studies and provides a valuable resource for teachers and students alike.’
John Hill, Royal Holloway
‘One of those rare events in the publishing world which will enrich and possibly change our approach to film criticism.’
Filmwaves Magazine
Marxism and Media Studies
Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends
‘Marxism could provide a powerful optic to understand the media and the contemporary world. This book shows how and why.’
Filmwaves Magazine
Understanding Film
Marxist Perspectives
Edited by Mike Wayne
First published 2005 by Pluto Press
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and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
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Copyright © Mike Wayne 2005
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1993 9 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1992 0 paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1629 6 ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1630 2 Mobi
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Contents
Introduction: Marxism, Film and Film Studies
Mike Wayne
1
Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht and Film
 
Esther Leslie
2
Gramsci, Sembène and the Politics of Culture
 
Marcia Landy
3
The Althusserian moment revisited (again)
 
Deborah Philips
4
Jameson, Postmodernism and the hermeneutics of paranoia
 
Mike Wayne
5
‘Making It’: Reading Boogie Nights and Blow as Economies of Surplus and Sentiment
 
Anna Kornbluh
6
The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
 
Colin McArthur
7
Economic and Institutional Analysis: Hollywood as Monopoly Capitalism
 
Douglas Gomery
8
Hollywood, Cultural Policy Citadel
 
Toby Miller
9
State Cinema and Passive Revolution in North Korea
 
Hyangjin Lee
10
Narrative, Culture and Legitimacy: Repetition and Singularity in Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju
 
Xudong Zhang
11
Cinemas in Revolution: 1920s Russia, 1960s Cuba
 
Michael Chanan
Notes on Contributors
Index
Introduction: Marxism, Film and Film Studies
Mike Wayne
Marxism and Film share at least one thing in common: they are both interested in the masses. Film it is true speaks to the masses rather more routinely, underpinned as it is by the institutional infrastructure of capital and state support (even where the state professes its belief in that phantom, the ‘free’ market), by a technology that multiplies and extends the reach of communication and through vernacular cinematic forms that knit together a variety of widely circulated storytelling and aesthetic strategies (from melodrama to music, narrative to special effects). The social reach of film explains the theoretical and practical interest that Marxists have shown towards the medium. Marxism itself speaks to and arouses the masses rather more sporadically (and some would say these days not at all), in those great ruptures in the continuity of things that we call revolutions, attempted revolutions or those less matured intensifications of social antagonisms that we call social crisis or cultural revolutions. Film has been remarkably attuned to these moments, these social convulsions whose aftershocks have rippled out across film theory and practice, inspiring, influencing and being reworked in new circumstances long after their original historical conditions of production have subsided.
ADORNO, BENJAMIN, BRECHT
Film as an established mass medium and developing cultural form had barely arrived on the stage of world history before the 1917 Russian Revolution opened up the prospect of an alternative modernity, very different from the capitalist one that had spawned the horrors of the First World War (1914–18). A number of key questions then arose for the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s (Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, Shub) that were also taken up by a trio of German Marxists over the next two decades. In her essay Esther Leslie identifies some of the ways in which Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht tried to understand the relationship between film and society: What effect did the integration of film into the capitalist culture industries have on it and its audiences? As a part of mass culture, what connection was there between film aesthetics and the reproduction of the capitalist social order? How did film technology and its industrial nature inscribe within it the contradictions of capitalist society? How does film and mass culture generally displace, suppress and marginalise class? What potential was there to disrupt, disturb and problematise film’s relationship to capitalist socioeconomic relations? How does Marxist film aesthetics differ from those developed within the capitalist culture industry? What mode of consumption, what kind of spectatorship would alternative film practices seek to foster?
Of the three, Adorno came to the most pessimistic conclusions. With Max Horkheimer he produced the brooding Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944. The chapter on the culture industry conjures up a devastating indictment on the integration of film into capitalist industrial production and consumption. This too is something that film and the masses share: the latter have their labour power industrialised for the pursuit of profit while film replays in their leisure time what is done to them in their labour time. Adorno and Horkheimer offer an unrelenting vision of an art form broken down into instrumentally calculated effects, subordinated in every particle to an efficient system of profit maximisation:
the important individual points, by becoming detachable, interchangeable, and even technically alienated from any connected meaning, lend themselves to ends external to the work. The effect, the trick, the isolated repeatable device, have always been used to exhibit goods for advertising purposes 1
One only has to think how long trailers of films today, which advertise the film as a series of ‘effects’, often leave you with the unsettling sense that you have virtually seen the film in abbreviated form. This suggests that the reduction of film to such a packaged commodity of ‘tricks’ with little internal integrity has hardly diminished. While some contemporary theorists are tempted to dismiss Adorno and Horkheimer as excessively pessimistic and prone to elitism, their critique should instead stand as a salutary reminder that concepts of diversity, subversion and resistance, which are today part of every ‘radical’ cultural theorist’s lexicon, are also the stock-in-trade of capitalist mass culture and its endless self-promotion. Who exactly has been had in this surprising convergence?
On film aesthetics Adorno noted how the instrumental manipulation of filmic elements within a commodified process was concealed by the seamless way all the elements were melded into place. The ‘unity’ and harmony of the various elements was a false one just as social consensus within a class-divided society is premature and requires a repression of the conflictual and dysfunctional nature of capitalist society. Worse, film aesthetics aspires to represent a ‘lifelike’ picture of the world, a pursuit of verisimilitude that stunts the aesthetic possibilities of the medium and the imaginative capacity to think of alternative social possibilities. Even today, digital technologies seek no higher purpose than the faithful reproduction of the human body and environment as if there were still some indexical link, some original trace of light on photosensitive paper necessarily connecting the image to everyday perceptions of the real.
Adorno was one of the first theorists to consider at length the role of music and sound in films, a dimension of the medium that has only recently been rescued from neglect. As Leslie notes, for Adorno sound helped glue the film’s elements together, breathing life into the human figure and affirming its apparent spontaneity, disguising its mechanical and mediated nature. One detects a tension around this difference between the finished film and the making of the film in those DVD extra features which ‘go behind the scenes’ of the finished text. The increasing cultural thirst to understand the processes that go into the making of commodities here comes into contradiction with the fetishised final product in which all trace of the labour process is erased. Hence the rapid editing and brevity of those scenes which show the shooting of the film, so as not to smash the ‘magic’ of the movies and reveal the gulf that exists between the prosaic production of scenes and the final shimmering product.
Today corporate synergies between the film industry and record companies mean the routine integration of film with the compilation CD score as the film is now routinely supplemented with a series of self-contained pop songs. One is aware of the tension between such economic imperatives and the classical narrative structure in those moments where the song has to be brought to a stop before its natural length threatens the classical n