Jane Gaines. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.
Reality is what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in the barracks, in a prison, in a police station. — Gilles Deleuze (quoted in Foucault, 1977: 212)
The assumed link between cinema and social criticism begins with the fact that moving pictures, a nineteenth-century invention, exhibited such an amazing similarity to the social world, not as it was but as it appeared to its observers. This likeness was remarked upon again and again at the inception of the cinematograph. Certainly, the case has often been made that cinema is able to bring social realities to visibility more effectively than any other form of art or culture. Encapsulating the political anticipation attached to the new moving image machine, German experimental filmmaker Hans Richter exclaimed in the 1930s: ‘Our age demands the documented fact … The modern reproductive technology of the cinematograph was uniquely responsive to the need for factual sustenance’ (1986: 43). This is one way of saying that political hopes and expectations in the first several decades of the century became attached to the invention that could deliver such a lifelike image-in-motion (through modern theatrical exhibition) to masses of urban viewers. Thus, it is nearly impossible to speak about the social in the cinema century, 1900 to 2000, without reference to the problem of aesthetic realism and its correspondence with historical realities. By convention, such correspondence anticipates correlation along a continuum from social reform to the cataclysmic utopianism of revolutionary change.
Correspondence would be the case complexly made for Dziga Vertov’s revolutionary Soviet kino pravda films in the 1920s (Vertov, 1984) and later more problematically made for post-World War Two Italian neorealism (Bazin, 1971; Kracauer, 1997). By the 1970s, however, the very hallmark of neorealism, the apparent capacity of the camera to effortlessly render the social realm, became politically questionable. The cinema institution, it was argued, could only bring us that which we already knew, not the new knowledge required to change social conditions. The political expectations that characterized 1970s film theory were French in origin, an outgrowth of the socially transformative events of May 1968, that culminated in the general strike in which workers joined students critical of the Vietnam War and authoritarian university structures (Harvey, 1978). That film theory, translated and exported to the English-speaking academy, now detached from its radical moment, stirred another generation.
How film theory moved from understanding the relationship between the moving image and the social world as privileged and toward seeing this automatic relation as politically suspect may be understood in retrospect with reference to a great world divide. The old antagonism between the Communist bloc and the capitalist West, mapped in recent memory by the Cold War, is one way of staging the central aesthetic polarity of the past century: globally dominating Hollywood narrative fiction film as countered and challenged by alternatives. Yet, as we will see, shifts in the political realm do not correlate with adjustments in the social realm, telling us that these realms will always be out of alignment, this disjuncture itself the great challenge to a politicized aesthetics. Indeed, it is the philosophical problem of non-correspondence, understood as the disjuncture between the economic base and the cultural superstructure, that has been a core question, with implications for what would be understood as a politically radical film theory.
Contemporary film theory’s passionate interest in working conditions and social hierarchies owes all to a confluence of events that began with the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the later test to which Marxist utopianism was submitted, first in Germany in the 1930s and later in the post-World War Two world. Here, it would be the Russian experiments, the legacy of the Futurists as well as the Formalists that would underwrite the challenge to a too easy, mirror-like art-reality relationship in favour of artistic practice as a transformative production in oblique relation to social conditions. The very terms of the social, however, would be as fraught as the question of how to re-present existing conditions. Since the expectation placed on the working class as the engine of revolution and author of proletarian culture, based first on the Russian experiments and later pinned to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, was not borne out historically, ‘class’ as theoretical category and historical structure was under review. As a constant, from the point of view of revolutionary Russia and later the postWorld War Two European New Left, world strife was the legacy of medieval ownership and colonial rule, and the industrialization that had promised liberation depended upon new inequities, best grasped as class difference. Just as in the contemporary moment ‘class’ is translated into yet another set of inequities, the theory and practice of political cinema born of post-revolutionary circumstances has been translated into political cinema within and for the capitalist West. Here, motion pictures as the art form of the second industrial age has been seen as uniquely able to represent social imbalance as well as to agitate for its rectification. But whether the mode this new form took should be documentary, narrative fiction, or an avant-garde alternative to either of these has been hotly debated, certainly because of the persistence of the expectation we are tracking—the expectation that cinema can be powerfully political.
The degree of politics is thus crucial, as seen in the difference between reform and revolution organized around the legacy of two figures, producer John Grierson and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Standing for moderate British social policy and revolutionary Russian ideals respectively, these figures continue to define the line between classical documentary and radical cinematic avant- gardism, even when that line is blurred. Griersonianism has been kept alive worldwide in the ‘social problem’ approach to television as well as theatrical film and low- budget video and now digital documentary (Winston, 1995). Eisensteinian avant-gardism (supplemented with the distanciation devices associated with German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht [1974]) has been periodically invoked since the 1970s in the imagination of vanguard cinemas for the present (Godmilow, 2002). Here is where the question of class returns, as we remember that Eisenstein’s theory of dialectical film form was originally derived from post-revolutionary Soviet theorizations of class antagonism and the critique of capitalism, and was intended to contribute to the education of a new citizenry according to Marxist-Leninist principles by an artistic elite (Eisenstein, 1988; 1992). Although in the development of a socially conscious film theory, Eisenstein has remained the centrepiece, legitimating the question of working conditions as well as checks on the power of the ruling class, over the last part of the cinema century, these questions have been reformulated, made moderate, safe, and academic.
To review, the twentieth was a century in which political alignments did not stay in the same place for long. To read the political expectations of the theory of the moving image is to follow capitalism as it spread, socialism as it grew and shrank, Marxist-Leninism as it migrated from Russia, colonialism as it lingered in Africa and Latin America, and finally Chinese Communism as it inspired and then betrayed revolutionary hope. Beginning in the 1970s, other movements substituted class for new ways of understanding oppression, best exemplified by the First World woman’s movement as it swelled, levelled off, and gave way to other vanguards such as the gay rights movement (Bad Object Choices, 1991). Over this terrain, patterns emerge and recede, but it is possible to perceive large shapes in the approaches taken by filmmakers as well as critics, which might be summarized tentatively as follows: going with realism as opposed to going against it, form as political or apolitical, film language as illusionism or disruptive montage, critique as the work of the film as opposed to the work of the critic, opposition as outside or inside the text, and the popular narrative as utopian or hegemonic, progressive or reactionary. No sooner have we set up these familiar critical oppositions, however, than the objects and terms of analysis begin to change sides. No concept has migrated more than ‘reality’ and the attendant aesthetic of ‘realism’, which was so thoroughly discredited by 1970s film theory, as we will see, but also utilized by major figures whose political sympathies were in alignment, but whose stated positions here seem at odds. Andre Bazin, for instance, praised director Eric von Stroheim because ‘in his films reality lays itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police’ (1967: 27). Bertolt Brecht instead defined realism as ‘laying bare society’s causal network/showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators/writing from the stand point of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society’ (1964: 109). One could contrast here the difference in investment in reality formed (into cinema) as opposed to reality unformed (or as it was said, appearing ‘unmediated’), except that the social world in Bazin only yields its meaning under the gruelling analysis of cinema. Quite apart from the philosophical problem of ‘reality as signified’ is the historically recurring need for any socially aware cinema to invoke if not refer to a world ‘reality’ outside the cinema, if nothing other than as a sign of political commitment. Thus emerges the need for caution about the slipperiness of reality as a critical category, a concept which in the same century has been associated with truth, illusionism, deception, class difference, gender inequity, marginality, historical materialism, and bourgeois capitalism.
Despite these critical shifts, at least where filmmaking as social criticism has been concerned, over the last century a canon has emerged, comprised of films privileging the existence of ‘real historical conditions’. What if we were to look at a cross-section of this international film canon, at works understood as unflinchingly social, or films that take peoples’ life conditions as a starting point? Let us, for instance, consider films about labour strife, workers’ societies, wage struggles, housing conditions, the aftermath of war, gender as well as race and sexuality as sources of oppression, and the struggle for socialism against its corruption and social justice against colonial rule. Finally, if we add films in which voice is given to the sexually abjected as well as to the traditionally poor and dispossessed, we might have the following list: Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1924), Misere au Borinage (Joris Ivens/Henri Storck, Belgium, 1929), Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, LuisBunuel, Spain, 1932), Housing Problems (Arthur Elton/Edgar Anstey, Britain, 1935), Roma citta aperta (Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945), Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvco, Algeria/Italy, 1960), The Brickmakers (Marta Rodriquez/Jorge Silva, Columbia, 1972), Memorias del subdesarrallo (Memories of Underdevelopment, Thomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuba, 1973), Czlowiek z Marmuru (Man of Marble, Andrej Wayda, Poland, 1977), Union Maids (Julia Reichert/Miles Mogulescu/Jim Klein, US, 1976), Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, US, 1999). What this mix of documentary and fiction films from divergent moments and traditions share is not only a critical but a ‘revealing’ approach to social conditions. Yet even the conceptualization of ‘revealed social conditions’ raises a crucial problem, since the issue for film theory has never exactly been the conditions themselves, the conditions in front of, but irrespective of, the camera.
If the question had ever been people’s experience of social conditions, then we might be satisfied with Gilles Deleuze’s casual definition of ‘reality’ made in an interview with himself and Michel Foucault in the 1970s: ‘Reality is what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in the barracks, in a prison, in a police station’ (Foucault, 1977: 212). But Gayatri Spivak, who critiques this interview, reminds us of the traps that intellectuals continue to fall into in their invocation of the Other, as well as their recourse to a desire for ‘what actually happens’. First, Deleuze and Foucault here exemplify what she calls ‘empirical desire’, expressed in the ‘empirical register of resistance-talk’, which cannot help but shore up the positivism that is the underpinning of advanced capitalist neocolonialism (1999: 252, 255-6). Second, these two ‘activist philosophers of history’, she argues, appear oblivious to the function of ideology most significantly as they ignore the way they themselves are positioned (1999:249). The double bind of social critique is that the intellectual defers to what the masses know but ventriloquizes the ‘speaking subaltern’ (1999: 255). In one move, Spivak both updates and criticizes Deleuze and Foucault’s post-1968 French Leftism in an eerie rehearsal of the questions that defined thirty years of film theory, tribute to the longevity of the legacy of post-structuralism and testimony to what film scholars would call an impasse. The impasse—the ‘no way out’ for film theory—centred on the question of the empirical real (the factory, the school, the barracks, the prison, the police station). Called into question would be all of the canonical films listed above. Here, following post-structuralist theory, cinema would represent a special signifying problem, as it has been understood as doubly ideological: existing ideologies are reproduced by another ideology—the film form that delivered the exquisite ‘impression of reality’. For the issue decidedly following poststructuralists Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and especially Louis Althusser has been one of what language, and, by analogy, what film form and style is finally innocent. The point would be that the very cinematic carriers of meaning, and especially those that receded into an unseen stylistic realism, were not innocently neutral but invested in the society that produced them. The question of what we have come to understand as the ideology of film form has been the theoretical question of the last decades of the cinema century.
In order to see how social critique became ideological critique in the history of Western film theory, one begins after World War Two. At that time, it could be said, models for film theory as having a special relation to the political world began to announce themselves as just that. Early preparation for the approach to ‘reading’ society by studying the cinematic mise en scene can be found in Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947). As it anticipates psychoanalysis, Kracauer’s study of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Weine, Germany, 1921), which understands the cinema of the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933) as a ‘premonition’ of Adolf Hitler, is itself a ‘premonition’ of a later criticism. The very ambition of the reading that would locate the political unconscious of the historical moment in the visual style of the film looks ahead to the ideological analysis of the film as text that would appear two decades later. In another part of Europe, Italian film theory responded to the starkly different look of neorealism and the urban sociology of films such as Roma citta aperta, but immediately interpreted this in relation to a new mobility of cinema production outside the corrupted Italian studio. Here, praise for the unscripted use of non-actors opened up the question of how some films might have a more proximate relation to real historical moments than others. Filmmaker Cesare Zavattini’s reaction exemplifies the claim, reiterated by Bazin, that a cinema about social reality was (almost) social reality itself: ‘It is not a question of making imaginary things become “reality” (making them look true, real), but of making things as they really are most significant, almost as if they were telling their story by themselves’ (quoted in Casetti, 1999: 25; see also Zavattini, 1970; 1979). At the same time that critics were struck by the black- and-white treatment that appeared to perfectly match the film’s interest in the heroism of a Communist former member of the Resistance (Roma citta aperta), the easy equation of a new style (‘realism’) with a bold approach to uncensored subject matter (‘reality’) did not go unnoticed, even then. Guido Aristarco would caution that: ‘There are many degrees of realism, just as there are many degrees of reality (reality as it is perceived)’ (quoted in Casetti, 1999: 28).
So here we are confronted with one of the most compelling questions for a theory of film, brought on, in part, by the tendency to use the same vocabulary in reference to the world itself as is used to refer to the cinematic images of that world. But cinematic reality’s reality is only apparently an inadvertent or a mistaken conflation of the world with the image of it, and more certainly an ontological and philosophical question of larger proportions. There is another possibility. Perhaps the case for seeing neorealism as a breakthrough for the post-war conditions themselves was overstated. In French theorist Bazin’s open letter to Guido Aristarco he would write, ‘Rossellini directs facts’ (1971: 100). Later, this paradox of self-effacing cinema aesthetics would be starkly seen in Peter Wollen’s paraphrase of Bazin: ‘No more actors, no more plot, no more mise en scene: the perfect illusion of reality. In fact, no more cinema’ (1969: 131). Neorealism appeared to be prized as a vehicle for social awareness only because it downplayed cinematic technique in favour of the untouched object before the camera. A return to Bazin, however, has found in him a much more complicated theorization of what has been recently addressed as the ‘indexicality’ of the photographic image, seen even in the same essay in which he praises Rossellini for directing facts where he would assert the ‘ontological identity between the object and its photographic image’ (1971: 98). Bazin’s interest in a photographic privilege vis-a-vis the event before the camera’s shot of it would be echoed in the truth claims made in the 1960s by cinema verite and yet again in the 1990s with the opposition between ‘true’ photographic and ‘false’ or falsified digital imagery (Rosen, 2001).
A later generation wonders where to place Bazin, the theorist who saw the ‘total representation of reality’ as both a ‘myth’ guiding the invention of photography, phonography and cinema and, in his terms, a ‘reality’ finally achieved by some select directors (1967: 20-1). Bazin might here have been writing as much about the guiding ‘ideology of realism’ as he was about the ‘myth’ of total reality that inspired inventors such as Thomas Edison to try to attach his kinetoscope to a phonograph to give sound to the image in approximation of the complete human sensorium. A second consideration of Bazin’s defense of neorealism might find within it a struggle to think through a film theory adequate to a newly engaged post-war cinema. At the centre of this theory was a conception of realism that was unlike earlier realisms, and unlike literary naturalism, in that it was not satisfied to let the subject matter (in an objective way) define the aesthetic. It was based on the premise that ‘reality’ requires filtering, analysis, and, in Bazin’s word, ‘presentation’ (1971: 97). And such a reconsideration of the theory gives a new perspective on what for a time was thought to be a ‘revolt against the father’—a rejection of Bazin’s position of intellectual dominance—staged in the French journal Cahiers du cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Browne, 1990). Another reading of Bazin’s Cahiers writings from the 1950s against the seminal editorial ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (1976), from October 1969, suggests the continuity with his thinking and that of co-authors Jean- Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni. However, at the same time that we would note Comolli and Narboni’s debt to Bazin, we should also stress the distinct break and consequent breakthrough for film theory represented by this editorial which, in conjunction with key essays by Jean-Louis Baudry, served as a 1970s political manifesto for criticism (1974; 1986a; 1986b).
The field may now be cycling back to Bazin, although not necessarily to ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, and a fuller discussion of this polemical piece is essential since it is here that the methodology of the ideological critique, the standard for close text analysis, is first laid out. Another way of putting this would be to say that after ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, film analysis has continued to be ideological critique, even when that analysis does not begin from the Leftist standpoint of the authors of the original article. Film production was originally another matter, which meant that the ramifications of realism as equated with ideology were dealt with on two different fronts, political filmmaking practice and film text analysis, with Cahiers invested in the latter. Returning to the Cahiers editorial is important if for nothing more than to study the development of the influential argument that cinema’s apparent ‘reproduction’ of reality (sometimes its successful ‘impression of reality’) is highly ideological. This would be understood against the historical function of realism (as a literary, pictorial, and finally photographic aesthetic) as support for the argument that the image that most closely resembles the world faithfully mirrors the world. But the post-1968 theorists went further. Here, the re-reading of ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, along with French Marxist Althusser’s theorization of ideology as a system of representation that conditions necessary social hierarchies, dramatizes the comprehensiveness of this view of society as well as of cinema (Althusser, 1969; Comolli and Narboni (1969; 1971; 1976). In French capitalist bourgeois society, the Cahiers editorial argues, ‘reality’ advances bourgeois interests, interests not shared by groups not in power, most importantly the working class: ‘Clearly, the cinema “reproduces” reality: this is what a camera and film stock are for—so says the ideology. But the tools and techniques of film-making are a part of “reality” themselves, and furthermore “reality” is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology’ (Comolli and Narboni, 1976: 25).
Around the same time, the editor of Tel Quel, Marcellin Pleynet, in an interview with editors of the new radical journal Cinethique, would make a connection that reinforced this understanding of the camera’s reality as ‘entirely caught in empiricism’. Tautologically, the empiricism of the camera lens itself was empirically verifiable: ‘the camera is carefully built so as to “rectify” any anomaly of perspective, so as to reproduce in its full authority the code of specular vision as it was defined by Renaissance humanism’ (Pleynet and Thibaudeau, 1979: 159). The camera, never a neutral instrument, appears to simulate the workings of the human eye, but it actually returns us to a perspective as old as the fifteenth century. Thus, the camera is so invested in the project of an emerging bourgeois class that it is impossible to use it to advance a working-class cinema, or to further the stated goal of so much of post-1968 film theory—to change the world.
The implications of this argument about the camera lens are staggering since all films, whether low-budget alternatives or mainstream studio productions, would use the lenses into which this perspective was ground; therefore all films would be reactionary, regardless of subject matter. The Cahiers solution to this filmmaking problem, part of a post-1968 political project, was to advocate films that might be able to ‘disrupt’ or ‘sever’ the connection to ideology with the use of techniques refined along the lines of Eisensteinian-Brechtian models to which I referred earlier. But some confusion may arise here since the implications for oppositional filmmaking practice were implicit in the Cahiers editorial, as I have said, leaving a more explicit imagination of a new practice to Cinethique. And it would be there that the program for transforming the world through direct threats to bourgeois cinema, opposing the smooth cinema that erased the conditions of its production with a cinema that revealed everything about itself was developed (see Rodowick, 1988). Was such a project either possible or sufficient? In a Brechtian move, Paper Tiger Television, the New York City cable and low-budget videotape phenomenon of the 1980s, listed the costs of each production in the credits. Politically astute as this move was, it was not exactly what ‘revealing the conditions of production’ originally meant. The French were advocating modernism, not popular mass culture nor even feisty experimental work.
The post-1968 radical project had its most lasting impact on filmmaking as Eisenstein’s pattern of formal anti-realism was refined by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, giving ‘revolutionary’ film form a second historical moment in films like Vent d’est (France/Italy/West Germany, 1972) and Week End (Italy/France, 1967). For the English-speaking West, Peter Wollen (1972) formulated Godard’s filmmaking practice as Brechtian ‘counter-cinema’. Claire Johnston (1976) and Laura Mulvey (1975) soon advocated a new feminist counter-cinema following similar practices as the antidote to Hollywood’s capitalist but also patriarchal narrative film form and its visual dangers: identification, gendered looking patterns, and realistic illusionism or the illusion of reality. In theory, Eisensteinian- Brechtian film practice was not only a set of aesthetic options but also came to involve prohibitions against making films and later videotapes about people’s struggles using the illusionistic devices of narrative realism seen as embodying the world view of the social class in power, the bourgeois. Here, aligned with a historical modernism in high art, the film that aspired to the highest degree of politics had to foreground its own production conditions, eventually formulated as a selfreflexive approach to showing that it was made as well as how it was made. Yet, in retrospect, it is certain that only a handful of films met the standard: Thriller (Sally Potter, UK, 1979), Far From Poland (Jill Godmilow, US, 1984), What Farouki Taught (Jill Godmilow, US, 1998) and other films by Harun Farocki (from West Germany). Thus, in the US, the Black British Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, UK, 1988) was preferred on political-aesthetic grounds to the African-American realist narrative fiction Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, US, 1989). But a turning point was Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, US/UK, 1993), a film that, despite its glossy Hollywood ‘look’ and narrative realist construction, was an independent feature, produced and directed by an African-American woman. Who the film was by and who it was ‘about’ trumped all other oppositionalities, rendering 1970s political film form orthodoxy moot. Although Daughters of the Dust took some experimental licence with film form, using exquisite dissolves in fantasy sequences, it did not seriously disturb the realist aesthetic. In other words, a narrative film about a tight matriarchal culture of the descendants of South Carolina slaves, transcending the conditions into which they were born, but connecting them to the rituals of their African home, would be politically oppositional and recalcitrant enough in content to render a political analysis of its cinematic realism irrelevant.
Daughters of the Dust is particularly difficult to analyze ideologically given the stated political expectations of the ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ editorial, which divides films into seven categories according to their relationship to ideology, whether complicit or critical, and as manifest in their ‘form’ as well as in their ‘content’. In the editorial, films with ‘political content’ are dismissed, and ‘live cinema’ or cinema direct (direct cinema) films are deemed problematic because, even if they ‘arise out of’ social events, these events cannot on their own produce knowledge, or theory, since theory must be produced out of rather than by events (Comolli and Narboni, 1976: 28). The critical mission of the journal as defined by the Cahiers collective was work on the textual strategies of a category of films that might just as well be mainstream mass entertainment. This highly influential category (e) defined what came to be known as the progressive text, and sometimes the contradictory text. For over thirty years, the approach illustrated by the analyses of two American popular films, Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) and Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, US, 1939) defined the methodology of the ideological critique, the most evolved form of social criticism (Cahiers du cinema, 1980). The genre in which the ideological critique was most thoroughly developed, not surprisingly, was melodrama, for this would be where the ‘internal criticism’ of the category (e) was first tested on the films of Douglas Sirk. As a companion model, Thomas Elsaesser’s ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ (1992), first appearing in 1972, demonstrated how in films such as Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, US, 1957) and Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, US, 1959), the auteur director was able to use cinematic stylistics against the ideological message (see also Fischer, 1991). On the surface, Sirk’s films performed a kind of criticism that, in the words of Comolli and Narboni, ‘cracks the film apart at the seams’ (1976: 27). But how these films are different from films in the largest group, the category (a) of films imbued with the dominant ideology, has never been adequately demonstrated, particularly since a case for being ideologically oppositional or progressive could be made for any film, whether ‘explicitly political’ and seemingly not commercial, or blatantly commercial and ‘blissfully’ ideological (Comolli and Narboni, 1976: 25-6).
Sorting out the legacy of the ideological critique also requires recalling the development of the concept of ideology from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and following it through Althusserian Marxism as it met Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as Derridian deconstruction (Marx and Engels, 1970; Althusser, 1969; 1979; Derrida, 1980). The methodology of reading the unconscious of the text for the ‘noticeable gap’, after all, was evolving in French literary criticism and philosophy at around the time of the publication of the Cahiers editorial (Macherey, 1978). Derrida’s epistemology of dismantlement had been developed in essays published in France in the 1950s and 1960s, so the critical ideal of ‘partially dismantling the system from within’ seems an echo of that tradition (1980: 27). Finally, the question of progressiveness, contradictoriness, or textual resistance to the ideological dominant still needs to be referred back to Frankfurt School utopianism, but without forgetting that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s analysis of the domination of the American capitalist culture industry was informed by their experience of European Fascism (see Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979; Gaines, 2000).
Heir to this confluence of traditions would be the analysis of melodrama as supremely social, the depository of all the imaginable scenarios of suffering and misery and readable in terms of what Linda Williams calls the ‘destabilizing effects of the modern world’ (2001: 22). Popular melodrama narrativizes the pathologies of wife and child abuse, racial and ethnic discrimination, gender inequity, marital infidelity, poverty, illegitimacy, mental illness, physical handicap, and financial ruin. But again, following the contours of the category (e) methodology, aesthetics can go one way and the overall ideology of the film another, and here feminist theory has powerfully demonstrated the generosity of melodrama as a genre which may deliver the ideology of male superiority while privileging the female victim and idealizing her domestic realm. Useful here is Christine Gledhill’s assessment that realisms ‘assume the world is capable of both adequate explanation and representation’. Melodrama, in contrast, ‘has no such confidence …’ (1987, 31). Importantly, it is the most despised and denigrated popular forms that have been considered the richest territory to mine for insights into contemporary social relations. I would single out as particularly exemplary several ideological readings of the horror film genre such as Patricia White (1999) on The Haunting (Robert Wise, US, 1963), Carol Clover (1992) on Halloween (John Carpenter, US, 1978), and Richard Dyer (1997) on Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, US, 1968). The critics here illustrate how popular genre films tell us more about the fear of lesbianism, young male gender ambivalence, and white suburbia’s racial nightmares than any sociology could hope to uncover. With the English translation of ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ appearing in Screen in 1971, the door was opened for exhaustive analysis of the most popular of narrative forms. Yet again we encounter the Cold War division not only of world territory, but also of intellectual tradition. How do we place, for instance, Cuban Leftist film criticism of the 1970s, then part of the Soviet bloc? One might assume a political continuity between Enrique Colina and Daniel Diaz Torres writing in 1972 in the Leftist journal Cine Cubano and the Marxist-Leninism of the 1970s Cahiers du cinema collective. However, as the Soviet revolutionaries before them had denounced the decadence of prerevolutionary czarist melodrama, the Cubans would reject the melodrama of an earlier Latin American cinema, this time by association with Hollywood’s cultural imperialism. The dismissal of the Latin American melodrama of the 1930s and 1950s, than places Cine Cubano at odds with Cahiers, where a political criticism at the same moment might have been interested in seeing how these decadent melodramas challenged the Hollywood dominance of Latin American markets as well as how the genre could be read as internally contradictory (Lopez, 2000: 429-30).
There may be no more dramatic challenge posed to 1970s Western film theory, its world view, and its understanding of the political ideology of cinematic realism, than the case of the Chinese Fifth Generation cinema. Eastern as well as Western legend locates talented youth, disillusioned with the 1970s Chinese Cultural Revolution after universities had been disbanded and students sent to the country for a decade of service. A gifted few of them are recruited as filmmakers and charged with making feature films for the Communist state at a relatively tolerant moment. One of the earliest films completed by the graduates of the first class of the Beijing Film Academy (1978-82) was the now-canonical Yellow Earth (China, 1984), directed by Chen Kaige with cinematography by Zhang Yimou. And it is with this film that the political expectations of 1970s film theory fall dramatically out of alignment with aesthetics. Here we see that Western capitalism is not the only antagonistic dominant, anti-realism is no longer the default oppositional form and classical narrative realism is not constitutionally unfit to produce political critique.
Young filmmakers with their first opportunity to write and direct rejected not European or American capitalist, but the Communist Chinese mainstream film ideology that historically glorified the party. Yellow Earth uses a young female peasant, Cuiqiao (Xue Bai), as an image of the readiness of the peasant classes to be rescued from the prison of arranged marriages and servitude to the hard land, a readiness to be recruited into a new society by the Red Army. Set in 1932 against the historical background of the growth of the Chinese Communist Party in Yan’an, where Chairman Mao built his organization, the film uses a lush cinematographic style, long horizontal pans and languid dissolves over the landscape of the Yellow River. But the narrative dares to be critical of the party’s methods of recruitment, casting the soldier as travelling to Cuiqiao’s village to collect folk songs that will then be turned into revolutionary songs used in the recruitment of the very people from whom the music has been taken. The soldier effectively betrays the hopes of the people when he fails to take Cuiqiao with him when he leaves, condemning her to a marriage from which the mere child finally flees. Taking the options held out by the Communists, Cuiqiao attempts to follow the soldier, but drowns in the river. Yellow Earth received immediate critical acclaim outside the People’s Republic but not within China, where it offended the hardline Communists then in power.
With Yellow Earth, the filmmakers strike two orthodoxies in one blow—the Chinese Communist historical party ideology as well as the Western film theory party line. But while the first target may have been hit strategically, the second was hit inadvertently. By all accounts, following the political tenets of 1970s film theory, Yellow Earth should be formally at odds with Hollywood continuity techniques because it was aligned with socialism, capitalism’s opposition. The first wave of Western criticism (Yau, 1991; McDougall, 1991), following these principles, described the film as aesthetically antithetical to Hollywood style as well as critical of the party. But for Yellow Earth and its Chinese dissident makers, Hollywood was not the enemy, nor was bourgeois capitalism an ideological opponent and realist aesthetics were not exclusively bourgeois aesthetics. In the end, what the case of Yellow Earth demonstrates is the ultimate impossibility of lining up political aims with cinematic devices. According to the political expectations of 1970s film theory, the young Chinese Communists should have followed the Soviet model, and their films should have looked like Eisenstein’s. After all, as Ni Zhen tells us in Memoirs of the Beijing Academy, students in the class of 197882 were taught editing by Russian teachers schooled in the Soviet montage method (2004: 66). But, he says, the class rejected this style in favour of the Soviet Socialist Realism of the late 1950s and 1960s. The students preferred films about disillusionment with Communism, such as The Cranes are Flying (Mikheil Kalatozishvili, USSR, 1957) and Ivan’s Children (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1962). In championing the Socialist Realism of the Russians, they were paradoxically reproducing the Russian-inspired Socialist Realism of the Chinese mainstream films that they sought to reject not emulate. Since Yellow Earth is more a work of epic narrative realism than anything else, it is thus an anomaly for 1970s Western film theory—a revolutionary realist film for Communist dissidents and a counter-revolutionary film from the point of view of Chinese Communist Party tradition (see also Donald and Donald, 2000).
It is safe to say that, since the cataclysmic event of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, all earlier political as well as aesthetic alignments are off. As Rey Chow has argued, since China no longer represents anti-imperialism for Third World nations and Left intellectuals, it can no longer be seen as ‘oppositional’ in relation to the West. Instead, China is on a course to becoming the capitalist ‘equal’ of the West (Chow, 2000: 406). Film theory as it considers globalization has not yet fully come to terms either with China as culturally dominant or with the international stardom of former Chinese dissidents, the producers of Yellow Earth, who now make epic fictional narrative films financed by international co-production arrangements, best exemplified by Farewell, My Concubine (Chen Kaige, China/Hong Kong, 1993) and Hero (Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2004).
Perhaps the point is that despite the concern that politically committed filmmakers have had historically for world events, despite the way that cinema itself traversed the world in translation, the cinema century did not produce one world film theory. People’s struggles throughout many parts of the world were depicted in moving images entirely without the benefit of Eisenstein and Brecht. But just as we might now look for exceptions to the rule that narrative realism is politically bankrupt (Latin American melodramas and Chinese dissident epics), we might also consider more examples of historical styles, thus opening up the category of political aesthetics by looking, for instance, at stylistic variation within regions of the world. This project might begin, not with the First World, but with the so-called ‘postcolonial’ world where a social cinema has been interested in residual oppression, but also look at ‘post-third-world’ spaces where liberation narratives have been updated (Stam and Shohat, 1994). Thus, we might consider the revolutionary rhetoric of the Brazilian experimental short Ilha das Flores (Isle of Flowers, Jorge Furtado, 1989) alongside the epic Chilean three-part traditionally shot documentary La batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile, Patricio Guzman 1975; 1977; 1979) (Lopez, 1990). The most experimental and loose Francophone African film Touki-Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal, 1973) could be considered in relation to the classically constructed and tight Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, France/Senegal, 1965). As for the premises of Western counter-cinema, this approach still needs to be explored and tested on such forgotten anti-realist and anti-continuity editing experiments as Peter Watkins’ Culloden (UK, 1964) or the newer work of Austrian dismantler Martin Arnold such as Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Austria, 1998) and Deanimated (Austria, 2000), which erases the images in the 1941 Hollywood horror film, Invisible Ghost (Joseph H. Lewis, US).
‘Reality is what happens in a factory, in a school, in the barracks, in a prison, in a police station’, is of course not an answer to the question of cinema and the visibility of social reality, but it does lead us back to the historical origins of ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ with which we are still engaged. Whether we argue that reality produces or is made to produce its own critique, with or without cinema, the question of which class ‘can’ and will be responsible for social transformation stands behind this philosophical issue. But the legacy of Marxist theory we hear echoed in the French philosopher’s statement from the moment following May 1968, is under review. We now ask, for instance, how ‘class’ has been differently theorized in China and Russia, and in Western Marxism before and after 1989, since the most comprehensive way to grasp ‘lived realities’ in any given social formation has been to ask the question of class. Perhaps in the post-1989 moment we can argue with more confidence, following Stanley Aronowitz, that classes are always historical. And thus, with him, start again from the standpoint that: ‘Saying classes are historical means that their composition changes at every level of the social structure—ruling groups as well as subordinate groups. Classes form when they make historical difference’ (2003: 38, my italics; see also James and Berg, 1995).
The mandate for reviewing and renewing the political expectations of film theory comes from a radically revised post-Cold War world historical picture. Perhaps today, in the interests of a one-world film theory, we are called upon to ask more about historically situated classes as we ask about the political reality of, for instance, the police station as the site of social upheaval. The international circulation of popular genres challenges the earlier approach to reading texts for what they say about historical ideologies, where historical situation was local rather than global. Once we might have analyzed Fort Apache, the Bronx (Daniel Petrie, US, 1981) in relation to an ideology of racism, the western genre and its Native American genocide displaced onto a modern New York City police station under siege. In contrast, analyzing a Hong Kong police thriller film such as Die xue shuang xiong (The Killer, John Woo, 1989), might require an understanding of the ideology of chivalry and the Chinese martial arts tradition with reference to wu xia fiction (see Bordwell, 2000). But also a political reading would look for the figuration of existing Hong Kong capitalism and anxiety about Communism before the 1997 handover of the former Crown colony to the People’s Republic of China. But this approach is taxed when the international mixture of genres and traditions, once an implicit widely- practiced borrowing, becomes explicit, and now a travelling from East to West rather than via the old route in which Hollywood ‘exported’ popular ideologies to the world. Consider, for instance, how The Departed (Martin Scorsese, US/Hong Kong, 2006), an American adaptation of the Hong Kong thriller, Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau and Alan Wak, 2002), won Academy awards in so many categories, the most important of which was best adaptation from existing material. Thus, the earlier question of the gangster genre structure, the critique of capitalism as family business and ethnicized class mobility does not tell us enough about The Departed with its undeniable Hong Kong origins, which are themselves already both Chinese and American. The Departed, this pronounced cultural composite, owes its narrative structure as much to an older Chinese understanding of honour and the violent dance of two mutually admiring, perfectly matched heroes, as it does to the familial obligations of American capitalism via the gangster genre. The striking structural difference between the two is in the figuration of the vertical hierarchy and strict loyalties of the Hong Kong police force which, transported to Boston, is both instituted and broken down, crossed by familial loyalties and challenged by entrepreneurial survivalism.
But film theory must now, and is now following, as it must, a phenomenon that outdistances it—the traffic in film titles over the World Wide Web. So the question of social structures mixed and modified is speeded up as these ideologies embedded in genres are trafficked. Back and forth and back and forth, the vertical Chinese relationships of respect are exported, but broken down in translation, built up in the West only to be broken down as the new narrative is returned to Asia, but the Hong Kong thriller and the American gangster film now travel together, their two capitalisms intertwined. If there is a new political expectation placed on the critique, it would be the imperative to follow the ideological traffic.