Marx and Cinema

11 Marx and Cinema Angelos Koutsourakis Classical Marxism embodied a political vision that could complete the unfinished Enlightenment project and overcome the contradictions of modernity, the tensions between town and country, the proliferation of poverty through the accumulation of wealth, and the simultaneous production of development and underdevelopment. Aesthetic modernism reacted against tradition as well as the division of labor between artists and consumers of art that characterized bourgeois society. In prioritizing the labor of style, modernism necessitates the labor of the reader and audience, challenging the neat separations between art and social life putting forward the idea of “art as material intervention.”1 The ultimate dream of modernism is its desire to come to terms with the real by refusing its unreflective reproduction. The emergence of cinema as an art form for the masses reliant on collective labor comes at a pertinent time in history when modernism seeks to reclaim art as part and parcel of social life. No other art form at the time was more suited to accomplish such a project, given that cinema was a new art that did not require literacy skills and could thus easily address a mass audience. As Adolf Behne wrote in 1926: “Film is something essentially new. It is the literature of our times.”2 An art form that becomes synonymous with the new and which can address millions of people irrespective of their educational background would be at the forefront of the Marxist and the modernist projects. It is not accidental that the first manifestations and theorizations of a radical and revolutionary cinema made use of Marx’s dialectical materialism. For the Marxist understanding of the dialectic seeks to show that what appears as unified, concrete, and natural is the product of historically determined social conflicts and the material connections between individuals. The Marxist dialectic is thus antithetical to an abstractly evolutionary understanding of reality, wherein historical development proceeds through conflicting collisions, whose synthesis generates more contradictions. Friedrich Engels argued that the dialectic is the “science of interconnections” that allows us to understand all social conditions as susceptible to change and not as static and universal abstractions.3 In these terms, dialectical materialism intends to fragment what seems to be unitary and complete, so as to reveal the historical transitoriness of social reality and its potential for radical change. Karl Korsch has described this dynamic, suggesting that for Marx a given socioeconomic status quo assumes the form of “consensus” whose self-evidence is to be attributed to its capacity to conceal the Marx and Cinema 135 social determinants that have produced it. However, the existing state of affairs faces pressure from new social collisions that lead to further conflicts: “From a harmonious ‘consensus’ it is at a certain point transformed into a ‘dissensus.’”4 Indeed, cinema was the quintessential medium that could serve the modernist and Marxist projects of analyzing the given state of affairs so as to envisage an alternative modernity, not least of all because it was a mass medium that refuted the class-laden understanding of art as the expression of cultivated taste. Film and media historians have discussed the culture wars initiated following the emergence of the cinema. Siegfried Zielinski explains that the advent of the new media of storage and transmission in the nineteenth century was received with suspicion.5 The shift from a literary to a visual mass culture posed threats to Western civilization and culture. Similarly, Sabine Hake explains that cinema posed a threat to bourgeois culture, firstly because it was a collective space where the masses could assemble and encounter themselves, but also because of its reliance on technology that was at the antipodes with the idea of art as individual creativity. We can therefore see how cinema in its early days coincided with the modernist desire to overcome tradition, but also with the Marxist project that aspired to enlighten the masses and do away with the conditions of alienation in modernity. Cinema was seen as a threat because it was an art form made for the masses. The fact that early cinema was an exhibitionist medium that did not rely on the use of verbal language made it more approachable to the urban proletariat. The new art form was therefore synonymous with the establishment of a working-class culture. Noël Burch has famously suggested that the primitive mode of representation (cinema in its early days) can be understood as a narrative and visual form influenced by folk art such as the circus, the cabaret, and vaudeville. Early cinema privileged the autonomy of the shot or tableau rather than narrative coherence and made use of antipsychological representational tropes. For Burch, the shift to a narrative cinema (the institutional mode of representation) influenced by literary dramaturgy was not the teleological development of an imperfect medium, but an industrial choice that aimed at popularizing the new medium to the bourgeoisie of the time so as to expand its market.6 Raymond Williams voiced a similar concern arguing that many scholars and students “know surprisingly little about the popular theatre on which, in that phase, it [cinema] drew so heavily. Some people still compare the new medium with such older forms as the bourgeois novel or academic painting, when they ought really to be looking at the direct precedents, with the same urban audiences of melodrama and theatrical spectacle.”7 According to Williams, cinema in its early days was monitored by the state, precisely because of its working-class appeal. These opening remarks provide a historical hindsight to consider why the key and still influential theorizations of a Marxist cinema did not start from countries in the capitalist West, but in the Soviet Union, whose historical experience of underdevelopment during the Czarist years prevented it from equating art with classladen cultivated taste. As the 1917 revolution contradicted Marx’s prediction that the revolution would start in the industrial West, similarly it was in the same country that the theoretical foundations of a revolutionary modernist cinema would be laid. Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov are the two central film practitioners who formulated 136 Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism the key theories of political cinema that are still influential in the present. Eisenstein, whose background was in theater, argued for a dramatic revolutionary cinema and his influence is evident on the majority of Marxist-modernist auteurs—including those who opposed the aesthetic of montage—such as Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, Straub/Huillet, Miklós Jancsó, Ousmane Sembène, Glauber Rocha, Theo Angelopoulos, and many more. Vertov, on his part, argued for a radical experimental cinema that does away with the theatrical tradition and his influence can be seen in the works of late Godard, Chris Marker, Thomas Heise, Alexander Kluge, and others. Godard, Kluge, Heise, and Harun Farocki have been equally influenced by both traditions. Eisenstein came from the theater to the cinema and his schooling next to Vsevolod Meyerhold was influential in his formulation of a collective dramaturgy that, not unlike early cinema, relied on the autonomy of the tableau or shot. Meyerhold’s aesthetic of biomechanics, his departure from the theater of the individual dramatic hero, and his manipulation of popular art forms such as the circus, commedia dell’arte, and cabaret had a significant impact on Eisenstein’s theory and practice. Meyerhold’s theater reacted against the dominant naturalist tradition and proposed an episodic aesthetic of attractions that did away with the linear drama, aiming instead to produce meaning out of the power of associations generated by the collision of independent episodes. Commenting on Eisenstein’s cinema he explains, What prompted Eisenstein to divide his subject-matter into a series of attractions, each with a carefully contrived climax? He developed the technique whilst working at the Proletkult Theatre, but it originated when he was working with me in my theatrical laboratory on the Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow. We were looking for a new type of stage, free from anything which might get in the actor’s way. Like myself, Eisenstein needs an arena, a platform, a theatre like Shakespeare’s Globe. When interviewers question me about this stage without a stage which I am building, I simply answer that I want an arena in which we can put on everything from variety turns like Uberbrettl to vast spectacles of Shakespearian dimensions like Pushkin’s Boris Godunov or Oedipus, the King. It will be possible to alternate these productions with gymnastic displays, ballet and folkdancing, because there will be nothing to separate the spectator from the one thing which matters—the performer himself.8 Eisenstein inherited Meyerhold’s suspicion of naturalism and formulated a dialectical theory of representation, which aimed at demonstrating the potential for the construction of a counter-reality. Here the influence of Marx and Engels is obvious, given that both argued that social reality might appear as natural and self-evident because it cannot be understood as the unity of positive and negative forces. One recalls the famous segment in The German Ideology (1845) where Marx and Engels explain how the reproduction of life has a dual character since it appears as a natural process and as a part of a broader web of social relationships. To study the social quality of life suggests that one can understand its changeability. The crucial step for this is to place one’s life within the context of human cooperation and consider how Marx and Cinema 137 the productive forces affect the lives of the individuals: “Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society, hence, that the ‘history of humanity’ must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange.”9 Eisenstein proceeded to achieve this by means of a collective dramaturgy that did away with the dramatic hero and psychological portraiture. In placing the collective as the key protagonist of cinema, he aspired to instill a materialist understanding of history and society to the audience. In good dialectical fashion, Eisenstein’s cinema brings together pathos and reason, so as to show in a Marxist way the connection between intellectual thinking and the practical overthrow of the conditions of alienation. The filmmaker solicits the audience’s emotional and rational responses by means of a synecdochic representational style that relies on the collision of episodes rather than on their smooth succession. The fragment is central to Eisenstein’s understanding of a dialectical representational approach that seeks to connect the particular with the general. Peter Wollen explains that one of the essays that had a tremendous impact on the Soviet director’s thinking was Lenin’s “On the Question of Dialectics.” One sentence is said to have struck Eisenstein forcefully: “In any proposition we can (and must) disclose as in a ‘nucleus’ (‘cell’) the germs of all the elements of dialectics.” Eisenstein was able to link this to his concept of the shot as the cell, or later, as his views grew more complex, “the molecule of montage.”10 This is clarified in Eisenstein’s seminal essay, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” where he distinguishes his own modus operandi from that of other Soviet filmmakers, such as Vsevolod Pudovkin, for whom montage serves mainly as a descriptive principle. Eisenstein instead proposes a constructive understanding of montage produced by the juxtaposition “of independent shots—shots even opposite to one another.”11 It is by means of such a collision that a narrative advances through the conflict of contradictory fragments that operate as clashing theses and antitheses. One needs to recall here the famous passage from the Старое и новое (The General Line, 1929), when the farmers test for the first time the cream separator that helps them make butter. The sequence defies verisimilitude by being intentionally prolonged. The camera registers a series of close-ups of the farmers looking at the machine in disbelief. The faces are captured from a variety of angles while visuals of the separator are also interjected. This rapid succession of visuals produces an emotional impact as well as a sense of suspense. Interpolated intertitles ask questions whether this is progress or deception. Eventually the camera cuts to the separator capturing its tubes, followed by low-angle shots of the tubes and a high-angle one of the separator’s wheel juxtaposed to the ecstatic faces of Marfa and the Party representative. A series of visuals of the milk exploding in the air like a water fountain—interrupted again by reaction shots of the farmers—succeed one another and the sequence culminates with the intertitles announcing that after this successful demonstration the numbers of the cooperative were increased. The sequence here operates as the “cum-shot” of socialist cinema since it combines an orgiastic aesthetic of visual excess with a rational conclusion regarding the benefits of collective organization and labor. The sexual connotations of the scene are visibly manifested when the separator starts spilling milk on Marfa’s hands and her face 138 Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism followed by visuals of the milk exploding skyward. This, however, should not be confused as pornographic hideousness especially in light of the fact that it is Marfa who has convinced the other farmers to invest in new technologies that can maximize production and render their labor more effective. The sexual connotations of this passage may well be seen as the celebration of a new life as showcased by the culmination of the sequence that privileges the rational conclusion, namely, the success of the cooperative experiment and its endorsement as an index of progress and development against religious prejudice and individualist farming production. This combination of affective engagement and rational deductions is a manifestation of Eisenstein’s desire to make the Marxist theory of knowledge palpable and graspable by the masses and not just an abstract theoretical exercise in style that obfuscates the practical effects of the dialectical worldview. What this passage of the film clearly articulates is the shift from a semi-feudalistic mode of agricultural production and labor to a socialist mode of industrial production founded upon the principles of collaboration and collective organization. The dialectic here is in service of demonstrating how cooperative labor is the crucial step for the shift from a semi-feudalistic and patriarchal reality of underdevelopment and prejudice, to a new world of development and socialist rationality. Unlike his previous classics, The General Line includes a key narrative agent, Marfa, who is the one to start the cooperative. Yet, in line with his previous works such as Стачка (Strike, 1924), Броненόсец «Потёмкин» (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), and Октябрь (Десять дней, которые потрясли мир) (October, 1928), Eisenstein makes use of typage, a strategy that he also got to learn while working with Meyerhold whose typage aesthetic was influenced by commedia dell’arte. According to Eisenstein, typage is not to be understood solely as the director’s approach to the characters, that is, the avoidance of psychological portrayal, and the schematic depiction of them based on their social positions, but “a specific approach to the events embraced by the content of the film.”12 Typage thus extends beyond the depiction of characters to the ways actions are represented as the collision between antithetical social forces and not as isolated conflicts among autonomous individuals whose acts seem to be devoid of social influence, as it was the case with naturalist theater against which Meyerhold reacted. Eisenstein admitted that typage is “rooted in theater,” but cinema had the potential to push this further thanks to its technological advancement.13 Evident in Eisenstein’s representational strategy is an awareness of the Marxist concept of realism summarized in his and Engels’ view of the individual as “the ensemble of the social relations” that contradicts the liberal understanding of the individual as a free and autonomous subject who is free to make their choices and achieve their goals irrespective of the social conditions.14 The radical aspect of Eisenstein’s typage and montage aesthetic is precisely this capacity to dramatize social circumstances and conditions, showing clearly the constraints placed upon individuals by repressive regimes, but also the collective’s capacity to change these circumstances on the condition that they understand them. The celebrated sequence in Strike where the workers’ massacre is juxtaposed through parallel editing to the slaughtering of a cow, as well as the renowned “For God and Country” sequence in October, and the Marx and Cinema 139 Odessa steps passage in Potemkin are emblematic in this respect. The first and the third put forward the brutality of the Czarist regime by means of montage effects that combine logos and pathos; the second shows the connection between religion and authoritarian rule by juxtaposing figurines from the Asian, Hindu, and Pacific traditions that culminate in the reconstruction of the statue of the Czar. The collision of thesis and antithesis here reveals how religious and patriotic rhetoric seek to divert the proletarian’s attention from the social conditions of their oppression. Consequently, Eisenstein’s major intervention was the theorization of a dialectical cinema, which radically challenged the individualistic dramaturgy motivated by the nineteenthcentury theatrical traditions; he introduced a dramaturgy that viewed characters as the products of processes taking place on a mass scale, and pointed to their capacity to act collectively to change them. It is fair to suggest that he is the Godfather of Marxist narrative cinema because he managed to dialectize representation by means of an expressive mise-en-scène that enabled the coexistence of entertainment and political critique. Nevertheless, Eisenstein’s background was in theater and his cinema was committed to storytelling. His stories followed the Russian formalist imperative of de-automatizing perception so as to enable the audience in a Shklovskian way not to recognize things but to see them differently and identify the social processes behind the narrated events. This is the reason why it would be interesting to envisage his unrealized film on Marx’s Capital (1867). The film, which did not materialize, can be imagined as a series of dialectical constellations, where the key protagonists would be neither the proletariat nor its exploiters. He envisaged it as an antiheroic film whose dramatis personae would be the workers’ production of surplus value and all the processes that perpetuate the capitalist mode of production. Again, the dialectical method occupies a privileged position in his plan for the film: In those “great days” I noted on a scrap of paper that in the new cinema, the established place of eternal themes (academic themes of LOVE AND DUTY, FATHERS AND SONS, TRIUMPH OF VIRTUES, etc.) will be taken by a series of pictures on the subjects of “basic methods.” The content of CAPITAL (its aim) is now formulated: to teach the worker to think dialectically. To show the method of dialectics. This would mean (roughly) five nonfigurative chapters. (Or six, seven, etc.) Dialectical analysis of historical events. Dialectics in scientific problems. Dialectics of class struggle (the last chapter). “An analysis of a centimeter of silk stocking.” (About the silk stocking as such, Grisha I copied out from somewhere— the silk manufacturers’ fight for the short skirt. I added the competitors—the textile masters’ for long skirts. Morality. Clergy, etc.) Still very complicated to think “somehow” in “extra-thematic” imagery. But no problem . . . a viendra!15 Eisenstein repeatedly states that the film should rely on the power of associations and start from the exploration of banal situations to move to more concrete ones, bringing as a model example James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Eisenstein intended to leave behind his theatrical influences without abandoning his commitment to the 140 Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism Marxist dialectic. “There are,” he states in his notes, “endlessly possible themes for filming in CAPITAL (‘price,’ ‘income,’ ‘rent’)—for us, the theme is Marx’s method.”16 Far from being outmoded or obsolete, Eisenstein’s desire to dramatize Marx’s Capital is pertinent in the present, at a time in history that finance capitalism obfuscates more and more its own modus operandi, while the shift to an immaterial labor in the capitalist West has obscured the fact that this transition is the product of the West’s reliance on material labor outsourced to the global south and industrial semiperipheries. In these terms, Eisenstein’s vision is as relevant today as when it was formulated in the years after 1917. Unlike Eisenstein’s desire to dialectize representation by pushing further experiments initiated in theater, Dziga Vertov epitomizes a filmmaking tradition which aspired to make use of the lessons of the dialectic through a type of cinema that was non-reliant on narrative and theatrical conventions. For Vertov, the collision of independent sequences did not aspire to produce predetermined effects and responses. Although his cinema was very much anchored in the principles of the dialectic, Vertov aimed to do away with cinema’s roots in theater and argued for an experimental film style whose dialectical effects would not be foreordained. It is a cinema committed to the Marxist theory of knowledge as manifest through the dialectic but whose ultimate aim is the use of the dialectic as a means of research. It is, as Annette Michelson aptly calls it, a cinema “of epistemological inquiry.”17 Vertov’s work is also committed to a paratactic style, yet the difference is that parataxis becomes anti-narrative and does not serve storytelling. So his modus operandi is grounded in cinema’s capacity to capture a material reality, but in a way that discontinuity instead of continuity is foregrounded. For Vertov, this process of recording fragments of reality without describing it is the model for the cinema of the future, a cinema that valorized the superiority of machinic (Kino-eye) over human agency (the human-eye) so as to reveal processes not captured by the human. Consider, for instance, his argument that The history of Kino-Eye has been a relentless struggle to modify the course of world cinema, to place in cinema production a new emphasis of the “unplayed” film over the play-film, to substitute the document for mise-en-scene, to break out of the proscenium of the theatre and to enter the arena of life itself.18 Literary dramaturgy erects an impediment to radical cinema’s desire to identify the connection between visual materials and social phenomena. As he says in an essay written in 1929, “the cinema’s chief function is the recording of documents, of facts, the recording of life, the historical processes.”19 The refusal to accommodate preordained narrative effects by means of dramaturgy is linked with his belief that dramaturgy perpetuates the bourgeois understanding of art as individual creativity. Documenting processes without commenting on them invites the audience to discover things and phenomena not visible in everyday life. Vertov’s faith is in the power of the camera to engage with material reality and not in the director’s individuality and creativity. The abandonment of authorship can liberate the medium from the remnants of the Marx and Cinema 141 bourgeois aesthetics “the poser-actor, fairy-tale script, those costly toys-sets, and the director high-priest.”20 Underpinning Vertov’s aesthetic is the idea that the camera should not reproduce actions but observe things objectively so as to enable the audience to discover the social processes behind the events. This is the reason why he stressed the role of the cameramen rather than the director. In doing so, he aimed at placing art within the sphere of material production. The cameramen and the filmmaker are to be understood as people who do not create but construct materials from their encounter with the world. This is the reason why he vehemently argued in favor of “filming life unawares” so that the people recorded by the camera would not be aware of its presence and would be captured performing their everyday undertakings unaffectedly.21 This is certainly the case in Человек с кино-аппаратом (Man With a Movie Camera, 1929), where he experimented with the medium to simultaneously produce cinematic and class consciousness through the camera’s encounter with the material reality of the new world of the time. Attending to the details of everyday life such as births, marriages, divorces, the working routine, and homelessness, the film is paradigmatic of Vertov’s understanding of constructive montage, where the dialectic between observing and recording is not necessarily synthetic. In this film, the audience is not encouraged to reconfirm a preexisting conclusion, but to form their own. As Michelson argues, the film “through the systematic subversion of the certitudes of illusion” proposes an understanding of the filmmaker as an “epistemologist.”22 Vertov’s legacy in experimental political cinema and documentary has been tremendous especially when considering the work of late Godard, Alexander Kluge, Chris Marker, and Thomas Heise. He was a passionate advocate of artistic experimentation against the platitudes of Socialist Realism and a firm believer that one should not flatter but challenge the audience. As he suggested in an article published in 1923, One of the chief accusations leveled at us is that we are not intelligible to the masses. Even if one allows that some of our work is difficult to understand, does that mean we should not undertake serious exploratory work at all? If the masses need light propaganda pamphlets, does that mean they don’t need the serious articles of Engels, Lenin? . . . The LENIN of Russian cinema may appear in your midst today, but you will not allow him to work because the results of his production will seem new and incomprehensible.23 Consistent with the Marxist project of radicalized enlightenment, Vertov’s work aspired to elevate the masses and teach them a new method of thinking. At the same time, one needs to acknowledge that with a few exceptions—Man with a Movie Camera is an obvious one—many of his films failed to promote the cinematic vision articulated in his manifestos and writings. Films like Шагай, Совет! (Stride Soviet, 1926) and Энтузиазм: Симфония Донбасса (Enthusiasm, 1930) produced undialectical results that did not comply with the filmmaker’s desire to observe reality without describing it. The first, for example, shows through the use of parallel editing the progress of the 142 Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism Soviet Union following the end of the civil war, so as to affirm the superiority of the present over the past. The dialectic here is devoid of complexity. Equally problematic is the reproduction of the Stalinist mottos of the five-year plan in Enthusiasm that deprive the film of any dialectical complexity especially in its depiction of labor at the time. Even key aspects of his aesthetic, such as filming life unawares, are visibly absent since the workers in the film seem to be very conscious of the camera’s presence; it is fair to suggest that the filming approach is not one of construction, but of reproduction, possibly a product of the pressures artists faced during the Stalinist years.24 One also needs to point out how many of his aesthetic approaches can be easily assimilated by the market, especially in the current reality of image saturation. To this, one should add that excessive abstraction can lead to indifference rather than political enlightenment. On these grounds, Viktor Shklovsky was one of the first to call Vertov’s project into question: Cine-eye and the whole “kinoki” movement do not want to understand the essence of cinema. Their eyes are placed unnaturally far from their brains. They don’t understand that cinema is the most abstract of all arts, close in its essence to certain mathematical devices. Cinema needs action and meaningful movement the way literature needs words, the way a painting needs semantic meaning. Without it, the spectator becomes disoriented; his view loses direction. In painting, shadows are a convention, but they can only be replaced by another convention. Cinema needs to accumulate conventions, they’ll work the way case endings work in language. The primary material of cinema is not the object, but a particular way of filming it.25 Similarly, Eisenstein famously suggested that “I don’t believe in kino-eye, I believe in kino-fist” although he later praised Vertov for having invented “musical rhythm in cinema.”26 These criticisms cannot be easily dismissed, especially if the Marxist utopian dream is to use cinema as a public sphere that can change collective perception by means of logical and emotional persuasion. At the same time, Vertov’s writings prefigure Godard’s argument that artistic and theoretical experimentation can have equal importance as the class struggle itself and Vertov was undoubtedly one of the film practitioners who broke ground in this respect. It will be worth recalling that modernist art negates the old so as to affirm the singularity of the present and the urgency to place art within the context of material production. This desire to simultaneously negate the old and construct something new links modernism with a manifesto culture initiated by Marx and Engels. Martin Puchner has described the Communist Manifesto’s (1848) influence on avant-garde manifestos of the twentieth century. He argues that political modernism and the avant-garde absorb the style and the form of the Manifesto and its combination of aphoristic, political, and poetic modes of expression. This is verified not only by the furious reproduction of manifestos on the part of modernism and the avant-garde but also by the eccentric styles of these manifestos and their longing for intervening in what they consider a moment of crisis. As Puchner says, “the avant-garde manifesto is Marx and Cinema 143 unthinkable without the genre-producing force of Marx and Engels’ text, its translations and adaptations. The emergence and breathtaking proliferation of art manifestos rival the proliferation of the Manifesto itself.”27 The polemical force that characterizes modernist literary and artistic manifestos is also evident in the manifestos of politically invested modernist cinema. The influence of the Manifesto on these is an area that remains relatively unexplored considering the majority of these texts openly use Marxist terms and rhetoric to envisage the emergence of a new cinema that can shake the cinematic institution and enlighten its audience; the spectators envisaged by these manifestos are like the proletariat of the Manifesto: they are a collective subject under construction whose emergence is envisioned as the dialectical other to the emergence of a new cinema. Eisenstein’s 1925 manifesto “The Method of Making Workers’ Films” is a good case in point. In it, Eisenstein contends the importance of the cinema of attractions as the route to the making of useful and socially engaged films that can instill class consciousness. This manifesto is significant because it clearly sets forth the need to produce films that employ affective stimulation as a means of producing political enlightenment. It also suggests that political cinema must acknowledge the nonhomogeneity of the audience even when it comprises members of the working class, for different types of workers react differently to artistic experiments rendering many of the desired political effects innocuous. One of the examples he brings forward is the famous slaughter sequence in Strike that failed to affect peasants for whom animal slaughter is part of their working routine. The modernist desire to encounter the real in its material complexity is aptly articulated in Cesare Zavattini’s 1953 manifesto of neorealism, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” which proceeds to differentiate the postwar Italian cinema from Hollywood’s illusionism by explaining that whereas the latter turns a blind eye to the complexities of everyday reality, neorealism is concerned with capturing the contradictions of reality as manifested in its raw and unembellished state. Indeed, the characters of neorealism are not the exceptional dramatis personae of commercial cinema but everyday people; this corresponds with Marx and Engels, for whom history is not to be produced by gifted individuals and party leaders, but by the international proletariat.28 Jean-Luc Godard’s 1970 manifesto “What Is to Be Done?” is wholly in keeping with this standpoint. The title is a direct reference to Lenin and the text itself is preoccupied with a desire to explore how making films politically differs from making political films, and yet the text also makes clear that the latter cannot exist without the former. In other words, Godard’s manifesto demonstrates how a militant type of cinema counters its bourgeois past, but is at the same time reliant on it in order to overcome it.29 An analogous approach can be seen in the manifestos of Third Cinema, a film movement that explicitly sees its cinema as a direct response to conditions of underdevelopment in the global south. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino’s 1969 manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World” is a good case in point. Reacting against economic, political, and cultural imperialism, the premise of this argument is that the imposition of conditions of dependency in colonized countries produces 144 Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism an image of cultural inferiority. The structures of economic exploitation on the part of the colonizers obfuscate the conditions of economic and political exploitation of the peripheral countries. Paraphrasing Marx and Engel’s famous formulation in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie creates an image of the world out of its own image, Solanas and Gettino imply that the colonizers produce a reality structured around their own imperialist historical experience. In effect, the task of the Third Cinema filmmakers is to produce a revolutionary cinema that cannot just deconstruct but also destroy the images that neocolonialism has produced of itself and of the colonized people. It is striking here, the rhetoric of construction through destruction that chimes neatly with the modernist and avant-garde manifestos of the twentieth century, and also with the Communist Manifesto to which Solanas and Gettino allude. These parallels have to do with the polemical form of the Third Cinema Manifesto whose ultimate aim is the production of a cinema that radically questions the cinematic institution of the world-system, destroys the cinematic images of colonialism and neocolonialism, and entails a radical critique of the ways capitalism reproduces itself in noncoercive ways through the power of its cinematic institution. It is, therefore, not coincidental that the new cinema proposed is directly linked with the class struggle, anti-colonialism, and dialectical enlightenment as formulated in a direct reference to Marx: “there is no knowledge of a reality as long as that reality is not acted upon, as long as its transformation is not begun on all fronts of struggle.”30 As these and other manifestos suggest, Marx’s influence on filmmakers across the world committed to the modernist project has been indispensable and needs to be rediscovered, rethought, and reexamined. Now that discussions of politics and representation have returned with a vengeance—following scholars’ apolitical dalliance with postmodernist clichés and a kind of identity politics that was more an index of neoliberal fragmentation rather than political critique—the relationship between Marx and modernism merits revisiting and can inspire new ways of thinking about cinema and politics. The skeptics could interject that cinema has now lost its cultural force and that modernism has been deradicalized, becoming part of the institution it once criticized. The truth, however, is that audiovisual representation can only become political on the basis that it addresses a collective audience as opposed to isolated individuals binging on films and series alone on their couches, as is encouraged by the current on-demand culture. Similarly, modernist cinema’s desire to render reality strange was never more pertinent than in the present, when the plethora of audiovisual objects and choices has not led to the development of audiovisual literacy but its opposite. The study of Marxist-modernist cinema can provoke the types of questions that enable us to reconsider the impermanence and changeability not only of the world in which we live but also of the type of cinema with which we engage. Notes 1 Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Post-Modernism,” New Left Review 152 (1985): 61. Marx and Cinema 145 2 Adolf Behne, “The Public’s Attitude toward Modern German Literature,” in The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, eds. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan (Berkeley: California University Press, 2016), 393. 3 Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens P. Dutt (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1946), 26. 4 Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2016), 135. 5 Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History, trans. Gloria Custance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 16. 6 Noël Burch, “Porter, or Ambivalence,” Screen, 19.4 (1978): 91–106. 7 Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 2006), 110. 8 Vsévolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. Edward Braun (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 327. 9 Marx, “The German Ideology,” 157. 10 Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), 47. 11 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (London and New York: Harvest Book, 1977), 49. 12 Eisenstein, Film Form, 8. 13 Eisenstein, Film Form, 9. 14 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145. 15 Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital,’” October 2 (1976): 10. 16 Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital,’” 23. 17 Annette Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera,” October 162 (2017): 123. 18 Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Liverpool, London, Prescott: George Allen and Urwin, 1960), 176. 19 Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 101. 20 Vertov, Kino-Eye, 71. 21 Vertov, Kino-Eye, 71. 22 Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist,” 132. 23 Vertov, Kino-Eye, 37–8. 24 Consider for instance Eisenstein’s troubles during Stalinism when he was (undialectically) accused of making films deprived of individual characters by placing too much emphasis on collective actions and processes. 25 Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Shklovsky a Reader, ed. Alexandra Berlina (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 361. 26 Wollen, Readings and Writings, 41. 27 Puchner, Poetry of the Future, 66. 28 Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 126. 29 Jean-Luc Godard, “What Is to Be Done?” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, 169–70. 30 Godard, “What Is to Be Done?” 241.