Capital and popular cinema

The dollars are coming!

Valentina Vitali

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780719099656
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784997779
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

Popular cinema has mostly been discussed from a 'cult' perspective that celebrates uncritically its 'transgressive' qualities. Capital and popular cinema responds to the need for a more solid academic approach by situating 'low' film genres in their economic and culturally-specific contexts and by exploring the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films, and the films' aesthetics. Through the examination of three different cycles in film production - the Italian giallo of Mario Bava, the Mexican films of Fernando Méndez, and the Hindi horror cinema of the Ramsay Brothers - Capital and popular cinema proposes a comparative approach that accounts for the whole of a national film industry's production ('popular' and 'canonic'), and is applicable to the study of film genres globally.

Based on new research, Capital and popular cinema will be of interest to undergraduate and post-graduate students, researchers and scholars of cult and exploitation cinema, genre cinema, national cinema, film and media theory, and area studies.

1

The time of popular cinema

For 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s. (Hobsbawm 1995: 288)

An important characteristic of academic publications on popular cinema is that, by and large, they discuss films made between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. Occasionally, earlier pre-World War Two films are considered,¹ but this does not contradict the fact that writing on popular cinema tends to cover the period from the end of the Korean War (1950–3) and the debacles of 1956 (Hungary, Suez, Aden) to the economic crisis of 1973. There are good reasons why these years have been the focus of anthologies on popular cinema. On the one hand, the cut-off date is connected with the mainstreaming in the mid-1970s, within North American cinema, of the generic features and other strategies associated with exploitation cinema (Cook 2000). Hollywood’s adoption of exploitation cinema’s generic menus and modes of distribution from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) onwards makes it difficult for cinema scholars to talk of films made from the second half of the 1970s and after that exploit the sales points associated with popular cinema as ‘popular’. I shall return to this point below. On the other hand, the developments that David Cook, among others, describes as having taken place in Hollywood from the mid-1970s onwards were part of a broader and longer constellation – a period that coincides with the installation of US hegemony after World War Two, not only in a Europe that was then in the process of reconstructing and was caught in the Cold War, but also in parts of Central America and in Japan. It is worth giving some consideration to particular features of this period.

In the second half of the 1950s and in the 1960s, US hegemony was resisted for a variety of reasons by Cuba and other Latin American countries, as well by some Asian nations – for instance, the troubles around the Japanese government’s renewal of the security treaty with the United States in 1952 and, of course, the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The Cold War is a fundamental context for this period, for political and economic reasons.² The direct rivalry between the United States and the USSR impacted greatly on the independence struggles in Africa, as well as on events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. More importantly, the conduct of the Cold War cost the US treasury and those of its European allies high social costs in the form of aid, the development of high-tech weaponry and surveillance strategy, and propaganda. The Marshall Plan is a case in point: as the exemplary instance of Italy showed, it was intended to secure Western Europe for (Conservative, Liberal or Christian Democratic) capitalism in spite of the enormous prestige gained by the political left and the communist parties during World War Two. The Cold War also had significant repercussions on the economies of European and Asian nations. It was the Korean War, the first significant armed conflict of the Cold War, and the wave of speculative buying which it incited, that allowed Germany and Japan to initiate the first phase of economic booms. During the 1950s Germany and Japan emerged as the largest exporters of manufactured goods, primarily at the expense of (and into) the United States, which was at the time caught up in large-scale military spending (Brenner 1998). From the 1960s, as the effects of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe began to be felt, other European nations followed suit, France and Italy especially.

As Eric Hobsbawm put it, the reconstruction of Europe and of Japan with US aid brought about the ‘death of the peasantry’. On the eve of World War Two Britain and Belgium were the only countries in the world where agriculture and fisheries employed less than 20 per cent of the population. Even in the greatest industrial economies, the United States and Germany, the agricultural population still amounted to about 25 per cent. In the most backward European nations, four out of every five inhabitants worked on the land. By the early 1980s no country west of the Iron Curtain, except the Irish Republic, had more than 10 per cent of its population engaged in farming (Hobsbawm 1995: 289–91).³ This shift coincided with hugely increased levels of urbanisation and industrialisation. The latter meant that a much greater share of the world’s working population than before World War Two worked fixed hours and had become entitled, as a result, to leisure time. From the mid-1950s the growth of disposable income for this expanding section of the world’s population brought about a new wave of industrialised culture,⁴ especially in fashion, in the music industry and in the realm of private transport (scooters, cars, etc.). Further, with the demise of the peasantry came the rise of occupations that required secondary and higher education. Before World War Two the combined population of Germany, France and Britain (150 million) contained no more than 150,000 university students (0.1 per cent). By the 1980s students counted in millions across France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Spain and the USSR, not to mention Brazil, India, Mexico, the Philippines and, of course, the United States (Hobsbawm 1995: 295–6). As Hobsbawm recalls, ‘all this was not merely new, but quite sudden … In fact, where families had the choice and the chance, they rushed their children into higher education, because it was by far the best way of winning them a better income, but, above all, higher social status’ (Hobsbawm 1995: 296).

Full industrial employment and a consumer society aimed at a genuine mass market placed most of the working class in northern Europe well above the threshold below which their fathers had lived, when income was spent on basic necessities. Education and greater disposable income changed their horizon and expectations, and this, in turn, required new modalities of social regulation. Before World War Two certainly and, to a large degree, until the early 1960s, religion and religious organisations played a central role in attitudes towards, and regulation of, the socially permissible. As Stuart Hall has written, some of the offences decriminalised by the British legislation of consent – that is, legislation affecting the spheres of sexual and social conduct, and freedom of expression – ‘had, at one time, been ecclesiastical offences, before they were secular ones … Long after their full appropriation into the framework of the secular law, religion continued to exercise a critical influence in giving these offences, proscribed by law, a moral content and gloss’ (Hall 1980: 4). But if in the articulation of moral ideologies and in the regulation of moral practice the force of religion remained ‘vital and continuing’ well into the 1960s, in that decade ‘the more fundamentalist sects, with their hold over the moral ideologies of sections of the “respectable” working class and the old petty bourgeoisie … increasingly stood with their backs to the defences’ (Hall 1980: 6). What took hold, instead, was ‘a “double taxonomy” in the field of moral regulation’ whereby ‘increased regulation by the state and greater intervention in the field of moral conduct’ went hand in hand with the exemption of other areas of conduct from ‘legal regulation – and, so to speak, from the gaze of public morality’. Such areas ‘shifted to a different domain, to be regulated by a different modality of control: that of the freely contracting private individuals’ (Hall 1980: 17–18):

The field of moral conduct was not dismantled or overthrown, but it was dislocated, rearranged: it received a new inflection. The pivot of this re-articulation was the public–private distinction. Around this couple, new modalities of regulation were made effective; a new balance was fixed between them. On the one hand lies the modality of ‘public morality’, which ‘keeps society clean’: a discourse whose key interpellation is the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ … On the other hand lies the modality of ‘private morality’, whose key interpellative structure is ‘economic man’, whose practical foundations rest on the exchange in private between equivalences. This modality is more individual – possessively individualist – and more ‘modern’. It is modern bourgeois man, market man. (Hall 1980: 19–20)

It is at this point that cinema emerged in Britain (and a few other European nations) as a terrain for debates about culture and politics, certainly, but above all as a crucial site of contestation, ‘of struggle where the boundaries and forms of these new control mechanisms were being fought for’ (Willemen 1983). The kind of cinema that most anthologies nowadays call popular cinema addressed not simply the 1960s but, more precisely, Hall’s ‘modern bourgeois man, market man’. This is not to say that, when films built on sales points such as nudity began to be made, such an addressee was already in place out there. The claim that so-called popular cinema – unstable genres such as mystery, horror and nudies – began to be made and circulated widely because this was the kind of film ‘that people wanted’ is not only very difficult to substantiate – the problem with such a claim is that it does no more than postpone the question: why did audiences begin to want to see these films? In the 1970s film historians brought this question to bear on their discussions and revaluations of some genres – for instance, the group associated at the time with the journal Screen and their engagement with (essentially Hollywood) melodrama. Some, such as Willemen and Johnston, also tried with Hammer films, but, as we have seen, this was a highly contested position. What matters here, and all that can be ascertained, is that horror and other cheaply produced genre films were made because they generated a profit, often a small one, but a profit all the same.⁵ The investment in, and the profit generated by, this kind of film was small because, until the mid-1950s, this was considered a limited market. Hall’s reference to ‘modern bourgeois man, market man’ as an ‘interpellative structure’ is useful because it implies that, with their address, horror and similar cheaply produced films mediated the ideological environment conducive to the changes in social relations necessary for sections of the ‘respectable working class and the old petty bourgeoisie’ to claim entitlement to areas of experience until then under the scrutiny of legal regulation and public morality. Risqué material was of course not a novelty, in cinema or in any other cultural practice. The 1940s ‘problem films’ and melodramas of Gainsborough Pictures are exemplary instances here. It is not simply that, for all their (1940s) sexiness, in most of them good ultimately triumphs over evil. Rather, although very successful at the box office, films such as The Wicked Lady (Lesley Arliss, 1945) were highly disliked by the critics, who regarded them as ‘inferior films … undeserving of the popular success they have won’ (Powell 1947). British producer and filmmaker Herbert Wilcox even called on producers to make ‘what one might call open pictures, unclouded pictures. We do not want sadism, abnormality and psychoanalysis. That sort of thing is no good for the average audience – they do not understand it and in most cases do not want to understand it’ (quoted in Aspinall and Murphy 1983: 6, 74). What was new from the mid-1950s was that larger sections of the population than before – Wilcox’s ‘average audience’ – came to be deemed entitled to be exposed to representations of situations that, until the end of World War Two, were considered safe only in the hands of the ‘cultured classes’.⁶

Films built on ingredients likely to challenge public morality have been made throughout the history of cinema. For instance, a wave of such films, produced by French company Éclair, swept the US market in the mid-1910s. At the time, sectors within public opinion reacted against it, eventually leading to the ousting of Éclair and other foreign producers from the US market. But, as Richard Abel has shown (1999, 2004), the real trigger to these events was not public opinion. There was a concerted effort within the film industry to mobilise the more fundamentalist sectors of US civil society in order to legitimate ideologically the implementation of a code of industrial practice, the intended effect of which was the ousting of non-US companies from the domestic market and the securing of the US market for US product. If, as Hall correctly noted, in the early 1960s the more fundamentalist sects within public opinion ‘increasingly stood with their backs to the defences’ (Hall 1980: 6), then the question arises: to which economic pressures (interests and power blocs) precisely do we owe the change? What are the factors that made films likely to offend conservative positions a viable economic proposition?

It is again Stuart Hall who points in the right direction when, in the same article quoted at length above, he argued that what was actually at stake with the 1960s reformist legislation was not a conflict between left- and right-wing positions. Rather:

the crucial move in the game was to fix the limits to state intervention, to circumscribe the sphere of operation of the state: to define the state as junior partner in the state–capital alliance, and to shift the dynamic of economic and social life back, not to the sturdy independence of the rentier or small businessman but to the reformed impulses of big, managerialist, corporate capital. (Hall 1980: 36)

A very similar line of argument – which also refutes the customary reading of post-World War Two history in terms of a tension between the political left and the right, however conceived – was advanced by Régis Debray a year before Hall in an article that sought to trace the roots and assess the impact of May 1968:

‘Chaos’? Not at all. The most reasonable of social movements; the sad victory of productivist reason over romantic unreason … Industrialization had to be given a morality not because the poets were clamouring for a new one but because industrialization required it. The old France paid off its arrears to the new; the social, political and cultural backlog all at once. The cheque was a large one. The France of stone and rye, of the apéritif and the institute, of oui papa, oui patron, oui cherie, was ordered out of the way so that the France of software and super-markets, of news and planning, of know-how and brain-storming could show off its viability to the full, home at last. This spring cleaning felt like a liberation and, in effect, it was one … Spontaneously, the tide swamped useless barriers: the dead weight of tradition, the envy of the displaced, the comfort of routine. Look around you, in shop windows or at the television screen. The slogans, the books, the personalities and the ideas of May are ‘going very well’. (Debray 1979: 47–50)

The shift evoked above by Debray has been analysed with greater precision by David Harvey (2005) and Robert Brenner (1998, 2002). Cinema is an industry, and it is only through that level of precision that we can begin to unravel why, at some point and place, films are made that exploit particular generic features rather than others. What follows is based mainly on Harvey and Brenner’s widely accepted accounts. What emerges from both is not only the industrial constellation responsible for the proliferation of cheaply produced films exploiting guaranteed sales points such as nudity and gore, but, above all, a shift in the composition of the capitalist world’s economy. It is that shift which, I argue, was instrumental in the growing visibility of popular cinema in the film studies canon from the 1990s.

The cinema from Keynesianism to neoliberalism

The term ‘embedded liberalism’ is generally used to describe the economic policies that most industrialised countries adopted between the end of World War Two and 1970.⁷ It involved a compromise between two desirable but partially conflicting objectives. The first was to revive free trade. Prior to World War One, international trade formed a large portion of global gross domestic product (GDP), but the classical liberal order that supported it had been damaged by war and by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The second objective was to allow national governments the freedom to provide welfare programmes and to intervene in their economies to, among other things, maintain full employment. This second objective was considered to be incompatible with a full return to the free market system as it had existed in the late nineteenth century. The resulting compromise was embodied in the Bretton Woods system, which was launched at the end of World War Two. The system was ‘liberal’ in the sense that it aimed to set up an open system of international trade in goods and services, facilitated by semi-fixed exchange rates. Yet it also aimed to ‘embed’ market forces into a framework where they could be regulated by national governments, with states able to control international capital flows by means of capital controls. New global multilateral institutions were created to support the new framework, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

During the 1950s and 1960s embedded liberalism delivered high rates of economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries. The system set in place by the United States, which partly depended on the US being prepared to run deficits with the rest of the world and to absorb any excess production within its border, enabled other countries to expand their export markets – first Germany and Japan, then, in the 1960s, France and Italy, but also, unevenly, across Latin America and parts of South-East Asia. In the advanced capitalist countries, redistributive politics, control over the free mobility of capital, expanded public expenditures and welfare state building, active state interventions in the economy, and some degree of planning of development went hand in hand with relatively high rates of growth. A social and moral economy, often supported by a strong sense of national identity, was fostered through the activities of an interventionist state, which controlled the business cycle successfully through the application of Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies (Harvey 2005: 11–12). These were the policies that, throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s, produced the economic boom, socially and economically: the demise of the peasantry, greater industrialisation and urbanisation, disposable income and leisure time to spend it for a larger section of the world’s population, a new wave of industrialisation of culture and, within it, popular cinema.⁸

Hall analyses the shift towards a discourse of ‘permissiveness’ as it played itself out in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: national cinema and unstable genres
• 1 The time of popular cinema
• 2 The exclusion of giallo films from the history of Italian cinema
• 3 Mexico: the cinema of Fernando Méndez
• 4 The Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index