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PART I
Approaches to cinema and politics
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INTRODUCTION
Philip Drake
Film has since its beginnings been political, and the emergence of film and cinema studies can itself be understood as a political project, legitimating film as worthy of scholarship. In arguing that film – both as a technology and cultural form central to the project of modernity – needed to be understood not just in terms of aesthetics but through its articulation with politics and ideology, academic research placed questions of power, identification, and representation at the center of the discipline. Over a century has passed since the release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) – still one of the most controversial films ever made – and the centrality of film to the twentieth century produced early studies such as those by Herbert Blumer and the Payne Fund Studies in the 1930s exploring movies and social conduct, and the culture industry critiques of the Frankfurt School. It also provoked the use of propaganda films during the World Wars, led to the production of films in the 1950s and 1960s that powerfully documented the post-colonial experience across Africa and Latin America, and consolidated the economic and symbolic power of Hollywood as the global popular cinema.
The chapters in this first part set out a range of theoretical frameworks, introducing critical approaches and key concepts that have shaped this history, and that engage with issues of national and global identity, the ongoing impact of advanced capitalism and new technologies, the global distribution of power and economic dominance, the regulatory forces and boundaries which comprise and construct the conditions within which film intersects with politics, and the explanatory force of approaches and modes of analysis to these issues. They raise key questions and overlapping concerns, for instance, over the relationship between market concentration, economic dominance, and plurality, over the cultural importance of cinema and how it might be regulated, over the relationship between film and dominant ideology, and of the need to understand how externalities, such as ecological footprint and unequal conditions of creative labor, create spill-over effects effaced by late capitalist modes of production, with their over-arching emphasis on consumption.
In “The Dialectics of Third Cinema,” Mike Wayne outlines the theoretical and political principles of Third Cinema, paying attention to its exponents in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the radical politics of Third Cinema was crucially fused with an appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of film and from there, of the importance of cultural politics and struggle. Yet he also views Third Cinema as defined as emerging out of a “dialectical” relationship (of influence and critique) with commercial, state and art cinema (so-called First and Second Cinema). In doing so, he suggests that Third cinema – often mixing documentary and fiction – contributes to the struggle for liberation by intervening in consciousness, culture, and identity, engaging with the political in terms of representation, working practices, and as a wider critique of the film industry and of cultural, political, economic, and military forces.
Cultural diagnosis is also an important theme in Toby Miller’s chapter. In “Geopolitics and Cinema” he traces Hollywood’s global influence not only on film form but on understandings of cinema itself, demonstrating an ongoing centrality in a supposedly decentered world, and emphasizing that cultural resistance to it will come from the exercise of citizenship rights rather than the advent of an “Asian century” or “cybertarian” technological freedom. In doing so, Miller outlines what we might consider an ethics of cinema, advocating greater attention to the hidden geopolitics of production and consumption.
Developing this theme, Sean Cubitt’s chapter on “Ecopolitics of Cinema” provides a critique of what neo-classical economics terms “externalities,” those factors not part of idealized models of competitive markets and, as in the case of other kinds of market failure (such as monopoly, oligopoly) requiring intervention or regulation. Cubitt argues that the “toxic soup” of ever increasing entropy, energy use, and alienation from production requires a new eco-cinema to invent new modes of cinematic mediations addressing “free-floating desires, excluded migrants and indigenous peoples, and non-human agents of technology and natural processes.” He reminds us that cinema, together with the technology that provides it, is a material practice, and that non-human as well as human actors need to be included in an expanded sense of the political and in the pursuit of common good.
The analysis of dominant cinema by film studies scholars, as Warren Buckland’s chapter, “The Politics of Form: A Conceptual Introduction to ‘Screen Theory’” outlines, paid close attention to form and the creation of meaning. His chapter focuses on what became known as “Screen Theory,” from the influential British journal published at that time by the British Film Institute and indebted to continental European theory and writing in French film journals such as Cahiers du cinema which, in the 1950s and 1960s, redefined film style and authorship as political issues. Buckland outlines how “Screen theorists” of the 1970s employed Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism to develop a dual agenda: first, to critique the ideology perpetuated by mainstream cinema; and second, to promote a political modernist avant-garde cinema. In using Althusserian concepts to understand ideology, such as interpellation, as well methods of symptomatic reading, such scholars offered a sophisticated analysis of cinema’s ideological work, the cinematic apparatus, and political potential of the “counter cinema.” This analysis was influential not just in the academic development of film studies, but also in British institutions, notably on the early years of Channel 4 television.
Janet Wasko, in her chapter “Revisiting the Political Economy of Film,” presents an overview of the study of the political economy of film, tracing its roots in classical political economy through its application to media and communications. In doing so, she strongly argues for the continued relevance of political economy approaches to understanding media power (what she calls “cultural capitalism”), and continued engagement with the politics of economy/economics. Her discussion also offers a comparison of “new” approaches that study media industries and, she argues, have so far failed to engage with questions of media power whilst misrepresenting political economy as either economistic or top-down. Citing numerous examples of studies engaged with institutions, individuals, processes and conditions of labor – as well as critiques of the regimes that underpin film (such as intellectual property law) – she underlines the continued importance of a political economic approach in critically understanding film and media industries dominated by large commercial enterprises and capitalist markets.
Each chapter in this part unfolds layers of tension and contradiction that characterize the understandings and engagements of film and politics. They collectively offer a range of approaches to re-evaluate the political character of film and media histories, texts, experiences, communities, and institutions. In doing so, they also illuminate the political underpinnings of film and media theories, and shed light on the ways in which these approaches might offer a political means to counter hegemonic, oppressive, or unethical practices through a range of critical or counter-cultural responses. As film has increasingly moved online, and the audio-visual industries have become ever more central to global cultural life, so ways of understanding film and politics continue to evolve. The chapters presented here share a conviction that film, and the understanding of film, is necessarily political. This requires film theory and analysis to rise to the political challenges of the present and future, and not only to develop new scholarly knowledge but also to inform policy and practice, to critique the politics of film but also to aim to change it for the better.
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1
THE DIALECTICS OF THIRD CINEMA
Mike Wayne
Introduction
Third Cinema is an appropriate place to begin an anthology on the intersection of politics and cinema. The term refers to a body of filmmaking practice and a series of manifestoes and essays by the filmmakers themselves that emerged in the 1960s. Territorially, its epicentre was Latin America, although important examples of Third Cinema were also produced in Africa and Asia. This tri-continental context was not of course accidental. For Third Cinema was powerfully marked by the political context of the struggle for decolonization and national liberation from the remnants of European settler colonialism and the even more powerful forces of North American Imperialism. The term ‘Third Cinema’ was coined in 1969 by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino to define, in a non-prescriptive manner, a cinema that was emerging out of this struggle and which other writers/filmmakers had called a Cinema of Hunger (Glauber Rocha), a Revolutionary Cinema (Jorge Sanjinés), an Imperfect Cinema (Julio García Espinosa) and a nationalist, realist, critical and popular cinema (Fernando Birri). For Solanas and Getino, Third Cinema emerges as a critique in theory and practice of First Cinema (mainstream, commercial cinema, both Hollywood and its national imitators around the world) and Second Cinema. Second Cinema is the cinema of institutionalized national culture, the cinema of authorial expressivity, the cinema of the middle class, the cinema of psychological crisis or, in its more outward facing, externally orientated ‘realist’ modes, the cinema of poverty as a great moral question (rather than a question of socio-economic relations), and sometimes the cinema of poverty as aesthetic beauty as in Margot Benacerraf’s gorgeously shot, and for that very reason, problematic, Venezuelan documentary, Araya (1959).
For Solanas and Getino, the prerequisite to imagine and produce a cinema that breaks with the two existing dominant models of cinema, was the Tri-continental movements of the masses that were demanding change:
[T]he revolution does not begin with the taking of political power from imperialism and the bourgeoisie, but rather begins at the moment when the masses sense the need for change and their intellectual vanguards begin to study and carry out this change through activities on different fronts.
(Solanas and Getino 1997: 35, original emphasis)
So cinema contributes to the struggle for liberation by intervening in what turns out to be one of the most important fronts: the front of consciousness, culture and identity. It is this focus in fact that means Third Cinema is not merely the subordination of film to a pre-existing political programme or ideology. Third Cinema is orientated towards the everyday life of the people struggling for change, it is, as the Argentinian director Raymundo Gleyzer, killed by the military after the 1976 coup, put it, a “cinema of the base” (Gutierrez 2004). The aesthetic dimension of Third Cinema is as important as the political. Third Cinema was characterized by Robert Stam as the conjoining of the two avant-gardes: the political and the artistic, a rare coming together indeed (1998). Stam was specifically discussing Solanas and Getino’s film The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and in that context, the artistic vanguard that meets the political is indeed the avant-garde. But the avant-garde is only one specific aesthetic strategy and not all of Third Cinema can be said to draw on the resources of European modernism. The key feature of Third Cinema is that as a politically questioning cinema it is also more than merely an instrumentally political cinema. Some aesthetic dimension – where the medium itself poses questions concerning the role of perception, consciousness and culture in the struggle for change – is as essential to it as an ambition to intervene in the struggle for political change. Birri described the new Latin American cinema in a way that underlines the importance of the aesthetic dimension to Third Cinema and why that aesthetic dimension is itself deeply political. It has, he writes, “a poetics of the transformation of reality … it generates a creative energy … to modify the reality upon which it is projected” (Birri 1997a: 96). This modification may occur because consciousness has been invited to modify its relationship with existing practices, and from that, perhaps, eventually, develop new practices. This aesthetic dimension means that the great Third Cinema films are simultaneously uniquely singular and at the same time saturated with the need to communicate truths about social, political, economic, cultural and military domination.
Third Cinema, as a cinema of liberation must pose this aesthetics and politics of transformation at several different levels. They are:
1 At the level of representation – the films themselves, who is represented and how (textual strategies) and with what tacit intention and effects?
2 At the level of working practices – how a production group works, its internal structures and what scope there is to break down hierarchical modes of working and develop collaborative models. Crucially how does the production group – especially the ‘intellectual vanguards’ as Solanas and Getino call them, relate to the people the film is about? What feedback mechanisms or possibilities of participation exist and how are these balanced against the exigencies to actually produce a ‘finished’ film? Here there is a whole deeply complex set of issues regarding the relationship between middle-class professionals and their relationship with groups who have not had the cultural and educational benefits of their upbringing. Many, although not all of the Third Cineastes came from such middle-class backgrounds, and if Third Cinema is a cinema that involves a break with the traditional institutional home of the middle-class filmmaker-artist – Second Cinema – then that must involve a continual process of critical self-reflection on the part of those filmmakers. Third Cinema filmmakers were indeed aware of this, more so than most Western filmmakers had been hitherto, but the difficulty and complexity of this question may be signposted by just noting that the very concept of ‘vanguards’ that Solanas and Getino invoke above, both artistic and political, has come under intense critique in the last thirty years, first with post-modernism and second with new digital technology facilitating and promoting more spontaneous and apparently more leaderless revolt.
3 At the broader level of the industry within which the working practices of a production operates – what is the relationship of a production to the industry in terms of its structures of production and practices of distribution and reception? Apart from fairly brief moments, such as Soviet cinema in the 1920s and Cuban Cinema in the 1960s and early 1970s, when, on both occasions the energies of a popular revolution were still coursing through the new institutions of cinema set up by the state, Third Cinema has been very largely a de-institutionalized cinema, sometimes even a guerrilla cinema, shot on the run from a state that would like to shoot the filmmakers. This de-institutionalized cinematic practice has brought it into conflict with states and has made its viability vis-à-vis the dominant cinemas of One and Two, highly problematic.
4 At the level of the wider cultural, political, economic and military forces at play – what is the relationship of Third Cinema to the concepts and realities of nation, class, race, gender and imperialism?
The posing of political questions by Third...
