Marxism and Film Criticism: The Current Situation

146 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW CHUCK KLEINHANS JULIA LESAGE MARXISM AND FILM CRITICISM: THE CURRENT SITUATION Film criticism is notoriously uneven. Marxist film criticism is no exception . In part the erratic development of critical film study by both Marxists and non-Marxists can be explained by a number of unique problems. First, there are many types and forms of and uses for film-from technical and education shorts to feature fictional entertainments, from documentaries to avant-garde experiments-as a result, "film" describes a medium, not a unitary object of study; it is closer to "book" and to "literature." Second, in contrast to writing or painting, filmmaking is almost always an expensive, collaborative effort -more like theatrical performance than dramatic text. Thereby film criticism demands an economic and sociological analysis of production and reception as well as a close study of the work, director, genre and period. The object of study itself is elusive: "film "texts" are altered physically by bad projection, fading color dyes, erratic repairs, and many other difficulties . Individually variant texts are a given. This problem is compounded when a 35 millimeter film is available for study only in the small image size of a 16 millimeter print. In addition, ordinary projection means a limited way of looking at film: until recently very few have been able to work with the expensive editing table facilities crucial for close study. Film is still so new that there are arguments on such fundamental questions as what film is. For example, the basic aim of Christian Metz's widely discussed and debated book, Language and Cinema, is to define cinema and film. In addition, the establishment of a canon for film scholars and critics is itself problematic in a field where the division of mass and high culture is questionable, if not invalid (which is Chaplin?). And the very diversity of film as a medium leaves it open to an inherently interdisciplinary approach since its specialists come from sociology, art history, literature, mass communications , cultural history, technical filmmaking, etc. However, all these "problems" present an immense advantage for Marxists . Relative to the other arts, film provides an open field with no significant tradition to battle, but rather an immense range of texts and approaches and an uncertain canon. Film has an inherently collective mode of production and a relatively close relation to the economic base and to other parts of the social superstructure. It is open to interdisciplinary approaches , and the Marxist critic can communicate with a fairly wide range KLEINHANS/LESAGE 147 of readers without recourse to the academic stylistics of the established disciplines . Marxist film criticism has one great strength: the body of early Soviet films. Both experimental and Marxist, these films give the critic a constant reference point. But such uneven Marxist film criticism as there is has tended to focus on the realist tradition in film as the norm without noticing the ideological biases inherent in realism. (It is only in the late 60's that film's version of Bertolt Brecht and Georg Luckacs' debate over realism began in earnest.) The attraction to realism is partially due to the fact that politically progressive filmmakers, such as those from the French Popular Front, Joris Ivens, the British documentarists, and the Italian neorealists, took as a given that a certain kind of "realist" cinematic narrative and visual continuity was most apt for making films about (and sometimes for) the proletariat. Most seriously, Marxists have overlooked the tradition of agit-prop filmsthose films made to directly contribute to a political struggle. To some extent this neglect can be attributed to the highly topical nature of such films, but the lessons for present radical criticism and film making are frequently missed. At present, Marxist film criticism stands at a partiuclarly important point in relation to Marxist aesthetics and cultural theory. Traditionally, Marxism has tended to either ignore mass art such as film, or to condemn it out of hand for not matching European conceptions of high culture. However, this neglect has also allowed recent Marxist film criticism to rapidly assimilate post-Leninist trends: for example, Walter Benjamin's concept of the industrial production of culture, Bertolt Brecht's critique of...