Introduction: Marking Political Cinema

This dossier is devoted to political cinema. The concept of “political cinema,” in common with many other concepts used in film studies, is difficult to pinpoint. Following Karl Marx’s observation that all cultural products reflect the conditions of their production, as much material as ideological, and the claim, linked to Ludwig Wittgenstein and poststructuralist thought, that language does not merely mirror the world, but creates it, the common claim today is that “all films are political.”¹ This is because all films, intentionally or not intentionally, either embrace or contradict a given view of the world. Such a position stems from the debate on cinema and ideology raised in the aftermath of the revolutionary events of 1968 by the French journals Cinéthique and Cahiers du cinéma and later involved contributions in English journals, such as Screen and Afterimage, as well as many other publications.

What one could derive from this debate is that pronouncing all films to be political requires making further divisions, using specific criteria. Perhaps the best known was offered by Jean Luc Godard during his “militant period,” when he announced that he does not just want to make “political films,” but to make them “politically.”² In his case, it meant making films in a self-reflexive way, revealing the means of their production and directly engaging with the audience, for example by showing them in factories and during rallies, for the purpose of politicizing the viewers. In this way, Godard followed in the footsteps of such filmmakers as Dziga Vertov and Aleksand Medvedkin and the best-known Marxist writer, Bertolt Brecht.

Godard’s ideas can also be compared to the views of two philosophers of Marxist persuasion, Theodor Adorno and Gilles Deleuze. Adorno, in his essays on what he termed the culture industry, contrasted (albeit on most occasions implicitly) political art with the products of the culture industry. The former attempts to undermine the political and cultural hegemony of the latter, which hides its class character by pleasing a mass audience, providing “something for everyone.” For Adorno, political art is thus always oppositional: it engages in struggle with the dominant views. Moreover, it should be of high quality. Inevitably, as long as it does not win over the world, it is a minor art, not least because its creators cannot use the resources available to the servants of the dominant class.³ When Adorno wrote about hegemony and mass culture, he meant capitalist and especially American hegemony and the mass culture supporting it. However, his diagnosis was largely valid in relation to the system known as “state” or “real” socialism. The cultures of the countries that adopted it, most importantly the Soviet Union, after a short period of producing revolutionary art, were dominated by the socialist culture industry, mirroring the mass products created in the United States, such as American films.

The second thinker, Gilles Deleuze, in his seminal works on art and cinema, Kafka and Cinema 2, also links political art with the concept of the “minor” (voice).⁴ In particular, in his discussion of political cinema he singles out what he labels “modern political cinema,” as represented by Glauber Rocha from Brazil and Ousmane Sembène from Senegal. They are “minor” because they come from outside the Western world and use a minor style, which Deleuze defines by his crucial term “time-image,” which designates a style that breaks with the hegemony of narration and individual authorship.

Drawing on the views of Godard, Adorno, Deleuze, and others who followed in their footsteps, I suggest dividing all political films into conformist or oppositional and marked or unmarked. Conformist films accept the political status quo; oppositional films reject it. Marked political films are willing to reveal to their viewers the “god whom they serve”; unmarked films prefer to hide it. Of course, the labels “oppositional/conformist” and “marked/unmarked” refer to ideal models. The reality of political cinema is always more complex.

It is the oppositional and marked political films that the bulk of viewers regard as political. For the first reason, frequently the term “political” has been specifically used as a synonym...