Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures ed. by Scott MacKenzie (review)

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is a strikingly massive and inclusive anthology of film manifestos that is notable for its global comprehensiveness and sheer quantity of surprises. The collection features 175 texts—the Table of Contents alone is 15 pages—divided smartly into eleven sections that encompass categories both expected ("The Avant-Garde(s)," "Third cinemas, Colonialism, Decolonization, and Postcolonialism") and surprising ("Militating Hollywood," "Archives, Museums, Festivals, and Cinematheques"). It is the first anthology on the subject of the manifesto, and will be the definitive English-language text for years to come—both for incorporating the canon of film manifestos and for expanding and redefining the category.

The anthology collects standard film manifestos like Dziga Vertov's "WE: Variant of a Manifesto;" François Truffaut's "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema;" texts by Surrealists and Lettrists; the crucial Third Cinema manifestos by Rocha, Espinosa, and Solanas & Getino; and the Dogma 95 manifesto (which MacKenzie argues has revived the film manifesto over the last two decades). These manifestos are contextualized not only in the economical and helpful annotations that accompany each text (along with publication information crucial for understanding the text's historical and social provenance), but also in the introductory commentaries that MacKenzie provides for each of the thematic sections. In addition to collecting standard manifestos, MacKenzie also makes a strong case for recognizing how many canonical film theory texts were originally manifesto-like, or at least polemical, in intention and impact. Thus, familiar essays like Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," John Grierson's "First Principles of Documentary," Maya Deren's "A Statement of Principles," Stan Brakhage's "Metaphors on Vision," and Sergei Eisenstein et al.'s "Statement on Sound" are given new life through their placement in the thematic sections, resonating with the lesser known texts therein.

The principal thesis of the volume is that film manifestos, though "often neglected," should be "at the center of film history, politics, and culture," because manifestos are, by their nature, constitutive, literally "calls to action for political and aesthetic changes in the cinema and, equally importantly, the cinema's role in the world." MacKenzie makes his case, not only by demonstrating the manifesto's centrality in the canon of film studies, but also by reframing documents that have heavily impacted film and social history. His favorite example is what he contends is "the most successful film manifesto of all time," Hollywood's Motion Picture Production Code (linked to The Legion of Decency Pledge, also included). The Code was constitutive not only of the moral content of films made under its aegis, but also of the aesthetic of indirection that underlies both Hollywood's ideological power and its occasional internal subversion.

In MacKenzie's introduction, he acknowledges the dominant leftist orientation of most film manifestos, which function as revolutionary calls for freedom and commitment (and the contradictions those twin directives often create) in relation to both aesthetic and political change. Fredric Jameson, Louis Althusser, and Walter Benjamin figure prominently with their impetus to integrate aesthetic and political innovation, often toward explicitly utopian goals. Yet one of the revelations of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is its inclusion of reactionary texts that are extraordinarily illuminating, especially in our current political moment as we suffer the rise of social conservative and neo-liberal regimes. If a savvy political strategy is "Know Your Enemy" (also the title of a US Army training film made during the Vietnam War), then Ayn Rand's gob-smacking "Screen Guide for Americans," Joseph Goebbels's "Creative Film," and Pope Pius XI's "Vigilanti Cura: On Motion Pictures" (another text MacKenzie calls attention to for its massive yet hidden impact on world cinema) make for essential reading, widening the spectrum of the manifesto outside predictable political and aesthetic lines (these texts are mostly found in the "Militating Hollywood" and "States, Dictatorships, The Comintern, and Theocracies" sections of the book).

The real pleasure of the volume lies in reading the many...