Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson (review)

In October 2016, months after the Brexit referendum, and weeks away from the election of Donald Trump, the British filmmaker Adam Curtis released his latest historical documentary, prophetically titled HyperNormalisation, a nod to how the once unthinkable can quickly become ordinary. In previous films, Curtis explored such topics as the twinned origins of consumer culture and fascism and the shared reliance of Cold War militarism and antidepressants on idealized models of human welfare. In HyperNormalisation, Curtis continues his habit of making sweeping arguments out of compelling historical facts and figures, utilizing archival interview footage of the techno-optimist John Perry Barlow, the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Donald Trump, and many others to suggest that it is possible to construct a world in which things are faked for so long that people begin to accept them as real. Although Curtis traffics in ideas that, in someone else's hands, might lend themselves to conspiracy thinking, his reliance on experts, documentary evidence, and historical nuance makes his films persuasive, even while his associative mode of argumentation retains a conspiratorial air.

In reading Lee Grieveson's impressive tome, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations, I was reminded of Curtis's films, not because I distrust Grieveson's alternative history of the cinema—in which corporations and governments worked together to demolish the democratic potential of cinema and build in its place a communications infrastructure intended to secure and protect a liberal political economy—but because his analysis requires the reader to come to terms with the fact that we may have been looking at film history all wrong. From the publication of his first book, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America, Grieveson has demonstrated a keen sense for the entrepreneurs, social institutions, governments, and other organizations that developed and sustained the cinema.¹ In Policing Cinema, Grieveson uses Michel Foucault's work on biopower as his historical floodlight, revealing municipal censorship in Chicago and New York as being more about social control of the working class than about addressing bourgeois concerns about illicit scenes in film. In his work since, Grieveson has expanded his analytic scope to encompass cinema's ties to military, colonial, and corporate power.²

In this his second book, Grieveson collects his arguments about why it is productive to consider cinema as both an institution like any other, thus robbing it of its privileged status as art, and as an agent in the formation of liberal democracy as we know it. As the title suggests, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations is primarily interested in the relationship between liberalism, the economic theory first popularized by Adam Smith that suggests that the role of the state is to create competitive markets, and the development of the cinema in the early twentieth century. While Grieveson's focus in this book is on the cinema in the United States (a few sections look comparatively at the United Kingdom), Grieveson's arguments, particularly in the second half of the book, are intended to be global in scope, and they shed light on the structure of the media as it exists today.

In general, scholars write books to correct, fill in, or shift our perspective on a given topic, and Cinema and the Wealth of Nations is no exception. More than most, it both argues for the necessity of a new history of the cinema focused on state and corporate power and delivers that history in the form of a single-author monograph. The text contains pocket histories of liberalism and political economy, the League of Nations, financialization, Edward Bernays and propaganda, John Grierson and the establishment of documentary, and countless other topics, some of which are rarely discussed in the field of cinema and media studies or limit their focus to analysis of extant films.

Densely written and, at times, intricately...