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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Marxism and Film Activism: Screening Alternative Worlds ed. by Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015, pp. 290
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2018-03-01
2021-10-06
2018-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Martin Hall
2018/03/01
University of Stirling
2036-461X
30
en
Marxism and Film Activism: Screening Alternative Worlds ed. by Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015, pp. 290
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16589/16932
18
Marxism and Film Activism: Screening Alternative Worlds
ed. by Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen
New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015, pp. 290




   This edited compendium, which comprises eleven essays split chronologically
into two discrete parts, is a useful addition to what is a relatively small field in
contemporary Film Studies: research into how Marxist practice informs types
of film production. While there is ample research (which part one of this books
adds to) into what Alain Badiou terms the ‘short…strongly unified century’1 that
begins with the First World War in 1914 and ends with the termination of the
Cold War in 1989, with the majority of it centring upon the Soviet Cinema of
the 1920s, the various post-war European New Waves and the Latin American
cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, there is little on how Marxism has survived as a
method in film praxis since neoliberalism gained its hegemonic position in the
1990s. Having said this, the title of this book does have the potential to mislead
the reader: while the majority of the chapters do concern activism, they are not
all concerned with Marxism nor informed by a historical materialist approach, be
that of the classical or orthodox type, or indeed of the Gramscian or Althusserian
turns that informed debates in Film and Cultural Studies in the final third of the
last century. This is particularly true of the potentially most needed part of the
book, its second half. In some ways, it would be surprising if they all did, due
to the scarcity of Marxist approaches in the academy from post-structuralism
onwards. That being said, the modes of film activism present here which have
at best a tangential relationship to Marxism, do allow the reader to gain further
understanding into the various directions that left oppositional film has taken in
the last 30 years.
   After an engaging introduction from Ewa Mazierska that presents the reader
with an overview of the rise and part-fall of communism and the various occasions
when it has functioned as a nodal point in both critical theory and film activism,
along with of course a summary of the chapters to come, part one presents five
historical case studies that range from the Kinopoezd (cinema-train) of Aleksandr
Medvedkin to the Third Cinema of South America, with the middle chapters
being devoted to various figures of the French New Wave and its post-’68


1
    Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. by Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 1.

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                 Reviews / Comptes-rendus


incarnations: Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
Huillet. As may be expected, the structure of the book, presenting as it does
what is effectively the high point of the interaction of Marxism and film practice
in its various guises (particularly the excellent chapter on revolutionary politics
and Medvedkin), does rather give part two a lot to live up to, for the simple
reason that the reader is not living in revolutionary Russia, the Paris of May ’68,
nor the tumult of Peronist Argentina. This does mean that the two halves read
very differently, and the relative paucity of Marxist film activism in contemporary
cinema cannot avoid being highlighted. One cannot help but think that the book
would work better as two discrete volumes, with titles reflecting that.
   To return specifically to the chapters concerned with the 1960s and ’70s, the
absence of any discussion of Maoism is of interest, considering the extent to
which the post-’68 left, particularly in France and Germany, embraced it. For
example, Jason Barker has gone so far as to refer to Mao as a ‘master signifier
in French theory of the 1960s and 1970s’2 and it is certainly the case that the
practice of Godard, Straub and Huillet is strongly inflected with Maoism; in
particular the latter couple’s ‘peasant cinema’, which is interrogated in chapter
4 by Manuel Ramos-Martinez, can be usefully seen in this light. His approach
offers much insight into Marx’s view that the peasantry could not represent
itself, but this could be further illuminated via French Maoism’s interest in the
‘investigation’, with its emphasis on resolving the dialectic of practice and theory.
   The contemporary part of the volume is necessarily broad in range, with
chapters concerned with the Marxist concept of value; oppositional cinema
in Palestine; audiences; the Critical Mass movement and its modes of self-
representation and two on video-activism in the UK: one a history; the other on
labour process. Both William Brown’s and Michael Chanan’s contributions are
notable for taking an aspect of Marxian thought and then using it as a method.
They think about value in differing ways: the former to interrogate Deleuze’s
categories of cinema and as a referent in textual analysis; the latter to think
about how his and others’ video blogging practice can be understood within
the framework of Marx’s theory of surplus value. Haim Bresheeth’s discussion
of Palestinian cinema is of interest as it is the only chapter that bridges the two
halves of the book, giving the reader as it does a global contextual history of
cultural resistance in oppositional cinema in order to situate what is contiguous
and what is specific to contemporary Palestinian cinema.
   Steve Presence’s chapter on contemporary video activism in the UK and Lars
Kristensen’s contribution regarding the Critical Mass movement, specifically the
reclaiming of urban streets via mass bicycle rides, can be usefully considered
together, as both concern movements which are not to any great degree Marxist,
as both authors admit. Instead, what the reader is presented with is the myriad
ways in which protest movements have responded to the defeats of the left in the

2
 Jason Barker, ‘Master Signifier: a Brief Geneology of Lacano-Maoism’, Filozofia, 69.9 (2014),
752-764 (p. 752).

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1980s. We have eco-socialism, strands of anarchism and overall, the replacement
of a class analysis via single issue politics; leisure and post-work; sustainability,
and so on. Both chapters highlight the internet’s role in the exhibition and
distribution of oppositional film. Martin Barker’s chapter on audiences and
Marxism stands out in the volume as the only one not to be concerned with an
oppositional cinema, but with the conditions of reception, and how audiences
can respond to mainstream Hollywood cinema collectively in ways that suggest
class-based agency, rather than as the individualised, passive spectator of Lacano-
Althusserianism or the audience vulnerable to ideology common to other Marxian
approaches, such as that of the Frankfurt School and its later proponents.
   As an afterthought, it is worth commenting that this volume was published
in 2015. Since then, the neoliberal consensus has started to unravel in a variety
of ways: the election of Trump; the rise of the far right and differing populisms
in various parts of Europe; the defeat of Syriza in Greece; the continued
Pasokification of the European centre left, with the notable exception of the
British Labour Party, which has seen a socialist left rise within it; Brexit and the
success of Eurosceptic parties, of both left and right. With all that in mind, it is
tempting to wonder what a second volume of this book might look like in a few
years’ time.

                                                [Martin Hall, University of Stirling]




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