By ALEXANDRE VANDER VELDEN, JOAO LEONARDO MEDEIROS & JOSE RODRIGUES*
Presentation by the organizers of the recently published collection
Great inventions are almost always surrounded by very human disputes, perhaps too human, about dates, places of origin, and even more so about their creators. This is certainly true for airplanes – our Santos Dumont or the Wright Brothers? –, for photography – the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce, the French-Brazilian Hércules Florence or the Frenchman Louis Jacques Daguerre? –, for cinema, which was nothing more than moving photography, the situation is not much different.
Was a Brazilian the inventor of cinema? José Roberto da Cunha Sales (1840-1903), born in Pernambuco, patented the invention of projecting moving images in 1897, presenting a sequence of scenes of the sea crashing against a pier, lasting less than a second, to justify the claim.[I]
In any case, the hegemonic historical version is that cinema was invented by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, using devices created by Thomas Alva Edison. The mythical public projections of The exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon [The departure of the Lumière factory in Lyon], promoted by the brothers, in December 1895, is considered the birth of cinema, including the charging of tickets. It seems that the seventh art was born with the mark of merchandise.
The revealer of commodity fetishism, Karl Marx, died in 1883, while Friedrich Engels died in August 1895, months before the supposed first public emergence of cinema. Therefore, neither Marx nor Engels went to the movies. But Marxists never stopped going to the darkroom, analyzing cinematographic works, or even making movies, from Sergei Eisenstein to Ken Loach, from Leon Hirszman to Renato Tapajós.
Marx Goes to the Movies: Cultural Materialist Essays on Cinema, volume VIII of the Niep-Marx Collection, brings together a varied set of 11 essays that have in common precisely taking cinematographic works as an object of analysis and/or a support point for analyzing the society that produced them, always using Marxism as a theoretical tool, in fruitful dialogue with other more or less similar perspectives.
It is perhaps worth noting that the current volume of the Niep-Marx collection is not the first to focus on culture. In fact, in 2022, Culture against barbarism, organized by Kênia Miranda and José Rodrigues[ii], which brings together 11 texts that are also quite diverse, on the theater of Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal and Sérgio de Carvalho, the multifaceted work of William Morris, passing through detective mystery literature, new cinema, the relationship between music and commodity form, arriving at a theatrical scene.
The collection that you, the reader, have in your hands, also composed of 11 essays, has no intention of providing an overview of Brazilian Marxist production on cinema, but only of gathering and disseminating some contributions from intellectuals who are members or collaborators of Niep-Marx.
The book Marx goes to the cinema is opened by the essay Brief commentary on Marxism and the history of cinema in Brazil, by Alexandre Vander Velden, which presents an overview of the contributions of authors who, influenced by or in dialogue with dialectical materialism, constructed interpretations for the history of cinema (and the history of culture more broadly) in Brazil. In effect, the text explores the strength of ideas in the 1960s about the “colonial situation” of Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes and its influence among the young “modern Brazilian cinema”.
As the decades passed, research advanced on new objects and methodologies, in important contributions from “university historiography” which refined theoretical and research rigor, while distancing itself from Marxism. Finally, the article addresses the dialogue between materialism and cinema that was constructed in the 20th century based on the few books that articulated these themes, as well as articles in Marxist journals.
“Reading the world precedes reading the word”: education, culture and politics in Leon Hirszman’s Absolute Majority, by Kênia Miranda and Alexandre Vander Velden, chapter 2 of this work, proposes a critical and dialectical reading of the documentary Absolute majority (Leon Hirszman, 1965) in light of its historical time, situating its dialogue with the education and popular culture movements of the early 1960s.
The second film directed by the young communist Leon Hirszman and censored in Brazil, which had recently been overthrown by a business-military coalition, the documentary is alive with a desire for an emancipatory pedagogy and a critical observation of the working and living conditions of rural workers, as well as a didactic and mobilizing desire for the viewer. This filmic and historical reading explores the movements of popular education, culture and the then nascent Cinema Novo, now 60 years old.
The text also addresses works on culture and politics in Brazil in the 1960s that point to “idealism”, “authoritarianism” and the supposed distance of artists and intellectuals from the “popular” in readings that complicate the materiality of cultural production in its relationship with the class struggle.
The third chapter of this collection of essays, “The Double Journey, in the light of Helena Solberg”, written by Nina Tedesco and Thaiz Senna, addresses a burning issue in contemporary debates about the condition of women under the capitalist mode of production and life, from the perspective of Helena Solberg, the longest-serving Brazilian filmmaker in continuous activity. In this chapter, the authors analyze the medium-length film in light of the Theory of Social Reproduction (TSR). It is no coincidence that the double journey, a fundamental concept of TRS, is so central to this documentary – to the point of becoming its title.
It has been said that Brazil is not for amateurs or beginners. The text “Bacurau: in the future, only resistance?”, by Carla Macedo Martins and Ana Lucia de Almeida Soutto Mayor, chapter 4 of Marx goes to the cinema, discusses the Brazilian film Bacurau, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, released in 2019. The modern-archaic binomial and melancholy appear in the work as allegories of our country of dependent capitalism. The essay also discusses figurations around the project of nation, social transformation and the resistance of the popular classes in Brazil in the here and now.
Chapter 5 of our collection, “Cinema and Human Emancipation: Regarding Some Marxist Interpretations of Chaplin”, by Miguel Vedda, is responsible for examining, firstly, a series of interpretations of the cinematographic work and artistic profile of Charles Chaplin carried out by Marxist thinkers and writers (Bela Balász, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertold Brecht, György Lukács).
Secondly, the article proposes to study the critical development of the reflections on Chaplin made by one of the main (Marxist) theorists of cinema, Siegfried Kracauer. The articles of the Frankfurt essayist situate Chaplin's production in relation to popular fairy tales [People's Day] and, on the other hand, to the emergence of a new model of subjectivity, aligned with 20th century Modernity. At the same time, Siegfried Kracauer inquires into the reasons – social, political, but above all aesthetic – for the repercussion that the figure of the vagabond reached in a highly heterogeneous public and on a global level.
“Eisenstein and the memory of the Soviet Revolution in October (1928): between avant-garde art and the nascent Stalinist narrative”, by Marcio Lauria Monteiro, chapter 6 of Marx goes to the cinema, argues that October marks the transition of Soviet cinema itself. Halfway between documentary and fiction, as Eisenstein himself proposed, and between poetry and history, as Rosenstone proposed, October it also fell somewhere between being, on the one hand, a bold piece of avant-garde art, through which Eisenstein attempted to take his aesthetic theories a step further, with “intellectual montage”, and through which he also perpetuated aspects of the memory associated with the early years of the revolution, and being, on the other hand, an instrument of the nascent Stalinist narrative about the Soviet Revolution.
In “Oppenheimer and reification: commentary on Christopher Nolan’s film”, Maurício Vieira Martins, author of chapter 7 of this collection, argues that the category of reification allows for a better visualization of the contradictory nature of the story of Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project, through which the first atomic bombs in history were produced, dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
This category – reification – emphasizes the fact that processes and relationships created by human beings overlap their creators and end up subjugating them. Thus, the internationalization of general intellect that Marx detected in the 19th century – constituted by the accumulation of knowledge of an era – ended up having a lethal effect on humanity. The result, now reified, is something like “His Majesty, the Bomb”, perhaps the most deadly face of capital.
In 1975, immediately after the overthrow of the long-standing Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, a group of filmmakers, film technicians and political activists embarked on the collective task of documenting the masses and the political process that took to the streets of Lisbon. The weapons and the people (1975), a documentary produced by the Cinematographic Activity Workers’ Collective, which emerged in the context of the Carnation Revolution, is the subject of analysis in chapter 8, “Arms and the people: wielding discourse or letting the subjects speak?”, by Adriano Del Duca. Without wishing to spoil the reading, it should be noted that “militant film, in its quest to represent, justify and exalt the political processes with which it identifies, is not exempt from the contradictions of its discourse. It is not possible to traverse the territory of politics unscathed”.
The current crisis of capitalism, which began, roughly speaking, in 2008, is the subject of two texts. In “Groundhog Day: the 2007/2008 financial crisis on the big screen”, chapter 9 of this work, Marcelo Dias Carcanholo and João Leonardo Medeiros discuss the issue by comparing three American productions, which are very skillful in exposing the dirty and irresponsible financial game that triggered the crisis: Capitalism: a love story (2009), by Michael Moore; Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), by Oliver Stone; and Internal Work (2010), by Charles Ferguson.
The main title refers to a famous comedy from 1993, directed by Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, which in no way deals with the crisis of the capitalist mode of production… Or does it? Well, let's not spoil it.
Already in chapter 10 of Marx goes to the cinema, “Lacan with Marx in Wall Street, one day before the end: an analysis of Margin Call from the encounter of Lacanian discourse theory and the critique of Marxian political economy”, José Rodrigues seeks, as the title and subtitle indicate, to analyze the film Margin call: the day before the end. The film, directed and written by JC Chandor, was released in 2011 and fictionally portrays the hours immediately preceding the collapse of Lehman Brothers. This bankruptcy, in 2008, triggered the crisis in which we are still mired. What could this perhaps unusual duo, Marx/Lacan, have to tell us about that early morning?
Closing our collection, João Leonardo Medeiros and Bianca Imbiriba Bonente discuss the sequel to a great film from the 1980s, directed by Ridley Scott, whose protagonist was played by Harrison Ford. The essay on Blade Runner 2049, whose title is “Humans: more capital than capital”, approaches this work as a means to reflect on the (non)existence of forms of “life” endowed with artificial intelligence. The authors characterize the belief in the threat posed by artificial intelligence as a myth and inquire both about its historical roots and its possible relationship with capitalist development.
After reading these chapters, which are briefly presented here, the reader will realize how cinema, when analyzed from the perspective of Marxist categories and philosophy, can help us understand the world of commodities, as well as how it will benefit from the wealth of reflections on society by filmmakers and artists influenced by Marx and his specter. However, as materialists, we must be fair to the current state of affairs and note that “cultural Marxism” – the analysis of the intertwining of “society and culture” based on Marx and Marxisms – is somewhat marginalized both in the hearts and in the battles of ideas in cultural criticism.
Whether in non-specialized public debates, in magazines and newspapers, in academia, or in specialized publications on literature, theater, visual arts, music, and other arts, we hear little about Marxism. Let alone a theory or history of materialist and dialectical cinema in this peripheral country, Brazil. Although almost always based on their specific disciplines, Marxists have not stopped writing about cinema and publishing the most interesting essays and analyses, such as those in this collection.
But let us return to the question that gives the title to this presentation – Did Marx go to the movies? Given the clear long journey that a cultural theory of weight in the public debate, and also in cinematography, that addresses culture and all aspects of social life from the perspective of class struggle and totality – in other words, “cultural Marxism” and dialectical historical materialism –, our conclusion is that the specter of Marx has not only been, but will continue to frequent and make films in the company of generations and generations of Marxists spread throughout the world. Action!
*Alexander Vander Velden is a professor of cinema history at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).
*João Leonardo Medeiros is a professor in the Department of Economics at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).
*Jose Rodrigues is a professor at the School of Education at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).
Reference
Alexandre Vander Velden, João Leonardo Medeiros & José Rodrigues (orgs.). Marx Goes to the Movies: Cultural Materialist Essays on Cinema. New York, New York Times, 2024, 308 pages.https://encurtador.com.br/rX1WX]
Notes
[I] Cf. Roberta NOVIS, Brazilian claims the invention of cinema, In: Folha de S. Paul, 02/01/2005: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq0201200514.htm.
[ii] Kenya MIRANDA, Jose RODRIGUES, Culture against barbarism, São Paulo: Usina Editorial, 2022, volume 7 of the Niep-Marx collection.
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