Film International nr 2

Class Visions: A Film International special issue on Class

by guest editor Daniel Lindvall

In the mid-1890s German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein claimed that class polarisation was soon to become a thing of the past. With the advance of modernity “the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie” were “yielding step by step to democratic institutions” and common interests between classes were already replacing earlier antagonism, proving the basic assumptions of Marxism wrong.1 Bernstein developed his argument at a time when his party was coming out of illegality and was about to take up its place within the political establishment. Ever since, versions of the-end-of-class ideology have continued to dominate the discourse of the social elites. That this is so, despite the overwhelming historical evidence disproving this thesis, is in itself proof of how hegemonic ideology is shaped by ruling class interest.
Today, more than a century after Bernstein introduced his revisionism, decades of class war, waged by the bourgeoisie against the international working class in the name of common interests, have in some cases brought back inequalities comparable to those of the late nineteenth century. Thus Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips fittingly referred to the Reagan years as a new Gilded Era, contending that “[n]o parallel upsurge of riches had been seen since the late nineteenth century, the era of Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers.”2 Some idea of where this wealth has come from can be given by the fact that the real value of the US minimum wage decreased by some forty percent between 1968 and 1996. During roughly the same period, the economy became fifty percent more productive.3
But growing inequality is not just an American problem. Neo-liberal policies are making sure that this trend is truly global, affecting North as well as South, East as well as West. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report of 1999, “the ratio of the income of the richest fifth of the world’s population to that of the poorest fifth had risen from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 60 to 1 in 1990. By 1997 the ratio had risen to 74 to 1.”4 Everywhere poor people, as well as poor nations, are becoming even poorer – at the very best only in relative terms, but often also in absolute terms. As much as ever, people’s life opportunities are regulated by what class they belong to, i e by their objective relation to the forces of production. No area of the production and reproduction of society – including the production of film, television and other audiovisual media – is unaffected by this drive towards concentration of capital and power.
Cinema and television may not, ultimately, be driving forces behind historical development, but it is equally misleading to treat these media as simply reflecting the world. Moving images are an integral, and throughout the last century increasingly important, part of the public discourse that shapes how we understand our reality, and thus important weapons in the class struggle. This is why continuous class analysis of all aspects of film and television culture – contemporary and historical – remains a crucial task. Over the last couple of decades questions of class have consistently had to stand back in favour of questions of gender and ethnicity within that limited space of the academy available to “radicalism.” In his introduction to the 1996 anthology The Hidden Foundation, David James discusses the reasons for this. Among these he points out how “all other identities have been eminently assimilable to the bourgeois academy, allowing female, black, and queer people to live privileged lives as female, black, and queer academics” whilst “such a richly rewarded career as the voice and image of a social identity is not even theoretically possible for a working-class person.” Instead, “the best a person from the working class can hope for is precisely that, to be from the working class.” 5
What is true of the bourgeois academy is equally true of class society as a whole. We may, at least, theoretically imagine a capitalist society treating blacks and whites, men and women, gays and heterosexuals equally (though I’m far from sure that such a society could actually come about). But we can never picture capitalism without the exploitation of the working class. This is indeed the hidden foundation of our global society.

Notes
1Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (1909) quoted in Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World, London: Bookmarks, 1999, p. 392.
2Phillips quoted in Alex Callinicos, Equality, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 3.
3Robert Pollin, “Anatomy of Clintonomics,” New Left Review 3, second series, May/June 2000, pp. 17-46, p. 21.
4Callinicos, Equality, p. 1.
5David E. James, “Introduction: Is There Class in This Text,” David E. James and Rick Berg (eds.), The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 1-25, p. 3.


In this issue

3 Editorial
by Daniel Lindvall, guest editor of Class Visions section

4 Léon Moussinac and the Spectator’s Criticism
What happens when “ordinary moviegoers” becomes film critics? Read Bert Hogenkamp’s essay on an interesting experiment in French Communist daily L’Humanité in the early 1930s.

14 Esther Bubley Invents Noir
Using many illustrations, Paula Rabinowitz suggests that photographer Esther Bubley went far beyond documenting women on the WWII home front.

24 An Impossible Cinema?
In this essay on the Los Angeles Newsreel in the 1960s and 1970s, David James reflects on the possibilities to challenge the ideological hegemony in the mass media.

33 Race, Class, Gender and Television Action
TV-series Martial Law and Vanishing Son becomes case studies for Gina Marchettis study on how Chinese protagonists are used to resolve contradictions in the society whilst remaining outsiders.

44 The Visual Politics of Class
Rarely are any political alternatives visualized on the screens of today, but as Steven J Ross shows us it was radically different at the movies in the early silent era.

Review section

51 Books
Faking It – Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality
I Know Where I’m Going + Whisky Galore! & The Maggie
The New Iranian Cinema. Politics, Representation and Identity

54 Films

About Schmidt
Band of Outsiders + Contempt
Culloden + The War Game
The Man With the Movie Camera

60 The Berlinale 2003
Take One, by Charlotte Sjöholm
Take Two, by Jan Lumholdt

Filmhäftet

Publicerad: 2003-03-31

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