THE HOLLYWOOD LEFT: CINEMATIC ART AND ACTIVISM IN THE 1930s
by Sam Mithani
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION—CRITICAL STUDIES)
December 2007
ABSTRACT
The dissertation re-examines the Thirties in its artistic, cultural and political
specificity to place leftist cultural productions in their complex contexts, particularly the ideological. It concentrates on radical/proletarian fiction and Hollywood leftist cinema as expressions of prevalent “crisis” conditions, such the Great Depression and the New Deal, anti-Semitism, anticommunism, labor unionism, racism in the South, and the rise of fascism/Nazism. It demonstrates how the leftist favored genres in literature (proletarian fiction) and cinema (the social-problem film) underwent transformations in response to the changing national and global conditions, leftist political positions and debates on the inter-relations between art, ideology and culture. Working in the tradition of American social criticism, the Hollywood Left responded productively to the challenges by creating a vibrant cinematic counterdiscourse. Leftists strived to create a “popular Marxism” and a “leftist populism” by interpellating their critique within popular Hollywood genres, albeit subject to the commercial mandate of the studio system and its heavy-handed censorship apparatus. This contentious and creative engagement produced some of the most memorable “critical” works of Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” such as I am a Fugitive
from a Chain Gang, Fury and Dust Be My Destiny. The dissertation critically examines these films, compares them to the mainstream “populist cinema” of Frank Capra, and argues that the Hollywood Left creatively reworked this populism to fashion a far more critical, even abrasive, cinema, giving rise to the foundational works of American film noir. The dissertation also frames leftist cinema as a committed response to the remarkable changes in race, class, gender and ideology taking places within American culture. In particular, the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and Nazism presented grave challenges to democracy. The Hollywood Left led the filmic battle against these forces and produced energetic cinematic propaganda in films like Blockade (1938), Juarez (1939) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), which are the focus of this work. In essence the dissertation calls for a re-evaluation of the “Red Decade” as one of great cultural and artistic renaissance for American culture and the Left rather than one of disappointment, disillusion and disenchantment as has been popularized by conservative critics.
Chapter One: Dissertation premise, method and organization
Chapter Two: The “Red Decade” and its Influence on American
Cinema, Literature and Culture
Chapter Three: A “Marxist” Cinema in Hollywood? Leftist cultural
productions in their Social, Political and Cultural Contexts
Chapter Four: Antifascism, the Hollywood Left and the transformation
of the social-problem film
Chapter Five: Leftist anti-Nazism, Warner Bros. studios and the further
transformation of the social-problem film
Chapter Six: Further research on Leftist studies of the Thirties
To Read the Dissertation
Showing posts with label Radical Cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Radical Cinema. Show all posts
Monday, December 06, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Deidre O'Neill and Mike Wayne: Return to Third Cinema: The Case of Listen to Venezuela
"Return to Third Cinema: The Case of Listen to Venezuela."
by Deidre O'Neill and Mike Wayne
Originally published in Film International 8.1 (2010)
...
The dialectical image
The question that we were confronted with was how do you make a film adequate to a process
as complex, collective and contradictory as a revolution? We felt that many of the dominant
film models were problematic from the point of view of making a revolutionary film.
What mode of consumption a film encourages in the watching audience is a political
question. Audiences are not only learning about a particular topic/content when they
watch a film, there is also a pedagogy involved in how they watch and use the medium of film itself. We wanted our film to be watched in a different way from the dominant models, we wanted to challenge habitual ways of looking and seeing and encourage the audience to critically decode images and sounds. A revolutionary film is one that gives agency back to the audience because it opens a space to question taken-for-granted models and values. We do
not know whether we succeeded in this but that was the intention.
For inspiration we looked to the traditions of radical cinema. Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of revolutionary cinema came out of a context of immense social changes in the first years after the Russian revolution and the overthrow of the centuries-old Tsarist regime. In this context Eisenstein tried to develop a theory of film form that was congruent with a period of social upheaval and change. Eisenstein developed a theory of editing that stressed how editing stirs up and agitates the spectator’s mind, conceiving each cut as a ‘shock’ or stimulus at the level of rhythm, tone, composition and juxtaposition. Eisenstein’s other ambition was to bring together the sensuous/emotional impact of the image with an intellectual and conceptual dimension to expand the spectator’s consciousness of social relations. This required rejecting the linear, continuity editing then becoming dominant in Hollywood.
Eisenstein’s fellow compatriot film-maker Dziga Vertov stressed the space between shots
as the moment where the spectator’s activity sets to work, making sense of the relationships
between the cuts or in the mental ‘space’ between sound and image.
Inspired by left cultural practitioners, the philosopher Walter Benjamin coined the phrase
‘the dialectical image’ to identify a distinctive revolutionary approach to social and historical reality. The dialectical image interrupts naturalized modes of seeing and hearing, it interrupts linear conceptions of history or narrative. The dialectical image has the potential to awaken us to the disjunctures and contradictions of social life. Awareness of disjuncture at the level of film form can begin a process of questioning and decoding representations. The dialectical image tries to enable a cognitive shift in the
viewer; it begins a process that starts with the film but can be applied beyond the film to social relations generally.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Deidre O'Neill and Mike Wayne
Originally published in Film International 8.1 (2010)
...
The dialectical image
The question that we were confronted with was how do you make a film adequate to a process
as complex, collective and contradictory as a revolution? We felt that many of the dominant
film models were problematic from the point of view of making a revolutionary film.
What mode of consumption a film encourages in the watching audience is a political
question. Audiences are not only learning about a particular topic/content when they
watch a film, there is also a pedagogy involved in how they watch and use the medium of film itself. We wanted our film to be watched in a different way from the dominant models, we wanted to challenge habitual ways of looking and seeing and encourage the audience to critically decode images and sounds. A revolutionary film is one that gives agency back to the audience because it opens a space to question taken-for-granted models and values. We do
not know whether we succeeded in this but that was the intention.
For inspiration we looked to the traditions of radical cinema. Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of revolutionary cinema came out of a context of immense social changes in the first years after the Russian revolution and the overthrow of the centuries-old Tsarist regime. In this context Eisenstein tried to develop a theory of film form that was congruent with a period of social upheaval and change. Eisenstein developed a theory of editing that stressed how editing stirs up and agitates the spectator’s mind, conceiving each cut as a ‘shock’ or stimulus at the level of rhythm, tone, composition and juxtaposition. Eisenstein’s other ambition was to bring together the sensuous/emotional impact of the image with an intellectual and conceptual dimension to expand the spectator’s consciousness of social relations. This required rejecting the linear, continuity editing then becoming dominant in Hollywood.
Eisenstein’s fellow compatriot film-maker Dziga Vertov stressed the space between shots
as the moment where the spectator’s activity sets to work, making sense of the relationships
between the cuts or in the mental ‘space’ between sound and image.
Inspired by left cultural practitioners, the philosopher Walter Benjamin coined the phrase
‘the dialectical image’ to identify a distinctive revolutionary approach to social and historical reality. The dialectical image interrupts naturalized modes of seeing and hearing, it interrupts linear conceptions of history or narrative. The dialectical image has the potential to awaken us to the disjunctures and contradictions of social life. Awareness of disjuncture at the level of film form can begin a process of questioning and decoding representations. The dialectical image tries to enable a cognitive shift in the
viewer; it begins a process that starts with the film but can be applied beyond the film to social relations generally.
To Read the Entire Essay
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