Marxism

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Marxism

MARXISM AND EARLY CINEMA
EUROPEAN CINEMA BEFORE AND AFTER WORLD WAR II
HOLLYWOOD AND THE LEFT
THE THIRD WORLD
THE 1960s AND AFTER
FURTHER READING

Karl Marx's three-volume study Das Kapital (1867, 1885, 1894), along with the earlier Manifest der kommunistichen Partei (The Communist Manifesto, 1848), which he co-wrote with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), and other works, were important to the nineteenth and twentieth century's numerous class struggles and wars of national liberation. Marx (1818–1883) argued that capitalism, although responsible for technological development and some social achievements, was fundamentally defective in that it was based on profit and human exploitation. Marx believed that capitalism would necessarily become outmoded, although his writings, especially the exhortative Manifesto, expressed the conviction that communism—the public control of the means of production—would occur only through human agency, namely revolution; those who benefit from capitalism would not simply step aside and allow the system to be replaced by a system beneficial for workers, the enormous and most productive class that communism would assist. For Marx, who wanted to develop a scientific understanding of the impact of economic systems on humanity, reformism and acts of charity would do little to transform a fundamentally exploitative system such as capitalism into a more just one such as socialism.

Later Marxists such as Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), Mao Zedong (1893–1976), and Che Guevara (1928–1967) would develop programs of revolutionary action, as would numerous non-Marxists aligned with anticapitalist movements such as anarchism. After Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) established himself as dictator of the Soviet Union following Lenin's death, various Western Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), György Lukács (1885–1971), Louis Althusser (1918–), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) would rethink Marxism relative to the political issues of the twentieth century, often linking Marxism to such movements as Freudianism to bolster Marxism's radical essence and to challenge forms of social injustice beyond economic formulations of base and superstructure. By the mid-twentieth century Marxism had become connected to the defeat of racism and endorsement of gender equality and sexual liberation. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), a member of the Frankfurt School of political and social thought, became important to film theory for his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935–1936), in which he argued that the "aura" of great works become diminished by the process of reproduction. Although this process had a democratizing aspect, it also tended to remove an artwork from its historical-political context. Benjamin followed a solidly Marxist argument that the artwork was very much conjoined to class assumptions.

MARXISM AND EARLY CINEMA

Marxist ideology is anathema to the business-driven film industry of the United States, but its outlook appears in one form or other in a variety of American films. Although the US government and business sector have been adamantly opposed to all forms of socialism, notions of class struggle have appeared in cinema from its inception. Filmmakers partaking of progressive discourse tend in general to appeal to notions of charity and social equality rather than to Marxist revolution. D. W. Griffith's (1875–1948) Intolerance (1916) can be read as one long plea for social justice. One of the epic's highlights is the Jenkins Mill episode, a loose recreation of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, during which Rockefeller financial interests hired National Guardsmen to assault and kill striking workers at a chemical plant in Colorado; this event outraged many, including conservatives such as Griffith. Early film comedy, especially the works of Charles Chaplin (1889–1977), have strong anti-authoritarian and socialist themes, from Chaplin's short farces such as Easy Street (1917), which portray in Dickensian fashion the life of the urban poor, to his feature-length spoof of industrial capitalism, Modern Times (1936).

Post–World War I European cinema, especially that of Germany, showed both the effects of the war and the alienated and helpless condition of people under the German class system. Expressionist horror films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Weine, 1920) conveyed a modernist sense of humanity's twisted, tormented situation under the standing economic order. Fritz Lang's pioneering science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis (1927), with its seminal vision of an ornate city resting atop the underworld city of the workers who maintain it (a notion derived from H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine), would foreground anxieties over the class struggle that had propelled Russia's October 1917 Revolution.

Indeed, the Soviet Union after the October Revolution would produce the key films extolling the virtues of socialism and communism; these films would also become landmark contributions to the development of the cinema. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, saw cinema as "the most important art," a phrase often repeated in histories of film. Lenin thought that cinema's ability to communicate through images had an innately democratizing aspect, one crucial to the Soviet Union's numerous ethnicities and languages. This idea was intuited by the pioneers of the Soviet cinema, including Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970), whose famous "Kuleshov experiment" emphasized the importance of film editing by demonstrating how the interrelationship of images affected the consciousness of the spectator. The Soviet cinema for the decade following the October Revolution was among the most avant-garde in the world and established a place in artistic modernism. The key figure of the Soviet cinema, and a giant of film history, is Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), who fused Marxist dialectics with art movements such as Cubism and Constructivism to produce a challenging, dynamic cinema that served the agitation purposes of the Soviet revolution. His major films, especially Stachka (Strike, 1925), Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), and Oktyabr (Ten Days that Shook the World and October, 1927), broke cleanly with the static melodrama characteristic of early cinema—even the innovative films of Griffith—to create a style based on montage, or cinema built around rapidly cut sequences whose images were charged with symbolism and interacted with each other with remarkable sophistication.

Eisenstein's theory of montage became crucial to the cinema, owing its intellectual basis to Marxist dialectics. In contrast to his colleague Kuleshov, Eisenstein felt that images should "collide" rather than merely be "linked" through editing. Eisenstein applied classical dialectical thinking of thesis opposed by antithesis, leading to synthesis, borrowing from Marx the idea that the standing thesis (problem) of society was capital, its antithesis the worker, synthesis the revolution. Eisenstein translated this into an editing structure wherein the thesis is, for example, images of Czarist troops in the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin, the antithesis shots images of the population. The ultimate synthesis is not revolution, but rather the awakening of the spectator. Clearly Eisenstein's films, even before his famous montage theory was formulated, were focused on agitation (as is evident in Strike, his first major film).

Other important early Soviet directors included Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), whose kino pravda ("film truth") movies inspired the cinema verité movement first in France and then internationally. Vertov sought to change the style of the documentary and the notion of the real as depicted in bourgeois art. His most radical accomplishment was Chelovek s kino-apparatom (The Man With a Movie Camera, 1929), which recorded a day in the life of a Soviet city. What could have been a prosaic film was a radical departure for the documentary, embodying various forms of modernism along with the Marxist aesthetics of theorists such as Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Vertov used split screens, superimpositions, animation, and above all an attempt to incorporate the viewer into the very process of filmmaking by showing us the operation of the camera and including self-reflexive jokes such as an image of the filmmaker floating with his camera over the city. Vertov challenged bourgeois realism as well as conventional notions of perspective inherited from the Renaissance, which Vertov, like other Marxist artists, believed lulled the audience into a sense of self-satisfaction and consolation as it accepted the singular vision of one inspired "genius."

EUROPEAN CINEMA BEFORE AND AFTER WORLD WAR II

Other manifestations of a Marxist cinema in Europe include the work of the Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). His early films Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) and L'Âge d'or (The Golden Age, 1930), made in collaboration with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904–1989), combined a Marxist slap at the bourgeoisie with surrealism's contempt for all social norms. Deeply affected by European fascism, Buñuel, throughout his long career, continued to lambaste bourgeois society with extraordinarily witty satires, the most notable of which include Belle de Jour (1967), Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972), Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974), and Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977).

Surrealism, like many art movements of the post–World War I avant-garde, had a strong if conflicted Marxist orientation. Buñuel and his old schoolmate Dali had a falling out during their collaboration on L'Age d'or: Buñuel, who at the time had strong communist sympathies, meant the film as a deliberate undermining of all bourgeois institutions. Dali, who eventually supported the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco (whose rule ran from 1936 to 1973) and various figures of the European aristocracy, wanted merely to cause a scandal through the use of various scatological and anti-Catholic images. André Breton (1896–1966), the author of the 1946 work Manifestoes of Surrealism and the movement's leading theoretician, visited Trotsky in Mexico during the Bolshevik leader's exile in the late 1930s from the Stalin-controlled Soviet Union. During that visit Breton had a brief association with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and other Mexican avant-garde painters. Breton's concern was to place surrealism as a movement in service of revolutionary action by creating works that would transform bourgeois consciousness. Yet many aspects of Breton were conservative and exclusionary, especially on the subjects of gender and the rendering of sexuality. Breton did not hesitate to "expel" surrealists whose works he deemed effete or gratuitously sexual.

Jean Renoir (1894–1979), perhaps the greatest figure of the French cinema, was a member of the French Communist Party, then a supporter of the Popular Front coalition of various leftist factions. He examined prewar French society from a sophisticated left perspective. His most acclaimed film, La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), offers a class critique in depicting the deceptions and self-deceptions of a marquis, his wife, and their circle of friends, servants, and hangers-on. The film, influenced by Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro (1784), presents a decaying bourgeois civilization in microcosm, showing how the facade and cavalier appetites of this society reflect the dominant assumptions that bring about both the horrors of war and the taken-for-granted forms of repression and denial that are the substance of capitalist life. In the 1930s Renoir directed films regarded by many to be his most self-consciously political, including Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932), about a derelict who disrupts a bourgeois household, and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1936), in which a collectively owned comic book company becomes an allegory of communist society and its internal and external opposition.

The German filmmaker Max Ophuls (1902–1957), who worked in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, is one of the first directors to introduce the ideas of the Marxist playwright and aesthetician Bertolt Brecht to the cinema. Ophuls, like Renoir, took as his subject the examination of bourgeois mores, especially assumptions pertaining to gender relations (which he saw as foundational to economic and all other relations). He used a high degree of camera artifice both to engage the audience and focus it, in the manner of Brecht's theories, on ideas rather than the melodramatic content of his films, from Liebelei (Flirtation, 1933) and La Signora di Tutti (Everybody's Woman, 1934) to La Ronde (Roundabout, 1950), Madame de … (The Earrings of Madame de …, 1953) and Lola Montès (1955), and even his American films. The Reckless Moment (1949) is a deceptively simple but comprehensive analysis of American postwar bourgeois society, especially its impact on the female. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) is one of the cinema's most perceptive meditations on gender relations under patriarchal capitalism, exemplifying the fusion of psychoanalysis and feminism with Marxism in artistic discourse.

Bertolt Brecht, the distinguished Marxist playwright and theorist, was influential on a host of left-oriented filmmakers beyond Ophuls. Brecht's notion of "distanciation," the idea that the illusionist tricks of the filmmaker or theater director should be revealed to the audience so that it might become fully engaged with the assumptions of the author, would influence a generation of artists on various continents. The cleverly anti-bourgeois Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk (1897–1987), especially All that Heaven Allows (1954) and Written on the Wind (1956), show the Brechtian influence on the expatriated German director through his deliberately artificial-looking color and set design. The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) is Brechtian through most of his films in the 1960s and early 1970s, which invite the spectator to interrogate the conventions and codes of representational cinema.

In the postwar period the Italian cinema became noticeable for its strongly progressive, leftist sentiment as Italy became so strong a center of European communism that it was targeted for disruption by the US government. The neorealist movement represented by directors Vittorio De Sica (1902–1974) and Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) (both of whom were Christian and humanist in their orientation—their works were nevertheless embraced by much of the left) became the most influential style of the period, with its focus on the plight of the poor. De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948) is representative. Luchino Visconti (1906–1976), whose career began within the neorealist style, made La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), about the hardships of a Sicilian fisherman and his family, with funds from the Italian Communist Party. Visconti, an aristocrat with Marxist convictions, applied his analysis of class to two early1960s masterpieces, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) and Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). His later films, La Caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) and Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971), focused on the decadence and irredeemable nature of the bourgeoisie. The Damned drew a connection between industrial capitalism and the rise of fascism. Visconti's work was strongly influenced by Lukács, the Marxist literary theorist, who argued against avant-garde modernism, which he saw as metaphysical and obscurantist in nature, and in favor of realism, for the portrayal of class conflict in art. Visconti's "Lukacsian epics" stick close to the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel, with attention to material reality through period detail to portray the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in various states of decline.

Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940) was, until the 1980s, another identifiably political Italian director, whose best-remembered films were very much influenced by the political activity of the 1960s in Europe and the United States. From his first feature, Before the Revolution (1964), his films display nostalgia for the old order simultaneous with its denunciation. The disintegration of macho masculinity in the face of a (potentially) revolutionary Europe was central to Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972), Bertolucci's most controversial film, rated "X" in the United States for its rather explicit sex acts and portrayal of sexual relations. Bertolucci's epic 1900 (1976), a portrayal of the rise of Italian communism and the struggle of the peasantry against the aristocracy, may be his defining political statement, after which he gradually abandoned many of his radical convictions.

Gillo Pontecorvo (b. 1919) is among the most prolific and committed of the Italian Marxist directors of the 1960s, his most stunning film being the Italian-Algerian co-production La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966), a documentary-like recreation of the Algerian revolt against French colonial occupation. A subsequent film, Queimada (Burn!, 1968), which gained brief notoriety in the United States because of Marlon Brando's starring role, is a meditation on imperialism in its colonial and neocolonial phases.

France's most radical filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s is without question Jean-Luc Godard, the central figure of the French New Wave, who combined Brechtian aesthetics with a love of American genre cinema to challenge traditional representational practices and their ideological underpinnings. A writer for the influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard was among the critics who championed a reevaluation of the American cinema. Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) is Godard's Brechtian reflection on the film industry, for which he had both nostalgic sentiment and considerable revulsion. Les Carabiniers (The Carabineers, 1963) is Godard's radical condemnation of warfare and imperialism. His most political, antirealist gesture appeared in Weekend (1967), an apocalyptic agit-prop collage of events suggesting the decline of capitalist society into barbarism. After the events of May 1968, Godard, by then a committed Maoist, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin (b. 1943), formed the Dziga Vertov Group, a loose filmmaker cooperative that rejected all forms of conventional representation and hierarchal film practices. Le Vent d'est (Wind from the East, 1970) was the group's anti-Western, a Maoist parable tied to the genre in part through the presence of Gian Maria Volonte (1933–1994), a leading figure of the Italian Communist Party who made an international reputation as the star of Italian Westerns. Tout va bien (All's Well, 1972) is Godard and Gorin's exploration, done in non-narrative, declamatory style, of events in post-1968 France through a satiric portrayal of a strike in a sausage factory. Although termed Maoist, Tout va bien, like other Godard–Gorin films, owed more to Brecht and the early Soviet avant-garde than the socialist-realist works of Maoist China. The film's companion piece, Letter to Jane (1972), is composed of one still of the radicalized actress Jane Fonda (featured in Tout va bien), her star image and radical posture deconstructed in a voice-over analysis. Since the 1970s, Godard's radical politics have greatly receded, his recent films, such as Notre Musique (Our Music, 2004), concerned with issues of representation and human conflict, but from a humanist rather than Marxist perspective.

A key filmmaker of the 1960s Marxist tradition is Jean-Marie Straub (b. 1933), who worked for much of his career in Germany. With his wife and colleague Danièle Huillet (b. 1936), Straub created a Marxist aesthetic far closer to minimalism and structural-materialist film than the montage aesthetic of Eisenstein and the Soviet avant-garde. In fact, Straub sought to do away with montage altogether along with most forms of representationalism as he made films composed almost exclusively of prolonged static shots so as to engage the spectator with the material phenomenon of the image, as well as with their own experience of watching the screen. Among the more famous Straub–Huillet films are Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968) and Moses und Aron (Moses andAaron, 1975). Straub's films were and are infuriating even to committed radicals because of their extremely slow, nonnarrative style and apparently apolitical content—Godard was upset with The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach for its refusal to engage with the events of the late 1960s, although Straub responded that the film was his contribution to the people of Vietnam in support of their struggle against the United States invasion.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
b. Bologna, Italy, 5 March 1922, d. 2 November 1975

Pier Paolo Pasolini is among the most challenging and important directors of the postwar European Marxist cinema. A prolific poet and essayist, Pasolini was sometimes confusing in his ideological convictions. His open homosexuality and support of the Vatican's views on abortion caused his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party. His belief in a progressive reading of Christianity motivated his reverential, multicultural film about the life of Jesus, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964). Yet his Marxism was caustic, complex but uncompromised.

Accattone (The Scrounger, 1961) is Pasolini's tribute to neorealism, with its grim story of a young homeless man begging for money in an urban slum. Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) updates Sophocles's play with a framing device featuring a young soldier's jealous rivalry with an infant boy, making concrete Freud's ideas about the structures of power within the male group. Teorema (Theorem, 1968) breaks entirely with neorealism in its story—often seen as a radical Shane (1953)—of an angelic young stranger who arrives in a bourgeois household, the mere presence of his androgynous countenance tearing the family to bits, suggesting Pasolini's view of the fragility of heterosexual capitalist life. Porcile (Pigsty, 1969) is a neo-Brechtian film combining a story about a young barbarian in a medieval wasteland with an inter-cut narrative about the machinations of fascist industrialists determining the fate of a perverse son from their palatial neoclassical chateau.

Pasolini's "celebration of life" films, Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971), I Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), and Il Fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974), exemplified his belief, common to postwar Marxism, in fusing sexual liberation to class struggle, as well as his insistence on narrative experimentation. His final film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), is one of the most controversial works in cinema history. The film recreates the four protagonists of the Marquis de Sade's novel as representatives of the church and state under fascism. They stage an orgy at Mussolini's final outpost in northern Italy, during which they subject a group of captured young people to all manner of sexual degradation, torture, and murder. The film has no specific basis in historical events but is Pasolini's meditation on the psychology of the fascist mind. Through this exploration of sexual libertinage, Pasolini questions the relative sexual freedom of the present world and whether any authentic liberation can exist in a society based on consumerism and exploitation.

Pasolini was brutally murdered on a highway in 1975, ostensibly by a gay hustler, although the case remains open as of this writing. His work remains a milestone for radical cinema. With Godard, he set a standard for innovative, critical uses of Marxism in art.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Accattone (The Scrounger, 1961), Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964), Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966), Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), Teorema (Theorem), 1968, Porcile (Pigpen, 1969), Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, 1975)

HOLLYWOOD AND THE LEFT

Marxist and other radical ideologies tended to find their way into the United States cinema following the devastating impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s on American capitalism. Some films embraced a point of view reflecting merely the liberal social policies and outlook of President Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945), whose New Deal defined the social worldview of several generations. Liberalism, designed to co-opt and diffuse a rising tide of Marxist and socialist activity in the United States during the 1930s, appeared in the films of conservative directors, including John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and the various populist films of the less reactionary Frank Capra (1897–1991), such as Meet John Doe (1941) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Films such as Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934) celebrated the collectivist spirit that accompanied phases of the New Deal and seemed to invoke the stylistics of the Soviet cinema.

World War II caused Hollywood to take complex political turns. Because the Soviet Union was allied with the United States in fighting Nazism, the film industry, working with the Office of War Information, made films that burnished Stalin's image and even helped justify his purges of many of the original supporters of the October Revolution. The most famous and rather bizarre example is Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943), about the globetrotting of Ambassador Joseph Davies that becomes a paean to Stalin as ally. After World War II, the Hollywood studios would renounce such films while helping the government condemn various directors, screenwriters, and producers as part of an international communist plot. In the climate of the Cold War, members of the film community were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which aimed to root out suspected communists but also to roll back the pro-union, prosocialist activity of the Great Depression as well as delegitimate Roosevelt's progressive social programs. A "blacklist" was created to purge communists and "fellow travelers" from the cinema. The most notorious phase of this process was the case of the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors including Ring Lardner Jr. (1915–2000), Alvah Bessie (1904–1985), John Howard Lawson (1894–1977), Herbert Biberman (1900–1971), Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976), Albert Maltz (1908–1985), Samuel Ornitz (1890–1957), Edward Dmytrk (1908–1999), Adrian Scott (1912–1973), and Lester Cole (1904–1985), who were sent to prison for refusing to tell HUAC their political sympathies or to "name names" of suspected communists within the industry. Dmytrk and others cooperated with HUAC when released from prison and were therefore allowed to return to work. Others were kept on the blacklist and forced either out of or to the margins of the industry. HUAC activity continued well into the 1950s, gaining new momentum with the activity of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a late-coming opportunist to the anti-left crusade.

By the late 1950s the hold of the Cold War on Hollywood tended to loosen somewhat with the censuring and early death, in 1957, of McCarthy, and the attempt by high-profile stars and producers to break the blacklist. Kirk Douglas hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for his epic Spartacus (1960); at approximately the same time, Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write Exodus (1960). Some of the blacklisted filmmakers worked on low-profile projects that received little distribution in their day, such as Herbert Biberman's Salt of the Earth (1954), with a screenplay by Michael Wilson (1914–1978; also blacklisted—he would write Lawrence of Arabia [1962] but did not gain screen credit for it until years after the film's release), produced by Paul Jarrico (1915–1997), another victim of the witch hunt. Salt of the Earth, which recreates a strike by white and Hispanic mine workers in New Mexico, cannot be termed Marxist since it does not challenge the mine owners' right to control resources; but the film has powerful left sentiments and is rather pioneering in its views of race and gender liberation as necessary to class struggle.

American cinema in the postwar period, though rarely explicitly Marxist, often contained powerful condemnations of the intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of the bourgeois life extolled by 1950s conservatism. Sirk's melodramas are perceptive comments, made by a European émigré observing the scene, on the limits of American middle- and upper-class life, with its social and economic contradictions and forms of repression. The melodrama is, in fact, the filmic site that seems to show, in the context of the 1950s, deep skepticism toward the American ideological program of restoring a sense of normality shattered by the Great Depression. Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955), Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), Bigger than Life (Ray, 1956), Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958), Home from the Hill (Minnelli, 1960), and Strangers When We Meet (Richard Quine, 1960) are all stunning rebukes of American patriarchal bourgeois civilization. Even the Western, Hollywood's traditionally conservative genre, showed the cracks in the postwar ideological facade in films such as High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952) and Man of theWest (Anthony Mann, 1958). Rather like the films of Renoir, Buñuel, and Pasolini, these films and later works of Hollywood seem less involved in offering a revolutionary solution than diagnosing the maladies of life under the capitalist social order.

THE THIRD WORLD

The cinema of Latin America, Asia, and Africa has produced what many critics argue to be the most radical cinema, despite often meager production resources of the overexploited nations interested in participating in cinematic discourse about Western imperialism. Many Third World films of a radical orientation enjoy little if any distribution within the United States; as a consequence, the work of Marxist directors from Latin America or Africa are often lost to all but the most diligent radical scholars. A key example of the problem is Hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1967), by the Argentine director Fernando Solanas (b. 1936), with Octavio Getino (b. 1935) and Santiago Alvarez (1919–1998), one of the most radical condemnations, in agitprop form, of American and European imperialism ever filmed, which has yet to appear in the United States in a serviceable video or DVD version. The Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez is perhaps the most renowned documentarian working in a communist country. His rather modest, often satirical agitprop films, such as LBJ (1968), and the tributes to Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, Hasta la victoria siempre (Until the Victory Always, 1967), and 79 primaveras (79 Springs, 1969), are remarkable works partaking fully of the avant-garde tradition in their satirical montage, their caustic condemnation of imperialism, and their celebration of the international struggle for liberation. Another Cuban filmmaker, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928–1996), offers a sophisticated meditation on liberalism and its hypocritical equivocations in Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968).

Africa's most renowned radical director is perhaps the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (b. 1923), whose films offer sublime, understated challenges to Western imperialism in a career spanning almost forty years. His Emitai (God of Thunder, 1971) is representative of his project of reclaiming African identity as it forces the Western viewer to understand her or his own imagination, and the ways by which this imagination has been projected on Africa. Concerned with the French occupation of Senegal during World War II and a resultant massacre, the film is among the most important postwar challenges by an African filmmaker. Sembene's film Xala (The Curse, 1975) deconstructs the colonialist mindset as internalized by the colonized—as such, Xala is a kind of cinema reflection on the essential thesis of Frantz Fanon's pivotal 1961 study The Wretched of the Earth. Guelwaar (1992) is an especially relevant comment on conflicts between the Muslim and Christian worlds in contemporary Africa, as it foregrounds the ongoing struggle for freedom from colonialism.

In the Middle East, Iran at the beginning of the twenty-first century seems to have the strongest potential for the production of a radical cinema despite its theocratic government. Dariush Mehrjui (b. 1939) appears an heir to Buñuel in such films as Baanoo (The Lady, 1999) and Dayereh mina (The Cycle, 1978). The prolific filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (b. 1940) has enjoyed much acclaim in recent years for his largely humanist films.

THE 1960s AND AFTER

During the Vietnam War, which by the late 1960s brought a major wave of dissent in the United States, the Hollywood cinema tended to portray a society on the verge of disintegration: Arthur Penn's The Chase (1965) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969), and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969) showed sympathy for the youth counterculture of the 1960s. During the 1970s audiences that had witnessed the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal were drawn to disaster films such as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno (1974), whose pleasures resided in watching the destruction of symbols of mainstream society. In the horror genre, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) portrayed the monstrousness of post-Vietnam America. Several films examined the war and its consequences, the most famous of which are The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). In the late 1980s, Oliver Stone (b. 1946) made two films about the war, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), showing the coming-apart of American myth and the social confidence that permitted the war to occur. A common critical view of Marxist film scholars is that few if any Vietnam films examine the role of imperialism and colonialism in shaping war policy.

The Hollywood cinema from the 1960s until the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) tended to offer challenges to the American ideological system that sometimes had obvious Marxist aspects. This was due in part to the collapse of the studio system, the rise of independent cinema, and the American crisis in ideological confidence. The tendencies of this new cinema may be best represented in Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), an epic rethinking of the Western that saw the winning of the West as class struggle. A new, corporatized studio system developed in the 1980s and 1990s, and adversarial cinema saw a gradual demise simultaneous with the public embrace of the status quo following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Still, challenges to the political-economic-social order, sometimes of a limited or compromised nature, occasionally appear in the commercial cinema of the new century, including, among others, the films of Todd Haynes, David O. Russell's Three Kings (1997), and David Fincher's Fight Club (1999).