Motion Pictures and Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

From its inception, cinema, as an art form, has been political. The works of George Méliès, who voyages to the moon in Le voyage dans la Lune (1902), and the Lumière brothers, who, in their short films (circa 1895–1900) send their cameramen throughout the world, reveal two varied approaches to cinematic art. Méliès attempted to create a world and then destroyed it through the fictional Selenite aliens.The Lumière brothers seek to document the world in its diversity, using overtly colonial language, and find themselves unexpectedly impressed by the “actuality” of these areas as they already exist. Both Méliès’s creative approach and the Lumière brothers’ documentary show that politics is inherent in cinema.

Early Years

Beyond its artistic dimension, cinema has always required means, capital, and a theater circuit. Bureaucracies, power, ideology, and financial interests thus affect the entire filmmaking process, from production, censorship, and distribution to viewing. Cinema is deeply influenced by questions of race (Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915), technology (Lang, Metropolis, 1927), morality (Buñuel, An Andalusian Dog, 1929; The Golden Age, 1930), fear and alterity (Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1927), capitalism (Chaplin, The Tramp, 1914), war (Gance, J’accuse, 1919), and subversion (Vigo, Zero for Conduct, 1933; L’Atalante, 1934).

Throughout history, cinema has been political and has sustained enormous political pressure. Politics voices itself through cinema (Leni Riefenstahl in Germany, Triumph of the Will, 1934; Olympia, 1938), attacks cinema (the Hollywood blacklist), and attempts to build consensus through cinema (Lenin describing cinema as the most important of the arts). Despite politics’ sway over cinema, many film artists have managed to elude censorship (Vertov, Cinema Eye, 1924; Three Songs about Lenin, 1934; and Eisenstein, Strike, 1925; The Battleship Potemkin, 1925; October, 1928; Alexander Nevsky, 1938; Ivan the Terrible, 1945 [unfinished]) or escape the cinema of a regime. From Italy come Blasetti’s A Walk in the Clouds, 1943; De Sica’s Shoeshine, 1946, and Bicycle Thieves, 1948;Visconti’s Obsession, 1943, and The Earth Trembles, 1948. And from Japan come Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , 1932, and Tokyo Story, 1953; Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth, 1946, and Rashomon, 1950.

After World War II

After World War II (1939–1945), cinema began to represent the unrepresentable—the Holocaust and the horrors of wartime (Resnais, Night and Fog, 1955; Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959; Last

Year In Marienbad, 1961; and Rossellini, Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisà, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948). The link between politics and cinema remains, and cinematic masters continue to be influenced by the tragedy of the postwar world and the cold war, producing graphic and relevant depictions of violence and destruction. Youssef Chahine (Egypt 1926–2008) depicts corruption and war in The Sparrow (1973), society’s transformations in Cairo Station (1958), gender issues in Alexandria . . . Why (1978) and Muslim-Christian relations in Saladin (1963). Haile Gerima (Ethiopia 1946–) uses film in order to interrogate black life and culture in Bush Mama (1976), colonization and resistance in both Sankofa (1993) and Adwa: An African Victory (1999), and politics and violence in his recent film Teza (2008). Jean-Luc Godard (France 1930–) portrays Marxism and revolution in his films La Chinoise (1967) and Weekend End (1967) and colonization and war in his films Le petit soldat (1960), Les carabiniers (1963), and Notre musique (2004). Elia Suleiman (Palestine 1960–) engages the very political issue of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation in Divine Intervention (2002) and the history of the Arab-Israel conflict in The Time That Remains (2009).

Dialogue Between Politics And Cinema

A filmmaker’s subtle challenge of the political conditions of a society and overt political attack on current values reveal a constant dialogue between politics and cinema. Cinema expresses resistance and revolution, directly or indirectly, through suggestion (Angelopoulos, Bertolucci), through more direct political discourse (Pontecorvo, Spike Lee), or through poetic narrative (Makhmalbaf, Straub-Huillet). In its capacity to expand, condense, or stop time; distort perspectives and alter distances; transform appearances; and create and destroy realities, cinema collapses art and politics. In The Social History of Art, art historian Arnold Hauser describes the essence of cinema as “the intermingling of the temporal and spatial forms of the film” (1958, 152).

The fluidity of space and time, the quasi-temporal character of space, and the quasi-spatial character of time characterize cinema as the epitome of subversive art. The inherent political character of cinema is apparent not only in a film’s content, but also in its various subversive forms. For example, Bunuel’s (Spain 1900–1983) Un chien andalou (1929) and Viridiana (1961), Fernando Arrabal’s (Spain 1932–) Viva la muerte (1970), Dziga Vertov’s (USSR 1896–1954) Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Three Songs about Lenin (1934), Orson Welles’s (U.S. 1915–1985) Citizen Kane (1941), Othello (1952), and The Trial (1962) all challenge and revolutionize the language of cinema itself, thereby producing political forms.

Conclusion

In the early twenty-first century, with the advent of cell phone cameras and user-generated video-hosting Web sites, a shift has occurred toward democratizing filmmaking. The big screen has begun to function as an outlet for today’s youth, who record performances on their cell phone cameras and upload them to the Inter net and, therefore, to the world.

Cinema continues to redefine politics. In a communications based economy that blurs the distinction between production and consumption, the very form of movie going—downloading films to cell phones, watching DVDs in cars or on airplanes—is political. Cinema, “the seventh art,” and politics are utterly and completely bound.

Bibliography:

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2008.
Christensen,Terry, and Peter J. Haas. Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Films. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2005.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson Smith. Cambridge: Zone Books, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1:The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Cinema 2:The Time-Image. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Giglio, Ernest. Here’s Looking at You: Hollywood, Film, and Politics. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art. New York: Vintage Books, 1957–1958.
Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Thornham, Sue. ed. Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. New York: Random House, 1974.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London:Verso, 2000.

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