copyright 2022, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Jump Cut, No. 61, fall 2022

Whatever happened to Marxist film theory?

review by Matthew Ellis

Mike Wayne, Marxism Goes to the Movies (New York, Routledge: 2000. $44.95, paper; $40.45, e-book. ISBN 9781138677876. 228 Pages

Anna Kornbluh, Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club. New York, Bloomsbury: 2019. $20.65, paper; $16.52, e-book. ISBN 9781501347306.

By now it is all but passé to note there has been something like a return to Marx in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. New periodicals with an explicitly socialist editorial line have popped up on either side of the Atlantic, staffed by Millennials saddled with student loan debt and a general antipathy towards the promises of the End of History capitalism they were born into. Anti-capitalist social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter have emerged alongside the surprisingly popular electoral campaigns of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, all of which were described in the bourgeois press as either disorganized tantrums or orchestrated plans to roll out the guillotines depending on how best to stop them at any given moment.[1] [open endnotes in new window] During this time, the currency of many social media networks began to revolve around popularized sentiments straight out of Marx’s Grundrisse, or in a particularly Twitterfied form, memes imagining a “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” culled from Marxist science fiction literature and the work of Aaron Bastani.[2] There seems to be a real growing dissatisfaction with the status quo on behalf of a generation of young leftists without a living memory of the Cold War—a break from what Mark Fisher saw as a “capitalist realism” organizing the entire horizon of the thinkable in a generation who had known no other alternative.[3] Ideas which had a mere decade earlier been relegated as extreme now have the currency of celebrity. Marx is not only no longer an unsayable name—he is cool again.

In recognition of this renewed engagement with Marx, Mike Wayne and Anna Kornbluh offer two books that begin from the prescient realization that one might no longer need to argue why reading or historicizing with Marx is important. Wayne’s Marxism Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 2020) and Kornbluh’s Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) both return us analytical frameworks that had been declared long obsolete during the 1990s, when communism was on the retreat worldwide, and dreams of a digital utopia for the global spread of liberal democracy seemed unstoppable—even to critics on the left. Wayne and Kornbluh’s accessible primers on Marxist film theory are written with educators of film and media studies in mind in this moment. This is all the more important so as to ensure the next wave of Marxist thought does not run into two of the constitutive problems we faced in the 2010s: a lack of popular historical and economic education of and within the sphere of cultural production, and careful attention to the methods of reading outlined within the Marxist tradition.

Wayne and Kornbluh offer what I might argue are two distinct yet necessarily complementary methods for incorporating explicitly Marxist analyses into a film and media studies curriculum. Wayne pays careful attention to the history of twentieth-century Marxist thought and its entanglements with the field of film and media studies, as well as the need to understand the distribution of power and labor within the media industries that are increasingly consolidating back into a monopoly stage of capitalist organization. Kornbluh reasserts the necessity of ideology critique and the symptomatic reading of popular culture at a time when capitalists themselves are appropriating calls for racial and sexual justice in their marketing strategies. Both texts are addressed to these respective problems through their organization. Wayne  offers a chapter-by-chapter conceptual breakdown useful for a survey course; Kornbluh  provides an exemplary close reading of a particular film (Fight Club) suited well to a course more focused on textual analysis.

What Wayne and Kornbluh both understand is that this return to Marxism within our current moment provides scholars with an opportunity to revisit the question of what happened to Marxist film theory. This is a chance not merely to engage in debates for the already initiated (or the always already skeptical) in academic journals, but for new readers hungry for tools to interrogate an unfolding present. Just as Kornbluh points to Marxism’s “insistence that philosophy is always invested in its own social situation,” these texts crucially situate themselves within our own present, offering overlapping yet at times contrasting genealogies of the history and development of Marxist film theory in an attempt to situate how it might be put to use in film and media studies moving forward (Kornbluh 1). And yet, as we will come to see, these genealogies amount to two distinctly different stories about Marxist film theory, what happened to it in the academy, where and how it went wrong (or was wronged), and what remains its potential for our political, historical, and intellectual present.

In what follows, I will outline the distinction between Wayne and Kornbluh’s historical accounts while asking how we might place their own work within the history of Marxist film theory. I then turn to a brief reading of the role of aesthetic and formal analysis utilized by each text. If one can suggest the legacy of Marxist film theory offers emancipatory potential for analyzing not only popular cinema but new media platforms such as TikTok, the question of what happened to Marxist film theory is just as salient as the question of what Marxist film theory can actually do in 2022. But it is this latter question, I argue, that is ultimately the most important for thinking through how one might use these two texts moving forward . And addressing this question demands not so much a doctrinaire commitment to this or that Marxist tendency, but rather the care to note the way our present is shaped by the past and our conceptions of it.

The books

Organized thematically (and somewhat chronologically), Mike Wayne’s Marxism Goes to the Movies is structured through eight chapters focusing on different aspects of how one might begin thinking through and alongside the Marxist tradition. This schema, I imagine, would be quite useful for students awash in what otherwise might appear to be two hundred years of abstract arguments. Beginning with a chapter on Marx and the dialectical method (1), Wayne then recounts the history of canonical Marxist entanglements with film and media studies in the twentieth (2) before moving to a chapter on methodology (3) which travels out of the Western Marxist tradition into a call for the importance of political economy alongside the legacy of Cultural Studies in the British tradition. Throughout the remaining chapters, Production (4), Form (5), Ideology (6), Realism (7), and finally Culture (8), Wayne peppers his text with brief readings and synopses of films to help him articulate, for instance, how Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuarón), Atomic Blonde (2017, David Leitch), and the documentary Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009) operate formally through different “realist” logics despite being quite different films in nearly every regard. This style of analysis seems readily teachable. And while the details can begin to accumulate rapidly even for the already initiated—206 pages of a proposed metahistorical account on method does add up—the text can clearly be chopped up into sections, perhaps week by week, in and out of order to introduce students to the discrete concepts Wayne unpacks.

Much of the story Wayne tells about Marxism and film studies speaks to his grounding within a British Marxist tradition. At times, he goes to great lengths to distinguish himself from what he suggests are the “excesses” of the post-Althusserian theoretical turn. In Wayne’s account of the development of Marxist film theory, a clean-ish line can be retroactively drawn from Gramsci through a briefly confused interregnum of psychoanalytically-inflected Marxist theory dominated by Althusser . Marxist theory finally finds stable footing in the late 1970s with the re-emergence of political economy’s attention to the material conditions of a film’s industrial production, and cultural studies’ insistence on centering the study of audience reception versus the ‘ideal subject’ of theory associated with the journal Screen in the 1970s (Wayne 58-70). Wayne’s account of the discipline makes an important intervention in a field that cannot afford to draw lines between Marxist approaches, whether one feels their theoretical abstractions are easily intelligible to the lay reader or the inverse. At a time when corporate monopolies are expanding at a rate not seen in the film industry since the 1930s (or ever), questions of labor and of the creative destruction wrought by the turn to streaming must be at the forefront of any Marxist analysis of film and media industries. Wayne’s insistence on the explanatory power afforded to Marxist film theory by a return to the economic and material conditions by which films are made is crucial for Marxist film theorists operating today in a moment of industrial transition, financial upheavals, and the increasing precarity of film labor in the global cinema industry.

At times Wayne can lean heavily on a critique of capital-T Theory; arguably, he oversimplifies the way in which theory is not ultimately a mere classroom obfuscation. Theory itself has become something like a mode of cultural capital in parts of the online left—from bot accounts tweeting phrases from canonical texts to the use of social media to self-organize reading groups outside the academy for members of organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. It seems to me the problem is less Theory itself and more that a belief in Theory’s inherently obfuscatory nature. Such a belief is a stumbling block to understanding how young Marxists are using theory to make sense of their changing world either within the academy or without—to say very little of the way in which the popular leftist publishing industry is increasingly staffed by precariously underemployed adjuncts with PhDs who are by nature of necessity bringing their analyses out of the classroom and online. Wayne notes of Althusser that

“Marx’s base-superstructure model would alert us to the fact that Marxism’s entry into academia would be difficult and problematic” (52-53).

Few would disagree that Althusser offers anything like a ready-to-go method for decoding ideology in dominant cultural (or institutional) practices without the use of heavy-handed jargon. But it seems clear that the larger problem of access has less to do with discourse and more with the commodification of higher education and the marketing of Theory as inherently epiphenomenal. Perhaps this institutional approach could tell us a more robust story of the decline of 1970s film theory than one that leans into the nature of its problematic abstraction.

To critique the scholars for elitism and over-complexity [you needed a subject for this paragraph and topic sentence. Please correct and change it if needed] as an account of the decline of Marxist film theory in the years following the 1970s (to say little of the incorporation of many of its theorists into the institutionalization of film studies within the Anglophone academy) could run the risk of ignoring the widespread intellectual heterogeneity of many of the moment’s top theorists. 1970s film theory was, as Philip Rosen notes, always a diverse movement. Stephen Heath’s groundbreaking work on narrative space, for instance, always critiqued Althusserian and psychoanalytic understandings of an ideal cinema spectator who actually is completely constituted by bourgeois ideology free of contradiction.[4] Heath’s intervention responded to a fear, from some post-Marxist film theorists, that every cinema spectator was ultimately stuck in a prison of the screen and unable to articulate their own ideas about what was represented in the cinema (Rosen 284-286, Wayne 56).

Nevertheless, finding a way to thread the needle between abstraction and materiality remains a worthwhile pursuit. Just as U.S. scholars have found (and will continue to need to find) new strategies for keeping left intellectual traditions alive in spite of red-scare style attacks on the academy, Wayne’s account illuminates this story for the survival of Marxist film theory that runs counter to many traditions within the U.S. academy. In this sense, Wayne’s account of the Birmingham School’s arrival in the history of Marxist film theory suggests a necessary corrective to the excesses of the 1970s moment in this tradition, proposing that the burgeoning Marxist film theorist today must situate its address not merely within the realm of textual analysis, but instead, must be prepared to ask questions about the consequences of corporate reorganization and mergers since the 1980s (60). This, I argue, makes this text an incredibly useful analytic framework for providing students with tools for understanding cinema not merely as just another industry in a media- saturated environment, but rather as a mode of production itself . Cinema needs to be understood through Marxist economics and not as a site for the production of liberal subjectivity which so often leads to the cooptation of empty calls for diversity in front of the camera (and not behind). In this sense, Wayne’s text provides one of the most concise and clear solutions to the problem of historical and economic education for media analysis in the classroom . T he text could, I argue, be a welcome addition to the necessary work that film and media educators have in front of us for the next decade.

While Wayne’s text remains a discretely organized and wide-reaching introduction to the history and contemporaneity of Marxist film theory, Kornbluh’s insists on historicizing her own intervention within the history of Marxist film theory. This move, she notes, is central to the philosophical project of Marxism, and it is crucial for turning her book into more than an introductory schema. Rather than trace the history of Marxian film theory leading up to the present moment of publication, Kornbluh notes that her return to the reading practices of U.S. Marxists such as Fredric Jameson stands as an intervention into her (and our) own present. This is the primary way her text begins to solve the problem I outlined in the introduction . She refuses to abandon ideology critique to surface interpretation, and in so doing, she provides a tool not only for university students but for all media consumers to think critically about what texts are doing in a new media environment.

In this way, Kornbluh’s Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club not only speaks to the nature of the historical materialist project itself, but also to a specific strategy in the U.S. academy for engaging with Marxism’s central ideas today. To teach these ideas as a re-emergent movement requires an attention to the history of Marxist film theory—its decline and contemporary re-emergence—that brings new life to a project long declared dead and over with. It also refuses the fetish of the new that so haunts the field’s publishing market. It is not merely by placing our current moment in a genealogy of the development of Marxist film theory, as Wayne does, that we can see how the theorist of today might find it useful. Instead, as Kornbluh notes, the goal is to “(invigorate) both film studies and Marxist film theory” with an awareness that media consumers know all too well when they are in history, and they are thinking of what has happened in the political situation over the past decade. Now it is time to return to questions of critique that parts of the academy have abandoned in order to ask not only how cultural production reproduces the dominant ideology—the concerns of the first wave of ideology critique that failed to transform society—but rather how our abandonment of these questions may have led to the present crisis itself (Kornbluh, 5).

Why must Marxist film theory be invigorated? Kornbluh’s Americanist answer is that it was supplanted by new approaches that pushed it to the margins following the 1970s. Here, New Historicism, which emerged out of the work of Michel Foucault, today dominates the field (65). New Historicism, Kornbluh argues, dispelled with the dialectic toward focusing on neoliberal “particularisms” of micro-difference, waves of affect, or rejection of totality (67). Two popular film studies textbooks emerging in the wake of 1970s film theory, she notes, don’t even mention Marxism (75). Rather than film studies taking a mere retreat from the pedantic obscurantism of Althusser’s interpellation or the identificatory processes that constitute a split subject, Kornbluh notes that the rise of film studies in the U.S. directly echoed new funding policies and institutions emerging with the rise of the public university following the Second World War, making the work of institutional film theory “inseparable from the Cold War, UN soft power, and the new social movements: (77).[5]

In a way, Kornbluh’s approach serves as a rejoinder to Wayne’s careful attention to the political economy of the film and media industries by saying: the production of knowledge itself has its own political economy, one that played no less an important role in the creation of the present crisis. Additionally, Kornbluh cogently notes that the rise of “reception-oriented” studies—which emerged in large part out of the Birmingham School during this same period—seems to fit all too comfortably within neoliberal logics of consumer choice, the few exceptions found only in the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall (81). Finally, the dominance of auteur theory—which elevates the genius of the individual over the labor of the collective that goes into producing every film—continues to haunt the halls of the academy (85). Wayne’s insistence that this tradition be read into political economy is a useful counterpart to Kornbluh’s analysis. These two texts, read in tandem, avoid the pitfalls of post-Marxist approaches over the past decades that were only all too eager to eject a coherent political project.

Wayne and Kornbluh are far from the first to ask what happened to Marxist film theory. While meta-analyses of disciplinary history have long played a crucial role in the intellectual framework of film studies, it is only since the late 1980s that books about the history of film studies itself have come to the forefront. Crucially, the late twentieth century moment for the discipline was haunted by the same then-contemporary specter Jacques Derrida cryptically warned of at a 1993 conference on Marxism following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of state Communism: that of Marxism itself.[6] As the theory wars of Anglophone literary studies in the 1980s played out alongside this very transition into a new geopolitical system, film studies found itself asking many of the same questions over the usefulness of the disciplinary heterogeneity and polemical power of French-inflected Marxist film theory. This moment in the history of film studies might be seen as the last gasp of something like a “collective” Marxist project of film scholarship, uniting disparate theoretical traditions, national and linguistic circles, and level of analysis under what Rosen describes as the post-68

“(desire) for radical political novelty…(corresponding) with a quest for radical transformation among some intellectual sectors” (265).

The story of what happened to Marxist film theory does not begin and end with Soviet montage, the Frankfurt School and other pre-war political modernists, “Western Marxism,” “structuralist Marxism,” the rise of so-called “post-structuralism” in mid-century France, ideology critique, third cinema and anti-colonial film production, or even the rise of the Birmingham School’s intellectual relocation into the emerging field of Cultural Studies. One thing does seem inarguable, however, and that is what Kornbluh describes as the decline of even heterodox Marxist film theoretical traditions over this same period in favor of New Historicism, and I would add, cognitive film theory and neo-formalism in the work of David Bordwell and others (Kornbluh 66). As Kornbluh argues, it is perhaps only the work of Fredric Jameson that has managed to avoid the broadscale rejection of Marxist analysis in U.S. film studies. In this sense, for the contemporary Marxist film theorist, it is Jameson’s insistence on art’s attempt to grasp a Lukácsian totality that marks the decisive return to Marx following what Kornbluh describes as a detour through post-Foucauldian notions of “micro-power” that emerge following the failure of 1968’s revolutionary upheavals and the subsequent neoliberal turn (Kornbluh 87).

Kornbluh insists that Marxist film theory is not merely an overarching set of methods one can use to talk about the mode of production or cultural reception, but it is instead like a knife that seeks to cut through the epistemological and political strictures that govern the possible of cultural systems. If Wayne ends his account primarily with the legacy of British Cultural Studies, Kornbluh casts her lot with Jameson’s dialectical approach, who comes to stand here as “the critic whose work most consistently actualizes the powerful promise of Marxist film theory” (89). But the story, for Kornbluh, doesn’t end with Jameson. This is due to Kornbluh’s insistence on a specific account of Marxist film theory that draws attention not just to the ways the 1970s moment failed, but rather the ways in which it was systematically cast aside at the very moment of capital’s retrenchment alongside the neoliberal turn in the 1970s and 1980s. In this sense, Jameson’s “actualization” of Marxist film theory’s promise places the reader not merely in history but rather as the inheritor of a radical tradition which is today beginning to see fresh air for the first time in what seems like decades. The practice of the dialectic, Kornbluh argues, “necessitate(s) taking a stand” (178).

Like the rest of the books in Bloomsbury’s Film Theory in Practice series, Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, as its title shows, does not merely offer an overview of the history of a particular film-theoretical tradition. The insight of the series is to allow each author space to account for their conception of a given theoretical tradition alongside the close reading of one particular film.[7] At the same time, this format alone makes books in this series highly teachable, and Kornbluh’s entry is no exception. Her reading of Fight Club brings the theory to a single text to illustrate that formal analysis can help interrogate films as systems in and of themselves, produced by, and producing, meaning. Like her insistence on placing her polemic to reinvigorate Marxist film theory within a tradition that has been pushed to the margins, it is precisely the textual evidence displayed by her close reading of a single film that gives her historical argument its weight and its explanatory power for the classroom.

In this way, Kornbluh’s text would function well as a particular week’s case study in a methods seminar, or as an initial reading for a course or unit dedicated to Marxist film theory as a whole. In either case, the book functions best alongside the film as an exemplary performance of close reading and methodological application, one that could work well in tandem with Wayne’s political economic approach. If the problem with Althusser is that he operates too much from the realm of abstraction, as Wayne argues, perhaps this focus on a specific film like Fight Club can both represent the process of, say, interpellation in the film’s self-conscious narrative, or, through a close reading of the film and its spectator, illustrate precisely how the process works in many of the ways 1970s film theorists argued. Kornbluh’s careful attention to the way form not only conveys content but is itself a product of history allows for the reader to understand that Marxist film theory need not be that which merely concerns itself with any given film’s economic incentives or mode of production, but rather a political weapon aimed at unmasking the contradictions of capitalist culture. This distinction, however, allows for each to tell quite different stories about the history and development of Marxist film theory, stories I would like to suggest allow for the articulation of the why now of Marxist film theory while arriving at quite different accounts of the what now, which are directed towards the specific uses and contexts each of these texts might find themselves deployed to address.

By this point, I hope to have made clear that it is not merely enough to ask what happened to Marxist film theory? nor what can Marxist film theory do? Both Marxism Goes to the Movies and Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club are two welcome additions to a corner of the discipline that could, frankly, use more bite-size introductory texts for a generation much more amenable to Marxist thought than in previous decades. However, it is in a return to our present from both these genealogies that I will conclude, urging a bifurcated approach to thinking through the history of the present and the eventual present of the future. How are we, as Marxists, to introduce a new generation of students to this century-old field at the precise moment that interest in socialism is at its greatest peak since the middle of the 20th century, and running the risk of losing that momentum in a wave of disillusionment and cultural exhaustion? How will we tell the history of our present, and what possibilities are engendered or foreclosed for our future when we tell the story of what went wrong in the past? How are we as educators engaging with ideas which are re-emerging in the public sphere while revanchist state institutions in the United States (and elsewhere) are beginning to once again crack down on pedagogy? These two texts are far from providing the solution, but in understanding precisely what possibilities and dangers lie ahead, might offer models for rebuilding the Marxist cultural project once again.

Notes