'Film': Politics

by Jason Monaco

The economics of film determines its infrastructure—its foundations—and therefore its potential. The politics of film determines its structure: that is, the way it relates to the world. We understand film, experience it, and consume it from two different perspectives. The "sociopolitics" of film describes how it reflects and is integrated with human experience in general. Film's "psychopolitics" attempts to explain how we relate to it personally and specifically. Because film is such a widespread popular phenomenon, it plays a very important part in modern culture, sociopolitically. Because it provides such a powerful and convincing representation of reality, film also has a profound effect on members of its audience, psycho politically. The two aspects are closely interrelated, yet the differentiation is useful, since it focuses attention on the difference between the general effect of film and its specific personal effect. 

​Whichever way we look at it, film is a distinctly political phenomenon. Indeed, its very existence is revolutionary. In his landmark essay on the subject, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the critic Walter Benjamin wrote: 

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.... it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition.... Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage [Illuminations, p. 221]. 

Benjamin's prose is a bit abstruse, but the points he makes are basic to an understanding of the way film (and other mechanically reproduced arts) function in society. The most significant difference, Benjamin is saying, between film and the older arts is that the new art can be mass-produced, reaching the many rather than the few. (This is the sociopolitical aspect.) This has a revolutionary effect: not only is the art available on a regular basis to large numbers of people, but it also meets observers on their home grounds, thereby reversing the traditional relationship between the work of art and its audience. These two facts about film— (1) that it is plural rather than unique; (2) that it is infinitely reproducible— directly contradict romantic traditions of art and therefore invigorate and purify. (This is the psychopolitical aspect.) 

Film has changed the way we perceive the world and therefore, to some extent, how we operate in it. Yet while the existence of film may be revolutionary, the practice of it most often has not been. Because the channels of distribution have been limited, because costs have prohibited access to film production to all but the wealthiest, the medium has been subject to strict, if subtle, control.

In America between 1920 and 1950, for example, the movies provided the main cultural format for the discovery and description of our national identity. (Television quickly replaced movies after 1950.) Historians argue whether the movies simply reflected the national culture that already existed or whether they produced a fantasy of their own that eventually came to be accepted as real. In a sense, the point is moot. No doubt the writers, producers, directors, and technicians who worked in the large studio factories during the great age of Hollywood were simply transferring materials they had picked up in "real life" to the screen. No doubt, too, even if those materials weren't consciously distorted toward political ends, the very fact that the movies amplified certain aspects of our culture and attenuated others had a profound effect.

Thus, two paradoxes control the politics of film: on the one hand, the form of film is revolutionary; on the other, the content is most often conservative of traditional values. Second, the politics of film and the politics of "real life" are so closely intertwined that it is generally impossible to determine which is the cause and which is the effect.
This discussion mainly involves American movies. The relationship between politics and film is no less intriguing in other contexts, but it was the homogeneous factory system of the studios that most subtly reflected (or inspired) the surrounding political culture. Because Hollywood movies were mass-produced, they tended to reflect the surrounding culture—or, more accurately, the established myths of the culture—more precisely than did the work of strongly individual authors. Indeed, many of the most notable auteurs in film history stand out precisely because their work goes against the establishment grain, politically: Chaplin, Stroheim, Vidor, Eisenstein, Renoir, Rossellini, Godard, for example. 

​The basic truism of film history is that the development of the art/industry is best seen as a product of the dialectic between film realism and film expressionism: between film's power to mimic reality and its power to change it. The earliest ​film artists—the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies—succinctly demonstrated this dichotomy between realism and expressionism. Yet, underlying the dialectic of mimesis/expression is another, more basic, premise: that the definition of film style depends on the film's relationship with its audience. When a filmmaker decides on a realist style, he or she does so to decrease the distance between viewer and subject; the expressionist style, on the other hand, looks to change, move, or amuse the observer through the technique of film. Both these aesthetic decisions are essentially political since they insist on relationships (among filmmaker, film, subject, and observer) rather than idealized abstract systems. In this way, too, the film is inherently and directly political: it has a dynamic relationship with its audiences.

​To summarize, every film, no matter how minor it may seem, exhibits a political nature on one or more of these three levels: 

• ontological, because the medium of film itself tends to deconstruct the traditional values of the culture;

​• mimetically, because any film either reflects reality or recreates it (and its politics); 

​• inherently, because the intense communicative nature of film gives the relationship between film and observe a natural political dimension. 

​A political history of film, then, might very well be three times as complex as anesthetic history, since we should trace the development of all three political facets. We have space to examine only a few of the most salient features of film politics. 

Ontologically, the best evidence we have that film has radically altered traditional values lies in the phenomenon of celebrity. Previously, heroic models for society were either purely fictional creations or real people of accomplishment (whom we knew only at one remove). Film fused the two types: real people became fictional characters. The concept of the "star" developed—and stars are quite different from "actors." The most important role Douglas Fairbanks played was not Robin Hood or Zorro, but "Douglas Fairbanks." (In fact, Douglas Fairbanks was played by Douglas Ullman—his original name.) Likewise, Charles Chaplin played, not Hitler or Monsieur Verdoux, but always "Chariot," the tramp and Mary Pickford (with Chaplin and Fairbanks the United Artists, the preeminent stars of their day) was forever typecast as "Little Mary, America's sweetheart." When she tried in the late twenties to change her public image, her career came to an end.
 
Early film producers seem to have been well aware of the potential phenomenon of stardom. They insisted that their actors work in anonymity. In 1912, however, the first fan magazines appeared, identifying "the Biograph Girl" and "Little Mary." A few years later, having been liberated from anonymity, Chaplin and ​Pickford was vying to see which of the two would be the first to sign a million dollar contract. Clearly, Little Mary and Chariot had struck responsive chords in audiences. The complex relationship between stars and the public has been a prime element of the mythic, and hence political, nature of film ever since. 

"Stars" act out their personas through nominal character roles. "Celebrities" appear mainly as "themselves" and are known, in Daniel Boorstin's apt phrase, "for their well-knownness." We tend to downplay the significance of this phenomenon, yet stars are extraordinary psychological models of a type that never existed before.

We can trace the development of the phenomenon of celebrity back to the lecture circuits of the nineteenth century, where intellectual heroes such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain (a "character," by the way, created by Samuel Clemens) played themselves to adoring audiences. Yet, until the "age of mechanical reproduction," these celebrities reached few people. The public outpouring of grief over the death of Rudolph Valentino in 1926, after his short and undistinguished career as a film actor, exceeded in intensity and dimension the reaction to any similar public death up to that time. It was only after politicians became celebrities that victims of assassination elicited such universal mourning. 
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Although studio moguls tried to construct stars of this magnitude artificially, they seldom succeeded. Stars were—and still are—the creation of the public: political and psychological models who demonstrate some quality that we collectively admire. Clark Gable was objectively no more physically attractive than dozens of other young leading men of the thirties, yet there was something in the persona he projected that touched a responsive chord. Humphrey Bogart was not an extraordinary actor and certainly not handsome by Hollywood standards, yet he became a central role model not only for his own generation but also for their children. As the actors became stars, their images began to affect audiences directly. Star cinema—Hollywood style—depends on creating a strong identification between hero and audience. We see things from his point of view. The effect is subtle but pervasive.

Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to Hollywood. In the sixties, European cinema demonstrated some of the same mystical power of identification. When Jean-Paul Belmondo models himself on Humphrey Bogart in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), he is announcing the second generation of celebrity, one that demonstrates a historical consciousness. Marcello Mastroianni became the epitome of existential European manhood. At his death in 1996 he was treated like a national hero. Jeanne Moreau was the model for wise, self-assured European womanhood, Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann the Swedish versions of the two models. Yves Montand served as the essentially Gallic Bogart. More recently, Gerard Depardieu has become an icon of his generation. 

But these people are actors as well as stars, so the effect is muted. There are occasions in their careers when individual roles supersede star personas. As American films came back to life in the sixties, a new generation of stars like the Europeans developed, displaying critical intelligence as well as powerful personas. Politically, this is an important advance. At its most deleterious, the Hollywood star system worked psychologically to outlaw roles that did not fit its own images. It was acceptable to act like Bogart, Gable, or John Wayne, but until the late 1960s there was no male star who was not a tough guy (like this trio) or sophisticated and urbane (like Fred Astaire or Cary Grant). Because we can now be critical of celebrities, contemporary audiences enjoy a wider range of types.

To a large extent, at least in nations in which film is dominant, the cinema helps to define what is permissible culturally: it is the shared experience of the society. Because its role models are so psychologically powerful, those roles for which it provides no models are difficult for individual members of society even to conceive, much less act out. Like folktales, films express taboos and help to resolve them. The cause-and-effect relationship is, as we noted, not very clear, but it is interesting to note that the quasi-revolutionary mores of the 1960s in America were predated by more than five years by the two major star personas of the f 950s—Marlon Brando and James Dean—both of which were notably rebellious. More specifically, Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise, which portrayed a group of revolutionary students from the University of Paris at Nanterre, predated the uprising of May-June t968 by precisely a year and, indeed, students from Nanterre were in the vanguard during the aborted real revolution, just as they had been in Godard's fictional rebellion.
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In the age of mechanical reproduction fiction has a force it never had before.

Because it is so much more pervasive, television has taken over a large part of the folktale function of cinema. In Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), an incisive, brilliant analysis of the relationship between media and politics, a group of Black militants challenge a television reporter: "You put him on the six-, the ten-, and the twelve-o'clock news," they demand for one of the characters, "then he be real!" The function of media in determining the validity of an action, person, or idea was one of the central truths of radical politics in the sixties and has remained so into the age of the sound bite.
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This unusual ability of film to "validate" reality is its most important mimetic political function. For example, one of the most telling social criticisms provided by the Black Power movement of the f 960's was its historical analysis of the inherently racist characterizations to which Blacks had been subjected as a matter of course throughout the history of film and television. In this respect, too, the media faithfully reflected the values of the society. But they also exaggerated the real situation. In general (there were some exceptions), films pictured Blacks in servile roles. More important, Blacks were used only to play Blacks—that is, in roles in which race was a significant element. One of the great accomplishments of the Black Power movement of the 1960's was to begin to crack that barrier. Black lawyers, doctors, businessmen—even heroes—are now validated by the media (if only intermittently). Yet it is still rare for a casting director to hire an African-American to play a role that isn't specified as "Black." 

As with so many other aspects of our culture, progress in racial politics seems to have been in a state of suspension for thirty years.* On the face of it, there were no more—or better—roles for African-Americans in the 1990s in mainstream films than there were in the 1970s. One of the brighter developments of the past few years has been the new group of African-American directors who have established themselves on the fringes of Hollywood. Yet there is nothing to connect the interesting work of filmmakers like Spike Lee, Matty Rich and John Singleton with the first wave of Black film 25 years earlier; they are not building on the work of the previous generation, they have had to start over again. 

Racism pervades American film because it is a basic strain in American history. It is one of the sad facts of film history that the landmark The Birth of a Nation (1915) is generally hailed as a classic despite its essential racism. No amount of technical expertise demonstrated, money invested, or artistic effect should be allowed to outweigh the essential racist tone of The Birth of a Nation, yet we continue in film history as it is presently written to praise the film for its form, ignoring its offensive content. This is not to imply that Griffith's masterpiece was anomalous. Until the late fifties, racial stereotypes were pervasive in a film, then in television. There had been liberal acts of conscience before—films such as King Vidor's Hallelujah (1929) or Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949)—but even these were almost without exception marked by subtle condescension. It was not until the late sixties that Blacks began to take on nonstereotypical roles in American film.

We are speaking here of Hollywood. A thriving if limited African-American film industry, separate and unequal, dated from the 1920s, producing films about Blacks, by Blacks, for Blacks. But, of course, general audiences rarely saw these films. 

Native Americans were as poorly served until very recently. Since they were integral to the popular genre of the Western, they were seen on screen more often than Blacks, but the stereotypes were just as damaging. There were a few exceptions in this regard. Possibly because the battle had already been won against the Indians, films were occasionally produced that portrayed them in a positive, human light. Thomas Ince's The Indian Massacre (1913) is an early example, John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964) a later instance.

Despite their rapidly increasing influence in U.S. culture, Asian-Americans have been relatively quiet on the film front. Bruce Lee in the 1970s and his son Brandon in the 1990s both dominated the martial-arts genre before their eerily similar early deaths. Wayne Wang has had singular success dealing with Asian-American topics since Chan Is Missing (1981), Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), and Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989). With The Joy Luck Club (1993), from the popular Amy Tan novel about immigrant mothers and their American daughters, he reached a wider audience. Smoke (1995), about a Brooklyn cigar store, marked a move into general subjects. 
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Ang Lee has had perhaps the most unusual career. Born in Taiwan, he attended NYU film school, then returned home to direct The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), two unusual films about cultural attitudes social traditions. Without skipping a beat, back in the west he scored with Sense and Sensibility (1995) and the cold psychological drama The Ice Storm (1997). The trans-cultural resonances are quite intriguing. 

The image of women in American film is a more complex issue. It seems likely that in the twenties movies did much to popularize the image of the independent woman. Even sirens such as Clara Bow and Mae West, while serving as male fantasies, were at the same time able to project a sense of independence and a spirit of irony about their stereotyped roles. Moreover, the image of women in films of the thirties and forties, on the whole, was very nearly coequal with that of men. A sensitive feminist can detect numerous stereotypical limitations in the films of that period, it is true, but for most of us to compare the thirties in film with the sixties or seventies or eighties is to realize that despite the awakened consciousness of contemporary women, cinematically we have only recently regained the level of intelligence of the sexual politics of even the mid-thirties. Actresses like Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, and even Joan Crawford projected images of intelligence, independence, sensitivity, and egalitarian sexuality the likes of which we have rarely seen since.

All this ended in the early fifties with the advent of the personas projected by stars Marilyn Monroe (the child-woman seductress) and Doris Day (the virginal girl-next-door). Of the two, the image projected by Day and similar actresses was to be preferred. She never achieved real independence, but she was often more than simply a male fantasy, like Monroe. It wasn't as if actresses of the caliber of the earlier stars didn't exist. Sidney Lumet's The Group (1966), for example, starred not one but eight young actresses, at least seven of whom showed talent. Yet only Candice Bergen achieved real success thereafter—and it took her more than twenty years. With the advent of the "buddy" film in the late sixties (the most popular early example of which was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969), what few major roles there were for women very nearly disappeared.

The sexual politics of the past thirty years in American movies is one clear area in which film does not simply reflect the politics of reality. This may have been true to a certain extent in the fifties, when our national culture was intent on coaxing women who had gained a measure of independence during the war back into the home. But it was certainly a false picture of the real world in the seventies, eighties, and nineties when millions of women were raising their own consciousness, if not their spouses'. 

For instance, one of the first films of the seventies that was praised for its "feminist" approach was Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975); yet that film presented us with a woman who, when deprived of the creature comforts of domesticity, couldn't survive on her own and, in the end, happily submitted to the role of helpmate once again. Why otherwise intelligent critics regarded Alice as in any way feminist is difficult to say, unless it was simply that the situation had deteriorated so drastically that any film that gave a woman a central role, no matter what its politics, had to be regarded as an advance. 

Despite a lot of hype, the feminist position in the film didn't advance much in the seventies or eighties. Such vaunted women's films as An Unmarried Woman, The Turning Point, and Julia (all 1978) did, it's true, use women as central characters, but with no discernible raised consciousness. Martin Ritt's drama Norma Rae (1979) gave Sally Field a powerful, Oscar-winning role as a protagonist but dealt more with union politics than sexual politics. 

Ironically, the film of that period that showed the most sophisticated understanding of sexual politics was Robert Benton's Kramer vs Kramer (1979), in which the woman (Kramer, played by Meryl Streep) was, if not actually the villain, then certainly the source of the problem, and the focus was almost entirely on the sensitive and painful reaction of the man (Kramer, Dustin Hoffman) to a classic feminist-inspired situation of the seventies. No film in recent years has shown this sensitivity and concern for a woman's point of view. Indeed, if we are to judge from Hollywood's evidence, the main benefit of the contemporary women's movement has been to free men from male stereotypes. This is true, but it is not anywhere near the whole truth.

In the eighties, the "new women's movie" if hesitate to call it a feminist film) quickly became an accepted genre, but without any real emotional or political clout. Such modern-day "women's movies" as Steel Magnolias (1989), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Nine to Five (1980), or Thelma & Louise (1991), for all their virtues, don't tell us much about sexual politics. The first two deal with women in their own world, while the last two simply let them play the buddies the men usually play, celebrating the newly acceptable character of the liberated woman without extending the dialogue and without challenging accepted mores. So what else is new? From the mid-1970's through the end of the century sexual politics in America and Europe, like politics, in general, has existed in a state of suspended animation. The same issues were discussed on the twenty-fifth Earth Day as on the first. The same problems confront what we continue to call, inappropriately, "minorities" now as then. The struggle continues to continue.
 
Yet, despite the fact that we can't point to a continuity of progress, the situation of women in the film now is better than it was thirty years ago. There is an indefinable sense that the balance between men and women is shifting. More important, it is now no longer unusual for an actress to be able to prolong her career as female lead well into her fifties: Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Tina Turner, Goldie Hawn, and Barbra Streisand suffered no decrease in earning power as they matured. And Susan Sarandon was past forty before she realized the full range of her talent. Sarandon is the first American actress in a long while to combine sexuality with mature intelligence in an ongoing star persona, just as Meryl Streep has carved a position for herself as a commanding "actor's actor." 
Indeed, here women have taken the lead in redefining our attitude toward aging. The generation that came of age in the 1960s, the "War Babies" and the "Baby Boomers," have decided to maintain a level of sexuality well into their fifties and sixties that was unheard of thirty years ago. 

At the same time, paradoxically, Generation X clasped to its bosom a retrograde sexual mythology that echoed the worst of the 1950s. Madonna refashioned the Marilyn Monroe sex kitten into a campy Valkyrie whose armor was her underwear. Truth or Dare was a stage most of us leave behind as high-school sophomores. Actresses like Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Kim Basinger, and Drew Barrymore are used and abused on a regular basis. Like their male predecessors in the 1980s—Sean Penn, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze—this new generation of actresses plays on less admirable Hollywood traditions. It is not enough to suggest that these roles may be ironic; we all know what they are selling. In the 1990s, sex disintegrated into a commodity and a vaguely boring one at that. Hardcore "porn" like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones—films which caused a furor when they were released in the early seventies—is now available on numerous cable networks in every living room and keeps most suburban video stores in profits. Since Flashdance (1983) and Dirty Dancing (1987), sex for teens and preteens has been a profitable Hollywood sideline and many theatrical features exploit their soft-core assets by releasing more explicit "video cuts" to the cassette market.*

Perhaps this is progress; perhaps it is necessary to pass through this phase to rediscover romance and nonpornographic eroticism; perhaps the AIDS epidemic requires more "virtual sex." In any case, it seems like the turn of the century is a good time to re-view Fellini Satyricon, and to remind ourselves that Clara Bow, the "It" girl of the twenties who introduced the idea of sex appeal, played her role with a wit and directness that revealed both a greater sense of self and a more powerful sensuality than we find in any stressful of current video cuts. 

Sexual politics in the film is closely connected with what we might call the "dream function" of the movies. Much of the academic criticism of the late seventies and eighties focused on this aspect of the film experience. The strong identification we make with cinematic heroes is simply observed evidence that film operates on our psyches, not unlike dreams. This is the inherent aspect of film politics: how do we interrelate with films? Since the early days, filmmakers have been in the business of selling fantasies of romance and action—or, to use the contemporary synonyms, sex, and violence. In this respect, the film is not much different from literature. Popular films, like popular novels, depend on the motivating forces of these twin libidinal impulses. 

The issue is complex: film satisfies the libido not only by giving a kind of life to fantasies but also more formally—the style of a film, its idiom, can be either romantic or active, sexual or violent, without any regard to its content. In addition, it is far from clear what precise effect this particular function of the film has on the people who experience it. Does it take the place of real experience? Or does it inspire it?

This is a particularly interesting conundrum when expressed in terms of political action. A film in which the hero wins the day may simply convey to audiences that "business is being taken care of"—that there is no need to act—while a film in which the hero loses may be taken as a sign that action is futile. How can a political filmmaker, then, create a structure in which the audience is involved, but not to such an extent that the characters serve as surrogates? How can it be made clear that action is both possible and still necessary in real life? There are no simple answers.
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The question of surrogate action is more easily explained in terms of romance and sex. Here the characters are clearly surrogates for the audience and there is no real intent to suggest that the drama of the film be carried over into real life. In fact, the verisimilitude of the film experience suggests the opposite: that the experience of the film can to a great extent replace the experience of reality. We speak of film "fans" and film "buffs," but there is also a subculture of film "addicts": people with such a strong need for the dream experience of the film that it might very well be physiological as well as psychological. These profound effects of the film have not as yet been studied in sufficient detail. Much of the most interesting work in film theory during the next few years will concern such topics.

The libidinal effect of the film as dream also has a more practical aspect. Ever since Edison's Kinetoscope loop the John Rice-May Irwin Kiss (1896), movies have excited outpourings of moralism, which in turn have led to censorship. While in Continental countries film censorship has most often been political in nature, in the U.S. and Britain it has been anti-sexual and puritanical, a vestige of native puritanism and Victorian attitudes toward sex.

In 1922, in response to supposed public moral outrage at a recent spate of sex scandals involving film actors (notably the Fatty Arbuckle affair), Hollywood founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America organization (the MPPA), colloquially known as the "Hays Office" after its first president. The Hays Office performed no formal censorship, preferring to counter bad publicity with good, but gradually guidelines were issued. The first production code dated from 1930. When Joseph Breen joined the MPPA in 1934, the code began to be strictly enforced. (The Catholic Legion of Decency was founded the same year and exerted a marked puritanical influence until the early sixties.)

The code made absurd demands on filmmakers. Not only were outright acts of sex and violence strictly prohibited, but also a set of guidelines was laid down (and strictly enforced) that prohibited the depiction of double beds, even for married couples, and censored such expletives as "God," "hell," "damn," "nuts"— even "nerds." The effect was profound.

One of the greatest surprises awaiting a student of the film first experiencing precode movies is the discovery that in the late twenties and very early thirties films had a surprisingly contemporary sense of morality and dealt with issues, such as sex and drugs, that were forbidden thereafter until the late sixties. The effect is curiously disorienting. We have grown up with the late thirties, forties, and fifties Hollywood through the wide exposure of the films (usually recensored) on television. To experience some of the realistic films from the precode era is to discover a lost generation. One of the last vestiges of precode relevance, for example, was the cycle of Gangster Rims - Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) among them—that attempted to treat political issues directly. 

In Britain, self-censorship by the British Board of Film Censors dates from 1912. Interestingly, the British system of censorship has had a less marked effect than the American code. Until 1951, British films were rated U, A, or H (for Universal, Adults, and Horrific—prohibited to children under sixteen). The object has been to protect young children from undue exposure to extreme violence (which is what "horrific" meant), an unobjectionable aim. In 1951, as sex became more important in the film, H was replaced with X.
 
The American code was useful to producers throughout the Hollywood period. Although it set up maddeningly arbitrary rules, it also freed the studios from any ethical pressure to deal with relevant political and sexual subjects or even to treat milder subjects with a degree of sophistication. Hollywood settled comfortably in the mid-thirties into a style of filmmaking that generally eschewed relevance in favor of the highly prized, often hollow, fantasy "entertainment values" of the Golden Age.

It was not only the direct proscriptions of the code that were significant. The code also had a general chilling effect on an industry that was particularly susceptible to economic pressure. In addition, this vulnerability yielded another type of censorship. The studios produced nothing that would offend powerful minorities in the audience. They were also very eager to please when the political establishment made suggestions. The lawlessness of the Prohibition era, for example, led to a cycle of protofascist movies in the early thirties--Star Witness (1931), Okay America (1932), and Gabriel Over the White House (1934) are examples.
During World War IT, naturally, Hollywood rose to the occasion, not only by producing thousands of training and propaganda films (the most famous example being Frank Capra's Why We Fight series), but also by quickly erecting in fiction films a myth of the conflict that played no small part in uniting the country behind the struggle. 

A perfect example of this is Delmer Daves's Destination Tokyo (1943), which displays the usual varied ethnic group united against the common enemy. As a leader, Cary Grant stops in mid-picture to write a letter home to his wife in the Midwest. The sequence takes a good ten minutes. As Grant writes, justifying the war, documentary shots illustrate his lecture, the gist of which is that the Japanese and the Germans are racially despicable, while our allies, the Chinese and the Russians, are genetically destined to win and historically peace-loving people very much like ourselves! Later, this didn't fit very well with the mythology of the Cold War. By design or accident, many of the prints of Destination Tokyo available at the height of the Cold War lacked this powerful sequence.

As World War 11 came to an end, there were occasional realistic treatments of combat that could almost be called antiwar in approach. The Story of G.I. Joe and They Were Expendable (both 1945) are two notable examples.

After the war, Hollywood dutifully followed along as the national myths of the Cold War developed. In the quasi-documentary spy films produced by Louis de Rochemont (The House on 92nd Street, 1945; 13 Rue Madeleine, 1947; Walk East on Beacon, 1952), we can trace a smooth progression as Commies replaced Nazis as villains, without any alteration of the style or the structure of the films.

During the fifties, the Cold War mentality was pervasive. There were cycles of Spy films and films glorifying Cold-War institutions like the Strategic Air Command and the FBI. But more abstractly, we can also discern Cold-War psychology in the popular genre of science fiction during the 1950s. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is perhaps the prime metaphor for the political paranoia of those years, while Forbidden Planet (1956) provides a more sophisticated approach. In the latter film, the monsters are not insidious, implacable, otherworldly beings against whom there is no defense short of complete mobilization, but rather creatures of our own kids, reflections of our own elemental fears. Once the characters of Forbidden Planet learn to deal with their own subconsciouses, the monsters evaporate.
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Obviously, the purges and the blacklisting that occurred at the urging of House Un-American Activities Committee in the late forties had a deeply disturbing effect. But this in itself is not enough to explain the widespread, nearly unanimous ideology exhibited by Hollywood films in the 1950s. Filmmakers were seized by the same paranoia that held the rest of the country in its grip. It was as if, having found a spirit of unification and purpose in the war against fascism, we desperately desired another enemy of equal danger to bring us together. When Cold-War myths disintegrated in the sixties, coincidentally, forces for social change were partially liberated. American films reflected these changes as well.

In Europe, the effects of World War U on film were, paradoxically, positive. In quiet, more sensible, and reasonable propaganda of films like In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, 1943), English filmmakers found a sense of purpose. As the documentary techniques of Grierson and his associates were applied to fiction, England discovered a national cinematic style for the first time. Politically conscious, historically intelligent, that style was reborn for a brief period in the late fifties and early sixties as the so-called Angry Young Men of the theater had their effect on film. 

In Italy, the long drought of fascism was ended by a flood of politically active, aesthetically revolutionary films known collectively as Neorealism. Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), De Sica's Bicycle Thief (1948) and Shoeshine (1946), Visconti's Ossessione (1942) and La Terra Trema (1947) set standards that inspired filmmakers around the world for decades.

But the political relevance that marked both British and Italian cinemas during the forties did not survive long in the fifties. Not until the late sixties was it revived, in a series of French and Italian muckraking films that had proven the political effect. The main exponents of this style were Constantin Costa-Gavras (Z, 1969; the State of Siege, 1973) in France and Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, 1962; The Mattel Affair, 1972) in Italy. There were very few examples of this muckraking style of cinema in the U.S. The most notable example was The China Syndrome (1979), released only weeks before the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island mimicked its plot.
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Since 1980, the relationship between politics and film has become increasingly skewed (as has the bond between politics and real life). The muckraking tradition continues to exist, but it has been almost twenty years since any European or American film has had a direct effect on real politics. Oliver Stone has established a unique niche for himself in Hollywood as the industry's last remaining politics, but his investigations of contemporary issues {Talk Radio, 1988; Natural Born Killers, 1994; and especially Wall Street, 1987) are overshadowed by his more popular historical panegyrics (Platoon, 1986; JFK, 1991; Nixon, 1995) obsessed with the events of thirty years ago. Perhaps the mixture of his obsessions simply mirrors our own, stuck at the end of the century between two political worlds—" one dead, the other powerless to be born."

Like all forms of mass entertainment, a film has been powerfully mythopoeic even as it has entertained. Hollywood helped mightily to shape—and often exaggerate—our national myths and therefore our sense of ourselves. It has likewise had a profound effect abroad. For the New Wave in France in the early 1960s, the phenomenon of American film cultural imperialism was an important subject of study. As recently as 1976, for example, only 40 percent of West German box office receipts was garnered by American films. By 1992 that figure had more than doubled, to 83 percent. American cinema is nearly as dominant in England, Italy, and France, and these are all major film-producing nations. American films consistently garner 50 to 60 percent of the French market. In smaller countries in Europe, and especially in emerging nations, the situation is even more unbalanced. In 1975, for example, 18 percent of Dutch film income went to native producers. By 1991 that figure had been reduced to 7 percent. (It should be noted that American market share can vary significantly depending on the particular films in release in a given year; American market dominance does not necessarily advance inexorably.)

At present, the overwhelming dominance of American films in the world marketplace is being challenged from several directions. Some countries have instituted quota systems. In the 1970s, Third World filmmakers worked to counteract Hollywood myths with their own, while a number of other filmmakers attempted a more radical approach, questioning the very premise of the Hollywood film: entertainment. This approach sometimes called the dialectical film, involved reconceiving the entertaining consumer commodity as an intellectual tool, a forum for examination and discussion.

This is a view of the film that not only admits the relationship between film and observer but also hopes to capitalize on it to the viewer's benefit by bringing it out into the open. Like the plays of Bertolt Brecht (see Chapter 1), these films want to involve their observers intellectually as well as emotionally. It is necessary, then, that the viewers participate intellectually in the experience of the film; they must work, in other words. As a result, many people who don't understand the dialectical ground rules are turned off. Waiting for the film to do all the work, to envelop them in the expected heady fantasies, they find that dialectic films— Jean-Luc Godard's work, for example—are boring.

​Although it certainly does not guarantee an increase in market share, this approach, when properly understood, offers one of the more exciting possibilities for the future development of film:

​• Ontologically, the power of film to deconstruct traditional values is enhanced and put to use. 

• Mimetically, a film becomes not simply a fantastic reflection of reality, but an essay in which we can work out the patterns of a new and better social structure.

• Inherently, the political relationship between the film and the observer is recognized for what it is and the observer has, for the first time, a chance to interact, to participate directly in the logic of the film.

​Hollywood film is a dream—thrilling, enthralling, but sometimes a political nightmare. The dialectic film can be a conversation—often vital and stimulating. 

James Monaco/ HOW TO READ A FILM/ The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia (Language, History, Theory) 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2000 

edit in Grammaraly by Dejan Stojkovski