Tuesday, 9 November 2010

Marixism in Film

First off, here's a brief outline of Marxism; it has 3 main components:

- The dialectical and materialist concept of history - Humankind's history is fundamentally a struggle between social classes. An example of this is slavery.
- The critique of capitalism - In a capitalist society, the bourgeoisie dominate and exploit an economic majority -proletariat-. Marx stated that 'the capital makes a man a prisoner, he is no longer free, they begin to depend on it' "Capitalism takes a man's individuality away"
- Advocacy of proletarian revolution - The working class must seize political power through a social revolution. Material foundation classes would be abolished and all forms of inequality would dissolve. 

Extract from Wikipedia:
Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet film makers expressed the ideas of Marxism through film:
Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over.
French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody, to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.

Films that explore Marxism include:
- Metropolis (1927) Dir. Fritz Lang
- Intolerance (1916) Dir. D.W. Griffith
- October (1927) Dir. Sergei Eisenstein


- Ben -

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