Marxist film theory

Form of film theory concerning Marxism

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Marxism
Outline

Theoretical works

* Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
* The Condition of the Working Class in England
* The German Ideology
* The Communist Manifesto
* The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
* Grundrisse
* Capital
* Critique of the Gotha Programme
* Dialectics of Nature
* The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
* What Is to Be Done?
* The Accumulation of Capital
* Philosophical Notebooks
* Terrorism and Communism
* The State and Revolution
* Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
* History and Class Consciousness
* Prison Notebooks
* The Black Jacobins
* On Practice
* Dialectic of Enlightenment
* A Critique of Soviet Economics
* The Long Revolution
* Guerrilla Warfare
* The Wretched of the Earth
* Reading Capital
* The Society of the Spectacle
* Pedagogy of the Oppressed
* Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
* Ways of Seeing
* How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
* Social Justice and the City
* Women, Race and Class
* Marxism and the Oppression of Women
* Imagined Communities
* Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
* The Sublime Object of Ideology
* Time, Labor and Social Domination
* The Age of Extremes
* The Origin of Capitalism
* Empire
* Late Victorian Holocausts
* Change the World Without Taking Power
* Caliban and the Witch
* An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital
* Capitalist Realism
* Capital in the Anthropocene

Philosophy

* Alienation
* Dialectical materialism
* Ideology
* Philosophy of nature
* Philosophy in the Soviet Union
* Reification
* Marxist ethics

Critique of political economy

* Capital (accumulation)
* Crisis theory
* Commodity
* Concrete and abstract labor
* Factors of production
* Falling profit-rate tendency
* Means of production
* Mode of production
* Capitalist
* Socialist
* Productive forces
* Scientific socialism
* State monopoly capitalism
* Surplus product
* Socially necessary labour time
* Value-form
* Wage labour

Sociology

* Base and superstructure
* Bourgeoisie
* Class
* Class consciousness
* Classless society
* Commodity fetishism
* Communist society
* Critical theory
* Cultural hegemony
* Democracy
* Dictatorship of the proletariat
* Soviet
* Radical
* Democratic centralism
* Exploitation
* False consciousness
* Human nature
* Immiseration
* Imperialism
* Lumpenproletariat
* Metabolic rift
* Proletariat
* Private property
* Relations of production
* State theory
* Working class

History

* Class struggle
* Historical determinism
* Primitive accumulation
* Proletarian revolution
* World revolution
* Theory of historical trajectory

Aspects

* Aesthetics
* Archaeology
* Criminology
* Cultural Marxism
* Cultural Studies
* Ethics
* Film theory
* Geography
* Historiography
* Literary criticism
* Marxism and religion
* Sociology
* Philosophy

Common variants

|  Structural

* Autonomist
* Marxism–Leninism
* Guevarism
* Maoism
* Neo-Gramscianism
* Regulation school
* Third-worldist
* Titoism
* Trotskyism

Hegelian

* Budapest School
* Frankfurt School
* Humanist
* Neue Marx-Lektüre
* Open
* Praxis School

Both

* Black
* Classical
* Communization
* Feminist
* Leninism
* Neo
* Post
* Western

Other variants

* Analytical
* Austromarxism
* Hispanic marxism
* Centrist
* Eurocommunism
* Instrumental
* Marxism–Leninism–Maoism
* Nkrumaism
* Political
* Revisionist
* Situationist
* Socialism with Chinese characteristics
* Wertkritik

People

* Marx
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* Morris
* Lafargue
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* Gramsci
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* Basu
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* Horkheimer
* Dutt
* Brecht
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* Kalecki
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* Lefebvre
* James
* Adorno
* Padmore
* Sartre
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* Beauvoir
* Sombart
* Nkrumah
* Sweezy
* Emmanuel
* Hill
* Bettelheim
* Draper
* Jones
* Hobsbawm
* Althusser
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* Williams
* Freire
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* Mandel
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* Cabral
* Thompson
* Bauman
* Fanon
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* Castro
* Guevara
* Liebman
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* Mészáros
* O'Connor
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* Mies
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* Amin
* Hall
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* Anderson
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* Vogel
* Sison
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* Berman
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* Cohen
* Therborn
* Losurdo
* Postone
* Rodney
* Bannerji
* Spivak
* Newton
* Wood
* Federici
* Wolff
* Balibar
* Eagleton
* Kurz
* Rowbotham
* Mouffe
* Geras
* Brenner
* Davis
* Massey
* Cleaver
* Bishop
* Haraway
* Panitch
* Clarke
* Jessop
* Davis
* Wright
* Fraser
* Burawoy
* Holloway
* Rose
* Screpanti
* Tamás
* Hampton
* Cano
* Žižek
* Berardi
* Sankara
* Hennessy
* McDonnell
* Douzinas
* Roediger
* Foster
* West
* Ghandy
* Marcos
* Heinrich
* Prashad
* Kelley
* Dean
* Lordon
* Linera
* Fisher
* Li
* Prestes
* Coulthard
* Malm
* Seymour
* Toscano
* Bhattacharya
* Moufawad-Paul
* Srnicek
* Horvat
* Hamza
* Saito

Journals

* Antipode
* Capital & Class
* Capitalism Nature Socialism
* Constellations
* Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory
* Historical Materialism
* Mediations
* Monthly Review
* New Left Review
* Race & Class
* Rethinking Marxism
* Science & Society
* Socialist Register

Related topics

* 21st-century communist theorists
* Anarchism
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* v
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Marxist film theory is an approach to film theory centered on concepts that make a political understanding of the medium possible. [1][failed verification] An individual studying a Marxist representation in a film, might take special interest in its representations of political hierarchy and social injustices.[2]

## Overview

[edit]

Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. The Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage.[3] While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more outspoken complaint that the Russian filmmakers had, was with the narrative structure of the United States cinema.[citation needed]

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.[4] Eisenstein himself was accused by the Soviet authorities under Joseph Stalin of "formalist error", of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly.[4]

French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, employed radical editing and choice of subject matter as well as subversive parody to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.[5] Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, began his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about their dispossessed daily life.[citation needed] Situationist film makers produced a number of important films, where the only contribution by the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks? (1973), a Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and Proletarian revolution. The intellectual technique of using capitalism's own structures against itself is known as détournement.[citation needed]

## See also

[edit]

* Karl Marx in film
* Screen theory, a Marxist-psychoanalytic film theory associated with the British journal Screen in the 1970s

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Mike Wayne (ed.), Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, Pluto Press, 2005, p. 24.
2. ^ "Marxist Theory on Films". Film Theory. 2014-08-27. Retrieved 2025-03-04.
3. ^ Shlapentokh, Dmitry; Shlapentokh, Vladimir (2021-12-08). Soviet Cinematography 1918–1991. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-33867-0.
4. ^ a b Bordwell, David (2020-10-08). The Cinema of Eisenstein. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003070801/cinema-eisenstein-david-bordwell. ISBN 978-1-003-07080-1.
5. ^ "Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics". Goodreads. Retrieved 2024-04-22.

## Bibliography

[edit]

* Forsyth, Scott (1997). "Marxism, Film and Theory: From the Barricades to Postmodernism". Socialist Register. 33: 265–287\. ISSN 0081-0606.
* Kornbluh, Anne (2019). Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781501347320.
* James, David E. (1989) Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties Princeton. Princeton University Press. ISBN : 9780691047553

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Film studies

Approaches|

* Analytic
* Cognitive film theory
* Historical poetics
* Linguistic film theory
* Neoformalism
* Classical
* Formalist film theory
* Continental
* Feminist film theory
* Film semiotics
* Marxist film theory
* Psychoanalytic film theory
* Screen theory
* Structuralist film theory
* Critical methods
* Auteur theory
* Schreiber theory

Scholars|

* David Bordwell
* Thomas Elsaesser
* Sergei Eisenstein
* Colin MacCabe
* Christian Metz
* Laura Mulvey
* Kristin Thompson

Academic journals|

* Cinema Journal
* Film Quarterly
* Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
* Journal of Film and Video
* Journal of Popular Film & Television
* New Review of Film and Television Studies
* Screen
* The Velvet Light Trap
* Television & New Media

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