Some misconceptions of Communist Filmmaking
Responding to four critiques that keep cropping up
I think it is important to pause and examine a couple of misconceptions that I’ve seen crop up in response to communist filmmaking:
Great artists don’t want to work collaboratively.
“Media production will be completely refigured under communism”
Is communist filmmaking just a coop?
Radical aesthetics or politics have nothing to do with art
Great artists don’t want to work collaboratively
Narrative filmmaking is already a collaborative art form. There is no way not to work collaboratively. To make a narrative film you need at least two people, someone to run the camera/sound and someone to act. Certainly, experimental circumstances exist but my focus is on narrative filmmaking and not the avant-garde. The greatest directors to ever live were only able to make their films because of a huge division in labor from pre-production to distribution.
The production of cinema closely parallels the factory floor of any Marxist analysis. It is an industrial art form, a very unique one, but the existence of cinema was born out of industrial capitalism and its exploitation of simple cooperation to produce products. Different from large-scale industry, the workers on film produce one massive product instead of the mass production of goods. If you want to make a film this way, you need to collaborate. The division of film labor, like the general division of labor in society, forces us to see certain roles as being more important than others, when, in a materialist reality every role is necessary for the production of a film. Where film differs from the factory is in the unique role of the director who has the vision for the art being produced. This role is instrumental to film as having a vision, themes, emotions, etc. but does not need to depend on a capitalist managerial hierarchy to function.
The industry of film operates in an interesting mode where a director can function in many different ways. This is not mutually exclusive from Communist Filmmaking as I see it. The director, whether working with a writer or wrote the film themselves, has sat with the story and the themes and the style and the atmosphere for so long that the art of filmmaking only exists because of this unique position. Anyone who thinks I’m saying that films need to be made by committee is regurgitating a false analysis of what communism is. A film starts as the singular vision as a director, but the second it comes into contact with the rest of the filmmakers—writers, production designers, producers, cinematographers, gaffer, camera operators, editors, sound mixers, distributors, it has become a collective vision guided by the director, since a film is a delicate thing and if one worker changes out, the film could totally change.
In a society where individualism is the dominant ideology, saying something to be made collectively scares people. Films are already produced through cooperation, however, film workers don’t own the means of production nor do they own the product they produced, and it's not like you can split a film into pieces, but the production of art should be able to generate a means of subsistence for everyone who works on it.
“Media production will be completely refigured under communism”
This is fundamentally true, but what is important to remember is that there is no pre-conformed way this formation of media production needs to exist. Communist filmmaking is a place to dream about different ways this can exist. The people who should control, decide how films are made, and how they are distributed are the filmmakers themselves. The point is: communists invent the world. And filmmakers in this world will decide how they want to reconfigure their industry in a world where everyone’s needs are met. One need that people need to be met is entertainment and spiritual engagement. Art functions in an interesting and controversial mode for Marxists where some see it as a petit-bourgeois pastime but others see it as necessary to the human condition. You can guess where I see it.
There seems to be an assumption that everyone wants to be a working artist but that is simply not true. Art, just like woodworking or weaving or sport or metal work is something that should be accessible for everyone to produce, but not everyone wants to be a working carpenter, or clothes-maker or athlete. Does art not satisfy some of humanity's greatest needs? The great beauty of art is the same as any other use-value is that in a communist world of collective production, the filmmaker produces a film while the clothes manufacturer produces a shirt. Both have different but equal use-values in the most basic sense of trade. Of course, this is not the world we live in.
If you look only to historical forms of media production under communism, you’ve already missed the point of inventing our own future that can incorporate what worked and throw out what didn’t. Tarkovksy constantly battled the film committee and yet he produced films that capitalism would not have been able to. Until he reached the point of international recognition, would any capitalist production company have produced Andrei Rueblov or Mirror? Discard the disastrous film committee, but keep the ability to produce radically new forms of cinema. Many people have lost the ability to dream up a world that does not yet exist.
Communism’s simplest form is the abolition of private property and thus the abolition of wage labor. Society will produce to meet the material needs of everyone in it, not for the accumulation of profits. Wage-labor will no longer need to exist because everyone’s material needs will be met, including the production of art. This is liberatory for artists since one no longer needs to produce for the market. Art will no longer be valued for its profit but for its ability to satisfy different human needs whether that be sci-fi escapism, spiritual transcendence, or romance. These three kinds of films already exist, but under capitalism are restricted in their forms since their number one function is to produce profits. Art, like health care, housing, and food, should be free. Art and the market are fundamentally incompatible.
Is communist filmmaking just a coop?
The largest obstacle to any communist, community, or mutual aid project is the necessity to first overthrow capitalism. Everyone needs to work for a wage in order to access basic human necessities: housing, health care, food, and water. These are not guaranteed under capitalism and can only be obtained by selling your labor-power i.e. the ability to perform a certain kind of labor and obtain the subsistence to reproduce that labor the next day. Because of this, any project has to function, survive, and sustain under capitalism and this means it must interact with the market.
The purpose of communist filmmaking as a project is not to create “islands of socialism” but to create sustainable alternatives to capitalist filmmaking. In her essay “With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives” Minsun Ji explores the complicated history of co-ops from a variety of classical Marxist thinkers. In exploring Marx’s thought on co-ops, Ji finds that worker cooperatives must understand their relationship to class struggle and that “a proper Marxist understanding of the potential of worker cooperatives begins with this insights and interprets specific cooperative innovations through the lens of whether they deepen or diffuse the worker’s understanding of their own class position and power,” (Ji 21). Coops must be politicized entities, not just a singular unit of worker capitalists.
This extends to independent filmmakers. Hollywood is a hierarchical factory-like structure with workers, managers, and owners in a web of social relations. Directors in Hollywood often function as managers instead of the specialized division of labor that has the skills of a director. Communist filmmaking must build out from this theory of the coop that abolishes class relations where film studios or individual films are self-managed by all of the workers. Again, this is not the same as saying that films are made by committee. This means that filmmakers must see themselves as a class and politicize their labor struggle both within Hollywood and outside of the system and not just “be grateful to work in the biz.” Class consciousness for filmmaker’s is the first step to forming a class itself to engage in the struggle.
This project, which I call communist filmmaking, is an experiment, an attempt at an alternative to Hollywood filmmaking that is not based on the production of profits and exploitation. In a world where capitalist realism is at every turn, communist experiments, even if forced to interact with the market, are necessary to prove that there are alternatives to capitalism. It helps leftists learn what works and what doesn’t because, ultimately, we get to build the world. Without a plan, capital will easily regain control. Marx saw “the value of these experiments [radical worker coops] cannot be over-rated,” (Marx quoted from Ji 8). As an experiment, we can learn how art can be created radically and sustainably in a world where the quality of a film is valued by how much profit it generates for the bosses.
There is much more to be written on this topic which I hope to explore in the future, but if we don’t start somewhere, where are we going to start in the production of radical art that offers an alternative to capital? In the ideal communist utopia, the conception of profit and art would not exist. We don’t live in this world (yet); we live under capitalism, and just like we need (in the US) universal health care now we need radical art now.
Radical aesthetics or politics have nothing to do with art
In what world has this ever been true? Working with Marxist and prison abolitionist and Angela Davis’s assessment of the word radical: “After all, radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’” This is why right-wing projects, in my mind, are not “radical” in the same way leftist ones are. They never grasp at the root of issues, only ever wanting to eliminate or go back to a past that can no longer exist. This understanding of the word has changed my understanding of what politics and art can do.
I think what radical aesthetics conjures in the capitalist realist mind is some strange mismashing of the most obtuse avant-garde film you’ve ever seen. Radical aesthetics are Tarkovksy, Tarr, and Ackerman using slowness and duration to create worlds and feelings that extend far beyond the image that all get to the root of something different. Radical aesthetics are filmmakers from the “New Hollywood” movement in the 1970s diving into gritty, dirty, realist stories of America. The radical examination of rugged individualism in Taxi Driver; the meandering wavering aesthetics of Nashville, these films get at the root of and examine ideals that are fundamentally American. It’s Cassavetes and co. producing some of the most formally interesting, radically performed stories about struggling individuals and their friends. The film bro who said this surely enjoys those films? At that time in America, there was a freedom that filmmakers obtained in an era where studios needed to rebrand themselves. These filmmakers took advantage of that.
This idea that radical aesthetics and politics have nothing to do with art is an inherently conservative approach to filmmaking that does not see how the medium can move forward or be anything different than before. Hollywood realism longs for the films of the 70s, but communist filmmaking longs for their radical spirit. We want to produce radical films–formally, narratively now. Not every film needs to reinvent the wheel, but the abolition of the market would make it much more interesting when filmmakers who never before thought about producing something non-commercial suddenly are free to experiment.
These were a few things that cropped up in response to my last post that I felt the need to respond to before moving on to the next post. It’s always important to remember that we’re treading in unexplored waters here but that the envisioning of a world without capitalism is difficult if all you do is spend your days suffering under capitalism. However, this is capitalist realism as I talked about in the last post. Breaking from the chains of “there is no alternative” is the first step in allowing yourself to dream of alternative ways of filmmaking and the organization of society. What communist filmmaking truly looks like requires the input, ideas, and needs of all filmmakers with the only absolute being the abolition of private ownership and exploitation.
If you missed my last post on “What is Hollywood Realism?” you can find it here. The next post will be what was promised in the last post on cinema in the “independent” and “alternative” zones.