Theory and Practice: The Lovers
Using my debut feature film as a start to explore radical alternatives
"Practice without theory is blind. Theory without practice is sterile. Theory becomes a material force as soon as it is absorbed by the masses." (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, Jan. 1844, MECW, Vol. 3, p. 182
As stated: communist filmmaking is a theory and a practice. Much of this project will be dedicated to producing theory, however, the point of producing this theory is so that it can be practiced. Soon enough, I’ll lay some foundations for communist filmmaking theoretically, and with my next film, attempt to carry them out. Everything is always good in theory, but the practice will shed light on how film labor can be quantified, how political film can be financed, and how a community can be built around a film.
I was a filmmaker before my interests in Marxist political economy were realized. Because of this, my debut feature film The Lovers, produced by 640 Films, a film collective I am a part of, comes out this summer. The film follows Louise, an overworked server, who cheats on her unemployed boyfriend Jon who spends his days studying Marx’s Capital. Overworked and exploited, their relationship suffers in their leaky apartment.
The film is 70 minutes and was shot in five days from a script of 25 pages. The film was shot in June of 2021 with a crew of eight to nine people, including myself, depending on the day. Since the entire film takes place in one room, I built the set in a spare room above my parent’s garage where I was living after moving home from MSU at the start of the pandemic. I began writing the film in August of 2020 so it’s been roughly three years since inception to release. The experience of making this film has been life-changing for me in many ways. For one, I have a beautiful film that is a perfect beginning to tackling how Capital affects people’s lives. And two, I met my partner Emily who played Louise. This is the beauty of making art.
The film was produced like many other microbudget features: with long hours. And when you’re just starting out in film, those long hours are fetishized since they are the industry standard. Hollywood work days are typically 12-14 hours but sometimes more and many IATSE members report working up to 20 hours in a day. This is draconian, and we can do a deeper Marxist analysis of this at another time, but the point is that this idea trickles down into independent and microbudget films.
And this is obviously stupid since filmmaking requires so much mental and physical energy that the quality of films suffers and most of us don’t even realize it since that’s how it always has been. The hours worked in the film industry are like 19th-century factory working days that Engels critiques in The Conditions of the Working Class in England.
Part of Communist Filmmaking is creating a practice that does not require the abysmal hours of the bourgeois film industry. Its function is to abolish the exploitation and “grind” mindset of the industry. Films require hundreds if not thousands of hours of labor from inception to completion and finding ways to space out these hours is incredibly important to the practice of communist filmmaking. I’ve been on many film sets in various roles and every time you get the sense that you’re just getting things done, not making things the best they can be, which, of course, requires time. And time in the art of film is not only spent in labor, but also functions as means of production. Time is the material of cinema.
Another aspect of filmmaking that I’ve learned from The Lovers is the need to create the collective ownership of a film upfront. The feeling that when the film is completed, everyone will feel like a part of them is in it and a part of them literally is. The collective labor of everyone involved. This needs to be felt by everyone who works on a film, not just the writer and director.
Films can be extremely personal pieces of art, but they are always collectively produced and thus ownership should be shared and felt collectively. Towards the end, I realized this, but in the beginning, isolated from the pandemic, I fell deeply into the individualized approach that most independent films take. Part of communist filmmaking is the raising of class consciousness through the practice of art-making.
The way films are distributed is one of the most pressing matters in the film industry today. The popular saying of the day is that anybody can make a film but the hard part is getting it seen. This is true in some cases, but it is much more complex than it seems. Cinema today not only competes with itself but with TikTok, YouTube, and social media.
With The Lovers, I’ll explore different modes of distribution beyond just AVOD and TVOD. I have reservations about AVOD (advertising video on demand, Tubi, Freevee, RokuTV, etc.), but it is a way for films to reach an audience and distribute without any capital. Regardless, we need to explore radical alternatives that are community-based like physical media in local stores and live shows at theaters and community institutions.
These are the most exciting but most difficult avenues to pursue. They could also end up being the most rewarding since the art of film can be so effective in bringing members of the community together. One of the ideal ways this film could function is in generating community discussion about its themes and about filmmaking itself.
This project is an exploration of these facets, how independent films repeat capitalist modes of production, and how art is produced for profit. The collective ownership of a film’s value is not a difficult question on the surface but becomes complicated with the complexities in film financing that exist in the American system of no State support for film. Investors want to capitalize their earnings, i.e. exploit those who did the work. What an alternative to the traditional industry working day will look like will require lots of knowledge production.
Film is such a fickle medium that requires both patience and speed, but there are ways to make working days shorter and have more of them; we just have to invent them. The Lovers is an experiment for 640 Films to examine alternative forms of distribution, as well as examine which traditional forms can sustainably recoup the means of production and create subsistence for all those involved. In the world of commodity fetishism, art needs to be decommodified.
The only way we can muster an alternative to Hollywood hegemony is to work consciously and collectively every step of the way. Repeating Hollywood’s values, narratively, formally, aesthetically, and in the way we produce films is a symptom of Hollywood realism—that there is no alternative to Hollywood. Communist filmmaking must dispute this every step of the way in order to create a landscape that makes better art more sustainably with a global reach.
The term “independent filmmaker” has broadened from being independent of the Hollywood studio system to purely independent, but a communist filmmaking perspective requires us to work collectively, not just on individual film productions, but as an entire industry.
Follow and share this project as we examine deeper how what I’m calling “Hollywood realism” permeates the American independent film industry and beyond.