Film: The Art Form of Late Capitalism

Abstract

History is not and can never become a seamless narrative. Historical narrative becomes myth when it performs the function of representing society to itself as forgetting and makes present only the surfaces of the material practices that constitute history, recuperating the past for the present. If we view film as ontology rather than representation we can understand how filmic images have shaped our beliefs about the history of the Bolshevik revolution more than the writings of John Reed, Lenin, and Trotsky. The task of the filmmaker, according to Sergei Eisenstein, is to involve the spectator in the process of creating the film. For Eisenstein montage (the creation of a new image from two partial representations) solves the problem of making the physical reality palpable without reproducing it. The filmmaker makes the viewer experience the emergence and assemblage of the image. By revealing the process as much as the result of the creation of film image, the filmmaker literally produces a new reality rather than merely representing it. Eisenstein and the various schools of Soviet filmmakers strove to achieve a synchronization of the senses through the film such that all the elements of perception are woven into whole cloth. For Eisenstein, Vertov, and other filmmakers of the Bolshevik revolution, the task was not to make a report about social reality, but to produce it: consequently, in the actual method of creating images, a work of art must reproduce the process whereby, in life itself, new images are built up in the human consciousness and feelings. I Thus, the international cultural function of the glorious years of Soviet art has been to structure our remembrance of the past. For us Eisenstein's October is the Russian revolution not a representation of it, not a report. Its power to evoke a nostalgia for that which was never present to us yet is part of our political repertoire just as Griffith's Birth of a Nation constitutes itself not only in films like Gone with the Wind but in the whole political repertoire of the right-wing. It is only by deconstructing these films that the structure of desire can be revealed and the desiring machine, to borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, that records and actually creates a mediated reality be surpassed. The real question raised by the political films of the revolution and counterrevolution is the question about the status of film as an object-form of which the entire repertoire of human emotions is the subject-form.

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