Cinema/Ideology/Criticism

Jean-Luc Comolli & Jean Narboni

Introduction

• Scientific criticism has an obligation to define its field, methods, context, current conditions, function it intends to fulfill, etc.
• Cahiers du Cinema should also do as much
• “Clear theoretical base to which to relate our critical practice and its field, taking the two to be indivisible” (812).
• “Our objective is not to reflect upon what we ‘want’ (would like) to do, but upon what we are doing and what we can do, and this is impossible without an analysis of the present situation” (812).

Where?

• Cahiers du Cinema is a magazine that fits inside the economic system of capitalist publishing (modes of production, spheres of circulation, etc.)
• Alternative parallel utopian system does not exist…
• “What is our attitude to our situation?”
• Majority of films are distributed by a capitalist economic system and within the dominant ideology - they all are in fact
• Which films support the ideology and which films are pushing back?
• Cahiers is within the film of cinema and the precise object of the study is the history of a film: “how it is produced, manufactured, distributed, understood” (813).
• What is the film today? What work is to be done in the field constituted by films? What is our specific function in this field? How are we different from other film magazines?

The Films

• What is a film?
• “On the one hand it is a particular product, manufactured within a given system of economic relations, and involving labor (which appears to the capitalist as money) to produce - a condition to which even ‘independent’ filmmakers and the ‘new cinema’ are subject - assembling a certain number of workers for this purpose” (813-814).
• It is a commodity, possessing exchange value, realized through ticket sales and contracts, governed by the laws of the market
• “On the other hand, as a result of being a material product of the system, it is also an ideological product of the system, which in France means capitalism” (814).
• Films nor filmmakers will ever upset this structure (deform it, deflect it, but not negate it)

Can’t Escape Ideology...

• You can’t escape ideology. You can’t escape the capitalist system.
• To say you want to work “outside the system” doesn’t make any sense…
• Cinema and art are branches of ideology
• Not every filmmaker plays a similar role
• “It is the job of criticism to see where they differ, and slowly, patiently, not expecting any magical transformations to take place at the wave of a slogan, to help change the ideology which conditions them” (814).
• Every film is political - it’s determined by the ideology which produces it (or within which it is produced)
• Films’ very manufacture mobilizes powerful economic forces

Cinema as Ideology

• “Clearly, the cinema ‘reproduces’ reality: this is what a camera and film stock are for - so says the ideology” (814).
• “Tools and techniques of filmmaking are a part of ‘reality’ themselves, and furthermore ‘reality’ is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology” (814-815).
• Cinema does not capture “concrete reality,” it captures the world of the dominant ideology
• Once this is realized, “the filmmaker’s first task is to show up the cinema’s so-called ‘depiction of reality.’ If he can do so there is a chance that we will be able to disrupt or possibly even sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function” (815).

Vital Distinction Between Films

• “The vital distinction between films today is whether they do this or whether they do no” (815).
• A) First and largest category = films that are imbued through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated form - no indication the filmmaker is even aware
• Not just commercial films
• “The majority of films in all categories are the unconscious instruments of the ideology which produces them”
• All films are commodities…
• “The notion of a public and its tastes was created by the ideology to justify and perpetuate itself” - a close circuit endlessly repeating the same illusion
• Formal techniques are streamlined - no difference between the ideology they meet every day and the ideology on the screen and how both are experienced...

Vital Distinction Between Films Cont...

• B) Second category: films which attack their ideological assimilation on two fronts
• 1. Direct political action, on the level of the signified - deal with a directly political subject
• Actively deal with issues, not just discuss, reiterate, or paraphrase them
• 2. Breaking down of the traditional ways of depicting reality (on the level of form)
• Only actions on both fronts - signified and signifiers - has any hope of operating against the prevailing ideology
• C) Third category: “against the grain,” content not explicitly political, but in some way becomes so through the criticism practiced on it through its form
• Persona for example
• Second and Third categories “constitute the essential in the cinema, and should be the chief subject of the magazine” (817).

Vital Distinctions Between Films Cont...

• D) Fourth category: explicitly political content but do not effectively criticize the ideological system in which they are embedded because they unquestioningly adopt its language and its imagery
• Film criticism and analysis is tantamount in order to suss this out...
• E) Fifth category: “Films which seem at first to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner” (817).
• Ideology becomes subordinate to the text
• “It no longer has an independent existence: It is presented by the film” (817).
• F) Sixth category: “live cinema” or “direct cinema” variety
• Arising out of political (or social) events or reflections, but which make no clear differentiation between themselves and the nonpolitical cinema - don’t challenge cinema’s traditional, ideological method of depiction

Vital Distinctions Between Films Cont...

• G) Seventh category: “the other kind of ‘live cinema’ - “the director is not satisfied with the idea of the camera ‘seeing through appearances’, but attacks the basic problem of depiction by giving an active role to the concrete stuff on his film. It then becomes productive of meaning and is not just a passive receptacle for meaning produced out it (in the ideology)” (818).

Critical Function

• “Such, then, is the field of our critical activity: these films, within the ideology, and their different relations to it” (818).
• Four functions in the field:
• 1. “In the case of the films in category A): show what they are blind to; how they are totally determined, moulded, by the ideology”
• 2. “In the case of those in categories B), C), and G), read them on two levels, showing how the films operate critically on the level of signified and signifiers”
• 3. “In the case of those of types D) and F), show how the signified (political subject matter) is always weakened, rendered harmless, by the absence of the technical/theoretical work on the signifiers”
• 4. “In the case of those in group E), point out the gap produced between film and ideology by the way the films work, and show how they work”

Critical Function Cont...

• No room for speculation (commentary, interpretation, de-coding even) or for specious raving (of the film-columnist variety)
• “It must be a rigidly factual analysis of what governs the production of a film (economic circumstances, ideology, demand, and response) and the meanings and forms appearing in it, which are equally tangible” (818).