The Political Film

Ulus Baker

What is politics? This is evidently a more difficult question than "what

is cinema", since the latter is clearly a technological-artistic event,
having a recent history, whose authors and actors are known, and
which is used generally for representational purposes. Or one kind of
politics has always been a representation in itself, whether it belongs
to the democratic clusters of Ancient Greece (the polis) or to the
historical domain of struggles for power, or rather, through power.
Hence politics is a generality, and according to Foucault's formula, one
is no longer capable to oppose political life to the private one, since the
political element is already contained in the second, and
"state"-modeled politics remains purely representational, even in
Ancient Greece.

Or cinema too has many dimensions --political, ideological, cultural and

economic... It can tell us "political" stories, and its birth was
nevertheless determined by the political interests of state powers and
social classes: an art of mass entertainment for the bourgeoisie, but at
the same time, as Dziga Vertov was formulating, an "opium of the
people" in its dramatic-representational manners. Lenin was the first
political leader of twentieth century to recall the cinema as the primary
art, and Dr. Goebbels, the chief-propaganda leader of Nazism called to
"emulate" it, although he was not so much willing to make political
motives a subject matter for films to be produced by German
filmmakers. Really, what Dr. Goebbels asks from German cinema
producers was to propound the empty, dramatic, melodramatic films --
to tell people stories... He intended a film of embellishment, that of the
"opium". This is why if Siegfried Kracauer sought the roots of Nazi's
aesthetics in German Expressionist films, the reasons are evident --
simply, since with the exception of some propaganda films by Leni
Riefenstahl, all great filmmakers were in exile in the Third Reich period,
and no seroius films were yet available.

Political cinema, properly speaking appears, however, at the very roots

of cinema: a piece like Griffith's The Birth of a Nation has been shot in
many countries in this or that manner --and it served as a model to tell
the history of the emergence of a nation (Gance's Napoléon, as a saga
of the Revolution, and in Turkey, many films on the "birth-of-a -nation"
model were shot, relentlessly). And already in his Intolerance, Griffith
was able to tell at least four stories in a trans-historical political motive
--the injustice and the intolerance throughout history, from Babylon to
nineteenth century United States, painted with the colours of liberal
politics. Up to the films of Frank Capra, idealizing the tensions between
the individual and community, the classical Hollywood cinema
constituted a classical model to see from the cinematographic point of
view the public and communitarian domains of activity. Hence, if not a
pure genre (since political issues can also serve as a background),
classical political film remained thematic, i.e. political only insofar as it
told stories about political and public issues. And the continuation of
politics was already possible and already there: the war film (in the
sense of the continuation of politics with different means, according to
the classical formulation of Clausewitz) soon became a film genre
apart, to live its peak during the Second World War American
propaganda cinema especially for the recruitment of voluntary troops...

Yet the political was immanent in Soviet film. Not to be seen merely as
a political propaganda, and in spite of Lenin's alleged formula to give
priority to cinema among other arts, revolutionary Soviet film tended
to become the eminent form of artistic avant-garde, with many
filmographic inventions and experiments. The works of Kuleshov,
Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Vertov have been the most
thorough and decisive explorations of the filmic means and
expressions, a real conquest of the images and they were capable to
develop their theoretical accounts of cinematography. Even in the
context of the agitprop, Vertov's newsreels remained "poetical" and as
quite complex masterpieces of filmic expression and of montage. And
the films of Eisenstein proved to be almost the birthplace of the
conquest of the cinematography, with extraordinary attempts of the
author to give theoretical accounts into film-analysis. This grandiose
filmic experience belonged at the same time to a developed artistic
milieu: Russian formalism, constructivism and futurism, as well as the
general communist movement inflected in the domain of arts. Yet,
many of these movement pretended to be warriors of the communist
case, as soon as they have been gathered together as circles like LEF
and Bakhtin's Leningrad School of Aesthetics. Constructivism, to where
belonged at first Dziga Vertov and his Kinoki movement did never
pretended to be an artistic current, but rather to become a
transformation of the art, a destructive force to bring art at the level of
socialized work and to the appreciation levels of the proletarian
masses. LEF on the other hand seemed to pretend to become a pure
avant-garde, with the New Language of the New Man which has been
declared to be born by the Bolsheviks. This was not simply a new
model of modernism, since every Revolution till now had to be started
by some kind of declaration --and this declarations, taking the official
forms of "universal human rights", or "the new cult of reason" etc.
Were in fact parts of a wider "declaration", that about the "new man",
liberal in United States, revolutionary in the old continent. The Soviet
avant-garde belonged to the second axis, continental, Jacobinist, but
aesthetically aware in their fullest.
An artist, a poet, a filmmaker has the chances to be aware of the fact
that his task is nothing but creating new sensations and perceptions of
the world --that is, according to a Hegelian aesthetics, a matter of the
"particularity". He or she has to do with "images" and he or she
addressses to sensations, attempting to provide new points of view,
new domains of reality. This belongs to a formula of Paul Klee, who
urged that any new artistic development asks such a burning question:
"what is this art still waiting for a people to come?" This is not purely a
matter of appreciation. It is rather the problem already formulated by
Nietzsche who poses one of the most fundamental questions of art:
how the author of a work could reach the level of his work? Are the
authors capable to reach the level and power of their works? And
clearly, there are two means to achieve this --to let the work into the
domain of collective intra-cerebral domain of variations and
innovations, or to produce works under the futile name of "art work",
based on imitation, tradition and repetition. One should then pose the
question whether Constructivism for instance was an attempt to
remove such a basis of repetition, which is something quite different
from Benjamin's concept of "mechanical reproduction". Its intended
task was to destroy the bourgeois ways of perceiving the world and
society in particular, which could transform the entirety of human
experience to liberate the forces inherent in such an experience. This
was not a matter of rights or of restrained politics: aesthetics belongs
to the everyday life, as particular objects brought by art into visibility
are taken from the stream of such an ordinary life. At this level the
famous Nietzschean question arises in a new vein: there is a
parallelism between asking the question "what is the value of values"
and the question "what is the reality of the real". Such a parallelism
manipulates the established values by bringing forth ***