I’m loosely aware that there’s a Marxist Film Theory school, and that obviously there were many filmmakers and theorists who were Marxists in history, but I can’t wrap my head around how one would specifically apply Marxism to film critique and production.
I also can’t find any understandable explanation. Could somebody ELI5?
Kim Il Sung’s On Cinema (you can find the PDF online) and the Soviet montage theory I think would be two starting points. And then watching marxist movies I think.
breadtuber (2h 55m run length)
Have a look at Michael Parenti’s Make-Believe Media or his lecture ‘Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes’. I’m not sure if this counts as ‘Marxist Film Theory’ because schools of thought can be weirdly exclusionary and not what they appear to be. But it’s Parenti criticising entertainment media and it’s production from a Marxist perspective.
Essentially, he finds that most movies are pro-capitalism and anti-communist and it’s partly because of the way they are produced and who pays for them.
Take a show with blue collar workers and notice how they’re all portrayed as being a bit stupid. Watch any movie with military or police vehicles and weapons and ask how the studio got their hands on all that gear to make it look realistic (answer: the police and military lend the equipment on the condition that they have editorial control over the final product). Consider why anti-capitalist movies and shows are poorly distributed – they can be made but you won’t be able to watch them (e.g. 1900). Ask why even ‘poor’ people in movies and shows love in massive apartments or houses.
Any media, not just overtly political media, can be criticised from a Marxist perspective. Have s quick look at this short article: https://redsails.org/the-swerve/ . Again, I can’t confirm whether this is what Marxist Film Theory is about.
I’ve tried looking into it as well, and my understanding is that it’s just a fluid term to describe films influenced by Marxist perspectives, or analysis of films that focuses on class struggle, the working class, contradictions of capitalism, material conditions, etc. It’s a sort of catch-all. At least that’s my reading of it.
I assume you’ve read the Wikipedia article for Marxist film theory since that’s the obvious search engine find, but have you also looked at Marxist literary criticism? That page breaks things down a bit more in the last section.
