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Marxist Film Theory
Marxist film theory is an approach to film theory centered on concepts that make possible a political understanding of the medium.Mike Wayne (ed.), ''Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives'', Pluto Press, 2005, p. 24. Overview Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage. While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of the cinema of the United States. Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into belie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Film Theory
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate. Although some branches of film theory are derived from linguistics and literary theory, it also originated and overlaps with the philosophy of film. History Early theory, before 1945 French philosopher Henri Bergson's ''Matter and Memory'' (1896) anticipated the development of film theory during the birth of cinema in the early twentieth century. Bergson commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay ''L' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parody
A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its subject is an original work or some aspect of it (theme/content, author, style, etc), but a parody can also be about a real-life person (e.g. a politician), event, or movement (e.g. the French Revolution or 1960s counterculture). Literary scholar Professor Simon Dentith defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice". The literary theorist Linda Hutcheon said "parody ... is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music, theater, television and film, animation, and gaming. Some parody is practiced in theater. The writer and critic John Gross observes in his ''Oxford Boo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Screen Theory
Screen theory is a Marxist– psychoanalytic film theory associated with the British journal ''Screen'' in the early 1970s. It considers filmic images as signifiers that do not only encode meanings but also mirrors in which viewers accede to subjectivity. The theory attempts to discover a way of theorizing a politics of freedom through cinema that focuses on diversity instead of unity. Here, the Marxist emphasis on universal consciousness as a basis for defining emancipation shifted to the articulation of diversities and multiplicities of individual and collective experience due to the psychoanalytic elaboration of the unconscious. Overview The theoreticians of the "Screen theory" approach—Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey—describe the " cinematic apparatus" as a version of Althusser's ideological state apparatus. According to Screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact that the subject is created and subjecte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl Marx In Film
Karl Marx and his ideas have been represented in film in genres ranging from documentary to fictional drama, art house and comedy. The Marxist theories of socialism, communism, class struggle, ideology and political economy influenced early Soviet-era filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein's theory of montage owed its "intellectual basis to Marxist dialectics". However, in addition to his philosophical influence on 20th century cinema and film-makers, Marx's life and times and his principal works have all been represented in film as subjects in their own right. Eisenstein's project, dating from 1927, to film Marx's book ''Das Kapital'' was never realised, although in more recent years the German film director and author Alexander Kluge completed a lengthy homage to Eisenstein's unrealised film entitled ''News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital''. In the 1960s French new wave directors, notably Jean-Luc Godard, used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Détournement
A détournement (), meaning "rerouting, hijacking" in French, is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and later adapted by the Situationist International (SI),''Report on the Construction of Situations'' (1957) that was defined in the SI's inaugural 1958 journal as " e integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, ''détournement'' within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres." It has been defined elsewhere as "turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself"—as when slogans and logos are turned against their advertisers or the political status quo. Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tact ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Revolution
In political science, a revolution (Latin: ''revolutio'', "a turn around") is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due to perceived oppression (political, social, economic) or political incompetence. Revolutions have occurred throughout human history and vary widely in terms of methods, duration, and motivating ideology. Their results include major changes in culture, economy, and social institution, socio-political institutions, usually in response to perceived overwhelming autocracy or plutocracy. Scholarly debates about what does and does not constitute a revolution center on several issues. Early studies of revolutions primarily analyzed events in European history from a psychological perspective, but more modern examinations include global events and incorporate perspectives from several social sciences, including sociology and political science. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proletarian
The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose only possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian. Marxist philosophy considers the proletariat to be exploited under capitalism, forced to accept meager wages in return for operating the means of production, which belong to the class of business owners, the bourgeoisie. Marx argued that this oppression gives the proletariat common economic and political interests that transcend national boundaries, impelling them to unite and take over power from the capitalist class, and eventually to create a communist society free from class distinctions. Roman Republic and Empire The constituted a social class of Roman citizens who owned little or no property. The name presumably originated with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their prope ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
State Capitalism
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized along business-management practices) or of public companies such as publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares. Marxist literature defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by a state. By this definition, a state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kung Fu
Chinese martial arts, often called by the umbrella terms kung fu (; ), kuoshu () or wushu (), are multiple fighting styles that have developed over the centuries in Greater China. These fighting styles are often classified according to common traits, identified as "families" of martial arts. Examples of such traits include ''Shaolinquan'' () physical exercises involving All Other Animals () mimicry or training methods inspired by Old Chinese philosophies, religions and legends. Styles that focus on qi manipulation are called ''internal'' (; ), while others that concentrate on improving muscle and cardiovascular fitness are called ''external'' (; ). Geographical association, as in ''northern'' (; ) and ''southern'' (; ), is another popular classification method. Terminology ''Kung fu'' and ''wushu'' are loanwords from Cantonese and Mandarin respectively that, in English, are used to refer to Chinese martial arts. However, the Chinese terms ''kung fu'' and ''wushu'' (; ) ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Media Of The People's Republic Of China
The mass media in China consists primarily of television, newspapers, radio, and magazines. Since the start of the 21st century, the Internet has also emerged as an important form of communication by media, and is under the direct supervision and control of the Chinese government and ruling Chinese Communist Party. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and until the 1980s, almost all media outlets in Mainland China were state-run. Privately-owned media outlets only began to emerge at the onset of economic reforms, although state media outlets such as Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television (CCTV), and the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, '' People's Daily,'' continue to hold significant market share. Non-governmental media outlets that are allowed to operate within the PRC (excluding Hong Kong and Macau, which have separate media regulatory bodies) are no longer required to strictly follow every journ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Society Of The Spectacle
''The Society of the Spectacle'' (french: La société du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book ''Comments on the Society of the Spectacle'' in 1988. Summary The work is a series of 221 short theses in the form of aphorisms. Each thesis contains one paragraph. Degradation of human life Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of ''being'' into ''having'', and ''having'' into merely ''appearing''." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." The spect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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