Philosophical Theories of Political Cinema

Angelo Emanuele Cioffi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000468656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Estética en filosofía

This book utilizes philosophical tools to build up a framework for the classification, analysis and assessment of political cinema. The author first maps the category of political cinema, clarifying what it means for a film to be 'political', and then analyzes the relation between the value of a film as a political film and its value as art.

Through philosophical enquiry, Angelo Emanuele Cioffi builds up a framework that could be of use in art-critical practice and that can help with the classification and assessment of political films. Grounded in analytic philosophy of art and cognitivist film theory, with insights from political science, political philosophy, epistemology and cognitive science, the book presents a unique analysis of the relation between films and the 'political'. This theory is tested with detailed case studies, and the author uses specific films as examples of the applicability and explanatory power of this theoretical framework.

As such, this book will be of interest not just to film studies, film theory and political philosophy scholars, but to anyone with an interest in political film, aesthetic practice and philosophy of art.

1 The ‘political’ of political cinema

DOI: 10.4324/9780367816872-2

The relation between politics and films has been analyzed from a variety of angles, both in film studies and related disciplines, like media and cultural studies. The bibliographical landscape is quite diverse. There are heterogeneous points of view on what counts as a political film, as some take political films to deal with political institutions, while others may consider a Hollywood comedy or a Hitchcock’s film political. In spite of all this talk about political films, very few efforts have been made to sketch at least some guidelines for the definition of the category. There seems to be a tacit agreement between writers and readers about what counts as a political film – of the kind ‘I know it when I see it’. Also, scholars have limited their field of analysis to subcategories of political cinema. Some authors have focused their attention on films of emerging countries (the so-called third cinema) in order to investigate the possible interrelation between political change and cinema. Others have focused exclusively on avant-garde and arthouse cinema in order to investigate the value of political cinema. Studies on Hollywood’s relation to politics and the political have many different angles of analysis. Some scholars see Hollywood as a capitalist machine that serves the purpose of spreading capitalist’s ideology. Other scholars have analyzed Hollywood’s films with overt political commitment or the politics of films in the blacklist era (see Humphries, 2008; Krutnik, Neale, Neve, Stanfield, & American Council of Learned Societies, 2007; Langford, 2010; Maltby, 1983; Ryan & Kellner, 1990; Scott, 2000; Smith, 2014). One thing seems to be clear: it is impossible to limit the category of political films to a single time and place. There were political films in the postwar era, as there are now, and these kinds of films seem to be ubiquitous, as every national culture has its own ‘flavor’ of political cinema.

In this book, I want to propose a theory of political cinema that transcends local foci of attention. This aims to be a theory of what political cinema is and why this is of value. As this aims to be a general theory of what counts as a political film, it should not depend on specific places or production eras.

Do we need a category of ‘political cinema’? I think we do. We classify artworks because classification helps with their interpretation and assessment. That is, our aesthetic judgments depend on categorical classification. Kendall Walton used the famous example of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, which ‘seems violent, dynamic, vital, disturbing to us’ (1970, p. 347). Whereas, were we living in a society without an established medium of painting, but rather one that produces a kind of work of art called guernicas – variations of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ done in various bas-relief dimensions – we would perceive Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ ‘as cold, stark, lifeless, or serene and restful, or perhaps bland, dull, boring – but in any case not violent, dynamic and vital’ (p. 347). Something similar happens to artworks about political issues: they are best appreciated if assessed and interpreted in light of the main characteristics of the category to which they belong. So, here I propose considering the category of political cinema as a genre, as I believe that it provides relevant tools for the classification and assessment of films.

When is a film political? What are the functions of political cinema? How do we assess it? These are the questions that guide the investigation of the first three chapters of the book. However, this first chapter is going to be primarily concerned with some theoretical clarification. In order to define what is characteristic of the political genre, these two concepts require clarification: ‘genre’ and ‘political’. I introduce the main theoretical difficulties related to the definition of genre (Section 1), and I stress how the focus of my attention is on problems related to the definition of an individual genre, that of political cinema. I highlight the difficulties in determining clear-cut criteria that could identify political films (Section 2), so I turn to the definition of the concept of the political (Section 3), and I introduce the tripartite distinction between politics, policy and polity (Section 4) as this distinction can help in mapping the concept of the political. The aim of this chapter is to provide an initial sketch of what constitutes political cinema. It will be clear that in classifying political films we cannot rely on formal elements and that an interpretative effort is required for an accurate classification of political films, so in Section 5, I clarify which interpretative practice I take to be most relevant for my purposes.

1 What is a genre?

Brian Laetz and Dominic McIver Lopes advance a proposal for a definition of movie genre:

Category K is a genre if and only if K has multiple members, which are made by more than one artist (for any given artist role) from any background, and K has features in virtue of which K figures into the appreciation or interpretation of K’s audience

(2008, p. 156)

This proposal has the merit of identifying those features that help distinguish a genre from any other category. We can have categories with only a single member. Indeed, every artwork belongs to a category of which it is the only member, like the category of novels that are identical to To Kill a Mockingbird. Moreover, there are categories that are made by the artistic production of only a single artist, like the category of films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Such a category is not a genre – but an oeuvre (Laetz & Lopes, 2008, p. 155). Also, artists can hold a variety of roles in the production chain: directors, producers, actors, cinematographers and so forth. No categorization based on a single artist, for any given role, will make up a genre: ‘movies-that-star-Jimmy-Stewart’ is not a genre and neither is a complex category like ‘movies-directed-by-Alfred-Hitchcock-starring-Jimmy-Stewart’ (Laetz & Lopes, 2008, p. 155). This is true not just for cinema. We can think of a parallel in literature: novels-written-by-Daniel-Pennac is not a genre, nor is the category of novels-on-Benjamin-Malaussène.

For a category to be a genre it needs to be somehow ‘open’; that is, different artists need to have the opportunity to make works in that category. Hence, categories that have clear boundaries in a historical period cannot be genres either. If I were to build a church in the style of Brunelleschi, that would hardly be considered an example of Renaissance architecture. As the category of works belonging to Renaissance architecture is historically confined, no architect can, today, build a church belonging to that category. The closure of such categories (those made by a single artwork, or single artists, or historically confined) seems to be the major difference from those categories that are prototypically called ‘genres’ like comedy and tragedy.

Laetz and Lopes’s proposal, however, also includes categories that we would hardly call ‘genres’, as the authors themselves acknowledge: ‘R-rated movies, movies with happy endings, and movies with foreign dialogue meet all the conditions laid out in the proposed schema, but it is a stretch to think of them as genres’ (p. 157). Probably we could gather more examples when exporting this theory of genre outside cinema. The category of artworks painted oil on canvas would be another candidate for being a genre, yet we do not really think of it as such.

Nonetheless, I take Laetz and Lopes’s proposal to be a valid starting point of analysis. Indeed, we can actually appreciate the difficulties of formulating a classical definition of genre based on necessary and sufficient conditions if we look at the problems affecting theories of single genres. The problems of ‘openness’ in Laetz and Lopes’s theory of genre mirror problems in the development of theories of a genre. The authors correctly argue that theories of each individual genre need to be worked out separately from a general theory of genre as each individual genre will be characterized by different features relevant in the appreciation and interpretation of tokens of its set. Yet, scholars writing about individual genres can hardly agree on what count as necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to the particular category K. We can see how a problem about the limits of a category reverberates from one theoretical level to the other. At a more abstract level there is the difficulty of tracing the borders of what counts as genre, and theories of individual genres struggle to identify a close set of features capable of classifying all relevant tokens. My book aims at contributing to these kinds of theories, that is, theories of an individual genre.

An example of a debate around the definition of a single genre can prove the complexity I mentioned. Here I want to quote a passage from Rick Altman’s reconstruction of the debate around the definition of ‘western’. This reconstruction is quite significant and shows the definitional difficulties faced by a theory of a single genre:

Jean Mitry provides us with a clear example of the most common definition. The western is a ‘film whose action, situated in the American West, is consistent with the atmosphere, the values, and the conditions of existence in the Far West between 1840 and 1900’… . Marc Vernet’s more detailed list is more sensitive to cinematic concerns … Vernet outlines general atmosphere (‘emphasis on basic elements such as earth, dust, water, and leather’), stock characters (‘the tough/soft cowboy, the lonely sheriff, the faithful or treacherous Indian, and the strong but tender woman’), as well as technical elements (‘use of fast tracking and crane shots’)… . For [Jim] Kitses the western grows out of the dialectic between the West as garden and as desert (between culture and nature, community and individual, future and past). John Cawelti attempts to systematise the western in a similar fashion: the western is always set on or near a frontier, where man encounters his uncivilised double. The western thus takes place on the border between two lands, between two eras, and with a hero who remains divided between two value systems (for he combines the town’s morals with the outlaw’s skills)

(2012, pp. 31–32).

Rick Altman, following Fredric Jameson and Todorov, distinguishes between a semantic and syntactic approach to genres. However, Altman’s use of the term ‘semantic’ is not related to the global meaning of a work (Jameson, probably more pointedly, uses the term in this fashion); instead, semantic, for Altman, refers to ‘lexical choices’ or semantic units characterizing a text. Hence, the author holds, definitions depending on ‘a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like’ (2012, p. 31) are semantic definitions, whereas ‘definitions that play up … certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders’ (p. 31) are syntactic definitions. It follows that the first two definitions (Jean Mirty’s and Vernet’s) are semantic definitions, whereas Kitses and Cawelti use a syntactical approach. I am not convinced that Altman’s approach and distinction between semantic and syntactic definitions may actually be illuminating. If anything, Altman’s use of the term ‘semantic’ can be misleading, as the definitions that he labels as ‘semantic’ have an actual focus on film form: they have an emphasis on mise-en-scène and cinematography, whereas the ‘syntactic’ definitions are focused on film content or meaning. However, what this brief survey demonstrates is that genre theory suffers from deep definitional problems that can be traced back to the complex interplay of form and content.

Robert Stam argues that genre analysis is plagued by at least five major problems. The first, and more obvious, relates to the question of extension. Certain labels are too broad, and they end up being unhelpful for critical assessment, like the general label of ‘comedy’, whereas other labels end up being too restrictive, say ‘Biopics on Sigmund Freud’ or ‘disaster films concerning earthquakes’ (Stam, 2000, p. 128). The second problem Stam points to is normativism: ‘having a preconceived idea of what a genre film should do, rather than seeing genre merely as trampoline for creativity and innovation’ (p. 129). Now, this second problem needs to be further clarified; any theory of genre will imply a certain degree of normativism, as we need a schema of selection of the relevant patterns and conventions that make a work belong to a particular genre. Otherwise we get stuck in a vicious circle in which we try to come up with a descriptive definition via an inductive process, but then we have to ask ourselves how it is we come to know the prototypical examples of a given category in the first place? As Edward Buscombe put it: ‘if we want to know what a western is, we must look at certain kinds of films. But how do we know which films to look at until we know what a western is?’ (2012, p. 14). So, a certain degree of normativism is necessary to build a theory of genre as long as this leaves the genre sufficiently open to recognize change, innovation, deviations from the norm and overlap with other genres. Third, genres are often imagined to be monolithic, whereas, in reality, even classical Hollywood movies blend genres, and the possibilities of mixing genres are part of the process of innovation and creativity that any theory of genre needs to take into account. The fourth plague is biologism: scholars, like James Naremore, have posited that genres have a ‘life cycle’ moving from birth to maturity and then parodic decline. Biologism is denied by actual counterexamples: parodies develop quite a lot earlier than the alleged decline of a genre. Stem suggests as examples Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Shamela in literature, or Griffith’s Intolerance and Buster Keaton’s The Three Ages in film. Also, the idea of a ‘life cycle’ seems to associate genres to historical periods, turning them into closed categories.¹ Fifth, Stam argues, genres can also be submerged. This happens ‘when a film appears on the surface to belong to one genre yet on a deeper level belongs to another, as when analysts argue that Taxi Driver is “really” a western, or that Nashville is ultimately a reflexive film about Hollywood’ (p. 129).

This consideration reveals probably the most important struggle for a theory of genre, that of clarifying the dialectic between classification and interpretation. Some genres can be ‘submerged’ because interpretation pulls in a different direction from the previous classification. We have seen in the opening of this paragraph, with Laetz and Lopes, that genre classification is important and of value, because it can help us to cast light on problems of interpretation and critical assessment of an artwork. Yet, is it possible to classify without interpreting an artwork? Let me consider Alfonso Cuaròn’s Gravity by way of example. The film is classified as a science fiction thriller – two different genres are needed for the classification. We can say, quite roughly, that the movie is about Dr. Ryan Stone’s attempt to get home after an extraordinary incident has left her floatin...