Filmatic rebellion

Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema
PROTEST / Morgan Adamson's Enduring Images brings new life to the 1960s revolutionary film and reminds us of the need to fight the prevailing forms of representation.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Not only do revolutionary movements attack the prevailing representations, they also create their own images. We saw it in 2011 during the Arab Spring, where social media played a key role in organizing and spreading the demonstrations against the despotic regimes of Ben Ali, Mubarak, Assad and others.

Of course, it was the presence of thousands of people in the streets, who occupied, marched and protested while fighting the police and military, which caused the regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt, but social media was an important tool in the preparation and mobilization of the rebellion against the despots.

The movements that occupied large spaces South Europe, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, which took over the baton in 2011, was also characterized by a combination of physical slowness in the occupation of places and public places and the rapid media of the new media. The protests were recorded directly with cameras in Cairo, Athens and New York in 2011. Mobile phones and platforms such as Facebook enabled protesters to become a new Victor Serge, documenting and broadcasting the formation of new collective protest movements while taking place, outside the traditional mass media.

Game Arena

Morgan Adamson's book Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema provides a compelling analysis of an earlier cycle of protest in which cinematic representations played a central role in the fight against the ruling order. Late in the 1960s, film became a fighting arena for a whole generation of filmmakers who sought to use the medium in a revolutionary struggle against imperialism and the mass media (the spectacle).

Adamson constructs his analysis as a contribution to the analysis that characterized the new left, which emerged in the 1960s in opposition to the Stalinist version of communism with its harsh developmental laws and privileges of the male industrial working class.

The new Left sought to highlight new revolutionary subjects, such as women and migrants, that did not fit into the dialectical-materialist model prevailing in the Soviet Union and its local communist parties throughout Europe and the so-called Third World.

According to Adamson, it turned out that the film became an important medium that brought up new subjectivities and new lines of breaking that critically followed the dictates of dialectical materialism. The new left challenged the "economism" of dialectical materialism, pointing to new forms of control and submission that took place outside the factory areas.

Society of the spectacle
From Debord's film the Society of the Spectacle

Adamson uses Guy Debord "Spectacle" thesis as an entrance to the expansion and rethinking of Marxism that took place in the 1960s. Debord claimed that the alienation in the factory was supplemented by a new form of alienation that took place in everyday life.

Everyday life was colonized, as he put it. More and more areas of human life, leisure, culture, the family and human imagination as such were subjected to the image form of the product. The late capitalist society is characterized by an intense and accelerating production and circulation of images that reproduce a number of increasingly meaningless subjects.

As Adamson shows, Debord and the new left considered the cinematic image to be a controlled form. But a controlled form that could be broken free from the mass media and used against them, through analysis and basketball. As in Debord's case, analysis of an almost total poor life was devoted to simple survival, combined with strict demands for rebellion and resistance.

Capitalism had managed to penetrate into the very core of the human, but it was still possible to strike back. Adamson analyzes several film projects in which the filmmakers retaliated and used the film medium as a tool of resistance and exposed the brutal violence in the unjust and all-encompassing development of capital (Trotsky).

Movies like analysis and confrontation

The films Adamson analyzes include The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord from 1973, Columbia Revolt of the Newsreel collective from 1968, The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Sanrizuka of the 1968 Ogawa Pro collective, Finally Got the News from 1970 by the Detroit Newsreel Collective and Roman Feminist Cinema Collectives The Adjective Woman from 1971, are all essay films. But not essay films in the traditional sense, that is, author films.

The book is a compelling analysis of a previous protest cycle in which films played
a central role in the fight against the ruling order.

The new left films were characterized by a movement from expressive subjectivity to collective thinking, in which the expressive principles of the author film were rejected. As Adamson writes, "The New Left film opens up a conflict arena in which every self-sufficient entity – including the originator – is the victim of an invasion from outside." left film and hit back. There were questions to highlight both the repression and the exploitation capitalism, but also about visualizing the anti-imperialist and revolutionary opposition to the colonization of everyday life and the global south. The subject of expression in the cinematic new left is thus a "we" or an impersonal "it" equipped with a historical agenda. The film was not a medium of idea for the individual filmmaker, but became a collective form of rebellion in which structural problems such as colonization and alienation became the subject of analysis and criticism.

As Adamson tells us, all the films she analyzes were part of a particular historical context of social revolt. In that context, film became not only something other than entertainment, but also something other than formally experimental films. Film became part of a collective political struggle against both material oppression and a new intangible, image-based alienation. Film was the battlefield where new politics came into being.

We still live in that room – which we can call Walter the Picture Room ("Bildraum") – where politics is not only represented by images, but also takes the form of an overwhelming amount of images in circulation. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 is the banal confirmation of the development. One development the new left-wing movie tried to break with to visualize another world. In a time of intense counter-revolution, it is well worth looking back on previous attempts to intervene in the saturated world of image capitalism.

Translated by Lasse Takle

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