A Marxist will return to the movies further on…

 

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?

 

          Although there is not a lot of competition, one must treat Jeremy Warner with respect as a Daily Telegraph financial commentator. He has both an authoritative portrait on display in the paper as well as years of experience in the defence of capitalism from within that mighty citadel. Nor does he gloss over unpalatable prospects, as in the headline for his Telegraph article of 20^th September 2017: ‘Another financial crisis is certain. The only question is when and how.’ This is hardly likely to soothe potential investors.

          But is capitalism itself in crisis? That depends on your context. In one sense all of capitalism is in crisis all the time, not merely on the economic front but on all fronts of world society. In another sense it is not, so I believe, as a Marxist, in terminal economic crisis just now. Perhaps not until the expropriators get a move on. Meanwhile, let’s have a bit of Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein, in the sense of a capitalist pick-me-up). As Warner says: ‘Like flowing water, finance finds a way around whatever obstructions may be put in place, and creating new hazards,’ suggesting that whatever the hazards, finance will find a way out of new ones as well. There have been many crises in finance and Warner enumerates them punctiliously:

1. The breakdown of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange regime in 1973
2. The UK secondary banking crisis of 1975
3. The two oil price shocks of the 1970s
4. The UK fiscal crisis of 1976, culminating in an IMF bailout
5. Numerous emerging market defaults in the mid-1980s
6. Mass failures in the US savings and loan sector, late 1980s/early 1990s
7. Various Nordic  financial crises, late 1980s
8. The bursting of the Japanese stock and property bubbles, 1990
9. Various emerging market shocks/devaluations, 1992
10. The Mexican tequila crisis, 1994
11.           The Asian crisis, 1997
12. The Russian and LTCM crisis, 1998
13. The dot.com crash, 2000

‘Nor did it end with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. This was quickly followed by the Eurozone sovereign debt and banking crisis. It is almost as if financial crisis is now the world’s more natural state.’ Warner has been drawing from ‘a new analysis by the markets team at Deutsche Bank…’ which received extensive coverage in the self-same Telegraph Business Section in the same week. Calling it ‘an old-fashioned view of the underlying causes of this rising tide of financial instability’, Warner indicates a scintilla of scepticism  over all this gloom-and-doom. But the list by itself makes fairly sobering or joyful reading depending on your point of view, and it does not seem that Warner is disputing the facts. Perhaps he is dissatisfied with it because absolutely none of these crises was the doing of workers, unions or Marxist organisations. They were capitalism feeding on itself.

          To a Marxist, Warner/Deutsche provides a convincing portrayal of an undead system in crisis that thrives on crisis. Derivatives, after all, make it possible to hedge against almost anything: the steeper the risk, the greater the profit. We can invest our way through crisis and out the other side becoming ever richer in the process – as seems to have been the case with the escalating fortunes of the ‘1%’ since 2008-09. The only problem may be when the lower-downs become fed up, but presumably they can be relied upon for internecine war amongst themselves (fascists-versus-reds, Blairites against Corbynistas, natives against migrants). These battles might even be able to get out of control if we can continue cutting down on police force numbers. A lawless state is a rich one. For some – think ‘oligarchs’, ‘drug barons’, the Koch brothers: the USA is making progress here.

          Deutsche is worried that spiralling debt levels, by being nourished through ‘stimulus’ ( quantitative easing and low interest rates encouraging borrowing) is putting off the ‘creative destruction’ – a term coined by the great Austrian Joseph Schumpeter – that purges the weaker capitals and cleanses the system by leaving only the stronger ones standing. And thus able to continue pursuing ‘destructive creation’ – I borrow here from Istvan Meszaros. Perhaps this is the ‘old-fashioned’ element Warner refers to: it is more fashionable to believe these days that massive crises of a destructive nature overall are a thing of the past.

          Warner, seeking an authority other than fuddy-duddy Deutsche, then cites the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney (who could be more modern and sleek?) who refers to Brexit as an example of ‘de-globalisation’. Carney acknowledges that Brexit for its supporters is seen as ‘an opportunity to enhance trade with the rest of the world’. There are bound to be hiccups before we reach the sunlit uplands, and ‘for a while, Britain will become a somewhat more closed economy’. Thus, for Warner, Carney’s cautious words offer a new hope for Britain through Brexit (the Telegraph is, of course, a vigorous Brexit supporter).

          Now, Labour sees Brexit as an opportunity to introduce legislation, currently difficult under neoliberal EU law, to re-build the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and bring about something more like economic equality in a country presently weighed down by an ever-growing gap between the richest and the poorest. It is here that the sharp-eyed Warner sees the danger ahead: ‘In itself, the sort of Brexit-inspired deglobalisation Carney talks of would be very unlikely to trigger a financial crisis.’ (Three cheers for Brexit!) ‘But mix it with the hard left policies of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, and all the ingredients for a catastrophic loss of international confidence in the UK economy would be in place. Brexit and Corbyn together would be a particularly toxic combination.’

          In other words, Brexit will only work if worker exploitation is maintained, intensified and prolonged while social services, public health and the like go down the drain. Small prices to pay for profit!

          And finally, in Warner’s words, ‘All Labour governments are eventually destroyed by fiscal and financial crisis. With Mr Corbyn, it would at least be swift.’  (‘Fiscal and financial crisis’ are code-words for capital flight in the event of a Labour election victory. Recall Wilson’s complaints about ‘the gnomes of Zurich.’) So at last we can get a 'Marxist' thing into a discussion of financial crises!

          Never mind that Tony Blair’s New Labour (elected 1997, 2001 and 2005) did not fall through fiscal and financial crisis by being ‘hard left’. New Labour reached an accommodation with capital, convincing large sections in it that they would flourish better with ‘moderate’ New Labour than with the socially-divisive Conservatives. Latterly – when prime minister – Gordon Brown worked with some success on the international scene to contain the Great Crisis of 2008-09 – a crisis spawned by reckless lending on a grand scale that had nothing to do with Labour being in power at the time, since it originated within banking and other forms of finance in the USA. Unfortunately through the years when New Labour was courting the City it lost 5 million Labour voters (and Scotland in 2015). This is a more accurate picture of the last fall of Labour.

          This blog has previously stated that the plans of Corbyn and McDonnell are no ‘harder’ left than was Clement Attlee now frequently cited as the most effective prime minister after World War II. The NHS was created, along with new social services provisions, public housing and nationalisation, and the stars did not fall from the sky. All these, presumably, Mr Warner hates and loathes like the plague.

          Alas, however, Mr Warner is probably right. These days a British Brexit fatally compromised over the limitless expansion of world capital promises domestic hardship, though those now dependent on food banks and desperate for shelter (where they are not already spending two-thirds of their income on accommodation alone, as in London) won’t notice the difference. Those who will notice the difference are those presently coining it, but numerally more significantly, also those in the ‘squeezed’ middle classes who fear for their small businesses and mortgages in the likelihood of even gentle rises in prices, taxes and interest rates. Say that Jeremy Corbyn is as ‘moderate’ as Attlee: the world system is so steeped in crisis that even modest reforms are seen by such as Warner to be dangerous. These days David Lloyd George would be too radical to vote for. Did I not say that undead capitalism thrives on crisis? That is, by vanquishing opposition through fear?

          Only via expropriation will capital ever get a stake through its heart. Until then it can stagger on, spreading dread within everyone within reach.

          More and more people, however, are becoming politically radicalised, which makes things difficult. Crises for the 1% will become less fun. Brecht may have been right in saying that what those in power really need are a new people. Perhaps Mr Warner agrees.

 

         

         

         

A Marxist at the Movies (3):

 

THE HOLLYWOOD EYE by JON BOORSTIN – A Critique Interlude

 

          In the main bulk of film watching and moviegoing, the fundamental bond between viewer and film is: money. Without money to spend we could not go to the cinema or buy box-sets. Otherwise we have download, and Pay TV which is a surcharge on top of the licence fee. Not forgetting that the often-lavish TV adverts on commercial stations add cost to the many advertised products and services we consume.

          I am of course writing of films that are considered going commercial concerns, not those pictures favoured especially by cineastes that stopped being ‘commercial’ a long time ago, except in commercial DVD form. The cheapest deals money-wise are films on BBC channels and borrowing DVDs from the public library – whatever the TV licence fee and Council Tax to pay for each. Of course the proportion of Council Tax for libraries is small but you still have to pay the whole tax! Anyhow libraries are disappearing at a rate of knots.

          The only one who gets truly free viewing of commercial films, where this is allowed, may be the prison convict who – along with minimal purchasing power – pays no fees or taxes at all.

          There is another category of free-viewers, so to speak: those in the upper reaches of film making and teaching/learning who can request viewings for purposes of research and appreciation. Film journalists go to previews or obtain free tickets and might at the very least offset research costs against tax. But all these don’t count because – whether this is enjoyed or not – it is ‘work’. But I sometimes wonder whether the prolonged and habitual obtaining of films without paying for them comes to insulate film makers and critics from the fact that others (or their parents) have to pay for them in one form or another. Somebody has to pay or the films don’t get made.

          All this is why I say that the almost invariable bond between films and their audiences is money. Invariable and invisible.

          Invisible, that is, until the experience of seeing the film – if a letdown – causes the viewer to feel somehow cheated out of the money paid for a ticket or download or DVD, causing much grumbling. Cinema tickets are not cheap and certainly not for a family of (say) four. Partly the cost of seeing a film makes one determined to enjoy it, or at least determined that one’s children will enjoy it. But equally it can cause dismay and even anger if the enjoyment proved elusive.

          Car-leasing is now the most affordable way of ‘owning’ a car – until the subprime car bubble bursts – but for most people it remains our most expensive commodity after a house or flat. It is also the most underutilised. Allowing for use for certain business purposes (like commercial travelling or farming) the car will likely be parked on average for 22-23 hours out of the 24. Except for car holidays and most definitely not for airborne ones or cruises.

          Underutilisation is the likely fate also for the rather more (!) modestly-priced DVD. DVDs at home end up on a shelf with dozens of others many of which will either never be viewed again after the first time, or only a few times’ each in the remaining lifetime of the purchaser. This will be true of those films labelled – and there is an irony here – as ‘straight to DVD’, which usually means they are of such low quality that they will hardly be viewed again after the once. By contrast, your refrigerator (say) functions – and not on mere ‘standby’ - 24 hours a day.

          Indeed home viewing taken as a whole may be more needlessly expensive than the cinema ticket, dear as that may seem at the time. You don’t ‘buy’ or ‘lease’ a film at the cinema but at least you aren’t lumbered with it afterwards. With download you may be stuck with ‘the 1000 Movies’ offer of many films you would not watch more than once if at all.         There is a particular financial emphasis on filmic experience: films in general, that is, feature-films, are far more expensive to make than, say, paintings and books, and sometimes even more expensive to hype than to make. The cost of film promotion frequently exceeds that of film production – I suspect this is even truer now than in 1991 and before. Boorstin does not mention the promotions executives – now brought in for their say-so at ever earlier stages in development. This hyping leads to occasional mismatch between the publicity and the actual film, resulting in viewers’ confusion of expectations. Unknown, it seems, to the Boorstin of 1991, advance publicity – grown into a huge and intrusive industry of its own (to reduce market risk on ever-higher budgets) – inserts itself between the viewer and the picture, manipulating a particular expectancy at the outset. Boorstin’s Voyeuristic, Vicarious and Visceral – if these separate aspects exist – do not come to the picture out of a socio-economic void. And the cost of film publicity has become an ever bigger factor in the price of viewing.

          Financial considerations are bound to impinge to one degree or another on the film viewing experience. And so films have to be made that appease the purse or wallet as well as the ‘mind’ and ‘emotions’, not to speak of the ‘visceral’. The wallet, indeed, may be the most ‘visceral  element of all.

          Boorstin doesn’t say so, but the viewing of commercially-viable films is first and foremost a financial transaction. As with cars, such transactions  have become fancier, that’s all.

A Marxist at the Movies (2):

 

The Hollywood Eye – What Makes Movies Work

 

          As the title of this series suggests, my concern as a Marxist is not merely a detailed account of making films; I am not a film maker myself nor even a seasoned cineaste. My principal interest lies in examining the ethos behind the enterprise.

          I want to focus initially on the first three chapters, which reach beyond film making as such. These are: (1) the Voyeur’s Eye, (2) the Vicarious Eye and (3) the Visceral Eye. Boorstin’s book on film commences with an anatomy – not of film – but of the audience.

          Simultaneously, Boorstin says, we watch movies in three distinct ways:

• The Voyeur’s way
• The Vicarious Way
• The Visceral Way

Let me give shorthand definitions of Boorstin’s three terms.

          The Voyeur represents the curious – a curiosity that must be satisfied by answers. This is the rational, ‘intellectual’ side of the viewer.

          Voyeuristic reactions:  Wow! Look at that view! / What happens next? / It’s not very realistic. / I tend to use the loo during the boring bits.

This is about storytelling and continuity – and plausibility, focused on the reality of the world we live in. The bedrock of a movie is its plausibility.

          The Vicarious represents the emotional involvement, the viewer’s psychological stake in the action (as in our experiencing emotions ‘vicariously’.)  It’s more concerned with the emotionally gripping than just the plausible. ('The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.')

          Vicarious reactions: What she must be going through! / What a cute little kid. / He’s a real shit. / I know just how Jack feels. / I was so involved. / I like a good weepy.  This is about the emotional pull of a movie. There must be empathy with /antipathy towards / the human characters and their situations.

          Visceral reactions come from the gut, from the so-called ‘lizard’  or primitive brain. They represent our physical and basest instincts.

          Visceral reactions:  Makes me heave. / Makes my mouth water. / Ow! That punch hurt! / Made my hair stand on end. / I got a hard-on just looking at her. / I hate spiders!  The Visceral demands of the film that it engage on the most basic physical level. It should not just interest us or move us, but also ‘get’ to us. It adds ‘touch’ to the film in addition to vision, sound and story.

          Common negative reactions to a particular film:

Voyeuristic: It wasn’t realistic and the ending fell flat.

Vicarious: I never felt anything for the people, positively or negatively.

Visceral: It didn’t get to me. All a bit bloodless.

Boorstin:

Each demands a different set of film techniques, often in contradiction with the others: each has its own sort of content, its own rules of time and space, its own way of judging reality. The three compete within us as we watch. Each movie is three movies running at once.

          Much of this looks convincing but I have my doubts.

          I wouldn’t encourage film students to start off by rationalising audiences. Art students are not taught what prospective viewers want. Of course Hollywood film is an industry from the ground up. So perhaps film students should be taught like apprentices in advertising. (Some of our top directors make more money doing TV adverts.) So the book betrays its assumption that the first imperative for a movie is to get those butts on seats. First and last.

          Thus we have the ‘three V’s’ approach, redolent of a whiteboard lecture at a sales conference. Are we supposed to be examining reality here or are we taking in a sales pitch?

          In any case Boorstin is rationalising why movies work – that is, after they’ve been made and distributed. It may or may not be an effective way of teaching film craft but all the same it puts the cart before the horse. And it starts with the most notoriously nebulous factor. By contrast, Boorstin’s book is absolutely concrete about how complicated it is to put a feature film together. He stresses further on the seemingly endless re-writes and re-edits required; in some instances the makers didn’t know what the film was really about until after the first preview. Shouldn’t the ‘three Vs’ make all this easier? Not if the recipients are to be treated in a formally simplistic manner, which reminds one of Pavlov’s experiments on salivating dogs. The irony here is that the audience make-up is even more complex than the processes through which films are made.

          A principal hazard of the marketplace is that sellers don’t know for sure in advance what the buyers want or will pay for, and at what price. Peddling films – which are commodities like any other – is plagued by the same uncertainty, made hazardous by the sheer scale of investment being made in (a) creating a film and (b) devising its promotion campaign. The concept of the ‘public’ doesn’t help here, because ‘the general public’ is itself a fiction. It washes over such concrete realities as classes, education, gender experience and generations. There is the difference between watching a picture in a theatre, influenced by the reactions of others, and watching it at  home, possibly alone; there is a difference between watching a film all in one go and seeing it broken up by TV adverts (all too frequently). My entire childhood filmgoing experience consisted in arriving roughly midway through the feature, sitting through everything and then leaving when we’d reached that midway point again!  All this is not to speak of facing the vagaries of individual taste and proclivity. We only know ‘what the public wants’ when people flock to one picture and steer clear of another (after having been told not to bother by those who went).

          The ‘three ’V’s’ concept is made obsolete by – amongst other things – advances in modern neurology. We do not have one order of the ‘higher’ intellectual and moral faculties set above the other, ‘base’ order of the physical needs and primitive instincts, as was taught by Ancient Greek philosophers, the moral being that we would lead the good life by the ‘higher’ dominating or suppressing the ‘lower’. By the 17^th century we had mind-body dualism: the ‘mind’ – a spiritual entity – being one thing and the body – a corporeal one – being the other. Quite how these two are supposed to interrelate was never satisfactorily explained by the dualists, a problem that remains philosophically insoluble. Modern neurology has made great strides in showing how intimately interrelated that astonishing organ the brain is with every facet and feature of our life, body, being and thought. All are energised by need, intent and purpose, some of these in the area of consciousness. Nothing is truly separate from anything else. We contain multitudes (Whitman) which is what Boorstin intimates in the above quote.  So he is on to something here. But the packaging is outdated, and so he seems to modify his trinity when he says that we experience the ‘three V’s simultaneously. It’s a vague idea made harder to understand by the positing of three discrete ’V’s’ to begin with.

          I might put it another way: that we are creatures of purpose, and we pursue a film much as we pursue a career or a love relationship (if not on the same level of seriousness). In other words, we are an audience of purpose-driven individuals, not a bunch of reified fragments.

          In which case is it not better to commence with ‘purpose’ and the finding of purpose by a screenwriter, a director, a composer, a designer, a cinematographer, an editor and so on? If their drive is penetrating and powerful enough, is it not this that powers us in our pursuit of mastering their film? Not that it happens invariably what with so many mediocre films. Nor need it be restricted to high or intellectual art, for purpose, like all the many films – is pursued at all levels and varieties of a human life.

          In fact much of what Boorstin says in these sections is convincing and rings true about cinematic experience. Needless to say it’s based on a wealth of observing audience reactions. But for me it is hobbled by an overly abstract and ideologically dubious restricting of the richness and potential of human response and reaction. Alas such restricting may be accurate. As was once said: no one ever lost money by underestimating the public’s intelligence. Humans – treated indeed as ‘the public’ – can live down as well as up to expectations. The human individual is the social being. But ‘where there is no vision, the people perish’ (Proverbs 29:18 AV). A dysfunctional society taken as a whole can degrade individuals, when is why the point of socialism is common self-creation of a society that brings out the best in each of us, by means of our politically active determination of it.

          But wait and see. Boorstein has much to offer, and God may be in the details. We will look further in the next blog at the Voyeuristic Eye.

A Marxist at the Movies (1):

 

Introducing Jon Boorstin

          It isn’t often that a historical materialist takes on the movies, but this is what I propose to do, at least in sketch-like form, through a commentary upon a book from 1991, The Hollywood Eye: What Makes Movies Work by Jon Boorstin. Born in 1946, Boorstin is a seasoned screenwriter, producer and teacher (see his website for career details), of much the same generation as the famous Movie Brats from Spielberg to Cimino, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese and others who re-made Hollywood in their own image and are characterised not only by innovation but also by a profound veneration for the classics of Hollywood and world film making from DW Griffith onwards. This book is perhaps one of the best on modern film making technique and practical aesthetics ever written and was hailed enthusiastically on its appearance by amongst others Robert Redford, Paul Schrader, David Brown (producer of Jaws, The Sting, Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy) and Gordon Willis (cinematographer on The Godfather trilogy, Annie Hall, All the President’s Men and many others). A book admired by professionals like these should not be passed over. It arrived at a propitious time at the start of the 1990s. This was in the wake of the gradual demise of the Hollywood studio factory system over the previous three decades and the sense of experiment and independence leavened with rigorous self-training in the traditions of Hollywood studio methods and technique. Not to speak of Hollywood’s response to (and participation in) the various social, political and economic upheavals of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Meanwhile the memory of the great 1930s pictures, the film noire of the 1940s, and the flourishing of the French nouvelle vague, Italian Realism and Scandinavian angst of previous decades was still fresh to those in the early 1990s, some of them continuing to be active today, who had grown up amongst all these influences. The result forms a dense texture of cinematic understanding, and from a young man Boorstin was right in the thick of it. In addition he has an unparalleled teacher’s gift for a didactic stance which is fresh and approachable. The book does not pretend to be an intellectual treatise but is all the better for that in the wealth of expertise and experience (the Acknowledgements give us a formidable list of advisors in the industry whom Boorstin consulted) that it brings to our appreciation.

          I’ve given myself a difficult task, which is to convey as much as I can of The Hollywood Eye without making my commentary a substitute for reading the book. And at the same time to provide a critique of what I consider to be its latent and not-so-latent wider values. My excuse is that Marxism does not exactly abound in critical writing on Hollywood. This book, while being so informative on the doing and thinking behind film making, is also representative of the values which, whatever the innovations in film technique and means, have essentially never changed: that is, the values of commercial film making whatever the aesthetic merit of individual ‘products’. For film making on a Hollywood scale has always been a big business shaped and governed by the demands of box office, plus share value and returns on investment as with any industrial commodity. Hollywood’s genesis is from within the prevailing industrial capitalism, which is also its own institutional structure and ultimate purpose. It reproduces the art and medium of capitalism, both historically and instrumentally.

          As an art film has long since proven its ability to shape and inspire human consciousness alongside every other manifestation of art and literature. But – let’s face it – feature films are far more expensive to make than poetry or novels or graphic art. Like architecture – a much older manifestation but subsequently also bound to the laws of massive investment and profit-making, film exists in permanent tension between the imperatives of the art and the demands of investors and financiers.  Through human ingenuity this in many cases has been a creative tension, but the cash-nexus can over time affect artistic consciousness and ideals.

          And so it is the values that Boorstin implicitly accepts that form the object of my own critique, not his willingness and ability to explain a form that is as artistic as it is technical and the other way round. There is also the tension between the artist as supreme individual and the collective of collaborators necessary to achieve anything on film: and Boorstin brings out the artistic collectivity of film making very well, even if he does not necessarily take this to its logical conclusions.

          Because a blog should be as short as possible I shall have to break this study up into several related blogs in an occasional series, thus rendering the whole effect rather bitty. I hope you will be patient with that, and refer to previous blogs in this movie series as it progresses.