Discovering a Politics of Cinema: The Influence of Althusser

Abstract

The birth of film studies in the university during the 1960s and 1970s was one in which a politics of cinema was central. Film studies as a ‘proper’ academic subject was, from the first, allied with questions of politics. Enlivened by the filmmaking of the 1960s—whether this be Bergman, Godard, Forman and others in Europe, or aspiring revolutionary filmmakers in Latin America—as well as by arguments set in motion by the auteur theory (la politique des auteurs), many scholars sought to make the connection between politics and cinema central to the academic founding of the discipline. The flavour of the times, especially in the wake of the ‘events’ of May 1968, was Marxist, and the politics of the period can only be understood in Marxist terms. What was at stake for many of the scholars theorizing a politics of cinema was nothing less than a revolution defined in explicitly Marxist terms.