What Is a Politics of Cinema?

Abstract

There is one overarching reason for writing this book. It is to argue that some examples of classical Hollywood cinema tackle politics and issues relating to democracy in ways that deserve to be explored. The films I discuss, The Sound of Music (1965), Marked Woman (1937), On the Waterfront (1954), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Born Yesterday (1950) and It Should Happen to You (1954), are ones that made democratic politics something worth thinking about, worth debating and worth considering in some detail. For too long film scholars have been taught to denigrate Hollywood films as politically nave or backward, or if such films could be said to have anything to do with politics, then those politics must necessarily be of a conservative, reactionary kind. Perhaps this is an argument born out of the emergence of film studies as an academic discipline, for during the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of the kinds of Marxism being espoused by journals like Cahiers du cinema in France and Screen in the UK, what came to seem important to many film scholars was that Hollywood films be criticized on the basis of their bourgeois, capitalist-based conservatism.