The Power and The Truth. A Film. A National Project

"This article tries to understand what type of film is approved by the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime and how it is promoted, through various propaganda channels. In this sense, we choose to discuss the film made by the artistic couple Manole Marcus - Titus Popovici, The Power and The Truth (1972), and we resort to a content analysis to understand the way it was made. We are also interested in the echoes of the film in the press of the time and how with the help of newspaper articles the authorities inoculate the idea that this film is the most important cinematographic achievement of the moment, a benchmark for political productions to be made from that point on. Keywords: Cinematography, Political Film, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Manole Marcus, Titus Popovici, Propaganda "

“Un film français et fier de l’être”: Gaspar Noé’s Climax in Context

Reading Gaspar Noé’s 2018 film Climax against the grain of the majority of critical reactions and the director’s own pronouncements, this article argues that this is a deeply political film. In line with West’s analysis of the films of the New French Extremity as works that are not (as suggested by Quandt) passive but a committed and politically engaged form of cinema, this article suggests that Climax can be read as an allegory of France’s current Realpolitik. Noé’s vision of this reality is revealed to be particularly bleak, for in line with the metaphysical stance of his other films, his is a universe ruled by entropic forces. The ramifications for Climax’s commentary on contemporary France are devastating, for the ideals of the Republic are shown to be no longer operational or capable of bringing people together, nor are they replaceable by any other form of identity politics.

Klasa i alegoria we współczesnej kulturze masowej. „Pieskie popołudnie” jako film polityczny

Polski przekład klasycznego artykułu Fredrica Jamesona, opublikowanego po raz pierwszy w 1977 roku. Na przykładzie analizy filmu Pieskie popołudnie (1975, reż. Sidney Lumet) autor proponuje metodę odczytywania dzieła filmowego jako alegorii relacji klasowych. Przygląda się w tym celu elementom fabuły filmu, jego aspektom gatunkowym i formalnym oraz usytuowaniu względem systemu produkcji obrazów w Hollywood i telewizji tamtego czasu. Podstawa przekładu: „Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film”, College English, Vol. 38, No. 8 (1977): 843-859.

The Transformation of Political Cinema in Turkey since the 1960s: A Change of Discourse

This chapter analyzes the transformation of political films in Turkey from the 1960s to the late 2010s. With the repression of labor movements after the 1980 military coup and parallel to neoliberal developments around the world, political cinema in Turkey changed dramatically. Earlier films, though in limited numbers, displayed overt political Marxist messages and, similar to radical political film movements of the time, aimed to move the audience to take action against exploitation. In comparison, in the absence of organized movements and under an oppressive political environment for a large part of the four decades since the 1980 military coup, more contemporary films have been political by displaying the lack of solidarity and struggle against that oppression. Accordingly, films with direct political messages aiming to move audiences to action are replaced with those exposing the shortcomings of the system with their portrayal of individuals squeezed in an existentialist impasse. As such, films, even the rare ones that aim to address contemporary sociopolitical issues, are now focused on the state of inability to express one’s self or criticize. The chapter focuses on films of Yılmaz Güney, the most prominent Turkish filmmaker, writings of Young Cinema members in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a leading figure in contemporary Turkish cinema, with a particular focus on Ahlat Ağacı (2018) to analyze the evolution of political filmmaking in Turkey.

Introduction

The idea of an outside of the film is based on the assumption that an absent cause is structurally immanent to film. In a film, the absent cause coincides with the camera’s gaze, which remains external to the image precisely as the generator of the cinematic image. This is the paradox of the cinema: the camera can never reveal itself as the cause of the image, the generative outside cannot be transferred to the inside of the image. With apparatus theory, however, this necessary split between gaze and image, cause and effect, production process and product, becomes the cardinal ideological problem of a political film aesthetics. How can cinema produce political effects when its the structure of its dispositif works towards concealing its productive outside?

Introduction

In the second part of this book, the political aesthetics of negativity is worked through from a different perspective. In Fredric Jameson’s writings on film, which are based on an idiosyncratic synthesis of Hegelian Marxism and psychoanalysis, the absent cause of the Lacanian real is that of a social totality which has become inaccessible to the subject under the conditions of late capitalism. For Jameson, the problem of a political film aesthetic refers primarily to an epistemological problem of aesthetically sensualizing the incommensurability between subject and totality.

Cinema between Fable and Political Mythology

This chapter discusses the theoretical and critical substance of Sergio Leone’s filmography, referencing modern and postmodern thinkers. It argues that the conceptual foundation of Leone’s cinema is a postmodern attempt to deconstruct complexity through the collapse of universal narratives (Enlightenment, Idealism, and Marxism), using irony and allusions to catastrophic events such as concentration camps, war, and revolution. The chapter illustrates Leone’s approach to cinema in relation to his experience between popular and political film, labeling his work “political spectacle.” It then elaborates Leone’s politics in relation to the two major thinkers who most influenced the director: Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Jünger (including Gramsci’s “national-popular” concept). This chapter analyzes Leone’s work—his début, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), the “Dollars Trilogy,” and the “Once Upon a Time Trilogy”—chronologically, indicating the evolution of his work and its references to Italian and American history, from Fascism to the Vietnam War.