Why were many masterpieces of cinema made by socialists or people sympathetic to socialism? Eisenstein created the montage, which Hollywood appropriated and standardised. Kurosawa brought samurai movies to its apotheosis, inspiring everything from Star Wars to contemporary westerns.
Kurasawa was a socialist? Interesting.
I think that we can find more left-wing people in the arts in general, so it correlates to that.
>>2893318>In 1928, when Kurosawa was eighteen years old, Japan attacked Manchuria and assassinated the warlord Zhang Zuolin. Society was in turmoil. A year later, the Great Depression struck, and as Marxist thinking carried the day, Kurosawa joined the Proletariat Artists’ League. Though he later renounced his belief in political organizations and actions as effective means to correct social ills, Kurosawa never denied the populist slant of his films. He said it was youthful passion that brought him to join a left-wing organization, but his compassion for the plight of the lower classes and his practice of engaging class differences as dramatic structure are readily discernible in Seven Samurai (1954), Ikiru (1952), High and Low (1963), and Dodes’ka-den (1970). >Kurosawa brought samurai movies to its apotheosis, inspiring everything from Star Wars to contemporary westerns.
Sounds like a net negative.
>>2893317Sergio Leone was also raised in a socialist family. His films weren't overtly ideological but there are some evil capitalist villians in his Westerns.
This is half-baked on my part but I think it's kind of dialectical like through absolute negation turns into its opposite. You don't have to hold any sacred feelings towards the past, but its through ruthless criticism that you can draw out certain things from history and appreciate it as well. The world that Kurosawa presents is really awful for example, like some town is just overrun by gangsters.
>>2893323ok so he sounds more like a petty bourgeois artist with vague socialist sympathies
>>2893985 (me)
still very cool, and more than i expected out of kurosawa. i always liked his movies but never looked into his politics because i assumed he would have been a japanese fascist during WW2
isn't the real root of the matter here just that reactionaries rarely make good art? the only far-right directors who come to mind as having contributed anything of note to film as an art form are like D.H. Laurence and Leni Riefenstahl, and their contribution is less about film as an art form in the traditional sense so much as demonstrating the power of film as a propaganda medium and apparatus of control.
>>2893991Reactionaries can be good at literature. Or at least they used to be.
>>2893991>the only far-right directors who come to mind as having contributed anything of note to film as an art form are like D.H. LaurenceSurely you're thinking of someone other than the author of
Lady Chatterley's Lover?
>>2894032It's weird as shit to be reading someone like Thomas Carlyle and admiring his mastery of English prose but also recognizing that he was pretty much a proto-fascist. Modern rightoids should be holding him up as a hero, but I'm not sure a single one of them can even understand what he writes.
>>2893758The Good The Bad And The Ugly
(the best film of all time) is pretty much an anti war film made during the Vietnam war, I would say that's quite ideological.
>>2893994Was Kurosawa forced to do that at gunpoint more or less?
>>2894037I think guys like him were also products of the British higher education system (which was also a very high-brow thing in the 19th century) and they studied theology and the classics so being able to know the difference between English words with Anglo-Saxon origins and words with Romance origins and being able to play with that is actually important.
Also there's something about reactionaries usually "having had it out" with the world that might contribute to writing good literature with a lot of tragic depth to it. Socialist realism is like you're looking at a muddy bog but instead but you have to imagine that there will be a beautiful park there in the future because of socialist construction. Yeah very inspiring but it's going to struggle to have the same power as WE'RE DOOMED and ~this world is so corrupt~
>>2894589
I made The Amazing Digital Circus
>>2893317Most artists of the early and mid 20th century were socialists because it was a visionary ideology and they predominately came from the working and middle classes rubbing up against a stale aristocracy. This was replaced by liberalism as the middle class came to dominate mass culture and the culture industry in of itself (forming a new media-gentry that we now labour under).
>>2894035Fuck I meant D.W. Griffith because I was referring to Birth of a Nation.
>>2894589I'm the hacker known as 4chan
>>2893991Reactionaries made 99% of "good art" in history. Even Marx and Engels preferred the reactionary writers of their time like Balzac.
>>2894645Reactionaries make pretty sweet art, Van Morrison for example.
>>289464599% is an enormous exaggeration, but I do think that first and second generation Marxists (Marx, Engels, and the people that studied directly under them, Lafargue Kautsky etc) preferred to recommend literature by reactionary anti-capitalists rather then disentangle any misleading themes from socialist novelists they didn't agree with 100% politically.
Engels for example was a big fan of Thomas Carlyle and all but invited him into the socialist movement near the end of
Condition of the Working Class in England (which is shocking considering Carlyle's views on democracy). Then both Marx and Engels thought that Balzac, the monarchist, exposed bourgeois hypocrisy better than the realist novels of self-described Socialists like Eugene Sue. In that case you could just claim that Balzac was a more skilled writer than leftist rivals, but then you run into Engels' comment that Balzac was "a far greater master of realism than all the [Emile] Zolas past, present and future". Nowadays Balzac is mostly out of print while Zola's whole collected works are getting brand new translations, and that's despite the fact that Zola was a self-described Socialist that put class struggle themes into the majority of his works.
I think the reason Engels scorned him (if he read Zola at all, it's quite possible he was just parroting what he heard from Lafargue) was because Zola's works were all imbued with a deterministic pessimism that he didn't want seeping into his socialist movement, whereas he could recommend Balzac to anyone, confident that they would absorb the anti-capitalist themes without adopting any of the reactionary monarchist politics. It's a real shame too, because socialist novels, however flawed their specific politics, were an enormous factor in the growth of the second and third internationals.
>>2894704I've only read La Débacle and Germinal. I would say that La Débacle is more deterministically pessimistic of the two, with the long tormenting sequence of the 2nd Empire's collapse and the Commune being portrayed as stillborne and chaotic from the suddenly thrown together elements of society during the Empire.
>>2894711Wrong. It's a story about bourgeois revolution inspired from La Fontaine "The Ant and the Grasshopper", it's about the up and coming class who loves work, savings, industry and investment trying to get rid of the feudal parasites.
>>2894704Interesting post
>>2894751>>2894753I only learned about Emile Zola pretty recently and have only read
Germinal. Like I said before, I feel like there's a pessimistic view of heredity (Zola's favorite word), which implies that socialist democracy is impracticable because even the genome of the working class has been degraded too much by capitalist exploitation; better that the existing educated classes become more compassionate and lift up the rest of humanity with them.
Despite this, it still immediately became one of my favorite novels. A lot of realist / naturalist literature succeeds in portraying a historical setting and nothing else; Zola does this, but also adds thrilling plot twists and thought-provoking social themes. I have a copy of Zola's
Money on my shelf and I will be reading it very soon.
Since we're on the subject of socialist literature, let me recommend my all-time favorite novel: Jack London's
Martin Eden. The premise of the book is essentially that the author recounts his real-life rags-to-riches story (the tentative title was "success"), but with one crucial difference: while Jack London was a Socialist, Martin Eden is a Nietzsche and Spencer-reading "individualist". The core theme of the novel is a critique of individualism and what it means for workers and artists, but I think what sets
Martin Eden apart is how it captures the burning angst of what it means to be a self-taught wannabe intellectual. I think a lot of us here can relate on that point.
I was never a big fan of Jack London's mainstream adventure novels, but I read through
Martin Eden without any prior knowledge in an omnibus volume and immediately thought it was a masterpiece. After reading, I went online to see what other people thought about the book. To my surprise nobody seemed to care at all - except in the Russian language. I soon found out that
Martin Eden was universally celebrated in the USSR and has become a cultural touchstone there similar to
The Great Gatsby. It's not just the Soviet party line either, the book continues to be widely popular and has received several luxury illustrated editions. A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
>>2894800>>2894704 (both me)
I forgot to mention a bizarre fun fact: just about all the translations we have of Eugene Sue's socialist novels were done by Daniel De Leon - yes
that De Leon, who translated a full 19 novels in between editing a daily newspaper and ruling his Socialist Labor Party with an iron fist. It goes to show you just how much De Leon thought it mattered for there to be socialist entertainment for the masses.
chris marker's a grin without a cat is a nice documentary about the new left. It does not celebrate it and it presents it as it really was, which is inevitably in a critical light because it was a whole load of bullshit. The artistic element is great. His documentaries are true cinema. The images do not try to hide the fact that this is a movie in order to present you a story. They ARE images, they ARE films, form and content do not contradict each other, they intertwine to create a positive work of art.
>>2894645>Reactionaries made 99% of "good art" in history.maybe in history but to day they make on the nose garbage like citizen vigilante
>>2894844
fuck off ziofash
>>2894645This is because you are obessed with Bourgeois """literature""" the novel form is inherently reactionary and hyperindividualizing, a product of the capitalist mode of production it's no coincidence that most famous novels are from the 19th and 20th centuries which is when capitalism was on the upswing and in the process of destroying feudalism. Besides arguably the most famous reactionary novelist Dostoevsy was pretty much a socialist atheist in denial and all of his books are basically arguing with himself in an attempt to validate his christian rebirth after a near brush with death after originally being a socialist. Read Lukacs.
>>2894852>the novel form is inherently reactionary and hyperindividualizingWhat the hell do you propose to replace it? Just about every other form of media (movies, TV etc.) tends to be far worse ideologically because of the capital outlays required.
>>2894852>>2895406 (me)
I will also add that I think your core argument is wrong even if there were hypothetically loads of cash on hand for socialist cinema. The key difference between reading novels and watching actors is that the printed page allows you to read the unspoken thoughts of the characters. Far from being "hyperindividualizing", I think this helps to develop a sense of empathy with your fellow humans that I think has been missing from society ever since TV took over mass entertainment. This shift happened, mind you, right around the 70s-80s, and I don't think it's a total coincidence that neoliberal "individualist" politics began its takeover around that time.
>>2895406The visual novel is inherently proletarian and revolutionary
>>2894852>a product of the capitalist mode of productionThere are novels from the middle ages and antiquity, and also socialist countries wtf are you on about.
>>2895421Why does everyone that does them have a patreon then?
>>2895430Patreon is proletarian control of the means of production. It's literally workers electing what gets made by democratically allocating resources.
>>2894620>Birth of a Nation>good as propagandaIt's shit, though. As in, only Nazi-adjacents liked it. It's only ever good for team building excercises among nationalists, because anyone who doesn't like it can be shamed for not being nationalist enough to like it
>>2893318>>2893317Kobayashi's movies (harakiri, the human condition trilogy, samurai rebellion) rival Kurosawa and he was also a socialist or left leaning
>>2894588>The Good The Bad And The Ugly (the best film of all time)wrong. for a few dollars more is.
>>2894852>most famous novels are from the 19th and 20th centuries which is when capitalism was on the upswing Did you know that Marx praises the novelists of his day? (1854):
<The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, have described every section of the middle class from the “highly genteel” annuitant and fundholder who looks upon all sorts of business as vulgar, to the little shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell painted them? As full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance; and the civilised world have confirmed their verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class that “they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them.”https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/08/01.htmHere, he portrays the novel as a more effective form than propaganda.
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often seen as the first novel in the English language. Defoe was a Whig and an egalitarian in his own time. The classic novel of Don Quixote (1615) is a biting satire of Medieval romanticism, of which the Arthurian literature of the 12th and 13th centuries were already pale reflections of. The novel has had a largely subversive and radical role in popular culture, by also being a more open space for female contribution.
>>2894645"Reactionaries" did not exist before 1789.
>>2894841Uwe Boll is a moderate.
His previous films like the Rampage trilogy were also boomer-esque "we the people" diatribes interspersed with random terrorism. The message of Citizen Vigilante at the end is literally just "I didn't leave the left; the left left me" drivel
>>2897253Engels addresses the Quixotic despair of the age as a fair sentiment, but one which cannot be resolved by naive appeals to the past (1843):
<Carlyle complains about the emptiness and hollowness of the age, about the inner rottenness of all social institutions. The complaint is fair; but by simply complaining one does not dispose of the matter; in order to redress the evil, its cause must be discovered; and if Carlyle had done this, he would have found that this desultoriness and hollowness, this “soullessness” this irreligion and this “atheism” have their roots in religion itself. Religion by its very essence drains man and nature of substance, and transfers this substance to the phantom of an otherworldly God, who in turn then graciously permits man and nature to receive some of his superfluity. Now as long as faith in this otherworldly phantom is vigorous and alive, thus long man will acquire in this roundabout way at least some substance. The strong faith of the Middle Ages did indeed give the whole epoch considerable energy in this way, but it was energy that did not come from without but was already present within human nature, though as yet unperceived and undeveloped. Faith gradually weakened, religion crumbled in the face of the rising level of civilisation, but still man did not perceive that he had worshipped and deified his own being in the guise of a being outside himself. Lacking awareness and at the same time faith, man can have no substance, he is bound to despair of truth, reason and nature, and this hollowness and lack of substance, the despair of the eternal facts of the universe will last until mankind perceives that the being it has worshipped as God was its own, as yet unknown being, until – but why should I copy Feuerbach.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/carlyle.htmIt is the same way religion as "opium of the masses" obscures the possibility of man's "real happiness", which in an existentialist sense, is his own personal responsibility. The authoritarian demands to be told his purpose, whether from a deity or a dictator. For more, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quixotism because socialists don't have any fucking money, they can't throw $200 million into a big dumb blockbuster superhero movie full of explosions and choreographed fight scenes and a cast of a-list actors and a huge production team of CGI artists and a massive ad campaign that costs more than the actual movie and get a basically guaranteed return on their huge investment, they have to work with a much smaller budget and basically no advertising at all and take a much bigger risk where they might end up spending $3 million of someone else's money on a movie that barely anyone watches and it only grosses like $100k and then they have to kill themselves.
>>2895428Merchants also existed before capitalism, dolt.
>>2897253I never got it. Don Quixote was based who lives a good life. Tell me honestly that tilting at windmills on your trusty steed doesn't sound like a good time.
>>2895406The epic predates the novel form and reveals that understanding fiction through the novel is not necessary. Regardless the novel's preeminence is a product of the age of alienation and capitalism, there is no articifially replacing it. Only through the collective building of communism can new mediums of translating the human experience be born. The question is not how can we replace the novel, but instead how can novelists turn the novel into a useful tool for building communism. My response was more against the idea that good literature can be made only by reactionaries rather than arguing we should abolish the novel entirely, that would be idealism.
>>2897267>barely anyone watches marxists are a tiny percentage of the market. and most likely poor, will pirate the film. i don't give a shit about property rights, but the sums are not adding. and most likely will call it shitty, slop, reactionary or bourgious anyway because it doesn't subsribe to their specific tendnecy
>>2897335Leftist filmmakers don't make movies for other marxists, you mong.
>>2897345thats what people on here are always complaining about though
>>2897345All the french ones in the 60's did lol
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