Blockbuster profits (2005)

From the April 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cinema and video industries make two things: films and, more importantly, money. Shed-loads of it and over a long period. In the 1910s The Birth of a Nation cost United Artists $110,000 to produce; it eventually grossed sixty million (thanks due to L. Menand in the 7 February issue if the New Yorker for that and some other facts in this article). More recently, Titanic took in $1.85 billion at the box office – many times what it cost. Of course some films don’t make money and some even lose it. But overall Hollywood, Bollywood and lesser-known ’woods are oligarchies designed for the enrichment of the oligarchs.

It isn’t just the movie business that seeks and makes a profit from movies. The key to the system is marketing. A lot of money is spent on creating “buzz” – a diffused sense in the public that a particular movie is on the way. Previews are part of “buzz”, as is “coverage” of forthcoming movies in media outlets that are often owned by the same conglomerate that owns the studio. The makers of Jurassic Park sold a hundred licences for a thousand dinosaur products.

The content of the films and videos reflects conditions in the world of which they are part. Soon after 9/11 Hollywood temporarily abandoned the hyper-violent spectacles that dominated cinema in the late 1990s. The public was thought to be in need of escape from such horrors. However, by 2003 it was a return to business as usual. Daredevil, Cold Mountain, Gods and Generals and The Core offered spectacles of contemporary, futuristic or historical destruction and carnage.

A recent British study of blockbuster audiences (by M. Jancovich, and L. Faire, ‘The best place to see a film’, in Movie Blockbusters) indicates that at least some audiences are not happy with the conditions in which they are paying customers. Apparently a fairly common complaint is that the cinema is an emotionally cold place. The audience is a mass but not a community. There’s no place to interact with one another or talk about the film afterwards.

What of the future of the cinema and the video in socialism? To some extent I go along with the safe but insipid view that “the people at the time will decide”. But I’d like to be a bit braver (or more foolhardy?) than that. I endorse Menand’s rejection of films that include any combination of wizards, slinky women of few words, men who can expertly drive anything or leap safely from the top of anything, characters from comic books, explosions, a computer whiz with attitude, or an incarnation of pure evil. I hope there will be more films like Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, a moving and beautiful depiction of British working-class life in the 1950s.

Stan Parker

Film Review: ‘Peterloo’ (2019)

Film Review from the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Peterloo’, directed by Mike Leigh

Over exuberant

Mike Leigh, writer and director of Peterloo, cut his teeth in the 1970s with episodes of Play for Today at a time when the BBC was introducing a smattering of ‘progressive’ programming in a futile attempt to soften criticism that it was an establishment mouthpiece peddling state propaganda. Peterloo is his first foray into the big screen epic. Subsequently Mike Leigh’s mix of social commentary and satire has included Nuts in May, Abigail’s Party, Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake. Peterloo is his first foray into the big screen epic.

The film depicts the events in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, in 1819 where, under the instructions of the local magistrates and with guidance from the bigwigs at Westminster, the cavalry rampaged through the 60,000 strong crowd of men, women and children with sabres drawn, killing 15 and injuring between 400 and 700 of those who were peacefully protesting their lack of political power and general privation.

Mike Leigh grew up in Salford, very close to St Peter’s Field, and says that the project arose from his personal resentment that he was never taught about the event in school.

In Mike Leigh’s exuberance to inculcate the importance of Peterloo he has reduced the film to burlesque. It was almost like watching a pantomime, with the wicked witch as the evil British Establishment on the one hand and the stoic downtrodden working class on the other. The stereotyping even extended to the geography, with everyone up North a by gum, honest hard-working salt-of-the-earth type and everyone down South an opulent decadent popinjay. In his self-imposed obligation to accurately portray the history (apparently he researched it for four years) Mike Leigh seems to have forgotten the importance of building meaningful characters and weaving them into an entertaining story.

The only character portrayed with a degree of nuance was the orator Henry Hunt, (Rory Kinnear). Of the others there were too many and they were one dimensional.

It would be fair to describe the reviews as ‘mixed.’ Some lauded the cinematography of Dick Pope, who is a frequent collaborator with Mike Leigh. Others applauded the film’s historical accuracy. Some reviewers bemoaned the fact that the film ended on such a bleak note of the massacre; presumably trying to breathe life into the moribund notion of the Whig view of history, that of inexorable human progress. Some ‘Guardian type’ reviews drew sombre parallels with today, encouraged by Mike Leigh’s statement that the film highlights the ‘have and have nots’ and thus has some contemporary relevance.

Peterloo was undoubtedly an event worthy of historical note. But not what Maxine Peake (who played Nellie in the film) exclaimed  at the premiere in Manchester: ‘Peterloo was an outrage of which humanity recoils with horror and which is a foul stain upon our national character.’ I assume by ‘our national character’ she is referring to the British Empire which, for more than 200 years, subjugated a quarter of the world’s population by mass murder, torture, starvation and other nefarious means.  For me this is the film’s most egregious characteristic. It elevates this episode of violence to a degree of  disproportionate importance. By depicting Peterloo as an aberration, out of character with British values, it obscures the reality that this was business as usual, at home and abroad, then and now. Rather than holding the Establishment’s feet to the fire the film is an insidious example of propaganda by treating Britain’s miscreant behaviour as exceptional.

If this is what counts as ‘resistance’ in the film industry, then we need to look elsewhere for inspiration for the revolution.

Tim Hart

Rear View: Class War (2018)

The Rear View Column from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class war

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, one of many brutal battles in capitalism’s ongoing class war, which saw a peaceful gathering of radicals in Manchester charged by a gentry militia and resulted in 15 deaths and 400-700 non-fatal injuries. Those attending had come to hear Henry Hunt, who advocated parliamentary reform and repeal of the Corn Laws, and carried banners calling for Parliaments Annual, Suffrage Universal, echoes of the French Revolution’s Liberty and Fraternity. There was, however, a general lack of political clarity, well illustrated when a band played God Save the King before the meeting started. The Times four days after the slaughter was both candid and clear: ‘The more attentively we have considered the relations subsisting between the upper and labouring classes throughout some of the manufacturing districts, the more painful and unfavourable is the construction which we are forced to put upon the events of last Monday…The two great divisions of society there, are the masters, who have reduced the rate of wages; and the workmen, who complain of their masters having done so. Turn the subject as we please, to this complexion it must come at last’. The anniversary is marked early with the release of Peterloo. ‘Mike Leigh’s period drama has immediacy and a sense of anger. It will ensure that the bloody events in St Peter’s Fields nearly 200 years ago are put back on the radar of politicians, historians and cultural commentators alike’ (theindependent.co.uk, 1 September). The film will be released next month, and if it registers with a less exclusive audience, reminding us that the class struggle, which throws up countless victims – from Peterloo to Marikana, Tolpuddle to Gdansk, and Kronstadt to Orgreave – has not gone away, it should be welcomed. The class war will not come to an end until the capitalists are defeated by the workers. That defeat will not require workers to use violence against the bosses – unless, of course, the capitalists have undemocratic ideas about making martyrs of themselves by defying the will of a conscious, socialist majority.

Star wars

The dailycaller.com (31 August) is one of many conservative websites lamenting loudly that a MOVIE ABOUT ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY DOESN’T FEATURE AMERICAN FLAG. ‘The upcoming film about Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s iconic moonwalk does not feature arguably the most important moment of the entire event. “First Man,” starring Canadian actor Ryan Gosling and directed by Damien Chazelle, does not feature a scene of the American flag being planted on the moon’s surface because Armstrong’s accomplishment “transcended countries and borders,” according to Gosling. “I think this was widely regarded, in the end, as a human achievement [and] that’s how we chose to view it” Gosling argued. “I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again, he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible.” “He was reminding everyone that he was just the tip of the iceberg – and that’s not just to be humble, that’s also true.” Gosling continued to say that he doesn’t think “Neil viewed himself as an American hero. From my interviews with his family and people that knew him, it was quite the opposite. And we wanted the film to reflect Neil.”’ Hear hear! Worth remembering on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing next year by those who are amazed and enthralled by the recent space-related discoveries or not is the fact that as long as capitalism remains on Earth, its rockets, its space stations, its whole space technology will be used as a means to solve the problems thrown up in the competitive struggle for markets by the major powers. That is, as the ultimate weapons of war.

Peace on Earth

‘The task of creating a coherent and free society is the mightiest to which man has summoned himself, and it is the task which now presses urgently upon us” (Professor G. D. Herron, Why I Am a Socialist, 1900).

‘What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do’ (H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World, 1924).

‘You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful—to make this life a wonderful adventure’ (Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940).

Films (1993)

Film Review from the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naked - Mike Leigh

If nothing else Mike Leigh's latest film provokes thought and discussion. I fell into a long, sometimes heated, discussion on the nature and meaning of this film shortly after viewing it. In short, it depicts the travels of a Mancunian initially fleeing Manchester and looking up an old girlfriend in London and later wandering around London bumping into various unusual characters: two homeless Scottish teenagers, a philosophic and lonely security guard, a fly-posterer, to name but a few. All this is handled with great sardonic wit and Leigh's usual social realism. It would be fair to say that this is a brutal film, depicting as it does a number of rape scenes, coupled with a sense of universal misogyny and a feeling of alienation gripping all the characters.

But from here my discussion came back to its point of departure. Whilst on the one hand my companion felt that this is the sort of viewing that everybody should watch, the sort of social realism that can be truly educational, the sort of film that can shake people into some vague form of action, I felt rather that the film had no "message." I saw it as the depiction of a hopeless scenario, one devoid of potential solution. The potential of the romantic ending was ignored, no spectre of a "solution" was apparent.

Powerful

This is powerful movie-making. It is not the Hollywood variety that insults its audience with fantasy solutions, rather it reflects in things as they are — to a greater or lesser extent devoid of hope. We live in an age of the politically-correct slogan, in an age of "care in the community", of "charity", of "Red Nose Days", of Esther Rantzen TV shows  . . .  the list goes on.

Well intentioned 

No matter how well intentioned some of those involved in these activities are, the fundamental reality is that they don't work. Whether one accepts the socialist analysis or not, nothing present social institutions have ever thrown up of has gone far in addressing the problems depicted in the film.

Socialists would have it that it is the system itself that is at fault, and while this is far from being universally accepted, there is no denying the seriousness of the problem around us. For me it is this blank depiction of reality, devoid of hope, that is the only "message" in this film.

G.