Marxist film theory is an approach to film theory centered on concepts that make a political understanding of the medium possible. [1]
An individual studying a Marxist representation in a film, might take special interest in its representations of political hierarchy and social injustices.
Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. The Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage.[2]
While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more outspoken complaint that the Russian filmmakers had, was with the narrative structure of the United States cinema.
Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over.[3]
Eisenstein himself was accused by the Soviet authorities under Joseph Stalin of "formalist error", of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly.
French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, employed radical editing and choice of subject matter as well as subversive parody to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.[4]
Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, began his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about their dispossessed daily life.
Situationist film makers produced a number of important films, where the only contribution by the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks? (1973), a Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and Proletarian revolution. The intellectual technique of using capitalism's own structures against itself is known as détournement.