screening for class consciousness

Agatha

i admit i was also surprised, like Edwin, to think of the origins of film as more than that of a commodity, to see it as the grounds for political and social contention. i guess i always imagined that most of the first films made, were choppy, black-and-white, vaudeville-esque ten minute romps of flappers doing the charleston. Ross gives a much more powerful picture of film as a venue for "teaching immigrants what it meant to belong to a particular class" (21).

that phrase also gave me some pause, however. Ross seems to both view the film as a means of inciting political action and labor-solidarity, but conversely also a sort of means of manipulation on the part of the filmmaker, à la Adorno. which is it? i guess we could ask the same thing of any film today, however, and of any creative expression of culture, for that matter.

i do like how film opened doors between class relations in many ways, but it seems like this working-class empowerment is complicated (well, duh). i mean, anyone could sit anywhere in the theatre (a revelation!) but "respectable" people didn't go to these theatres. so how much class-mixing really went on there? i wonder, too, about the realities of immigrant/race dynamics, of whether or not italians, jews, blacks, and swedes, really embraced sitting next to each other in the darkened nickelodeon. maybe. but sometimes that seems a little too hopeful as a twenty-first century look at the past.

it seems like while early labor filmmakers could make cheap films on their own time, they could reach a mass labor audience; but once the expectation for elaborate and costly film became the norm, these filmmakers effectively lost to the affluent resources of middle-class investors and censorship boards. i wonder today how this struggle translates; are the "radical," independently funded films really all that radical? or if the movie industry were different, were still in its baby-stage of undefined, would we see so much more diversity of thought on the big screen?

Ross's final lament over the turning of the labor film industry over to middle-class censorship and to Hollywood's homogenizing clutches, made me think of a film we watched last semester, I Remember Mama (film adaptations, anyone?). i debate with myself whether the film is part of the last vestiges of the overt class-conscious film, as it glorifies the life of a Norwegian immigrant family living in San Francisco; or whether its lack of political antagonism, and soothing family-values message, are rather part of the new Hollywood trend to present all (good) Americans as classless, yet noble, citizens of a democractic society. what complicates this more for me is that we discussed last semester how even such a film in which immigrants take a central role, became non-existent after WWII, effectively making even this film seem a bit "controversial." which is really kind of laughable if you ever get a chance to watch it. but still, perhaps I Remember Mama is an expression of that transition, that conflict between radical labor filmmakers and the blooming Hollywood industry.