Marxism, Film and Theory: From the Barricades to Postmodernism

From the sixties onwards, the study of media and culture has increasingly moved from the pages of journalism and fan mags into the expanding 'mass' universities of advanced capitalist countries. The new or para-disciplines of film, communications and cultural studies, related but usually institutionally distinct, emerged from English and Sociology departments to occupy considerable space in the academic landscape. The revitalised Marxism of the sixties and seventies was important across the humanities and social sciences; but in these new fields, Marxism - married to related radicalisms like Third World anti-imperialism and socialist feminism - was virtually hegemonic. The most influential critical work in film and cultural studies was specifically understood as Marxist (of varying strains and combinations) and located in the politics of socialist transformation. Thus an enriched Marxism helped to understand how this century's massive growth and consolidation of media and cultural industries not only transformed the face of world capitalism and the everyday lives of its peoples, but how they altered the way capitalism rules politically and reproduces itself culturally. Little more than twenty years later, the 'retreat of the intellectuals' from this apparent position of strength seems a rout. Amidst the dominance of poststructuralism, postmodernism, aesthetic formalism and genre populism, academic radicals, if cultural theorists, now textually rebel with their favourite rock videos or thrillers. Vulgar anti-Marxism is common currency. And connections to social movements, let alone anything so materially crass as class, are little mentioned. What happened