Abstract
A short detour to commodity analysis allows a perspective on the transformation of reality, as well as the perspective which cinema establishes for us. Film theorists Comolli and Narboni point out that film is a commodity “possessing exchange value,” but which “as a result of being a material product of the system, it is also an ideological product of the system.” This is the two-fold aspect of the film. First, it is a particular product, that is to say, a commodity produced within a certain economic formation, which, as every other commodity in order to be produced, involves the existence of labor force. First, when it is produced, it becomes an ideological product of the given social–economic formation. The second, and arguably more crucial, aspect is that the product occurs within the capitalist form of organization of production.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean-Louis Comolli & Jean Narboi, “Cinema/Criticism/Ideology,” Screen Reader 1, 1977, p. 4.
- 2.
Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art: In Reply to André Daspre,” in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), p. 174.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 175.
- 4.
Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), p. 40.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 126.
- 7.
Ibid, p. 183 (emphasis mine).
- 8.
Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital, p. 48.
- 9.
Several key directors of the twentieth-century cinema have in different stages of their careers dreamed about filming nothing less than The Genesis (or at least the elements of it): David Wark Griffith, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, and so on.
- 10.
Jean-Louis Comolli & Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Criticm/Ideology,” Screen Reader 1, 1977, p. 3.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics, p. 31.
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Hamza, A. (2016). Film as a Commodity. In: Althusser and Pasolini. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56652-2_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56652-2_19
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