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April 16, 2007
An interesting book on cinema: Jonathan Beller's The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle is a Marxist analysis of cinema as a mode of production in what many call “post-industrial” capitalism. So cinematic images are not just representations of capital, but that they actually are capital.
Courtesy of le Colonel Chabert
Steven Shapiro over at Pinocchio Theory describes it thus:
Beller describes cinema.... as a machine for circulating images and their affects, for exchanging them one for another, for inciting us to consume them in their very distance (or “alienation”) from us, and for swallowing up the entirety of society and social action (production) in this fantasmagoria of images and their circulation.
This political economy of vision is a building on Adorno & Horkheimer's Culture Industry and Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle in an innovative way that incorporates the body as desiring subject
The Introduction to the Cinematic Mode of Production is heavy going, so I will leave it to another post after I have my way through it. So I'll need to ease my way into this work on attention economy'; where cinema is understood as a deterritorized factory in which spectators work. If visuality reigns (not print technology), then cinema has industrialized vision, and then shifted to an electronic form based around reader attention.
In the meantime we have this earlier article in Postmodern Culture, which starts from the Coen brothers 1992 film Barton Fink. Beller says:
In the film, Capital Cinema is the name of the late 1930s pre-war Hollywood production studio which, makes cinematic expression possible. This company, as a representative of the studio system, is used by the Coen brothers to demonstrate that cinema is at once a factory for the production of representation and an economic form, that is, a site of economic production. As factory and as economic system cinema is inscribed in and by the dominant mode of production: specifically, industrial capitalism and its war economy. As a factory of representation Capital Cinema dictates limits to the forms of consciousness that can be represented, but as an economic form inscribed by the larger cultural logic, Capital Cinema dictates limits to forms of. consciousness per se.
Straight marxism really----the development of culture as a sphere of the production line and so creating new pathways of commodity flow. The spectacle which we consume in late capitalism is the spectacle of late capitalism itself; but one that performs a retooling of the sensorium by initiating a new disciplinary regime for the eye.
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