Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: “the mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of Marxist film theory. Fight Club is an exceptionally useful text with which to explore these three concepts because it so vividly and pedagogically engages with economic relations, ideological distortion, and opportunities for transformation. At the same time, it is a very typical film in terms of the conditions of its production, its marketing, and its popularity. Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the film is a contemporary classic that has lent itself to significant re-interpretation with every shift in the political economic landscape since its debut. Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club models a detailed cinematic interpretation that students can practice with other films, and furnishes a set of ideas about cinema and society that can be carried into other kinds of study, giving students tools for analyzing culture broadly defined
There could scarcely be a novel more searingly critical of social contradictions than Thomas Hardy's last, and arguably the last Victorian one, Jude the Obscure. Between its Pauline epigraph (“the letter killeth”) and its unforgettable tragedy (“done because we are too menny”), Jude bears out in its plot an indictment of law's inherent abjections and an interrogation of the value of life that seem to precociously articulate the consensus of today's hegemonic biopolitical theory: that human institutions tend inexorably to subjugate humanity itself. Yet the form of the novel develops another theory of the political, another conception of the letter of the law. In ways legible from the presentation of the epigraph onward, that form is conspicuously experimental about typography, the lining and lettering of the letter. The form is also, as Hardy himself repeatedly maintained, “geometrically constructed,” riveted by the study of lines and shapes. Reading Jude's manifold geometric imagery in the context of the revolutionary non-Euclidean break in Victorian-era mathematics and tracing the novel's bold typographic experiments, this essay highlights Hardy's surprising exuberance about the shape of letters. Typography and geometry are unexpectedly crucial to the political imaginary of Jude the Obscure, which projects the malleability of social lineaments even as it tells the tale of lethally rigid norms.
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