Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Subjectivities, Publics, and New Forms of Resistance
In the wake of the credit crisis and the subsequent Wall Street bailout in 2008, when we started to plan this book, we were sometimes asked why we would embark on such an outmoded project. After all, even the most avid advocates of neoliberalism, such as Alan Greenspan, had acknowledged that “mistakes” had been made and that the seeds of the current crisis lay in the unprecedented deregulation of the last two and a half decades.1 In the desire for novelty that dominates the academic marketplace and the postmodern disdain for meta-narratives that still persists, it should be no surprise that Marxism or the critical analysis of capitalism would once again be declared fashionably out-of-date. Yet, if there is a moment when Marxism may be rigorously applied to understanding and seeing alternatives to our world, there could be no better time than ours. As neoliberalism has emerged as the hegemonic world order, the contradictions of capital—its tendency to disintegrate the world while it radically integrates it—have erupted globally in social tensions, people’s protests, and widening chasms. New technologies of communications have served as the glue and conduit of neoliberalism whereas the production of culture is, after war, the second most important sector in the neoliberal economy. Consequently, Marxist critique, whose prime subject has been capitalism and its human consequences, when applied to global cinema can offer key insights into the nature and contradictions of the neoliberal project. In other words, global cinema can, in the hands of Marxist criticism, become a lens into the political economy of neoliberalism and its far-reaching implications on culture. It brings cinema studies into the center of any inquiry into contemporary society while at the same time bringing the unique assets of cinema studies, its study of the economics, aesthetics, and politics of cinema culture, to bear upon such a study. This book hopes to help ground cinema studies in this much-needed inquiry into the neoliberal project and also in imagining its alternatives.
DEFINING NEOLIBERALISM
Whereas we can expect to see more berating of the idea of neoliberalism, there can be little understanding of the transformative effects of its practice, in fact, of our present moment, if we consider the last two decades simply a mistake or aberration brought about by the greed or miscalculation of certain individuals and not a systemic consequence of capitalism. We would have, for example, no way to account for the global nature of the current economic crisis; the radical restructuring of relations between labor and capital in favor of the latter; the dismantling of social welfare; the conversion of one nation-state after another to advancing the free market; and a rampant culture of commodification, abstraction, and dehumanization. Unless there is a structural change, a move towards socialism rather than capitalism, we can expect more of the same because neoliberalism is not an alternative to capital but a radicalized return to nineteenth-century principles of the free market. Yet, the return has been fiercer and more destructive the second time around, as capital has now at its service newer technologies that have further increased its mobility and power to exploit human labor. At the very same time capitalism is, as Marx explained, a system constituted by crisis: its propensity to increase production results in constantly declining profits and the more it expands the greater it creates its own opposition.
Indeed, the process has gone on for over the last four decades as capital has shifted its crisis geographically—from Latin America to Asia to Europe to now hit the metropolitan center, i.e., the U.S. itself—producing a ruling class that is richer than ever before and, by all accounts, appears committed to further privatization and concentration of ownership. Over the last four decades of continued dispossession of social wealth, to use David Harvey’s description of capital accumulation by dismantling the welfare state, capitalist processes have burrowed deeper into the realm of the global and local, reproducing and deepening the enchanted, surreal sense of life that had found expression in the art movements of the early twentieth century, particularly surrealism. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff note the odd duality that has increasingly become part of the everyday, extending and transforming ordinary lives and institutional discourses at an alarming rate.
Among them are an odd coupling, the binary complementarily, of legalistic with the libertarian; constitutionality with deregulation, hyperrationalization with the exuberant spread of innovative occult practices and money magic, pyramid schemes and prosperity gospels; the enchantments, that is, of a decidedly neoliberal economy whose ever more inscrutable speculations seem to call up fresh specters in their wake.2
Known to those outside the academy as free market capitalism, neoliberalism is best identified with the Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng administrations in the early 1980s, preceded by a bloody trial run in Chile in 1973. The linguistic origin of the term may be traced back to Latin America where, in the late 1960s, many were calling the increased market liberalization found on the continent as “neoliberalismo.” There are also conflicting accounts that the Hungarian neoclassical economist Janos Kornai was responsible for coining the phrase in the 1960s.3 Regardless of its derivation, the term has remained a source of considerable confusion. The misunderstanding stems from an association of the “liberal” in neoliberal with some type of democratic principle rather than free market economics. This conflation is, in fact, precisely the kind of fundamental contradiction that Marx saw as inherent to the bourgeoisie. Although revolutionary in dismantling the traditional privileges of kings and the clergy and establishing the principles of democracy the bourgeoisie resisted the extension of democracy to all and secured its own class power through the ideology of the free market. See, for example, these well-known lines from the Communist Manifesto:4
It [bourgeoisie] has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom—free trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
There certainly is a fundamental contradiction between the political principles of liberalism, i.e., democracy, and the economic principles of free trade that undercut democracy by perpetuating inequality, exploitation, and poverty. Whereas bourgeois democracy guarantees the right of citizenship with its one-person one-vote mantra, political power continues to rest with national elites and global capital. The irreconcilability of democracy with the free market was clear in Latin America in the 1970s, when neoliberalism was marched in by military dictatorships; and it is becoming clearer now as contemporary anti-capitalist protests the world over, ranging from large civil demonstrations (just this year in London), worker agitations (against austerity policies in Athens in 2010), and violent uprisings (harking back to the first Palestinian Intifada in the Gaza Strip in 1990), are testing the limits of liberal democracy in the midst of increasing disparities. “Where people starve, all talk of democracy is a sham,” is a commonplace left slogan in India that underlines this basic incompatibility between the free market and democracy.
Consequently, rather than prematurely announcing the aftermath of neoliberalism, or rejoicing in the post-neoliberalism canting, without any evidence of a restructuring or redistribution of wealth in place, the authors in this volume take stock of the contemporaneous now—roughly the late 1980s to the lead-up to the housing and financial crisis in 2008—reconsidering even more urgently the nature of subjects and subjectivities produced by the neoliberal project.5 We propose to do so by taking cinema as the subject of our study, inquiring into the ways in which it has participated in and resisted the neoliberal project. The chapters in this volume weave in discussion of commerce with culture. They consider how the production of cinema as an industry and commodity intersects with its production of subjectivities; how the transformation of the business of cinema was a central feature of the reorganization of neoliberal cultural production and also reveals the significance of culture in neoliberalism; the anxieties around public and private spaces as they are played out nationally and globally in cinematic texts; questions of gender and sexuality in relation to neoliberal-ism; and the relation between cinema, civil society, and the nation-state. In other words, this study attempts to investigate what Henry Giroux has called the “cultural politics” of neoliberalism.
We suggest then, to varying shades and hues of ideological interpretation, that cinema can offer a lens into both the political economy of the neoliberal project and its far-reaching implications on culture. In other words, we can hope to find what it feels like to live in a certain time, and therefore an understanding of, if not identification with, the conditions that produce such subjectivities. The effects of the neoliberal discourse, in that it produces subjectivities that have, as Lisa Rofel recounts, penetrated “into the sinews of our bodies and the machinations of our hearts,” is a phenomenon that is necessarily articulated in culture, via cultural texts, such as cinema.6 Cultural texts, as Marx explained, help explain capitalism in ways that economic treatises cannot (subsequently his well-known interest in Shakespeare, Balzac, and newspaper reports). In them one can understand what is sick about society and what remains resistant to being incorporated. Marxist critique, at its best, reveals the connections between subjectivities and historical-material conditions.
The authors in this volume take neoliberalism rather than globalization as a starting point because the former term identifies a history, structure, and a set of relations—i.e., free market capitalism. In contrast, the latter appears to suggest that globalism is something new and without a structure or direction even as it is clearly animated by nineteenth-century ideas of free trade and free market, and we have a theory—Marxism—that can help explain its logic. The various studies in this book then are very much informed by a sense of history, both in local and global contexts. They trace certain features of capitalism that have become radicalized in the neoliberal phase.
In terms of the production of culture, this has meant an increasing trend towards monopoly and concentration of ownership despite new technologies that continuously make it possible to generate a far greater democratic public sphere. In her chapter in this volume, Eileen Meehan elaborates on the emergence of the hydra-headed transnational corporation made possible by the deregulation set in motion in the 1980s. Not only is this giant trans-industrial, i.e., it owns various media industries but it is also trans-sectoral, i.e., it has its fingers in multiple sectors, such as GM with its holdings in finance, military, media, and manufacturing. Similarly, Toby Miller and Rick Maxwell trace the collusion between the Pentagon, Hollywood, and the digital special effects industry based in Silicon Valley. Yet, the contest with new technologies and social movements remains sharp as the chapters in this volume show in the context of Latin America, France, and Asia. See the discussion on Cuban cinema by Michael Chanan; Third Cinema and documentary practice by Mike Wayne and Deirdre O’Neill; and French cinema by Martin O’Shaughnessy.
In terms of culture, the authors trace the anxieties that now haunt the social imaginary through close readings of texts. David Harvey, one of the key Marxist thinkers to connect the culture and economics of neoliberalism, has delineated the culture of neoliberalism as follows:
Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture, differentiated consumerism, and individual libertarianism. As such it proved more than a little compatible with that cultural impulse called ‘postmodernism’ which had long been lurking in the wings but now emerge full-blown as both cultural and an intellectual dominant.7
Harvey further described the cultural crisis of neoliberalism, the terribly lonesome subject that stands at the pinnacle of bourgeois civilization, as follows:
The anarchy of the market, of competition, and of unbridled individualism (individual hopes, desires, anxieties, and fears; choices of lifestyle and sexual habits and orientations; modes of expression and behavior towards others) [that] generates a situation that becomes increasingly ungovernable. It may even lead to a breakdown of all bonds of solidarity and a condition verging on social anarchy and nihilism.8
A closer look at the cultural politics and political economies of cultural production that neoliberalism has since restructured—from China to Peru to North America and beyond—provides a bridge to connect the micro with the macro in order to appreciate what full-blown capitalism has meant for life and culture. For instance, the postmodernism of affluent consumer societies financed on debt has had a far harder time taking root in neocolonial economies, such as Latin America in the 1970s or in contemporary India, where excessive private consumption has had to be guarded and militarized. Everywhere, the neoliberal ideology of extreme individualism appears to clash against an uncertain economy that has proven itself unable to guarantee the right to life, let alone one of dignity in many parts of the globe. Bourgeois economic expansion, Ishay Landa tells us, cannot be reconciled with “the sanctity of individual life.”9 Its implications for subjectivities are drawn out by close readings of (possible or impossible) lives played out on the world’s screens.10 In this regard, Bliss Cua Lim’s exposition of speculation and risk-taking in the debt-and-borrowing society characteristic of the Philippines is echoed by Jyotsna Kapur’s discussion of lumpen subjectivities in India and Keith Wagner’s description of the cutthroat realities portrayed with such passion in Park Chan-wook’s critique of contemporary South Korean society. Equally, Xudong Zhang characterizes both the social reality and the collective mind-set as schizophrenic in his chapter on Chinese cinema. Very much the product of their times, the film texts discussed here remain filled with contradictions, mourning and rejecting the culture of neoliberalism even in the midst of celebrating or acting it out.
FROM WORLD CINEMA TO GLOBAL CINEMA
The other major theoretical aim of this volume is to help clarify the growing field of what is known today as world/international/global cinema. Whereas there has been a noticeable internationalizing of film culture the world over with the Internet, television, and film festivals breaking national boundaries and bringing a wide variety of films to global audiences, the study of international cinema has remained ghettoized in and out of film studies scholarship. Our major point of departure from these earlier perspectives is an orientation that is firmly global, in that we understand any particular instance or space to be globally orientated. In other words, whereas earlier treatments of the world’s various cinemas under the rubric of international or world cinema tended to regard each as a separate entity marked mostly by national origin, we are interested in exploring the ways in which any and all cinema is the localized expression of a globalized integration; a process that has been well under way since the birth of cinema but is now more fully radicalized.
Let us not forget that in its very inception, cinema was imagined globally: early filmmakers, in particular, Eisenstein and Vertov with their cinematic juxtapositions of time and space, imagined it as a kind of international language; business, particularly Hollywood, looked beyond the nation to a world market; and early cinema served as a virtual travel machine for the working classes and those others who could not afford to travel. Such a “global sense of place,” to use Doreen Massey’s phrase, is very much in evidence today as well, both in the political economy of production as well as textual politics of contemporary cinema.11 The industry imagines a global market, is constituted by an international division of labor, and texts, even when confined to local contexts, are marked by a global sense of space.
International or world cinema studies have, in contrast, tended to look for autonomy rather than interdependence. In their edited volume, Remapping World Cinema (2006), Dennison and Lim, for example, argue that world cinema is, in fact, a discourse, an “epistemological premise.”12 Their epistemological premise, in line with postcolonial theory and its roots in post-structuralism, chooses to disregard meta-narratives such as capitalism in favor of “hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism and translation.”13 World cinema, they argue, resists the tension between non-Western uniformity and a self-reflexive “exoticization”; and is comprised of films determined to be something more than just Otherly delight.14 Such a discussion is judicious in foregrounding difference, in discarding the canon—as in world culture or literature—in favor of multiplicity and showing the continuing “effect of colonialism in an age of globalization.”15 However, by foregrounding colonialism as the primary antagonism this view elides the contradictions between labor and capital, the internal colonialism that has become the norm in neoliberalism, and is unable to account for the abstractions and depersonalization of commodity culture that are shared globally albeit colored by specific contexts.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Indeed, as the authors in this volume underline, neoliberalism has further augmented the capitalistic commodification of culture and its tendency towards monopoly over the means of cultural production. We have organized the chapters geographically because location remains integral to experience as well as the division of resources that have remained tied to a center and periphery relationship to global capital. Furthermore, our aim is to offer an overview of the truly global nature of the change we are in the midst of and, therefore, the close analysis of case studies based in specific locations. Our choice of film texts is deliberately eclectic, ranging from commercial popular cinema to the documentary and experimental as we are not tied into validating or rejecting a particular aesthetic but in the history and politics of aesthetic choices. The chapters may be read in order of geography or according to theme and the following outline of the book is meant to assist the reader in making such a choice.
We begin with the U.S. film industry because it has indeed led the way in neoliberal restructuring of the film/media cultural industries. An integral part of the web of consumer-capitalistic culture, the U.S. film industry is not only part of the corporate-financial structure at the top (i.e., GE, Coca-Cola, Ford, Apple, etc.), but it also is at the base of a culture of commodity, such that audiences are produced as commodities and buyers of commodities, thus sutured into an entire network of commodity relations. The industry has, in the words of Paul Grainge, perfected “the process of selling entertainment [which] has come to rely, increasingly, on the principles of deepening audience involvement in immersive world brands.”16
Expanding on their extensive work on the global domination of Hollywood, Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell launch the critique in this volume with their moniker, Siliwood. Combining Sili(con valley) with (Holly)wood they underline the connections between U.S. cinema, state policy, and militarism that have sharpened in neoliberalism. They draw attention to the collusion between the state, for example, California’s tax breaks to movie producers, the blockbuster model, and the movie magic of Silicon Valley’s special effects laboratories that has been secured under the umbrella of the U.S. military-industrial complex. They take us back to the beginning, reminding us of Ronald Reagan and the long-standing ties between Hollywood and neoliberalism. Moreover, this association between the military and Hollywood, Miller and Maxwell tell us, is endemic and can be traced back to the Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), which was also given official military support. Now updating this connection to the two Transformer films (Michael Bay, 2007, 2009), Miller and Maxwell argue that the visceral violence and fetishization of weapons that has become iconic of these texts is a homage to military prowess in the twenty-first century. Far from the champion of freedom that it claims to be, Hollywood, or should we call it Siliwood, is sustained by militarism as state policy, financing strategy, and cultural politics.
Eileen Meehan deepens the discussion on the un-freedom of the “free market” by bringing her ongoing analysis of the monopolistic tendencies of capitalistic cultural production into the present moment to ask how neo-liberalism may be outmoded if capitalist structures remain well in place. As Meehan shows, the legacy of neoliberalism is the trans-industrial media conglomerate—the seven big mass media firms, Bertelsmann, General Electric, National Amusements, News Corporation, Sony, Time Warner, and the Walt Disney Company—who benefited from worldwide government deregulation started in the 1980s. The business strategy that remains the most cost-efficient and profitable for these conglomerates is synergy, i.e., to cross-market intellectual property over multiple operations. It makes logical sense, then, for these conglomerates to own multiple platforms so that an idea or content may be marketed as a film, a video game, a theme park, a TV show, and so on. Not only would it be a challenge to untangle these holdings, it would be even more naïve to expect neoliberals to suddenly change course and democratize cultural production, especially given the ongoing stability of the entertainment-information sector, where Hollywood-style global cinema has continued to earn strong revenues at the box office. Meehan further explains the extent of the concentration achieved by neoliberalism by taking the case of GE, which she shows us is not only trans-industrial like the big seven media conglomerates, but also trans-sectoral. That is, GE’s tentacles are not confined just to media but extend to consumer and industrial manufacturing and services, energy, military, and capital and financial services. To unravel the horizontal and vertical integration of a hydra-headed giant such as this would amount to a revolution—not just another tweaking or correction of the problem of capitalistic monopoly.
In the final chapter in the part on Hollywood, Dee Tudor begins the discussion on subjectivities, analyzing the nature of masculinity represented in two recent inter-media texts and franchises, Dexter and Star Trek XI. The fictionalized intersections of business, military, science, religion, and family relationships in these texts, Tudor proposes, offer a lens into the contradictions of gender construction in neoliberalism. In particular, she explores the ways in which neoliberalism has brought about a certain revocation of traditional notions of hegemonic white patriarchy in favor of a masculinity that can compromise with and accommodate certain feminist positions, in particular the white bourgeois kind. For example, she indicates, certain pragmatic feminist ideas, such as “opening the paid labor market to women,” can easily coexist with the tenets of white neoliberal masculinity. This kind of analysis of gender and capital has become increasingly urgent in the post-9/11 militarization of U.S. society and culture.
Next, we take up Latin America, where it all began. Market “reforms” were brought here by a violent seizure of power by the military with August Pinochet’s 1973 coup destroying countless lives and terrorizing others. Yet, this was met with spirited resistance and solidarity. Latin America gave birth to Third Cinema, which was not just a film movement but also a radical politics that questioned both the U.S. Empire and its domestic collaborators. Its project of decolonizing both a people and the imagination, its combination of filmmaking and criticism, and, most of all, the ways in which it turned the spectator into a guerilla resister and an ally makes Third Cinema profoundly important for a cinematic history of resistance to neoliberalism.
Michael Chanan follows up his extensive work on Latin American film, especially Cuban cinema, to offer here an account of the changes that have taken place in Cuban film since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Chanan writes that when the Cuban revolution launched a project to create a new national cinema, in defiance of U.S. hegemony, the term ‘neoliberalism’ had not yet been coined. However, the new cinema that exploded onto the screens created waves among film audiences across the world; one of its leading directors, the documentarist Santiago Alvarez, spoke of “accelerated underdevelopment.” Fifty years later, after various crises, both political and economic, a small Cuban national film industry still exists—just barely—which competes for international co-production funds with other Latin American producers. However, what has grown in its place is an active independent video movement that produces short works for television, video art for the galleries and clubs, and, most importantly, circulates over the Internet. Digital technologies have opened up the public sphere to topics, in particular related to family, sexuality, and gender, that were previously taboo. The result is that much of the new Cuban video art movement can be found on the Internet, despite the difficulties of access from inside the country because the hardware remains under the ownership of multinational media conglomerates. The impulse behind Third Cinema, i.e., to democratize and radicalize the public sphere, Chanan tells us, now lives on in the interstices of cyberspace.
In Peru, the same struggle to open up and democratize the public sphere continues. Film and literature scholar Sophia A. McClennen draws our attention to one such instance of struggle, the work of the Marxist film collective Grupo Chaski, and in the process highlights the neoliberal tendency to privatize the public sphere in much the same way as it encloses industry. Representing the most disenfranchised sectors of Lima society, Chaski has been dedicated to revolutionizing all components of the filmmaking process. From the group’s inception, they have consistently worked on creating alternative modes of exhibition at the same time that they have sought to make their films available to the public via commercial releases, television screenings, videos, and other more mainstream distribution outlets. Since 2004, the group began working on a project of local, grassroots distribution and exhibition, a process they call “microcines.” McClennen’s account restates how new technologies when backed by people’s struggles—as Third Cinema was in its moment of birth—can dynamically open up and radicalize the public sphere.
Writing as theorists and practitioners, Mike Wayne and Deirdre O’Neill, discuss the ongoing significance of Third Cinema as an alternative to neo-liberalism by grounding their own film practice in it. Wayne and O’Neill, on a teaching assignment in Venezuela, end up making Listen to Venezuela (2010), a documentary about Hugo Chavez. Comparing their work with contemporary films on Latin America, in particular, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2002) and Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’s The Take (2004), which they find to be conventional in form, they assert the renewed relevance of Third Cinema as an alternative to neoliberalism. Most notably, they argue that Third Cinema is a form of cultural politics that goes beyond the limits of traditional representative democracy/documentary and is most compatible with the impetus to build a ‘horizontal’ rather than a ‘vertical society’; and echoes the call for a ‘protagonistic’ democracy embedded in the new Venezuelan constitution of 1999. In many ways then, Wayne and O’Neill may be included in the contemporary tradition of Third Cinema.
Next we move to Asia, an area that has gained increasing attention in the last three decades, to the extent that the twenty-first century has been called the Asian Century. Take Japan’s economic prominence in the 1980s; China, whose economic growth, David Harvey remarks, may be considered a side effect of the Washington consensus in that the dismantling of manufacturing in the U.S. turned China into the world’s biggest exporter; India’s rising prominence as a market and source of labor along with geopolitical significance in the U.S. led war against Afghanistan; and the hydra-like formations of neoliberalism in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
Along these lines, Xudong Zhang summarizes the contradictions of Chinese neoliberal culture. He builds on his previous analysis that the paradoxes of capitalist-driven development in China have resulted in genuine schizophrenia in social reality and the collective mind-set along with the radical disintegration of traditional (both agrarian and socialist) social fabric, the decentralization of power, the loss of moral and theoretical authority, and China’s uneasy and often embattled relations with a reintegrated and expanded capitalist West after the Cold War. 17 Zhang elaborates on the implications of a fading socialist organization of society by a close reading of Jia Zhangke newest release, 24-City (2008). This award-winning film is about an aeronautical/munitions factory that along with its industrially designed clay brick buildings and working-class inhabitants is set for demolition/dissolution to make way for a new postsocialist city, adorned with cosmopolitan high-rises and a super-rich class (bu fao hu). The film was shot in Sichuan Province with real factory workers telling their stories. In reading this film against the background of China’s neoliberal turn, Zhang fleshes out the impossible contradictions of postsocialist living, especially the erasure of history and living memory, which is then repackaged and sold as commodified nostalgia of the Maoist period.
The contradictions between living memory and commodified nostalgia are to be found in commercial genres as well even when they explicitly avoid the kind of trenchant critique offered by a once nonmainstream filmmaker like Jia Zhangke. Ying Xiao discusses here a new genre, the leitmotif (zhuxuanlu) film, which is the birth child of state subsidy and the neoliberal blockbuster phenomenon inspired by Hollywood. In particular, she takes up the example of Feng Xiaoning’s Grief over the Yellow River (Huanghe juelian), which outgrossed many foreign releases and Hong Kong imports in 1999. Following Xiao’s reading, the film may indeed be considered a textbook illustration for the oxymoronic phrase “Market Socialism.” A big-budget film with a domestic and global market in sight, it is an epic rendering of socialism as commodified nostalgia.
Sharon Hayashi explores the confrontation between the past and the present in Japan through a different lens, i.e., the widespread social anxieties about young people and intergenerational relationships that have become center stage with the increasing isolation of the individual in neo-liberalism. Taking the newly coined term “freeters,” i.e., part-time workers, unmarried men and women between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four years who are expected to hold their jobs for less than five years, Hayashi explains the ideological mystifications of neoliberalism. Whereas the precarity of freeter existence is very much a systemic result of neoliberalism, conservative discourse holds these young people as not only responsible for their insecure lives but, in fact, for the dissolution of the social fabric. Hayashi contextualizes the moral panic around youth violence and sexuality in the increasing precarity of life for young people under neoliberalism. In contrast, Hayashi identifies and describes instances of progressive youth cultural politics that present a collective response to neoliberalism, while at the same time restoring agency to the individual. Taking her cue from a new generation of labor activists in Japan, who are combining new aesthetic forms and multiple media with claiming public spaces, such as city parks, Hayashi offers significant insights in the ways in which cinema is being integrated into leftist politics. In particular she discusses Tanaka Hiroyuki’s Kani kôsen/The Crab Cannery Ship (2009), a remake of an early twentieth-century proletarian novel now inflected with manga; Tokachi Tsuchiya’s documentary Futsû na shigoto ga shitai/A Normal Life, Please (2008), first screened at the New Year’s Tent Village in Hibiya Park; and Yuki Nakamura’s 2008 documentary Shiroto no ran/Amateur Revolt. Circulating on YouTube, shown in union meetings and public parks, these films present an alternative youth politics based in a savvy knowledge of media; an alternative globalization to the media conglomeration Meehan, Maxwell, and Miller describe earlier in the book.
Jyotsna Kapur’s chapter also dwells on the generational politics of neo-liberalism, in this case in India, as a new generation is being socialized into radicalized capitalist social relations. If, on the one hand, there is an increasing market-based rhetoric of individual freedom and choice, with its attendant promises of sexual autonomy, there is, on the other, a crushing onslaught of the power of money and commodity to decide one’s fate in life. Working with the notion of lumpen-development or capitalism as a systemic underdevelopment of development, Kapur discusses the transformation of an iconic figure of Indian popular cinema, Devdas, from an early twentieth-century characterization as a romantic, tortured individual of exceptional sensitivity to the emergence in an incisive contemporary incarnation, Anurag Kashyap’s 2009 film, as Dev. D, a lumpen who declares, almost cheerfully, “I am a slut.” Rereading Freud, from a Marxist-feminist perspective, Kapur finds his analysis of the sadomasochistic inner life of the bourgeoisie to be especially helpful in understanding the current crisis of the self in contemporary Hindi cinema.
The estrangement of labor that Marx identified as the core dehumanizing feature of capitalist subjectivity has been radicalized in neoliberalism. Through a close analysis of Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Oldboy (2003), Keith B. Wagner explains how the filmmaker reveals the estrangement of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, such that instruments of labor turn into sadomasochistic tools of torture. Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci’s tracing of the inner worlds of the bourgeois and proletariat under a previous phase of corporate fascism, Wagner takes us back into Marxist history to understand the present.
We move from the textual politics of representing labor to considering the nature of work in the creative-cultural industries with the contribution by Mirana M. Szeto and Yun-chung Chen on Hong Kong cinema. Noting the commodification of culture and the central role it has come to play in urban renewal under neoliberalism, Szeto and Chen discuss the ways in which the renewal of Hong Kong cinema under neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics has come at the costs of culture and the labor involved in producing it. They note a greater cultural bifurcation, homogenization, and distance from autonomous self-expression as Hong Kong cinema has been co-opted into the cultural and economic regime of mainland production. Tracing the cultural and human costs of this political economy through interviews with cultural practitioners, the authors counter the neoliberal discourse and its emphasis on economic growth.
Moving from these long-running cinematic traditions in Asia, our attention shifts to island state cinema. In this regard, Singapore represents one of the more interesting case studies in this volume due to its much-celebrated market readiness and fusion of Asian and Western business practices and models. “As a postcolonial island nation of under four million people (of whom over half a million are foreign), Singapore is famous for being run like a giant corporation.”18 Political economist Henry Wai-chung Yeung has asserted that “Singapore, as a major entrepôt in Southeast Asia, has relentlessly positioned itself vis-à-vis the global spaces of flows. Since its independence in 1965, the PAP-led state has planned and implemented several national development strategies to create and sustain Singapore’s competitiveness in the face of accelerated global competition.”19 However, this state-market economy changed in the 1990s under IMF’s stringent supervision after the Tiger Market crash. In order to remain competitive and position itself as a beacon of neoliberalism outside of China’s state-regulated mixed economy and South Korea’s cheabol consolidations, Singaporean businesses were encouraged to outsource labor and invest in transnational ventures that left many jobless—fissuring a gap between newly affluent white-collar entrepreneurs and the invisible working classes that carried on with menial jobs for their rich clientele. This invisible or at least semi-detectable class (in filmic productions) was then forced to carry on without the assistance or support of the island state. Yeung adds:
The dismantling of such well-established state apparatus and the unconditional opening of domestic economies to foreign competition under the current IMF guidelines is tantamount to destroying the very foundation of their success—the embedded relationships between economy and state in these countries. The consequence can be extremely serious, ranging from social unrest (e.g. Indonesia) to extreme nationalism and xenophobia (e.g. Malaysia).20
Many of these themes are covered in Jenna Ng’s chapter, which once again highlights the authoritarianism that underlines neoliberalism, as she explains the unstable balance that Singapore’s one-party, socially conservative regime must maintain in order to pursue its neoliberal agenda. Her close reading of Djinn’s Perth (2004) brings out a highly nuanced record of the painfully violent fantasies that underlie a global imaginary trapped in extremely crushing and impoverished local realities. Her chapter corroborates Tan See-Tam’s recent discussion of Singapore’s neoliberal condition as a “Society of Strangers” where human relations pivot around fantastic experiences, “empty lives and socially alienating spaces.”21
In another exploration of the reification of life, its subjection to market values of exchange in neoliberalism, Bliss Cua Lim looks at independent Filipino director Jeffrey Jeturian’s Pila Balde / Fetch a Pail of Water (1999) and Kubrador / The Bet Collector (2006). Both films reflect Jeturian’s preoccupation with the intrusion of exchange relations in all areas of human life, including sex, longing, death, and grief. In Pila Balde, sex is linked as much to emotional devastation as to economic desperation, and in Kubrador, gambling is presented as a way of life, such that every experience, including grief, is subjected to calculation. Lim then goes on to show the workings of neoliberalism in film production itself. Jeturian’s Pila Balde, shot in thirteen days with a budget of U.S.$50,000, was part of a trend started in the late 1990s with Philippine studios giving new directors an opening to make films but on a bare-bones, exploitative budget.
Our part on Africa and Europe is, we are sorry to say, far less detailed than we had hoped but will be developed in future work. Here we carry Jonathan Haynes’s discussion of the political economy and textual politics of Nigeria’s Nollywood industry. Comprised of many small producers working with tiny amounts of capital, producing cinema directly for sale as cassettes or video compact discs this bare-bones industry presents an image of the city as a turbulent and dangerous landscape. Here class divisions are extreme but permeable, while enormous wealth does not buy insulation from the chaos and misery that surrounds it. They show supernatural forces permeating all social levels, particularly the wealthiest. The enchantment of the everyday that several authors have traced in this volume is very much alive in Nigeria as well.
Martin O’Shaughnessy reports on how the long-standing oppositional stance of French cinema against Hollywood hegemony and the significant part it has played in anti establishment critiques is being put to the test in neoliberalism. O’Shaughnessy traces, despite a state subsidy and French commitment to cultural exceptionalism, an increasingly bipolar cinema that is divided between small-versus big-budget productions, art-house versus multiplex exhibition, and film geared towards national versus global markets. He also points to specific film texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that have articulated a strong critique of neoliberalism. Elaborating on the resistance that French cinema has put up to capitalist globalization, both at the level of production and exhibition practices as well as in its texts, this chapter reaffirms cinema as a significant site of anticapitalist resistance.
In concluding then this reckoning with neoliberalism, as demonstrated in the practices and commerce of cinema globally, we find a sharpening of the contradictions and conflicts of capitalism, not their resolution. Each and every case study in this volume speaks of crisis: between the monopolization of cultural production and newer media technologies that another generation of cultural producers are using to resist and democratize the public sphere; between a social fabric that is coming apart as the middle class gets submerged under neoliberal withdrawal of social welfare while at the same time a younger globalized generation is experiencing a common dependency, a shared proletarianization, imposed by the market; between the production of self as commodity and the painful and violent costs extracted by such domination. The return of nineteenth-century capitalist relations is, perhaps, nowhere as strikingly painful as in China, where Lin Chun writes:
Engels’s description of the conditions of the working class in the nineteenth-century England became applicable to Chinese workers in some coastal cities. It was widely felt among them, as reported by one labor scholar, that if Marx could see Guangdong today he would die of anger.22
The universal triumph of capitalism has, as Randhir Singh writes from India, universalized the systemic logic of capital and made Marxism both as social theory and political practice even more relevant today. “So long as capitalism lasts, triumphant or otherwise,” Singh writes, “Marxism can neither die nor go obsolete, nor socialism, as a negation of capitalism, disappear from the agenda of human history.”23 Marxist theory offers an explanation of structures and whereas the triumphalism may have gone out of the neoliberal discourse it has by no means reversed course. As any mechanic knows, you can’t fix something if you don’t know it is broken, and we have offered in these pages cinema as one such site where the wreckage wrought by capital may be observed.
NOTES
1. Quinn, 2008.
2. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001, p. 2.
3. Phillips et al., 2006, p. 588.
4. Marx and Engels, 2005, p. 43.
5. See, for example, Macdonald and Ruckert, 2010.
6. Rofel, 2007, p. 15.
7. Harvey, 2005, p. 42.
8. Ibid., p. 82.
9. Landa, 2007, p. 32
10. Rofel, 2007, p. 15.
11. Massey, 1994.
12. Dennison and Lim, 2006, p. 2.
13. Ibid., p. 6.
14. Ibid., p. 3
15. Ibid., p. 2.
16. Grainge, 2008, p. 175.
17. Zhang, 2007, pp. 6–7.
18. Ong, 2007, p. 177.
19. Yeung, 2000, p. 141.
20. Ibid., p. 146.
21. See-Tam, 2009, p. 210.
22. Lin, 2006, p. 9.
23. Singh, 1998, pp. 17–27, 25.
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