The cinema is an invention without a future.
—LOUIS LUMIÈRE, AUTHOR OF THE FIRST FILM MANIFESTO
To forge oneself iron laws, if only in order to obey or disobey them with difficulty . . .
—ROBERT BRESSON, NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPHER
Manifestos are typically understood as ruptures, breaks, and challenges to the steady flow of politics, aesthetics, or history. This is equally true of film and other moving image manifestos. Paradoxically, film manifestos pervade the history of cinema yet exist at the margins of almost all accounts of film history itself. An examination of this elision raises not simply the question of whether manifestos have changed the cinema (even if their existence has often been marginalized in film history) but whether the act of calling into being a new form of cinema changed not only moving images but the world itself. For this proposition to make any sense at all, one cannot take moving images to be separate from the world or to be simply a mirror or reflection of the real. Instead, one must see moving images as a constitutive part of the real: as images change, so does the rest of the world. By way of introduction to Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, I examine what exactly a manifesto is, consider the role played by manifestos in film culture, offer an overview of some of the film manifestos and manifesto movements covered in the book, and map out a critical model of what constitutes a film manifesto and a manifesto-style of writing. My aim is to outline a theoretically informed counterhistory that places film manifestos, often neglected, at the center of film history, politics, and culture.
Film manifestos are a missing link in our knowledge of the history of cinema production, exhibition, and distribution. Often considered a subset of aesthetics or mere political propaganda, film manifestos are better understood as a creative and political engine, an often unacknowledged force pushing forward film theory, criticism, and history. Examining these writings as a distinct category—constituting calls to action for political and aesthetic changes in the cinema and, equally important, the cinema’s role in the world—allows one not only to better understand their use-value but also the way in which they have functioned as catalysts for film practices outside the dominant narrative paradigms of what Jean-Luc Godard pejoratively calls “Hollywood-Mosfilm.” Yet manifestos and manifesto-style writing have also greatly influenced, and indeed regulated, narrative cinema, especially that of the classical Hollywood period.
One of the other goals of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is to reconsider the status of the film manifesto in film theory and history. Part of my desire to do this stems from my coming of age, as an academic, during the “theory wars” of the 1990s (nowhere near as sexy as the “Clone Wars” but similarly populated with mutterings about the “dark side”). Many of the most contentious essays at the center of the “theory wars” are better understood not as theory qua theory, in some empirical sense, but as manifestos—calls to arms to change, destroy, and reimagine the cinema. Certainly, this is the political and aesthetic power that lies behind a multitude of central writings on the cinema, from Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Method of Making Workers’ Films,” and Dziga Vertov’s “WE: Variant of a Manifesto” through Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and Claire Johnston’s “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (indeed, some of the writings from the analytic side of the debate by Noël Carroll and Gregory Currie can be read as manifestos for film theory itself).1 To get tied up in positivist arguments about the empirical nature of these texts is to miss the means by which they functioned as catalysts for writers and filmmakers alike to reimagine the cinema.
Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures brings together film manifestos from the global history of cinema, constituting the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture.2 Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestos (and the numerous ones that address the relationship between aesthetics and politics), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures uncovers a neglected yet central history of cinema through the exploration of a series of documents that postulate ways in which to reimagine the medium, how moving images intervene in the public sphere, and the ways film might function as a catalyst to change the world. Many film manifestos accomplish these goals by foregrounding the dialectical relationship between questions of aesthetic form and political discourse, raising salient questions about how cinematic form is in and of itself a form of political action and intervention in the public sphere. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of film manifestos could be understood by the maxim “aesthetics as action.”
Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures brings together key manifestos of the last 110 years, alongside many little-known manifestos that, despite their obscurity, have nevertheless served to challenge and reimagine cinema aesthetics, politics, distribution, production, and exhibition. To this end the book includes the major European manifestos (those of Sergei Eisenstein, François Truffaut, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ’95, et al.), the Latin American political manifestos (Fernando Birri, Jorge Sanjinés, Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Solanas, et al.), those of the postcolonial nation-state independence movements (Scotland, Québec, Palestine) and those of avant-garde filmmakers and writers (Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, Keith Sanborn, et al.). Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures also brings to light many manifestos largely unknown in Anglo-American film culture, as the book contains many previously untranslated manifestos authored or coauthored by figures such as Icíar Bollaín, Luis Buñuel, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Isidore Isou, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and François Truffaut. The book also includes thematic sections addressing documentary cinema, feminist and queer film cultures, and state-controlled filmmaking and archives. Furthermore, it includes texts that have been traditionally left out of the canon of film manifestos, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI’s Vigilanti Cura, which have nevertheless played a central role in film culture (indeed, the Production Code can be seen as the most successful film manifesto of all time). Finally, I have also included many local manifestos, ones that were influential in specific scenes and micromovements. The counterhistory that emerges from these varied texts brings to life, in essence, a new history of the cinema.
Before turning to film manifestos, consideration must be given to what, in general, constitutes a manifesto. To begin, then, a perhaps audacious claim: the last three thousand years of Judeo-Christian history are based on a manifesto. The Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments, declaimed in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, functions as Western culture’s first and most definitive manifesto. The rules it sets out defined the basic structures around which Western culture has organized itself and its belief systems. The Commandments, like any good subsequent manifesto, offer not only rules to live by but nothing less than a totalizing vision of how one ought to live one’s life. An examination of the Decalogue also allows one to delineate the difference between a manifesto and what could be more broadly construed as rules: “You shall have no other gods before me” or “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:3, 7; and Deuteronomy 5:7, 11) are imperatives that effect one’s morality and ethics in a way that “don’t run with scissors” does not (even though the latter may be considered a more pragmatic piece of advice).
While the Decalogue is only the most prominent of the myriad of totalizing theological proclamations of the way in which one ought to live one’s life, contemporary manifestos and our understanding of them date from the upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably with the United States’ Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Constitution of 1788, and the Bill of Rights of 1791; France’s Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto) of 1848. These foundational documents of two of the three competing ideologies of the twentieth century (the other being fascism) have taken on a quasi-religious status, partly replacing old messianic principles with newly found societal and secular ones; for instance, James Madison once referred to the founding American documents as “political scripture.” Here, the political manifesto takes on the totalizing role of societal definition once held by the Decalogue. Indeed, Fredric Jameson sees connections between these forms of writings, codifies both manifestos and constitutions as subsets of utopian writing, and delineates the four different kinds of utopian writing: “the manifesto; the constitution; the ‘mirror of princes’; and great prophecy, which includes within itself that mode called satire.”3 All four kinds of writing can be seen as means by which to reimagine the world by calling a new world into being through the act of writing.
The aesthetic manifesto demonstrates many of the same qualities as the classical political manifesto, even when lacking an overt political or ideological goal. The rules put forth in aesthetic manifestos set structures that not only pertain to artistic form but do so with the implicit or explicit belief that following aesthetic rules in artistic production has political, social, and cultural consequences in the world at large. The rules or constraints placed on poetic form, from haiku to iambic pentameter, may lead to aesthetically pleasing texts, but the rules themselves don’t speak to larger cultural, political, or aesthetic issues. Aesthetic manifestos, then, make claims about not only the formal aspects of art but the ways in which these formal rules will help transform the world at large.
What constitutes the preferred discursive model of the manifesto in order to bring this transformation into being is open to debate. As a form of speech, manifestos have been understood as both monological and dialectical in nature. Janet Lyon, for instance, argues that traditional aesthetic and political modernist manifestos are both exhortations to action and simultaneous attempts to eradicate dissent and debate:
The literary and political manifestoes that flag the history of modernity are usually taken to be transparent public expressions of pure will: whoever its author and whatever its subject, a manifesto is understood as the testimony of a historical present tense spoken in the impassioned voice of its participants. The form’s capacity for rhetorical trompe l’oeil tends to shape its wide intelligibility: the syntax of a manifesto is so narrowly controlled by exhortation, its style so insistently unmediated, that it appears to say only what it means, and to mean only what it says. The manifesto declares a position; the manifesto refuses dialogue or discussion; the manifesto fosters antagonism and scorns conciliation. It is univocal, unilateral, single-minded. It conveys resolute oppositionality and indulges no tolerance for the faint hearted.4
For Lyon it is a strategic necessity for the manifesto to be monological in nature. To engage in a dialogical process in regard to what the manifesto is calling into being is to undercut its very efficacy as a speech act. In contrast, for Louis Althusser the manifesto is dialectical in nature, mediating past and present. Writing on Antonin Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince as a manifesto, Althusser writes, “Machiavelli ‘speaks’ to Gramsci in the future tense. . . . Gramsci calmly writes that The Prince is a manifesto and a ‘revolutionary utopia.’ For the sake of brevity, let us say ‘a revolutionary utopian manifesto.’”5 He argues elsewhere, also in relation to The Prince, that “for the manifesto to be truly political and realistic—materialistic—the theory that it states must not only be stated by the manifesto, but located by it in the social space into which it is intervening and which it thinks.”6 Manifestos for Althusser, then, are invocations: they call the future into being through a dialectical mediation of the present and the past. This utopian drive is central to the post-Enlightenment manifesto and to the calls for a radical reimagining of the cinema in film manifestos, bringing into being not only a new cinema but a new world.
What would a new intellectual history of film culture, read through the prism of the manifesto, look like; and how can one, in a theoretical frame, begin to synthesize this kind of history and writing with the concept of the utopian? What kind of form might this kind of “secret history” take, and what might this history reveal? One notion that comes to mind is that a radically different kind of dialogical process would occur among different historical, political, national, and cultural moments in film theory, criticism, and history. This reimagination of the history of cinema through the utopian ruptures of film manifestos has philosophical precedents: in strikingly different ways the works of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord engage in this process, as both these Marxist philosophers examine the role of the image in twentieth-century culture.
Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, his classic study of punk, the Diggers, the Lettristes, the Situationists, and a cornucopia of other “termite-like” political and aesthetic movements, is also an example of this kind of radical utopian critical approach to cultural history. Marcus traces dialogical relationships among different moments of radical cultural history and uses punk as a contemporary culmination of many of these cultural and political practices:
In “Anarchy in the UK,” a twenty-year-old called Johnny Rotten has rephrased a social critique generated by people who, as far as he knew, had never been born. Who knew what else was part of the conversation? If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation; then the task of the critic would be to lead speakers and listeners unaware of each other’s existence to talk to one another. The job of the critic would be to maintain the ability to be surprised at how the conversation goes, and to communicate that sense of surprise to other people, because a life infused with surprise is better than a life that is not.7
This analysis is both utopian and dialogical in nature. But it also speaks of the ways by which social and political breaks and ruptures take place in culture—in other words, how radical interventions from radical voices come about. Part of the task of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is not simply to document, in some sort of Rankéan manner, the inexorable progression of one manifesto movement to another; instead, it is to place these manifestos, as if in a noisy room, in dialogue and debate with each other, much like the role of the critics that Marcus outlines in the passage above. The reason to consider film manifestos as if they are in dialogue with each other is that this allows one to open up the possibility of seeing manifestos not simply as static, temporal texts but as discourses and exhortations, knowingly or not, in cacophonous debate, shouting from the margins an untold history of the cinema and its radical, utopian possibilities. This, in essence, is the goal of this collection: by placing film manifestos at the center of film history and culture, the book aims to reimagine a lost history of the cinema and to bring to light the way in which so many filmmakers, critics, theorists, archivists, activists, and historians have deployed cinema as a means to reconfigure the world.
This utopian, if not messianic, desire to radically reimagine the world deserves further consideration. Karl Mannheim was one of the first critical theorists to explore the role played by the utopian in contemporary theory, with his groundbreaking study Ideology and Utopia. Writing in 1936, he stated:
A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs. This incongruence is always evident in the fact that such a state of mind in experience, in thought, and in practice, is oriented towards objects which do not exist in the actual situation. However, we should not regard as utopian every state of mind which is incongruous with and transcends the immediate situation (and in this sense, “departs from reality”). Only those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.8
Paul Ricoeur analyzes the perceived strengths and limitations of Mannheim’s theory by drawing distinctions between the utopian and the ideological: “ideologies relate mainly to dominant groups; to comfort the collective ego of these dominant groups. Utopias, on the other hand, are more naturally supported by ascending groups and therefore are more usually by the lower strata of society.” He continues: “Utopia is not only a set of ideas but a mentality, a Geist, a configuration of factors which permeates a whole range of ideas and feelings. . . . Mannheim speaks here of the ‘dominant wish,’ something which can be retained as a methodological concept if we understand it as an organizing principle that is more felt than thought.”9 Ricoeur concludes by drawing into relief the clear distinctions between the two concepts: “If we call ideology false consciousness of our real situation, we can imagine a society without ideology. We cannot imagine, however, a society without utopia, because this would be a society without goals.”10 One of Ricoeur’s critiques of Mannheim is that Mannheim postulates that society is moving toward a “gradual approximation of real life” and therefore no longer has a need to postulate utopias; Ricoeur fundamentally disagrees with this Rankéan conception. However, one can take away from Mannheim’s conception of the utopian the notion of the “dominant wish,” which echoes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “dialectical image,” as outlined by Susan Buck-Morss:
As fore-history, the objects are prototypes, ur-phenomena that can be recognized as precursors to the present, no matter how distant or estranged they now appear. Benjamin implies that if the fore-history of an object reveals its possibility (including its utopian potential), its after-history is that which, as an object of natural history, it has in fact become. . . . In the traces left by the object’s after-history, the conditions of its decay and the manner of its cultural transmission, the utopian images of past objects can be read as truth. . . . Benjamin was counting on the shock of this recognition to jolt the dreaming collective into a political “awakening.”11
Here are the beginnings of what a theory of the manifesto might look like: manifestos not only as diagnostic but as causing a “shock of recognition,” a blow to the dominant order’s illusion of ideological and aesthetic coherence: one witnesses the revival of the utopian as a political form, recasting a leftist critique of both culture and theory. In essence, then, film manifestos, read as utopian texts, function in a similar way to the “dialectical image.” Along similar lines this relationship between the utopian and the political, and specifically the ideological, is outlined quite clearly by Fredric Jameson in his analysis of the relationship between ideology and utopia: “A Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same ideological cultural texts.”12 In a more recent article, evaluating the possibility of the utopian in a globalized world, Jameson notes that “it is difficult enough to imagine any radical political programme today without the conception of systematic otherness, of an alternative society, which only the idea of utopia seems to keep alive, however feebly. This clearly does not mean that, even if we succeed in reviving utopia itself, the outlines of a new and effective practical politics for the era of globalization will at once become visible; but only that we will never come to one without it.”13
What Jameson does not address here is the fact that the utopian can and has been mobilized by the right as often as it has been by the left. Certainly, the rightist ideologies and manifestos of fascism and Stalinism both postulate utopian visions of a future world. This is in no way to discount the leftist manifesto and its relationship to the utopian, but it is to foreground the ways in which the utopian is postulated across the ideological spectrum. Broadly speaking, while leftist utopias look to the future for a better world, the utopias of the right position the utopian by harking back to the past. Both kinds of utopias run through the histories of film manifestos.
Within most accounts of cinematic history, the film manifesto plays a decidedly marginal role. While moving image manifestos are often seen as relevant to the study of national cinemas or as cornerstones to aesthetic movements such as surrealism or Dadaism, they are rarely understood as one of the driving forces behind large swathes of film theory and practice. Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures readdresses this critical elision. The book traces the interface between film manifestos and film practice in the broadest sense—-to consider not only the high art manifestos of surrealism, Dadaism, expressionism, and futurism, or more recently, the Oberhausen, Third Cinema, and Dogme ’95 manifestos—-but also to examine “manifesto-style writing,” found in documents as diverse as Laura Mulvey’s highly influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code, and the papal encyclical Vigilanti Cura. The reason these documents can be usefully understood as instances of manifesto writing is precisely because of their authors’ attempts through polemics to radically reimagine the nature of cinema (and, by extension, social and political relations) and to delineate in a programmatic and utopian manner what the cinema ought to be and how it should best function within the public sphere. At times, this reimagining is undertaken in order to bring about political, social, aesthetic, or cultural revolution. At other times it is undertaken to preserve a quite reactionary status quo. In most cases film manifestos postulate a discursive, imaginary, but politically charged utopia of one form or another, be it purely social, political, aesthetic, or some combination thereof. My aim, therefore, is to delineate a critical history of the role played by film manifestos in the construction of both the cinema itself and the theoretical and critical practices and apparatuses that surround and underpin it.
Throughout the history of the cinema, radicals and reactionaries alike have used the film manifesto as a means of stating their key aesthetic and political goals. Indeed, film manifestos are almost as old as the cinema itself; the first film manifesto can be traced to 1898. By the early 1910s and 1920s, Italian futurists, French Dadaists and surrealists, and German expressionists were all producing manifestos, stating their political, aesthetic, and philosophical principles. In most cases these texts were calls to revolution—a revolution of consciousness, of political hierarchies, and of aesthetic practices, which all bled together in an attempt to radically redefine the cinema and the culture in which it existed. Luis Buñuel’s famous claim that the film Un chien andalou (France, 1928) was a call to murder is only the most infamous of the statements in circulation at the time; many others framed the ways in which avant-garde, experimental, and alternative film (and later, television and video) came to be understood throughout the history of moving images.14 Furthermore, film manifestos can be seen as constituting the earliest form of film theory; for instance, Ricciotto Canudo’s “The Birth of the Sixth Art” in many ways marks the beginnings of a theory of radical film practice. Similarly, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov’s “A Statement on Sound” marks the beginnings of critical discussions on the relations between image and sound in the cinema. Surrealism, Free Cinema, and the emergence of film archives were all framed, to varying degrees, by manifestos. In subsequent decades virtually every artistic and political movement existing outside mainstream, narrative cinema sallied forth with a manifesto, proclaiming the end of the old regimes of representation and the need to wipe the slate clean and begin anew. Here, the slicing open of the eye in Un chien andalou again stands as a nodal point, encapsulating the preferred mode of address adopted by manifesto scribes.
Despite the wide variety of ideological and political points of view put forth in film manifestos, the rhetorical stances adopted by the writers—which foregrounded both an urgent call to arms and a profoundly undialectical form of argumentation—led to a certain similarity in the cinematic manifesto genre, at least in its modernist iteration. Because of the programmatic, proclamatory nature of most manifesto writing—which is an unavoidable occurrence, precisely because of the inflammatory nature of the discourse involved—the intended outcomes of manifestos were, for the most part, hopelessly doomed; yet this hopelessness added to the nihilistic romance of dramatic intervention in the public sphere. This romance was fortified by the fact that manifestos were most often texts of the moment. Intrinsically tied not only to the cinema, but the immediate world surrounding the authors, manifestos have had, in most cases, quite short life spans; they quickly left the world of political intervention and became that most aberrant thing (at least in the eyes of the writers themselves), a declawed aesthetic text. This led to the need to write and rewrite basic principles, either by design, in order to maintain relevance, or by force, because of political pressures; one only has to look at the ways in which André Breton continually rewrote his manifestos of surrealism as an example of the former, or the ways in which the fundamental, guiding principles underlying the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein necessarily shifted as intellectual montage and Lenin led to Stalin and socialist realism—a sad but inevitable example of the latter.
Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures elucidates, within this theoretical and historical framework, the role played by manifestos and manifesto-style writing in film culture. Through this analysis a very different, though crucial, history of the cinema comes to light—one that engages critically not only with moving images but also with the diverse and contradictory discourses that inevitably surround cinematic production and consumption within the public sphere. The perceived failure of film manifestos to create a new, utopian, revolutionary world through the moving image points to the fact that the interest they generate as texts, and as statements of purpose, are as tied to their extremism, and the possibility they offer the reader to reimagine the cinema, as they are to initiating programmatic changes in and of themselves. In many ways, therefore, it is the extremism of most manifestos that give them, if not their political foundation, then their intellectual appeal. Indeed, the cinema one imagines whilst reading these texts is often more compelling than some of the films produced under the auspices of their influence. Yet many manifesto writers have transformed the cinema: the raison d’être of the film manifesto is to provoke not only a new form of cinema but a way of reimagining the medium, and therefore the world, itself. If one is to analyze manifestos of any kind, one must return to Karl Marx. And while the spirit of The Communist Manifesto haunts everything from Godard to Dogme, it is most certainly Marx’s posthumously published “Theses on Feuerbach” that sits at a key nodal point in the emergence of the manifesto-like nature of critical theory. Marx’s most famous edict in the theses is number 11: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”15