 I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched sea beams glitter in the dark near the tan house or gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain, time to die. These words by the dying replicant Roy Batty spoken during the final section of Blade Runner, 1982, with the Scott film, have become justly famous. They have an emotional impact, which has lasted over the years and decades. I do have to say, Rupert Hauer does a much better job of saying them than I ever did. Everyone was in tears apparently during the shoot when he was speaking these 42 words. Don't see anyone crying here. Maybe tears of laughter, but never mind. But scenes like this indicate the intense power of film, of cinema. It's the most revolutionary and widespread art form in history. One is directly linked to the modern age, the age of capitalism actually. One that has no precedent in history. No one in ancient Greece sat down on an evening to watch a film. They watched plays and stuff like that, musical performances, but no one said, ah, stick the film on there. They said, let's watch it, what's on? You know, it's Hercules again. It didn't happen. This is entirely something which is linked to the modern world and the modern age. Now, of course, all art has a relationship to technological and economic advances. For example, when oil paint replaced egg tempering painting, it completely transformed the world of art. It went from frescoes to actual paintings. But no change, no link has been more obvious than that of cinema and film and technology. You know, you do require a mechanical film camera, or at least a digital camera in the modern world, and then a projector. Without this, you cannot have cinema. It is therefore uniquely modern and is linked to the modern society in which we live in. Something else about cinema we need to think about. Paintings, classical music, statue, all the arts through the ages, were all pretty much aimed at a very small elite audience, a group of patrons able to pay for the privilege of having these art forms. In fact, they often existed purely to glorify this or that painting. If you go to the National Gallery, there's a marvellous painting of Jesus and disciples entering Jerusalem. And on the side, there is the Medici family watching it. Historically impossible, of course, but when you pay the money, you get yourself in the picture. So, art in the past has been very elite, it's been very isolated. Probably Beethoven's symphonies, as wonderful they are, were probably only heard by a couple of thousand people, during his lifetime. But film is a mass form of art. Duplication of prints means it can be seen the same everywhere, in any part of the world, in any cinema or whatever. Film exists in every part of the world. It's hardly a country, I think, apart from Antarctica, which doesn't have a film industry, which doesn't have cinemas. It therefore brings to a mass audience, in a completely new way, the image you're painting, the link to the movement of music. It's a completely live, dialectical form of art. Above all, it's an art form that can reach and reflect the lives of the working class. You know, if you want to see the Mona Lisa, the real Mona Lisa, you have to go to the Louvre in Paris. If you want to see a great film, you can, in a reason, see anywhere in the world, exactly the same, give or take quality of the print. So, that, I think, is the first thing to understand. Therefore, we have to understand that film has a dual character, both as an art form, as a mass form of entertainment. At its best, it's able to combine the two to stunning effect. The films of Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman, Truffaut, Lumet, Fellini, Fuller, Melville, Hitchcock, It Is Best, Peckinpah, On and Off, I've all achieved this, to his list, and I'll also add Sergio Leone and Mario Barber. We don't have time to discuss that. Today, we could add the films of Wes Anderson and of course, Martin Scorsese in his prime. There are many others who have been able to produce stunning works of art that can be enjoyed by everybody. And that is the power of film. The other thing that is important about film and about cinema in particular, is that it's a shared experience. You know, when you can run, it's capable of having a profound effect. You sit in the cinema, you laugh, cry, jump out of your seats, and you do it all together. You know, that singing jaws when the guy's swimming around and finding his sunken boat and he rips off a bit of the wood and his decomposed face drops out at him. I remember seeing that in 1975 at the Paramount Cinema in the West End and I've never seen it like it. It was everybody, so he went, whoa, like that. And yeah, and then everyone laughed, you know, because they felt full. That is a shared experience. And to be honest, a film like George is not the same on the small screen. And that's something we need to bear in mind. Now, obviously, today's cinema is under threat. It's under threats never before. I mean, when I was growing up, we had 10 cinemas within the walking or bus journey from where I lived. Three in Southgate, three in Enfield, one huge one in Edmonton, and three in Wood Green, Turnpike Lane. All gone. So for many people, you cannot even see a film today in the cinema. It's impossible. There are no cinemas to actually go through. And of course, now we've got streaming and home video, which particularly with COVID, having hit cinema very hard, these, the film companies have used this to push forward streaming home video, video on demand. Why? Because it means cinemas lose a load of money. The film companies gain a lot and they have gained a lot through this. So this is, if you like, you can see that in many ways, cinema is under attack now more than ever. The cash returns from streaming have simply made this a logic. They're fighting back, but it's not going to happen. But let's think about it. To really experience film, you need to see it in a cinema. That's where you really see the power. Think about it. The famous jump cut at the early on in Lawrence, Arabia from inside the smoky map room to the blazing red of the desert. Stunning sequence, which can only be really enjoyed on a huge 70 millimeter screening film. The last half hour, 2000 on a space Odyssey on Cinerama, which I was lucky enough to see in 1968. The experience I've never forgotten. And I've seen that film in the cinema about 25 times over the last 30, 40, 50 years now, I suppose. The deathly silence of the audience at the end of one flew over the cuckoo's nest. I don't know if anyone's seen that film. She really has a powerful emotional ending, but what really hit was in a big cinema fall Saturday night, everyone got up and no one was talking. No one was saying a word. You could feel the emotion. That is the power of cinema. And you can go back. It was said that when the Lon Cheney version of Phantom of the Opera first opened, when he got to the famous scene where the woman rips the mask off and you see the real face beneath. It was said people were out of their seats, up the aisle, out the cinema, half a mile down the road before they drew breath, such was the terror which they felt. You can't match this on a small screen. You can't begin to match it on a small screen. So cinema is important. It's an important social experience. And for that reason, we as Marxists should be interested in it. I mean, Marxism has always had an interest in art as in all things human, but cinema's role as a mass art form, woven deep into society, particularly working class society, makes it a particular importance for Marxists. That is why we're having this discussion. Right, let's consider a couple of hurdles. You're going to have to jump over here. The first, let's face it. The left are incredibly snooty when it comes to cinema. They really are. They often tend to follow the academic line, avoid talking about mass entertainment. They often look at just that layer of art films exists at the top, not helped by the fact that of course there's very little on classic texts. The draw run and like, say, for example, economics or historical materialism or something like that. Marx and Engels didn't have a cinema to go to. Lenin and Trotsky did live through the early age of cinema, but they frankly had more important things to worry about. Lenin did know about the film trains that were traveling around Russia, telling people about the Bolshevik Revolution and how society was changing. But again, he couldn't spend that much time thinking about it for obvious reasons. Trotsky wrote a hell of a lot about art and literature. You can buy a book downstairs, I hope, on that. But for obvious reasons, he also couldn't think much about film. He's running for his life for the last two decades of his existence. So we pretty much have to make our own way on this. The other problem you have to face is the dominance of academic twaddle in film criticism. I've been quite kind here, even left film criticism, to be honest. Post-modernism lurks in film criticism, a bit like the alien lurks in John Hurt's stomach in Alien. You pick up, I was going to do some horrific examples along just to frighten the life out of you, but you pick up any sort of like sight and soundish sort of film criticism and it'll all be there, concentration on the surface, looking at technique, not content. Literally, picking up and saying that the medium is the message. All just completely surface structured. Well, we say the message is the message. Substance is not important. And in that sense, he's even actually shaped the very art films you watch today. For example, a couple of years ago, a film called The Sassing came out. The critics loved it. Sight and Sound made it his film of the year, even though it hadn't actually opened yet. Amazing. Anyway, the film did open and a couple of weeks later, there was this review of how films are going and they noted The Sassing wasn't doing very well. Okay, it's a three hour film in China, but it's about martial arts. Surely people would be rushing to see it and they said, well, it has a lot of amazing techniques on it. Maybe people were put off by the fact it didn't have a plot. It didn't have a plot, really. And then there's a new films is coming out. I think it's called Titane. I haven't got the exact pronunciation of it. Again, the critics are loving it. Cannes Film Festival loving it. Whipping it up. You're gonna have to see this film three hours long, of course, when it comes out. What's it about? It's about a woman, young girl, who gets pregnant after having sex with a car. And then for the next ounce, she's not mechanically rearranging her face. It becomes a serial killer. Really? This is what passes for artistic film. Somebody's rogered by a Renault and heads off to become a serial killer for three hours. And they think this somehow has something to say to us. And don't get me started on bait. I don't know if anyone's ever seen that film. Suffice to say, me and my brother went to the BFI to see something else. And they had to trade it for bait. And he was convinced it was a comedy and started laughing. So I never was looking at him and I said, no, actually, I think this is a serious British film about people who have become profoundly disturbed by fish and stuff like that. This is the way that art film has gone. It's adopted to see the philosophy of post-modernism and all its linked ideas to shape a whole art form. When you consider the great films of Truffaut, Fellini, Antonio and so on, which has shown how film can directly reflect life and save something with great skill. Then it really makes you weep. The final hurdle you have to think about and I'm going to wear your time here is that film history itself is becoming lost. Not just in a physical sense. And a huge number of films have been lost. Not just from the silent era, but even from the 30s and 40s. Apparently, so like 15 films of Powell and Pressburger cannot be found anymore. You know, and even 60s and 70s films have just disappeared. So the general understanding of film history is fading away to a certain extent, at least amongst people who are prepared to study it. So these are all problems and things you have to be aware of when you're approaching film from a Marxist perspective. So what do we have to say about film and what does film have to say about us? Just in passing, I'm going to jump over this actually because I've got over it, we're almost halfway through, we're more than halfway through. We don't, I have big issues with the auteur theory. I think it's completely wrong, this idea that film is controlled and shaped by one powerful individual with a single vision who does everything apparently. Film is a collaborative experience in almost uniquely amongst art that involves not just directors but producers, cameramen, editors, clothing, actors of course, and so on and so on and so forth. You sit through the credits, you end the film, there are hundreds, but thousands of people working on a film. So this idea that it's elitist actually, that one person is responsible for everything is completely wrong. That doesn't mean by the way, I won't be referring to directors when I link to film just for convenience sake, but just bear that in mind. So dealing with the vastest of subjects, in fact I'm almost halfway through the time allotted anywhere, I am. I cannot deal with all the isms, waves, trends, genres, high points, low points, et cetera, which exist in film history. I cannot deal with the rich reservoir of counter-culture underground film, one exception for a comment later. I certainly cannot even deal with the Soviet cinema or even the important strand of left films that somehow got through the establishment net. So what can I deal with? Very little, I just wanna throw up a few issues if you'd like to think about perhaps in the discussion. Art form versus commodity. Now Marx was interested in art because it exposed the special characteristic of commodity production under capitalism, the requirement to envisage an item before it became real. Marx talked a lot about the special role of an architect, for example. He wanted us to understand that we were more than just machines. We create, abstract, visualize. Animals just do things for immediate need. We go beyond that. That's what differentiates us. But this creativity, this desire to create, actually, which exists in all of us, comes up against the requirements of a class society in the need for capitalism to choose commodities for product to realize the surplus value creates the sweat of one class with a benefit of a rich few. So our creativity is constantly being used but also crushed exactly at the same time. And film production, remember the word production? It's no different. Cinema today dominated by the money banks of Hollywood and Hollywood is dominated by rich, powerful cartels lots of Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony and Fox. You may see lots of other company names on film credits but most of those are subsidiaries of these big firms. Others are finance representatives. You'll often see Chinese companies because Hollywood is desperate for Chinese finance and also to get into the Chinese market. So that's a factor. And of course, behind all this, you also now got Netflix and Amazon lurking around in the wings trying to get in, they've been rejected but the money is money is money. These film companies are owned by financial interests not by film fans, you want one thing, cloth it. So production, the film production today has increasingly been shaped from needs of a guaranteed return on investment. So you got endless remakes, sequels and films that look like 100 others. You've already watched this film, I'm sure you have. It's like action films. They all have the same character and have you noticed there'll be a bloke in his 30s, maybe separated from his wife but he's got a little daughter who he loves or something like that. You might have a beard and this is Mike Dane which he hasn't. But here's a loner who plays by his own rules. Around so many times that we've seen these cracks. He'll set you straight, don't you worry. Of course, he'll come up against all manner of villainous Chinese and Russians or North Koreans or Arabs. And now of course you have to add Venezuelans to the list who will be fuddled the rest of the system but not our hero who by the way would really survive an extraordinary beating over the hour and a half or two hours of the film. If you've blown up, thrown through windows, shot. It doesn't matter because at the end people, you're getting the last of the plaster and it'll be fine. These films actually even look the same. Have you noticed that strange orangey blue effect you see in action films? It's called teal. They teal the films because they think this is the best way for the films to look. They use algorithms to calculate how films should be edited and what scenes should follow on from another. Literally, we're at a point when these sort of films are as close to computer games as you can get. Resident Evil anyone? Of course the trick then is to produce the maximum product self and the minimum cost. And Hollywood plays in the fact that people are desperate to get into the film, to exploit them every which way they can. Low pay, long hours, poor working conditions and so on. And here I do want to say a word about the recent death of cinematographer, Halina Hutchings who I'm sure you know was killed just over a week ago. A very promising young cinematographer whose life was cut short just as the career was taking off. Why? This death is completely avoidable. It's completely down to cost cutting which these film companies in order to gain maximum profit set about doing. The guns, these real guns, because real guns in Texas are much cheaper. Didn't check they're properly prepared. This is not the first accident the way this happened. The set itself is considered so dangerous that Union people had already walked off and yet nothing was done. These are Victorian style exploitation we're seeing here. Which also shouldn't forget the Me Too movement which came out, what's a surprise? Women are exploited in Hollywood. They've been exploited for the last 100 years, the so-called casting couch and so on used by people who see that people are desperate for a way out of their miserable lives by getting into cinema. Yet nothing has ever been done. Casting couch was no secret. And yet enough Hollywood who's blubbering away now about the Me Too movement have done absolutely nothing. Of course this doesn't mean that Hollywood doesn't occasionally allow interesting and exciting films to get through. Let's be fair about it. Between 1968 and 74 as the youth movement got underway there was a Hollywood starting throwing money, all manner of mavericks and people like that. Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Robert Ormond, Sam Peckinbar. Suddenly had all the funding they needed to make all the films they could make. Even John Casavetes actually got some funding after years of having to constantly mortgage his house to make his very low budget films. In Britain people like John Borgman and Nick Rowe were able to find a place but the ultimate expression of this was the funding. Hollywood's desire to fund a follow-up to Last Tango in Paris by Bernardo Bertolucci. Here upon was an historical epic to be called Novo Cento or 1900. Fox, United Artists, Paramount all put loads of money in and they were able to film to have a huge cast but Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Ronald Sutherland, Robert De Niro, Gerard Depadier, Dominique Sander, on and on and on. A massive budget because they thought Last Tango in Paris made a mint. This one's bound to make a mint. They thought that up until the first six-hour print was screened in Italy, it was private showing. Paramount boss got a phone call, hey, we've just funded a six-hour Marxist epic, what? As a result, this film has never been seen and it's filled for, and the Americans got a three-hour version. I saw a four-hour plus two-part version in London 1978. The version of DVD today is the five-hour 15-minute version. It's about the longest you're ever going to see. By the end of the 1970s, all that spending was gone. These visionary filmmakers were either scrabbling around for work or drifting into the mainstream to make normal, boring films. Better Luchin never really made another decent film. John Cassavetes was back to making cheap films and more during his house. Profits first, originality second. That is the nature of film production now. I did want to talk a little bit, but I'm not going to have to cut over it, the question of film as propaganda. I think it's important to understand that because film has this huge impact on people, the ruling class have been able to use it, although sometimes it's been used against them, to shape ideas and views. For example, when have you ever seen a sympathetic view of a trade union in a film? In the 1940s and 50s, they produced films which revert the propagandistic films about the communist threat to all of us. But he also had these films as kind of like covert versions in which the enemy wasn't the communists, but it was the other aliens of outer space, monsters from the deep, giant ants, so on and so forth, which shaped the fear that America is under attack. We have to be on our guard. There's a film called Invasion of the Body Snatches, the original Don Siegel film. In my opinion, it can only be seen as a warning. He said it's a warning against conformity and later remakes did go along with that. But how else can you interpret a film in which apparently these pods have been brought into a small American town and a turning small American apple pie making mums into people who look the same, but have no emotions, no religion, no lack of conformity and so forth. That is a covert, perhaps not so covert message about communism. They're actually, the state has always been very keen to ensure that films do not drift away into terraces they don't want to drift away. I have here some excerpts from the guidelines of the British Board of Film Sensors, 1916, when people have come worried about films that have been produced, they set up the British Board of Film Sensors, now the British Board of Film Placification and they've produced some guidelines. Now, you probably think this is all about no sex, no brutality, no funny business of animals or anything like that. Oh, listen to this. Here's the things they don't tell you about. Filings that should also be banned, references to controversial politics, relations of capital and labor, scenes, tendings, disparage, public characters and institutions, realistic horrors of warfare. I don't want to see that. Incidents having a tendency to disparage our allies, scenes holding up the king's uniform to contempt or ridicule. And this is my favorite. Subjects dealing with India, attempting to suggest a disloyalty of British officers, native states, or bringing into dispute British prestige in the empire. Does this require any further comment? Needless to say, one of the first films to be banned under this was Battleship Tempting. The point is, the absence of an alternative, the dominant ideas of in society, the dominant ideas of the ruling class. Film can affect that. That is why film, unlike any other art form, has been subject to huge censorship and control because it can be used to shape what we think about. Some filmmakers are able to flip it, but that unfortunately is still an exception. Now in the last couple of minutes, I just want to say something else about films. I think it's important. We don't look at film just as the thing in itself. It's what film criticism does. It analyzes the film, perhaps in relation to other films by the same director or whatever, or maybe I have examples of the same genre. But as of all, they look at film as if it's, was produced completely in a separate universe to the one we live in. But we understand that film comes real much about society. In the future, it's been said, people, when they want to know how we live today, they'll look at our films. I think it comes with a shocker, like some of the films, you know, do we really do that? You know, are we really fighting Russian invasion all the time? It doesn't matter. There are exceptions. Films of Ken Loach and Stephen Queen, for example. But some of these films, when you look at them, it's only by looking at them in the context of society which produced them at times and the age that you can really gain and understand it. For example, Three Days of a Condor. So I think it's one of the best films of the 1970s. Because it's one of the best films to show up what was happening in the 1970s America. You can see the oil crisis, Watergate revelations about and the CIA. A general feeling that things weren't right. All that is reflected in Three Days of the Condor. Alan Pakula's Parallax View also taps into, I recommend both films. So by looking at it this way, you gain an understanding of much, much more. And the film itself becomes far more relevant. We need to look beyond the surface. Now, if I had time and I haven't, I'll give you a couple of examples. He plays out. I'll just give one very briefly. Everyone's heard of Film Noir. I hope everyone's heard of Film Noir. A hugely influential genre of film criticism in the 1940s and 50s. Now, no one set out in 1939 ever say, hey, let's do a different style. Let's do a Film Noir. Now, that name was applied much later by critics. And why was it called Film Noir? And no one spoke French in it. It's because they felt these films had a foreign style to them. They should really have actually called it German Noir, I suppose, but French seemed easier. Something far away, something un-American. American filmmakers couldn't have made this. It had to be influenced from abroad. French, of course, had no tradition of Film Noir. Too much, much later it was Jean-Pierre Milleville and people like that who copied it because they thought it was an American genre. But Film Noir was approached because, like in this manner, because it seemed to reveal an alternative to the American dream. If you watch mainstream cinema of the 40s and 50s, you see the American dream, the suburban, shiny, happy, smiling people, you know, Brad and Mary Lou, their two sons and their daughter and all the rest of it, enjoying a happy life, working for the corporation. Nothing can go wrong. Nothing can break away from this ideal, it will. Film Noir looks at American dream and presents the American nightmare, a world of corruption, a world of poverty, a world of union unrest, a world of bribery, of mental illness, of drug addiction, of all these things which weren't supposed to exist in America, but actually did exist. A world of racism, for example, Odds Against Tomorrow, and late example of 1959, is one of the boldest films to pick up on the issue of American racism, which apparently didn't exist anywhere else. Two examples, there's just a bit of a touch on as to how this, I think we should all try and see. 1942 film, This Gun for Hire, is Anne and Ladd's big breakout film. Ladd plays a real antihero, he's a contract killer and he's capable of really dark deeds, at one point he's contemplating killing a young crippled girl because he might have been a witness to a hit, he's just carried out. And he's really thinking about it, should I get my gun out and shoot her? He doesn't. But he's also extremely kind and very moral. The point is that Raven, in his dissenting disaster, comes up against something far worse, the capitalist system. And that's what this film presents. The real villain is a capitalist who has no morals, is purely in it for profit, wants to sell an important weapon to the enemy, just to make money. He doesn't think, you know, this is un-American and this is quite common by the way and it's this which Raven ultimately rebels against. Another interesting film is Force of Evil, I've written about this once already, and it's a David Hamplonski's film from 1948, which has been called the most anti-capitalist film ever made. And it starts with John Garfield, it's something called Joe Morse, who does his voiceover. Very first scene. This is Wall Street and today was important because tomorrow, July the 4th, I intend to make my first million dollars. The fact this has been said over an image of Wall Street gives the thing away. The film directly links the method of the crime organization which Morse is increasingly involved in, with the methods and practices of big business. If I actually sort of do this numbers racket, the local collection points are called banks. You can't miss the line on this and the whole purpose of Morse's scam is to get these banks merged together into one big bank under his control. Is this not capitalism? Of course, none of this went unnoticed. Polonski and quite a few other people have worked in film noir, were probably put on the blacklist. He didn't make another film till 1972. So by studying these films, which are presented as simple thrillers, you start to gain an understanding of what was happening in American society. And this is the approach you should adopt in relation to Orphan. Not to take it to ridiculous lengths. You know, look, they sit there washing Eve or the dead and trying to work out what he tells us about 1990s Britain or something like that. But you can draw a lot about why these films, how these films function within society and therefore gain an understanding of that. So to finish, my remarks, big business controls the world media, including cinema. Now we could see, I don't mind as many filmmakers have attempted to, but in reality, Hollywood holds purse strings. The power of film, which I imagine is why you're all here, needs to be opened up, no longer constrained by Iron Healer profit. It's incredible, dynamic, modern, revolutionary form of art. It's capable of so much more. You know, the rich cinema, even now with home viewing and streaming becoming the norm, it's still quite extraordinary and quite unique. Yeah, well, we start with Fast and Furious 327 of a 900th remake of Halloween. The nationalization of the means of production, the work of control, must include not only factories and banks, but also the bosses media, remember it is the bosses media, including film production, making this huge, recreative resource available to all will present us with a new renaissance of the arts and show us actually what we are all capable of. You know, when we've got the time to do it, turn ourselves from tools of a capitalist class into creative, collective human beings in a society free from class oppression and exploitation. That is the cinema I'm waiting to see. Thank you, comrades.