Cinema Through Marxist Lenses

Abstract

Cinema, like all forms of art, carry within itself the hopes, dreams, anxieties, and horrors of a society. Movies are social constructs meant to entertain their audiences by bringing them romantic stories, heartfelt dramas, fast paced adventures, and even dreadful horror. The production of films is something quite complex and entails the influence of many different individuals. From director and actors to producers and sponsors, every human element will bring its own social influence in the final product. In that, a movie is, in a postmodernist approach, a parallel reality conceived of different visions. Given that this entails different possible interpretations for films and that, ever since the age of industrialization, class struggle seems like a constant characteristic of capitalism, it’s certain that many movies will often carry Marxist subtexts to them. From Metropolis (1927) to Joker (2019), this research intends to use discourse analysis to interpret a selection of movies through Marxist lenses, thus adding to the already existing literature on sociological interpretation of cinema.Keywords: cinema, Marxism, Karl Marx, films, movies, sociology, science fiction, silent film, entertainment, media, art, interpretation, class struggle, class alienation, capitalism, commodity, commodity fetishism, discourse analysis, postmodernist research, qualitative method.