"Film then does not promote socialist revolution in any consistent way"
About this Quote
Poster’s line lands like a corrective to a habit of cultural wishful thinking: the idea that movies naturally radicalize audiences just by depicting injustice. By insisting film “does not promote socialist revolution in any consistent way,” he punctures the comforting notion that representation equals political traction. The key word is “consistent.” It concedes that films can spark dissent or sympathy, but it refuses to treat cinema as a reliable transmission belt from viewing to organizing.
The subtext is an argument about the medium’s built-in ambivalence. Film is industrial: financed, distributed, and marketed through systems that generally benefit from stability, not upheaval. Even explicitly left politics often get absorbed into familiar genres (the inspirational underdog, the lone hero, the cathartic uprising) that convert structural critique into personal drama. You leave the theater moved, maybe even angry, but the feeling is packaged, time-limited, and resolved on screen. That’s not nothing; it’s just not revolution.
Contextually, Poster is writing from a late-20th-century moment when cultural theory wrestled with mass media’s political effects and when the Left repeatedly overestimated “consciousness-raising” as a substitute for organization. His claim reads less like anti-art skepticism than a demand for analytical honesty: film can illuminate contradictions, circulate images of struggle, and normalize certain desires for change, but it also sells those desires back to us as spectacle. The line works because it replaces romance with a harder truth about power: culture can unsettle, but it rarely rearranges the furniture by itself.
The subtext is an argument about the medium’s built-in ambivalence. Film is industrial: financed, distributed, and marketed through systems that generally benefit from stability, not upheaval. Even explicitly left politics often get absorbed into familiar genres (the inspirational underdog, the lone hero, the cathartic uprising) that convert structural critique into personal drama. You leave the theater moved, maybe even angry, but the feeling is packaged, time-limited, and resolved on screen. That’s not nothing; it’s just not revolution.
Contextually, Poster is writing from a late-20th-century moment when cultural theory wrestled with mass media’s political effects and when the Left repeatedly overestimated “consciousness-raising” as a substitute for organization. His claim reads less like anti-art skepticism than a demand for analytical honesty: film can illuminate contradictions, circulate images of struggle, and normalize certain desires for change, but it also sells those desires back to us as spectacle. The line works because it replaces romance with a harder truth about power: culture can unsettle, but it rarely rearranges the furniture by itself.
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| Topic | Movie |
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