Politics & Power Quote by Roland Joffe

Joffe frames filmmaking as an ideological contact sport, and the candor is the point. Calling The City of Joy his "best political education" demotes classrooms and manifestos in favor of lived contradiction: the set as seminar, the production as pressure cooker. The punchline lands in that deliberately physical metaphor of a "wrestling match" - not a debate, not a dialogue. Wrestling implies leverage, exhaustion, and rules you only learn by being pinned.

The subtext is an admission that his politics were already in motion. "An Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist" reads like a confession wrapped in understatement: a slow drift away from grand theory, perhaps toward liberal humanism, pragmatism, or simply disillusionment with ideological purity. He then collides with "a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day", a line that compresses late-Cold War anxieties, postcolonial realities, and the moral urgency of poverty into a single accelerating image. The "by the day" matters: it suggests not a stable tradition but a rapidly sharpening critique of power, class, and Western presence.

Contextually, The City of Joy (1992) sits at a moment when Western artists were increasingly scrutinized for how they depicted the Global South - charity narratives, savior tropes, aestheticized suffering. Joffe hints that the real education wasn’t India teaching him Marxism; it was the production exposing the politics embedded in who tells the story, who gets paid, who gets framed as heroic, and what the camera turns into "reality". The wit is in the self-portrait: a director discovering that ideology doesn’t stay in the script. It shows up on set and fights back.