11 Marx and Cinema Angelos Koutsourakis Classical Marxism embodied a political vision that could complete the unfinished Enlightenment project and overcome the contradictions of modernity, the tensions between town and country, the proliferation of poverty through the accumulation of wealth, and the simultaneous production of development and underdevelopment. Aesthetic modernism reacted against tradition as well as the division of labor between artists and consumers of art that characterized bourgeois society. In prioritizing the labor of style, modernism necessitates the labor of the reader and audience, challenging the neat separations between art and social life putting forward the idea of “art as material intervention.” 1 e ultimate dream of modernism is its desire to come to terms with the real by refusing its unreflective reproduction. e emergence of cinema as an art form for the masses reliant on collective labor comes at a pertinent time in history when modernism seeks to reclaim art as part and parcel of social life. No other art form at the time was more suited to accomplish such a project, given that cinema was a new art that did not require literacy skills and could thus easily address a mass audience. As Adolf Behne wrote in 1926: “Film is something essentially new. It is the literature of our times.” 2 An art form that becomes synonymous with the new and which can address millions of people irrespective of their educational background would be at the forefront of the Marxist and the modernist projects. It is not accidental that the first manifestations and theorizations of a radical and revolutionary cinema made use of Marx’s dialectical materialism. For the Marxist understanding of the dialectic seeks to show that what appears as unified, concrete, and natural is the product of historically determined social conflicts and the material connections between individuals. e Marxist dialectic is thus antithetical to an abstractly evolutionary understanding of reality, wherein historical development proceeds through conflicting collisions, whose synthesis generates more contradictions. Friedrich Engels argued that the dialectic is the “science of interconnections” that allows us to understand all social conditions as susceptible to change and not as static and universal abstractions. 3 In these terms, dialectical materialism intends to fragment what seems to be unitary and complete, so as to reveal the historical transitoriness of social reality and its potential for radical change. Karl Korsch has described this dynamic, suggesting that for Marx a given socioeconomic status quo assumes the form of “consensus” whose self-evidence is to be attributed to its capacity to conceal the