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German Film after Germany
Toward a Transnational Aesthetic
By RANDALL HALLE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Randall Halle
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07538-4
Chapter One
Apprehending Transnationalism
Globalization and Capitalism
The terms "globalization," "transnationalism," or "free market" have currently an interesting quality in that they elicit advocates and detractors throughout the political spectrum. There are a limited number of terms that can create such rifts. In political debates in parliaments and on the streets we find odd configurations of socialists and conservatives uniting against libertarians and anarchists, communists and republicans casting votes against free markets, while social democrats advocate the dismantling of state regulation. We witness the emergence of a new discourse that realigns our geopolitical negotiations, as once did the Cold War.
To shape our critical approaches vis-à-vis globalization, beyond quotidian advocacy for or against, we do well to recall that global trade has a long history. Indeed, if we trace the historic routes of trade through the archeological evidence of cultural artifacts, we could understand the expanse of this history stretching out as long as the expansion of the human species. However, a shift does occur in historical global trade and distribution networks with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in the modern era. Whoever wants to analyze globalization must be prepared to analyze capitalism. Capitalism transformed global contact and trade, bringing about a rapid increase in global productive capacity and an expansion of intercontinental distribution networks, but also establishing unevenness and inequality within those capacities and networks.
When we speak about globalization, we speak precisely about the tendencies in global capital to extract wealth by opening up new markets, drawing them directly out of local and regional into world systems of production—a process that results in "complex connectivity." Dialectically, we might suggest that globalization draws the world into a "cosmopolitan form." Goods, people, and ideas follow the paths opened up by global capital, drawing disparate people into greater contact with each other, expanding productive capacity to satisfy their material needs, and thereby universalizing their human interdependence. Yet this cosmopolitan form and its commodity relations threaten to reduce specificity, and the human interdependence instead of universal elevation threatens to become a banal massification addressing the needs of the least common denominator.
If we would approach it dialectically, this process evidences new complexities that make it particularly difficult to adjudicate positive and negative, progressive and regressive, resistant and retrograde, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions. In the colonial imperial era, the nation-state provided a useful vehicle for the spread of capitalism; the armies of the European powers assisted the growth of capital by breaking down forcibly and violently any opposition to expansion found abroad, while national ideologues portrayed their colonialism as a civilizing act, a "white man's burden" to bring bourgeois culture to distant locations. Colonial imperial powers took as their goal the effacement of oppositional cultures and the imposition of an external hegemonic one. But now, after decolonization, after the end of the Cold War, after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, what characterizes contemporary globalization is that the expansion of capital takes place relatively divorced from national interest. No need exists anymore to justify the opening of another McDonald's in Beijing as an act of civilization. No need exists anymore for a national army to force natives into Union Carbide, Nike, or Levi's factories. The World Trade Organization does not need its own standing army to enforce its negotiations. Of course, underlying both eras is the same material economic dynamic: capitalist pursuit of profit that opens unexploited markets, establishing ever-larger ensembles of the forces of production.
The world market makes possible not only a world trade in iron ore and steel girders but also in literature, music, and cinema. As ensembles of production unite, the process effaces and shatters old national and local differences. A common trade creates a cosmopolitan, "multicultural" draw of commodities onto the market, but in doing so wrenches them out of specificity and cultural function. In the age of mass (re)production, the hand-carved gods of ritual practices become shower curtain motifs for "African" or "South Sea" style bathrooms. However, if this process actually destroyed cultural production, robbed people of wealth, and offered nothing positive, nothing productive, no potentials, then this observed willingness to enter into the global free market would not exist. But it does exist. Our error might be to overemphasize the commodification of culture. If cultural artifacts enter into new trade routes, this does not mean that culture ceases to exist. Reification has certain limits and culture proves to be much more resilient, much more than soapstone carvings and enchanting drum rhythms. The exporters of cultural artifacts would be the first to resist protectionist policies.
If we are to speak critically of globalization, we must respect the interests and desires that incite agents to intensify their engagement with the world system. Rather than simply denounce the process of globalization, critics must begin by asking what does globalization offer? Why do the masses desire globalization? What exactly is it in globalization that draws our criticism? The anxiety of massified culture might derive rightly from observations of certain processes, yet it would also seem that such processes have limits to them. Where global cultural production appears as more than adornments, for example, in transnational book trade or transcultural music, a cultural specificity and authenticity must remain attached to the commodity, if only as local color, a whiff of exoticism. At the same time, it is important to note preemptively that the draw into common trade does not mean that the local ceases to exist; Africa and the South Seas continue to exist. The local does not disappear, consumed by the global, even if it is transformed. It does cease to speak only to the specific and begins to address common denominators, to recognize shared interests in a broader scale, but such universalization does not inherently mean the loss of particularity. Throughout this study I will try to explore the dynamics of transformation, the Aufhebung of the local into the global. Indeed, with a hint of optimism I will even try to highlight the vibrancy of cultural production that globalization and transnationalism bring forward.
Cultural Imperialism, Americanization, Statism, and National Film Production
I am suspicious of outright denunciations of globalization, rejections of transnational culture, analytic terms such as "Americanization" or "cultural imperialism." The discourse of Americanization has a long history among cultural pessimists; it has served too often the purposes of ultra-conservative finances and far-right agendas. Yet now cultural imperialism and Americanization are invoked to critique the effects of global capitalism on national cultures. Rather than receive praise for drawing disparate peoples into world historical processes, America as a metonymy for capital, is described as overwhelming an innocent, essential, and yet endangered national culture, destroying thereby indigenous production and replacing it with cheap, mass-produced goods. Such a position focuses on economics, reduces culture to commodity, and presents economic developments as being opposed to material interests and destructive of authentic cultural production.
While it would be erroneous to deny the impact of the American culture industry on the world's media generally and the European media specifically, we must be careful not to present the century of cinema as a monolithic century of American hegemony—Hollywood against the rest of the world, or Hollywood against the smaller national film industries. Hollywood's dominant position in the world film market is not a new problem for competing film industries; rather, it is a problem with a history, and that history has taken on different forms. We will review some of that history below, but it is important to recognize that Hollywood's role has not been a matter of constant domination or a consistent strategy of competition.
In order to compare American and other national film production, the critic must take care to attend to parity. There are numerous problems generally with comparisons of national film culture that adopt a defensive posture. Critics must differentiate precisely between types of national film, making sure to take popular film into account, lest the comparison become one of Hollywood popular culture versus national high culture to the advantage of the smaller film industry. Kerry Seagrave's indictment of Hollywood "monoculture," for instance, compares American popular film to French art film. Such an uneven comparison seems to assume that the U.S. culture industry "dupes" audiences into ignoring their real interests and that these audiences in France, so "duped" by crafty U.S. advertising campaigns, if left to their own devices would flock to the Nouvelle Vague; instead of Jerry Lewis they would head for Godard's films, or at least Truffaut. Of course, art film is never synonymous with the totality of a national film industry's output; French film production is not synonymous with Nouvelle Vague. Were Seagrave to undertake comparisons of equivalent cultural registers, he would have to examine Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati, The Matrix and Pacte des Loups, Amélie, and American Beauty, Godard and Altman. For Germany, such comparisons as Werner and South Park, Heimatfilme and Westerns, Das Boot and Air Force One, open up insights missing from the opposition of Fassbinder and Spielberg.
More importantly, critical assessments of national film production should not fall into an inconsistent position of being critical of the capitalism of Hollywood and turning a blind eye to the political economy of other national cinemas. All too frequently in attempts to defend national film industries, analysts misrepresent the function of the nation-state and elide the difference between opposition to the American culture industry and opposition to a capitalist culture industry in general. To be sure, for Seagrave's analysis many of Godard's films may contain a critique of capitalism, but filmmakers like Godard, Straub/Huillet, Peter Wollen, or even Michael Moore do not control the film industries in their respective countries. The French media giant Vivendi did not take over American Universal Studios in order to dismantle Universal's portion of the world film market. Indeed, given Vivendi Universal, Sony Pictures, and Murdoch's Fox, if we begin from a position that acknowledges Hollywood as a hegemon, it turns out to be a highly porous hegemon. Moreover, we must explore the similarity of the economic foundations of those national film industries that Hollywood dominates, lest we ultimately seek to save one capitalism from another. Under the guise of cultural protectionism, critics would promote an economic protectionism of the type so frequently promoted in France itself. Of course, neither protectionism nor isolationism in themselves undo the culture industry or capitalism as such; thus such protectionism fully carried out could result in the establishment of a national Hollywood, a "bois de houx," a "Stechpalmenwald," the ultimate success of which would derive from its replication of Hollywood levels of production.
In some analyses, cultural imperialism is invoked to explain why certain classes of people do not recognize their own "authentic" interests. A culture industry, and specifically the American culture industry, is blamed for diverting individuals away from their real interests. This culture industry "deals" with consumers' needs, producing them, controlling them, disciplining them, and as it creates needs and directs desires, it also appears to rise up and to stand against the interests of cultures, effacing difference, leaving only a totalized homogeneous consuming mass behind: McWorld as it has been described by some, monoculture as it has been described by others. Instead of revolting or even simply writing a good book, the consumer is lured by clever advertising into the latest blockbuster or off on a family outing to the Universal Studios theme park in Bottrop, Germany. Increasingly, the terrain of activities people participate in during their free time becomes standardized. In this analysis, critics appear oddly superior to the consumer, who is a duped, passive object in a cultural industry that allows for no variation, although somehow the critic can see their way out of this process, while the rest of the world can only seriously debate which is better, Coke or Pepsi, McDonald's or Burger King. There is an arrogance in the attempt to foreclose the possibility of a pleasurable visit to a theme park for the German family, requiring them to live out their wanderlust only through an authentic hike in the Black Forest. The way to work against monopolization in the entertainment and culture industry is not through an inverse totalizing control over people's desires.
The critique of globalization from the left and the right too often ends with a turn to a statist position, or even worse, a version of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. An odd gesture takes place in the defense of statism as well—intentioned leftists shake those nationalist hands bloodied by a long century of service to capital. In what can be most generously described as a false estimation of the forces of history, as transnational capital unfolds, a portion of the left breaks away and becomes the theorists of the anachronistic interests of a declining faction of the right. Seagrave, for instance, after lengthy explorations of the dynamic of Hollywood's cultural imperialism, ends his study with a chapter warning of Hollywood "monoculture," a warning for which all his readers should have a certain sympathy. However, for Seagrave only the nation-state provides the parameters of a possible response. He writes, "The state is responsible for the maintenance and perpetuation of national heritage and culture; the authority of the state gives it the mission to preserve and encourage art and culture for it is the only institution representative of its people and their traditions."
Many problems attend to such statism. It freezes culture like an antiquarian historian, speaking of preservation and heritage and not of support for the dynamic production and innovation that marks living cultures. It presumes a form of isolatable authenticity, separating the (French) people from the rest of the world, ignoring the role of contact, dissemination, influence, and diffusion that compels culture. (It is an odd position to take vis-à-vis France, with its long history as exceptional player on the global stage.) The protectionism and isolationism that underlie the position do not undo capitalism. The position does nothing to undo the economic problems of the small national film industries, other than offer subsidies. Subsidies do not create viable autonomous cultural production; rather they make culture dependent on the state. The resort to statism generally presumes a benevolent state that tends to its public sphere without restrictions, but state-sponsored art has always had to pay allegiance to the state. In fact, Seagrave's position has historically proven actually detrimental to critical, engaged, avant-gardist art. Filmmakers who present radical political critiques, significantly challenge the state's social programs, or question the foundational histories of legitimacy, have chronically found themselves passed over by the funding organizations. The reality is that the state cannot refrain from exercising control through the means of funding; we need only think of Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s, or likewise the NEA debates in the United States in the 1980s.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from German Film after Germany by RANDALL HALLE Copyright © 2008 by Randall Halle. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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