Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures ed. by Scott MacKenzie (review)

FILM MANIFESTOS AND GLOBAL CINEMA CULTURES Edited by Scott MacKenzie Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014,651 pp.REVIEWED BY MICHAEL ZRYDFilm Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is a strikingly massive and inclusive anthology of film manifestos that is notable for its global comprehensiveness and sheer quantity of surprises. The collection features 175 texts-the Table of Contents alone is 15 pages-divided smartly into eleven sections that encompass categories both expected (The Avant-Garde(s), cinemas, Colonialism, Decolonization, and Postcolonialism) and surprising (Militating Hollywood, Archives, Museums, Festivals, and Cinematheques). It is first anthology on subject of manifesto, and will be definitive English-language text for years to come-both for incorporating canon of film manifestos and for expanding and redefining category.The anthology collects standard film manifestos like Dziga Vertov's WE: Variant of a Manifesto; Francois Truffaut's A Certain Tendency in French Cinema; texts by Surrealists and Lettrists; crucial Third Cinema manifestos by Rocha, Espinosa, and Solanas & Getino; and Dogma 95 manifesto (which MacKenzie argues has revived film manifesto over last two decades). These manifestos are contextualized not only in economical and helpful annotations that accompany each text (along with publication information crucial for understanding text's historical and social provenance), but also in introductory commentaries that MacKenzie provides for each of thematic sections. In addition to collecting standard manifestos, MacKenzie also makes a strong case for recognizing how many canonical film theory texts were originally manifesto-like, or least polemical, in intention and impact. Thus, familiar essays like Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, John Grierson's First Principles of Documentary, Maya Deren's A of Principles, Stan Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision, and Sergei Eisenstein et alls Statement on Sound are given new life through their placement in thematic sections, resonating with lesser known texts therein.The principal thesis of volume is that film manifestos, though neglected, should be at center of film history, politics, and culture, because manifestos are, by their nature, constitutive, literally to action for political and aesthetic changes in cinema and, equally importantly, cinema's role in world. MacKenzie makes his case, not only by demonstrating mani- festo's centrality in canon of film studies, but also by reframing documents that have heavily impacted film and social history. His favorite example is what he contends is the most successful film manifesto of all time, Hollywood's Motion Picture Production Code (linked to The Legion of Decency Pledge, also included). The Code was constitutive not only of moral content of films made under its aegis, but also of aesthetic of indirection that underlies both Hollywood's ideological power and its occasional internal subversion.In MacKenzie's introduction, he acknowledges dominant leftist orientation of most film manifestos, which function as revolutionary calls for freedom and commitment (and contradictions those twin directives often create) in relation to both aesthetic and political change. Fredric Jameson, Louis Althusser, and Walter Benjamin figure prominently with their impetus to integrate aesthetic and political innovation, often toward explicitly utopian goals. Yet one of revelations of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is its inclusion of reactionary texts that are extraordinarily illuminating, especially in our current political moment as we suffer rise of social conservative and neo-liberal regimes. If a savvy political strategy is Know Your Enemy (also title of a US Army training film made during Vietnam War), then Ayn Rand's gobsmacking Screen Guide for Americans, Joseph Goebbels's Creative Film, and Pope Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura-. …

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