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FILMING the CRISIS: a SURVEY JEFF KINKLE and ALBERTO

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FILMING the CRISIS: a SURVEY JEFF KINKLE and ALBERTO FILMING THE CRISIS: A SURVEY JEFF KINKLE AND ALBERTO TOSCANO ANALYZE FILMS ABOUT FINANCIAL MELTDOWN At one point in Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological devaluations, and ever fewer of these have been compelling. Antiquity: Marx—Eisenstein—Das Kapital (2008) the direc- Filmmakers have struggled to incorporate economic turmoil tor quizzes the German essayist Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, into their works without reverting to longstanding and ulti- born in 1929, on the images produced in that fateful year mately comforting tropes: families reuniting to overcome of the stock-market crash. Enzensberger, who laments his hardship, the machismo and malevolence of stockbrokers, own difficulties in writing lyric poetry on the economy, re- the corrosive power of greed. Whether in fiction or docu- calls newsreels showing the destruction of mountains of mentary, the temptation has been not so much to dramatize foodstuffs and commodities that could no longer find a mar- as to personify systemic and impersonal phenomena, resolv- ket. This emblem of capital’s irrationality was indeed used ing widespread anxiety and hardship either into the simplis- to great effect at the beginning of Joris Ivens’s tremendous tic identification of culprits or into the backdrop for the trials fresco of Stalinist industrialization, Komsomol (1933). Just a and tribulations of the nuclear family and the aspirational year before, it was precisely around the destruction of tons of individual (a tendency also in evidence in recent apocalypse coffee in Brazil that Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow drama- and catastrophe cinema). tized contrasting class perspectives on the crisis in the final Hollywood’s difficulty with giving narrative shape to eco- scene of Kuhle Wampe (1932), in which a sample of Berlin nomic upheavals is not new. Interviewed about her part in social types, crammed in a crowded train carriage, voice their Alan J. Pakula’s widely panned Rollover (1981), Jane Fonda views on the vicissitudes of one commodity, coffee. Were we remarked that, “It’s hard to build a melodrama and explain to seek some emblems of the financial crisis that began in how the banks and the economy work.” Rollover was an ex- 2008, Kluge suggests, we could do worse than starting with plicit response to the crises of the 1970s and the political an image of defaulting holders of subprime mortgage in the panic instilled in the U.S. by the increasing power of pet- U.S., who simply left their keys behind and walked away from rodollars. Though Pakula had memorably captured the so- their foreclosed properties. The disjunction between Brecht called “paranoid style” of 1970s politics in The Parallax View and Dudow’s staging of social conflict, and the vision of thou- (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976), in Rollover he was sands of foreclosed home-owners engaging in a kind of re- incapable either of successfully enacting generic conventions verse Gold Rush in the suburban sprawls of California and (the film flounders symptomatically between drama, thriller, Florida, is indicative of the times. and melodrama) or of delineating the wills and mechanisms Is the suggestion that we are suffering from a deficit of behind social cataclysm. For some, the failure of Pakula and images and narratives of the crisis correct? TV procedurals others may be reason to recall Samuel Goldwyn’s rough wis- like Law and Order and CSI have been quick to incorporate dom: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” foreclosures and economic stagnation into their storylines, The dangers of didacticism, or the seemingly unbridgeable contributing to the naturalization of economic calamity as rift between cinematic drama and economic affectlessness, the violently disruptive background of everyday life. By con- would seem to factor against attempting to film the crises trast with its enduring attraction to images of social and envi- of capitalism. Yet the works of past filmmakers and theorists ronmental collapse, which may now double as allegories of struggling with the experience of economic collapse remain economic crisis, mainstream U.S. cinema has produced few alive with lessons for the present, and the ongoing financial depictions of the unfolding process of crunches, defaults, and crisis has been the object of noteworthy, if rare, attempts to give narrative and visual form to its underlying causes Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1, pps 39–51, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic, ISSN 1533-8630. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California. and effects. Representations of crisis need not be crises of All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2011.65.1.39 representation. FILM QUARTERLY 39 VISIONS OF CRISES PAST FIlmOgraphy Invisibility and connectivity, the immaterial and the systemic —these associated dimensions of modern economic life make PRECURSORS it so that capitalism “itself” poses obdurate problems for plot L’Argent (Marcel L’Herbier, 1928) and image. In depressions, such problems only gain in acute- Boiler Room (Ben Younger, 2000) ness and urgency. A 1936 article in Life on photojournalism Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954) after the crash lamented that, “depressions are hard to see Komsomol (Joris Ivens, 1933) because they consist of things not happening, of business not Kuhle Wampe (Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow, 1932) being done.” Yet it is precisely in crises that the interruption Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) of normal service, and its impact on everyday life as well as on Patterns (Fielder Cook, 1956) the symbols of wealth and power, makes the abstract concrete, Rollover (Alan J. Pakula, 1981) the invisible visible. That is what the wastage of goods meant Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) for Ivens and Brecht–Dudow, or what the shiftless container ships idling in the Pacific, or the vast tracts of empty fore- FICTION closed homes, should signify for us today. Such effects—on commodities, on circulation—can easily be depicted, though The Company Men (John Wells, 2010) they can rarely afford to go uncaptioned. But the centrality of Freefall (Dominic Savage, 2009, TV) finance to the current crisis poses representational problems The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh, 2009) of its own, namely the prohibitive mathematical and legal Krach (Fabrice Genestal, 2010) complexity of the financial instruments (derivatives, collat- The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (Michael Samuels, eralized debt obligations, credit default swaps) at the heart of 2009, TV) the matter. Yet, though far more refractory to representation Margin Call (J. C. Chandor, 2011) than class or even greed, finance has not been entirely absent News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx—Eisenstein— from the silver screen. Das Kapital (Alexander Kluge, 2008) A year before the Great Crash, Marcel L’Herbier, spar- The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010) ing no expense, adapted Émile Zola’s naturalist novel on Too Big to Fail (Curtis Hanson, 2010, TV) the Paris Bourse, L’Argent. In a plot that weaves together ro- Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009) mantic intrigue, the struggle between a financial aristocrat Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010) and a crass upstart, and a transatlantic flight by a renowned aviator to find oil in Guyana, L’Herbier constructed a gran- DOCUMENTARY diose dramatization of the emotional frenzy and communi- American Casino (Leslie Cockburn, 2009) cational complexity that make a stock-exchange floor almost Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009) too dramatic for an audience of laypeople, which can only Debtocracy (Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hatzistefanou, gawp at the numbers, the movement, and the shouting as if 2011) at some exotic ritual. In a bravura sequence tying together The Flaw (David Sington, 2011) the announcement of the voyage’s outcome to the breathless Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010) rhythm of speculation, L’Herbier’s montage follows not the Social Genocide (Memoria del Saqueo, Fernando E. money, but the path of financial information in the great hall Solanos, 2004) of the stock exchange. Telephone switchboards and banks The Take (Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, 2004) of typewriters (all operated by women), pulleys expediting crucial numbers to the arenas of decision, boards with the AVANT-GARDE status of stocks—all are spliced together in a frenzied move- ment in which the speed of the montage mimics the haste of Crisis in the Credit System (Melanie Gilligan, 2008) profit-making. In Free Fall (Hito Steyerl, 2010) Invisible threads connecting disparate characters and The Financial Crisis (Superflex, 2009) locations, sudden reversals of fortune, personal fates buffeted Popular Unrest (Melanie Gilligan, 2010) by inscrutable structures—for all of the representational Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller, 2010) problems that they present, one cannot say that finance and capital are devoid of drama. Blinded by amphetamines after 40 FALL 2 011 Economic dramas Top: L’Argent. © 1928 Société des Cinéromans, Cinégraphic. DVD: Masters of Cinema (U.K.). Second row, left: Patterns. © 1956 Jed Harris, Michael Myerberg. DVD: ROAN. Right: Executive Suite. © 1954 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. DVD: Warner Home Video. Bottom: News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx—Eisenstein—Das Kapital. © 2008 Suhrkamp Verlag. DVD: absolut Medien (Germany). FILM QUARTERLY 41 the grueling montage of October (as Oksana Bulgakowa re- tures that registers an ambient experience of powerlessness counts in Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity), and in- before the abstraction, complexity, and global scope of an spired by Joyce’s Ulysses (which he also hoped to film), economic spirit. In this world, there is no collective agency, Sergei Eisenstein took up this very challenge in 1929. He of the kind affirmed in Brecht–Dudow’s communist drama, sought to imagine, in some influential if unrealized notes, to put a spanner in the works. The system can, however, how one could film Marx’s Capital.
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