Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10316/91249
Title: The Class of Images: Sketch for a Research Project
Authors: Branco, Sérgio Dias 
Keywords: Film studies; Christianity; American cinema; Working class studies; Marxism
Issue Date: 2019
Publisher: IEF Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos
Serial title, monograph or event: Politics and Image
Place of publication or event: Coimbra
Abstract: The concept of class has been progressively erased in contemporary discussions around art — and other topics. The explanatory power of this economic and social category, as articulated by Karl Marx, has been annulled precisely at a time when the contradictions of late capitalism are growing, composing an ideological background that creates conditions for the perpetuation of this system. From a Marxist point of view, class is neither a product of Marx’s invention nor of anyone who thinks with him, but reflects existing social relations and the dynamics of everyday life. By isolating art production from historical processes, by privileging the inner workings of languages, by favoring an aestheticist approach to art, postmodernist cultural theory has relinquished critical knowledge about art as a phenomenon irremediably pertaining to the social fabric. If in this theoretical framework, cultural differences replaced class antagonisms as the driving force of society, then one must ask how these differences emerge and operate, what determines them and what do they produce, thus recognizing the fundamental importance of their material basis. To think critically about art to its foundations is to re-materialize it as a production process instead of analyzing works of art in an idealist manner. The same may be said about religion. In order to tackle these matters, I will focus on film images understood as material, creative, and symbolic productions, and in the way they evoke class antinomies, expose class marks, and use Christian concepts and imagery in the portrait of working-class life in American cinema.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10316/91249
ISBN: 978-989-54328-3-7
Rights: openAccess
Appears in Collections:FLUC Secção de Artes - Artigos e Resumos em Livros de Actas

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat
2019_Class.Images.pdf1.43 MBAdobe PDFView/Open
Show full item record

Page view(s)

207
checked on Oct 1, 2024

Download(s)

83
checked on Oct 1, 2024

Google ScholarTM

Check

Altmetric


Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.