Committed or militant, cinema can be so in a thousand ways: by the choice of a subject, the production policy, the type of editing chosen, or even according to the team that wrote or directed it. But between the intentions that govern the making of a cinematographic object and the way it is received, there are sometimes considerable gaps.

Even the most cautious filmmakers cannot escape the risk of being misunderstood: this was the case in 1925 of the Soviet Sergei Eisenstein, who was nevertheless known for taking a close interest in the effects of his films on the public (through calculations, experiments, etc.).

The dramatic final sequence of The Strike shows the repression of a popular movement by the Tsarist army, interspersed with shots of cattle slaughter. This example, which has become canonical, is often used to illustrate “parallel editing”, that is, the interweaving of two series of apparently unrelated images to produce a metaphorical meaning (the workers are massacred like animals ). However, a year after the film’s release, Eisenstein confessed that he had not obtained the desired effect, particularly on the peasants, who were accustomed to slaughtering their own cattle, and who therefore did not perceive the political significance of the editing.

Faced with this kind of example, it would be wrong to be satisfied with a relativistic observation – of the type “everyone understands what they want”. The disagreement itself can become an object of study. To do this, we can refer to the model proposed by the semiologist Roger Odin, who theorizes the notion of reading mode  : it is, in essence, a question of revealing the diversity of ways of analyzing, of frameworks of thought and of possible perspectives on the same work.

Odin lists up to nine modes of reading (spectacular, fabulizing, aesthetic, etc.), recalling that the reading intended by the author of the film is rarely equal to those subsequently adopted by the spectators. This hypothesis provides the beginnings of an explanation in cases where the differences in interpretation are significant: thus, we can say that Eisenstein had conceived his sequence in a “persuasive” mode (the spectator draws lessons from what he sees), where the popular public implemented a “documentarizing” reading (the spectator assumes that the images refer to a reality ), or even a “private” reading (the spectator relates what he sees to his own existence – in this case their daily life as breeders).

Defining “political cinema”

This approach seems to me to be extendable to the more general question of “political cinema” – of what it is and what it should be. Let’s say it from the outset: although often asked, this question has never received a definitive answer. But here again, if we do not have a clear and unique definition of political cinema, it is not simply because “everyone has their own opinion”; it is because the frameworks of thought mobilized to understand it are themselves incompatible.

Not only are there political cinemas , but they are based on conceptions of cinema and commitment that are sometimes very far removed from each other.

We should then agree to shift the terms of the question: rather than asking what political cinema is, ask what is political in a film. A quick glance at the history of film criticism and theory teaches us that the answers diverge. For some, what is political in a film is only its content, the “subject” or the themes addressed; for others, it will be the way in which it was produced, its economic model or the position of its author in the intellectual landscape of the time; still others will prefer to politically value the formal originality of the work rather than its explicit meaning. In short, there are several ways of reading politics in cinema… sometimes incompatible with each other. This is what we saw, exemplarily, with the recent release of Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023): while some critics praised the feminist themes addressed by the film, others criticized it for a classic style that ends up promoting a capitalist, unequal and patriarchal Hollywood model. Between these two opposing interpretations, we do not find a difference in ideology (both claim to be feminist), but in reading mode (one is interested in the content of the film, the other in its form).

Content analysis (or, to use a term much criticized by film scholars, “message” ) is only one way of politically analyzing a film – perhaps simply the most common one today. It should be remembered that this was not always the case: in the post-68 period, for example, the rise of militant cinema and the rediscovery of older experiments in the collectivization of film production contributed to imposing a reading of films in terms of financing and organization of work. And before that, some commentators of the “new waves” defended a conception of cinema in which the subversive quality of a film resided primarily in the power of its form (editing, sound, colors, etc.) – an approach that we then find in research on experimental cinema . In short, everything depends on the elements that we value as political in films.

Why is it more interesting to pose the problem from this angle? First, showing the diversity of possible readings invites us to challenge the privilege of authors, who are still too often given the last word on the meaning to be given to their work. However, there are many cases in which the interpretations made by the public reveal a truth that the filmmaker himself had not perceived: from Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), transformed into a symbol of the anti-capitalist struggle against the wishes of its author , to BAC Nord (Cédric Jimenez, 2020), which the French far right spontaneously identified as subscribing to a racist ideology, there is no shortage of contemporary examples. Here, a reading in terms of aesthetics allows us to reveal a political coloring in films that do not explicitly claim it: through their way of filming bodies (more or less respectfully), their enthusiastic or on the contrary contemptuous vision of the people, of an event, of a social group. Proof that a filmmaker’s “intention” says nothing about what is really happening in the images he produces.

Rethinking the political analysis of films

The challenge is also to rethink our way of doing the political analysis of films, and above all, by giving up the idea that it would be possible to establish once and for all the positioning of a work. No film, or almost, is simply “right-wing” or “left-wing”: in addition to reducing the specificity of artistic engagement, this commonplace often prevents us from understanding how the modes of reading complement or contradict each other. It is by working in the gaps between these contradictory propositions that we can hope to clarify the links between cinema and politics, both in the field of “auteur” cinema and in that of popular culture.

For example, we will note that the development of an ecological discourse on art is taking place in several directions at the same time, sometimes at the level of production, sometimes through new narratives. But then, who should we consider the most eco-friendly between, say, an Avatar 2 (James Cameron, 2022) based on a neoliberal vision of nature but designed in solar-powered studios , and on the other hand, the modern and ecofeminist point of view of a Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), but whose filming caused significant ecological damage in the Namibian desert? As we can see, the positioning of the film here depends on what we value as being the heart of political action (content or process), and the truth lies less in the choice of one or the other than in the identification of a gap, a tension between the two.

The same is true of the feminist question in cinema, structured today around demands which, although they appear complementary, are based on distinct theoretical frameworks: recognition of women filmmakers, parity in technical teams, screen time, differentiated writing of roles, staging of bodies, etc. Thus, the arrival of a “mainstream” feminism, compatible with the logic of the entertainment industry, has relaunched the debates on what deserves or does not deserve to be called feminist in films , and therefore on the advantages and disadvantages of each mode of reading.

It should also be noted that the concept of the male gaze, theorized in the 1970s by Laura Mulvey and which has enjoyed great success in feminist studies , is not unrelated to the “aesthetic reading” that I developed in my own work, Cinémas politiques, lecture esthétique (2024): reasoning from the “gaze” (and not from the discourse or the message), comes down to valuing the sensitive data of the image, which can never simply be translated into words or concepts.

Finally, this approach offers an attempt to answer the eternal question of whether “everything is political.” But it does so by shifting the terms of the problem: whether everything is political or not matters little, what is certain is that everything can be politicized – the question remains with what expectations and from what reading grid.

Author Bio: Raphael Jaudon is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Caen Normandy