Karl Marx died in 1883. He was buried in a Victorian cemetery in Highgate, North London. Still today, a small but regular flow of tourists from across the globe visits the grave, where the British communist party built a tombstone with a portrait bust in 1954 (Figure 1.1). Some of them bring flowers, some even burst to sing aloud “The Internationale” in front of the cenotaph. But, very rarely do these visitors happen to cross another grave, which is located off the beaten track at the far side of the cemetery, next to the fence that borders Swain's Lane and the mock Tudor houses from the 1920s. This is where we encounter the grave of William Friese-Greene, a British entrepreneur and early pioneer in the development of moving picture technology in the United Kingdom (Figure 1.2). Friese- Greene passed away in 1921.

Surely, it is merely a coincidence that these two individuals came to share the same cemetery. The spatial proximity of Marx's and Friese- Greene's earthly remains nonetheless suggests resonations and overlaps between the two key historical forces of modernity these two individuals were part of, and in many ways epitomized. In this respect, a visit to the Highgate cemetery today brings about a certain sentiment of loss, even nostalgia. On the one hand, we remember the individual who gave his name to one of the defining political worldviews and philosophies of the twentieth century, a worldview that is increasingly undermined by the triumph of the current neoliberal form of capitalism. On the other hand, we are reminded of a person who, even if he holds merely a minor position in the (pre)histories of cinema written today, contributed to the birth of a medium that is now losing its status as the leading global cognitive and cultural technology. Digitalization and neoliberalism — those are the predatory forces (tightly married to one another, one could argue) that have been eroding the subjects of this essay: films and Marxism.

But how are we to map cinema in relation to Marxist thought? Marx, as is known, was a philosopher and political economist of German Jewish origin, famous for his theory of historical materialism — stipulating, to put it crudely, that a society's means of production determine its makeup.