In order to address the issue of contemporary political cinema I will propose that contemporary cinema should be conceived as a speech-act in free indirect discourse. I will depart from Deleuze's observation that in the time-image the whole of cinema becomes a free indirect discourse, operating in reality (Deleuze 1989: 155). But I will also propose a more polemical reading of Deleuze's cinema books, arguing that there is a dialectical shift between the movement-image and the time-image, or, between First, Second and Third Cinema.

Cinema and the Masses

As Walter Benjamin wrote in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, film, because of its mechanical reproduction and therefore its relation to the masses, is fundamentally related to politics (Benjamin 1999a). When Benjamin wrote this article, two main political currencies were dominant. On the one hand, fascism used cinema to give the people a feeling of strength and beauty born of a remythologisation of the present, while at the same preserving property relations and power structures. Fascism rendered politics aesthetic. Communism, on the other hand, Benjamin argued, responded by politicising art. Eisenstein's Russian revolution films like Potemkin (1925) and October (1928) Benjamin considered fine examples of such politicised art.

From this one can conclude that, in a way, cinema is always political: either it makes the masses ‘absent minded’ as in fascism, or it can be used as a weapon in the emancipation of the people in the communist tradition. Although in contemporary audiovisual culture it is no longer possible to make these oppositional distinctions (I will come to that later) I will take the communist approach of cinema as a political weapon for the emancipation of the masses as a starting point for my discussion of political film.