The Hidden Foundation This page intentionally left blank The Hidden Foundation Cinema and the Question of Class David E. James and Rick Berg, editors University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London The Louis and Hermione Brown Humanities Support Fund at Occidental College assisted in the preparation of this book. Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The hidden foundation : cinema and the question of class / David E. James and Rick Berg, editors, p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8166-2704-5 (he) ISBN 0-8166-2705-3 (pb) 1. Motion pictures—Political aspects. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects. 3. Social classes. I. James, David E., 1945- . II. Berg, Rick. PN1995.9.P6H5 1996 791.43'652062—dc20 95-22733 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. It is always the direct relation of the owners of the conditions of pro- duction to the direct producers which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden foundation of the entire social construction. —Karl Marx, Capital,///:47 This page intentionally left blank Contents 1. Introduction: Is There Class in This Text? David E. James 1 2. Beyond the Screen: History, Class, and the Movies Steven J. Ross 26 3. The Melos in Marxist Theory Jane Gaines 56 4. Strike and the Question of Class Bill Nichols 72 5. The Gun in the Briefcase; or, The Inscription of Class in Film Noir Paul Arthur 90 6. "No Sin in Lookin' Prosperous": Gender, Race, and the Class Formations of Middlebrow Taste in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life Marianne Conroy 114 7. Compromised Liberation: The Politics of Class in Chinese Cinema of the Early 1950s Esther C. M. Yau 138 8. Out of the Mine and into the Canyon: Working-Class Feminism, Yesterday and Today Lillian S. Robinson 172 vii viii Contents 9. For a Working-Class Television: The Miners' Campaign Tape Project David E. James 193 10. Poltergeists, Gender, and Class in the Age of Reagan and Bush Douglas Kellner 217 11. Class in Action Chuck Kleinhans 240 12. The Hollywood Waitress: A Hard-Boiled Egg and the Salt of the Earth Jane Callings 264 Contributors 285 Index 289 Chapter 1 Introduction: Is There Class in This Text? David E. James Academic Identity Politics The present collection of essays was occasioned by specific insti- tutional events. At the 1989 meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies, the professional organization of film and television schol- ars in the United States, one of its several internal interest groups, the Task Force on Race and Class, voted to dissolve and reconsti- tute itself as the Task Force on Race. The decision to sever institu- tional consideration of class from that of race and to jettison the former occurred at a moment when demands for increasing the presence of people of color in higher education and for increasing attention to ethnically oriented film practices were regaining some of the momentum lost in the previous decade and a half. And al- though nothing like justice has been done to those concerns, let alone to the wider social conditions to which they speak, still sub- stantial attention to what has become known as "multicultural- ism" did come of the initiative. But the zero-sum rules of academic identity politics ensured that ground gained by one marginalized discourse would be lost by another. After a decade that had been as devastating practically for the global working class as it had been theoretically for Marxism, the fact that in this case the loser was class should have come as no surprise—except to anyone who had followed the rhetoric of the 1