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Filming Politics: Communism and the Portrayal of the Working Class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-1946.

Article Excerpt
Malek Khouri. Filming Politics: Communism and the Portrayal of the Working Class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-1946. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007. 278 pp. $34.95 paper.

Scholarly consideration of class and working-class consciousness has been a relatively recent development within the field of cinema studies. The U.S. film industry, in keeping with its capitalist economic base, has tended to reinforce the dominant political rhetoric by producing films that emphasize the importance of democracy, equality, and notions of a "classless society." Yet in certain historical moments, oppositional films have appeared that demonstrate, either directly or indirectly, an awareness of class stratification in American culture and society. For example, filmmakers during the Progressive era used the medium to frame a variety of class-based issues, such as labor-capital conflict, union organizing, workplace safety, and social injustices from a range of ideological perspectives. Likewise, with the onset of the Great Depression many Hollywood productions dealt frankly with the economic crisis at hand. Although the film industry continued to release escapist...

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