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Popular art and the cultural traditionC.L.R. JamesPublished online: 19 Jun 2008.

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Popular Artand the Cultural Tradition*

C.L.R. James

* Translation of a talkdelivered at adiscussion on massculture held under theauspices of TheCongress of CulturalFreedom, March 9,1954, at the offices ofthe French review,Preuves, Paris.

We are publishing thisarticle with the kindpermission of CLR JamesEstate.

I propose to show that artistic creation in the great tradition of Aeschylus andShakespeare finds its continuation today in films by D.W. Griffith, CharlieChaplin and Eisenstein.

I shall also make some remarks about the function of literary criticism inrelation to these films.

Film critics often write as if Griffith invented techniques as Edison inventedthe electric light. But the film techniques which Griffith created are the resultof the extended interests, awareness, needs and sensibilities of modern men.

Our world of the twentieth century is panoramic.Contemporary society gives man a sense, on a scale hitherto unknown, of

connections, of cause and effect, of the conditions from which an event arises,of other events occurring simultaneously. His world is one of constantlyincreasing multiplicity of relations between himself, immense mechanicalconstructions and social organizations of world-wide scope. It is representationof this that demanded the techniques of flashback, cross-cutting and a cameraof extreme mobility.

Along with this panoramic view we are aware today of the depths andcomplexities of the individual personality, as opened up by Freud and others.

This finds its most plastic representation in the close-up.Modern content demanded a modern technique, not vice versa. What is the

content that this technique serves? Ours is an age of war. D.W. Griffith's Birthof a Nation portrays the American Civil War, the first great modern war. Oursis an age of revolution. The Birth of a Nation is the first great epic of a modernnation in revolutionary crisis. And reactionary as is his attitude to the Negro,in his famous scenes of the organization of the white-shirted Ku Klux Klan,

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Griffith gives us a portrayal, to this day unsurpassed, of the rise of the Fascisticmovements which are so characteristic a feature of our age. In this film heunfolds the history of our epoch. The date is 1915.

The two masterpieces of Griffith bear the stamp of an artist in the grandmanner.

In periods of historical transition man seeks to integrate in the present hisconceptions of his past and his expectations of the future.

Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.1

It is a common characteristic of the great artists at the height of their powers.Aeschylus in the Oresteia, Dante in the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare in KingLear, Victor Hugo in Lgende des Sicles, Melville in Moby Dick. But no age hasbeen so conscious of the permeation of the historical past in the actual presentas our own, and no modern artist has attempted such a colossal integrationof the historical past as Griffith in Intolerance. In this film he shows us the fallof Babylon, the story of Christ, the religious crisis in Europe in the 16th century,the struggle between capital and labour, and the story of a family ofunemployed in a big city.

The means he uses show the same insight into the needs of our century.Today, in mid-century, as we look back and forwards, we can see that ourage is dominated by a sense of the immense accumulation of institutions andorganised social forces which move with an apparently irresistible automatism.Yet at the same time it is an age more than ever conscious of the inviolabilityof the single human personality. The sub-title of Intolerance is Love Throughthe Ages. In reality Griffith gives a portrait of the individual in desperate struggleagainst the constantly increasing power of social forces.

Griffith writes the epic of the ordinary man. The lyric poet of the ordinaryman is Charlie Chaplin, from his beginnings up to City Lights. (For me afterthat, there is still genius but genius in decline.) The Tramp is himself the modernindividual, inviolable in the midst of the cruelties and pretenses of modernsociety. But how does he convey this inviolability? Modern aesthetics, in itssearch for the secret of form, has neglected perhaps the most remarkablemanifestation of it that our society has created. Chaplin is, above all, an actor.And certainly within the memory of man living, no one has seen a performermore fully equipped, both in his individual virtuosity and his sense of himselfin relation to the whole. It is by the perfection of his form that Charlie, theTramp, becomes a heroic individual, representing all humanity.

The existentialists have never surpassed Chaplin in their emphasis on thefact that the essential existence of man is in the violent struggles that take placein him over the most elementary details of his everyday existence. But they,like the Freudians, are overwhelmed by these problems. The Tramp alwaysemerges from them, not necessarily victorious, but always undefeated.

Why?I believe that it is because Chaplin played for a mass popular audience.

Chaplin and Griffith, like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, had to please the massaudience.

We have therefore to examine this audience.The mass popular audience of Griffith and the early Chaplin lived in an

atmosphere of social freedom and absence of traditional restraints characteristicof the growth of the United States. It enjoyed the most advanced technology

1 T.S. Eliot, 'BurntNorton' from The FourQuartets.

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C.L.R. James in United States, 1940 (Photo: Penumbra)

in the world and the greatest possibilities for formal education and socialmobility. The beginning of the century in the United States saw the growthof the cheap popular newspaper and the inclusion of the great masses of thepeople in the hitherto restricted stream of general intellectual communication.It was precisely in this period that there sprang into sudden existence thepopular arts which, characteristic of American civilization, have been welcomedby the common people all over the world, the comic strip (culminating in thework of Walt Disney) and jazz music. It was this public for which the earlyfilm was produced.

These new popular arts seemed very far removed from the work of the greatartists in Europe. Yet I believe there is a bond and one whose significance willgrow with time. Proust, Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot (and also Bergsonand Freud) are united in this, that they seem to have had as their commonpurpose the complete destruction of the values of 19th century civilization.

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An examination of the popular art of the early 20th century of the Americanmass will show that they were no less hostile to the values of the 19th century,and particularly to romanticism. The two masterpieces of Griffith2 and thefilms of Chaplin are only one proof of this. But while in the European art ofthe 20th century the impression is of doom, an undefeated buoyancy pervadesthe American popular art, despite its frequent crudenesses and brutality. Itis this buoyancy which finds its most characteristic expression in the work ofChaplin.

The mass popular audience, however, must not be considered as beingseparate from the nation. If the mass was decisive, yet the audience for whichGriffith and Chaplin produced was a national audience. It was the depressionin 1929 which opened the split in the national consciousness in the UnitedStates. And with that began a period of decline for the film.

No less characteristic of modern society than the mass audience in the largeindustrial cities is the great industrial corporation. I believe it to be of immensesignificance for the study of aesthetics that the artistic productions of Griffithand Chaplin were created by typical modem corporations, with their hierarchialorganization, their thousands of mass employees, their financial manipulationsand the extent and variety of their relations with their public. In other wordsthe artists, the medium and the audience, were an organic part of the socialstructure of their day. (Contrast this with the isolation of a Valry or a Joyce)

The third of the great masters is Eisenstein, but what I have to say abouthim will be better said later. I prefer immediately to take up the other pointthat I stated at the beginning, that a modern aesthetic an aesthetic of the20th century must base itself upon modern popular art and above all, themodern film. In the light of what we have observed about Griffith and Chaplin,let us look at Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a script writer for a dramaticcompany, and the modern screen writer has more interest in his script thanShakespeare seems to have had in his. Whenever I read that school of criticswho persistently treat Shakespeare as if he were engaged in writing cosmicprofundities for philosophic minds, I say to myself: if indeed it were so, it isvery strange that he did not take more care to see that these were printed.

Full of philosophical profundities as he might be, the artistic companythrough which and for which Shakespeare worked was a commercial company,(like Griffith's and Chaplin's) characteristic of the new forms of industry ofthe time. He and the actors had their money invested in it. They had to pleasea mass popular audience. If they didn't please it, like Griffith and Chaplin,they would go bankrupt.

To continue this line of investigation we therefore have to examine thisaudience carefully. It was one of the greatest audiences that an artist ever had.First, it was a national audience composed of all classes. At the time ofShakespeare's death the national consciousness had not been split by the CivilWar. But the great body of the audience consisted of artisans, apprentices andstudents, the mass popular audience of the London of that day. From theseLondoners, within a generation after Shakespeare's death, came some of thecadres of Cromwell's army. From them came the cadre of that great politicalparty, the Levellers. From that stratum came some of the men who foundedthe United States. This class of men was permeated with the great new ideaof free individualism, and all of Shakespeare's great tragic characters areessentially individualists who are in conflict with the corporate society ofmedieval Europe. Even the puritans who bitterly opposed the theatre werethemselves an extreme form of this individualism. Every thinker was prepared

2 This is not true of hisother better knownworks.

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to stand on the corner of the street and expound his individual interpretationof the scriptures.

Hamlet is an individualist, a man of free enterprise. But I have to separatemyself from the vulgarities of Stalinist criticism. Hamlet is not a rising capitalist.His activity, the freedom of his enterprise, is intellectual. For him thought isa form of action. To think freely, to examine, to speculate, that was a newforce in society in 1600. And Hamlet is torn between the need for action asa member of a corporate society and his need to examine, to speculate oneverything in sight, and above all, on his own individual personality.

The individuality of Hamlet is the individuality of the intellectual. In everysucceeding generation the intellectual has been caught between these twocompulsions, to act within the precise and limiting conditions of society orto preserve his intellectual being by wandering through continually expandingseas of thought alone. That is why the play has achieved increasing significancethrough the ages, particularly for the cultivated, the intellectuals.

Now the relation between Shakespeare and Griffith and Chaplin is this. Themodern novelists and the modern poets are at the tail-end of that traditionwhich had its magnificent beginning in Hamlet. But Griffith and Chaplin andEisenstein have broken out of it. I am not asking "futile comparisons betweenthe relative aesthetic values of Shakespeare and Chaplin. What I am drawingattention to is that Shakespeare in giving artistic embodiment to the intellectualtradition in Hamlet was seeking to please his mass popular audience. AndGriffith and Chaplin have broken out of that tradition, now in decay, becausethey sought to please their mass popular audience. They deal with an individualtoo, but the individual they deal with is not an intellectual. He is the commonman, everyman, the lowest possible denominator. The Tramp could not belower in the social scale. Griffith would not even give names to any of hisfictional characters in Intolerance.

With Aeschylus I can be even more brief.The organisation for which he worked was a state organisation, whose

structure was characteristic of the social political organisation of the Greekcity-state.

His audience was truly national. It was also truly popular, the overwhelmingmajority being that extraordinary social phenomenon, the political democracyof 5th Century Athens. This mass audience, directly or indirectly, decided whowere the victors in the dramatic competition. I am sure that I have seensomewhere that Aristotle or Plato, or both, disapproved of this literary criticismby the populace. But this audience gave Aeschylus the prize thirteen timesand I don't see how Aristotle and Plato and their friends could have done anybetter.

For this popular audience (and it seems that it was extremely partisan andvery noisy) Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia which is admittedly the greatest dramaof ancient times and for me personally the greatest play that has ever beenwritten.

Here we have to note only that Orestes is not Hamlet nor is he the ordinaryman of Chaplin and Griffith, overwhelmed by institutions. Prince thoughOrestes is, his crisis was the crisis of the normal Greek citizen caught betweenthe old tribal society and the new order of democratic government by law.

We can now see the umbilical cord that enables us to bring together suchdiverse names: revered artists of the cultural tradition, like Aeschylus andShakespeare, and modern popular favourites like Griffith and Chaplin. In theirways they give three stages in the development of the relationship of the

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individual man to his social environment which is the true history of humanity.I am not confusing aesthetics with history. Aesthetics is the study of artistic

form. And the form of the film both illustrates and is illustrated by the historyof the dramatic classics. In the art of the Greek city state, where individualand universal have achieved some balanced relation, it is the chorus upon whichthe whole dramatic action depends. In the drama of the modern freeindividualist, it is the soliloquy. It is because the individual is dominant inlife that he can take the liberty of explaining to the audience not only his openbut his secret motives, the motives of everyone in sight and anything whichis needed to advance the drama. It is in our world, the world of vast institutionsand the helpless individual, that Griffith's close-up tells us the facts about theindividual that the individual does not know himself.

But these relationships are even more subtle. We have lost the chorus whichwas the audience on the stage. But the modern director moves his cameraalways with a view to whether he wishes the audience to be directly involvedin the middle of the action or for some artistic reason to be removed from it.Never before has the audience been so directly a constituent of the processof artistic creation. The recent film production of Julius Caesar is for me asarresting, as startling, as revealing a commentary on our own age and onShakespeare as I have seen in a lifetime of reading and study of the plays.To oppose to these considerations comparisons between the relative valuesof the work of Shakespeare or of Griffith is entirely irrelevant, not to saystultifying.

It is now that I want to say a few words about Eisenstein. If Griffith andChaplin refused to deal with the heroic individual of free enterprise (eitherin action or in thought) but dealt with the individual as symbolic of the mass,Eisenstein goes further. He makes the mass itself his hero. All criticism mustbegin from the individual impulse. And for my part, from the very first timeI saw Battleship Potemkin many, many years ago, the scene on the steps ofOdessa has not been the greatest scene in the film. I was fascinated by thespectacle of the thousands upon thousands of people bursting from all partsof the screen on their way towards the body of the dead sailor. And the yearshave only confirmed this first impression. And I believe that it is this discoveryof a new category in dramatic creation that accounts for the formal perfectionand simplicity of the structure of Potemkin. But Eisenstein was never to repeatit. Like Aeschylus he worked for a state organisation. But unlike Aeschylusthe final verdict on his work was not the verdict of the mass popular audiencebut of the central committee or its representatives.

Here it is convenient to point out the infinite complexity of some of theproblems which for the most part I am merely stating here. I will take onlyone. It seems to me that Eisenstein had to satisfy a committee. The Russianworking class, the basis of the mass audience in Russia, was separated fromthe rest of the nation in its own consciousness and in the consciousness ofthe Russian artist of that time. I have made clear my belief that (judgingempirically from history) this conscious separation of the classes seems to bean obstacle in the way of the greatest creation. I am concerned with it herefor its effect on form. The more I see of Potemkin, the more it brings to mind,of all people, Racine. It is true that the 20th century sees infinitely more inRacine than did the 18th and the 19th. Perhaps we are beginning to understandwhat his audience saw. Be that as it may. In Potemkin as in Phdre I see theresult of an artist who knows precisely the clearly defined audience for whomhe is working, and I note the same in The Mother of Pudovkin.

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Formal perfection is not necessarily the most inclusive mode of expressingwhat is there to be expressed. Potemkin was a very early creation of Eisenstein.But this artist teeming with ideas was denied a natural development. And asI read the fascinating account of his theories in Marie Seton's recent biography,I am more than ever convinced that the tragedy of the whole brilliant Russianschool was that they were not able to test their theories by the suffrage of thepopular mass.

I am now in a position to make some remarks on criticism today. Moderncriticism has to reckon with the fact that modern man, the ordinary everydaycitizen, feels that he requires to know his past in order to understand hispresent. This knowledge he can learn only in art, and above all, in literature.So that criticism today has a popular function to perform. It will cease beingmerely culture or perish. The great creative works of Aeschylus andShakespeare, which I have taken here as examples, were not produced asculture. And it is noticeable that the greatest of all literary critics, Aristotle,did not know drama as culture but as a popular art.

What is one distinguishing characteristic of Aristotle's criticism, especiallytoday since the development of psychoanalysis? It is the theory of catharsis.Through the pity and terror which the audience feels, these passions are purgedfrom them. The importance of this theory to me is that Aristotle had in mindand could not have had in mind anything else but the great body of the politicaldemocracy of Athens. In other words, he had in mind the Athenian form ofthe modern film audience. I believe that to be the source of the enduring valueof his Poetics. I go further, I believe that we of the 20th century will get closerto an understanding of the Poetics of Aristotle by a study of it in relation tothe modern film and its audience. By it also we will understand more clearlythan previous generations where we have left the Poetics behind. Plato., in hishostility to the poets, was obviously motivated also by the mass character ofthe Greek audience. In this study modern literary criticism can find its truefunction.

Since Aristotle and Plato and the decline of the Greek city-state, criticismof necessity no longer has the mass popular audience as the center of itsconceptions. It is the modern film which has restored this possibility.

I am not speaking of social consciousness. No philosopher was moreconscious of society than Hegel. His philosophy was completely permeatedwith a conception of humanity developing through different social stages tocomplete self-realisation. His aesthetics is the culmination of his system, butit is the culmination of his system because he believed this complete self-realisation was impossible in the objective world. That is why he placed itsrealisation in intellectual activity, specifically art and religion. The Romanticismof disoriented men of genius like Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth,Keats, Shelley, and the whole French Romantic movement was only theactuality of what was arrived at by a man so entirely different from them asHegel. Aristotle might have that problem in his politics and longinglycontemplate refuge in a community of kindred souls. He did not have it inaesthetics.

That problem is still with us.I want to take as an example English criticism of Shakespeare. Coleridge

lifted Shakespeare criticism to great heights by the romantic interest inindividuals, both in the characters of the plays and the uniqueness of the giftsof the great artists. But once he and his colleagues, Lamb and Hazlitt had done

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that, there was nothing left to be done in that field but a mere repetitionaccording to personal insight, idiosyncracy and the capacity to generateenthusiasm of the critic. English criticism of Shakespeare has not recoveredfrom it to this day. The great advances that have been made have been in thefield of scholarship. A reviewer has recently said in the Times Literary Supplementof Shakespeare criticism that it is a jungle. Of integration there has been none.

Integration there will have to be. Nothing on earth can prevent thecoalescence of the cultural tradition with the popular audience. The questionis: How? It can be done according to the directives of that great literary critic,the late Zhdanov, or of that other great literary critic, Mao-Tse-Tung. Possibledeficiencies in criticism are more than atoned for by the power of the totalitarianpress, and if that is not sufficiently convincing, the secret police. But thedemocracies have no reason to be complacent. In America the divorce iscomplete. American criticism lives almost entirely in little magazines read onlyby students and professors. A great government corporation, like the BritishBroadcasting Corporation, frankly divides its cultural programme into twoparts, the Third programme for the cultivated and popularisation for the mass.

As far as France is concerned, I have constantly in my mind the conclusionof Jean Paul Sartre's otherwise very illuminating book What is Literature? Herehe puts forward the doctrine that for literature to be saved, writers must writefor the masses on behalf of the proletarian class struggle in order to advancemankind on the road to socialism. That is the way to produce party resolutions,not great literature. But it is significant evidence that serious criticism on itspresent basis either retires into the clique or the coterie, or in its desperateeffort to reach the masses of its own free will arrives at conceptions leadingto totalitarianism.

I do not propose to give any advice to creative artists. I believe, however,that if Aeschylus, Shakespeare or the author of Tartuffe and Don Juan (I amnot sure of Racine) came back today, they would take one glance around andimmediately buy a plane ticket for Hollywood, in order to make contact withthe popular audience of the world.3 But to critics and to all interested in thecultural tradition, what I have to say amounts to this. Today the tradition canonly be renewed in the place where the tradition was created, in an art intendedfor the popular mass audience.

I have confined myself to the classic films. It is not that there are no modernfilms worthy of critical notice, for example, the Italian school which sprangup after the nation purged itself of totalitarianism. There are good modernfilms. There are bad ones. But whether they are good or bad, the medium dealswith that range and variety of modern sensibilities from which it originated.

If the film however has declined, as it undoubtedly has, the reasons, I think,are not artistic but social. At the root is the depression which deprived theartist of that national audience which it seems is inseparable from greatcreativity. And the other reasons spring from the first. Griffith could treat,for example, the subject of capital and labour with the utmost freedom. Buttoday, in the United States, for instance, or for that matter anywhere, so tenseis the relation between the different classes, and so highly organised theirrepresentative institutions, that immense areas of social experiences have noopportunity to be presented on the screen. In this respect Aeschylus andShakespeare had infinitely greater freedom than any modern film director.The poet or novelist is free. The film director is not. He needs it far more thanthey. His creative imagination is stunted from the very beginning. The solutionof that is not an aesthetic question. It is a question of politics.

3 What would happen tothem there is anothermatter.

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