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In the concluding essay of his unpublished explorations on Comparative Film Studies, Willemen posits a series of bold strategies to arrive at a theory of value, which would enable him to claim relevance to all geopolitical frameworks that are beset both directly and indirectly by the workings of Euro-American capitalism. Willemen recognizes that the historical frame within which questions of value have to be located is a little different from the historical narrative most often deployed when addressing culture. To understand value in this area, we need to recognize that distinct and co-existing modes of production exist in any social formation, and that contemporary ideological and political constellationswithinsocieties “like our own” reveal overwhelming evidence that premodernity is still very much with us. A “pre-modern” ideological frame which aligned god-given social status with power (both physical and political), wealth, wisdom and virtue, finds a productive afterlife within the confusion between money and aesthetic value by mystifying the difference between the two. However, given that there is no such thing as “cultural capital”, there is only capital, the ownership of congealed labour/value, then how, the essay asks, can we imagine the elaboration of a responsible mode of intellectuality? How are we to distinguish between valuable work and the production of cultural fertilizer or raw material, or allow for the possibility that both kinds of work may well coexist inextricably intertwined within the same product? The essay provides tentative answers, and the author provides his own test of value: namely, whether a work is orchestrated in such a way as to promote the best possible insight into the dynamics (historical and political as well as economic) which format cultural practice as a specific if not a quasi-autonomous sector within or in relation to capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Originally written as an introduction to Willemen's unpublished book of essays, this paper provides perhaps the most concise outline available of what he meant by the concept “comparative film studies”. Making a strong case for why all thinking on film should once and for all jettison the discredited framework that saw films at the intersection of national specificity and universal values, Willemen proposes that we replace that intersection as an encounter between “national” histories and the capitalist-industrial production of culture. This requires us, first of all, to replace the very concept of “universality” with what underpins it, namely a pervasive capitalist mode of production. In exploring the historical-narrative constructions of such a capitalist mode, the argument draws from several disciplines to propose that—contrary to conventional views—it is not only language that defines national-cultural memory. He draws from Marx to contend that past generations' accumulated efforts and experiences are also stored as a kind of labour power, in the form of dead labour in machines of various kinds. A good way to understand this concept of dead labour, then, is to see the purpose of narrative as also concerned with proposals, suggestions and dreams about the management of what he calls “the dead labour savings account.” Finally, Willemen outlines the way by which such an approach allows us to rethink the trope of modernity, and whatever it constructs as coming both pre- and post- that modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay is a critical appreciation of Paul Willemen's proposals for a comparative film studies, illustrated with examples from Indian film history. The suggestion that the universal history of capitalism is the common ground on which a comparative study could be located, and the related questions of value raised by Willemen in the chapters of a forthcoming book are considered here in relation to recent developments in Indian cinema. Willemen suggests a way to avoid the pitfalls of nationalist exceptionalism in cultural studies as well as an abstract universalism that neglects the specificity of capital's presence in different regions of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo-liberal ‘free-market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro-American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues that the recovery of film from the bureaucratization of its study and its rediscovery as one of the modalities of modernization require both a framework of analysis that is fully conscious of its own historicity and critical role, and a new topography of cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]