Filming Capital, Masking Democracy: Cinema and the Politics of Appearance

Abstract

This essay rethinks cinema’s political vocation through a Marxian theory of appearance. Reconstructing the passage from civil society to the State, it argues that modern democracy functions as a scene of masking, where the antagonisms of capitalist society are re-presented as the universality of citizenship. Drawing on Sohn-Rethel’s notion of “real abstraction,” Rubin’s account of value, and a Lacanian reading of fetishism as imaginarization, the article contends that cinema is not merely a medium to represent exploitation but a “science of appearance” capable of staging how mediation is naturalized as immediacy. The methodological core is an inquiry into montage—from Eisenstein’s unrealized Capital project to Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity (including Tom Tykwer’s “The Inside of Things”)—to show how associative construction can “open” the commodity and make visible the hidden networks of production, circulation, and belief that sustain democratic equality as semblance. The conclusion posits a double bind: film can reproduce fetishism by pacifying conflict, yet it can also interrupt it by converting surfaces into sites of proof, thereby re-politicizing spectatorship and illuminating democracy’s dependence on capitalist appearance.