Bourgeois film: the phrase conjures a lost world of seething Communist weeklies, their back pages in thrall to the tidy metaphor of base and superstructure. But for much of cinema’s first century, “bourgeois film” was real enough: it could be said to exist because it had something to define itself against, an artistic and ideological challenger belonging to the bourgeoisie’s historical antagonist — proletkino, as the early Soviets called it. The working class, too, had its cinema. “Leaning on the trades unions, supported by state organs, closely linked to the party, Proletkino goes cheerfully to work” — so announced an editorial in the journal published by Proletkino, one of many film organizations launched in the early years of the Soviet Union. The group aspired to invent cinema by, for, and about the working class, supported by and expanding the institutions made in the proletariat’s name.

A series of objectives condenses in this vision. As the project of working-class cinema was transformed and went global in the subsequent decades, these objectives would only be realized in part, spawning a diversity of proletkino-aligned films that checked some of the founding vision’s boxes, but not others. In the 1920s and ’30s, Communist Party–backed films, rarely made by working-class artists themselves, pioneered formal breakthroughs, from Eisenstein’s montage to Renoir’s novelistic realism, as working-class institutional worlds developed in parallel: workers’ film clubs and agit-trains in the USSR, Popular Front film productions in France. The ’40s and ’50s saw the rise of Italian neorealism — stories of proletarian life, shot at street level in the open air and featuring nonprofessional actors, though largely operating independent of working-class institutions — which later inspired new film movements in India, the Philippines, Iran, and Brazil. And as the New Left became a global force, a Latin American film movement — Third Cinema — reinvigorated the bond between working-class political parties and working-class cinema, flourishing during Allende’s tenure in Chile and the first post-revolutionary decade in Cuba. Third Cinema’s influence also spread to every continent, and its novelty lay not just in its anti-imperial force, but in how it lent proletkino’s vision a new practice of cultural organizing. As the Argentine directors Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas explained, movement- and party-affiliated exhibitions doubled as “enlarged cell meetings,” with pauses and prompts for audience discussion built in, leading to the discovery of “a new facet of cinema: the participation of people who, until then, were considered spectators.”

The irony of working-class film flourishing at the end of history lends this new proletkino its distinct structure of feeling. Today’s working-class films have dwindled to the size of isolated protagonists, often women, trapped in small homes with families burdensome or disintegrating, their loneliness symbolized by “the shot of the solitary walker, alone in the crowd.” Politics, Bickerton points out, lies outside their scope, with protest “limited to individual acts of defiance, or criminality.” Happy endings are rare. Work is less a problem than its absence: unemployed, or soon to be, or loosely employed, characters wander through second-tier cities on the lookout for jobs, or sit in dimly lit rooms, sedated by drugs, the noise of the slums filtering through their windows. Panoramas of class war have narrowed to portraiture, claustrophobically drawn, relieved only by imprints of place: post-industrial landscapes and slums appear as backdrops, mere intimations of social context. Yet shining through in these films is a profound “moral charge,” Bickerton argues, one otherwise “entirely absent from today’s cinéma de qualité.” In them a world of experience typically neglected or sentimentalized instead finds expression.

[...] And in China a canny, Party-negotiated mix of state funding and foreign partnerships has propped up an industry likewise defined by its blockbusters. The Wandering Earth (2019) — “China’s first full-scale interstellar spectacular,” The Hollywood Reporter gushed — is exemplary: a feverishly action-filled, staggeringly high-grossing, relentlessly dull climate change allegory in which the United Earth Government abandons Earth and leaves a lone Chinese rescue unit, armed with a combustible bottle of Russian vodka smuggled into outer space, to stave off the planet’s destruction.

Aesthetically, these national cinemas tend toward Hollywood-style garbage; politically, they tend toward nationalism. They challenge US cultural dominance by lapping up its forms and diversify commercial cinema by flying different flags in the backgrounds of the same CGI-generated explosions. But their rise has opened up an alternative possibility: that a 21st-century cinema might describe a path divergent from Hollywood if not in opposition to it.

The entire haunting, ludic mood of New Korean Cinema’s class-war films can be summed up by a scene in Bong’s Mother (2009)

André Novais Oliveira’s Long Way Home (2018), their most quietly entrancing feature, tells the story of Juliana (Grace Passô, star of FP’s anti-star system), a woman who recently moved to Contagem for a job with the city’s anti-dengue unit. She knocks doors and inspects backyards for humid areas where mosquitoes might gather. She’s touchingly reticent; eventually, we learn that her husband, supposed to relocate with her soon after her move, has ghosted her, their marriage crumbling after a car accident ended her pregnancy. This appears to be the plot, but the pulse of the film is elsewhere: it is less an individual than a plural story, as Ivone Margulies has argued in Film Quarterly. The representative shot, rather than one of an individual alone in a crowd, is one of Juliana and her coworkers walking slowly down the middle of the street, the bright rolling hills of Belo Horizonte’s outskirts as backdrop. Juliana makes friends at work, opens up a bit. Her life stays suspended amid disorientation and late paychecks, but meanwhile it reaches a kind of ordinary half-happiness, a life lived in relation. Politics appears at a slant: through the racial lineage of old family photos in a stranger’s home, complaints of terrible pay, or a story of the suburb’s origin in forced relocations. In the feminist film journal Another Gaze, the curator Janaína Oliveira spoke of how Long Way Home wasn’t received in Brazil as Black cinema, since it doesn’t revolve around racism or social struggle. And yet “Temporada [the film’s Portuguese name] is Cinema Negro, man!” In the same way, it’s working-class cinema. Here is a film made possible by the Workers’ Party that devotes less attention to class war than to the banal rhythms of working-class community, crafting a proletkino of everyday Black life, modest and unspectacular, beyond romance or bleakness. Its politics enter here, through a cultural vision that values working-class life at its most quotidian.