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.”