ABSTRACT
Over the past several years, to pick up a scholarly book on film has meant being faced with work informed by one of three critical modes of inquiry: psychoanalytic-semiotics, experiential culturalism, and new historicism. An inspection of the conditions of emergence of these modes of critical cultural practice finds them continuous with the enabling conditions of phenomena obtaining in other spheres of social (re)production, namely those of economic resources and state power, a disclosure coming as no surprise to critics situated on the left, but subject to vicious contestation by cinema scholars whose stakes are more aligned with programmes of the dominant sector, whether positioned in contemporary terms as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’. This is because critics of the left-also known as radical critical theorists or intellectuals-are concerned with how modes of knowing (including reading books and newspapers, or watching films, plays and TV), as part of the domain of cultural production, are linked, either in support of or in resistance to, the oppressive and exploitative functioning of global, transnational capitalism, a concern the effect of which Mas’ud Zavarzadeh forcefully and rigorously displays is none other than the realized possibility of dismantling and re-situating-critiquing, or theorizingthe very foundations-the unspoken tenets, or ideology-of ‘mainstream’ film criticism.
