ABSTRACT
“Well, it would be an idealism to think that a kind of counter-cinema, as some would call it, would somehow finally replace Hollywood. You don't just wipe that out… you have to deal in terms of the concrete power relations of who's running Hollywood, what the business and economic interests are. Obviously an avant-garde that sees itself as separately changing things is naive. That's why avant-garde filmmakers do have to be socialists, because that cannot happen in a vacuum outside of the economic. I don't go so far as to say that what follows is always true, but certainly the economic and sexual are the kinds of co-determining final instances without whose change all other important change remains unrooted. What won out in the USSR was a kind of economism, which was necessary, industrialization was so important against the West's aggressions that culture, the Soviet avant-garde work of the 1920s, suffered. One can hardly, though, say that the moment wasn't right. One can merely say that the forces of capitalism were always stronger in the end in these revolutionary historical moments, in this case necessitating Russia's industrial and military defence. We do know that the moment of highest responsiveness to cultural revolution was in times of, and right after, political revolution, in the Soviet Union around 1915–25, during the Bavarian Soviet around 1919, in Cuba after 1959, in Nicaragua after 1979. This is why the entropie position of hopelessness is not decadent. One has neither to be romantic nor idealist about the future.
