ABSTRACT
Analysis of the cinema's place within capitalism can broadly be seen to have entailed a double focus for Marxists, both generated and legitimated by a sense of what constitutes a proper and recognisable Marxist concern. A 'materialist' concern to place cinema via its social and economic determinants whether grasped in terms of technology, economy, class base or conjunctural complex. A 'critical' concern to place the cinema via its role within the social formation, to account for cinema in its ideological clothes, its complicity with a continuing structure of domination. In translating the concerns to the British cinema, it can at once be seen that work has hardly begun. In 'Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations', Graham Murdock and Peter Golding explicitly attack those brands of Marxist theory which have placed cultural criticism economic analysis, beginning with cultural artefacts and then working backwards to the economic base rather than vice versa.
