Materiality and Materialism in Robert Kramer and Philip Spinelli’s Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977-79)

Abstract

Robert Kramer and Philip Spinelli's Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977-79) is one of the major films about the Portuguese Revolution of 1974-75. If Kramer’s filmography anticipates and participates in the self-referential turn of militant and engaged cinema in the sixties and seventies, Scenes from the Class Struggle, a North-American film production, fully integrates the history of Portuguese cinema, as it interweaves a critical, analytical, materialistic and dialectical representation of the Revolution with a formal and material proposal that is in line with the main trends of Portuguese revolutionary cinema, particularly concerning the tension between political engagement and formal experimentation of a significant part of its corpus. This paper seeks to inquire how Kramer and Spinelli’s film addresses issues related to materiality and materialism in cinema. With these factors in place, Scenes from the Class Struggle not only focuses on the Revolution of 1974-75 and its cinematic figurations, but also critically and actively questions the possibility of representing a revolutionary process in cinema and the possibility of representation itself. Firstly, the article briefly retraces the film’s complex material history. Secondly, it argues that it is part of a materialistic and dialectical cinema, following Jean-Paul Fargier’s conceptions, taken up by Dominique Noguez: it is a film that does not seek to reflect ‘reality,’ nor to produce an impression of reality, but that, pondering its filmic materiality and the materiality of the world, reveals this double materiality in one movement, through self-reflexive and self-referential strategies.