ICYMI: My thoughts on Mank, Citizen Kane & the contradictions of the Hollywood left.https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mank-welles-mankiewicz-kane/ …
Sigh. This is a view of Popular Front art that is based on hostile stereotypes. In fact it was much more complicated than that. The Denning book I cite in my piece is a very useful corrective to the hostile stereotype.
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I haven't read the Denning, but I'm already skeptical of the use of "Popular Front" to describe America, whereas in Europe the term made sense to denote an alliance of circumstance between Communists, Socialists, and liberals. The WPA may have made possible art much further to...
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...the left than could have been fostered by private enterprise (that would quash it either out of ideological or commercial considerations), but I would be hard pressed to denote any explicit mainstream political endorsement of these radical tendencies, even from large unions.
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Jeet, at the risk of getting into "Annie Hall"-Marshall McLuhan territory, I have actually written and taught the FTP, WPA films, etc. As for the connection to Citizen Kane, you're going to have to be more specific. Some of it is nuanced. Some of it is, yes, unbearably didactic.
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Ofc Welles was intimately connected to the FTP. But the bigger point is that Kane is ambiguous enough for the argument over its "true meaning" to continue, which is not something you can say for "Revenge of the Beavers," "It Can't Happen Here," etc.
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Anyone who doesn’t recognize how tediously didactic Popular Front art was will never again get to read Joyce, only Dos Passos’ USA trilogy. And if they keep talking, they have to read the back half of Native Son aloud
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. And yes, U.S.A. is a perfect example. It's not like we don't know what political art from the 1930s looks like.
Nobody would write an essay on "the hidden politics of The Grapes of Wrath."
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