Film and Culturalism

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Some films from
Battleship Potemkin to A Short Film about Love, from The Seventh Seal to Dreams, from Pather Panchali to Charachar or from Brazil to Dialogue Delirium (Kichhu Sanglap Kichhu Pralap) give us something pure in essence. What it actually is? This hovering atmosphere of cinema-aesthetics and film culture has been developed out of a concept and its subsequent practices of cultural theory. That is culturalism. Now, the whole cinematographic culture can be looked in this perspective for getting a novel taste of better understanding. In this paper, I am trying to give such visions and concepts. In this axis of cultural theory, culturalism is radiating as an important concept that follows a culturalist tradition in human civilisation. Culturalism flourished in Europe to be specific it has found its root in Germany and England during the last two centuries. The course of culturalist tradition and culturalism as it is found in England are taken in this paper for analysing film and cinematographic culture in general including Indian perspectives.

Culturalism stands for pure culture, preservation of culture and promotion of culture. It is against utilitarianism. Culturalism gets its force with the rise of English studies in England. It is only from the later half of 19th century the study of English in the academic institutions in England began. With the culture of serious English studies the cultural tradition of the English and England are being preserved culturally and systemically to a great extent. Culturalism also allows people to make choices they really want to make. As for students, they are free to use a help of https://customwriting.com/pay-for-paper  and other services.  Government in many places comes to take the responsibility of preserving culture through opening academic institutions and helping them to sustain and flourish. Matthew Arnold to whom culturalist tradition own a lot of decisively opted for state sponsorship of education as the mechanism by which culture could be preserved and extended, and as the centre of resistance to the driving imperatives of an increasingly mechanical and materialist civilisation. In the late 19th century, and even more so in the 20th, the culturalist discourse finally become institutionalised within the academic discipline we now know as "English"1

The context of English literature comes very much in association with culturalism. Culturalism bears is a tradition which from Barke through to T. S. Eliot (1885-1965), clearly embraced, in one important registrar, a radically conservative reaction against capitalist modernity. But in another, and equally important register, it embraces also a radically progressive aspiration to go beyond that modernity: the obvious instances here include William Blake (1757 - 1827), P. B. Shelley (1792 - 1822), William Morris (1834 - 1896), Orwell of course, but also Williams, whose intellectual career is properly intelligible only as a late constitution of this Anglo-culturalist tradition. Whatever the register, however, culturalism remains irretrievably adversaries in its relations both to capitalist industrialisation and to utilitarian intellectual culture. This is a tradition which underpins much of English romantic poetry, but also much of what we often describe as the 19th century English realist novel.

From these two above quotations of Andrew Millner the sense, nature and practice of culturalism seems a little bit clear. Following him again we can get more fundamental aspects of culturalism. Moreover, it has been accorded a quite distinctively Marxist inflection. Thus Richard Johnson, for example, sees the new discipline of cultural studies as founded upon a theoretical terrain demarcated between, on the one hand a kind of Anglo-Marxist culturalism best represented by the works of the historian E. P. Thompson and the literary critic Raymond Williams, and on the other, that type of Francophone structuralist Marxism establish by the philosopher Louis Althusser Johnsons usage seems to me far too preoccupied with these comparatively recent culturalist and structuralist Marxism, to the extent that it clearly underestimates the significance for each of their respective non-Marxist precursors. I propose, then, to use the term rather differently to denote that type of anti-culturalism which become incorporated within a largely literary tradition of speculation about the relationship between culture and society, variants of which recur within both British and German intellectual life. In both German and British versions, the concept of culture is understood as incorporating a specifically "literary sense of culture as "art" with an "anthropological sense of culture as a "way of life". And in each case, the claims of culture are counterpoised to those of material civilisation. Hence, Shelleys famous dictum that: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.".