Examining the fallout from the ousting of a vital cultural worldview, Phil Collins’s ‘Marxism Today’ is a befitting swan song for the BFI Gallery – the space will soon fall victim to budget cuts. Playfully matching a historical engagement with endearing diversions into the contingencies of emotion, Collins’s post-1989 documentary rests on three former teachers of Marxist-Leninism in East Germany. While positioning their narratives historically, he articulates their experience in sympathetic relation to their yo-yoing roles of professional, mother and lover. These are people, not prototypes.
Collins’s brilliance lies in introducing a complex re-imagining from the point of view of the disavowed – admittedly a familiar artistic pursuit – productively, with a personal sensitivity that draws these stories into direct relation with current climes.
Sewn together by a blissful post-rock soundtrack, ‘Marxism Today’ collages interviews with archival footage of 1970s GDR educational TV. Surplus to requirements, one Marxist-Leninism teacher tells of her turning to lonely hearts for employment as a dating agent, while her daughter, an ex-Olympic gymnast, details her disillusion with the sport following an onset of body-image issues after her early retirement. It is impossible not to search for comparisons within our own socio-political contexts.
Collins’s rapturous final sequence features footage of a stadium filled with a kaleidoscopic mass of uniformed performers, its purpose spelled out across the seating: ‘SOZIALISMUS (socialism)’. An explicit acknowledgement enforced by accompanying film ‘Use! Value! Exchange!’, featuring a student lecture on Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’, Collins’s work emphasis the overt nature of socialist ideology. Taking this exhibition beyond a simple commentary on the contemporary relevance of Marxist thinking, Collins pushes us to ask, what are we ever told of capitalism, the guiding ideology of today?