2025/01/01 by Georgie Carr · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Cinema and Media Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/screen/hjaf024
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Screen studies theorists have long maintained that the cinematic apparatus is geared towards the production of consent.1 But such a focus can risk developing unbalanced accounts of screen culture that privilege the analysis of discourse while ignoring the centrality of material infrastructures to the reproduction of coercive power. In analysing the ways in which cinema is conscripted into the processes of building hegemony, it is possible to overstate the cultural aspects of hegemony while losing sight of the coercive affordances of culture. Through an analysis of a forgotten archive of British cinema – police cinema – the films produced, distributed and exhibited by police forces, and a particular focus on recruitment films shown in schools, I challenge this blind spot, prompting a reconsideration of how policing functions through culture and ideology and how this function is connected to its repressive maintenance of social order. Through the production, exhibition and distribution of recruitment films, policing and education were brought together in the space of the school, mediated by cinema, intended both to undermine ideological resistance to policing and intensify the surveillance and criminalisation of young, racialised, working-class people. Marxist accounts of the institution of the police hold that it functions through repression, using violence as a means to reproducing the conditions of production.2 These approaches usefully describe the connections between public order and the wage relation, linking the brute operation of police power to the reproduction of capitalist society. But these accounts can be extended to reveal how the police operate ideologically through the mobilisation of culture, drawing attention to the links between cultural production and the use of force. To analyse the underexamined coercive aspects of culture and the ideological operation of police work, I turn to Gramscian theories of hegemony, unpacking how recruitment films made by British police forces and government departments between 1965 and 1975 were designed to reshape the ‘collective national will’ through incursions into practices of education, a process that restructured the ideological and material environment of classrooms and intensified class and race hierarchies. By focusing on police films shown to schoolchildren – one subset of an archive of British police cinema that has never been systematically analysed until now – I reveal the multiple ways in which the infrastructures of state and civil society were imbricated at the level of culture, and how police film was designed to function through the simultaneous construction of consent and the deployment of coercive force. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony posited a non-economistic re-theorisation of the modern state, which analysed the relation between the state’s repressive function and the ruling classes’ establishment of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’.3 Against inflexibly deterministic accounts of base and superstructure, Gramsci argued that the remaking of political and economic relations entailed the reconstruction of forms of popular knowledge, calling attention to the ways in which state power was maintained through the organisation of culture as well as through blunt force. The modern state, for Gramsci was one that ‘plans, urges, incites, solicits, punishes’. In this formulation the state is: ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class.4 As Stuart Hall argues, ‘this points irrevocably to the increasing complexity of the relationships […] between state and civil society’ in which the power of the historical bloc (the constellation of class fractions recruited to the agenda of the ruling classes) ‘is through the of the state is in the relations and of civil I these to analyse police recruitment films shown in as a cultural the of state and civil society. analysis the historical of this of cinema, I reveal both how the police to consent in and I the violence by cinematic the analysis of cinema Gramscian of culture, a analysis of the ways in which practices by class and the operation of the state in the of cinema is to function both through and and in of – to describe the of cinema – that cinema and an analysis of film as of a as of films and that and as in an for and political on by and on the use of the cinematic apparatus as a of particular practices and I that and be to this of focus on the state accounts that to power as in the In on police cinema, how the institution of the police into the of cinematic production, distribution and exhibition as a means to police power in that police power its in and through how the screen was to – and – and of cinematic can be to how the exhibition of police cinema coercive police both and in how film the police in The of in which function together to describe the ways in which the and material infrastructures of police recruitment films were to and I how police recruitment films were to into the institution of the In I how the of – the political and to British education, the function of cinema in and the of police in the state – the conditions for the of the cultural power of police in British between the and these through Gramscian theories of and I how the political that the of the state be by a police and ideological I the of the coercive infrastructures of police cinema, that the exhibition of films as a material through which the state to classrooms and the of police film to an of policing into social and a of state I how film production and exhibition – through the use of cinema and – was to the of police in working-class I the of cinematic as a to screen studies analysis that is to the of hegemony in the means by which consent can be and ignoring coercive By I the of through coercive material linking the exhibition practices of police cinema to the that it and to the of in British in the police operation as a material I the exhibition of police films in an that was as of and to economic this historical were by the political of the British in which the reproduction of forms of in the national and economic that were the that in 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