The Young Karl Marx

Last updated
The Young Karl Marx
The Young Karl Marx film poster.jpg
French theatrical release poster
French Le jeune Karl Marx
Directed by Raoul Peck
Written by
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyKolja Brandt
Edited byFrédérique Broos
Music byAlexei Aigui
Production
companies
Distributed by
  • Diaphana Films (France)
  • Neue Visionen Filmverleih (Germany)
  • Cinéart (Belgium)
Release dates
  • 12 February 2017 (2017-02-12)(Berlinale)
  • 2 March 2017 (2017-03-02)(Germany)
  • 27 September 2017 (2017-09-27)(France)
  • 1 October 2017 (2017-10-01)(Belgium)
Running time
118 minutes [1]
Countries
  • France
  • Germany
  • Belgium
Languages
  • German
  • English
  • French
Box office$4.8 million [2]

The Young Karl Marx (French : Le jeune Karl Marx; German : Der junge Karl Marx) is a 2017 historical drama film about Karl Marx, directed by Haitian filmmaker and political activist Raoul Peck, co-written by Peck and Pascal Bonitzer, and starring August Diehl. [3] It had its world premiere at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival on 12 February 2017. [4]

Contents

August Diehl and Raoul Peck at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival August Diehl and Raoul Peck at the 2017 Berlinale.jpg
August Diehl and Raoul Peck at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival

Plot

While in his 20s, Karl Marx struggles to establish himself as a writer of political and sociological importance. The film begins with a scene where poor people are gathering dead wood in a forest where they have done this for centuries, but the government has made it illegal to collect the wood as it is now legally private property of the landlords. The poor are persecuted and extrajudicially killed by the government officials. Marx wrote about these events and believes that the bourgeois class has taken ownership of the state itself.

Marx meets Friedrich Engels, a young man whose wealthy father owns factories. Engels' belief that the workers there and elsewhere, including children, are mistreated and underpaid matures. The men begin to work together to create a new political movement to reform and unite the impoverished workers. Eventually, the two stage a coup during a meeting of the League of the Just and create the Communist League in its place. The film ends with Marx and Engels publishing select theories, in a simple language for anyone to understand in a relatively short writing known as The Communist Manifesto the same year of the 1848 revolutions. [5]

Cast

Reception

Critical reception

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 63% based on 51 reviews, and an average rating of 6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The Young Karl Marx makes a valiant attempt to make the philosophical cinematic, but lacks sufficient depth to tackle its complex themes." [6] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 62 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [7]

The Guardian's review by Peter Bradshaw gave the film four out of five stars and stated, "It shouldn't work, but it does, due to the intelligence of the acting and the stamina and concentration of the writing and directing." [8] In a review for Inside Higher Ed , Scott McLemee described the film as "a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man", noting its faithfulness to the historical record. [9] Writing for the New Statesman , Suzanne Moore described the film as "sparky, brave and totally absorbing" and "in many ways a conventional biopic, lifted by its performances, and by its insistence that ideas matter". [10] A.O. Scott of the New York Times regarded it as being "both intellectually serious and engagingly free-spirited." [11]

Awards and nominations

Traverse City Film Festival

Home Video

The film has been released on Blu-ray and DVD in areas of Europe, though these releases are reported to lack English subtitles for extensive passages of dialogue in German or French, and are region-locked. A Region 1 DVD has been released for the North American market which includes English subtitles.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Marx</span> German-born philosopher (1818–1883)

Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism and represents his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.

<i>The Communist Manifesto</i> 1848 political publication by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for widespread consumption the core historical materialist idea that, as stated in the text's opening words, "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published against the backdrop of the Revolutions of 1848 and their subsequent repression across Europe, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friedrich Engels</span> German philosopher (1820–1895)

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marxists Internet Archive</span> Non-profit online encyclopedia

Marxists Internet Archive is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Rosa Luxemburg, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as well as that of writers of related ideologies, and even unrelated ones. The collection is maintained by volunteers and is based on a collection of documents that were distributed by email and newsgroups, later collected into a single gopher site in 1993. It contains over 180,000 documents from over 850 authors in 80 languages. All material in the archive is provided free of charge to users, though not necessarily free of copyright.

Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist theory exists. Marxism has had a profound impact in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic determinism</span> Theory that all societal relationships are based on economic relationships

Economic determinism is a socioeconomic theory that economic relationships are the foundation upon which all other societal and political arrangements in society are based. The theory stresses that societies are divided into competing economic classes whose relative political power is determined by the nature of the economic system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raoul Peck</span> Haitian filmmaker and activist

Raoul Peck is a Haitian filmmaker of both documentary and feature films. He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events. Peck was Haiti's Minister of Culture from 1996 to September 1997. His film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), about the life of James Baldwin and race relations in the United States, was nominated for an Oscar in January 2017 and won a César Award in France. Peck's HBO documentary miniseries, Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), received a Peabody Award.

The two-stage theory, or stagism, is a Marxist–Leninist political theory which argues that underdeveloped countries such as Tsarist Russia must first pass through a stage of capitalism via a bourgeois revolution before moving to a socialist stage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Marx in film</span>

Karl Marx and his ideas have been represented in film in genres ranging from documentary to fictional drama, art house and comedy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marxist literary criticism</span>

Marxism was introduced by Karl Marx. Most Marxist critics who were writing in what could chronologically be specified as the early period of Marxist literary criticism, subscribed to what has come to be called "vulgar Marxism". In this thinking of the structure of societies, literary texts are one register of the superstructure, which is determined by the economic base of any given society. Therefore, literary texts are a reflection of the economic base rather than "the social institutions from which they originate" for all social institutions, or more precisely human–social relationships, are in the final analysis determined by the economic base.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workers of the world, unite!</span> Rallying cry from The Communist Manifesto

The political slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is one of the rallying cries from The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation of this phrase is also inscribed on Marx's tombstone. The essence of the slogan is that members of the working classes throughout the world should cooperate to defeat capitalism and achieve victory in the class conflict.

Principles of Communism is a brief 1847 work written by Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism. It is structured as a catechism, containing 25 questions about communism for which answers are provided. In the text, Engels presents core ideas of Marxism such as historical materialism, class struggle, and proletarian revolution. Principles of Communism served as the draft version for the Communist Manifesto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist League</span> International political party established in June 1847 in London, England

The Communist League was an international political party established on 1 June 1847 in London, England. The organisation was formed through the merger of the League of the Just, headed by Karl Schapper, and the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, Belgium, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the dominant personalities. The Communist League is regarded as the first Marxist political party and it was on behalf of this group that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto late in 1847. The Communist League was formally disbanded in November 1852, following the Cologne Communist Trial.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theses on Feuerbach</span> Philosophical notes by Karl Marx

The "Theses on Feuerbach" are eleven short philosophical notes written by Karl Marx as a basic outline for the first chapter of the book The German Ideology in 1845. Like the book for which they were written, the theses were never published in Marx's lifetime, seeing print for the first time in 1888 as an appendix to a pamphlet by his co-thinker Friedrich Engels. The document is best remembered for its epigrammatic 11th and final thesis, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it", which is engraved on Marx's tomb.

Karl Friedrich Schapper was a German socialist and labour leader. He was one of the pioneers of the labour movement in Germany and an early associate of Wilhelm Weitling and Karl Marx.

The League of the Just or League of Justice was a Christian communist international revolutionary organization. It was founded in 1836 by branching off from its ancestor, the League of Outlaws, which had formed in Paris in 1834. The League of the Just was largely composed of German emigrant artisans.

Permanent revolution is the strategy of a revolutionary class pursuing its own interests independently and without compromise or alliance with opposing sections of society. As a term within Marxist theory, it was first coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as early as 1850, but since then it has been used to refer to different concepts by different theorists, most notably Leon Trotsky.

Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.

1848 in philosophy

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tomb of Karl Marx</span> Tomb in Highgate Cemetery, London

The Tomb of Karl Marx stands in the Eastern cemetery of Highgate Cemetery, North London, England. It commemorates the burial sites of Marx, of his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, and other members of his family. Originally buried in a different part of the Eastern cemetery, the bodies were disinterred and reburied at their present location in 1954. The tomb was designed by Laurence Bradshaw and was unveiled in 1956, in a ceremony led by Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which funded the memorial.

References

  1. "The Young Karl Marx". Playtime. Retrieved 30 December 2016.
  2. "The Young Karl Marx (2017)". Box Office Mojo . Retrieved 27 May 2020.
  3. Blaney, Martin (29 September 2015). "Diaphana picks up 'Young Karl Marx'". Screen Daily . Retrieved 7 May 2018.
  4. Roxborough, Scott (15 December 2016). "Berlin: Richard Gere, Rebecca Hall's 'The Dinner,' Sally Potter's 'The Party' in Competition". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  5. Cabana, Ysh (23 February 2018). "Fim Review: The Young Karl Marx (2017)". The Philippine Reporter. Retrieved 3 February 2020.
  6. "The Young Karl Marx (Le jeune Karl Marx) (2018)". Rotten Tomatoes . Retrieved 31 August 2022.
  7. "The Young Karl Marx Reviews". Metacritic . Retrieved 31 August 2022.
  8. Bradshaw, Peter (12 February 2017). "The Young Karl Marx review – intelligent communist bromance". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 May 2018.
  9. McLemee, Scott (2 February 2018). "200 Years Young". Inside Higher Ed . Retrieved 7 February 2018.
  10. Moore, Suzanne (4 May 2018). "The Young Karl Marx is a sparky retelling of the build up to The Communist Manifesto". New Statesman . Retrieved 4 May 2018.
  11. Scott, A.O. (22 February 2018). "Review: In 'The Young Karl Marx,' a Scruffy Specter Haunts Europe". The New York Times . Retrieved 6 May 2018.
  12. "TCFF XIII Award Winners". Traverse City Film Festival. 30 July 2017. Retrieved 7 May 2018.