For decades, it was a burning issue among politically minded film-makers, critics, and audiences — what form a film took. The way it was shot and cut, the way the sound was recorded, how the mise-en-scène was handled; even the processes by which the film was produced, distributed, and exhibited were equally as important as the content — if not more. From our vantage point, it’s hard to imagine, but from the end of World War I through the late 1960s, filmmakers across the world hoped to use these experiments in form to unlock a new revolutionary consciousness in audiences worldwide.

That was a long time ago. Who today argues about the political implications of a film’s editing approach, or advocates a Brechtian performance style that will promote active, politicized spectators, or objects strongly to the “Mickey Mousing” of sound effects or to emotionally coercive film scores?

Today, content is everything. It’s regarded as more than enough to simply have politically promising subject matter: The Young Karl Marx, The Death of Stalin, Peterloo. These films vary in quality and effect, of course, but all are united in their roughly standard movie form. Director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Fruitvale Station) recently announced that he was making a film about the assassinated Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Just the promise of socialist political content was enough to generate excitement — we don’t need to have hopes for the form.