In the wake of the proletarian defeat in Central Europe during the years 1918-23 and the Fascist victories thereafter—both taking place under conditions presumably favorable for Marxist causes—thinkers on the left initiated a serious invesitigation into cultural matters and questions of consciousness in an effort to understand the stabilizing features of capitalism (Lunn 5). In such an atmosphere of political frustration and powerlessness, emerging technological advances—especially in the visual arts such as photography and film-making—brought on immense implications as well as new challenges to existing concepts of artistic presentation, provoking quite different responses among the left. On the one hand, the fashionable preoccupation with the juxtaposition of disparate images and disjunctive moments and other technical matters was seen by some, such as Georg Luk^cs and Theodor Adorno, as consuming the energies of the artistic world while distancing artistic productions from the reception of the general public. Thus，in an effort to situate the new techniques so as to contain their application in the domain of the arts, such leftist critics resorted to what are now classified as “ideological analyses” to demonstrate and thus expose the possible impact of such techniques upon the reading public. On the other hand，these breakthroughs in the arts were also seen by others on the left, such as Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, as holding out new inspirations and suggesting new strategies for their cause, who in turn wrote to extol how powerfully the new techniques and new artistic works might serve as forms of political resistance.