Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility

Paper given at 'Deleuze and the Contemporary Moving Image', KAVA (National Audiovisual Archive), Helsinki, Finland. 2 March 2013

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2014

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a sub-category of Art proper, it is worth re-considering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. T. W. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’; mass produced culture which presents a ‘flattened’ version of reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a context, making the focus on the reception of the work important. The dialogue held between Adorno and Walter Benjamin post-WWII is interesting because, between them, they consider both the possible positive emancipatory and negative politicization effects of film as a mass produced and distributed story-telling medium. Reading Adorno alongside Benjamin is a way to highlight the role of the critical thinker who receives the film. Arguing that the critical thinker is a valuable citizen, this paper focuses on the value of critical thinking in the reception of cinematic artworks. It achieves this by reconsidering Adorno and Benjamin's theories of mass art.

Contemporary Political Theory

Film scholarship, from early on, has been caught in the matrix of the political theory of its time. From the early writings of Eisenstein on the dialectical image and Soviet montage theory, to the postwar French criticism found in the Cahiers du cinéma and the post-1968 English developments in so-called 'screen theory', all the way up to the political debates about the role of theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis in filmic critiques of ideology and subjectivity in the post-Soviet period, political theory has always seemed to edge its way into the study of cinema. Political theories have often been tied to the aesthetic weighting and visual rhetorics of the image, usefully bringing about tactics for political criticism in areas beyond the cinema. It is with this in mind that political theory has benefitted from film theory, and vice versa. Ian Fraser's Political Theory and Film: From Adorno to Ž ižek seeks to add and contribute to contemporary efforts in this area. True to its subtitle, the book examines a range of past and contemporary theorists, including

2018

Film scholarship, from early on, has been caught in the matrix of the political theory of its time. From the early writings of Eisenstein on the dialectical image and Soviet montage theory, to the postwar French criticism found in the Cahiers du cinéma and the post-1968 English developments in so-called 'screen theory', all the way up to the political debates about the role of theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis in filmic critiques of ideology and subjectivity in the post-Soviet period, political theory has always seemed to edge its way into the study of cinema. Political theories have often been tied to the aesthetic weighting and visual rhetorics of the image, usefully bringing about tactics for political criticism in areas beyond the cinema. It is with this in mind that political theory has benefitted from film theory, and vice versa. Ian Fraser's Political Theory and Film: From Adorno to Ž ižek seeks to add and contribute to contemporary efforts in this area.

This article seeks to illuminate and overcome certain limitations in the influential 'post-Marxist' discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau. It does so by way of examining two apparently simple but perhaps unexpectedly complex case studies. So, after introducing Laclau and Mouffe's influential theory of discourse, the article first exposes aspects of this theory to a reflection on some famous ideas about martial arts as disseminated by the kung fu film star Bruce Lee in the 1970s. It then justifies this case study by situating Bruce Lee as a key dimension of some wider macro-cultural discourses. After doing so, the article turns to a more recent but connected example: the 2002 Hollywood film, The Bourne Identity, which turns out to be an unexpectedly 'cross-cultural' filmic text. The point of this exercise is to illustrate that although fields such as film studies and cultural studies have traditionally imported many of their notions and understandings of 'politics' and 'the political' from texts such as the political theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), there are in fact limits to what such paradigms and approaches are able to 'see'. Consequently, the article seeks to clarify how and why fields outside of political theory ought not to simply rely on the terms and concepts developed within and by political theory, and reciprocally to indicate some of what political theorists might learn from film and cultural studies approaches. Ultimately, the article aims to reiterate the significance of Laclau and Mouffe's key critical contributions to wider understandings of politics and the political, whilst at the same time revealing the limitations of this paradigm of analysis. The hope underpinning the orientation of the article is that cross-disciplinary dialogue across such fields as political studies, film studies and cultural studies might enrich

2012

The current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account. How can artists address social politics when the politics of art remain opaque? Artists situated critically within the museum self-consciously acknowledge the institutional frame and their own complicity with it. Artists’ compromised role within the institution of art obscures their radically opposed values. Institutions are conservative hierarchies that aim to augment and consolidate their authority. How can works of art be liberating when the institutional conditions within which they are exhibited are exclusive, compromised and exploitive? Despite their purported neutrality, art institutions instrumentalise art politically and ideologically. Institutional mediation defines the work of art in the terms of its own ideology, controlling the legitimate discourse on value and meaning in art. In a society where everything is instrumentalised and heteronomously defined, autonomous art performs a social critique. Yet how is it possible to make autonomous works of art when they are instantly recuperated by commercial and ideological interests? At a certain point, my own art practice could no longer sustain these contradictions. This thesis researches the possibilities for a sustainable and uncompromised art practice. If art is the critical alternative to society then it must function critically and alternatively. Artistic ambition is not just a matter of aesthetic objectives or professional anxiety; it is particularly a matter of the values that artists affirm through their practice. Art can define its own terms of production and the burden of responsibility falls on artists. The Exploding Cinema Collective has survived independently for twenty years, testifying to this principle. Autonomy is a valuable tool in the critique of heteronomy, but artists must assert it. The concept of the autonomy of art must be replaced with the concept of the autonomy of the artist. KEYWORDS: art, art institution, autonomy, institution, contemporary art, critique, Exploding Cinema, institutional critique, ideology, politics, political, aesthetic, agency, museum, use-value, underground cinema.

Discourse 37.1-2 (Winter/Spring 2015) Special issue on Derrida and cinema, edited by Timothy Holland and James Leo Cahill This article addresses the general lack of reference to Jacques Derrida's work in contemporary film and media studies as a reaction to his ostensible silence on cinema. In addition to accounting for this absence through the politics of 1970s film theory, the essay locates and develops Derrida's comments on cinema in the original publications of "Force and Signification" (1963) and "Writing Before the Letter" (1965).

ATTACHED IS THE COMPLETED PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION OF THE ESSAY. FOR A COPY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSION , PLEASE GO TO THE LINK BELOW OR CONTACT ME AT MY TRENT UNIVERSITY INSTITUTIONAL ADDRESS. ABSTRACT: In this essay I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project make available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power. In my treatment of these issues I rely on Hume’s ontology of “broken appearances” and “interrupted perceptions”, as well as Stanley Cavell’s ontology of film as treated in The World Viewed, and elaborate the following four aspects of the relation between film and political theory: 1. The Action-Image; 2. Discontinuity and the Fact of Series; 3. Actors, Artificial Persons, and Human Somethings; 4. Political Resistance and an Aesthetics of Politics. The manner in which I proceed is to show the aspectual overlay between film and political thinking. Such a method of exposition suggests a further, methodological, site of mattering of film to political theory: namely, that the stochastic serialization of moving images in film provides political theory with a genre for elaborating ideas that is not reducible to the analytics of causal argument.

Film & History 49.1, 2019

If all films are political, as Christian Zimmer famously asserted, then the entire literature on cinema, too, can be said to explore the interconnections between the medium and the total complex of relations between people living in society. Even the studies that conceive of politics not in that broadest sense in which politics is defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, but in the narrowest one-as the art or science of government-occupy several shelves in the cinema section of the library where this reviewer is writing. To the corpus of scholarship among those books that explores films in relation to concepts of political theory, Ian Fraser has added an accessible and engaging-albeit questionably Eurocentric-contribution. As Fraser notes himself, Political Theory from Adorno to Žižek repeats the analytical approach of Fraser's book on the novel, where each case study was read through the hermeneutical lens provided by a major thinker. Perhaps as a tacit acknowledgment of cinema's breakthrough in the past century, Political Theory, unlike the earlier book, limits its attention to theorists who emerged during that period. In addition to the titular ones, Fraser discusses the theories of

Cultural Studies Review, 2007