Akomfrah’s Foreigner

In John Akomfrah’s essay-film, The Nine Muses (2010), the aesthetic paradigms of politics and art are broached so evenly that it is as possible to speak of a ‘cinema of politics’ as it is to speak of a ‘politics of cinema’ – both concepts are equalised, so that each is constitutive of the other. A bricolage of extraordinary intertextuality, Akomfrah’s film is equally concerned with the socio-historical problem of migrant subjectivity and the politico-aesthetic distribution of hierarchies relating to forms and technologies of art. The thematic concern for migration becomes a formal ‘foreignness’, creating a reconfigurative possibility for cinema and its adjacent art forms. Following Rancière’s utopian framing of the wandering ‘foreigner’ (1990: 3), I claim that Akomfrah film ‘persists in the curiosity of his gaze, displaces his angle of vision, reworks the first way of putting together words and images, undoes the certainties of place’ (1990: 3). The foreigner is an urgent political concept at a time of consensus and especially crucial in regards to public responses to mass migration from the Middle East to Europe.

Larraín’s Ambivalence

This chapter brings together the political aesthetic writings discussed thus far with works on historiography and ethics in Rancière’s work, in order to understand how historical representation contains its own latent potential for politics. Focusing on No (2012), the film’s ambivalent relationship to the effects of atrocity is, I argue, representative of what Rancière describe as an essential ambivalence at the heart of political resistance: ‘to resist is to adopt the posture of someone who stands opposed to the order of things, but simultaneously avoids the risk involved with trying to overturn that order’ (Rancière, 2010: 169). No offers a deeper understanding of the forms and concerns of contemporary political art cinema through its rejection of partisan narratives, its ironic employment of classical conventions (like stardom and linearity) and its artful use of obsolete technologies.

Kaufman’s Dissensus

Exploring the tensions between the themes and visual style, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is an exemplary manifestation of dissensus: ‘the presence of two worlds in one’ (Rancière, 2010: 37). Staging and subsequently thwarting middle-class America and classical Hollywood style, the film ultimately allows us to envision ways of being beyond the apparent “end of history”. Yet, in so doing, the film also highlights the tendency towards irony in contemporary American art cinema: a feedback-loop, art-housing the art film spectator safely, intellectually, inside the space of the film. This takes us to the political impasse of art cinema in general: when formal innovation meets cultural critique, a redistribution of the sensible occurs and makes possible subsequent changes outside of the cinema.

Conclusion: Contemporary Political Art Cinema

By way of conclusion, I once again bring to the foreground debates on art cinema, in order to answer three questions directly: where precisely do political redistributions exist in the films discussed? How do these redistributions relate specifically to consensus politics? Third, how does the discourse of art cinema itself occupy a particular space of political potential? To answer each question, I revisit key points made in each chapter in order to elaborate on how art cinema proposes confrontations with, and developments from, Rancière’s claim that ‘there is no politics of cinema’.

Ceylan’s Equality

This chapter rehearses the thesis put forth by Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator (2009): politics does not arise from resituating an individual elsewhere on a hierarchy of meaning, but from the presupposition of an even playing field. That this should cease in the cinema is a point of contention – it is realised vividly in Climates. Ceylan initiates this through a traversing of roles, redistributing the hierarchy of meaning between film and spectator. Turning this redistribution into an aesthetic approach of fragmentation, the spectator is herself invited to traverse roles. It is not then a matter of ‘gaining knowledge’ rather than ‘the providing of knowledge’, as Colin MacCabe argued in his seminal essay on Brecht and cinema (1985: 54); rather, it regards the potentialising a freer form of association between the spectator and the film. Through analysis of Ceylan’s uses of burlesque comic registers and visual fragmentation, I shall argue the political agency of the spectator is potentialised in the cinema in ways denied by Rancière.

Panahi’s Disagreement

Following discussion of the particularities of the Panahi case and the cultural specificity of the film, I engage with This is Not a Film in the context of what Rancière describes as ‘suitable political art’ (2004: 63), making the case that Panahi’s non-film – his, as he describes it, “effort” – constitutes a form of political subjectification. I explore what I refer to as an ‘aesthetic of effort’, tracing the lineage of domesticity, self-reflexivity and the long-take in relation to discourses of political filmmaking.

Introduction: Politics and Art Cinema

This introduction introduces the thought of Jacques Rancière, making connections across his political, aesthetic and film writing. It also situates his thought in the theoretical domain of political film theory, as well as locating shortfalls in his film analyses.