Cinematic Political Thought

This book has two aims: to offer a series of investigations into aspects of contemporary politics such as race, nation and gender; and to articulate a critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema. What the author offers is a politics of critique, inspired by Kant, in which he attempts to show what it can mean to think the political. The interventions into aspects of contemporary political issues, as reflected in films including Hoop Dreams, Lonestar, Father of the Bride II , The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and To Live and Die in LA, are also influenced by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard: theorists loosely regarded by the author as post-Kantian. This is a polemical work, aimed at encouraging critical, ethico-political thinking. Its breadth of theoretical scope and empirical reference, and the innovative style of presentation will make it vital reading for all those with an interest in the linking of culture and politics.

Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political? In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and politics.

In this book, Michael J. Shapiro stages a series of pedagogical encounters between political theory, represented as a compositional challenge, and cinematic texts, emphasizing how to achieve an effective research paper/essay by heeding the compositional strategies of films. The text’s distinctiveness is its focus on the intermediation between two textual genres. It is aimed at providing both a conceptual introduction to the politics of aesthetics and a guide to writing strategies. In its illustrations of encounters between political theory and cinema, the book’s critical edge is its emphasis on how to intervene in cinematic texts with innovative conceptual frames in ways that challenge dominant understandings of life worlds. The Cinematic Political is designed as a teaching resource that introduces students to the relationship between film form and political thinking. With diverse illustrative investigations, the book instructs students on how to watch films with an eye toward writing a research paper in which a film (or set of films) constitutes the textual vehicle for political theorizing.

This book utilizes philosophical tools to build up a framework for the classification, analysis and assessment of political cinema. The author first maps the category of political cinema, clarifying what it means for a film to be ‘political’, and then analyzes the relation between the value of a film as a political film and its value as art. Through philosophical enquiry, Angelo Emanuele Cioffi builds up a framework that could be of use in art-critical practice and that can help with the classification and assessment of political films. Grounded in analytic philosophy of art and cognitivist film theory, with insights from political science, political philosophy, epistemology and cognitive science, the book presents a unique analysis of the relation between films and the ‘political’. This theory is tested with detailed case studies, and the author uses specific films as examples of the applicability and explanatory power of this theoretical framework. As such, this book will be of interest not just to film studies, film theory and political philosophy scholars, but to anyone with an interest in political film, aesthetic practice and philosophy of art.

This text is both a series of investigations into aspects of contemporary politics, and a more general attempt to articulate a critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema. The interventions into aspects of current political issues, as exemplified in films like Hoop Dreams, Lonestar, Father of the Bride II, and To Live and Die in LA, are also influenced by Delueze, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard; theorists loosely regarded by the author as post-Kantians. This book is suitable reading for all those interested in the links between culture and politics.

Critically examines how radical political theory and its application to film analysis can provide insight to the aesthetic self during political upheaval and conflict

The Politics of Hollywood Cinema radically transforms our understanding of cinema's potential to be politically engaging and challenging. Examining several films from Hollywood's classical era, including Marked Woman, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Born Yesterday, On the Waterfront and It Should Happen to You, alongside contemporary theories of democracy advanced by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claude Lefort, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, Richard Rushton argues that popular films can offer complex subtle, relevant and controversial approaches to democracy and politics.

" a modern mythography, a study of contemporary Hollywood films based on the tools offered by feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxist cultural theory, and deconstruction." --Village Voice "Solidly thought-out observation of the films of the 70's and 80's that comment on the system." --Audience "... intelligent, open advocacy. Its responsible arrangement of carefully described cultural materials will challenge students and instructors alike." --Teaching Philosophy Camera Politica is a comprehensive study of Hollywood film during a period of tremendous change in American history, a period that witnessed the end of the American empire, crises in the economy, a failure of political leadership, loss at war, and the rise of the Right.