Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of "suture," whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of "suture"-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.
Author(s): Sulgi Lie
Series: Film Culture in Transition
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 332
City: Amsterdam
Table of Contents
New Preface to the English Edition
Preface
Part I The Absent Cause of Film: On the Theory of Enunciation and Suture
Introduction
1. On Enunciation in Apparatus Theory
2. On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture
3. On the Pragmatics of Enunciation
4. On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture
5. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of the Repressed: Caché
Part II Allegories of Totality: Fredric Jameson’s Political Film Aesthetics
Introduction
6. The Dialectics of Mass Culture
7. Cartographies of the Postmodern
8. Geopolitical Aesthetics
9. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining
Filmography
Bibliography
Index of Names
