Suchergebnisse

This essay argues that the conditions of contemporary finance capitalism have exhausted the revolutionary potential of political modernist aesthetics. The global '68 conjuncture generated many of the fundamental concepts that continue to underscore how contemporary radical film practice is understood. As such, montage continues to occupy a central place in today's radical aesthetic imagination, its model of active spectatorship still accepted as a vital expression of an autogestive oppositional politics. However, the economic and political landscape has changed significantly over the last fifty years such that the radical potential of political modernist aesthetics needs to be reevaluated. To this end, this essay examines how the shift from industrial to finance capitalism transforms montage and its concomitant investment in spectatorial autonomy into a conservative affirmation of the neoliberal subject. Now resembling the pattern hunters of speculative finance, the active spectator of political modernist cinema is today compromised by the new conditions of volatility, instability, hyperindividualism, and privatization that demand the same cognitive labor. In exploring how neoliberal ideology has absorbed and reframed the driving logics of 1968, this essay argues that montage's radical political potential has been exhausted by the conditions of contemporary finance capitalism and instead calls for alternative modes of aesthetic engagement better equipped to at once express and oppose these new conditions of exploitation.

This essay argues that the consistent association of human rights film with historical accuracy as a means of raising awareness has led human rights education to focus on filmic content, with fiction films being used primarily as case studies about particular atrocities or as opportunities to discuss more general ethical issues. While the subject matter of human rights films is certainly a major component of human rights education, I maintain that this singular focus prohibits students from examining how a film is situated within a specific matrix of geopolitical power relations and cultural presuppositions. This presumption of truth thus normalizes a westernized worldview, obscuring its ideological foundations and the geopolitical structures that give human rights discourse its universality and function. Using Larysa Kondracki's The Whistleblower as a teaching case study, this essay demonstrates how an attention to stylistic and generic conventions helps us understand how a film may educate about a particular human rights issue while at the same time propagate the very logics of geopolitical inequality that are implicated in its emergence.