In Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema, James Harvey contends that Rancière’s writing allows us to broach art and politics on the very same terms: each involves the visible and the invisible, the heard and unheard, and the distribution of bodies in a perceivable social order. Between making, performing, viewing and sharing films, a space is constructed for tracing and realigning the margins of society, allowing us to consider the potential of cinema to create new political subjects. Drawing on case studies of films including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates and John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, this books asks to what extent is politics shaping art cinema? And, in turn, could art cinema possibly affect the political structure of the world as we know it?
James Harvey is an independent scholar. His research interests revolve around contemporary global politics, continental philosophy, film and visual culture. He is also the editor of Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Introduction: Politics and Art CinemaPart I: A Cinema of PoliticsChapter 1: Panahi’s DisagreementChapter 2: Larraín’s Ambivalence Part II: A Politics of CinemaChapter 3: Kaufman’s DissensusChapter 4: Ceylan’s EqualityPart III: Between Politics and CinemaChapter 5: Akomfrah’s ForeignerConclusion: Contemporary Political Art CinemaList of imagesBibliographyFilmography
A bold intervention in Rancière scholarship and film-philosophy. Harvey takes films that have been deemed either politically impotent (This Is Not a Film, No) or simply apolitical (Synecdoche, New York, Climates, The Nine Muses) and mobilises close, formal analysis of their textual properties to mount a direct challenge to Rancière’s denial of political cinema.