The Biopolitical Film

Kunsttheorie: NITZAN LEBOVIC
Vortrag

As a distinct strand in current cinema suggests, our political culture sees itself reflected in the dark horizon of the German 1920s-1940s: A catastrophic dystopian view of western culture controls the narrative in David Cronenberg, Michael Winterbottom, Michael Haneke, Alfonso Cuaron, and Roland Emmerich. All use the sci-fi genre to question a present-past processes, the failure of democracy and a landscape covered with concentration camps and the walking dead. Other film-makers, like Gabriel Range or David Fincher research the mechanism of control and power, and use biopolitical critique, including the pre-assumed state of emergency (the murder of a president, a city in siege), in order to depict it. As will be shown in this lecture, the Biopolitical film of our era is not about a society without history, but rather, a society that sees itself mediated through a historical model of a post-Holocaust catastrophe and in urgent need of a new culture of decisionism. These conventions rely heavily, literally and metaphorically, on the problems presented by a post-Nietzschean, post-liberal critique.