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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
PhD Thesis Project - Cinema and Agency: Rancière’s Political-Aesthetics and Contemporary Film
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2014-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
James Harvey-Davitt
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Anglia Ruskin University
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PhD Thesis Project - Cinema and Agency: Rancière’s Political-Aesthetics and Contemporary Film
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Cinema and Agency: Rancière’s Political-Aesthetics
and Contemporary Film
James Harvey-Davitt / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
Anglia Ruskin University




   Jacques Rancière has provided some of the most innovative and stimulating
analyses of society and culture in recent times: some cynical and some hopeful.
In the contemporary “consensual” climate which attempts to prohibit social
disruption through an omniscient demarcation of the “us vs. them,” people
are immobilised, change is restricted, and what is “common” is granted from
above: this is the scene of the end of politics. How does one negotiate this pes-
simistic outlook, with a somewhat utopian perspective on the subjectivizing
potential of art? Since politics exists because “those who have no right [...]
make themselves of some account,”2 the case is such that politics is always a
latent possibility – that potential interruption always exists beneath the stag-
nant facade. This potential, it seems, is signalled most decisively in art. To this
extent, I believe cinema is of urgent consideration.

    The relationship between aesthetics and politics consists [...] in the way in which the
    practices and forms of visibility of art themselves intervene in the distribution of the
    sensible and its reconfiguration, in which they distribute spaces and times, subjects and
    objects, the common and the singular.3

   Politics is thus enacted through, envisaged by, and describable as an aesthetic
experience. Therefore, the relationship between the “consensual times” con-
structed by state mechanisms, and the films produced in recent years, invoke
an urgent inquiry regarding their discrepancy. How does cinema intervene in
the social situation from which it arises? How might cinema imagine new “dis-
tributions of the sensible?” Yet this is not a wholly new proposition. From its
inception, scholars have mused over the emancipatory potential of film, and its
pedagogical possibilities in the cinema. Apparatus theories of interpellation, and


1
  Ph.D. thesis supervised by Professor Tina Kendall. For information: james.harvey-davitt@
student.anglia.ac.uk.
2
  Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 1999, p. 27.
3
  Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, Polity Press, Cambridge (MA)-Malden (MA)
2009, p. 25.

                                             Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                                 James Harvey-Davitt


counter-interpellation, have been proposed and critiqued, then revived and re-
thwarted. What I propose is a reconsideration of what is commonly understood
as “politics,” through the lenses of Rancière’s political-aesthetics. The stakes of
this are such that the relationship between cinema and politics becomes positive:
departing from the subordination of spectators and minorities, the appearance
of politics in the cinema becomes a matter of empowerment and innovation.
   To elaborate, my thesis is concerned with considering two conceits: the pos-
sibility of cinema altering the politics of states and state-governed societies, and
the possibility of a politics reliant solely on the cinema itself (the “politics of
aesthetics” that defines and reconfigures a social distribution of the sensible, as
it appears in the space of, and experience of, a film). The first of these I term “a
cinema of politics.” Here, I consider two recent examples of cinema engaging
with state mechanisms and innovating upon official discourses, in a uniquely cin-
ematic way. Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010), and NO
(2012) is a trilogy of films which intervene into the official, documented truths
about recent traumatic events in Chilean history. But they also interrogate the
simplistic dichotomy of partisan politics, in a way which caused furore in their
reception. Poetically and aesthetically challenging the representation of history,
Larraín’s films invoke a radical ambivalence, which Rancière describes as ap-
propriate to the homonymy of histoire (1994): entangling both art and science,
fiction and reality. Larraín’s are films which intervene into the way political histo-
ries generally represent the winners, or the leaders, or even the unacknowledged
masses, offering instead something quite unique and distinct. Moving on from
representations of the political past, the second chapter considers a presently
occurring political event, in the form of a video-diary of an imprisoned film-
maker: Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2010). Panahi’s “non-film” is an urgent
appeal for sight upon a helpless situation, an effort to confront and disrupt the
Iranian state’s decree upon his movement and vocation. However, confined to
the absurd situation of attempting to describe a film he was banned from making,
I claim that while intervening in the social situation in which he finds himself,
Panahi also produces a rich investigation into the politics of aesthetics. As he sets
about delineating the limits of his film, he tests and stretches the limits of film in
general. Larraín and Panahi’s are examples of films about politics, which are at
the same time in the process of playing an active, political role.
   By “a politics of cinema,” I play upon the difference invoked by Rancière when
he describes an aesthetics of politics (what is and is not perceivable in the social
environment) and “the politics of aesthetics” (what is political – what of novelty
appears and disrupts – in a space definable as “art”). Diverging wholly from films
with any apparent relation to politics “as we know it,” I focus instead on instanc-
es definable as political in the sense that they are opposed to delimiting the social
and propose unique explorations into novelty (in the first film) and equality (in
the second). Firstly, I consider Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008):
a biting appeal for heterogeneity in the face of Baudrillardian uniformity. Putting
Rancière’s political-aesthetics into dialogue with Thomas Elsaesser’s writing on

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“productive pathologies,” I claim that Kaufman’s consistent concern with pe-
ripheral characters (those on the fringes of mainstream society) challenges both
commonplace pathologizing, and the conviction that “there is no such thing as
the subject,” in order to claim that novelty is always possible. My final analysis
considers the concept of the author, and the critical writing emanating from the
subject. The author symbolises an unjust distribution of power – a hierarchy of
meaning which must be overturned for the empowerment of the spectator: this
is the critical stance promoted by poststructuralists. With particular attention to
Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator,4 I contemplate the possibility of a more
agonistic relationship between author and audience. Through a close analysis of
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates (2006), I consider the political potential involved in
the filmmaker’s traversing of several roles in the filmic space – at once, director,
actor, character, my claim is that Ceylan disrupts several hierarchies and in turn
invites the spectator into a dialogue of equality.
   Through each of these chapters, my aim is to reconsider the relationship be-
tween film and politics, as a vital one for the restoration of social participation,
both inside and outside the cinema. I aim to reiterate Rancière’s claims on the
politics of aesthetics in order to confuse the simplistic subordination of film to
politics, or politics to film, instead proposing a productive negotiation between
two equal sites of social engagement.




4
    Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, London-New York 2009.

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