Review: Contemporary Political Cinema, by Matthew Holtmeier

Abstract

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama pronounced the end of history, arguing that the dissolution of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the terminus of political transformation with “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”1 Although roundly critiqued as an idealistic neo-evangelism of free-market capitalism, Fukuyama’s declaration did underline a significant shift in world politics, namely the seeming exhaustion of the grand narratives of revolution that had up to that point driven the twentieth century and the concomitant consolidation of neoliberalism as the dominant world-system. Matthew Holtmeier’s Contemporary Political Cinema picks up at precisely this historical juncture, examining films from the 1990s to the 2010s made in the wake of the decline of the “grand gestures of political cinema” (1). A delicately theoretical book, informed but not dominated by Gilles Deleuze, Contemporary Political Cinema explores the new transnational forms of political and cinematic subjectivity that emerge from the conditions of globalization and neoliberalism.Holtmeier approaches this question through the lens of world cinema for several reasons. Such a framework is dictated, in part, by the changes in film production engendered by the transformations of the world-system. Holtmeier focuses primarily on the festival film, a mode of film practice that is fundamentally transnational in as much as such films are produced, distributed, and exhibited within global art cinema networks and created with international audiences in mind. While this context has arguably been a constituent feature of political cinema since the emergence of various postwar festival circuits, Holtmeier rightly claims that such networks have become increasingly globalized in concert with the development of telecommunications infrastructures to create a more fully transnational, quasi-commercial networked sphere of production and reception. At the same time, this global approach is also necessitated by the new political sensibilities that these films articulate. More than simply passive reflections of the conditions of globalization, Holtmeier argues that the political subjectivities expressed in these films reflect a transnational imagination distinct from the conventional logics of the nation-state. The book thus poses a reciprocal relationship between cinema and politics, where as “cinematic expression shifts to document contemporary politics…the films themselves produce new forms of political thought” (2).The global framework of Contemporary Political Cinema is one of the reasons why the book is such a welcome contribution to the current renewed interest in political cinema. Centering films from regions that have historically been marginalized in favor of a largely Eurocentric viewpoint, Holtmeier’s approach goes beyond engaging the conditions of globalization to make a compelling intervention into the way we think about the geographies of political film practice. At the same time, the book does much to move forward what is often a backward-looking field. Rather than looking at the long 1960s, a period habitually seen as the height and limit of political filmmaking, Holtmeier takes on the decidedly more challenging project of teasing out the political potential of world cinema in an era characterized by the absence of what philosopher Alain Badiou calls objective, historical agents, that is, the cohesive sense of a people traditionally understood as the engine of transformative politics.2 Instead of lamenting this loss or looking for ways to recover a unified political consciousness, Holtmeier argues for new possibilities for collectivity that coalesce from within this fragmented state.Holtmeier takes his cues from cybernetic theory, Gilbert Simondon’s work on individuation, and Deleuze’s concept of minor literature as he examines the various political subjectivities that contemporary cinema mobilizes to oppose the repressive majoritarian discourses of religion and ethno-nationalism and neoliberal global capitalism. This opposition operates not via the “classical form” (9) of a unified people or coherent subject, but through the production of more complex subjectivities that are at once fragmented and networked by the transnational flows of economic and cultural globalization and the multifaceted “proliferation of desires, identities, and collective affiliations” (49) that such flows engender. These assemblages remain heterogeneous, but this does not prohibit the “collective enunciation” of resistance and, in fact, opens the space for new or heretofore marginalized figures to articulate political subjectivity (20). In Holtmeier’s words, “the proliferation of identities, subjects, and ways of being in the world that are not immediately compatible with a particular faction or ideology” can nonetheless “be united by something they find intolerable” (25).Holtmeier frames this creation of new political subjects as a biopolitical act. Significantly, his analysis isn’t just interested in the negative conception of biopower as a disciplinary technique. This is certainly present in the films he discusses through the ways they render visible the intersections of local and global biopolitical control and expose “the conflict between existential experiences of characters and attempts to regulate populations for political, religious, or economic agendas” (24). In addition, however, Holtmeier posits a productive sense of biopower drawn from Hardt and Negri’s idea of the multitude, whereby confronting this negative biopower prompts characters to formulate alternative political subjectivities in opposition to it. For Holtmeier, this “recognition of the intolerable in films is a way of mobilizing biopolitical production in order to postulate a future-oriented politics based not on revolution, but the creation of a people” (27). Contemporary Political Cinema thus proposes what Holtmeier defines as a “processual politics,” whereby films depict and prompt “acts of transformation rather than providing blueprints for a particular political future” (3).The formation of new political subjectivities that Holtmeier explores is a specifically cinematic endeavor. Holtmeier concedes that while globalization’s simultaneous fragmentation and networking of subjectivities may not be “an operable theory for international relations” (20), it is something that can be uniquely expressed through film form. Holtmeier examines films that employ nonclassical formal techniques and reads them as manifestations of this fragmented condition, both for characters in the film and for the audience through the disjunctive spectatorial experience they create. Moreover, these aesthetics combine with a “banal, seemingly disordered realism” that stresses daily life rather than “grand objectives” (7) to encourage spectatorial identification. As such, Holtmeier postulates that this political project extends beyond the text; through these temporal and aesthetics strategies, such films engender a “pro-filmic futurity,” one where “viewers see these films and are affected by seeing the intolerable alongside characters with whom they identify or about whom they care,” thus “potentially draw[ing] their viewers into the biopolitical production being depicted on screen” as a kind of “mutual becoming-political” (27).After an impressively lucid introduction that skillfully lays out the complex historical and theoretical nuances of the argument, Contemporary Political Cinema takes up a series of case studies that combine production history with detailed close reading. The body of the book is loosely divided into three overlapping sections, each one focusing on a specific concatenation of global and local forces that generate political subjects: Islamic identity, censorship, and precarious labor. The first three chapters take up films from France, Algeria, Mali, and Iran to explore the role of Islamic identity in shaping political subjectivity. Chapter One develops the historical transition from a dialectical to a networked view of politics. Turning to two historical films about the Algerian revolution, this first chapter compares Battle of Algiers (1966, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo) and Outside the Law (2010, directed by Rachid Bouchareb). Holtmeier illustrates how the contemporary film, which revisits this moment of anticolonial struggle, critiques the classical film’s presentation of a singular political vision articulated through the collective action of a coherent, unified people against an identifiable enemy.Chapter Two transitions to contemporaneous events and focuses on Bab El-Oued City (1994, directed by Merzak Allouache) and Timbuktu (2014, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako). Here, Holtmeier explores how political extremism, in the form of military dictatorship and Islamic fundamentalism, attempts to discipline and unify a population and how such oppressive regimes stimulate oppositional subjectivities. Building on the critique established in Chapter One, this chapter examines how the global flows of people and information disrupt any attempt to forcefully cohere a sense of the people. However, it also departs from the revolutionary political framework through which Holtmeier reads Battle of Algiers and Outside the Law, arguing that the production of political subjectivities in Bab El-Oued City and Timbuktu is not about dialectical transformation. Rather, by centering diverse ideologies and fragmented subjectivities, these films present this production as “a facet of contemporary experience that conflicts with the everyday life of heterogeneous publics” (60). In this vein, the inconclusive endings of both films gesture toward a more open-ended sense of futurity, which underscores the becoming-political that is characteristic of the kind of political cinema Holtmeier theorizes.Chapter Three brings in questions of censorship as it examines how the Iranian government enforces various production restrictions as part of its effort to form and control a unified national and religious body. In what is perhaps the most sophisticated and original chapter in the book, Holtmeier provides close readings of two films by the Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi: Half Moon (2006) and No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009). Focusing on the relationship between sound, movement, and temporality, this chapter compellingly explores the ways by which these films indicate how ethnic subjects are subjugated and disciplined by the biopolitical regimes of the theocratic state. Moreover, Holtmeier argues, they simultaneously fragment this idea of a singular Iranian national subject, despite being unable to explicitly represent any such challenge.Similarly, Chapter Four considers the impact of state censorship, but it shifts the focus away from religious fundamentalism to take up issues of precarity, exploring the effects of Chinese neoliberal economic reform in several films by the Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke. Here, Holtmeier situates his analysis within the broader trend in Chinese cinema that saw Sixth Generation filmmakers use their independent/underground status to critique state authority through films that explored the experiences of those marginalized and disaffected by the nation’s new economic priorities. Holtmeier expands the discussion of Jia’s art cinema film style and pre-hodological narratives to encompass the black market circulation of his banned films. To this end, he argues that despite echoing the film-events of Third Cinema, Jia’s films promote witnessing rather than revolutionary action as a political response to the intolerable inequalities of rapid urbanization and marketization. Significantly, Holtmeier maintains that this political agenda carries over into films made after Jia resumed production within the state-run studio system such that Jia’s return to state-sponsored filmmaking should not be understood as “selling out” for economic profit but as “selling out to secure better access to the audiences that might be politically affected by his films” (128).The book concludes with a chapter focused on what Holtmeier calls “Contemporary American Realist Cinema,” a new aesthetic that emerges around the 2008 economic crisis to counter Hollywood’s familiar affirmation of conservative platitudes about hard work and success. Developing the previous chapter’s discussion of neoliberal precarity, this chapter counterposes the classical narrative structures of The Pursuit of Happyness (2006, directed by Gabriele Muccino) with the Sisyphean temporal and narrative form of Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007) to at once expose the bankruptcy of the new myths of the American Dream that emerge within neoliberalism and articulate the new political subjectivities that take shape in response to these intolerable conditions.As in the previous chapters, this new political subjectivity does not take the form of a coherent oppositional subject that leads to dialectical transformation, but for Holtmeier, it does contain a potential for political mobilization. Across all the films that Holtmeier discusses, the characters do act in response to something intolerable, and although their individual conditions might vary, they are united by a shared experience of dispossession bought on by the concatenation of colonial, racial, religious, and economic ideologies exacerbated by the precariousness endemic to neoliberal globalization. In this way, Holtmeier argues that contemporary political cinema carries a disruptive potential as it “lays the ground for a cinematic Multitude to emerge” (57). Moreover, by centering everyday experience and nonclassical formal techniques, such films encourage the audience to see themselves in relation to the characters and events represented; they ask the viewer to similarly “see deeply, to see cliché in order to see through cliché, and consider the precarity that pervades the contemporary world” (37). Through these structures of representation and identification, the films potentially interpolate the viewer in this “processual politics” to facilitate a communal politicization that extends beyond the screen. This is not a revolutionary political cinema, but it does gesture toward an immanent crisis in the structures of globalization. And it is thus an important framework for theorizing contemporary cine-politics.