Cinema in dispute : audiovisual adventures of the political names 'worker', factory', people'

• Main Author: Ramos Martinez, Manuel
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: Goldsmiths College (University of London) 2013

Political names define the symbolic organisation of what is common and are therefore a potential site of contestation. It is with this field of possibility, and the role the moving image can play within it, that this dissertation is concerned. This thesis verifies that there is a transformative relation between the political name and the cinema. The cinema is an art with the capacity to intervene in the way we see and hear a name. On the other hand, a name operates politically from the moment it agitates a practice, in this case a certain cinema, into organising a better world. This research focuses on the audiovisual dynamism of the names ‘worker’, ‘factory’ and ‘people’ in contemporary cinemas. It is not the purpose of the argument to nostalgically maintain these old revolutionary names, rather to explore their efficacy as names-in-dispute, as names with which a present becomes something disputable. This thesis explores this dispute in the company of theorists and audiovisual artists committed to both emancipatory politics and experimentation. The philosophies of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou are of significance for this thesis since they break away from the semiotic model and its symptomatic readings in order to understand the name as a political gesture. Inspired by their affirmative politics, the analysis investigates cinematic practices troubled and stimulated by the names ‘worker’, ‘factory’, ‘people’: the work of Peter Watkins, Wang Bing, Harun Farocki, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. These are practices affected by their engagement with political names that generate audiovisual assemblages exceeding standard sociological representations. These practices do not adapt the names ‘worker’ or ‘people’ to modern times. These are inventive practices undoing simplistic dichotomies between the obsolete and the new and articulating images and sounds with which to resonate in the endless assemblage of the present.