Non-Cinema, or The Location of Politics in Film

Abstract

Philosophy has repeatedly denied cinema in order to grant it artistic status. Adorno, for example, defined an ‘uncinematic’ element in the negation of movement in modern cinema, ‘which constitutes its artistic character’. Similarly, Lyotard defended an ‘acinema’, which rather than selecting and excluding movements through editing, accepts what is ‘fortuitous, dirty, confused, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed’. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou embraces a similar idea, by describing cinema as an ‘impure circulation’ that incorporates the other arts. Resonating with Bazin and his defence of ‘impure cinema’, that is, of cinema's interbreeding with other arts, Badiou seems to agree with him also in identifying the uncinematic as the location of the Real. This article will investigate the particular impurities of cinema that drive it beyond the specificities of the medium and into the realm of the other arts and the reality of life itself. Privileged examples will be drawn from various moments in film history and geography, starting with the analysis of two films by Jafar Panahi: This Is Not a Film (In film nist, 2011), whose anti-cinema stance in announced in its own title; and The Mirror (Aineh, 1997), another relentless exercise in self-negation. It goes on to examine Kenji Mizoguchi's deconstruction of cinematic acting in his exploration of the geidomono genre (films about theatre actors) in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangigku monogatari, 1939), and culminates in the conjuring of the physical experience of death through the systematic demolition of film genres in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012).

Abuse of Power Through the Prism of Contemporary Political Cinema

“…According to Adorno, un-cinema is the negation of movement in modern cinema which constitutes its artistic character. 10 Adorno positioned cinema as a leader of modern art, but only insofar as it rebelled against its own status as art through self-awareness of its technological origin. 11 For Lyotard, the concept of acinema is a treat of sterile moments which "gives rise to perversion and not solely to propagation".…”

“…The Annals of the American Academy ofPolitical and Social Science, Vol. 636,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] 23 R. S.Еjkerman (2007), Korupcija i vlast: uzroci, posledice i reforma, Beograd: Službeni glasnik, 126-132.…”

Sensing History. On the Uses of Medium-Specific Noise in Eastern European Found Footage Films

“…Theorists of the 1990s conceptualized the televised revolution in Romania as the "end of history," as being l'art pour l'art (Flusser 1990), a reality of the image or an example of simulacra and dissolution of history (Baudrillard 1994, 54). But recently emerged concepts, such as non-cinema (Nagib 2016;Brown 2016), allow it to understand these ruptures as "going underneath the surface," as part of a counter-aesthetics based on errors precisely to occupy an oppositional stance towards an established image regime (itself derived from a real social regime) and to reconnect the precarious images with a reality in transition. The aesthetics of non-cinema, in a post-indexical manner, considers the artifice of cinema as a passage to the material reality via medial transmissions and variations (see the interview with Lucia Nagib in the present issue of the journal).…”

“…Meta-mediumistic, materialist strategies prevail in the cinema of the digital age. The increasingly sharper, high definition image and the immersivity of 3D technologies has resulted in a hyper-realist aesthetic, but also in a revival of the decorative, pretty image (Galt 2011) or the tableau aesthetic (Pethő 2014), but contemporary cinema also developed the opposing strategy of "poor images" (Steyerl 2009), low definition (Casetti-Somaini 2013, Balsom 2017, vague/ indefinite (Beugnet 2017), non-cinematic (Nagib 2016, Brown 2016 or the socalled precarious aesthetic (Fetveit 2015). Arild Fetveit identified the cinematic retooling of originally unwanted "symptoms of wear and tear, malfunctions characteristic of specific media as deliberate expressive devices" (2013, 189) as a new aesthetics: that of the medium-specific noise.…”

2. Jafar Panahi’s Forbidden Tetralogy

“…My approach may diverge from views such as William Brown's (2016: 105), my fellow advocate of non-cinema, which he def ines as an intrinsic component of cinema brought about with crystalline clarity by digital technology. As I have explained elsewhere (Nagib 2016), my own view of non-cinema refers to works which, throughout f ilm history and geography, have overflown the boundaries of the medium in order to merge with other artforms or life itself, resulting in transformative politics. Needless to say, noncinema is utopia, for indexical as it may be, cinema is first and foremost manipulation, from the moment a camera frames and decontextualises a chunk of objective reality.…”