Reinventions of Life: The Cinematic Avant-Gardes in the Age of Spectacle and Biopower

Berger, Kenneth

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Overview

Year:: 2019
Contributor:: Berger, Kenneth (creator); Rosen, Philip (Advisor); Copjec, Joan (Reader); Rooney, Ellen (Reader); Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne (Reader); Brown University. Department of Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Biopolitics; Aesthetics; Spectacle; Critique; Life; Refusal; Avant-Garde; Cinema
Extent:: 7, 294 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/zpcg-n293

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Abstract:: This dissertation reevaluates the history and legacies of the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Focusing on postwar cinema, I reconsider one of the avant-garde’s central preoccupations – the relationship between art and life – which I reexamine from the vantage point of contemporary retheorizations of life as a social and political category. Challenging the longstanding view that the avant-garde project was a failed utopian attempt to reunify art and life, my dissertation instead proposes that the avant-gardes sought to invent modes of existence capable of continuously evading and contesting power’s intensifying hold on life. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s late writing, contemporary Italian Marxism, Frankfurt School social theory, and psychoanalysis, I reassess this totalizing form of modern power, which I argue is increasingly dependent in the postwar period on a new and pervasive apparatus of spectacle and mass communication. Against this background, I examine specific instances of politically oriented avant-garde cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, centering my analysis on Situationist film in France, Latin American Third Cinema, and British counter-cinema. While attending closely to the distinct political concerns that arise in each case – spectacle and the commodity-image, neocolonialism and state violence, sexual difference and domestic labor – my dissertation contends that these cinematic avant-gardes are linked by two fundamental strategies: refusal and critique. First, highlighting the “refusal of work” that arises in 1960s Italian workerist movements, I argue for a corresponding “refusal of communication” in the activities of the avant-gardes, one aimed at disrupting the pacifying function of cinematic spectacle. Second, I assert that these avant-gardes develop a strategy of “permanent critique,” a mode of continuously questioning and attempting to move beyond the limits imposed on both cinema and existence itself. Emphasizing the crucial and interrelated role that refusal and critique thus play in this context, my dissertation proposes that the avant-garde project, rather than a failed utopian enterprise, remains an essential reference point in today’s ongoing efforts to confront and escape the forces that have increasingly circumscribed life in the last century.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019

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Rights: In Copyright
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Citation

Berger, Kenneth, "Reinventions of Life: The Cinematic Avant-Gardes in the Age of Spectacle and Biopower" (2019). Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/zpcg-n293

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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department.
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