International Center for Cultural Studies

Des peuples et des films: cinématographie(s), philosophie, politique forthcoming

2022-07-15

Des peuples et des films: cinématographie(s), philosophie, politique

Publication Date｜2022-07-25

Authors｜Alain Brossat

Press｜National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Press

ISBN｜9789865470371

Synopsis

A battle is raging today (and actually has always been raging) in the world of cinema and movie-making about the name of the people or « the people » as a term and a signifier. For some of those who make the films and watch them, the people or the peoples can only coincide with nation – the national people as the only legitimate and tangible embodiment of the people in modern societies. Nevertheless, as we watch films, all kinds of films, old films or recent, films from all arount the planet, what we feel is very different : all kinds of peoples surface and take shape there, peoples from below, plebs, underdogs, angry masses, the working class as people, revolutionary people, subalterns as people - but, as well, exotic people, unexpected, uncanny, evanescent peoples, ugly people, sublime people...
What we see is that films are not only made of individuals (characters) and society, past and present, here or elsewhere – there is always something in their watermark, if not quite explicitely, that makes that the people or the name of the people is at stake in each of them. What we see in films, if we watch them carefully, is that « the people » is not only the name of so many different things, that is social, moral, cultural, political entities, but perhaps before all a condenser of narrative intensities. Cinema, as an art and an industry, has become in modern societies the manufacture for collective narratives where the name of the people is in question, that is the object of an endless dispute. This is the battlefield made of pictures, words and sounds this book explores and tentatively marks out.