Contemporary societies have been termed “image conscious”. We live with mental images of our lived realities – idealistic and tragic. So while we are continually sold the media-packaged promises of a better tomorrow, we are also constantly subjected to an endless barrage of performances which reaffirm with increasing frequency the insecurities of our times. Not that we are simply docile agents who receptively follow dogmatic propaganda. As critical/creative subjects, we actively experience the world in a manner which tends to challenge the conventional order of things. While it is therefore true that “a picture can tell a thousand words”, so it is the case that “a picture can affect a thousand different emotions”. This insight is significant. Since it is impossible to separate aesthetics from our ethical and political considerations, we should not simply be content to abstract life to the orthodox realm of power politics. That is to say, since no clear separations exist between the public, private, and military spheres of life, there is a need to acknowledge that creative outputs can bring about real political change by formally challenging ones perception of the world.
While cinema has traditionally shared an intimate relationship to the problems of war and violence, glorifying in many instances certain storylines for the purposes of agenda setting, the affective dimensions of the film industry tend to be overlooked. In other words, whilst some intellectuals tend to see cinema as a media for highlighting contemporary problems or reaffirming established values, it is still relegated to a mere cultural past-time – “representative” yet fully divorced from the genuine realities of the everyday. Our intention is to challenge this position. Not only is possible to move beyond these conventional representations in order to draw out meaningful connections between cinematic politics and the logics of societies. Demonstrating how cinema can help us escape the narrow shackles of structural modes of thinking, it is possible to invite a more immanent concept of politics – what Jacques Ranciere calls a “re-partitioning of the political”, accounting for the many different ways people are influenced by aesthetic productions. As Ranciere explains:
“Aesthetics is not a discipline dealing with art and artworks, but a kind of, what I call, distribution of the sensible. I mean a way of mapping the visible, a cartography of the visible, the intelligible and also of the possible. Aesthetics was a kind of redistribution of experience, the idea that there was a sphere of experience that didn’t feed the traditional distribution, because the traditional distribution adds that people have different senses according to their position in society. Those who were destined to rule and those who were destined to be ruled didn’t have the same sensory equipment, not the same eyes and ears, not the same intelligence. Aesthetics means precisely the break with that traditional way of embodying inequality in the very constitution of the sensible world”.
Following Ranciere, we entertain here what Michael Shapiro has termed “cinematic heterotopias” – those sensory lived experiences which, profoundly shaping the political fabric of the everyday, allow us to overcome the dominant analytical models that underpin conventional ways of thinking. With this in mind, we are proud to feature as our inaugural “Film & Violence” lecture Michael Shapiro’s talk on “Post 9/11 Cinema & Art”. Not only has Shapiro’s work been at the forefront of those attempts to challenge orthodox political narratives by highlighting the shallow frailties of sovereign approaches. In doing so, his work reveals the affirmative politics of cinematic production so often neglected by conventional structural paradigms.