nitzan lebovic - Wien - Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien

NITZAN LEBOVIC
Gastvortrag der Abteilung Kunsttheorie
BIOPOLITICAL
FILM
THE
Donnerstag, 12. Mai 2016 um 19:30 Uhr
im Sitzungssaal, Ferstel Trakt / 1. Stock
Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien
Oskar Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Wien
As a distinct strand in current cinema suggests, our political culture sees itself reflected in the dark horizon of the German 1920s-1940s: A catastrophic dystopian
view of western culture controls the narrative in David Cronenberg, Michael
Winterbottom, Michael Haneke, Alfonso Cuaron, and Roland Emmerich. All use
the sci-fi genre to question a present-past processes, the failure of democracy
and a landscape covered with concentration camps and the walking dead. Other
film-makers, like Gabriel Range or David Fincher research the mechanism of
control and power, and use biopolitical critique, including the pre-assumed state
of emergency (the murder of a president, a city in siege), in order to depict it.
As will be shown in this lecture, the Biopolitical film of our era is not about a
society without history, but rather, a society that sees itself mediated through a
historical model of a post-Holocaust catastrophe and in urgent need of a new
culture of decisionism. These conventions rely heavily, literally and metaphorically, on the problems presented by a post-Nietzschean, post-liberal critique.

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