Between Montage and Gesture: Ethics, Politics and Cinema in Giorgio Agamben and Francis Alÿs

Abstract

The political valences of cinema have long been a topic of both artistic and philosophical enquiry. This thesis stages a dialogue between one artistic work and one body of philosophical work that, taken together, provoke critical reflection on the ethical and political significance of cinema in the context of contemporary global political conditions. The artistic work is Mexico-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’s digital video work REEL-UNREEL (2011). The philosophical body of work is Giorgio Agamben’s texts on the politics of cinema, written during the first half of the 1990s, as well as a body of transdisciplinary scholarly literature engaging specifically with those writings that has emerged in the last few years. REEL-UNREEL can be seen as an encounter between cinema—as a historically-shaped technological apparatus, and as something like a sociocultural paradigm—and the political ramifications of modes of mediating situations of geopolitical crisis. Agamben’s cinema texts excavate the significance for conceiving political and ethical life immanent to cinema. They do so through a philosophical elaboration of two main tropes, made separately but along comparable conceptual lines: montage—a theory of cinematic images—and gesture—a theory of cinema’s treatment of the body. My task in staging an encounter between these two bodies of work is twofold. First, I frame REEL-UNREEL’s engagement with Afghanistan’s political situation through the theoretical framework of Agamben’s cinema texts. This involves situating the latter within the broader scope of the philosopher’s politico-philosophical work on biopolitics and the society of the spectacle, as well as contextualising their ethical and political claims in the terms of Agamben’s notion of potentiality. Second, I show how analysing REEL-UNREEL in this way calls for a way of reading Agamben’s separate texts on montage and gesture together, since the video work provokes thinking about the ways in which these two concepts can become inseparable in cinema. Carrying out this twofold task shows how, through Agamben’s writings, REEL-UNREEL can be seen as manifesting a cinematic ethics in the specific context of contemporary political conditions. In doing so, it simultaneously calls for an intensification and a reconfiguration of the main conceptual tropes of Agamben’s texts on cinema.