The Cinematic Political

Film Composition as Political Theory

Michael J. Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138596177
• eBook ISBN: 9780429947322
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, Michael J. Shapiro stages a series of pedagogical encounters between political theory, represented as a compositional challenge, and cinematic texts, emphasizing how to achieve an effective research paper/essay by heeding the compositional strategies of films. The text's distinctiveness is its focus on the intermediation between two textual genres. It is aimed at providing both a conceptual introduction to the politics of aesthetics and a guide to writing strategies. In its illustrations of encounters between political theory and cinema, the book's critical edge is its emphasis on how to intervene in cinematic texts with innovative conceptual frames in ways that challenge dominant understandings of life worlds.

The Cinematic Political is designed as a teaching resource that introduces students to the relationship between film form and political thinking. With diverse illustrative investigations, the book instructs students on how to watch films with an eye toward writing a research paper in which a film (or set of films) constitutes the textual vehicle for political theorizing.

Chapter 1
Extracting Political Theory From Lars von Trier

Conceptual Interferences With His The Element of Crime

The Writing Occasion

It is often the case that to compose a political theory essay while engaging a cinematic text, one selects a political theory problem first and then decides to explore a particular film or set of films for purposes of amplification and illustration. For example, to theorize interethnic antagonisms during the Euro-America’s westward expansion, an appropriate cinematic engagement would be with John Ford’s classic westerns, from Stagecoach (1939), a pro–white settler film, to Cheyenne Autumn (1964), one quite critical of the Euro-American “ethnogenesis”¹ However, in this case the film selection came first. I was invited to choose one of von Trier’s films to make a contribution to political theory while analyzing it. Although it is usually the case that the cinematic text I select is one I have already seen, in this case I selected von Trier’s The Element of Crime sight unseen. Even though I had watched a number of von Trier’s films, I decided to let this one affect me before I determined how to frame my engagement with it. Having written about detective stories in novels and films, I was led by the synopses of von Trier’s Element to expect that the previous work I had done on detective fiction would provide some entry points for the analysis. As many have discovered, detective fiction is a promising genre to which one can turn for purposes of theorizing because detectives are among other things epistemologically oriented aesthetic subjects. As they seek to discover the agents or pattern of agency responsible for a crime, they also uncover aspects of the sociopolitical order.

Why von Trier? My hosts for the project, Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, provide an intriguing rationale. Looking at von Trier’s cinematic corpus as a whole, they

see von Trier’s films as intensifying clichés of gender, power, and politics that ironize them and may usefully press democratic and feminist theory in new directions, perhaps even releasing them from the ennui that is often associated with the practice of theory today.²

That conceptual hint provides the opening for my reading of von Trier’s The Element of Crime.

The Cinematic ClichÉ in the Element of Crime

Although here I approach von Trier’s The Element of Crime by drawing on the chapter I contributed to the Honig–Marso volume, I want to begin by heeding the conceptual gesture I quoted above, the Honig–Marso phrase that refers to the way von Trier’s films intensify the “clichés of gender, power, and politics that ironize them and may usefully press democratic and feminist theory in new directions, perhaps even releasing them from the ennui that is often associated with the practice of theory today.” Recalling my remarks in the Introduction about the critical value of resisting institutionalized modes of intelligibility, the Honig–Marso reference to the cliché encourages me to recall Gilles Deleuze’s gloss on the cliché in his reading of the canvasses of Francis Bacon and to pursue a critical intermediation between painting and cinema. Deleuze locates Bacon’s strategy in a phenomenological frame, suggesting that to understand what Bacon does in executing a painting is to presume that he does not work on a blank white surface. Rather, “everything he has in his head or around him is already on the canvass, more or less virtually before he begins his work.”³ “In order to resist the ‘psychic clichés’ and ‘figurative givens’ that have governed artistic practices, Bacon had to ‘transform’ or ‘deform’ what was always-already on the canvas.”⁴ Bacon’s own account of how that is accomplished invokes the concept of distortion: “what I want to do is to distort the thing beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of appearance.”⁵ With the word recording, Bacon provides a conceptual bridge from painting to cinema. What his canvasses show, he suggests, is the process by which something appears. Deleuze is helpful with respect to that aspect of Bacon’s painting as well. As I noted in the Introduction, in his lecture on Kant Deleuze suggests that what the Kantian revolution in philosophy turns on is a dramatic change in approaching the phenomenon of appearance. To repeat that quotation, “with Kant a radically new understanding of the notion of phenomenon emerges. Namely that the phenomenon will no longer at all be appearance.” Rather, what Kant lends to epistemology is a concern with “the conditions of what appears.”⁶ Accordingly, as is the case with interpreting Bacon’s canvasses, the analysis of cinematic texts requires a consideration of the epistemology of the image as it emerges, that is, inquiry into the conditions of possibility for its appearance. And given Deleuze’s account of Bacon’s struggles with the “psychic clichés and “figurative givens,” which are already symbolically there on his canvasses, we must also concern ourselves with the epistemic significance of cinematic clichés.

Figure 1.1 Psychiatrist with a monkey on his back. Source: Lars von Trier, The Element of Crime, Det Danske Filminstitut (1984).

In contrast to the Deleuzian account of the clichés that Bacon strove to resist on his canvases is the Honig–Marso account of von Trier’s intensification of them. Although the two strategies appear to be radically opposed, the effects are similar. Von Trier’s intensifications, like Bacon’s deformations, serve to call attention to one’s tendency to be absorbed unreflectively into common sense, into the prevailing systems of intelligibility through which one (uncritically) shares the world with others. Thus, in the opening scene of Element, where the protagonist, Fisher (Michael Elphick), is under hypnosis and being sent in a dream state back to Europe to solve a crime (while actually sitting in Egypt in the office of the psychiatrist who has hypnotized him), the psychiatrist has a monkey on his back (Figure 1.1).

The literal presence of the cliché, having a “monkey on your back” has the effect of distancing us from psychiatric practice. Instead of unreflectively accepting its protocols, we are encouraged to recognize its weight of ideational baggage. The monkey on the psychiatry’s back is what weighs him down; it stands (or, better, sits in) for an accumulation of professionally protected protocols.

The Film Narrative

Before mobilizing concepts to engage the rest of the film, I need to provide readers with a brief synopsis, one that serves as a threshold to the conceptual work on the film. At a minimum, that implies identifying protagonists. The film opens with the previously noted Fisher living in Cairo as an expatriate. He is undergoing hypnosis in order to recall his last case. The hypnosis serves as a frame with which to present Europe as a dreamscape, a Europe that ultimately serves as the film’s main protagonist. My primary theoretical move is therefore to suggest that Europe-as-dreamscape displaces the film narrative’s murder story by calling the viewer’s attention to the land- and cityscapes through which Fisher moves. At the beginning of the film, we learn that the case Fisher is undergoing hypnosis to recall is his last one, the pursuit of a killer known as the “Lotto Murderer,” who had been strangling and mutilating young girls selling lottery tickets. The Europe he encounters as he picks up the pursuit again has become dystopic. It is dark, decaying, and subject to violent policing practices. As Fisher undertakes the investigation, he employs the controversial method of his former mentor, Osborne (Esmond Knight), which is described in Osborne’s book The Element of Crime. Joined eventually in his search by a prostitute named Kim, who had allegedly been involved with the murderer (and has borne his child), Fisher takes on additional aspects of his quarry as well because Osborne’s method requires the detective to identify with the mind of the killer. As Fisher’s mind merges with that of the killer, his behavior becomes increasingly like that of his quarry.

Cinematic Cartographies

Having identified Europe as a main protagonist, a crucial step requires coordinating cinematic and historical space. Once Fisher takes leave of the psychiatrist (but actually remains in his dream state) and the scene shifts from Egypt to Europe, the film’s spatial context is foregrounded. Drawing conceptually on Tom Conley’s analysis of cinematic cartography (in which he states that a film’s first shots initiate “the spaces of the cinematic story”),⁷ I wrote in my original analysis of the film, “Two cartographic migrations shape the narrative of von Trier’s The Element of Crime.” The first migration is oneiric; it is Fisher’s dream state migration from Egypt to Europe when he begins narrating his story: “I’m a policeman. I’ve finally been called back to Europe to solve a murder case.” We can thus see von Trier’s human protagonist as an exile and border crosser whose movements inscribe the film’s double terrain, a cartographic journey of detection and an extended dystopic representation of Europe, which Fisher’s self-description reinforces at the point where he characterizes himself as “the last European.”

As the film narrative progresses and we learn that Fisher has translated his former mentor’s book into Arabic, he emerges as an aesthetic figure who bridges two domains (to translate is to “bridge” in most Northern European languages). Consequently, we have to recognize that the film’s initiating geography is not merely functional; that is, it is not there simply to provide the viewers with a route map of a protagonist’s journey. On one hand (in terms of the film narrative), Fisher’s journey follows his investigation, as he “moves” (in his dream state) from Egypt to Europe. On the other (in terms of the film’s symbolism), the two places, Egypt and Europe (specifically Germany), are historical imaginaries, where Egypt seems to stand for an anachronistic historical space. It represents the beginning of the kind of complex social and political system that receives its consummation in the contemporary European nation-state. Michel Foucault provides a conceptual intervention to characterize that historical fantasy. Quoting Nietzsche, he refers to “Egyptianism, the obstinate ‘placing of conclusions at the beginning,’ of ‘making last things first.’”⁸ The Europe with which the psychiatrist tells Fisher he is obsessed is thus a longstanding obsession, articulated as a mythic narrative in which Europe is the epitome of a progressive modernity. Jacques Derrida also provides us with a critique of that story. He treats that view of Europe as the self-centered fantasy that it is “the universal essence of humanity.” He suggests that there are other possible “headings.”⁹

As for the second cartography, which articulates the film narrative, it emerges as a geographic odyssey that follows a “tailing report” created by Fisher’s mentor, Osborne who had preceded him as the investigator on the case. The report refers to an H-shape that is supposed to show the trajectory of Harry Grey’s (the alleged “Lotto Murderer”) murders. Guided by the report, Fisher draws an H on a wall to serve as a map of the crimes, so that he can anticipate the location of the killer’s cartographic progress and prevent his next murder....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Extracting Political Theory From Lars von Trier: Conceptual Interferences With His The Element of Crime
• 2 Toward a Critical Assessment of “Now-Time”: Contrasting Hoop Dreams With Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon
• 3 Resituating Hiroshima
• 4 “The Light of Reason”
• 5 “Borderline Justice”
• 6 A Bi-City Cinematic Experience
• 7 The Phenomenology of the Cinema Experience
• Afterword: The Phenomenology of Watching and Writing
• Name Index
• Subject Index