"The Contentious Image": Jacques Rancière and the Historicity of Cinema

 
The writings of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, which consider politics and aesthetics as forms of complementary investigation, encourage us to question anew the utopian potential of film. From a technical point of view, film is one of the prime art forms of the 20th century; for Rancière, however, the automatism of filmic recording brings a project of Romanticism to fruition, namely the merging of the sensual with the intelligible. "It is the aesthetic programme of thought, art and community which was, so to speak, waiting for film, which then brought forth the term of an actual aesthetic art: an art which has been emancipated from a representative system which is tied to a hierarchical social order."

 

Rancière sees this latter order as a "division of the sensual" which establishes who can take part of the communal and who is excluded, who remains visible or invisible in a common space. Rancière also calls this order of the visible and speakable the "police". As an alternative, he proposes a policy which reveals itself in the form of discourse, in acts of subjectivization and utterance, and which thwarts the identities, functions and placements that the "police" have preordained. Against the backdrop of this tension, the conference “The Contentious Image” will attempt to discuss the "historicity of film" and the possibilities of a political film aesthetic (Drehli Robnik/Siegfried Mattl)