Mike Shapiro Day 3

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Mike Shapiro taught a course entitled GEOPOLITICS IN CINEMA. This class attempts a rethinking of the planetary impact of media such as cinema as a challenge to political thought.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

There are several texts I recommend you visit as we consider the Geopolitics of Cinema:
Atlas of Emotion by Giuliana Bruno
Stupendous Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome by John David Rhodes
"Is There a Deleuzian Aesthetics" by Jacques Ranciere (in Qui Parle journal)

Kant was able to make the experience of art an epistemological phenomenon; we have to think about what arts are, here in this class they are agglomerations of the senses. We must situate Deleuze's aesthetic.... The most expressive artist for Heidegger was Holderlin. Catastrophe, from the Greek meaning turning-down.

Deleuze is about the disjunction, his logic of sense rather than essence. He uses the power of the false (see Cinema II)

There is homology between the city and the arts because both are a bundling of sensation. There is a very serviceable distinction made in epistemology between subject matter and object matter, that to which theory is applied. Fascism is an attempt to situate the subject in an historical moment so as to minimize the multiplicity....

If you want to shit like an elephant you can't eat like a bird.

Check-out Kittler's "The City Is a Medium"

A city can be understood as a series of flows - what are the coercive elements that effect those flows? In terms of the city, there is the crisis of attention (see Kaja Silverman's The Threshold of the Visible World)


Here is a clip from Bread and Roses (2000) by Ken Loach

There are these contentious "Contact Zones" within urban environments.

What could be more micropolitical than the policing of sexuality in public places?

Forensics vs. Metis - what kinds of knowledge are deployed with these? Odysseus had metis, cunning skill.



The main offender in Falling Down just wants to go home, the cop doesn't want to go home. L.A. here is a hotbed of discursive walls, no one understands anyone else, like Simone's (2007) comment about Dovala, Cameroon (For the City Yet to Come): Hyperstimulating signs of the city: seducing you or warning you of fines to be imposed.

Every Thursday is peasoup day in Sweden.

Why is the only thing that makes D-Fens special "that little girl"?

There's the narrative structure, the plot, and then there is the mise-en-scene, the content.

Deleuze & Guattari discuss smooth vs. striated spaces; these piers keep coming up - they're on smooth space vs. the highly-striated space of L.A.

He is no longer visible, economically, emotionally - there's nowhere else for him to go. The "draw" at the end, where he in effect commits suicide says something about agency. Suicide is the ultimate act of self-action, nobody is going to take that away from you.

See Svend Ranulf's Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology

For next class we will discuss Milan Kundera's Ignorance.