materiali » Dirty Pretty Things
To get what we have lost
A discussion with Michael J. Shapiro on cinema and politics
It seems to me that the world we live is plagued by a desire for essentialism to navigate the Huntington-like map of the Clash of Cultures. We are in fact facing a crisis of tolerance based on the assumption that there is a single center of perception. What if cinema, or quoting Michael J. Shapiro, ‘a critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema’ can challenge this assumption?
I met with Michael J. Shapiro, professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, shortly after his latest work ‘Cinematic Geopolitics’ had been released and published by Routledge. In this book one of Americas’ leading theorists of culture and politics continues on his journey alongside the weave involving cinema and politics. Shapiro has been writing and teaching on issues of war, body and culture for a long time, creating pedagogical work aimed at encouraging critical thinking. Now more than ever, in the post -9/11 world we live, he believes that films and cinema venues can offer a counter space to the contemporary ‘violent cartographies’ within and between states. Influenced by Gille Deleuze’s philosophical reading of cinema and Jacques Ranciere’s politics of aesthetics, Shapiro maintains that cinema is a decentering mode of creation and perception that has the capacity to depart from the control exercised by individual perception and embodiment. I asked him about the genealogy of his cinematic thought and ultimately the political implications of his approach.
Rinelli - Your early work in Political Science covered conventional areas of the discipline and probably someone today would still describe you as an important International Relations scholar.
Shapiro - Actually even before that, I was best known for doing decision theory, quantitative models of decision theory, legislative behavior, voting behavior. I published in those areas. Before I did stuff that has to do with international politics or foreign policy analysis, I was known much more for decision theory and political psychology – in particular cognitive dynamics which I subsequently began to apply to foreign policy and national decision making. Eventually, as I moved more toward a linguistic or discourse idiom, my decision modeling became discursive rather than cognitive in orientation.
Rinelli - So, what was the reaction of the audience at conventional political science venues when you started to present your work combining cinema and politics?
Shapiro - Well, increasingly my work is relatively unknown and unintelligible to social scientists and much more welcomed by humanities people. The typical reaction I get from social scientists is ‘What is your method? Because social scientists tend to be method-obsessed. Indeed, my most recent statement about “method” in my forthcoming book is in a section I have entitled “ Poesis as method” – a dramatic departure from my decision theory days!
Rinelli - How did you begin to reflect upon the relation between cinema and geo/bio-politics?
Shapiro - It took quite a while. I have always liked films but I was not really analyzing them initially. The more I got into what we generally call textual analysis, the more I became aware that film is an interesting and complicated text, because it deals not only with words but also with images, and, moreover, has interesting compositional effects. Consequently when I began to think about composition as an issue with respect to text and form, cinema became interesting to me as a political analytic.
Rinelli - From the moment you have turned your attention to cinema, have you started to write ‘cinematically’?
Shapiro - Often yes. In my 1999 book Cinematic Political Thought I make the argument, inspired in part by Walter Benjamin, that “literary montage” is my method of writing. My texts think with juxtaposition rather than by explicit argumentation.
Rinelli - In Cinematic Political Thought you mention that you try to ‘articulate critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema3’. Is this in any way related to Foucault’s concept of critique4 as response to the State’s truth weapon? Or more in general what is the role of cinema in critical political thinking?
Shapiro - I guess most recently what cinema tends to do as Ranciere puts it is to restore what the brain evacuates. What perception tends to do is to lose information in order to produce an interest-based perspective on things. Cinema basically has de-framed zones to use Deleuze’s expression that defy the narrowing perspective of perception. So cinema basically holds the very forms that produce critique. But yes, there is also a Foucauldian critique aspect involved, inasmuch as Foucault famously noted that knowledge works for cutting rather than understanding. Film form, more than any other, works by cutting!
Rinelli - In Cinematic Geopolitics you mention Benjamin’s early comment on film’s ability to reactivate the object providing an intimacy with reality that was not available before. What did you mean by referring to that concept?
Shapiro - What I meant is that once an object is more or less embedded in a particular perspective, it dies with respect to its critical life. It is already stored and sheltered; it is already an ossified model of thinking (I think ossification is a good example; think of ossuaries where bones are stored). To reactivate the object is basically to provoke a re-thinking about the context and the meaning of the object.
Rinelli - In my reading of your work it appears to me that film venues, festivals, theatres are some of the location where the object can be reactivated.
Shapiro - Probably because those are different spaces. Victor Burgin called them cinematic heterotopias, adapting Foucault’s notion of heterotopias as spaces of otherness. The role of a space of otherness, à la Foucault, is as a space from which we can reflect on the existing spaces, on the extent to which the variety of contingent practices create the boundaries and margins for the differences among spaces. So, cinema is a space of critique especially when it is a concentrated space like a festival. There is another dimension of the contemporary spaces of cinema to which Burgin referred in his book called ‘The remembered film’5. In former times, if, for example, you wanted to see a particular Bergman film, you had to hope that it would come to a theatre near you again; nowadays with DVDs and all the other ways and forms of purchasing movies, as I say in my book, even the classroom actually can became a mini film festival where you can constantly rearticulate the films in different situations, with respect to different kind of problematics; and so, if you are doing a course on the city, a course on war, a course in public policy almost on any particular problematic, the film can be reproduced, repeated within a different context and therefore take different significance for different constituencies; and so modern technology relocates the film as an iterative phenomenon.
Rinelli - And this is true the other way around. The fact that we can watch a film in different locations several times, sometimes alone, can represent a tool of resistance as much as a hegemonic tool.
Shapiro - Yes. A very good example of this is the recent way The Battle of Algiers was watched first by people in the Pentagon in order to develop notions of how to interrogate people as opposed to the critical view that was originally intended. Then in my book I re-evoke The Battle of Algiers, as Ben Highmore does in his book on cityscapes6, to produce a more critical perspective on the relationship between France and its colonial possessions.
Rinelli - How certain cinematic techniques are politically charged? For instance, you quote Deleuze on the use of montage when he writes that ‘with the use of montage the shot would then stop to be a spatial category to become a temporal one’. What is the political implication of that statement?
Shapiro - The political implication is basically to de-privilege particular narratives, structures, stories, within which reality is authoritatively controlled. Introducing a time image in which you have a direct model rather than indirect model of time you de-privilege particular modes of understanding. But there is another dimension to that: the critical aspect of film has to do with how one wants to approach art. Deleuze, in the last pages of Cinema 2, talks about the concept of interference, in which the role of critical philosophy is to interfere with the film, not simply to reproduce it, but to sort of deflect it and re-inflect it in particular ways.
Rinelli - A propos of Cinema 2, in that book Deleuze writes extensively about the implications of the use of depth-of-field shot which ‘can fracture the illusion that space is only separated from time’. Why is this idea important for critical thinking?
Shapiro - I think it is important in all of kind of visual culture. For example, Georges Didi Huberman refers to the way a particular mark on a canvas can effectively create a “catastrophe for the figurative space.” In other words the way an artistic text can make people think is by defying their attempt to grasp one particular master code with respect to what the work can mean. Indeed, any approach that makes attempts at intelligibility work over time and never reach closure results in effective critique. Film is particularly good at that. I am thinking for example Claire Denis’s recent film l’Intrus in which you have a whole variety of juxtapositions: landscapes, faces, situations with no clear narrative structure.
Rinelli - In relation to the concept of depth of field shot, in your book Cinematic Political Thought you write about Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and the relation between the immobile camera and the thought that is not immobilized.
Shapiro - What is very interesting to me is that it is a very painterly kind of film: zooms, framing, hardly any tracking or panning shots. What I argue in my Cinematic Political Thought is that in some ways the film’s form is homologous with the structure of power and authority in the historical period that the film is about; namely, a time in which political power immobilizes the body rather than forcing it to move. That’s why I juxtapose Barry Lyndon with Hoop Dreams in which in the latter you have these young black bodies whose imperative to mobility is the only chance for an ultimate economic reprieve. That film effects its perspective with tracking and panning shots to capture the movement of their bodies.
Rinelli - And eventually they fail because they are not fast enough.
Shapiro - Yes, and interestingly as is the case with in Barry Lyndon, they fail in part because of an injury to their legs.
Rinelli - Moving towards a movie, which I personally love, Dirty Pretty Things, I am curious to know the reason why you have decided in Cinematic Geopolitics to focus on that film.
Shapiro - Lots of different reasons at different times. Originally When I was focusing on that movie, I was working on the juxtaposition of Dirty and Pretty which creates a fracture that one has to grasp, and I was dealing with Kant’s notion of the beautiful and the way in which I can use Kantian and post Kantian models of critique through the film. But there is another interesting aspect of the politics of that film - the relationship between bodies and spaces, especially the mobile bodies of people who have a unusually strong demands for attention placed on them because they have been harassed by the immigration naturalization people. Observing them, you get to see a mapping of London that is extraordinary: back alleys, the non public spaces within the Baltic hotel and so forth. Their body space demands are juxtaposed with the ease with which for example tourists can enjoy London’s venues without having to worry about the forms of surveillance, because surveillance is for their protection rather than to harass them. So the film presents juxtapositions of the kinds of bodies that enter and leave that huge metropolis. Such flows of different bodies in places like London - bodies that can be exploited because they lack legitimate presence as opposed to those with legitimacy and financial power, e.g., tourists reveal a politics of disparity. At any given time in any city like Paris London or Moscow, the population is doubled: the residents (legal and illegal) on the one hand and the tourists on the other.
Rinelli - You write that the action of Okwe and his collaborators in Dirty Pretty Things constitutes an event that Ranciere calls subjectification, meaning that they became political subjects
Shapiro - I was thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s argument that there are people that basically have no resources. However, contra Arendt, if we think of Okwe et al within Ranciere’s political imaginary, they became resourceful. Moreover, the irony is that their very invisibility (which in some ways reflects their disempowerment) becomes an asset, because they can move about in certain spaces and attract certain assumptions. For example Okwe was able to get into the pharmacy by pretending that he was a janitor because, even though he is in fact a doctor, being a black man made his appearance as a janitor fit within the dominant perceptions.
Rinelli - He fits into the role. Being a black man he is invisible. And his transformation, you write, it is possible because he makes use of ‘the cracks of the city’; so the city as a location of resistance becomes crucial.
Shapiro - Indeed, what his condition illuminates is that all cities have rhythms of various kinds, and in order to be strategic one has to engage in an effective timing, not just managing spaces but also managing time. If you look at the way they pull off the operation and harvest the kidney of Señor Juan instead of that of the intended victim, Senay, it has to do with the careful management of not only spatiality, but also temporality.
Rinelli - It seems to me that since the time of your Violent Cartographies to get here to your latest work, one of your major preoccupations has to do with the body and war. Illuminating to me was your reading of the Deer Hunter. Immediately my thought went to the thousands of American soldiers and the more than one million casualties among civilians in Iraq. How can cinema open for new possibilities for alternative worlds that go beyond national codes?
Shapiro - The one thing that people have small window on is the relationship between the war front and home front. One of the things that is least appreciated with respect to warfare is the future imperfect, the will-have-been, i.e., the extent in which the suffering produced during war will be registered well into the future for generation after generation, as the result of the traumas, the casualties, and the fractures visited upon domestic life. Films often offer a correlation between the home front and the war front. What is it, for example, that recruits those bodies and places certain kind of bodies in danger and protects other bodies. And so one of the things that becomes available with some kinds of films is the injustice that makes some bodies vulnerable and some protected
Rinelli - In the post 9/11 in which we live the world seems to be marked by a violence perpetuated in the name of identity, cultural or not; what is the role of cinema in this?
Shapiro - I think what most recent documentaries and feature films are telling us more and more is the larger context in which to locate this violence-identity relationship. Many people for example thought that a place like Abu Ghraib was a small cellblock with a few bad people inside, but then through documentaries we have started to learn that Abu Ghraib is a huge complex with thousands of people detained. We become aware of the dimension of the persecution that it involves. Cinema has begun to show that the post 9/11 world has become a global gulag rather than a world with some isolated wars in the Middle East and in Afghanistan. The gulagification of the war on terror is one of the things that cinema is making people to think about.
Rinelli - As a conclusion I would like to remember the words of Peppino Impastato, whose life and legacy of fighting Mafia, became one of my favorite Italian movie of the last years: I Cento Passi (100 Steps). In that movie, Peppino (Luigi Lo Cascio) suggests to his friend that in order to work out the problems of our society, we should teach people what is the beautiful; so that people do not accept awful things simply because they exist or because someone has found for them a justification; we should remind people what is the beautiful, to recognize and to preserve it; from there, he says, descends everything. Along this idea, in your opinion, how can we look at cinema other than aesthetically? Or better, how can we combine aesthetic and ethics along the path opened by Kant in his ‘The Critique of Judgment’ treatment of the sublime and then followed by Ranciere in his ‘Politics of Aesthetics’?
Shapiro - I would say that aesthetic judgment is intimately involved with ethical and political judgment because what aesthetics is about, à la Ranciere among others, is the reframing of bodies in relation to spaces. But the question you are raising is very interesting. If films focus not only on the bad that has happened but also the good that could have been, viewers are able to think about what has been lost because of the violence encouraged by a variety of historical forces, let’s say global capitalism or various kinds of economic predatory behaviors, I think it is important to remind people what it is that it is lost, with respect to certain ways in which now, we organize our lives. As Kant argued, judgments evoked by “the beautiful” produce a powerful reflection on the interaction of our various faculties, reason, imagination, moral, and so on. The beautiful, à la Kant, cannot be grasped with determinative judgments. We are forced to think rather than merely recognize something familiar.
Rinelli -. In the same shot I have mentioned before, Peppino brings up little things like ugly windows for instance, on which people would put then some flowers, a curtain, window-dressing you would say, and eventually accepting them passively, oblivious of what they have lost.
Shapiro - I think it is very much right, historically also. We have many contemporary arrangements, but frequently those arrangements are often the result of whole varieties of violent moments; war produces institutions, economic catastrophes produce institutions and then the radical contingency which produces those arrangements, which could have been otherwise, is all forgotten. Thus part of what cinematic juxtapositions can encourage is thinking historically in order to recover lost opportunities and ways of being. The modern city provides a good example of spaces that hide what has been lost. Its huge boulevards and spaces that were basically invented to produce an iconic support for forms of authority have destroyed and over coded the organic aspect of the city life. Among other things, the modern city, as a product of “urban planning” effectively hides a history of urban planning-as-violence.
Rinelli - If we consider the city in which we are now, Honolulu, its architecture aesthetics, each building, and the very appearance of each façade of its edifices hide histories of violence, displacement, occupation. People just accept it without questioning its aesthetics and the juxtaposition with the Hawaiian landscape.
Shapiro - All the historical forces and values that made possible the architecture (the cityscape) and its population (its ethnoscape) are tied to the history of the plantation. As a result, given the forms of exploitation that plantation life (the violent appropriation of the Hawaiian aina among other things) has involved, Hawaii does not fit comfortably within the dominant U.S. nation-building narrative of increasing freedom and equality. Here, as elsewhere (Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. mainland) indigenous cinema is rearticulating the history of spaces and bodies, using the critical capacities of cinema (something I address in my Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (Routledge, 2004) to generate a counter-history and provide political support for the re-subjectification of the indigenous body.
Honolulu, September 21, 2009
Lorenzo Rinelli teaches introductory courses in Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where is completing his Doctoral degree.
JGCinema - Jura Gentium Cinema - Cinema and Globalization