https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0040.11

Flisfeder, Matthew

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1/21/2016 Ideology Critique and Film Criticism in the New Media Ecologyhttp://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0040.110?view=text;rgn=mainIdeology Critique and Film Criticism in theNew Media Ecology Matthew FlisfederVolume 40, Issue 1, January 2016Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13761232.0040.110[http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13761232.0040.110] [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/]   Academic buzzwords in the humanities and social sciences, in recent years, are quiteindicative of the times. “Digital humanities;” “screen studies;” “entrepreneurship:” itseems clear that neoliberalism and the ideology of technological progress havesomething to do—much more so in our current age of austerity—with the shape,relevance, and space for critical theory. Cultural criticism in neoliberal times has shiftedaway from the critical investigation of the arts (including cinema), and has geared thestudy of culture towards business interests—the Culture Industry thesis has transformedinto “the cultural industries.” Technological transformation, though, certainly, haschanged the way films are made, and the way that we view cinema: IMAX and 3D, on theone hand, and hand-held devices and online streaming services like Netflix, on theother. We have a larger than life “cinema of attractions” on one side—a side that“massifies” the audience—and digitized personalization on the other (and here I use the“digital” to indicate, as well, the individuation of spectatorship—pseudo-individuation, ifyou like, very much keeping with Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the CultureIndustry).Though the grand spectacle of the cinema attracts “audiences,” it might be moreappropriate now—more so now than in the 1970s—to speak of the “spectator.” The post-Theory criticism of the 1990s chastised the “screen theory” version of the ambiguousspectator, preferring instead the empirical audience; and though “audience” seems todenote a “mass,” the personalization of media experience might make the spectator anappropriate unit of study (when the neoliberal “individual” has largely taken priorityover the society) in the “post-media” era. By “post-media” I refer to a media ecology thattends to blur the lines between different media. I borrow the term from Lev Manovichwho, in an unpublished paper available on his website, argues in favour of doing awaywith the critical distinctions between different media in the digital age, since it is all toooften difficult to really draw the lines in contemporary aesthetics; and I think that this isa suitable argument given that new media changes the way that we experience art,culture, and cinema. But, because of the blurring of the lines, it is my contention thatfilm criticism must all the more forcefully be tied to the critique of ideology.1/21/2016 Ideology Critique and Film Criticism in the New Media Ecologyhttp://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0040.110?view=text;rgn=mainThere is a distinction that needs to be made between the ideological analysis of cinema,and the cinematic critique of ideology. The former deals with films as ideologicalsymptoms, and the aim is to deconstruct the film text to locate the ideology presentwithin the frame. The cinematic critique of ideology, a practice engaged by critics likeSlavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson, tells not something about the ideology of the text;instead it is a practice of using the text to deal with textuality of our everyday lives—thatis, the uncovering or the revealing of ideology as part of the fabric of our everydayculture.If we want to locate a particular practical mode of operation here, we can think ofComolli and Narboni’s category ‘e’ in their well-known editorial in Cahiers du cinema,“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” The films in this category, they point out, are those whichseem to fit directly with the reigning ideology, but can be appropriated for radicalpurposes, helping to dismantle ideology from within. This includes films like The Matrix(1999) which, though they appear as typical sci-fi action thrillers, help us to grasp moreeasily the operation of everyday ideology. More recently, I would include films like DavidFincher’s Gone Girl (2014)—a film that at first glance is codified in misogynistic visualrhetoric, but which can also be appropriated to develop an apt interpretation andcritique of the media ecology of our hyperreal environment, particularly in the way thecharacters self-reflexively perform their identities for the media. The film teaches us thatreal change demands a pseudo-individuated construction of the Self for the media—particularly in social media, where the construction of a Self in the form of the publicprofile has become the very means by which we make ourselves available to the Other.This is the fabric (or fabrication) of identity in the twenty-first century, modelled on theentrepreneurial ethic of post-2008 financial crisis neoliberalism.If film criticism is going to have any relevance for the twenty-first century, it’s going tohave to commit to the raising of critical awareness of our own historicity, and the cultureof neoliberalism and austerity-finance-capital, the digital, and processes ofpersonalization that further mark gaps in the social. I draw my own inspiration fromComolli and Narboni’s editorial where, in the context of the post-May ’68 period, theysought to politicize film and film criticism directly—something that contributed toearliest formations of film studies as a distinct academic discipline. A politicized filmcriticism can be part of the congealing of the “digital humanities” and contemporary“screen studies.”Author Biography:Matthew Flisfeder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and PublicAdministration at Ryerson University. He is the author of The Symbolic, The Sublime,and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film.Hosted by Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library. For more information please contact mpub-help@umich.edu. Online ISSN forthcoming

Ideology Critique and Film Criticism in the New Media Ecology

Matthew Flisfeder

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Ideology Critique and Film Criticism in the New Media Ecology

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