Cinematic Forms and the Assembly of Cities

This article suggests that an aesthetics of contemporary urban life builds new avenues for treating the politics of visibility. Several reasons instigate this new approach. First, art forms illustrate and train a specific way of “seeing,” a camera consciousness, that correlates with changes in the built landscape. A specific configuration, in other words, presents a relationship (an analogy) between the contemporary predominance of urban images and urban subjects that elude preexisting categories. These aesthetic departures can be illustrated by literary and cinematic “sentence-images” within the project that Jacques Rancière (2004; 2006; 2007) calls the “redistribution of the sensible.” This paper's attempt to locate this redistribution according to the appearance of “the urban” in the literature of Prabda Yoon, Wanich Charungkichanant, Siriworn Kaewkan, Parinya Phiphathphorn, and two films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, explains how Bangkok’s aesthetic landscape is produced by its material “visible” form

Aesthetics · Analogy · Archaeology · Art · Consciousness · Downtown · Epistemology · Geography · Inscribed figure · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sentence · Sociology · Visibility · History · Law · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Urban Planning and Governance