The Politics of the Sign and Film Theory

The political events of 1968 produced a politicization of crucial sectors of western European and American film culture, evidenced in the opening of discussion surrounding the film practice of Godard, Straub and Huillet, Oshima, Makavejev, and others. Their practice was given a certain privileged status in influential film journals such as Cahiers du Cinkma and Screen. It was, in fact, proposed that filmmakers working in specified ways at the fringes of narrative conventions were building a politically significant cinema through the introduction of struggle within the production of images and sounds. Significant developments in film theory over the past decade are partly grounded in a placement-an identification-of this work as politically important. I want to review the theoretical premises for such claims. Godard himself has often proclaimed, both in film and in writing, that the matter is as simple as that: the production of images and sounds. But, of course, this simplicity is complex, for neither images nor sounds, nor their combinations, exist solely in the realm of the cinematic or the filmic.' If cinema or film is the production of images and sounds, it is only one form among many of such production. No form is socially innocent, nor are their interrelationships. No experience of them is pure, isolated from others

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Film theory · Identification (biology · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sign (mathematics · Simplicity · Sociology · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy

• Citizens of a hydropower nation

  Open Access•Austin Lord•Economic Anthropology•2016

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