Foucault News

Mark de Valk (Ed.) Screening the Tortured Body. The Cinema as Scaffold, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Inspired by Michel Foucault’s examination of state subjugation and control, this book considers post-structuralist notions of the ‘political technology of the body’ and ‘the spectacle of the scaffold’ as a means to analyse cinematic representations of politically-motivated persecution and bodily repression. Through a critique of sovereign power and its application of punishment ‘for transgressions against the state’, the collected works, herein, assess the polticised-body via a range of cinematic perspectives. Imagery, character construction and narrative devices are examined in their account of hegemonic-sanctioned torture and suppression as a means to a political outcome. Screening The Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold elicits philosophical and cultural accounts of the ‘retrained’ body to deliberate on a range of politicised films and filmmakers whose narratives and mise-en-scène techniques critique corporeal subjugation by authoritarian factions.

Table of contents – ebook links

Tortured Spectators: Massacred and Mucosal
MacCormack, Patricia
Pages 9-24

Torture Porn: The American Sadistic Disposition in the Post-9/11 Horror Genre
Kerner, Aaron
Pages 25-49

Discipline… But Punish!: Foucault, Agamben and Torture Porn’s Thanotopolitical Scaffold
Aldana-Reyes, Xavier
Pages 51-69

The Expectational Body: The Becoming of the Tortured Vampire Horde in Daybreakers
Bacon, Simon
Pages 71-88

An Apology for French Torturers: L’Ennemi intime (2007)
Wallenbrock, Nicole Beth
Pages 89-108

The Ideological Purpose of Torture: Artur London’s Nightmare of Reality in L’Aveu/The Confession (Costa-Gavras, 1970)
Hayward, Susan
Pages 111-132

Mr. Stone Goes to Washington: JFK 2.4
Valk, Mark
Pages 133-157

There’s No Geneva Convention Here: Torture in Three Films Set in World War II
Turim, Maureen
Pages 159-174

Modes of Silence and Resistance: Chilean Documentary and Gendered Torture
DiGiovanni, Lisa
Pages 177-206

Torture Documentaries and Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007)
Lesage, Julia
Pages 207-237

Zero Dark Thirty: A Filmmaker’s Notion
Anderson, Larra
Pages 239-263

Hypermediacy, Embodiment and Spectatorship in Brian de Palma’s
Fagan, Calvin
Pages 265-279

Enemy of the State: Framing the Political Assassin
O’Sullivan, Shane
Pages 281-317

‘She’s a Killer,’ ‘The Image of the Women of Zero Dark Thirty’
Olkowski, Dorothea
Pages 319-336