Foucault and Film (Part I)
Monday, February 10, 2025 to Friday, February 14, 2025
Theme week organized by Jenny Gunn, Georgia State University
Co-editor
Sara Ghazi Asadollahi
Foucault’s ‘Cinematicity’
By Jenny Gunn, Monday, February 10, 2025
Curator’s Note
“Foucault is uniquely akin to contemporary film.”
-Gilles Deleuze[i]
Despite Deleuze’s definitive claim in the above epigraph, Foucault’s impact on the theoretical study of film is comparatively modest. What we may characterize then as a sort of missed encounter in part results from the lack of direct engagement with film in Foucault’s formally published oeuvre. As the co-editors of the 2018 collection, Foucault at the Movies, Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan argue, cinema was in Foucault’s view, too new a discourse to be analyzed through either genealogical or archaeological methods.[ii] Indeed, in Foucault’s most productive years, the practice and discourse of cinema in France were equally prolific if also in the legacy of May 1968—most contentiously unsettled.[iii]But it was not for lack of interest that Foucault did not explicitly take up cinema in his writings. Like most of his generation, Foucault was an avid moviegoer […]
The Lonsdale Operator
By Jordan Chrietzberg, Tuesday, February 11, 2025
How do you read a “fog”? How does one interpret it? You could first describe it perhaps? Easy enough, provided we take Foucault figuratively, keep this fog a “fog,” render it a body, a human body, an actor named Lonsdale, side-lit, center-framed, front-facing, shot for a medium, a medium shot. […]
The HETEROTOPIA OF SAINT PETERSBURG: Film Landmark of POLITICAL CHANGE
By Xenia Leonteva, Wednesday, February 12, 2025
[…]
The types and connections of Foucault’s heterotopias that I have noted find an interesting reflection in contemporary Russian cinema – more precisely, in a series of films that trace their origins back to Soviet classics. According to Foucault, these archival “series” create events and are of particular interest to research, as they correlate with each other and generate new ideas (Maniglier 2018, 58). Thus, through the series, we can track the political changes in Russian cinema as a propagandistic tool forging audiovisual landmarks of the époques. […]
Untethering Structures of Power: Re-Examining Foucault’s Heterotopia
By Tara Heimberger, Thursday, February 13, 2025
Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us interrogates systemic inequality through the Wilson family’s confrontation with their doppelgangers, part of a group called “the Tethered.” Central to the film’s social critique is the revelation of the underground tunnels where the Tethered live – a labyrinthine, subterranean world of clinical white tile in which the Tethered mirror the lives of their surface counterparts. These tunnels are allegorical to the hidden mechanisms of oppression and societal othering which, I argue, align with Michel Foucault’s theories of power, confinement, and heterotopic space. […]
Foucault and Film (Part II)
Monday, February 17, 2025 to Friday, February 21, 2025
Theme week organized by Jenny Gunn, Georgia State University
Co-editor
Sara Ghazi Asadollahi
“My memory comes in the way of your history”: Radical remembrance in Amma Ariyan as a route to politicizing history
By SanchariDuttaChowdhury, Monday, February 17, 2025
Ray vs. Foucault on the speech of the ‘mad’ subject
By Basudhara Purkait, Tuesday, February 18, 2025
The Empty Panopticon: Surveillance and Parrhesia in Iranian Cinema
By Parsa Naji, Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Sing Sing and The Cinematic Prison
By Jeffrey W. Peterson, Thursday, February 20, 2025
Prisons of Rhythm
By Jarred Biederstaedt, Friday, February 21, 2025
Foucault News 