New Book! Film and Everyday Resistance by Marguerite La Caze

19 Dec 2024

Below is a text from a speech delivered by A/Prof Ted Nannicelli (School of Communication and Arts) at the book launch of 'Film and Everyday Resistance' by Professor Marguerite La Caze.

Film and Everyday Resistance puts cinema and philosophy into a productive dialogue in a way that shows both philosophical erudition and aesthetic sensitivity. Marguerite effortlessly engages with the thought of Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Simone de Beauvoir, W.E.B. Du Bois, Václav Havel, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard just to name a few, and shows how their ideas might illuminate a diverse group of films that depict acts of everyday resistance.

For Marguerite, everyday resistance is to be understood as essentially non-violent means by which the citizens of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, actively resist the conditions of subjugation under which they are living in the ways that they can control or that are within their grasp. Central to her understanding of everyday resistance is Václav Havel’s notion of “living within the truth” in such regimes – that is, finding a way to “live with dignity” in a way that “rehabilitates values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, and love” that run counter to and reject the moral vision of the repressive regime. Following Havel, Marguerite emphasizes “small scale work,” which I take to be committing to living within the truth by taking responsibility for and pride in the aspects of one’s day to day life one can control. And to do this in a way that refuses the despair or hopelessness that the oppressive regime would use to consolidate its control over all aspects of life.

The book offers rich, detailed analyses of a group of fascinating films, highlighting different possibilities for everyday resistance. Indeed, the concept of everyday resistance is enrichened by the examination of films made and set in a diverse group of countries, whose protagonists face rather different sets of circumstances. These include A Dry White Season (1989), which is set in apartheid South Africa, but was in fact the first Hollywood studio production to be directed by a black female filmmaker – who happened to be from Martinique; The Look of Silence (2014), a documentary that explores aftermath of the Indonesian genocide of 1965-6; Barbara (2012), set in East Germany in 1980; No (2012) about the 1988 Chilean plebiscite that ended Pinochet’s 16 year military dictatorship, A Separation (2011), produced and set in contemporary Iran, and Wadjda (2012), produced and set in contemporary Saudi Arabia.

Of the books many merits, a notable one is the balance it strikes between the explication of philosophical ideas and the close analysis of the form and style, including mise-en-scene, cinematography, and editing, of the films. It is not an easy balance to strike. It is not unheard of for philosophers to take an interest in film to the extent that it seems to allow them to neatly illustrate the ideas or concepts that are their real concern – in which case the result is usually philosophical exposition with a bit of plot summary and dialogue thrown into the mix. At the same time, it is standard practice for film scholars to “apply” the philosophy of Deleuze, Levinas, (or whoever the philosopher du jour may be) to the reading of a film –which, lo and behold, turns out to exemplify the philosophical ideas with which the scholar started.

In contrast, Marguerite looks closely and carefully at the details of these films, and in them, finds distinctive depictions of everyday resistance – instances of everyday resistance than sometimes exemplify important ideas from various moral or political philosophers, and that sometimes might seem opaque until we turn to salient ideas from moral or political philosophy that illuminate a character’s actions and their implications. It is rare for a scholar to have such an appreciation of and aptitude for the distinctive methods and norms of multiple fields. Marguerite does this with a truly impressive amount of ease – so much so that the connections seem natural. But this belies the deep knowledge of a wide variety of philosophers and cinematic traditions that is necessary to see such connections, let alone to be able to draw them in ways that seem unforced, let alone productive.

We are lucky not only to have such a book that manages this feat, but to have a colleague who can write such books. The acknowledgements section of this book gives one a bit of insight as to just how widely Marguerite casts her intellectual net. In preparing this book, she talked with and read the work of colleagues not only in philosophy and film studies, but in languages, politics, and genocide studies amongst others. The result is the sort of sophisticated interdisciplinary work that is inspiring and to which we should all aspire. Congratulations, Marguerite.

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