Utopia and Reality. Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
This book is the first major study on utopias in nonfiction film. Since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia more than 500 years ago, countless books have been written which describe a better world. But in film, positive utopias seem to be nonexistent. So far, research has focused almost exclusively on dystopias, since positive outlooks seem to run contrary to the media’s requirement. Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new approach; starting from the insight that literary utopias are first and foremost meant as a reaction to the ills of the present and not as entertaining stories, it looks at documentary and propaganda films, an area which so far has been completely ignored by research. Combining insights from documentary research and utopian studies, a vast and very diverse corpus of films is analysed. Among them are Zionist propaganda films, cinematic city utopias, socialist films of the future as well as web videos produced by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS.
Some thoughts on the utopian film
Science Fiction Film & Television, 2017
In film, the positive utopia-the eutopia-is basically non-existent. There is a wide agreement among scholars that a typical eutopia lacks some very basic elements of a typical narrative film: it neither features a conflict that drives the plot forward nor real characters with individual traits-both of which are required by feature films in the classical Hollywood tradition. This article argues that there are areas beyond Hollywood mainstream movies that are much better suited for filmic utopias. After all, the literary utopia is characterised by its hybrid nature; it is a blend between narrative and philosophic dialogue. In the classic utopia, the fictional story only serves as a frame for the detailed description of the utopian state. The primary goal of this draft is not an exact implementation, but rather a reminder that alternatives can be conceived. Utopias in this sense are much more tightly bound to a specific historical reality; therefore, non-fiction films are much better suited for utopias. The article gives a theoretical sketch of how utopias and documentaries fit together and analyses Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist: Addendum as an exemplary utopian non-fiction film.
The Visualisation of Utopia in Recent Science Fiction Film
Colloquy 14
Utopia can be conceived as a possibility a space within language, a set of principles, or the product of technological development but it cannot be separated from questions of place, or more accurately, questions of "no place." 1 In between the theoretically imaginable utopia and its realisation in a particular time and place, there is a space of critique, which is exploited in anti-Utopian and critical dystopian narratives. 2 In Science Fiction narratives of this kind, technology is responsible for the transformation of the utopian impulse into a set of principles that are precisely stated and rigidly enforced. The critique focuses on the impossibility of any systematic realisation of a eutopia, where the positive qualities of freedom, individualism and creativity are nurtured, due to the reductive force of instrumental reason. The films Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks, 2002), and Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (Columbia, 1997), both examine utopian claims through speculation on the possible future use of current technologies, the tools of crime investigation and the genome project respectively. However, examining the plot does not attend sufficiently to the particular properties of film and how it, as a medium, constructs utopia as a place. This article aims to address this issue by examining how technologically derived images of utopia are realised in the visual space of film, that is, on the level of the mise en scène. These images are often dystopic but the distinction between dystopia and eutopia is not crucial to the argument because the aim is not to return utopianism to its place at the vanguard of progressive politics nor is it to reject utopianism on the basis that it is unrealisable but rather to examine how technology and utopianism can combine in the visual language of film. 3 The issue examined here is how utopia is conceived according to the specific features of the medium rather than to present an overarching narrative judgement as to the value of utopian principles. In Gattaca, the utopianism of a genetically determined future is reproduced in the mise en scène as a set of aesthetic principles whereas in Minority Report the utopian technology itself resembles the apparatus of film. This involves two quite different approaches to the visualisation of utopia: 4 in Gattaca, utopia is embodied in a society in which there can be "no other place," realised through the subtraction or reduction of visual difference; in Minority Report, utopia is an expression of a panoptic regime that can incorporate all visual and cultural difference such that the visible is "every place."
Utopia & Dystopia on the Screen
Dreams of an ideal society called utopia and its negative counterpart dystopia have been fascinating topics for the literary imagination and have also found their way to the screen. This chapter offers a framework for understanding this genre and will analyse several dystopian movies (focusing on adaptations of literary works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and A Clockwork Orange, but not excluding original movies, such as Equilibrium). Special emphasis will be laid on the recent interest in dystopian themes. Originally published in Dorottya Jászay and Andrea Velich (eds) Film and Culture, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2016, 30-43 https://edit.elte.hu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10831/30209/FSA.Film%20and%20Culture.Angol-Amerikai%20Int%C3%A9zet.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
Cinema of the Not-Yet: The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia
Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, I argue that cinema is by its nature heterotopic: it creates worlds that are other than the ‘real world’ but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. The landscapes and people portrayed in film are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers’ relationship to the real objects denoted or signified by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes or fails to mobilize this affective charge to draw out its critical utopian potentials. I examine four films from the 1970s—Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Stalker—as examples of richly heterotopic films that elicited utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences, and I discuss some ways in which American environmentalists, British Pagans, Europe’s ‘generation of ’68’, and Soviet citizens worked with these affects to imagine change in their respective societies.
Utopia, Dystopia and the Global Order of the Image, Neagu (ed).pdf
Foreword Imagination dead, imagine! (Samuel Beckett, 1965) Taking utopia and dystopia to be the defining sensibilities of global times, in the proposed volume we seek to explore the structures of the global imagination from a perspective informed by comparative poetics and global theory. As expressions of the social imaginary, utopia and dystopia have galvanized the spirit of each age, firing the imagination of writers, historians, philosophers, political thinkers. Since Aristotle’s Republic through Thomas More’s Utopia to the post-apocalyptic trends of the global times, utopian/dystopian thinking has constantly testified to the propensity of the human mind to conjure up ideal or dark visions of the future. Beyond this disposition of the mind toward envisioning societies of the future, utopia/dystopia foregrounds itself as a ‘structure in waiting’, a’space of the possibles’ reflective of the ethos of a certain community at a given time, illustrative of its guiding beliefs, ideals and, above all, of its fears, i.e. what Ana-Karina Schneider, in her systemic approach to 9/11 as a generic and periodical marker, terms a “structure of feeling.” Profuse and prolific, capable of great versatility, utopia is as protean and heterogeneous as the variegated mediums in which it has manifested itself so far: fiction, film, TV series, comics, computer games, and creative writing blogs. Suffice it to look at utopian/dystopian cinematic representations alone to note that, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to The Wachowschi’s Brothers’ Matrix (1999), running through the visual imagination is a strain of millennialism, the morphological traits of which are identifiable in the various religious utopias, the ecology utopias, political utopias, economic utopias, feminist utopias, indeed the science and technology utopias engendered by the literary imaginary from early modernity to hypermodernity. Observing this at work with a keen eye for confluence and convergence, Corin Braga and Sämuel Ludwig provide contemporary insights into original sites of utopia, as the imagined and intentional lieux de mémorire foregrounded by canonical literary texts. In “Utopia: between Eutopia and Outopia,” Corin Braga revisits Thomas More’s Utopia, deconstructing its dual modal structure, standing “between the possible and the impossible,” between eutopia and outopia with a view to appraising its twofold, metadiscursive levels of representation. Rethinking William James’s theory of truth, Sämuel Ludwig sheds new light on the utopology-dystopology equation streaming through America determinism, in so doing, tracing anew the cultural filiation underpinning the American realist tradition. But whereas the patterns of continuity are ostensibly more likely, congenial and evident, the elements of incongruity and/or change particularizing the utopian/dystopian thinking and sensibility in global times are perhaps less distinct hence at least equally worth investigating. And it is the turns and twists of this ‘brave new world ageism’ that the present volume, among other, sets out to explore, the ‘new directions from old’ , its new departures under the transformative power of the global condition. Typically, globalization is construed as the cultural logic of processes of standardisation, to many, synonymous with ’Americanisation’. In the present volume, we take issue with this thesis, in the attempt to make the case for a cognitive rather than culture-specific model of global theory, one that views knowledge structures as significantly more consequential and reflective of global anxieties than the cultural patterns to which they give rise. Working in the medium of literature, culture history, film and television, we aim at identifying a set of dominants constitutive of the global ‘order of imagination’, wherein ‘order’ is understood in the Durandian acceptation of the term, i.e. as ’regime of the image’. For while it is beyond the scope of our enquiry here to embark upon in-depth analyses of the topoï and tropoï of the utopian/dystopian imaginary, we do hope to shed light on some of the dominant motifs resurfacing in global cultural production. ‘Liaising’ between the post-apocalyptic horizon pre-/9/11 and the posthumanist dimensions of post/9/11 fiction, Ana-Maria Schwab delves into the Manhattan dystopia of the by now E.L. Doctorow classic The Waterworks (1994), engaging a close reading of Doctorow’s dystopian future structured as a recurrent past. One of the central tenets of the present investigation is that dystopian projections, in general and apocalyptic trends, in particular, form an integral part of global sensibility, with catastrophe looming large on the horizon of expectation of globality and dystopia as a dominant cognitive paradigm. Drawing inevitably on the utopian repertoire, the anti-utopia, particularly in its global guise, of posthumanist allegory and digital catastrophe, postapocalysm, as I argue, becomes a natural dis/order of the world. “Post-Apocalypse Now: Globalism, Posthumanism, and the ‘Imagination of Disaster’” if anything attempts to uncover what I envisage as a shift in the dystopian imaginarium, from an epistemological to an ontological regime. In her examination of the Asian cyborg as the universal, posthuman subject, Amelia Precup takes stock of this particular metamorphosis into a ‘cyborg-topian future’ as projected in Karen Tei Yamashita’s performance prose “Anime Wong” (2014). The dystopian ontologies of globalism, culminating in the doctrines and aesthetics of posthumanism, could not be accounted for in absence of a return to Enlightenment, symbolic thinking and radical critique; or else, the passage from humanism and its protocapitalist ethics to posthumanist poetics and corporate capitalism goes through postmodern allegory the province of David Howard’s original and unsettling collage, “Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the 21st Century.” In a seminal work devoted to the archeologies of utopian fiction, Northrop Frye placed utopia at the centre of the fictional experience, recalling to mind the ultimately inherently utopian structure of all literary works, all configuring to a certain extent a’ no-place’ to be inhabited and populated by the receiving subject. In what follows, we sought to build on the Durandian metaphor toward an enhanced and, as we hope, topical exploration of the limits and limitations of the global imagination. Adriana Neagu Cluj, 25 October 2016
Utopias in conflict: History, political discourse and advertising
Critical Discourse Studies, 2016
The concepts of 'utopia' and 'ideology' were key elements in political debate in the 20 th century but they seem to have virtually disappeared from the scene since then. After the collapse of communism, the media and intellectuals announced the demise of utopia, coinciding with the end of history and ideology. The use of the terms largely remains pejorative in common parlance or conceptually ambiguous in the scholarship. Despite their inherent ambiguity, this paper reflects on the role played by utopias, hope and political imagination in the mobilization of people. The use of utopian rhetoric by social movements and advertising demonstrates that utopia still enjoys a robust life. Three recent examples of commercials are analyzed in order to understand how utopias may be used in many ways and how their reception depends on their accommodation within broader cultural and political narratives.