Population Crisis in Late Twentieth
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CINE-DEMOGRAPHIES CINE-DEMOGRAPHIES: POPULATION CRISIS IN LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY FILM CULTURE By JUSTIN A. SULLY, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Justin Sully, July 2011 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2011) McMaster University (English and Cultural Studies) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Cine-Demographies: Population Crisis in Late Twentieth Century Film Culture AUTHOR: Justin A. Sully, B.A. (Queen’s University), M.A. (Warwick University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Imre Szeman NUMBER OF PAGES vi, 217 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the significance of demographic discourses and epistemologies in the emergence of global film culture over the last three decades of the Twentieth Century. Adopting a materialist reading of Serge Daney’s notion of a critical cine-demography, I explore three ways in which moments of population crisis over this period can be interpreted through film. An experiment in method as much as an alternative periodizing account of late capitalist culture, I trace the evolution of a demographic imaginary through three, chronologically organized, case studies in the articulation of population crisis since the early 1970s: (1) the fear of overpopulation that reaches a frenzied pitch in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s; (2) anxiety about absolute population decline, situated in the context of Eastern Europe in the late 1990s; and (3) the emerging problem of population aging at the end of the century, centered in Western Europe, Japan and North America. In each of these cases, I identify a corresponding archive of films that are marked at the level of their formal and narrative construction by the pressure of these demographic and discursive formations. In the first chapter, I read the emergent contradictions entailed in the globalization of population discourse through the lens of popular American science fiction films of the 1970s. In second chapter, my approach is adjusted to consider the way film style of regional movement, school or single director might be interpreted in terms of its response to local demographic conditions. Here, I look in particular at the development of an aesthetic of slowness in the films of Béla Tarr and how this feature of his mature film style can be interpreted through the population crisis attributed to a state of absolute demographic decline in post-socialist Eastern European nations. In the third chapter, I take up the expanded frame of a global cinema to position the equally, if uneven global process of the contemporary crisis discourse of population aging. My concluding statements return to the broader questions of method raised in my study. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Having lived out of a suitcase for much of the time of writing this, I have come to depend upon the kindness of strangers and, so, to the countless baristas, servers, students, office-, carrel- and room-mates, to the patient secretaries, administrators and coordinators and, again, especially to the baristas: to all of you, I am sincerely grateful. For providing me a temporary institutional home during my wandering, I also want to thank the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. I have been blessed with a multitude of brilliant and beautiful collaborators, comrades and conspirators to whom I’m sure I owe much of what is worth reading in this dissertation. My thanks go in particular to: Jaya Karsemeyer, Elaine Van Der Geld, Wafaa Hasan, Michael Mikulak, Max Haiven, Alyson McCready, Dilia Narduzzi, Andrew Griffin, Nick Buffo, Scott Stoneman, Alex Diceanu, Alex Means, Lesley and Conrad Engel, Christina Godlewska, Jeff Diamanti, Brent Bellamy, Alexei Penzin, Ilya Budraitskis, Gorkem Akgoz, Asha Varadharajan, Will Straw, Antoinette Somo, Ilona Forgo-Smith, Susan Henry, Markus Heide, Nicholas Brown, Mary O’Connor. To a smaller group of people, I owe a still greater debt of gratitude for keeping me sharp and sane over the past few years. Tim Kaposy has been a constant friend, a generous listener and reader and has sagely kicked my ass out of despair more times than I can recall. Justin Armstrong is a gentle warrior and one of the most tirelessly inventive humans I’ve met; he has gifted me countless hours of wisdom about science fictions, empty places and dub. My thanks go to Andrew Pendakis, the most exhilarating interlocutor I have ever known; most of my thoughts worth keeping over the past five years have probably passed through conversation with him in one form or another. I am grateful to Sarah Blacker for much-needed conversation during the long night of an Edmonton winter, for her encouragement and her editing skills over the last leg of writing. Adrienne Batke has given me a space of love, laughter and orderly calm to dwell in over the past two years and has corrected many of these pages; I would not have made it through the end without her. For making me feel at home in theirs, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to Maria Whiteman and Joseph Szeman, Evan Mauro and Jaime Yard, and Jon and Jacqueline Karsemeyer, and Konrad and Lesley Engel. To Petra Rethmann, I owe the conviction to pursue this project; she has been a constant supporter, a dear friend and one of the rare stewards of radical politics that I have encountered in the academy. To Donald Goellnicht, I owe immense gratitude for his patient guidance and support throughout my PhD and for his meticulous corrections and comments on this dissertation. My greatest thanks go to Imre Szeman, without whose work this project would have stalled (and I likely would have starved) long ago. He is the most generous, thoughtful and committed educator I know. I cannot imagine a better supervisor and am grateful beyond words for his unflagging support of my work. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who somehow continue to take my phone calls, from however many time-zones away. Without them I would be lost. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv List of Illustrations vi Introduction: Toward a Cine-Demography of Late Capitalism 1 Sensus/Census: Demography as Political Aesthetic 8 Workers Leaving the Factory: Periodizing Cinema’s 19 Demographies The Lateness of Capitalism 24 Chapter 1: Seventies Science Fiction and the Crisis Logic of Population 39 Crowding the Scene 43 The Seventies, the Crisis and the Problem of Population 52 Projecting Demographic Apocalypse: The Omega Man 65 A Time of Monsters 78 Chapter 2: Béla Tarr and the Aesthetics of Demographic Decline 84 Slow Cinema 85 Deleuze’s Time-Image and the Persistence of Realism 93 A Biopolitical Aesthetic? 103 Really Existing Population Decline 108 Prologue: First Comes Food 116 Chapter 3: Population Aging and the Cinematic Lateness of Capital 126 Aging Populations and the Temporality of Finance Capital 136 The Cultural Study of Aging and its Contradictions 152 The Cinematic Subject of Aging 164 Conclusion 183 Bibliography 201 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1.1 Strike shootout in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1931) Fig. 1.2 Workers at the gate in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Deserter (Desertir, 1933) Fig. 1.3 World map. The World Bank. “World Development Indicators.” December 2010 Revision. Fig. 2.1 Louis Lumière, La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (1895) Fig. 2.2 King Vidor, The Crowd (1928) Fig. 2.3 Sleeping pedestrian in René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort (1925) Fig. 2.4 Walter Ruttmann, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) Fig. 2.5 Charlton Heston makes his way up a staircase of sleeping bodies in Soylent Green (1973) Fig. 2.6 The Omega Man: Lisa (Rosalind Cash) “shopping” in an abandoned Pharmacy. A faded sign on the wall reads "Planned Parenthood Supplies." Fig. 2.7 The Omega Man: Uninfected survivors as foquiste cadre. Fig. 2.8 Images of the post-apocalyptic city in The Last Man on Earth (Top) and The Omega Man (Bottom). Fig. 3.1 The whale exposed at the conclusion of The Werckmeister Harmonies Fig. 3.2 A realism of the split-second in Martin Arnold's Passage a l'acte (1993). (Mary Badham playing Jean Louise "Scout" Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird [1962]) Fig. 3.3 Prologue Fig. 3.4 Members of the cooperative, with their belongings on the road in Satantango. Fig. 4.1 Charles Swchab television advertisement. "Retirement" (October, 2010) Fig. 4.2 Machiko and Shikegi outside the retirement home in Mogari no Mori Fig. 4.3 Machiko and Shikegi enter the forrest in Mogari no Mori Fig. 4.4 Free indirect subjectivity in Mogari no Mori Fig. 4.5 (Top) Walt (Clint Eastwood) alone with his illness. (Bottom) Walt is introduced to his neighbours by Sue (Ahney Her). Fig. 4.6 Exits and entrances: (Top) Elderly mourners leave a funeral at the Kawalski home in Gran Torino, while next door (Bottom) the Hmong community arrives to celebrate the birth of a child. Fig. 5.1 Gran Torino: Walt as Sacrifice. vi PhD Thesis – JA Sully– McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies Introduction Toward a Cinematic Demography of Late Capitalism In a 1988 contribution to Libération, Serge Daney proposed that “the science that ought to be applied to cinema today is no longer psychoanalysis or semiotics but the study of movie-populations.” “What’s needed,” Daney claimed, “is a demography of film beings.” The argument that Daney outlines posits a fascinating reconception of the hermeneutics of cinema as a social form, built around the relation between a cinema population – which is to say the film-going audience – and a screen population – or the population of actors filling the projected image. The “cine-demography” that Daney broaches as a way of assessing the state of cinema at the twilight of the twentieth century conjugates these two populations along their halting, shifting, waxing and waning relation to each other over time.