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Equally important to the development of American law, as well as the Western’s imagination of gunslinging heroics, is the constitutional guarantee of gun possession, a guarantee explored in this chapter by examining key Supreme Court cases. This chapter argues that the modified conception of defense, from a collective duty to an individual right, enforces a rhetorical shift to normativity concomitant with the rise of modernity and the formation of dispersed, interrelated networks of power that create individuated subjects, what Michel Foucault has termed ‘biopower.’
Genealogy is most commonly represented through the family tree, as patrilineal and heteronormative understandings of the family unit create a body armoured with patriarchal notions of bloodline, inheritance and property. This discussion of genealogy finds a renewed relevance to contemporary developments in subjective and autobiographical filmmaking, particularly concerning those films which excavate family history at the intersection of private and public realms. This chapter discusses two films, Sandra Kogut's Um Passaporte Hungaro and Albertina Carri's Los rubios, which amply demonstrate family history need not be a linear, essentialising gesture in search of a pure origin. Rather, Um Passaporte Hungaro and Los rubios from Brazil and Argentina respectively, experiment with autobiography in order to discuss identity, memory and history, thus bringing Michel Foucault's genealogical model to fruition with remarkable effect. In demystifying the notion of foundational origins, Kogut and Carri challenge the law of the father which propels classical genealogical quests.
This chapter demonstrates how the development of Jean-Luc Godard's thinking about cinema have constantly mirrored wider trends in continental thought. The phenomenological method of Godard's early films interrogated the relationship between language and the reality perceived through our senses, the director's innovative approach to sound and image repeatedly questioning the nature of representation and its ability to circumscribe the real. Godard's cinema accompanied the renewal of Marxist thought in France, from Michel Debord's critique of spectacle, through Michel Foucault's analysis of power, to the determined unpacking of the harsh realities of postmodernism by the likes of Jean-Francois Lyotard. Godard followed philosophers such as Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, in a tradition of thought inherited from Friedrich Nietzsche, in denouncing the nihilism of a society that smothers the vitality of life beneath the reifying discourse of truth, and in defending desire against the curmudgeonly categories of psychoanalysis.
in the field that it developed as a synonym not only for asylums in general, but also as a kind of idea in a broader sense, ‘coming to mean not just “insanity” but chaos in general’. Incarceration in Bedlam was the fate of Delaney’s late mother, Salish (Noomi Rapace). According to Michel Foucault in his seminal work Madness and Civilisation (1965), the period in which Salish would have been institutionalised was one in
. 19 J. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984 ), p. 115. 20 Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s cinema as counter-cinema’, in Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Volume I, p. 211. 21 Michel Foucault, ‘Critical theory
of French cinema in the 1970s Michel Foucault argued that recent French films (featuring the French Resistance) were engaged in ‘a battle . . . to reprogramme . . . the “popular memory”; and . . . to . . . impose on people a framework in which to interpret the present . . . So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been.’ 17 Although I reject Foucault’s rather crude
hampered by the vestiges of class structure and cultural allegiances. Rather than evaluate the workers’ collective enterprise in La Belle Équipe solely in terms of ‘failure’ or ‘success’, Flinn casts the very construction of the riverside dancehall as an architectural metaphor for community, in relation to the spatial theories of Louis Marin and Michel Foucault and in the context of themes that coalesced mid decade around France’s Popular Front. Departing from the strict social geographies of popular narrative filmmaking, Erik Bullot (Chapter 6) addresses marginality and
and Times of Judge Roy Bean—‘the way it should have been.’ Michel Foucault and the numerous critics who have drawn on his insights have painted a picture of the development of Anglo European civilization that is by now familiar, a tale of the transition from complete subjugation to monarchical law to the varied mechanisms, technologies, and apparatuses of modernity that produce individual subjectivities. Foucault’s conception of the generative, productive nature of diverse networks of power, which he termed ‘biopower’ in his History of Sexuality, has been massively
over-reliance on legal evidence. 38 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, repr. 1996), pp. 97–8. 39 Lawrence Stone, ‘An Exchange with Michel Foucault’, The New York Review of Books (31 March 1983), p. 43. Quoted in James Miller, The
shift to normativity and objectification that is concomitant with the rise of modernity and the formation of dispersed, interrelated networks of power that create individuated subjectivities—what Michel Foucault has called ‘biopower.’8 The remaining chapters return more solidly to the Western genre. The fourth chapter traces the changing iconography of guns through relevant literary texts of the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. I argue in this chapter that the Western’s iconographic emphasis, which shifts from the primacy of accuracy to