New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2018

This article discusses different concepts of utopia and dystopia and their diverse fates in contemporary film, analysing their typical representations, popular themes and tropes. It argues that in the new cinema, utopia has practically disappeared, preserved in works nostalgically or ironically commenting on its demise, its place being appropriated by dystopias that tend to dominate the cultural imagination and that gradually evolve from politically driven narratives towards dystopian adventure movies. Referring briefly to The Mission (Joffé, 1986) and The Beach (Boyle, 2000), it shows the withdrawal of utopias from contemporary cinema and their residual presence in nostalgic or ironic returns, while the evolution of dystopias is illustrated with the presentation of The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) and Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013). The dual shift, then, first from utopia to dystopia, and then from hard-boiled politics towards individual subjectivity and entertainment marks one of the most characteristic tendencies observable in contemporary dystopian cinema. Its increasingly individualist orientation and the character-driven rather than political focus lead in turn back to the reconsideration of the meaning, value and future of the very concepts of utopia and dystopia in contemporary culture and film.

Using the post-Marxist framework of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy) (Kluge and Negt [1981] 2014), this article contends that a utopian conception of labour grounded in the historically developed forces of human imagination and obstinacy underpins The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) and its development of Katniss Everdeen’s relationship to her own alienated labour. By tracing the formal and thematic elements of this development, I argue that both Nancy Collins’s book and the adapted film indicate an abiding investment in the Kantian schema of cognition, in which the dialectical forces of conceptuality and intuition suggest the human imagination’s paradoxical threat to capitalist processes of reification. By invoking virtual alternatives to the alienating spectacle of the games, Katniss’s labour becomes a conduit for moving from the imaginary realm of utopian hope to its actualized manifestation. This manifestation is based not only on the capacity of the human imagination, but more specifically on the willingness of an alienated audience to construct connections between their own historical circumstances and the phantasmatic material provided by plot and narrative form. The article may be of interest not only to scholars of utopia, but also to those working in film and media studies, critical theory and continental philosophy.

This article takes up the representation of cannibalistic foodways in dystopic science fiction films. Keeping with a Hollywood generic tradition, these are not moralistic or dramatic tales of taboo or human nature as might be found in horror films, but distinct explorations of industrialization, mass culture and capitalism and the effects of these phenomena manifest on the bodies of the populace. The benchmark text in this discussion is Soylent Green (Fleisher, 1973), wherein the human body processed into food represents the human turned into a commodity. Consumption in the film is a mechanism of destruction, and the cinematic spectacle concludes with repeated visions of containment and disaffection. By contradistinction, two contemporary texts – The Hunger Games (2012) and Cloud Atlas (2012) – rework the dystopian vision in ways that suggest a more optimistic turn. Of central concern throughout the article is a consideration of the cinematic spectacle as a potential political, visceral and/or affective force for change.

While it is true that contemporary filmmakers are finding new resources to explore the topic of utopia, this exploration has occurred primarily within the confines of two genres: science fiction and fantasy. In many instances these films are guided by an appeal to the pop culture boom of the young adult sub-genre; these cinematic explorations tease out many of the themes of utopia previously underdeveloped such as young love and romance, maturation and growth. One thing that recent mainstream Hollywood productions do not develop or address is the sheer horror and pain that moving towards something better, i.e., utopia, entails. The transition or movement towards utopia is not seamless in any way but rather fraught with struggle, angst, schism, terror and even death. To examine these aspects of utopia, I turn to the so-called New Extreme genre of cinema, primarily out of France. Specifically, analysing À l’intérieur (Inside) (Bustillo and Maury, 2007) and Martyrs (Laugier, 2008), I argue that New Extreme cinema offers unconventional and unexpected lessons on the process of working toward utopia, lessons not foregrounded in more mainstream utopian cinema. I build my argument by weaving some existing criticism of utopian theory with themes from New Extreme cinema such as abjection, death, pain, suffering and torture. In my analysis I draw on the theory of abject as used in the work of Julia Kristeva.

This article analyses a recent iconic film of postcolonial Bengali and Indian cinema. Aneek Dutta’s 2012 smash-hit Bhooter Bhabishyat is a fantasy urban comedy that hinges on the punning word ‘bhoot’, which means both the past and ghost in Bengali. I show how the film carries powerful charges of the utopian principle of hope as analysed by Ernst Bloch, which finds expression in Dutta’s critique of neo-liberal predatory property development that dispossesses earlier denizens of the city. I analyse how in Bhooter Bhabishyat the mansion of ghosts becomes an inclusive reservoir of many aspects of Kolkata’s transculturality and utopian spirit and community, articulating hope against the backdrop of a dystopian present. The article draws particular attention to how crucial women’s agency is in resisting such predations of criminal real estate development. I further show how Bhooter Bhabishyat articulates the utopian principle of hope by situating itself firmly in the present of Kolkata, narrativizing elements such as Bengali rock bands and fashion shows, while also paying tribute to the past history and histories of Kolkata, including histories of classic Bengali cinema. The world of the ghosts in this film, the article argues, ties together past, present and future and reinvents them, articulating utopian hope.

Today’s American independent movie scene, like the contemporary world system, is plagued by political economic contradictions and crises. Thousands of indie filmmakers across the country find their works increasingly lost in a rapidly changing marketplace where cinematic supply, bolstered by a proliferation of digital production technologies and online distribution platforms, far exceeds audience demand. And yet, a group of besieged artists working in the shadows of Hollywood are envisioning a utopian tomorrow despite the unprecedented challenges they face today. In fact, these unsung directors, producers, and writers express enthusiasm about precisely the new business models, media shifts and social relations that are threatening their very livelihoods. They are using their filmmaking imaginations to engage in ‘dialectical dreaming’, a playful process of generating ideal possibilities out of everyday limitations. Examples from an ethnographic study of more than twenty such filmmakers living in Los Angeles include the invention of cognitive storytelling software to level the resource playing field, the development of completely collaborative film projects through crowd-sourcing, and the transformation of single-family households into creative community workspaces. These dialectical dreams of socialized means of production, collectively owned intellectual property, and public/private sphere synthesis are placed within the context of recent innovations in Marxist theorizing about utopia in the hopes of inspiring not only new forms of cinematic practice, but also radical action among creative professionals across the current socio-economic structure.