Sarah Hamblin

This essay is an effort to imagine new modes of revolutionary cinema in the age of the Capitalocene. Starting from the premise that the environmental volatility of this new epoch forces us to fundamentally reconsider the basic tenets of the revolutionary imagination, the essay asks what radical transformation looks like when we abandon earlier modes of resistance and visions of the future that are wedded to anthropocentric fantasies of humanity's sovereignty over nature and the promises of petromodernity. To begin answering this question, the text takes up the lo-fi Angolan Africanfuturist film Air Conditioner (Fradique 2020). Set in Luanda, Angola, where air-conditioning units across the city suddenly begin failing and falling from windows, the film dramatizes the problems of technological collapse combined with a rapidly warming climate. Resigning the legacies of colonialism and the nation's protracted conflict between communist and capitalist forces to the decaying infrastructural backdrop of the film, Air Conditioner is instead concerned with the new modes of solidarity and ideas of futurity that emerge from within these conditions of catastrophe. The film's incidental references to socialism, combined with its meandering narrative and languid pace, render it quite different in form and tone from the revolutionary anti-colonial cinemas of independence. Thus, against earlier images of revolution as a sudden rupture that harnesses the twin powers of industrialization and human agency, Air Conditioner roots itself in slowness, imagining revolution as a process of withdrawal based on the wearing out of life.

From the release of his groundbreaking first film, Pather Panchali/Songs of the Road in 1955, Satyajit Ray has been a constituent figure in postwar global art cinema and is without doubt the most celebrated Indian filmmaker in the West. Ray is credited with forging the Indian parallel cinema movement and thus with transforming the landscape of a national industry. At the same time, his cosmopolitan perspective and engagement with a rich international film history have been central to expanding the conventionally European borders of the art cinema tradition. For a collection on the cinemas of 1968, however, Ray might seem like an odd choice. He is typically identified as the least radical of the Bengali filmmakers at work during the politically tumultuous years of the late 1960s and 1970s, and unlike the more overtly marxist cinema of his contemporaries Mirnal Sen and Rhitwik Ghatak, Ray's films are thought to favor broad humanist ideals over a specific political program. Given the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's influence on Ray, his films are celebrated for their lyricism and naturalism, not for their penetrating ideological critiques. As such, humanism and radical politics are largely placed in opposition to each other, and Ray is located firmly on the side of the former; he is the "gentle humanist, " 1 whose films remain "timeless and international, " 2 not the radical revolutionary. This is not to say that Ray's humanism is apolitical. Indeed, for critics attentive to the larger historical context of Ray's work, his films are profoundly tied to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's liberal nationalism. Ray's earlier