Kathryn Bigelow

The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically-received ‘critical’ film, as a symptom of today’s prevailing cultural and political codes. First we dwell on the homologies between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, including its reflection on the banalization of exception. This is followed by a parallel between the biopolitical optic of the film and today’s dominant ideology, which Badiou calls ‘democratic materialism’. We emphasize that, despite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, its de-politicizing effects. It is a depoliticized picture, in which the lack of antagonistic politics and subjectivities in today’s democratic materialist constellation is countered with the inherent excess of the system, the protagonist’s (self-)destructive passion for the Real. Following this discussion at the level of the narrative, we discuss the film in the context of what Deleuze conceptualized as ‘time-images’. Our point here is that with the The Hurt Locker we are within ‘the cinema of the seer’, within a nihilistic portrayal of nihilism from inside, on the basis of highly formalized time-images that do not become politicized. In other words, The Hurt Locker is trapped within what it describes.

In Cinema’s Baroque Flesh, Saige Walton draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for a distinct aesthetic category of film and a unique cinema of the senses: baroque cinema. Combining media archaeological work with art history, phenomenology, and film studies, the book offers close analyses of a range of historic baroque artworks and films, including Caché, Strange Days, Trouble Every Day, the films of Buster Keaton, and many more.

Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that can make room for structure, signification, and thought, as well as the aesthetics of sensation.

Interestingly, the cinematic use of the war hero as an overarching symbol of American identity within the cultural zeitgeist remains as true for The Hurt Locker as for any production of the war film genre. The absence of the hero is represented by the presence of the female body reincarnated as a bomb capable of scarring the earth with burning craters and exploding the bodies of men into nothingness, so much so that the American military’s creed that no man will be left behind2 becomes a literal impossibility. The framework of this symbolic dynamic transcends biological function and additionally represents the female body as the cultural construct of the creation of the nuclear family, a central and significant component of the American Dream. In other words, The Hurt Locker’s circular imagery has a greater meaning— when the power of the phallic weapon has been usurped by the über-powerful, and arguably gendered IED (Improvised Explosive Devise), the man himself loses value and the consequence is fatal, literally and figuratively: for if man cannot assume his place as husband and father, then the social contract of the American family and the American Dream is void.

This thesis investigates the ways representations of terrorism in Hollywood, German and British cinema embody what Slavoj Žižek describes as the postpolitical, that is the current state of denial of alternatives within global politics and a directionlessness within cultural theory, which set in after the apparent defeat of the possibility of a radical alternative to capitalism. Moreover, this thesis proposes that films about terrorism are not only cultural expressions of the post-political, but also show the post-political condition to be problematic, displaying as they do symptoms such as the devaluation of human subjectivity and its concomitant failure to achieve progressive political change. Žižek’s philosophical approach as a method of interpreting the postpolitical is applied to the films Munich (2005), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) Die Kommenden Tage/The Coming Days, (2010) Four Lions (2010) and Hunger (2008). As well as Žižek’s work, the writings o...

The notion of American hero has changed a lot in recent years. In the past the typical American hero was portrayed as a strong man, fighting for freedom, truth and justice, the fundamental values of the American society. This notion of American hero has been completely revised after some events of the 20th century, such as political scandals and the rise of conspiracy theories, but in particular after a dramatic and shocking event of the 21st century: the 9/11 terroristic attack to the Twin Towers in 2001. This work analyses the change of the notion of "American hero" in the light of the way in which the American hero is portrayed in the movie Zero Dark Thirty directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Résumé : A partir d'une mise en perspective historique du travail d'appropriation culturelle de la mélancolie en Occident et de son articulation avec le thème de la crise, ce texte établit - dans le cinéma hollywoodien - un rapprochement entre une certaine «esthétique de la mélancolie et de la crise» et les reconfigurations postcoloniales de la blanchité. En étudiant la façon dont ces dernières mobilisent de façon centrale l'enjeu du «féminin», deux films sont examinés qui, à trente ans d'intervalle, représentent la femme blanche comme une alliée pour la masculinité hégémonique face à une altérité raciale incarnant un danger renouvelé. Les différences entre les deux films sont questionnées afin de mettre en évidence les potentialités critiques de la masculinité hégémonique blanche dont les figures féminines sont porteuses.

[TEXTE A PARAITRE EN 2017 DANS "Ecritures Postcoloniales du Genre", Anne Castaing, Elodie Gaden (dir.), Editions des Archives Contemporaines ]

An in depth comparison of the conventions and techniques used within Sirk's "Written on the Wind" and Bigelow's "Blue Steel" meant to stir different types of reactions within the audience, utilizing key points from Linda Williams' theories on the body genre

"Noi non ci battiamo per i soldi, noi ci battiamo contro il sistema, quel sistema che uccide lo spirito dell'uomo. Noi siamo l'esempio per quei morti viventi che strisciano sulle autostrade nelle loro infuocate bare di metallo. Noi dimostriamo, con la nostra opera, che lo spirito dell'uomo è ancora vivo". È notte, i rapinatori travestiti da ex presidenti degli Stati Uniti hanno appena messo a segno un nuovo colpo e hanno scoperto che un loro nuovo amico, che sembrava condividere i loro stessi ideali, è in realtà un agente dell'FBI che sta dando la caccia proprio alla banda degli ex presidenti. Il capo del gruppo, Bodhi, interpretato da Patrick Swayze, fa un discorso sulla spiaggia a tutti per affermare che il loro agire non è finalizzato banalmente all'arricchimento materiale, ma è una via di fuga dalla società e contemporaneamente la dimostrazione che ci si può opporre al sistema capitalistico repressivo che impone all'uomo una libertà che è tutt'altro che libera. È questo il cuore del film. Pochi minuti che ci fanno capire che c'è qualcosa che va oltre le logiche strettamente hollywoodiane. Point break è un film del 1991, firmato dalla regista americana Kathryn Bigelow. Racconta la storia di un giovane agente dell'FBI, Johnny Utah, interpretato da Keanu Reeves, che tenta di sgominare una banda di rapinatori di banche, che ha messo a segno numerosi colpi nel giro di breve tempo. Le prove che raccoglie lo portano a supporre che si tratti di surfisti e si avvicina a loro, in particolare ad un gruppo tra i vari che incontra in spiaggia che sembra particolarmente interessante. Johnny si appassiona al surf, a quel tipo di vita, alle idee del loro capo, Bodhi, sul contatto e il mistero della natura, vista come ciclica e che va oltre le idee razionali di fisica meccanica. All'uscita il film ricevette critiche piuttosto positive che consideravano però soprattutto gli aspetti di action-movie e nient'altro. Ad esempio Entertainment Weekly sottolinea l'esaltazione dell'atletismo e della ricerca costante di adrenalina nella pratica di sport estremi come segnali discriminanti della società. Ed effettivamente Point Break è una pellicola facilmente definibile come adrenalinica, vitalistica, machista anche. Niente di più falso, o meglio non del tutto vero. In realtà possiamo notare alcuni aspetti che meritano di essere approfonditi in chiave filosofica che potrebbero aprire ad una interpretazione non convenzionale della pellicola. 1-Il rapporto tra Johnny Utah e Bodhi e quello simmetrico tra Johnny e Tyler, la ragazza che conosce frequentando i surfisti e di cui si innamora. In questo doppio rapporto si instaura un passaggio dialettico fondamentale. Il rapporto tra Johnny e

The horrifying images of the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, in which three thousand civilians were killed, have become some of the most famous images ever committed to film or television. When analyzing the ways the military and intelligence agencies (such as the CIA) are represented in some US films from this period, it becomes clear that such representations changed over just a few years. Surprisingly, however, the ways the military and intelligence agencies are represented in ways which did not necessarily mirror the political change that was occurring.

How does Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" evoke such various responses to its use of torture? And what should we make of it? 
This paper argues that what matters is the response of the witness who passes moral and aesthetic judgment, both within the diegesis and outside of it, i.e. both the characters within the film and the movie audience.

When director Kathryn Bigelow’s wartime drama _The Hurt Locker_ won several Oscar awards in 2010, many commentators noted that her film was unusual for a narrative about war created by a woman, claiming that men have generally focused on the battlefields, whereas women have tended to focus on the “homefront” when fictionalizing war. Very few detailed critiques of this assertion have been put forth, however, and this course will endeavor to see to what extent such a potentially inflexible dichotomy is actually true and, if so, whether it is an American cultural phenomenon or a universal one. We will begin by watching Bigelow’s film and then reading a number of novels by women from seven different countries that have suffered the ravages of war in recent decades to see how and why their fictional narratives intersect with one another and also what, if anything, distinguishes them from more familiar narratives of war by male writers like Tim O’Brien (_The Things They Carried_) or Erich Maria Remarque (_All Quiet on the Western Front_).

"This is the final draft of an essay on the historical and affective inter-relationship between cinema, crashes and modernity, which was published in the edited collection, Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material, ed. Arthurs, J., Grant, I.  (Bristol and Oregon: Intellect), pp. 23-34 .
It was collectively written by six members of the Lancaster University-based cultural research seminar, 'SHaH'. It was followed by a short digital video, How it Feels 2 (2002), which was collectively conceived, and shot and edited by myself and premiered at the 'Crash Cultures' symposium at Bristol Watershed Media Centre (30/11/02)."

From the point of view of the paranoid, the tiniest of aberrations can harbor the potential for catastrophe. Clear examples of this principle can be found in New Hollywood films like THE CONVERSATION (Francis Ford Coppola, USA 1974), where it is the shifting intonation of a single word that makes all the difference in uncovering a conspiracy. The fragmentary montage of the “paranoid style” (Richard Hofstadter) is constantly on the verge of isolating an ominous detail that would be capable of disrupting the fabric of consensual reality, with paranoid thinking hesitating “between the suspicion that the truth is wholly obscured by the visible, and the equally disturbing sense that the truth may be a sinister, invisible design in the visible” (Leo Bersani). In the quest for truth, the paranoid seeks to break through the opaque surface of the blown-up image, looking for proof in smoke, speckles of dirt, and finally the film grain itself (the paradigm for this being the Zapruder film).
In recent years, and especially after 9/11, this paranoid style in American cinema has reached new levels of complexity. In this essay I explore the ways how in ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow, USA 2012) the role of the singular deviation is interpreted. The attack on the World Trade Center sets in motion a frenzied search for a single clue regarding Bin Laden’s hide-out. The cinematic image itself is the site where the devastating effects of this frenzy can be experienced by the spectator whose very perception and cognition are "stylized" by the way ZERO DARK THIRTY creates its world of temporal and physical torture.

Concepts such as 'gamification' and 'video game logic' have started to filter through popular culture in the last few years. This has come hand in hand with debate about whether video games can be considered literature. However, something that has not yet been much discussed is the impact that video games are having on more traditional media; the novel and the cinema. In this paper I look at two artists who have their roots to a greater or lesser extent in cyberpunk; Neal Stephenson, who is one of cyberpunk's most famous names thanks to his novel Snow Crash (1992), and Kathryn Bigelow who directed one of the most critically acclaimed cyberpunk movies of the 1990s, Strange Days (1995). In this paper I trace the connections between these cyberpunk interests and the use of video game design in more recent works; Stephenson's REAMDE (2011) and Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Both Bigelow and Stephenson show concern throughout their careers about the impact of new technologies on human subjects, but their more recent works explicitly tackle this issue in terms of our historical reality. REAMDE and Zero Dark Thirty are no longer set in fantastic cyberpunk futures, but are ostensibly set in the present day and are historically situated through the use of the War on Terror in the foreground of the conflict. This realist setting, with Zero Dark Thirty even based on real events surrounding the death of bin Laden, shows a marked change from the imagined futures produced by Bigelow and Stephenson in the 90s. In this paper I will discuss the intersection between video games, literature, cinema and the War on Terror. I argue that REAMDE and Zero Dark Thirty are both concerned that the impact of video games will lead to a moral vacuum wherein the importance of attaining goals is privileged over moral consideration; the ends justify the means, and this process is hastened by an everywhere war that muddies the distinction between the meat and the game more than any cyberpunk fantasy ever dreamed possible.

Queste pagine propongono una fenomenologia dell’attuale autorappresentazione cinematografica degli Stati Uniti. Come espresso dal titolo: “impero” si dice – ovvero: viene detto e dice se stesso – in molti modi.
All’interno di un discorso teso a evidenziare alcune criticità entro il chiasma di cinema e storia, di cinema e politica/democrazia, emergerà al contempo la vitalità persistente di una forma espressiva (il cinema e il cinema americano in specie) che continua a incarnare un decisivo a priori storico e culturale, un sismografo privilegiato per leggere il proprio tempo.
In concreto, questa fenomenologia consterà di tre direttrici (ognuna composta da una coppia di film) lungo le quali si declina, entro lo spazio filmico, l’attuale “autoscopia imperiale”. Avremo così: un’autoscopia spettacolare (Django Unchained e Inglorious Basterds), un’autoscopia radiografica (The Conspirator e Lincoln) e un’autoscopia mimetica (The Hurt Locker e Zero Dark Thirty).