Fredric Jameson and Film Theory

Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema

Edited by Keith B. Wagner, Jeremi Szaniawski, and Michael Cramer

Rutgers University Press

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.

[The essays] demonstrate the range of interpretive projects made possible in the Jamesonian mode, the 'geopolitical aesthetic,' as it were, entailed in the study of the cultures generated in globalized capitalism. These collected essays bear out the editors’ belief that Jameson's film theory might be a missing link that authorizes nuanced historiography without divesting the field of its critical powers. Critical Inquiry

This exciting volume explicates the Jamesonian project while also extending and—sometimes—taking issue with it. It will be regarded as a major landmark in film studies. Carl Freedman, author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction

This collection offers a thoughtful reckoning with the impact of Jameson's work on film studies to date while also charting a critical agenda for a Jamesonian film studies to come. Drawing on an international range of scholars Fredric Jameson and Film Theory answers Jameson's call to map the relation of individual films to the world-system of capitalism, illuminating along the way exciting new avenues for film theory and criticism. Derek Nystrom, author of Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema

The excellent essays collected here revisit some of Jameson’s explicit filmic engagements before scaling out to explore the wider utility of Jamesonian theoretical models in contexts that he did not necessarily address. In so doing, Fredric Jameson and Film Theory exemplifies one of its central claims, the importance of Jameson’s work for thinking about the 'global turn' in film studies. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, author of Vicious Circuits: Korea's IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century

KEITH B. WAGNER is an assistant professor of global media and culture and director of doctoral research in film and media studies at University College London in the United Kingdom. He is the coeditor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique.

JEREMI SZANIAWSKI is an assistant professor of film studies and comparative literature, and the Amesbury Professor of Polish language and culture at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox.

MICHAEL CRAMER is a professor of cinema studies at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. He is the author of Utopian Television: Roberto Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard Beyond Cinema.

Introduction: Always Historicize the Moving Image! Fredric Jameson’s Place in Film Studies
MICHAEL CRAMER, JEREMI SZANIAWSKI, AND KEITH B. WAGNER

1 Feeling Film as the Pulse of the Postmodern Condition: On Jameson’s “On Diva”
DUDLEY ANDREW

2 Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film
JOHN MACKAY

3 Nostalgia, Melancholy, and the Persistence of Stalin in Polish Cinema
JEREMI SZANIAWSKI

4 Jameson, Angelopoulos, and the Spirit of Utopia
PAUL COATES

5 Jameson and Japanese Media Theory: A Virtual Dialogue
NAOKI YAMAMOTO

6 Where Jameson Meets Queer Theory: Queer Cognitive Mapping in 1990s Sinophone Cinema
ALVIN K. WONG

7 A Jamesonian Reading of Parasite (2019): Homes, Real Estate Speculation, and Bubble Markets in Seoul
KEITH B. WAGNER

8 Strategies of Containment in Middle-Class Films from Mexico and Brazil
MERCEDES VÁZQUEZ

9 The Neoliberal Conspiracy: Jameson, New Hollywood, and All the President’s Men
MICHAEL CRAMER

10 The Conspiracy Film, Hollywood’s Cultural Paradigms, and Class Consciousness
MIKE WAYNE

11 A Theory of the Medium Shot: Affective Mapping and the Logic of the Encounter in Fredric Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic
PANSY DUNCAN

12 “An American Utopia” and the Politics of Military Science Fiction
DAN HASSLER-FOREST

Afterword
FREDRIC JAMESON

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

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