Introduction: Art Cinema and the Aesthetics of Crisis

Abstract

This chapter traces the crisis characteristics of art cinema throughout its history and assesses the capacity of this mode of filmmaking to meaningfully intervene in a crisis situation. There is an analysis of the crisis tendencies of the neoliberal period and the strategies of legitimation used to consolidate neoliberal rule. Through an engagement with theories of Brechtian estrangement and Russian Formalist defamiliarization, this chapter proposes an aesthetics of crisis that can foreground the displacements at the heart of neoliberal crisis management. There is also a discussion of the way contemporary auteurs are revising art cinema conventions in order to address the various social, political and cultural crises generated by neoliberalism. The chapter concludes with summaries of the remaining chapters and an overview of the book’s overall structure.