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!'.
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
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.
