ABSTRACT
The Introduction is focused mainly on both cinema and political theory as compositional practices. To locate both within critical frames, the analysis emphasizes the historical breaks-the “events”-that shape their respective cinematic and theoretical forms and goes on to treat the way the engagement between cinema and political theory is a textual encounter, which, when texts are understood as methodological fields, yields analyses that are subversive with respect of traditional classificatory frames. For purposes of illustration, the introduction treats the historical moment of a particular film genre, Italian Neorealism (with an extended reading of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist [1970]) and U.S. post-World War II political theorizing to show the different ways that cinema and political theory were shaped by the historical moment of fascism. The Introduction ends with a turn to the work of Walter Benjamin, who, combining an attunement to theory and observations about film, provides an analysis of images that yields a critical politics of memory.
