ABSTRACT
One of the more recent developments in Jameson’s criticism is an interest in cinema. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was writing a great deal of film criticism, and this chapter deals with that aspect of his work. This interest in the more popular medium of cinema has developed, in part, from Jameson’s engagement with the debates around postmodernism, and, in particular, his sense that the postmodern cultural logic sees a blending of ‘high art’ and ‘popular cultural’ categories. Nonetheless, the strategies Jameson deploys in his readings of film represent a series of continuities with his early pre-postmodernism writings. Although published in 1992, Jameson’s first book on cinema (Signatures of the Visible) in fact collects writings from the late 1970s as well as the 1980s. The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992) continues his explorations of ‘the political unconscious’ via film. One of the key focuses of Jameson’s film criticism is an awareness of the ways film reproduces this political unconscious in an especially direct manner. His readings of Western, and more recently of Third World cinema, is acutely sensitive to the historical and cultural forces that determine the art.
