ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault has been relatively little discussed in theoretically informed academic film studies. This may be for several reasons. Firstly, Foucault did not write or speak very much about the cinema, with only one interview, published in Cinématographie in 1975, directly addressing the medium. Secondly, Foucault’s work is best known for its analysis of discourse; its theorization of the power of words in institutional contexts. As cinema is principally a visual medium, it is perhaps understandable that his work is not, at first glance, the most likely toolkit with which to analyze representations on screen. However, even when writing on power, institutions and discourse, much of Foucault’s work uses visual metaphors and models (e. g. the memorable discussion of power and point of view in Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas [1656] in The Order of Things, 1966). Moreover, it focuses – perhaps more than any other body of thought except psychoanalysis, to which it offers a theoretical counterweight – on the mechanisms of watching, particularly in the context of social surveillance (Discipline and Punish). Foucault’s theory of surveillance makes challenging arguments
about the ubiquity and complexity of forms of observation, scrutiny and control in modern societal institutions. Importing this model to the mechanism of the gaze at and within film might allow for a way of thinking about watching that re-politicizes and re-ethicizes some of the clichés of gaze theory. Foucault’s work also rethinks sexuality and corporeality in ways that
question psychoanalytic diagnostic epistemologies. The first volume of his tripartite History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge, published in 1976, a year after Discipline and Punish, makes powerful claims for the importance of rethinking bodily pleasure outside of the discursive knowledge categories of modernity. As explored in Chapter 5 of this book, much recent filmmaking and debate in film criticism has focused on the ethics of corporeal display. It may be profitable to think through cinematic experiments in somatic representation alongside Foucault’s writing on the challenge of redefining the erotic body. In what follows, then, I shall focus on two concepts in Foucaldian thought – surveillance and theories of the body – to explore the possibility of creating a dialogue between his ethico-politically informed philosophy and the medium of cinema; thereby re-energizing both fields.
