Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political? In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and politics.

This work breaks new ground in the understanding of South Indian cinema and politics. Through incisive analysis and original concepts it illustrates the private, public and cinematic personas of MGR and Rajinikanth. It challenges the popular and scholarly myths surrounding them and shows the constant negotiation of their on-screen and off-screen identities. The book revisits the entire political history of post-Independent Tamil Nadu through its cinema,and presents a refreshing psycho-political and cultural map of contemporary South India. This absorbing volume will be an important read for scholars, teachers and students of film studies, culture and media studies, and politics, especially those interested in South India.

The political films that have emerged on the global film festival circuit since the 1990s mark a shift in cinematic strategies for critically addressing dominant, militant, or otherwise repressive ideologies. From a focus on the representation of oppression in films like The Battle of Algiers, films such as Timbuktu, Nobody Knows About Persian Cats and Chop Shop now contribute to the active formation of political characters and viewers, a form not fully realized until the 21st century due to shifts in information technologies and resulting political organization. This book demonstrates that a contemporary form of political cinema has emerged, centered on the production of subjectivity and networks of protest, which depicts the active formation of political identities that resonates with off-screen protest movements.

The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics brings together forty essays by leading film scholars and filmmakers in order to discuss the complex relationship between cinema and politics. Organised into eight sections - Approaches to Film and Politics; Film, Activism and Opposition; Film, Propaganda, Ideology and the State; The Politics of Mobility; Political Hollywood; Alternative and Independent Film and Politics; The Politics of Cine-geographies and The Politics of Documentary - this collection covers a broad range of topics, including: third cinema, cinema after 9/11, eco-activism, human rights, independent Chinese documentary, film festivals, manifestoes, film policies, film as a response to the post-2008 financial crisis, Soviet propaganda, the impact of neoliberalism on cinema, and many others. It foregrounds the key debates, concepts, approaches and case studies that critique and explain the complex relationship between politics and cinema, discussing films from around the world and including examples from film history as well as contemporary cinema. It also explores the wider relationship between politics and entertainment, examines cinema’s response to political and social transformations and questions the extent to which filmmaking, itself, is a political act.

Over the past decade, Ethiopian films have come to dominate the screening schedules of the many cinemas in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa, as well as other urban centers. Despite undergoing an unprecedented surge in production and popularity in Ethiopia and in the diaspora, this phenomenon has been broadly overlooked by African film and media scholars and Ethiopianists alike. This collection of essays and interviews on cinema in Ethiopia represents the first work of its kind and establishes a broad foundation for furthering research on this topic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic and bringing together contributions from both Ethiopian and international scholars, the collection offers new and alternative narratives for the development of screen media in Africa. The book’s relevance reaches far beyond its specific locale of Ethiopia as contributions focus on a broad range of topics—such as commercial and genre films, diaspora filmmaking, and the role of women in the film industry—while simultaneously discussing multiple forms of screen media, from satellite TV to “video films.” Bringing both historical and contemporary moments of cinema in Ethiopia into the critical frame offers alternative considerations for the already radically changing critical paradigm surrounding the understandings of African cinema.

"Covering a broad scope, this collection examines the cinemas of Europe, East Asia, India, Africa and Latin America, and will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies, as well as to film enthusiasts keen to explore a wider range of world cinema."--Jacket.