Maria Hellström Reimer (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)
URBAN ANAGRAM: a bio-political reflection on cinema and the city
anagram
Anagrams Never Lie [but] Reveals A Renaming…
The filmic medium, as ubiquitous imagery, discursively reinforced through creative montage and audio editing, has certainly transformed the understanding of the urban landscape. If before, as Walter Benjamin expressed it, “[o]ur taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly”, the advent of cinematography changed this, releasing us from incarceration, “so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.”
What comes through in this quote is the bio-political aspect of cinematic urbanism. As a multi-medium operating through distraction, film infiltrates what used to be a solid everyday surrounding, disseminating potentials and opening up viable routes. Yet, at the same time, it also actualizes the intense inter-mediality between film and urbanity and the political paradoxes of mass-mediated, spatial distraction. While the film, as transient disruption, may push the aesthetic cult value into the background – encouraging each and everyone of us to take part rather than to contemplate – it is at the same time offering a preconceived framework within which to maximize the subjective, spatial experience experience of life.
The paper will address such bio-political aspects of cinematic urbanism and especially what could be described as its double agenda of freedom and fear, of emancipatory promises and entrepreneurial governance. The answer to this ‘spectacular’ power exercise has often been articulated from within the filmic medium as such, as a Dadaist, situationist, or new wave tactics of spatial play, transgressing borders and challenging genres.
In a situation, where the visual surveillance of space has been supplemented with the narrative tracking of individuals, cinematic urbanism has become even more ambiguous, giving rise to new forms of tactical interventions, many of which could be described as urban anagrams in different ways contesting, but also undermining current cinematic hegemony. A type of word play, where letters or phonemes of a word or phrase are disconnected and rearranged as to produce new words or phrases, the anagram presents a game devoid of meaning, a game ‘good-for-nothing;’ a game that for this very reason also actualizes the affective logic, including its unexpected and unwanted dimensions.
While it may be easy to reject the rigid discipline or monumental urbanity, it is more difficult to escape the multifaceted liberty that a cinematic urbanism seems to offer. The paper will, however, discuss a number of examples of filmic ‘anagrammatic’ practices in different ways exploring the ways in which cinema – as a bio-political game – deconstructs and recombines urbanity, thus challenging the bio-political aggregate pointed out by Foucault of truth, knowledge and subjectivity.
What comes through in this quote is the bio-political aspect of cinematic urbanism. As a multi-medium operating through distraction, film infiltrates what used to be a solid everyday surrounding, disseminating potentials and opening up viable routes. Yet, at the same time, it also actualizes the intense inter-mediality between film and urbanity and the political paradoxes of mass-mediated, spatial distraction. While the film, as transient disruption, may push the aesthetic cult value into the background – encouraging each and everyone of us to take part rather than to contemplate – it is at the same time offering a preconceived framework within which to maximize the subjective, spatial experience experience of life.
The paper will address such bio-political aspects of cinematic urbanism and especially what could be described as its double agenda of freedom and fear, of emancipatory promises and entrepreneurial governance. The answer to this ‘spectacular’ power exercise has often been articulated from within the filmic medium as such, as a Dadaist, situationist, or new wave tactics of spatial play, transgressing borders and challenging genres.
In a situation, where the visual surveillance of space has been supplemented with the narrative tracking of individuals, cinematic urbanism has become even more ambiguous, giving rise to new forms of tactical interventions, many of which could be described as urban anagrams in different ways contesting, but also undermining current cinematic hegemony. A type of word play, where letters or phonemes of a word or phrase are disconnected and rearranged as to produce new words or phrases, the anagram presents a game devoid of meaning, a game ‘good-for-nothing;’ a game that for this very reason also actualizes the affective logic, including its unexpected and unwanted dimensions.
While it may be easy to reject the rigid discipline or monumental urbanity, it is more difficult to escape the multifaceted liberty that a cinematic urbanism seems to offer. The paper will, however, discuss a number of examples of filmic ‘anagrammatic’ practices in different ways exploring the ways in which cinema – as a bio-political game – deconstructs and recombines urbanity, thus challenging the bio-political aggregate pointed out by Foucault of truth, knowledge and subjectivity.
