In this book, political film aesthetics will be articulated as a negative project. This premise presupposes the following negations: the politics of aesthetics is to be found neither in the manifest political content of films, nor in the political intentionality of individual authors, nor even in the canonized practices of political modernism. I do insist on the primacy of a politics of form, but I seek to divorce this from the modernist dogma of reflexivity. A political valency will also be ascribed to films that do not, on the surface, appear to be political. This book is not dedicated to directors and films that have cultivated a high-level avant-garde politics of form, but aims for the release of a symptomatic, non-arbitrary political potential in supposedly “apolitical” films. Thus, the contours of a political film aesthetics can only be found, here, in the process of interpretation, which precisely mistrusts the common sense of a political cinema in the style of Jean-Luc Godard.

In the wake of the discursive hegemony of the Godardian tradition of political modernism that has dominated film theory since the 1970s, another cinematic connection between politics and aesthetics must be developed. With this in mind, my work rests on two theoretical pillars: with the twin concepts of enunciation and suture as my point of departure, I will initially attempt a political revision of psychoanalytic film theory. This revision rests on the hypothesis that, in its preference for political modernism, apparatus theory, despite its seminal role for the field, is based on theoretical shortcuts which underpin the filmic dispositif with a structurally anti-political ideological disposition. The ontological absence of the production process in the filmic product is thus, according to this outlook, the cardinal political problem of the cinema. In the first part of this book, in contrast, I conceive of this absence as the unique aesthetic and political capability of film. Negativity here means, literally, the Outside of the Film: the paradoxically invisible element that lies at the core of what appears to be the most visible of the arts. The negative force of absence will firstly be formulated as a revised theory of the gaze, which has been considered as a relic of psychoanalysis since the phenomenological, corporeal turn in film theory since the 1990s.