Cinema of the Not-Yet

Abstract

Drawing on Ernst Bloch's writings on utopia, Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, and the 'affective turn' in social theory, I argue that cinema is by its nature heterotopic: it creates worlds that are other than the 'real world' but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. The landscapes and people portrayed in film are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers' relationship to the real objects denoted or signified by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes or fails to mobilize this affective charge to draw out its critical Utopian potentials. I examine four films from the 1970s-Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Stalker-as examplesof richly heterotopic films that elicited Utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences, and I discuss some ways in which American environmentalists, British Pagans, Europe's 'generation of '68', and Soviet citizens worked with these affects to imagine change in their respective societies.

When Worlds Collide: Using Films to Understand the Heterotopic Overlaps of Multiple Worlds

“…Heterotopia is transformation of the 'real world' into a world that relates and contradicts in multiple ways (5). The landscapes, backdrops and people depicted in films are an alternate reality, portrayed in such ways that the viewer could dominate, manipulate the optical toy and could control the speed and timing of movement.…”

From Dusk till “DAU”: the Rise of Heterotopic Cinema in the Times of Pandemic

“…DAU film set -the Institute (photo: Jörg Gruber, DAU press kit, Phenomen IP 2019). (Ivakhiv 2011, Näripea 2013, Burlacu 2015. More recent examples of films investigated using the concept of heterotopia include George Miller's Mad Max franchise (Corbett 2017), Stephen Daldry's The Hours (Zhao, Öner 2018), Todd Haynes's Carol (Smith 2018), and Ben Wheatley's High-Rise (Klein 2019).…”