Political Theory and Film

by Ian Fraser (Author)

Critically examines how radical political theory and its application to film analysis can provide insight to the aesthetic self during political upheaval and conflict

Review
Up to date and up to speed, Fraser’s book is an excellent introduction to the developing relationship between political theory and cinematic meaning-making. Using insights from Kant and Hume to Deleuze and Rancière, Fraser pairs major theorists with major films, working from Adorno to Žižek, from Chaplin to Chandor. Just as films make politics, so now they make political theory. (Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory, University of Bristol)

Ian Fraser is one of our foremost political theorists exploring the relationships between aesthetics and politics, demonstrating how film has a powerful social significance in providing graphic and valuable exemplifications ideas and concepts developed in political philosophy. This book considers with remarkably wide-ranging agility and insight the provocative investigations of leading continental philosophers into the political imagery and radical social critique projected in such films as Chaplin's Monsiuer Verdoux, Loach's Land and Freedom and Chandor's Margin Call. (David Boucher, Professor of Political Philosophy and International Relations, Cardiff University)

Through a series of carefully chosen case studies Ian Fraser examines the relationship between cinema and political theory of (mostly left-wing) authors, such as Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch and Rancière. In a lucid way he demonstrates that films can visualise and explain ideas which are often difficult to grasp, while putting them into a test of concrete, even if fictional situations. (Ewa Hanna Mazierska, Professor of Contemporary Cinema, University of Central Lancashire)

About the Author
Ian Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University, UK. He is the author of: Identity, Politics and the Novel: The Aesthetic Moment (2013), Dialectics of the Self: Transcending Charles Taylor (2007), Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need (1998), co-editor, with Tony Burns, of The Hegel-Marx Connection (2001), and co-author, with Lawrence Wilde, of The Marx Dictionary (Continuum, 2011).