Review: Christopher Pavsek (2013) The Utopia of Film: Cinema and its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik. New York: Columbia University Press.
I have now read The Utopia of Film by Christopher Pavsek cover to cover twice and the introduction three more times. It is a book well worth returning to repeatedly for its close textual analyses, rigorous discussion of critical theory (especially Marxism, Modernism/Postmodernism, and the Frankfurt School), and dialectical approach to utopia and failure in these films and philosophies. I came to this book for its sustained focus on Kidlat Tahimik ‐ a filmmaker whose work I have often taught but rarely seen put under such thorough scrutiny ‐ and left with a refreshed appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard and a new excitement about the work of Alexander Kluge as well. Before encountering Pavsek’s book, I had only a passing familiarity with Kluge’s work, but after reading his richly engaging analysis of Kluge’s films and philosophy, I have come to consider Kluge, a former student of Theodor Adorno, in much more critically engaged ways. I have always been strongly influenced by, but am still wary of, Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), Negative Dialectics (1966), and Aesthetic Theory (1970). Now, with Pavsek’s explication of Kluge’s dialectical approach to Adorno, I find Frankfurt School critique ever more germane to cultural, ethical, political and aesthetic concerns. On the first page of his Introduction, Pavsek explains that he has borrowed his title from Kluge’s first essay on film, ‘Die Utopie Film’, and that the book is written under Kluge’s thought that ‘utopia is an inordinately rich concept possessed of complex temporal dimensions that bind the present to the past and to the future’ (1). According to Kluge, ‘utopia is a conservative idea, the search for a quality about which one vaguely knows that it existed at some point in the past’ (1). Something is amiss in the present political and cinematic situation due to a failure in the past or the failure of a past event to meet its full potential, and the utopic imperative is the call to redeploy these unrealised possibilities, thwarted ambitions, and disappointed hopes. The utopic impulse is to pursue the realisation of failed past promises that a better world, a better life, is possible, and Pavsek’s goal is to examine in detail the films and cinematic practices of Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge (as well as Sergei M. Eisenstein, Chris Marker and Agnes Varda in places) that reflect this utopic drive to engage dialectically with cinematic and political failure and realisation. Thus, The Utopia of Film considers how the utopic imperative addresses cinema production, distribution, exhibition,