Cinema of Resistance: Manifesto for a Minor Cinema to Come

Abstract

This thesis explores the necessity of constructing a new way to conceive and produce political cinema, in recognition of the ever-growing difficulties filmmakers have in doing so outside a system that assimilates and overcodes almost anything. Engaging with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the research presupposes the filmmaking event as an act of resistance, and analyses the conditions under which this occurs. The work of Deleuze & Guattari will serve, firstly to examine the current state of the modes of production in capitalism (within which cinema is produced), and secondly to suggest new lines of action to escape these constraints and liberate cinema from its commodification. In developing the concept of what I term Cinema of Resistance (CoR), I will articulate four propositions that emanate from the collision between Deleuze & Guattari’s thought, the work of a number of filmmakers whose works embody the political potentialities of cinema’s form, and my own practice. My film Work or To Whom Does the World Belong was shot amongst, and with the collaboration of, the mining community of Asturias during the final years of an incremental decline in the coal industry and in the working-class movement. The film and the accompanying case study of its production will manifest that regardless of whether a film’s subject matter is political, it is largely the methods by which it is produced and its experimental nature that qualify it as a form of resistance. The conclusions of this study take the form of a manifesto, a call to action directed to other filmmakers with the necessity, artistic volition, and duty to abandon industrial structures and homogenising systems, in order to engage with cinema’s full artistic potential.