law,

order,

cinema

Visual and Environmental Studies 186g

Harvard University

• The gangster was the “man of the city,” embodying “the no to that great American yes,” challenging the optimism of “official” American culture: “in ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche, which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects ‘Americanism’ itself.”

Robert Warshow, “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” (1954) in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Expanded Harvard Edition, 2001), 105-124.

• why were people concerned about cinema? (who were these people/groups?)

• what did they do as a consequence of those concerns?

• what did film entrepreneurs, the film industry and others interested in the film industry do in response?

• and, finally, what were the consequences of these discourses, practices, and compromise formations?

• how does regulation work? how is culture regulated? how do “governance” and culture interact?

• how did people imagine cinema might be used to ameliorate the problems of modernity?

• how was cinema used by particular individuals and groups (social reformers, say, industrialists, government officials)? what films were made? what uses was cinema put to?

• another set of questions about cinema and government that are about the films themselves – the production of films by these organisations and the way these and other films imagined aspects of governance and performed processes of government in certain ways.

1. cinema and regulation

2. governmental uses of cinema

3. cinematic articulations of government

• what is government?• how can we understand its goals and

functions?• what is specific about the way

government works in the U.S.?

• “How to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best governor.” Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87.

• “the conduct of conduct” – a form of activity aiming to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of some person or persons.

• “[P]opulation comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government. In contrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc … Interest at the level of the consciousness of each individual who goes to make up the population, and interest considered as the interest of the population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of the individuals who compose it, this is the new target and fundamental instrument of the government of population: the birth of a new art, or at any rate of a range of absolutely new tactics and techniques.”Foucault, “Governmentality,” 100

• government is a whole ensembles of institutions, practices, discourses etc that has as its target population

• this type of power – that of government – results in the formation of a) whole series of specific governmental apparatuses. and b) the development of a whole complex of knowledges (about individuals, about groups, about sexuality, criminality, social order and so on and so on). and c) in forming particular structures of self-governance (of ethics, of morality, self-surveillance)