Microsoft Word - 12.CINEJ8.1.263.docx


 

    
 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
 
 

Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy 
 
Anthony James Ballas, University of Colorado at Denver 
 tonyjballas@gmail.com 

 

Abstract 
Review of Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 248 
pp. ISBN 9780231184236, $28.00 (pbk) 
Keywords: cinematography, Hollywood cinema, framing 

 

 
New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. 

 
This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part  

of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press

Volume 8.1 (2020)  |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263  |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 



     CINEJ Cinema Journal: Review of The Dynamic Frame 

  Volume 8.1 (2020)  |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 
292 

Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New York: Columbia University 
Press, 2018. 248 pp. ISBN 9780231184236, $28.00 (pbk) 
Reviewed by: Anthony Ballas, University of Colorado at Denver, United States 

 

In this audacious debut, Noah Baumbach simultaneously resuscitates the philosophical and the 

political project of film theory, reconsidering its precepts of the 1960s and 70s through the lenses 

of latter day continental thinkers. A fitting alternate title may well have been What is Cinema? 

given the predominating philosophical and ontological questions that Baumbach endeavors in this 

work. However — and what will be immediately noticeable to film scholars is — the reminiscent 

form his title takes conjuring up the tradition of other “triadic” titles from Jean-Luc Comolli’s and 

Paul Narboni’s “Cinema/ldeology/Criticism” to Philip Rosen’s Cinema/Ideology/Apparatus. Thus 

already in the title Baumbach shows us his hand: this book is neither a work of film criticism nor 

a method of applying philosophy to individual films, it is a work of reimagining the political and 

philosophical foundations of film theory.  

The book presents three sets of juxtapositions between six continental thinkers of cinema, and art 

and aesthetics more generally; Althusser with Rancière, Deleuze with Badiou, and Benjamin with 

Agamben. Chapter One recounts Jacques Rancière’s break from his former teacher Althusser, 

whose legacy in film theory — often under the banner of “Althusserian-Lacanian” — is by now 

well known, having been suffused into film theory via a combination of Jean-Louis Baudry’s 



 

 CINEJ Cinema Journal: Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy 
Volume 8.1 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

293 

apparatus theory, and Screen theory’s (Mulvey, et. al) psychoanalytic, political project from the 

70s (what Copjec would later call “the Foucauldianization of Lacan,” 2015, p. 19). In contrast to 

Althusser’s ideology/science split, Baumbach explains Rancière’s proposal of the police/politics 

disjunction, and his assertion that no true politics can take place under the auspices of a hierarchical 

division of the aesthetic, or “le partage du sensible.” Instead, Baumbach sums up what he terms 

Rancière’s “two-part discovery”: the definition of politics as “axiomatic equality,” and the notion 

that “axiomatic equality is not a science but must be conceived of in a relation of aesthetics” (18). 

According to Baumbach, Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic ground of political equality runs 

counter to Althusser’s Marxist science, which, “not only failed to transform but rather collaborated 

with the university as an institution set on reproducing itself as the guardian of knowledge” (ibid). 

Whereas for Althusser, art leads to an ideological impasse (a feature which Baumbach rather 

brilliantly explicates from Althusser’s unfinished essay “On Brecht and Marx”), Rancière 

“provides a way out of this impasse not through a new solution so much as a brilliant rethinking 

of the history of the relation between aesthetics and politics grounded in a commitment to 

emancipation” (19).  

Chapter Two shifts focus to Deleuze and Badiou, both of whom treat the seventh art as a modality 

of thought capable of producing a kind of ontological truth — for Badiou, “an unprovable axiom 

affirming inconsistent multiplicity,” and for Deleuze an actualization of his theory of perception 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Anthony James Ballas 

 Volume 8.1 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263   |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 
294 

and affection (124/125). It is important to note that Baumbach does not collapse Deleuze’s 

immanence with Badiou’s eventalism, but rather finds in both a similarity in terms of the way they 

treat cinema “as a site of ambiguity in their larger philosophical projects” (125). Whereas “[f]or 

Badiou, Althusser’s belief in science was not the problem,” as it was for Rancière, “the challenge 

was rather how to think art, science, politics, and sexuality together without making all truth a 

matter of one of these four arenas” (124). For Rancière contra Badiou, it is precisely this kind of 

“militant fidelity” which risks reduplicating a form of policing, just as Althusser’s Marxist science 

(125).  

In Chapter Three, Baumbach explores his final philosophical coupling, Benjamin and Agamben, 

chiefly between the former’s Dialektik im Stillstand and the latter’s isolation of the function of 

gesture as a suspension of narrative. Although Agamben has written scarcely thirty pages 

dedicated to cinema (a point which Baumbach qualifies early on), Baumbach extrapolates from 

his theory of gesture as a kind of praxis of “pure means” (156) — a way of conceiving of 

suspension of meaning, unmoored or “wrested from causality” (159) as a potential way out of the 

hegemonic form spectacle cinema takes in the 20th and 21st centuries, “epitomized,” as Baumbach 

notes, “by advertising and pornography” (157).  



 

 CINEJ Cinema Journal: Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy 
Volume 8.1 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

295 

It might be fitting to think of these chapters as montages; as dialectical engagements between 

thinkers, which compound and lead the reader into the next philosophical coupling as they 

progress. In this way, at least to this reviewer, Baumbach accomplishes something special in this 

volume, revitalizing the politico-philosophical stakes of cinema via its continental varieties, and 

thereby opening up a new horizon of theory premised (once again) on film as a form of image 

production which speaks to the ontological relationship between being and appearing without 

getting lost in the web of cultural critique, identity studies and alike. In other words, the book, and 

the kind of theory espoused therein, have universal import. 

The book is filled with details from the annals of film theory, some often overlooked today given 

the ebb of this particular brand of theory: he recounts with nuance the racist origins of Bela 

Balazs’s physiognomy for instance, and offers a quite ruthless critique of Daniel Frampton’s 

Filmosophy, in particular his notion of “filmind,” (86) as well as the “quotability” (145) of GIF 

images and the condition of repetition built into the texture of the medium of viral videos, among 

other things.  

 As successful as the book’s main chapters are, and although the book does cover the 

Althusserian-Lacanian vein, its counterpart in Bordwell and Carrol’s Post-Theory, as well as 

(albeit briefly) the continuation of the psychoanalytic tradition of film theory and Žižek’s rejoinder 

to Post Theory in his book The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Anthony James Ballas 

 Volume 8.1 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263   |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 
296 

Post-Theory, there are a few omissions worth mention, in particular Baumbach’s handling of the 

political features of psychoanalytic film theory today: no mention of Todd McGowan, scant 

mention of Žižek’s Hegelian-Marxist inspired readings of film, and, perhaps most scandalous of 

all, no mention of Joan Copjec and her well-known though scarcely cited intervention against 

Screen theory in her classic “The Orthopsychic Subject” — a point which is still met with 

contention by figures such as McGowan and Flisfeder (see: McGowan, T. (2007). The real gaze: 

Film theory after lacan. NY: SUNY; McGowan, T. (2015). Psychoanalytic film theory and ‘The 

Rules of the Game’. NY: Bloomsbury; and Flisfeder, M. (2012). The symbolic, the sublime, and 

Slavoj Žižek's theory of film. NY: Palgrave Macmillan).  

 There are two ways to read this omission within the contemporary constellation of film 

studies and theory more generally as far as I am concerned. First, we can interpret it charitably and 

direct all attention to the masterful unpacking of the latter day giants of the continental tradition 

(again, the triad): Rancière, Badiou, Agamben. This reading is for anyone fatigued by the tradition 

(either read as an onslaught or a renaissance, depending on one’s view) of Lacanian theory, chiefly 

by the “Slovene Three,” Žižek, Zupančič, and Dolar, and the Americans McGowan, Copjec and 

Johnston among others. Alternatively, our sympathies may lie with the Hegelian-Lacanians 

themselves, in which case an additional chapter perhaps dedicated to Žižek himself would’ve been 



 

 CINEJ Cinema Journal: Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy 
Volume 8.1 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263 |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

297 

warranted between the book’s covers. The choice depends on where we might land on Baumbach’s 

claim from his concluding chapter: “The concepts that Žižek finds in films are not the concepts 

cinema gives rise to, as they are for Deleuze, but mere repetitions of the same Lacanian apparatus” 

(p. 171). For Baumbach, although Žižek adds something crucial to the study of film (namely his 

privileging of the impasse of the symbolic), he ultimately treats film as an artform which can be 

put into service toward exemplifying something about Lacanian thought, whereas for Deleuze, 

Badiou and Agamben, film is a form of thought which changes the way conceptual thought itself 

operates.   

 Baumbach ends Cinema/Politics/Philosophy in a similar way to the opening pages of 

Rancière’s The Intervals of Cinema, with a kind of recap of five ways of approaching film (for 

Rancière, as a form of spectacle, an ideological apparatus, a utopia, or a philosophical concept 

(Rancière, 2019, pp. 5-6), and for Baumbach romantic, utilitarian, didactic, sociological, or 

philosophical (pp. 175-177)). Although Baumbach and Rancière vary slightly on these forms, the 

final category resonates between the two, a resonance which perhaps foreshadows and (at least for 

this reviewer) drums up excitement for Baumbach’s next book (yet to be announced, though 

rumored to be in the works), The Anonymous Image. With this title, Baumbach has set up a 

promising trajectory for a revitalized return to the political and philosophical roots of film theory.  

 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Anthony James Ballas 

 Volume 8.1 (2020)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2020.263   |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 
298 

 

Bibliography 

Baumbach, N. (2018) Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Copjec, J. (2015). Read my desire: Lacan against the historicists. London: Verso. 

Rancière, J. (2019). The intervals of cinema. London: Verso.  

Žižek, S. (2004). Parallax view. Cambridge: MIT Press.  

 
Anthony Ballas 
Instructor, University of Colorado at Denver 
 
English Department Office 
1015 Ninth Street Park 
Downtown Campus 
Denver, CO 80204 
 
anthony.ballas@ucdenver.edu 
Tel: 303.847.9038