The Geopolitical Aesthetic

"The Geopolitical Aesthetic is a dazzling... distillation andapplication of the theoretical system he first presented in The PoliticalUnconscious (1981)." -- The San Francisco BayGuardian

Taking contemporary films from theUnited States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The GeopoliticalAesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decadeand a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. FredricJameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function incontemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex andinternational social reality? Jameson's sophisticated and theoretically informedreadings stress the ways in which disparate films -- for example, Godard's Passion, Pakula's All the President's Men, Yang's The Terrorizer, Tahimik's The PerfumedNightmare, Tarkovsky's Andrei Roublev -- confront similar problems ofrepresentation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same -- thedesire to find adequate allegories for our socialexistence.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement anddevelopment of the arguments put forward in Jameson's seminal work The PoliticalUnconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis andcultural studies.