Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique

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Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique explores cinema in relation to the critical tradition in modern philosophy and its heritage in Romantic aesthetics. Using a variety of discursive fields and traditions, including Early German Romanticism and critical theory, this book outlines a radical new interpretation of Romanticism in reference to the films of Arthur Penn and Lindsay Anderson cultural texts previously underexplored by academic studies, such as Mickey One, O Lucky Man! and The Missouri Breaks. Negation and Freedom provides new theoretical tools for the textual analysis of concepts such as stillness, indecision, doubt, and pain in filmic representations. After an initial theoretical analysis which Romanticises Theodor Adornos negative dialectics, a series of expansive case studies focusing on the political and philosophical interpretation of selected films provide opportunities to link close textual and thematic analysis with a revitalised understanding of Romanticism as a contemporary critical concept. This book offers an enriched and revitalised understanding of Romanticisms relevance to both the filmic texts of the 20th century, and also the aesthetic, philosophical and political conditions of modern subjectivity and spectatorship.

Author Bio

Will Kitchen was Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. He is the author of Romanticism and Film: Franz Liszt and Audio-Visual Explanation (2020), also published by Bloomsbury Academic.