The Mosaic Film: Nomadic Style and Politics in Transnational Media Culture
Year: 2011
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: In contemporary media culture the formal, narrative, and stylistic structures that are most pervasive can be described as an aesthetics of the mosaic. Multiple main characters, multiple interwoven story-lines, multiple or fragmented spaces, different timezones or paces seem to be specifically apt for engaging with the migratory nature and politics of our times. In this essay, I will look at Babel (USA: González Iñárritu, 2006), WWW. What a Wonderful World (Morocco/Germany/France: Bensaidi, 2006), and Kicks (Netherlands: Ter Heerdt, 2007). In relation to these films I will discuss the ways in which an aesthetics of the mosaic is related to migratory movements and contemporary globalized media culture. This aesthetics, I will argue, is closely related to transnationalism, which can assume different forms. Its style and politics can be characterized as nomadic, a concept that should be understood in its Nietzschean implications of mixing heterogeneous codes and referring to the Outside world. By means of a nomadic style and nomadic politics these films assert a Deleuzian “becoming-minoritarian” as everyone’s affair.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Patricia Pisters
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2169293222