The Contested Community: On European Auteur Cinema at the Beginning of the 21st Century.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation explores figures of community, utopia and dystopia in recent European auteur cinema from across the continent. Centered on a close-analysis of four portraits of small communities under attack and on the brink of collapse --- The White Ribbon (Haneke, 2009), White Material (Denis, 2009), Dogville (von Trier, 2003), and Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 2000) --- it defines the "contested community film." Putting up a strong resistance to any kind of positivity, these films stage community as a breeding ground for both petty animus and extreme violence. Depicted here are small towns either unable to accommodate the stranger (Dogville, White Material ), unable to resist corruption or withstand assault from the outside (Werckmeister Harmonies), or always already rotten to their core (The White Ribbon). As inter-communal hostilities reach heightened degrees of violence, the very possibility of peaceful coexistence between human beings --- let alone the kind of mutual flourishing that so often marks utopian imaginings --- is called into question. Yet it is here that a "utopian surplus" (Ernst Bloch) may begin to reveal itself. These failed communities seem to call for fundamentally new social organizations, imploring the spectator to imagine a radically different future.
Combining film theory and political philosophy --- particularly the work of Nancy Fraser, Jean-Luc Nancy, Fredric Jameson, and Etienne Balibar --- the dissertation asks, what is cinema's relationship to utopia now? And, more specifically, what is the present European art cinema's relationship to political practice? These concerns pervade the four chapters that the body of this text comprises. The films are not considered chronologically; rather, the method employed is meant to be additive. After discussing relevant theories of community and utopia, the dissertation turns to The White Ribbon to establish a kind of baseline for the contested community and shows how Haneke's film adds the notion of violence to community's conception. This becomes a facet of all the films discussed, but each new film brings something else. Werckmeister Harmonies further radicalizes The White Ribbon's idea of violence while Dogville and White Material theorize the contested community in terms of waning public sphere politics and resistance to capital.
The contested community film not only undermines community as a utopian social formation. It also performs a systematic undermining of those tropes and techniques, inherited from 1960s cinematic modernism, meant to ensure an infinite openness to the text, and wielded in the name of spectatorial emancipation. These tools include narrative shuffling, de-suturing, gaps and fragmentation, and its opposite, the long-take. In the contested community film, what is supposed to offer a certain degree of freedom for the spectator is turned on its head, becoming an anti-utopian, imprisoning device.