Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis

• Includes highly original readings of individual films and the work of key directors such as Audiard, Sciamma, the Dardenne brothers and Kechiche
• Refuses to fetishise the Crisis as a singular event and develops a nuanced account of crisis and cinema’s capacity to respond to it
• Shows how cinema can move beyond critique to provide resources for the political imagination
• Generates approaches that are transferable to other cinemas

Looking Beyond Neoliberalism explores how cinema is responding to the economic crisis that sprang to public attention in 2008 and continues to shape our politics and societies. Bringing French and francophone Belgian films into dialogue with carefully selected theories, O’Shaughnessy develops insights and an analytical framework that will become important resources for other scholars of contemporary cinema.

This book explores cinema's capacity to register mutations in subjectivity, the material grounds for identity construction and the machinic dimension of neoliberal subjection. It also probes its capacity to imagine alternative economies and identities and an exit from neoliberal labour. By developing fresh insights into political cinema, this book provides engages with cinema’s response to neoliberalism in crisis.