Book Review: Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity, by Joshua Foa Dienstag

• Author: Brian Price
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221076085
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(6) 975 –990

© The Author(s) 2022

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity, by Joshua Foa

Dienstag. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, 192 pp.

Reviewed by: Brian Price, Department of Visual Studies and the Cinema Studies

Institute, University of Toronto

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221076085

At the core of Joshua Foa Dienstag’s remarkable new book, Cinema

Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity, is the con-

junction of cinema and democratic politics as representational practices.

Cinema and representational democracy are both responses, varied though

they each may be, to populations that exceed a reasonable capacity for self-

presence (in the case of film) or direct democracy (in the case of politics).

And while representation has remained at the core of political theory, even if

only to be subject to critique, the representational dimension of cinema is

rarely celebrated, or even accommodated as a necessary evil. Unlike repre-

sentational democracy, cinema is rarely understood as a response, at least in

part, to population swells over time and the class division that such swells

inevitably effect.

Much more common to the history of film theory and philosophies of

mass culture is a neo-Platonic skepticism about representation as a pernicious

source of false consciousness and the maintenance of inequality. By the late

1960s, film theory became, and has remained, preoccupied with the decep-

tive pleasures of representational cinema, such that pain and self-denial

becomes confused with emancipation. Only rarely do film theorists seem to

wonder how an iconoclastic and fundamentally modernist relation to cinema

could possibly beget a better order of the social, as if the point of film theory

were only ever to declare one’s opposition to what cannot actually be bested

or made more useful, as if representation works always against the unpredict-

ability and inconsistency of social relations. And to be fair, the skeptical tra-

dition of film theory was born of at least two major interventions in the lived

experience of the totalitarian embrace and production of the mass-ness of the

1076085PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221076085Political TheoryBook Reviews

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