“Foucault is uniquely akin to contemporary film.”

            -Gilles Deleuze[i]

Despite Deleuze’s definitive claim in the above epigraph, Foucault’s impact on the theoretical study of film is comparatively modest. What we may characterize then as a sort of missed encounter in part results from the lack of direct engagement with film in Foucault’s formally published oeuvre. As the co-editors of the 2018 collection, Foucault at the Movies, Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan argue, cinema was in Foucault’s view, too new a discourse to be analyzed through either genealogical or archaeological methods.[ii] Indeed, in Foucault’s most productive years, the practice and discourse of cinema in France were equally prolific if also in the legacy of May 1968—most contentiously unsettled.[iii]But it was not for lack of interest that Foucault did not explicitly take up cinema in his writings. Like most of his generation, Foucault was an avid moviegoer, friendly with filmmakers such as Werner Schroeter and Carmelo Bene, and significantly, a credited writer on Rene Allio’s 1976 film, Moi, Pierre Rivière, based on Foucault’s archival publication by the same name (slides 1-5).[iv] As with most of Foucault’s ruminations on the present, what thoughts of his on film we have are to be found in interviews and dialogues, including substantial conversations with the editors of Cahiers du Cinema, helpfully collected by Maniglier and Zabunyan and translated to English by Clare O’Farrell. Two observations of note in response: Foucault’s highly contemporary dialogues on film during the 1970s are, from the perspective of an American film studies curriculum, also idiosyncratic. Unlike the broad swath of films covered in Deleuze’s two volumes on the cinema, Foucault is on record discussing only a small sample of films and directors, some of whom risk being forgotten in the rapidly diminishing historical memory of the discipline: Schroeter, Bene, and Rene Allio as already mentioned but also René Féret, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, and Marguerite Duras. Thus, engaging the question of film through Foucault may revive the study of overlooked if also critically influential and formally experimental films and filmmakers entirely appropriate to genealogical study in our own so-called post-cinematic era. Secondly, given Deleuze’s enormous import for contemporary theories of film or film philosophy, Foucault’s interviews on film from the mid to late 1970s are provocative in relation to Deleuze’s later Cinema books. Foucault’s descriptive sensitivity to formal particularities such as, for example, the radical disjunction between image and sound/ body and voice (i.e. the visible and the articulable) in Duras’ India Song in his conversation on the film with Helene Cixous deserve further consideration with Deleuze’s elaboration of similarly descriptive film concepts or images. More generally, the correspondences between the Cinema books and Deleuze’s Foucault published only a few short years apart are provocative. In the latter, Deleuze underscores not only the spatiality but the audiovisuality of Foucault’s thinking. What Foucault’s project famously lacks in traditional systematicity, Deleuze suggests, he makes up for in what we may deem in shorthand a more fully modern ‘cinematicity’—of sound and vision.

The submissions for this curation take up the question of Foucault’s cinematicity in the spirit of an opening. Staging Foucault’s preoccupation with the peculiar force of actor, Michael Lonsdale in Duras’ India Song, Jordan Chrietzberg argues that this star-struck Foucault, eschewing categories, thus stymies traditional film description and its ideological groundings. Here, Foucault, the casual moviegoer, stands distinct from the practice of a Foucauldian method or the methodological more broadly. Sanchari Dutta Chowdhury and Basudhara Purkait each test the applicability of Foucauldian concepts beyond the West, specifically in Indian cinema, analyzing respectively John Abraham’s 1986 Amma Ariyan and Satayajit Ray’s 1980 Kingdom of Diamonds. Parsa Naji applies Foucault’s concept of parrhesia to creative strategies of resistance to censorship in Iranian cinema. The concept of the heterotopia is taken up by both Xenia Leonteva and Tara Heimberger. While Leonteva leverages the concept of the heterotopia and the series to think Russian melodrama as a historical and political genealogy, Heimberger explores the rich spatial conceptuality of the heterotopia and what it may offer contemporary horror studies beyond well-worn concepts such as the abject through the case study of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). Finally, Jeffrey Peterson attempts perhaps the most challenging task, reapproaching the panopticon neither as abstract cliché nor habit of thought. Rather, Peterson examines the theatre group at the center of 2023’s Sing-Sing, which features formerly incarcerated men and members of the New York State maximum security prison’s Rehabilitation through the Arts program as an assemblage that may invert the panopticon as overdetermined power structure. By no means exhaustive, these entries stand to suggest only further potentialities for theoretical (re)investigation. Perhaps only now do we recognize the validity of Deleuze’s conviction in the rich conceptual pairing of Foucault and film/film and Foucault.