ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Drive in Cinema, Marc James Léger presents Žižek-influenced studies of films made by some of the most influential filmmakers of our time, including Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, William Klein, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Harmony Korine, and more. Working with radical theory and Lacanian ethics, Léger draws surprising connections between art, film, and politics, taking his analysis beyond the academic obsession with cultural representation and filmic technique and instead revealing film’s potential as an emancipatory force.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Marc James Léger is an independent scholar living in Montreal. He is the author of The Neoliberal Undead and editor of The Idea of the Avant Garde—and What It Means Today.

REVIEWS

“Drive in Cinema can be seen as an intellectual ‘Molotov cocktail,’ bringing together diverse theoretical elements in order to ignite the cinema screen with the flames of radical theory and avant-garde practice.”

— Bradley Tuck, coeditor of One+One Filmmakers Journal

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Foreword: Revolution at the Drive-in by Bradley Tuck
Introduction: 1 + 1 + a
Chapter 1: Sad Bunny: Vincent Gallo and the Melancholia of Gender
Chapter 2: Drive in Cinema: The Dialectic of the Subject in Daisies and Who Wants to Kill Jessie?
Chapter 3: The Ghost is a Shell
Chapter 4: Ecstatic Struggle in the World System: Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World
Chapter 5: Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Einstein – Das Capital: A Conversation with Michael Blum and Barbara Clausen
Chapter 6: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Obama (But Were Afraid to Ask Mr. Freedom)
Chapter 7: An Interview with Marc James Léger on Radical Politics, Cinema and the Future of the Avant Garde by Bradley Tuck
Chapter 8: Pasolini’s Contribution to La Rabbia as an Instance of Fantasmic Realism
Chapter 9: Godard’s Film Socialisme: The Agency of Art in the Unconscious
Chapter 10: What Is to Be Done? with Spring Breakers
Chapter 11: Analytical Realism in Activist Film
Conclusion: Only Communists Left Alive
Index