The film is composed in the head of the spectator; it is not a work of art that exists on the screen by itself.

– Alexander Kluge

In the nineteenth century, the Paris Salon was an occasion at which art and politics were so highly sublimated that radicalism could come down to a debate about line and colour. As a prominent critic, Charles Baudelaire is famous for championing the painter Eugène Delacroix through completely subjective criteria that the painter himself failed to understand, declaring that the poet is a bore, which is perhaps not an insult since Baudelaire viewed the world in much the same way as the Michelin guides that so fascinated Roland Barthes. Always paradoxical, Baudelaire thought that the dictionary was one of those “great ideas” without which much else, including “great art,” was impossible. He had not come up with this belief himself, however, but stole it outright from his predecessor, Denis Diderot.

One of the not-so-great ideas in art and culture today is identity. As regards criticism, it has even been suggested, in the pages of The New York Times, that “white” critics should stay in their lanes if they do not understand the work of black artists and should moreover refrain from any verbiage that could cause artists from underprivileged backgrounds to suffer career setbacks.[1] The valid and important notion of academic freedom is denied by postmodern flat earthers on the simplistic view that nothing is neutral and everything serves power relations within a zero-sum game. Yet the construction of the value of academic freedom is a social right that was achieved by civilization and critique over many centuries. Before destroying it, you must think to replace it with something better.

The main difference between now and the nineteenth century, which some would no doubt define as white, Eurocentric modernity, are the views that people have towards the question of aesthetic autonomy, which in the language of Goethe also implies sovereignty, meaning the mastery and control of one’s craft. An original artist may understand what they are doing better than the critics or audiences. When in 1865 Édouard Manet complained to Baudelaire about the torrent of insults he was receiving for his famous Olympia – a painting of a prostitute who refuses to reveal her sex before she’s paid, which in this case is for all of eternity – the poet replied:

So once again I am obliged to speak to you about yourself. I must do my best to demonstrate to you your own value. What you ask for is truly stupid. People are making fun of you; pleasantries set you on edge; no one does you justice, etc., etc. Do you think you’re the first to be placed in this position? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? And did people make fun of them? They did not die of it. And so as not to make you feel too proud of yourself, I shall add that these men were exemplary, each in his own genre, and in a world which was very rich, while you, you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art. I hope you don’t take offence at my treating you thus, without ceremony. You know the friendship I feel for you.[2]

Nothing like a cold shower to stiffen one’s resolve. Of course, in today’s world of care studies and sensitivity training, this kind of sophistication is conservatively pathologized as toxic. Manet gets cancelled. End of problem. Donald Trump takes over the Kennedy Center.

It’s not news how postmodernism said farewell to great ideas and great art, summed up by Cultural Studies with the 1869 Matthew Arnold byline, “the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters that concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”[3] Liberal humanist universalism was torn down with only a few unassuming questions. What is an author? Is the artist alive? Why have there been no great women artists? When was modernism? The jury is still out regarding whether we can still make claims to autonomy, and if so, how, with what caveats, with what methodological presuppositions, and according to what historicity. A while ago, Franco Moretti enlisted the powers of the digital humanities to uncover 20,000 to 30,000 novels from the nineteenth century that had not made their way into literary consciousness. Using a new set of junk in and junk out criteria to evaluate the lot – data analysis, keywords, mapping, graphs, and so on – he was surprised to discover that the roughly 2000 novels that are already known are the ones that stand out, with the canonical works remaining at the top.[4] Post-structuralist anti-humanism had not managed to defeat the sweetness and the light.

The latest episode around this academic chestnut is the statement that film auteur Wim Wenders, acting as president of the jury of the 76th Berlin Film Festival, made at the opening press conference. Before the mic unexpectedly went down, a German journalist was asking the jury: “My question is, in light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale, do you as a member of the jury …”[5] The rest of the question was “…support this selective treatment of human rights,” based on the fact that the Berlinale had made official statements of support for Ukraine and Iran but none for Gaza. The reply by Wenders made headline news. However, co-juror Ewa Puszczyńska also pushed back against the question, saying that it was a bit unfair since the goal of film is to make people think and not necessarily to give them the answers about what they should believe and support. But it’s Wenders who caused a backlash, with the following:

We cannot really enter the field of politics. We have to stay out of politics because if we made movies that are decidedly political, we enter the field of politics … We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics, we have to do the work of people – not the politicians.[6]

As Melanie Goodfellow reports, the genocide in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people and left 1.5 million in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Although there were calls for a boycott of the Berlinale in 2024, the Palestinian film No Other Land (2024) had that year won the Documentary Award, with co-director Yuval Abraham accusing Israel of apartheid during his acceptance speech. In 2025, although festival director Tricia Tuttle had laid some ground rules for freedom of expression and opposition to antisemitism, a pro-Palestine speech by award recipient Jun Li led to complaints by politicians. This year, Wenders’ statement set off an avalanche of criticism, with Indian writer Arundhati Roy cancelling her attendance and honouree Tilda Swinton joining 80 prominent cinema figures in an open letter condemning the Berlinale’s silence over Gaza, which of course is not unrelated to the German government’s stance on taking responsibility for the Holocaust, with this leading to justified accusations of complicity in the genocide.

On the closing day of this year’s festival, February 21, the filmmaker Abdallah Al-Khatib, who was awarded the Perspectives prize for Chronicles from the Siege (2026), accused the German government of complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, causing the Environment Minister to leave the ceremony. His speech was one of many similar statements made throughout the festival. With Tuttle’s directorship hanging in the balance, not to mention government financing for one of the most political film festivals in all of Europe, Wenders walked back his previous argument at the closing ceremony, stating that cinema is the common language that those who had participated in the Berlinale have to express themselves about the world. The language of cinema, he argued, is different from the language of politics and the language of the Internet, which the participants also use to express themselves. Activists use the Internet to fight over what happens at festivals like the Berlinale, he said, but this language is not that of the cinema. Recognizing the courage of those who protect the dignity of human life, he called on activists to not be in competition with the festival, but instead to immerse themselves in the “sensual” and “existential” aspects of culture, and for all to treat one another as allies with shared causes. Only this, he concluded, can stand against the winds of consumerism, abstraction and over-saturation.[7]

Reflecting on cinema as a quasi-mystical space of ambient togetherness and the Internet as a dead zone of worldless strife, it’s maybe not too surprising that this luminary of the New German Cinema recently made a film about a man who cleans public toilets with the same dedication a Buddhist monk pays to the keeping of his temple. Wings of Desire (1987), Faraway, So Close! (1993) and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (2016) collaborator Nick Cave chimed in against the pile-on, affirming his filmmaker friend’s protective attitude towards the creative arts but wrongly blaming activists rather than organizers and politicians for the cancellation of the Adelaide Writers’ Week festival, a fiasco that got underway when pro-Zionists pressure caused the Adelaide Festival Board to disinvite author-scholar Randa Abdel-Fattah from the largest and oldest literary festival in that country on the view that the Bondi Beach massacre cast a new light on Abdel-Fattah’s defence of Palestinians.[8] The demand for “political art” leads to no art at all, Cave thinks, and Wenders is simply trying to prevent this from happening to the Berlinale.[9] Channelling Immanuel Kant, the musician confirms the view that art is not utilitarian. (Try telling that to the accountants and ministers of creative industries money who rely on neoclassical economics to fix their budgets.) Although Cave is happy to fly alongside fellow noncommittal hipsters like Jim Jarmusch or Thom Yorke, there are also Marxists, like the scholar Mike Wayne, who believe that bourgeois aesthetics are distinct from ethics and science.[10] Indeed, there is not likely one Marxist cultural theorist who does not have a strong attachment to the theory of autonomy in one form or another. However, outright Marxism makes matters simpler since it does not require that we choose one superstructure over another, but rather that we on some level relate both art and politics to the historical and dialectical materialist critique of political economy. Not that they are doing their utmost for the revolutionary movement, but this gives Wenders and Cave some leeway.

Google’s AI Overview tells me that Karl Marx had a formative influence on Nick Cave, along with Homer, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky. For obvious reasons, Wim Wenders said nothing about Marxist aesthetics in his Berlinale statements. Nor was this mentioned by Roy, Swinton and the open letter, which was couched in the language of historical witnessing and human rights law.[11] This most recent of ongoing protests against the genocide of Palestinians and everything else, from climate catastrophe, attacks on the public sector, billionaire political extortion, ICE detention and homicides, militarism and neo-fascism, etc., is of course not about Wenders. Nevertheless, having an international star of independent cinema, the maker of Alice in the Cities (1974), Paris, Texas (1984), Until the End of the World (1991) and Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015), confront humanity with the dogma of bourgeois idealism is nothing if not remarkable at this moment when the very notion of Western civilization is, as the old Weimar song goes, up in the air. As Sven Lütticken put it a few years ago, the constant stream of “cultural emergencies” that infiltrate the psyche through social media, all of which are legitimate cause for action, too often obliges the left to play the part of a reactive bogeyman.[12] While the sense of emergency is no doubt correct, there is a danger that such hyperpolitics, as Anton Jäger refers to the condition of being on constant alert against injustice, incites the left to slip into a reactive mode.[13] It’s one thing to subtract ourselves from microscopic culture wars, but there are two things we cannot subtract ourselves from: culture and wars. This is why artists and theorists have already come up with at least a thousand ways to operationalize the relation between art and politics. Wenders’ retort is not altogether misplaced but is rather, as Slavoj Žižek would put it, a wrong step in the right direction. He defended the universality of art instead of defending emancipatory universality. In doing so, he allowed his gesture to also defend the foreign policy of the genocidal German state, which is now in the process of rebuilding the Wehrmacht, in part, by working to reintroduce conscription. This same state has supported the U.S./Israel attacks on Iran. The element that Wenders ignored, but that the authors and signatories of the open letter also ignored, is social class.

When it comes to art and politics, suspending the question of labour, there are two basic formulas that circulate widely. We could refer to these as modernism and avant-gardism. The former says that art as such is political. The more that art remains committed to its own separate domain and logic, the more that it contrasts with the heteronomous world of everyday life and the commodity form. According to the Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this modernist phenomenon supports the idea that art reverses the values and logic of the economic world.[14] This means that no matter how “bourgeois” the concept of autonomy may be, at the level of theory, it’s based in the specificity of the cultural capital that allows someone to ignore the pressures of political or money capital. This of course is the kind of art power that can be used to support a cause, as Emile Zola did when he came to the aid of Alfred Dreyfus. But cultural or political capital can also be spent, as it were, losing effectivity over time, or wasted, when artists and critics defend the status quo. For example, although it was heartening to hear Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Minneapolis,’ which condemns Immigration and Customs Enforcement criminality, the fact that the singer was a staunch supporter of Barack Obama, known during his administration as the “deporter in chief,” simply adds to the shrug that comes from learning that Springsteen wrote and recorded the song practically overnight. Almost every member of the celebrity class, including professional athletes, now has an activist rider in their diversified portfolio of investments.

The second, avant garde version of the art and politics formula is historically intertwined with the modernist stance and often calls for the direct politicization of art, which is understood as a realist reflection and refraction of the world. (Realist here means historical rather than illusionistic or naturalistic.) Contrary to Wenders’ sanitary cordon between the space of cinema and the Internet, these kinds of artists are rather prone to using whatever means and methods that advanced industrial and post-industrial civilization has dreamed up because they are democratically distributed across the social space – not unlike the self-cleaning public toilets that are shown in Perfect Days (2023). In his Short History of the Avant Garde, David Cottington takes this as far as possible – too far, really – suggesting that modernist, avant-garde art is a professional domain that is based on the networking of artists, gallerists, critics, dealers, educators, and so on, in an international cultural bureaucracy.[15] In a similarly “machinic” vein, the autonomist cultural theorist Gerald Raunig describes in his book on transversal activism the phenomenon of post-national insurrectionary mass demonstrations.[16] These dispersed, horizontalist practices are also organized by the media platforms of the network society. One of the predecessors of transversal activism is, according to Raunig, the “[Gustave] Courbet model” that developed at the time of the Paris Commune. Here, militant art refuses to compete with militant politics. Art politics attempts instead to defend its autonomy against revolutionary universalism while also contributing to the Commune. (Courbet famously fought to protect cultural heritage from the Commune’s iconoclastic vandalism.) Autonomy is presumed in both fields. As art for art’s sake developed after the levelling of the Commune, many artists sought to place art above politics. While some maintained revolutionary beliefs, their practices were overtaken by events at the level of production techniques and in terms of the advent of the so-called “party artist” advocated by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, with for example many Constructivists, Dadaists and Surrealists participating in more than simply the “literary” collective. Interwar fascism and Stalinism damaged the attention given to realism in this period, and the danger of having one’s successful freedom of expression serve whichever system shifted the source of authenticity from the artists to the struggles themselves. Since then, the group that operated most effectively within the new conditions was the Situationist International. It succeeded, however, by not only opposing the consumer society but also those mass movements of the communist left that remained tied to workplace organizations and communist party leadership, swimming like a petty-bourgeois fish in the glacial waters of the spectacle. This petty bourgeoisie is the living contradiction in which capitalist and proletarian forces oppose one another. The task before us is to understand the statements made by Wenders and Cave as not simply tokens of the bourgeois cultural legacy, and its decay in the context of fin de siècle nihilism, but as elements of this “middle” class contradiction.

It’s in the postwar era that American consumer culture transformed and captivated the European youth that had grown up in the shadow of mass annihilation. Wenders belongs to this generation, whose call to arms against the 1950s culture of forgetting – the commercial “Heimatfilme” that was known derisively by these artists as “daddy’s cinema” – resulted in the first salvo of the New German Cinema, the Oberhausen Manifesto. Signed in 1962 by 26 West German filmmakers at the Oberhausen film festival, this intervention into German film production demanded from the state apparatus authorial independence as well as the power of the filmmakers to determine for themselves what is of political relevance in what they produce. Among the signatories was Alexander Kluge, a student of Theodor Adorno and an independent filmmaker who although not particularly well-known outside of Germany is undoubtedly the leading figure of this movement. On the question of film language, Kluge published along with Edgar Reitz and Wilfred Reinke the 1965 text titled “Word and Film,” a fitting disquisition for this period when structuralist linguistics and semiotics was displacing aesthetic theory.[17] The establishment, they write, misconstrues cinema as a fixed language. However, just as sound had changed cinema, words as such could intervene within film language to create new forms of expression. The film establishment blocks the emancipation of cinema with the demand for naturalism and narrative continuity for the sake of entertainment. The authors tie their argument to Max Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, advocating a Brechtian notion of antithetical, epic cinema, while criticizing the establishment for only supporting the kind of visual culture that denies film new means of expression. They remark sarcastically that because of this, even minor genres like the Western are more able to act as vehicles for political messages, taking film beyond a merely subjective experience. Like literature, film could be used to develop concepts, but for this to be possible, a different notion of the public sphere would be required.

One should mention that just as the 1993 English translation of Oskar Negt and Kluge’s theory of the proletarian public sphere was in the process of displacing the Foucault-Habermas debate, postmodern academia churned out countless identity-oriented versions of so-called counter-publics, each one as eager as the other to engage in the contest for hegemony.[18] While these have supposedly been brought into allyship by left populism, privilege theory, intersectionality and decoloniality, none of this has much bearing on socialist politics, except perhaps for those erstwhile radicals whose power-based social constructionism bridges the divide between Stalinism and postmodernism.

As modernist as it may sound, the cinema that Kluge has advocated is avant-garde rather than postmodernist. It begins with the autonomy of materials but also a rejection of the temptation to make films that do little more than decorate film theatres while aiming for prizes. However, the postmodern condition is also acknowledged in the fact that the radical film is more fragmented now than the modernist work, as noticed for example in the films of Radu Jude or the documentaries of Werner Herzog. This allows the different and contradictory facets of experience to figure – work, leisure, domestic life, history, memories, conflicts, rituals, accidents. While naturalism is a perfect vehicle for the presentation of film celebrities, montage and the presentation of words, for example, allow cinema to approach journalism and literature, working against the image and interrupting storytelling. The political filmmaker is not required to stand over and mold these materials into some kind of grand aesthetic statement but works with these to allow reality into the work. Playing with vignettes, episodes, stills, jokes, interviews and documentary formats, and eliminating the fatalism of narrative, helps the director avoid clichés, allowing distraction to facilitate a form of active viewer participation.

For example, all films have dialogue, but this is usually subordinated to the action. Dialogue in the films of Jean-Luc Godard or of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is not required to serve the action and can stand on its own. It sometimes appears in the form of quotes from famous people and authors or can be read outright, as was done for example by Captain Thomas Smith in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022), who, while completely inebriated, reads from Noam Chomsky over the luxury cruise ship’s PA system as the yacht is literally going down in a shitstorm – not unlike the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford that in February 2026 was plagued by toilet sabotage on its way to the Arabian Sea. Such impurities, however timid in the case of Östlund, do not submit to the demands of autonomy that are conceived by Wenders and company in pre-avant-garde terms, but they do mitigate the anti-proletarian politics that prevail in the pessimistic and accommodationist institutions of culture and knowledge.

The antagonistic realism that one finds in montage, discontinuity and satire, may in fact raise more questions than it answers, as is the case with a film like Jafar Panihi’s It Was Just an Accident (2025), especially at this moment when the West is attempting to stoke a colour revolution that would install a compliant monarch. The difference is that the negation of entertainment is performed with and for the audience, as Kluge advocates, rather than for the profits that come from selling missiles and bomber jets. The failures of the state to provide for the needs of the population should be shown. This becomes a problem for those filmmakers and film festivals that are dependent on state subsidy. But so should the problems with nationalism, academic postmodernism and identity politics be shown, so that struggles can be related to those forces that prevent revolutionary social change. Such a cinema of ideas, as Wenders well understands, may not depict precisely defined solutions to problems. This is not because film speaks a different language from politics, but rather, because its relation to the audience is not one of control but of imagination, emotions and thought, with unexpected combinations and independent elements reflecting the reality of the historical process. Films by Michael Haneke, Darren Aronofsky, Lars von Trier, Ari Aster or Chloe Zhao that torture its characters and the audience at the same time are not likely to achieve anything liberatory, in that regard, let alone cathartic. The relations between film elements are not intrinsic to the film but exist between the film and society. As it is being shown, the film exists in the mind of the spectator. It persists in the reflection and the conversations it has prompted. The people who make history and create reality are those for whom the film is made. The box office receipts are merely an indication of this potential political and cultural power of the audience, as opposed to a behaviour model of rational self-interest. It is the film and not the admission ticket that creates this social, political, cultural and economic sphere that can resist forgetting about the plight of those people that the transnational capitalist class considers expendable.[19]

All of this means that the bourgeois ideas that Wenders taps into with his defence of artistic autonomy are not simply to be rejected as obsolete. This is where activists, especially those who have sought to apply post-structural discourse theory and deconstruction to everyday life, are typically wrong. The bourgeois space remains active within our petty bourgeois culture as one of its dimensions. At the level of ideas, the principles of equality, freedom and universal emancipation retain a power of thought against the status quo in government, business, the media and academia. Cinema must therefore be closer to common experiences in its effort to build a public, which means shifting away from the kind of identity politics that serves the status quo. It must address issues that are vital to people and that represent a challenge to vested interests. Identity politics is directed against majority groups, seeking advancement within the existing system. But Marxism is directed against the system as such. Identity politics avoids the problems of proletarian existence and the public interest in favour of conservative and pluralist stereotypes. Even subcultural expressions are commodified in non-oppositional and nihilistic directions against the public articulation of social life. The pretence that postmodern culture is anti-bourgeois because it rejects what is universal and public simply underwrites the fragmentation of social life in the interest of capitalist valorization.[20]

Since the experience of alienation makes the audience amenable to the cinema’s production of fantasy, the latter must be connected to a collective project of emancipation. The problem with politics is that it is often presented in the finished form of dogma, most of which is simply taken for granted. The dogma that is not presupposed seems even more objectionable, even if it is correct. For Kluge, film liberates consciousness from the reaction to revolutionary dogma that is conditioned by the existing reality. It alters this reality through artistic form, allowing the spectator to grasp the fragments of experience and radical theory in a non-dogmatic frame. The social relations that are experienced in everyday life become relations between the elements that are communicated by the film. A new society inevitably produces a new cinema. A society that stagnates likewise has a stagnant cinema.

In an interview with Stuart Liebman, Kluge laments the state of filmmaking and the control that major cartels have on theatre chains, such that the best filmmakers have difficulty working or are forced out altogether.[21] The average age of the audience that is presumed by the average film has slid down from what used to be the median age to the mentality of a teenager. Kluge echoes the Situationists when he says that in this context, and because they feel they cannot change society, people would rather be the spectators of their lives than producers. Their inability to change society means that filmmakers have the task of grasping, though techniques like allegory and montage for example, the totality of experience. This requires that filmmakers be independent. On the question of Enlightenment, Kluge notes the petty-bourgeois condition of the public sphere. The bourgeois class is no longer a “great” class but only a narrow-minded class of speculators, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are now being spoofed in films such as Don’t Look Up (2021) and The Mountainhead (2025), along with their political minions, who are derided in films like Rumours (2024) and The Apprentice (2024). To the extent that working-class politics has been displaced by consumerism and technology, the main cultural developments are made by the in-between class: the merchants, creatives, managers and academics. These elements accumulate and profit from information. They see to it that social cognition is industrialized through computer technology and entertainment. This puts cinema, which is an expensive medium, in the pincers.

To create a counter-public, as the critics of the Berlinale have done, means to challenge the public. But the writers of the open letter wish to criticize the directors of the festival, and through them, the German state. A political film may be able to challenge the public, but its form remains in most cases that of the naturalistic cinema. These are values that the establishment recognizes as its own, even if in practical terms it opposes taking those actions that would improve social relations. Rather than making allies with the establishment, those who want to end the genocide in Gaza and end the stranglehold of the Zionist lobby on Enlightenment, must create their own counter-establishments and counterforces against the established centres of capitalist power. Culture will not suffer since humans who yearn for freedom and dignity yearn for genuine culture that speaks the truth – a realist art through which a new form and a new idea conveys the relevant content. This is the opposite of what Pam Bondi tells Americans they have not seen in Minneapolis, someone whose name accidentally echoes the Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, a disaster that is being used by the stooges of the billionaires to close the eyes of those who know what is happening in Gaza. Enlightenment, Kluge says, is more active in the mind than in the eyes. A genuinely political cinema cultivates the mind by placing film in the totality of the contemporary context, which includes politics and the Internet. The rest is mostly decadent or trivial.

Notes

1. See for example, Rock Moody, “Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul,” The New York Times (March 28, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/books/review/james-mcbrides-kill-em-and-leave.html; Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, “The Dominance of the White Male Critic,” The New York Times (July 5, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/opinion/sunday/we-need-more-critics-of-color.html.

2. Cited in T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 82.

3. This reference from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy has been used by nearly everyone, but also by Victor Burgin, who misquotes and misattributes it to Clement Greenberg in Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Palgrave, 1986), 3.

4. Marc Parry, “The Humanities Go Google,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 28, 2010), https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-humanities-go-google/; Labex OBVIL, “Franco Moretti – Large-scale dynamics in the literary field,” YouTube (April 24, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t7gBTDYNKY.

5. Melanie Goodfellow, “Berlinale Press Conference Live Feed Cuts As Journalist Asks Palestine-Related Question; Festival Denies Censorship,” Deadline (February 12, 2026), https://deadline.com/2026/02/berlinale-press-conference-live-feed-cut-palestine-1236717005/.

6. Goodfellow, “Berlinale Press Conference Live Feed Cuts As Journalist Asks Palestine-Related Question.”

7. Melanie Goodfellow, “Read Wim Wenders’ Full Speech As Director Finally Addresses Berlinale Backlash: ‘The Weather Was a Bit Stormy’,” Deadline (February 21, 2026), https://deadline.com/2026/02/wim-wenderss-full-speech-berlinale-backlash-1236731905/.

8. Helen Livingstone, “How Australian festival imploded after axing Palestinian author,” BBC (January 13, 2026), https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgm4jkwz2z8o.

9. Nick Cave, “At the International Film Festival in Berlin…,” The Red Hand Files (February 2026), https://www.theredhandfiles.com/film-festival-berlin-wim-wenders/.

10. Mike Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

11. The letter can be read at Alex Ritman and William Earl, “Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton Among 104 Names to Sign Open Letter Criticizing Berlin Film Festival for ‘Silence’ on Gaza: ‘We Are Dismayed’ (EXCLUSIVE),” Variety (February 17, 2026), https://variety.com/2026/film/global/javier-bardem-tilda-swinton-letter-berlinale-gaza-silence-1236665382/.

12. Sven Lütticken, “Performing Culture Otherwise,” in Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken, eds. Deserting from the Culture Wars (Utrecht/Cambridge: Bak/The MIT Press, 2020), eBook.

13. Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences (London: Verso, 2026).

14. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29.

15. David Cottington, The Avant-Garde: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

16. Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), [2005] 2007).

17. Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge and Wilfred Reinke, “Word and Film” (1965), October #46 (Fall 1988): 83-95.

18. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1972] 1993); Michel Kelly, ed. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

19. William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalism’s Extermination Impulse,” The Philosophical Salon (August 19, 2024), https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/global-capitalisms-extermination-impulse/.

20. See for example David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

21. Stuart Liebman, “On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview with Alexander Kluge,” October #46 (Fall 1988): 23-59.

 

Feature image: Jean-Luc Godard, Notre Musique, 2004. Courtesy of Grand Action.

Marc James Léger