On the Edges of Geopolitics: Sexual Difference in Ursula Biemann’s Video Essays

Abstract

Many have observed that cinematic forms have some sort of parallel with the socio-political contexts from which they emerge. Somewhat reductively and retrospectively, Siegfried Kracauer traced German Expressionism to the rise of Nazism some years after the demise of the Weimar Republic. More recently, Gilles Deleuze makes the connection between world history and cinema in his two-volume topography of cinematic forms entitled Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1997) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989). In this influential study, Deleuze discerns a particular cinema of the movement image, characterised by the narrative stability and linearity of clas-sical Hollywood cinema, before the outbreak of the Second World War and a subsequent cinema of the time image, where the consistency of subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality are thrown up in the air. Deleuze attributes this change in film form to the radical transformation of the ideological and polit-ical landscapes wrought by the effects of the Second World War. Taking this topography further, one then needs to con-sider the implication of the collapse of socialist states in Eastern Europe and the rise of the transnational globalised economy for the contemporary political landscape in which a particular political media practice emerges as definitive: the digital video essay.