Notes on Alain Badiou and the cinema

Abstract

This article reviews some of Alain Badiou’s main ideas about cinema, collected from different texts through his work. The writing is organized in twelve sections: 1) cinema is a new art that was born in the 20th century; 2) cinema is a mass art; 3) cinema is an ontological art; 4) the cinema makes time visible; 5) cinema as the most-one of the other arts; 6) cinema is an impure art; 7) each film is a singular real object, which exposes the passage of an idea according to the shot and the montage; 8) the art of cinema as a visitation of an idea; 9) cinema as an ethical setting; 10) the three ways of talking about a film; 11) a film is a point-subject of an artistic configuration; 12) from tragic cinema to cinema as a moving image of eternity. These ideas are presented in conjunction with various films: The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915), Pasaron las grullas (Kalatozov, 1957), Last Year at Marienbad (Renais, 1961), Death in Venice (Visconti, 1971) , False Movement (Wenders, 1975), Stalker (Tarkovski, 1979), Barton Fink (Coen and Coen, 1991), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 2001), Joker (Phillips, 2019) and Nomadland (Zhao, 2020).