Cinema Against Spectacle

Jean-Louis Comolli’s six-part essay Technique and Ideologyhad a revolutionary effect on film theory and history when it first appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1971. In 2009, Comolli revisited his earlier text, arguing that the present age, marked by the total dominance of media-filtered spectacle over image production, makes the need for an 'emancipated, critical spectator' more pressing than ever. In this volume, Daniel Fairfax presents annotated translations of these two texts to provide an overview of Comolli’s activity as both a theorist and a filmmaker.

"Hopefully this intelligent edition will make Comolli and his work more visible to contemporary readers, while also positing the development of a more ‘scientific’ ideological critique not just of individual films, but of cinema and the society of the spectacle as a whole." - William Brown in New Review of Film and Television Studies

Jean-Louis Comolli is a French writer, editor, and film director. He was editor of Cahiers du cinéma in 1965-73. Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and an editor of the online film journal Senses of Cinema.