• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.49
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• pp.59-93
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• 2017

This paper provides an in-depth examination of the relationship between cinema and Giorgio Agamben's aesthetics and philosophy. Intersecting Agamben's key concepts including gesture, mediality, biopolitics, historicity, and profanation with historical and aesthetic dimensions of cinema, I argue for his ambivalent view on cinema and visual media. On the one hand, Agamben linked cinema and visual media to his discussion on biopolitics and spectacle as he considered them as apparatus for capturing and controlling gestures. On the other hand, he also argued that cinema could restore the image with capacity to preserve and recuperate gestures based on his consideration of montage as cinema's key aesthetic and technical component (an operation of profanation) and his Benjaminian thought on the ways in which montage suspended linear flow of images and activated an alternative memory of them. Drawing on history of cinema and optical devices in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as examples of found footages of filmmaking predicated upon stoppage and repetition of images, I argue that Agamben's concept of potentialities can be extended into his thought on cinema and visual media apparatuses in general.