Paranoia Cinema

Introduction to Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema, out now through Duke UP. https://www.dukeupress.edu/fidel-between-the-lines. Book description below:

Through a study of Cuban cinema (1985-2017), Fidel between the Lines demonstrates how allegory can both enable and constrain public debate. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban state strategically relaxed censorship, attempting to contain dissent by giving it an outlet in the arts. Along with this shift, foreign funding and digital technologies gave filmmakers more freedom to criticize the state than ever before, yet these openings also exacerbated the political paranoia that has long shaped the Cuban public sphere. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, Humphreys shows how Cuban filmmakers have historically turned to allegory to communicate an ambivalent relationship to the Revolution, and how such efforts came up against new forms of suspicion in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. In making these arguments, Fidel between the Lines advances a new approach to the study of allegory. Scholars have argued against depth models of interpretation--known as paranoid or symptomatic readings--contending that such allegorical interpretations simply discover meanings predetermined by analysts. Fidel between the Lines instead demonstrates how, in a context shaped by censorship, artists and audiences themselves "read between the lines" in paranoid fashion, with polarizing consequences for public debate and imaginable political futures. Fidel between the Lines was selected as a 2020 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title.

From the point of view of the paranoid, the tiniest of aberrations can harbor the potential for catastrophe. Clear examples of this principle can be found in New Hollywood films like THE CONVERSATION (Francis Ford Coppola, USA 1974), where it is the shifting intonation of a single word that makes all the difference in uncovering a conspiracy. The fragmentary montage of the “paranoid style” (Richard Hofstadter) is constantly on the verge of isolating an ominous detail that would be capable of disrupting the fabric of consensual reality, with paranoid thinking hesitating “between the suspicion that the truth is wholly obscured by the visible, and the equally disturbing sense that the truth may be a sinister, invisible design in the visible” (Leo Bersani). In the quest for truth, the paranoid seeks to break through the opaque surface of the blown-up image, looking for proof in smoke, speckles of dirt, and finally the film grain itself (the paradigm for this being the Zapruder film).
In recent years, and especially after 9/11, this paranoid style in American cinema has reached new levels of complexity. In this essay I explore the ways how in ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow, USA 2012) the role of the singular deviation is interpreted. The attack on the World Trade Center sets in motion a frenzied search for a single clue regarding Bin Laden’s hide-out. The cinematic image itself is the site where the devastating effects of this frenzy can be experienced by the spectator whose very perception and cognition are "stylized" by the way ZERO DARK THIRTY creates its world of temporal and physical torture.

In this paper I suggest that the best way to interpret Arthur Miller's The Archbishop's Ceiling, which was written in the 1970s, is through the lens of paranoia. This leads into a discussion of the postmodernist aspects of the play, the first time Miller truly situates his work in a postmodernist trend. Miller's depiction of surveillance in an Eastern European city fits in perfectly with the cultural narrative of paranoia that defined the 1970s for many, and here I make the link with classic films of the genre, including Alan J Pakula's "paranoia trilogy" of Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men.

Im heutigen Zeitalter der Unsicherheit und Angst florieren konspirative Fantasien zuhauf. Ver-schwörungsfiktionen haben insbesondere in Film und Fernsehen Konjunktur. Im Zentrum des vorliegenden Bandes steht daher die Frage nach der medialen Konstruktion der kollektiven Imagination einer durch Verschwörung gesteuerten Welt.