A keynote to kick off the semester
It would be almost trivial to say that democracy is in crisis, for democracy—inherently a fragile project—is more or less always in crisis. At the moment, though, this is indeed an especially relevant theme. A democracy that desires to avoid violent times must encourage diversity, pluralism, and solidarity. I state this up front in order to now shed some light on the relationship between democracy and film one level deeper.
The narrative feature film, namely, is an art form based upon plots that involve characters, and it lives from the dramaturgical parameters of these plots. In its portrayal of characters, a central role is played by two aspects: realisation and decision. These elements represent the core of character development, for at a point typically situated around half to three-quarters of the way through a film, a character will realise something significant that causes them to alter the thrust of their actions. This plot reversal points subsequent events toward the consequences with which the film concludes.
I’d like to illustrate this by way of two concrete examples: The classic film The Day of the Jackal (1973), a book adaptation directed by Fred Zinnemann, tells of a professional assassin who is hired to murder French president Charles de Gaulle. Film scholar Kerstin Stutterheim, in her analysis of this film, zeroes in on the central moments of realisation and decision by the main character: we first see him on the phone as he learns that his cover has been blown. He now has to decide whether to continue pursuing his mission or to abort it. In the second scene she mentions, we see the moment of the decision itself: Does he abandon the job and head for Italy, where he’ll be safe, or continue driving to Paris? He ends up turning left, of course—otherwise, the film would be over.
In the film Aftersun (2022) by Charlotte Wells, we experience a similarly decisive moment in the life of the young protagonist Sophie. She had expected to go onstage and sing karaoke together with her father. She then, however, realises how she’s taken the stage alone while her father has remained seated with defensively folded arms. The lyrics “I thought that I heard you sing” symbolise her inner feelings and her disappointment. She ultimately makes a decision and tells her father that she will not return with him to their lodgings; instead, she’ll spend the evening with other young people. It’s at this moment that her coming-of-age crystalises.
These moments—already described in Aristotle’s Poetics as “anagnorisis” and “peripeteia”—represent an integral component of drama and are also closely associated with democracy. Or, put differently: it was democracy that, via the detour of ancient tragedy, actually brought drama into being. Here, one needs to know that every type of society has brought forth its own dramaturgical form: some societies produce above all fairy tales, others give rise to musicals, while still others crank out endless streams of crime thrillers. Hollywood, for its part, is dominated by hero’s journeys—in whose structures, by the way, a fairly hierarchical world order comes to bear.
The fact that tragedy arose concurrently with democracy is no coincidence. As writers including the theatre scholar Joachim Fiebach have elucidated, it emerged in the context of Athenian democracy and its attendant novel demands on citizens as decision-makers and protagonists (demands that, at the time, applied only to men and not to women or the enslaved). These citizens thereby began to experience themselves as autonomously acting persons for the first time, and art accompanied this new experience by way of critical engagement in general and the question of whether and to what extent human beings actually can determine their own actions.
This dialectic between individual agency and embeddedness in supra-individual forces, be they fateful powers or social obligations, sits at the core of numerous dramatic materials. Moreover, the associated conflict between individual freedom and collective uniformity, between the rights of the individual and the needs of society, also reflects democracy’s fundamental paradox. In a democracy, this conflict must—as described exhaustively by writers including the political scientist Chantal Mouffe—be constantly renegotiated and resolved.
In doing so, democracy (just like drama) is reliant upon aesthetic representation. This can be seen even in architecture: the similarity between, for example, the historicist 19th-century Austrian Parliament building and the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, thought to be the world’s oldest dedicated theatrical venue, is unmistakable. Both in parliament and onstage, people step forward to expound upon or perform something. And in both, people rely on their ability to convince others.
Democracy has come under frequent criticism for its dependence upon representation and upon convincing portrayals. After all, this entails that demagogues who are also good performers have decent chances of winning elections. The philosopher Juliane Rebentisch, however, argues that democracy is among the best of all possible systems of government precisely because of its dependence on aesthetic representation. It is a feature, she holds, that makes it possible for every individual to step forward, take the stage, and express themselves publicly. The decision to make movies likewise entails actively taking this public stage—and the opportunity to take part in public discourse with its most varied content and forms is something that other systems of government ultimately do not necessarily guarantee in quite the same way.
