Biopolitical Realism

Abstract

Mark Fisher’s term capitalist realism is tested against the films Pity (2019; dir. Makridis), Attenberg (2010; dir. Tsangari), L (2011; dir. Makridis). The main characters’ dislocation, ironic disposition and embodied reactions to events in these films point to the full implementation, but also to a certain exhaustion, of capitalist realism. What these films show well, it is argued, is the need for a representational strategy that this book proposes calling biopolitical realism. The chapter suggests that ‘[b]iopolitical realism thrives on collation, seriality, contiguity, metonymical thinking, posturing, framing, performatively gesturing, moving and self-referential filming’. The documentary series Mikrocities, produced and shown in Greece in 2010-11, is presented as a clear and very self-conscious example of the expansive poetics of such a biopolitical realism.