Cinema and its Discontents: Jacques Ranciere and Film Theory

Jacques Rancière may have entered a French pantheon of film theory in 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical and contemporary films in La fable cinématographique. In that book Rancière posited cinema to be “to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood.”1 Cinema rejects the Aristotelian poetics of fables and fabulation by reconfiguring the Greek philosopher’s hierarchy that favored muthos, the rationale of a plot, over opsis, the “sentient effect of the spectacle.” The camera records its stories via linked actions, headed toward various resolutions by way of often unforeseen twists and turns. The dramatic progression of the Aristotelian scheme is betrayed, however, when the camera records information and evokes sensations that go both against the grain of dramatic progress and in myriad directions, many of which are beyond the director’s or editor’s control and have little to do with the narrative.