Crowds, Swarms, Multitudes

What is a crowd? How do moving images organize and produce collective bodies? From background noise to central motif, from the uncanny to the engulfing power of unruly affect, this seminar examines the ways in which crowds, masses, swarms, and other forms of multitudes have populated moving image art from early cinema to contemporary video. If crowds are not masses, collective bodies have been conjured by film and media to produce an image of the political, from the racial organization of society to the surveillance and control of popular uprisings. Moving from early theories of the crowd and mass society to contemporary debates on networked multitudes, we will watch films by Lang, Eisenstein, Riefenstahl, Romero, Lynch, Peele, and Steyerl, and read works by Kracauer, Simmel, Fanon, Hardt and Negri, Thacker, and Raengo. In English.