Radical Minor Cinemas in the 1970s: Alberto Grifi, Chantal Akerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Emile de Antonio and the Anthropology of Disobedience Seminar

Abstract

‘Minor cinema’ was a term used independently by both Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to discuss a range of cinematic practices that intervened in different ways in the production of subjectivity, outside of dominant modes of representation. While Guattari applied this especially to films engaged with anti-psychiatry, it was also applicable to a range of radical cinema projects beyond this. This paper will engage with this field of practice in the 1970s by means of a second concept formulated by film and video maker Alberto Grifi, namely the ‘anthropology of disobedience’. This will firstly be examined in his own experimental work, especially the film Anna (1975) and then in examples from the very different filmmakers Akerman, Fassbinder and de Antonio. I will be arguing less for any common style between their works than a shared impulse of producing a minor cinema that combines subjectivity and politics directly, and thereby calls dominant modes of both cinema and power radically into question.