Drive in Cinema

In Drive in Cinema, Marc James Léger presents Žižek-influenced studies of films made by some of the most influential filmmakers of our time, including Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, William Klein, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Harmony Korine, and more. Working with radical theory and Lacanian ethics, Léger draws surprising connections between art, film, and politics, taking his analysis beyond the academic obsession with cultural representation and filmic technique and instead revealing film’s potential as an emancipatory force.

“" Drive in Cinema can be seen as an intellectual 'Molotov cocktail,' bringing together diverse theoretical elements in order to ignite the cinema screen with the flames of radical theory and avant-garde practice."”

'Marc James Léger's Drive in Cinema is a vivid and compelling account from the front lines of post-avant-garde and popular cinema, bringing into view a politics of cinematic form in the wake of the long drawn out crisis of revolutionary film since the 1970s. If one wanted to distinguish today's neoliberal moment of film criticism from the 1970s - the partisan professionalized radical film theory of Screen, etc - this is where you'll find it.' 

-- John Roberts, author of Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde

'Marc James Léger's Drive in Cinema is precisely what we need in film theory today. More than just a reading of cinema, it attends to the urgent necessity of thinking film and art beyond the more common formalist varieties that continue to dominate, and to the urgency of emancipatory politics in the new age of austerity. The essays collected here demonstrate with brilliance why Léger is one of our leading writers on avant-garde art and culture. A pleasure to read!' 

-- Matthew Flisfeder, author of The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek's Theory of Film

'Drive in Cinema is concerned broadly with artists and filmmakers who exemplify the 'triple A' of avant-gardism: the antagonist, activist and agonist relationships between everyday life, art, theory and politics. This original and challenging contribution, an extremely readable and well-researched text, will be recognized by readers and filmmakers alike as a powerful intervention into the space of cinematic studies.' 

-- Bruce Barber, author of Trans/Actions: Art, Film and Death

Marc James Leger is an independent scholar living in Montreal. He is the author of The Neoliberal Undead and editor of The Idea of the Avant Garde "and What It Means Today.

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