Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema by Claudia Breger (review)

Claudia Breger's Making Worlds engages with contemporary European films to examine the affective responses that these works engender and the types of relations among individuals or groups that they invite viewers to imagine. Drawing on an impressive conceptual corpus by theorists such as David Bordwell, Eugenie Brinkema, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and Jacques Rancière, the goal of Making Worlds is to

attend to the perspectives of the—diegetic, performing, narrating, producing, and perceiving—human and human like actors that populate the loops of film composition and spectatorship without underestimating their ties with nonhumans and the myriad ways in which each of their acts is shaped by other forces.

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In so doing, Breger underscores how the films she discusses not only elicit positive, convivial, and empathetic responses but also engage and comment on hate, fear, and aggression in the public sphere and thus produce complicated and seemingly contradictory affective assemblages that are typical of viewers' current political and socio-cultural realities. Making Worlds mobilizes Rancière's concept of "the sensible" as it calls for a critical engagement with contemporary European film and the "overlaps as well as tensions between cinematic and life worlds at local, regional, national, European, transnational, and global—or, alternatively, planetary—scales" (21).

In its four chapters and an epilogue, Breger's book lays out the stakes of an analysis that is attuned to the notions of worlding (the significance of affect) and worldmaking (symbolic and cognitive processes of plotting, narration, and spectator comprehension), "sensation and signs," as well as "ontology and semiotics" (9). Given this particular theoretical approach, Making Worlds attempts to trace the coexistence of ideas of (closed) communities and postmodern understandings of flexibility in our contemporary (global) world in European cinema by attending to narratives of universal cosmopolitanism and connectedness that are grounded in the socio-political and cultural realities of a specific and localized context. For instance, this dynamic dualism comes to the fore in Breger's reading of Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007) and Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (2011). The former is a film with multiple focalizing narratives that all display and elicit a high degree of affect in both protagonists and audience while also portraying characters that appear detached, resulting in a sense of alienation in viewers. Coining the term nonsovereign storytelling to describe how the narrative authority in The Edge of Heaven is based on "the way the narration 'follows' and arranges a plurality of perspectives rather than on anyone's pretensions to an autonomous, definite understanding of how the—or a—world is, could be, or should be," Breger emphasizes that "[f]ictional worlds are never imaginatively closed and autonomous" (34) but are always in dialogue with intertextual and lifeworld references. The intertextual fabric in A Separation, so Breger's analysis, emerges through an interweaving of religion, class, and gender politics in ways that are different from traditional modes of storytelling by employing a camera style that appears muted. Thus, this "model of affective cinematic worldmaking gains contours as a methodology of following the actors of social controversies" (55) and suggests that the film is about the process of listening rather than drawing conclusions or providing answers. In short, A Separation demands of its audience "nonsovereign perception" (55): that is, it calls on viewers to engage with what is onscreen and to allow themselves to listen, see, and feel.

In tracing oppositional forces and linking them to affect, Breger outlines some of the continuities and differences from the political cinema of the 1960s (films by Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) that apply to the current moment of cinematic production, asking for a reconceptualization of historical genealogies. Drawing on theoretical concepts of defamiliarization famously introduced by Bertolt Brecht and rediscovered by film scholar André Bazin, Making Worlds argues for a "phenomenological methodology" that encounters the filmic characters in Godard's My Life...