Review: Contemporary Political Cinema, by Matthew Holtmeier

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama pronounced the end of history, arguing that the dissolution of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the terminus of political transformation with “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”¹ Although roundly critiqued as an idealistic neo-evangelism of free-market capitalism, Fukuyama’s declaration did underline a significant shift in world politics, namely the seeming exhaustion of the grand narratives of revolution that had up to that point driven the twentieth century and the concomitant consolidation of neoliberalism as the dominant world-system. Matthew Holtmeier’s Contemporary Political Cinema picks up at precisely this historical juncture, examining films from the 1990s to the 2010s made in the wake of the decline of the “grand gestures of political cinema” (1). A delicately theoretical book, informed but not dominated by Gilles Deleuze, Contemporary Political Cinema explores the new transnational forms of...