CINE-DEMOGRAPHIES: POPULATION CRISIS IN LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY FILM CULTURE

Abstract

<p>This dissertation investigates the significance of demographic discourses and epistemologies over the last three decades of the Twentieth Century through the emergence of global film culture. Adopting a materialist reading of Serge Daney’s notion of a critical cine-demography, it explores three ways in which moments of population crisis over this period can be interpreted through film.</p> <p>An experiment in method as much as an alternative periodizing account of late capitalist culture, the core chapters trace the evolution of a demographic imaginary through three, chronologically organized, case studies in the articulation of population crisis since the early 1970s: (1) the fear of overpopulation that reaches a frenzied pitch in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s; (2) anxiety about absolute population decline, situated in the context of Eastern Europe in the late 1990s; and (3) the emerging problem of population aging at the close of the century, centered in Western Europe, Japan and North America. In each of these cases, the dissertation identifies a corresponding archive of films that are marked at the level of their formal and narrative construction by the pressure of these demographic and discursive formations.</p>