Film, Risk, Contingency

This evening at the Film Studies Workshop, Mette Hjort from the Lingnan University of Hong Kong, will be speaking on "Film and Risk," based on a book of the same title she is editing. Just a cursory read of her introduction chapter drew me in considerably. Film-making involves many risks: economic, political, environmental and personal. The book project she and others are working on aims to understand how this risk is perceived and experienced by individuals involved in filmmaking and viewing, and how it is managed (or ill-managed) in the film industries and in the wider society. Their methodology is a combination of ethnography (of the film industry), oral history, textual analysis, and sociological study.

The choice of "risk" as the organizing concept is an interesting one. On the one hand, "risk" dialogues with the much older concept of "contingency" in film studies, yet treats "chance-happenings" with more human agency and responsibility than how "contingency" is traditionally treated. On the other hand, "risk" is a term used often in the context of politics and economics, therefore it allows us to speak about film experiences in relation to other social experiences. Further more, while risk involves personal rationality, calculation, and responsibility, it also involves the power structures that distribute the risk. (In Hollywood cinema, for example, stunt actors have to perform risky activities in place of real actors; In China, certain film projects damage environment, and the risk is shouldered by the residents who live there). Therefore, thinking about risk and cinema raises questions not only with regard to "ethical accounting" in filmmaking, but regarding all our cultural activities and how they interact with real-life politics and society.

For me, this is a particular attractive line of thinking about cinema. I think of cinema, theater and literature as laboratories for us to experiment with ideas about ourselves and about the world. The film studies I have read seems to deal much with trauma, suffering, memory, history, but not enough with other operative ideas such as risk. There is so much more to be done in this field--what a happy reminder from Mette Hjort's visit!