Foucault, Frankfurt, Film: The Birth of the Financial Aesthetic

One route to understanding how the contemporary moving image makes sense of the current state of finance capital is to look at the emergence of neoliberalism as a political doctrine. For Foucault, this is not a phenomenon that is conceived in 1970s Chile under Pinochet, or indeed in the 1980s in the US under Reagan and the UK under Thatcher. Foucault makes the case that the birth of neoliberalism, and consequently the birth of a new manifestation of biopolitics, comes in 1949 with the establishment of West Germany and with the debates around the constitutional formation of a political state that would have as its rationale the maintenance of a specific formation of economic liberalism. For Foucault, in his The Birth of Biopolitics lectures, West Germany sees the first manifestation of the radically economic state wherein the traditional legitimising relationship of political sovereignty and economic activity are formally reversed. How is this new state constituted in cinema? In this paper, I look at the representation of economics and power in Frankfurt, Germany’s financial hub, in the award-winning Das Mädchen Rosemarie (The Girl Called Rosemary, Rolf Thiele, Roxy Films, 1958). Thiele’s satirical film, a hybrid ‘musical tragedy’, attempts to find images and sounds to register the changing nature of power in the West Germany of the ‘economic miracle’. In its focus on Frankfurt, and in its formal complexity, it offers a pioneering yet accessible engagement with the difficulties of constituting a ‘financial aesthetic’. Paper for the Political Screen conference, LSE/UCL/University of London Screen Studies Group, 19-20 June 2015