Right-wing agitator Andrew Breitbart commented in 2009 that instead of funding political candidates, conservatives should have created a film studio. While motion pictures have lost the broader cultural relevancy they have enjoyed during most of the 20th century, conservative film producers have since taken on Breitbart’s advice. Off-Hollywood studios such as Pinnacle Peak Production, Angel Studios or Bonfire Legend, as well as streaming platforms like Great American Pure Flix, Angel+ or The Daily Wire+, are now offering hundreds of movies ranging from „faith-based“ family entertainment to violent horror and action films. What unites this very heterogenous slate of productions is their shared metapolitical effort to normalize right-wing talking points and comment on hot button topics that have increasingly informed the US presidential races since 2016. With the reactionary backlash rapidly changing the political and cultural landscape of the United States and mainstream studios such as Paramount, Sony or Universal Pictures increasingly getting involved in the production and distribution of openly conservative movies, this seminar shines a light on the aesthetics, economics and politics of MAGA cinema. This seminar aims to historically contextualize this still very young but currently rapidly growing movement and its infrastructures, to relate it to the current meta-politics of “reflexive fascism”, and to map the industry and infrastructures responsible for the production and international distribution of the films. Weekly film analyses will focus on the question of normalization strategies with which conservative to right-wing extremist positions are discursivized and narratively legitimized.
- Kursleiter/in: Peter Vignold