Documenting financial assemblages and the visualization of responsibility

A powerful scene in the 2010 documentary Inside Job (dir. Charles Ferguson), which analyzes the 2007/2008 financial crisis and its fallout, provides a crisp explanation of what it calls the ‘securitization food chain’. A mere three minute scene, offering some simple graphics and a few well-chosen quotes from experts, explains the historical background and technical arrangement of the complex derivatives – called Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSs) – that played an important role in the crisis. MBSs bundled, repackaged and (re)sold mortgages and other small household debt to global investors and are now widely regarded as one important element underlying the crisis, for the repackaged loans dispersed risk in ways that were poorly understood by, or indeed hardly understandable to, those who invested in them. Even though Inside Job’s explanation of MBSs is doubtlessly oversimplified, the scene is important and compelling for the ways in which it makes arcane financial product innovation accessible and comprehensible to the average cinema-goer. Its ‘arrangement of perceptibility’ opens up the ‘black box’ of financial technical knowledge and reconnects it with wider questions of politics and moral legitimacy (van Munster and Sylvest 2013: 5; MacKenzie 2005). This chapter focuses on documentary films that are broadly in the realm of political economy and the financial crisis. In particular, the chapter explores the question of how these films render visible complex political economies and arrange the perception of responsibility. Global economies involving speculative investments, financial derivatives, transnational pipeline deals, export networks and technical consumer standards are both seemingly distant from mundane lives and largely incomprehensible to the uninitiated viewer. The films discussed in this chapter aim to render these complexities accessible and comprehensible in order to draw the (Western) viewer into understanding and critique. The selected films can be understood as contributing to the work of ‘perspectivism’ and ‘decentering’ that for Shapiro (2009: 5-6) are key elements in cinema. For

Shapiro there is a capacity for political work in cinema and the visualization of ‘movement’ that exceeds the capacities of language and linguistic meaning to render interconnected and ‘vulnerable lives’ intelligible (2009: 40-41). Thus, the films may be understood as contributing to the work of politics and the creation of what Ute Tellmann calls a ‘critical visibility’ (2009: 7). At the same time, the films discussed in this chapter engage their viewers in radically different ways. Though they all reflect on the ways in which lives are interconnected and rendered vulnerable through the distant spans of politicaleconomic assemblages, the ways in which they apportion responsibility and engage their viewers through framing, narrative and editing are very different. With the help of Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘distributed responsibility’, the chapter analyzes and critiques selected films to tease out these differential engagements. Ranging from an Oscar-winning box-office hit to a multi-channel video essay that was shown mainly within a museum space, the selection of films discussed in this chapter is admittedly eclectic. What unites them is their attention to the dispersed, transnational subject matter of contemporary political economy and the complex questions of politics and blame that they bring to bear. The chapter will take as its starting point a reading of the much-lauded film Inside Job, in which complexity is visualized, but where blame is ultimately positioned with bad politics and big banking. It subsequently discusses the Dutch documentary The Food Speculator, which sets in scene a childish innocence vis-à-vis the financial markets, as a way of approaching its distant geographical and political relations. Finally, the chapter moves to explore a set of slightly different films – Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea Files and Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare – where politics and responsibility are much more diffusely located, and where the non-human comes to play an important role in the assemblages being visualized and critiqued.