Упълномощеното тяло. Политестетика на монтажа в седмичните кинопрегледи
The Authorized Body, Politaesthetics оf Montage in Weekly Newsreels

Summary/Abstract: In using a visual archive of weekly newsreels for the period 1947–1971, the article raises the problem of the legitimation of power in the classical phase of ‘socialist society’. We are trying to decipher the symbolic alchemy of this power, the secret of its penetration into the ‘capillaries of the socium’ when it is no longer violence and is no longer affirmed through its right over the enemy, through the negative mechanisms of the ‘purge’ but in inventing its own positivity, in touching – in Havel’s words – with ‘ideological gloves’. We focus on the visual and discursive staging of official political spaces in the cinema chronicle. We view them as the ‘sacred places’ where rituals are performed of institution of the social body, and respectively, symbolic effects of totalization are born which weave into one social times, spaces, bodies, and actions. The core of the empirical material is the visual series ‘The Leaders of Socialism 1947–1971’. The ‘case’ that we are analyzing is the ‘apparat charisma’ of Todor Zhivkov as a symbolic constitution of a series of acts of taking and affirming the political power, sanctified in rituals of meta-institution.

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