This practice-based PhD, Treating the Abstract of Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism, looks at how film can oppose the prevailing ideas of capitalist systems.

The research asks: What qualities do films have that can be used as strategies against capitalism and what knowledge do these films produce? In an understanding that capitalism projects concepts onto the world, and that mainstream film can frame people’s lives though a reductive capitalist understanding, the research suggests that more politically powerful moving images need to be the focus to create societal change.

Treating the Abstract of Capitalism Concretely: Films Against Capitalism, includes six aesthetic, political and conceptual video works, and an accompanying written handbook, that together consider capital as the relation between abstract laws of accumulation and concrete lived situations.

Making moving image works against the capitalist system necessarily involves knowledge about capitalism, however, the research charts how the knowledge most central in filmmaking is often associative, affective and combines knowledge with practice. A variety of methodological approaches are pursued through practical and theoretical research about how films can oppose capitalism. This investigation is explored materially, through video projects that interrogate capitalist abstraction from inside social processes, in realities that people live. The video works present a critique of racial and patriarchal capitalism, while the written component presents a contextual discussion about films against capitalism.

The PhD submission consists of six video projects: The Common Sense, The Bay Area Protests, Parts-wholes 2, Crowds, Home Together, and Health as Individual vs. Health as Social and a PDF handbook, Treating the Abstract of Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism. The written text puts forth theoretical and practical proposals for films against capitalism as well as a script. Connections are here made between different understandings of abstraction, while bringing in ideas from political theory, as well as demonstrating allegory as a technique against capitalism in film.