Cinema As Infrastructure

Examining the interplay of visuality and infrastructure in Latin American films.

Images do far more than we realize. They do not simply represent or depict; they run our world. Surveillance cameras and drones, medical imaging, social media platforms, market-data visualization––these and other technologies make the image an infrastructure of power, a tool for organizing and governing, impressing labor and extracting value.

Adriana Johnson draws on the medium of film to sensitize us to the logics of visuality as a technology of power. In particular, Latin American cinema presents a key site for both crystallizing and retreating from these logics. Through close readings of Argentine, Paraguayan, and Brazilian movies—including the documentary Bus 174, the dystopian sci-fi The Aerial,and the farcical The Gold Bug—Johnson shows how filmmakers can amplify or attenuate the infrastructural reach of visuality. They also reveal visuality's otherwise-submerged power, and even engage in something like piracy: hacking into, rerouting, and deconstituting the workings of visual infrastructures. A deeply insightful and theoretically rich account, Cinema as Infrastructure reframes the political stakes of filmmaking in an era when visual forms have become means of production and order.