Anarchism, Archaeology, and Aesthetics: On Cyril Schäublin’s film "Unrest" (2022)

The presentation begins with a reflection on the utopian tendency that informs Giorgio Agamben’s political archaeology, considered in light of his sporadic commentary on cinema and, more recently, on anarchism. These introductory remarks will be developed through the lens of Cyril Schäublin’s film Unrest from 2022, which reimagines Pyotr Kropotkin’s brief sojourn among the federation of watchmakers in the Jura mountains in 1877. Two concomitant theses inform the analysis. First, that the guiding tenets of anarchism—anti-authoritarianism, decentralization, and non-hierarchical organization—prior to being communicated as the film’s message, are expressed and contemplated through the film’s form. Second, I propose to consider Unrest as one possible figuration of an archaeological cine-aesthetics. Granting that the aim of archaeology is to free the imagination from the images that captivate it, acts of unfreezing or unframing the image would be intrinsic to such an aesthetic endeavor.