Film and Financial Performativity

This chapter analyses two contrasting case studies of the way that financial performance and performativity have been explored in contemporary film. Melanie Gilligan’s YoutTube and gallery trilogy Crisis in the Credit System (2008), Self-Capital (2009), and Popular Unrest (2010) draws on science fiction, crime thriller and financial news parody. Marc Bauder’s documentary, Master of the Universe (2013), depicts the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on speech acts of explication and justification. Both filmmakers argue that we must reconnect the financial system to the field of politics to extend democratic accountability to the financial regime.