<i>Law and Film: Critical Reflections on a Field in Motion</i> Edited by VittoriaBecci, AlexiaKatsiginis, and EdwardvanDaalen, London: Routledge, 2025, 202 pp., £135.00

Conjured in the main during the sequestration of the pandemic, Law and Film is a dramatic, acute, yet convivial intervention into an expanding field of jurisprudential interest. It is a skillfully curated collection of essays on the impact of film on legal theory, developed out of a desire to enjoy film and to use it as a conduit for existential, theoretical, and pedagogic revitalization of the jurist's relation to and inhabitation of both doctrine and practice. While ‘Eating Popcorn Like a Lawyer’, the title of the orienting essay by the editors, might sound flip or cognitively thin, it in fact captures the first major theme of the volume, which is that of using film – understood here as any streamed visual narrative in our era, as Gabriele Pedullà puts it, ‘after the cinema’,1 and also as the collective experience and visceral enjoyment of watching and dissecting specific movies – to bring legal abstraction down to earth. Precisely because the pandemic separated and virtualized the experience of studying law, it proliferated a shift towards a new materialism, and here a drive to reimagine the academic experience, and to reinvigorate embodied performance, the corporeal enactment of the scholarly, pedagogic, official, and social dimensions of learning and writing about the juridical realm that jurists inhabit. The opening opens to affect in a dual sense. It starts with a dissatisfaction, an unease that is often felt in the process of becoming a ‘lawyer academical’, focusing on what is lost or left behind in taking up the mantle and role of reproducing legal institutions. Particularly during a pandemic shutdown, the study of law seems dead, monochrome, the epitome of what Friedrich Nietzsche describes as a profession of filing clerks lost in the dust of archives and the dead letters of arcane texts.2 The turn to film, to eating popcorn, unabashedly seeks to inject enjoyment into the process of study and to reimagine both reality and law through the fictions on screen. The boredom of reading and writing about law estranges the scholar from the reality of law, the contexts of its performances, and the body that incorporates and enacts it. Reduced simply to text – to ‘black letters’, as the expression was – law is not only a source of ennui but also of estrangement from feeling, a disembodiment that is boring in the negative sense of passivity, lassitude, and lack of critical focus. The opaque language, the abstraction, and the lack of images and colours dull apprehension, and suppress the anxieties and doubts that question and potentially motivate critique of the violence and inequality that the abstraction of rules tends to cloak and hide. Movies, clips, and images, the argument for law and film contends, can revitalize, invigorate, engage, and transmit a visceral relation and affective response to the sedimented dogmatics embedded in disciplinary reproduction. The initial sense of film as an antidote – as dispelling boredom and rescuing the jurist who has become in one phrase a wandering, though no longer wondering, encyclopedia – is that of a critical corrective. Film is a vehicle for enjoyment that will provide access to other ideas, to the felt sense of seeking to do justice. The argument is refreshing, not least in admitting that as pedants – academics, scholars, jurists – we seek to enjoy law as a modality and object of study, and to believe that betterment may be promoted through our scholarly work. It is this impulse, this desire, so often denied in legal studies, for the hermeneutic and didactic jouissance of erudition that propels several of the essays and perhaps most distinctively the excursus into existentialism and its roots in Nietzsche's philosophy undertaken in Louis Hill's ‘Revitalising the Law’. The theme that Hill climbs is that of method as existence, posing insistently the question of the impact of cinema on the everyday lives of legal scholars. How do they inhabit their roles differently as a result of enjoying their work more? The answer is that film grounds, contextualizes, connects, and engages the jurist in a dialogue with experience that responds to the environments and material occasions of law's transmission and subjective hold on its subjects. For law to change, the lawyer has to reform, feel, and commit, and film can help in that essentially therapeutic process. The most compelling analysis of the existential quandary and political dilemma of the critical legal neophyte comes in a savage essay by Alberto Rinaldi, dissecting Abel Ferrara's 1995 movie The Addiction. Taking off from Walter Benjamin's essay on the critique of violence3 and addressing the effects of writing about evil in the context of the horrors that have to be witnessed by scholars of international law, Rinaldi uses the movie as a device to analyse the narcotic effects of legal academic literature. The protagonist of the film, a PhD student, is bitten by, and so becomes, a vampire. A different perspective on the academy emerges, in which the scholar of international law is portrayed through the vampiric lens as slowly falling into addiction: ‘A slave to your cravings, a vampire in search of other disciplines to bleed out’ (p. 30). The academic as addict uses scholarship, writing, both as a device for building a persona – we are what we write – and as an escape route from the world and from feeling the impact of law; ‘[a] screen is placed between us and the evil we attempt to describe and make sense of’ through dissertation, monograph, and article (p. 24). The critical point is that ‘[a]cademics just go on as if nothing mattered, as if everything was normal’ (p. 28). Over time and producing the comfortable screeds, the publications that advance a career, the figure of the vampire coalesces in the academic's scriptive addiction, the escape route of writing, and thus we become ‘part of that evil we keep describing so clinically and naturally … We have embarked upon a journey with no return … [i]mmolated on the altar of the academic abattoir’ (p. 38). The left critique of academic international law is not in itself especially novel. The point that this genre of scholarship is self-serving and evades the questions thrown up by international events and conflict is made very forcefully by long-serving scholars such as Anthony Carty and Pierre Legrand, and by younger advocates such as Robert Knox and Helena Alviar García (the latter also among the contributors to this volume).4 What is distinctive is the use of film to carry a more visceral argument and sensibility, a force and passion that escapes the conventions of semiotics through accessing the road to a libidinal economy. The medium of film refuses the mise en signe, which reduces, substitutes, and enmeshes the sign in nihilism, remaining in semiotic thought, which is – to borrow from Jean-François Lyotard – ‘to languish in religious melancholy and to subordinate every intense emotion to a lack and every force to finitude’.5 Escape, liberation from academicism and its semiotics, is to dispel boredom, to have fun, to choose acturience and access reality – as Vittoria Becci formulates it – through film and its multi-sensory versions of fictions, both legal and narrative (p. 5). The other dimension of escaping boredom and its stupefaction is to embrace the boring, the drilling down to something creative and cognitively interesting. As Rinaldi points out, and as his postdoctoral position indicates, joining the academy involves exchange, institution and office, and modes of compromise. Film as fun, eating popcorn as a lawyer, is transformative, and – to borrow from another recent work on the topic – it is through movies that ‘the dry as dust soil of legal doctrine flowers into something truly substantive and dramatically compelling’.6 That long-resisted theme of affect in law, forever a minor language of comedy in its old sense of theatrical genre, is reinstated as a valued method of propaedeutics and also as an existential carapace that enables critical performance and an authenticity of lifestyle and inhabitation of office. What is key is that film is recognized in this collection as a hedonic strategy, a medium of legal transmission that engages the jouissance of theory and the libidinal economy of the imaginal relay through which most subjects first and most often encounter matters legal. The latter point propels the second feature of affect: the aligned sense in which image, clip, and film gain legal gravitas and epistemic status as a result of the remediated transfer of legal norms and policies. The editors write of replacing thinking like a lawyer with eating like a lawyer, as a means of shifting ‘from the mind to the body and the personal’ (p. 3), suggesting the interior intimacy of thought, as well as the physical community of scholarship and seminar. This is not to suggest an antinomy but rather an imbrication and commonality that recognizes the appeal of the imagetic because, as Hill puts it, ‘movies impress images on us that we cannot escape’ (p. 147) and, as Rinaldi also observes, those pictures haunt and infest the several world of the night. To take the obvious starting point, it is through the myriad filmic, televisual, and streamed legal dramas, courtroom scenes, enforcement mysteries, thrillers, and now also streamed court hearings, proposed as recently as January 2025 in the UK ‘Call for Evidence: Open Justice, the Way Forward – Summary of Responses’,7 that the student first encounters and primarily follows the rule and concept of law. This novel medium or more accurately remediation of law juxtaposes the image and enactment of the juridical with the now seemingly outdated pedagogy of the exegetical and textual. The field, as the editors note, is now in motion and performance is law. How does remediation impact the classical trinity of ordo, lex, medium − the mediological configuration of the discipline? The initial answer, as adumbrated above, is that it provides access to the affects, the viscera, the violences, the intimacies, and the entertainments of law. It bespeaks that it is alright to enjoy, to feel passionate about the subjects taught, the institutions relayed, the forms reproduced. It is also the case that such critical affect and enthusiasm rides on, is subject to, and makes use of the novel technologies of relay and – to borrow from Nathan Moore's disorienting essay on Holy Motors – it prefigures a transition from the era of the machine to the cognitive relay of the electron, a move from disciplinary to control societies. This makes a difference and disorients how sociality operates and how lives are lived. The image of the subject as an individual that emerges from the Hobbesian social contract, the Faustian covenant of modernity, has now reached its endpoint and is replaced by the ‘dividual’, an interface, a mask with no face, where algorithms code and transmit information and form patterns: ‘[T]he film suggests that the subject has become a kind of open platform, to be filled temporarily (from project to project) with the appropriate informational content – that is, an interface’ (p. 111). There are only performances, ‘without outside, and one is never not in character’ (p. 113). Drawing on Franz Kafka's The Trial, Moore depicts a sociality where ‘invisible, virtual forces shape our physical interactions in some mysterious way’ (p. 114). The algorithm replaces the grundnorm, one fiction for another. In a cautionary vein, one can recall Jorge Luis Borges’ observation that it is the fate of all humans to be born in bad times.8 Film makes visible and evident that we are choosing what we see, perceive, and respond to on any given occasion. That allows for the dystopia of the world of violence and war that international legal scholarship tries to veil, as also for the disorientation of becoming avatars seduced by datasets and large language models that know us better than we know ourselves. The computer needs neither light nor visibility, whereas its interface with the human eye is all image and visibility; the ocular is the avenue, the via Appia, and the elaborate imaginal orchestrations of what we see are the latest phase of the legal spectacle. For Elie Aslanoff in the concluding chapter, the hypothesis, drawing on Guy Debord,9 is that the use of film in teaching allows ‘jurists to bring the law back into the realm of fantasy and reverie’ (p. 176) and thereby to admit the ‘as if’ that founds all theory and likewise lies at the heart of legality. Imagination lurks hidden in the interstices of the discipline, and generally discounted in the textual, microliterary, exegetical, and panegyric expressions of commentary. Those scriptural elements are also, however, sensory and imagistic, as are the architectural and more obviously theatrical dimensions of law that all depend on the didascalia, the stage directions according to which the performance takes place. Real law is an image, and it is one that has used its guild tools and argot to estrange the lawyer from the sociality, the ‘other’, that it impacts, regulates, or – in Aslanoff's thesis – more often intimidates and excludes. Whether through algorithmically surveilled and dividuated instants on an interface, actors in myriad programmed stage plays, or avatars accessorizing situationist needs, the use of film to mobilize legal studies reflects a prescient sense of the sociality – or, more optimistically, the democracy – to come. On the one hand, as Aslanoff argues, ‘the legal order prefigures the spectacle’ (p. 184), because church and state were forever the first to organize and manipulate the social according to regimes of icon and idol, image and performance. The legal fiction is, according to Becci, ‘the juridical escamotage, the everyday operation of law that is used to imagine reality … and fiction is the engine of every legal action’ (p. 7). Film reconnects the law student to the wonderful and mad spectacular-reticular trajectory of what one heterotopic work designates as respublica jurisprudentia,10 or in another version the astral world of law.11 On the other hand, the spectacle, the imaginal realm, and the suspended ontology of imagetic interfaces not only ineluctably impress images on the soul of social dividuations, but also in Nietzschean fashion make the real world a myth, or – as Aslanoff puts it – ‘the sign no longer signifies lived reality; lived reality signifies the sign’ (p. 185). Images are all that we have as portals to normalization. The pleasure and the force of Law and Film resides in taking the perpetuum mobile of legal performance, as also the fictions and fantasies of jurists, to address the critical possibilities of détournement, of juxtaposing legal fiction with filmic fiction, and so drawing the student into the visceral world of the sensory presence, the atmospheres and spectacles of law's social manifestations. Behind that drive resides another sensibility, one that seeks to break through the separation of subjects and acknowledge that – disorienting, insufficient, estranged, gimmicky, and at times evil as it may be – law is the social fantasy of order that we necessarily share.