Powers of Powerlessness: The Politics of Defeat in the Cinema of Nouri Bouzid

This article examines the cultural politics of defeat in the cinema of Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid. Taking a lead from Bouzid’s directorial début Man of Ashes, the author focuses on Golden Horseshoes (1989) and Making of (2006), the two films that best dramatize the continuities between the crisis of filiation and the crisis of affiliation, and that deal head-on with left-wing (socialism) and right-wing (religious fundamentalism) ideologies. These two early films paint the broad strokes of Bouzid’s cinematic project, specifically its entwined dramatization of the crisis of filiation ( Man of Ashes) and the crisis of affiliation ( Golden Horseshoes), the profound loss of any discernible project of psychoaffective investiture, intellectual commitment and decolonial resistance, especially in the wake of the spectacular dissolution of international socialism and the ensuing triumphalism of global capitalism and financial imperialism.