Us to-Come: Francesco Vezzoli’s Nonconsensual Futures

Abstract

A television pilot for a reality show that will never be aired, a trailer for a film that will never be made and advertisements for two competing presidential campaigns that will never materialize. In this article, the author discusses the ways in which Francesco Vezzoli’s films (No-Love Meetings, A Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula and Democrazy, respectively) in their appropriation of utterly familiar and pervasive media genres of promotion and publicity are practices of invention: artistic, cultural and political. Addressing consensus, the society of the spectacle and contemporary economies of labor, the author presents a critical assessment of the hyper-mediated and thoroughly scripted real in which we live, and suggests ways to re-think a future that would have been more properly ‘ours’, if only we could re-make it now.

Keywords

cinema consensus Francesco Vezzoli future Jean-Luc Nancy love spectacle television

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