Making “A Political Movie That Does Not Take a Political Stand:” Specialization and Depoliticization in American Cinema

Based on sociological interviews and observations, this paper addresses the question of the politicization of art in a contemporary American fieldwork: the production and promotion of a fiction film referring to the war in Iraq, Day Zero (2007). The analysis of this artwork reveals the modes of politicization open to artists—holding different types of position in the film industry and diversely positioned in terms of their own careers—in this particular professional sphere. This case study contrasts both with the experiences of activist filmmakers in the 1960–1970s, in the USA as well as in France, and with the explicitly political, if not partisan, posture taken in a number of contemporary documentary films regarding Iraq. The paper first depicts the ambivalent type of involvement built through the participants’ discourses and activities around this movie. They refer to a civic duty fulfilled through their contribution to the making of the film but, at the same time, they remain extremely cautious, restrictive and minimal in the way they publicly acknowledge its connection to any “political message.” In so doing, they paradoxically define an “a-political engaged art.” The second section of the study analyzes the professional logics and rules driving the protagonists, resulting in such naming and framing mechanisms. The participants work to reshape the political events referred to in the movie according to the formats and limits required by the film world, in order to avoid the risk of transgressing the specialized norms and codes used to evaluate the quality of an artwork. The conditions of appropriate actions are thus defined at the crossroads between political dynamics and professional constraints.