This essay considers Thomas Elsaesser's debut film, Die Sonneninsel/The Sun Island (Germany, 2017), in particular in light of the concept of ‘tactical compliance’, which Elsaesser himself developed during his keynote paper, reproduced herein, at the Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness Conference at the University of Bedfordshire on 11 May 2018. The aim is to work through what tactical compliance might mean in the age of neoliberal hopelessness – and in some senses to take issue with the concept. I shall do this by situating The Sun Island within the context of Elsaesser's own theoretical work, in particular his understanding of the so-called Persistence of Hollywood (2012), which itself springs perhaps from his contribution to Vivian Sobchack's edited collection on The Persistence of History (1997). The aim is not to produce an ad hominem ‘attack’ on Elsaesser and his work, but to understand tactical compliance as a means towards persistence, while also relating persistence to systems of power. In other words, the ideas of Elsaesser will be linked to Elsaesser-as-idea (as author, as filmmaker), with no real concern for Elsaesser-as-man (if that is how he would define himself and/or if that is what Elsaesser is).

What follows will nonetheless seem to conflate the personal with the political because The Sun Island is in some senses a deeply personal film. The film is primarily about the rehabilitation of the reputation of the filmmaker’s grandfather, Martin Elsaesser, an architect who played a significant role in the design of Frankfurt between 1925 and 1932, and whose most famous work, the city's Grosmarkthalle, or Central Market, was to be destroyed to make way for the new headquarters of the European Central Bank in the first part of the twenty-first century. However, the film also is a consideration of the Elsaessers's family history – including perhaps most significantly the relationship between the filmmaker's grandmother, Liesel, and landscape designer Leberecht Migge. Migge, whom Elsaesser has referred to elsewhere as ‘something like the Grandfather of the German Green movement’ (Elsaesser 2009a: 47) is the person mainly responsible for the titular Sun Island, which started out in 1932 as a kind of project for sustainable living, where inhabitants would be able to survive without the interference of the modern world.

In this essay, I shall describe the content and the delivery of a module (referred to in some institutions as a course or a unit) that I designed at my institution, called Guerrilla Filmmaking. The reasons for doing this are several. Since the module springs in some senses from my own theoretical research into and practice as a zero-budget filmmaker, Guerrilla Filmmaking exemplifies how to bridge practice and theory in the classroom, or, to put it in the language of this edited collection, how to teach practice-research. As the making of zero-budget films springs from the development of readily available digital technologies, the module also allows students themselves to bridge practice as research, in that the module involves the adoption of new media technologies in order to explore their expressive possibilities, which also means that practice (for example, making films with smartphones) involves research (working out what sorts of film a smartphone can help to produce), which in turn helps to generate a theoretical understanding of what (in this example) smartphones mean. As we shall see, by exploring the expressive possibilities of new media technologies, students (and teachers) on the module begin to understand that they are not ‘inferior’ to conventional cinematic technologies, but simply different – a shift in outlook/theoretical thinking that the module conscientiously ties to a history of ‘imperfect’ cinema (both as a theory and as a practice), which shift itself is linked to a ‘decolonisation’ or a ‘liberation’ of thought in relation to film and perhaps to the world more generally. In order to understand how Guerrilla Filmmaking does this, though, let us begin with an overview of the module.

THE PRAGMATICS OF GUERRILLA FILMMAKING

Guerrilla Filmmaking is a module in which, over the course of an eleven- or twelve-week semester, students are invited to make a portfolio of three to five short films (typically I ask them to have a duration of between one and three minutes, although some can be slightly shorter and some longer). The three highest scoring of these films are carried forward as the first of two assignments that students complete for the module. Each of the films involves a formal and a thematic ‘constraint’, in that students must make a film on a certain topic, or which answers a certain question (about which more below), while at the same time only using certain filmmaking techniques.

Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) continues the account of the life of the eponymous diarist, as the film opens with Bridget (Renée Zellweger) turning forty-three, having aged only eleven years in the fifteen-year period since the franchise's first film, Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), in which Bridget was thirty-two. Single once again, Bridget none the less becomes pregnant after two one-night stands, one with American internet dating tycoon Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey) and another with childhood friend and old flame Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Uncertain as to who the father is, Bridget allows both men to believe the child to be theirs, with both happy to prepare for parenting duties even after Bridget explains to both men her confusion over the father's identity at a meal at Gianni’s, an Italian restaurant near Bridget's flat. A rivalry develops between Jack and Mark, with the former eventually losing out to the latter when Bridget grabs Mark's hand during the delivery of her child – a clear sign that he is the man for her rather than the result of pain-induced confusion. Although Jack is present at their wedding and clearly now a close friend, the film ends with Bridget marrying Mark, who also turns out to be the father of their son, William Jones-Darcy.

There have been Anglo-American relationships in all three of the Bridget Jones films. In the first film, for example, Mark is initially going out with American lawyer Natasha (Embeth Davitz), with whom he moves to New York, before returning to London to be with Bridget. In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), meanwhile, Mark is again associated with an American, Rebecca (Jacinda Barrett), who turns out to be obsessed with Bridget, as opposed to being her rival. What is more, Renée Zellweger, who plays Bridget, is of course an American actress playing a British woman – an idea to which I shall return – while all of the films are also international co-productions involving British and American funding. None the less, where, in the earlier films, Bridget had to choose between Mark and playboy Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) – who, in the third film, is supposedly dead after a plane crash, although a newspaper headline seen in the final moments suggests that he has been found alive (opening up the possibility for more sequels) – here she has to choose between British Mark and American Jack.

Genomic imprinting is genotype-independent parent-of-origin gene expression. It is a well-understood example of epigenetic inheritance, as the environment (i.e., whether a gene resided in the egg or sperm in the previous generation) leaves a reversible mark on offspring DNA. These marks are erased when the offspring produces its own gametes (i.e., sperm or egg), so that new parent-of-origin marks can be placed. The phenotypic effects of imprinted genes are significant, especially in terms of growth and neurobiology. Imprinted genes are rare in mammalian genomes, but here I make the case for the idea that they are critically important for our understanding of how natural selection shaped functional adaptations. There are approximately 100 imprinted genes in humans that have differentially methylated regions by parent of origin. The effects of imprinted genes are species, isoform (i.e., alternative transcripts), tissue, and developmentally dependent.

In this essay, I shall offer a historical overview of cognitive approaches to film, before putting forward what to cognitive film theory might be an ‘heretical’ argument, in that I shall try to find ways in which cognitive film theory can work with, rather than against, more ‘classical’ film theory in order to enrich our understanding of cinema. I shall do this by looking at the concept of heuretics, as discussed by Christian Keathley in his book, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2006). Before reaching this point, though, let us look at the history of cognitive film theory.

From The Photoplay to Post- Theory and Beyond

For the uninitiated, cognitive film theory has as perhaps its central principle the idea that viewers are active while watching a film; that is, viewers constantly are carrying out cognitive/ conscious labour in order to recognise what they see, make sense of a story, make evaluations about situations and characters, have an emotional response to films and so on. In some senses, to assert as much should be self- evident: of course, viewers engage actively with films when they watch them. Nonetheless, this claim was perhaps a big one when cognitive film theory began to emerge in the mid- 1990s through the development of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) and, in particular, the publication of David Bordwell and Noel Carroll's edited collection, Post- Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996a). For, as various authors make clear in that collection, cognitivism marks a break from the older, more ‘classical’ film theory that had psychoanalysis and Marxism at its theoretical core.

Emerging most prominently out of the journal Screen in the 1970s, the ‘classical’ or ‘Grand’ film theory argued that viewers of films were passive in that they unwittingly were prey to the ideologies peddled by mainstream cinema. Laura Mulvey (1975) famously suggested, for example, that mainstream cinema reinforced a specifically masculine way of looking both at the world and at women in particular, since in most mainstream narrative films, women are reduced to spectacles that are to be looked at, rather than being active agents or rounded characters.