Documenting financial performativity: film aesthetics and financial crisis

ABSTRACT

Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary film
• financial performativity
• Judith Butler
• film aesthetics
• financial crisis
• Marc Bauder
• Master of the Universe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Re-invitation Programme for Former Scholarship Holders 2015 [grant number 50068612].