Episode III: Enjoy Poverty: An Aesthetic Virus of Political Discomfort

Abstract

This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). Martens's film is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the film, which creates troubling identifications and disidentifications for a Western spectator, offers a politically productive lesson on the power of discomfort to disrupt unethical image practices. Communication studies scholars have engaged in these conversations via studies about identification and disidentification and the documentary genre; affect in cinematic media; and more directly, through work that investigates the perils of cookie-cutter frames for representing (racialized) poverty.

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