Documenting financial performativity: film aesthetics and financial crisis

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.     

The buy-out/property right share choice in film financing: Financial rationing,adverse selection and the bayesian dilemma

Reduced state support of film financing in Europe requires the creation of an efficient market of private cinema financiers. Principal-agent models with and without common consent over film risk show that the two main problems of film financing (high risk and lack of collateral for the borrower) may be solved if the financier achieves economies of scale in costs of capital and is efficient in information gathering. Conversely, the pathology of a market with inefficient financiers includes: film financial rationing, adverse selection, and refusal of financial support to otherwise profitable film projects. From the normative point of view, the creation of efficient financiers would be fostered by institutional changes that promote market thickening and risk spreading (the case of the USA) instead of simple forms of risk shifting (the case of Italy).