The Color of Pomegranates (1969) dir. Sergei Parajanov

Cinema in the outskirts of Naples, Italy
Thomas Hoepker
1956

Shame, in other words, does not require responsible action, but it also does not prevent it. Indeed, the risk of shame for the nation may be that it can do too much work in the uncertainty of the work that it is doing. It is no accident that public expressions of shame try to ‘finish’ the speech act by converting shame to pride. In this case, what is shameful is passed over through the enactment of shame. It is also no accident that in political rhetoric, ‘sorry’ moves to ‘regret’ by passing over ‘shame’. The affective economies at work, where words are substituted for each other as ‘names’ and ‘acts’ of emotion, certainly do something – they re-cover the national subject, and allow recovery for ‘civil society’, by allowing the endless deferral of responsibility for injustice in the present.

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Pather Panchali (1955), dir. Satyajit Ray