Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, by David Martin-Jones

True empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the other’s shoes, but an encounter with empathy’s own limits, the impossibility of access to the other’s experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance. What David Martin-Jones does in his bold and brilliant Cinema Against Doublethink is to extend this Levinasian insight to a perspective on world history and the lost pasts of the Global South. By analysing films where “cinematic depictions of the past are aesthetically structured like ethical encounters with others” (2), Martin-Jones diagnoses and exposes a trend in world cinema (what he calls a “world of cinemas”) to decentre Eurocentric and colonialist historical narratives through forcing an encounter with histories that do not fit the singular narrative decreed by colonial modernity. This is framed by Martin-Jones through the Orwellian notion of doublethink as the spinning of a political narrative of the past at odds with the facts