Capitalism as Creative Destruction The Representation of the Economic Crisis in Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall

Opening with an image of a Boeing airliner falling to the ground, Hito Steyerl’s video In Free Fall (2010) is action-packed, supercharged, and visually enthralling. Steyerl’s work presents re-edited footage from Hollywood disaster movies portraying an airliner about to crash over a nondescript suburban town. In this fast-paced montage a stunned pilot stares at the message ‘system failure’ flashing in the cockpit instrument panel while emergency oxygen masks drop down over the passengers’ heads; the fuselage splits apart and objects inside the cabin start whirling around. This scene is, according to Steyerl, a metaphor for the mayhem generated by the 2008 banking crisis, which saw global financial institutions previously thought to be rock solid collapse in the space of few days. In In Free Fall, contemporary capitalism emerges as a precarious world, rife with destruction. Steyerl’s video significantly differs from documentaries produced in the aftermath of the crisis in that the work does not embrace a straightforward and detached didactic approach. Unlike, say, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010), or Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), In Free Fall shuns the use of animated graphs and statistics explaining the obscure and fraudulent mechanisms of the financial economy. Instead, it mimics the spectacular quality of consumer culture – which has been discussed by Fredric Jameson – by presenting the audience with a nerve-racking combination of theatrical performances, lively animations, clips of airliner explosions and snippets from television science programmes about recycling. This act of mimicry demands attention: is Steyerl’s work an elegy to the possibility of critical distance under the conditions of financial capitalism? Indeed, the image of the falling airliner that forms the centre of Steyerl’s essay recalls the apocalyptic metaphors used by Jean Baudrillard in the early 1990s to describe the ‘vanishing of history’ that he saw as a central feature of postmodernity. For Baudrillard, the increasing speed Third Text, 2013