Film and Moving Image Studies does not constitute a unified disciplinary field at the epistemological level. In the Euro-American sphere, these studies have been historically divided between the social sciences, human sciences, and humanities, Film and Moving Image Studies generate a wide range of knowledge in relation to often very different epistemic aims. However, the rise of academic discourses and their institutionalization had led to various questions concerning the reproduction and legitimation of knowledge in Film and Moving Image Studies. For instance, how are to distinguish between academic discourse and discourses that fall under the heading of “nonacademic criticism” (including serious forms of criticism)? Are hermeneutic practices different in these two types of discourse? Are their epistemic aims distinct? Do we have to distinguish between the different types of knowledge that are thus produced? The rapid growth of what was called "Theory" beginning in the 1970s, followed by historiography in the 80s, appears to offer ways of distinguishing and legitimizing different epistemic practices both within academic Film and Moving Image Studies and when they are confronted with other discourses on film, such as cinephilia. However, Film and Moving Image Studies have not yet extensively investigated their epistemological foundations — their the tools, their concepts, their modes of knowing and their forms of rationality.
If it is true that since the introduction of accelerated digitalization, the practice of archiving has strongly influenced modes of academic work and cultural activities, it has also massively affected artistic practice.
If cinematic media may be understood to have a Copernican potential, whereby they may be used as instruments of scientific discovery and anti-anthropocentric displacement, how does such a potential change how one conceives of the world or even constructs, or for the historian, reconstructs new ones?
VISUAL STUDIES. Intersecting Art History and Film Studies
February 18, 2016 16h00
DB Clarke Theater
A discussion with Thomas Elsaesser and James Elkins
Our contemporary media landscape might be called the era of heightened seriality. In this talk, Professor Jason Mittell explores how serial storytelling has pervaded both film and television narrative, considering what formal elements define contemporary seriality, and how seriality is forged by industrial and viewing practices.
Laikwan Pang, Thomas Lamarre
From the mid-1940s, when Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave a lecture on film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, which was subsequently published as ‘Le Cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie’ (‘Cinema and the New Psychology’), film scholars have shown a keen interest in the relationship between his philosophy and cinema.
Of the large human symbolic constructions, fiction is probably the most ancient and universal. It concerns every one of us and constitutes an important part of our mental activity. Its main purpose is to duplicate our direct experience of the world while giving it symbolic form; hence its cognitive and even reflexive aspects.
In most cases, to film (the act of filming something) implies capturing an event which actually takes place, in order to create an image of this event – faithful or not, altered or not, but always referring to it. We all know the momentous importance that the history of film theory has assigned to this conservation of the filmed event, in a filmic work that would perpetuate its memory.
This talk contemplates the figure of enchainment in one of the more graphic films of contemporary horror and exploitation cinema, Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (2009), which literalizes intolerable fastening, an anxiety of overclose touching, in the conceit of its title—a cruel violence in which three bodies are sewn to each other, mouth to anus.
