Plenary Abstracts

There’s something deeply troubling about contemplating the death of cinema while ignoring death at the cinema, for its history reveals much about racist, neoliberal fantasy undergirding our notion of “cinema.” Acts of cinema violence—shootings, stabbings, riots, and other melees at movie theaters—may have a coincidental or causal relationship to the screening they accompany, but either way, but moral panics over cinema violence help enforce the idea that only some people belong at the movies. The US media have variably represented cinema violence as predictable or random, contemptible or tragic, depending on: 1) the racial identity of the shooter, 2) the racial identity of the victim(s), 3) the racial identity of the audience targeted by the film’s distributor, 4) the racial identity of the film’s protagonists, and 5) the racial discourse of prior moral panics about cinema violence. The movies themselves often play a pivotal role in these panics, not through any fault of their own but because their fictions can inadvertently provide scripts for interpreting cinema violence.

Starting in the 1970s, cinema violence panics coalesced around a fear of Latino and African-American street gangs, even when there were none involved in a given incident. The 1990s saw movies by and about Black men being blamed for inciting gang violence at movie theaters, whether or not any actually occurred. In the twenty-first century, a wave of white cinema assailants forced a change in the discourse. Blame shifted from Black gangs to mental illness; simultaneously, the media finally began lamenting cinema violence as tragic, acknowledgements largely withheld so long as the problem seemed limited to Black audiences.

From the many obituaries for cinema coincident with its 120-year history, one could write an entire history of the medium and its commentators’ sense of its threatened particularities. This paper contributes to this elegiac genre but shifts focus from the death or end of cinema to the remains and remainders of the medium and the modes of collective perceptual experience of its many ends, particularly as they resonate in the increasingly surreal landscapes and environments of the sixth extinction. I will elaborate both a historiographical position on cinema’s ends and a materialist theory of cinema’s specters as what remains of these ends in their solicitation of an untimely astonishment and ethical appeal. To do this I will develop a reading that puts Siegfried Kracauer’s and Georges Bataille’s mid-20th century writing on photographic and cinematic media with Momoko Seto’s series of short experimental “Planets” movies (2008-2017), which mobilize the medium as part of a laboratory of growth and decay, conservation and expenditure. This talk will draw out a set of questions facing scholars working in an era of accelerated extinction. Where Kracauer historicizes photography and film through the figures of garbage and ghosts, Bataille develops a method for asking how the detritus that surrounds us may conjure ghosts sufficiently terrible for their times. What then are the ghosts adequate to the ends of cinema today and how might they position film and media scholars as important voices in the crises of our moment?

We usually consider film as an optical medium. The etymology of the word “screen” and some lateral but not marginal film theories authorize another interpretation: film is an environmental medium. Film’s re-definition changes the assessment both of its birth and its alleged death. Its archaeology can include different ancestors and different descendants. Yet, what is a medium’s birth and death? Which kind of rules govern media history?

(Abstract coming soon)

(Abstract coming soon)

The paper measures how the end of cinema might in fact signal a newly emergent circuit of practice and thought with regards to culture and aesthetics. The presentation focuses on a cluster of contemporary short films with attention to how distinct modalities of cinema render black death. By thinking with Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, this presentation concentrates on the critical and aesthetic resistance of these shorts in the terms of “cinema in the wake.” Collectively stirred by incitements of film form, materiality, temporality, and conceptions of black being, cinema in the wake operates as an analytic to think through black death and across the formal experimentation and acute capacities of film to devise and stage the precarity of black life.

“The Somnolent Spectator”

Jean Ma will be discussing the work of the Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. She will focus on their integration of sleep, as both a theme and an audience response, linking this to a history of avant-garde challenges to the ideal of alert and attentive spectatorship, and elaborating its implications in a contemporary moment of changing exhibition formats.

“And, and, and, &:  On the Laterality of Queer Web TV”

What direction is “more”?  If we take the web or network itself as the source for our metaphors and concepts about a directional itinerary for digital media, we are offered an alternative to the death and ends of cinema in the model of proliferation. This paper takes as its provocation the ampersand—appearing in all sorts of additive models for “film & media”—and considers what I call the lateral temporality of web-based television production. Drawing examples from New Zealand to Brazil, I track the production of value in the additive logic of global connectivity.