»Renewing Film Theories of Subjectivity Production through Deleuze« 

Zeit: Montag, 06.11.2017, 18.30 Uhr
Ort: Bauhausstraße 11, Raum 014

One of modern film theory’s defining characteristics was its sustained interest in how the cinema produces subjectivity. Perhaps no other line of questioning was as emblematic of film theory as it was practiced from 1964 right up until the »crisis of political modernism« in the mid-1980s. At that critical juncture of film studies’ epistemological development, the shortcomings of modern film theory were becoming increasingly apparent to scholars of diverse intellectual orientations who subsequently proposed new culturalist, cognitive, historicist, and empiricist research agendas. Much was gained by this shift in the scholarly sensibility since it opened previously unexplored avenues for research into film, media and visual culture that have gone on to shape the state of the discipline. The guiding hypothesis of this talk, however, is that the post-theoretical climate of film studies over the past three decades has precipitated the loss of one of its richest and most politically urgent areas of inquiry: namely, the production of subjectivity. The terms of the »theory / Post-Theory« debates that took place in the 1990s and 2000s misleadingly suggest that film scholars are obliged to either accept the methods of 1970s film theory wholesale, or abandon its guiding questions entirely. Free from any nostalgia for the theoretical models which preoccupied modern theory at the height of its disciplinary dominance, I would like to suggest that its preoccupation with the production of subjectivity is still as timely as ever, and that the unresolved tensions of this problem can be renewed and reinvigorated through the work of Gilles Deleuze.

Adam Szymanski ist eingeladen über das Forschungsnetzwerk Immediations, Media, Art and Event (Jun.-Professur Bildtheorie)

Adam Szymanski wird im Rahmen des Seminars transcultural cinema am 2.11. von 13:30 bis 15:30 Uhr in der Berkaerstr. 1, R003 einen Workshop zu 4th cinema / indigenous cinema geben, zu dem alle Interessierten sehr herzlich eingeladen sind. Bitte um kurze E-Mail an Julia.bee[at]uni-weimar.de senden, um die Materialien zur Vorbereitung zu erhalten.