Afterall is pleased to present Hypertopia – a lecture by Francesco Casetti and the first public event of The City and its Moving Images, a new collaboration between Afterall, based at CSM, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.

Friday 3 May 2013, 6-7:30pm, Central Saint Martins, London

Following an introduction by Mark Lewis, Francesco Casetti will explore the ways in which the experience of cinema is always the experience of a place and discuss the contemporary condition of the moving image, its re-emergence architecturally and topographically, and its changing viewing conditions in the cinema and elsewhere.

The City and its Moving Images is a collaborative research project and series of talks exploring the impact of the moving image on the cultural life of the modern city.

Francesco Casetti is Professor of Film Studies at Yale University, and has written extensively on the semiotics of film and film theory (Theories of Cinema: 1945–1995, Texas, 1999). He is currently studying the reconfiguration of cinema in a post-medium epoch, comparing this shift with the rise of cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Mark Lewis is an artist, an editor of Afterall and Professor of Fine Art at Central Saint Martins.

The City and its Moving Images: Hypertopia by Francesco Casetti
Friday 3 May 2013, 6-7:30pm

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
University of the Arts London
Granary Building
1 Granary Square
London
N1C 4AA

Admission free but booking essential. To reserve a seat email events@afterall.org. You will be sent a confirmation email with access details.

This event is a collaboration between Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and Afterall with the support of the Research Office of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, the University of the Arts London, and Yale University.

On Thursday 13th September I will deliver a lecture on Philosophical Issues in Early Film Theory as a keynote speaker of the Film-Philosophy Conference at King’s College London. 

In early film theories, there is no lack of references to philosophy and philosophers. We may find on the one side the claim for a “philosophical” account of cinema as a modern form of experience (Papini), on the other the claim for a “philosophy of the art of film” modelled on the German “Kunstwissenschaften” (Bálazs). These two approaches – whose goal is to find a legitimisation for the movies – cross each other when at stake come topics like the very nature of the objects on the screen, or the role of the camera as an eye. In critics and scholars like Canudo, Epstein, Cendrars, cinema challenges the traditional categories of thought – and it establishes itself a true philosophical discourse.

International Conference of the Junior Fellow Program
»Theory and History of Cinematographic Objects«
July 11-13, 2012, IKKM, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

In recent years, studies in the history of science, social sciences, and ethnology have prompted cultural theorists to return to the realm of things. However, the potential contributions of film and the study of film to our understanding of what constitutes a thing or object, and how they operate for and within film, remains an open question. One may ask, for instance: “What do things do in or to film?” And conversely: “How do film and media theory affect objects and existing concepts of objecthood?”

Films are assemblages of things: suitcases, revolvers, cars, shower curtains, bones that turn into spaceships within a split second. Insofar as these »things« make their peculiar appearance on film, they can be called cinematographic objects. The complexity of cinematographic objects resides in the fact that their very definition is always implicated in an ever-evolving network of associations with: 1) things on film, 2) the materiality of filmic images, and 3) the mechanical and operational relationships between the apparatuses necessary for their production (i.e. cameras, editing equipment, projectors, microphones, etc.)

»Cinematographic objects« are characterized by a specific relationship between thing and operation. The screen is full of props, artifacts, material objects either made explicitly for the cinematographic apparatus or merely picked up and recorded by it. Yet these things and objects only acquire certain cinematic qualities once the lights in the theater dim and their visual and temporal configurations unfold. It is only here that they begin to move, change shape, emerge, then vanish through zooms, tracking shots, pans, cuts, and editing. It is only here that they are enlarged and isolated in close-ups, arranged and gathered in ensemble-staging medium shots, and rendered landscapes and scenery with the long-shot. Likewise, things find a particular form of expression in filmic diegesis and narration when they align the various looks and gazes, motivate the development of the plot, distinguish characters, and circulate between protagonists. And not least of all, the film seems to chart the extra-filmic routes along which a cinematographic object as an artifact will migrate—as a piece of cinephilic memorabilia or in an exhibition in a film museum, or as iconic gestures associated with six-shooters, sunglasses, and cars—as visual motifs in art, as archival objects, or as fetishized images.

Following the »Cinematographic Objects« workshop in 2011, the conference »Cinematographic Objects II: Things and Operations« is organized around precisely these relations between artifact and operation. On the one hand, it seeks to closely interrogate the specificities of film and cinema according to film and media theoretical concerns with the cinematographic operations of object construction, as well as the peculiar nature and properties of things objects, and artifacts in film. And on the other hand, it also welcomes discourses on the transformations and migrations of things between film and other disciplines and areas of study such as art history, natural sciences, politics, and the everyday.

Conference Program

Media/City. New spaces, new aesthetics
7-9 Giugno 2012, Triennale di Milano
Convegno a cura di Francesco Casetti

From the beginning, cinema has been a peculiarly controversial object: it has been deeply loved by many, who saw in the reality on the screen the fulfilment of their desires, but it has also been hated by many, who were scared by the intensity of the represented world, and by the social effects that such representations could trigger. One of the roots of this controversial attitude is precisely cinema’s technical nature. This will be the subject of my lecture in the congress “The Impact of Technological Innovations on the Theory and Historiography of Cinema,” held at the University of Montreal on 1-6 November 2011. The lecture, entitled The Little Magic Machine. Technology and Iconophobia in Early Film Theories, will retrace the presence in early film theories of an “iconophobic” attitude towards cinema as a “mechanical eye” or as “mechanical art,” as opposed by a more positive appreciation of cinema as a “witness” (even if a “creative” witness). Among the iconophobes, we meet for example Pirandello (who calls cinema a “little magic machine” and claims that a mechanical copy steals life from reality); among the iconophiles we may list Epstein and its idea that the camera provides a gaze “without hesitation or scruples.” Both sides are highlighted in the debate between Paul Souday and Emile Wuillermoz in the mid ‘10s. A late reconsideration of the mechanical nature of cinema is provided during the ‘20s by ideological and anthropological discourses. A re-reading of the book by Eugenio Giovannetti, Il cinema e le arti meccaniche (a complex anticipation of some Benjamin’s issues) will drive the lecture to its end.

I will deliver a keynote speech at the Screen Cultures Conference organized by Dr Catherine Fowler and Dr Paola Voci at the Department of Languages and Cultures of the University of Otago (3rd-4th June 2011).

Some remarks on the relocation of cinema
Keynote speech
Friday 3rd June 2011

Thanks to convergence, media now overlap and merge. This does not mean that media have reached their end: although they no longer depend on a specific apparatus, they still have an identity, linked to the specific experience they offer. Cinema survives because there still exists a certain way of wathcting things. Relocation designates the movement through which media migrate to new environments and to new devices, where they reenact their basic mode of experience. The concept of relocation is important for at least three reasons within the context of the digital revolution: it focuses on permanence within a great process of change; it highlights the experiential dimension over the technological one; and it reveals the relevance of a spatial dimension – where space acts both as a phisical environment and as techno-virtual setting.

My essays on relocation are available at the Research page.

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I will also lead a masterclass open to postgraduate students and early career researches in film and media studies.

Early film theory and the problem of modernity
Postgraduate Masterclass
Sunday 5th June 2011

A discussions of film, modernity, and iconophobia  through a selection of (pre-read) texts. These will include Giovanni Papini’s, Luigi Pirandello’s, Jean Epstein’s, Georg Lukacs’ writings.

Cinema is a peculiarly controversial object: it is deeply loved by many, who see in the reality on the screen the fulfilment of their desires, but i, but i t is also hated by many, who are scared  by the intensity of the represented world, and by the social effects that such representations could trigger. More precisely, film is a controversial object as an emblem of modern life: it unfolds all the possibilities, but also all the risks, tied to a new model of life. It is a controversial object from the aesthetic point of view, too: if it is often devoid of any artistic qualities, it also entails another  an  kind of art – one based on totally new values. And finally it is a controversial object because through its impressive work on space and time, it liberates us from any constraints – it releases our bodies and our minds – but in the meantime, because of its excess of freedom, it needs a control, a discipline, that channels its action towards a positive, though even limited, goal. Film is good and is evil: behind such oscillation of confidence and apprehension, we may read the resurrection of iconophilia and iconophobia (if not iconoclasm), which, in film, find their last battlefield.