Screens and Screams, The Wild and the Weird

BG1 Turfdraagsterpad 9, room 0016 |  8 February, 3-6 pm.

Special ‘hors serie’ Seminar of the Film-Philosophy and Cross-Media Seminar on Media Ecologies, Ethics and Affect. Organized in collaboration with MIT, convened by Eugenie Brinkema. With Nadine Boljkovac and Julius Greve.

Professors Nadine Boljkovac of Falmouth University and Julius Greve of University of Oldenburg will present paired lectures exploring questions of media ecology, ethics, affect, and temporality. Professor Boljkovac’s lecture, “Screens and Screams: Post-Cinematic (Im)Materialities and Perception,” asks: In our perilous time of ‘post-truth,’ how are we to perceive of the cinema’s future? With respect to the cinema’s propensity to directly reveal time and its contact with the objects and subjects it exposes, via works including Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), this talk contemplates how the medium might continue to expose ourselves to ourselves in ethical and affective modalities. Professor Greve’s lecture, “The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outré-Normative,” traces the conceptual affinities that the genre conception of “the weird” entertains in regard to earlier traditions, genres, and discourses in American literature and culture—chief of all, “the wild.” Examining the works of a diverse group of writers, theorists, and filmmakers, including Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Ligotti, H. P. Lovecraft and Wu Tsang, Greve will delineate the media-ecological and ethico-aesthetic conditions of the meeting between the weird and the wild in American artistic practices. These lectures are relevant for scholars working in film and media studies, cultural analysis, American studies, literary studies, gender studies, philosophy, and critical theory.

Nadine Boljkovac (PhD, Cambridge 2010) is Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. Her monograph examining affect and ethics via Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2013), was reissued in paperback in 2015. A second monograph in progress, Beyond Herself: Feminist (Auto)Portraiture and the Moving Image, assesses works by international filmmakers and media artists. Most recent peer-reviewed works appear in‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media,’ a Special Dossier (ed.s Saige Walton and Nadine Boljkovac) for Screening the Past: A Peer-Reviewed Journal of Screen History, Theory & Criticism (2018); The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (2018, ed.s Hunter Vaughan and Tom Conley); and On Style: Transdisciplinary Articulations (2018, ed. Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank).

Julius Greve is a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is the author ofShreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), and of numerous articles on McCarthy, Mark Z. Danielewski, critical theory, and speculative realism. Greve has co-editedAmerica and the Musical Unconscious (Atropos, 2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and “Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds” (2017), a special issue of EJAS:European Journal of American Studies.