<nettime-ann> ARGOS // Laura Mulvey Lecture // Friday 26.10.2007

ARGOS, Centre for Art & Media in Brussels, presents

Laura Mulvey lecture

FRIDAY 26.10.2007 // 20:30 // free

Filmmaker and critic Laura Mulvey (UK, 1941) is professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her work as a critic during the 1970s, particularly her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), is considered to be one of the main foundations of feminist film theory. During the period 1974–1982 she produced numerous theoretical films with her husband Peter Wollen, touching areas in the discourse of feminism, semiotics, psychoanalysis and left-wing politics. Later she also produced the film Disgraced Monuments (1993) together with Mark Lewis. Her recent book Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) offers a number of reflections on the impact of new technologies on the cinema experience, particularly with regards to the relationship between the moving and the static image, since the possibilities to decelerate the image, repeat and freeze it, creates a shift from a voyeuristic to a more fetishist relationship with the cinematographic object

in the context of the programme 'Cinema in Transit'

What does ‘Cinema’ mean today? In the aftermath of its one hundredth birthday the field of cinema seems to be expanding further and further, split up into countless media and modalities, based on wide-ranging technologies and motives. Now that the analogue image is being quickly replaced by the digital one, beyond the materiality of video and film, more is being produced and distributed than ever before, but at the same time the way we watch, listen and experience cinema is being severely fragmented and individualized. Cinema no longer holds a specific place of its own; it is everywhere, intertwined with and integrated into other cultural forms. Within that context we today witness a significant renewal in the ways of approaching cinema and the audiovisual arts, not only in the work of a great number of artists, but also on an institutional level. The familiar opposition between the ‘black box’ and the ‘white cube’, between cinema culture and museum culture, can no longer be sustained, and the call for new models resounds more and more. What kind of shifts in meaning do these evolutions and contaminations entail in the way we look at and reflect on art and film? Do visual arts provide filmmakers with a free zone, where they can finally fulfil their most radical promises, or is it more like a transit zone, an intermediate stage in the re-thinking of the cinema project?

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Stoffel Debuysere

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mail: stoffel@argosarts.org

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