May 4, 4:30 PM: Christa Blümlinger, “A Return to ‘Techniques of the Body:’ Zoe ...

The Counter Cinema/Counter Media Project presents Christa Blümlinger, “A Return to ‘Techniques of the Body:’ Zoe Beloff’s Reinventions” This lecture investigates a multimedia installation from New-York-based artist Zoe Beloff, The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff (2011). I will comment on the installation’s epistemological and aesthetic dynamics as raising two questions: on the one hand, animation as an act of the cinema machine; on the other hand, the animated image as an instrument of psychosocial control of the human body. This double process combines cultural recycling and visual reinvention. I will analyze to what extent “techniques of the body” (Marcel Mauss) were the object of films that were meant to be entertainment or that belonged to the sphere of utilitarian genres, such as “pedagogical” films. With this connection, the focus will be put on the distribution between a world of objects and a world of human beings, described by Gilbert Simondon as “mode of existence” and by Walter Benjamin as “material community.” Christa Blümlinger is Professor in film studies at the University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris 8). She formerly taught at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle and at the Free University Berlin. She has directed numerous curatorial and critical activities in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Her publications include an edition of writings by Harun Farocki (in French), Serge Daney (in German), and books about the essay film, media art, film aesthetics, and Austrian cinema. Among her most recent publications are : Cinéma de seconde main, Esthétique du remploi dans l'art du film et des nouveaux médias, 2013 (published in German in 2009; about the aesthetics of recycled images in film and media art), Paysage et mémoire. Photographie, Cinéma, audiovisuels, edited with Sylvie Lindeperg, Michèle Lagny and Sylvie Rollet (Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle); « Théorème », 2014; and « Attrait de l’archive », Cinémas, vol. 24, no 2-3, 2014 (guest editor).

Date: May 4, 2016
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM