Jan van Eyck Event:

The Ghostly Social Aspects of Cinema
Film and Biopolitics

14 - 16 April 2005

Jan van Eyck Academie
Academieplein1
6211 KM Maastricht

From Thursday 14 to Saturday 16 April (inclusive) the Jan van Eyck
Academie organises the conference The Ghostly Social Aspects of Cinema.
The conference will approach post-classical and post-avant-garde film
work from a biopolitical viewpoint. Speakers will be Sabeth Buchmann,
Helmut Draxler, Stephan Geene, Drehli Robnik, Katja Diefenbach, Tanja
Widmann, Eric de Bruyn, Clemens Krümmel and Bert Rebhandl.

Cinema’s mythical universe is strongly affected by metaphors of life
and death. To invade life, to engender or to preserve it, and even to
remove it from the surface of living bodies are common phrases in film
theory. They can be understood as final fulfilments of the
avant-garde’s old dream of reconciling art and life. The biopolitical
approach, initiated by Michel Foucault in the 1970s, allows a less
mythical understanding of the issue. It questions critically any
conception of life and death as a-historical moments of the human
condition, and rather connects them to modern and contemporary modes of
production, economic and social, and therefore raises the crucial
question of representation.

Whereas classical cinema and the avant-garde struggled over the degree
of reality in their representations – and over the reality of
representation itself – nowadays, post-classical cinema and
post-avant-garde film works seem to converge much more due to a common
interest in loss and memory. They both got involved in reconstructing
history in more or less nostalgic ways, in addressing the media’s
history, e.g. the ‘Death of Cinema’ in the discourses on New Media, or,
in shaping the history of their characters in terms of
dramatic-traumatic experiences. Compare the different approaches of
Steven Spielberg and Pedro Almodovar, of Roberto Begnini or Charlie
Kaufmann, Stan Douglas or Isaac Julien. Instead of the ‘immediacy’ of
classical narrative styles and of avant-garde strategies to overcome
the distance of the viewers, the new ‘film languages’ seem to filter
life and death and keep the viewers at a distance, aware of the ongoing
mediation through history, social conditions and narration.

The questions raised at the conference will concern issues of history
and representation: which and whose histories can or cannot be
narrated, from which perspective, how is history itself shaped by
narration? In the many attempts to represent the non-representable –
the Holocaust or nuclear strikes – the issue no longer seems to be the
authentic or false representations of reality in the past, but how
history has become the battlefield of representations, constituting the
present symbolic, economic and political realities.

Programme

Thursday 14 April
19:00
Christian Petzold
Ghosts (film screening)

Friday 15 April
12:00
Registration
13:00
Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler, Stephan Geene (advising researchers
Theory department, Jan van Eyck Academie)
- Introduction
14:00
Drehli Robnik (film historian, Vienna)
- Among other things: Cinema´s vitalism of whatever-beings
15:30
Katja Diefenbach (political theorist, Berlin)
- Ghostly value-form
17:00
Break
18:00
Thomas Elsässer (film historian, Amsterdam)
- Body, Time, Agency: From post-modern to post-mortem cinema

Saturday April 16
11:00
Registration
12:00
Tanja Widmann (artist, Vienna)
- How Life invades Work (as Emotion). Abbas Kiarostami and Andrea
Fraser.
13:30
Eric de Bruyn (art historian, Groningen)
- A Cinematic Politics of Translation: Lawrence Weiner’s First and
Second Quarter
15:00
break
16:00
Clemens Krümmel (art critic, Berlin)
- "I sow for all winds". Motifs of Bios, Movement and Fertility in
Imamura's Cinema of Chaos
17:30
Bert Rebhandl (film critic, Berlin)
- The Biopolitical Aesthetic. Is there a Culture to ‘Life and nothing
But’?

Practical information

Language: English

Admission
15 euro / Students: 10 euro

Information & Registration
www.janvaneyck.nl/biopolitics

Questions:
Madeleine Bisscheroux: madeleine.bisscherouxjanvaneyck.nl
+31 (0)43 3503729

The conference is organized by Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler and
Stephan Geene within the framework of their research project Film and
Biopolitics which is being conducted at the Jan van Eyck Academie.

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Jan van Eyck Academie
Academieplein1
6211 KM Maastricht
The Netherlands
t +31 (0)43 350 37 37
f +31 (0)43 350 37 99
www.janvaneyck.nl