dec 5 th 2006
Sabeth Buchmann, with Stephan Geene
Strategies of >Verlebendigung< (Vivification)
in Art and Film
dec 6th 11 h
Stephan Geene, with Sabeth Buchmann
>if i would know how to enter before i leave<
unfinal statements to the quest for biopolitics in film
Monday 13 November 14:00 – 18:00
Film and Biopolitics
Rainer Bellenbaum, Sabeth Buchmann,
Cinematic Strategies of Subjectivization
Lars von Trier, Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005) — seminar
— auditorium
7 Monday 6 November 20:00
Stephan Geene, Lemming (Dominik Moll 2005)
— film screening
— auditorium
Tuesday 7 November
13:00
Stephan Geene
Subjectivity, and its life(-form)
A comparison between Giorgio Agamben and Paolo Virno
— seminar
Within the Foucauldian use of the notion of biopolitics, we can distinguish a subjectivity, that is formed in order to be gouverned, and a subjectitvy, that is concerned with itself as an aesthetics of existence, the more recent theory-buildings developed that as production of subjectivity (as a means of postfordist economy), and as a constitution of subjectivity between dread and refuge (Virno) and qualified life (as opposed to naked life with Agamben). Are these different uses contradictory, exclusive, or are they supporting each other?
Tuesday 15 August 19:00
Film and biopolitics
Stephan Geene
— film screening Michelangelo Antonioni,
Zabriski Point (1970)
— auditorium
Wednesday 16 August 2006 11:00
Film and biopolitics
Stephan Geene
One and many. Multitude
— seminar and introduction to Paolo Virno by Sönke Hallmann
— audiorium
tuesday june 27 2006 th 13 h
Stephan Geene, Seminar
To be exposed
Demons, Subjectivity, and Fetishism in Pierre Klossowski’s Drawings
with a discussion on Linda William’s Theory of Pornography by Tim Stüttgen
Pierre Klossowski reworked the same concept of an image over and over. His monomanic stance resonates with more recent paradigm’s of the >corporeal density of the image< (Jonathan Crary). To follow this line may engender profound consequences for any account of life-forms, being included in image-politics as it is the case for late capitalism. The biopolitical discussions of the postfordist work-regime can be prolonged in a rethinking of the processes of subjectivation within the frame of fetishes and an economy of the self. Linda Williams Theory of Fetishism is proposed as a first step.
Wednesday 24 May 2006 10:00
Sabeth Buchmann
Jean-Luc Godards, Passion (1982)
— seminar
— room 201
15:00
Stephan Geene
Pierre Klossowski, Re-animating a Tableau Vivant
By giving up theory for drawing, Pierre Klossowski invented the pornographic's passive activa, and developed a theory of the existential monetarian exchange with no ends
Pierre Klossowski developped an extremely interesting position for the context of film theory, since he not not only came (in time with foucault or deleuze) to a very special nietzsche-reading, by giving up theoretical writing for an intrinsically visual >call<, that forced him to draw, mainly one and the same motiv, he emblematically takes into account the difficulty of theorizing the visual. Together with the chilian filmmaker Raul Ruiz he realized two feature films, rarely to be seen (>la vocation suspendue< (1977) and >l'hypothese du tableau volé (1979)), which just came out on dvd. The latter is centered around the staging of a tableau vivant, which, in a way, is impossible to be rendered in film
i would like to expand the klossowski-discussion to more contemporary approaches to film's ability to include the specator, mainly in porn-films along the lines of the theoreticians linda williams, linda
singer and steven shaviro. films: catherine breillat, anatomy of hell
(2004), bruce la bruce, rasperry reich (2004), vincent gallo, the brown
bunny (2003)
Monday 24 April 2006 10:30
Helmut Draxler
Authorship as genre: reading Robert Altman’s the player
— lecture
18:30
Drehli Robnik
The logic of sensation in film aesthetics: Sam Fuller´s improper communities
— lecture, discussion
Tuesday 25 April 11:00
Sabeth Buchmann
Film theory since the 60s in the light of biopolitics
— lecture
— auditorium
Saturday 1 April 2006 11:00
Stephan Geene
Does he deny to read these lives in a political way?
on Gus Van Sant's Elephant, 2003
— seminar, discussion
while michael moore tried to politicize the killings of schoolkids by their peers in columbine, gus van sant seems to do the opposite. his film is a sober account, a sensitive re-staging of everyday-life, excluding any positioning as on the causes of the act. his film is very close to film's bottom-line: taking the observed people as hosts for a crime, that is due to come: creating a subjectivity as if at stake.
Monday 6 February 2006 18:00
Stephan Geene Claire Denis' film L'intrus (2004)
— introduction, screening
— auditorium
Tuesday 7 February 14:00 Stephan Geene
Claire Denis' post-avant-gardist film L'intrus
— discussion
can we discuss her film in terms of visual expertise, or even: biopolitical engineering? with an introduction in the vocabulary of some biopolitical + film-theoretical ideas.
opening week 2006
Stephan Geene
Anyone's life re-animated, the freshness of commodified moments
— lecture
Sabeth Buchmann
From system theory to biopolitics: remarks on (post)avant-garde art and film discourse
— lecture
Thursday 24 November
14:00
Stephan Geene
Failing a revolution
jean-luc godard and anne marie mieville as the production company sonimage in postrevolutionary mozambique 1978
— lecture
— screening
— auditorium
Monday 3 October20:00 2005
Helmut Draxler
The labor of writing. The authors destiny in Hollywood
— presentation
Joel Coen, Barton Fink, 1991
— film screening
— auditorium
Monday 11 July 2005
13:30 On the television work of Jef Cornelis
Helmut Draxler
On the film Little Sparta, et in arcadia ego, a portrait of Ian Hamilton Finlay
Little Sparta, et in arcadia ego, a portrait of Ian Hamilton Finlay by Jef Cornelis and Chris Dercon (1990, 41 minutes)
— film screening
— auditorium17:00 Film and biopolitic
Helmut Draxler, Stephan Geene
Trouble every day (2001) by Claire Denis
— film screening
— auditorium
Tuesday 12 July13:30 Film and biopolitic
Stephan Geene
Vivacity as ultima non-ratio of film
Is a film of Claire Denis likely to be produced?
— discussion
— auditorium
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
14.-16.4.2005 conference
The Ghostly Social Aspects of Cinema
Film and
Biopolitics
invited are katja diefenbach, eric de bruyn, thomas
elsaesser, drehli robnik, tanja widmann, bert rebhandl, christian
petzold
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 the living bodies are common
phrases in film theory.
They can be understood as final fulfillments of
the avantgarde’s old dream of reconciling art and life. The biopolitical
approach, initiated by Michel Foucault in the 1970ies, allows a less
mythical understanding of the issue. It questions life and death as
ahistorical moments of the human condition, and rather connects them to
modern and contemporary modes of production, economic and ideological. The
true challenge of Foucaults thinking can be found in the argumjent, that
not only eugenic and other far right wing ways of thinking could be
considered as "bio-political", but also liberal democratic, administrative
planning activities, and even emancipatory discourses referring to the
liberating potentials of "life".
Whereas classical cinema and the
avantgarde struggled over the degree of realitiy of their different
representations, and over the reality of representation itself, nowadays,
post-classical cinema and post-avantgarde film works seem to converge much
more in a common interest for loss and memory. They both got involved in
reconstructing history in more or less nostalgic ways, in adressing the
media’s own 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. Instead of the “immediacy” of classical
narrative styles and of avantgarde strategies to overcome the distance of
the viewers, the new “film languages” seem to filter life and death, and
to keep the viewers distant, aware of the ongoing mediation through
history, social conditions, and narration. The question remains which,
whose, and from which persepctive history can be narrated, and how history
itself gets shaped by narration. Particularily in the many attempts to
represent the non-representable, the Holocaust, it seems not so much a
question of authentic or false representations of reality in the past any
more, but how history has become the battlefield of representations,
constituting the present symbolic, economic and political realities. In
Christian Petzold’s new film “Ghosts” the split between a life only in
history and a life only in the present cannot be bridged. The conditions
of subjectivitiy as they emerge here are lost in complete absence or
presence of history. The characters seem neither alive nor dead. The story
enfolds and collapses as the characters do. With the social relations it
tries to describe Cinema itself has become ghostly. Jacques Derrida has
addressed those conditions in his call “to live with the specters”. It
refers to the inextricability of fetishism in desire and production,
which, however, should not be encountered with postmodern resignation, but
rather with critique and reflection.
Organisers: Sabeth Buchmann,
Helmut Draxler, Stephan Geene
Film Screenings: Christian Petzold, Gespenster (Ghosts),
2005
Hartmut Bitomsky, Das Kino und der Tod (Cinema and Death),
1988
Thursday 14 April19:00
The ghostly social aspects of cinema. Film and biopolitics, Christian Petzold
Ghosts
— film screening
— gallery space
Friday 15 April 12:00 – 19:30
The ghostly social aspects of cinema. Film and biopolitics
Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler, Stephan Geene
Introduction
Drehli Robnik
Among other things: Cinema´s vitalism of whatever-beings
Katja Diefenbach
Ghostly value-form
Thomas Elsässer
Body, Time, Agency: From post-modern to post-mortem cinema
Saturday 16 April
The ghostly social aspects of cinema. Film and biopolitics
Tanja Widmann
How Life invades Work (as Emotion).
Abbas Kiarostami and Andrea Fraser
Eric de Bruyn
A Cinematic Politics of Translation:
Lawrence Weiner’s First and Second Quarter
Clemens Krümmel
"I sow for all winds". Motifs of Bios, Movement and Fertility in Imamura's Cinema of Chaos
Bert Rebhandl
The Biopolitical Aesthetic. Is there a culture to ‘life and nothing but’?
+ + + + + + + + +
postphones, mid march helmut draxler
The aestethic
road ot victory: sharing education . seminar
The expanding economics of empathy and compassion are
surely important in helping people worldwide suffering from natural and
other desasters.
However, the marketing of empathy and compassion often
reproduces stereotypes concerning the relations between ethnic or racial
codes on the one hand and codes of wealth of power on the other.
Therefore, global charity activities, especially in the enlighted version “to help ‘them’ help themselves”, can be easily considered as a
contemporary form of the philanthropic, educational and colonial regimes
of the 19th century, described by Foucault and others. Compared to those
brutal, disciplinary regimes the morals of contemporary charity look
harmless and indeed noble-minded (a beautiful soul, like the late George
Harrsion, organizing the first Bangladesh-benefit-rock concert in 1971),
but is rooted in the same idealist concepts of an aesthetic state. Its
contemporary cultural forms seem to me Wellness, Charity, and Art, as
growing economic factors, all based on generosity (towards oneself, the
others, humanity), and all based on sharing: time, money, and affection,
however, not to share but to practise privilege (bell
hooks).
tuesday, 22.2.05 21.00 Film Screening:
Mike Figgis,
The Loss of Sexual Innocence, 1999
wednesday, 23.2.05 10.30
stephan geene
to find some animal in man seems easy, but does it
work the other way round?
whose life can be captured in film,
discussed with excerpts from david lynch’s film elephant man, and
reference to Giorgio Agamben’s book >The Open. Man and animal<
(stanford, 2004) (see: chapter 14, Boredom), and Monika Bakke’s
>Zoopleasures<, her paper at the Jan van Eyck’s Opening
week)
11.1.2005 opening week
soft cars & motorized
feelings
Visual cars and real cars in cinema
with sabeth buchmann, stephan geene
mo 13.12.2004 16h30 Helmut Draxler
the uncanny
productivity of criticism
Being critical has become a dominant mode of production
in metropolitan "life-forms" from subcultures to academia. Compared to the
"authoritarian characters" of the modern age this is undoubtfully a
progressive development. But in many ways "habitual" criticism seems to be
very much part of that culture against which it turns itself. Criticism is
more and more welcomed and highlighted as a positive goal or outcome in
political debates (compare e.g. the discussions around the
flick-collection in berlin). In this context it becomes more and more
important to differentiate, to reflect, and in the end to "queer"
criticism in terms of forms, positions and contexts of critique. In
articulating the contradiction between production and critique this is
precisely what art and/or film can do in sometimes convincing ways: to
perform and to criticze, to be analysis and symptom, and to offer
"elastic" negotiations in between their different semiotic
regimes.
21 h Film-screening, pedro almodovar
Labirinto de
Passiones, 1982
(in spanish with english subtitles)
thursday 14.12.2004 13h30 h , stephan
geene
author/producer in contemporary post-Arthouse cinema as
biopolitical producer (theo van gogh as its latest example)
if creating a public means to enter public antagonisms
(chantal/mouffe), the strategy seems necessary to stir up those
antagonisms in order to market one's own film (or art in general). This
strategy can be understood in Negri/Hardts concept of a biopolitical
entrepreneur, who creates a whole social network, considered as a new
notion of production in general. The succes of films like Michael Moore's >Fahrenheit 9/11< or of the films of Piedro Almodovar can only be
understood in the context of their stimulation of public antagonisms.
Regarding the scandal of Theo van Goghs/Ayaan Hirsi Ali s Film
>Submission<, there is a more profound infliction of a political and
biopolitical instigation.
friday 5th november 16.30 stephan geene
is the
commodity visible? (laura mulvey's negative fascination with the
image)
in her essay >visual pleasure and narrative cinema<
mulvey tracks the image's extreme fascination, but still evades any
account on visibility as such. by reading her essay >death - 24 times a
second< + by watching (excerpts of) her movie >riddles of the
sphinx< (1977, with peter wollen), the traces of the visibility in her
theory should be discussed.
text: >death - 24 times a second< in:
death drive, art&film beyond the pleasure principle, ojeblikket, #2,
vol. 10, 2000
saturday, 7th november 2004 14h00, sabeth
buchmann
griselda pollock's essay >still working on the
subject<
pollock starts her essay on mary kelly's work >post-partum document< with a reflection on two films, which both
try to present a non-spectacular, female environment (>night cleaners,
mary kelly, 1975 and >riddles of the sphinx, mulvey/wollen). the
seminar will focus on the question, how a feministic perspective can
render a female body differently.
text: griselda pollock, still working
on the subject, in: mary kelly, ed. by sabine breitwieser, wien
1998
Monday 18 October 2004 16.30, Helmut Draxler
Qualities
of Live in Avant-garde
Tuesday 19 October, Filmscreenning, t 14.00
eternal
sunshine of the spotless mind, michel gondry (2004)
Wednesday 20 October, t 10.30, Stephan
Geene
Bio-politics, Visual Consumption,
Avant-garde
23 june, 2004 stephan geene
pornography
filmscreening
sex is comedy, catherine breillat
(2003)
>Friday 28 May 2004 16.30, Stephan Geene
Le nouveau
X - lecture with filmextracts
contemporary french cinema, explicit
sex-scenes, and the raily routines
>Saturday 29 May 2004 , 12.00 Sabeth Buchmann, Stephan
Geene
discussing the text of Pamela Lee:"Bare
Lives"
Exemplary Works of Carolee Schneemann,
VALIE EXPORT and Joan Jonas.
The US-american art historian discusses in
her text specific aspects of feminist film and performance practice with
reference to Foucaults and Agambens concepts of biopower.
with sabeth buchmann, stephan geene
30 april, sabeth
buchmann, stephan geene
text/discussion: giorgio gamben, michel
foucault, negri/hardt
and: on >monster< a film by
pattie jenkins
monday, apr.5
lecture by helmut draxler
tuesday, apr.6 filmscreening, Lecture/ Sabeth
Buchmann
Postrevolutionary melodrama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder und
Yvonne Rainer
The lecture asks in how far the
production and control of emotions and affects in "Warnung vor einer hl.
Nutte" (1971) by Fassbinder and "Lives of Performers" (1972) by Rainer
touch a biopolitical notion of art, life and labour.
wednesday, apr.7 filmscreening, Stephan Geene
i
like your life (more than mine)
>quest for an esthetics of
production<
Film, the movies, are -- next to advertisement --
the mastermedia of visual production. Throughout its 100 years of
development it still sticks to the endeauvour, to somehow >resemble<
its audiences’ life. In the beginning, this effect was immediately given
through the media characteristics as such, a film showing >leafs
moving< was a thrill, how kracauer reports of Lumières first films. A
shop front in Berlins 1903 had in ultra-big letters: Das lebende Bild (the
living image). Nowadays a comparable thrill has to be produced in much
more refined ways. This refinement might be seen in what is regarded as
the classical Studio Systems aesthetics, but the styles and techniques of
a director like Pedro Almodovar for example are nothing else.
To me, it
seems too narrow to restrict filmanalysis to the confinements of the film
as such, its styles and techniques (although most scholars feel forced to
do so), I would like to acknowledge all the means of its – biopolitical – production, the means that enable a film to be produced.
In a strong
sense, no film – not even avantgarde-film – can follow the dispositif of
>the singular-artist<, film forces us to include the logics of
production into its aesthetical valorization, though their theoretical
means have not been developed yet.
The offer of contemporary
biopolitical discussions are threefold: first of all the notion of the
biopolitical entrepreneur, a productivity that is decenteralized, highly
dependent on communication, on the social and the affective.
Secondly
film makes use of peoples life in a broad range of ways, touching the
critical question of bare life versus qualified life, placed in the center
of a new discussion on power, law and life by Giorgio Agamben. And thirdly
film constructs a new connex of body, desire, and life-time as theorized
by authors like Donna Haraway, Beatriz Preciado, and Marie-Helene
Bourcier, who recently depicted Tom Cruise as >Dildo< in his
appearance in the film Magnolia.
In this project, I would like to start
a discussion with the researchers at Jan van Eyck about these topics, a
discussion which will over time include theory as well as the >close
reading< of films (hollywood, new-hollywood, non-hollywood, avantgarde
and independent films) and might end finally by >producing< bits of
films by ourselves, thus developing in a more complex way an understanding
of the premises of >film/production<.
stephan
geene
|
texts of the
project
Hopeless
Illusionism
Sabeth Buchmann
Against
Dogma
Time Code as an Allegory of the Social Factory
helmut
draxler
i like your
life (more than mine)
stephan geene |
|
