I just returned from this wonderfully organised conference in Zürich, where I gave a paper on “Thinking Cinema: Christian Metz and/in the Tradition of Film Theory”. Here is the abstract:
In an interview in 1986 Christian Metz stated that he had always worked “in the company” of classical film theorists such as Béla Balázs, André Bazin, or Sergej Eisenstein, who, together with others, he often quotes, comments, and critiques in his own writings. In my contribution I will look at some examples in order to see how exactly this ‘companionship’ becomes an element of Metz’s theorising. In particular, I will discuss the way in which Metz discussed Rudolf Arnheim’s Film als Kunst in his seminar between January 1982 and June 1983. Metz not only translated (literally) the German original text into French, but also the issues addressed by Arnheim in 1932 into the larger field of debates within film theory half a century later.
Sabine Lenk and I will give a lecture on the institutionalisation of educational cinema in Germany in the 1910s at this conference in Stockholm. We will be looking at the Kinoreformbewegung‘s efforts to establish a network of non-commercial film theatres for educational screenings.
In the past few days Donald Crafton visited Utrecht. He was appointet Festival Fellow at the Holland Animation Film Festival by the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. At the festival, he curated two programmes and gave a lecture presening his latest book Shadow of a Mouse. He also gave a much appreciated lecture in my MA course “Film and Television in Transition”.
The volume Audiences, edited by Ian Christie in the same collection as the book on Ostrannenie is made available online by Amsterdam University Press here.
I have contributed an article on the films of Georges Méliès, critiquing the French film historian Georges Sadoul’s famous statement that Méliès reproduced the point of view of “the gentleman in the stalls” (le point de vue du monsieur de l’orchestre“.
I also added the article to the publications online section.
After having neglected this site for some time, I will try and keep it up to date again.
I have updated the publications and added a pdf of my “Ostranenie” article that was published in 2010 to the “available online” categroy.
