2nd conference / Visual Dispositif / Social Dispositif
Visual Dispositif - Social Dispositif is part of the collaborative project Art/Knowledge/Politics which joins politically engaged artists, critical academics and activists at the platform of Visual Culture Research Center as a research institution of National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The project was launched in April 2010 at the conference under the same title, which studied visualizations of power relations in different social practices and their critical analysis in art and moving image.
The conference “Cinematic dispositif: Moving image in Social Context”
(1 – 7 November, 2010)
In collaboration with Research Center of Cinema Studies and Kyiv International Film Festival ‘Molodist’
What does it mean to make and to analyze moving image today, when both cinema and film studies witness conceptual crisis? Is it possible to overcome a crisis of film studies as a ‘pure’ discipline by its hybridization, by placing film in the context of other ‘visual’ media (television, video, Internet, computer games)? Why the project of political cinema declined despite the arrival of new media?
If film is not just a medium but also a social practice then the question perhaps should be formulated differently: how it is possible by making and analyzing cinema to analyze society, and its ideology?
Christian Metz once said that films are difficult to analyze because they are easy to understand. Apparent ‘transparency’ of photographic image produces an impression that reality simply unfolds by itself. The invisibility of subject of enunciation renders it an ideal ‘body’ for ideology. To reveal the work of ideology the presence of subject of enunciation has to be made tangible. The employment of the analytic concept of discpositif liberates cinema from the theory of reflection. Cinematic dispositif does not represent reality but the real circumstances of our existence: our “always-already” belongingness to social dispositifs within which we act.
The conference discusses following topics:
Cinema as a screen of social phantasms: political unconsciousness/optical unconsciousness
Corporeity and technology in mediated experience
‘Ideology of realism’ and its transformation in new media
Urban space and narrative space in media and in city
Sexual/political dimension of visual pleasure
Dialectics of eye and gaze in psychoanalysis and cinema
Dream and film: Filmdeutung
Political cinema and practices of contemporary art