Vortrag: The Uneasy Appeal of the Primitive – Three Projects for Nonfiction Cinema
In this presentation Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers will present material from their most recent book, Violence’s Fabled Experiment (August Verlag, 2018), as well as their previous book, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (Fordham, 2016) and most current, ongoing work, A Perverse Naturalism.
The Primitive stands before us as an abject and thoroughly debunked figure. Understood as a relic of a colonial and racialized discourse of the Other, an allegory of the childhood of Man, there really seems nothing more to say about this figure in the present. And yet, this seemingly vanquished figure remains as problematically vibrant and phenomenologically present as ever in nonfiction cinema – the Primitive holds sway over any visual artifact that purports to tell us who we ‘really’ are. As our interlocking projects show, expressing human nature cinematically never eludes the Primitive, be they films of our past (Deren, Christensen, Painlevẻ) or present (Herzog, Castaing-Taylor, Oppenheimer, Farocki).
Richard Baxstrom is Professor of Anthropology and the Humanities and Deputy Head of School, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Society, Health, and Medicine at NYU-Shanghai; Global Network Associate Professor, NYU
Zeit: Donnerstag, 4. Oktober 2018, 18 Uhr
Ort: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 7 (VDV Winkelbau), Raum 116, 99423 Weimar
Eine Veranstaltung der Professur »Theorie medialer Welten«.
Kontakt:
Prof. Dr. Henning Schmidgen
E-Mail: henning.schmidgen[at]uni-weimar.de