Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference 2017
“Love and Death”
May 12-13, Toronto, Canada
*PANELS AND PRESENTATIONS HELD AT THE CENTRE FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION (192 SPADINA AVE., TORONTO)
**EACH PRESENTATION IS 20 MINUTES IN LENGTH
DAY I: Friday, May 12
CONFERENCE CHECK-IN
(08:30-09:15)
CONFERENCE INTRODUCTION
(09:15)
PANEL I – Affections
(09:30 — 10:50)
Zorianna Zurba (Ryerson and York Universities)
I L-l- love to you: From Luce Irigaray to Alvy Singer
Olivia Landry (Stanford University)
A horror story. The face is a horror story
Apple Igrek (Oklahoma State University)
Sadomasochism in the Dome: From David Cronenberg to Spike Jonze
Chair: Scott Birdwise (York University)
Panel II – Dark Screens
(11:00 — 12:20)
Nathan L. Smith (Duke University)
The Metaphysics of Death: Ceasing to Appear in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia)
Philippe Theophanidis (York University)
Lucus a non lucendo: Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light
Joshua Wiebe (Concordia University)
Kino-Death, the Black Screen as Contingent Gesture
Chair : Tamás Nagypál (York university)
LUNCH BREAK
(12:30-13:30)
Panel III – Wounds
(13:30 — 14:50)
Sara MacLean (Centennial College)
The CHROMO Series: Embodied Encounters with Genetic Disorder
Kyler Chittick (York University)
Love, Life and Death in the Neoliberal City: Re-Thinking Paris is Burning through Queer Memoir
Christine Negus (Northwestern University)
Asses to Ashes
Chair: Jessica Mulvogue (York University)
Panel IV – Things, Bodies, Figures
(15:00 — 16:20)
Meraj Dhir (Harvard University)
Clarifying Affect: Post-Structuralism, Film Studies and Beyond
Tamás Nagypál (York University)
Masculine Fatalism and Feminine Jouissance in Film Noir
Mackenzie Leadston (Ohio State University)
The Phenomenology of the Comic Film Object: Between Love and Death
Chair: James Cahill (University of Toronto)
Panel V – Loving Others
(16:30 — 17:50)
Anne van Leeuwen (James Madison University)
Femme Fatale: Sexuality, death and the subject of the unconscious
Alison Taylor (Bond University)
Pursuits of Transcendence: The ‘Tragedy of Remarriage’ in Extreme Cinema
Phil Kaffen (New York University)
The Promise of Cinema: Like Being in Love
Chair: Tamás Nagypál (York University)
DAY II: Saturday, May 13
Panel VI – Community and Death
(09:00 — 10:20)
Patrick Marshall (University of Toronto)
The Gift, Agonism, and the Constitution of Democratic Community in Kieślowski’s Blue
Scott Birdwise (York University)
Where is Fear? Community and Death in The Hart of London
Balca Arda (York University)
The Subject Matter of Love and Death in Middle Eastern Cinema Screened in North America
Chair: Philippe Theophanidis (York University)
Panel VII – Subjects of Excess
(10:30 — 11:50)
Fan Wu (University of Toronto)
Patient Death, Passive Love: Todd Haynes, Blanchot and the Cinema of the Disaster
Victoria Robinson (Grinnell College)
Bodies through Time: Disrupting the Myth of the Metanarrative in Twin Peaks and American Horror Story
Amita Valmiki (University of Mumbai)
Love and Death: An Ontological Discourse Among the Auteur(s) of Cinema – A Feminist Perspective
Chair: Sara Swain (York University)
LUNCH BREAK
(12:00 — 13:00)
Panel VIII – Artifacts of Love and Death
(13:00 — 14:20)
Carrie Reese (University of Toronto)
She Got Love: An Intermedial Meditation on Violence and Death
Marta del Pozo (University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth)
The performance of death as an act of love in Isabel Coixet’s My life without me
Chair: Genne Speers (York University)
Panel IX – Endpoints
(14:30 — 15:50)
Trevor Mowchun (Concordia University)
The Death of God, the Birth of Film, and the New Metaphysics
Terrance H. McDonald (Brock University)
Encounters with the Anthropocene Era: Tarkovsky and a Cinema of Life
Andrew Utterson (Ithaca College)
Cinephilia in the z-Dimension: Jean-Luc Godard’s Intertextual Vectors of Love and Death
Chair: Reşat Fuat Çam (York University)
KEYNOTE
(17:00 — 19:00)
Incremental Love
Prof. Eugenie Brinkema (MIT)
Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) is set in a single restricted location, the Parisian apartment in which a dying, suffering woman is being cared for by her husband. The film plots an obsessive formal language of spatial increments, organizing itself around minor but crucial distances across the geography of the home. Against and within this ordered relation of objects and space, extraordinary pain and terrible violence ultimately arrive. Eugenie Brinkema’s lecture explores this interrelation to suggest that figures of entrance, distance, and spatial increments articulate a formalized ethics of care that is commuted over the course of the film to the paradoxical figure of an ethics of violence. Love—which absorbs within its affective extremity philosophical figures of completion, unity, fulfillment—is thereby radically altered. When read through the notion of discrete increment, an alternate tradition of the amative is opened up, one in which love names a brutal measurability of the world.
Eugenie Brinkema is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics in texts ranging from the horror film to gonzo pornography, from structuralist film to the visual and temporal forms of terrorism. Articles have appeared in the journals Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and World Picture. Her first book, The Forms of the Affects, was published with Duke University Press in 2014.
Organized by the Spiral Film and Philosophy Collective in collaboration with the department of Cinema and Media Arts, York University.
Co-sponsored by: the Graduate Program in Philosophy at York University, the York Graduate Film Student Association, and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University