Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Raymond Bellour
Since 2003, the Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professorship has been held by some of the world’s most renowned scholars. The CI Professor is in residence at the University of Chicago for an academic quarter, where he or she teaches a graduate seminar and offers two public lectures. For Spring 2016 we are proud to welcome film scholar Raymond Bellour, Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS. He is the author of, among others, The Analysis of Film (1979) and Le Corps du cinéma (2009).
SEMINAR
“The Body of Cinema: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities”
Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Spring quarter
April 18th - May 25th
PUBLIC LECTURES
May 6 @ 4pm
"L'art est ce qui résiste même si ce n'est pas la seule chose qui résiste” (Art is what resists, even if it is not the only thing that resists)
This famous sentence by Gilles Deleuze, addressing the FEMIS students in his lecture "What is the Creative Act?", unites "the work of art" and "the struggles of men" in the act of resistance. Strangely, philosophy is not included in this destiny of resistance, even though it serves both art and the struggles of men by making thought about them possible. Deleuze also quotes what he calls "a beautiful philosophical concept" by Malraux, who said "Art is the only thing that resists death." There again, art would be doing what philosophy doesn't. This may be a clue to an uncertain relationship between art and philosophy, for the good of both. It is this productive indecisiveness that we would try not to lighten, but at least to define.
A lecture on Gilles Deleuze and cinema
Logan Center Screening Room 201
May 20 @4pm
"Couches d'images" (Layers of images)
Michael Snow said of Wavelength: “The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).” There is thus a thickness, something like layers of images accumulating, from the outer to the inner eye: what this film reveals is the experience of film itself, of any film.
The gradual unfolding of this vision, whose virtuality Wavelength opened, has apparently been the purpose of at least three of Snow's works: Slidelength, a slide show; Place des peaux, an installation made of colored translucent panels; and WVLNT - Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time, a DVD where the 45 minutes of the original film, folded onto itself, become 15 minutes of superimposed parts, opening the work to a new visibility.
A lecture on the relation between film and installation.
Following a screening of Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) @ 2:30pm
Logan Center Screening Room 201
