Abstract

26 – 27 February (Fri & Sat)

Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) 17 Mill Lane Cambridge CB2 1RX

This conference will explore the aesthetic and institutional origins and characteristics of the recent efflorescence of ‘mourning films’ after Trauma Studies and in the wake of the Benjaminian ‘age of mechanical reproduction’.

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1042/

Online Registration until February 20

Programme: Friday 26 February

09:00 – 09:30 Registration at CRASSH , 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

09:30 – 09:45 Welcome

09:45 – 11:00

Jay Winter (Yale University) Moving images: From silent film to film silences in war films, 1914-2009

Chair: Richard Armstrong (University of Cambridge)

11:00 – 11:15 Coffee and tea

11:15 – 13:00 Panel I: Imaginary Memories

Chair: Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge)

Marion Schmid (University of Edinburgh) Phantoms of the Present: Mourning and Memory in Chantal Akerman’s ‘Histoires d’Amerique’ (1989)

Colin Davis (Royal Holloway, University of London) Film as Shipwreck: Acting-Out and Working-Through in Jean Renoir’s ‘The Woman on the Beach’ (1947)

Colin Murray Parkes (Author; Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, St Christopher’s Hospice, Sydenham and Consultant Psychiatrist, St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney) Death Games – What are the Rules?

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch at CRASSH

14:00 – 15:45 Panel II: Histories of Mourning

Chair: Isabelle McNeill (University of Cambridge)

Lisa Downing (University of Exeter) On the Fantasy of Childlessness as Death in Psychoanalysis and in Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1973) and von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ (2009)

Jenny Chamarette (University of Cambridge) Mourning a Life not yet over: Agnès Varda’s spectral bodies and temporalised spaces

Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge) Museum Spaces in Palliative Art: Mariana Otero’s ‘Histoire d’un secret’ (2003)

15:45 – 16:00 Coffee and tea

16:00 – 17:30 Panel III : Spectrality Chair: Olga Smith (University of Cambridge)

Alex Dougherty (University of Cambridge) ‘God’s Funeral’: Tragic Space and Cinema

Laura McMahon (University of Cambridge) The Justice of Images: Derrida and Nancy on Film 19:30 Conference dinner at King’s College (speakers only) Saturday 27 February 09:15 – 11:00 Panel IV: The Living Dead

Chair: Marie-Christine Clemente (University of Cambridge)

Max Silverman (University of Leeds) Loss and the concentrationary Image

Kristian Feigelson (Université Paris 3) Theresienstadt, living among the dead…

Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London) Grief, Horror and Filiation in ‘La Question Humaine’ (2007)

11:00 – 11:20 Coffee and tea

11:20 – 13:00 Panel V: The Lamentation

Chair: Axel Bangert (University of Cambridge)

Omri Grinberg (Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Walter Benjamin Fellow, PAIDEIA , The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden) A Flooding Thirst – Grieving Space in ‘Atash’ (2004) and Noah’s Ark

Ariella Azoulay (Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan) Civil Lament and Political Imagination (with screening of short film)

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:45 Panel VI: Resurrection

Chair: Amanda Minervini (Brown University)

Richard Armstrong (University of Cambridge) La ‘Diva du Deuil’: Towards a Pantheon of Mourning Women

Song Hwee Lim (University of Exeter) Slowness, Nostalgia, Cinephilia: Tsai Ming-liang and the Discursive Death of Cinema

Martine Beugnet (University of Edinburgh) Mourning in the Age of the Digital: Memory, loss and materialist filmmaking

15:45 – 16:00 Coffee and tea

16:00 – 16:45

Carol Mavor (University of Manchester) Blue is the Colour of Impossible Mourning: Chantal Akerman’s ‘La Captive’ (2000)

Chair: Anna M. Elsner (University of Cambridge)

16:45 – 17:15 Roundtable

Close

This event is generously supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), The French Embassy, the Society for French Studies, the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University and Lenore Ruben.