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Please join us on Friday, November 19, 2004 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation for a public conversation with John Mowitt and Gregory Flaxman on the question of language in the cinema. This event is co-presented with the Film Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania and will be introduced and moderated by Karen Beckman, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Modern Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Presentations by Mowitt and Flaxman will precede the conversation.
In the past, film scholars as well as philosophers have struggled to define the relationship between words and images, often with the result that the cinema has been read according to an overarching linguistic code. In this event, however, the speakers return to this traditional problem by renovating the concept of discourse as the means to describe the audio-visual image. While Flaxman will discuss discouse in terms of the devlopment of a speaking cinema and what Gilles Deleuze has called the "civilization" of the cinema, Mowitt will elaborate a theory of discourse in order to address the development of postcolonal and global cinemas.
"If the brain is a plane of immanence or consistency, then we might understand its function through networks of images themselves. The brain is a screen, Deleuze says, but the screen, the cinema, is also a brain, an organization of images and memories whose connections (regular or irrational) comprise an 'image of thought.' [...] The brain and the world are virtually identical ... because the world itself has become brain, a vast neural arrangement." -- From 'Third Proposition: The cinema is a cerebral machine or image of the brain," by Greg Flaxman and Gregg Lambert, Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory, 2.02
John Mowitt is chair of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at
the University of Minnesota. He has written widely on matters of
theory, culture and politics; his most recent book is Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Duke University Press, 2002). He is a senior editor of Cultural Critique.
Gregory Flaxman is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The editor of Brain and the Screen, he is currently at work on two books: The Undiscovered Country: A Philosophy of the Western (with Gregg Lambert), and a treatment of the subject of lying in art and philosophy. He co-organized the 'Theorizing' Series at the University of Pennsylvania from 1999-2001 (http://slought.org/series/theorizing/).
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To Cite this Page using MLA Style:
John Mowitt, et al. "The 'Civilization' of the Cinema." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[19 November 2004;
Accessed 20 July 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11253/>.
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